Jeanne Glidewell - Lexie Starr 06 - Cozy Camping

Cozy Camping

A Lexie Starr Mystery

Book Six

by

Jeanne Glidewell

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ISBN: 978-1-61417-635-0

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Dedication

I’d like to dedicate Cozy Camping to RVers everywhere. Writing this novel brought back many fond memories of the twelve years my husband, Bob, and I owned and operated a large campground in Cheyenne, Wyoming. We found 99.9 percent of our customers to be the nicest, friendliest, and most fun-loving people you could ever want to meet. The tiny fraction of our customers who didn’t fit into this category were just freaks of nature who had probably spent too many hours on the road that day. Marc and Jane, the current owners of A.B. Camping, Inc., have added their special touch to the RV Park and made it an even better place to stay. They are now making fond memories of their own.

I’d also like to dedicate this novel to my beautiful niece, Kylie Rae (Goodman) Moore, who stepped in to run the office of A.B. Camping for me one summer when I became gravely ill. She took over a week before Cheyenne Frontier Days, when the job always became very intense, and handled it with exceptional grace and professionalism for an eighteen-year-old. I like to pretend Kylie inherited her amazing creativity from me. She didn’t, but I still like to pretend she did.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my dear editors, Judy Beatty, of Madison, Alabama, and Alice Duncan, of Roswell, New Mexico, who help keep me from butchering the English language with words I make up when I feel the situation calls for it and punctuation that has no rhyme or reason to it.

I’d also like to thank Nina and Brian Paules, of eBook Prep and ePublishing Works, for all the long hours and hard work they put in to make my books available to readers. They save me a lot of frustration and anxiety from trying to do it on my own.

Chapter 1

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Not at all, Lexie. The clean air and scenery in Wyoming is incredible. And camping there will be a lot of fun. You know how much you enjoy new adventures,” Stone Van Patten, my husband of one year, replied.

“Adventures, yes! Sleeping on the ground with spiders and other creepy crawlers is definitely not my idea of a fun adventure. And I cringe at the idea of a snake slithering in next to me to curl up in the bottom of my sleeping bag! Sitting next to poison ivy while eating gritty hotdogs turned into burnt leather over a blazing fire, does not sound all that appealing to me either.”

At age fifty-one, I had no desire to hone my survival skills in the deep, dark woods, where danger might lurk around every corner. With the snap of every limb, I’d fear I was about to be mauled by a bear or a mountain lion. I’d run out of pepper spray before we reached our camping site, just reacting to phantom assailants. I had my own little pink-handled gun now, too, but randomly firing bullets at figments of my imagination might make my fellow campers uneasy.

Stone would probably insist I catch my own supper in a rippling stream, too, and he should have learned from his first attempt to teach me to fish that was a recipe for disaster. He would spend his entire vacation untangling my fishing line and digging hooks out of somebody’s flesh, most likely his own.

Stone and I own and operate a bed and breakfast lodging facility in Rockdale, Missouri, called the Alexandria Inn. Alexandria is my given name although everyone calls me Lexie. We’d both lost our first spouses years ago, and then met and fell in love when I was in Schenectady, New York, investigating a murder case that involved the welfare of my only child, twenty-nine-year-old Wendy.

Now we were celebrating our first anniversary, and Stone thought we needed to get away for a couple of weeks to rest and relax and enjoy ourselves. Ever since he told me he was planning a secret vacation to celebrate the end of our newlywed status, I’d been hoping he had booked a Caribbean cruise during which we could ingest entirely too many calories at a midnight chocolate bar and stuff ourselves like throw pillows at the endless buffets. The onboard entertainment and nightly shows would no doubt be fascinating, and the ports of call would offer endless possibilities.