Isabel Puddles Investigates

Book 2: Mitten State Mystery

by M.V. Byrne

Genres: Mystery; Animal Cozy Mysteries; Craft & Hobby Cozy Mysteries; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

"Too late" isn't a factor for Isabel Puddles—until the clock starts ticking on a deadly mystery in the cozy town of Gull Harbor, Michigan . . .



Isabel is living life on her terms as summer stirs the peaceful shores of Lake Michigan. Only slowing down to meet her oldest friend for daily coffee, the newly licensed PI has found herself chipping away at the college degree she never completed—and, to her surprise, eagerly awaiting letters from her pen pal, an admired British mystery writer. But when her latest client turns out to be an extravagant recluse who's rich both in secrets and money, Isabel becomes embroiled in the strange world of Rust Belt royalty and the Memorial Day Weekend disappearance of a handsome young heir.



Beyond the famous family name and ugly rumors surrounding her, Abigail Bachmeier is an enigma. With one great nephew presumed dead after vanishing off the side of a ferry, Abigail makes the strange request to locate another missing relative. As Isabel investigates and gets closer to revealing at least one more possible murder, she begins to suspect yet another life could soon be in terrible danger—her own.

Release date: November 30, 2021

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Whenever the wind was blowing from the north, which was always a cold wind even in the summer months, Isabel Puddles could hear the faint, haunting blasts of the SS Badger’s horn wafting down from Wellington Harbor, some twenty miles north of her cottage on Gull Lake, the place she had called home most of her life. The sound was as familiar to her as the wind rustling through the poplar trees surrounding her property or the frantic barking of her dogs after successfully treeing another squirrel.

Isabel’s father, Buddy Peabody, bought the little white clapboard-and-river-stone cottage when Isabel was just a girl, and her mother, Helen, named the plot of land it sat on Poplar Bluff. Buddy intended the cottage to be an investment—a rental property for summer people—but after the insurance agency he worked for folded, the Peabody family found themselves in reduced circumstances, so their handsome brick Colonial manse in town was sold, and they moved into their quaint little clapboard cottage full-time. One day, after Buddy was back on his feet and heading up his own agency, their old house in town came back on the market, and he jumped at the chance to reclaim it. Buddy surprised his wife and daughter at dinner that night by telling them he had made an offer, to which Helen and Isabel responded, and in no uncertain terms, that he should rescind it immediately. Poplar Bluff was their home now, and they were staying put, they told him. Buddy did as he was told, having grown accustomed to losing two-one majority votes to his wife and daughter.

Many years later, Isabel raised her own family at Poplar Bluff. And when Buddy and Helen decided the Florida retirement community they had retired to was not what they had signed up for, they moved back to Gull Lake and happily settled into the cozy garage apartment Buddy had built himself years before. But after Isabel’s husband, Carl, died, and the children had gone off to college, Buddy and Helen moved back into the main house at their daughter’s insistence, and Isabel moved into the apartment. As Helen and Buddy entered their elder years, Isabel looked after them in the same home where they had once looked after her. “The circle of life,” Buddy often liked to point out. But now her kids, Charlie and Carly, were living on opposite coasts, a decade had passed since Carl had died, and it had been five years since Buddy and Helen passed; Buddy first, and just six months later, Helen. So for the past five years Isabel had been living alone for the first time in her life. Well, alone in that she was the only one living at Poplar Bluff who walked upright. She did have roommates—her Jack Russell terrier, Jack, short for Jackpot, and her cocker spaniel, Corky, a black-and-gray-speckled beauty Isabel had recently adopted. At some point, two cats—one a gray tabby, the other an orange-and-black calico—had moved into the garage, so she now counted them as neighbors. Because she was a devoted admirer of Jane Austen, she named them Mr. Darcy and Miss Bennet.

Isabel’s son, who now went by Charles, although she still called him Charlie, was a successful architect living in San Francisco. Years before he had changed his last name to his mother’s maiden name of Peabody. “Do you know what it’s like to spend your entire childhood being called Mud Puddles in school?” Charlie said to his mother in defense of his decision to establish a more professional persona. But she understood. It took a few years for her to get used to her new last name too, but after a while she decided she liked the uniqueness of it. Isabel Puddles . . . It had kind of a lilting ring to it. But Charlie had evidently decided at some point he was not a fan of lilting rings, and that was fine by Isabel. He also decided at some point after changing his name, to change his religion too, converting from Congregationalism to Buddhism. That one threw her for a loop at first. All Isabel knew about Buddhism was that the Dalai Lama seemed to be the man in charge, and she thought he looked like a very kind person, so she figured it must be a friendly sort of religion. But did this mean Charlie was going to shave his head, dress in robes, and wear sandals year-round? That might be hard for her to get used to. After Charlie assured her he was not becoming a Buddhist monk, only a Buddhist, and made sure she understood the difference, she embraced his decision wholeheartedly. And after doing some reading on the subject, she concluded it was a religion that made a lot of sense. She could see the appeal for Charlie, who had always been a deep thinker. Charlie even suggested to his mother that she consider becoming a Buddhist, but since Isabel considered herself an agnostic, she was going to stick with Congregationalism, which wasn’t quite as strict as other denominations were about uncertainty when it came to one’s faith. When Isabel finally shared her pendulum-like philosophy concerning the existence of God and heaven with her minister, the Reverend Curtis, he assured her that pondering His existence was perfectly understandable and nothing to be ashamed of. He even admitted he had pangs of disbelief himself from time to time. Isabel told him she did her very best to live by the Golden Rule, and if that wasn’t enough to get her into heaven, assuming there was a heaven, she would just have to hope St. Peter would give her the benefit of the doubt. Reverend Curtis, knowing the character of one of his favorite parishioners, assured her that she would likely make the cut.

During a recent visit home for Christmas, after Mr. Darcy and Miss Bennet had moved into the garage, Charlie decided that his grandparents, Helen and Buddy, had trans-mutated and come back as cats, taking up residence in the garage in order to keep an eye on things. Isabel assumed this was something Buddhist’s believed in, although she found it to be a bit of a stretch. Charlie arrived at this conclusion after being startled more than once by Mr. Darcy and Miss Bennet sitting on the windowsill outside, casually but very intently observing what was happening inside. “They look like they’re plotting . . . like they want back in . . . it’s a little spooky.” Charlie’s canine brother and sister, Jackpot and Corky, were not big fans of the practice either, but their barking did nothing to scare the cats away. They just looked down at them in disdain as they swished their tails. Carly, a banker, who now lived in Boston, was of a different mindset altogether regarding the cats. All she wanted to know was how much her mother was spending on cat food per month, and how that would amortize after five, and then ten years, allowing for inflation.

“I can assure you,” Isabel said to her son over blueberry pancakes one morning, “that if your grandparents were going to reincarnate or trans-whatever, it wouldn’t be as feral cats living in the garage.” Then, in an effort to calm her daughter’s fear that feeding two cats would eventually lead her to financial ruin, “And just in case they are your grandparents, I think eight ninety-nine a month in cat food is the least we can do . . . They are the original owners, after all.” And that ended that conversation.

The SS Badger was a massive, four-hundred-foot car ferry, and the only remaining coal-fired steamer left on the Great Lakes. It had been running between Wisconsin and Michigan, from May to October, for well over fifty years. When she was a girl, Isabel Peabody was fascinated by the enormous ship, and longed to sail across the Big Lake on her one day. Every summer she asked her parents if they could make the four-hour journey to Wisconsin. Her mother, always the voice of reason in the Peabody household, didn’t want to discourage her daughter’s adventurous spirit but also wanted to manage any expectations that it would ever happen, knowing her husband’s aversion to the state of Wisconsin. “Honey, if you can think of a good reason to go to Wisconsin, we can talk about it . . . but I really can’t think of one. They have trees and they have lakes . . . and we have that right outside our picture window.”

Buddy Peabody was quick to invoke the tragic fate of the Titanic whenever his daughter brought up sailing on the Badger. “Why would you want to risk your life to visit a state that counts cheese making as its crowning achievement? In Michigan we make automobiles. In Wisconsin they make sharp cheddar. Enough said.” The world was a very black-and-white place for Buddy Peabody.

For years her father’s contempt for the state of Wisconsin had been a mystery to Isabel, but one day her mother offered up a simple explanation: “Your father is as kindhearted and fair minded as a man can be. But everybody needs to hate something . . . For me it’s mice. For you it’s lima beans. For your dad it’s Wisconsin . . . We just have to let him have that.”

When Isabel got into high school and began dating Carl Puddles, a transfer student from Wisconsin, her father was surprisingly calm . . . at first. But the day her new boyfriend came to pick her up wearing a University of Wisconsin sweatshirt, Buddy stopped him cold at the front door and made him wait outside, in December, in falling snow. Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Peabody finally announced to his daughter that her date—still standing on the front stoop shivering—was there to pick her up. The stunt resulted in a good scolding from both his wife and his daughter, and from that day forward, Isabel’s dates with Carl began with a friendly honk from the driveway.

Eventually Isabel learned that her father’s disdain for Wisconsin, and virtually anybody who hailed from America’s Dairyland, could be traced back to a Milwaukee boy who spent a summer living in his family’s very grand lakefront estate and working as a lifeguard alongside Buddy at a nearby Lake Michigan beach. But when he wasn’t lifeguarding, the handsome young rich kid devoted his free time to trying to woo a beautiful local girl named Helen MacGregor away from her boyfriend—Buddy Peabody. The unwelcome interloper, who was an heir to a famous beer fortune, was about to begin his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin. He was so smitten with Helen that he implored her to dump Buddy and go steady with him. He even dangled the possibility of a marriage proposal after he graduated. But in the end, Helen stayed true to the boy she had been going steady with since seventh grade, resisting the temptation of one day marrying into great wealth and privilege, and a lifetime supply of beer. Instead, she promised to marry Buddy, who was destined for a career in the insurance business, and provided her with a lifetime supply of laughs. Although they were far from rich, financially speaking, they were rich in every other way that mattered. Buddy had been a good provider, a devoted husband, a wonderful father, and a pillar of the community, and Helen MacGregor Peabody had never for a moment regretted her decision. And she wasn’t much of a beer drinker anyway. But ever since that brazen romantic coup attempt—which ended with the handsome rich kid from Milwaukee going home on Labor Day with a black eye, courtesy of Buddy Peabody—he had remained contemptuous of the boy’s home state and his alma mater. He also prohibited the brand of beer that bore his family’s name from ever coming into the house.

After Isabel married Carl, which was a marriage Buddy blessed only after his future son-in-law laid his hand on the family Bible and swore he would never move back to Wisconsin with his daughter, she finally made the journey she had always dreamed about, setting sail on the SS Badger one summer with their first child, Carly, to visit Carl’s grandparents in Green Bay. Thirty minutes into the four-hour voyage, Isabel and the baby both got terribly seasick, and suffered for the remainder of the journey. After their visit in Wisconsin, Isabel and the baby flew home, and Carl and their Ford Country Squire took the Badger home alone.

When Buddy and Helen picked their daughter and granddaughter up at the airport, Isabel began to gush to her mother about her trip, although she had the good sense to wait until her father had gone to get the car. Isabel loved Wisconsin. She loved Wisconsinites, the cheese was wonderful, and she couldn’t wait to go back the next summer and see more of it, just not by way of the Badger. She then slipped her mother a wedge of white cheddar. Helen smiled, dropped the cheese into her purse, and patted her daughter’s hand. “Well, I’m happy to hear that, honey. I’m sure it’s a lovely place. But don’t tell your father, it’ll kill him.” To this day, whenever Isabel heard the Badger’s familiar horn blast, it brought back fond memories of that first trip to Wisconsin, although these waves of nostalgia were often accompanied by waves of nausea.

The sound of the Badger’s horn could also stir up sadness for her, especially in stormy weather. On those days, the horn sounded almost mournful, reminding Isabel of the many thousands of souls who had perished on Lake Michigan over the years. But she loved Lake Michigan. It felt like it was almost a part of her. Through the woods, the Big Lake was only a quarter mile or so from Poplar Bluff, and she made the hike with Jack and Corky as often as she could. And every time the trail ended and the lake revealed itself, she was still awestruck by its beauty. Looking out across that seemingly endless expanse of water was as second-nature to her as looking up at the sky. “Salt free and shark free for ten thousand years,” the locals liked to say. But just as the skies in this part of Michigan could go from a brilliant blue one minute to dark and ominous the next, so could Lake Michigan. Those who loved the beauty and majesty of the lake as she did also had a healthy respect for the unexpected and deadly dangers it could present.

For her Michigan history class in high school, Isabel wrote an essay inspired by Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” about the doomed freighter that went down on Lake Superior in 1975, taking with it its twenty-nine-person crew. The song still brought tears to her eyes whenever she heard it. She nearly came unglued at the Kroger recently while standing in the checkout line with a carton of orange juice and a loaf of whole-wheat bread when the song came on.

In her essay, which won first place in an essay-writing contest held by the Gull Harbor Gazette, Isabel also wrote about a sad event recounted by her grandparents, who told her in somber recollections about what came to be known as the Armistice Day Storm, which hit the Midwest on November 11, 1940. The unexpected and brutal early-season blizzard tore across the upper Midwest, wreaking havoc with every vessel sailing on any of the Great Lakes, but Lake Michigan was hit hardest. Captains and their crews had virtually no warning, so they were caught completely unprepared. Three large freighters sank just off the coast of Gull Harbor.

After the storm cleared, anybody with a boat went out in search of survivors, but found only a handful of bodies. At dusk, hundreds of locals went down to the shore holding lanterns and candles. Led by the choirmaster from the Methodist church in the nearby town of Hartley, they sang hymns so that anybody who might be out there struggling to stay alive would know there were people on shore pulling and praying for them. But in the end, there were no survivors. Tragically, sixty-four men met their deaths on those three ships.

In the spring, when the lake began to thaw, bodies that had been frozen in ice all winter began to wash up on shore. Isabel’s grandmother, Hazel Peabody, was out beachcombing one morning when she found the body of a young sailor lying face up on the beach. Grandmother Peabody never got over it, and she never swam in the Big Lake again.

It was the Friday morning before Memorial Day weekend, and Isabel was on her way to the Land’s End to meet Frances, her very best friend, for breakfast. Gull Harbor was already beginning to buzz with the usual influx of summer visitors, and it wouldn’t stop buzzing until Labor Day. Some were tourists who had come to town for the holiday weekend, some were only passing through on their way to other points north, but many were Gull Harbor’s usual summer residents who traditionally arrived on Memorial Day weekend to open their summer homes and cottages, either on the Big Lake or on Gull Lake. Other summer people sailed into the harbor and moored their enormous yachts at the exclusive Gull Harbor Yacht Club, where many would spend their summers onboard.

This morning, Gull Harbor merchants and their summer employees, mostly high school and college kids, were busy sweeping, washing windows, and pulling racks of merchandise out onto the sidewalks, preparing for the larger onslaught of summer tourists who would be streaming in over the next three months, ready to shop. The regular summer residents—most of them from the wealthier suburbs of Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit—were not really the souvenir-buying types, but by Isabel’s observation, there seemed to be a whole species of tourist who were unable to check the place they were visiting off their list until they had purchased a T-shirt or a coffee mug to remind themselves of where they had been.

Isabel Puddles was not a fan of the crass commercialism on display in her hometown during the summer months, but this aversion was not an opinion she shared with others around town. People had to make a living, and she didn’t want to insult anybody’s livelihood. And she had done well by the summer tourists, too, for the past few years, so she didn’t want to be a hypocrite either. Still, despite the many changes Isabel had witnessed over the years, and not all of them for the better, Gull Harbor was still as charming a shoreline village as you could find anywhere on any of the Great Lakes, and she was proud to call it home. Living anywhere else had never even occurred to her.

When Isabel Peabody was a girl, downtown Gull Harbor, all three blocks of it, was as quaint and wholesome as a Norman Rockwell painting. The Ben Franklin Five & Dime store was Isabel’s favorite, and always her first stop on Saturday morning after she received her two-dollar-per-week allowance. They had a luncheonette counter with a soda fountain, where she and her mother would have lunch together nearly every Saturday afternoon—Isabel spinning in her stool and drinking a vanilla Coke, while Helen talked to whoever was working behind the counter and drank her chocolate Coke—soda concoctions younger generations couldn’t quite understand. Mother and daughter would usually split a grilled cheese sandwich on rye bread with mustard and dill pickle chips, still one of Isabel’s go-to comfort foods, and an order of onion rings.

Lining either side of Gull Harbor’s Main Street, which was still paved with brick, was the Harbor Bakery, a movie theater called the Royale, Wurzburg’s gift shop, Longwood’s department store, a corner market called the Pixie Plaza, the post office, Birke’s Boot Shop, Herb’s Tackle and Bait, and her cousin Flora’s florist shop, called Flora’s Florist Shoppe, which had caused Isabel years of confusion over the proper spelling of shop. Surrounding the village proper were gracious old clapboard homes and cottages with manicured lawns and big clumps of hydrangea, all sitting proudly along streets canopied by giant sugar maple trees. Most of the homes in town, many of them owned by summer people now, had been meticulously preserved, but a few of the older families who struggled in the off-season to keep the lights on had let their places fall into various states of disrepair. Locals understood that the choice between putting groceries on the table, or putting a fresh coat of paint on your hundred-year-old house, wasn’t a difficult one to make.

One home did stand out as an eyesore by anybody’s definition, however. It was a three-story Victorian—a style very common in Gull Harbor—that looked as though it had not been given a fresh coat of paint since Queen Victoria was still on the throne. The house sat on two lots and was set much farther from the curb than the other homes on the street. It also had a good-sized barn covered in ivy, where the owners stored God knows what. The home was owned and occupied by two brothers named Emmett and Elliot Twistleman, identical twins, who were now well into their seventies, and whose family had owned the property since it was built back in the 1870s. According to local historians, Colonel Twistleman, the twins’ great-grandfather, was a Civil War hero who retired to Gull Harbor after the war and built himself what was, at the time, considered quite a grand estate.

Everybody in town knew of the twins, because they were out and about all the time, but nobody really knew them. They were, to be kind, kind of the town oddballs. Both had wispy red hair and long beards that looked as if they were trimmed maybe once a year, and they wore matching overalls. They were also notorious hoarders, who drove around town in a beat-up old red pickup truck collecting whatever caught their eye, which was just about anything. If you had an old dresser you wanted to get rid of, all you had to do was take it out to the curb, and the next time you looked out your window, the Twistleman twins would have scooped it up. Every Memorial Day weekend, the twins’ yard sale opened, and didn’t close until Labor Day. At night or when it rained, they simply covered their merchandise with tarps. Every summer the neighbors, especially the summer neighbors, complained to the town council, asking them to shut down the twins’ yard sale, and every summer the council reminded them that nowhere in the town charter did it say that homeowners couldn’t hold yard sales, nor were there any restrictions on how long they could last.

Isabel stopped in at least once every summer out of pure fascination. You never knew what the twins might have dug up over the winter months for one thing, but the twins themselves had always intrigued her too. She always enjoyed her conversations with them, as awkward as they often were, because neither of them would make eye contact. They both looked up and around like they were following birds around the yard. But she always found something to buy, sometimes only because she felt it would be rude not to. “I don’t know why you insist on stopping by and talking to those nutjobs,” Frances scolded her one morning at breakfast. “They scare the bejibbers out of me! I’m afraid you’re going to wind up in their crawl space one of these days! ‘Where’s Isabel?’ ‘Last time I saw her she was buying a cup and saucer off the Twistleman twins!’ ” Isabel rolled her eyes and sipped her coffee, as she always did when Frances turned on the drama.

When Isabel was growing up in Gull Harbor, it took her less than five minutes to walk from one end of town to the other, and she wouldn’t pass a single person whose name she didn’t know, and who she would most likely stop and chat with. Except for the Amish, who would come into town on the weekends in their buggies. A faint smile and a polite nod were usually the best you could ever get out of them. There were still some Amish families scattered around the county, but she rarely saw them in town anymore. Thankfully they did still have the Amish Dairy, which Isabel and many others considered the mecca for dairy products in this part of Michigan. Their ice cream was highly coveted, and you needed to be there early if you wanted black cherry or butter pecan. Isabel recognized a lot of the summer people too, and they might smile and nod politely, but they were not the stop and chat types, unless it was with each other. For them, the locals seemed to serve only as window dressing who added to the country charm of the place.

Anchoring the north end of town were the offices of the Gull Harbor Gazette, and on the other end was Shumway Park, with a vast lawn that meandered down a gentle incline and hugged the shore of the harbor. The town’s gazebo was the focal point of Shumway Park, and where concerts were held every weekend in the summer. During the holidays, the gazebo was home to the town’s Christmas tree, with a Nativity scene off to the side intended to, as her father used to say, “Keep the Baptists happy.” Thankfully those traditions hadn’t changed. There was still music every weekend during the summer, and the lighting of the town Christmas tree was still a beloved Gull Harbor tradition. And the same Nativity scene, now slightly worse for wear, was still set up beside the gazebo on the same day the tree went up.

A few years back, some local hooligans kidnapped the baby Jesus one night and returned him the next morning wearing a toddler’s University of Michigan sweatshirt. “That’s the sort of thing you’d expect from a Michigan fan,” she remembered a loyal Michigan State supporter remarking at breakfast after hearing about the prank. The following year, this time on Christmas Eve, baby Jesus was kidnapped once again, and returned on Christmas morning in a hooded Michigan State sweatshirt. Local clergy of all denominations failed to see the humor, and it became a hot topic for a sermon or two, but most of the townsfolk just thought it was funny. “All you have to do is look around you,” Frances joked, “to see that God has a great sense of humor!”

The largest structure in town was the Gull Harbor Yacht Club, an expansive, beautifully maintained property that sat along the harbor on the opposite side of Shumway Park, surrounded and secluded by tall, thick hedges on three sides. On the fourth side were slips for about two dozen yachts. The clubhouse was a grand old Edwardian structure, painted white, with yellow-and-white-striped awnings and an enormous wraparound porch lined with white wicker furniture, where members could sit and look out over the grounds and the harbor. Yachtless members, usually those more elderly, stayed in the suites on the second floor of the clubhouse, while members with children and grandchildren stayed in small bungalows that peppered the property. The club had an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a couple of clay tennis courts, and a croquet court. GHYC members represented old money, steeped in old-money tradition. These were people of privilege who had been “summering” in Gull Harbor going back three and four generations. Aspiring members, no matter how rich, who were without a family history at the club, were rarely allowed to join. For most locals, members of GHYC seemed as mysterious and remote as the Amish, but with suntans and much more colorful clothes.

Although the population of summer people stayed fairly fixed, for the past few years Isabel had been noticing more and more folks coming from farther away. She was now seeing license plates from back east: Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey. And there was a recent smattering of European tourists—French, German, and English, mostly—who had apparently discovered the place after a popular European travel magazine published a glowing article about Gull Harbor and some of the other picturesque hamlets along the Big Lake. Going to Europe was high on Isabel’s bucket list, but until she could get there, if she ever did, she kind of enjoyed Europe coming to her. Frances, who had also lived in Gull Harbor all her life, and had been friends with Isabel since kindergarten, was not as enamored of the European influx. But then she didn’t like tourists no matter where they came from. Last summer at the Land’s End diner, where Isabel and Frances had breakfast nearly every morning, two large tables were occupied by stylishly dressed German tourists enjoying their breakfast, all excitedly chatting with each other in German, naturally, just laughing and having a grand time. Frances was clearly annoyed. “I feel like an extra on Hogan’s Heroes,” she remarked. “Where’s Sergeant Schultz?” Isabel and Kayla both shushed her simultaneously, and thankfully her xenophobic remarks were not overheard.

After finally finding a place to park, Isabel walked two blocks to the Land’s End to meet Frances for their standing eight a.m. breakfast date. Frances was at their usual table hidden behind a newspaper when Isabel walked in and sat down. Their waitress, and now dear friend, Kayla, met her at the table with a steaming pitcher of hot coffee.

“Morning, Iz. Did you hear?” Kayla asked, flipping Isabel’s cup over on its saucer and pouring her coffee.

“Hear what? I haven’t read the paper yet.” Isabel reached for the little metal pitcher and poured milk into her coffee, stirring as Frances folded the newspaper in half and handed it across the table.

“Kid went missing coming across on the Badger yesterday. His girlfriend was there to meet him, but he never got off the boat.”

Isabel took the newspaper and gave it a shake before opening it. “Maybe he never got on the boat,” she suggested as she began reading the front-page article.

Kayla was still hovering nearby. “No, he was definitely on the boat. He took a selfie after he got on board and sent it to the girlfriend.”

Isabel looked over the top of the paper and scrunched her nose. “A selfie? What’s that?”

Frances laughed. “Kayla, have you forgotten who you’re talking to? This woman is still waiting for the Bee Gees to come out with a new album.” Then turning to Isabel, “a selfie is what the kids call it when you take a picture of yourself with your phone and then send it around for the whole world to see.”

Isabel sho