Mischief at Eden's Gate

By Crissie Acosta

Ever had a post deathbed confession? Danni Hernandez has, twice. They're not as fun as one might imagine, especially when her mother reveals her childhood preacher is her father. Danni is a private investigator, dealing mostly with financial fraud.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aga Associates, LLC
• Release date: Feb 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9781917095655

Book preview

Mischief at Eden’s Gate

By

Crissie Acosta

Copyright © 2024 by – Crissie Acosta – All Rights Reserved.

It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited.

Dedication

Mi Tesoro

Meda Kajana

Hakuna Matata

Teamwork

Love you

To Ava

‘Merica

Table of Contents

Dedication

Prologue -Danni

Danni  1

Teddy  2

Danni  3

Teddy  4

Danni  5

Teddy  6

Danni  7

Parker  8

Teddy  9

Danni  10

Teddy  11

Danni  12

Teddy 13

Danni  14

Parker  15

Danni  16

Teddy  17

Craig  18

Danni  19

Craig  20

Danni  21

Teddy  22

Danni  23

Teddy  24

Danni  25

Parker  26

Danni  27

Danni  28

Teddy  29

Danni  30

Parker  31

Danni  32

Teddy  33

Danni  34

Craig  35

Danni  36

Epilogue –Danni

Acknowledgement

About the Author

Prologue -Danni

I’ll see you next session, Armando, I said, straightening out the bite marks from the last of the hundred-dollar bills. Next time I expect to see your wife, you know she loves a good participation.

Yes, Mistress, Armando muttered, still cum drunk and ready for a nap.

As I packed away the last of my instruments, Armando nestled into his oversized bed. The look of sheer pleasure on his face is all I can ask for from my clients, that and $ 1,500 per session.

Walking into the bathroom, I begin to change into normal street clothes. As flashy as Downtown Miami is, I don’t think the suburban housewife of Coral Gables will appreciate my leather corset, matching thong, and Patent Leather thigh-high stilettos. But the Uber driver usually does. Then again, I’m sure they have seen it all. Normally, I won’t break the ‘illusion’ and change until I get home, but who the fuck was I kidding? It’s too damn hot for a trench coat.

I’ll see myself out, I call out to an already sleeping Armando. Back in jeans and an off-the-shoulder t-shirt, I release my hair from the high ponytail I usually keep it in, and it feels as good as when I let Lefty and Jose out of my corset. I massage my tits as I wait for my rideshare driver to pull up to the curb; I get the same ostracizing stares from Armando’s neighbors.

He really stretched me today, I’ll tell ya. I called out to the neighbor, ‘watering’ her lawn, just so she could get the latest gossip. He’s like my vibrator, but you know, cleaner.

The woman’s mouth drops open in pure shock. For a minute, I thought she would clutch her pearls if she had any. But the Versace top, linen pants, and Tom Ford wedges just don’t go with pearls.

The ride home is blessedly quiet. I’m not great with chatty drivers. I’m not great with chatty anyone. The balmy night air rested heavily on my skin as I exited in front of my building.

At home, my one and only is waiting for me, Count Pugula. My asthmatic, snoring, prone to spontaneous peeing rescue Pug. He is curled up in his coffin-shaped bed, happily snoring away. Unceremoniously dropping my things by the door, he didn’t even stir. The downtown Miami high-rise I was currently calling home was as empty as my refrigerator. It’s not that I didn’t like the place. The million-dollar view of the bay was spectacular. As it should be after what I paid for the place. It had been months, and I still didn’t feel at home.

The only thing that did make this feel like it was mine at all was the six laptops I had set up in lieu of a dining room. All running chasers for different cases I was working on, tracking down information for my real job.

The one that doesn’t require me to carry a bullwhip and leather handcuffs. After all, do I really want to be a Geriatric Dominatrix? Not that there's anything wrong with that. I know several Dommes who have been around the block and still love what they do. It’s just not my passion.

In the daylight hours, I am a forensic fraud specialist, for several different firms around the city. This may or may not include some light hacking. I love the chase, figuring out the mystery. Whether it be financial or otherwise, I love putting the pieces together.

These things keep my life on the fringes of society, just the way I like it.

One of my favorite indulgences is my bathroom, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a catty-corner to the windows. I love taking long, luxurious bubble baths. During a soak, I enjoy the views of the city down below, probably as much as my neighbor enjoyed seeing my down below. In my apartment, clothing is optional, and I don’t have any curtains.      

In the middle of my bubble bath, I heard a knock at the door, I’m not expecting anyone. Are you? I asked The Count as he sauntered into my bathroom.

Quickly toweling off, I reached for my retractable baton and snapped it open. No one, and I mean no one, knows where I live. It was safer that way. Having someone knock on my door is like having pizza delivered during the apocalypse.

Once, when I was a kid, my mom and I lived in a run-down tenement building. While trying not to get evicted by the sheriff, my mom showed me how to use a simple mini crowbar to create a lever lock against the front door. A technique I still employ today. Pulling the crowbar out of place, I looked to the peephole to see a Sunny Day Courier.

Danni  1

I really hadn’t meant to cause such a scene at that poor man’s funeral. I mean, what kind of man faints in the middle of church? Who the fuck was I kidding? I abso-fucking-lutley loved it.

My mom was right to name me Jessica lo Dannos Hernandez; said I was mischievous even in the womb. By the time she figured out she was pregnant, she was shacked up with a Northern Italian man she met while hiking in the Swiss Alps. She thought the name was appropriate: lo Dannos loosely translates to mischief in Italian. Or at least that was the cock and bull story she fed me until I found her passport. It didn’t have one travel stamp and still looked brand new even though it had expired when I was five. Whether the Italian guy ever existed or was, just another one of my mom’s witty pathological lies that remains to be seen. I think she just thought the name flowed. She had called me Danni until she died a month ago.

She had known she was dying for three months before she actually told me. The following week, I buried her. That was her style, with no consideration for anyone else. In typical Magdalena Elena Hernandez de la Cruz fashion, her deathbed confession came in the form of a Lavender scented gift basket delivered to me the week after she died. Buried at the bottom, next to the lavender bath salts, was a letter postmarked twenty years ago.

Breathless, with shaking hands, I took the butterfly knife out of the hidden pocket in my jacket and swiftly sliced open the envelope, taking a chunk of a blurry photograph that was hidden inside two folded sheets of paper.

Ignoring the photo for the moment, I focused on the letter with the handwriting I recognized. It was my mom’s curlicue chicken scratched. She liked to pass it off as cursive. It was addressed to some guy I didn’t recognize. Basically, the letter stated she had a kid and that it was his. At the time she sent it, I was eleven years old.

On cheap yellow stationery with little flowers on it, the respondent had written back: SHE’S NOT MINE in bold, blocky letters. That’s it.

I would have taken the man at his word because I knew my mom’s uncanny ability to get just about everything important in my life wrong. I’m not mom blaming, but the woman actually tried to take the wrong baby out of the hospital because she was convinced the nurses had switched me at birth. Thankfully they lo-jack babies, so, crisis averted. Then there was the time she strapped me into the car seat of the wrong car. To be fair, the car was unlocked, but at the time, she drove a white civic and strapped me into a navy suburban. After that, I wasn’t surprised that even the soccer moms didn’t invite us back for the next season.

It’s not that she was an alcoholic, an addict, or even made bad choices in men unless you considered being addicted to yourself a habit. She was young, just a child herself. We practically grew up together. Plus, if it wasn’t for her brand of absentee parenting, I wouldn’t have been allowed to hone my current skill set. She wasn’t all bad. Once, when I had been suspended for running a high-stakes poker game with the janitor, basketball coach, groundskeeper, and Assistant Principal. My mom stormed into the principal’s office and accused the administration not of being degenerate gamblers but of not knowing how to lose to a girl. Then she stormed out of the principal’s office.

Picking up the torn portion of the picture, I could certainly see a resemblance to the man whose head I had accidentally cut off. The respondent, my ‘would-be’ father, wrote his response on none other than Our Lady of the Little Flower letterhead. I wasn’t going to pursue it. At least, that is what I kept telling myself. That is until I taped the picture back together. Although, I got my coloring, eye shape, and body type from my mom. My height, eye color, and flaming red hair were definitely from the man wearing the clerical collar with his arm draped around my mom’s shoulders. A fucking Clerical collar.

That is when I realized finding my father was going to be as entertaining as when my mom hired Madam Se Livrer for my seventh birthday party. When Ms. Se Livrer cracked her whip to turn off the candles on my birthday cake. Everyone took off. I don’t think I have ever seen a stampede like that unless it was for a Black Friday sale at Walmart.

When I parked my rental car in front of the church two weeks later, this place was like Stars Hollow on crack. There was an old-timey ice cream parlor with pink and white striped curtains, a barber shop with the little blue and red spinning thing, and a community board featuring next Sunday’s farmer’s market and craft fair. The quaintness of the town made my skin itch. I need cars blaring salsa and a little spice in my day-to-day. This place was as bland as cafeteria green beans. No wonder my mother ran away.

My grandparents lived on the outskirts of town in what was once called the rich part of town. I’m not sure what it would be considered now. It didn’t matter anyway. The moment they found out my mother was pregnant, they up and sold the house before the first sonogram was done. Scandal for the Hernandez de la Cruz familia, not a chance.

As for the church, Our Lady of the Little Flower was a modest-looking building, nothing like the catholic churches I had seen before. There were no gargoyles or stained glass adorning these walls. But there was something to be said about the stateliness of the church. The building itself demanded respect. 

I had the idea of wandering the grounds until whatever service let out to talk to the man with whom I shared DNA. At least, that’s what I had told myself. Then I saw a man standing on the sidewalk looking as lost and uncomfortable as I felt. So, I took Count Pugula out of his carrier and went to find out what I could about the man outside the church. It all went to shit when he started staring at my tits from half a block away. This should be fun!

Teddy  2

Are you going to stare at my tits all day? Or are you at least going to attempt to be a decent human being and look at my face? The woman said as she stood toe-to-toe with me on the sidewalk.

I’ll admit she had the most beautiful breasts I have ever seen. The woman wasn’t wearing a bra. She was barely wearing a shirt. It was light blue and threadbare. I wasn’t sure if it was on purpose or just old. As a cool breeze ruffled the fabric in her shirt, I noticed her nipples were hard. By the time I pulled my gaze away from her breasts, I was ashamed to say my mouth watered. I wanted to know how they would react to the rasp of my tongue or the graze of my teeth - well, maybe not ashamed.

Wow, do you always look like you are going to lose your load when you meet a woman? She asked.

Registration dawned, and I tried to school my features as much as my burning cheeks would allow. When I finally looked up at her face, she was simply arresting. She wasn’t magazine ad beautiful by any means. Her eyes were set too far apart, and there was a depth of loneliness in them I had only ever seen with my own eyes. Her nose looked like it had been broken at least once. She had full lips almost too large to be natural, and at the moment, they were scowling at me. I opened my mouth to say something when she put up a hand to stop me.

Her crystalline blue eyes blazed a trail from the tips of my unremarkable shaggy ash-blonde hair to briefly meet my eyes, daring me to interrupt her. I remained stock still as her dissection of me continued. My skin burned as if she were raking her nails over me. I puffed out the breath I was holding as her eyes rolled past my face. But sucked in another one just as harshly as she continued down my midsection. I began to fidget. Her eyes shot up to mine again with a raised eyebrow. I stopped moving, stopped breathing. If I could have, I would have turned into a marble statue. She went right back to ogling me.

When her eyes landed on my crotch, I could feel myself pulse and thicken at her scrutiny. I thanked the Gods of clothes for being there until she raised her eyebrow to match the wicked quirk on her full lips. God, you have failed me yet again. I thought as I tried not to cover myself with my hands. I had never understood the term ‘eye fucked’ until now.

I felt exposed and violated. Once she had drank her fill of me, her eyes trailed back up to mine. Her hand shot out. I’m Jessica Lo Dannos Hernández, she said. Then, before I could shake her hand and introduce myself, she cupped her right breast and said, This is Lefty. she cupped the left one and said, This is Joseph. We are pleased to meet you.

So shocked by the entire encounter, the only thing I could think to say was, W..Why is your pug wearing plastic D…D…Dracula teeth?

Fucking Stutter!

She tilted her head back and gave an outrageously loud laugh. Did I mention the part where we were standing outside the church at my mother’s neighbor’s funeral? Parishioners stared at us in shock as she continued to laugh, each round getting more and more boisterous.

Although I’d known Mr. Thomas my whole life, I knew little of him. In the early eighties, he was the mayor, and after retiring, he moved next door to our house. Where my mother unofficially adopted him as one of her own even though he was at least fifteen years older than she was.

I wasn’t even sure why I was at the funeral; I hadn’t spoken to Mr. Thomas since I left for college, and that was almost a decade ago. Now, I run Grinder, a coffee shop near the edge of town about a ten-minute walk from here. Mr. Thomas never came