Mayor for murder, p.1
Mayor for Murder, page 1
* * * * *
FREE EBOOK OFFER
Sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know about our new releases, special bargains, and giveaways, and as a bonus receive a FREE ebook!
Sign up for the Gemma Halliday newsletter!
* * * * *
* * * * *
MAYOR FOR MURDER
a Merry Wrath Mystery
by
LESLIE LANGTRY
* * * * *
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2022 by Leslie Langtry
Cover design by Janet Holmes
Gemma Halliday Publishing
http://www.gemmahallidaypublishing.com
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 both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
* * * * *
CHAPTER ONE
"I didn't kidnap the mayor," Betty insisted.
She was setting up a bunch of Barbie dolls in a diorama where the ninja Barbies were about to take out a Boy Scout troop made up of damaged Ken dolls who looked like they'd been through this kind of thing before.
I picked up one of the battered boy dolls, who had a tiny ninja star embedded in his forehead and a Sharpie tattoo on his bicep that read BETTY IS A BADASS. I glanced at Betty's parents on the sofa, who offered me the kind of nervous smiles that you might see on a pair of bacon-draped chihuahuas who accidentally wandered into a lion's den.
I put the toy down and folded my arms over my chest in an attempt to look menacing. "Well, the mayor is missing and you are the only one who's threatened to do that for years."
It wasn't working on the eleven-year-old.
"Yeah." Betty added a samurai sword to one of the ninja's hands. "But I didn't."
Tearing my eyes away from the diorama, I pressed on. "Where were you last night?"
"At a thing," Betty evaded, still not making eye contact with me.
"A thing…" I echoed.
She shrugged. "At a place…"
"What place?" I asked.
The kid ignored the question as she continued. "With people…"
Less than twenty-four hours ago, Mayor John Van Meter and his wife were having dinner at Oleo's, when he ran to his car to get his wife a sweater and never returned.
The car door was open and May Van Meter's sweater was on the front seat. The keys were on the ground. But John Van Meter was gone. And he hadn't shown up since.
Which was why I was sitting in Betty's living room, with her very nervous parents who'd just returned from a month-long stay at Rest Haven for Stressed-Out Parents, grilling my scout.
After a moment, she looked me in the eye. "The election is in a couple of days," she said. "Ava's going to win, and then I'll be handling black ops for the new mayor, so what's the big deal?"
"Oh, I don't know." I corrected the grip of one of the dolls who was wielding a sickle improperly (it's all in the grip). "Probably the fact that his wife is in hysterics and wants him back," I said. Why didn't I ask about the black ops thing? Ava wasn't mayor…yet.
How serious was this? Very. How serious was I that Betty was a suspect? I didn't think she did it. Or at least, I hoped she didn't do it. The probability rate was most likely 99% that she was innocent. Okay, maybe more like 79% if I'm completely honest. The fact that she'd had a CIA assassin (who wasn't an assassin because the CIA doesn't condone assassination) for a babysitter while her parents were recuperating from, well, Betty, tended to lower the odds. Well, that and the fact that ever since she was in first grade, "kidnapping the mayor" for varying reasons seemed to be on the kid's bucket list.
That's a lot to take in. I'll explain. Betty's parents needed a break from Betty being Betty, so they asked Hilly Vinton, a friend of the troop and CIA assassin who wasn't an assassin but totally is, to stay with her while they were gone. To be fair, they probably didn't know about Hilly's job—they just knew that she was my friend and that she and Betty had hit it off and thought this was someone who could handle the tiny terrorist-in-training. It most likely never occurred to them that they were throwing gasoline on a fire, and I would've told them that if they'd asked me before skipping town. I had hoped that nothing would go wrong and thought things had gone smoothly, until the mayor vanished.
Mayor Van Meter was in his sixties and was extremely dull. He didn't really do much of anything in the last four years besides hold town council meetings, but it was still a surprise when eleven-year-old Ava, one of my scouts, was kicking his butt in the polls.
There was no rule in Who's There, Iowa, requiring a candidate to be of a certain age, and until thirty years ago, you didn't even have to be human, as was evidenced by the fact that we once had a donkey as mayor.
Ava was the girl in my troop destined for leadership. Her dream was to be CEO of a major insurance company, and she believed that being the youngest mayor in the history of the state of Iowa would get her there.
If Ava was the JFK of mayors, Betty was her G. Gordon Liddy. That kid had a dark side that was as scary as it was awesome.
My name is Merry Wrath, and I'm an ex-CIA field agent turned Girl Scout leader in my hometown of Who's There. I wouldn't be an ex-CIA agent if the Vice President at the time, because of a grudge against my Senator dad, hadn't "accidentally" outted me on CNN while I was undercover with Chechens.
My real name is Fionnaghuala Merrygold Czrygy. When I left the spy life, I took my mother's maiden name and became Merry Wrath and moved back home to small-town Who's There, Iowa to figure out what I wanted to do next. That was five years ago, and I still didn't have a job, aside from being a volunteer Girl Scout leader to my amazing troop.
I'd tell you that life was pretty good with the exception of interrogating one of my scouts for the possible kidnapping of the mayor.
Carol Anne and Roderick, Betty's parents, looked like they wished they were back on "vacation" recuperating instead of here. Their choice of babysitter had worried my best friend and co-leader, Kelly, and me. Now I was even more concerned. Because what if Hilly had done something with the mayor at the little girl's request?
"Um, Betty?" Carol Anne asked hesitantly. "This isn't true, right?"
"Of course not, Mom." Betty gave the other Barbie ninjas various weapons that included an Uzi, a flamethrower, and something that said DEATH RAY on the side, made out of a drinking straw and an Altoids tin.
"Oh good," her mother said unconvincingly. Seeing Carol Anne's skepticism was a concern. Over the years she'd insisted that aliens had abducted her multiple times with the sole intent of teaching her how to play the bassoon.
Roderick shifted uneasily in his seat. "Well, that's good enough for me. I think you should handle it from here, Merry. It really seems like a scout thing."
A scout thing? What exactly did Roderick think we did in our meetings? And what was I going to do about Betty and the missing mayor?
CHAPTER TWO
One Week Earlier…
"The mayor debate is tomorrow," Ava piped up during our troop meeting. "I need talking points…whatever that is."
"Maybe they mean ninja star points?" Betty asked.
Lauren nodded. "I'll bet that's what they mean. Do we have enough for the debate, and who do we throw them at?"
Inez rolled her eyes. "The candidates throw them at each other, duh!"
"Talking points," Kelly interjected, "are based on your position on the issues."
Ten little girls looked up from the craft project they were working on.
"What does that mean?" Inez asked.
We were having a meeting at my house. Well, my second house. I actually lived across the street with my husband in what had previously been just his house. Because I was fond of the first house I'd ever owned, I'd kept it.
For the past few weeks, an older group of seventy-something ladies were living here. No, they weren't renters. They were a group of six hermits we'd found at an abandoned Girl Scout camp, where they'd been living for more than fifty years. I offered them my other house as a place to stay while they figured out what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives.
Currently, they were on a road trip around the Midwest to see what they'd been missing during their five-decade-long, self-imposed isolation. So once again, my troop had the house for meetings.
"It means," I replied, "that Ava should have a list of issues that she thinks are important. The debate is the perfect way to tell the public wh
"Okay." The girl shrugged and went back to making a paper-mache bust of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
It was because of Ava's candidacy that we were studying women's history and focusing on the Suffrage Movement when women got the right to vote. Betty and two of the Kaitlyns were working in clay on a sculpture of a suffragette engaged in combat against a policeman. The girls had recently learned that the fight for the right to vote included actual fighting from women bodyguards who studied, and I'm not making this up, Suffrajitsu.
"Are you ready for the debate?" Kelly asked.
"Oh yeah," Ava said. "Betty and the Kaitlyns have been helping me with it."
I had four Kaitlyns in my troop, all with the same last initial of M, all of whom looked exactly alike and had mothers improbably named Ashley. They spoke in unison and were very hard to tell apart. It was interesting that Betty was working so much with the Kaitlyns instead of her usual co-conspirators Lauren, Ava, and Inez.
I worried that this disruption in in troop dynamics might cause a rift in some interdimensional force field, leading to dire repercussions later. But then Kelly explained that with Lauren busy as a junior zookeeper, Inez spending a lot of time with Esme (one of the older women who lived in my house), and with Ava interested only in her campaign, the Kaitlyns were the next logical step. This was also because the remaining girls, Hannah and Caterina, were super sweet kids who never said anything bad about anybody and would be unlikely to help with smear campaigns against a sixty-something man.
"We need to set up your talking points." Lauren eyed Ava.
"I do, now that I know what they are," Ava admitted. "By the way, I hope you'll all be at the debate tomorrow. I've got VIP passes for all of you so you can sit in the front row."
"Too bad we can't vote." Hannah shook her head as she stuffed Kleenex into a chicken wire VOTES FOR WOMEN…OR ELSE sign.
"I offered to make fake IDs," Betty announced.
One look from Kelly and I said, "That would be wrong. We discussed that."
Currently, I was working to dial Betty back a notch or ten. Her parents had already threatened to send the girl to boarding school in Texas, and Kelly had asked me to keep an eye on the kid.
But dialing back Betty would be like chaining a dinosaur to the ground with chains made from toilet paper.
"I was just kidding." Betty rolled her eyes.
I'll bet.
"Is it going to be on TV?" Caterina asked.
"It'll be streamed," Betty said. "My brother Bart is back from college. He's going to handle it."
"There." I sat back and nudged Kelly. "Bart will handle it."
Kelly shook her head. While not Betty's biggest fan, Bart was still Betty's brother and susceptible to blackmail from his little sister. He never really did anything wrong but was easy to manipulate because Betty was a master at making him feel as if he had.
"What are you making?" I deflected and asked as Betty turned away from the clay and began putting strips of gluey newspaper on a balloon.
"It's Huey Long." She slapped another strip of wet newspaper on the balloon.
Lauren nodded. "Betty's into Huey Long now."
"The governor of Louisiana in the 1920s?" Kelly asked with some surprise.
I cut in, "What happened to Scottish Independence?"
"I'm still all about that," Betty said. "But I'm kind of feeling Huey Long right now."
Of course she was. Huey was a mastermind at corruption. "And this doesn't have anything to do with you helping Ava with her political campaign?"
Betty nodded."It totally does."
"Hey!" Caterina pointed at the balloon. "He didn't have anything to do with getting women the right to vote!"
"How do we know he didn't?" Betty asked.
Caterina and the other girls looked to me. Kelly shook her head slightly, indicating I was on my own.
"Let's stick to the project at hand," I decided. "You can work on Huey Long another time."
Betty shrugged and popped the balloon, causing it to deflate into a sticky mess on the table. "I'll do one of Emily Davison."
"Who's that?" two of the Kaitlyns asked in unison—something they did unnervingly often.
"She walked out in front of a racing horse to die so women could vote," Betty said.
An audible gasp went up around the room.
"Was the horse okay?" Caterina's eyes grew wide and watery.
Ten concerned pairs of eyes turned to me. My troop loved horses, and if they could, we'd ride them every weekend. In fact, the girls had asked if they could ride horses to school and tie them up to the bicycle rack, but the principal nixed that idea for logical reasons. That and none of them owned a horse.
"Yes, of course," I reassured them with no idea if that was the truth. "The horse was fine. He lived to old age. But I don't think Emily Davison is a good role model."
"Why not?" Lauren asked me.
"I don't know everything about her," I admitted. "But she did some pretty bizarre things, like setting fire to mailboxes and planting bombs to get her point across."
Kelly closed her eyes and sighed, indicating I was going to get a lecture later.
"That's awesome!" Inez pumped her fist into the air. "I'm going to make some paper mache bombs!"
"And mailboxes on fire!" Lauren added. "Do we have any orange tissue paper?"
Ava turned to Betty. "She sounds a lot like you."
"Thanks," Betty grunted. "Mom thinks Emily Davison is like, my great-aunt times like, a thousand or something."
My heart skipped a beat as the girls congratulated Betty. I'd always suspected she'd had some scary characters in her family tree. Oh well. A raging suffragette was nothing compared to someone awful, like…
"I'm also related to Ivan the Terrible," Betty added. "On my dad's side. And Grandpa said something about some creeper cousin named Rasputin, whoever he was."
I'd like to say I was surprised, but I wasn't. Hopefully I could have some sort of influence over the child before she went mad and killed her heir or conned royalty into think she could heal hemophiliacs. I still had plenty of time before anything like that happened.
Right?
CHAPTER THREE
The community center was packed the next night as one of the Kaitlyns, acting as an usher, led Kelly, my husband Rex, and me to our seats in the front row. Someone had marked off the first two rows with crime scene tape (and by someone, I mean probably Betty). Kaitlyn wore a state-of-the-art headset with mic and carried a clipboard. Every few seconds it looked like she was listening to someone through the headphones.
"Cue the clown," she said.
A clown with neon yellow curly hair, a big red nose, and huge shoes stepped onto the stage and began juggling rubber chickens.
"Why is there a clown?" Kelly asked the girl. "For entertainment?"
Kaitlyn looked at her as if she felt sorry for her leader. "It's a statement on the troubling times this city faces and a satire of…" she looked down at the clipboard "…our government being a joke."
Our mouths fell open in surprise.
"I don't really know what that means, but he's free and Betty thought it would be a good warmup act," Kaitlyn said. "You can sit here." She motioned to three empty chairs.
May Van Meter, the current mayor's wife, sat a few seats away. She looked like she'd travelled through time to be here, wearing a pink suit with pillbox hat and white gloves. The stern, matronly woman stared straight ahead with a grimace on her face as she tightly clutched her handbag.
"She really fought us," Kaitlyn whispered to me. "We told her that these seats are reserved, but she said she's the mayor's wife, so what could we do?"
I looked around, but there was only one usher present.
"Who's we?" I asked.
"Oh." The girl waved me off. "It's just me. The other Kaitlyns are all grounded."
