Bag And Lady: A Cozy Mystery Short Story

By S. Y. Robins

Bianca Cooper lived a charmed life, one filled with happiness and friends. Then one day she finds the unconscious body of one of her best friends in her shop, next door to Bianca's. The only things missing are some patterns and cloth for making dresses. Who robs a store and attacks a woman over some old patterns and cloth? Her friend Christine has no known enemies and the patterns are all but worthless. Bianca is determined to find answers, however, and starts investigating possible suspects. She soon learns a family secret that Christine has kept hidden and the suspect list grows. Was this just a random act of violence or has the family secret finally come back to haunt Christine? Bianca may not be the world's best detective but she's determined to find answers for her friend and protect her at all costs. After all, Christine would do the same for her, what else are BFFs for?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lovy Books Ltd
• Release date: Aug 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223842323

Book preview

1

Bianca Cooper, 28 years old, owner of her own successful handbag shop, and best friend to Clara and Christine had lived a charmed life so far. Nothing bad had ever happened to her, if you looked over a few failed relationships, and she looked forward to more of the same in her life. Her parents and grandparents were still alive, she lived in a nice home, though she rented it, and life was not bad. Not bad at all.

Perhaps fate had finally decided it was time to throw a wrench in the works, or perhaps it was just Bianca’s turn on the wheel of life but looking down at her best friend Christine laying on the floor unconscious, and dialling 999, she knew that fate had suddenly, inexplicably, turned her life from placid normality to undiluted chaos. Oh dear!

The day Bianca found Christine unconscious on the floor started out as any other normal day, she went next door to get a coffee, waved at Clara and her daughter Selena through the glass window of Clara’s shoe shop, headed to her shop, and picked up the phone as it started to ring.

I’m here, Clara, nobody mugged me and dumped me off of the train this morning. How’s our girl? Bianca asked, knowing by now who was on the phone. The daily calls had become routine and Bianca walked over to her shop window to wave at Clara, on the other side of the street, one more time.

You still haven’t had your car repaired? You really need to get on to that, Bianca, have you seen the things that have happened on the trains this week? Oh, Selena has another tooth coming in, did I tell you? Clara carried on speaking as if she hadn’t asked Bianca a question she wanted answering.

Bianca listened as she heard Clara replying and teased her friend about her ‘baby brain’. Clara never even talked about her shop anymore only Selena’s milestones and how well Champagne, Selena’s birth mother, was doing at uni. Bianca should have known her day was not going to go as planned when she heard her friend utter the dreaded words every single, childless woman dreads hearing from her friends with children.

Oh, you’ll understand when you have your own children. Bianca snorted and tried not to roll her almond shaped green eyes. Not likely sister, Bianca thought. Bianca had no plans to have children in the foreseeable future; she didn’t even have a steady boyfriend at the moment.

She’d chosen to focus her time and her energies on her shop, not on a man or children. To be fair though Clara hadn’t had those plans either, she’d literally had a baby dropped on her doorstep, after all. No, Bianca’s plans did not include children and her plump frame proved that. She spent so much time working on creating inventory for her shop, working in the shop, and just being at the shop that she rarely had time for exercise or eating healthy and her body was starting to show that.

Bianca was quite pretty though, and though she might not have a lot of time for exercising she did dress her frame in sophisticated clothes and kept her shoulder