Ghouls and Jewels: An Abi Button Cozy Mystery Romance #4

By Lizzie Lewis

Abi returns from her honeymoon to find a threatening letter on the doormat. Her new friend Alice says her sister and brothers are claiming she’s secretly in possession of a priceless Russian tiara and associated jewels, and they insist on having their share ‒ and they are already arranging to take her to court.
This is news to Alice, so Abi and Alice, with their new husbands set out to search the creepy old house that Alice has recently purchased.
A neighbour says she has heard wailing coming from the house, and Abi’s childhood fear that the house is haunted seems to be confirmed when she sees a woman’s face staring out between the bars of a basement window at night.
The search for the Russian treasure leads to an unpleasant encounter with a dominating father and aunt. More problems for Abi to solve, in between running Button Up coffee shop with her co-owner Melanie Upton, who has romantic news to share. This time it sounds as though it could be promising ‒ with just one small drawback.

• Language: English
• Publisher: White Tree Publishing
• Release date: Apr 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781912529643

Book preview

About the Book

Abi returns from her honeymoon to find a threatening letter on the doormat. Her new friend Alice says her sister and brothers are claiming she’s secretly in possession of a priceless Russian tiara and associated jewels, and they insist on having their share ‒ and they are already arranging to take her to court.

This is news to Alice, so Abi and Alice, with their new husbands set out to search the creepy old house that Alice has recently purchased.

A neighbour says she has heard wailing coming from the house, and Abi’s childhood fear that the house is haunted seems to be confirmed when she sees a woman’s face staring out between the bars of a basement window at night.

The search for the Russian treasure leads to an unpleasant encounter with a dominating father and aunt. More problems for Abi to solve, in between running Button Up coffee shop with her co-owner Melanie Upton, who has romantic news to share. This time it sounds as though it could be promising ‒ with just one small drawback.

Ghouls and Jewels

An Abi Button Cozy Mystery Romance #4

by

Lizzie Lewis ©2020

This eBook ISBN: eBook ISBN: 978-1-912529-64-3

Also available as a paperback

paperback ISBN: 978-1-912529-63-6

Published by

White Tree Publishing

Bristol

UNITED KINGDOM

[e-mail]

Full list of books and updates on

https://whitetreepublishing.com/

Ghouls and Jewels is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this abridged edition.

Table of Contents

Cover

About the Book

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Epilogue

More Abi Button Books

About White Tree Publishing

An Abi Button

Cozy Mystery Romance #4

Chapter 1

I’ve never seen a threatening letter before. Not a real one. And we certainly didn’t expect to find one lying with our other mail on the doormat when we came back from our honeymoon on Friday evening, even though it wasn’t addressed to me.

Danny and I had been married one day short of two weeks. After our Saturday wedding we spent our first night in an airport hotel before flying to Lake Garda in Italy where we spent twelve blissful nights.

So far, our marriage is working out excitingly well, and I’m sure our new friends Alice and Rupert Forrester feel the same about their marriage. They shared the wedding with us. No cross words, but obviously the inevitable minor misunderstanding now and again. That’s me and Danny. Possibly more me than Danny.

I have to say we’re totally compatible. We both squeeze the toothpaste tube at the far end. From what I’ve heard, one person squeezing the tube at the end, and the other person squeezing it in the middle can be grounds for separation.

From my experience of marriage ‒ nearly two weeks enjoying the late September sun in Italy ‒ there has to be more to it than that. After all, the problem would be solved by buying two tubes of toothpaste, and each partner could squeeze it in whatever way they fancied. I can’t believe fixing problems of married life is really that simple, so I’m probably not quite ready yet to give sensible marital advice.

We returned home with stars in our eyes. We had Alice and Rupert sharing our house, because their builder still had a lot of work to do to make their house fit for human habitation, rather than the dwelling place of vampires and other unearthly entities.

The wedding had gone as successfully as could be expected in the circumstances. No, it had gone far, far better than I had envisioned that morning sitting in the hairdressers. It seemed that when everyone in the church learnt of the pending disaster, they responded to the plea from Pastor David to rally round.

The church was packed. The table decorations were amazing. The two supermarket cakes Julie Watkins had put together looked and tasted amazing. Everything was amazing. The honeymoon at Lake Garda was beyond my expectations – and that’s saying a lot, because my expectations were high.

According to the marriage licence I’m no longer Abi Button. I’m Abi Wells, and that immediately presented us with a bit of a problem. I asked Melanie Upton if we should change the name of our coffee shop. If we changed it from Button Up to Wells Up ‒ the Up part comes from my co-owner’s surname of Upton ‒ that would sound like a place where people come to weep.

Although I sometimes find I’m a shoulder people want to cry on, I often say the wrong thing and end up being no help at all. Sort of like Job’s three comforters in the Bible, who are famous for giving rubbish advice.

Melanie Upton says we don’t want to change the name of Button Up. It will confuse our existing customers who expect, and get, coffee and food of the highest quality. Okay, well, that’s our aim.

When Melanie and I started the coffee shop, we came up with the unbelievably brilliant idea of linking our surnames! We didn’t dream business life could get so complicated. So our coffee shop is still called Button Up, and to the world at large I’m still Abi Button.

When Danny and I were at school, I was known as Happy Button, and I’m sure Danny also thinks of me as that. Or maybe his special name for me ‒ the Happy Bookworm, because I always had my face buried in soppy romances. And Melanie? At the time of this story she was still Melanie Upton. But I had a sneaking suspicion before going on honeymoon that things could be about to change.

We arrived back from our joint honeymoon late on Friday, and as soon as we opened the front door and saw the mail on the mat, things went south. Or is it north? It could be north, because that’s where the Wicked Witch lives. Anyway, there was a threatening letter waiting for Alice, who was temporarily using my address.

Between my house and Alice’s there’s an area of woodland open to the public. I still think of it as Alice’s house, although now she and Rupert are married I gather the house will be in their joint names. It’s the creepy old house that belonged to scary old Isaac Newton who lived there as a recluse after his mother died, and he let it fall into stinking decay around his ears.

Perhaps a reminder is needed here. When the old man died, he left a cryptic clue to what everyone believed was a fortune. The first of his four nephews and nieces who managed to solve it would get the lot. They could also choose some items of furniture each, which they could either keep or sell.

Alice cracked the cryptic clue, and because none of her siblings wanted to keep much of the furniture, the good stuff went to auction, and the rest to house clearance and the rubbish dump. Actually, most of it had to go to the dump.

Alice used the prize money, which certainly wasn’t a huge fortune, to buy the dilapidated house from her siblings and restore it. I know she willingly paid over the odds for the property, because for some reason she felt sorry for her older sister and two older brothers.

Me, I don’t think they deserved it. Their poverty was of their own making, because they used to scrounge from their uncle rather than work for a living after their parents were killed in a boating accident some years ago. When their uncle died, the handouts came to an end.

Old Isaac Newton had been living on his own for years and years, and the house had become really putrid inside. My original thoughts were that the house should be declared a public health hazard and knocked down as soon as possible. The site could then be used to build a luxury house, or two smaller less luxurious houses. But Alice and Rupert were determined to restore Creepy Castle and live there.

There was also a report with our mail from Alice and Rupert’s builder that the roof had been stripped of the original tiles, and roofing felt applied. Some of the tiles had been broken for many years, which accounted for the constant dripping of rain into one or two of the bedrooms. But, resourceful man that he was, Brian the builder said he’d managed to find some matching tiles in a reclamation yard, and the roof was now watertight, and looked original.

Brian Warmley was doing the restoration on Alice’s house at a very reasonable price, to fill in when things were slack. Brian goes to our small church, and when he heard that Alice and Rupert planned to open their house to small groups and other church use, he immediately offered to help.

As soon as they had seen the builder’s letter, Alice and Rupert dashed off to look at the new roof. Unfortunately, it was dark by that time. They returned crestfallen, to tell us the flashlights on their phones didn’t do much to relieve the gloom. Even Rupert’s large LED lantern wasn’t much help. To my mind, that house was going to be gloomy at all times of the day and night, somehow managing to mop up light. Talk about creepy.

As soon as they got back, we took our time digesting the consequences of the threatening letter. Alice’s three siblings had been looking through a pile of society magazines that were in the small oak chest Esther kept as a chosen item from their uncle’s house.

I have no idea why she bothered to keep the magazines. I thought she was leaving them behind in the house. It certainly wasn’t for fashion hints. Esther and her brothers are untidy. Slovenly is probably a better word. And lazy.

In one of the magazines they found a photograph of Isaac Newton’s grandmother wearing a fancy tiara, necklace and earrings. According to the report, the dazzling gold tiara with diamonds and large Russian pigeon’s blood rubies belonged to Isaac’s Newton’s grandmother. It said she had once been a countess in the Russian Palace in St Petersburg belonging to the Romanovs.

It seemed that, unlike the Romanovs, the Countess had wisely foreseen what turned out to be a disastrous end for the Tsar, the Tsarina and their children. She fled to England with her small girl before the Russian Revolution in 1917. She had also fled with the jewellery in the photograph, which suggested it was of the highest quality and therefore almost priceless.

The formal letter, jointly signed by the three siblings, instructed Alice to hand over the jewels or the equivalent value of them, because she must have found them in the house, and had perhaps already sold them. They were taking her to court to recover their share of the value, sold or not, and had engaged a top solicitor. It certainly was a threatening letter.

"Alice, you’re going to be incredibly wealthy, I said excitedly. That is, assuming you sell them. I don’t think there’s anywhere in town you could safely wear jewellery like that."

I’m not suggesting Craidlea is dangerous, or even run down, but no one with any sense parades in priceless bling around their home town without a bodyguard. Most of my town was built to provide housing for the cotton mill that closed many years ago. My house was originally built for the senior mill foreman, and Alice’s at the other end of the road is larger, and was built for the manager.

Opposite, between our two houses, is a long row of brick terraced houses that once housed workers for the original, small mill, a short walk away by the river. So status was reflected in the type and size of house. They are built of the dark red local brick that seems to have provided the walls in just about every building in town. There’s also a play area for small children directly opposite my house.

The first thing we examined was a poor photocopy of a page from one of Esther’s old society magazines. Photocopiers don’t do a very good job of reproducing photographs, but it was good enough to show a rather elderly lady, looking very grand, wearing a sparkling tiara, with what appeared to be a matching necklace and drop earrings.

I thought she had a rather superior smile. Well, wearing jewels like that would make anyone look and feel superior. Those were the days when people dressed up in all their finery for society events, and surely a Russian countess living in Craidlea would have been of greater news than usual.

The date of the magazine was September 1938, exactly a year before the start of the Second World War. Countess Anna Kerkovski, according to the article, had brought the jewels back from St Petersburg earlier in the century.

So this was Isaac Newton’s grandmother. His mother would have been in her thirties by that time, and