Bed & Breakfast Bedlam (A Logan Dickerson Cozy Mystery Book 1) by Abby L. Vandiver

it.
    Maybe it’s time I took my father’s advice.
    My father wrote a syndicated sports
column. He and my mother had been married for more than thirty-five years. Most
fathers are leery of their daughters dating, no man’s good enough. Not my
father. Andrew Mase Dickerson, called Mase by all, was gung-ho on his baby girl
finding a man.
    With my mother believing in Martians, my
daddy trying to marry me off and all the other craziness I had to deal with
growing up in my house, it’s no wonder I took to Miss Vivee and her outrageous schemes.
    As I rambled along the shore, the waves of
the river’s blue water brushed lazily upon the sand and I spotted the shoal
that led over to the Island. It wasn’t more than a couple yards from Oliver’s
beachfront house.
    I knew I was still young and that if fame
and fortune was what I wanted, I picked the wrong profession. So, I was okay
with not having it. I just wanted to make a contribution. I just didn’t want to
end up like Gemma Burke – dead before my time.
    I don’t know why I hated to admit it,
although I used this fact whenever I needed to, but my mother was very
successful. There weren’t many in our field that were as accomplished as she
was. Yet, she was so down to earth. So normal. I knew that I’d never make a
find as big as the one my mother had made, but if I could be just as good . . .
    I stepped timidly across the shoal, the
fishy odor abruptly invading my nostrils. I found myself holding my breath,
arms out to keep my balance and anticipating what may lay on the Island for me
to discover.
    I was so excited.
    Unfortunately the first thing I found when
I got there was Renmar and Oliver. I ducked behind a tree and thought about
what to do. They had been so secretive since Gemma’s death. And even before
that conspiratorial.
    What if they really were the killers?
    I turned around and went back to the
Maypop.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter Nineteen
     
    Sunday
Afternoon, AGD
    “Mae Lynn called me this morning,” Miss
Vivee said in a strained whisper. She grabbed my arm and pulled me into the
closet under the stairs as soon as I walked in the door from Stallings Island.
    I didn’t even know there was a closet
there.
    I twisted myself around in the small space.
It was pitch black and even with Vivee’s small frame it was tight for the both
of us. “You couldn’t tell me that out there?” I said bumping my head on the
angled ceiling. I had taken to whispering too.
    “No. I don’t want nobody else to hear.
Renmar is still a suspect you know.”
    “I just saw Renmar over on the Island,” I
protested. “She’s not even here.”
    My eyes adjusted to the dark and I felt
around on the wall by the door for a light switch, but found the light bulb was
attached to a long cord that hung from the ceiling. I yanked on it and a beam
of light broke up the darkness.
    “What did Mae Lynn say?” I said in a
regular voice.
    Miss Vivee reached up and jerked the chain
turning the light back off. “Shush. Not so loud.” I could hear her breathing
hard. “I wrote it down in my notebook.” She started moving around. I could tell
she was fiddling around with her purse.
    “Oh shoot,” she said. “I can’t read it in
here it’s too dark, dang it. That’s okay, I remember what she told me.”
    “Well, what did she say?”
    “She said that the girl is from Atlanta,
her name is Koryn Razner. And it looks like Gemma Burke had lived there for a
while too. So maybe that’s where they met.”
    “How come we can’t have any light?”
    “I don’t want anyone to know we’re in
here.”
    I couldn’t argue with that.
    “We have to talk to Colin Pritchard,” she
said.
    “The deputy?”
    “Do you know another Colin Pritchard?”
    I guess I didn’t.
    “He went to Atlanta to do his Peace
Officer training. Would’ve been there the same time that Gemma Burke was
there.”
    “I thought you told me that he did his
training up north?”
    “Ain’t Atlanta north of