Granny Bares It All Read online

  Granny Bares It All

  A Secret Agent Granny Mystery Book 4

  Harper Lin

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  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  GRANNY BARES IT ALL

  Copyright © 2018 by Harper Lin.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  www.harperlin.com

  Contents

  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

  About the Author

  A Note From Harper

  Excerpt from “Sweets and a Stabbing”

  One

  It was supposed to be a routine trip to the supermarket to buy cat food for Dandelion, my tortoiseshell kitten, and help my friend Pearl do her own shopping.

  But nothing routine ever seems to happen to me.

  I’m Barbara Gold. Age: seventy. Height: five foot five. Eyes: blue. Hair: gray. Weight: none of your business. Specialties: Undercover surveillance, small arms, chemical weapons, Middle Eastern and Latin American politics. Current status: Retired widow and grandmother.

  Addendum to current status: Realizing that suburban America can hide as many dark secrets as Kabul or Baghdad.

  I had retired to Cheerville, thinking it was a dull town, in order to be close to my son and his family. Instead I had come across murders, an illegal gambling ring, organized crime, and all sorts of lethal hatred and rivalry.

  The worst was yet to come.

  Well, maybe not the worst, but certainly the weirdest.

  So I was driving to the supermarket, singing a little tune to myself as I passed through downtown Cheerville. I was humming in order to drown out Pearl’s monologue, which, like all her monologues, was an endless list of everybody’s faults. At the moment she was complaining about her nurse, Fatima. Pearl is ninety-six and needs help with many things. Fatima was a patient woman from Nicaragua who cooked, cleaned, and cared for her. Not that Pearl showed any gratitude.

  “… so then she put the salt shaker to the right of the pepper shaker. Have you ever heard of such a thing?” Pearl was saying.

  “La la la la,” I sang. It was a tune of my own making, one that ran as long as Pearl would complain.

  “I mean really, the salt shaker goes on the left. It always goes on the left. Maybe it doesn’t in Mexico where she’s from. Or is it Honduras? One of those countries anyway.”

  “La la la la.”

  She couldn’t hear my singing. Pearl is as close to deaf as you can get without being a lamppost.

  I drove through the historic center of Cheerville, past a large, triangular village green with gnarled old oak trees growing along its edges. Just as gnarled and old as Pearl, but quieter. To one side stood a splendid old Colonial church with a fine white steeple that seemed to touch the sky. Beside the front door, a bronze plaque gleamed in the sunlight. It commemorated a visit by George Washington, who according to local legend, prayed here during the War of Independence. Next to it was an eighteenth-century graveyard where some of his soldiers were buried.

  On another side of the green stood a long row of Colonial-style buildings—some old, some imitation—with boutiques and antique shops. The supermarket was about half a mile beyond the village green in a less quaint part of town near the commuter railway station.

  Downtown Cheerville’s one streetlight turned red just as we came up to it. I stopped, and a woman in her sixties strolled out onto the pedestrian crosswalk in front of me.

  Just then, a car that had been idling in front of the antiques shops roared out of its parking place, shot past me, and slammed right into the woman.

  She flipped over the hood of the car, crashed into the windshield, rolled over the roof, and smacked hard on the pavement.

  “Oh my God!” I shouted.

  “Ouch,” Pearl said.

  The car kept on going.

  “Well, he’s sure in a hurry,” Pearl commented.

  I glanced at the woman. She was obviously dead. Her neck was at an unnatural angle, as were two of her limbs. Looking back at the car that had hit her, I saw it was picking up speed, heading out of the town center. It had already gotten far enough that I couldn’t see the license plate.

  I hit the gas and went after it.

  “You just ran a red light,” Pearl said.

  “I need to get the license number of that hit-and-run driver.”

  “Aren’t you going to help that lady back there?”

  “No one can help her now.”

  “That’s rather cynical. People can change, you know.”

  “Unless she’s going to turn into a zombie, she’s not going to do any changing that will see her up and about.”

  The car was a Lexus and had a better engine than my little old Toyota. The Lexus was already going sixty in a thirty-mph zone and took on a sudden burst of speed, no doubt because the driver noticed I was following. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see the driver or even whether there was more than one person in the car because it had tinted windows.

  The Lexus passed another car and swerved back into our lane to avoid a van moving the other direction. As soon as the van went by, I passed the car in front and tried to gain on the Lexus. It had pulled farther ahead.

  We had left the town center behind us now and were zipping past a few homes and shops. The Lexus took a right off the main road leading to the train station and instead went along a winding, two-lane country road. It went past a housing development and then on to a less built-up area. At least we had left most of the people behind. The way the Lexus was going, it was going to hit someone else if it stayed in town.

  No matter how much I tried, my sensible little four-cylinder engine simply could not keep up with the Lexus. I lost sight of it on the curves. On every straightaway, I saw it had pulled a little farther ahead.

  “Are you going to follow this person all day?” Pearl asked.

  “Yes, if I have to.”

  “I’m going to be late for my bridge club.”

  “People still play bridge?”

  “There’s quite an active group at the Seniors’ Center.”

  On the next straightaway, it had put enough distance between us that I was about to give up.

  At least I would have until nature gave a helping hand.

  A white-tailed deer bounded out of the woods right in front of the Lexus.

  “Bambi! No!” Pearl cried out.

  She had a soft spot for deer and proudly said that seeing Bambi in the theater when it first came out had been a defining moment of her life, although she was so old she must have graduated from college by that time.

  The Lexus swerved to avoid the animal, not from any charitable intentions on the part of the driver but because a good-sized deer can total a car. It’s a little-known fact that deer cause more fatalities than any other animal in the United States—more than scorpions, more than rattlesnakes, more than dogs, and way more than sharks. Sharks hardly kill anyone. Not that I’d go swimming with them or anything, but they are a much-maligned creature.

  The Le
xus swerved into the left-hand lane, nearly wrapped itself around a tree, and cut back into our lane, leaving a set of curving black tire marks as it did so.

  The driver adjusted too much, however, and the wheels on the right side ploughed up dirt and gravel on the side of the road. The deer ran into the woods, flicking by us as a brown-and-white blur.

  After a few seconds, the driver had regained full control of the Lexus and got back on the pavement. The whole thing had slowed him or her down, though, and I got close enough to check the license plate. It was from our state, and I started reciting the plate number to myself to make sure I remembered it.

  Suddenly I got a closer look at the license plate than I wanted to. The driver unexpectedly slammed on the brakes, and I nearly rear-ended the Lexus. The Lexus slowed further, trying to get beside me.

  The intent was obvious—the driver wanted to run me off the road, preferably into a tree.

  Luckily, I’d been trained in evasive driving when I was in the CIA. A hard foot on the brakes, a swerve to the left, a touch on the gas, and our roles were reversed. If I had been alone, I would have knocked the Lexus off the road myself, but I didn’t want to risk a collision with a ninety-six-year-old woman in the passenger’s seat.

  The driver of the Lexus realized they’d been outmaneuvered and decided discretion was the better part of valor. They hit the gas again, and I began losing ground. I let it go. I had the plate number, and that was good enough for now. I slowed down and drove for another mile to make sure the Lexus wasn’t going to turn around and come after us, and then I headed back for the town center.

  “Well, that was exciting,” Pearl said. “Can we go to the supermarket now?”

  “One minute,” I muttered, pulling out my phone and writing down the license plate number in the Notes app.

  “You shouldn’t text while driving,” Pearl advised. “You might end up hitting someone like that maniac you were chasing.”

  I didn’t answer, already lost in my own thoughts. That had not been an accident by some idiot who was texting while driving, and that had not been your usual hit and run, where an accident turns into a crime because the driver panics and drives off.

  No, that had been cold-blooded, deliberate murder.

  Two

  When we got back to the town center, a small circle of people had gathered around the body in the street. I parked in front of the antiques shop—right where the Lexus had been idling a few minutes before—and left Pearl as I went to check out the scene.

  A middle-aged man was kneeling by the body, feeling for a pulse.

  Just as I got there, he stood up and shook his head.

  “She’s dead,” he said.

  “Are you a doctor?” I asked. He had the precise touch and immaculate hands common to medical personnel.

  “No, a dentist, but I’m trained in CPR and first aid. Those won’t do any good for her, I’m afraid.”

  A police siren wailed in the distance. Someone had called 9-1-1.

  The police and paramedics were on the scene in less than ten minutes after the hit and run. It didn’t take long for the ambulance crew to confirm what the dentist had said. She had been killed in the initial collision.

  Now I don’t want to give the wrong impression of Cheerville’s emergency services. Yes, they had made it to the scene in less than ten minutes, but the police station stood just off the village green, and the hospital wasn’t much farther away. Any first responders worthy of their name would have been there in half that time.

  But Cheerville’s first responders aren’t used to emergencies like this. It’s supposed to be a sleepy suburban oasis away from the crimes of the big city, a place where commuters can come home and feel safe with their families, a place where retirees can walk the streets at night without fear.

  Yeah, right.

  While one policeman taped off the lane of the road where the body lay, set up traffic cones, and started directing traffic, his partner took statements from a couple of witnesses who saw the hit and run and from the dentist, who hadn’t seen it but had come on the scene a couple of minutes later. Then it was my turn. I gave them a description of the Lexus and the license plate number and said I wanted to press charges for the driver trying to run me off the road while I was in pursuit.

  The policeman, a young man in his early thirties who was already developing a donut belly, shook his head.

  “Ma’am, you shouldn’t have taken the law into your own hands. You might have gotten hurt. You should leave this sort of thing to trained professionals.”

  I wondered how he would have done in a firefight with the enforcers of a Colombian drug cartel. Not well, I imagined.

  Another police car pulled up, and the least efficient officer of Cheerville’s inefficient police force got out—Arnold Grimal, the chief of police.

  While I never liked seeing this arrogant paper pusher, the look on his face when he spotted me was worth nearly getting run off the road by a murderer.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  The epitome of tact, that’s Grimal.

  “I witnessed the hit and run and pursued the vehicle. I got a license plate number and a description of the car that I gave your officer here.”

  I made a point of leaning over the officer’s shoulder and reading what he had written on his notepad.

  “Yep, he wrote it down right.”

  The cop frowned at me. Grimal decided to ignore my comment. He would like to ignore my existence entirely. No such luck.

  “What possessed you to chase a hit-and-run driver?” he asked.

  “A sense of justice. Also, it wasn’t a hit and run, it was premeditated murder.”

  “Murder?” the dentist exclaimed. I hadn’t noticed him still standing there.

  “Come with me,” Grimal growled.

  We walked a little apart. He spun on me.

  “Why do you have to plague me with things like this? Why can’t you just have an uneventful retirement?”

  “I often ask myself the same question.”

  “Death seems to cling to you.”

  I thought about Afghanistan. Lebanon. El Salvador.

  “You have no idea.”

  He paused, sighed, put his hands on his hips.

  “So why was it murder?” he asked in an impatient tone.

  Nice choice of words. He didn’t ask, “Why do you think it was murder?” He had already decided I was right. I guess after my being right and his being wrong more times than I could count, he had finally given in.

  “I was at the intersection, waiting for a red light, when she crossed right in front of me. The Lexus was idling right over there—” I pointed to the parking spot where my car was now. I could just see Pearl’s white perm peeking over the dashboard like a giant marshmallow. “It pulled out, picked up speed, rammed right into her, and took off.”

  Then I gave a detailed description of the chase. Grimal listened in silence.

  When I finished, he pulled out his phone and told me to wait. Then he placed a call to the station.

  “Linda, could you give me the license number of that Lexus that got stolen this morning?”

  The Lexus was stolen? This was getting interesting.

  Grimal’s groan told me what Linda’s answer was. What could have been an open-and-shut case had just gotten a lot more complicated.

  “So someone stole a Lexus this morning to use in the murder?” I asked when he hung up.

  He nodded. “A couple on the edge of town noticed their car missing this morning. They had it parked in the driveway. Last looked at it about ten o’clock last night and noticed it was gone at seven this morning.”

  “You’ll want to check on their story, of course, but they’re not behind this.”

  Grimal shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

  I turned to the woman lying in the street. The paramedics had covered her with a sheet. The scene still needed to be photographed.

  “And who is she?” I asked.


  The officer who took my statement walked up with her purse. He turned to me.

  “That’s all, ma’am. Thank you for your help.”

  I was being dismissed. I don’t like being dismissed. I gave Grimal a significant look and stood my ground.

  The chief of police took the purse.

  “Thank you, Officer Wilkins. I’ll take it from here. You go deal with crowd control.”

  Wilkins gave his boss and me a curious look and walked away without saying anything.

  “You’re learning,” I told Grimal with a grin.

  “Learning that you’re like a bad penny that I’ll never get rid of? Yeah, I’ve sure learned that.”

  “So let’s see what we have.”

  He opened the purse and found the usual things like makeup and Kleenex and car keys. The wallet inside contained her identification.

  Clarissa Monell. Age: sixty-two. The license showed a Cheerville address. I made a mental note of it. Besides the license there were several other cards—two credit cards, social security, health insurance (oh, the irony!), a membership card to a local gym, and a card for something called Sunnydale Nature Resort. This was printed on cardstock and had a member identification number, her name, but no address for the resort. I found that odd. I also found the logo odd—it showed a silhouette of a man and woman raising their arms to a sunny sky. The man and woman looked nude. Of course, since they were drawn in silhouette, it was impossible to say for sure, but that certainly seemed to be the impression the artist was trying to convey.

  Grimal didn’t seem to take much note of it and put all the cards back in the wallet.

  “We’ll take a look into it,” he said. He sounded as dismissive as his officer but with a hopeful strain to his voice.

  Hopeful that I would allow myself to be dismissed.