Invitation to Murder (Book 1 in the Candlemaking Mysteries) Read Online Free

shop tomorrow, if you don’t mind.”
    “ That depends on why
you’re interested. Do you want to check up on me, or are you sizing
me up as your competition?”
    “ What if it’s a little bit
of both?”
    I laughed. “Then I’d have to say you’re
welcome to visit. Make it early, though, could you? I’d hate to see
you get trampled in the rush of customers.”
    “ I’ll be there bright and
early,” Sara Lynn said, and then she was gone.
    Normally I would have called my best friend,
Gail Lowry, before I ate, especially with what had happened
earlier. But she was out of town for two weeks at a sales
conference on the West Coast. Gail had been gone just two days, but
I missed her already. We were two single ladies barely into our
thirties, and while most of the other women we knew our age were
either married or working on it, neither one of us was in any hurry
to walk down the aisle.
    I found myself humming softly to myself as I
heated up some leftover lasagna from the night before. Even with
everything that had happened, I still felt better than I had in
weeks. Fighting with my sister had taken more out of me than I’d
realized. I caught myself singing out loud when I noticed that
Oggie and Nash were both staring at me like I’d grown a second
head. “Come on, I put up with a lot of odd behavior from you two,”
I said. “You can just deal with it.”
    They were unimpressed with my argument and
went back to their normal interests. Nash was playing with his
catnip mouse, barely recognizable from wear and tear, while Oggie
was staring out the window in earnest. I didn’t realize why until a
few minutes later when it started to rain. Blast it all, it was
almost as if that crazy cat knew the storm was coming and was
waiting for the first drops. I stuck my tongue out at him and went
to bed. I had enough on my mind without worrying about a psychic
cat.
    The telephone rang at
2:47 a.m . “Hello?
Hello.”
    “ Fm drunk, Annie,” the
woman’s voice said in a near whisper.
    “ I'm not
Annie.”
    There was a pause, then she said, “Would you
come get me anyway?”
    “ I think you need to call
a taxi.”
    “ Cabs cost money. Come on,
be a sport.”
    “ Good luck, and good
night.” I turned the ringer off before I cradled the telephone back
in its base.
    With the kind of calls I’d gotten in the
past twelve hours, I was ready to throw every telephone I owned out
into the street and go without.
    Bradford was standing by
my apartment door when I walked out to get my newspaper the next
morning. It had taken half a dozen telephone calls and a monthly I
chocolate-chip-cookie bribe to convince the paperboy to deliver my
edition upstairs on the second-floor landing outside my door every
morning, but it was worth it not to have to trudge any farther than
I had I to before I was fully awake.
    “ Have you been out here
all night?” I asked him. “Relax. I just got here. So how did you
sleep?”
    “ Fine.” Then I remembered
the drunken caller, and felt guilty about hanging up on her. “Were
there any car accidents last night, by any chance?”
    “ Why, were you out
joyriding in that rust bucket of yours?”
    “ Come on, Bradford, I need
to know.” He scratched his chin a minute, then said, “No, it I was
a quiet night. As far as I’ve heard, there were no accidents, no
break-ins, nothing out of the ordinary. Do you think your telephone
call had anything to do with, a car wreck?”
    “ What? How did you know
about that? What did you do, tap my phone line?”
    “ Take it easy, Jen. You
told me about the call yourself yesterday afternoon,
remember?”
    “ Oh, you’re talking about
the call at the store.” He looked taken aback. “You mean there have
been others?”
    I told him about the drunk
woman calling me in the middle of the night. He said, “It was
probably just someone from one of the taverns.”
    “ So why are you
here?”
    “ I wanted to let you know
that we haven’t found I anything that might