The Unwatched Kettle

By Maryjane Elizabeth Jones

First entry in the new Phantom Cooks Mystery Series, three friends in Maine start a small catering business, but when a severed thumb turns up in their potato leek soup the women spend more time trying to stay out of jail than in the kitchen as they solve this lighthearted murder mystery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AbsolutelyAmazingEbooks.com
• Release date: Jul 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311429933

Book preview

The

UnWatched Kettle

A Phantom Cooks Mystery

Maryjane Elizabeth Jones

ABSOLUTELY AMAZING eBOOKS

Published by Whiz Bang LLC, 926 Truman Avenue, Key West, Florida 33040, USA

Copyright © 2013 by Gee Whiz Entertainment LLC.

Electronic compilation copyright © 2013 by Whiz Bang LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized ebook editions.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. While the author has made every effort to provide accurate information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their contents.

For information contact

[e-mail]

Chapter One

Marcia Lambert hardly ever cooked for her husband, but she often cooked for others. Last year she and her two girlfriends, Peggy Doyle and Jean Turlington, had formed Phantom Cooks, a small catering service that delivered a home-cooked meal right to your doorstep. All it took was a phone call and four-hour’s notice.

Her husband Bradley didn’t mind this culinary oversight of his own family. Actually, he preferred Big Mac’s to Duck à la Orange or Fettuccini al Fredo with a shrimp-based sauce. Bradley’s taste buds were plain and simple, no need to experiment with any foods more foreign than Taco Bell.

That’s why he was caught off-guard when his wife phoned him from the Danger Rocks police station to tell him that a customer had found a man’s thumb in her potato leek soup. And that she and the other Phantom Cooks were under arrest for murder.

Thankfully, Bradley was a lawyer.

≈≈≈

Danger Rocks is a small village (population 1,857) on the coast of Maine, not all that far from Portland. The area took its name from the lighthouse on its boulder-strewn shores, a hazardous passage for whaling ships back in the 1800s. The straights between Danger Rocks and Wickijibi Island was the shortest distance between Bangor and the deepwater harbor of Portland to the south.

No one knew where the name of the island came from. Wickijibi was no known Native American word. One amateur historian attributed it to pre-Columbian Norsemen, but there is no supporting evidence to this theory. Another wag claimed it was gibberish, a name given by some long-ago village idiot. That made about as much sense as anything else.

Marcia Lambert had grown up in Danger Rocks, her father being the local minister. His small church – that picturesque structure with a tall spire overlooking the town – was officially Presbyterian, although its congregation also included Methodists, Baptists, Jews, and two practicing Buddhists.

The current position of village idiot was open, but Marcia considered Police Chief Montgomery Knoble a prime candidate for that position. Otherwise why would he have arrested Marcia and her fellow Phantom Cooks for the murder of an encyclopedia salesman from Knoxville, Tennessee?

The body of Fred Grote – minus his thumb – was found on Wickijibi Island, which is a state park favored by boaters and campers in the summer months, and an abandoned snow-covered rock during the winter. That’s why Grote’s presence on Wickijibi was a mystery, this being January, not an ideal time for camping.

The only connection between the fat salesman and the Phantom Cooks was his thumb turning up in the cream-based soup they had delivered to the Angleton family on Lost Pelican Lane. Fortunately, it only took Bradley’s uttering those magic words habeas corpus to spring Marcia and her pals from the holding cell at the Danger Rocks police station.

Chief Knoble was new to town and didn’t know the way things worked hereabouts. In the old days the police chief wouldn’t have bothered arresting the wives of three prominent townsfolk on such a ridiculous charge. If the encyclopedia salesman’s death were indeed a case of murder, he’d have known that the guilty party couldn’t be anyone local. Danger Rocks residences didn’t commit crimes more serious than overtime parking in front of the public library.

Nobody could figure out what a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman was doing in this area anyhow. The Internet and Wikipedia had all but put Compton’s and Britannica out of business. There wasn’t a fact in the world you couldn’t get by tapping a few keys on your laptop PC.

Jesse Angleton’s wife admitted that the salesman had knocked on her door only last week, but assured the police chief that he hadn’t left his right thumb behind. Arlene said she told him her kids were grown and living in Boston, so she had no need of a $300 set of encyclopedias, even if he did offer an easy 10-part payment plan.

When contacted, Everyman’s Encyclopedia Company denied having any door-to-door salesmen on its payroll, these days its products being computer software, not printed books.

Based on that, Chief Knoble figured the victim to be a con man working small towns and backwoods communities, selling a product that would never be delivered. With $100 down, the balance promised in 10 installments, a clever crook could make himself a good illegitimate wage.

No one could figure out how the late Fred Grote had gotten over to Wickijibe Island. No boat had been found, and the ferry service was closed this time of year. Chief Knoble couldn’t locate any fishermen who had taken the salesman over to the closed-for-the-winter state park. And all boat rentals were accounted for.

Kerry Lewis, the harbormaster’s son, did say he’d spotted a light on the island one night last week, possibly a campfire. But he’d attributed it to park rangers making their rounds.

It was a park ranger named Benjamin Bullmoose who had discovered the frozen body. Benny was a full-blooded Mohican – living proof of the error in James Fenimore Cooper’s book title. He’d been a ranger since graduating four years ago from Fullbright Junior College in the nearby town of the same name. His father was a tribal elder and sometimes pit boss at an Indian casino down in Connecticut.

Benny had never encountered a dead man before, although he’d once discovered a decomposing whale on a state-owned beach to the north. The 300-pound ersatz encyclopedia salesman reminded him of that whale, lying there on his back, belly protruding into the air like a bloated Megaptera novaeangliae. He’d radioed his supervisor who told him to turn the matter over to the local police.

Enter Montgomery Knoble, the closet law officer to be found.

≈≈≈

Marcia’s husband mostly practiced business law, a boring routine of incorporating small companies, handling land transactions, and waging an occasional lawsuit over property lines. Robert Frost had been right when he wrote, Good fences make good neighbors.

Bradley had never handled a murder case before, especially one involving his own wife and her two best friends.

Oh my, this will be the end of our catering business, Marcia