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  Praise for Joan Hess and her Claire Malloy Mysteries

  “A wildly entertaining series.”

  —Mystery Scene

  “Claire Malloy is one of the most engaging narrators in mystery.”

  —The Drood Review

  “If you’ve never spent time with Claire and her crew, I feel sorry for you. Stop reading this nonsense and hop to it. You’ll see wit and humanity all wrapped up in a nifty murder mystery.”

  —Harlan Coben, author of Just One Look

  “Joan Hess is seriously funny. Moreover, she is seriously kind as well as clever when depicting the follies, foibles, and fantasies of our lives. Viva Joan!”

  —Carolyn Hart, author of Death of the Party

  Out On A Limb

  “Witty plot twists and hilarious exchanges…You can’t go wrong with a Joan Hess novel.”

  —Mystery Lovers Bookshop News

  “Joan Hess writes this series with a wickedly funny sense of humor. Anyone looking to be amused by a wildly entertaining series will have a good time.”

  —Mystery Scene

  “With her wry asides, Claire makes a most engaging narrator. The author deftly juggles the various plot strands…The surprising denouement comes off with éclat.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Preview

  Chapter 1

  “My mother was a very strange woman,” the customer said, “and so was my father.”

  In that we’d done no more than make bland observations regarding the weather, I was not prepared for her abrupt pronouncement. I edged behind the counter, wishing there was at least one other customer in my dusty bookstore. As usual, there was not. Farber College had ended its fall semester, and the earnest young students had fled home for the holidays. I was reduced to selling books to stray Christmas shoppers like the one standing in front of me on this gray afternoon. “Stray” was an appropriate word; she appeared to be in her sixties or early seventies, with wispy gray hair in a haphazard bun, an ankle-length print dress, sandals, heavy wool socks, and a scarlet cloak. All she lacked to fit the stereotypic portrayal of a gypsy was a gold tooth and a wart on her chin.

  “Oh, really?” I said.

  “It was due, I should think, to her unconventional childhood. Mumsy was never quite at ease among the cannibals.” She wandered behind the paperback fiction rack. “She remained a vegetarian until she fell to her death some years ago.”

  I resisted the urge to pinch myself as I watched the top of her head bobbling above the rack. “She fell to her death?” I said, futilely trying to come up with a scenario that entailed cannibals and trapezes.

  “As did my father, as you must have guessed. Where do you keep the New Age books, dearie? All I’m finding are covers with buxom women in leather underwear and boots.”

  “You’re in the fantasy section,” I said, “but it’s the closest I carry to New Age material. You might try one of the bookstores out at the mall.”

  This had to be the first time since I’d bought the bookstore in the old train station that I had discouraged a customer, and I could almost hear my liver-spotted accountant hissing in disapproval. There were months when business was adequate to pay the bills and make nominal contributions to the credit-card companies, but there were also months when I endangered my relationship with the various publishers, as well as with the local utility companies, the above-mentioned accountant, and my daughter, who has a black belt in consumerism.

  The woman reappeared and gave me a reproving look. “I do not patronize the merchants at the mall. The place is permeated by a negative energy field that makes me queasy. I have often suspected that the music blaring from unseen speakers masks subliminal messages. My name is Malthea Hendlerson, by the way. What’s yours?”

  “Claire Malloy,” I said. “Would you like me to find out if I can order books for you?”

  “I have a list,” she said as she began to dig through an immense satchel made of bright fabric patches. “This store, by contrast, has a very well balanced energy field. It must be situated on a ley line.”

  “Only if the railroad tracks qualify.”

  Malthea finally produced a scrap of paper covered with tiny writing. “See what you can do. I sense you have a very determined nature and will not allow yourself to be daunted by a challenge.”

  I put on my reading glasses and peered at the paper. “Celtic Mysticism in the Second Century? Applied Magick? The Encyclopedia of Pagan Rituals and Initiations? Symbols of Irish Mythology? A General Introduction to the Fellowship of Isis? Pagan Spirituality in the New Age?” Seriously daunted, I looked up at her. “I’m not sure I can locate these. They’re not mainstream titles.”

  “Making the books difficult to acquire is an insidious form of censorship perpetrated by the religious right. After all, I am hardly a satanist.”

  I made sure the scissors and letter opener were not within her reach. Her expression was benign, almost twinkly, but during the course of my civic-minded attempts to aid the police in the apprehension of miscreants, I’d learned the wisdom of prudence. “Shall I call you if I have any success?” I asked.

  “That would be very nice,” she said. Her hand once again plunged into the satchel. I held my breath until it reemerged with a rectangle of stiff, if somewhat soiled, paper. “Ah, yes, I knew I had it here somewhere.”

  She put it on the counter, nodded, and sailed out of the store before I could respond. I picked up the dog-eared card and read: “Malthea Hendlerson, Arch Druid of the Sacred Grove of Keltria.” Beneath this announcement were a mundane street address and a local telephone number—although, of course, the address might prove to be a vacant lot and the telephone attached to an oak tree.

  I dutifully scanned the microfiche for the pertinent titles, found all but one, and called in the order to a distributor in Nashville. The woman at the other end may have sniggered, but she promised the books would go out that afternoon. I was wondering how the employees of the mall bookstores would have reacted to the Arch Druid of the Sacred Grove of Keltria when I was pleasantly diverted by a customer in search of a coffee-table book. He was more interested in size and weight than content. In that I had no reservations about selling books by the pound, I sent him away with the most expensive of the lot.

  After that, diversions were few and far between, and by late afternoon I was reduced to watching the traffic crawl down Thurber Street. The merchants’ association had done what it could to battle the magnetism of the mall, but we all knew it was a matter of time before the pasteurized chains put us out of business; wreaths on streetlights were no match for Muzak and parking. A few people were drifting into the bar across the street in anticipation of happy hour, which was much happier when the beer garden behind it was open and conversations could be conducted under a thick canopy of wisteria vines (and a thick haze of exhaust fumes).

  I was somewhat pleased
when my daughter, Caron, and her steadfast companion, Inez Thornton, came careening into the bookstore like a pair of dust devils. Caron has my red hair and fair, lightly freckled complexion, but at the moment her face was flushed with excitement. Inez was more muted; the two made a wonderful example of bipolar attraction. Inez is a placid lake, deep and sometimes unfathomable. Caron is, in all senses of the phrase, a babbling brook.

  “We got the most fantastic job,” she began, her hands swishing in the air. “You won’t believe it! We not only get minimum wage—we get commissions, too! It works out to more than ten dollars an hour.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” I said mildly.

  Inez nodded. “If we work ten hours a day until Christmas, we’ll make as much as six hundred dollars—less taxes and withholding.”

  Caron began to pirouette. “What’s more, we don’t have to wear dweebish paper hats and ask people if they want fries. We tried all the boutiques and department stores, but they weren’t hiring. Inez wanted to try the shoe stores, but I wasn’t about to spend eight hours a day bent over smelly feet and end up with hoof-and-mouth disease. The lady at the gift-wrapping booth said we’d have to come back when the manager was there and wrap packages so we could be rated on speed and aesthetic effect—as if some snotty little kid’s going to sit there Christmas morning and admire the bow instead of ripping into it. Give me a break!”

  Although I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to know, I forced myself to say, “What’s this fantastic job?”

  Caron twirled to a stop and gave me the vastly superior smile she’d perfected on her sixteenth birthday in hopes, perhaps, of being conscripted into the British monarchy. “We’re working for a photographer at the mall. The girls who were working for her quit, and she was so desperate that she came up to us at the frozen yogurt stand and offered us the jobs. Starting tomorrow, we work from ten till eight. We each get a twenty-five-cent commission for every portrait.”

  “In a department store?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” inserted Inez, who occasionally found the nerve to undertake a minor role in Caron’s melodramatic presentations. “We’re assistants in Santa’s Workshop. It’s this gazebo kind of thing in the middle of the mall, with a bunch of fake snow, plastic elves, and Christmas lights. We collect money from the parents and steer the children up the steps to sit on Santa’s lap.”

  “At which time,” Caron said, regaining the limelight with negligent ease, “the photographer takes the shot, we stuff a candy cane in the kid’s mouth and hustle him back to the rope, and then go for the next one. Santa gets regular potty breaks, but we can still run twenty to twenty-five kids through the chute every hour. Maybe more, if she’d let us use cattle prods. I don’t think she will, though. She’s anal.”

  “I should put in an application, too,” I said. “Of course I’d have to go on unemployment on December twenty-sixth unless I was offered a permanent position at the North Pole.”

  “Doing what?” Inez asked, staring at me.

  Caron grabbed her arm. “Come on, let’s go to my house and look at fashion magazines. I am Sick And Tired of Rhonda Maguire feeling obliged to tell us the brand name of everything she wears from her sunglasses to her shoelaces. When school starts back up, she’s going to look like a bag woman compared to us.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said with a frown. “You are not going to spend every penny you earn on clothes. For one thing, you still owe me a hundred dollars for the traffic ticket and defensive driving course.”

  “I already explained it wasn’t my fault,” Caron retorted. “The whole thing was stupid.”

  “But also expensive,” I said. “What’s more, the other day I gave you ten dollars to put gas in the car. I did not intend for you to put in a gallon and pocket the change.”

  Her lower lip crept out as she considered her response. She eventually opted for pathos, one of her favorites. “Then you should have said so. I assumed you didn’t want me to be the only student in the entirety of Farberville High School who had to stand in the hall and beg for lunch money—or root through garbage cans for crusts of bread and moldy carrot sticks.”

  “Or have pizza at the mall,” I said, unimpressed by the performance. “The first one hundred and nine dollars of your wages have my name written all over them.”

  “That’s a violation of the Child Labor Act.”

  “So report me.” I made Caron hand over the car key, shooed them out the door, and went to find a guide to boarding schools in Iceland.

  At six o’clock, I locked the Book Depot and drove home to the duplex across the street from Farber College. As always, I glanced at the venerable landmark that had housed the English department and provided my deceased husband with the privacy he required when tutoring distaff students in fields not related to twentieth-century American literature (with the possible exception of The Tropic of Cancer). On a winter night not unlike the present one, Carlton had had an unfortunate episode with a chicken truck on a mountain road, leaving me a widow without a viable source of income.

  I still didn’t have one, but life (mine, not Carlton’s) had been…well, lively since then. Being suspected of murdering a local romance writer had led not only to the dawning of my talents as an amateur sleuth but also to an ongoing relationship with Lieutenant Peter Rosen of the Farberville CID. Ongoing and off-going, to be precise, since Peter has been known to object to my well-intentioned assistance in situations in which I’ve felt obligated to involve myself. I’ve never walked the mean streets in hopes of capturing a drug dealer or thwarting a mugger, nor have I advertised my services in the yellow pages. Things just kept happening.

  As I let myself into the top-floor apartment, I could hear a heated fashion debate emanating from Caron’s room. I plugged in the lights that decorated the runty Christmas tree in the living room and glumly regarded the few packages around its base. Caron had been much easier to gratify as a child; cheap plastic toys and new crayons had thrilled her, as had a tricycle gleaned from a garage sale.

  These days, however, she had the eye of a real estate appraiser, and I was worried that my scant offerings—paperback classics, a sweater, a pair of earrings, and a CD that Inez had recommended—would fail to elicit delirious gratitude. A key to a red convertible, yes. Her very own copy of Pride and Prejudice, no.

  There was nothing I could do about it short of holding up a convenience store, so I poured myself a drink, found the mystery novel I was currently reading, and retreated to the bathroom for a bubble bath.

  I was immersed in hot water and genteel mayhem when Caron knocked on the door. “Peter called about five minutes before you got here,” she said, making it clear that this constituted a grave intrusion on her right to privacy. “He was at the airport, and said to tell you he has to fly to Rhode Island to deal with his mother. He doesn’t know when he’ll get back to town.”

  “What’s wrong with his mother?” I asked.

  “He didn’t say.”

  I listened to her stomp down the hallway and close her door with just enough forcefulness to convey her displeasure at being coerced into service as a social secretary. I wasted a few minutes speculating about Peter’s family crisis, then took a sip of scotch and settled back to outwit Scotland Yard. It was not as difficult as one might surmise, at least for those of us endowed with perspicacity and a keen nose for red herrings.

  Peter called the next afternoon. Since I was alone in the bookstore, we exchanged steamy sentiments involving potential physical entanglements before I asked him about his mother.

  “She’s getting married,” he said morosely.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “So now you’re advocating marriage? That doesn’t seem to be your attitude whenever I suggest that you and I give it a whirl. Something about compromising your independence and sacrificing closet space, I recall. Oh, and let’s not forget shelves in the bathroom cabinet and razor stubble in the sink.”

  “That’s different,” I said.

&n
bsp; “Why?”

  Lacking Caron’s talent for extemporization, I fumbled for an answer. “It just is, so let’s not talk about it anymore. Doesn’t your mother deserve companionship at her age? If she were blissfully married, she wouldn’t be threatening to sell the mansion in Newport and move to a retirement community to be near her only child.”

  “It’s more complicated than that. The guy’s given her so many flowers that the house looks like a funeral parlor. She’s gained ten pounds from all the fancy chocolates and champagne. She gets all moony-eyed when she talks about him, as if she were a ditzy adolescent with a crush on a rock star. In fact, Myron’s the only thing she’s been talking about since she picked me up at the airport last night. She didn’t even ask about my flight.”

  “Then they ought to be very happy together,” I said, feeling more forceful now that the topic was back on the right track (or ley line).

  Peter sighed. “My mother and I had lunch with him today. I could tell the moment I saw him that there’s something phony about him. He was more deferential than the maître d’, and oilier than the raspberry vinaigrette on the salad. He was nervous, too. Only people with guilty consciences are nervous around cops.”

  “That’s not true. Whenever I pass a police car on the street, I get a lump in my stomach because I’m sure I’m inadvertently doing something illegal. Furthermore, you were probably glowering at him so furiously that he was afraid you were going to stab him with a butter knife.”

  “I wasn’t glowering,” he said huffily. “Don’t I have an obligation to scrutinize the man who wants to marry my mother? His name’s Myron, for pity’s sake. What kind of name is Myron? Have you ever met anyone named Myron? He’s probably a Mafia accountant.”

  “Why don’t you ask him for a DNA sample so you can determine if he’s related to Jack the Ripper?”

  After a moment of silence, Peter said, “I certainly will run a background check before this nonsense gets serious. My mother’s too besotted to ask him anything more illuminating than his preference for lemon or milk when she pours his tea.”