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  “A Cold Day for Murder”

  A Cozy Mystery

  Lost in Alaska Series

  Volume One

  Leigh Mayberry

  © 2019

  Leigh Mayberry

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner & are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Products or brand names mentioned are trademarks of their respective holders or companies. The cover uses licensed images & are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any person(s) that may be depicted on the cover are simply models.

  Edition v1.00 (2019.09.02)

  Special thanks to the following volunteer readers who helped with proofreading: Christine S., Kari Wellborn, M. McMath, Dick B., RB, JayBee, Julie Pope, and those who assisted but wished to be anonymous. Thank you so much for your support.

  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

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

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  Chapter One

  When Cheryl and Brian Snyder made their daily trek to the Midnight Sun Café on Shore Avenue, Nancy was usually already in the kitchen prepping ovens, checking inventory and refrigeration temperatures. It was a routine they shared since Brian bought out the owner of the restaurant five years ago, using their combined retirement accounts on a vision of the future that somehow had to do with serving greasy burgers and fries to the villagers and thinking that life was going to be more relaxed in the north.

  “When did you last talk to Nancy?” Cheryl asked. It wasn’t a loaded question, Brian and Nancy usually stayed later than Cheryl, one of them had to be a parent to their precocious ten-year-old.

  “We closed up around eight last night.” Brian turned on the rest of the lights in the dining area. He checked the bathrooms and collected the napkin dispensers to refill.

  Cheryl started the first round of coffee in the commercial coffee machines. They had two antiquated brewers. Most of the morning, customers put more cream and sugar in their cups than coffee. They didn’t make any money on beverages, but they had to compete with the hotel and the trader store. The competition was supposed to be good for business. In a town with three thousand year-round residents, anyone selling coffee other than the Midnight Sun Café put them deeper in red.

  “Did you call her yet?” Cheryl shouted from the walk-in cooler.

  “Why do I have to call her? She’s your sister.”

  The cooler door slammed, much to Brian’s displeasure. Cheryl didn’t have a sense of what it meant to take it easy on equipment. Maintaining refrigeration in town was hard enough without the added stress on the doors because someone was ornery about employment problems within the company.

  Brian pulled the smartphone from his pocket; hit the contact number on speed dial. Wedging the phone between his ear and shoulder, he continued to fill the napkin dispensers. “No answer.”

  “She’s probably got a guy over there.” Cheryl lived vicariously through her sister. Nancy had charisma, was slimmer than Cheryl and younger by ten years. She’d moved out of town for the first part of her life once high school was over. Like most kids who had no clear direction or focus to kick-start her life, she’d come back to town, on her sister and brother-in-law’s dimes to work off her debt until she had another break or someone to latch onto for the next part of her life. Until then, Cheryl and Nancy talked about her lovers, knew about the few men in town who had secret crushes on her sister, and for some reason, it was enough for Cheryl to watch at a distance as someone lived an exciting life instead of trying to have one herself.

  “Do you want to go wake her up?” Brain called from the dining room, replacing the dispensers. He didn’t wait for Cheryl to answer before adding, “You know, we don’t have to pay her if she doesn’t come in.”

  “You know how Mondays are!” Temper up, frustrated with the business and balancing the relationship where nepotism got in the way of commerce, Cheryl used the inanimate objects in the kitchen to take out her aggravation with hiring her sister to wait tables and schmooze with the customers.

  Brian would never admit it, but Nancy was good for business. Even if she was always late, usually wanted loans against her weekly paychecks, and had a carte blanche attitude when it came to lovers, she drew in crowds to the restaurant. People liked her. It wasn’t only men, single and married, who came to ogle his sister-in-law, women liked Nancy. Because she had a no-nonsense attitude about life, Nancy didn’t have a lot of filters when it came to casting light on acquaintances.

  “Where are you going?” Brian asked when the plastic plates dropped on the steel counter in the kitchen. Cheryl moved around to the dining area and headed for the door. She slipped on the heavy coat while she fumed.

  “You know we need her here.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Brian said. He snagged his coat from the back of the booth near the door. He switched off the overhead restaurant lights before leaving and locking up. “I want to check the coffee prices at the hotel this morning.”

  “You’re not going to compete with them,” Cheryl said, her voice tinged with anger. “They’re getting their supplies in from Anchorage.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I talked to Cindy. She told me Bill and Mona are modeling the hotel after the one on Fifth Avenue. They got on the hotel supply list for discounts. They’re ordering another espresso machine.”

  “Shit,” Brian hissed. “Are they looking to franchise?” He climbed into the Chevy pick-up. Cheryl climbed into the passenger seat. It took two turns of the key to getting the engine to fire up.

  “You should have plugged in the truck last night,” Cheryl complained.

  “Weather was supposed to start to break.”

  They continued to bicker as Brian pulled onto Shore Avenue and headed for the apartment complex where Nancy lived in a one-bedroom on the third floor.

  It was a little after five in the morning. Nancy never liked mornings, complained when she had to open. She lived the life of a nocturnal creature, and while that worked for winter months, during the summer, Nancy taped cardboard to the windows in the apartment to block out the midnight sun. Many of the units left cardboard or aluminum foil over the windows year-
round, why remove it when it had to go back up again in a few months?

  Mountain Manor was a thirty-unit, three-story apartment building without an elevator. There was ramp access to the first floor, and anyone who needed a place with no stairs was on a six-year waiting list. Nancy was young, fit, and she considered the daily stair climbing exercise.

  Brian and Cheryl went through the side door, closest to the stairwell. There was a keycode electronic lock, and everyone in town had the codes. People talked in a small town. Guests didn’t need to ring when they visited. Texting worked; people shared the system. It was a false sense of security and just part of day to day life above the Arctic Circle.

  “You got your key?” Brian asked. He’d tried the doorknob when Nancy didn’t answer after the third round of knocking. There was a lingering scent of cigarettes and a mild layer of marijuana smoke in the hallway.

  Cheryl dug through her purse until she produced a key ring with two keys. One for Nancy’s Honda four-wheeler, which was still parked outside with a crust of frost coating it, and another key for the apartment that Cheryl slipped in the doorknob and turned.

  Inside the small apartment, it looked as if Nancy had company. The small round dining table near the door was set with two plates, and two glasses.

  “Nancy! Yo, Nancy! Let’s go!” Brian felt every minute they wasted collecting Cheryl’s sister was a dollar they could earn on coffee for customers. He wandered down the hallway while Cheryl, collected the plates and glasses and put them in the dishwasher, she couldn’t help but clean-up after her sister.

  Nancy already had the washer at full capacity, and by the time Cheryl put in the rest of the dishes and added detergent she was left with no choice but to switch it on and turned around.

  “Oh my God,” she stammered. Brian stood close to her; he had somehow returned to the kitchenette without her hearing him. “What’s wrong?”

  His face was alabaster, his brown eyes rimmed with red. “Call the police.”

  Chapter Two

  Meghan Sheppard knew how to start with the word “king” add a “guy” with the French pronunciation, with a double dose of a “Kiya” for the ending. Kinguyakkii, Alaska wasn’t hard to pronounce once someone said it for you a few times. It was a five-syllable word in Inuit which translated into Northern Lights. She’d memorized it when it wasn’t necessary because Meghan believed in the importance of traditions, even when they weren’t her own.

  The smartphone rang a little after seven in the morning. Anywhere else the sun would already be up, cresting mountains or skyscrapers, not in this town, thirty-three miles above the Arctic Circle. In March sunrise wasn’t expected until after nine, at least until Daylight Savings added an hour to the schedule.

  “What’s up?” Meghan dropped the standard address a few months after she got hired for the job. It turned out her staff wasn’t big on protocol when it came to phone etiquette. Rather than waste more time trying to get her team to play by her rules. Meghan had a lot to learn about the game they were playing because it was older than most games she knew about in her years of law enforcement.

  “Hey Chief,” Lester said. He worked overnight and was supposed to have Oliver relieve him for the morning shift. “We got a thing over at the Manor.”

  “Okay,” she said, drawing out the word. Lester talked to most people in a way that suggested they were already in the middle of a conversation before someone spoke to him.

  “Yeah, you should get over there, Chief.”

  “Can you give me a clue before I head there?”

  Lester and Oliver addressed Meghan as ‘Chief’ because it was technically accurate. She felt that it was somehow insulting to their Native Alaskan sensibility. There were some words just shouldn’t be used anymore in the English language.

  Her officers were tenth or eleventh generation Inuit. Native Alaskans who’d spend every breath of their lives in and around Kinguyakkii. Two men, who grew up together, knew everyone in the township and the surrounding villages. The kind of deputies she wanted because they could identify people at a distance by the color and style of their fur hats, or Ushankas as the Russians called the cold-weather caps. If they called her “Chief” it had nothing to do with Native American stereotyping, it had to do with the fact she was the Chief of Police for Kinguyakkii—the Town of Northern Lights. She forced herself to get used to it.

  “Brian Snyder called Oliver. He said that he and Cheryl went to their sister Nancy’s apartment.” It was one of those mornings where Lester was going to make three left turns to go right. “Oliver said that Brian told him they found Nancy in bed.”

  “Okay,” she said again, “and?”

  “She’s dead, Chief.”

  ***

  Meghan had a promising career as a Special Agent in the FBI. She admittedly loved the bifold black leather ID wallet, and flashing her credentials at important events, like terrorist strikes, crime scenes and crazy Black Friday sales at the department store in Syracuse, New York, where Meghan was before she left the real world and took the job in Kinguyakkii.

  The trouble was, Meghan never saw terrorist activity, never hunted a serial killer, she once flashed her credentials at a Black Friday event, but it was only to get to the front of the line before the store opened.

  After eight years as ‘Special Agent,’ Meghan lost interest in tracking predatory offenders who defrauded the government when they reused a postage stamp twice because the machine didn’t postmark the letters directly. The title was impressive, and the work was mundane. At least until the night, she got shot.

  “You checked the body?”

  “Yeah, Chief, she’s dead all right, a little blue too.”

  Immediately Meghan started considering what happened to the woman. Blue tones meant a lack of oxygen. “Make sure no one gets into the apartment, Lester.” Meghan stayed on the phone the entire time she’d leaped from bed, struggled with yesterday’s jeans, debated briefly to change her panties before putting on the layers of clothes it took to go out into the environment and manage to stay warm.

  “I got a sign on the wall in the stairwell.”

  “What sign?”

  “Housekeeping had a ‘Wet Floor’ sign lying around,” he said, “Should keep people from coming upstairs.”

  “Call Oliver, have him bring over the forensic kit from the office.” She didn’t wait for Lester to answer.

  By the time Meghan went through the front door, she saw the frost had built up on the windshield of the Chevy Suburban. She hadn’t plugged in the engine block heater last night because people were talking in town, mentioned how the weather was supposed to change.

  When she finally got the engine to fire up for the Chevy, Meghan wondered if they were talking about it getting colder instead of warmer. Either way, she had to wait for the windshield to defrost because the ice scraper she had in the truck broke when it was —5 F° for a week straight in January.

  Sitting behind the wheel of the freezing truck, heater on full, blasting icy air in her face before the coils heated up, Meghan reflected on her time in Kinguyakkii.

  Somehow Meghan ended up in a village on the top of the world where people referred to the rest of the United States as ‘the lower-forty-eight.’ She took the job because it sounded like an adventure. The divorce was final, she was forty-six years old, and while law enforcement still appealed to her, she wanted something that sang a different tune than mail fraud, or the occasional federal subpoena service. US Marshal sounded exciting until Meghan found out that apprehending wanted fugitives happened about as often as a hit movie came out with title cards that had better fonts than the actual business. Air Marshals spent entirely too much time off-earth. While Meghan liked to travel in moderation, she felt more secure when she did the driving, and her vehicle was on the ground.

  She didn’t complain. People here were friendly, for the most part. There were occasional bouts of domestic violence, some issues with alcohol, usually both at the same time. Kinguyakkii was
a place Meghan never knew existed until it showed up in an internet search for a career change. Exotic locations didn’t always include sunny beaches and tropical weather.

  It was a balmy 26°F with the high expected around 45°F and a clear day with a little more sunlight than yesterday, by about seven minutes. In another month the town would get twenty-four hours of daylight for about forty days, better than forty days of rain, Meghan considered.

  Once the ice melted from the windshield enough for her to see, Meghan turned on the police flashers on the Chevy, pulled out of the driveway and sped across town to where Lester held back the crowds with a ‘Wet Floor’ sign and the Town of Northern Lights saw its first possible murder in fifteen years.

  Chapter Three

  The crowd consisted of mostly renters from the third floor, Cheryl and Brian Snyder, and Officer Lester Graves. By the time Meghan arrived, Officer Oliver Henry pulled up on the Polaris four-wheeler he drove most of the year. It had a collection of police strobe lights he had rigged onto the car that he liked to use. He waited for Meghan outside the apartment complex.

  “Where’s our forensic kit?” she asked, seeing his hands were empty.

  “I found the toolbox under the counter in storage,” he explained. “I didn’t know if you wanted that or not. I can go back and get it.” His gloved thumb pointed behind him.

  “Never mind,” Meghan said with a sigh. She faced the ramp and they ascended through the main doors of the building. The foyer cut the first floor in half. Stairwells were at opposite ends of the building. Only one stairway had an exit to the side parking lot. It felt as if some fire code issues were being overlooked, but Meghan had more important things to worry about.

  “Brian was pretty shaken up,” Oliver said as he walked slightly behind Meghan along the first-floor corridor. Space was only ample enough for one and a half people walking together. “He said Nancy was supposed to be at work this morning.”