A Mouthful of Murder: A Frosted Love Cozy Mystery Book 4 (Frosted Love Mysteries) Read Online Free Page B

across table tops for several feet. Once she
knew when this location would be ready to open, she’d have to collect
applications for someone to work in both the Dellville shop and the LaChance
shop. She planned to have Cheryl manage the Dellville store and Ben would go
back to managing the LaChance location. The inseparable duo would be
disappointed at not being able to work together anymore, but since they saw
each other practically every day outside of their workplace, it wouldn’t be
intolerable.
    Missy
was pleased with both the progress of the LaChance shop and the performance of
the Dellville shop, but everything in her life was overshadowed by the fact
that Cora Nesbitt’s murder was still unsolved, she was still classified as a
person of interest, and she saw police cars cruising slowly by her house at
times, as though keeping an eye on her. Detective Johnson had treated her
report of having seen the scruffy-looking man near her shop with extreme
suspicion, remarking that the sighting had certainly been ‘convenient,’ which
infuriated Missy to no end. She had not made it up, she really saw and chased
the man, and if he had nothing to hide, why had he run?
    When
she parked in the back of the Dellville store, arriving early, even before Ben,
Missy saw a bushel basket brimming with peaches sitting next to the back door. She
unlocked the door, balancing the basket on her hip, and felt a trickle of peach
juice soaking through the thin fabric of her white linen capris. Sighing, she
knew that she wouldn’t have a chance to go home and change, because it was
Cheryl’s day off and Ben couldn’t handle the crowds that would undoubtedly be
showing up on his own. Once inside, she set the bushel basket up on the kitchen
counter and grabbed a towel to try to sop up some of the peach juice on her
pants. She was perplexed when she saw that the juice was tinged with red, but
made the best of it, wetting the towel and trying to clean it off with a bit of
dish soap. She didn’t get nearly as much of the icky stain out as she would
have liked, but gave up and waited for it to dry, thinking she could use stain
remover before laundering them at home.
    She
dumped the peaches into one of the stainless steel commercial sinks so that she
could wash them and dispose of the ones that had split open and were leaking
juice. After dumping the basket, she looked in the sink, horrified and unable
to believe what she was seeing. There, in the midst of the pile of plump, ripe
peaches, was a severed finger, with a half-moon of dirt under the nail. Missy
felt faint, but knew that this was certainly no time to swoon. She made two
phone calls, the first to Ben, to let him know that he needed to call Cheryl in
on her day off, the second to Detective Johnson, for obvious reasons.
    Missy
had requested that the police park in the rear of the building, so as not to
alert customers that something was afoot, and soon, two uniformed officers,
followed by Detective Johnson and a forensics tech came in the back door. The
poor woman was white as a sheet, and Ben made her sit down and drink some
coffee when he came in, as police swarmed her kitchen. Every time she looked
down at the ugly stain on her capris and realized that it was blood mixed with
peach juice, she had to fight the nausea and revulsion that rose up within her.
The forensics tech swabbed her pants, and she turned her head away, not wanting
to think about it.
    “So
what happens now?” she asked Johnson, as his team wrapped things up and
prepared to leave.
    “Now
we test the digit for DNA, blood type, the works, we’ll get a soil sample from
underneath the nail, and hopefully that’ll help us determine who it belongs to.
We’ll also be contacting local hospitals to see if anyone has come in with a
missing finger. Once we find the owner of the finger, we’ll be able to get more
information about how it ended up in your peach basket.”
    “Should
I be worried? Do you think this is some sort