Prize and Prejudice_A Cozy Mystery Novel Read online

  “I like them. Have you ever thought about selling them?”

  He laughed deprecatingly. “What, and give up my romantic job at the Chamber of Commerce for the fame and fortune of running my own tie business?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Well, it’s enough for me just to have a great conversation piece around my neck." He said with a grin, “Besides I have kids to support, so being a starving tie artist isn’t really an option for me.”

  “I didn’t know you had kids.” she said.

  “Yeah, two girls, 8 and 10, they live with their mom off island.”

  “Ah,” she said sympathetically. Of course she wanted to know the whole story, but she’d do the decent thing and ask Aunt Margery later rather than bugging the poor man now. She poured Jasper an extra cup of coffee from one of the other pots so he’d have a full pot to take back with him to the office.

  “Carol sends you her gratitude, by the way,” Jasper said. Carol Brightwell was executive director of the Chamber of Commerce—the woman in charge. She had not been happy to hear about Walter’s plan for the treasure hunt. Angie didn’t think much of the woman. If it had been up to Carol, Nantucket wouldn’t have had any events, period. She was always trying to reduce the effort she had to put in to various festivals and projects. Angie might complain from time to time, but Carol Brightwell seemed to be actively trying to sabotage the treasure hunt.

  Why run the Chamber of Commerce if you positively hated tourists? One of the great mysteries on the island.

  She wished Jasper luck. Her regulars had started coming in. Copies of the Herald and Globe sat on the counter along with a couple of Wall Street Journals and New York Times. The local paper, The Inquirer and Mirror, was published on Thursdays, and it was only Wednesday, so she was out. Yesterday’s Island, the free local paper, was supposed to be restocked daily at various businesses around town, but so many copies were being snapped up that Angie wasn’t sure whether she’d get a delivery that day or not.

  The regulars were stingy; they shared out a single copy of each paper and bickered over sports scores and discussed the obituaries like professional mourners.

  Eight o’clock came and went, and the tourists started to arrive.

  The first pair in were Mr. and Mrs. Beauchamp, a newly retired couple from Boston who struggled with what to do with themselves now that they weren’t tied to their jobs. Mrs. Beauchamp, who had been a nurse for 42 years, was taking it worse than her husband, a former accountant. But Mr. Beauchamp was a thin, wiry man who had run several marathons, so he wasn’t exactly someone who could sit still, either.

  Angie waved at them. They had brought an RV over to the island after learning about the treasure hunt, and they planned to stay in it until the painting was found or they got bored—whichever came first. After their first visit, they had asked Angie whether they could park their RV in the back parking lot behind the bookstore while they were downtown. She had sent them to the property manager, who had given them the okay. So now they stopped by the bookstore for coffee regularly.

  “Hello, Angie,” Mrs. Beauchamp said.

  “The usual?”

  “If you would, please,” she said stiffly.

  Angie made her a cup of coffee with neither cream nor sugar, and one for her husband that contained both. She winked at him. He’d whispered to her that he wasn’t allowed to have coffee, dairy, or cane sugar, but that his wife was allowing him to have one cup a day, “so make it a good one.”

  She warmed up two pastries for them and carried everything over to their little table. Mrs. Beauchamp gave her a genuine smile. “Thank you, my dear.”

  Mr. Beauchamp said, “I’m sure it isn’t poisoned.”

  Mrs. Beauchamp mock-slapped him on the arm. “Charles!”

  He chuckled under his breath. “You know, there was some suspicion that my wife poisoned someone, years ago.”

  “Oh, my,” Angie said. She looked at Mrs. Beauchamp to try to gauge her reaction. The woman seemed to curl up on herself. Whatever this was, it was no mere setup for a bad joke. “Excuse me, I have to get back to things.”

  Mr. Beauchamp latched one hand onto her arm. “It was a rival…they were both working on the same research project at John Hopkins. He was a bad apple, though, through and through.”

  “Oh, Charles, now is not the time,” Mrs. Beauchamp said primly. Her face had turned red.

  “Used to harass all the girls.” Mr. Beauchamp shook his head. “Wouldn’t have blamed her if she had poisoned him, you know. But it turned out to be an accident—or mostly an accident— by this little side piece he was seeing behind his wife’s back. Rat poison in the coffee, only she always made such bad coffee that he didn’t notice it until it was too late.”

  “She had switched it with the sugar by accident,” Mrs. Beauchamp said. “Although how you’d do that, I haven’t the slightest.”

  “He put it in his own coffee,” Mr. Beauchamp added. He let go of Angie’s arm, patting it.

  She knew she was gaping at him, but she couldn’t seem to stop. She was completely flummoxed. “You’re…you’re just pulling my leg, right?”

  He winked at her, and she quickly retreated in confusion. If discretion was the better part of valor, then she was going to just pretend she hadn’t heard a word of that conversation.

  The café sales had settled down. Since she had a moment, she decided to do a sweep through the store to see if anyone needed anything, and to make sure no one was trying to pry up her floorboards. If not, there were a thousand tasks that she could chip away at, like check her email and see if anyone had ordered any additional books. If she could stay caught up on her online orders, then she at least wouldn’t have another night like the previous one.

  She stopped at one of the mystery shelves, a hardcover catching her eye. It was one of Louise Penny’s more recent novels. Looking around to make sure nobody was watching, she slid the novel off the shelf and held it in her hands, then carried it into the stock room and put it onto the small desk that held the inventory computer.

  She was going to read that book. Aunt Margery was right. If she was going to own a bookstore and not read any books, was that any more of a life worth living than being an analyst for an investment firm?

  She put a hand on her forehead, femme-fatale style. Okay, she was getting a little bit melodramatic. Of course she’d have more fun as a bookstore owner, even if she didn’t get to read many books. And anyway, January was going to be dead. She could read then.

  She heard a terrible groaning noise and ran back out to the floor to see what had happened.

  A woman was pulling at one of her bookshelves, trying to literally yank it off the wall.

  “Please stop that,” Angie said. “If you’re convinced that the painting is behind one of the bookshelves, all you need to do is take the documentation supporting your suspicion to the Chamber of Commerce, and they’ll supervise the investigation.”

  The woman looked over at her with a blank face. “This bookshelf is a fake wall.”

  “I’m sorry, it isn’t,” Angie said.

  “It is,” the woman said, grabbing the side of the bookshelf again.

  “It isn’t.” Angie led her to the end of the aisle, where they could both look from one side to the other. The bookshelf did brace up against a section of inner support wall, but by leaning from one side of the shelf to the other, it was easy to see that it didn’t go anywhere.

  The woman stared back and forth for what seemed a ridiculous amount of time, as if she were trying to find a way to prove herself right somehow—that a bookshelf leading directly from the Romance shelves to the Sci Fi section was somehow hiding a portal of some kind.

  “And even if that were a secret passage,” Angie said finally, “You would still need to get permission through the Chamber of Commerce first. Otherwise you’d risk invalidating the contest results.”

  “That’s just wrong,” the woman insisted.

  “It’s in the rules.�
�

  “But it’s wrong.”

  Angie stepped away from her rather than lose her temper. Some people just didn’t want to accept what was right in front of their eyes.

  But the woman followed her. “You must work here.”

  “Yes,” Angie said shortly.

  “Tell me where the painting is. It’s here. It has to be here.”

  Angie’s curiosity got the better of her. “What makes you say that?”

  What followed was a complicated explanation of the history of the building that Pastries & Page-Turners was in. Most of it even sounded correct. In short, this was the very building that Victor Nouges had used for his offices on Nantucket while he was assessing the condition of the railroad properties and helping negotiate the price of its sale.

  “So…what makes you think that the painting is here?” she asked the woman.

  “Because where else would it be?”

  “The mysterious lover’s home,” Angie said.

  “No. As an unmarried woman at the time, she would have been living with her parents. What happened was that Nouges left the painting in his former offices, where she would come to see it once a year.”

  “How would she have had access to this building?”

  “If you look at the ownership records, you’ll know that the building belonged to the Snuock family and stayed with them to this current day.”

  “You think the lover was related to the Snuocks?”

  “Definitely. Don’t you?”

  Angie shook her head. “I only just took over the lease on this part of the building three and a half years ago. I know the Snuocks a little, and I know they’ve been on the island for over a century, but if the woman had been part of the Snuock family, wouldn’t they have been suspicious when she came here once a year on the same day?”

  “You’re just not seeing the bigger picture,” the woman said.

  “I guess not.” Angie held out her hand. She didn’t necessarily want to introduce herself, but she wanted the woman’s name so that if she did any damage, Angie could at least report it to the Chamber of Commerce. “My name is Angie Prouty.”

  “Of the Nantucket Proutys?”

  “Yes. And you are?”

  “Alayna Karner. I’m an archaeology student at NYU.”

  “I see. Modern archaeology?”

  “No, ancient Aztec.”

  Angie nodded. The woman’s inability to tell a supporting wall from a secret passage made a little more sense now.

  “I wish you the best of luck,” she said. “But please make sure you go through the Chamber of Commerce next time.”

  Alayna Karner sniffed and walked out of the bookstore. As soon as the door closed behind her, Angie’s shoulders dropped and she sighed with relief.

  The front door opened again, and within moments someone was saying in a plaintive voice, “Hello? Hello?”

  A young woman with purple glasses was standing at the café counter with a terrified look on her face and an empty coffee pot dangling from one hand.

  “How can I help you?” Angie asked.

  “I’m from the Chamber of Commerce and Jasper sent me to pick up coffee, and there’s a fight going on over there. I’m not sure if it’s going to be okay or if someone should call 911, but either way we’re out of coffee again and I don’t know if maybe they’ll all just settle down if they get something hot to drink.”

  Angie discovered the young intern’s name, Marlee Ingersoll, and sent her off with two coffee pots full of coffee, one for each arm. Then she called Jasper’s office number on the business card he’d left her.

  “Director of Communications office, Nantucket Chamber of Commerce,” a woman’s raspy voice answered. “Where may I direct your call?”

  “I’d like to speak to Jasper Parris, please.”

  “He’s not available at the moment. He’s in a meeting. May I take a message?”

  The back door chimed and Angie twisted around to look. It was Jo, carrying a box of pastries.

  “Tell him that Angie called from Pastries & Page-Turners. The extra coffee is on its way.”

  The voice gave a heartfelt sigh of relief.

  By the time Angie had a moment to sit down and check her emails for orders, it was ten o’clock in the morning. Her early regulars had long since left the building and the tourists had flooded in. Most of them were curiosity seekers, far less serious about finding the painting than they were about finding a cup of coffee. Many of them asked for updates—had the painting been found? Were there any other clues?—but didn’t seem to be too disappointed when there weren’t any.

  Then another one of the more serious treasure hunters came in.

  Angie’s radar for customer trouble went off the charts when the man walked into the shop. He was dressed in black leather and carrying a helmet under one arm. He wore mirror shades. He turned his head back and forth as he scanned the store, still holding the door open with one hand.

  “Close the door,” said one of the customers sitting at the café seats. “It’s cold out there!”

  He turned his head toward her, then released the door so that it closed, but not tightly. With one foot he kicked it shut.

  He walked straight up to the café counter and set the helmet on it, almost knocking over the tea rack.

  “Doppio,” he said.

  Angie pulled a double espresso, making sure that the crema was nice and thick. She served it up on a little tray with a small cup of carbonated water and a teensy adorable espresso spoon.

  The man tossed a ten-dollar bill on the counter and walked off with the tray. Angie jotted the price of the espresso down on a napkin and folded it up with the bill—some people liked to open a “tab.” If he hadn’t spent it all by noon, she’d consider the rest a tip.

  She kept her eye on him as she sat down at the desk she’d set up for Aunt Margery and stopped to check her emails for orders.

  To her delight, she had received an email from Reed Edgerton.

  Angie,

  Delightful to hear from you! Yes, I will be on the island sometime later today (depending on traffic, of course), and I would be simply enchanted to see you. Regretfully, I have already arranged for a temporary residence and do not need to take advantage of your kind offer of a place to stay.

  The treasure hunt for the lost Monet must be tremendously exciting for the island. However, it’s not the treasure hunt directly that brings me to the island. I am on a different type of quest entirely. As you may not know, tracking imposters is a side hobby of mine—an unfortunate side effect of being true art appreciator. I recently have discovered some new information which leads me to believe that some rather magnificent impostors are finding their way onto Nantucket. They might even originate there! I look forward to boring you with my theories and documents over dinner. Would you be available tonight, perhaps? Hopefully the treasure hunters have left you a little time to eat with an old friend. As a reminder, I do not have any allergies or dietary constraints that you need to concern yourself with—in fact, I’ve decided to abandon my diet entirely for the next few days! And please do hold the books for me at the store; I shall pick them up forthwith.

  Reed

  She grinned. How she was going to find a way to ditch the store for several hours in order to eat dinner with Reed, she didn’t know. But she’d work something out.

  After replying that she would ask Aunt Margery and Janet to cover for her that evening (crossing her fingers even as she typed her reply), she heard someone clearing his voice on the other side of the desk. She looked up.

  Mr. Motorcycle was trying to get her attention.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have any books on the lost Monet?”

  She went through her usual spiel, trying to size him up a little better as he spoke. He seemed deflated compared to his behavior as he had come in.

  “So you’re saying you have no books that might help.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  His shoul
ders dropped. “Could I, uh, have another doppio?”

  “Sure!”

  She made him another as he brought his first tray over to the dirty dish tub that she left out for her more thoughtful customers.

  She handed over the new tray and he hesitated. She waited. It looked like he was trying to work up the nerve to say something.

  “Nothing’s been found, has it?” he asked, sounding anxious.

  “No, nothing,” she confirmed. “If there are any updates, they’ll be available at the Chamber of Commerce, although…” She waved at him to follow her back to the computer. Quickly, she looked up the Chamber of Commerce’s website. “…There’s nothing new on the site.”

  “How often do they update it?”

  “Pretty often,” she said. She suddenly remembered what the NYU archaeology student, Alayna Karner, had said about the building. That wasn’t up on the site yet.

  The man sighed again.

  “Let me tell you something, though,” Angie said. “I should call it in pretty soon, but you sound like you’re having a bad day, so I’ll share it with you first. It’s not much,” she warned.

  “What is it?”

  “It turns out Pastries & Page-Turners is in the same building that Victor Nouges once used as his office, back when he was inspecting the railroad materials and equipment that he planned to buy for the war effort in France.”

  The man’s eyebrows rose.

  “Is that a fact?”

  “I’m pretty sure. I just learned it from another tourist, and it wouldn’t surprise me. But I haven’t had a chance to research it for confirmation.”

  “Why wouldn’t that be on the website already? That sounds like elementary research right there, finding out where Nouges’s office had been.”

  Angie felt her cheeks heat a little. “It’s our first historical treasure hunt. There have been some bugs to work out.”

  He raised a hand. “Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to…it’s just frustrating. I’ve driven here all the way from Indiana.”

  “All the way from Indiana? Just for this?”