A Star-Spangled Mayfair Read online

  Contents

  OTHER BOOKS by KASSANDRA LAMB

  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

  Epilogue

  Author’s Notes

  About the Author

  Published by misterio press LLC

  Cover art by Melinda VanLone, Book Cover Corner

  Photo credits: silhouette of woman and dog by Majivecka,

  (The right to use this image purchased through Dreamstime.com; this and the cover image of this book are copyrighted. They cannot be used without express permission.)

  * * *

  Copyright © 2019 by Kassandra Lamb

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used, transmitted, stored, distributed or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the writer’s written permission, except very short excerpts for reviews. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or by any other means without the publisher’s/author’s express permission is illegal and punishable by law.

  A Star-Spangled Mayfair is a work of fiction. All names, characters, events and most places are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Some real places may be used fictitiously. The towns of Mayfair, Florida and Collinsville, Florida are fictitious.

  The publisher does not have control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites and their content.

  OTHER BOOKS by KASSANDRA LAMB

  The Kate Huntington Mystery Series:

  MULTIPLE MOTIVES

  ILL-TIMED ENTANGLEMENTS

  FAMILY FALLACIES

  CELEBRITY STATUS

  COLLATERAL CASUALTIES

  ZERO HERO

  FATAL FORTY-EIGHT

  SUICIDAL SUSPICIONS

  ANXIETY ATTACK

  POLICE PROTECTION

  ~~

  The Kate on Vacation Novellas:

  An Unsaintly Season in St. Augustine

  Cruel Capers on the Caribbean

  Ten-Gallon Tensions in Texas

  Missing on Maui

  ~~

  The Marcia Banks and Buddy Mysteries:

  To Kill A Labrador

  Arsenic and Young Lacy

  The Call of the Woof

  A Mayfair Christmas Carol

  Patches in the Rye

  The Legend of Sleepy Mayfair

  The Sound and the Furry

  A Star-Spangled Mayfair

  Lord of the Fleas

  (coming 2019/2020)

  ~~

  Unintended Consequences Romantic Suspense Stories:

  (written under the pen name, Jessica Dale)

  Payback

  Backlash

  Backfire

  (coming 2019)

  Chapter One

  The door of the Mayfair Diner burst open, almost knocking me on my keister.

  A handsome, dark-haired man grabbed my arm to steady me. “Sorry. I didn’t see you there.”

  “S’okay.” I gently extracted myself from his grip and stepped back to spare his nose. I really wasn’t fit for human company, especially of the male variety. I’d just come from mucking out stalls and feeding the equine residents of the Mayfair Riding Stables.

  The man eyed my Black Lab-Rottie warily.

  “Don’t worry,” I quickly said. “He’s harmless.”

  A smile lit up his boyish face. “You’ve got to be Marcia.” He pronounced my name correctly—Mar-see-a, not Marsha—and extended his smile to include my dog. “And Buddy.”

  Then he sneezed.

  “Bless you,” I said. “And you are…?”

  He stuck out his hand. “Jess’s fiancé, Dan.”

  I shook the hand with pleasure. “Finally, we meet.”

  “Look, I’ve gotta run. But talk to Jess. We’ll work out the details later.” He took off, loping down the sidewalk to a shiny black pick-up truck parked at the curb on Main Street.

  A newbie to Florida, Ms. Snark commented internally. The intense sun down here tends to turn dark vehicles into ovens.

  Ignoring my snarky persona, I stared after the man. Work out the details of what?

  I shook my head and stepped over the diner’s threshold, intending to call out a request for Jess to bring me a carry-out breakfast sandwich, since I had Buddy with me.

  A loud but strangely muted banging lured me farther inside.

  Through the large pass-through to the kitchen, I spotted the diner’s diminutive owner, Jess Randall, standing on her wooden footstool at the stainless-steel work table. She slammed a rolling pin down onto the biscuit dough in front of her.

  I winced, then called out, “Hey, Jess.”

  She didn’t respond, her gaze now focused on the round biscuit cutter that she banged down on the surface of the dough.

  She wore her usual pressed jeans, sneakers, and white chef’s jacket. But today her medium-length dark hair, that would normally be pulled back in a short ponytail with a hairnet over it, was stuffed up under a tall white chef’s hat.

  “Hey there.” I called out again.

  She glanced my way and slammed the biscuit cutter down.

  “Uh, could you go a little easier with a couple of those. I don’t want my biscuits pissed off before they even go into the oven.”

  A corner of her mouth quirked upward.

  “I met Dan as he was leaving.”

  Another glance that was more of a glare.

  “I take it he’s done something to piss you off.”

  She snorted and began putting discs of dough on a large, flat baking pan—a cookie sheet on steroids.

  “What’d he do?”

  Jess sighed, lifted the pan and slid it into the commercial oven behind her. Then she wiped her hands on a towel. “Coffee?”

  I grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  She came out of the kitchen and grabbed a glass coffee carafe from one of the burners behind the counter.

  “Hey, Buddy.” She smiled down at him, apparently not all that concerned that his presence was breaking half the health codes in the county.

  I shrugged. It was fifteen minutes until she opened. As long as I had my stinky self and Buddy out of here by then. Taking my usual perch on the end stool in front of the counter, I lifted my long auburn ponytail to allow the air-conditioned air access to my sweaty neck. Buddy settled at my feet.

  Jess brought over two white mugs, brimming with the magic elixir of morning. I took a small sip, testing its temperature, and smacked my lips. Jess makes the best coffee I’ve ever tasted.

  She planted her elbows on the other side of the counter and blew out air. “Dan told Edna that we’d host a July fourth extravaganza for the town, out at the farm.”

  I groaned sympathetically.

  Jess loved to cook, but she did not love the smiling and small-talk making that were part of running a diner. She was good at faking it, however, and most people didn’t realize she was an introvert by nature.

  She’d sold her house in town, ostensibly to help pay for the farm she and Dan had bought. But she’d told me that Dan could have easily paid for the property himself. They now grew organic vegetables and had a passel of free-range chickens, providing most of the eggs Jess used at the diner.

/>   And Jess had an excuse to get out of Mayfair each afternoon, after the diner closed.

  She just wasn’t cut out for small-town living. She’d confided that the first time she’d truly relaxed since moving to Mayfair was when she watched the sunset from the back deck of their farmhouse.

  I took another sip of coffee, carefully choosing my words. “So, you’re not all that happy about having the town come to you.”

  Her face scrunched up as if she were in physical pain. “Yeah, you could say that.”

  “It’s only one day.”

  Water pooled in her dark eyes. “It’s not that I don’t like the folks around here. It’s… Well, crowds make me nervous.”

  “You could hide in the kitchen most of the time, theoretically preparing more goodies for us to feast on.” She was so organized, I knew she’d have everything prepared well in advance.

  She blinked away the tears. “Dan’s already hired a caterer.”

  “What?” I half shouted. I’d liked him immediately when we’d met out on the sidewalk, but now I was having second thoughts. How could he hire a caterer when his wife-to-be offered catering as part of the diner’s services?

  Jess grimaced, then her face settled into a defeated expression. “He said he didn’t want me to have to slave over a stove for days on end, yada, yada.”

  I sat up straighter on my stool. “Well, the good folks of Mayfair don’t know how much work goes into supervising such an endeavor. You could still hide in the kitchen most of the time.”

  Jess looked thoughtful for moment. A slow smile spread across her face. “I knew there was a reason why I like you, Marcia Banks, oops, I mean Haines.”

  I grinned back at her.

  Her face quickly sobered again. “The thing that really makes me mad is that he didn’t talk to me about it first. He said he wanted it to be a surprise.”

  I wanted to say something female buddy-ish to be supportive, but everything I thought of seemed more like man-bashing. Seriously, he thought Jess would like such a surprise?

  If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, my inner Mom intoned.

  I got it, Mom.

  Jess shook her head. “It’s partly my fault, I guess. He seemed to be going stir-crazy out at the farm all the time, so I encouraged him to come to town more, to meet people.” She sighed. “Well, I guess I’ll tie a knot in my rope and hang on. In a few weeks, it’ll be behind me and I can forget about it. You want your usual?”

  I wasn’t about to share my next thought either. If the bash was successful, then Edna Mayfair, one of the town’s matriarchs, would want to make it a yearly event.

  Instead, I said, “Make it an egg biscuit to go.” I glanced meaningfully down at Buddy. My stomach growled in anticipation of the melt-in-your-mouth biscuit coming its way.

  Jess stepped around the counter and leaned over to give Buddy an ear scratch.

  He obligingly stood up to give her better access.

  She grinned.

  “Now that you’re out at the farm full-time,” I said, “why don’t you get a dog? I’ll go with you to the shelters and help you pick out a good farm dog.”

  Jess grimaced again and then let out a slight laugh. “Unfortunately, Dan’s allergic.”

  Ah, thus the wary look and the sneeze.

  Jess vigorously rubbed Buddy’s chest. He closed his eyes, a blissful expression on his face.

  “Dang shame,” I said.

  “Yes, it is.” Her voice was wistful.

  “Hey, what’s with the hat?”

  She gave me another smile, this one slightly lopsided. “Another of Dan’s ideas. He says it gives the place class. I think it’s kind of over the top, no pun intended.”

  I chuckled. “I kinda like the look.”

  Two days later, as I drove Edna Mayfair out to Jess and Dan’s farm, I struggled with how to explain Jess’s issues with the Independence Day Extravaganza, as it had been dubbed.

  “Um…”

  My, aren’t we eloquent today, Ms. Snark commented internally.

  You’re not helping.

  Edna turned her head toward me. “Yeah?”

  Buddy stuck his nose over the edge of my seat back, as if he too was eager to hear what I had to say.

  I smiled and my tense insides relaxed some. “Jess probably isn’t going to be out and about much during the event. She’ll have a lot to do in the kitchen.”

  Edna frowned. “I thought Dan was gettin’ a caterer from Ocala to do the spread.”

  “Well, yes, but you know Jess—she’s a perfectionist.” Actually, Edna didn’t know Jess all that intimately, even though she owned the diner’s building and Jess rented it from her. Edna had a tendency to assume everybody was as outgoing as she was.

  Today, she was dressed in one of her dressier muumuus, a lavender sack over her short, plump body. It was accented with black Cala lilies. I shuddered a little. They looked like the flowers of doom.

  She also wore her “dress” flip-flops, black with silver sequins. Her gray hair stuck out in all directions, as usual. For the umpteenth time since moving to Florida five years ago, I wondered if the woman owned a comb.

  Edna shook her head slowly. “I sure hope Jess don’t get too stressed out by all this. Nobody else expects perfection.” Her Florida Cracker accent grew stronger. “It’s a cookout, for heaven’s sake. Slap some burgers and hot dogs on the grill and git on with it.” She made a shooing motion with her hand.

  I chuckled inside at Edna’s simple, matter-of-fact approach to life and swung my car into the gravel lane leading to Dan and Jess’s big red barn and the white farmhouse beyond.

  Chickens scattered in front of the slow-moving car. A rooster glared at us from a fence post and cock-a-doodle-doed as we went past.

  Buddy woofed softly from the backseat. I wasn’t sure if he was exchanging a greeting with Mr. Rooster or warning us about the fierce attack bird nearby.

  Dan greeted us enthusiastically and showed us around the farm. His easy smile and attentiveness had Edna blushing like a schoolgirl. He lavished her with compliments on how much she had done to promote Mayfair as a tourist attraction.

  “Seriously, this town would be nothing without you,” he said.

  That was absolutely true. Edna’s brother had founded the town when he’d set up a tourist-trap alligator farm here in the 1960s. But Edna had supervised the building of the Mayfair Motel and had turned it into a thriving enterprise.

  And long after the gator farm’s demise and her brother’s death, she’d struggled to keep her motel and the town alive. The latter had dipped dangerously close to ghost-town status around the time I’d moved here. But it was growing now, slowly but surely.

  We entered a large, old barn. “If it rains on the fourth,” Dan said. “We can move the food in here.” He waved his hand in a big arc.

  “Uh, Dan.” A lanky teenager appeared in the doorway, silhouetted against the bright sunlight.

  It took me a beat to recognize Billy Baker.

  Heat filled my chest and rose to my cheeks. Seriously, Dan had hired Billy to work on his farm? The kid who’d helped a psychopath terrorize our town!

  Billy shoved too-long blond hair out of his eyes and glanced around. “Where’s Jess?”

  “In town, of course, at the diner.” Dan’s tone was slightly irritated.

  The teen’s shoulders slumped.

  “What do you need?” Dan’s voice was neutral now, and I wondered if I’d imagined the irritation. Or projected my own anger onto him.

  “Um, more hay outta the loft for the cattle.”

  Cattle? That was news to me. Dan and Jess had cattle? I focused on that, trying to get my pissed-off body to relax some.

  “I’ll get it,” Dan said, a bit too enthusiastically. But then again, he seemed to be enthusiastic about everything.

  I wondered if he was so joyful when he was taking out the garbage cans on trash night.

  He jumped onto the lower rungs of a wooden ladde
r and clambered up it.

  I tilted my head back and looked at the underside of the loft. Quite a few of the boards were lighter, new replacements that gave off the scent of recently hewn wood. “You’ve done a lot of work on the place,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the sounds of movement above us.

  “I like working with my hands,” Dan responded. More rustling, then, “Timber.”

  I jumped back under the loft, grabbing Edna’s arm and pulling her along with me. A round bale of hay tumbled down and landed with a heavy thud in the shiny flatbed trailer hooked to an old rusty tractor.

  A high-pitched shriek, and Dan tumbled past us as well. He landed with an oomph on the barn’s hard-packed dirt floor.

  Chapter Two

  I’d been avoiding the diner, which definitely placed me in the category of “bad friend.”

  It had been two days since Dan’s tumble from the loft. Edna had told me his injuries were minor—a mild concussion and a broken arm. But I still felt a twinge of guilt whenever I thought about him or Jess.

  I don’t know why. The fall certainly wasn’t my fault. Dan had tripped over a pitchfork, lying half buried in the loose hay on the floor of the loft.

  Even the July fourth bash hadn’t been my idea.

  Maybe it wasn’t guilt per se that was producing the heaviness in my chest and stomach. I had a gut feeling that Dan’s fall was only the beginning of the couple’s troubles. They didn’t seem to be all that in sync.

  I did feel a little guilty, though, about Billy Baker. I’d wished him ill from the moment I’d seen his pimply face and thin body in the barn’s doorway. But when Dan had blamed him for carelessly leaving the pitchfork in the loft and had fired him, my fickle emotions switched to feeling sorry for the kid.

  And speak of the devil. I’d finally forced myself to come over to the diner, figuring mid-afternoon would be a slow time, and here was Billy hanging out at the large corner booth with most of the other teenagers in town.