Deadly Thanksgiving Sampler: a Danger Cove Quilting Mystery (Danger Cove Mysteries Book 21) Read online

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  DEADLY THANKSGIVING SAMPLER

  A DANGER COVE

  QUILTING MYSTERY

  by

  GIN JONES

  &

  ELIZABETH ASHBY

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  Copyright © 2018 by Gin Jones

  Cover design by Janet Holmes

  Gemma Halliday Publishing

  http://www.gemmahallidaypublishing.com

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

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  DANGER COVE BOOKS

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  BOOKS BY GIN JONES

  SNEAK PEEK

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  CHAPTER ONE

  "What's the big deal?" Matt Viera tucked his phone into one of the myriad of pockets in his cargo pants and peered down at the lists I was making on my own phone. We were seated next to each other at the kitchen peninsula that had only minutes earlier been cleared of the remnants of our dinner.

  Matt was tall, dark-haired, and every bit as gorgeous as would be expected for an ex-spokesmodel, although he tended to downplay his appearance by consistently wearing ugly clothes and somehow keeping his dark hair perpetually shaggy, even immediately after a visit with a competent barber.

  Matt continued, "We've still got three days to get ready for Thanksgiving dinner. That's plenty of time for just a handful of guests."

  "Easy for you to say." When I'd first been introduced to Matt, I'd distrusted his too-good-to-be-real looks and his obvious interest in me from the moment we met, before he got to know me. He truly was stunning, and while I had the benefit of being taller than most women, I was otherwise pretty ordinary in appearance, with dark shoulder-length hair and an average build. Plus, Matt was a reporter for the Cove Chronicles, so I'd assumed he was using me to get a scoop. It had taken him some time and effort, but he'd won me over with his intelligence and, most of all, his laid-back personality. His relaxed approach to life was a nice contrast to my own tendency toward what used to be called a type A personality, someone who fretted about every little thing that might possibly go wrong. Keely Fairchild, constant worst-case-scenario-anticipator—that was me.

  At the moment, though, I would have preferred it if Matt were a little more like me and not quite so relaxed in the face of this week's challenges. If he wasn't going to get as worked up as I was about the holiday planning, he could just go somewhere else to be all calm and Zen-like. "You'd be more worried if you were the one doing all the cooking."

  Matt raised his hands in surrender. "I'd have offered to help, but you said you didn't mind doing it all."

  "That was when I thought I was cooking for just the two of us." Back in September, he'd done a story on a local farmer who raised heritage turkeys, and Matt hadn't been able to resist buying one for Thanksgiving, even though he didn't have a clue how to cook it. For that matter, I wasn't entirely sure I knew what to do with a turkey that didn't come with a pop-up timer and a plastic wrapper that told me how long to cook it.

  "We're not having that many guests," Matt said, clearly not understanding why I was so worked up, which was unusual for him. He usually read me better than that. "Why are you so worried?"

  For weeks I'd been counting on an intimate meal for just the two of us. It would have been the perfect time to have a personal conversation I'd been putting off for too long, but it would have to wait a bit more. I wasn't quite sure how it had happened, but somehow I'd ended up inviting the elderly president of the Danger Cove Quilt Guild and her only slightly younger best friend to share our Thanksgiving dinner.

  "Dee and Emma make things more complicated than the numbers suggest. They're pretty agile for their ages, but they won't be comfortable sitting on these stools at the kitchen peninsula." When I'd had an old bank building renovated into my home, I'd opted to skip a formal dining room and left what used to be the main lobby and teller area as one open space, divided only by a peninsula into a great room and a kitchen with only the tiniest two-person breakfast table in a tight corner. "It's not like we can eat a formal dinner in my appraisal office or the bedrooms. We'll have to move the furniture out of the way in the great room and set up a folding table for the four of us."

  "I suppose eating in the bank vault is also out of the question," Matt said. "Especially since we've got another guest now, if it's okay with you. My cousin from Seattle. My mother just texted to say he's got nowhere to go for the holiday, so she told him we'd take him in."

  I hadn't met Matt's family yet, but I'd heard enough about them to know that they weren't as laid-back as he was. His mother in particular was known for being high maintenance. "Okay. I can handle five people, but that's my limit. Still, we'll need more than a card table to sit at. And something to cover it so it looks nice. And a whole lot more groceries. You did say that heritage turkeys were smaller than the more modern ones, didn't you? That means ours can't feed a whole crowd without lots of side dishes. I'll have to go shopping tomorrow."

  I'd given up driving due to a medical condition that caused me to pass out without warning. It wasn't a problem usually, since I lived within walking distance of Main Street and most of the other places I needed to go. Picking up a table and more groceries than I usually needed wasn't so easy without a vehicle.

  "Relax," Matt said. "I'll take care of getting a table, and I'll give you a ride to the grocery store tomorrow. You can fill the truck with whatever you think you'll need. My treat."

  "Thanks."

  "So how about we go fool around in your bank vault for the rest of the evening?"

  From the moment Matt heard that I'd transformed a bank building into a residence, he'd been fascinated by the old vault. It would have cost too much to remove and dispose of the massive door, so I'd arranged for it to be secured open, affixed against the wall with heavy metal fixtures and its locking mechanism disabled as an extra precaution against anyone ge
tting trapped inside. Even now, months after Matt had seen how the space had been transformed into a small reading room, he remained fascinated by it, and we spent many evenings in there after dinner.

  I wanted to finish the grocery list tonight, but now might be a good time to have the chat that I'd originally planned to have on Thanksgiving. We'd been seeing each for about a year now, but the time had never been right to tell him about my medical condition. It wasn't fatal or anything, but it was worrisome enough that the diagnosis had caused me to leave my litigation career, one that I'd really loved. The condition was known as syncope, and it caused me to briefly pass out during stressful situations.

  Every time I'd planned to tell Matt about it, I'd ended up postponing the conversation for one reason or another. But Matt was perceptive and had known for some time that I had a secret, and if I didn't tell him soon, he'd figure it out on his own. Especially if the stress of preparing for the holidays triggered an episode. Then he'd have good reason to think I wasn't as committed to our relationship as I claimed to be, since I hadn't voluntarily shared my secret.

  Tonight might be a good time to tell him. The next few days would be busy, starting with the shopping on Tuesday and then the cooking that had to be done in advance on Wednesday. After that, I'd be alternating between cooking and participating in the Thanksgiving parade, walking alongside the Danger Cove Quilt Guild's float while a friend's teenaged daughter kept an eye on the turkey in the oven.

  I decided the grocery list could wait until after Matt and I had our talk. I was about to shut down my note-taking app and agree to retire to the vault-turned-reading-room when the phone rang. According to the caller ID, it was the president of the quilt guild, Dee Madison.

  I answered the phone, and instead of Dee, her best friend, Emma Quinn, said, "Oh, thank goodness you picked up. We need you right now. It's terrible."

  I heard Dee's voice in the background but couldn't make out the words.

  "Who died?" I asked.

  There was a brief pause, and then Emma said with less conviction than I'd have liked to hear, "No one died."

  "Yet." Dee's voice in the background was clear this time.

  Emma hurried to add, "Although I suppose I can understand why you'd think someone might be dead, given our track record. I'm sorry if we interrupted anything. We didn't know what else to do, and Lindsay said we should call you before we did anything else."

  "She was right."

  Lindsay was Dee's granddaughter, and she used to be my paralegal before I left the practice of law due to my syncope diagnosis. Lindsay must have heard me say countless times that I wished, just once, a client would call me before she got into trouble instead of afterwards. Even if Lindsay hadn't absorbed that lesson, she still knew her grandmother well enough to worry about what rash thing Dee might do in whatever the crisis was if I didn't talk her out of it. In fact, my cell phone was already pinging in the background, and I suspected it was signaling a text from Lindsay, a few seconds too late to give me advance warning, but I didn't want to look and risk missing any of what Emma might tell me.

  "What's the emergency?" I asked, bracing myself for something earth-shattering.

  "The miniature quilts for the Thanksgiving parade have been stolen."

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  Half a dozen people were milling around the front porch of a little bungalow on a cul-de-sac in the northwest corner of Danger Cove. It reminded me of the one where I'd appraised an extensive collection of cheddar quilts when their maker had died. Unlike that woman's shockingly bright orange house though, this one was painted in traditional shades of soft taupe to blend in with the rest of the muted colors throughout the neighborhood.

  Emma Quinn noticed Matt and me before the others did and hurried down the front steps to greet us. She was a tall, sturdy woman in her seventies, dressed in loose dark pants and a knee-length gray wool coat.

  "Thanks for coming over." She glanced over her shoulder to where a woman the same height as Emma, but much thinner, was giving the fragile, eighty-something Dee Madison some extra support on the way down the stairs while everyone on the porch headed in our direction. "We all want to do the right thing here, but you know how Dee gets when she's upset. What she thinks is a good idea may not always be wise."

  Matt pulled a notepad out of one of the many pockets in his black cargo pants. "What did the police say when you reported the theft?"

  "We didn't bother to call them." Emma's voice dripped with frustration. "We only called Keely as soon as we confirmed what we'd been told about the theft. You know the police won't do anything if we file a report. 'It's just a bunch of silly old blankets and even sillier old women.' That's what they'll say. But you two will take us seriously. And you've got experience at catching criminals."

  I wouldn't call it experience so much as luck. Bad luck, for the most part.

  "There's one police officer who would take it seriously," I said. "Fred Fields would listen to you. Of course, then he'd wander over to the Cinnamon Sugar Bakery to eat a dozen cupcakes to cope with his frustration at having failed to prevent the theft before it happened, plus what he had to know was his likely future failure to bring the thief to justice. The odds of recovering any kind of stolen goods were never good, whether it was quilts or things of more highly respected value. But he always tried to do something. That was more than many people in his position would do.

  "There's no time to wait for Fred's next shift," Emma said impatiently. "We need to find the quilts right away before the trail goes cold. There's no time to replace them, and we can't risk breaking our record of participating in the parade every single year since it started. We need those quilts."

  "I'm not sure what I can do to help. I wouldn't know where to start investigating a theft."

  "We already know where to start," Emma said. "It had to have been an inside job. It happened when the owner of the house, Tricia Sullivan, was at The Clip and Sip. She was only gone an hour, and this is usually a safe neighborhood, so she was shocked to come home and find her window broken and the quilts gone. And nothing else was taken, so we know the thief targeted the quilts specifically."

  From the bottom of the porch stairs, Dee shouted something about stringing the culprits up by their toes in the middle of Pacific Heights Park.

  Dee was probably just blowing off steam, but I was never entirely sure how far she'd go in advancing the interests of the quilting community. Plus, I owed it to my ex-paralegal Lindsay to at least try to keep her grandmother out of trouble.

  "If I agree to help, you've got to promise not to take any vigilante actions," I warned.

  There was a pause while Emma seemed to be weighing the objections Dee might have to such a deal. They were such close friends, living together as well as quilting together for the last several years since Emma's husband had died, that they frequently communicated without words.

  "All right," Emma said at last. "Neither of us will do anything that you wouldn't want us to."

  There was a bit of grumbling from Dee, but Emma added, "Don't worry. I'll make sure everyone in the guild behaves."

  The tall, thin woman who'd been escorting Dee down the front steps joined us. Up close, I could see that she appeared to be in her forties, and her hair was pulled tightly back into a bun wrapped in an elaborate braid that included ribbons in the local high school colors. Her overall appearance suggested she was a strong woman, both physically and emotionally, but I couldn't help noticing the anxious way she was wringing her hands now that they weren't needed to support Dee. I'd always thought hand-wringing was a metaphorical description, but this woman was literally squeezing one hand with the other repeatedly, alternating which one was being assaulted. Perhaps she was just cold and trying to warm up her fingers, since she was only wearing a light hooded sweatshirt over jeans and a scoop-neck knit shirt on the chilly late-November evening.

  "This is Tricia Sullivan," Emma said. "She took the quilts home last night after the guild met to choose which ones to in
clude in our parade float."

  "Nice to meet you." I offered my hand for a shake. "I'm Keely Fairchild. You probably already know Matt Viera."

  She nodded. Her long, thin fingers were cold as she shook mine briefly and then Matt's. As soon as she let go of him, she resumed her hand-wringing. "I'm so sorry. I thought the quilts would be safe enough in my house. I did consider taking them to Brooke's house instead. Her husband is a fanatic about security, so they've got a state-of-the-art system. The problem is that he's also a fanatic about neatness and would have been irritated to have all the clutter from the quilts and the other supplies in his way. Brooke didn't want to upset him, and I was too tired to argue, so I took the easy way out. It's all my fault."

  "You can't blame yourself for someone else's criminal actions," I said. "You didn't have any reason to think anyone would want to steal the quilts."

  Her hand-wringing slowed but didn't entirely stop.

  "Keely's right," Matt said, using the calm, reasonable tone that hadn't worked on me earlier this evening but did seem to be reassuring Tricia. "The break-in could have happened to anyone, and no one could have predicted it."

  "Does anyone have any idea why the quilts were stolen?" I asked. "Were any of them particularly valuable?"

  "No more than usual," Emma said.

  Miniature quilts often required a huge investment of time to make, but they were seldom worth much in dollars and cents. Unless they were made by someone well-known. I turned to Matt. He'd made and donated some ornaments for the local historical museum's previous holiday fundraisers, and they'd sold for far more than anyone else's. They'd been nicely done, but most of the value had come from his celebrity. "I don't suppose you made or signed any of the stolen quilts?"

  "Not this year," he said. "I'm working on something for the Christmas auction at the museum again."