Elizabeth Zelvin - Bruce Kohler 04 - Death Will Save Your Life

Elizabeth Zelvin - Bruce Kohler 04 - Death Will Save Your Life

Bruce Kohler [4]

Elizabeth Zelvin

booksBnimble (2012)

Tags:
Mystery: Thriller - Humor - AA - NYC
Mystery: Thriller - Humor - AA - NYCttt

Recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler and his good friends Jimmy and Barbara decide to escape the big city for a wellness and couples workshop outside of Sedona. The joint is called The Aquarius, a New Age community the locals have taken to calling The Woo-Woo Farm. But the serene retreat has much more in store than yoga mats, didgeridoos, ecstatic dancing, and aboriginal tracking.
During an early morning hike, the trio encounters America’s bestselling relationship guru, Melvin Markowitz, posed for meditation and strangled to death with a luggage strap. The race is on for the three friends to find the murderer. Bruce falls for the victim’s widow, Jimmy longs for the city, and Barbara minds everybody’s business as usual.
But when Melvin’s baby sister’s volatile husband “Madhouse” is also found dead, it seems everyone at the Woo-Woo Farm is suddenly in danger from more than just a handful of holistic loonies…

Praise for DEATH WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE and the Bruce Kohler mystery series by Agatha and Derringer Award nominated author Elizabeth Zelvin:

“Zelvin’s DEATH WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE is filled with zingers and zest.  Set in the isolated location of a New Age camp for adults, with enough colorful suspects to have a Kumbayah fest, the mystery has the vim and vitality of Agatha Christie’s finest.”

—Avery Aames, Agatha Award-winning author of the Cheese Shop Mystery series.

“Zelvin tackles and subdues the novella form, losing none of her trademark heart and humor.”

—G.M. Malliet, Agatha Award-winning author of the St. Just and Max Tudor mysteries

“ Zelvin’s wit is as sharp as ever as she leads her readers down a fast, 12 step path to humor and homicide.”

—Rosemary Harris, Anthony and Agatha Award-nominated author of
Pushing Up Daisies

“A clever mystery peppered with intriguing characters and Zelvin’s droll New York humor.”

—Krista Davis, New York Times bestselling author of the Domestic Diva mysteries

“Smooth prose and outstanding storytelling ability … A remarkable and strongly recommended first novel.”

–
Library Journal

“A hell of a job … Great characters and a wonderful voice.”

—Crimespree Magazine

“Will keep readers guessing until the end.”

—
Crime Fiction Examiner

“Zelvin doesn’t shy away from serious interpersonal issues. She has a natural ear for efficiently melodic prose.”

—
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Also by Elizabeth Zelvin

Death Will Get You Sober

Death Will Extend Your Vacation

Death Will Help You Leave Him

Short Stories featuring Bruce Kohler:

“Death Will Clean Your Closet”

“Death Will Tie Your Kangaroo Down”

“Death Will Trim Your Tree”

“Death Will Tank Your Fish”

Other Short Stories:

“The Green Cross”

“Navidad”

“The Silkie”

“Dress to Die”

“Choices”

“The Saxon Hoard”

“The Emperor’s Hoard”

Death Will Save Your Life

By

Elizabeth Zelvin

booksBnimble Publishing

New Orleans, LA.

Death Will Save Your Life

Copyright 2012 by Elizabeth Zelvin

Cover by Click Twice Design

ISBN: 9781617506185

www.booksbnimble.com

All rights are reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: December 2012

WE GUARANTEE OUR BOOKS…AND WE LISTEN TO OUR READERS

We’ll give you your money back if you find as many as five errors. (That’s five verified errors—punctuation or spelling that leaves no room for judgment calls or alternatives.) If you find more than five, we’ll give you a dollar for every one you catch up to twenty. More than that and we reproof and remake the book. Email [email protected] and it shall be done!

Dedication

To Brian, with love always and thanks for the one-liners I steal.

Acknowledgments

Fellow members of Sisters in Crime Guppies were kind enough to critique this story when it was 50,000 words longer. Heartfelt thanks to Krista Davis, Lisa Black, Judy Clemens, and S.W. Hubbard. Thanks, too, to Lt. Chuck Fernandez of the NYPD, who suggested a reason a detective might be giving out traffic tickets. They’ve probably forgotten all about it.

Woo-Woo Farm and its inhabitants are purely fictional. New Age intentional communities exist. They offer a wide variety of remarkable experiences, but as far as I know, murder is not one of them.

Contents

Also by Elizabeth Zelvin

Death Will Save Your Life

About the Author

Death Will Save Your Life

The real name of the place was the Aquarius Institute. Barbara called it a New Age intentional community. Jimmy called it a dude ranch for space cadets. Anyone who’d heard of Esalen and Sedona but wouldn’t be caught dead going there called it Woo-Woo Farm.

It’s very, very hard to say no to Barbara, who’s my best friend Jimmy’s girlfriend. Jimmy’s been sober forever, and Barbara has parlayed his alcoholism into a career for herself as an addictions counselor. That’s the day job, and she has a second full-time job on the side as a world-class codependent. This gives her license to mind everybody’s business, especially Jimmy’s and mine. She’s been in therapy for years, and she loves Al-Anon almost as much as Jimmy loves AA. But she backslides whenever the burning desire to help somebody comes over her.

That’s where Woo-Woo Farm came in. She had signed herself and Jimmy up for a couples workshop with a relationship guru named Melvin Markowitz and insisted I come along. She said a diet of veggies, meditation, and early morning yoga would do wonders. I’d been dodging those kinds of wonders ever since I got sober eighteen months ago, give or take a couple of weeks. I told her I didn’t want to learn to bend like a pretzel. I’m a natural breadstick. As usual when Barbara gets a bright idea, protest got me nowhere.

That’s my cover story. The truth is that I owe Barbara and Jimmy for giving our friendship a second chance when I came out of a blackout in detox on the Bowery on Christmas Day and finally had to admit that dying would suck worse than giving up the booze. Jimmy doesn’t even rub it in. Barbara doesn’t have his restraint, but she managed to save my life when I stumbled into a bunch of murders and she sucked Jimmy and me into looking for the killer. Now she’s sure she knows exactly what we need to do to stay sober. Don’t drink, go to meetings, and investigate a murder. And if you can’t find a murder, don’t drink, go to meetings, and say, “Yes, dear.”

She wore me down on Woo-Woo Farm. Eventually I said, “Yes, dear.”

My fellow passengers boarded the train with copies of the Aquarius catalog sticking out of backpacks and rolled up with yoga mats and didgeridoos. If I wanted, I could sample past life regression, right-brain vegetable gardening, ecstatic dancing, and aboriginal tracking. If I’d come a week earlier, I could have found my spirit guide and been eligible for advanced shamanic journeying while Barbara and Jimmy polished up their relationship. She must have been out of her mind.

“Dammit, honey, where is my camel cashmere pullover?” The petulant voice drilled into my right ear.

Honey mumbled a reply.

“If I’d wanted my beige cardigan, I’d have told you to pack my beige cardigan. Well, where is it?”

I hate bullies. I felt sorry for Honey.

“What good does it do me in my big bag? I can’t reach my big bag. Someone should redesign these cars. And the air conditioning is on too high. It’s intolerable!”

Honey’s murmur elicited a growl.

“No, I do not want to borrow your raincoat. If you had the brains God gave a gnat, you would have packed the things I need in the small bag.”

I bet they were headed for the couples workshop.

He pushed past me when we reached our station. A balding guy in his fifties, he wore an unbleached cotton tunic and pants with designer wrinkles. A couple of strands of what we used to call love beads hung around his neck. Bad-temper lines creased his jowly, froglike face. The wife looked maybe thirty-five, with a discouraged stoop and a loose dress that would have looked more at home on the prairie in 1854. He carried nothing. She was loaded down like a pack mule.

She stumbled down the aisle ahead of me. She dropped a book, and I handed it back to her. She muttered a breathless thanks without meeting my eyes. I looked at the book. The title was
How to Improve Your Relationship
. Barbara owned a copy, which she’d tried in vain to get Jimmy to read. The photo on the back showed a jowly man with a face like a bad-tempered frog. The obnoxious husband was America’s bestselling relationship guru, Melvin Markowitz.

I sat on the terrace of the Watering Can, contemplating my latte. The Can was Woo-Woo Farm’s version of a speakeasy. You could get leaded coffee and dump white sugar in it. Wow. I had to admit it was pleasant. The air smelled of pine. A breeze tossed the feathery branches high overhead. Sunlight played leapfrog over the stones of the brook that trickled past the terrace. The peace and quiet didn’t bother me. Yet.

Around me, Aquarians drank herbal tea or read. A remarkable absence of iPads indicated that WiFi was on the
verboten
list along with alcohol and heavy metal. The loudest sound anybody made was a turning page or the scratch of a pen on a yellow pad. Now and then, one of them would look up, look around, take a deep breath, and settle in again. A guy knitting caught my eye and smiled.

A couple carrying trays pushed onto the terrace from inside the café. She wore a skimpy tie-dyed dress and straw sandals. He had on a natural-fiber tunic and ragged denim cutoffs with leather sandals laced up to the knee. Their hair fell in thick braids down their backs.

“I think it’s stupid!” he announced as he let the door swing to. “Why should we?”

The sitters on the terrace raised their heads in unison, like prairie dogs popping out of their holes. The pair slapped their trays down next to me.

“I told you.” She had a high, whiny voice. “We’ll lose the free course.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “Who needs the course?”

“We do,” she said. “Besides, we’ve done past life and spirit guides. You won’t do ecstatic dancing. You won’t take tracking because it involves climbing.”

“Feather, give it a rest. Our relationship is fine.”

“Oh, Madhusudhana, you know we can always rise to a higher level.”

I choked back a snicker. Feather and Madhusudhana. I bet those weren’t the names they’d been born with.

“Maybe, but with Mel?”

“He’s the best!” she insisted. “Besides, he’s just the channel. If you’ll only open yourself to the experience, it will be wonderful.”