Celia Kinsey's Blog, page 2

 

 Click on the image to view full size, then right-click and "save as" to download to your computer. 

How to reset wallpaper image for Windows 10 (Youtube Tutorial)Created using images from freepik.com and Picmonkey

 Click on the image to view full size, then right-click and "save as" to download to your computer. 

How to reset wallpaper image for Windows 10 (Youtube Tutorial)Created using images from freepik.com and Picmonkey

 

 Click on the image to view full size, then right-click and "save as" to download to your computer. 

How to reset wallpaper image for Windows 10 (Youtube Tutorial)Created using images from freepik.com and Picmonkey

 Desktop Computer Wallpaper Calendar for October 2021

Click on the image to view full size, then right-click and "save as" to download to your computer. How to reset wallpaper image for Windows 10 (Youtube Tutorial)Created using images from freepik.com and Picmonkey

Lonesome Glove is the third title in the Little Tombstone Cozy Mystery series. It is a full novel-length mystery.

Buy the EbookBuy the Paperback
Blurb
Emma Iverson is just settling into her new life at Little Tombstone when one cowboy from a neighboring ranch is murdered and another goes missing.

When Earp, Emma's ancient and irritable pug, drags in a single bloody work glove belonging to the missing man, she knows It's up to her to find the missing ranch hand before the murderer does.

Emma's investigation is complicated by a spate of mail thefts, attempts to turn Earp into a social media sensation, the acquisition of a potbellied piglet, and a local eccentric's insistence that his late mother is sending him cryptic messages through the crossword puzzles in the local paper.


Read a Sample
Chapter One
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to make tamales, but it’s not as easy as it looks; at least it’s not as easy as Juanita, my late grandmother’s closest friend, and proprietress of the Bird Cage Café, makes it look. When Juanita makes tamales, she assembles eight at once.

I stood in the kitchen of the Bird Cage and watched as Juanita slopped masa on the middle of each boiled corn husk, smoothing it with the back of the spoon as she went. Then she added dollops of filling to the middles. Finally, in what took about 60 seconds, for her, she rolled all the tamales into neat little corn husk bundles, ready to go into the steamer.

I’d been rolling and rerolling a single miserable overstuffed tamale in the same time Juanita had made sixteen. In my pitiable version of the classic Mexican dish, the masa mixed with the filling and spilled out of the split husk to decorate the outside of the misshapen bundle.

I’ve never been good in the kitchen, and I had already repeatedly congratulated myself that I’d not dropped anything on the floor or down the front of the sturdy apron Juanita had insisted on tying me into.

I had a feeling that Juanita was regretting that she’d offered to teach me to make tamales. She’d tried to teach me to cook when I was a teenager. It had not been an outstanding success. I think Juanita assumed I’d make a better student now that I was past thirty. Sadly, untrue.

While I disassembled my misshapen abomination against Mexican cuisine in general and corn-based products in particular, Chamomile, Juanita’s head waitress at the Bird Cage, mentioned that there’d been a recent spate of mail thefts in the village of Amatista.

“Stealing the mail?” I asked as I took a spoon and tried to scrape my masa/green chili/chicken mixture back into the center of the husk. “Is somebody stealing mail in general or one person’s mail in particular?”

“Roberta Haskell says the money her son’s been sending her is getting stolen, but my mother has been keeping a lookout for the envelopes in her mailbag and hasn’t seen anything from Roberta’s son come through for months.”

Chamomile’s mother, Katie, is one of my tenants in the trailer court out behind the Bird Cage Café. She’s also the village of Amatista’s sole mail carrier. Katie delivers to the rural postal customers, which, if you subtract the 30-odd people who live in the village proper, is pretty much all of them.

I tried to place Roberta Haskell and failed, which didn’t surprise me, seeing as I’d only been back in Amatista since early November, and it was only the second week in January.

Out in the dining room of the Bird Cage, I heard a small boy yell “Tiiimber,” followed by a crash and the high-pitched barking of our pug-in-residence, Earp.

My cousin Georgia—second cousin, if I’m going to split hairs—had insisted that it was high time to take the Christmas decorations down from the dining room, much to her young son Maxwell’s sorrow.

I suspected the crash had been the aluminum Christmas tree falling over, and doubtless, Maxwell and Earp had had something to do with the toppling of the tree.

“Does Mrs. Haskell get her mail delivered?” I asked Chamomile.

Everyone living in the village proper has to go pick up their mail from the bank of boxes in the tiny adobe post office on the edge of town. I couldn’t imagine how anyone but a postal employee would manage to steal mail from the bank of little boxes inside the post office proper.

“Mrs. Haskell is on the rural route,” said Chamomile. “Mom tells me she’s still getting bills and an avalanche of junk mail. Just the money from her son is going missing.”

“How long has this been happening?” I asked.

Chamomile didn’t know.

“You go to church with Roberta, don’t you?” I asked Juanita, who had been uncharacteristically quiet that morning.

“Last Sunday, at church, Roberta was telling me all about it. I got the impression it has been a problem for several months.”

When Juanita says “church” she’s referring to the weekly Sunday meetings Freddy Fernandez, the devout barber, holds in the back of his barbershop next door to the Bird Cage Café.

“Is her son sending cash?” I asked. “Because if he’s sending checks, wouldn’t anybody else have trouble cashing them?”

Juanita said she didn’t know and moved the conversation on to my own personal troubles. “Has Frank signed your divorce papers yet?”

I told Juanita that Frank had not.

Shortly before Christmas, my soon-to-be-ex-husband Frank had inexplicably and abruptly decided that he could not live without me—this despite having allowed his mistress/office manager Shirley to take the money I’d earned from finally selling a screenplay and blow it on the roulette tables in Vegas.

Frank remained entirely unrepentant about the whole sordid affair, yet vowed he was going to “win me back.” I’d suggested that winning back lost property was more a matter he should be addressing with his ladylove Shirley.

“I was mistaken about Shirley,” Frank had said. “She’s nothing compared to you.”

It was at that moment I realized that Shirley, too, had left him. Frank never has been a man who copes well on his own. He can’t even iron his own shirts.

“Frank will sign the papers eventually,” I told Juanita. “He’ll have to.”

I had no intention of getting back together with Frank, an intention that my divorce lawyer, Mr. Wendell, had quietly affirmed. It was typical, Mr. Wendell told me, for the offending party in a divorce to have last-minute remorse over the consequences of their actions.

This discussion of my messy personal life was cut short by the entrance of Ledbetter.

Marcus Ledbetter parks his trailer on the second of the three occupied spots in the trailer court out back of the Bird Cage.

He’s a bit of a recluse, which my Great Aunt Geraldine always insisted was due to coming back with PTSD after his tour of duty in Afghanistan.

My Aunt Geraldine and Ledbetter had been close in the years leading up to her death, so close that he’d taken my aunt Geraldine’s nest egg and turned it into a small fortune. Ledbetter is something of a stock-picking genius, and nobody knows it but me.

Ledbetter certainly doesn’t look like he’s involved in high finance. He looks more like a member of one of your less-reputable fraternities of motorcycle enthusiasts, but he’s a gentle and generous soul under all that black leather, scowl, and muscle.

Ledbetter shifted from one enormous booted foot to the other and turned his intense blue eyes on me. “I’d like to add an item to the agenda.”

Ledbetter was referring to the agenda for the meeting of the newly formed Little Tombstone Preservation board. Not long after I’d inherited Little Tombstone from my Great Aunt Geraldine, I’d decided to take the bulk of the considerable sum I’d inherited along with the ramshackle roadside tourist attraction and place it in trust to be used for the preservation of the crumbling monstrosity.

The newly formed Little Tombstone Preservation board consisted of the current tenants of Little Tombstone, Nancy Flynn, our neighbor and the mayor of Amatista, my cousin Georgia, and me. For various reasons, the first two meetings of the board had been far less productive than I’d hoped.

“What do you want us to discuss?” I asked Ledbetter.

“Parliamentary procedure.”

I’d rather lost control of the last meeting. When I’d brought up the subject of repainting the row of buildings that fronted Main Street, two distinct camps had emerged. One was strongly in favor of brownish-yellow, and the opposing camp was equally set on a brownish-gray. A minority of one (Hank Edwards, proprietor of Little Tombstone’s Curio Shop and the Museum of the Unexplained) made an impassioned case for grayish-green.

It had been a trying experience, with no conclusive outcome. I was toying with the idea of resigning my position as chairperson and letting someone with a great deal more natural authority take over the role, someone like Ledbetter.

“You won’t reconsider taking over the role of chair?” I asked Ledbetter.

He gave me a barely perceptible nod and an unblinking stare.

“I will not,” he said, “but I do have a few suggestions.”


Chapter Two

After Ledbetter had advised me on how to take a firmer hand on the proceedings of the Little Tombstone Preservation Board meetings, he left, and I gave up on making tamales and wandered out to the dining room of the Bird Cage where my cousin Georgia and Maxwell were still at work taking down the Christmas decorations.

“I always feel a little depressed when Christmas is over,” I told Georgia as we disassembled the massive pink and green aluminum tree (circa 1968 and courtesy of my late Uncle Ricky).

The tree had been Maxwell’s idea. Maxwell is six and perhaps not the best arbiter of good taste. While cleaning out the least rundown of Little Tombstone’s derelict guest cottages in preparation for renovating it into a habitable abode for her and little Maxwell, my cousin had come upon the aluminum Christmas tree, and it had captured Maxwell’s imagination.

Maxwell was bemoaning the putting away of the Christmas tree, but the retirement of Earp’s Christmas costumes was what really had him deep in mourning.

Earp, my late Aunt Geraldine’s ancient and irritable pug, had been bequeathed to me when I inherited Little Tombstone in early November. Eight large boxes overflowing with tiny canine costumes and hideous doggy sweaters had been bequeathed to me along with the pug.

Up until Aunt Geraldine’s death, I don’t think Earp had ever experienced the luxury of being a nudist, but I’d let him go around stark naked practically every day until Georgia moved in with me, and little Maxwell developed a minor obsession with Earp and his accoutrements.

Earp tolerated Maxwell’s enthusiastic attentions remarkably well. That was largely because my cousin Georgia was not of the no-food-between-meals school of thought, and Maxwell seemed to spend most of his waking hours with a snack in his hand. He dropped a lot— sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose—and Earp was happy to be on hand to snaffle down any little bits and pieces as soon as they hit the floor.

Earp was Little Tombstone’s mascot, and if ever a rundown roadside tourist attraction had needed a lucky charm, it was Little Tombstone.

Back in the 1960s, my Great Uncle Ricky had constructed the whole now-crumbling wooden monstrosity—a truncated version of the real town of Tombstone, Arizona. The place had outlived Uncle Ricky by almost half a century, and it was showing its age.

“What did the estimates on the new roof come in at?” Georgia asked me as we shoved the lower half of the Christmas tree back into its box.

“The lowest bid was $40,576.52,” I told her, but Georgia wasn’t listening.

“Maxwell! I thought I told you to put Earp’s reindeer costume back in that bin.”

Maxwell had wrestled Earp into a tiny sweater that said, “PUGDOLF.” He was having a lot more trouble getting Earp to surrender to the antlers. Maxwell had managed to get the floppy fabric antler apparatus tied under Earp’s chin, but getting them properly positioned on top of Earp’s head was proving to be more of a challenge.

Somewhere back in the kitchen of the Bird Cage, somebody dropped a pan on the floor. Earp is half deaf in one ear and completely deaf in the other, but between the bang and a desire to get away from miniature humans trying to compromise his dogly dignity, Earp decided to make a run for it.

As he bolted from the dining room, Oliver, our handyman about the place, came in through the back door. Oliver tried to cut him off at the pass, but Earp managed to dart between Oliver’s legs and out into the great blue yonder.

I abandoned the bottom half of the Christmas tree and took off in hot pursuit. It’s not that there’s anything in the trailer court out back of the Bird Cage that’s particularly dangerous for dogs, it was just that the last time Earp had gone on the lam, he’d not confined himself to sniffing around the trailer court; he’d headed for the wide-open spaces, gotten himself covered in cactus spines, and then somehow managed to get himself wedged down a hole in the ground. It had been a trying experience for everyone involved, including Dr. Bagley, the vet who’d had to extract all the cactus spines.

There were only three slots in the trailer court with tenants, and Earp bypassed them all. As I rounded the corner of Morticia-the-psychic’s colorfully painted Winnebago, the door swung open, and Hank stepped out.

Hank Edwards rents the storefronts containing the Curio Shop and the Museum of the Unexplained for the princely sum of $10 a month in perpetuity—a condition that was written into my Great Aunt Geraldine’s will.

Hank’s lived in a cramped apartment in the back of the Museum of the Unexplained for almost fifty years. In other words, Hank is a fixture at Little Tombstone and likely to remain so until either Little Tombstone bites the dust, or Hank does.

It surprised me to see Hank coming out of Morticia’s Winnebago. I’d never known Hank to consult the cards about his future. Hank is more receptive to conspiracy theories concerning the fate of humanity at large, rather than the type to try and get a sneak peek into his own personal destiny. I made a mental note to look into Hank’s sudden interest in fortune-telling after I’d recovered the runaway Earp.

Earp is an elderly dog with incredibly short legs, but, for the moment, at least, the pug was outpacing me. I decided to slacken my speed, in the hopes that he would. I didn’t want the poor old thing to suffer from a heart attack.

My plan worked, sort of. Earp kept one eye on me and the other on the horizon. I’d dart forward at intervals hoping to grab him by the collar, but he maintained a six-foot buffer between us at all times.

When we reached the barbed-wire fence that separated Little Tombstone land from Nancy Flynn’s ranch, I gave up the chase. Earp kept going, heading toward the cluster of outbuildings up by Nancy’s house. It was a hard quarter mile uphill to Nancy’s place, under barbed wire, and through the cactus. I saw a plume of dust out on the road, so I scrambled out to the roadside and flagged down Nancy.

“Earp’s done a runner again,” I told her.

“Get in.”

We tore up the road, and as soon as Nancy skidded to a stop in front of her rambling farmhouse, I tumbled out. Earp was just emerging out of the sagebrush. The antlers had shifted around and were now hanging down under his neck. His “Pugdolf” sweater had sustained a rip, but he appeared free of cactus spines, so I considered that a major victory.

I took a dog treat from my pocket and called out to Earp. He started toward me. Apparently, he’d slaked his thirst for freedom and was feeling peckish after his unaccustomed exertion. I was just reaching out to attach the leash to his collar when Nancy started screaming bloody murder.


Chapter Three

I was startled by the screams, and so was Earp. I dropped the dog treat, and Earp skittered away around the corner of Nancy Flynn’s bunkhouse.

Nancy came out the front of the bunkhouse and stood on the porch looking very shaken. It takes a lot to shake Nancy. She’s seen a lot of life—she’s well past sixty—and not much of that sixty-plus years has been pretty. In fact, during my first weeks at Little Tombstone, Nancy had shot someone. There were extenuating circumstances, but I mention it because when a woman like Nancy comes out of a doorway with her hands clasped over her mouth and shaking like a leaf, one tends to sit up and take notice.

“What happened?”

Nancy didn’t answer, she just pointed inside. I came up on the porch and peeked through the open doorway.

It was a long, old-fashioned bunkhouse unaltered since the early days of the ranch except for the fact that someone had built a bathroom into one end of the long, narrow structure. The main room had eight bunks in it.

They were unoccupied except for one, which had a cowboy lying in it, with his face to the wall.

“Sleeping?” I said to Nancy in a hushed voice.

She shook her head. He was not sleeping.

I crept forward to look at the inert cowboy. I stepped back when I saw that his pillow was soaked with blood. He’d been shot in the back of the head.

My hand was shaking as I reached into the pocket of my coat for my phone. I had a hard time dialing.

“Who is it?” I whispered to Nancy, as I waited for dispatch to pick up. I don’t know why I felt the need to whisper; it was not as if we were going to wake him.

“I think it’s Jorge.”

While I was explaining to the 911 operator that the Flynn ranch had a dead man on the premises, Nancy went down to the other end of the room and gingerly nudged open the door of the toilet with the toe of her cowboy boot as if she was afraid she’d find a second body in the bathroom.

She wasn’t far wrong.

Nancy turned back from the doorway and motioned me over. I looked inside. There was no body, but there was blood: a little trail of blood across the black and white linoleum tiles. It couldn’t have been the man lying in the bunk who’d bled on the bathroom floor. He’d clearly been shot as he slept.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Nancy said and went out on the porch again.

I followed her out and handed off the phone, so she could speak to the dispatcher, then picked up Earp’s leash from where I’d dropped it and went around the back of the bunkhouse in search of him. I called out, but Earp did not come. I passed the small stable, the barn where Nancy parked her tractors, and continued on to the pig shed.

The pig shed was a recent development at the Flynn Ranch. Nancy had decided to diversify by branching out into porciculture. However, these pigs were not ordinary animals destined to end up as ham or pork chops. These were potbellied pigs for the pet trade.

Nancy currently had two breeding sows, one of which had already produced a litter, and it was nestled in amongst the piglets that I found Earp.

He was fast asleep, his head resting on one of the pint-sized pigs. Another piglet was futilely suckling on one of the ridiculous antlers which still encircled Earp’s neck. I would have found the setup highly amusing if I hadn’t been listening for the sound of sirens and trying not to think about the dead man lying on the blood-soaked pillow.

I decided to leave Earp where he was. Even if he did wake up, I doubted he’d stray far from the litter.

I returned to the porch of the bunkhouse and sat down beside Nancy. She informed me that the police were on their way.

“How long has Jorge been with you?” I asked.

“A little over a year.”

“Any idea who might have—”

“No.”

“How many ranch hands do you have right now?”

“Four. Besides Jorge, there’s Jasper, August, and Hugo.”

I was about to ask if Jasper was the one she’d hired to be her pigman, when, at our feet, a phone began to ring.

I looked over at Nancy. She shrugged.

I got up and crept down the steps and picked up the phone which lay on the ground. The screen was shattered, but the phone itself appeared to be working just fine.

According to the name showing up on the shattered screen, a Janey was calling someone. I wondered if the Janey calling was the same Janey that Juanita had recently hired as a second waitress at the Bird Cage.

I watched the phone until it stopped ringing and went to voicemail. Almost immediately, it started ringing again. The third time Janey called back, I could stand it no longer. I picked up the phone, raised it to my ear, and went out on the porch.

“Who is this?” Janey asked.

“This is Emma Iverson from Little Tombstone. I’m up at Nancy Flynn’s ranch.”

“Where’s Jasper?”

I could hear Juanita singing at the top of her lungs amidst the banging of pots and pans in the background, so I had no doubts I was speaking with that Janey from the Bird Cage Café.

“I don’t know where Jasper is. I just picked up his phone because it wouldn’t stop ringing.”

“Where are you, exactly?”

“On the porch of the bunkhouse.”

“Did something happen?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. There was silence on the line for a few seconds before Janey spoke again.

“I’m afraid Jasper is in danger.”

“He told you that?”

“Not exactly. He started to say something, and then the line went dead.”

“Did you call the police?”

“No.”

I wondered why.

“Well, you’d better come up to Nancy’s ranch,” I told her. “I think the police are going to want to talk to you.”

“Jasper’s not—”

“No.” Jasper wasn’t dead, that I knew of. I decided not to bring up that blood in the bathroom just yet. “Jorge is the one who got shot.”

“Shot?”

“In the back of the head while he slept, by the looks of it.”

End of Sample
Buy the EbookBuy the Paperback

When Emma Iverson's great aunt Geraldine leaves her a rundown roadside attraction in rural New Mexico, the inheritance comes with strings attached.
If Emma wants to take possession of Little Tombstone's motel, cafe, curio shop, and Museum of the Unexplained, then she has to agree to "Love, Honor and Cherish" Earp, her late aunt's ancient and irritable pug. It says so, right there in the will.

What Aunt Geraldine's will conveniently omits to mention are the bodies buried underneath the trailer court.

Book One in the Little Tombstone Cozy Mystery Series.
Buy the ebook edition

Buy the paperback edition

Chapter One

“Do you have any questions, Mrs. Iverson?” my Great Aunt Geraldine’s lawyer asked as I finished reading the first half of my aunt’s will and placed it back on his immaculate desk, too overwhelmed to go on.

The surface of the desk was so shiny that I could see that my eyeliner had smudged and that I had a bit of spinach stuck between two of my front teeth.

Aunt Geraldine’s lawyer had instructed me to call him Jason, although, as he persisted in addressing me as Mrs. Iverson, rather than Emma, I’d decided it was safer to stick with Mr. Wendell.

“Aunt Geraldine is leaving me Little Tombstone?”

“According to the terms of her will, Mrs. Montgomery has left you nearly everything she possessed, yes,” Mr. Wendell said. “The few exceptions are addressed in the later pages.”

He smiled an impersonal smile, displaying a row of very white, very straight teeth. I doubted Mr. Wendell ever went around for hours, oblivious to the fact that part of his lunch was on display every time he opened his mouth. At least everyone I’d seen since noon would know I was the sort of responsible citizen who ate her vegetables and did her part to keep rising health care costs at bay by practicing preventative medicine.

I smiled back at Mr. Wendell with my lips pressed firmly together. Smiling with my mouth shut makes me look slightly deranged, but as Mr. Wendell had obviously had extensive dealings with my Great Aunt Geraldine, he shouldn’t be surprised to discover that being slightly deranged runs in the family.

“I’m getting the café building?” I asked.

“Yes. The Bird Cage Café is included on the deed.”
“And the little shop with that funny old man—Hank? He runs that weird museum thingy?”

“The Curio Shop and Museum of the Unexplained, yes. Hank Edwards leases that portion of the premises, although I understand his rent amounts to a purely symbolic sum.”

“Hank will become my tenant?”

“In the latter half of the will, Mr. Edward’s use of the premises is discussed. It seems your aunt had granted Mr. Edwards tenancy for life at what seemed to me a rather reduced rent.”

“How reduced?”

“The will stipulates the rent to remain, in perpetuity, at ten dollars a month.”

If I hadn’t been so shocked by the will in its entirety, I would have asked a lot more questions about the relationship between Hank Edwards and my Great Aunt Geraldine—not that Mr. Wendell would have been in a position to answer them—but I didn’t. At the moment, I had more pressing concerns.

“Aunt Geraldine left me the trailer court too?”

“Yes, also with several long-term tenants, although I won’t deceive you that the rents amount to much. You are free to raise those rents, unlike Mr. Edwards’, at your discretion.”

“And the motel?”

“There are the two tourist cottages as well as the eight-room motel, all of which are vacant and virtually derelict.”

“If Aunt Geraldine was this loaded,” I pointed down at the documents on Mr. Wendell’s desk, “why is Little Tombstone in such bad shape?”

“I’m afraid Mrs. Montgomery did not confide in me her reasons for allowing things to run into such disrepair.”

“But what about Abigail?” I asked. “Shouldn’t she be the one getting all this?”

“Mrs. Montgomery’s daughter?”

My cousin Abigail had been on the outs with her mother off and on for years, but I had a hard time believing that their relationship had deteriorated to the extent that my Aunt Geraldine would cut her daughter out of the will entirely.

“Mrs. Montgomery did leave her daughter a small bequest,” Mr. Wendell said. “You’ll find it on page eighteen.”

I consulted page eighteen.

“’A blue 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme with an extra set of hubcaps (needs new carburetor and windshield, hood ornament missing).’ What about Abigail’s daughters?”

“Keep reading,” said Mr. Wendell. “Mrs. Montgomery left something for each of her granddaughters.”

I scanned the page once more.

“A large box of miscellaneous Tupperware (some have lids) for Freida and a set of World Book Encyclopedias (missing volume B and U-V) for Georgia?” I said. “Isn’t this all a bit insulting?”

“It’s not my place to interpret the intent of the deceased,” said Mr. Wendell, and for a few seconds his stuffed-frog demeanor slipped a little, “but I have reason to believe that Mrs. Montgomery may have been less than pleased with her daughter and granddaughters at the time of her death. Mrs. Montgomery altered the will, shortly before she died, to leave her real estate and the bulk of her personal property to you. Your name was added as sole beneficiary to all her banking and investment accounts at the same time Mrs. Montgomery altered her will. Those accounts are not reflected in the will itself, and their existence may be kept confidential if you wish.”

“But why would my Great Aunt Geraldine leave me practically everything?”

“I believe that your grandmother had specified that her half of Little Tombstone should pass on to you upon your aunt’s death. I understand that it was joint property between your great aunt and your grandmother. The earlier version of the will had named you and your cousin Abigail as joint inheritors of Little Tombstone, but your great aunt must have had misgivings about the arrangement.”

I checked the date on the will. It had been signed just three weeks before Great Aunt Geraldine had passed away.

“But I didn’t even come to see Aunt Geraldine when she was sick,” I said. “I haven’t visited Little Tombstone for almost three years. I always called my aunt at Christmas and on her birthday, but that’s about it. I don’t deserve this.”

The truth was, I hadn’t known my great aunt even had cancer until I’d received a call from Aunt Geraldine’s best friend, Juanita, telling me that my aunt was already gone. There’d been no service. Just a quiet cremation.

I’d inherited Great Aunt Geraldine’s ashes too, apparently. The bright blue ceramic urn containing all that was left of my aunt sat on Mr. Wendell’s shiny desk next to the manila envelope which held my copy of the will.

“Your aunt did not confide in me her reasons for leaving you the bulk of her property. The only comment she made when she came in to draft the changes was that she was doing it for Earp.”

“Earp? Aunt Geraldine’s dog, you mean?”

I was shocked that Earp was still alive. I’d not been back to visit Little Tombstone since my grandmother’s funeral three years before, and even then, Earp, my Great Aunt Geraldine’s ancient and irritable pug, had looked about a hundred years old—in dog years, of course.

Earp had taken an obsessive shine to me. I suspected that it was not my personal charm that fueled his possessiveness, but because I surreptitiously fed him little powdered sugar-covered lemon cookies out of the package I always keep in my handbag. Whatever the reason, for my entire visit to Little Tombstone, Earp had refused to let me out of his sight.

“You’ve not made it to the section addressing the matter of Earp,” said Mr. Wendell. His lip twitched a bit at one corner as if suppressing a genuine smile of amusement, but he hastily replaced it with a professional display of his straight, white teeth. “If you’ll skip to page nine, you’ll find the matter of Earp addressed in great detail.”

I read page nine, then page ten, followed by pages eleven through thirteen. By the time I was finished reading the lengthy passages addressing the care, feeding, and sweatering of the pug, I understood why Mr. Stiff-as-a-Double-Starched-Shirt was having trouble keeping a straight face.

There was a condition attached to my inheritance of Little Tombstone Café, Curios, Museum, and Trailer Court: I was obliged to Love, Honor, and Cherish my Aunt Geraldine’s beloved pug ‘til death-do-us-part. Those were her exact words.

If I didn’t, Little Tombstone, along with what appeared to be a substantial stash of cash and even more substantial investments, would go to the Animal Rescue in Albuquerque, and all I’d be left with was an old set of golf clubs formerly used by my late Uncle Ricky to hit rocks at rattlesnakes.

Chapter Two

After I had finished reading the will and asked at least a million questions, all of which Mr. Wendell patiently answered, he insisted on accompanying me to Little Tombstone.

“Just in case,” he said.

“Just in case of what?” I asked, but Mr. Wendell ignored my question and instructed me to follow his spotless, white, and nearly-new Land Rover in my compact rental car.

I wondered what someone who drove a spotless, white, and nearly-new Land Rover and wore what looked suspiciously like handmade Italian leather loafers was doing practicing law in a dusty New Mexican wide-spot in the road. Even Mr. Wendell’s small concrete office building looked out of place. It was the newest structure of the twenty-odd buildings that made up the village of Amatista by a good thirty years.

Mr. Wendell looked more like the Santa Fe type. I’d have thought he’d be well suited to intellectual property law or corporate mediation, rather than officiating the wills of eccentrics who bequeath rundown roadside tourist attractions to their down-and-out grandnieces.

I wondered if Mr. Wendell handled divorces. I’d already filed for one in LA County, but after seeing what Aunt Geraldine was apparently leaving me, I was in no mood to let my fiscally reckless ex get his hands on that, too.

I’d selected my LA lawyer by the dubious strategy of performing an internet search for divorce attorneys and then picking one at random. It was all I’d had strength for at the time. It might do to get a second opinion, just in case my first arbitrary pick of legal counsel was giving me bad advice.

When we reached Little Tombstone, a mere half-mile north of Mr. Wendell’s office, it looked much as I had left it three years before. Little Tombstone had looked shabby then, and it looked shabby now.

According to the deed, which I’d received along with Aunt Geraldine’s will, Little Tombstone sat on one hundred and fifty acres, but the buildings were clustered on three blocks’ worth of street frontage along Highway 14. The buildings were on the far north edge of the tiny village of Amatista, but the bulk of the land attached to Little Tombstone extended into rolling hills dotted with sagebrush and cactus interrupted by the occasional arroyo.

Little Tombstone proper—a haphazard and truncated imitation of the original historic town in Arizona—had originally been my grandfather’s idea, back in the 1970s, but his idea had outlived him by forty years. After my grandfather’s unexpected death left my grandmother a very young and overwhelmed single mother raising a daughter on her own, she had invited her sister Geraldine and her husband Ricky to move to Amatista and help run the roadside attraction—then in its heyday.

Judging by the condition of the place, Little Tombstone’s heyday was over, never to return.

Mr. Wendell bypassed the eight-unit motel with its broken-out windows and collapsing roof and pulled up in front of the Bird Cage Café, the only building within the three blocks’ worth of weather-beaten structures which had any cars parked in front of it. I pulled into the gravel strip which fronted the dilapidated boardwalk that tied the whole crumbling monstrosity together.

Mr. Wendell climbed out of his Land Rover and navigated the broken steps leading up to the elevated boardwalk with a look on his face that plainly said, “This place is a personal injury lawsuit waiting to happen.”

I made a mental note to use a bit of the cash my Great Aunt Geraldine had left sitting in the bank to get someone out to fix those steps before some poor soul broke his neck.

I’d always assumed that Aunt Geraldine had let things get in such a sorry state because she lacked the funds to do anything about it, but, based on the assets enumerated in the list, I’d just received from my aunt’s lawyer, I’d assumed wrong. Aunt Geraldine had been practically rolling in dough.

Mr. Wendell held open the swinging saloon-style doors which led into a small open-air vestibule.

“You may find that Mrs. Gonzales is still somewhat distraught over your great aunt’s passing,” he said as we paused in front of the glass door which led into the café’s dining room.

I noticed one of the panes of glass in the door was broken out and had been covered over with an old license plate screwed haphazardly to the frame.

As Mr. Wendell pushed open the door, a bell jingled overhead. The dining room was empty except for a wizened old man I immediately recognized as Hank, the proprietor of the Curio Shop and curator of the Museum of the Unexplained next door.

Hank was sitting at a table for two in the back corner sipping a cup of coffee and smoking a cigar. He’d overturned one of the little plastic No Smoking signs that sat on each table and was using it as an improvised ashtray.

“Morning, Mr. Edwards,” said Mr. Wendell.

Hank just grunted and took another draw on his cigar.

“You remember Mrs. Iverson.”

Hank grunted again, allowing his gaze to hover somewhere east of my left ear. Hank looked none too happy to see me, although, if my memory served me correctly, none too happy was Hank Edwards’ perpetual state of mind.

I could hear Juanita in the back, banging pots and singing at the top of her lungs. She didn’t sound terribly devastated, but then she was the type who could laugh through her tears, so I concluded that Mr. Wendell’s read on the situation was probably accurate.

Juanita had almost forty years of friendship with my Aunt Geraldine to look back on. Nobody gets over a loss like that overnight.

Mr. Wendell and I left Hank to his coffee and his probably-not-legal-on-the-premises-of-a-food-service-establishment-open-to-the-public-in-the-state-of-New-Mexico cigar and went through to the kitchen.

As soon as Juanita clapped eyes on me, she proceeded to maul me in a motherly fashion which I’ve always found incredibly endearing.
Both my grandmother and my great aunt had been raised up under the “a handshake is as good as a hug” school of thought, and they’d instilled the same philosophy in my late mother. During my childhood, hugs had been in short supply. Still, every time I’d been to visit Little Tombstone, Juanita had more than made up for my flesh and blood’s standoffishness by practically squeezing the stuffing out of me every chance she got.

“Emma!” she said, “You’ve—”

I half expected Juanita to tell me I’d grown. It was true. I had grown. Outward. Which is the only way that thirty-three-year-olds generally do grow. I had gained fifteen pounds in the last three months. Stress-eating will do that to a person.

I guess Juanita realized that it would be insensitive to point out my weight gain, so she finished with, “—changed your hair.”

I hadn’t, not since she’d last seen me, but I wasn’t about to argue with her in front of Mr. Wendell.

“You’ve seen Hank?” she asked.

“Yes, he—umm—greeted us as we came through,” I said.

I wondered when Mr. Wendell was going to leave. It appeared he planned to conduct me on a complete tour of Little Tombstone, a place I’d been coming to all my life. I hoped he wasn’t billing me by the hour for his services.

“You can go,” I told him. “Thanks for bringing me out here, but I’ll be fine on my own now.”

For the first time since I’d met him, Mr. Wendell appeared flustered.

“Have you had lunch?” Juanita asked. It was nearly four in the afternoon. I’d had lunch hours ago. Skipping meals is not something I do if I can help it. Truthfully, the soggy chicken sandwich and anemic spinach salad I’d eaten at the Albuquerque airport before picking up my rental car had worn off sometime halfway through the reading of my Great Aunt Geraldine’s will.

“I could eat,” I said.

The Bird Cage Café might not look like much. It might have broken down steps and a broken down clientele who haunted it, but it had Juanita Gonzales, and Juanita Gonzales made the best food I’d ever eaten. I’d been eating Juanita’s food for as long as I’d been old enough to lift a fork, and I’d yet to come across anyone who could rival her.

“What about you, Jason?” Juanita asked. “Could you manage a bite?”

Mr. Wendell nodded. I wondered if he was a regular at the Bird Cage Café. He didn’t look like the sort who’d patronize such a rough-around-the-edges establishment, but maybe there was more to him than his handmade Italian leather loafers implied.

“I made fresh tamales this morning,” said Juanita, without giving us an opportunity to order. “I bring you both a plate.”

I sat down at the table farthest from Hank, who was still working on his cigar and pretending he was the only one in the room.

Mr. Wendell walked to the front of the dining room and cracked open a window before coming and sitting down across from me. I hoped he wasn’t planning to charge me 200 dollars an hour to watch him eat Juanita’s tamales.

While we were waiting for Juanita to return with our plates, the front door opened, and a generically pretty blonde of about twenty came in. She was wearing an apron over a ruffled dress that looked utterly unequal to the task of holding up to grease and green sauce. I wondered where Juanita had found her.

The waitress beamed in our direction—well, mostly in Mr. Wendell’s direction—before disappearing into the kitchen. She didn’t even look over at Hank. Apparently, Hank was such a fixture he didn’t bear acknowledgment.

“Who’s that?” I asked Mr. Wendell.

“Chamomile.”

“Like the tea?”
Mr. Wendell nodded. “Chamomile is Katie’s daughter.”

“Who’s Katie?”

“One of your tenants at the trailer court.”

I wracked my brain. I didn’t recall any Katie. The last time I’d visited Little Tombstone, there’d been only two permanent residents of the trailer court, although there’d be the odd vacationer or snowbird who’d take one of the empty slots from time to time.

As I recalled, there were only two tenants: Morticia the Psychic—I never had asked about her real name—perhaps her parents had been diehard fans of The Adams Family and Morticia was her real name—and Marcus Ledbetter, who went by his last name. Ledbetter was a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. My aunt Geraldine had once explained that Ledbetter suffered from PTSD, and that was why he rarely left his trailer.

“Katie must be a new tenant,” I said.

“I moved here two years ago,” Mr. Wendell told me, “and she was living here then. Katie’s the mail carrier for Amatista. She does the rural route.”

I was about to make a smart remark about the rural route being the only route Amatista had, but then I remembered that everyone within village limits had to collect their mail directly from the post office and realized that I’d just be stating the obvious. Besides, Mr. Wendell had the air of a man with a severely limited capacity for sarcasm.

Juanita emerged from the kitchen carrying two steaming plates of tamales. Chamomile brought up the rear with two tall glasses of iced tea.

After patting me affectionately on the cheek, Juanita withdrew to the kitchen.

Before following her, Chamomile bestowed an unnecessarily sunny smile on Mr. Wendell. She even tossed her flaxen hair a little and batted her fake lashes, something I’d never seen anyone do in real life. Clearly, Chamomile had a thing for the man, but Mr. Wendell appeared immune to her charms.

It struck me as odd that Chamomile would be interested in Mr. Wendell, considering he must be closing in on thirty, but after I thought about it for a few seconds more, it no longer seemed so strange. Mr. Wendell might be one of only a handful of men in the village of Amatista who was both gainfully employed and still had all his own teeth. Mr. Wendell was undoubtedly the only man who drove a spotless Land Rover and wore custom-made shoes. He wasn’t bad-looking, either, provided one could get past the starchiness.

Just in case I was paying for the privilege of dining with Amatista’s most eligible bachelor—

if the absence of a ring on Mr. Wendell’s left hand could be believed—I decided to pump him for legal advice.

“I’m getting a divorce,” I said.

Mr. Wendell practically jumped. His fork clattered to his plate, spattering his spotless white shirtfront with salsa verde.

“Pardon?” he said.

“I’m getting a divorce,” I repeated. “I mean, you being a lawyer and all, I thought I might ask you a few questions since you’re right here in front of me unless this is strictly off-the-clock.”

“No, no, ask away,” Mr. Wendell said, leaving me more in the dark than ever as to whether he considered eating tamales with me as part of his duties as executor of my great aunt’s estate or if he was planning to present me with a bill later on for legal services rendered while eating Mexican food.

“It’s about the will,” I said. “Could my soon-to-be-ex-husband claim a portion of what Aunt Geraldine left me?”

“You’ve already filed for divorce?”

“Yes.”

“In the state of California?”

“Yes.”

“Property acquired by gift or inheritance during the marriage is that spouse’s separate property. Additionally, many states—and I believe that California is one of them—also provide that property spouses acquire before the divorce but after the date of legal separation is separate property.” He managed to sound as if he were reading off a legal document, even though there was nothing in front of him.

“Good to know,” I said. “Can I ask you something else?”

Mr. Wendell was distracted. He’d noticed the sullied purity of his shirt front and was futilely dabbing at the green speckles on his chest with a paper napkin.

“Hydrogen peroxide,” I suggested.

“What?”

“For the stain. Full strength hydrogen peroxide before you put it in the washer. I’m an expert on stains. I’m always spilling something on myself.”

Mr. Wendell looked up at me as if to say he’d thought as much, even though I hadn’t managed to get anything on myself. Yet.

“What’s your other question?” he asked.

“How would I go about recovering an investment I’d made in my husband’s business?”

“Do you have any legal interest in the business?”

“No. My husband is a cosmetic surgeon.”

Mr. Wendell looked surprised. I don’t look like the wife of a cosmetic surgeon. Frank—my husband—was always offering helpful little hints on how I could improve myself—or rather how he could improve me—but I never took him up on any of his offers, not even for a bit of Botox.

“If you could provide me with supporting documentation and specific details, I could better advise you.”

“He doesn’t have it anymore,” I told Mr. Wendell.

“The cosmetic surgery practice?”

“No, the money.” I was babbling now. I’d been up since three a.m., Pacific Time, and the shock of finding out that Great Aunt Geraldine had left me all her earthly goods, plus Earp, was contributing to my feeling that this was all just a weird dream.

“Your husband took off with the money?”

“No, Shirley did.”

“Who’s Shirley?”

“His business manager.” And his mistress, but I didn’t feel like telling Mr. Wendell that. 
Shirley was the reason Frank and I were getting a divorce, and it wasn’t just because Shirley had stolen every last cent of what I’d earned from finally selling my screenplay. That money was supposed to be paying for Frank’s big office remodel, and Shirley had gone and blown it at the roulette tables in Vegas.

I might have carried on and told Mr. Wendell the whole torrid tale, except that we were interrupted by Hank.

“You’re the new landlady,” Hank said. It was a statement of fact, not a question.

“That’s what he tells me,” I said, pointing across the table at Mr. Wendell.

“Well, I want to know what you’re going to do about our little problem,” Hank said.

“I’ll get to work right away on getting stuff repaired,” I said. “I’m sure there are hundreds of things that need fixing, so I’ll need to prioritize. If you could make me a list of the most urgent—”

“I don’t mean that,” said Hank. “I want to know what you’re going to do about our alien invaders!”

End of sample.
Buy the ebook edition

Buy the paperback edition

About the Little Tombstone Cozy Mystery Series
These quirky, light-hearted cozies are set in rural New Mexico and feature a collection of endearing residents from the village of Amatista and its main attraction, a dilapidated roadside tourist stop called Little Tombstone. Little Tombstone is a truncated version of its namesake, Tombstone, Arizona, and is home to a variety of sweet but eccentric characters.

The Cast of Recurring Characters
Emma Iverson: Our sleuth and heir to Little Tombstone.
Earp: Emma's ancient and irritable pug, inherited from her Great Aunt Geraldine.
Hercules: Earp's porcine companion.
Juanita Gonzoles: Proprietress of the Bird Cage Cafe.
Georgia: Emma's cousin and coheir.
Maxwell: Georgia's precocious six-year-old son
Marcus Ledbetter: Veteran and undercover stock-picking genius.
Hank Edwards: Curator of the Museum of the Unexplained and conspiracy theory enthusiast.
Phyliss: Hank's longtime ladylove.
Morticia: Resident psychic.
Katie: Mail carrier and mother to Chamomile.
Chamomile: Waitress at the Bird Cage.
Jason Wendell: Amatista's only lawyer and most eligible bachelor.
Oliver: Resident handyman and Australian transplant.
Nancy Flynn: Neighboring rancher and mayor of Amatista.
Freddy Fernandez: Amatista's devout barber and lay preacher.

All the Little Tombstone Mysteries
The Good, the Bad, and the Pugley (FREE)Rebel Without a Claus Lonesome GloveSomething Borrowed, Something ChewedTamales at High NoonThe Trifleman (FREE) Home on the Mange