Candy Canes of Christmas Past

Book 0: Lucy Stone Mystery

by Leslie Meier

Genres: Female Sleuths; Cozy Mystery

Synopsis

Christmas past meets Christmas present in this holiday whodunit set in Tinker’s Cove, Maine, featuring reporter and sleuth Lucy Stone—and a not-so-cold case of murder. For fans of cozy mysteries and the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author’s ever-popular Lucy Stone series.
 
Twenty-some years ago, Lucy Stone arrived in Tinker Cove, Maine, and discovered her knack for solving mysteries. It happened when she met Miss Tilly, the town librarian, whose mother took a fatal fall down the basement stairs one Christmas Eve. The “accident” left a cloud of suspicion on Miss Tilly’s father—and a slew of other suspects . . .
 
The only clue was a glass candy cane found smashed to bits by the victim’s body. Now, as she unlocks the doors of Christmas past, Lucy must learn the mystery of the glass candy cane to expose secrets, scandal—and a killer who got away with murder . . .

Release date: October 1, 2023

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 112

Sample

A fire was crackling in the grate, Christmas carols were playing on the stereo and Lucy Stone was perched on a step ladder in the living room arranging strings of twinkling fairy lights on an eight-foot balsam fir her husband Bill had cut in the woods behind their old farmhouse on Red Top Road in Tinker’s Cove, Maine.

“Watch out, Lucy,” warned Bill, coming into the room with several battered brown cardboard boxes of ornaments. “You don’t want to lose your balance and fall.”

“I’ve just finished,” said Lucy, slipping the last loop of wire over a branch and stepping down from the ladder.

Bill put the boxes on the coffee table and stood back, arms akimbo, admiring the tree. “It’s the best we’ve ever had, I think. I’ve had my eye on that tree for a couple of years now.”

“A special tree for a special Christmas,” said Lucy, wrapping her arms around his waist. “It’s Patrick’s first.”

“Not that he’ll remember it,” said Bill. “He’s only nine months old.”

“We’ll remember. After all, it’s our first Christmas as grandparents.”

As if on cue, the dog’s barking announced the arrival of Toby and Molly and the baby, who had come from their house on nearby Prudence Path. Feet could be heard clattering down the stairs as Zoe, at eleven the youngest of Lucy and Bill’s children, ran to greet them. Behind her, moving more sedately but unable to resist the allure of their nephew, came her older sisters, Sara, who was a high school sophomore, and Elizabeth, home from Chamberlain College in Boston, where she was a senior.

“Look at how big he’s gotten!” exclaimed Elizabeth, who hadn’t seen the baby since Thanksgiving.

“Can I hold him?” asked Sara.

“No, let me!” demanded Zoe. “Let me hold him!”

“Careful there,” cautioned Lucy, asserting her grandmotherly prerogative and scooping little Patrick up in a hug. Then she sat down on the couch with him in her lap and began unzipping his snowsuit, revealing a blond little tyke in a plaid shirt and blue jeans that matched his father’s, and his grandfather’s. She nuzzled his neck and Patrick crowed and bounced in her lap, delighted to be the center of attention.

“Elizabeth, you can get the cookies and eggnog, and everybody else can start trimming the tree. Patrick and I will watch. Right, Patrick?” But as soon as the boxes were opened and the first ornaments taken out, Patrick was no longer content to watch. He wanted to pull the paper out of the boxes and touch the ornaments, too. Deftly, Lucy distracted him with a cookie and took him over to the window, to look at the Christmas lights strung on the porch.

“It’s starting to snow,” she said. “It’s going to be a white Christmas.”

“Nothing unusual about that,” said Bill, who was attaching a hook to a round red ball.

“We’re only supposed to get a couple of inches,” said Toby, pulling a plastic trumpet out of the box. “Hey, I remember this,” he said, blowing on it and producing a little toot.

“Look at this one!” said Zoe. “It’s baby Jesus in his manger, and if you shake it the snow falls on him!”

“Poor baby Jesus,” said Molly, making herself shiver. “He must be cold.”

“It snowed on me in my crib, when I was a baby, right in this house,” said Toby. “Right, Mom?”

“He’s making that up,” declared Sara.

“And how could he remember, if he was a baby?” asked Elizabeth.

“That’s silly,” said Zoe. “It can’t snow in the house!”

Lucy looked around the room, at the strong walls and the tight windows, the carpeted floor, and the brick fireplace where the fire crackled merrily, and then her eyes met Bill’s. “We-e-ll,” she said, “this house was in pretty bad shape when we first moved here.”

“It was a nor’easter,” said Bill, exaggerating. “The wind blew the snow through a crack. It was easy to fix, the window just needed some caulking.”

“See, I was right,” declared Toby.

“It was Christmas Eve,” said Lucy. “Toby was two. I found him in his crib, with a little dusting of snow. But how did you remember?”

“I think you must’ve told me,” said Toby. “To tell the truth, it just popped in my head this morning when Patrick woke up and I went into his room to get him.”

Lucy smiled fondly at her grandson, who looked so much like his father at that age. Things had certainly changed since that awful winter of 1983….

December 1983

Only a week until Christmas. Not that it felt like Christmas. Lucy Stone was crouched awkwardly on the cracked linoleum kitchen floor in front of an elderly gas range, trying to reach all the way back inside the broiler despite her six-month pregnant belly to relight the oven pilot light that was always going out. No wonder, considering how drafty the old house was.

The flame finally caught and she sat back on her heels, gathering up the collection of wooden matches she’d used and groaning a bit as she hauled herself to her feet. She tossed the matches in the trash and washed her hands in cold water—it took a while for the balky hot water heater to produce anything remotely warm, much less hot—before returning to the cookie batter she was mixing. Spritz cookies, just like her mother always made. Except this year she had to make them because she wouldn’t be seeing her mother, or her father, this Christmas. They were staying in New York City because Dad was making a poor recovery from heart surgery and was lingering in the hospital, needing all Mom’s attention. That left Lucy, who could use some attention herself, out in the cold.

Literally out in the cold, she thought, switching on the mixer to cream the butter and sugar together. It didn’t get much colder than coastal Maine and that’s where she was, in the nowhere town of Tinker’s Cove. It was certainly a far cry from the Upper West Side of New York City, where she and Bill and Toby, who was almost two, had lived in a tight three-and-a-half rooms overlooking Central Park. But what did space matter when you had the entire park with playgrounds and a zoo and even a carousel, and the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art just steps away? When you could hop the subway to Battery Park for a breath of sea air and a walk along the water? Or a night out at a Broadway show? Or a quick trip to Bloomingdale’s where they sprayed you with the newest fragrances and you could find the cutest little outfits for Toby?

Lucy switched off the mixer and set it on the kitchen table, then began adding the flour by hand. It was hard work but she was glad to have something to occupy her, something that would make it seem more like Christmas. Which was weird, she thought, because Tinker’s Cove was one of those picture-perfect New England towns that looked as if it could be on a Christmas card. But even though the air smelled piney and the houses all had wreaths with red bows and the big fir tree in the center of town was decked with colored lights, it wasn’t nearly as festive as Rockefeller Center where they set up a proper Christmas tree above the skating rink and played Christmas carols on loudspeakers and Fifth Avenue was filled with shoppers carrying bags that bulged with presents.

Just the thought of presents made Lucy groan. There weren’t going to be presents this year, at least not the lavish presents of Christmases past. She and Bill had agreed to exchange one modest gift apiece, reserving the rest of their limited budget for toys for Toby. Limited being the operative word here, thought Lucy, who had a fifty-dollar bill folded in the back of her wallet and was keeping an eye on the assortment of trucks and stuffed animals at the IGA, anxiously hoping they held out until Christmas Eve when Dot, the friendly cashier, promised her prices would be cut by half.

Somehow she hadn’t expected it would come to this when she agreed to Bill’s plan to dramatically change direction, exchanging a well-paying job as a stockbroker and their comfortable life in the city to realize his longtime dream of living in the country and working with his hands. Back then he’d just gotten a fat bonus and it seemed that they could easily afford the fixer-upper farmhouse they’d found in Tinker’s Cove. He’d learn by doing, he said, gaining the skills of a restoration carpenter by refurbishing the big nineteenth-century house room by room. But everything was more expensive than they anticipated and the fat bonus shrank rapidly, going to the hardware store and the lumber yard and the electric company and the grocery store and the oil company. Especially the oil company. When Bill tore out the old, rotted plaster and lath he discovered there was no insulation, and sometimes not even proper studs, in the walls. Which meant it was always cold even though the furnace ran constantly, burning oil at a ferocious rate.

Even worse, Bill’s career change had alienated him from his parents. Bill Sr. and Edna had seemed so jolly, so easygoing when Lucy first met them but that had all changed when Bill announced his plan to give up corporate life. Bill Sr. had listened stony faced as Bill explained his reasons for quitting the brokerage firm he bitterly referred to as “Dewey, Cheatham and Howe.”

“They don’t care about the clients, Dad, all they care about is making a big profit. There’s so much pressure to churn accounts to generate commissions, to sell limited partnerships and other products that aren’t going to produce a dime until most of my clients are long gone. And there’s the insider trading. I tell you, it’s just a matter of. . .