Crystal's Beau Wedgewood, Minn. Detective Renee Brown Mystery

By Fay Risner

Police Detective Renee Brown is keeping Wedgewood, Minnesota safe. This time the problems are happening on Marceil Pestkey's block. Detective Brown dreads those calls. Marceil Pestkey thinks she can get partial treatment since she's Renee's mother's best friend. Ordinarily, the calls coming in to the dispatcher at night would be handled by the night duty officer. Not when Marceil Pestkey is making the call. She asks for Detective Brown. The drunk riding a cow home in the middle of the night wasn't so hard to handle. It was the next calls that were confusing. One night a neighbor, Crystal Tolivar, across the street from Marceil's house reported a Peeking Tom. Others reported a stalker spending time around the Tolivar house. Marceil and her sister, Tess, watch a man they called the Raincoat man show up when Crystal wasn't home and leave before she comes home. So who is the mysterious man Detective Brown is supposed to catch if he isn't Crystal's Beau?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fay Risner
• Release date: Jul 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370242009

Fay Risner

Fay Risner lives with her husband on a central Iowa acreage along with their chickens, rabbits, goats and cats. A retired Certified Nurse Aide, she now divides her time between writing books, livestock chores, working in her flower beds, the garden and going fishing with her husband. In the winter, she makes quilts. Fay writes books in various genre and languages. Historical mystery series like Stringbean westerns and Amazing Gracie Mysteries, Nurse Hal's Amish series set in southern Iowa and books for Caregivers about Alzheimer's. She uses 12 font print in her books and 14 font print in her novellas to make them reader friendly. Now her books are in Large Print. Her books have a mid western Iowa and small town flavor. She pulls the readers into her stories, making it hard for them to put a book down until the reader sees how the story ends. Readers say the characters are fun to get to know and often humorous enough to cause the readers to laugh out loud. The books leave readers wanting a sequel or a series so they can read about the characters again. Enjoy Fay Risner's books and please leave a review to make others familiar with her work.

Book preview

Crystal's Beau

Wedgewood, Minnesota's Police Detective Renee Brown Mystery

Book Three

Novella

Fay Risner

Cover Art

All Rights Reserved

Author Fay Risner

Published by Fay Risner at Smashwords.com

Copyright (c) 2017

All rights reserved

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 recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to the actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locals are entirely coincidental. Excerpts from this book cannot be used without written permission from the author.

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Fay Risner

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Prologue

Hi, I'm Wedgewood, Minnesota's only police detective. My name is Renee Brown. My town has a small, three person police force. That's why I'm the only detective.

I was born and raised in Wedgewood. My family is one in a long line of Browns that helped found the town.

Most of the time my days are pretty routine. That includes both work and my private life. My boyfriend is Pike County Coroner Ross Klink. So on our dates, you can imagine the type of shop talk we swap.

Sometimes there is no accounting for my 6th sense. Have you ever had one of those days when you had a feeling something was going to go wrong? It's a worrisome nagging that I feel clear to my bones. What it does is makes me wish I'd stayed in bed.

One morning recently, I knew when I got up with that feeling it wasn't going to be one of my better days. Actually, I woke up in the night with dread coursing through me like a lightning bolt struck me. I knew the feeling to be one of those second sight warnings that comes over members of my family from time to time.

My sister and I were born with second sight, and my mother has it. She lays the blame for it on to her mother's Indian blood.

With me, the warnings are far and in between. Usually, I feel blindsided when I receive a forewarning of something ominous to come. I'm guessing by the time second sight passed from one generation of my mother's family to the next the gene I inherited was strained down until it's diluted to third or fourth sight.

That night I wasn't just dreaming the turmoil outside. The noise turned out a bucket pouring soaker with thunderous rumbles and forked lightning that lit the sky. That realization didn't make the feeling of dread go away. I spent the remaining hours until daylight trying to figure out what was going to happen to me to ruin my day.

Finally, dreary light shone through my windows. I expected to feel better now that the rainstorm had ended, but the gray cloud cover and drizzle didn't help my disposition.

What I'm going to tell you about happened a while back. Now the premonition I felt in the night, the storm and my feeling of dread for the day to come are all scrambled up in my memory. Jumbled up with a Guernsey milk cow and Mrs. Marceil Pestkey.

During our growing up years, Mrs. Pestkey was aptly called a pest by my sister, Janice, and me. She can be a real pest in spurts. Sometimes, the police department doesn't get a call from her for months. Then again when she is on a roll, she thinks she should get special favors from the department, because she is my mother's best friend. That's when she does name dropping to get immediate help. My name is the one she drops.

A call to come to work about either one, the cow or Mrs. Pestkey, would have been enough to give me a headache. Just my bad luck, I got stuck with both the cow and Mrs. Pestkey in the same 24 hour shift. That was enough to amount to a doosy of a migraine.

So you will see what I mean in the following case about Crystal's Beau.

Chapter 1

Mid Monday morning, elderly Marceil Pestkey pottered around her kitchen. She had on a cotton house dress with a blue plaid pattern. Her blue-gray hair was rolled into a bun on the back of her neck. At her sister, Tess's request, she was making them cups of hot tea.

By the time she had the tea ready to pour, it was much too quiet in the living room. She slipped quietly across the kitchen to the door, leaning on a wooden cane. This senior citizen was five feet three inches tall and wide at the hips. Since she'd had both knees fixed, Marceil walked with a stiff kneed gait like a marching soldier.

She wanted to see if her sister, Tess Grover, had dozed off. I declare, if I napped as much as that sister of mine does I wouldn't sleep a wink at night. Not a wink.

Earlier, Tess had been knitting. She'd raised her voice to be heard by Marceil in the kitchen while they discussed the sharp lightning and loud thunder that occurred during the night. The sisters agreed they were glad the storm had passed on through town.

It was only in the last few minutes Tess had grown quiet. Since she hadn't been in good health, Marceil watched her younger sister closely. She worried about the frail woman. A few weeks before, it made good sense to Marceil to have Tess move in with her. They were both widows and lived alone. With Tess in her home, she could keep an eye on her sister until Tess felt well enough to return to her own home.

Before Tess moved in, they saw each other often enough to suit Marceil. They met up at the same women's groups and visited. Most Wednesdays, they went to the community building and ended up having lunch at the same table.

However, those meetings out in a crowd didn't prepare Marceil for living with her sister day in and day out after all the years they were used to living alone.

The two women, set in their own routines of doing things, had a stubborn streak a mile long. Marceil thought about their childhood and what they were like since they grew up. Neither of them had changed much personality wise as they aged.

As soon as her sister was able to take care of herself again, Marceil intended to tell Tess she could go home. Those four blocks would be close enough to give Marceil peace of mind. She could check on her sister as often as she needed to and have her house to herself.

Peering around the door frame, Marceil glanced across the room at the straight back chair Tess liked to sit in by the lamp table. She said it was the easiest of any of Marceil's fancy living room furniture to stand up from. All that was in the chair now was her knitting needles stuck straight up in the piece of striped scarf. The yarn attached to the scarf trailed beside the chair to a blue, plastic mop bucket on the floor, filled with balls of yarn.

Chapter 2

Marceil frowned as she surveyed the living room. Her petite sister, dressed