Charlie's Secrets: The Mac 'n' Ivy Mysteries, #6

By Lorena McCourtney

Mac and Ivy, while living full time in their motorhome, usually write lighthearted articles for travel magazines about quirkty people, places, and events, but now they're doing memoirs for a mysterious and reclusive woman. They expect a simple book for family and friends, but these memoirs turn out to hold explosive revelations about the woman's three prominent and well-known ex-husbands.

 

Ex-husbands who are each desperate to stop publication of the memoirs. How far are they willing to go? Threats, bribes ... murder?

 

Beware those ex-husbands, Ivy and Mac. Now that you know all their incriminating secrets, you're also in line for their dangerous determination to stop the memoirs.

 

Watch out for those sneaky peacocks too!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rogue Ridge Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798989858910

Lorena McCourtney

Lorena McCourtney is the author of 51 books of mystery and romance. She and her husband live in Southern Oregon, and she especially likes wrriting about the Oregon coast. She also enjoys the coast itself, walking the beach and searching for agates, driftwood, sand dollars, and anything else the ocean tosses up.

Book preview

Charlie’s Secrets

Book 6

The Mac ‘n’ Ivy Mysteries

by

Lorena McCourtney

Copyright ©2024 by Lorena McCourtney

Published by Rogue Ridge Press

Cover by Travis Miles

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, posted on any website, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, scanning, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the author, except for brief quotations in reviews or articles.

Scripture used in this book, whether quoted or paraphrased by the characters, is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV®). Copyright© 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

This book is a work of fiction. Certain actual locations and historical figures mentioned in the book are portrayed as accurately as possible but used in a fictional manner. All other names, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition,

with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.

Philippians 4:6

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Books by Lorena McCourtney

Chapter One

MAC

Mike, you know what I write. Quirky celebrations and unusual travel destinations. Crab races. A garlic festival. I don’t know anything about writing memoirs.

How hard could writing memoirs be? Mike scoffed. Mike is editor of the travel magazine for which I’ve written numerous articles. He was calling me now to say he’d been contacted by a subscriber who wanted to hire me to write a book of memoirs. You start with when he or she came into this world—

You don’t know if this memoirs person is a man or woman? I put the cell phone on speaker so Ivy could also hear the conversation. She was sitting on the sofa in our motorhome with cat Koop purring in her lap and dog BoBandy curled at her feet.

I have only the name on the email. I looked it up in our records, and C. M. Wieland has been a subscriber for several years. It could be a great opportunity for you.

I appreciate that, but—

As I’m saying, you just start with a birthday, segue into marriage, children, work, probably death of the spouse, and wind up with what a great inspiration this person’s life is to all known inhabitants of the planet, past and present and future. This is undoubtedly an older person, and no one but family and a few friends will ever read it. Although there is a detail that may interest you.

What kind of detail? We’re required to spend a month in some jungle hut battling snakes and spiders in order to interview this person? Or he/she is an alien from a planet made of green cheese, and we have to beam up to the cheesy mothership to meet him or her?

Mac, you’re such a cynic. Mike’s tone was reproving, but he didn’t comment on my facetious comments. Actually, C. M. Wieland lives in Lewiston, Idaho, which I’m sure is a perfectly normal town, no green cheese or aliens involved. And Lewiston is only six hundred or so miles from where you are now, and it’s known as the banana belt of the Northwest.

We were still in Northern California, where I’d recently done an article on the peculiar legends of Mt. Shasta, and it was fall now. We’d considered buying a home and settling down here, but no murders is on our short list of requirements for permanent residence, and we’d been involved in a doozy of a murder here. Could the banana belt of Lewiston be the right area not only for the winter but also for a permanent home?

But I was still suspicious of this opportunity.

So exactly what is this ‘detail’? I asked. The pay comes in the form of some cryptocurrency I’ve never heard of? There is some sort of payment, I presume.

Oh, yes. Actually, the detail is about the payment. And what may interest you— Mike paused, and I was thinking, yeah, right. Payment is the contents of this person’s piggy bank. But then he went on. —is that payment for the job is seventy-five thousand.

Seventy-five thousand, I repeated. Actually, I almost gasped and I’m not generally a gasping man. "Seventy-five thousand dollars?"

"Of course, I know you don’t write just for the money," Mike said, heavy on the snark.

I try to write useful and entertaining material, true, but the money comes in handy, and $75,000 is far more than I’ve ever made writing about crab races or garlic festivals.

So, what’s the catch? There must be one. I think I write a competent rooster-crowing contest or a frog race, but I can’t see how this would inspire someone to offer me big bucks for writing his or her memoirs.

No catch that I know of. Although C. M. Wieland is in a hurry and wants you to come to Lewiston and get started right away.

Why the rush? And why not just do it with phone interviews?

I don’t know, Mike admitted. It’s possible that C. M. Wieland may be . . . oh, a little eccentric.

What makes you think that?

"It does strike me as a bit, well, peculiar, that someone would want a writer who specializes in the subjects you do to write his or her memoirs. Not that I consider such subject material peculiar, of course. Our readers love it."

The fact that this person wanted me to write the memoirs also struck me as peculiar. Although I have to admit the fact that the way Ivy and I keep running into dead bodies and murder on our travels might also be considered a little peculiar. Maybe even ominous.

So peculiarity is not necessarily a deal-breaker.

The thing is, Mike said, I’m not going to have any assignments for you in the next few months. In fact, because of some financial complications, we may discontinue the print edition. I don’t want you to miss an opportunity to make a few bucks. A lot of bucks, actually. At least from my viewpoint.

Mine too. I’m sorry to hear about the magazine’s financial problems. I had no idea. Can I do anything to help?

No, we’ll manage. Maybe it’s time we consider retirement and start chasing around the country in a motorhome like you and Ivy do. He paused. Minus the dead bodies you tend to encounter, however.

I ignored the comment. It wasn’t as if we sought out dead bodies and killers. They just . . . happen. I do appreciate the opportunity, I said. Still, I couldn’t dodge my doubts. You’re sure this is legitimate, not some complicated con game?

Why don’t you contact C. M. Wieland and decide for yourself? Mike suggested.

Okay. Give me a phone number.

Mike didn’t have a phone number. His only contact with this person had been by email. Was that eccentric? Not necessarily. But maybe.

After the phone call with Mike, we looked in an online phone book and couldn’t find any C. M. Wieland listed in Lewiston, Idaho, but Ivy and I talked it over with the Lord, as we do all big decisions, and I sent a message to the email address Mike had given me. I said I was interested in writing the memoirs but I couldn’t claim any expertise or experience in this area of writing. I also hinted . . . subtly . . . that we had some doubts about the legitimacy of the offer.

The quick message in return assured me the offer was indeed legitimate, and the writing in my magazine articles was sufficient to show my competency to write the memoirs. Payment would be one-third on signing the contract, one-third on completion of the manuscript, and one-third on publication. The reason for the rush in requesting my immediate presence in Lewiston was that the publisher’s deadline for the manuscript was only two months away.

A publisher with a deadline? Perhaps this wasn’t just a family-and-friends kind of memoir after all?

So Ivy and I again talked it over, and I emailed back that we could be in Lewiston within three days. Even if the memoir-writing job didn’t pan out, we could take a look at an area new to us. That banana belt thing sounded good.

And, actually, how difficult could it be to write some elderly person’s memoirs? Especially with the incentive of $75,000 for a couple months’ work.

Chapter Two

IVY

So here we were, on an afternoon three days later, crossing the bridge between Washington and Idaho, which put us directly into Lewiston. Bare brown hills loomed to the north, the dark line of a highway winding upward through them. We’d done some online research about the area and had a reservation at an RV park on the river, the Snake, that flowed between the two states. I hoped the name of the river referred to its winding course and not an over-abundance of slithery inhabitants. This LOL . . . little old lady . . . respected all the good Lord’s creations, but snakes were not on my list of favorites.

We got the motorhome set up in the nice RV park, tipout and awning in place, and took BoBandy for a walk. Mac emailed C. M. Wieland and suggested meeting tomorrow morning. Although the cloudy sky was already into evening dusk, the return message said we should come to the house immediately. An address and directions were included, and we were now given a phone number to use at the gate.

So, even though we’d have preferred to wait until morning, we went. We didn’t want to be money-grabby about this, but $75,000 did make an impression on us.

We followed Tammany Creek Road, as directed, and found a battered-looking mailbox with the address on it. Here in this rural area the hills were much smaller than those hulking to the north, but they were also bare and brown, with only dark islands of growth around a few sparsely scattered houses. I couldn’t tell if houses had been built where natural islands of growth already existed, or if trees had been planted around the houses.

We turned into the driveway, which had been carved between two hills, the hillsides rising steeply on either side. A dozen or so yards into the narrow driveway, a tall, iron-barred gate with spikes on top blocked the roadway. An equally tall chain-link fence followed the hillsides on both sides of the gate. In the beam of the headlights, trees beyond the fence were turning color in this fall season, but pines rose above them, tall and green. This appeared to be one of the larger islands of trees on the bare hills. We both stared up at the gate and fencing, which had to be at least ten or twelve feet high.

What do they keep in here, elephants? Mac muttered.

"Or are they concerned about keeping something out?" I hadn’t seen anything threatening so far, but the height of the fence made me look around uneasily.

Of course, Mike did say C. M. Wieland might be a bit eccentric, Mac added. Maybe tall fences are just part of the eccentricity.

Okay, I’m fond of pickle and peanut butter sandwiches. For some time now, I’ve felt LOL invisible. I don’t consider either of those attributes eccentric, but perhaps they are. Everyone has little eccentricities. The fence was no big deal, I told myself. But it was odd.

As instructed, Mac texted a message to the phone number that we were at the gate, and after a short wait, the gate opened. We drove through, and the gate closed behind us. Here, under trees that hovered over the driveway like a gloomy canopy in some Gothic novel, we were in near darkness. No house was visible as Mac edged our old pickup forward cautiously.

An unearthly screech blasted out of the darkness . . . human, animal, alien? . . . and something crash-landed on the hood. I instinctively ducked and gave a little screech of my own, but the following silence made me cautiously peer out. Something with beady eyes peered back. The thing enlarged even as we looked at it, billowing and rising to cover the entire hood. Its feet—no, claws—scraped the metal. It shrieked again, a fingernails-on-blackboard screech.

"What is it?" I have an active imagination. Oversized vulture? Vampire? Leftover flying dinosaur? I ducked again when it dipped its head and pecked at the windshield.

I think it’s a peacock, Mac said.

I think of peacocks as colorful and beautiful. Although I can’t say that I’ve ever really thought about them much. This thing looming out of the darkness was more creature from the Black Lagoon. What does it want?

I don’t know. But I don’t think peacocks eat Toyotas. Mac pounded on the windshield with his fist. Shoo! Go away!

The creature lifted its head, regarded us for a moment, and then pecked at the windshield again.

Mac opened the pickup door and waved his arms at it. After another shriek, the creature deflated the spread tail, flapped its wings, and departed into the branches of a nearby tree.

I didn’t know peacocks could fly, I said. Were there more of the creatures around? Was this perhaps some eccentric watchdog . . . watchbird . . . system of protection?

Mac put the pickup in gear and we cautiously crept forward again. Around a bend in the narrow roadway we spotted the lights of a modest frame house with another larger, but still very ordinary looking house nearby. No lights in that one. Neither house looked like the residence of a person willing to pay $75,000 to have his/her memoirs written.

We stopped by the lit-up house, and Mac went to the door. A light came on over the door, and a middle-aged Hispanic woman answered the knock. A burly man joined her, sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular forearms. I lowered the window so I could hear the conversation. Although I did it warily. I’m always curious, but I wasn’t eager to have something that might be a peacock vampire or zombie fly through an open window.

I’m looking for C. M. Wieland, Mac said.

The woman smiled but shook her head. I’m Maria, the housekeeper and cook, she said in only slightly accented English. And this is my husband, Alfredo. Charlie lives up at the big house. Another wave indicated the big house was farther up the driveway.

Oh. Okay, thanks. I hope we didn’t disturb you.

Watch out for the peacocks, the woman called from the doorway as Mac headed back to the pickup.

Which meant . . . what? Watch out so we didn’t run them down with the pickup? Or watch out, they attack without warning?

However, we had no more peacock encounters as we drove on up to the main house, which was set in a clearing away from the trees. Under a barrage of motion-activated yard lights that came on as we approached, the big house appeared to be three stories of glassy cubes with stone accents. Impressive, but the cubes were stacked at odd angles, rather like blocks assembled by a child whose alignment skills were a little iffy. A three-car garage angled off to one side, and an older-style barn stood beyond the garage. Across a big, open field we could see the dark line of the tall fence.

There must be a good fourteen or fifteen acres fenced in, Mac said. That much chain-link fencing may have cost more than they’re offering us to do the memoirs.

A few lights behind closed drapes lit the bottom floor, and a single light glowed from behind more closed drapes on the second floor. The river and lights of the small town on the other side of the river made a spectacular view in that direction.

We went to the big double doors of translucent glass. A corner of the second-floor cube extended over the doorway, forming a roof overhead. Two stone columns supported the corner of the cube, and a slate entryway covered the ground beneath the columns. A light shaped like a miniature of the house lit up the entryway. Mac pushed the doorbell.

C. M. Wieland? Mac said when the door opened.

She was fifty-ish . . . no, sixtyish, I decided after a closer look . . . but she was fighting it, with considerable success. Slim figure, red hair in a sleek, curved style, perfectly manicured fingernails, French tip style, I think it’s called. Hers were black with scarlet tips. No wedding ring. She wore dark leggings and a black tunic with a bright Aztec design, and high-heeled sandals with only a couple of narrow red straps across her feet. Her toenails matched her fingernails. I doubted this woman was ever going to be an invisible LOL like yours truly.

I’m Anastasia Stone, she said. C. M.’s agent. You must be Mac MacPherson. Her smile matched the impersonal, businesslike tone of the emails, and I suspected we’d been communicating with this woman rather than C. M. Wieland. I spotted an office alcove off the entryway with a laptop on a desk, copier off to one side, printer underneath.

Mac nodded and added, And this is my wife, Ivy.

She shook hands with both of us.

Come in, she said. No apology for demanding Mac’s immediate presence after a long day on the road. No apology for attack by a watchbird peacock. She did say, Call me Stasia, please.

We followed her directly into a living room with glossy hardwood floors. There were three space-age looking sofas of bent steel framework with white leather cushions and several leather chairs of the same color and design with more steel framework ottomans like crouching robots in front of each. Several lamps looked like tall, skinny mushrooms from some alien planet. There was other furniture that I could only assume were chairs. Some were shaped like tangled caterpillars, and others had odd curves and angles, like bent traps ready to spring shut on any unwary visitor. A couple were shaped like oversized hands, also ready to close around a victim. A futuristic style, I think the furniture would be called. Except most pictures I’d seen of such styles had a clean, almost ascetic look, with furniture sparsely spaced. This room, although the odd furniture was undoubtedly expensive, looked as cluttered as a secondhand store. One item I didn’t see was a TV.

Metal steps of a stairway on the far side of the room angled upward. They appeared to float in the air, although I assumed there was some support I couldn’t see holding them up.

A glass coffee table, in what I think would be called a trapezoid shape, also with steel framework underneath, sat between two sofas facing each other. It looked strong enough to support a bulldozer, but atop it was a delicate purple vase filled with an arrangement of peacock feathers. A spectacular wall hanging of blue-and-green peacock feathers hung over a white fireplace, feather wreaths on either side. The peacock feathers were the only spots of color to warm the room. Everything else was black and white.

The whole room looked as if it were more suitable for a herd of robots than human occupancy, the only human touch a collection of tabloid newspapers and magazines scattered on the coffee table.

Stasia didn’t explain the cluttered furniture, but she did notice our interest in the colorful hangings. Charlie made those. Creating decorative items of peacock feathers is a, oh, hobby of hers, I guess you’d call it, although her creations are quite popular and much in demand. She has a studio for her work beyond the kitchen. She gestured toward a doorway beyond the office alcove.

The pronouns in her statement did give us one useful bit of information. C. M. Wieland, Charlie, was a woman. Although I doubted her unusual home and furniture, or her ability to create colorful decorations of peacock feathers, were sufficient to interest a publisher in her memoirs. But the feathers did interest me.

Do peacocks just . . . donate their feathers? I asked. That one on the hood of the pickup hadn’t looked inclined to donate his.

Stasia gave me an impatient look, as if the question was an irrelevancy she hadn’t expected. Charlie says the feathers fall off after mating season in the spring, and sometimes at other times, and she just picks them up off the ground. Some dealers actually kill the creatures and pluck the feathers. Maybe peacocks are edible, and they use the meat too. I don’t know. But Charlie would never do that. She’s very fond of the peacocks.

Something in her tone suggested she didn’t share Charlie’s fondness for peacocks and might consider some different method of obtaining feathers. Peacock stew, anyone?

We encountered a peacock in the driveway, Mac said. Actually, it flew up and landed on the hood of our pickup.

One of them did that to my car the first day I arrived a couple of weeks ago. They also tend to peck at their reflections in anything shiny and leave, well, you know, droppings everywhere. She wrinkled her nose. I never leave the car outside the garage.

Stasia, apparently finished with any discussion of peacocks, walked briskly to the desk. I have a contract drawn up for you to sign. She pulled several typed pages from a stack of transparent black containers atop the desk and handed them to Mac. As I mentioned earlier, I’m Charlie’s agent, and I’ll be handling all details of her agreement with you. She held out a pen.

Mac flipped through the papers, as thick with words as the ingredient list on a TV dinner. I’ll have to take this back to the motorhome to go through it.

Yes, of course. If you think that’s necessary. Stasia spoke with another touch of impatience, as if she considered a word-by-word inspection of the contract a delaying inconvenience. Your first check will be available as soon as you sign, she offered as an incentive.

Mac thanked her but didn’t change his comment about reading the contract. Mac always reads fine print to see what may be hiding there. Will Charlie be joining us?

No. She had a doctor’s appointment this morning and went up to her room early.

This statement surprised both of us. We had been instructed to come to the house immediately, but Charlie had retired early rather than wait up to meet us? Another hint of eccentricity? As seniors, Mac and I usually go to bed before the eleven o’clock news comes on, but not this early. Just how old was Charlie? Antique era? And, given the doctor’s appointment, was she in declining health . . . physical or mental?

As if she heard the unspoken questions, Stasia said, You should probably know that Charlie is something of a recluse and does not care to mingle with people. Most of the information you’ll need for the memoirs will come from her extensive collection of papers and mementos. Come with me, and I’ll show you.

Stasia led Mac, with me following,