Maggie and the Empty Noose Read online

  Maggie and the Empty Noose

  A Carita Cove Romantic Mystery

  Barbara Cool Lee

  Pajaro Bay Publishing

  Contents

  Introduction

  Newsletter

  Copyright & Dedication

  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

  Jasper

  Booklist

  Newsletter

  Charities

  Stay in Touch

  Introduction

  When the movie star renting Maggie's house is accused of murder, she's the only one who believes he's innocent. Now all she has to do is prove it.

  Maggie McJasper is starting over in a little California beach town. She has a craft shop, a nice circle of friends, and a handsome movie star who keeps flirting with her. Life would be pretty great if she could just stop stumbling over dead bodies….

  The Carita Cove romantic mysteries are fun and flirty reads, with no swearing or love scenes, and no gruesome violence to keep you up at night. Collect them all:

  * * *

  1. Maggie and the Black-Tie Affair (short intro story)

  2. Maggie and the Inconvenient Corpse

  3. Maggie and the Mourning Beads

  4. Maggie and the Empty Noose

  5. Maggie and the Huichol Homicide

  6. Maggie and the Whiskered Witness

  And more to come. Click here for the latest booklist.

  Copyright © 2019 by Barbara Cool Lee

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Neither the author nor the publisher claim responsibility for adverse effects resulting from the use of any recipes, projects, and/or information found within this book.

  This edition published: December 3, 2019

  First Edition.

  2019-11-24-A

  Chapter One

  August 18, just after dawn

  Carita, California

  * * *

  Stanley John Tibbets, known to the world as Reese Stevens, former rock star, current movie star, last year's number one box office draw, this year's sexiest man alive, former drug addict, currently clean and sober for 4234 days, was awake.

  He came up to consciousness slowly, like swimming toward the light out of deep, swirling water. Finally he reached some semblance of alertness, to find himself face down in his own bed, and tangled in the sheets. His head felt like it had been kicked by steel-toed boots, and he was sweating, the dampness making his hair cling to his scalp and his eyes sting as the perspiration ran down his face.

  Had he been sick? He turned his head a fraction of an inch and almost howled at the pain.

  With a huge effort, he kicked himself free of the damp sheets and turned over on his back, throwing his arms up over his face to block the baleful morning light glaring in the French doors at him and burning his eyes.

  His elbow hit something and he opened his eyes to see what it was.

  A pair of green eyes stared back at him.

  He knew those eyes.

  Knew them like you knew the eyes of a lover.

  Knew them like you knew the eyes of an enemy who was threatening everything that mattered to you.

  For the eyes belonged to the person who was both of those things: former girlfriend, current enemy, and the one person on Earth he could truly say he wished was dead.

  Olivia Sigworth. Blond, beautiful, and evil. The mother of his child. The woman who called herself Olivia Stevens to capitalize on his fame. The woman who marketed their teenage son like a product to further her own ambitions. The woman he'd sworn to stop, at any cost.

  He would have said something to her, would have told her not to give him that look, that smug look she always gave him when she was feeling full of herself and was sure she could get away with pulling one over on him.

  But he couldn't find the words. His mouth was full of cotton, and his head roared like all the seas in the world were on top of him, pushing him under and churning menacingly all around him.

  It wouldn't have mattered.

  Wouldn't have mattered at all if he could have unstuck his tongue, worked it around in his bone-dry mouth, struggled through the confused thoughts bubbling in his brain to express some coherent message to the woman he hated more than anyone in the world.

  It wouldn't have mattered at all.

  Because those green eyes were empty. They were simply blind, glassy marbles with no thought or expression behind them.

  Because Olivia was dead.

  In his bed.

  With him.

  Maggie McJasper heard the phone ring just as she was rinsing her hair.

  "Ow!" Her arm hit the wall of the two-foot-square stall of the tiny house's shower.

  She rubbed her elbow to stop the throbbing, then yanked the shower curtain open.

  Jasper, her oversized Rough Collie, lay on the bathmat waiting for her. His nose touched one side of the minuscule bathroom, and his tail the other, so she couldn't step out of the shower.

  The phone was still ringing.

  She dipped her head under the spray to rinse the soap out of her eyes.

  "Jasper, Towel," she burbled, her mouth full of water.

  She turned off the shower.

  The dog got up and grabbed the purple bath towel with his teeth and handed it to her.

  His tail wagged while he did this, and it smacked against the bathroom wall.

  She took the towel from him and wiped her eyes. "Good dog. Jasper, Pillow."

  He went through the curtain that separated the bath from the living area of the 240-square-foot home. She could hear him plop down on his pillow bed as commanded.

  She now had enough room to get out of the shower and finish toweling off, so she stepped out onto the fur-covered bath mat, the fuzz making her feet itch.

  The phone had stopped ringing.

  She rubbed her hair with the towel while listening for the sound of a beep from someone leaving her a voicemail.

  It didn't come.

  "Telemarketer," she grumbled.

  The ringing started again.

  "Not a telemarketer," she muttered. "Where did I leave the phone?" She could have sworn she'd brought it in the bathroom with her.

  "Jasper, Phone!" she called out. She was pretty sure he didn't know that command yet, but you never could tell. He picked up ideas so quickly.

  When the dog poked his head through the bathroom curtain there was nothing in his mouth. "No, huh?" she asked him.

  He barked helpfully in reply. His bark, a Collie trait perfected over generations to carry across miles of pasture, made her ears ring in the small space.

  "Jasper
, Quiet," she said, and he cocked his head, a confused look on his face. He was still no closer to understanding that command.

  Lauren, her advisor in all things dog-related, had explained that teaching a dog to not do something was much more difficult than teaching them to do something. Lauren had suggested teaching Jasper to bark on command, and then he might understand what not barking meant.

  Maggie finished towel-drying her hair while she mused about this. She had never owned a dog before, and the complexity of training them had never even crossed her mind until she'd met Jasper. She'd always been a cat person, and cats had their own opinions, so they weren't about to listen to anything a human told them to do.

  Jasper grinned at her through the hair-drying process, head tilted to the side to express his utter fascination with everything she did.

  It was a minute later when she realized that, while she had been pondering the endless dichotomy between cats and dogs, the phone had rung, stopped, rung, stopped, and was now ringing a third time.

  She wrapped the towel around herself and left the bathroom, following the ringing until she discovered the phone on the stool next to her bead loom. The mourning bead necklace she had made to honor her dead husband was hanging from the loom's top beam, the necklace's jet crystals contrasting with the pastel lavender seed beads that formed the background of the tapestry. Her fingers itched to pick up the needle and do another row on the bead tapestry, but she had to get downtown to open her bead shop, so she just reached for the phone instead.

  The phone had stopped ringing again by the time she picked it up, so she checked the caller ID, then hit redial.

  "Hey, you!" she said cheerfully when Reese picked up. "What can your landlady do for you this morning?"

  There was silence on the phone.

  Not silence, really. Not the blank emptiness of a dead line, but the barely audible gasping of a voice straining to say something.

  "Reese? What's wrong?"

  "Please… Maggie… help… me…."

  Chapter Two

  She slammed out of her tiny house about a minute later, her hair a tangled mess around her shoulders, and her feet slippery in the flip flops she'd donned after throwing on jeans and a tee.

  The fog was thick this morning, but she didn't need to see where she was going to know the way. The huge white block shape of the house across the driveway soared up in front of her.

  She ran to the front door of Casablanca, sliding to a stop against the red door and losing one flip flop in the process. She grabbed the shoe and shoved it back on her foot.

  She realized she'd forgotten her keys, but when she tried the doorknob she found it unlocked. She threw the door open. It banged against the wall and then ricocheted back in her face.

  She barreled past it impatiently.

  "Reese!" She shouted. "Where are you? Are you hurt?" What had happened? He wasn't even forty years old, awfully young for a stroke or heart attack, but with the abuse his body had been through in the past she supposed it was possible. Maybe he'd fallen and broken his leg, but then he should be able to talk, and not just gasp out her name and then drop the phone, leaving only that eerie, straining silence that had sent her into a panic.

  Maybe he had been attacked, and was hiding in a closet or something. She called out again, a bit nervous now that she'd thought of crazed assassins loose in the house.

  The security system must be off, or it would have started blaring when she banged the door open and shouted. He tended to forget to set it, no matter how much she nagged. She clenched her fingers together and called his name again, more softly, then went further into the room, wondering if she should call the police.

  But there was no sign of any intruders. The huge living room was pristine, with its sofa pillows all perfectly fluffed up as the housekeeper must have left them the day before, rugs all aligned, oak floor gleaming, magazines on the side table in neat stacks, Reese's keys sitting on top of the latest issue of Astronomy to show that he must be around here, somewhere.

  And it was quiet, with the same eerie not-quite-silence that made her hold her breath and strain her ears, listening for the tiniest pin-drop.

  All the lights had been left on, the track lights overhead highlighting the dark beams holding up the twenty-foot-high ceiling. The entire ocean-facing wall of the room was windows, with a big sliding glass door that led to the pool. The slider stood wide open, and it was freezing in the house, as if the door had been that way all night.

  The morning fog crept in, like a menacing presence invading the house.

  She went over to the slider and closed it. The patio outside was filled with swirling fog, and the huge ugly sculpture that overlooked the pool arched up in the gray like a bird of prey.

  But there was no one there.

  "Reese!" she shouted again. Wasn't he home? She had assumed he was calling from here.

  She had shoved her phone in the back pocket of her jeans. She reached for it, but then heard a thump overhead, and ran for the stairs instead.

  She found them in the master bedroom.

  Them.

  A man who seemed half-dead, half in and half out of the bed, weaving back and forth, with wild hair, wild eyes, and an expression of pure confusion on his face.

  And beside him on the bed, a woman who was not half-dead, but all the way dead.

  Olivia Stevens.

  I'm going to kill her! Reese's furious shout echoed in her memory as she stood in the doorway, dumbfounded at the bizarre scene in front of her. Just last night she had hushed him when he'd made the threat, warning him jokingly that people might take him seriously and believe he would actually murder his ex.

  She ignored Reese for the moment and went around to the far side of the bed to take a look at Olivia, hoping against hope that there would be time to call 911 to save her, to somehow salvage this horrible situation.

  But no.

  There was no doubt about it. Olivia was not just dead, she was in full rigor mortis.

  Without touching the body, Maggie tried to examine her. She was lying on the bed fully clothed in the same outfit Maggie had seen her in just last night: tight flowered dress that hugged her impressively silicone-enhanced and liposuctioned curves; strappy pink sandals Maggie recognized as costing about a thousand bucks, now all dirty and covered with sand; perfectly blown-out ombre blond hair, now looking tangled and rumpled.

  Her head was turned to the side, and there was a wound on the back of her skull, the blood dark and stiff against the streaked hair. There wasn't too much blood, but there was no question the blow was a terrible one that must have caused her death.

  She glanced around the room but didn't see anything that could have been the murder weapon.

  Reese was still struggling to get out of bed. He was naked, except for scuffed slippers that he'd apparently worn to bed.

  A strange way to sleep. But apparently he had slept. He seemed to only now be waking up, many hours after Olivia died. The rumpled sheets on his side of the California King bed showed that he had lain there, beside the body of the woman he hated. How was that even possible?

  Reese finally made it all the way to his feet. Without a word, she handed him the jeans that were lying on the floor, and he sat down again to pull them on.

  He tried to do it over his slippers, so she stopped him, then bent down and took off his slippers, ignoring the fact that the most handsome man she'd ever known was stark naked in front of her.

  "Now try," she said, straightening up.

  He pulled the jeans on, then repeated the apparently difficult task of getting to his feet.

  When he succeeded, he stood there swaying for a minute, then began to fumble around the nightstand, looking for something.

  "Stop!" she ordered. "Don't touch anything."

  "Wanna water," he mumbled.

  "Not now. We have to preserve any evidence for the police."

  "Ebdence," he repeated, slurring it.

  She spoke loudly and clearly, tr
ying to get through to him: "We have to leave the scene undisturbed so the police can look for fingerprints and figure out who did this."

  "Did is?" he repeated, the words all slurred together. "I did is? Did I kill ur?"

  "You—what? Of course you didn't kill her. What's wrong with you?"

  He was still fumbling around, so she took hold of his arm.

  He swung around and grabbed Maggie by the shoulders so hard it made her cry out. "Did ah kill ur?" he cried out, the words still a jumbled mess as if he couldn't make his tongue work. "Please tell me I didn't. Please help me, Maggie."

  "Shhh," she said gently. "Hush now." He loosened his grip on her, and she lifted her arms up to brush his rumpled hair, soothing him. "Shhh, Stanley," she whispered, calling him by his real name, trying to reach him.

  His eyes were still wild, but then he closed them, and let her brush his golden hair smooth with her fingers. "It's going to be all right, Stanley. It's going to be all right."

  His whole body was shaking, and he looked like a man in shock.

  No. Not in shock. Like he was drugged out of his skull. Wasted.

  But he couldn't be. Reese Stevens had been sober for more than eleven years, ever since he crashed his car into a palm tree in a drugged-out haze. He wouldn't take drugs, he wouldn't kill—

  She didn't look at the body on the bed.

  He wouldn't do this. He couldn't have done this.

  "Reese?"

  He didn't respond, just stood there, rocking back and forth on his feet, with his eyes closed and that stunned expression still on his face.