Red Mourning

  Red Mourning

  A Rosie Casket Cozy Mystery

  R.M. Wild

  Version 1.0 (4/29/20)

  Copyright © 2020 by R.M. Wild

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Description

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  47. Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by R.M. Wild

  Description

  They say that beauty is only skin deep.

  Which is all it takes for a good poison to work its charms…

  After Rosie Casket inherits an old inn, she drains all her money to keep it afloat. Worried that she’ll go bankrupt before she gets her first guest, she begs the universe to send her customers.

  Unfortunately, the young guest who arrives is not the relief that Rosie hoped for. In the young woman’s dying grasp, is the first page of an elaborate puzzle, one tailor-made for Rosie.

  And the woman’s lips are a shocking shade of red—even in death.

  To make matters worse, there’s a new man-eater in town, a powerful woman who has ensnared Trooper Matt Mettle in her deceitful web, a woman who leaves Rosie wondering if she and Mettle have any kind of future together.

  Desperate to keep the town from branding her fledgling business as a murder house and forced to work alone, can Rosie get to the bottom of the red lipstick before she loses everything?

  Or will more single women end up on the autopsy table?

  Red Mourning is the second novel in the Rosie Casket cozy mystery series. It features snark and snappy dialogue, wild twists, and more buried secrets than a government graveyard.

  Prologue

  Fifteen Years Ago

  “The prosecution calls Rosemary Casket to the witness stand.”

  The courtroom audience shifted. The Grundéns and the flannels and the salt-crusted jeans chafed the wooden seats, the Bean boots squeaked on the marble floor, and all the other roughneck accoutrements of battling the elements in coastal Maine turned to weather me.

  I wanted to bore into the wooden bench like a shipworm, but I couldn’t retreat any farther into myself unless my skeleton turned to chowder and my boyish shoulders shrank to the size of She-Ra accessories. My foster father kept promising me that I was due for a growth spurt and I would grow into the hideous things, but so far, he was wrong and my body was nothing more than a coat rack for dwarves with a ragged red clown wig on top.

  Now all eyes in the courtroom were looking at me—all fifty-nine freakish inches. I inhaled raggedly and closed my book and set it on the bench beside me. I stood and straightened my shoulders to act more confident, fully aware that I might be gouging out someone’s eyes with the horribly pointed things, but no one in the row bothered to stand to let me past.

  I turned sideways and shuffled. A few of the men were considerate enough to pull their knees up to their flannel chests, but the women stayed exactly where they were.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I whispered. “Coming through.”

  All I got in return were grunts and glares. The preliminary hearing was open to the public and the courtroom had filled with folks who had come out to support Stanley Eldritch, the man I had accused of murdering my sister Chrissy.

  None of my new family—if I could call them that—had shown up to support me. I only recognized two people in the audience.

  One was Charlie Margin, his monstrous hump making it look like he was trying to tie his shoes the whole time. When your foster father owns the only law firm in town, you would think you would get decent support, but no, Charlie Margin was the only representative from the law firm of Slate and Bearing to show up.

  The only other person I recognized in the audience was Katelyn Kennedy. She sat in the front row. I was in the seventh grade and went to junior high with her. I had no idea why she was here.

  All around, the whispers rose and hissed like the time I put my wet She-Ra doll in my Easy-Bake Oven to dry out her hair.

  “How dare she do that to poor Stanley.”

  “Does she have any idea the damage she’s caused?”

  “What kind of mother would allow her out that late on a school night?”

  “What kind of mother would allow that frightful hair?”

  The mother in question, of course, was my foster mother. Two years ago, my real mother had left me on Robert Slate’s doorstep.

  Given the shape of the Sunrise County courthouse, a giant toilet bowl in the county seat, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to call everyone in the audience a turd.

  Chrissy would have said much worse. She had a mean streak that could bring out the worst in a nun. She would tell the haters they were full of gas, that they had nothing better to do on a Tuesday evening than to swirl around the toilet bowl and get stuck to the sides, that they were all puppets on a string, all clinging to Eldritch like a bunch of dingleberries on the unwiped butt of society.

  The little princess in me never imagined that my first walk down the aisle would be this mortifying. I tried to walk like Chrissy and pop my hips from side to side, but a sharp pain shot through the ball joint in my pelvis and I winced and wobbled.

  When I finally reached the bar, the prosecutor, a woman with big brown eyes and a big brown perm, gave me a thumbs up.

  Her name was Mrs. Waldenflower. I liked her. Two weeks earlier, she had screened me for competency. She had warned me that the defense would ask me all sorts of questions to try to discredit my story, even debase me personally. She had said that I didn’t have to take the stand if I was too afraid, but I insisted.

  I wanted to punish that horrible Eldritch.

  At the other table, the defense lawyer, Mr. Flint, didn’t bother to look up. He had a crease between the edge of his nostrils and the corner of his lips that was so severe, he looked like he could smuggle the constitution in there.

  Mr. Flint was from the Navy JAG Corps and was wearing a dark blue uniform with gold stripes on the sleeves and colorful patches on the chest. In our preparation, Mrs. Waldenflower had informed me that as the keeper of the Saratoga Lighthouse, a beacon maintained by the government’s lighthouse commission, but operated locally thanks to a special agreement with the town of Dark Haven, Stanley Eldritch had access to the lawyers of the United States Navy for his defense.

  So not only were we up against the citizens of Dark Haven, but we were also up against the brass of the United States armed forces.

  Sitting beside Mr. Flint was Stanley Eldritch himself, aka the creepo-sister-killer. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, not that different from the stained smock he had worn on the night when Chrissy disappeared. His handcuffed wrists sat on the edge of the table as if he were ready to thrust himself from the chair and sink his teeth into my neck; because his job required him to work all night and sleep all day, he was as pale as a vampire—and spending last month in a jail cell hadn’t improved his complexion. At the time, I fully believed that if he didn’t go to prison, he would hunt me down and skewer me on the lighthouse lightning rod as he allegedly did to that teddy bear he had taken from a kid he had found trespassing on the edge of the town’s property.

  “Come here, child. Don’t be afraid,” Judge Butler said. He was wearing a red tie and a black robe. “You have vetted this girl, correct Mrs. Waldenflower?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Mrs. Waldenflower said.

  The bailiff, a man dressed like a park ranger, stopped impersonating the Maine State flag in the corner and came toward me. I met him in front of the bench.

  “Raise your right hand,” the bailiff said.

  “Don’t I need to swear on a book? That’s how they do it in the John Grisham books. I brought a copy of The Hobbit with me in case you need one.”

  “There’s no need to swear on a book,” the bailiff said. “Just repeat after me. I swear that the evidence that I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”

  I repeated his words exactly, my voice quaking.

  “Good. Have a seat on the witness stand.”

  I climbed up and sat on the hard chair. I
wished I hadn’t left my book in the pews—or whatever the benches were called in a courtroom. While waiting to be called, I had been too nervous to read, but I always carried a book with me, more as a security blanket than as a way to pass the time.

  As I sat there, my sneakers barely touched the platform. The chair had no cushion, probably to keep the witnesses from getting too comfortable, and the front edge of the chair was worn smooth, probably from nervous thighs as folks fidgeted.

  Me, I hooked my thumbs in the pockets of my acid-wash jeans, more anxious than when giving presentations in school. At least there, I knew I had prepared more than the other kids—but here, my audience was all adults who hated me.

  Across the way, old-man Eldritch was glaring at me, his nostrils snarled, his crooked teeth grinding from side to side as if he were trying to make peanut butter with his molars.

  I looked away, but my eyes fell on Katelyn Kennedy. She too was glaring at me and shaking her head as if to say “you will pay for this.”

  With nowhere comfortable to look, I fixed my eyes on the marble floor. Thanks to my flaming-red hair, all I could see of my reflection was a big blotch of redness—as if someone had literally spilled their guts on the floor in front of me.

  Mrs. Waldenflower stood from the prosecution’s table, smoothed her business skirt, and approached the bench. “Miss Casket do you—”

  “Please, call me Rosie,” I said, remembering her coaching. Using my nickname was supposed to make my testimony seem more friendly.

  Across the way, Mr. Flint rolled his eyes.

  “You are an eighth-grader at Rockford Middle school, correct?”

  As she had coached, I made sure to keep my eyes on her and only on her. She had said that averted eyes might make me look as if I were dissembling.

  “Yes, ma’am. I just turned thirteen.”

  “And how are your grades?”

  “They are very good. Straight A’s, even in math.”

  “Your friends consider you to be very smart, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you consider yourself smart?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “I just like to read a lot. I work very hard.”

  “That’s good, Rosie. Would you say that you have a good memory?”

  “Yes. Go ahead and ask me anything about Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Objection,” Mr. Flint said lazily. “They could have prepared this little stunt beforehand.”

  “Sustained,” Judge Butler said. “I don’t see how Rosemary’s knowledge of Sherlock Holmes is relevant.”

  Mrs. Waldenflower turned to the judge. “You’re right, Your Honor, it’s not directly relevant, but we are trying to establish that Rosie is a credible witness who is wise beyond her years.” She turned to the defense. “Mr. Flint, to show that we have not prepared this beforehand, what book would you suggest?”

  “Something by Tolstoy.”

  There were mean sniggers from the audience. Even Mrs. Waldenflower laughed. “Come now, Mr. Flint. Be fair. She’s only thirteen.”

  “Then I suggest we move on,” Mr. Flint said.

  Mrs. Waldenflower sighed. “Question retracted, Your Honor.”

  But I straightened in my seat. “No, I’ll answer it. What is your question about Tolstoy?”

  Mr. Flint smiled. “When Vronsky chooses to dance with Anna Karenina at the big ball, who does he throw over?”

  “Kitty,” I said without hesitation. “In my Russian phase this past summer, I discovered that Anna Karenina and War and Peace make for fine platform shoes when I strap them to my sneakers with a yard of twine.”

  The audience, though hostile, actually chuckled.

  Mr. Flint’s jaw dropped.

  And Mrs. Waldenflower grinned. “Any other books you’d like to suggest, Mr. Flint?”

  “No, ma’am. Continue.”

  “Very impressive, Rosie,” Mrs. Waldenflower said. “Now that we’ve established the excellence of your memory, can you take us back to the night of Thursday, April thirteenth? What exactly happened on that night?”

  I pulled my thumbs out of my pockets and twiddled them in my lap. This was what we had practiced for. Mrs. Waldenflower had said that I shouldn’t try to memorize the story, but instead, let it play in my mind like a VHS tape and simply narrate what I saw.

  “I was reading in my room—”

  “And this was at your house, right Rosie? Your foster father is Robert Slate, a partner at the law firm of Slate and Bearing in Dark Haven?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I was reading when my sister Chrissy—”

  “Your foster sister?”

  “Correct. But she’s like a real sister to me.”

  Katelyn Kennedy scoffed and crossed her arms.

  I tried to ignore her. “Chrissy knocked on my door and said that she wanted to go out. She wouldn’t tell me where we were going, but knowing Chrissy, I figured it would be exciting. I always looked up to her.”

  “And how old is your foster sister?”

  “She had just turned seventeen,” I said. “She was dressed in all black that night, all except for a pink watch, her Strawberry Shortcake watch. I wanted to wear a knit cap, but she said it wasn’t cool, so I took her advice, even though it was really cold. I followed her all the way through town and over to Beacon Street. We passed the inn and then we crossed into the woods. A storm was coming and it was very windy. Chrissy still wouldn’t tell me where we were going and I thought maybe we were looking for pirate treasure on Taylor’s Bluff.”

  “The lighthouse was lit that night, correct?”

  “Yes, ma’am. That red beam was the only thing I could see in the woods. We headed toward the light, but Chrissy had really long legs and was always ten yards ahead of me. As I lingered behind, I could have sworn I heard footsteps.”

  I stopped, my voice quivering at the memory. Ever since she disappeared, I’d wake up in the middle of the night, my mouth dry, my brow soaked.

  “Take your time, Rosie. I know this is hard.”

  I sniffled and nodded. Mrs. Waldenflower said that I should try to play up any pain that I was feeling to gain sympathy from the judge.

  “There was a bright light and I tripped. When I looked up, Chrissy was gone. Then I heard a scream. It was high-pitched, like Chrissy’s. I know it was Chrissy’s. I’ve heard her yell before. I got up and ran toward the lighthouse. First, I was afraid that Chrissy had taken a wrong turn and fallen off the cliff. I ran up to Mr. Eldritch’s house to ask him for help and banged on the door, but he didn’t answer. Then I ran toward the lighthouse, thinking that maybe he was working on the lantern or something, but I ran right into him. I fell backward onto the ground. Mr. Eldritch growled at me and asked me what I was doing on his property. I specifically remember a big red stain on his smock. It looked like blood.”

  The audience groaned. Eldritch clenched the edge of the table and leaned forward, ready to object. Mr. Flint held up a hand for his client to sit back and keep his mouth shut.

  “And then what happened?” Mrs. Waldenflower asked.

  “I ran and ran,” I said. “I ran for the road and ran all the way to my foster father’s law office. Mr. Eldritch had been the one who was following us in the woods. I know it. He grabbed Chrissy and she screamed, but it was too late.”

  “What happened once you got back to town?”

  “I told my foster father. At first, he was skeptical. He asked me why I had made it out alive, but not Chrissy. I said it was simple. Chrissy was prettier than I. He said I was acting ridiculous, but when Chrissy didn’t come home after a few more hours, he finally got worried and called the cops.”