Autumn & Autopsies by Maisy Marple

Author:Maisy Marple
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CCS Publishing

13

The weekend had been a story of two Main Streets.

It was the busiest of times.

It was the slowest of times.

It was the Saturday of hope, leading into the Sunday of despair and all of that Dickensian type stuff.

I parked my car outside of the Coffee Creek Savings & Loan mostly because I could. The other reason being, I thought the walk down the street would help clear my mind.

As I looked around at all of the shops, I got to wondering if they knew something I didn’t.

Almost every single business was closed.

Even Mable’s antique shop was vacant with her fancy antique sign in the window denoting the changes to her normal business hours.

I looked at my watch.

It was only ten-thirty in the morning.

Boy had this been a long day already.

“So, are we gonna do this or what?” Reba’s voice came ringing through the crisp autumn air.

Today was a mighty change from the previous couple of days. It was almost as if the tourists brought all of the heat in with them, and took it when they left.

She was standing in front of the shop, one hand on her hip, the other twirling the ends of her punk rock purple hair, a wad of gum that would have made even the most voracious of gum chewers jealous being worked on by her sassy mouth.

I shrugged emphatically as I approached her. “I don’t know if we should even open. It seems pretty dead down here.”

Rebecca Fairmack had come out of Reads & Teas.

“I thought I heard something out here,” she said as she walked up the sidewalk toward us. “For what it’s worth, I’m just closing down shop now.”

“That’s actually worth quite a lot,” I nodded. “I just can’t believe how quickly everything’s cleared out this year.”

“I know,” Rebecca said. “I’ve never seen anything like yesterday in all my years in Coffee Creek. On the other hand, I’ve never seen anything like today on the Sunday of Apple Festival weekend. Usually we’d get a few hundred people coming down here for one last round of browsing and buying before they headed out of town for the winter. But I haven’t see a single person this morning.”

“What do you say, Rebes?” I turned to my star barista. “Do you want to roll up your sleeves and do some behind the scenes work today?”

“You payin’?”

“Maybe,” I smirked.

“I’m in then,” she smiled.

“Well, you two have a productive day. I’m going to head home and give my feet some well earned time off.” Rebecca smiled and took her leave.

Reba and I went inside and locked the door behind us.

“Before we do anything,” I said, looking at refrigerator in the kitchen. “I say we grab some cold brew and a few of those leftover brownies from yesterday and head out onto the deck.”

“If that’s what you say, boss!” Reba saluted me.

We both laughed as we prepared to raid the fridge.

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