Chapter 1
The nightmares were back. They’d started up again about a week-and-a-half ago, out of the blue, for no apparent reason. Things were going well. Jane Cho was living her dream of running a tiny, mostly take-out food shop, cooking and baking all her favorite things. Comfort & Joy was a hit from the day the doors opened. There was nothing else like it in the small, seaside village of Waverly.
Quitting a job she loved hadn’t been an easy decision, but felt like the only sensible option, given everything that had happened. Coming home to Waverly, where her grandfather was a retired sheriff and her cousin, David, lived, felt right—and safe. Jane had always loved to cook, and found the repetitive, mindless motions of chopping, dicing and stirring relaxing. It soothed her soul like nothing else.
No matter how often she reminded herself that they’d caught the killer and he would be behind bars for a very long time, it had taken a while for the nightmares to go away—but they finally did and she’d thought they were gone forever. It didn’t make any sense that they were suddenly back now.
Her grandfather said it was just part of the natural transition. Now that she was settled into her new routine with the shop and things were going well, perhaps a part of her missed her former life. She had been a very good legal investigator. But, she loved running Comfort & Joy, too. Jane pushed the bothersome thoughts out of her mind and got to work, preparing for the day ahead.
For the next few hours, she made chicken pot pies, and beef stew, baked cornbread and muffins. She tossed an assortment of salads and then packaged them into individual serving boxes. She had her favorite jazzy music playing in the background and started the coffee brewing so it would be ready when the doors opened at eight a.m. for her first customers.
Her grandfather was usually one of the first to arrive, with several of his cronies. All but one were retired policemen who still kept abreast of everything going on in the small town, and discussed it at length over their morning muffins and coffee.
As she unlocked the front door and switched the closed sign to open, a cold draft blew through her hair and rattled the windowpanes. The strange sense of unease crept back again, but Jane pushed it away, determined to focus and have a good day. Melissa, her assistant, had arrived a few minutes earlier and welcomed their first customer. A moment later, her grandfather and his two buddies strolled in.
“Good morning, Janie!” he greeted her.
“Hi, Gramps.” Jane smiled. Even at ninety-two, her grandfather was one of the most cheerful, positive people she knew and he always brightened her day. “The usual for you?”
Gramps glanced at his friends and they all nodded.
Jane poured their coffees and set out two corn muffins and a blueberry, all grilled with plenty of butter. Once they were set, she asked Melissa to keep an eye on the front counter while she ran the trash out back to the dumpster.
The air was cold and raw as she lugged the heavy trashcan to the shed where the dumpster was. Jane fished in her pocket for the key, but when she looked closer saw that the shed was open and the padlock was hanging open. That was odd. It wasn’t like her to forget to lock it. But, she hadn’t been sleeping well all week and must have been distracted. She pushed open the door and the key dropped out of her hands.
In front of her, lying flat on the ground and looking quite dead, with a deep, bloody gash across her forehead, was Samantha Sellers. She was about Jane’s age and hadn’t been happy about Jane opening Comfort & Joy. She had actually just brought a lawsuit against her, trying to get the town to shut her down.
What Jane noticed next sent a chill up her spine. The stiletto heel of Samantha’s bright red pump had been shoved in her mouth, and stuck to the shoe was a yellow sticky note with a message written in bold, black marker,
“I took care of her for you.”
“You okay, honey? Jake should be here any minute. Maybe you should sit down?” Gramps seldom fussed over her—he wasn’t the type to fuss. But he sounded worried now, and with good reason. Jane was okay, though. Just a bit shell-shocked. It was an unnerving start to her day to find a dead body sprawled by the trash.
“I’m fine, Gramps, really,” Jane assured him.
“If I was in Jake’s shoes and didn’t know you like I do, you’d be my prime suspect. Just thought you should know that. You had motive and opportunity.” Gramps had slipped into his former sheriff’s persona.
Jane opened her mouth to protest, and he cut her off.
“Obviously, you had nothing to do with it. I’m just saying it looks bad. And it looks like someone wanted it to look that way. Interesting touch with the sticky note. Any thoughts on who might do something like this?”
They were standing by the dumpster and Samantha’s body. One of Gramps’ buddies reached out to touch her cheek, probably curious to see what a dead person felt like and if she was really dead, but Gramps kicked his hand away. “What are you doing, Carl? You can’t touch a crime scene. You could mess it all up.”
Carl took a step back. “Sorry, I’ve just never seen anything like this before.” Carl was a retired science teacher.
Jane took a deep breath and nervously waited for Jake to arrive. She hadn’t seen him in many years, since high school. He was one of her cousin David’s best friends and had been an award winning quarterback throughout high school. Tall, dark and classically handsome, and way out of her league. She’d admittedly had a small crush on him but he’d never noticed her.
Why would he, though? She was a freshman when he’d been a senior and, thankfully, she looked very different now than she did then. That was what she liked to think of as her awkward period.
Not that it mattered, anyway. Even if Jake was as gorgeous now as he was then, she wasn’t interested. She wasn’t looking for a relationship with anyone at the moment. The breakup with Nick was still too recent and too raw. For now, all her energy and focus was on making Comfort & Joy a success. And it had been going so well, until now.
* * *
“Janie Cho?” The stunning petite woman standing next to Gramps looked nothing like he remembered. The Janie he knew had been his best friend, David’s, younger cousin and his last mental image of her was a scrawny, geeky girl with ugly braces, thick glasses and a ponytail. She hadn’t made much of an impression.
The woman standing before him still wore a ponytail, but it was a fashionable one. The glasses and braces were gone and her mix of Korean and Caucasian features gave her an exotic wholesomeness that was very attractive.
“I’m Jane Cho. Nice to see you again, Jake.”
Jake nodded to Jane, turned his attention to the elderly man at her side. “Gramps, how are you?” Jake had the greatest respect for David’s grandfather. He was a legend around the station and the joke was that he was still on duty, because Gramps didn’t miss a beat. He knew almost as much as Jake did about what was going on in this town, and Jake enjoyed chatting with him and bouncing ideas off him from time to time.
“Never better. Well, except for this of course. Hell of a way to start the day.”
Jake got his camera out and started snapping pictures of the crime scene. Then he walked over to Janie and Gramps.
“The rest of the team should be along any minute, and they’ll finish up with the body. Why don’t you take me through what happened?”
“There’s not much of a story. We’d just opened for the day. I was taking out the trash, and there she was. My key is missing, and the door was unlocked. That’s all I know.”
Jake frowned. There had to be more to the story. “That’s it? Nothing else you can recall?”
Jane appeared to be thinking for a moment and then said, “No, nothing. Sorry.”
“Okay. Well, let’s talk about the deceased, then. Do you know her?”
“Samantha Sellers. Yes, I know her.” Her tone was clipped, and Jake paused his pen and looked up. This was interesting. Jane knew Samantha and, quite clearly, did not like her.
“How do you know her?”
“She filed a lawsuit against me last week.”
“Why?” He didn’t like that everything he’d heard so far seemed to work to establish a motive for Jane.
“She is going through a bitter divorce, and she and her soon to be ex-husband used to run a bed and breakfast together two blocks from here. It has a small restaurant that is also open to the public for breakfast and lunch. She wanted him to sign his share of the business over to her and he refused, until a week after I opened Comfort & Joy and it was clear that we were doing well. That infuriated her. She finally got control of the restaurant and then worried that she’d be losing business to me.”
“Did she? Have you taken business away from her?”
“She thought so, but I think there was plenty of room for both of us. She was still as busy as ever, from what I could tell.”
Jake paused for a moment. He wasn’t at all convinced that Jane had anything to do with this, regardless of how it looked. If she didn’t, though, who did? What was he overlooking? He’d learned over the years that criminals almost always made at least one mistake and usually left something useful at the crime scene.
He walked over to the body again and stared at it intently, willing it to talk to him, to reveal its secrets. A cool breeze blew through and made the yellow sticky note flutter furiously. He leaned over and took a closer look at it. Then he looked back at Jane. “I took care of her for you. What do you suppose that means?”
“I don’t know. But it seems like someone may have written that to make me look guilty.”
“You think someone is trying to frame you? Why would anyone do that?”
“I honestly have no idea.”
Jake scratched his head. “It’s odd phrasing, though. It’s almost as if someone wants you to know they did this for you. To impress you?” He chuckled then. “That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, though, does it?”
“Probably not,” Janie agreed. But there was something in her tone that made him question her further.
“Is there anything at all that you’re not telling me?”
“I don’t think so. You’re right, it’s just too crazy. Impossible now. Though it is the kind of thing that I could have imagined Drummond doing, if he wasn’t in jail.”
“Alex Drummond? What’s your connection to him?” Alex Drummond was a highly successful technology executive and a sadistic killer.
“He’s the reason I moved home to Waverly.”
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