Isabel Puddles Investigates Read online

  Outstanding praise for M.V. Byrne and Meet Isabel Puddles!

  “I was very happy to meet Isabel Puddles and I’m

  sure readers will enjoy making her acquaintance,

  too. M.V. Byrne’s small-town sleuth with a big heart

  sees the possible in impossible, whether she’s cooking

  up a delicious pot roast or solving a devious crime.”

  —Leslie Meier, author of Irish Parade Murder

  “A charming debut, a captivating cast, and

  many spells of laugh-out-loud humor.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “When you meet the delightfully witty and no-nonsense

  Isabel Puddles, you’ll never want her to leave.”

  —Lee Hollis, author of Poppy Harmon and the Hung Jury

  “I’ve met Isabel Puddles and I love her. She’s a smart, funny

  AARPster who can whip up a mean pot roast while solving

  a diabolical murder. I eagerly turned the pages of this

  charming, action-packed whodunit. What a fun read!”

  —Laura Levine, author of Murder Gets a Makeover

  Books by M.V. Byrne

  MEET ISABEL PUDDLES

  ISABEL PUDDLES INVESTIGATES

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.

  ISABEL PUDDLES INVESTIGATES

  M.V. BYRNE

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2021 by M.V. Byrne

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  The K logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-2834-0 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-4967-2833-3

  To Rick, with love and thanks,

  for decades of friendship, inspiration, and endless laughs

  Chapter 1

  Whenever the wind was blowing from the north, which was always a cold wind even in the summer months, Isabel Puddles could hear the faint, haunting blasts of the SS Badger’s horn wafting down from Wellington Harbor, some twenty miles north of her cottage on Gull Lake, the place she had called home most of her life. The sound was as familiar to her as the wind rustling through the poplar trees surrounding her property or the frantic barking of her dogs after successfully treeing another squirrel.

  Isabel’s father, Buddy Peabody, bought the little white clapboard-and-river-stone cottage when Isabel was just a girl, and her mother, Helen, named the plot of land it sat on Poplar Bluff. Buddy intended the cottage to be an investment—a rental property for summer people—but after the insurance agency he worked for folded, the Peabody family found themselves in reduced circumstances, so their handsome brick Colonial manse in town was sold, and they moved into their quaint little clapboard cottage full-time. One day, after Buddy was back on his feet and heading up his own agency, their old house in town came back on the market, and he jumped at the chance to reclaim it. Buddy surprised his wife and daughter at dinner that night by telling them he had made an offer, to which Helen and Isabel responded, and in no uncertain terms, that he should rescind it immediately. Poplar Bluff was their home now, and they were staying put, they told him. Buddy did as he was told, having grown accustomed to losing two-one majority votes to his wife and daughter.

  Many years later, Isabel raised her own family at Poplar Bluff. And when Buddy and Helen decided the Florida retirement community they had retired to was not what they had signed up for, they moved back to Gull Lake and happily settled into the cozy garage apartment Buddy had built himself years before. But after Isabel’s husband, Carl, died, and the children had gone off to college, Buddy and Helen moved back into the main house at their daughter’s insistence, and Isabel moved into the apartment. As Helen and Buddy entered their elder years, Isabel looked after them in the same home where they had once looked after her. “The circle of life,” Buddy often liked to point out. But now her kids, Charlie and Carly, were living on opposite coasts, a decade had passed since Carl had died, and it had been five years since Buddy and Helen passed; Buddy first, and just six months later, Helen. So for the past five years Isabel had been living alone for the first time in her life. Well, alone in that she was the only one living at Poplar Bluff who walked upright. She did have roommates—her Jack Russell terrier, Jack, short for Jackpot, and her cocker spaniel, Corky, a black-and-gray-speckled beauty Isabel had recently adopted. At some point, two cats—one a gray tabby, the other an orange-and-black calico—had moved into the garage, so she now counted them as neighbors. Because she was a devoted admirer of Jane Austen, she named them Mr. Darcy and Miss Bennet.

  Isabel’s son, who now went by Charles, although she still called him Charlie, was a successful architect living in San Francisco. Years before he had changed his last name to his mother’s maiden name of Peabody. “Do you know what it’s like to spend your entire childhood being called Mud Puddles in school?” Charlie said to his mother in defense of his decision to establish a more professional persona. But she understood. It took a few years for her to get used to her new last name too, but after a while she decided she liked the uniqueness of it. Isabel Puddles . . . It had kind of a lilting ring to it. But Charlie had evidently decided at some point he was not a fan of lilting rings, and that was fine by Isabel. He also decided at some point after changing his name, to change his religion too, converting from Congregationalism to Buddhism. That one threw her for a loop at first. All Isabel knew about Buddhism was that the Dalai Lama seemed to be the man in charge, and she thought he looked like a very kind person, so she figured it must be a friendly sort of religion. But did this mean Charlie was going to shave his head, dress in robes, and wear sandals year-round? That might be hard for her to get used to. After Charlie assured her he was not becoming a Buddhist monk, only a Buddhist, and made sure she understood the difference, she embraced his decision wholeheartedly. And after doing some reading on the subject, she concluded it was a religion that made a lot of sense. Sh
e could see the appeal for Charlie, who had always been a deep thinker. Charlie even suggested to his mother that she consider becoming a Buddhist, but since Isabel considered herself an agnostic, she was going to stick with Congregationalism, which wasn’t quite as strict as other denominations were about uncertainty when it came to one’s faith. When Isabel finally shared her pendulum-like philosophy concerning the existence of God and heaven with her minister, the Reverend Curtis, he assured her that pondering His existence was perfectly understandable and nothing to be ashamed of. He even admitted he had pangs of disbelief himself from time to time. Isabel told him she did her very best to live by the Golden Rule, and if that wasn’t enough to get her into heaven, assuming there was a heaven, she would just have to hope St. Peter would give her the benefit of the doubt. Reverend Curtis, knowing the character of one of his favorite parishioners, assured her that she would likely make the cut.

  During a recent visit home for Christmas, after Mr. Darcy and Miss Bennet had moved into the garage, Charlie decided that his grandparents, Helen and Buddy, had trans-mutated and come back as cats, taking up residence in the garage in order to keep an eye on things. Isabel assumed this was something Buddhist’s believed in, although she found it to be a bit of a stretch. Charlie arrived at this conclusion after being startled more than once by Mr. Darcy and Miss Bennet sitting on the windowsill outside, casually but very intently observing what was happening inside. “They look like they’re plotting . . . like they want back in . . . it’s a little spooky.” Charlie’s canine brother and sister, Jackpot and Corky, were not big fans of the practice either, but their barking did nothing to scare the cats away. They just looked down at them in disdain as they swished their tails. Carly, a banker, who now lived in Boston, was of a different mindset altogether regarding the cats. All she wanted to know was how much her mother was spending on cat food per month, and how that would amortize after five, and then ten years, allowing for inflation.

  “I can assure you,” Isabel said to her son over blueberry pancakes one morning, “that if your grandparents were going to reincarnate or trans-whatever, it wouldn’t be as feral cats living in the garage.” Then, in an effort to calm her daughter’s fear that feeding two cats would eventually lead her to financial ruin, “And just in case they are your grandparents, I think eight ninety-nine a month in cat food is the least we can do . . . They are the original owners, after all.” And that ended that conversation.

  * * *

  The SS Badger was a massive, four-hundred-foot car ferry, and the only remaining coal-fired steamer left on the Great Lakes. It had been running between Wisconsin and Michigan, from May to October, for well over fifty years. When she was a girl, Isabel Peabody was fascinated by the enormous ship, and longed to sail across the Big Lake on her one day. Every summer she asked her parents if they could make the four-hour journey to Wisconsin. Her mother, always the voice of reason in the Peabody household, didn’t want to discourage her daughter’s adventurous spirit but also wanted to manage any expectations that it would ever happen, knowing her husband’s aversion to the state of Wisconsin. “Honey, if you can think of a good reason to go to Wisconsin, we can talk about it . . . but I really can’t think of one. They have trees and they have lakes . . . and we have that right outside our picture window.”

  Buddy Peabody was quick to invoke the tragic fate of the Titanic whenever his daughter brought up sailing on the Badger. “Why would you want to risk your life to visit a state that counts cheese making as its crowning achievement? In Michigan we make automobiles. In Wisconsin they make sharp cheddar. Enough said.” The world was a very black-and-white place for Buddy Peabody.

  For years her father’s contempt for the state of Wisconsin had been a mystery to Isabel, but one day her mother offered up a simple explanation: “Your father is as kindhearted and fair minded as a man can be. But everybody needs to hate something . . . For me it’s mice. For you it’s lima beans. For your dad it’s Wisconsin . . . We just have to let him have that.”

  When Isabel got into high school and began dating Carl Puddles, a transfer student from Wisconsin, her father was surprisingly calm . . . at first. But the day her new boyfriend came to pick her up wearing a University of Wisconsin sweatshirt, Buddy stopped him cold at the front door and made him wait outside, in December, in falling snow. Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Peabody finally announced to his daughter that her date—still standing on the front stoop shivering—was there to pick her up. The stunt resulted in a good scolding from both his wife and his daughter, and from that day forward, Isabel’s dates with Carl began with a friendly honk from the driveway.

  Eventually Isabel learned that her father’s disdain for Wisconsin, and virtually anybody who hailed from America’s Dairyland, could be traced back to a Milwaukee boy who spent a summer living in his family’s very grand lakefront estate and working as a lifeguard alongside Buddy at a nearby Lake Michigan beach. But when he wasn’t lifeguarding, the handsome young rich kid devoted his free time to trying to woo a beautiful local girl named Helen MacGregor away from her boyfriend—Buddy Peabody. The unwelcome interloper, who was an heir to a famous beer fortune, was about to begin his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin. He was so smitten with Helen that he implored her to dump Buddy and go steady with him. He even dangled the possibility of a marriage proposal after he graduated. But in the end, Helen stayed true to the boy she had been going steady with since seventh grade, resisting the temptation of one day marrying into great wealth and privilege, and a lifetime supply of beer. Instead, she promised to marry Buddy, who was destined for a career in the insurance business, and provided her with a lifetime supply of laughs. Although they were far from rich, financially speaking, they were rich in every other way that mattered. Buddy had been a good provider, a devoted husband, a wonderful father, and a pillar of the community, and Helen MacGregor Peabody had never for a moment regretted her decision. And she wasn’t much of a beer drinker anyway. But ever since that brazen romantic coup attempt—which ended with the handsome rich kid from Milwaukee going home on Labor Day with a black eye, courtesy of Buddy Peabody—he had remained contemptuous of the boy’s home state and his alma mater. He also prohibited the brand of beer that bore his family’s name from ever coming into the house.

  After Isabel married Carl, which was a marriage Buddy blessed only after his future son-in-law laid his hand on the family Bible and swore he would never move back to Wisconsin with his daughter, she finally made the journey she had always dreamed about, setting sail on the SS Badger one summer with their first child, Carly, to visit Carl’s grandparents in Green Bay. Thirty minutes into the four-hour voyage, Isabel and the baby both got terribly seasick, and suffered for the remainder of the journey. After their visit in Wisconsin, Isabel and the baby flew home, and Carl and their Ford Country Squire took the Badger home alone.

  When Buddy and Helen picked their daughter and granddaughter up at the airport, Isabel began to gush to her mother about her trip, although she had the good sense to wait until her father had gone to get the car. Isabel loved Wisconsin. She loved Wisconsinites, the cheese was wonderful, and she couldn’t wait to go back the next summer and see more of it, just not by way of the Badger. She then slipped her mother a wedge of white cheddar. Helen smiled, dropped the cheese into her purse, and patted her daughter’s hand. “Well, I’m happy to hear that, honey. I’m sure it’s a lovely place. But don’t tell your father, it’ll kill him.” To this day, whenever Isabel heard the Badger’s familiar horn blast, it brought back fond memories of that first trip to Wisconsin, although these waves of nostalgia were often accompanied by waves of nausea.

  The sound of the Badger’s horn could also stir up sadness for her, especially in stormy weather. On those days, the horn sounded almost mournful, reminding Isabel of the many thousands of souls who had perished on Lake Michigan over the years. But she loved Lake Michigan. It felt like it was almost a part of her. Through the woods, the Big Lake was only a quarter mile or s
o from Poplar Bluff, and she made the hike with Jack and Corky as often as she could. And every time the trail ended and the lake revealed itself, she was still awestruck by its beauty. Looking out across that seemingly endless expanse of water was as second-nature to her as looking up at the sky. “Salt free and shark free for ten thousand years,” the locals liked to say. But just as the skies in this part of Michigan could go from a brilliant blue one minute to dark and ominous the next, so could Lake Michigan. Those who loved the beauty and majesty of the lake as she did also had a healthy respect for the unexpected and deadly dangers it could present.

  For her Michigan history class in high school, Isabel wrote an essay inspired by Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” about the doomed freighter that went down on Lake Superior in 1975, taking with it its twenty-nine-person crew. The song still brought tears to her eyes whenever she heard it. She nearly came unglued at the Kroger recently while standing in the checkout line with a carton of orange juice and a loaf of whole-wheat bread when the song came on.

  In her essay, which won first place in an essay-writing contest held by the Gull Harbor Gazette, Isabel also wrote about a sad event recounted by her grandparents, who told her in somber recollections about what came to be known as the Armistice Day Storm, which hit the Midwest on November 11, 1940. The unexpected and brutal early-season blizzard tore across the upper Midwest, wreaking havoc with every vessel sailing on any of the Great Lakes, but Lake Michigan was hit hardest. Captains and their crews had virtually no warning, so they were caught completely unprepared. Three large freighters sank just off the coast of Gull Harbor.