A Berry Murderous Kitten_A Laugh-Out-Loud Kylie Berry Mystery Read online

  A Berry Murderous Kitten

  A.R. Winters

  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

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  A Berry Murderous Kitten in Las Vegas

  Copyright 2018 by A. R. Winters

  www.arwinters.com

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental.

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  Chapter 1

  You don’t have to do this. Nobody has to be a hero,” I pleaded, but Joel and Brad continued to glare at each other.

  The air was heavy with the electricity of male testosterone. I, Kylie Berry, owner and operator of Sarah’s Eatery, had a front-row seat for the two most mesmerizing men in my life facing off over who could stomach more of my notoriously horrible cooking. The counter was laid out with plate after plate of different kinds of egg dishes. None of them were good. Most of them were barely edible.

  Brad rolled his police-uniformed shoulders, and I could see his muscles bunching as he grit his jaw. He didn’t once avert his eyes from Joel. “I can handle it if he can.”

  Joel sat up straighter and dwarfed Brad with his size. While Brad looked as though he was intimately acquainted with every single piece of gym equipment ever created, Joel had been born with a body naturally designed to lift compact cars as a mere afterthought. “I’ve been preparing for this my whole life,” Joel said, giving his flat yet solid middle a couple of slaps.

  “I can’t watch,” Zoey said from where she sat next to Joel. While Joel made Brad look small, Zoey’s petite Asian frame was downright minuscule next to him.

  “I can’t stop watching,” Agatha said as she leaned in, resting her chin on her hand. Her wrist tinkled with the adornment of what could have been a thousand bracelets, and the slender length of her elegant neck was emphasized by her dangling beaded earrings.

  On any given day, she and Zoey would be able to compete for most fashionable townie of Camden Falls, despite the six decades of age and experience that separated them. In so many ways they were polar opposites. The octogenarian’s silvery-white hair framed her face with a shorter-than-short pixie cut that amplified her timeless beauty, while Zoey’s long, thick hair was so black that it seemed to have natural highlights of blue and could be worn slicked back or as a wild, untamed mane. Agatha wore just enough makeup to emphasize features unravaged by the passage of time while Zoey’s face was a palette on which she fearlessly explored fashion trends usually only employed by the divas of the catwalk.

  Visually, they were night and day, but in their hearts they were the same.

  Both lived by codes of their own making, and they didn’t care if others understood that or not. Neither allowed anyone to define their lives but themselves.

  They were quickly becoming my role models.

  Tearing a more than slightly burnt piece of sourdough bread in half, I put each half on a different plate. I then scooped an undercooked poached egg onto one and an overcooked poached egg onto the other. Next to that I ladled runny scrambled eggs, frittata chunks that had stuck to the pan and had to be scraped out, sunny side up eggs that looked more cloudy than sunny, and half of an omelet that had so much cheese in it that it was more of a greasy lump of melted cheese than eggs.

  I pushed equally loaded plates in front of Brad and Joel. Joel picked up his fork and leaned forward while Brad gulped, wiped beads of sweat from his brow and then grabbed his fork and leaned forward as well.

  Jack, sitting next to Zoey in an Armani business suit, could have passed for a dark-skinned James Bond on a no-hair day. He had his wrist raised and was looking at a watch that I was sure cost more than my first car. Brad and Joel eyed him pensively, waiting for the moment that they would venture where few others had dared. “Go!” Jack exclaimed, and the race was on.

  Brad’s fork dove into the small mountain of scrambled eggs while Joel went right for the poached egg on toast.

  There was a subtle shift in air pressure and then a whoosh of an arctic breeze as the front door of the café opened and the woman who loved to hate me best stormed in. “Stop!”

  Brad paused with his egg-laden fork halfway to his mouth while Joel stopped mid-chew.

  “I have warned you to stay away from this heathen of a woman, but you continue to tempt your fate. She got away with murder once and she’ll get away with it again! How can you be so blind to her ways?”

  “Hi, Aunt Dorothy—I mean Dorothy,” I quickly amended on account of her not being my aunt anymore. She was my ex-husband’s aunt, not mine. “Want a Coke? They’re sealed and everything.” I quickly retrieved a glass Coke bottle from a small fridge under the grill’s bar and put it on the counter. “No tampering possible. And, best part, these are from Mexico and have been made with sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup!”

  I made the announcement about the soda’s sugar contents with no small amount of pride. While I was still a terrible cook, I was making an effort to learn. It was true that the eggs were awful, but I had made them in only an hour and a half instead of the four hours that it used to take me.

  In response to my offer, Dorothy looked at me like the devil’s spawn that she thought I was.

  In a surprise turn of events, Dorothy hadn’t been in the café to warn away my customers—what few I had—for a full week and a half. I’d started to think that her hatred of me had been replaced with something else to occupy her time, something like making small children cry or declaring to any person who’d had a life mishap that it was God’s punishment for being a less-than-perfect person. Of course, by that same line of logic, I couldn’t help but wonder why she wasn’t covered in boils with a raging mouth fungus that was making all her teeth fall out.

  Instead, she was the picture of health as a woman in her mid-forties with long, light brown hair that reached almost all the way to her backside. The only marks that her rampant hatred had left on her were the thousand feather lines around her mouth, from it always being pinched in judgment of somebody else.

  Brad put down his fork of eggs, and I saw his muscles bunch and flex beneath his State Police uniform. “Dorothy, you know that Kylie didn’t murder Rachel Summers. Her murderer’s been caught and jailed.”

  Dorothy did an old-Italian style spit on the floor. “That’s what she’d like you to think, but the woman is a sickness on this town and mark my words, you will all pay the price sooner or later.”

  “I know I’m paying the price,” Joel said around a mouthful of food. He hadn’t yet managed to make himself swallow the poached egg
and toast.

  “Time! And the winner is Joel!” Jack exclaimed, but Joel didn’t look like he felt like that much of a winner. He finally swallowed, and his face twisted into a painful grimace followed by an all-over bodily shudder.

  The café’s doors burst open again and in rushed two people I had not seen in almost a year.

  “Mom? Dad? I mean…”

  “It’s okay, Kylie,” Bruce Hibbert said as he moved to stand at Dorothy’s side. Just as Dorothy wasn’t my aunt, Bruce Hibbert wasn’t my dad. He was my ex-husband’s father.

  “How are you, sweetheart?” Maryann Hibbert asked as she took up a spot on Dorothy’s other side. They both linked their arms with hers. I got the impression that it wasn’t for the sake of solidarity.

  “I’m good,” I answered weakly.

  “So nice to have you in town,” Maryann said.

  Bruce and Maryann lived in Camden Falls, Kentucky, and Dan, my ex, had grown up in Camden Falls. I’d grown up in Illinois, and met Dan through the brother of a friend of mine when I was seventeen and still in high school. Dan had been a worldly twenty-six. We’d married right after I finished high school, stayed married for eleven years, and then divorced earlier this year. In the divorce, Dan had kept the house, the cars, the business we’d built together, and the entire contents of our bank account. I’d kept my dignity. I had thought that he’d gotten sole property of his family, the same as with everything else, but life was proving me wrong.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been by to say hello.” It wasn’t true. I wasn’t sorry. I had assumed we would politely go out of our way to avoid each other when I moved here to take over the café that my cousin Sarah had owned. Again, I’d been wrong.

  “We’ve missed you,” Bruce said.

  “Dan’s missed you,” Maryann added.

  My right eye involuntarily twitched. Dan was a lot of things, but I was certain that sorry-to-see-me-gone wasn’t one of them.

  I liked my nose and didn’t want it to grow any longer, so I didn’t return the sentiment of having missed him. The silence that followed made me wish for the chirp of crickets. My gaze fell to the plates in front of me. “Would you like some eggs?”

  “No,” Bruce and Maryann answered emphatically and in unison. Then they looked at each other. It was one of those married couple looks where a whole conversation takes place in half a second with no words spoken. Then Maryann added, “We had a big breakfast.”

  “She’s going to rot in hell,” Dorothy said as she stared at me. “Thank God our Danny is no longer married to her. Now she can’t drag him down with her.” Then she narrowed her eyes. “And get a haircut. You look like—”

  “Dorothy!” Maryann cut her off, then to me she said, “I’m so sorry about her,” Maryann said in a stage whisper. “We begged her to stop coming here.”

  “Dan should have never let you go,” Bruce added.

  Dan should have never cheated on me with anyone who would say yes.

  Maryann smiled wistfully. “We’d sure love to see you two kids work things out.”

  “Our boy’s just not the same without you.”

  I thought I might vomit. Their son was a narcissistic troglodyte disguised as a caring member of society. He’d fooled me for years, but once I’d finally recognized who he was, it was as if a veil of lies had been lifted to reveal the truth about our whole marriage. Yet I didn’t want to hurt his parents. They had always been good to me.

  “He’ll be fine,” I said and then broke off a small piece of the burnt bread and stuck it in my mouth to chew on it slowly. It helped to cover up the taste of bile the conversation was leaving in my mouth.

  “We’ll have him call you!” Bruce said.

  No no no no no! I could feel panic sweat breaking out on my brow. “I’m dating someone,” I croaked.

  “Who?” Dan’s parents asked at the same time as Dorothy yelled, “Whore!”

  Bruce and Maryann didn’t even blink. Their entire attention was on me.

  My gaze flitted between Brad and Joel as random letters of the alphabet bounced around inside my mouth to form a name. “Broel.” The letters had formed a word, and it had fallen out of my mouth.

  Brad and Joel both looked at me, and I silently begged for one of them to come to my rescue. They then both turned to face my ex-in-laws.

  “She has a date with me on Saturday,” Joel said.

  “And I’m taking her out on Friday,” Brad said. Joel shot Brad a glare, and the café’s air once again crackled with testosterone.

  “Whore!” Dorothy exclaimed again, this time her voice filled with triumphant vindication.

  Chapter 2

  The door didn’t quite hit my ex-in-laws in the butt as they head out the door, but it came close.

  “Well, that’s my entertainment for the day,” Joel said as he stood up and stretched. He gave the counter a tap. “I’ll pick you up at eight on Saturday.”

  My jaw fell. Joel was actually planning on going through with the date. But why? No more need for the ruse. My ex-in-laws were gone.

  “And I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty on Friday,” Brad said.

  My mind raced for what to say but both men were out the door before I got the chance. “What just happened?”

  “You, my dear, just started dating two men at the same time,” Jack said. His mouth was quirked up on one side and there was a twinkle in his coal-black eyes.

  “Ahhh, those were the days,” Agatha sighed. Her chin was on her hand, and her eyes had a dreamy quality to them.

  “Are you shopping for a new man, Agatha? I thought you had someone,” Jack said.

  Agatha scrunched her nose. “Alfred up and died on me.”

  So much was happening so quickly. I had dates with two different men, Agatha had been in a relationship, and now her man was dead. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Agatha.”

  Agatha waved a hand in dismissal. “He was old.”

  “What is this, the fourth boyfriend you’ve buried?”

  “The seventh,” Agatha said. “I really need to start dating younger.”

  “I’ve heard Newt Brayton is newly single.”

  “Oh…” Agatha’s brows rose as she turned her head to give Jack her full attention. “And how old is he?”

  “Late forties at best.”

  “That could work.” Agatha smiled, and I could see that her spirits were lifting.

  The café’s front door opened again, and this time I swore that I caught a faint scent of sulfur as a cold breeze blew in. I turned to look at who could be walking in, but as soon as I saw, I shifted my eyes immediately to Zoey. She had her head down but as soon as she spotted the newcomer, her eyes flew wide.

  “Max,” she whispered.

  Max had been around for more than a week, but as far as I knew, this was the first time he and Zoey had laid eyes on each other since he’d started haunting the town. I say “haunt” because Max had ghosted Zoey. She’d moved to Camden Falls because it was where Max had wanted to live. She’d secured a home for them and had made all the plans for their wedding while he’d travelled the country as a sports talent scout. Leaving her up to her eyeballs in debt from taking care of everything, Max had stopped calling. He’d also stopped answering when Zoey called him.

  He’d pretended Zoey didn’t exist.

  Now it was Zoey’s turn to do the same to him.

  Zoey’s eyes were on me, and she’d gone pale beneath the natural glow of her honeyed skin. Retrieving my upstairs apartment keys from my pocket, I slid them across the counter to her under the cover of my hand. She took them and without saying a word to Max, turned and walked around the end of the grill’s counter to disappear into the industrial kitchen in the back. In there was a door that led to my apartment. It was my nightly sanctuary. Now it was Zoey’s.

  I turned to face the café door. In Max’s hand was a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses. He was six feet of all man. He was the rare high school and college athlete who had kept his physique long after g
raduation. His shoulders were wide, and his legs were long and muscled. His stomach was flat, and his hair was a thick sandy brown.

  “Max, you shouldn’t have!” I said as I raised a hand high into the air, making like he’d brought the flowers for me. I said it loudly, and I made a show of myself. I wanted everybody’s attention on me, especially Max’s. Zoey deserved to be able to slip away in peace.

  Max’s smile was boyish and charming. He understood exactly what I was doing, and he played along. “I’m glad you like them. Red roses for the fiery redhead.” When he spoke, his voice carried from his diaphragm. It wasn’t even as if he were speaking that loud, but I was sure that his voice could be heard throughout most of the café.

  He pulled one of the roses free from its sisters, sniffed it, and then let its soft petals rest on his chest. “I was wondering if I could speak with Zoey. There are things I need to tell her.”

  Soooo many words flew through my head. Cutting words. Mean words. Words that were designed to cripple. I had seen the unshed tears in Zoey’s eyes and how she’d scoured the world for Max, breaking countless laws with her savvy techie ways. I kept them to myself, though, and simply said, “She’s not here.”

  Max nodded in understanding and then rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, if you see her again, please tell her…” His voice trailed off. He looked chagrined. “Tell her I’ll make things right.” He laid the rose he’d chosen for Zoey to the side of the rest, then he turned and left. I watched as he climbed into a white Toyota Prius parked curbside of the café. He merged with traffic and was gone again, a ghost once more.