Murder at the Snowed Inn Read online

  MURDER AT THE SNOWED INN

  A Cozy Claire Andersen

  Murder for All Seasons Mystery

  By

  Imogen Plimp

  Copyright 2020 by Imogen Plimp

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without express permission from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to any entities, current or historical, or any persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.

  eBook cover by: Carrie Peters @ Cheeky Covers

  Dedication

  For my grandmother, Mary, who loved puzzles.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Prologue

  Mrs. Buckminster didn’t like living things. She didn’t much care for dead things, either. She didn’t like anything but her cats—two tabbies named Errol and Nadia—and even then, she didn’t like them that much.

  What Mrs. Buckminster liked were the little things. Simple amenities. Quiet things that couldn’t be a bother, wouldn’t give her trouble, and left her alone when she wanted them to. She liked: her recliner; her big old television set—sometimes the picture was fuzzy when weather was coming, but she didn’t mind; and the smell and taste of a decent casserole.

  Late one Friday evening, Mrs. Buckminster had just finished gobbling up a TV dinner of chicken fried chicken with bits of buttered corn, and she was enjoying a nice nip of brandy—which she preferred to slurp daintily from a paper-thin tea cup—when she heard a strange noise just outside her house. Actually, it wasn’t the hearing that got her hot and bothered. Mrs. Buckminster couldn’t hear very well—hadn’t been able to hear well for years—but she had no interest in hearing aids as they would only exasperate her irritation with the world at large.

  But while Mrs. Buckminster hadn’t necessarily heard anything outside per se, she had most certainly felt something. She could always tell when someone—or something—was near her house. The hairs on her arms and legs stood on end, and her scalp prickled excitedly. She possessed what she liked to think of as a sixth sense, which she in no way connected to any kind of phooey spiritual baloney. She thought of her sixth sense as an expedient tool, an internal alarm whose sole purpose was to protect the territory that was rightfully hers. Had she missed her hearing at all, she would have considered this sixth sense a blessed substitute for her hearing. But that’s not the way Mrs. Buckminster saw things. She would have considered this particular take on her rotating senses hogwash. To her, her sixth sense was simply the same kind of sense that dogs and cats had. It alerted her to intruders. And it was never wrong.

  Reluctantly, Mrs. Buckminster placed her paper-thin tea cup of brandy onto her dinner tray, set the dinner tray down onto her teak coffee table, and slowly lifted herself up and out of her beige recliner. Were a person to find themselves surreptitiously standing in Mrs. Buckminster’s house without Mrs. Buckminster present, he or she would be able to decipher Mrs. Buckminster’s exact shape and size from the imprint her tiny body left in her recliner after decades of daily—and nightly—use.

  Mumbling under her breath, Mrs. Buckminster shuffled angrily toward the front of the house in her house slippers—her back bent, her neck nearly horizontal to her daisy-print linoleum floor. Not without a concerted amount of effort, she reached the bay windows that looked out onto her front lawn. She stood perilously up on tip-toe, peered out from behind her strawberry-print curtains—which would be white and crimson were they not stained yellow and rust from Mrs. Buckminster’s relentless cigarette-smoking—and squinted.

  What Mrs. Buckminster saw was a dark figure, dressed all in black, hunched over the overgrown vines that covered her walkway, most of her yard, and much of the side of her house. Man or woman, young or old, white or black, Mrs. Buckminster couldn’t tell. A person is a person—and a person on her property was a nuisance.

  Mrs. Buckminster watched the figure intently, not daring to take a breath—not because she was scared, but more like how a cat watches a mouse before it’s decided whether to stalk it. If Mrs. Buckminster’s eyes were not failing her—which was entirely possible, if not likely—then what she was seeing was said mysterious dark figure pruning her thorny vines. The intruder seemed to be cutting shriveled berries off the branches—and then dropping them into a mason jar filled with some sort of transparent liquid.

  Mrs. Buckminster narrowed her eyes toward the figure even further. Now she found herself in a pickle. A conundrum, even. And that conundrum made her even angrier. One the one hand, she was peeved at having been roused from her perfectly lovely evening, vexed at having been disturbed enough to drag herself up and out of her beige recliner and all the way to the bay windows. But on the other hand, she was relieved the figure wasn’t one of the neighborhood rascals—a teenage hooligan come out late at night to spray-paint something crude on her sidewalk. Besides which, Mrs. Buckminster thought, shouldn’t she be grateful that someone was pruning her overgrown vines? They were a pain, to put it mildly.

  Mrs. Buckminster dropped the curtains from the shaky grasp of her boney fingers and shuffled back toward her beloved recliner. Now she was even more confused than ever. What were those vines, anyway? She had never thought to wonder it before. They had purple flowers in spring and black berries in summer. They certainly weren’t roses. Unless of course they were wild roses. But then, wouldn’t Mrs. Buckminster have been able to smell them (cigarette-smoking be darned)? And if they were wild roses, was the dark figure out in her front yard attempting to harvest some part of the plant that was rightfully hers for some sort of gain that would benefit only them? Although she didn’t care one iota about the precious wild roses, if her suspicion was correct, then what was unfolding out in her own front yard would make Mrs. Buckminster a rube. And say what you will about Mrs. Buckminster, she was not a rube.

  She decided—though not without a huff—to forget all about it, settle back into her beige recliner, and turn her undivided attention to whatever black and white film was now being broadcast on AMC’s Turner Classic Movies, her niggling suspicion further dissipated by her taking another dainty slurp of brandy out of her paper-thin tea cup.

  But Mrs. Buckminster couldn’t put out of her mind a single, nagging thought. A perception that sewed seeds of unease deep down in her chest. An unsettling notion, how or why she couldn’t explain. And to put it plainly, it made Mrs. Buckminster cross. Why would a person—no matter how neighborly—prune any ugly old vine—no matter how valuable—at midnight in the middle of December?

  Chapter One

  There’s nothing as beautiful as Brooklyn’s first snow. It usually comes when school is already in full swing—as if waiting for the children to forget to expect it—when you’ve become accustomed to steaming hot cider, when the pumpkins
begin to rot (if they’re still on your stoop like mine), and when the last of the wrinkled golden leaves are still hanging on for dear life. The snow coats everything in a wool blanket and makes everyone a kid again. I once saw a stock trader, bundled in a chic Ralph Lauren overcoat and baby blue designer scarf, trundle joyously through an otherwise untouched snow drift on the corner of Union and 5th. The first snow brings a smile to the lips of even the most seasoned, cynical New Yorker. Right before it turns into a molten toxic sludge of urban decay. Or worse, an invisible ice shelf.

  Winter in New York is a wonder, but it’s nostalgic for me—in a manner only a widow would understand. I’m getting better at “seeing the silver lining”—noticing a particularly exquisite winter sky against the heart-aching foreground of a nearly deserted Manhattan bridge on a Sunday morning at dawn, for instance. But then I think of the last time George and I walked across it, arm-in-arm. I’ll be snapped back to earth by the vision of an achingly adorable toddler, bundled in a head-to-toe snowsuit and chewing hungrily on an honest-to-God gingerbread cookie. But it only makes me think of the winter our daughter was three—sporting a similarly adorable snowsuit—and we spent an entire Saturday in Central Park, then stopped for hot chocolate on the way home. Tourists in our own homestead.

  If nothing else, I wish I could talk to George about these memories, about the ache they cause. He would smirk gently and say something simple, mundane—forgettable even. Something like, “Don’t fret, Claire.”

  My full name is Mary Claire Andersen. Claire to my tribe. I just celebrated my 50th birthday—my tenth 40th birthday to my wonderful friends and family. I’m usually the one set apart in a crowd by my long, thick salt-and-pepper hair. I’m told it’s a trait that would make George Clooney green with jealousy.

  I met my own George Clooney five days before my 30th birthday, right about the time Dr. Doug Ross became a pediatric attending. My George stepped on screen in the soap opera of my life via the basement dive of a Japanese restaurant in Chinatown. It was before 9/11, when painters, poets, jazz musicians, and drug dealers still congregated downtown, before the Starbucks weaseled its way in across the street from the other Starbucks at Astor Place. I was there for a college girlfriend’s burlesque performance. So was he.

  The crowd was trying not to wince through a bit wherein the male MC, hidden under a hideous plastic wig, played Ingrid Bergman to a female burlesque performer’s Humphrey Bogart—tassels and all. (Fun fact: Humphrey was the woman George was casually dating at the time). I was pretending to fish something terribly interesting out of my empty martini glass, trying in vain to stifle a judgmental snort or three, when a very handsome man saddled up to my bar stool with two champagne cocktails (or as close as the poor bartender could get to ‘em) and said, “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  He pressed on. “To be fair, it wasn’t supposed to work.”

  We got to chatting, and he bought me another drink, and then another (this was back when we were still young enough to hold our liquor). And then we walked all around the city well into the night, just talking—until the drinks turned to late night kiosk hot dogs and then early morning kiosk coffees in those classic I-heart-NYC paper cups, and the beautiful evening turned to a beautiful lower Manhattan sunrise. We’d been inseparable ever since—best friends (until he broke up with his burlesque performer girlfriend), then lovers, then husband and wife … and then deceased and widow. George was an investment banker on Wall Street and eleven years my senior, so I was at least hypothetically prepared our age difference and his high-octane lifestyle would mean his checking out before mine. I just didn’t know it’d be so soon.

  After 9/11, George wanted out. He quit the Wall Street game, pulled his partnership shares cheap for a clean break, sold our Upper West Side apartment, and purchased a four-story walk-up in good ole’ Red Hook, Brooklyn. I quit my one-time dream job as a chef at an Uptown restaurant. Exhausted, but with stars in our eyes, we envisioned turning our corner storefront into a neighborhood coffee joint—before coffee joints were all the rage. I picked out the furniture and the kitschy wall paper and baked my bum off, and George researched and roasted the coffee beans. We ran the coffee shoppe ourselves and loved every minute of it. Until he got sick. Then our angel of a foster daughter, Al (who more often than not disguises herself as the devil) took it over. Without her—and our trusty bloodhound-pitty rescue Rupert (a dicey but precious Christmas gift from the she-devil)—I don’t know what I’d do with myself.

  This particular morning, Al was in rare form. She barged through the front door in a huff—though being careful to take off her shoes, to her credit—and launched right on into the drama du jour. As per usual, Rupert was sitting gingerly on my feet as I read my copy of the New York Post (I’ve always been a sucker for Page Six gossip) and sipped my English breakfast tea. Rupert didn’t even lift his head when she banged her way into the kitchen nook, a bull in a China shop. He’s used to her by now.

  “Damn Brooklyn hipsters,” she snorted.

  “Al, language!”

  “Sorry. I swear to G-O-D, Mom, they all move here from Connecticut or Wisconsin, they pay for Guatemalan beans with Daddy’s credit card, import them here by shipping container, and then feed them to a cat, and then, after they pick all the beans out of the cat excrement—”

  “Al, that’s gross,” I gestured for her to stop. “Please don’t—”

  “Mom, I’m serious! They extract the beans from the stuff and then they roast them. And they charge eight bucks a pop. I hate them all so much!” She pulled off her ratty baseball cap, tossed it nonchalantly across the kitchen, and slumped into a wooden chair with a pout.

  “Well, honey…”

  “No, Mom. Don’t Judy Garland out on me with this.”

  “I know,” I cooed. “It’s unfair, it’s gentrification, and it shouldn’t be happening. And it totally sucks in the parlance of our times…”

  “Wow, props for melding a cheesy mom-ism with a Big Lebowski reference,” she shot back. “I’m impressed.”

  “…but at the end of the day, your customers love you and they love the shoppe, and you’ll win out in the end!”

  Al eyed me suspiciously over her thick-rimmed glasses, sighed, and said dully, “Well, thanks Mom.”

  “What?” I retorted. “I’m just saying, I think your customers will see though all of this … new fad BS.” I sighed. “I’m just trying to look on the bright side.”

  “I know, and I love you for that.”

  Al came to us from a foster agency when she was three—just a baby, really—although considerable in size, bless her little heart (George’s words, not mine). She was all chubby cheeks and thighs and belly. George used to joke that watching me cart her around on my hip was like watching a program on the Discovery Channel—one where the ants carry the giant larvae. She’s always hiked her pants down below her underwear line. She’s always “led with her belly”—though as she got older, she traded her Disney princess and Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle pull-ups in for men’s trousers.

  When she was a teenager, she asked us to adopt her. Officially. We were floored—well, me more than George. Those two were birds of a feather. She changed her name from Alejandra Rose to Al just a couple of years ago, the same month she chopped off her gorgeous honey-coloured locks and refused to take out what I dubbed her “bullring”—a giant earring in the center of her nostrils (Ouch!). Even still, I’m just trying to catch up.

  Out of breath from tailing her at full throttle up four flights of stairs, a friend of Al’s padded softly into the kitchen. He was tall and gangly, a rather androgynous young man with closely-cropped hair the color of plums. He had large almond eyes, a delicate nose, and long eyelashes—which were accented by his magenta eyeshadow. He wore skinny blue jeans and a t-shirt that said “Black Magik.” At his entrance, Rupert took notice—lifting his head and ears in alarm—though not yet ready to get up off my feet, which, although toasty under the warmt
h of his frame, were beginning to fall asleep.

  “This is Ry,” Al said politely. “They’re working at the coffee shoppe.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ry,” I replied. “Who else is working with you?”

  “What?” Al cocked her head to one side.

  “You said ‘they.’ ” I specified, confused.

  “Yes. Ry is non-binary.”

  “Right.” I pursed my lips.

  “Remember, Mom? We talked about this last week…?” She rolled her eyes in the distinct direction of her friend, who laughed awkwardly.

  “Yes, I know,” I sighed. “It’s hard to keep up with, though. So, Ry, you’re neither a man, nor a woman. More power to ya, I gotta say. But I just don’t understand how I’m supposed to untangle the singular from the plural here. I mean, grammatically, it’s not even grey area…”

  “Mom!” Al shrieked, horrified.

  “No biggie,” shrugged Ry with a smile. “My preferred pronoun is they/them. And you’re right, I identify as neither male nor female. I guess ‘they’ is just easier and, well, kinder than ‘it’.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Nobody deserves to be called an ‘it.’ ”

  “Unless that’s their preference.” They replied.

  “Naturally. Well…” I wanted desperately to change the subject. “Can I offer you some tea?”

  “Ry’s just here to borrow a record—” Al interrupted our niceties. “—and to check out the crib.” Al handed Ry a Joan Baez album out of the record collection next to the stove. George claimed good music made his cooking better, so that’s where our record collection lives—nestled snugly on the kitchen shelf between my Ina Garten cookbook collection and Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

  “Thanks, boo,” Ry pecked my daughter with a dramatic “muah” on the cheek. “Nice to met you, Mrs. A! Hope to talk to you a little more sometime soon.” Then Ry sashayed out of the kitchen like a supermodel on the runway, record underarm like a clutch, with all the grace of a young Ginger Rogers.