Mystery Night Murder Read online

  * * * * *

  FREE EBOOK OFFER

  Sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know about our new releases, special bargains, and giveaways, and as a bonus receive a FREE ebook!

  Sign up for the Gemma Halliday newsletter!

  * * * * *

  * * * * *

  MYSTERY NIGHT MURDER

  a Merry Wrath Mystery

  by

  LESLIE LANGTRY

  * * * * *

  Copyright © 2019 by Leslie Langtry

  Cover design by Janet Holmes

  Gemma Halliday Publishing

  http://www.gemmahallidaypublishing.com

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  FREE BOOK OFFER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY LESLIE LANGTRY

  SNEAK PEEK

  * * * * *

  FROM THE AUTHOR…

  This book, MYSTERY NIGHT MURDER is a little nod to two of my favorite mystery thingies: Agatha Christie's amazing AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, and CLUE—the board game (not CLUE—the movie. Never CLUE—the movie).

  Agatha Christie is the must-read, go-to author for cozies, and I doubt I'll even come close to her greatness here, but I'll give it a go.

  CLUE is the board game I played so often that my siblings ran in terror whenever they saw the box. And yes, I always won. And no, I never cheated. At least…I don't think I did, but then, my memory isn't what it used to be.

  I hope you enjoy my little tribute.

  —Leslie

  Dedicated to the memory of Lori Sweet—the amazing woman who co-founded our Girl Scout Troop and who was a wonderful co-leader for many years.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  The Troop:

  Merry Wrath—Ex-CIA agent, Girl Scout leader, and full-time dead body magnet.

  Dr. Soo Jin Body—County Medical Examiner—annoyingly gorgeous.

  Betty—A feisty 4th grader with issues (far too many to list here).

  Lauren—Creative kid with a quirky outlook and penchant for booby traps.

  Inez—Clever and resourceful, Inez is the idea kid.

  Ava—A natural leader of girls, not afraid to give marching orders (read—a bit bossy).

  The Girl Scout Council:

  Stacey Gillespie—Girl Scout Director of Camps—a real trooper with a positive attitude.

  Juliette Dowd—Possible Satan's spawn.

  The Guests:

  Thad and Wren Gable—Wealthy young couple. Thad is an attorney, and Wren manages an art gallery. Thad is arrogant, and Wren is jittery—which means their marriage is a challenge to themselves and everyone else.

  Caroline Regent—A no-nonsense, gruff, middle-aged doctor. Practical to the point of forgetting that there are other people in the world.

  Dennis Blunt—Twenty-something trust-fund baby with no goals in life beyond downloading the latest version of whatever video game can keep him from having to work. Coerced into going by parents, who were unable to come.

  Arthur and Violet Kasinski—A wealthy couple in their 70s. Generous donors, from old money (well, for Iowa) who love kids but were unable to have any.

  Taylor Burke—Forty-year-old first female CEO of one of the largest insurance companies in the world. Was once a Girl Scout and lets everyone know it by saying irritating things like, "That's not how we did it when I was in Scouts."

  Enos McQuaid—Nouveau riche. Enos made fast money creating an app that reminds people to brush their teeth. Sold his company for millions. Bored, which is how he got talked into coming.

  The Staff:

  Miriam Cooper—Housekeeper/cook, in her thirties. Very quiet. Makes a mean lasagna.

  Ned Odom—Groundskeeper/handyman, in his sixties. Scary to everyone but Betty.

  CHAPTER ONE

  "Murder me!" the girl cried out with large, pleading eyes. "Please?"

  "No!" begged another. "I want to be murdered!"

  I was holding a large carving knife in my hands as I looked these two over. "I'm not going to kill either one of you."

  Betty pouted, folding her arms over her chest. "But Mrs. Wrath! You need victims!"

  Mrs. Wrath. Sigh. For the past few years, I'd been begging my girls to call me Ms., since I wasn't married. But technically speaking, they were right this time. Sort of. Newly married, my name was actually Mrs. Ferguson. Or at least, it would be if I'd taken Rex's last name.

  Lauren objected. "I'm the tallest. I should be the one killed. It only makes sense."

  Mrs. Linda Willard, my fourth-grade teacher who had started helping out with my troop here and there, arched an eyebrow in my direction but said nothing. She was learning that my Girl Scouts were, well, a bit quirky.

  The girls, who were fourth graders themselves, saw my fourth-grade teacher as a sort of mythical creature from the olden days, and they viewed her with an awe they'd have for the arrival of Abraham Lincoln dressed in full samurai armor astride a pterodactyl.

  Kelly, my best friend and co-leader, gently took the knife from my hands and set it up on a high shelf so the girls couldn't reach it. She should know better. I'd seen these kids form a human pyramid just to get the cookies off the top of my fridge.

  "We talked about this," she said sternly (she always said things sternly). "This is a fundraiser for the Girl Scout Council, and we are here to help run it. The adults who paid for tickets get to be the characters and they get to be the victims."

  Betty and Lauren simultaneously threw their arms up in the air and stomped away in disgust. I wondered if they'd been practicing that move and finally found a reason to deploy it. Kind of like an angsty, synchronized fury swim.

  "We could kill one of them," I mused. "No point in having the whole troop against us."

  Kelly rolled her eyes.

  Linda Willard stepped in. "I came up with the mystery for an adult victim. I don't think it's a good idea to kill off one of the girls."

  Kelly pointed to her and nodded. Mrs. Willard had been her teacher too.

  Our former educator was a puzzle master who actually had a New York publishing contract to create crossword books. And when the Council asked me to come up with a murder mystery–night fundraiser, I'd turned to her. She'd helped me solve a mystery recently and was rewarded by the local police with a Medal for Murder. Okay, they didn't call it that. They called it a Citizen's Award for Service. But Medal for Murder would've been way better.

  My name is Merry Wrath, and I used to be a spy with the CIA, until I was "accidental
ly" outed by the vice president of the United States. As Fionnaghuala Merrygold Wrath Czrygy, I had to flee my field assignment to get home in one piece when the news came out. That wasn't easy since I was in a dive bar in Chechnya with a group of paramilitary terrorists who had a thing for CNN (which didn't mean much since that was the only channel they could get besides the current strongman's cable access show on house cats). I barely made it out intact.

  Because I was forced into early retirement, the government awarded me a huge settlement before sending me packing. I changed my name to Merry Wrath and came back to my hometown of Who's There, Iowa, to figure out what to do next. Kelly talked me into helping her with a troop, and that was how I ended up in this particular predicament.

  Due to a number of unusual events, word leaked out about who I really was, and the Girl Scout Council asked me to create a fun mystery fundraiser for their biggest donors. Linda came up with the mystery, clues, and whodunnit stuff. Kelly and I filled in the blanks.

  We were going for a sort of twist on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. One of the board members owned a private island in the middle of a huge lake with a mansion there that we could use. There was no Wi-Fi—ergo, no cheating by looking stuff up on the internet. The players would arrive by boat, and we'd be stranded for forty-eight hours. It was the perfect setup.

  The party would start soon. We'd arrived early this morning to help with setting things up. Only eight of my girls were able to come, due to a Monster Golf Cart Rally being held in Bladdersly.

  So it was the four Kaitlyns (I have four Kaitlyn M.'s who all look alike for no apparent reason), Betty, Lauren, Inez, and Ava. Dr. Soo Jin Body—the county medical examiner—and I were providing adult supervision because Kelly had to work at the hospital this weekend and Mrs. Willard was going out of town to visit her daughter in Texas. At least they came to help us set up.

  And I'd just found out that the four Kaitlyns couldn't stay because they were going to a Weimaraner dog show in Ames. Their mothers, all improbably named Ashley, had started an Etsy shop, making harnesses strictly for that one dog breed. The girls were going along to help and, I assumed, to roll around in puppies.

  "Are you sure you can handle it with just four girls?" Kelly bit her lip.

  "This is the third time you've asked," I reminded her. "Yes. I've got this. And four girls will be much easier to wrangle."

  "I still don't know why they won't tell us who the victim or murderer is," Betty grumped loudly, from across the room.

  I ignored it. Kelly and I'd decided that the girls would experience this firsthand. They could try to solve it on their own but had to keep that to themselves. The guests were the stars of this show. Six mega donors who'd paid $10,000 each to be here, these folks were smart and wealthy. They were about to have their socks blown off. Almost literally in fact, since I confiscated Betty's homemade shape charges an hour ago. She'd insisted they were for special effects, but I threw them into the lake anyway.

  Other than the four adults (including two employees who lived here), four girls, and eight players, the Council sent two staffers to help. One was Stacey Gillespie, the camp director who my girls loved, and the other was Satan. I'd love to say I'm kidding, but Juliette Dowd was my arch nemesis (and this is from an ex-CIA agent who literally had arch nemeses in the past).

  An angry young woman who had a thing for my husband, Juliette tried (and sometimes succeeded) in making my life miserable. I'd wanted to "kill" her off, but Linda said it would be too obvious. She had a point. Plus, Kelly thought I might really kill her instead of fake killing her, so she decided to remove the temptation for me and edited her right out of the script.

  "This house is awesome," I said for the one hundredth time today.

  Soo Jin nodded, her beautiful eyes wide with glee. "It's a Queen Anne Victorian! And it's original to the island."

  "How do you know that?" I asked. I didn't know that.

  She held up a book titled Islands in the Middle of Lakes in Iowa. "I found this at the library. I can tell you everything about this place!"

  "Is it an interesting history?" I asked. Maybe there was a ghost story! The girls would love that!

  Soo Jin flipped the book open and showed me a photo from the mid-1800s. "That's Jim Bentley." She pointed to a scowling man in the photo, standing next to a pretty young woman. "And that's his wife, June. Jim was cheated out of his life savings by a con man from Chicago."

  "So he got revenge?" Kelly asked.

  Soo Jin shook her head, "No. He developed tuberculosis and was sent to an asylum in Colorado. His wife, June, believed that his poor health was a result of the swindle. I guess they didn't really know what caused tuberculosis back then. Anyway, she tracked the crook down and lured him to the island, to this very house, and murdered him."

  "She killed him?" I gaped. "That's an opportunity missed. We could've built a ghost into the script."

  The medical examiner shrugged. "It was a pretty straightforward case. June admitted guilt and went to prison. Somebody bought the island after that, and since then it's been privately owned."

  "Too bad it wasn't an unsolved mystery," I said. "We could've plugged that in somewhere."

  Soo Jin smiled. "That's the only good story in the book. The rest are pretty boring."

  I could imagine. A book on islands in lakes in Iowa? Still, I had to give Soo Jin props for preparedness. That combined with her dazzling beauty was a source of aggravation for me. Since it was unreasonable to feel this way, I kept it to myself.

  "Okay, everyone!" Stacey appeared in the hallway. The tall woman with blonde hair and a permanent, infectious smile was easily likeable. She ran the Council's camps and was the perfect camp director, always ready with a game or song for the girls to keep them distracted (a talent that made me very, very happy).

  She clapped her hands together. "The boat is on its way here with the guests! Those who are staying need to get into their costumes and assume their roles! Those who are leaving should get ready to go!"

  Kelly, Linda, and the Kaitlyns waved goodbye and disappeared through the front door. They'd hide in the boathouse until the guests were unloaded and then take the boat back to the shore, where it would remain until lunchtime Sunday, when it would return for us.

  The unfortunately named Dead Otter Lake (an improvement on the original Native American name that translated to Stinky Water Where Animals Die and Men Get Dysentery) was one of the largest in the state. Just twenty minutes south of Des Moines, in our home county. A very exclusive area, the lake was ringed with giant homes, each one bigger than the next.

  Penny Island sat dead center—a small five-acre wooded area with the large mansion in the middle. Our hosts, the Deivers, handed over their staff and the keys and fled for the big city. The only warning was that they had a mini Holland lop rabbit named Gertrude, that lived in the walls.

  "She's hiding from us at the moment," Audrey Deivers apologized. "You probably won't even see her while we're gone. We don't even know how she gets in and out of the walls." She went on to say that they'd put a small bale of Timothy hay and a water bottle in the mud room so the bunny would have access to food.

  "A mini lop?" I asked. "She must be small."

  Audrey gave me a look I couldn't translate. "You'd think so, wouldn't you? But no, it's actually larger than the Holland lop. Which was a huge surprise when she grew."

  Upon hearing about Gertrude, the girls launched the greatest manhunt since Jimmy Hoffa, searching high and low (including one rather optimistic search on top of the fridge) but never found the bunny. Audrey told us we might hear her thumping…a thing she did when angry.

  "They're here!" Lauren shouted from the front window.

  I shooed her and the other three girls up to our room to change their clothes. Soo Jin was waiting for us, already dressed in a fitted skirt, high heels, and an angora sweater with a circle pin. She looked ridiculously stunning. I tried not to hate her for it.

  The guests were suppose
d to arrive dressed in clothes from the 1950s. Linda had wanted to set the party in the '20s, but we couldn't find enough costumes for all of us, so the '50s it was.

  The four girls were dressed in sleeveless buttoned-up blouses, pedal pusher pants (that just looked like capris to me), socks, and saddle shoes, with their hair in ponytails tied with scarves. I had to admit, they looked adorable.

  As for me, I'd been dreading this moment. Kelly must've thought it hilarious when she brought the giant felt poodle skirt, short-sleeved blouse with Peter Pan collar, and loafers with pennies tucked into them.

  "I look like an idiot," I said as I surveyed myself in the mirror. "I'm too old for a poodle skirt."

  Soo Jin and the girls looked me up and down. Then my troop began laughing hysterically. I toyed with stuffing them into the walls with Gertrude.

  "Okay." Soo Jin approached and looked at my reflection in the standing mirror. "I think I can help."

  A few minutes later, Stacey and Juliette burst into the room, each looking very chic in pencil skirts, twinset cashmere sweaters, and high heels.

  "You look like an idiot!" Juliette sneered.

  Stacey shook her head. "What did I tell you about being negative?"

  The redhead simmered but kept her mouth shut. The camp director outranked her. But I knew if we were ever alone, the insults would flow like lava.