Poisoned Pin: A Cozy Mystery (Brenna Battle Book 2) by Laney Monday Page A

into a bright, lightweight teal sweater that billowed about her arms. Layers of beaded necklaces in white and translucent blue hung in a similar, casual-dressy way. Her hair was gathered up in a beaded clip, and her lips freshly glossed.
    The pair strode across the street, and Jacinda positioned herself on the sidewalk, right in front of the base of the steps. In other words, just a few inches from me. Fantastic. Now I was stuck, crouching behind a bush. I tried to think of a way to gracefully emerge from hiding, to come up with a sensible reason for being there, or perhaps a greeting so brilliant it made Jacinda and her friend fail to notice I’d just burst from the greenery like a fairy out of a dewy morning blossom. A big, wingless, slightly sweaty, still-somewhat bloated-with-banana-split, fairy.
    “Just a little bit to the left,” I heard the girl tell Jacinda.
    Carefully, I pushed down a feathery evergreen branch until I had a narrow tunnel to spy through. The girl stood across from Jacinda with her smart phone positioned for picture-taking.
    “There?”
    “Yes, perfect! Ready?”
    “Go!” Jacinda put on a serious face. “Welcome, once again, to Bonney Bay. Many of you may recognize the incredible building behind me,” Jacinda began. She gestured and spoke as if for an audience. And her friend was clearly recording. “The house, built just above the deadly cliffs, which fall into the ice cold, treacherous waters of Bonney Bay, Washington. You can find out just how treacherous those waters are in my historical novel, Bonney Queen of the Bay , a tale of tragedy inspired by real events.”
    I rolled my eyes. Ice cold, yes. But treacherous?
    “This is the house where furniture has been known to move on its own, where mysterious, shadowy figures can be seen wandering in the night and unexplained voices and footsteps interrupt the otherwise quiet days. Some say the house itself is responsible for these disturbances. That it has its own personality, its own spirit. Moira, the woman it was built for, once treated this house as a friend. As her beloved. As though it had a spirit of its own. But I believe it is her spirit that haunts this house. Her spirit that’s responsible for the strange happenings. And now, her spirit that is responsible for a man’s death.
    “That’s right. Just yesterday, a man was killed in this house. Though the last surviving resident of Reiner House told them who was responsible, the police initially treated the death as a natural one. Today though, that unfortunate man—we’ll call him H —was arrested in connection with that untimely death. This isn’t the first time the Bonney Bay PD got it wrong. Just a week ago, an innocent woman was accused of murder. That killing turned out to have been done by another woman, in self defense. There was no murder at all. And I’m telling you, this case is the same. There is no murder. At least not within the law. Because the guilty party is far beyond the jurisdiction of the Bonney Bay PD. She is subject to no earthly law, and she knows it.
    “The killer is Moira. And there’s nothing the police can do about it, since she’s been dead since 1890. You can read all about Moira’s tragic end in Bonney Queen of the Bay . As we’re about to discover, new material is mounting daily for my upcoming book on the house itself. In House of Spirits , we will explore the after-lives of Reiner House’s early residents. Spirits like Julia, a distant relative of the current owners, who died in a tragic kitchen fire at a tender young age, and of course, Moira, whose life is a tale of tragedy upon tragedy.”
    There was a silence as Jacinda paused. So that’s who Julia was! A relative of Harvey’s. I shivered. Wow. For a second there, Miss Ghost Buster even had me at the mercy of the heebie-jeebies.
    “Got it!” the girl said. “Should we try to get some shots through the windows next?”
    “Play it back for me first, Avery. I want to make sure I got