Fatal Floss E-Book

ACF Bookens

• Herausgeber: ACF Bookens
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

A morning visit to the chicken coop is supposed to be a delight, not a fright. 

On the day when Paisley Sutton goes to salvage barn board from an old chicken coop on her neighbor’s land, she thinks the worst thing she may find is rotten eggs. Little does she know, she’s about to unearth a mystery that has lingered for decades. She can’t help but research the story, but when she does, she finds far more than she hoped. 

Does she really want to know the whole story, or would she rather bury it again?

Leseprobe

FATAL FLOSS

STITCHES IN CRIME

BOOK 8

ACF BOOKENS

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

A FREE cozy set in San Francisco

About the Author

Also by ACF Bookens

1

I tightened the last bolt on our solar chicken door and sat back to look at my work. It was a little crooked and I could see daylight on one side, but it worked. It would keep out predators. “Good enough for a Sutton,” I said to my four-year-old son Sawyer next to me. “Want to try it out?”

Given Sawyer’s level of excitement, I might have just asked him if he wanted to get a puppy, which I was definitely not asking. Fifteen new chicks were enough tiny animals for this single mom.

Saw jumped up and slapped his still-chubby fingers over the solar gauge, then pumped his fist in the air when the door slid shut. “We did it!” he shouted. “You are a genius, Mom.”

I smiled. I’d started saying that when I successfully constructed his wooden train set without any extraneous pieces, and he’d quickly picked up on the saying ... Not that I discouraged him.

“We are both geniuses,” I said. “We make a good team.” I put my hand out for him to give me a high five. “Now, are you ready to go get our chicks?”

It was early September, and I’d let Sawyer stay home from preschool today just so that we could go to the post office together to pick up our new baby birds. I’d ordered chicks from a hatchery and received them in the mail several times, but it never failed to amaze me that living creatures were shipped like dog treats. Even so, the chicks from this hatchery were almost always quite healthy and quite loud when they arrived.

That loudness was the reason Saw and I got up extra early and got the coop door installed. We wanted to be able to go get the birds as soon as we got the call from the post office, and that call had come in ten minutes ago. I didn’t want to make the postal workers have to put up with fifteen tiny peeping voices for any longer than necessary.

“Yes,” Sawyer said and bolted for the car. Then, he paused and looked back, shouting, “We’re not taking Beauregard, right?”

I shook my head vigorously. Definitely not. Our Maine Coon cat, Beau, was typically very laid back, if slightly crotchety, but even his apathy and laziness might be disrupted by the sight of day-old chicks. “No, baby birds and kitties don’t mix,” I said.

It was going to be a chicken-filled day. After we brought our babies back and installed them in the brooder we’d made from a tote, we were going over to our neighbor Jackie’s house to take down her old chicken coop. She’d never used it, and lately raccoons had been taking up residence in the building. I had told her that I could probably use the wood in my architectural salvage business, and she’d offered to give it to me if I took down the building. I was happy to trade labor for product most days, but especially when it was a kindness for a neighbor.

Given that the building was pretty small, I thought Sawyer and I could probably handle it by ourselves. And I’d told Saw that he could have some of the wood to build something of his own to sell in the shop. The boy was surprisingly good with a hammer, and even if whatever he made came out really wonky, I knew two grandparents who would proudly make the purchase for their own home.

The chicks were as loud as expected when we got to the post office, and Sawyer spent the whole ride back to our house talking to them and imitating their peeps at ever louder volume. By the time we got them out of the box, dipped their beaks into the water to teach them to drink, introduced them to the food, and checked the temperature under the heat lamp, I was ready for the alternative noise of hammers and crowbars.

We walked over to Jackie’s house, and as we strolled down her long drive, I looked at the small white house that sat facing the back of mine on the small hill across the ravine created by the train tracks. On the historic map of the area, that white house was here early, as early as 1838, and I enjoyed looking at it and thinking about the farmer that had lived there. Maybe a bachelor. Maybe a young couple.

They had likely farmed most of the land around us for subsistence and a small profit. And while I imagined the chicken coop we were about to take down had at least been re-sided if not entirely rebuilt in the centuries since the farm was established, it probably sat on the same spot as every coop before it. Geographic change was not something that came easily on farm spaces.

We walked up onto Jackie’s porch, me via the steps and Sawyer via her wheelchair ramp, and before he could even ring the doorbell, she was there with her taupe glasses and warm smile. “Hi, Saw,” she shouted. “Would you rather walk in or get a wheelie ride?”

Saw looked at her and said, “Wheelie, please!” before climbing into her lap in her wheelchair and letting her spin him around and then give him a wheelie ride into the living room.

Jackie had used a wheelchair her whole life, and she was a master with that thing. While it had taken Saw a while to realize that Jackie could just let him take it for a ride after she shifted to the recliner she used for work, he was always glad to get a ride from her when she offered, which was pretty much every time we came over.

His ride over, Saw settled into the couch and helped himself to the small bowl of Hershey’s Kisses that Jackie kept on her side table. The boy really knew how to make himself at home. While I wanted to scold him, I also knew Jackie didn’t mind. She and Sawyer had become fast friends in the past few months, and now she was his favorite babysitter … partially because she was really fun but also because she always had chocolate.

“We’re ready to work,” Sawyer said around a mouthful of chocolate.

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I said. “Hi, Jackie. How are you?”

“I’m good. Thanks for doing this, Paisley. I love raccoons from afar, but those suckers are a real nuisance when they take up residence.” Apparently, a mother raccoon had given birth to a litter of adorable masked babies a couple of weeks back, and they had been littering Jackie’s backyard with garbage that they brought in from who knows where. She shook her head. “It’s like having a bunch of short, masked frat boys living out back.”

“I bet. Just the squirrels nesting in our oak out front are loud enough to startle me sometimes. I can’t imagine a family of raccoons,” I said with a laugh.

“Do we get to see the raccoons?” Sawyer said

My heart stopped. I had not thought of this possibility. I could have kicked myself.

Jackie glanced at my face and then cracked up. “Don’t worry, Paisley. Animal Control came earlier in the week and relocated them. It’s just the building left.”

The rhythm of my heart picked up again. “Oh good. That makes things easier.”

Saw was of a different mind, and I thought we might have a bit of a meltdown on our hands. But I handed him the small hammer and crowbar my dad had gotten for him, and he immediately forgot about the raccoons in favor of destruction. “Let’s go, Mom!”

I waved to Jackie as we went outside and around to the back of her beautiful farmhouse. This one had been built in the early part of the nineteenth century and featured the standard kitchen and living room of an old farmhouse with two bedrooms upstairs, but Jackie had put on a large addition at the back with a master bedroom, luxurious bathroom, and a closet the size of my first floor.

She’d made her money in banking, and while she was retired now, she still covered her expenses and more with her wise investment strategy. Every year, she took a month-long vacation to a country she hadn’t yet visited, and I looked forward to seeing her photos on social media so I could live vicariously through her experiences. This year, she’d gone to Iceland, and after seeing her photos I was so jealous that I promised myself that Saw and I could go there in the next couple of years.

The coop was long and low, with horizontal boards spanning the length. The wood itself had a lovely gray patina, and as long as we got most of the boards off intact, they could make nice flooring for a small space. Of course, the trick here was going to be preventing Sawyer from causing mass destruction.

I had explained to him that we were going to sell these boards and we needed to have them intact, and he had seemed to understand that. But as soon as we got to the coop, he slung the hammer back like he was going to pound the first board into pieces. It was then that I decided Sawyer needed his first lesson in capitalism.

“Saw, if you help me get these boards off without breaking them, I’ll give you some of the money from selling them.” This got his attention, and he stopped mid-swing.

He turned to me and, with all the seriousness of a child who is going to be a fierce negotiator, said, “I want two fives.”

I feigned that I was considering his offer and said, “Okay. If you help me get the boards off without breaking them, I will give you two fives. And if you’re really good and listen carefully, I will give you three fives. That’s fifteen dollars.”

A giant smile broke across his face. “Okay, Mama.” He turned the hammer in his hand like a pro and began gently pulling on the board with the claw. I guess all that work hammering and removing nails with his grandfather was paying off, and a little bribery didn’t hurt either.

For the next hour, Sawyer and I worked diligently, and I was stunned by his focus for so long. But eventually, his attention started to wander, and I kept an ear out for him as he trotted around the yard gathering flowers and following butterflies. Eventually he settled down to dig a hole in an old flower bed behind the coop. Since he was using a stick, the going was slow, and I had enough time to get the rest of the boards off before I could tell he was done with manual labor for the day. Fortunately, I’d planned ahead and timed things well, it seemed.

“All right, Love Bug,” I said when I heard tires on the gravel driveway. “Boppy is here to take you for ice cream and to visit the playground. I’ll see you at home in a little while.”

Sawyer leaped up with delight when he saw not just his grandfather but his grandmother, too, coming around the corner of the house. My boy loved my dad, but he had a special affection for Lucille. The idea that both of them would be taking him to the playground and pushing him on swings and playing monster chase – well, it was a four-year-old’s delight.

I waved as they intercepted him and took his hands to swing-walk him to the car. We had all learned that when Saw moved quickly from one place to another, it was best to go with the flow and not try to slow down for things like greeting, cordiality, or small talk. Dad and Lucille were coming over for dinner, so I’d catch up with them later.

Now, I could get to the hard work on the coop: the work that I didn’t want to share with a small child who could not keep from touching things, including chicken excrement. It was helpful that we were down to the stud walls now, providing extra ventilation, but it was still going to be a dusty, dirty job of clearing the floorboards to see if we could salvage them to clean and sand. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

But this project was a job for a friend, and it would yield some good boards for someone to reuse. I slipped on my respirator and headed in. Fortunately, the coop had been kept relatively clean over the years, but no matter how tidy a coop is, chickens are dirty animals and even the best bird keepers can’t clean up all of the poop, all of the time.

I began by sweeping out as much as I could of the dust and other deposits off the floor and onto the tarps I’d laid around the building. My plan was to gather up the tarps and drag them to the woods to let the dust be part of the natural ecosystem. It quickly became clear, however, that the dust was going to become a part of the lawn since the wind had picked up and begun creating a cloud around the building.

“Did someone set off a smoke bomb?” I heard a familiar voice say.

When I saw Santiago, my fiancé, step through the dust with his own respirator on, I laughed. “Looks like it, doesn’t it? But nope, it’s just dust mites and poop.”

“Oh, much better,” he said. “How can I help?”

I smiled at him. “I didn’t expect you here today. I thought you were on duty.”

“I was, but the new guy came in, so I begged off.” The edges of his eyes crinkled, which told me he was smiling. “I couldn’t pass up the chance to see my fiancée in this particular glory.”

A blush rose up under my skin, and I grinned behind my own breathing device. We had only been engaged a few months, but it had been an amazing and busy few months. We had plans to marry in April, and we wanted to do as much of the event ourselves at my farmhouse as we could. Even with the informal theme and our house as the venue, we still had to book a lot of things as soon as possible. Lucille was doing our cake, and she and our friend Mary Johnson were going to handle the catering, too. Yet, Santi and I were still trying to decide on flavors and menu items. Plus, we had decor to choose and our attendants to select. Music, favors, tent, chairs, tables – it all got so overwhelming when I started to think through things.

So mostly, I didn’t. Santiago and I had agreed to set aside two hours a weekend to power through as much planning as we could, and then the rest would have to wait until the next weekend. Given how busy we both were, this solution was working, even if it left me a little breathless with anxiety in between.

Now, though, I was glad to see him for something other than flipping through wedding magazines and talking about the costs and the pros & cons of serving alcohol. He took to the work with great fervor, and before I knew it, the floorboards were up, the rafters lifted, and the entire structure picked apart into two piles – “keep” and “burn.” I was happy to see that the keep pile was quite substantial and included a lot of the floorboards, which were thick oak and could be used for the same purpose when cleaned.

The fun part came now, when we got to burn the detritus. I texted Jackie to let her know we were getting started, and a few moments later, she came out with a tray of s’mores makings on her lap. “I know, I know. We can’t cook marshmallows over chicken dookie, but I had the kid who does my yard set up a fire in the pit for after we light this one.” She pointed back behind her toward the house. “You can’t have a bonfire, even with poop, without marshmallows. It’s a rule.”

I laughed. “I like your rules,” I said as I tucked some loose newspapers under the pile of trash wood that Santi had just built. He threw on some lighter fluid, probably more than was necessary, and tossed in a match. The flame shot up like a reverse rocket engine, and I was a little sad that Sawyer couldn’t see it. But my sadness was matched by relief that I didn’t have to keep him from seeing how fast various sticks would burn in that heat.

Jackie led us over to the actual firepit, and without lighter fluid this time, Santi lit a second pile of newspaper and sticks. The three of us sat around roasting marshmallows and eating s’mores while we chatted about the big news in town: the decision that the county board of supervisors had made to not allow any more franchised businesses to build within county limits. All of us were pleased by the decision, even though we realized it might mean fewer jobs for some folks, but as small business owners, Jackie and I both appreciated both this decision and the tax incentives the county had put in for local folks to start their own companies.

“Going to be a big help to me,” Jackie said. “It’s hard to run a virtual assisting business when I’m paying taxes through the nose. Those breaks will help me do more than just break even.”

“Yep, me, too. And Mika’s store will see a big boost. I know the retailers in town have a hard time justifying their storefronts with the slim foot traffic on Main Street. This should help.” My best friend Mika’s yarn store was very popular with the local knitters and crocheters, and she had built a good following online and at the Charlottesville market, too. But yarn is not a necessity, and in a place like Octonia, where a lot of folks live below the poverty line, she was barely surviving some months.

I stood up and brushed off my hands. “Only one thing left to do,” I said as I walked back toward the square of bare earth where the coop had stood. “My favorite part.”

Santiago shook his head. “I’ve never met a woman who likes to play in dirt as much as you do,” he laughed. “She gets such a thrill out of finding trash,” he said to Jackie.

“Not me,” Jackie said as she moved toward the house. “I’ll leave you to it, but if you find gold doubloons, you know where to find me.”

I smiled and waved as I headed back to grab my rake and begin the hunt for anything that had been thrown or fallen under the coop. I didn’t expect gold coins, but maybe a button or a cool old bottle or two. I had just been reading The Last Apothecary, so I imagined myself as Caroline Parcewell mudlarking in the Thames as I began to gently rake back the piles that had accumulated under the coop.

It took me a few minutes to get past the first layer of old poop, but then, I started turning up the good stuff – a small blue jar with a glass eyedropper in it, a piece of green glass as thick as my thumb, and even a wheat penny that Sawyer would love to add to his collection, once I washed it.

I was just getting down into the dirt when my leaf rake skimmed over something much more firmly stuck in the ground. I raked away as much as I could from the yellowish edge I could see peeking out of the ground and tried to temper my imagination’s whims of colonoware pots or some fine Royal Doulton jug. As I bent down to use my fingers to free the item from the soil, I pictured myself on Antiques Roadshow, my jaw sagging as a British woman with a stylish brooch told me that my find was one of the finest pieces of ceramic she’d ever seen.

I had visions of putting away enough money from the sale of the delicate platter – my visions were getting grander as I dug – for Sawyer to attend undergrad and grad school without needing a loan, but just as I started to think I might retire at 60, something about the shape of the object stopped me cold.

Below me, I could see a slightly bulbous knob that appeared to taper down further into the soil. The object was a creamy white color that I, unfortunately, recognized.

It was a bone, and given my luck with jobsites and bodies, I wasn’t going to bank on the fact that some poor dog had met its end under the chicken coop. “Santiago?” I called as loudly as I could while trying to remain calm.

Clearly, my voice had not conveyed calmness because he sprinted around the house from the firepit. He came to an abrupt stop when he saw what I was staring at. “Is that what I think it is?”

I shook my head. “I hope not.”

2

Unfortunately, neither my dreams of the Roadshow nor my hopes that this wasn’t a human body were panning out. Santiago had quickly determined that, as best he could tell, I had found the knee-end of a human femur. So we were sitting around waiting for the coroner to arrive so that she could extract the rest of the remains.

Jackie had invited us to wait inside with her, but none of us had been much in the mood for polite conversation. So Santi and I had taken the huge, ice-filled glasses of Pepsi she’d offered and gone to sprawl in the grass while we waited, nestling the glasses into taller tufts of grass so they wouldn’t tip over.

I was lying on my back with my phone creating a sunshade for my eyes while I tried to begin the research I needed to do anyway to establish the provenance of the wood I hoped to sell. I knew that I’d be spending a lot more time looking into the person whose body we had just found, but right now, I needed to keep my mind busy, especially since Jackie had told me she didn’t know much about the previous owners.

My explorations had already revealed that the farm had been in existence for well over 150 years, but I hadn’t bothered to dig into the ownership yet. Now, though, I was trying to figure out who had owned the place before Jackie. Fortunately, Octonia had digitized the past ten years of deed records, and the date when Jackie bought the place was just six years ago.

With a few taps of my finger, I had the name of the previous owner: Jonathan Boykins. He had lived here for at least four years before selling the place – that much I could tell because his name wasn’t included as a purchaser for the property in that decade’s worth of records.

His name was unusual, especially around here, so I was able to track him down fairly quickly with a Google search. Apparently, he was an elite cabinetmaker who specialized in custom-made pieces for homes. His website included images of beautiful wardrobes and spans of kitchen cabinets that made me a little envious of their owners. Okay, a lot envious.

A few more taps of my finger brought up his Facebook profile, and from the images he had made public I could see he wore a long, graying beard and appeared to enjoy wearing leather kilts at Renaissance faires and the like. He seemed friendly enough, and I didn’t see any affiliations on his page to suggest he was a serial killer, a member of the KKK, or a Holocaust denier. Believe it or not, I’d met two of those three in person when researching other projects in the area, and I didn’t want a repeat of those conversations. Also, serial killers weren’t high on my list of people to talk to.

I turned my head toward Santi, who appeared to be taking a nap in the afternoon sun, and said, “I found the previous owner. If I don’t mention the bone, do you mind if I reach out on the pretense of research about the chicken coop?”

The corner of Santi’s mouth twitched up. “I appreciate the courtesy of the ask, Paisley, but we both know you can’t resist a research conundrum when you come upon one. Go right ahead.” He turned his head and looked at me. “But yeah, don’t mention the bone.”

I nodded and opened Messenger on my phone. My note to Boykins was very brief and just explained that I was doing some research about the property he used to own down by Octonia Creek and wondered if he would mind talking with me about it.

With my research process at a dead end for the moment, I put my phone into my pocket and rolled over to lay my head on Santiago’s chest after determining I had enough chicken dust in my hair already to not worry about the coating on his clothing. “Do you ever think I’m bad luck?” It was a question I carried around with me all the time.

Santiago didn’t even pause. “Nope,” he said as he put a warm hand on my back. “These people would be dead no matter what, and the fact that you find them and recover their stories – I think they’re pretty lucky folks.”

I felt a little glow in my chest. I guess he was right. If I didn’t do what I did, no one would know where these people were, and the stories of their deaths would remain hidden. I didn’t know if I could take any credit for bringing people closure, but I hoped I was doing right by history and its people to help preserve not only buildings but the stories of the people who had lived and loved in them, too.

I sighed. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little weird about the fact that I was uncovering – quite literally, in many cases – the darkest sides of Octonia history. In the past year or two that I’d been doing this work, I’d heard from more than a few local folks that I needed to stop meddling, stop digging up the past. “Leave it where it lays,” one man had said. Some folks didn’t like secrets being brought to light for various reasons. Mostly because some people just couldn’t handle uncomfortable topics of discussion.

Often I couldn’t help but wonder if some of these people were trying to scare me off my work just so I wouldn’t be able to tie them to something unsavory in their family’s history. I had decided long ago, however, to not let other people’s fears become my own. This was my work – to tell the truth – and I was going to keep doing that for as long as I could.

“Thanks,” I said to Santiago as I snuggled deeper into his arm. “How much longer will the coroner be?” I asked.

At that moment, tires crunched over the gravel driveway. “Sounds like not much longer at all,” he said before rearing his head up to kiss the top of my head. “Come on. Let’s get her back here so we can see what we’re dealing with.”

We stood up from the warm grass, and I followed him around to the front of the house to greet Alexandra Chu, the new county coroner. She’d moved up from Richmond a couple months back, and we’d become fast friends because her daughter Olivia and Sawyer had become besties at a law enforcement picnic over the summer. The two of them played together at least a couple times a week, so Alex and I had spent a lot of time watching them play while we sipped sweet tea or a little white wine.

“Hi, Alex,” I said as she pulled her messenger bag out of her van. “Sorry to bring you out this late in the day.”

“Part of the gig,” she said as she gave first me and then Santiago a fist bump. “Show me what we’ve got?”

Jackie joined us as we went back to the site of the chicken coop, and while the three of us watched, Alex finished clearing the soil around the bone I’d found and pulled it gently from the ground.

“Human femur,” she said definitively. “Probably a young man. Maybe 20, 25. I’ll know more in the lab” – she looked down at the ground – “or if we find more remains.” She knelt and moved back the top couple of inches of soil around her. “We need to excavate the whole site.”

I groaned and sent an apologetic smile toward Jackie. “I’m so sorry, Jack. A simple project has become this whole big thing.”

“Are you kidding? This is the most exciting event to happen to me in a long time. Let’s get digging.” She picked up a long-handled shovel from the stack of tools I’d dropped off earlier in the week and started to dig.