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  A Gift for Murder

  Lady Justice – Forest Springs Mysteries

  Megan Porter left the small city she spent most of her life in to start over only to find that some strange things never changed. When she moved back to Forest Springs to build a new life with a new café home she never expected for the history she was running from the first time to come back to bite her once again. Can a woman starting over get away from that pesky thing called murder?

  Find out in A Gift for Murder how Megan fairs when the detective she never expected to see again shows up at a spa she never thought she would see a frozen corpse sleeping on the bench.

  Free café recipe in this story.

  Copyright © 2020 Capri Montgomery

  All Rights Reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the author’s permission is illegal and punishable by law.

  Publisher’s Note:

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

  Any stock photo/graphic art drawing parts of the cover were free on Pixabay.

  Cover design by Capri Montgomery

  About the Author

  Capri Montgomery started with cozy mysteries as a child but as she grew and realized boys really did like girls she found herself writing a little bit of love into every book. She ended up is the romance genre with suspense romance.

  Years later she thought of the cozy mysteries she had written and published in a college newsletter. She missed writing mystery. She returned to straight out cozy mystery with the Lady Justice Series featuring:

  Murder Beneath the Bubbles (Book 1)

  Murdering Daisies (Book 2)

  Now she is in Forest Springs following Megan Porter and Merck Holmes as they walk feet first into murder.

  A Gift For Murder (Megan and Merck) Book 1

  Mystery, café building, spas and murder. Oh, and did I mention there is a free homemade recipe in this book? Have fun reading the novel.

  Book 2 is coming soon.

  Follow my blog for more updates on the Cozy Mysteries out now and soon to come.

  Find all books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and some on Smashwords.

  Please leave a review, even if just a line or two, on the site you purchased this book from. Megan and Capri would greatly appreciate your words and your stars.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Author Thanks and Notes

  Chapter One

  Frozen in the Steam Room

  Megan Porter sat in Seaside and Oceans spa. She had only been there for ten minutes before everything hit the bleeding fan. “Life is just so unfair,” she mumbled as she pulled the rose colored scrunchie out her hair, letting the onyx and silver loose finger twirled strands brush below her shoulders. One of the things she never expected today was seeing Special Regal Detective Merck Holmes. The unexpected twist of this spa won trip was making it one of the worst things she could ever have won.

  Megan shook her head as she sat amongst the other ladies waiting to talk to the detective. The woman with the cucumber mask still splattered on her face looking green like Kermit the Frog and more annoyed than a rabid dog cut her a lot of side angle looks that told her this woman was angry with her. She didn’t know this woman. Or maybe she did but she didn’t know she did because Megan couldn’t tell while the woman was behind that really gross mask on her face. Her sloping breasts could make her anybody. Without a bra and covered in the standard spa covering it really could be anybody.

  Megan had been given the not so grand tour after she signed her name on the dotted line. “Here are the lockers where you need to store your backpack and keys.” The nameless blond with the frizzy hair pointed with orders to the locker she needed to use while she told her that the microwave, refrigerator and freezer were down the stairs but nobody was allowed through that painted black steel door. Megan had put the backpack in but she took her keys with her. She was only there for the manicure and pedicure routine, so pulling off clothes were not necessary for her and she didn’t leave her keys anywhere.

  With more walking a short distance the frizzy blond pointed out the steam room, the spa visitor’s restroom and the employee restroom the spa visitors were not allowed to use. “Your useable restroom is bigger and probably cleaner, too.” She had inverted her brows and tilted her lips downward showing her dislike and anger before walking her back to this area. Megan supposed she didn’t need to know about all the other rooms since she had only used her won spa stay for the one thing and the green smoothie and fruit and cheese brunch gift. Nobody stayed at the spa without getting their choice of brunch, lunch and a salad dinner if they stayed all day.

  Megan didn’t know anybody in here. Not that she could remember anyway. Megan was just really getting back to Forest Springs and getting settled. She was trying to get her café, Sweet Sensations, off the ground but she still had to wait on the city business lawyers to finally get her the approval of her outside silver steel sign. Megan had thought of anything she could do with the sign that she bought. Her district in this place wasn’t as hard to get approval as the district the spa was in, but paperwork still had to be done and a signature on the papers still needed to be signed. The upper end of the business sector in the city took a while it would seem because some people working there liked to assure they had a job by keeping piles of paperwork on their desk to prove they were still needed.

  For Megan the café seemed the best idea when she worked up the business plan. She had worked under a man in Venice Italy who was an excellent chef, and also a pastry chef since she had learned so many ways to try a different ways to make differences. Of course she already knew how to bake because she loved baking when she was a little girl. She had made so many of her own recipes for scones, cookies, cakes, pies, brownies and more sweets. People could come in, have a wonderful cup of tea and if they wanted they could sit there and eat a little bit of healthy and a little bit of sweet. She had a wonderful idea but she never really thought people would remember her.

  She had gone away to the north east coast, Bar Harbor, and then she moved farther away and ended up in London, then in Paris, and at the end of her playing gypsy by moving from country to country she landed in Venice Italy and she loved it. She had only come back to America because her mother was sick. She, her mother, had already moved away from Forest Springs to Colorado so she didn’t have to go back to the home of her birth. She did, however, have to leave her world behind in the kitchen in Venice to be there for her.

  Her mother got better and decided to go off on a world cruise with her boyfriend of whom she never planned to break up with him so Megan figured it was time for her to settle in somewhere like her mother had suggested. For some reason she decided to go back to the place where she
was born. She decided to go more city than country. Of course she never expected to see the special detective at all since she had been told, while talking to her mother, that he was a specialist around the world. Hearing her mother’s words pretty much meant he was a specialist in the major cities far away from where they had lived before. It’s not that she hated him. Not that she could say that she liked him very much either.

  He was tall dark hair, icicle blue eyes, and he had a beautifully sculpted body that all the women seemed to rave about and follow him around for. She, however, she did not fall for him because to her, while he was attractive, he was kind of confidently bossy. It was not her fault that she was always the mystery solver for everything that happened everywhere she went. It really was not her fault that a few of the people in their school had named her the Greek Gift Giver. And yes she did know what that was symbolic of because she actually did study a lot of Greek history and mythology even though she was not Greek.

  Megan could not show up at anybody’s birthday party, anniversary party, wedding or anything else her parents were invited too.

  Before she decided to come back home to help her mother in her new sleep spot in Colorado she had thought of getting the legal rights to stay in Venice and open up a café or art studio. But when her mother got sick and she came to her Megan never really thought of what to do in America. When her mother got better and ran off with the recently retired military man on a world cruise Megan figured going back to her original birth town was fine so long as she didn’t live in the rural area.

  She thought of a Christmas shop but Christmas was once a year and food was every single day.

  Things were going fine. Nobody seemed to remember her and maybe that was because of the silver strands in her onyx hair and the smaller thighs showcased with knee high boots of European fashion. She was stylish and a mystery in the city. Twenty years was a long time to forget somebody and she knew having the flat above her café could be perfectly mysterious with food too delicious for anybody to remember the school children’s mean names about her.

  Things were going well until one of the maintenance guys turned up frozen in the steam room.

  It took a while for anybody to go in to sit in the steam room as they were told it still had to get ready for visitors that morning. Somebody had obviously turned on the steam from one of the back rooms not even a half hour earlier seeing as though the dead guy was still half frozen.

  Why the change of body locations had a few different reasons. Freezing a body or keeping it hot would make identifying time of death difficult either way. Moving the body could help make it difficult to sort out where the murder happened. It wasn’t difficult to come up with answers to some things. But why risk moving a dead body? Moving was a risk but depending on the time of the murder and the moving would change the difficulty of not being seen. Megan was thinking early morning while the sky was still black and the moon was less than a new quarter whole. Add a few clouds to covert and visibility here would be difficult unless a light was on out front. Moving a dead body from a freezer to the steam room just might be easy to do at that time. And there was not any proof that the murder had not been done yesterday or a few days before that. If the body was in the freezer first then nobody would notice unless they needed to get something out of the freezer. And it is also possible that the body was moved because new products that had to go in the freezer were on the way in today. Megan was not a private detective. She was more of an artist for visual and edible things. Well maybe she was more baker than cook and sketch artist but she still was not a detective on this murder issue and she wanted out of the spa sooner rather than later.

  Yes she was a cook and an artist which is why she really loved living where she was. She knew she didn’t need a formal degree to call herself a cook or a pastry chef because that’s exactly what she was. Of course right now the problem was not if she was the chef to prepare small dishes for people paying for a full day at the spa. They had stored their food that they give to the spa clients. Not the issue now because right now they needed to figure out who froze the dead man and who moved him to the steam room. Of course that was not her job and the detective on scene there was no chance in the world she was going to be solving the crime nor did she want to. And as long as the detectives didn’t recognize who she was she wouldn’t have to try. Just because she was always rumored to have a gift for murder as long as they didn’t recognize her then she was free to go once they let everybody leave the building.

  Of course, with her unlucky enough win of a spa trip for murder Merck would actually remember her and recognize her. Why did he have to come back here again? Then again why did she have to come back here? The officer seemed to be taking their time collecting statements and the detective was conversing with Dutch Linguist now and everybody knew that woman could talk a million words for a million hours. Megan just thought maybe she was lonely after her husband died. She always needed conversation and a lot of people seemed to run away from her when they saw her because she never knew how to shut up.

  Everybody said Duchess was ready for a man to baby her and she had the money to give him so he would do it. Megan wondered if Duchess’ frequent visits to this spa might have something to do with her desire for any of the male workers who were said to be a rarity in this spa.

  Whatever happened to that the man in the steam room was more important than a lady craving a man unless her cravings got that man killed. Nobody would actually know the why and the who because nobody, other than the killer, was with him when he died.

  It would seem that Duchess, the woman who was named Duchess because her mother’s love of a Dutch man, could not hold a chain around Merck’s neck and keep him standing there talking to her. Merck jotted something else on his notebook and then excused himself from her and directed another officer to watch her.

  Megan sat there silently hoping Merck would not recognize her and he would not remember what she had been rumored to be. Of course in this city the rumors were not technically one hundred percent fictional even if they were painful.

  Merck’s icicle blue eyes looked her up and down and when that little upturned smirk graced his lips she know he knew who she was and he was so not looking as if he were going to let her forget about it. She wondered if she just ignored it if he would ask case related questions and move on but something told her maybe not.

  Megan tried to keep her posture the same as it had been since the event happened. She sat as relaxed as she could sit; shoulders back, head up and hands softly resting in her lap. You were never really a beacon for trouble if you looked as if you were peacefully sitting and not about to cause trouble of your own.

  “Nice to see you again, Megan.” His shoulders were perfectly poised for a long stand right there in front of her. His posture and his body language assured her his investigation questioning with her would not be as short as the last lady. She was never a talker and she didn’t want to be one now. “What brought you back here?”

  Did she really need to answer that? Megan mentally shook her head reminding her not to cause trouble because she would leave sooner if she spoke faster. “It was personal but nothing so drastic that we need to discuss it.” That answer suited her just fine.

  Merck looked at her as if he wanted to say more on the subject but quickly went back to working on what he was supposed to be working on—solving the crime.

  “You were here when the body was found; were you not?”

  “Yes I was.”

  Merck noted her words skillfully so. His eyes darted back up to hers and it made her nervous. “Where were you when you heard the scream?”

  “I was in the waiting section. Not the waiting room where you wait to be let into the place but this one here, where you are waiting to be taken to your treatment.”

  Merck jotted down more notes before looking at her once again. “I cannot imagine what you enjoy having done in this place. You are beautiful just as you are so you don’t need any face
lifting massages or anything like that. And your hair looks good in that messy ways you wear it all the time. So why are you really here?”

  He had just given her compliments. It was nice, but at the same time why did he want to know why she was really there? And why did he know how she wore her hair? It wasn’t illegal to go to a spa at any point in this world. The government would never do that because then they would lose tax money from the spa itself. “I won a day here and so I just took it. And while I thank you for the compliment; I think it was a compliment. It is nice sometimes for a woman to be able to get out and have something nice done for her. The fact that I did not have to pay for this spa day is even better.” Of course the fact that somebody died here today and she just had to be here for it was not a good thing.

  “Yes that was a compliment because you are looking mighty beautiful these days. Despite the times we had when you and I were here before I hope that we can actually be peaceful with each other this time. Either which way, when I ask you questions I need honest and forthright answers without a little bit of anger in your tone. Do I make myself clear, Megan?”

  What was his problem? She didn’t do anything wrong? Was he claiming that she did? “Crystal clear Detective Holmes. However, I was not, and have not, been angry with you on any level. I answered the question you asked me.” The fact that the detective here decided to coast one leg over the other with the ankle on the left knee like he had docked a ship in the spa ocean told her he was not planning on ending this conversation anytime soon. What was it about her this man had issues with? Did he think because she is here that she was going to turn into the detective who wanted to solve the crime? If he did think that, he was dead wrong.

  Dead was so the worst word to use right now. Trying to ease the situation back into calmness made her slip one finger behind her ear, pushing a curl that really wasn’t hanging there away from ear. “At any rate, I won this trip and I wanted to use it so I figured I should use it before I opened my own place. Not my own spa, by the way because I have no interest in having one of those.”