Mystery At Little Faith Community Church: The Doreen Sizemore Adventures, #7

By Serena B. Miller

What's a church supposed to do on a Sunday morning when the preacher disappears?

The Little Faith Church of South Shore, Kentucky, is shocked when their minister, the Reverend Jimmy Bell, doesn't show up to preach his sermon. The whole town is mystified until their reluctant amateur sleuth, Doreen Sizemore, discovers a clue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: L. J. Emory Publishing
• Release date: Jun 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781940283562

Book preview

Mystery At Little Faith Community Church

Mystery At Little Faith Community Church

The Doreen Sizemore Adventures Book 7

Serena B. Miller

L J Emory Publishing

Copyright © 2021 by Serena B Miller

Find more books by Serena B. Miller at serenabmiller.com

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Author photos by Angie Griffith and KMK Photography

KMKphotography.com - Used by permission.

Cover & Interior design by Jacob Miller

Published By L J Emory Publishing

ISBN: 978-1-940283-56-2

Contents

Mystery At Little Faith Community Church

Also by Serena B. Miller

About the Author

Mystery At Little Faith Community Church

There is just something about early April in these Kentucky hills. Something that makes even an old woman like me want to go out and roll around in that green pasture out there like a newborn colt. I think part of it is sheer relief that the winter’s over and we don’t have to go through that no more for a few more months.

There’s something about the smell of earth and new life popping up everywhere that makes the body want to start planting beans and corn long before it’s wise to do so. Anybody with half a brain knows you can’t plant a garden in early April, but the sunshine and the warm wind makes a person get so optimistic it can almost fool you into thinking maybe spring is here to stay this time. Of course, here in Northern Kentucky, those of us who have lived a spell know that the bad days are coming again soon.

I’ve had my heart broke more than once watching my little peach tree blossom during a fake spring, as pretty as a picture, just to have an icy wind blow in and ruin everything. Them tiny blossoms are delicate and can’t withstand much. When that happens, instead of picking sweet, juicy, sun-ripened peaches off the tree in my backyard, I got to trudge on over to IGA and hope for the best. I sure do get a hankering for peaches in the summer, but sometimes the peaches at IGA are hard as rocks. They’ll put you off peaches for a while if you’re not careful. It ain’t IGA’s fault. They’re just setting out what they can get.

Life is a lot like that. Sometimes things are so good it’s just like having peaches so ripe and sweet they’re falling off the trees right into your basket. Other times it’s like you bit into something that looks like a peach, and smells like a peach, but you find out it’s just something hard and sour that calls itself a peach from Mexico or some other foreign country I don’t trust a whole lot.

Speaking of blossoms, Dogwood trees are coming in strong this year. The woods around South Shore remind me of a lacy green dress with a frilly white petticoat showing. Everywhere you look right now, there is white or pink dogwoods. It’s the prettiest thing. Over in Portsmouth, I seen one house that had a tree that had white Dogwood blossoms on one side and pink Dogwood blossoms on the other side. That took some grafting skill on somebody’s part, that did. I look forward to seeing that tree every year.

April is also a good month to hunt them morel mushrooms that’s so tasty. I love me a good mess of morel mushrooms fried up all nice and crispy. In case you never fixed morel mushrooms straight from the woods, here’s what you do: You have to soak them in saltwater until all the little critters crawl out, then you throw out the water, dry the mushrooms off with paper towels, dip them into some beat-up eggs and dredge them through a cup or two of cornmeal and flour mixed together. Then you fry them up in some grease with a little bit of butter thrown in. That is some serious good eating.

Morel mushrooms are shy, though. They don’t want just anybody to find them. You gotta look hard. I was always pretty good at spotting them. My daddy and me, we’d go mushroom hunting every spring. I still have a few locations here and there in the woods I visit, but I don’t never talk about them none. A good mushroom hunter don’t reveal the location of his morel patches.

The time to go morel mushroom hunting, as everyone in these parts knows, is when the Dogwood blossoms are just about the size of squirrels’ ears. You get yourself a nice warm spring morning after a good gentle rain, and them things are going be popping up all over the place if you know where to look.

I’ve been around people that would trounce right over top of them and wonder why they never found none. I guess some people got the gift of finding things, and some people don’t. I was always good at finding mushrooms. Pretty good finding four-leaf clover, too, even if I do say so myself, although that’s one skill I never figured out how to turn into a meal or a paycheck.

Sometimes it’s possible to find things you don’t want to find, though. And that’s what happened to me. It liked to have ruin’t the whole month of April for me. Pretty much ruin’t it for everybody else in South Shore, too. It almost made me wish I didn’t live there no more, and that’s saying a lot. Few people cherish their hometown as much as I do. It’s not that South Shore isn’t flawed. It surely is. It’s just that it’s home. I