The Mushroom Mystery by Agnes Lester Brown

Author:Agnes Lester Brown [Brown, Agnes Lester]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cozy, Crime, Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Paranormal, suspense, Witches
Published: 2018-05-14T22:00:00+00:00

Today was Thursday, the one day of the week Lori would have liked to scratch from the calendar if she could. Every Thursday the family gathered in the backroom at the Wholesome to pack the week’s orders that had come in from clients of their witch potion mail order business. The room was a small, low-roofed space with walls covered in bunches of drying herbs and sacks of twigs and roots hanging from the ceiling. An old refrigerator in the corner brimmed with packets of freshly picked mushrooms and flowers. Archaic measuring scales, cutting knives, and mixing bowls littered the roughly hewn working benches. Preparing the potions was a grinding, boring job: picking ingredients, mixing, adding a sheet with instructions and a spell to make the concoction work, and packaging and mailing it out.

Sometimes Lori wondered whether their products had any effect, but then again, she had seen a few potions and spells wreak havoc in unfamiliar hands. They vetted and chose their clientele carefully. From time to time, a poorly prepared potion caused unforeseen effects, like the health elixir that caused a woman to grow a beard that would be the envy of ZZ Top.

Lori had to remind herself that the income from their secret business kept them financially afloat, so she focused on getting everything done by the end of the day. She breathed in the heavy, herbal aromas that hung in the air. Behind her, the twins were spending more time checking Facebook on their phones than packing, busily chattering away about the latest trends in hip-hop and R&B music.

Fae was dozing in a rickety wicker chair with a well-worn stone pestle and mortar on her lap. Lori and Hazel seemed to be the only ones being productive. “Managing to keep the delegates fed and happy?” Lori asked her aunt to try and take her mind off the brown mushrooms she was chopping into fine pieces.

“Yes.” Hazel gave a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness, everything’s going well. We don’t need another case of food poisoning. How was the field trip?”

“The whole thing was meant to smoke out a few murder suspects, really,” Lori confessed.

Hazel looked impressed by her niece’s cunning detective skills. “And did it work?”

“It looks like there might be more to Dr. Pearce than meets the eye, and Matt’s hunch about him being the bad guy might be correct,” Lori said as she dumped a bowl of chopped mushrooms onto a scale. “He got very agitated when Matt almost duped him into believing he’d found a specimen of the legendary Halo mushroom Justus had discovered and showed him a photograph of it. We believe he may just try and break into Justus’ room to steal the data file.”

“Yes, I saw him at the inn when you guys returned from the forest.” Hazel leaned towards Lori, switching into gossip mode. “He was looking about to see if anyone was around, but he didn’t notice that I could see him in the lobby mirrors from where I was in the kitchen.

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