Wedding Thrashers Read online

  Wedding Thrashers

  A Bird Lover's Mystery

  J.R. Ripley

  Beachfront Entertainment

  Copyright © 2020 J.R. Ripley

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblances to actual places or events, or persons, living, dead, or even zombiefied, is purely coincidental, liberally twisted to suit my needs, or a figment of your imagination or mine.

  All rights reserved, preserved, and possibly even pickled, under international and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the USA by Beachfront Entertainment. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without our written consent, with the exception of brief passages contained in critical articles or reviews.

  First edition 2020

  Trade Paperback: ISBN 9781892339430

  Ebook: ASIN B087QQPW1P

  Cover Design by http://www.StunningBookCovers.com

  Contact us at [email protected] for any issues or comments regarding our books. We appreciate the feedback and we hate errors and love reading as much as you do!

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

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  13

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  Hi, thanks for reading!

  Wedding Thrashers

  1

  “Guess who’s getting married!”

  That was Kim Christy, my best friend, bursting through the front door of Birds & Bees, my little home-based downtown shop for bird lovers here in the equally little and historic Town of Ruby Lake, North Carolina.

  Kim panted excitedly. Her face lit up like she’d just won a million bucks in the North Carolina state lottery.

  I wish. Maybe then she would pay me back the bajillion or so dollars I estimated she had borrowed from me over the years.

  “You?” I slowly lowered the pair of binoculars pressing against my eyes. I’d been studying an energetic brown thrasher rooting around in the flowerbeds bordering the front porch. Thrashers love to, well, thrash around, looking for insects lurking under the leaves and debris to snack on.

  The binoculars dangled over my chest on a black nylon strap.

  On the subject of snacking, Kim is a long-legged, blue-eyed blonde who could eat practically anything and not gain so much as an ounce of fat.

  I’ve got blue eyes too and she and I are about the same height but there the similarities end. My wavy and mostly unruly hair is the shade of a chestnut-colored woodpecker. If I so much as look at a bar of chocolate, let alone an onion ring, I put on five pounds. And I’ve never been known to stop at simply looking.

  I could have hated her for being too pretty, too thin and far too unreasonable in all matters that I believed required a certain level-headed pragmatism but I didn’t. Kim and I go way back. Practically to the womb.

  Kim’s vivacious smile turned into a dispirited frown.

  Oops.

  I had hit a nerve there with that crack about her getting married. Kim has big, maybe too big, hopes of marrying her beau, Dan Sutton, one of our local police officers. One of the better ones, I might add.

  Kim’s hints regarding matrimony had been getting a little heavy-handed lately. She’d recently coerced poor Dan into binge watching a reality series about an L.A. wedding planner when he would have rather been watching the latest NASCAR race.

  She had even resorted to taking subscriptions to a couple of bridal magazines, monthly copies of which she placed strategically around her house, mostly on the coffee table and nightstand.

  Adding fuel to the matrimonial fires, one of Dan’s old police academy buddies, the gorgeous and vivacious Paula D’Abbo, had taken up temporary residence in Kim’s house. At the moment, however, she was in Arizona assisting her mother.

  To be fair to Paula, the entire living situation thing was Kim’s fault. Both Dan and Paula thought they were doing Kim a favor by having Paula stay with her. Long story short, rather than admit to even the teensiest bit of jealousy, my best friend had gone the I’m-not-jealous-I’m-a-lunatic route. That led to Dan and Paula worrying about the state of her mental health and coming up with the idea that she could use a roommate.

  Paula, a young brunette with eyes the hue of a golden brown kestrel’s wings and a perfect bottom, had chosen to continue her leave of absence from the Scottsdale PD and nurse Kim back to good mental health.

  I wished Paula all the luck in the world with that.

  She was going to need it.

  “No,” said Kim, in answer to my question as to who was marrying. “Amy Harlan.” She tossed her black leather jacket over a hook on the coatrack inside the front door and squeezed my arm. The jacket merely grazed the brass hook and fell to the floor to the accompanying slap of leather on wood.

  Kim ignored the fallen jacket, knowing I would pick after her. I always did. I sometimes thought Kim’s mother had retired to Florida so she wouldn’t have to keep picking up after her daughter.

  “Isn’t that great, Amy?”

  “Amy-the-ex is getting married?” The binoculars flopped against my chest as I snatched her jacket off the ground. I hung it properly on an empty hook.

  Amy-the-ex is not me. That is, she shares my first name.

  We share little, very little, else.

  I am Amy-the-present, in a manner of speaking.

  Amy-the-ex and I did have one thing in common: the same man. That is to say, she was once married to Derek Harlan, my current boyfriend. Amy-the-ex had long carried a torch for the guy even though the marriage has been over for a number of years. To which I say tough noogies because he is mine.

  Now she was getting married?

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yep. Absolutely positive. I heard it from Rhonda who heard it from Sally May when I was getting my hair done.”

  Sally May is a manicurist. Rhonda is my cousin Rhonda. She and her twin brother Riley are two of my nearest and dearest relatives. Not that they were without their challenges. Who wasn’t?

  “Are you sure?” I couldn’t help repeating myself. “How did this happen?” I crossed to the sales counter, threw off my binoculars and tucked them safely away in their softshell case under the counter.

  “When did this happen?” I pressed my hands against the countertop and leaned into Kim standing on the opposite side. “Does Derek know about this?”

  I glanced up the staircase in the middle of the store.

  Birds & Bees is located in the charming three-story Queen Anne Victorian house that also serves as my residence. It further serves as the residence of one of my employees, Esther Pilaster, and Paul Anderson, one of the owner-operators of Brewer’s Biergarten, which sits on Lake Shore Drive adjacent to my place.

  “Don’t ask me. He is your boyfriend.” Kim’s eyes followed mine up the stairs. “He hasn’t said anything?”

  I shook my head. “Not a word.”

  “Not a word about what?”

  I jumped out of my jeans. “Stop doing that!”

 
It was the septuagenarian she-devil herself, Esther Pilaster, or Esther the Pester as I frequently thought of her. In a manner of speaking, I had inherited her. She had been renting a second floor apartment in the home when I bought it from the previous owner—a difficult woman named Gertie Hammer.

  What I did not know was that the two were sisters. As a stipulation of the purchase agreement, I had been forced to agree to let Esther remain in her apartment.

  Ever since Gertie joined us on her very first weekend birding expedition, she had become quite the pest too. It must run in the sisters’ genes. Gertie was always popping into the store with that big camera of hers. It had a lens so long it would have been right at home at the end of some bushy bearded, one-legged pirate’s kneecap.

  Gertie takes hundreds of photos of wild birds to post on her blog and in her scrapbook.

  As for Esther, it had begun to dawn on me that she was never going to leave. In fact, she was now part of my business. A ten percent part to be exact, according to the papers Derek had drawn up and I had signed. Derek was a lawyer and a good one. So I knew there was no way I was breaking that contract.

  If I ever really wanted Esther out, I’d have to buy her out. My finances being what they were—and me selling cheap bird seed at low margins, not pricey rubies with a fat markup, my finances were unlikely to change dramatically—therefore, buying her out was out of the question.

  Esther’s recent investment in Birds & Bees made her a member of an ever-expanding group of partners that now included my mom, my aunt Betty and Kim.

  Some days I had more partners than I had customers. Something was going to have to change. At the rate I was going, soon everybody in Ruby Lake would be my partner. Then who would I sell my goods to? Birds don’t have credit cards.

  “Apparently, Derek hasn’t told Amy, this Amy,” Kim poked me in the chest as she addressed Esther, “that his ex is getting married.”

  Esther cackled. Esther worked part-time hours, those being pretty much whenever it suited her. Not me, her. She’s also given herself the title Assistant Manager and has the badge to prove it.

  Esther is a small woman with narrow shoulders, sagging eyelids and a hawkish nose. She keeps her silvery hair in a tight knot at the back of her head most times. She keeps her gray-blue eyes trained on me more often that I would like. She has a mysterious past that may or may not include a string of broken hearts and international spy rings.

  I am pretty sure she keeps a cat in her apartment, against house rules. Regarding said cat, Esther and I have a sort of Schrödinger’s cat mind game going. That is, if I never actually see her cat with my own eyes, does it really exist?

  Sometimes I lie in bed at night pondering that very question. These are not things a sane woman does. Is it any wonder I have nicknamed her Esther the Pester?

  “So Derek’s breaking up with you and remarrying his ex, eh? I’m not surprised.” Esther grabbed an apron from the hook behind the cash register and tied it snugly around her waist.

  “Hey!” I folded my arms over my chest. “She’s getting married, not remarried,” I snapped.

  I swiveled my head towards my best friend. “That is it, isn’t it? She is getting married not remarried? To Derek, I mean.” The celebrity rags were full of such stories. Didn’t Elizabeth Taylor marry Richard Burton twice?

  “Um, I guess so.”

  “You guess so?” I drilled her so hard with my eyes that a yellow-bellied sapsucker couldn’t have done a better job pounding a string of holes up and down the trunk of a thirty foot maple tree.

  “Easy there, Amy. I’m only teasing. Rhonda says Amy Harlan’s fiancé is some hotshot real estate developer. His investment firm has bought the Rivercrest Country Club. The scuttlebutt is that they are planning to remodel the whole shebang and expand its size.”

  Kim had recently quit the real estate business as a result of some messiness involving her former boss. She still kept her ear to the ground when it came to the Town of Ruby Lake’s real estate doings, however.

  “You are evil.” I swung my finger from one woman to the other. “Both of you.” I pushed past Esther and took the central stairs upward two at a time.

  “Where are you going?” demanded Esther.

  “I left something burning on the stove.”

  “Ha! Derek’s up there. I know,” said Kim, “because I called your apartment phone before I left for work and he answered. Spend the night, did he?”

  “You shouldn’t gossip, Kim.” Esther shook her head side to side. “Now, pull up a stool while I tell you who Mrs. Early told me she saw making out like two school children behind the farmers market yesterday morning.”

  2

  I found Derek right where I had left him earlier that morning—sprawled out on the sofa, gray socked feet on the coffee table, watching golf tournament being broadcast from Scotland on the flat-screen hanging on the exterior wall of my third-floor apartment.

  The sweet scent of maple syrup and toasted pecans hung in the air, a reminder of our pancake breakfast that morning.

  The brown leather sofa and not-so-matching dark green easy chair taking up the bulk of my living room floor space had been fixtures in my parents’ house for as long as I could remember. Now they’d come to rest here in the top-floor apartment along with my mother and me.

  That suited me just fine.

  “Hey, Amy.” Derek greeted me lazily, cradling a beer can in his lap. “What’s up? Taking a break?”

  “Sort of. Scoot over.” I shoved his legs to one side and sat.

  “Sure. Can I get you a beer?”

  “No, thanks. This will do.” I grabbed the open can from his hands and tipped its contents down my throat. “So,” I cleared my throat. “I hear your ex is getting married again?”

  A red flush rose along the side of Derek’s neck. His hands fiddled with the remote control. “You heard about that, huh?”

  “I heard about that.” I pressed my finger against his chin and forced his head around so that his eyes were on me rather than some guy in a hundred-dollar polo shirt taking a swing at a little white ball.

  The pro swung, a clod of wet grass flew further than his pricey golf ball. The golfer cursed and banged his iron into the sod.

  “What a waste of space,” I said. “They could use all that green space to go bird walking. Why, with a decent pair of binoculars and a cheap digital camera, I could teach that guy to have a lot more fun communing with nature than he seems to be having now. I’ll bet there’s some great birding over there.”

  “That’s Patrick O’Brian. If he looks frustrated, it’s because he’s bogeyed the last two holes and dropped out of the lead. A few more and he’ll be out of contention. Why don’t you suggest that to him?” Derek said on the wave of a chuckle. “Did you know that the Royal Course at—”

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” I chopped the air with my hand. “You are not changing the subject.”

  Derek raised a brow. “I thought the subject was golf?”

  “The subject,” I stressed, “is your ex-wife and marriage. Care to address either or both?”

  Derek forced a small smile. A dimple appeared almost magically on his cheek. I felt my resolve softening. His dimples have that effect on me. He’s tall—when he isn’t loafing on the sofa in a horizontal position—dark and ruggedly handsome, with a touch of gray at the temples. A combination that I find very sexy.

  “I’d been meaning to talk to you about that. In fact—” The remote control slipped out of his hand and slid down the back of the sofa, promptly disappearing under the seat cushion. “Oops.” He thrust a hand in after it.

  “No you don’t.” I grabbed his hand and squeezed his fingers. “Never mind that. I’ll fish it out later.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  And who knew what else I’d find when I did go sofa cushion fishing? Esther had a way of breezing in and out of my apartment as if it were her own. She’s been known to squirrel away all sorts of things under the cushions, including a sl
ender bottle of bourbon and some knitting-in-progress that looked suspiciously like a leisure outfit for a cat.

  Once, I found a pair of tiny booties and what looked like a tail warmer, all fashioned out of gray yarn. When I asked Esther about the items, because who else could they have belonged to, she insisted they were for the stray cats at the animal shelter. I wasn’t sure I believed her, but I let it go.

  A male robin appeared at the bird feeder outside the living room window and grabbed an unshelled black oil sunflower seed, distracting me momentarily from my thoughts. A second and then a third robin joined it. The American Robin is a gregarious bird.

  I patted Derek on the knee. “Back to your ex.”

  “Amy met this guy, Tom Visconti, two, three months ago. Two weeks ago, he asked her to marry him and she said yes.”

  “Wow,” I whistled. “The guy moves fast.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” I said hurriedly. “What do you know about him?”

  “Not much. We’ve never met. When I drop Maeve off at her mom’s house, from the car I can sometimes see him inside through the windows but he’s never come out and introduced himself.”

  “Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  Derek shrugged. “Maybe he feels awkward, what with me being the ex.”

  “He’s going to have to get used to having you around sometime. Like it or not, you are going to be a part of his life, if only because of your daughter.”

  “True.”

  “Amy?” Derek wrapped his hands around mine.

  “Yes?” I watched the robins hop from perch to perch as they pecked for more seed.

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Huh? Those robins are so cute. Did you see the way that little one—” I froze. “Wait. What?” I twisted quickly, banging my knees against his.

  Derek grinned. “I asked if you would be my wife.”

  I swallowed so hard I figured I’d be looking for my tongue for a week. “I-I mean, that is…YES!”