Maggie and the Whiskered Witness Read online

  Maggie and the Whiskered Witness

  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

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Jasper

  Booklist

  Newsletter

  Charities

  Stay in Touch

  Introduction

  Maggie's dog-training buddy drops off her German Shepherd for a play date–then disappears. Soon Maggie begins to wonder if her friend could be leading a deadly double life.

  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 heartwarming 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

  2. Maggie and the Inconvenient Corpse

  3. Maggie and the Mourning Beads

  4. Maggie and the Empty Noose

  5. Maggie and the Hidden Homicide

  6. Maggie and the Whiskered Witness

  7. Maggie and the Serpentine Script

  8. Maggie and the Rattled Rake

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

  Copyright © 2020 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: June 2, 2020

  2021-01-15-D

  Chapter One

  Monday, November 4, 8:43 AM

  Carita Cove, California

  * * *

  "You're mad," he said.

  Magdalena Lopez McJasper didn't look at Reese.

  "Please, Maggie," he said. "Don't be mad."

  She stared out Casablanca's big glass doors at the view of Carita Cove. The sun was just peeking through the clouds on this cold autumn morning, turning the water to dark teal, and adding a sparkle to the tip of each wave that crashed against the sandy shore.

  The swimming pool just outside the glass sliders, with its waterfall edge making it appear to drop away into nothingness, rippled with little waves of its own as the pool skimmer chugged around, picking up fallen leaves from the surface.

  The big iron wave sculpture looming over the pool cast a dark shadow on the pool's surface, making her shiver.

  "I'm not mad," she said quietly, watching the shadow hovering on the water. "Not at you, anyway."

  "I'm sorry," he said, and she knew he was. Knew this was the last thing he'd wanted to have happen.

  She looked down at the phone in her hand again. The image on it stared back at her, mocking, rude, offensive.

  It was a photograph of a woman on the high end of her thirties. She wore baggy sweat pants, and her dark hair was up in a messy bun, the unforgiving camera lens emphasizing every single stray hair out of place. She was in the act of bending over to pick up a scrap of paper, her rear end captured at just the perfect angle to make her look like a hippopotamus. Her face was turned to the camera, and she wore no makeup and a startled expression—the angle, again, the worst one possible, creating the appearance of a double chin and emphasizing the raccoon-like shadows under her wide brown eyes.

  Beneath the photo the screaming headline made it worse. So much worse. For it was the only reason the picture was on the ugly tabloid website at all. Millions of people took out the trash daily. Millions of people walked around in their most casual clothes, with no makeup on and their hair unstyled, not wasting their time thinking about how they would look if someone snapped a picture of them at the wrong angle in an unguarded moment. But she was no longer to be allowed unguarded moments:

  REESE STEVENS' NEW GIRLFRIEND: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST?

  "Please, Maggie," he said again.

  She finally turned around to face the beauty. And he was. Unlike anyone else she'd ever known, Reese didn't have bad angles. He didn't have moments of slovenly, casual obliviousness where a stray photo could make him a laughingstock.

  He couldn't help it. He was nearly forty years old, decades past the day when his teenaged self had burst onto the scene as a sexy young rock star. And now he stood there in the living room of Casablanca in his oldest jeans and plain T-shirt and scuffed Vans, just like any normal man might dress.

  Yet somehow, in that way he always did, he seemed golden and glowing and like he'd walked off the cover of a magazine.

  His hair was blond and shaggy and had been growing out for a couple of months without being touched by a stylist. But on him, it looked like a shimmering halo highlighting his perfect cheekbones.

  He was too skinny at the moment, having recently been ill, but on him it just created an impression of slender, otherworldly gracefulness.

  He had dark circles from stress, but on him it only called attention to the vivid cobalt blue eyes, sparkling with an intense intelligence that was mesmerizing.

  It was all too perfect. Too much. And it wasn't his fault.

  He wasn't trying to be gorgeous. In fact, he often hated it. Hated the distance his incredible attractiveness had created in his life, the way being so strikingly charismatic was off-putting to people, how it made them both lust after him and at the same time not see him as a real human being.

  He was a star. A celebrity. A sex symbol. And a bunch of other accolades and phrases that conveyed just how desirable he was.

  But he was also a real person. Maggie knew that. She'd known him for over a decade, since the time all those years ago when he'd left behind his glamorous rock star persona to build an equally impressive career as an actor.

  He was amazing and talented and gorgeous, and he'd dated most of the beautiful women in show business at one time or another.

  But Maggie knew the truth about him. She knew how all those labels pinned on him didn't have much to do with who he really was.

  And more than that, she knew just how vulnerable he was right now. Knew he had recently faced down death—and knew how close death had come to winn
ing the battle. Knew he was struggling for stability and sobriety in his life. Knew he was really just small-town boy Stanley Tibbets beneath the veneer of Sexiest Man on the Planet Reese Stevens.

  She knew his secrets, and he knew hers.

  And she had been treacherously close to falling in love with him, after years of being platonic friends and avoiding the complications of his very messy life.

  She had been so tempted to take their relationship further, into romance. Until this very ugly reminder of what her life would be like if that happened.

  "Please, Maggie," he begged yet again. "Please talk to me."

  She shrugged. She wiped the image off the screen. She shoved the phone into the back pocket of her jeans and sniffed away the angry tears. "There's really nothing to say."

  He stood in the living room of her oceanfront mansion, with its overstuffed furniture and its bleached oak floors and its amazing view. But he wasn't noticing any of that. He was laser-focused on her, and he was gripping the handle of his big rolling suitcase with knuckles that had gone white.

  So she forced a smile on her face, wanting to make this all go away. "You'd better get going. You're going to be late."

  "I can't leave like this."

  She forced her smile wider, attempting to convince him to let it go. She was no actress, though, and it didn't fool him for a minute.

  "We have to talk about it," he said.

  "No," she said, attempting to sound bright and unconcerned. "We actually don't. We both know it's awful and insulting and there's not a thing we can do about it." She waved it away. "So what time do you have to be in LA?"

  Those blue eyes bored into her. "You know you don't really look like that," he said. "I've seen you strut your stuff like a Rodeo Drive beauty queen—and you've seen me a total mess, on the verge of death. You know what they said isn't true about either of us. It's all illusion."

  She tried to show him she wasn't hurt by meeting his eyes without wavering. "I know. I know I can dress up and put on makeup and do up my hair and look fairly good."

  His faint smile was, in its own way, very flattering. "Fairly good," he drawled.

  "And I know you're a wreck," she added. She smiled fondly at that, and his grin matched it. And he was. And that was the issue. Ironically, given his overwhelming fame, most people didn't know anything about him at all. But she did. Really did. They had been through life and death, love and loss together, as friends. And they both had come dangerously close to admitting they wanted more than just friendship.

  Then she frowned. "But if we continue dating, this kind of thing will keep happening."

  "If?" he whispered. He grew very still, withdrawing into that eerie beauty to become ghostlike, distant.

  "I'm not saying anything's going to change now," she replied quickly. "I'm just saying I need more than two minutes to process seeing my rear end blown up larger than life on a website before I'll be ready to hash it out. So let's not go into it right now."

  His body was so still it seemed he wasn't even breathing. She watched, and waited, knowing he was looking for some reassurance from her. She wasn't able to lie and give it to him yet, and she waited for him to accept that. And, after a minute, he did.

  He gave a curt nod, and answered the earlier question she'd already forgotten she'd asked. "One? Or two?" he said. "I forget what time I need to get to the city. There's a stylist booked, and then I have the first interview tonight. A couple of shows in LA, and then I head to New York for more appearances. I'm skipping the London leg of the promo tour, so I'll come back to LA in a few days to finish up. Then it'll be over. I don't know all the details. The publicist will take care of everything."

  "Do you know the publicist?"

  He shook his head. "Nah. It's somebody new. I'm being handled like a prize cow. Led around by the nose to interviews and photo shoots and public appearances. You know how it is."

  And she did, having once been married to a movie producer.

  Who she'd divorced, in part to get away from that world of phonies. "I'm sure there will be plenty of chances for you to talk about my sweat pants." She said it wryly, trying to make it light, but he didn't smile.

  "The subject won't come up," he said flatly.

  "How do you know?"

  "Because there's a contract. They only ask the questions agreed to. About how 'thrilled' I am about the new pic. About how 'happy' I was to work with the director. About how I "love" my costars. I filmed the movie two years ago, and barely even remember what it's about. But I'll do my job and hit all the notes they want me to. I just have to recite my lines convincingly and everyone will be happy. Then I can come home." He paused. "Will you be here when I come home?"

  "I'll be around," she said. "Unless I'm at work."

  He finally let go of the suitcase handle, and she could see the blood begin to rush back to his whitened fingers. He came closer, so he was only a few feet away. He whispered, "I meant, will you be here when I get back?"

  "Oh." She stepped back, putting some more space between them. Their dating was a new thing, something they'd agreed to try, as a first attempt to see if there was a chance they could build a life together.

  But now, after this ugly tabloid story had brought the reality of what they were doing crashing in on their fantasy of a normal small-town private life? "I don't know," she said. "I mean, I'll be here, in Carita. I need some time to think about it."

  She added as a joke, to make it light, "so if any cute groupies throw themselves at you, don't let me hold you back."

  "Yeah," he said quite seriously. "Like the Jagger quote: I don't get the women I want. I get the women who want me." He had said that to her once, a long time ago, and it had seemed funny then. It didn't now.

  He gave her a firm nod, accepting her decision. He grabbed the suitcase again and started to go. He was a tall man, well over six feet, but at the moment he looked like a lost little boy.

  She listened to the roll of the suitcase wheels across the oak floor, a lonely sound as it moved away from her. The sound of leaving.

  She knew he was an actor. Knew he could turn on a sad look at the drop of a hat. But he wasn't acting now. She felt his aloneness like a shot through her heart. This was the feeling he was carrying inside himself as he headed out for a week on the road, his first week back in the viper's pit of show business in quite some time.

  "Stanley!"

  He stopped in the doorway and glanced back over his shoulder at her.

  "I'm not saying no. I'm saying I need time. That's all. Just some time to think. But my sweat pants and I will be here when you get back. One way or another. Can you give me time to think?"

  He flashed that signature grin at her and nodded. "I can give you all the time you want."

  Then he let go of the suitcase and took the eight long strides back to where she stood.

  He kissed her, hard, in that way of his that left her swooning. He held her head gently between his palms and caressed her hair, messy as it was, and she closed her eyes and let him lead. Which he knew well how to do. She forgot her own name when he kissed her like this. The fact that he knew that, and could use it at will to sweep her off her feet, didn't make it any easier to resist.

  When she opened her eyes and faced him, she couldn't speak.

  He whispered, still holding her, "I won't give up the fight easily. I'm used to getting what I want." Then he let her go.

  He went back to the door, grabbed his suitcase, and left without another backward glance.

  She turned back to look out at the water again, trying to catch her breath.

  Chapter Two

  Maggie followed Reese out the front door shortly afterward.

  He was just pulling out of the driveway, his glossy silver Porsche purring like a contented cougar. She caught a glimpse of his face in the rearview, grim, shuttered, like a man heading off to battle in a foreign land. She understood the look. It was another thing no one else saw in his picture-perfect life. And though she was
n't religious, she said a quick prayer to whoever was up there to bring him back home safely.

  Then he was gone, and silence returned to The Row, the elite little street lined with luxury homes.

  And without his larger-than-life presence, silence returned to her life.

  She locked Casablanca's big red door, then headed across the driveway to her own house.

  Technically, Casablanca was her house, too, having been the settlement she received when she divorced the two-timing jerk she'd quite literally caught in the act of cheating on her.

  But unfortunately, Casablanca really belonged to the bank that held its mortgage, and they were getting anxious for a return on their investment. She owed more on the house than it was worth. She'd known that for months, but someone at the bank had apparently figured it out recently, and they had informed her, in a very polite letter on fine linen stationery, that she would need to fix the little million-dollar oversight soon, or face foreclosure.

  So now a discreet FOR SALE sign was attached to the pristine white stucco near the door, her attempt to dig herself out of the financial mess her ex-husband had left in his wake.

  And while she waited for someone with a lot of money and not a lick of common sense to buy her personal white elephant, Reese had been living in Casablanca, and paying the rent that kept her from falling further behind on her mortgage payments.