Coastal Views to Die For

Book 2: Oliver Popp’s Travel Guides to Murder

by Sam Lumley

Genres: LGBT Gay; Craft & Hobby Cozy Mysteries

Synopsis

The fabulous Oregon coast is a scenic getaway to behold, but for a gay, autistic travel writer and amateur sleuth, there is no such thing as a vacation from murder…

Though sparks flew between travel writer Oliver Popp and extroverted photographer Ricky Warner on their last assignment together, when they're teamed up again for a road trip, they agree to keep things low-key. But that's a little at odds with Oliver's new assignment: finding romance on the Oregon coast. The destination is a picturesque inn overlooking the Pacific. With the crashing waves below, it seems like an ideal spot for dramatic love connections.

Curiously, the other guests are innkeeper Mary Alice's large extended family, headed by a fabulously wealthy aunt, with various children, in-laws, husbands and wives, all vying to stay in her good graces...and her will. Then on the first night, settling into their room, Oliver and Ricky make an unsettling discovery: a dead man in their hot tub—one of Mary Alice’s tragically unlucky relatives who, from the looks of it, dropped in from the balcony above. The sheriff concludes it was an accident. Considering the circumstances of this odd family reunion, Oliver and Ricky have doubts.

When another body turns up, the vibes on what was supposed to be a relaxing getaway take an absolutely sinister turn. As family secrets, old grudges, and greedy motives come to light, Oliver’s sleuthing side is coming out. Who’s the next heir in line to die? As the suspects pile up, Oliver is certain of only one thing: it’s no mystery that murder is bringing him and Ricky closer together…

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 272

Sample

I didn’t expect it to be a trap.

Lunch dates with my managing editor, Drea, are rare since I generally work from home, but they’ve been known to happen when I have a need to be at the Offbeat Traveler editorial offices in San Francisco. What should have tipped me off, in hindsight, is that I wasn’t in the office on this particular day. I had been invited, and gone into the city, specifically for lunch, at a trendy Mexican spot with patio seating that served so-called street food at expense account prices with full service. This was a little more luxe than our usual run down to the sandwich-and-salad joint on the ground floor of our office building. Tip-off number two.

Alarm bells would have really gone off if I’d seen the distinctive, copper-colored car circling on the street, looking for parking, but by that point, Drea had already started to drop her bombshell, so I was distracted.

I was dipping a tortilla chip into some salsa when the campaign against me began. Drea had the nerve to make it sound like she was paying me a compliment, which I would discover was merely a clever cover for her ruse.

“So, Oliver,” she began, “you’re officially in print as a feature writer! Your piece on DC came out so great. Has your mom sent copies of this month’s issue to everyone she knows yet?”

“I might have seen a few extra copies lying around the last time I was up in her place,” I said, smiling shyly.

“Oh, yeah, that’s right! How’s the apartment?”

I had recently moved into the downstairs unit of the old high-water house I had grown up in. My mom still lived upstairs, so as independence went, it wasn’t a huge step, but I was enjoying it. “It’s great. It’s still mostly empty, but it’s nice to have all that space just for me.”

Her eyes sparkled. “We might be able to help you afford to fill up your apartment a little more. I have another feature assignment for you, and if it goes as well as the last one, you might be in line for a promotion soon—if you’re interested, that is.”

Oh, boy. That was a loaded question. I was proud of the article I’d been able to put together out of the wreckage of my trip to Washington, DC, in April, but the experience had been stressful and chaotic and strange—all words that my Autistic soul liked to avoid as much as possible. I had been almost immediately thrown off my itinerary, had ended up taking on a second, unplanned assignment, and had witnessed—and solved, I had to modestly remind myself—a murder. I had also left a big chunk of my heart with a guy I had met there, which had left me grappling daily with my biggest pet peeve: unresolved feelings.

If that was what becoming a full-fledged travel writer entailed, I was fairly sure my answer was No, thank you. But I knew that not all assignments could possibly be like that one. I swallowed my nerves and some more chips and salsa, and said, “What’s the assignment this time?”

“It’s a little closer to home,” Drea said. “We’re putting together a package on road trips, and I had you in mind for our Pacific coast piece—specifically, the Oregon coast.”

“Road trips? But, Drea, I can’t drive.”

Her eyes lit up again, though it felt like she was looking past me. “That’s no problem. I’m pairing you up again, so you don’t have to.”

“Pairing me up—?” I was cut off, and my question answered, as a figure came up the sidewalk behind me to the patio railing and swooped in over the rail to plant a peck on Drea’s cheek before swiveling in close to aim the most devastating, dimpled smile at me.

“Hi,” he said, waggling his thick, mischievous eyebrows.

Ricky Warner. Drea’s old college pal, the most beautiful man I had ever met, the freelance photographer who had been my guide to Washington and the devil on my shoulder goading me to follow him into mischief and mayhem. The one I had fallen hard for, but had pulled away from when it was time to go home because I couldn’t imagine how to sustain a relationship from opposite coasts. Or maybe I had been terrified of the idea of my first real relationship. Maybe I had been terrified of him.

I flushed red to my toes, watching as he rounded the railing to come join us at our table on the patio. Seeing him again filled me with a heady mix of mostly unfamiliar emotions: happiness—no, giddiness, maybe—and excitement and maybe a hint of lust. Sneaking through these, though, were also a few more familiar friends: shame and embarrassment and anxiety. Did he know how strongly I felt about him? Had he felt the same way? Did he still? Was he happy to see me? I knew that I hadn’t been as diligent about keeping in touch with him since I’d been home as I should have been, as he’d wanted me to be. There had been a few flirty text exchanges that I’d tried my best to keep up with, but felt inadequate to, and a couple of missed calls—which, if I was being honest, had really been calls that I could have answered, but had been too afraid to.

I could barely bring myself to look at Ricky as he dropped into the chair next to Drea and lazily draped an arm across the back of her chair before reaching in for a tortilla chip. But besides the easy comfort he seemed to feel in any environment, which I deeply envied and had sometimes leveraged to my advantage in DC, his body language and expression betrayed little that I could decipher of what he thought of our reunion. When he finally caught my eye, he grinned and winked—again, a baseline level of flirtiness for him that told me little.

“I’m putting my favorite team back together!” Drea could hardly contain herself. “I wanted to surprise you, Oliver, but you’ll be working with Ricky again! And he can drive you guys to Oregon. It’ll be perfect. I have a great hook I’d like you to use for the piece, too.”

“You can’t help yourself, can you,” I said to Drea, raising an eyebrow. She had concocted my trip to Washington at least partly in an attempt to set me and Ricky up, and as her new trap snapped closed around me this time, I could see that she wasn’t prepared to accept failure. “What’s this great hook of yours?”

“You’re gonna love this.” Ricky grinned. “It’s so desperate and obvious.” He nudged her back. “Go on, tell him.”

“You two are no fun, but you’re taking my direction on this, and it will work, so help me. The hook for your piece is ‘Find romance on the Oregon coast!’” She finished with a flourish of her hand.

I blushed again, and goggled my eyes at her, not daring to look at Ricky.

“I’ve got you booked into a couple of really sweet B and Bs along the 101, and a couple of spas that offer couples packages, some romantic restaurants. There are some hikes to really beautiful spots in nature—it’ll be so pretty and relaxing and fun, you’re going to love it. And, you know,” she said, lowering her voice to a mumble, her words almost running together, “maybe you’ll love each other, too, I dunno.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Shameless,” Ricky said. “But worth a shot, no?” He shot me a mock-seductive look, one eyebrow raised, his dark brown eyes melting a little.

Drea pushed back her chair, forcing Ricky’s arm away. “I need to powder my nose before our food gets here,” she announced. “And you two have some catching up to do.”

We both watched her go, and then Ricky turned back to me. “She’s about as subtle as a sledgehammer, isn’t she?”

“How long have you been here?” I blurted, still confused by Ricky’s sudden reappearance.

His golden cheeks flushed slightly, and for a second his eyes darted away in embarrassment. “Yeah, I’m sorry to surprise you like this. It was Drea’s idea, but I should have reached out sooner. I got into town last week.”

He’d been here a week and hadn’t said anything?

“I wish I’d known,” I said, surprising myself with my frankness. “It would have been nice to see you in a … less … trappy-feeling context, but it looks like we’ll be seeing plenty of each other anyway. Did you come out specifically for this job?”

Ricky seemed to be studying me. “No,” he said finally, shrugging. “I felt the need for a change of scenery. I left DC about three weeks ago—drove down to see my dad in North Carolina for a couple of days, then headed west and just kind of ended up here.”

“So you and Drea cooked this one up together?” I cocked an eyebrow and grinned at him, to let him know it would be okay if the answer was yes.

“Not exactly,” he said, smiling a little. “We can give her more or less all of the credit for this little scheme.”

At that, Drea returned from the bathroom as a server arrived with our food, and we moved on to eating and talking logistics, and Ricky and me being embarrassed by Drea’s obvious delight in her machinations and mildly, curiously uncomfortable to be back in each other’s presence.

My anxiety edged steadily upward for the few interminable days between the lunch attack and our planned departure on Sunday morning. It didn’t much help that all I heard from Ricky in that time was a brief text on Saturday to confirm my address and the time he’d be coming to pick me up, meaning that the rest of our communications were all in my head, and kept getting more and more dramatic as they alternated between bitter recriminations about my failure at friendship and desperate attempts at declaring undying love, or at least a healthy case of like a lot.

I’d packed my bag on Saturday night, then lay awake for hours, thrashing around my bed in a mixture of dread, hope, excitement, and despair at the prospect of spending the next several days alone with Ricky. Finally, I got up and spent the remainder of the night in an increasingly cold bath, stewing through my second and third winds as I played movies at low volume on my laptop, ignoring them as I tried to figure out what “finding romance” looked like, and what romance even meant.

Finally, it was morning, and time to get ready to go. I trudged through the motions, everything taking longer than I’d planned, and I was upstairs in my mom’s kitchen, still eating breakfast, when my pocket buzzed. I fumbled the phone out of my pocket and saw to my dismay that Ricky had arrived and was waiting outside.

“Oh, shoot,” I said, Cheerios and milk dribbling from my mouth back into the bowl. “I have to go.”

“Nonsense,” my mom said, springing up from the table in her fuzzy pink robe. “I’ll invite him in.”

Before I could protest, she had flown from the kitchen, and in a second I heard the front door unlatch and my mom call out, “Yoohoo! Ricky! Come on up!” I halfheartedly considered abandoning my breakfast and trying to make a break for my apartment out the back door, but decided I was too tired.

Soon I heard Ricky making his way up the front steps, and my mom greeted him warmly, ushering him through to the kitchen. “Ricky, it’s so nice to meet you! I’ve heard so much about you. I’m Oliver’s mom, Robin. Oliver’s still eating breakfast—would you like anything?”

“No, thank you, I’m fine.” He smiled as he came through the door, lighting up the kitchen. His shorts and crisp, white, short-sleeve, button-down shirt, the top two buttons left undone to expose a tantalizing suggestion of chest hair, indicated that he had been expecting more of a Southern California June than our customary Bay Area gloom, but I didn’t mind the amount of golden brown skin they left on display.

“I heard quite a bit about you, too, when Oliver was in Washington,” he continued, a note of deference in his voice clearly intended to charm my mom’s socks off. “I’m very glad to have the chance to meet you.”

My mother, successfully de-socksed, beamed as she poured herself more coffee, then waggled the carafe at Ricky to be sure he didn’t want any. He declined with a graceful wave and sat down next to me at the table.

“So, Ricky,” my mom asked, “where have you been staying while you’ve been in the area?”

“In San Francisco. At Drea’s, actually,” he said.

“That tiny little place? And aren’t she and Josh … trying? That seems like it might be a little uncomfortable.”

“Trying what?” I wanted to know between bites of cereal.

“Trying to get pregnant,” my mother said, an eyebrow raised. She and Drea were Facebook friends, and I didn’t really use social media, so there always seemed to be a side of Drea’s life that my mom knew more about than me.

“Indeed they are,” Ricky said. “I think they think they’re being discreet about it, but you’re right, their place is very small. We’ve all been a bit on top of each other—uh, so to speak.”

“Will you be staying in the area after you get back from this trip?” my mother asked, a glint in her eye.

“I might stick around for a while,” Ricky nodded. “We’ll see. I don’t have anything pressing waiting for me back home, and it’s a long drive, so I’d like to make the most of my time away.”

“Oliver,” my mother said, unconvincingly pretending that something had just occurred to her. “When you get back, you should have Ricky stay with you!”

I was trying to finish my orange juice, but choked a little at this pronouncement. Ricky whacked me on the back with a bemused grin, and a bit of juice dripped out my nose.

“What,” I managed to choke out.

“Well, I’m sure it would be much more comfortable for him, and you’ve got the whole downstairs to yourself.” She stared at me defiantly.

“I’m sure I wouldn’t want to impose,” Ricky said, his hand still resting lightly on my back. It was the first time he’d touched me since I’d seen him again, and I was relieved to feel the old familiar thrill of it from the last time we’d been together, rather than my usual recoil from physical contact.

“Well, uh,” I said, rising from my chair to put my breakfast dishes into the dishwasher and trying to figure out how to gracefully get out of the corner my mother had backed me into. “We’ll have plenty of time to figure that out, I guess. I should go grab my stuff from downstairs.”

“I’ll meet you at the car,” Ricky said as he, too, rose from the table. He extended a hand to my mother. “Robin, it was so lovely to meet you. I promise I’ll get Oliver back to you in one piece.”

For a second they seemed to share a peculiar look, but then she smiled. “See that you do. You boys have fun—take good care of each other.”

As I tried to follow Ricky out of the room, she grabbed my arm and pulled me back, wrapping me into a hug. “I mean it,” she whispered into my ear. “I want you back in one piece this time.”

I wondered what my mom had meant by this time as I settled into Ricky’s car and we headed toward the freeway. Had I been that obvious?

“I can’t believe you drove all the way here from DC in this car,” I commented, trying to recenter myself by taking in the familiar copper-colored vinyl environs of Ricky’s ’66 Corvair sport coupe, feeling a little like they were those of an old friend.

He grinned a little, his hand on the shifter as we merged onto the first of several highways we would navigate in short order as we made our way north and across the bay, until we made it to US 101, our route for the rest of the way. “I’ll be honest—take this as a warning—it’s not the most comfortable car for long distances, but it eats up the miles like a champ. I had no problems at all on the trip out.”

Uncomfortable, and reliability was a surprise. This boded well. Now that Ricky mentioned it, I became acutely aware of the lack of a headrest, and of how little support the marshmallow-soft bucket seat afforded my back and rear end. I squirmed a little, realizing with dismay that as the adrenaline of our departure wore off and my wakeful night caught up with me, I was growing steadily sleepier in an environment that was not at all conducive to sleep, other than being quite warm and smelling faintly of gas.

Fighting to keep my eyes open, I gazed absently out the window as the car droned up the high, undulating bridge over the bay from Richmond to San Rafael. My mind was busy rehashing all of the repetitive thoughts that had kept me up the night before, and I realized I’d need to do something proactive to change course. I shifted my gaze to Ricky, and tried to come up with a topic of conversation.

“So, this hook of Drea’s,” I finally started, then realized I didn’t know how I planned to finish.

Ricky sensed my pause. “‘Find romance on the Oregon coast,’” he filled in with a soft smile, giving the words about as much ridiculous exaggeration as they deserved.

I fidgeted a little, looking at my hands, then blurted out, “So, do you want to? Or … are we …” I trailed off again.

He chuckled a little, then furrowed his brow and thought hard for a moment. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he said softly. “I gotta be honest, Oliver, I’m a little confused about where we stand.”

“You are?” I said meekly, then admitted, “So am I.”

“Well,” he said slowly, staring steadily ahead out the windshield to avoid making eye contact with me, or maybe to relieve me from having to make eye contact with him. “It won’t do for us both to be confused. Maybe we should see if we can figure it out. What’s confusing you?”

“I—uh—” I hadn’t been ready for this, and I definitely wasn’t awake enough for this. I swallowed hard, trying not to let myself get overwhelmed. “It doesn’t feel the same? And I’m worried that’s because I’ve totally messed it up.” Without warning, I burst into tears.

“Oh, jeez,” Ricky said in dismay, craning his neck to check behind him as he hustled over to catch a last-minute exit off the freeway. He turned from the off-ramp into a gas station, brought the car to a stop, and pulled me over into his arms.

“Don’t cry, Oliver,” he said into my hair, sounding worryingly close to tears himself. “What makes you think you messed up?”

I sniffled into his chest. “I didn’t know how to do it,” I mumbled. “I didn’t know how to be your friend or keep the conversation going or keep you interested.”

“I kind of got the impression that you weren’t interested,” he said gently after a pause. “You didn’t seem to want to talk to me. You never called me back.”

“I was scared,” I said, sobbing a little. He rubbed my back.

“Why were you scared? We didn’t have any problems talking to each other when we were together before.”

“Yeah, but we were together. And I thought when we weren’t together, you’d think I was less interesting or less fun—I am less fun when I’m on my own.” I let out a half laugh, half hiccup.

“Hmm,” was all he said. He held me for a minute longer, but finally I sat up, wiping my nose on my wrist.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We can keep going.”

Ricky looked over to me as he turned the engine back over. “We’re back together now. We don’t have to commit to finding romance, but I’m willing to be interesting and fun together with you, if you’re willing to be interesting and fun together with me.”

“Sounds okay to me,” I said with an only slightly watery smile. “And, you know, if the other thing happens, that might be … okay. Right?”

“I think so,” he said with a lopsided half smile. “Now, let me know when you’re ready to start being fun,” he said, his face turning mock serious, as he pulled onto the on-ramp back to the highway.

Laughing, I gave him a weak shot to the ribs.

As we resumed our northward route through the affluent suburbs of Marin County, I slumped against my door, looking out my window and trying to collect myself. I hadn’t totally realized how tired I was, and how thrown I had been by not being ready to go when Ricky arrived. And then my mom had stuck her nose in and made things awkward, and then I’d brought out the ultimate weapon in my arsenal of embarrassing reactions to stress and burst out crying. But Ricky had been nothing but kind, and he had held me, and we had even gotten back a hint of our old banter. So maybe the day could recover.

Ricky had clicked on the AM radio and was fiddling with the dial to see what he could pull in, finally landing on a station playing old big band standards. He adjusted the volume down so that the music settled into a soft background, his fingers occasionally tapping time on the steering wheel. My mind wandered back to the bigger picture of our assignment, and after a while I turned back to Ricky. “What even is romance, anyway?” I demanded. “What is it we’re supposed to be telling people how to find here?”

He glanced at me, his eyebrows raised. “That’s what you’ve been thinking about over there? What do you mean, what is romance? You know what romance is. Everybody does.”

I thought about this. “I know what romance is as, like, a genre of books I don’t read or movies I don’t watch. But that’s fiction. What does romance look like in the real world?”

He screwed his face up for a minute. “Huh. Now that you mention it, it is kind of a vague concept to me, too. I mean, it’s mostly a state of mind, right? And that might look different to different people. But I think if you asked most people what made a place, for example, feel romantic, they might also describe it as intimate. You’re put in close physical proximity, the lighting might be low, music, candles, that kind of stuff.”

We drove in silence but for the lush strings of a ballad coming from the radio, the cabin of the car heavy with contemplation. Eventually, Ricky seemed to reach a conclusion. “I guess if you want to find romance with someone, you might find ways to be so close to them that, even if you’re not, you feel like you’re alone with each other. And you’d find ways to shut out distractions, so you’re focused on each other and the things you like about each other and about being together, and you can find ways to treat each other well.”

I looked around the cabin of the car. We were definitely in close quarters. Other cars rolled by outside our windows, but they were mere background noise; we were very much alone in our own little vinyl-lined cocoon. There was soft music—romantic music, even—coming from the radio. And as I looked at him, I was once again smacked in the fac. . .