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  PANIC IN THE MORNING

  “Julia? Come right away! I’m at the shop.” The vibration in my sister’s voice said it wasn’t time to ask questions.

  “Be right there.” I jumped into my Bean boots and pulled on my jacket. The sky was steel gray and the air was so damp I could feel the moisture on my face as I ran. It was going to rain, hard and soon.

  My mind raced as I sped down Main Street. Lupine Design had been vandalized again. That had to be the reason for the shakiness in Livvie’s voice.

  Once again, there were three police cars in front of the store, lights ablaze. But this time there was also an ambulance with its back doors opened wide.

  Out of breath and sweating in my waterproof jacket, I skidded to a stop in front of Lupine Design. I registered that there was no one in the ambulance, and the two EMTs lounged behind it. When I glanced through the display window, my instant impression was that everything was as it should have been—the shelves were upright, the was floor clean—but I didn’t take time to process what that meant.

  Then I saw the uniformed Busman’s Harbor officer, standing, arms crossed, in front of the door . . .

  Books by Barbara Ross

  Maine Clambake Mysteries

  CLAMMED UP

  BOILED OVER

  MUSSELED OUT

  FOGGED INN

  ICED UNDER

  STOWED AWAY

  STEAMED OPEN

  SEALED OFF

  SHUCKED APART

  MUDDLED THROUGH

  Collections

  EGG NOG MURDER

  (with Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis)

  YULE LOG MURDER

  (with Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis)

  HAUNTED HOUSE MURDER

  (with Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis)

  HALLOWEEN PARTY MURDER

  (with Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis)

  Jane Darrowfield Mysteries

  JANE DARROWFIELD, PROFESSIONAL

  BUSYBODY

  JANE DARROWFIELD AND THE MADWOMAN

  NEXT DOOR

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.

  MUDDLED THROUGH

  Barbara Ross

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  PANIC IN THE MORNING

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  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

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  RECIPES

  Acknowledgments

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2022 by Barbara Ross

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

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

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the Publisher and neither the Author nor the Publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  The K and Teapot logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-3570-6

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-3570-6 (ebook)

  This book is dedicated to our Maine Friday night Zoom group, especially the regulars: Dick and Anne Cass, Brenda Buchanan and Diane Kenty, Gayle Lynds and John Sheldon, and Barbara Kelly. Bill and I couldn’t have made it through the pandemic without you all!

  CHAPTER ONE

  I spotted the whirl of blue lights the moment I left my mother’s house. I squinted into the morning sun, trying to make out what was happening. There were three police cars stopped in front of Lupine Design, the pottery shop and studio at the end of the last commercial block on Main Street. I started down the sidewalk, picking up my pace from walk to jog to run as I went. For the past two years, my sister Livvie worked at Lupine Design during the off-season.

  The closer I got, the faster I ran. The door of one of the police cars hung open, as if the driver had leapt out in a rush. The double doors of the pottery shop were open, too. I couldn’t imagine what was going on inside. My heart hammered, not only from the run.

  I stopped outside the big display window and looked into the store. Livvie stood talking to Jamie Dawes, one of Busman’s Harbor’s police officers and a childhood friend. I exhaled with relief. My sister was okay.

  But all around her the shop was in chaos. Broken pottery littered the floor. Display shelves were tipped over. Cabinet doors hung open.

  Livvie leaned in to say something to Jamie. A thick lock of her auburn hair fell across her profile, obscuring her face. She was almost his height, and Jamie was tall. He said something and Livvie nodded.

  I hurried inside. “What happened?”

  They turned, surprised to see me. “I found the place like this when I opened the store this morning.” Livvie was unnaturally pale, and her voice shook. Her trembling hand swept around the shop, where the glass display shelves were empty, knocked over, some leaning against others. The dark wood floor was littered with ceramic shards in Lupine Design’s signature ocean colors—blues, greens, grays, and white. I recognized the rounded body of a teapot, the lip of a serving platter, the handle of a pitcher. The original shape of most of the pieces had been obliterated.

  On a side wall of the shop, a door I had never noticed before stood open. Beyond it, a blue-gray staircase led up to a landing, then turned and disappeared out of sight. “Zoey?” I gasped. Livvie’s boss, Zoey Butterfield, the owner and entrepreneur behind Lupine Design, lived in the apartment over the store.

  “Not here,” Jamie reassured me. “We’ve checked.” As he said it, I heard the clomp of footsteps overhead, then the clearing of a throat from the basement below us. The other Busman’s Harbor cops were moving around the building.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “We were just getting to that.” Jamie took back control of the conversation. It was his interview. He was in charge.

  “Yesterday she told me she was going early to collect local clay,” Livvie said. “She warned me I’d be opening the studio this morning because she probably wouldn’t be back in time.”

  Jamie pulled his cell phone out, thumb at the ready.

  “You won’t be able to reach her with tha
t unless she’s already on the way home,” Livvie told him. “I know where she goes and there’s no service there.”

  Jamie dialed the number Livvie gave him and left a message carefully worded not to cause panic. “Following up on some inquiries,” he said after introducing himself. “Please get back to me right away.”

  “Can you think of anyone who might have done this?” Jamie’s voice was calm, businesslike but not abrupt. I imagined he used it with all the upset citizens he dealt with. But then he put his hand on Livvie’s shaking arm and squeezed, a gesture reserved for a good friend.

  Livvie swallowed hard. “No. No one.”

  Jamie slipped his phone back into his pocket. “The officers will be here for a while, taking photos and fingerprints. It would be helpful if you could figure out if anything is missing, beyond what’s broken.”

  Livvie gave a curt nod to indicate she accepted the assignment. My body had relaxed the moment I’d seen her standing in the shop unharmed. She, in contrast, was still tensed like a jungle cat about to pounce. I moved next to her, fit myself beneath her shoulder and hugged her rib cage. I was the older sister, but she had been the bigger one since adolescence.

  “I can’t imagine we’ll find any usable prints.” Jamie looked around at the mess. “This stuff probably gets touched by all of the staff when you’re shelving, and by lots of customers, too.”

  “Over here.” Livvie led us to the other side of the shop where high counters ran along the wall, left over from the nineteenth-century apothecary that had originally occupied the building. Zoey had painted the once dark wood the same blue gray as the stairs to her apartment. The paint had been applied in wide strokes that allowed a bricky-pink undercoat to show through in places. Normally, the effect was warm and gorgeous against the white walls of the large, light-filled store. Today, the cabinet doors hung open, broken pieces of glass still in some of their panes.

  Livvie pointed at the mess on the wide planks of the floor. Pieces of glass were mixed with the ceramic shards. “If you’re looking for fingerprints, the broken pottery around here will be your best bet. Our most expensive pieces were kept locked in these cabinets. I washed them myself and placed them in there at the end of the fall season. I doubt anyone has touched them since.”

  “Thanks,” Jamie said. “I’m going to let the other officers know what you’ve told me and then I’m going out to look for Ms. Butterfield. The sooner she gets here, the better. I’d like to spare her being unprepared for the sight of patrol cars in front of her place when she returns. You said you know where she is?”

  Livvie rattled off a set of directions that I immediately recognized led to the Old Culver property. Back when he was alive, with the Culver family’s permission, our dad had used the easy access to a protected inlet that their private road provided, to load firewood into the small boat we used to take it out to Morrow Island.

  During Maine’s all too brief summer season, twice a day, the Snowden Family Clambake brought two hundred guests over to the island and provided them with an authentic Maine “dining experience.” I managed the business. Livvie’s husband, Sonny, ran the crew that cooked lobsters, clams, potatoes, onions, ears of corn, and eggs under saltwater-soaked tarps and over the fire the wood provided. Livvie was in charge of the kitchen where she and two other cooks put out the clam chowder we served for the first course and the blueberry grunt we offered for dessert. My mother did all the buying for and managed the gift shop.

  Livvie’s directions to the Old Culver property included a lot of “turn at the green house” and “take the veer left, not the slight left or the turn left,” and “look for the break in the hedge,” type directions. I could tell by the furrow in Jamie’s brow he was having trouble keeping up. He was a native and a first responder, but there was no dwelling on the Culver property, no town or county road. He would never have been there, and he wouldn’t be able to get GPS directions where he was going.

  “I know where it is,” I volunteered. “I’ll go with you.” We hadn’t used the Old Culver property for years. Now we trucked the wood directly to our boat at the town pier, but I was confident I could still find it.

  Jamie hesitated, wanting to argue, but then gave in to relief. “Great. Give me a minute and we’ll go.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  We drove in the easy silence that comes from long friendship. Jamie steered us out of Busman’s Harbor, across the swing bridge onto Thistle Island, then over the second bridge to Westclaw Point. He didn’t need me to give him directions for this early part of the ride.

  The sky was bright blue with high puffy clouds riding on a stiff breeze. In mid-April there were mere suggestions of buds on the trees. When I’d lived in New York City for eight years for business school and then work, I’d fallen in love with spring. The warm days, full of promise and renewal. The flowering trees and shrubs in Battery Park, where I went for my evening runs.

  But when I’d moved back to Maine five years earlier, I’d had to move my favorite season allegiance back to the fall. Spring, such as it was, arrived in Maine almost a full month later than in New York. When it came it brought gray, cold, rainy days, broken occasionally by sunny ones like today. Reacquaintance had taught me that these rare nice days were a tease. Maine spring was like Lucy Van Pelt jerking the football from Charlie Brown. As soon as we began to believe warmer weather would come, Mother Nature would pull it away. You could almost hear the wind call, “Blockhead.”

  April was mud season. The snow had melted, bathing the landscape in water. The trees and shrubs weren’t yet absorbing the moisture from the soil. April’s torrential rains, added to all that, created a boggy, miserable mess. In Maine, April was to be endured, not celebrated.

  “I’m not looking forward to this conversation.” Jamie adjusted the visor to keep the sun out of his eyes. “How much do you think all that stuff was worth?”

  “At retail, a lot.” Lupine Design, pronounced LU-pin, like the wildflowers that filled Maine meadows and lined the roads in June, specialized in gorgeous, sophisticated, expensive, handmade pieces. “At cost, I have no idea. I also have no idea how long it will take to remake the inventory they need to fill orders.” The retail shop was, for Lupine Design, a showcase but something of a sideline. Zoey made most of her money selling her wares through high-end gift shops and online orders. She was a prime example of the new kind of entrepreneur Maine had attracted in recent years. She lived and worked in Busman’s Harbor because she wanted to, not because her business depended on the location.

  We fell silent again. I glanced at Jamie’s profile as he drove, focused on the road. He was one of those blonds with tannable skin, dark brows and dark lashes, a state of affairs Livvie pronounced, “desperately unfair.” His parents’ property backed up to my parents’ yard and we’d grown up together. He’d gotten tall, his face had lengthened, and his features sharpened, but a slight fullness in his cheeks still gave me glimpses of the boy I’d known.

  Over the winter, Jamie and I had gone out to eat or to the movies a few times. I suspected these outings had been engineered by my mother and sister to distract me from my tragic, single state. Nothing had come of it. Probably we’d been friends too long to change our status. At least that was my assessment.

  My family refused to give up hope. They, and by they in this case I meant Mom and Livvie, fervently hoped I would stay in Busman’s Harbor. They believed that without a romantic partner and meaningful winter work it would be hard to hold me. They weren’t wrong. Only the inertia born of a bad set of circumstances kept me from exploring my options more actively. Besides, there were worse things than being loved and wanted by your family.

  I pointed out the turn at the green house to Jamie and set us on the right road at the intersection with the slight left, veer left, and hard left turns. Together he and I hunted for the break in the thick vegetation that could only charitably be described as a hedge. The opening would be almost impossible to spot once the buds on the branches turned
into leaves. When we were through the hedge, the dirt road was familiar to me. The heavy patrol car, built for speed but not for traction, spun its wheels. They don’t call it mud season for nothing. Jamie cursed under his breath, but kept the big car moving.

  The road came around a long, wide curve and ended at a sweep of marsh that opened to the West Bay, a protected spot surrounded by summer houses up on the rocky hillside. The faded browns of the winter marsh grass spread out toward the deep blue of the bay. Jamie parked behind a big, bright red SUV. We got out and walked to the edge of the marsh.

  I spotted Zoey before he did. Or I assumed it was Zoey, a figure in a puffy navy-blue vest and tall army-green rubber boots. She was bent over, digging in the mud with a shovel. I waved and called out, but a stiff wind coming off the water blew my words away. I poked Jamie in the arm and pointed. We trudged in the figure’s direction.

  Eventually she straightened up and watched us come toward her, a puzzled but not panicked expression on her face. I’d been introduced to her before, a few times, when I’d buzzed in and out of Lupine Design to pick up Livvie or deliver a message. Zoey was a pretty woman with a cascade of curly brown hair that she had tamed with a blue bandana. She was broad-shouldered, broad-hipped, and pleasantly curvy. With her large brown eyes and generous smile, I guessed she attracted her share of attention. I judged her to be in her midthirties, same as me.

  “Can I help you, Officer?” she shouted when we got closer.

  Jamie waited to speak until we reached her. “Ms. Butterfield?”

  She swallowed and nodded that she was.

  “I’m Officer Dawes with the Busman’s Harbor P.D. This is Julia Snowden. Her sister Livvie Ramsey works for you.”