Drowning in Amber (A Marie Jenner Mystery Book 2)

Drowning in Amber

Published by Tyche Books Ltd.

www.TycheBooks.com

Copyright © 2015 E.C. Bell

First Tyche Books Ltd Edition 2015

Print ISBN:
978-1-928025-37-5

Ebook ISBN:
978-1-928025-38-2

Cover Art by Guillem Marí

Cover Layout by Lucia Starkey

Interior Layout by Ryah Deines

Editorial by Allison Campbell

Author photograph:
Shelby Deep Photography

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage & retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third party websites or their content.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead would be really cool, but is purely coincidental.

This book was funded in part by a grant from the Alberta Media Fund.

Dedication

To Bear, the best dog ever...but don’t tell Buddy and Millie. I don’t want to hurt their feelings.

UNDERSTAND NOW, I’VE
taken a kicking or two in my life. I have. That’s part of living on the streets. But these three guys in Donald Duck masks—which made me half laugh and think, “What the hell?” just before they caught me—put the boots to me good.

I curled into a ball, felt my kidneys turn to mush, and knew I’d be pissing blood for days as I waited for them to stop. Ribs broke—snap snap snap—the pain a distant burr, thank God. They’d caught me just after I’d smoked, and I wasn’t feeling much. But I was going to. Like I said, I’ve taken a kicking or two in my life. I knew what was coming. Another visit to the Royal Alex Emerg.

“Please stop.” My voice sounded funny, whiny and high. “Please. I won’t do it again.”

Had no idea what I’d done, but I was ready to admit to just about anything to get them to stop. Really, just about anything. My pathetic-sounding voice must’ve touched a chord in one of them, because the boots laid off and the voices started, and so I did what I always do when I get a small break in a beating. I tried to run.

Didn’t go so good, I must admit. I crawled about a foot and a half. They grabbed me again, and as they hauled me to my feet, I heard screaming. Took me a second to realize it was me.

Stop the noise. Just stop the noise and maybe they’ll leave you alone,
I thought. But it didn’t stop. Just gouted out of me like it was my lifeblood. Like if I stopped that, I’d stop everything.

Through my high, I started to feel afraid. No. That word’s not big enough for what I was starting to feel. Not by a long shot.

They dragged me across the Holy Trinity Church front yard where I’d been sitting, peddling my wares. Scruffy grass, mostly dirt. I watched my feet kick up dust as I tried to run, but the hold on my arms didn’t loosen, and then they had me under the only tree left.

They pushed me up against it, face first. The bark bit into my bloody cheek and the screaming went up in pitch. I sounded like a girl—why wasn’t anybody helping? There had to be someone around. They flipped me so I was looking out at them. Their masks didn’t look so fucking funny anymore, and I tried to stop screaming so I could talk them into letting me go but my voice just wound up and up to soprano registers as they held my arms out, touching the branches of that fucking tree, and I felt the broken bones grinding in one of them. I was broken everywhere.

“Please!” I screeched, blood spewing from my mouth like a fucking fountain, and then even my screams got small and thread, and I couldn’t catch my breath.

One of the ducks looked at the leader. “Isn’t this enough?” he asked. At least I think it was a he.

“No,” the leader said. “We have to make an example of him. These pieces of shit have to understand—”

And then he pulled a hammer out of somewhere, and with it long spikes, and I found the strength to fight against the hands holding me, and almost made it, almost fell out of their grasp, but not quite. Oh god. Not quite.

“We have to make them all understand that nobody can do what this shit bird did and expect to live.”

He held one spike to my mostly open left palm and smacked it a good one with the hammer. And again I found my voice.

The last thing I remember seeing, after he nailed me to that fucking tree, was the hammer swinging up in the full moon light. I watched the blood—my blood, my god that was my blood, there was so much of it—arc away, black against the grey of the rest of the world. Then the hammer came down and hit me on the forehead.

My last thought as the world went black was, “I’m in real trouble here.”

Truer fucking words were never spoken.

I WENT LOOKING
for Brown Eddie one day after he died. I wasn’t happy about this particular meeting, because to that point, dealing with ghosts hadn’t helped me further my life goals one iota.

I thought I’d have a career by now, know what I mean? That I’d never wear mismatched socks, my hair would always look good, and I wouldn’t have to worry about paying my rent again.

Not a very long list, but the only thing I could definitely check off was not having to worry about paying my rent, because technically, I was homeless. (That’s what happens when your ex-boyfriend burns down your apartment building in a city with a zero vacancy rate.) My best friend, Jasmine, was letting me couch-surf at her place, but still. Not good.

On the plus side, I did have a job—sort of. I was working as a secretary for James Lavall, who’d inherited a ramshackle private investigation business from his recently deceased uncle.

The big problem was, James wasn’t even a real private eye, yet. He’d inherited his dead uncle’s licence with the business, so he had a month to either wind up the old man’s affairs and close the office, or get his own licence and carry on.

The fact that he was suffering from a concussion—due to our last, and only, case—was making him think very hard about whether he wanted to do this private eye thing. Which meant, well, I had a job, but only sort of.

In short, I felt like a fly trapped in amber or something. My life wouldn’t get better no matter how hard I tried. But there I was, trudging toward the Holy Trinity Church near downtown Edmonton, preparing to talk to another ghost like I thought it was actually going to help my situation at all.

My cell phone chirped. James Lavall’s name showed on the display, and I sighed, deeply. He might be my boss, sort of, and gorgeous, definitely. But I didn’t want to talk to him, because I hadn’t yet told him about the new case I’d taken in his name. I stared down at the phone and decided that since this job was one of the only things I
did
have going for me, I didn’t want to screw it up. So I slapped a big, fake smile on my face and answered his call.

“Hi, James. How’s your head?”

“Not great.” He sounded terrible, like he was recovering from a concussion, which he was. “Somebody named Honoria Lowe called. She told me to tell you the dead guy’s name is Brown Eddie and that she wants her appointment moved to two o’clock.”

Oops.

“Who is she,” he asked. “And
why
does she think she has an appointment?”

“Because she does,” I said. “She wants to hire us.”

“Why?”

“The cops think she had something to do with a murder. She didn’t, of course, so—”

“A what?” His voice went from impatient to angry. “A murder?”

“I’ll explain everything when I get back to the office,” I said and crossed my fingers.

He was silent for a long time, and when he spoke, he sounded even more tired than he had moments before.

“I thought we were going to make some decisions before we took another case,” he finally said.

“Decisions?” I asked, weakly.

“About this place,” he replied. “This business. Us. You know, decisions.”

Us. There it was. The thing I didn’t want to deal with. The possibility of us. Chicken that I am, I decided to ignore that and concentrate on the business.

“I know we haven’t had a chance to talk, James, but here’s the thing. You still have a month to use your uncle’s private investigator’s licence. That’s the reason I told Honoria to come in for a meeting. I think we should take her case. Why not have some money coming in while you’re deciding. You know?”

“Twenty days,” he replied. “I have twenty days.”

“All right, twenty days,” I repeated, trying to keep the crankiness, which was really bubbling to the surface by that time, at bay. “I don’t know about you, but I could use some cash.”

He was silent for so long I wondered if we’d lost our connection.

“Do you honestly have a lead?” he finally asked.

“Yes.” And I held my breath.

“Then go,” he said. “I gotta lie down.”