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Overview
In “The Proof of the Pudding,” Belle and Rosco interrupt their Vermont holiday to solve a crossword that’s a recipe for murder. Pennsylvania Dutch Country is the setting for “A Partridge in a Pear Tree” as Rosco helps a college buddy crack a case of foul play concealed in a puzzle. “Mum’s the Word” for mobster Freddy Five Fingers. Before he croaked, he was sending tip-offs to the cops via crosswords printed in the local tabloid. Now Belle and Rosco are in Philadelphia to help the Feds figure out Freddy’s final puzzle.
While in the Cotswolds to visit old friends, Belle and Rosco encounter “A Ghost of Christmas Past” when they find a fragment of a puzzle that holds clues to a haunted house’s secret history. And in the title story, Belle and Rosco are enjoying a quiet Christmas in Nantucket when a purveyor of priceless Americana asks for their help in solving a puzzle hidden inside a forgery. Now the race is on to decipher clues that could save a life.
This ebook includes five crossword puzzles that can be downloaded as PDFs, with answers in the back of the book.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497671713 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 10/14/2014 |
| Series: | Crossword Mysteries , #4 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| Sales rank: | 913,456 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Crossworder's Holiday
Five Short Tales
By Nero Blanc
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2002 Cordelia Frances Biddle and Steve ZettlerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7171-3
CHAPTER 1
Tonight's recipe cover was created especially in your honor." It was Frank Finney, the handlebar-mustachioed owner of Vermont's Misty Valley Inn who said this, although he retained a proud—almost triumphant—possession of his offering.
"A crossword puzzle ... with a recipe for Hunter's Pudding, as you'll note. It was a great favorite—a staple, one might say—of the Victorian holiday table ... The artwork and cookery instructions were devised by one of our frequent guests, Mrs. Stacy Lavoro, a longtime member of the other party here ... We shall miss her and her husband, but their regrettable last-minute change of plans enabled the three of you to join us in their stead. And for that we are eternally grateful." With that, the inn's magisterial host produced the recipe, handing them around to the threesome at the table before turning his attention to the dining room's only other inhabitants: a rather noisy party of six.
"But how—?" Belle began.
"—did someone manage to construct a crossword on such short notice?" It was Sara Briephs who finished the sentence. As surrogate grandmother to the younger woman, as well as a blissfully unrepentant autocrat, the octogenarian felt it not only her right but her duty to come to Belle and her husband's aid—whether the assistance was requested or not.
As Belle regarded Sara, a smile crept into her eyes. "That's not what I was about to say, Miss-Know-It-All. I was going to ask how anyone knew Rosco and I—and you—were visiting. We were on a waiting list, after all."
"Well, I assume the guest who canceled ..." Sara paused, her carefully coiffed head suddenly lifting in concern. "You're right, dear; revealing the identities of visitors does seem rather a breach of etiquette ..."
Rosco, wisely, kept his eyes intent upon the menu's contents during this exchange.
After a moment Belle added, "Oh, I get it now," and glanced at her husband. "This has nothing to do with missing guests—or even a recipe hidden in a crossword ... There's a secret message in the puzzle. It's going to say, 'Happy Birthday, Sara. December Twenty-eighth'—"
"I certainly hope you didn't tell them that my birthday's the day after tomorrow, dear child—"
"I didn't," Belle continued, "but someone else at the table might have spilled the beans." She nudged Rosco's foot with her own. "Fess up."
He raised his hands over his head. "Don't look at me."
Belle laughed. "It's a terrible thing not to believe your spouse."
"Really ... It's the truth, Belle."
"What do you think, Sara? Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth."
"I'd say he's innocence itself."
"Inculpable," put in Belle. "A paragon of virtue."
"Pure as the driven snow, a brick, a trump ..."
"I've never heard that one."
"Before your time, dear child ... Derived from triumph, I might add." Her bright blue eyes twinkled; her patrician face wreathed with glee.
"You win," laughed Belle, but the two women's customary linguistic sparring was cut short by an uncomfortably loud argument that arose from the room's other table: one couple in the party of six seemed unable to keep their rancorous feelings private.
"We can discuss this later, Marcia."
"It's late enough already, Gene—if you want to know." The voice had taken on a tone of inebriated and reckless abandon.
"I meant upstairs in the privacy of our room." The words were a basso hiss of malice.
"Oh, why not air our dirty laundry with the group, honey bunch? They're your best friends, aren't they? Your dearest, dearest buddies in all the whole wide world. They're the reason we troop up here every damn—"
"Marcia, please—"
"Marcia, please, my foot. Since when—?"
"Hey, you two," a raucous male companion called out. He was in his early forties, expensively decked out in the very latest in country weekend garb, and his tone was full of forced cheer. "Kiss and make up ... Then let's get on with our host's most excellent feed."
Another male and two other females joined the exhortation. Like their companion, they also appeared to be in their forties and were equally expensively groomed and accoutered. "Kiss and make up, Marcia, Gene ..."
The inn's host reappeared at that moment, moving effortlessly among the residents of the argument-stricken table. "An amuse buche for Marcia ... pâté aux truffes for Gene ... white asparagus from Holland ... a soupçon of ceviche ..."
"They must be serious foodies," murmured Belle.
"They are," Rosco answered. "The host warned me we were in for a 'culinary roller coaster' when our rooms became available two days ago. Apparently, the same group comes up here every year during the holiday season; after the first night, they take over the kitchen and whip up all sorts of surprises."
"As long as they don't whip each other," was Sara's wry comment.
Dinner progressed, an endless array of goodies, cooked to perfection—so Belle, Rosco, and Sara surmised by the delighted comments from the neighboring table. No more rancorous outbursts marred the festivities; in fact, a decided peace had descended on the place—the various dishes served blending seamlessly with equally pleasing surroundings: the traditional painted paneling of a historic Vermont country inn decorated with greenery and tartan bows, starched lace curtains tied with crimson velvet ribbon, a fire flickering upward from the stone hearth while beyond the windows the blackness resonated with comforting solitude.
Not a single far-off porch lamp was sighted, not a car's high beams bounced by in the distance, not a plane's flickering lights intruded. The nine guests at the Misty Valley Inn, their hosts Frank and Agnes Finney, and Lori, the young woman who helped out as kitchen maid, parlor maid, and chamber maid, might as well have been dropped into a private and sybaritic sphere.
"Happy?" Rosco asked as he leaned toward his wife.
Belle nodded. "Aren't we all?"
Sara cleared her throat. "I'll let you two lovebirds continue to bill and coo, while I repair to my room and trundle off to the land of nod." She started to push back from the table, but Belle reached out a hand to stop the older woman.
"We don't want you to go, Sara. This is your celebratory weekend ... Besides, you haven't tasted the Hunter's Pudding yet ... the much-vaunted recipe—"
Sara's reply was a tart: "Have you ever eaten Hunter's Pudding?" She looked at Rosco.
"Something tells me it's not high on your list ..."
"Oh, it's tasty all right ... Very tasty ... My grandmother made it ... Her grandmother boiled it up before her—and probably her grandmother before that ... But it's definitely not a low-cal treat—"
"You have to live a little, Sara. It's your birthday." Belle laughed.
"I already have, my dear. I already have. And that's why I—" But Sara's protestations were interrupted by the ceremonious procession of the Finneys and Lori bearing a flaming Hunter's Pudding aloft into the room. "Happy birthday ..." they sang while Sara whispered an inaudible, "It's not until the day after tomorrow." Then she turned to the window, noticing before any of the inn's other residents that it had begun to snow. Her face creased in an expression that mingled both joy and regret. "'The season of snows and sins' ... Swinburne."
"A poet long before your time, Sara." Belle took the older lady's hand. "Besides, what happened to 'pure as the driven snow'?"
"Touché, dear girl."
During the night, Sara was awakened more than once with abdominal pains and a slight case of the chills. Being a "mind over matter" New Englander, and a devout believer in physical exercise, she finally got up, pulled her woolliest sweater over her flannel robe, and began pacing her room, all the while criticizing herself for overindulgence in the previous evening's feast. It was the pudding, in particular, that bore the weight of her ire. She was too old a lady, she decided, to be filling her gullet with rich foods.
"Besides causing bad dreams," Sara said aloud, then smiled in the dimly lit room. It was the voice of her long-dead father she heard. Her father who had espoused the notion that nightmares were the product of fats and sugars improperly digested. Apple pie slathered with ice cream was high on his list of guilty comestibles. And floating island, and plum cake with hard sauce. As a child, Sara had paid only lip service to the dire parental warnings.
Feeling a trifle better, she removed her sweater, folded it carefully, then returned to bed. Within a few minutes she was fast asleep. But her brain was full of disquieting visions. She imagined she heard whisperings outside her door, imagined she heard furtive footfalls creaking past, imagined the snow had grown so deep that the roads had vanished, that the inn was cut off from the rest of civilization.
Then Sara dreamed she heard a woman screaming, and awakened to find it was true.
"Dead ... He's dead!" It was Marcia, the argumentative wife of the previous evening, now distraught and sobbing spasmodically while Frank and Agnes Finney tried to calm her as the other members of the party hurried bleary-eyed from their rooms. "And I was ... I was ... Oh, my God ... the last words I—!"
Rosco arrived on the scene followed immediately by Belle. "What happened?"
Frank Finney pointed toward the bed. "I'm afraid Mr. Jaffe—" while Marcia screeched out a tear-shaken:
"It's Gene ... He's ..." She gazed goggle-eyed at the prone figure of her husband, his rumpled pajamas and tangled sheets, the glass of water lying spilled on the nightstand. "I told him he should go on that diet! Over and over, I told him! The doctor said so, too...." Her words flew out in bumpy gasps. "With his cholesterol ... risk of a heart attack ... He must have ..." Marcia buried her face in Agnes Finney's protective shoulder and wept afresh.
Rosco, ever the P.I., eased his way over to the bed and assessed the situation. The deceased's eyes were wide open; the hands clutched the bedclothes, and a look of horror had frozen on the face. It was true that Gene Jaffe was no longer among the living, but Rosco guessed that coronary disease hadn't been to blame. He decided to keep that opinion to himself for the moment, however. If Jaffe had been murdered, the criminal was too close for comfort.
"Look here," a male member of the group said while he strode farther into the room. It was the same man who'd initially taken charge during Marcia's outbreak the evening before, and he now confronted Rosco with the belligerence of an accepted leader. "Our party needs a little solitude here. The lady's—"
"I'm a private investigator and former police officer, and until we contact the Vermont authorities—"
"The authorities!" Marcia shrieked, tottering forward until it looked as though she were about to collapse on her husband's body. One of the other women in the group pulled her back. She was clad in a flame-colored velour dressing gown that matched her flame-colored hair; genuine concern seemed to emanate from her. "Oh, Bobbi ..." Marcia wailed while Rosco turned to Frank Finney:
"Is there a local constable you—?"
"I appreciate your sense of decorum, Mr. Polycrates. But the snow seems to have knocked out the phone lines. Agnes just tried to reach an ambulance service—"
"I'll get our cell phone," Belle offered while Rosco returned his gaze to the body on the bed, and then gradually took in the fact that the other bed hadn't been slept in, and that the new widow was swathed in blanketing.
At that moment, everyone else crowded into the room appeared to notice the same thing, and there was an uneasy shuffling of slippered feet as Marcia, again trying to control her fear and shock, began to speak. "Gene and I ... You all know we had that itsy-bitsy little blowup at dinner ... and then, well, he was kind of in his cups ... I mean, weren't we all?" She looked beseechingly around the room. Blank faces gazed back. "So, I decided ... well, you know what they say about arguing when under the influence ... So, I thought I'd just curl up by the fire downstairs ... and sort of let the heat up here cool off ... And then I guess I dozed off ..."
Again, she looked to her friends, who again ignored her unspoken pleas. "After I woke up, I thought I'd just creep back and climb into bed ...'Cause I thought, you know, that Gene and I could kiss and make up in the morning. But, but—" She began to sob anew.
"So you only entered the bedroom a few minutes ago, Mrs. Jaffe?"
All faces swiveled toward Rosco, then swung back toward Marcia as though they were watching a tennis match.
"Well, you know how Gene can be when he—" She bit her lip; her chest rose and fell. "No, I guess you don't ..." Her voice dropped to a near whisper. "Yes, yes, I slept downstairs ... All by my lonesome ..."
The guest who'd first addressed Rosco took the lead again. "Look, Polycrates—or whatever your name is—I don't know why you're here, but it's obvious that Mrs. Jaffe is in a highly agitated state ... She needs sympathy and care, not an interrogation. None of us do. Gene Jaffe was both friend and colleague—"
But Rosco was not to be browbeaten. "And you are?"
"Sacks ... Chuck Sacks ... Charlotte, my wife," he added as an afterthought, indicating a woman in a black dressing gown trimmed with glossy maribou feathers, then waved his hand to indicate the third couple who made up the party. "Bob Tyler and his wife, Bobbi—"
Belle reappeared at that moment, silently handing Rosco the cell phone; who then diplomatically passed it to the inn's host.
The room was silent while the emergency call was made, and the death reported. Finney flipped the receiver shut. "There's been a car wreck," he said. "On the other side of the covered bridge. A bad one. No one can get through until they cut the driver out and a tow truck moves the vehicle—and someone assesses structural damage to the bridge. We've been advised to sit tight."
"Not much else we can do in the middle of the night, in the middle of a snowstorm," observed Bob Tyler. His mouth was hard. He shrugged. "Sorry, I'm just being practical."
"The night is darkest just before the dawn." It was Sara who offered this bit of homespun wisdom. She smiled sympathetically as she spoke, the very image of an old woman with a heart of gold and demeanor to match. "Why don't we all go downstairs and have some cocoa. It's a comfort in terrible times like these to feel that one is not among strangers." She looked at Belle, who glanced at Rosco; all three nodded in private collusion while Sara moved to Marcia Jaffe's side. "I'm so sorry, my dear ... I'm a widow myself ..."
Marcia said nothing.
Still in their robes, the residents of the Misty Valley Inn sat clustered in front of the fire in the first-floor parlor. Lori and Agnes passed around mugs of cocoa and coffee, which some sipped at but no one truly drank.
"Cosby's Coffee," Chuck Sacks announced in a tone that was overloud and overebullient. "I'd recognize the taste anywhere."
His black-clad wife snorted, and grasped her coffee mug so tightly her vermilion-colored nails looked like bloodied talons. "Can't we talk about something other than business, business, business?"
"C'mon, you two—" began a sincere Bobbi Tyler, but Charlotte fixed her with a withering stare:
"Are you telling me you enjoy discussing—?"
"You wouldn't have that new fur coat you were dolled up in yesterday if it weren't for—"
"Cosby's Coffee?" Sara supplied the words. She'd been sitting near Belle and Marcia, and idly penciling in answers to the crossword recipe. "You mean, the Cosby Café chain? Are you young people connected with that extraordinarily successful enterprise? Why, your attractive shops are all over the country. Almost on every street corner."
Bob Tyler answered. His voice had an aw-shucks openness. "Founders and partners. At least, we men are. Started the business back in our college days. Harvard, of course."
The smile was a little too smug for Rosco, but he said nothing as Tyler pushed on:
"Small time—a way to earn a little extra dough. We all roomed together, but by senior year we'd picked up an apartment in Cosby House, so the name kind of stuck. It was Gene who supplied our start-up capital; Stan's the bean counter ... No pun intended."
"Well, isn't that wonderful!" Sara said. "And you've been good friends since then."
"Some of us," was Charlotte's steely reply.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Crossworder's Holiday by Nero Blanc. Copyright © 2002 Cordelia Frances Biddle and Steve Zettler. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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