Red Hairing Read online

  Red Hairing

  A Rosie Casket Cozy Mystery

  R.M. Wild

  Version 1.0 ( 3/24/20)

  Copyright © 2020 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

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by R.M. Wild

  Description

  What if you had to live next door…

  …to the man who kidnapped your sister?

  When Rosie Casket learns of a mysterious inheritance, she returns home to Dark Haven, a tiny lobster village in Maine so isolated that even the old lighthouse still burns kerosene.

  Reeling from the loss of her job and haunted by her sister’s disappearance, Rosie’s trying to make peace with her past when a dead lawyer washes up on the shore.

  He’s got something in his pocket that doesn’t belong, something that perplexes State Trooper Matt Mettle, once the most popular boy in high school.

  Something that only Rosie Casket, self-made genius, can figure out.

  With the help of a quirky innkeeper and enough chowder to clog a firehose, Rosie must find the evidence to put her number one suspect behind bars…

  …or else become the next victim.

  Prologue

  Fifteen Years Ago

  In desperate need of a female role model, I looked up to the girl I called my older sister—at least for the two years I knew her.

  For a time, I bought into all the stories. At six, she was singing karaoke at the local bar so well she made the town’s failed American Idol weep. At seven, she was a goddess-ling on the balance beam, petite, cute, and powerful. Supposedly, she could throw a gravity-defying back tuck off two talcum-powdered toenails as if she were competing at the International Space Olympics.

  Me? I could barely balance on the curb outside my foster father’s law firm without falling into a puddle, let alone balance on a beam four inches wide.

  As the stories go, Chrissy quit singing at thirteen, making her voice deep and breathy. She quit gymnastics at fourteen, making her body explode into the kind of succubus that the boys burst a salivary gland over. When I first met her at sixteen, she was already a legend: thin ankles, long legs, big boobs, and hips that popped from side to side when she walked, no in-betweens, just extremes, kind of like a bird’s head when it pecks at seed.

  Even the boys in junior high would whisper about her in the school hallways, every hormone-addled lad sneaking over to the neighboring high school to snap a pic of Chrissy Slate’s butt when she got up from the outdoor lunch tables to throw away her veggie chips. Sometimes the girls would sneak over too, wanting to see what the big deal was—and then they’d return to the junior high cafeteria with their clumpy mascara smeared, their self-esteem ravaged by savage envy.

  In terms of allure, I was Chrissy’s polar opposite: freckles, braces, and glasses thicker than the Fresnel lens in the Saratoga Lighthouse. That’s no joke; when I first moved in with her, Chrissy goaded me into testing the strength of my spectacles by shining a flashlight through the lens and trying to set a poor ant on fire. It worked. I felt guilty for weeks.

  Of course, the boys in junior high never gave me more than a cursory glance, except when I was walking near Chrissy and blocking their view.

  “Get out of the way, Pippi Tube Socks!”

  Merely being seen in my sister’s general vicinity was a privilege, as if some of that ogling would miss Chrissy’s bosom and land on my freakishly broad shoulders. Collateral gawking, I called it. Not a day went by that I didn’t hope to soak up some of Chrissy’s magic.

  Unfortunately, by the time I was old enough to earn some ogling of my own, it was too late to seek her advice.

  She disappeared at seventeen.

  One night in the early spring, when I was in the seventh grade and Chrissy was a senior, she knocked on my bedroom door and said, “Put down that stupid book for a second and let’s go for a hike.”

  I nodded as stupidly as a puppy excited for attention. “Okay! Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see. I want to show you something.”

  It could have been a dead body for all I cared. I had seen Stand By Me and was up for a mystery—especially if it involved the possibility of being seen with Chrissy. I tossed my book on the bed and followed her downstairs. In the foyer, I grabbed my knit cap from the closet and pulled it over my head and stuffed my curly red hair inside the knit webbing. I had so much hair that tentacles of red escaped the folded brim like I was smuggling an angry octopus underneath.

  “Are you really going to wear that?” she said.

  I pulled off the cap and looked at it. It was the one with an anchor on the front, the only one large enough to hold all my hair.

  “What’s wrong with it?” I said.

  “You do know that Dad bought that cap for you sardonically, right?”

  I sniffed the webbing. “There’s nothing fishy about it. We live in a lobster village, not a fishing village, duh.”

  “Not sardines, dummy. Sardonically. With all the stupid books you read, you should know that. And with that crazy red hair, Dad thinks you bear a striking resemblance to a certain local Navy captain. All you need is a blazing red beard.”

  “I do not.”

  “Do too.”

  Sure, I might have looked like a flaming Troll Doll, but I looked nothing like Commander Taylor. I had seen the paintings in our textbook. Besides, I was currently taking measures to shrink my manly shoulders; unfortunately, the internet hadn’t yet provided any shoulder-reduction spells, only gnarly pictures of shrunken heads.

  “I don’t look anything like that beastly coward,” I said and threw the cap at the banister. If it wasn’t Chrissy-approved, I wasn’t going to wear it, not even in the dark.

  “Let’s go, we don’t have all night.”

  “What about Robert?” I said. “He doesn’t want us going out on school nights.”

  Chrissy checked her vintage Strawberry Shortcake watch, one of the accessories she wore to look even cuter for the boys. “If you mean Dad, then he is still at work. He’s got another big case this week. He won’t be back for at least an hour. There’s still plenty of time if you’d keep up with me for once.”

  “Time for what?”

  She dinged my nose. “You’ll see.”

  I was out of excuses—and too excited that she actually wanted to spend time with me to know any better—so I followed her outside without asking any more questions.

  Thick clouds were covering the moon, and in Chrissy’s black skinnies, black turtleneck sweater, and black boots, she nearly disappeared, all but her shimmering black hair and the glow-in-the-dark hair tie that bound her pony tail like a neon halo.

  Her handbag was black too, black leather, and in contrast to the pink watch she wore upside down on her wrist, the bag made her look much older. I didn’t have a clue about its contents—maybe her cell phone (Robert wouldn’t let me get one), maybe some makeup (Robert wouldn’t let me wear any), or maybe a collapsible baton to beat off the boys (Chrissy always laughed when I said it like that)—but whatever the case, I knew I wanted a bag of my own, preferably twice the size to hold all my books.

  The Saratoga Lighthouse had been lit for the night and the beam from the flame colored every roof in town red. It was supposed to warn lobstermen of the dangerous tide beneath Taylor’s Bluff. According to local legend, back in the days before the lighthouse, the Navy commander who lent his name to the cliff ran his Sloop-of-War aground on the shallows. Every kid in Sunrise County knew the story because every teacher recited the jingle in Down East history class:

  In eighteen-sixty-one, Commander Taylor fired many rounds,

  But missed the slaver who ran him aground…

  Chrissy’s long legs translated into steps twice as long as mine and I had to jog to keep up. The trek from old town past the harbor was about four miles and I was winded by the time we got to Beacon Street. Chrissy, of course, seemed fine. I didn’t know where she got lungs like that.

  The wind got worse as we walked parallel to the bluff. The black shutters shuddered on the Inn on Beacon Street, the old Queen Anne Victorian mansion where Phyllis Martin, queen of the town chowders, cooked her delicious potion.

  Chrissy stepped across the ditch. She was headed for the woods bordering Martin’s property.

>   “You’re trespassing,” I said.

  “We have to cut through the woods. The road is too dangerous.”

  I followed her, the wind blowing hard enough to make the weeds lie down. A storm was coming and my braces tingled. They were like tuning forks, all my chompers chattering.

  At the edge of Martin’s property, Chrissy pinched the barbed wire and lifted it for me so I didn’t snag my sweats.

  “After you, Nancy Drew,” she said. “I don’t want you to rip a hole in your butt area and give the lighthouse keeper a view of your freckled cheeks.”

  I ducked under the wire. How the heck did she know what my nether-cheeks looked like? “Thank you, Sis.”

  She followed and dropped the barbed wire and it twanged. “Don’t call me that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Just don’t.”

  I was pretty sure she didn’t want me calling her “Sis” because we weren’t real sisters, but I kept my reasoning to myself.

  I followed her deep into the woods. The trees were still skeletal, the wind making them shed their brittle branches, and I had to dodge the falling dead wood as it exploded at my feet.

  “I should have brought my bike helmet,” I said.

  “If you wore that stupid helmet, I would test its marketing claims by throwing you off the cliff.”

  Ahead, the lighthouse beam swept across the trees. Everything glowed red and twisted. I had no idea where we were going, so I had to trust Chrissy. For the next ten minutes, we tromped over the rocks and roots. Chrissy maintained her pace and stayed at least ten steps ahead. No matter how hard I tried to close the gap, she always pulled ahead.

  “That stupid lighthouse is nothing more than one big compensation,” Chrissy said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind. You’ll figure it out one day.”

  Judging by how loudly the water was slapping at the rocks below, I guessed we were maybe twenty yards from the edge of the bluff. The wind settled for a moment and I stopped, thinking I heard something.

  “Hold up. Did you hear that?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Footsteps. I think someone’s following us.”

  She checked her watch. Its face was glowing in the dark. “That’s just your imagination.”

  I pointed to a geometric shape in the distance, a squat rectangle against the trees. “Then what is that?”

  “An old camper.”

  “Someone lives in here?”

  “No, it’s abandoned,” she said, pulling far ahead. “Trust me.”

  I quickened my pace. “Wait up, will you?”

  “If I went any slower, I’d be lying down.”

  “What are we doing here? Are we looking for pirate treasure?”

  “There’s no such thing as pirate treasure,” Chrissy said. “Not around here, at least. We’re going to a secret place. A place I found.”

  “Where? What secret?”

  “You’ll see. I want you to meet someone.”

  “Who?”

  “You’ll see. It’s an adventure, Rosie. You need to poke your head out of your books from time to time.”

  “But what about the lighthouse keeper? He’ll catch us.”

  By now, Chrissy had turned her ten-foot lead into ten yards. “Old-man Eldritch is harmless. A paper tiger.”

  “That’s not what I heard. Remember that kid he caught trespassing on his property? He impaled him on the lightning rod.”

  “That was a teddy bear,” Chrissy said. “And besides, that’s precisely what makes this adventure worth pursuing. It’s not an adventure if there isn’t any danger.”

  She had a point. The girls in my mystery books were always looking for adventure.

  Determined to show her I wasn’t scared, I tromped harder.

  “Careful, there’s a loose root up here,” she said.

  I dropped my eyes, but couldn’t see anything: the ground was nothing but a black canvas, no contours in the darkness.

  Two flashes of white light came from the left. Then her handbag rang, the first few notes from a local metal band. She pulled out her phone, flipped it open, and her chin glowed blue. She had gotten a text.

  “Where was that loose root?” I said, but the words had barely escaped my lips when I pitched forward. I put my hands out just in time to keep from smashing my braces on a rock and landed on all fours, the leaves damp and stinking of decay.

  “Ewwww, it’s all wet,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” Chrissy said, stuffing her phone back into her bag. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. This was a bad idea.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s all off. Turn around and go back. Follow the road home.”

  “Wait—“

  Without another word, she ran ahead and blended into the darkness.

  “Chrissy, wait!”

  I scrambled to my feet, but tripped again. By the time I got up, Lacey was completely gone, not even a moving shape.

  “Chrissy?”

  A scream. It was high-pitched, like the whistle from a tea kettle, and it made the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand up. My blood slowed and thickened worse than maple syrup.

  “Chrissy!”

  No answer.

  My heart pounded and worked hard to pump my thickened blood. Breathless, I scrambled to my feet and spun around in circles, expecting Chrissy to jump out at any moment and say, “Boo, gotcha!”

  But she never did.

  “Chrissy! This isn’t funny! Where are you?”

  There was still no response, just more wind in the trees. I tried to run in the direction I had seen her go, the lighthouse beam my only guide, but I stumbled over more roots and branches as awkwardly as a newborn fawn finding its legs.

  Finally, I grabbed ahold of a fat tree and hugged it for dear life to catch my breath.

  I was totally lost.

  “Chrissy, c’mon! I’m scared! Where are you?”

  Another scream.

  My skin burst out in goose pimples. I blinked hard, trying to make sense of my surroundings. Up ahead, I could see the ancient rubble-stone column of the lighthouse, its peak flashing red. I must have been near the clearing.

  I ran toward it, not even stopping to think I could be running toward the edge of Taylor’s Bluff. A few minutes later, the branches stopped crunching underfoot and the ground leveled. I slowed. The clearing. I had gotten lucky. I hadn’t fallen to my death.

  A solid shape, a small building with a steep roof, sat about twenty yards from the hard column of the lighthouse. It must have been the keeper’s house.

  “Chrissy!”

  The trees were gone, but my sister was nowhere to be seen, no graceful silhouette leaning against the base of the lighthouse, no perfect teeth shining in the light from her cell phone as she responded to whomever had texted her.

  Had she taken a wrong turn?

  Had she lost her footing and fallen off the bluff?

  Or had those footsteps been real?

  Had someone kidnapped her?

  I needed to get help. I ran up to the keeper’s house. A tattered American flag whipped in the wind, hard enough that the red and white bars looked like they would rip to shreds. I climbed the porch, the steps creaking under my weight. Chrissy would have made a fat joke, would have stomped around in circles saying Fee Fie Foe Fum!

  I knocked on the screen door.

  No answer.

  “Mr. Eldritch! I need your help!”

  I banged even louder. Nothing. If only my stepfather had allowed me to have a cell phone, I could have called for help. He had let Chrissy have a phone, but not me, never me, and now he was going to regret his double-standard.