Dial Marr for Murder Read online

  Dial Marr for Murder

  A Barbara Marr Murder Mystery

  Karen Cantwell

  Contents

  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

  Get Free Stories

  Enjoy These Books?

  About the Author

  Also by Karen Cantwell

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  If I were an assassin, Rustic Woods’ most famous real estate flipper, Sharon Forrest, would be at the top of my hit list.

  The woman started her day way too early, and she always seemed to have a complaint of some kind. Our grass was too brown. Our Halloween decorations were too floppy. Our mums were too dead.

  This morning she decided to bang on my door before sunrise to complain about a duck.

  Robed and slippered, but not entirely awake, I squinted at her through a cracked door. “I told you, Sharon, Vito Corleone isn’t my duck.”

  Sharon’s knocking had aroused Puddles the poodle. Upstairs, he yapped like a mad dog and scratched at my daughter Bethany’s bedroom door, demanding to be let out. The racket set my teeth on edge.

  Sharon chastised me with a glare and wagging finger. “He’s over at my house wreaking havoc, interfering with the workers. We have a tight timeline for renovating this house and getting it on the market. Your duck is slowing down our progress.”

  Her waggling finger fueled my irritation. I argued through grinding teeth. “He’s not my duck.”

  “Then why did you give him a name?”

  “He saved my life. He deserved a name.”

  A hint of a sneer curled her thin lips. “You and your wild disasters, Barbara Marr.”

  She always did that—called me by my full name like I was some child. “Are you jealous, Sharon Forrest?”

  She raised her hand, all fingers spread. “Five minutes, Barbara Marr. Five minutes to get your duck out of my house or I report those dead mums to the association.”

  For a moment, I fantasized that I was Cyclops from X-Men, shooting death beams from my eyeballs at Sharon Forrest’s back as she stomped away. When she didn’t burst into flames, I slammed the door and trudged upstairs to dress in duck-catching attire. The woman had serious connections inside the Rustic Woods homeowners’ association—I didn’t dare mess with that.

  Three months earlier, the decades-long-vacant house next door, which I had dubbed House of Many Bones, was finally released for sale by the county. Sharon Forrest swooped in like an ambulance chaser to snatch it up at auction. Once her permits were in place, demolition and reconstruction began. Residents of White Willow Circle were subject to the din of power tools day and night. If the promotional calendar she sent out every year wasn't so darned handy, I would have burned the thing. Instead, I hung it on my refrigerator and I drew a mustache on the picture of her fake smiley face.

  With my feet slipped into Howard’s work boots and sweat pants pulled over jammie bottoms, I braced the October morning chill and shuffled across our lawn to House of Many Bones with a cat carrier in hand. My history with House of Many Bones was definitely one of those wild disasters to which Sharon had referred. Not like it was my fault or anything. I mean, I didn’t invite the chain-smoking Viviana Buttaro and her misfit mafiosos to commit their felonies in my neighborhood. And I certainly didn’t ask her to kidnap me during a tornado-producing storm that brought an FBI helicopter down on top of us all. Well, I guess if I was being entirely honest with myself, the kidnapping could have been preventable had I not been so meddlesome. But it all worked out in the end. My assistance helped put Viviana behind bars, so there you go, Sharon Forrest: I’m a crime fighter, not a disaster-monger.

  I crossed the threshold of the missing front door and had to shout over the roaring of a power saw. “Vito! Vito Corleone!”

  The saw-yielding man stopped to stare at me in surprise, the roar of the saw cutting off. A hint of fear flashed over his face as he gave me the once-over. I didn't look that scary. I mean, my jammies were showing out the bottoms of my sweatpants and my hair was sort of Bob-Marley-Meets-Albert-Einstein, but he had the saw. What was he afraid of?

  I yelled for Vito again. The silence allowed me to triangulate Vito’s responding call. “Quack, quack.”

  The sawing man hoisted his jeans up while pointing to the back of the house which had been gutted down to the rafters. I nodded, spotting Vito between the beams, in exactly the same location I’d found him the previous week: in the dining room picking crumbs out of a trash bag on the floor. Vito Corleone, the very sweet-but-nosy duck who had taken a bullet for me the previous summer, had a habit of leaving his lakeside home to visit me and my family on White Willow Circle.

  He loved us, what could I say? Only, once this construction began, he became keenly interested in visiting this house as well, drawn to the food left behind by messy contractors.

  So there I was, at six o’clock on a Friday morning, crouched in the House of Many Bones, luring a white duck into a cat carrier.

  “Thank you, Barb,” Sharon said when the deed was done. “Now, is there some way you can keep him from returning?”

  “He’s got a mind of his own, Sharon, but I’ll see what I can do.” I lifted the hefty carrier as Vito complained loudly. The poor guy was squeezed in tighter than a sumo wrestler in a Smart car.

  “And that dead tree on your property is dropping branches into my yard. It’s a hazard. You need to have it taken down.” With arms crossed, her red fingernails drummed an impatient beat.

  “I’m working on it, Sharon. See ya. Have a nice day.” I stomped away muttering under my breath. “One day I’ll get you, Sharon Forrest. One day.”

  Vito quacked. I think he was offering support.

  Before loading Vito into the van, I ran back into the house to leave my husband Howard a note in case he awoke before I returned. Howard worried about me if I disappeared without notice. I could hardly blame the guy since I did have a history of abductions. Bad guys liked to kidnap me. Although, to be fair, I’d gone over a year without incident. Not the kind of milestone most soccer moms celebrate, I know, but hey, that’s my life.

  Vito Corleone lived on the banks of Lake Muir behind Vikki Cleveland’s house. Vikki was a thriller writer. I’d befriended her while doing some investigative work the previous summer. It was an exciting case; I helped her locate a winning lottery ticket that had belonged to her dead father. The investigation went pretty well up until her ex-stepmother tried to strangle me.

  Vikki was now romantically involved with Colt Baron, our friend and business partner. Howard and I really liked Vikki and hoped her union with Colt would become more permanent.

  Usually, when I returned Vito after one of his migrations to our house, I would stop and talk to Vikki for a few minutes, but it was far too early. Instead, I hoisted the carrier from the back of my van with a grunt and lugged it past her house and down the grassy slope of her back yard.

  At the lake’s edge, I opened the carrier gate. Vito emerged from his cramped confines, ruffled his feathers, and flapped his wings. H
e always seemed happy to be home, despite his tendency to wander.

  “Now here’s the thing, buddy,” I said to him. “You know we love you, but you belong here. You need to stay here. Find a girlfriend. Someone to marry and have ducklings with, you know?”

  He quacked in response, and I liked to believe that he agreed, but since this little chat wasn’t our first, I was beginning to doubt that we truly understood each other. I snapped the carrier gate back in place. The horizon was pinking with morning light.

  I heard Vikki call out softly from her back deck. “Barb?”

  Not wanting to wake any additional neighbors, I shuffled her way before responding. “You’re awake awfully early. Wow, you’re dressed and everything. Are you going somewhere?”

  “Ha, no. I’m on a deadline with my latest book. The only way I get anything done is to get up, get dressed and act like it’s a normal work day in an office. I’d invite you in for coffee, except I can’t. Need to work.” She smiled. “But I could run in get you a hair tie if you like. Or a really big hat. That’s some scary hair.”

  I cringed and tried to tame the beast on my head. “You’re not the first person I’ve frightened this morning.” I motioned her back to her house. “Get back to writing. I was just bringing Vito back. You know how it goes.”

  Vikki and I agreed to meet for lunch when her book was done and I returned home to shower and chase the girls off to school.

  Soon after the buses came, Howard showed up downstairs with his briefcase in hand and a glum expression on his face. “Going to work, honey.”

  Howard was currently a retired FBI officer-turned private investigator. He had partnered with our good friend, Colt Baron, and while business had picked up some, it wasn't quite enough to make all the ends meet. He had taken a mundane corporate contract that required him to be on the company site in Maryland, twenty miles away. He wasn’t thrilled with the commute, but I was happy because the danger-potential was nil compared to the FBI gig that had nearly gotten him killed.

  “Hey,” I said in a chipper tone, hoping the levity would be contagious, “I see you haven’t decorated outside for Halloween, this year. I tried to help you out, but only got as far as the inflatable witch and as you may have seen, she didn’t inflate so well. Sharon Forrest says she looks like the wicked witch of the depressed. Actually, Sharon didn’t say that, because Sharon doesn’t have a sense of humor like I do. But she doesn’t like the droopy witch. Can you help bring her to life?”

  He grabbed his keys. “When is Halloween again?”

  “Monday.”

  He shook his head and opened the door to leave. “Sure. I’ll get to it this weekend.”

  I kissed him on the cheek. “Sounds good. Should I bring everything else up from the basement so you can put it up also?”

  “Yeah, sure. If you want me to.”

  I closed the door behind him, puzzled. Howard was Mr. Halloween. Every year, without fail, he and the girls hung ghosts from our maple tree and adorned the lawn with fake headstones and the tacky, but lovable, inflatable witch. Since moving into this house, he’d never missed a year decorating for Halloween. That commute was wearing him out more than I'd realized.

  With the house quiet once more, I sat at my kitchen table and stared out the window, worried about Howard and feeling the pang of empty nest blues.

  Obviously, my nest wasn’t entirely empty, but when our oldest daughter, Callie, had moved off to a college dorm in August, my heart hadn't quite recovered from the change. Lately, I was having what my younger daughters called “separation issues.” They also used words like “losing it” and “gonzo.”

  At first, I ignored their jibes as silly. Did I cry for three days straight after dropping Callie off at the University of Virginia? Yes. But that’s normal—I looked it up. And did I text Callie two or three times a day? Sometimes maybe ten or twenty, but certainly never more than thirty? Yes. But I’m pretty sure that was normal as well. And I’ve talked to several other mothers who routinely stalk their college kids on Facebook, so I obviously did not have a problem.

  Turns out, I did have a problem. At the time, my action seemed completely sane. One evening, Callie hadn’t responded to my goodnight text. Or the next text or the next ten. With no one else to check on her for me, I did what I figured any worried mother would do, I drove down to peek in her dormitory window. I mean, it was only a two-hour drive, for crying out loud. Easy peasy. The campus police woman who almost arrested me at two o’clock in the morning for voyeurism complicated my mission, however. After hearing my story and waking Callie up to verify I was who I claimed to be, the sympathetic cop let me off with a warning. Callie wasn’t nearly as understanding.

  She threatened to unfriend me on all social media, so I promised to change my ways. I had to agree to texting just twice a day: once in the morning and one goodnight text. One phone call or video chat a week. That meant severe Callie communication withdrawal. My texting fingers itched something fierce, but I had already used up my morning text telling her about Vito’s visit. With nine-year-old Amber and thirteen-year-old Bethany at school, I sat at my kitchen table sipping coffee, wondering how to keep myself occupied.

  The lawn was covered in fall leaves. I could rake, but that felt like too much work. The dead mums needed pulling, but I didn’t want to give Sharon Forrest satisfaction. A good, brisk walk on any of the Rustic Woods paths sounded like a great idea too, but both of my walking buddies, Roz Walker and Peggy Rubenstein, were down with the flu. What was a lonely mother to do?

  Thankfully, my phone rang, and another friend answered my prayers. Bunny Bergen, it seemed, was desperate. Bunny and I had bonded during one of those “disasters” in my past. Admittedly, that one did have several disastrous elements: three of the FBI’s most wanted bank robbers were involved, as was a hand grenade, and a crazy woman pretending to be a man. In the end, I had to shoot Bunny in the foot to end the debacle. The idea was all hers. Anyway, we’ve been helping each other out ever since.

  Her voice shook with panic. “Barb, tomorrow is the Halloween Nature Walk, and all of my volunteers are sick with this flu that’s going around.”

  Bunny’s upset was understandable. She had recently been promoted from receptionist at the Nature Center to activities coordinator. The annual Halloween Nature Walk was her first big project. I knew she really wanted to do a fantastic job to prove herself. Not that I thought she needed to prove anything to anyone. She was the best thing that ever happened to the Nature Center. Just having her friendly, smiling face at the front desk and her very knowledgeable answers to nature questions increased their donations.

  “What do you need?” I asked her.

  “Can you come over now? There is so much to be done.”

  “Say no more.”

  Bunny sighed in obvious relief. “I owe you one.”

  “Nope. Trust me, I think I need you more right now than you need me. Be right there.”

  I clicked off and downed the rest of my coffee. After feeding Puddles and our two cats, Indiana Jones and Mildred Pierce, I slipped on some shoes. Luckily, they fit better than my husband's boots and looked better too.

  In my driveway, I spotted a fallen limb behind my van. It wasn’t huge, but it was large enough that I had to unlock the van, and set my purse down before tackling it. I left the heater running so that the van might get above freezing. Dragging the limb onto the lawn wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.

  After clapping bits of dead bark from hands, I scooted my purse out of the way and closed the door. As I fumbled for my keys, a stirring from behind startled me. A man’s face popped into my peripheral vision.

  “Hi ya, Barb. Did I miss anything?” he said.

  With my heart in my throat, I peeled myself off the van ceiling and turned to scold him. “What the heck, Moyle! Why did you sneak up on me the like that?”

  “I didn’t sneak up on you. I’ve been here the whole time. How long was I asleep?” Moyle yawned and scratched his head.


  Let me explain. Moyle was a nice guy, but had a bit of a quirk. He believed he was a time traveler from the year 2525. He referred to his mode of time-related transportation as “twisting.” I was pretty sure he was just a homeless man with a talent for slipping in and out of shadows. Moyle didn’t have a last name, because he said they were unnecessary in the future. He looked pretty much the same as the last time I saw him: big head of brown, frizzy, afro-like hair and a couple of missing teeth. His clothes were newer though, not tattered, and he looked and smelled like he’d been bathing regularly. Over a year ago, he, Vikki Cleveland, and I stood in the middle of a commuter parking lot during a thunderstorm looking for a winning lottery ticket worth millions. That night, he disappeared never to be seen or heard from again.

  “Moyle, we’ve been looking for you for over a year.”

  “You have? That’s a long time. Who is ‘we’?” Moyle’s sleepy eyes widened with interest.

  “Vikki Cleveland and I. Well, mostly Vikki. She wants to talk to you about the lottery winnings.”

  “Do tell, do tell.”

  “Vikki should be the one to give you the news. I’d drive you over there, but I promised another friend I’d help her. I have to get to the Nature Center now.”

  “The Nature Center—I know that place.” Moyle cleared his throat. “Hey, I’m thirsty. Think I had a bad dream or somethin’. You got water?”

  I sighed. He was worse than my kids. “I have bottled water in the house.” I pulled my keys out of the ignition. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” he nodded. Moyle wasn’t one for sticking around, even when you asked him to. By the time I returned with a bottle of water and a peanut and butter jelly sandwich, he was gone; nowhere to be found. I walked all the way around my house, looked up and down the street just to be sure, but he had definitely flown the coop. Too bad, because he had part of that winning lottery money coming to him, and if he was homeless or unemployed in the year 2025, he could sure use it.

  Shrugging it off, I climbed back into the van, and motored up White Willow Circle toward the Nature Center. At the stop sign, I sat there with my left turn signal blinking and waited as a thin man with ear buds passed slowly in front of me. I cringed at the sight of a sizable black gauge in his earlobe. Those things always gave me the willies. His head bobbed rhythmically and his lips moved while his gaze and enormous beak-nose pointed down at the pavement. Impatient with his slow pace, I rolled the window down to get some fresh, fall air. As the man passed my side of the van, he lifted his head, caught my eye, and smiled a creepy zombie grin that chilled me. He was singing the lyrics to Prince’s, “Purple Rain.”