Dying to Remember Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Mailing List Signup

  Smithwell Fairies Cozy Mystery Series

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Dead and Buried Cover

  Dead and Buried - Chapter 1 Sneak Peek

  From the Author

  More Books

  DYING TO REMEMBER

  A SMITHWELL FAIRIES COZY MYSTERY

  KARIN KAUFMAN

  Copyright © 2018 Karin Kaufman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

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  SMITHWELL FAIRIES COZY MYSTERY SERIES

  Dying to Remember (Book 1) — Out Now

  Dead and Buried (Book 2) — Out Now

  Secret Santa Murder (Book 3) — Coming Soon

  CHAPTER 1

  It had rained earlier in the day, and now, as my trowel met earth in the gray afternoon, a fine drizzle began to fall. Kneeling in my front yard, head down and rain dripping from the brim of my sun hat, I dug a hole twice the size of the small rhododendron at my side, squeezed the plant from its plastic pot, and set it in the hole.

  Next spring, you’ll be beautiful. I sat back on my heels and admired what was left of the plant’s narrow, glossy leaves. There were no purple flowers and the plant had lost most of its summer leaves, but then, it was the middle of October. In time it would bloom. And I had oodles of time.

  “It’ll be at least two years before that itty-bitty thing flowers.”

  “Out for a walk in the rain, Ray?” Still resting on my heels, I twisted back and looked up at Ray Landry, a neighbor from down the street. My friend wore a tan raincoat and shielded himself from the drizzle with a shockingly red umbrella.

  “You know me, Kate. But no, I got my walk in earlier. I just wanted to bring you something.” He sat himself down on a mossy landscape boulder. “But you finish what you’re doing first.”

  “Want some tea?” Using my bare hands, I began to pull the soil back into the hole, gently pressing it around the plant.

  “Maybe tomorrow. That’s one big worm on top of the dirt there.”

  “I see.” The poor thing. I set the plump earthworm I had inadvertently expelled from its home near the rhododendron’s stem and sprinkled it with soil, being careful not to compact the earth about it. The rain would keep the creature moist until it could dig its way down again.

  I pushed to my feet, grateful that I was still strong and agile enough to get down, dig holes, and get back up again, all with relatively little fuss. Gardening had always been a pleasure, but now it was a refuge, even in the gray days of autumn.

  “Of course, the question must be asked,” Ray said. “Why are you gardening in the rain?”

  I glanced down at the wet knees of my jeans and then examined my boots. They were remarkably free of mud, but I scrubbed the soles on the grass anyway. How to answer? It was a more complicated question than Ray knew. “It’s my birthday.”

  “I know it’s your birthday. The question must still be asked.”

  With a sigh, I picked up my trowel and sat on another landscape boulder. My husband had set eight of them in our large front yard, and over the years they had proved useful. “It’s my fiftieth birthday.”

  “I’m eighty-one, dear Kate, and I wouldn’t garden in the rain.” His mouth twisted in a crooked grin.

  “I promised myself I’d plant that little rhododendron today, come rain or high water, and I wasn’t about to back out.” But there was so much more to it than that. I was fifty years old. I had crossed a border, entered a new frontier from which I could never return, and I’d done it alone. “I just wish . . .”

  “You wish what?” Ray rested the handle of his umbrella against his shoulder.

  “Don’t you wish things weren’t so ordinary?”

  He chuckled softly. “You’re not ordinary.”

  I begged to differ. “My name is Kate Brewer, I’m a very average five foot seven inches, and I have brown hair—going gray—and brown eyes. I’m as ordinary as can be. Ten thousand women in Maine fit my description.” I gestured with the trowel toward the road below us and the woods beyond. “Trudging along, day after day, year after year, getting up, going to bed, waiting and waiting.”

  “What’s wrong with that road?”

  “We live in Smithwell. Not even Smithwell Cove or Smithwell Harbor—something with a little pizazz. Just Smithwell. Smith. And we live on Birch Street.” I aimed the trowel back at my house. “I’m at 2000 Birch Street. Not 2001 or 2023.”

  Ray let out a warm, full-throated laugh. “You love it here. I know you do. And I still don’t understand why you’re gardening in the rain and what it has to do with your birthday.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just being persnickety.” I had to laugh too. Truthfully, I did love my house, though it felt too big now. Like Ray’s house, it sat on the hilly side of Birch Street. My large front yard sloped ever so gradually toward the road and ended, along with other yards on the block, in a flat terrace hemmed in by stone. Beyond the terrace, the ground slanted more sharply toward the meandering road. And behind our houses were even more woods, thick with balsam firs and maples. The result was an idyllic sense of isolation.

  My friend’s expression became solemn. “You’ll get past this day. It’s just another day in a long line of days, you know.”

  “That’s the point, Ray. It makes you wonder. I always thought there was more, even when I was a kid.”

  “More what?”

  I shrugged, at a loss to explain the longing within me. I’d felt it my entire life, and it had only grown stronger over the years. “More than what I can see, I guess.”

  A flicker of recognition crossed Ray’s face. Somehow he understood. “Kate, there’s far more to life than what you can see. Don’t you know that?”

  I jammed my trowel in the soil. “To be honest, no. I only know what I see. I know what’s in front of my eyes, and I’ve never known anything else.”

  “That’s not true.” Ray put a hand to his chest. “You feel what you can’t see. I know you do. And not everyone does. Some people go their whole lives without wondering what’s beyond their vision. You wonder about it.”

  Sitting in the drizzle, still getting wet on my birthday, I gazed toward the woods on the far side of Birch Street. “Michael and I used to collect wild blueberries there every August,” I said softly.

  “Ah, the fairy woods.”

  “I’ve never imagined fairies in those woods. Not like you, Ray. How do you manage without Donna? Does it get easier?”
>
  He shook his head. “It gets harder.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “I would never lie to you. I miss her more now than four years ago, when I lost her. As time goes on, the missing gets harder. But somehow the living gets easier. You’ll understand. She’s waiting for me, and every day I get a little closer to seeing her again.”

  “I hope that day is a long way off.”

  “In the meantime, I have a lot to do.” He unzipped his raincoat a few inches and showed me a bundle of paper held together with a large black binder clip. “That’s partly why I’m here. I wasn’t only being nosy about your gardening habits. I promised you my memoirs, and here’s the final draft, safe from the rain.”

  “Good! I’ve been looking forward to reading that.”

  “You’re being kind.”

  “And I would never lie to you, Ray. I can’t wait to get started. Are you sure you don’t want to come inside and have some tea?”

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Your memoirs should be better than the thrillers I read. You’ve led quite the life.”

  It was as though I’d flipped a switch with those few words. Ray energetically pulled the bundle from his raincoat and thrust it toward me. “I had the oddest conversation yesterday with an old friend. No, acquaintance better describes him. We haven’t been friendly for years. Not that we dislike each other, but we run in different circles now.”

  I shielded his memoirs from the rain by stuffing the bundle in my own raincoat. “What was odd about the conversation?”

  “Our recollections of an old matter differed considerably.”

  I saw now that Ray’s brow was lined with worry. On his walk to my house, he had carried with him whatever was weighing him down—and something was—but I had prattled on, not allowing him to get a word in. “That can happen, even with memories of recent events, let alone older ones.”

  “He hadn’t forgotten. He knew I was telling the truth, but he insisted I was wrong. I wouldn’t have brought the subject up, but I overheard him—in the Hannaford of all places. Why would he be talking about something that happened six years ago?”

  “Who was he talking to?”

  “Our illustrious town manager, Conner Welch. I was in the canned soup aisle—you know how I like my Campbell’s—and this acquaintance didn’t know I was there. I only meant to say hello, but he jumped and stared at me liked I’d purposely crept up on him.”

  “That’s a funny thing to do. What was this old matter?”

  “The Alana Williams case. You remember that.”

  “Of course I do. Everyone in Smithwell remembers.”

  “As long as I live, I’ll never forget finding her body. Such a tragedy. She was a young woman just starting out in life, teaching at her first school. It’s always disturbed me that her killer was never brought to justice.”

  “Her parents left the state, didn’t they?”

  “There were too many memories for them. Every corner they turned, there she was.” Ray chewed on his lower lip, and I could tell his conversation in Hannaford’s had left him puzzled in any number of ways. “People don’t talk about Alana Williams in the supermarket, even with the detective who ran the case. Not six years later.”

  “But it’s almost the anniversary of her death.”

  “No, it doesn’t come up like the weather or current news. Alana was on my mind, but only because I’d recently written about her for my memoirs.”

  “Who was this acquaintance of yours?” I asked.

  “A Smithwell police detective. The one who ran the Williams case. Martin Rancourt.” Ray grunted and stopped chewing his lip. “I must have misunderstood him. That could well be it. He wasn’t upset, he was . . . oh, I don’t know. You know what my hearing is like. I should get a hearing aid. Donna used to tell me to, but I can’t be bothered. Do you realize we’re sitting in the rain like a pair of nitwits?”

  His change of tack was disconcerting, but I went along with it. I’d learned in the twenty years I’d known him that there was no use pressing him to talk when he wasn’t ready.

  “Well, then.” Holding his umbrella in one hand, he used the other hand to push to his feet and then took a moment to work the muscles in his legs. “Stop by for coffee tomorrow morning? Say, about eight?”

  “I’d love to.”

  “I’m sorry I don’t have tea.”

  “I can drink coffee. I’m not a barbarian.”

  “You’re too trusting, Kate.”

  I let go with a laugh and said, “What brought that on?”

  “Friends are fine, but don’t trust people you don’t really know. Even if they say you’re supposed to trust them.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “No one in particular.”

  I bent to retrieve my trowel and stepped closer to him. “Are you all right, Ray? You seem worried. Is it that conversation or something else?”

  “We’ll talk tomorrow, don’t you worry. We’re both thriller readers, aren’t we? We can put our heads together and come up with something. Imagine a town manager and a detective talking about an old murder in the soup aisle. What’s that about? In the meantime, I need to do some thinking about the past. You know us old men. We do our best living in the land of the past.”

  “Stop that right now.” I looked directly into his brown eyes and spoke in my I-ain’t-playing voice. “You tell me not to live in the past, and you’re right. So you stop it right now, Ray Landry. You have a lot of living to do.” I thumped my raincoat where it guarded his memoirs. “More than what’s here in your memoirs.”

  He reached out and gave me a hug—surprising because he was not a physically demonstrative man—and then started toward home.

  “Take care, Ray,” I called.

  He halted and looked back at me. “And Kate dear, most of the time you have to believe to see. Everyone gets that dead backwards, you know. They say seeing is believing, but I can’t tell you how wrong that is. It works the other way around. Interesting, isn’t it?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Ray had me worried. He had always put up a good show of being lighthearted. I say “show” because he’d lost his precious wife, Donna, four years earlier, and he was not light of heart. So when he appeared to be concerned, he was indeed concerned. And now, of all things, he’d been reminded of the Alana Williams murder. He had happened upon the young teacher’s body in the woods, a few hours after she’d been killed, and I knew from talking to Donna that it had taken weeks for him to stop seeing her whenever he shut his eyes at night.

  But he’d invited me for coffee in the morning. We could talk about his memoirs, I thought, and take his mind off his troubles for a little while. In the meantime, I needed to get my nitwit self out of the rain. I turned toward my house, concentrating my attention on the empty terracotta pots by the teak bench at the front door. I knew better than to allow gloomy thoughts a foothold. It was rapidly getting dark, and the dark served to double my gloom if I didn’t keep my mind occupied.

  What to do with those pots? Store them in the garage? Use them for transplanted herbs? That was it. The nights were cold now, and my chives and spearmint had only survived because they were in a protected spot in the garden.

  I trudged to the door, my eyes on a short stack of two upside-down pots. The uppermost pot had a triangle-shaped hole in it just below the rim, but no matter. My husband had taught me thrift, and I was proudly carrying on his tradition. I inverted a third and larger empty pot over the other two, and then, laying my trowel atop the stack, I carried the pots into the foyer and set them on the tile floor before slipping out of my gardening boots and into my clogs.

  In the kitchen, I put the pots and trowel on the table, slipped out of my raincoat, and laid Ray’s memoirs next to the pots. Then I rinsed my hands in the sink—taking special care to clean my wedding band—and busied myself making a pot of tea. Almond oolong, I decided. And absolutely no teabags. Making tea the proper way took time and attentio
n. I filled the stainless kettle with water, placed it on the stove, and turned on the burner.

  “What to do with the pots?” I said aloud. “The pots, the pots.” Transplant the spearmint first? It was more susceptible to the cold than the chives.

  I heard the trowel clatter to the table and spun back, jolted by the sudden noise.

  Calm down. I’d set the trowel on top of the wet pots and it had shifted, that’s all. Take a deep breath. Count your blessings. A woman at Michael’s hospice had told me not to be surprised if my grief felt like fear. If I flinched at everyday sounds. Not to worry if I was on edge for the first six months or so. It would take time for my nerves to settle. Ten months had passed since my husband’s death, and though the constant, gnawing anxiety I’d felt early on had eased and I was able to sleep at night, I still jumped like a nervous cat at unexpected noises.

  “Tea, tea, make some tea,” I said. That was another thing. Lately I’d been talking to myself all the time. I mean all the time. But I had to talk to someone, didn’t I? I chose a Wedgwood teacup from my hutch, taking it and a saucer to the counter. As I drew a tin from my well-stocked tea cabinet, the doorbell rang.

  I flicked off the stove and strode for the foyer. Through the glass panel on one side of the door I saw my next-door neighbor, Emily MacKenzie, holding a pizza box with a somewhat rain-splattered cake atop it. “Happy birthday!” she cried as I opened the door.

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I did.”

  “Come in out of the rain.” I tugged on her sleeve and pulled her inside. “Is it dark chocolate? It looks like dark chocolate.”

  “Would I give you anything but dark chocolate on your fiftieth? It would be sacrilege, and you’ve suffered enough. I mean, turning fifty and all.”

  “Don’t make fun. In two short years, you’ll be in your fifties too.”