A Fatal Visit (A Harbor Cove Cozy Mystery Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

As he spoke, he didn’t look at Skyler. His eyes were directed at the sea, but his gaze suggested he was looking somewhere far beyond that. “I had quit.  But after the other day.” He closed his eyes and shuddered. Opening them again, he took in a breath of smoke and then exhaled it away from Skyler. “It was…people are awful to each other sometimes. Aren’t they?”
     
    She nodded. They sat together in silence for a few moments. The beach was expanding as the tide retreated. A previously idle hermit crab scuttled after a receding wave, and Skyler watched it as it disappeared under the water.
     
    “You’ve never seen anything like that before, have you?” Skyler spoke softly.
     
    Ash dropped from his cigarette as he turned to her. He had an odd, unreadable expression on his face. “What makes you say that?”
     
    She could only offer him a shrug. “You seem so…so strongly affected by it.”
     
    “Whereas you seem oddly numb.” The retort was an unexpected bite. Skyler shrank away from him a little. He stubbed the cigarette butt out under his shoe, on the sand. “Sorry. It’s a sore area.” His expression fell to sadness, his voice lowered. “I really am. I found my brother dead after…well, I suppose it isn’t that important now.”
     
    She bit her lip and allowed silence to fall between them. Their eyes met briefly, and then the shared look broke.
     
    “Who do you think murdered him?” Bill ventured.
     
    Skyler shrugged. “I don’t have any strong leads so far.”
     
    “Seems obvious to me.” He looked at her again. “This guy they let go from the scene of the crime. He was homeless, right? Probably desperate. Murdered him to take the money.”
     
    “That’s guesswork and assumptions. They released him because they have nothing to go on.”
     
    “I dunno.” He paused, wiped something off his shoe. “But he was at the scene. There’s no one else that fits.”
     
    She didn’t respond to his statement. “It was nice to see you again, Bill—”
     
    Standing, he gave her a firm hug. She blinked in shock. “Take care of yourself, Skyler.”
     
    She nodded, and then she turned as if she were made of clockwork and walked away down the beach.

Chapter Six
     
    The picturesque day had faded into a glowing evening. Sunset bathed the world outside the window in orange and red, and the ocean mirrored the scene in watercolor. Skyler rolled up the sleeves of her soft, woolen pajamas and pulled a blanket over her legs. Her red laptop whirred on the bed beside her, open on a word processing program that had a few lines of text written on an otherwise blank document. The pictures of the murder scene were arranged on her bed, as if in some kind of gruesome collage. She glanced over them again but nothing jumped out. Her hands clenched into fists and she frowned.
     
    None of this is making an awful lot of sense yet.
     
    Clue grumbled in her sleep and turned over. Skyler allowed herself a fractional smile at the huge animal that seemed to think it was a lap dog. She picked a mug up from the window and sipped hot chocolate. She yawned and stretched before pulling the laptop onto her knee. She began to type.
     
    ‘The victim, Chase Myers, was texting one of the suspects, Bryson Everett, a day before the murder. Their conversation breaks down a sort of plan between them. Myers ‘borrowed’ a safe key for the restaurant from Aubrey. When at the restaurant visiting her, Myers intended to steal money from the safe—to pay for their daughter’s spiraling medical bills. Everett was to hold the money for Myers until he was ready to pick it up and deposit it into Aubrey’s bank account. Everett couldn’t understand why Myers couldn’t pay the bills with his own money, and the following texts explain that because of his current status as missing, his bank accounts had all been frozen. And the problem had to be sorted immediately. Everett seemed hesitant to agree at first, but it seems as if