Berried Alive Read online

  BERRIED

  ALIVE

  by

  CHELSEA THOMAS

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Berried Alive

  1 How Now Brown Cow?

  2 Blueprint Blues

  3 Third Turtle

  4 Small Town Scorn

  5 Town Gall

  6 Taking the (Brief)Case

  7 Trailer Tragedy

  8 Sun Don’t Shine

  9 Land and Pleas

  10 Water Fountain Chatter

  11 Oh Dear, Sudeer

  12 Castle Capers

  13 Trophy Wife

  14 Little Kimmy Attacks

  15 Lunches and Hunches

  16 Bakin’ Break-in

  17 Hudson Heart Attack

  18 Rent Destabilized

  19 Watching Wallace

  20 Out of the Shell

  21 Hot Sauce and Havoc

  22 Forest Fortress

  23 A Surprise Visitor

  24 Lost and Found

  25 Killed and Kebabbed

  26 Pain in the Wayne

  27 Chains and Cranes

  28 Bodacious Berry Bake

  29 Mayor, May I?

  30 Nectarine Dream

  31 Suddenly No Susan

  32 Design to Die For

  33 Oh Brother

  34 The Faceless and the Furious

  35 Foiled by Fawns

  36 Hasty Hastings Hating

  37 After Party

  38 A Surprise Visitor

  Book 5 Preview

  Chapter 1: Revolutionary Revolt

  Chapter 2: German Invasion

  Chapter 3: You Bet, Buster

  A Note from the Authors

  Copyright & Disclaimer

  Berried Alive © Chelsea Thomas, 2019

  Disclaimer—All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, including mechanical or electronic, without written permission from the author.

  While the author has made every effort to ensure that the ideas, guidelines and information printed in this eBook are safe, they should be used at the reader’s discretion. The author cannot be held responsible for any personal or commercial damage arising from the application or misinterpretation of information presented herein.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to the actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  And don't forget to sign up for “Thomas Tuesday,” Chelsea's weekly newsletter that features free cozies, bonuses, and exclusive content from this series. Just for you!

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  Cover Design: Priscilla Pantin

  To the Cozy Crew

  “Reading brings us unknown friends” – Honoré de Balzac

  With special thanks to

  Christy Murphy, author of Mom & Christy’s Cozy Mystery Series

  1

  How Now Brown Cow?

  “CHELSEA AND MISS MAY! Get over here. I need you to solve a super mysterious coffee shop mystery!" Brian smiled at us from behind the counter at the Brown Cow.

  I squinted at him through a fog of early morning grogginess. “Mystery? At this hour?”

  Brian laughed. But I was serious. It was 7:56 AM on a Sunday. I was wearing sweatpants I had owned for twenty years. My blond hair was frizzy with a nest of tangles.

  It was too early for me to be awake, let alone solving mysteries.

  Miss May, on the other hand, was bright-eyed and mushy-tailed. Is that the expression? Mushy? Bushy? Whatever. She was wide awake. And her eyes flickered with anticipation as soon as Brian said the word ‘mystery..'

  She leaned toward Brian with a smirk. “You say something mysterious has occurred at your quaint, small-town coffee shop?”

  Brian smiled and gave us the low-down on the crime.

  Apparently, he had shown up about half an hour late for work that morning. And when he’d gotten there, his cash register and counter had been covered in sticky notes.

  “It was a mosaic of sticky yellow squares,” he said in his SoCal drawl. “I think it was a prank pulled by one of my sneaky staff members. But I’m not sure whodunit.”

  Miss May gave Brian a playful grin. “Hmmm. I don’t know. Not sure we want to help Boss-Man Brian punish a light-hearted prankster at work.”

  “You know I’m not going to do that, Miss May. I want to figure out who the jokester is so I can get them back with a prank of my own.” Brian said. “And you two are expert mystery-solvers by now. So I need your help.”

  “The technical term for ‘mystery-solvers’ is ‘sleuths,’” Miss May said.

  “You know what I mean.” Brian looked off into the distance. “I think for my revenge, I shall fill their shoes with slime.”

  I grunted. “I think your victim will suspect something is amiss as soon as you ask them to take off their shoes.”

  “Good point,” Brian said. “I’ll plot my revenge later. But I can’t do anything if I don’t know who did it. And I can’t figure it out for the life of me.”

  Brian gestured behind me and Miss May. “Plus. All these people want to see the famous Pine Grove detectives at work! You’re not going to disappoint your fans, are you?”

  Miss May and I turned around. Indeed, an elderly couple, a young family and a few stragglers had gathered behind us.

  “I think this crowd has gathered for coffee,” Miss May said.

  The elderly woman stepped forward. “You’re wrong about that one, missy! I want to see you two genius sleuths at work.” The old woman held up her phone. “Also can I get a pic with you gals?”

  Miss May smiled. She and I had solved several mysteries together by that point, and the selfie request from the old woman was not our first. But our minor celebrity status still felt novel and surprisingly flattering.

  “Of course,” Miss May said.

  The old woman handed her phone to her grouchy husband. Then she jumped between me and Miss May, smiled and held up a peace sign for the photo.

  “OK,” she said after reviewing the photo. “Great pic. Now. Solve the mystery!”

  Miss May wavered but the crowd egged her on.

  “Yeah!”

  “Solve it!”

  “Crack the case!”

  Miss May held up her hands to quiet the onlookers. “OK. We’ll take a look and see what we can do. Brian, can you bring your employees out here?”

  Brian pumped his fist. “Nice. This is so fun. You and Chelsea are local treasures, you know.”

  “Just get them over here,” Miss May said.

  A few seconds later, Brian had lined up the two members of his staff in front of the counter to be questioned by Miss May.

  First came Rita, an old high school classmate of mine. Rita and I had gone from frenemies to friends after I’d moved back to Pine Grove, and she had played a huge role in the first mystery Miss May and I had solved.

  That day, Rita looked striking as always. Curly hair. Olive skin. Perfect smile. I wondered how she managed to look so good while raising a baby on her own, but that was a mystery for another day.

  Brian’s other employee was a girl in her early 20’s known as Willow. I had no idea if Willow was her real name or not, but it was fitting. Willow was a genuine 21st-century hippie, with dreadlocks and a nose ring and a tattoo of every phase of the moon climbing gracefully up her forearm.

  “Both these girls were here before I got in this morning,” Brian said. “And neither will fess up to anything.”

  Rita and Willow looked
at one another and smirked.

  “I see,” Miss May said. “Perhaps there is a bond of secrecy between them. What do you think, Chelsea? Any initial theories?”

  Although Miss May had been hesitant to begin this ‘investigation,’ once she started, she was all in. That meant that I was all in with her.

  “It’s possible they worked together,” I said.

  “True,” Miss May said. “Would you ladies do me a favor and empty your pockets?”

  Another smirk between the employees. They both emptied their pockets onto the counter, but neither was carrying anything suspicious. Mostly spare change and lint. Plus a tube of cherry-flavored lip balm.

  A balding man called out from the crowd, “This store has security cameras! What if you check those?”

  Miss May shook her head. “That’s cheating. And I don’t think it’s what Brian had in mind when he asked us to solve the mystery.”

  “You got that right,” Brian said. “I want some genuine detective work.”

  “May we walk around the counter?” Miss May said.

  Brian nodded and Miss May stalked behind the cash register. I followed like a loyal hound dog on the scent.

  Once I got a look at the counter, I cracked up laughing. Almost half the work surface was still covered in sticky notes. And each sticky note had a little message written on it in messy handwriting.

  I turned to Brian. “I thought you said you cleared off all the sticky notes!”

  Brian chuckled in chagrin. “Yeah. That’s just my personal collection. I guess I do kind of have a thing for convenient, sticky paper. That’s why it was a good prank.”

  “That’s not even as bad as it gets,” Rita said. “Some days there’s like three times as many.”

  Miss May squatted down and read a few of the notes out loud.

  “Greet every customer as if they are your mom!”

  “A smile goes a thousand miles!”

  “Make each cup with genuine kindness!”

  My aunt looked up, eyes twinkling. “No wonder the service in this place is so good, Brian.”

  “I hire good people,” Brian said. “When they aren’t playing tricks on me.”

  “I don’t suspect your employees actually committed this crime,” Miss May said. “Would you agree, Chelsea?”

  No clue. Need coffee, I thought. But I managed to sputter out a few words. “Yup. Agree. Totally! The prankster is not Rita or Willow. Someone else sticky-noted this joint.”

  Miss May scratched her head. “Then tell us, Chels. Who could it have been?”

  I glared at Miss May. She was having fun putting me on the spot, and she knew I didn’t know the answer. But the crowd was waiting for me to speak, and I could feel my hands starting to clam up with stress.

  I looked around the room to figure out who, other than the employees, could have played the practical joke. That’s when I spotted a conspicuous table along the far wall.

  There were only two cups on the table, but there were seven or eight used tea bags on saucers beside the mugs. Whoever had been sitting at that table had been there for quite a while.

  Perhaps, I reasoned, he or she was already at the Brown Cow before Brian had arrived that morning.

  Miss May followed my line of sight over to the table and smirked. “What do you think, Chelsea? Could the suspect be one of Brian’s customers, not an employee?”

  An excited murmur erupted throughout the room. The patrons were thrilled by the prospect that one of their own could’ve perpetrated the practical joke. But the trill of excitement exacerbated my hand sweat. Gross.

  “I do think it’s possible,” I said, wiping my hands on my jeans. “But which one of these fine people could it have been?”

  Suddenly, an angry man stormed into the shop, pushed his way through the crowd, and slammed his fist down on the counter. “I want my coffee and I want it immediately and I want it now and I want it dark and I want it rich!”

  I recognized the man as local rabble-rouser Wallace the Traveler. Wallace was bald. And paunchy. He wore the same pair of stained, oversized khakis every day. And he also wore a light blue sweater with a large hole in the back. The look was topped off with a pair of bifocals that Wallace wore down on his nose. And he never left home without a personality so gruff, it could shock a lightbulb out of its socket.

  Pine Grove did not have a lot of strangers like Wallace roaming the streets, and his recent emergence in our small town was one of the biggest mysteries of the prior months. Neither Miss May nor I had tried to solve that particular quandary. We agreed that Wallace’s life was none of our business.

  But questions swirled about town, nonetheless. Many suspected Wallace was homeless. Others thought he might take the bus up from the city every day for the fresh country air. No one knew for sure, but everyone seemed to have had their own uncomfortable “Wallace experience.” Including me.

  One day, when I was running errands in town, Wallace had followed me across the street singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” at the top of his lungs. I’d tried to keep my head down and continue walking, but Wallace had jumped in front of me and screamed, “I’m the lamb! Look at me. I am the lamb!”

  It had been a chilling moment. And I love lambs.

  So... yeah. Wallace’s presence in the coffee shop that morning transformed my trickle of palm sweat into a flash flood. Fortunately, Brian was far more relaxed about his unruly customer.

  “Hey man, we’re kind of in the middle of something here,” Brian said.

  “Hey man, do you think I care? I need the strongest cup of Joseph that you got!”

  “Do you mean you want a cup of joe?” Brian asked, with saintly patience.

  Wallace smacked the counter once more. “I don’t have money to pay for it but I’ll leave if you give it to me for free.”

  Brian shook his head. “I told you last time, man. I don’t appreciate those threats. If you need a cup of coffee, I’d be more than happy to give it to you on the house.”

  “Then do it already! La-di-da, la-di-da. Enough singing songs. The only song I want to hear is the sound of pouring coffee. Yum yum I need it now!” Wallace threw his head back and cackled, sending the nervous patrons a couple steps back.

  As I watched Wallace wait for his coffee, I felt a warm pang of sympathy in my stomach. Wallace scared me, for sure. And he could be mean. But he was clearly troubled. And few people treated him as kindly as Brian did.

  Everyone in the Brown Cow breathed a collective sigh of relief upon Wallace’s departure. But no one seemed to remember the light-hearted mystery of the sticky notes, until Miss May stepped forward to break the ice. “So do you all want to know who played the practical joke, or not?”

  The patrons of the shop turned back to Miss May, with renewed interest on their faces.

  Miss May took a step toward the elderly woman who had requested the selfie earlier. “Is that your table by the window? With all the teabags on it?”

  The old lady smiled. “Yes. I love tea.”

  “You’ve been here quite a while then, haven’t you?” Miss May returned the woman’s smile.

  “You could say that.”

  “Turn your palms up for me, ma’am?”

  The woman complied without remark. Miss May rubbed the tips of the woman’s fingers, then my aunt looked up with a grin.

  “Just as I thought,” Miss May said. “Your fingers are sticky. I felt it when you put your arm around me for our photo earlier. It felt almost like...you’d been handling sticky paper all morning. Would you be willing to open your purse for me, ma’am?”

  The elderly woman broke into a broad smile. She opened her purse and inside were hundreds of sticky note pads.

  “Show everyone what we’re looking at?” Miss May requested. The woman held out her bag and turned in a slow circle for everyone to see. This old lady was the guilty party, and she was proud of it.

  The patrons of the Brown Cow clapped and laughed, impressed by Miss May’s sleuthing.

>   “Let me guess,” Miss May said. “You heard that Chelsea and I come here most weekend mornings. You read it in the Gazette. In one of Liz’s articles about us. And you figured you would come by and try to create a mystery for us to solve in real time.”

  The woman grinned. “That’s exactly right, girly. And I saw the sticky note prank online! It just happened to work out perfectly that Brian here is already a fiend for the little yellow squares! How did you know all that?”

  “Hunch,” Miss May said. “And you’ve got two issues of the Pine Grove Gazette on your table, both of which are open to articles about Chelsea and me.”

  More applause rippled through the room.

  “Drats,” the old woman said. “I did myself in.”

  “You had help on that front,” Miss May said. “Your accomplices? Rita and Willow? They kept shooting looks over to you as I was investigating behind the register.”

  Rita slapped her knee. “Darn! I gave it away? That’s why I can’t go to Atlantic City. I’ve got no poker-face! I say I’m just going to go and watch the Blue Man Group and I end up losing my shirt at the tables. That’s it for me! I don’t care how blue those guys are. Or how bald! Or how cute!

  “You think the guys in the Blue Man Group are cute?” I asked. “They’re all bald and blue.”

  Rita smirked. “Blue is my favorite color.”

  I laughed, but my jovial mood faded as I noticed an angry mob marching down Main Street past the shop. I turned to Miss May. “Do you see that?”

  Miss May nodded. She ambled toward the main window, and the other patrons and I crowded behind her. We watched as the angry mob gathered a few storefronts down. They were chanting something but I couldn’t make out the words.

  Miss May turned to me. “Let’s go see what that’s all about.”

  2

  Blueprint Blues

  MISS MAY AND I HURRIED toward the angry mob, followed by a few curious patrons from the Brown Cow. Including the perp from our recently-solved case, the cute old woman.

  As we got closer, I saw that the “mob” was just three or four people, yelling at one man: infamous local real estate developer, Hank Rosenberg.