A Drink of Death (Japanese Tea Garden Mysteries Book 2) Read online

  A Drink of Death

  Blythe Baker

  Copyright © 2018 by Blythe Baker

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Description

  Newsletter Invitation

  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

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  About the Author

  Description

  When tea and death mix ...

  Maddie Morgan hasn’t had long to recover from a recent murder investigation and to settle back into running her new tea garden, when disaster strikes again. Like most catastrophes, this one involves Mamma Jackie and her crazed old parrot. With the clock ticking down and time running out, can Maddie save Mamma Jackie from the clutches of a fiendish villain? Or will the mysteries of her ex-mother-in-law’s disappearance and Maddie’s strange discovery of a lucky cat statue be doomed to remain unsolved forever?

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  1

  I was trying to run but it was so dark. My body was exhausted. I didn’t know what I’d been doing to get so tired. Hauling a refrigerator? Carrying a backpack of encyclopedias up ten flights of stairs? It was like someone had weighted my legs down. Each step pulled more and more energy out of my body. But my mind kept screaming RUN! RUN!

  The tea garden was no longer the tranquil, meditative environment it was supposed to be. In the daylight, it was usually lush and green with colorful sculptures and ceramic garden fairies. Butterflies and bumblebees flourished. People came to visit the tea garden because it was beautiful. But not now. In the darkness, it had morphed into some twisted, scary swamp out of a horror story. The trees drooped menacingly and the foliage reached up from the ground like greedy fingers. I couldn’t smell the lavender or the mint or the jasmine that thrived in pockets all over the grounds. Instead I smelled the moist, grassy scent of stagnant water.

  Don’t stop! My brain urged me to keep going. I felt like I was up to my knees in mud. Every step was excruciating. But I couldn’t stop. I didn’t dare stop. Not with who was coming up behind me.

  Who is it? Or what is it?

  I couldn’t be sure. The only thing I was certain of was that if I turned around the danger would be right there. Whatever it was would be staring at me, gaining, panting, glaring with black, lifeless eyes.

  Keep going! There had to be somewhere to hide. If I didn’t rest soon I was going to stumble. Then the predator would pounce.

  Use the gun!

  What?

  Use the gun in your hand!

  What was I thinking? Of course! I had a gun. Where it came from I wasn’t sure but I had it. It was heavy, solid and real in my sweaty hands. Suddenly I was brave. I stopped and fell to my knees. Without hesitating I raised the gun in both hands and aimed into the darkness. With my arms straight in front of me, bracing myself, I squeezed the trigger.

  CLICK!

  I shook the weapon like that might rattle something back into place to make it work. Again I aimed at the black void in front of me and pulled the trigger.

  CLICK! CLICK!

  Nothing! I pushed myself to my feet with all my strength and started to run again. Every muscle in my body was crying for relief. I wanted nothing more than to just fall down in a dark corner, close my eyes, and hide. Couldn’t I curl up in a ball and let this terror, this stalker run past me? The glow of the moon said no. It was too bright for me to slip away now. Mother nature mercilessly shined her spotlight at me making sure I was exposed.

  “HELP!”

  I tried to scream. It came out as nothing louder than a croak. I felt the air filling my lungs. I opened my mouth. But when I strained my vocal chords nothing but a pitiful whisper came out. No one would hear me. Even if I had been alone in a church no one would have been able to hear me.

  The further into the tea garden I ran, the denser the foliage became. It was almost a jungle. Finally, I spotted a place to hide.

  I’d had no idea that my grandmother had installed such an elaborate waterfall pond in this area of the garden. After all the time I had spent in this place, I should have seen it before now. Yet here it was, the unfamiliar pond appearing suddenly before me. Smooth river stones and flagstones flanked either side of the pool of water. From five feet above, water rolled from one ledge to another and another until it reached the pool below. The moonlight was glinting off the water. The koi were circling around the large rock that was floating in the middle.

  That’s not a rock.

  “Of course it is,” I whispered. It was a dark black mass in the middle of the pool.

  Suddenly, the person or thing pursuing me was no longer my first priority. It was that rock in the middle of the koi pond. It wasn’t supposed to be there.

  Only minutes ago I had wanted my legs to keep running. But now, I wanted them to stop. They carried me toward the pond and that horrible rock in the center. Every tendon tensed as I tried to put on the brakes.

  You don’t want to see it.

  I had no choice. The pond seemed to advance toward me, whether I took a step or not. My heart was racing. The sound of steps behind me turned to nothing but crickets. The wind pulled through the leaves like hidden fingers. If only a patch of clouds would pass across the sky. Couldn’t the moon be blocked out for just a minute? Maybe there could be darkness for a couple of seconds? I only needed it to be long enough for me to believe that dark mass was a rock and not…

  Don’t say it!

  … Drake.

  But it was too late. I saw the body. It was Drake. There he was, like something out of a horror movie. He was bloated and his eyes were open. The moonlight made his complexion even more ghastly.

  It was then that whatever was behind me finally caught up and reached its claws or tentacles or hands out toward me. I screamed…

  “No!” I sat bolt upright in my bed.

  Blinking wildly, I watched as my bedroom came into focus around me.

  “What in the world?” I gasped and put my hand over my chest trying to slow my pounding heart.

  Through the window, the sky was a rich cobalt blue, indicating the sun was starting to rise. It was almost time to get up. I looked at the clock. The red numbers said 5:43, fifteen minutes before I had to get out of bed.

  It felt good to flop back down on my pillows. My muscles ached like I’d run a hundred miles. But unlike other mornings when the warmth from my quilt tempted me to fall back asleep, I was wide awake now and sweating.

  “What a nightmare,” I murmured into the emptiness. “Drake? What was he doing there? Like he hasn’t been enough trouble in real life? Now he has to float around in my dreams?”

  I winced. “Bad choice of words, Maddie,” I told myself.

  My ex-husband, Drake Morgan, was not dead at all. He was alive and well.
/>   It was Angela Jenkins who had turned up dead in my koi pond several weeks ago, courtesy of her twin sister Agatha. If anything made me thankful that I was an only child, it was remembering the relationship between Angela and Agatha Jenkins. Murder between strangers was bad enough. But murder between siblings was outrageous.

  So, thanks to the Jenkins sisters, I knew when I woke that I was suffering from a touch of PTSD. If a person could have just a touch of PTSD. It was hard for me to admit it, because that kind of affliction was reserved for people who had witnessed the horrors of war, wasn’t it? Not a divorced thirty-two year old woman who had recently inherited a house and tea garden from her eccentric Japanese grandmother. Post traumatic stress disorder? For heaven’s sake, I should have been suffering from sunburn or mosquito bites, not PTSD. And yet, the image of the dead woman was burned into my mind.

  “But you didn’t dream about Angela, Maddie.” I sighed. “You know it isn’t about the Jenkins sisters. Otherwise, it would have been Angela you dreamed about in the pond. Not Drake. Do you really need to pull out a book on dream interpretations to figure out what it all means?”

  Of course I didn’t. I just didn’t want to admit that this was some Freudian, symbolic interpretation from my subconscious, reminding me that my marriage was dead. It wasn’t coming back. On the bright side, one positive thing that came from our split was that I found Drake a lot easier to talk to now that I didn’t have to talk to him. That made perfect sense, right?

  I shrugged and kicked off my quilt. The cool air in the house sent goose bumps racing over my skin. I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. The days were getting shorter as winter was quickly approaching. That meant the thermometer in Little River, Texas would just barely scrape past seventy degrees in the daytime. I didn’t mind. I loved the cooler weather. Coffee tasted better. Just the thought of some steaming hot java was enough to pull me out of bed and tuck my creepy nightmare into the back of my mind.

  As soon as my feet hit the hardwood floor, I heard a scream from downstairs. Without thinking, I bolted out of my bedroom and flung myself around the banister, pounding at break-neck speed down the stairs to the living room. But just as I was envisioning where I left my cell phone in order to call 9-1-1, I remembered.

  There was another scream. Then he spoke. “Breakfast!”

  I rubbed my face and pulled my hair back.

  “Rawk! Breakfast!” came the repeated demand.

  “He’s worse than a toddler,” I grumbled.

  “Breakfast!”

  “Moonshine! It’s not even six o’clock!” I bellowed as I stomped the rest of the way down the stairs.

  This was the second time that my adrenaline had kicked in for a false alarm. I was going to be exhausted by 9:00 this morning. When I came to the end of the stairs and shuffled into the front room, I saw Moonshine, my ex-mother-in-law’s parrot, happily bopping his head up and down. He was happy he gave me a start. He was just like my ex-mother-in-law herself.

  “Did we forget your blanket last night?” I asked the bird, attempting to summon a cheery tone.

  His cage wasn’t covered. When it wasn’t, Moonshine was up at the crack of dawn, screeching. I wondered if he wasn’t part rooster.

  “Rawk! Lazy!” he squawked now.

  “Lazy?” I harrumphed. “Moonshine, I refuse to take abuse from a bird. Just for that, your breakfast can wait until I have my coffee.”

  I picked up the cage cover and slipped it over his cage, but not before he popped off one more, “Lazy!”

  I waved my hand like I was shooing a fly away, then went toward the kitchen.

  Normally, I loved animals. The first time I had met Moonshine, I thought he was beautiful. It’s one thing to see pictures of macaws and note their rainbow feathers. But it’s completely different to see one up close. The shades of green and yellow next to red and blue are so intense a person might think they’re fake. The beak is sharp, like a razor, and even though the bird stands on dangerous looking talons, it moves gracefully.

  But after that first meeting, I quickly discovered that, as with so many pets, Moonshine had taken on the characteristics of his owner. In this case, that wasn’t a good thing.

  The state of my kitchen, when I entered it, quickly chased all thoughts of Moonshine away.

  I felt the little bits of sawdust and plaster powder sticking to my bare feet. Right now the kitchen was a room with a mini-fridge, a hotplate on a bare counter, cabinets with no doors along the walls, and a rusty farmhouse sink. The stove, full-size fridge, dishwasher, cabinet doors, fake marble countertop, and new stainless steel sink had yet to be installed.

  The breakfast nook that would later become a three-paned bay window was currently covered with a tarp. The new windows were in but the insulation and molding had yet to be added. The nook was too depressing for me to look at, since it was the part of the kitchen I was waiting for the most.

  It wouldn’t be too long until I could fix myself a cup of my favorite ginger tea and sit in the window looking out at the back garden.

  But for now, my coffee pot was on the floor and my mugs were stacked on the small dining room table that I was using as sort of a catch-all.

  The wall between the kitchen and the dining room had been knocked down. All that remained were jagged plaster teeth sticking out from the sides. That would be fixed at the same time as the window.

  I pressed the coffee maker’s “on” button with my toe. Within seconds, I could hear the water dripping. The smell of hazelnut filled the air.

  The house was old but the inspector had said it had excellent bones. The plumbing was in tip-top shape. The air conditioner and heater were less than five years old. The roof had been shingled before my grandmother had died. Only the kitchen and the two bathrooms needed to be updated.

  My bathroom upstairs was already done. That had been my first priority, after moving in only weeks ago. I didn’t have my kitchen bay window but at least I had a soaking tub with faucets that didn’t drip.

  I was originally hoping to get the house on the market within six months but that was looking more like fantasy than reality, these days. I’d be lucky if the repairs were done by then.

  It was the tea garden that was the real inheritance. When she was alive, my grandmother had spent every waking hour tending it and welcoming the visitors who would come from all over the state to relax on the property. But taking it over after her death was proving a challenge for me. There were barely enough hours in the day to manage the garden.

  Plus, I still needed to finish going through the things my grandmother had left in the house. Recently, it had taken me over a week just to bring her things from the attic down to the first floor, where there was light to work by. I hadn’t wanted to spend too much time up in the attic. A spider web, with its creator right in the center, had hung dangerously close to the steps and I was sure I had seen some mouse poop dotted along the insulation. More than once, I had let out a scream as shrill as one of Moonshine’s screeches, because something furry scurried from underneath a box or a cobweb brushed across my cheek. It was nerve-wracking, to say the least, and I still had lots of work on the house ahead of me.

  But I tried to shove these worries from my mind, as problems for another day. While I grabbed one of my coffee mugs, I thought instead of how wonderfully peaceful the house was. Then I remembered the hour. Suddenly the silence became suspicious. Mamma Jackie wasn’t fussing about.

  2

  My ex-mother-in-law, Mamma Jackie, was staying with me while I got the house in order. She wasn’t helping with anything, other than helping herself to a peach julep a couple times a day. Still, I liked to tell myself it was the thought behind her visit that counted. In her way, she was trying to support me as I adjusted to a new home and new town, away from all my old friends and family.

  Now, I tiptoed to her bedroom and peeked in. It was probably pretty obvious when I had moved her recently from her upstairs bedroom to a room off the kitchen that I w
as putting her as far away from my room as possible. It wasn’t because I didn’t like her. It certainly wasn’t because she snored loud enough to be heard through the walls. No, the downstairs guest room was simply the largest. It had the prettiest view. The veranda at the back of the house was only three steps away. At least, those were the reasons I had given at the time. There was no knowing whether she had bought them.

  Not finding her in her new bedroom, I peeked out onto the veranda but didn’t see her there, either. Not even an empty peach julep glass or one of her paperback romance novels remained to let me know she’d been out there.

  “A note, Mamma Jackie. A note would have been nice,” I grumbled. I needed my first cup of coffee badly.

  The fact that the older woman would up and leave so early in the morning without telling me was annoying but not out of character. If she left without telling me, I’d have to ask her where she went when she got back.

  “I’m a grown woman. I don’t need to announce my comings and goings,” she would undoubtedly inform me.

  But, if she mentioned where she went and I didn’t ask her about it when she got back, I’d get the other side of that coin.

  “I could drop dead somewhere and you wouldn’t even notice until the worms had feasted on my flesh,” she would probably cry dramatically. She was a one for drama.

  As I sipped my coffee, I looked out the front window. Noting that her car was still in the driveway, I figured the old woman had probably walked to wherever she had gone. It was a small town and the shopping district wasn’t far away. Sometimes walking was more convenient. She normally drove herself around in a 1985 cream colored Cadillac that was as obnoxious as she was. The car took over sixty dollars to fill up, and finding any kind of street parking for it was darn near impossible.