Apple of My Eye: Tiger's Eye Mysteries Read online

  APPLE OF MY EYE

  TIGER’S EYE MYSTERIES

  Alyssa Day

  Holliday Publishing

  Contents

  Dear Readers:

  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

  Thank you!

  Books by Alyssa

  Darla Holliday's recipe for Lemon Lush:

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Dear Readers:

  I thought long and hard about whether to address the current health crisis in my books, but in the end, I decided that my quirky little supernatural town of Dead End is a haven for its residents and a bit of respite, as so many of you have told me, for my readers. So Dead End and the Tiger's Eye Mysteries will remain pandemic free. However, in a strange coincidence (that Jack and Tess would not believe), a bad cold virus is going around Dead End in this book that I plotted and started writing in 2019. I'm happy to report that everyone in Dead End recovers.

  Sending all my best wishes that you and your family and loved ones are well.

  Alyssa Day, St. Augustine, Florida, September, 2020

  1

  A man named Lucky walked into my pawnshop carrying a skull and a pie pan.

  The skull was not in the pie pan, to be fair, but it was not the kind of thing I took in for pawn, either.

  It was human.

  "Please tell me that's fake," I said, torn between competing impulses to clutch my head or call the sheriff.

  Lucky, who had a super cute, blue-eyed, blond-haired, boy-next-door thing going on, but with muscles that showed he just happened to be ex-Special Forces, squinted at me. "No, it's not fake, it's the pan from the pecan pie you baked for Molly last week. She asked me to drop it by."

  I took a long, deep breath. "No. The skull. Please tell me the skull is fake. Halloween decoration you want to pawn, maybe?"

  He laughed. "Oh. Sorry. No, it's real. I'm on my way to find the sheriff and thought I'd drop off your pan. I didn't want to leave the skull in the car because what if someone broke into my car and stole it?"

  I stared at him for a moment, because what were the odds that someone would:

  1) break into his car, and

  2) break into his car at the exact time there happened to be a skull in it, and

  3) break into his car at the exact time there happened to be a skull in it and decide to steal the skull.

  Maybe he was thinking the same thing, because his cheeks turned a little pink, and he shrugged. "Anyway, I thought maybe you'd want to see it, in case you and Jack…"

  His voice trailed off, and we both glanced over at the door that connected my half of the building—the pawnshop—to Jack's half of the building, where he housed his fledgling private detective business, Tiger's Eye Investigations.

  "Still no word from him?"

  I shook my head and started polishing the already-sparkling glass countertop, avoiding his gaze. Jack and I had been on the verge of finally—finally—going on our first official date when an old friend from his days as a rebel leader in the vampire wars had contacted him for help on some secret, urgent mission.

  I'd barely heard from him in the several weeks since he'd left. So, on the too-frequent occasions when I caught myself wondering where he was and whether he was safe, I'd tried to stop. Maybe out of sight was out of mind for tigers.

  Maybe Jack hadn't been all that interested in me, after all.

  Maybe I needed to quit thinking about Jack.

  I shoved the polishing cloth in the drawer, slammed it shut, and pointed a finger at poor Lucky.

  "Please take the skull out of my shop. Now. I've had more than enough dead bodies and body parts in here to last me a lifetime."

  Lucky gently put the pie pan down on the counter and then hastily stepped away. "I'm sorry, Tess. I wasn’t thinking about the amputated foot. I'll just go downtown and find the sheriff."

  The bells over my door chimed, and Sheriff Susan Gonzalez walked in. "I hear—and I can't believe I'm saying this—you have a skull for me, Lucky."

  Susan Gonzalez was the kind of beautiful that makes you catch your breath and then wish you had a better skincare regimen. She had silky black hair she always wore up in a bun when she was working, rich golden-brown skin, and huge, dark eyes. She'd been a couple years ahead of me in high school, but we'd been building a friendship since she returned to Dead End and joined the sheriff's department as a deputy a few years back. Ever since she'd helped me with a black-magic-coven situation, I'd considered her to be part of my family. She was looking tired and thinner than usual today, though, which made me realize we hadn't seen each other in a few weeks.

  Now that she was the sheriff, I'd been involved with her in her professional capacity more often than I'd wished. She didn't seem that happy about it when I showed up at crime scenes, either. Unfortunately, all too often the crime scenes seemed to find me, rather than the other way around.

  Like now.

  "Hey, I was having a perfectly normal day until he stopped by with a skull. This one has nothing at all to do with me," I said, giving her my 'I'm completely innocent' look.

  She winced. "Tess, are you in pain?"

  I sighed. "That was my innocent look."

  "Huh. I was guessing 'severe hangover.'"

  "Anyway, how did you know I was here?" Lucky asked, switching the skull to his left hand. He held out his right to her to shake.

  Susan glanced down at the hand, which clearly had skull-of-death cooties on it, and shook her head. Then she pulled a pair of nitrile gloves out of her pocket and pulled them on.

  "It's sad that I know that those are nitrile gloves," I muttered. "That means I've been at way too many crime scenes in my law-abiding-citizen life."

  She laughed. "Or it could just be that I mentioned I have a latex allergy when we were at lunch one day. And I knew you were here, Lucky, because Elmer called me from the Pit Stop, to tell me that 'one of those wild Army boys from the swamp' was out there getting gas and had a skull on his dashboard. Also, he wanted to complain about how Sue-Ellen Bishop had been off work with a cold for almost a week, and who takes off work for a mere cold, and here's what's wrong with the modern generation."

  I winced. Elmer Krantz was in his eighties and, to hear him tell it, every single one of those years had been filled with trials and tribulations. Since he owned the Pit Stop, I ran into him sometimes, and it was always a test of my patience and Southern manners to remain polite. Aunt Ruby had worked for him, part-time, for a while. She always said the trick was to drown him in sweetness until he didn't know which way was up. I didn't have that knack, so I usually just smiled, gritted my teeth, and got away from him as fast as I could.

  She took the skull and turned it one way and then the other, eyeing it closely. "I took off to find you and saw your truck turn into Tess's parking lot, so here I am."

  "And I'm glad to see you," I told her, edging around her and walking over to open the door. "And I'll be even happier to see that skull leave my shop. Nice to see you. Have fun with the evidence."

  A rare smile spread across her face. "Tess. I'd think a little old skull wouldn't bother you after the year you've had."

  "It's a cumulative effect. And, is it?
Old?" I nodded at the skull "Ancient? Maybe some old guy who wandered into the swamp hundreds of years ago and got lost and died?"

  "Maybe. But I've seen enough to know that this is probably a gunshot entry wound on the back of the skull. So, unless our victim died by falling backward on his gun, this is probably a homicide."

  The muscles in my neck and shoulders started to knot themselves into a stress-induced tangle. "Oh, goody. And where's the rest of the body?"

  "Skeleton," Susan reminded me. "But, yeah, Lucky, where is the rest of the skeleton?"

  He blew out a breath and shoved his hands in his pockets. "Um. Yeah. It's in my trunk."

  Susan raised an eyebrow. "Should I just get out the handcuffs now?"

  "No! No, I know about not disturbing the crime scene or whatever, but I followed the gator after I took the skull away from him, and he went back to a nest he'd been wallowing in at the edge of the swamp. And the rest of the skeleton was there. Or, at least, a lot of bones were there; I don't know if it's a full skeleton, or even all the same skeleton, or some animal bones, or what. I shooed him off and grabbed what I could, because I figured disturbed by me was better for you, evidence-wise, than eaten or destroyed by a gator. Then I took the boat back to the dock, wrapped the bones up in a tarp, threw them in the trunk, and here I am."

  Only Lucky, Jack, or one of their crazy friends would talk so casually about taking a skull away from a gator and 'shooing' it. I'd had too many encounters with gators recently to be anywhere that casual about it—the more I saw of them, the scarier they were. Especially when they were leaping at me.

  Except Fluffy. Our shop mascot, a taxidermied gator who'd seen better days, currently sported a blue, sparkly beret on her head, a pink ribbon around her neck, and purple-polka-dotted duct tape that covered the bullet hole in her tail.

  "Okay." Susan headed for the door, which I was still holding open. "Lucky, let's transfer the bones to my car, and then you can take me out to the swamp and show me where you found the skeleton. Tess, take care. I'll see you soon."

  "Hey—lunch? Monday, maybe?"

  She hesitated. "Maybe. If I'm not too busy with whatever this turns out to be. We might catch a break, though. We had a little money left in the budget for the year, so I hired a magical resonance expert to come out and look at the decades of junk piled up in the evidence room. Sheriff Lawless had no rhyme or reason, that I can tell, to how he categorized evidence or even what he decided to keep. Since I can't reach him to ask about it, I thought I'd have an expert take a look. Maybe we can clear out a lot of that crap."

  She couldn't reach the former sheriff, because he was currently taking up space in an FBI Paranormal Operations special holding facility for very bad people, and I hoped he never, ever got out. He'd been involved in my late boss's—Jack's uncle's—death.

  Lucky wandered over from the knives and weapons case, where he'd been studying a particularly fine dagger with a camel-bone handle, which gave me hopes for a sale. He did have a thriving swamp boat business these days, so instead of only seeing him in the shop when he wanted to pawn his guitar, I sometimes saw him when he was in a shopping mood.

  "What's a magical resonance expert?"

  "I can take this one," I said. "Mrs. Kowalski, the evil witch, came over to the shop and performed one when we were trying to figure out who killed Jeremiah. At the time, we didn't know she was involved in his death. But, basically, it's a test to see if there's any trace of magic in a place."

  "Right," Susan said. "Or if magic users have been there in the timeframe determined by how powerful the witch doing the testing is. This expert I have coming down is extremely good. I read an article about how she once picked up traces of magic used more than a century ago, and the subsequent investigation confirmed her results. She's really good, and we're lucky to get her. Her schedule is insanely packed."

  "Wow, that's great. I kind of wish I could see her in action," I said. "I think that stuff's fascinating."

  They both looked at me with identical skeptical expressions.

  "Well, it is, when it's about an old skeleton, not somebody I love," I said, throwing my hands up in the air.

  "Sorry. Police business. I can't have civilians in the evidence storage room," Susan said. "She'll start work Monday morning and be here for two days before she goes down to Miami for a vacation with her family."

  "Sounds great! Let me know. And good luck with your immediate future." I couldn't repress a gleeful smirk, and Susan narrowed her eyes.

  "What are you talking about? That face is about more than the skeleton."

  The smile escaped and spread all over my face. "Oh, you know. Just thinking about how you'll have to report the find. To the mayor."

  Susan's entire body slumped, and she muttered something beneath her breath in Spanish that I was betting was not entirely complimentary to the newly elected mayor of Dead End:

  My Aunt Ruby.

  My overprotective, prone-to-nervous anxiety, Aunt Ruby.

  The woman who'd raised me, loved me, and stifled me with a cocoon of caring, and who, when we went somewhere together, still—to this day—would ask me if I had to use the bathroom before we left the house.

  "Heh. Does she ask you if you need to go potty before you leave the jail?"

  Susan groaned, and a look of terror mixed with resignation crossed her face. "Not yet, but she asked me if I needed her to whip out her sewing machine and take in my uniforms for me, since they've been fitting kind of loosely."

  Lucky glanced back and forth between the two of us. "Why is that bad? Sounds pretty nice, actually. I wish somebody—"

  "When I was at work."

  "But—"

  "Interrogating a suspect."

  "Oh."

  "And then she asked my suspect how he thought his mother would feel about finding out he was robbing houses."

  I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe by then. "And did he start crying and confess all? I know I always did, when I did something bad as a kid."

  She shook her head in disbelief. "It's amazing, but he did. This hardened criminal, with a rap sheet longer than the line at Mellie's on gingerbread donut day, was practically sobbing, confessing to all, and promising to 'do better.'"

  I sighed. "The strangest part of it is that he probably will. She has that effect on people. And, knowing Aunt Ruby, he'll be invited to Thanksgiving dinner."

  "That, at least, you don't have to worry about. I shipped him back off to Michigan, where the authorities have a ten-year spot in a very nice jail cell waiting for him. He was breaking his parole. I emailed them the videotaped confession, and the police chief up in Lansing asked me if she could borrow Mayor Callahan for a few months to clean up crime in their city."

  "She'd probably do it too, but don't let her go until after Thanksgiving," I told Susan, only half joking.

  "No worries. Our new mayor is my secret weapon," she said, laughing.

  "Okay. Well, you and Lucky and Yorick, there, should head on out now and do whatever you need to do, while I get the Lysol out and spray it all over the place, in case any residual death cooties have shed themselves in my shop," I said, making shooing motions with my hands. "And, Lucky? Please, please, don’t bring any body parts into my life or shop, ever again, okay? Just… no."

  He grinned and held out his arms as if to hug me, but I wagged my finger at him and made aanh, aanh, aanh sounds. "Not a chance, buddy, until you sterilize yourself. Now, out! And tell Molly to call me. I miss her."

  "She left to go play a few gigs in New England, but she should be home by Thanksgiving," Lucky said, an enormous smile lighting up his face so much that he looked like a model in a toothpaste commercial. He had it bad for my best friend, and I was happy for both of them.

  I just wished she could be around more.

  I waved them off and went back to work, not really in the mood to watch the Great Skeleton Handoff of 2020, but not really in the mood to do anything that required focus, either, like payroll or taxes
.

  I was feeling uncharacteristically low and kind of lonely, to be honest.

  Aunt Ruby was so busy with her new job that I hadn't seen her much, and Uncle Mike had been occupied with some secret project he wouldn't tell me about. Jack was… well, forget Jack. And Molly had been gone a lot, touring with her increasingly famous band, and even when she was home, she spent a lot of time with Lucky. They were still in the new-relationship-excitement phase.

  Even my new sister Shelley was busy as president of both the newly formed robotics club and the newly formed history club at school that she didn’t have a lot of time to hang out with her big sister.

  I stared unseeingly at the new, professionally printed sign taped to the customer-facing side of my cash register:

  WE DO NOT DEAL IN VAMPIRE TEETH, EVER

  Then I spent a minute or two wallowing in a big, fat bout of self-pity.

  But, finally, I gave myself a mental smack on the forehead, because I am just not a wallower.

  I'm more of a 'get your butt in gear and bake something or clean something' person when I feel low or stressed. Since I was at work, baking was out, at least until this evening, but I could always clean.

  Glancing around, however, reminded me that my little shop was already shining. Business had been slow for a few days, but I knew the Swamp Cabbage Festival shoppers would be coming in soon, so I'd spent my spare time getting Dead End Pawn into tiptop shape.

  Being bored and lonely equaled shiny, shiny floors, evidently.

  Ack. Now I was even boring myself.

  Wait. Swamp Cabbage Festival shoppers… I hadn't put up my decorations yet! I usually jumped on that the first of September, but why not do it a little early?