Granny Goes Wild

  GRANNY GOES WILD

  A SECRET AGENT GRANNY MYSTERY BOOK 9

  HARPER LIN

  Want new Harper Lin ebook releases for 99¢?

  Sign up HERE

  * * *

  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 GOES WILD

  Copyright © 2020 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

  About the Author

  A Note From Harper

  Excerpt from “Love and Murder in Savannah”

  ONE

  The fact that I stumbled across yet another murder while on a camping trip with my grandson came as a big surprise. Not that the murder was a surprise—they have been happening around me with such frightening regularity that I’m beginning to think I’m some sort of mild-mannered weapon of mass destruction. No, the real surprise was that I was able to tear Martin away from his phone for an entire three-day weekend.

  I’m Barbara Gold. Age: 71. Height: 5'5". 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 CIA agent, widow, and grandmother.

  Addendum to current status: in the wilderness, cut off from phone coverage and with no idea where I am while trying to protect an adolescent boy from a murderer who’s stalking us.

  Perhaps I should back up.

  My grandson Martin’s school offered a parent/child hiking trip over the Labor Day weekend. My son and his wife signed him up without telling him, thinking (A) he’d like it, (B) it would give my daughter-in-law some much-needed alone time, and (C) it would be a good experience for him.

  Assumptions A and B turned out to be incorrect.

  When he heard that he wouldn’t be allowed to take any electronic gadgets, including his phone, he set up a howl to frighten a thousand banshees. His parents, Frederick and Alicia, stood firm, however, saying it would be a “growing experience.” That led Martin to explain that growing experiences were stupid ideas concocted by old people to control young people and keep them from having any fun.

  So much for assumption A.

  Then Frederick, who was supposed to go with him, fell down a flight of stairs while showing some potential clients around a house he was trying to sell them and got a hairline fracture on his ankle. Not the best sales tactic. They didn’t buy the house, and he ended up in a cast. Alicia volunteered to go with Martin but then got called away to CERN in Europe because they had some sort of emergency with the supercollider that you need a PhD in some esoteric science to even understand, let alone solve.

  There went assumption B.

  Then Martin made a terrible assumption of his own: he figured that with his dad laid up on the sofa watching Westerns and his mom flying over the Atlantic, he wouldn’t have to go.

  It was then that I stabbed him in the back.

  No, I didn’t murder my grandson. The dead guy comes later.

  I volunteered to take him on the trip myself.

  “Whaaat?” all three of them said over the dining room table.

  They all looked incredulous. Martin added appalled and betrayed to that emotion. They all stared at me—little, gray-haired old me—as if they couldn’t imagine me on a hike in the mountains.

  And it was true that I had never done any survival training in northern American woodland. Jungles and deserts were more my thing. I’d even clambered over a glacier or two.

  Pro tip: don’t fire your M16 on full automatic while standing on a glacier. You shoot backward like an Olympic skater with a poor sense of direction

  But I digress.

  “Barbara… do you think you’re up for it?” Alicia asked. “They’re going to be hiking in some pretty remote mountains.”

  I only smiled. As remote as the Khyber Pass? Not in this state.

  “I looked at the information sheet they sent,” I replied. “The hikes are only eight miles a day, with a change in altitude of only a thousand feet. I used to run that.”

  Martin laughed. Alicia gave me one of those indulgent, pitying looks old people get from young people when they mention how they were once young too.

  But then Frederick, bless his heart, stood up for me.

  “She used to run a lot more than that. When she wasn’t on one of her business trips, she’d go jogging ten miles with a backpack full of stones. Must have weighed fifty pounds.”

  “Eighty,” I corrected.

  “Grandma used to ruck?” Martin asked incredulously.

  “Language!” I snapped at the boy.

  He flushed. “Rucking. It’s when you go around with a bag full of stones on your back.”

  “Oh,” I replied. Now it was my turn to blush. I’d never heard that term. The new fitness gurus had come up with all sorts of flashy words for things we used to simply call “training.”

  “Your grandmother was in amazing physical health,” Frederick said. “I never understood why she and my dad did so much training for a boring government job.”

  Boring? It was never boring. Terrifying? Yes, but never boring. But we had told Frederick we were a pair of federal pen pushers who had to go on regular tours of inspection.

  Martin looked at me, puzzled. “That’s cool, I guess. But that was, like, ages ago. When what’s-his-name was president. Bush?”

  “I worked under both Bush administrations. Clinton too.”

  “Like I said, ages ago.”

  Good thing I hadn’t mentioned Carter. Or Ford. The boy probably didn’t even know who they were.

  “I’m still in good shape,” I said. “The hikes will be easy.”

  “I don’t think you’d like it,” Martin said. “You won’t get to do your book club or see your boyfriend.”

  This last was said with a chuckle and a sly look at his dad, who frowned. Frederick still hadn’t gotten used to the concept.

  “I think she’d do fine,” Frederick said, obviously liking the idea of getting me away from Octavian for a long weekend. He had caught us kissing once, and I think it traumatized him.

  “They’re really intense hikes,” Martin said. “Like super-survival Special Forces stuff.”

  “Not really,” Frederick countered. “And she’s been doing power walking every morning. Haven’t you, Mom?”

  “I have. And I’ll do some more every day until we go so that I’ll be fit.”

  “Then it’s decided,” Frederick said with a note of triumph. Not only would he get a Labor Day weekend alone to drink beer and have his buddies over to watch sports and Westerns, but he’d keep me from kissing anyone for three whole days.

  Martin groaned, defeated. Alicia gave me a concerned look.

  I smiled at my grandson. “Don’t worry. It’s going to be fun. I love nature.”

  Martin made a gagging sound and looked away. I furrowed my brow, confused, and then it hit me.

  On one of my previous cases, I’d had to infiltrate a naturist colony to catch a murderer, going undercover (or uncovered, rat
her) as a naturist. Or nudist. Or nakedist. Or whatever you called them.

  Martin had stumbled upon my membership card and nearly broke the state record for the youngest boy to have a heart attack. I had to quickly explain that I was working as a special deputy for the police department.

  That had staved off Martin’s existential crisis and earned me cool points, but it had remained hanging between us as a source of unspoken embarrassment ever since.

  Luckily, this hike was not to a naturist resort. Instead, it was to a rural stretch of mountains out of reach of cell phone coverage.

  I thought that sounded relaxing.

  Martin thought it sounded boring.

  Turned out we were both wrong.

  TWO

  “OK, Cheerville Campers, let’s have a big cheer for what’s going to be a super-duper-great weekend!”

  The dozen teenagers from Martin’s high school who had “volunteered” to go on this trip glared at the bright-eyed, smiling woman standing in front of us. She was about thirty, fit, tanned, and wearing a T-shirt sporting the logo of Muggy Mountains State Park, khaki shorts, and hiking boots. She smelled of mosquito repellent and unbridled enthusiasm.

  “Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!” we all cheered.

  “We” being Ms. Chipper and the assembled parents and lone grandmother. The teenagers did not join in.

  Yes, Chipper was her actual name. Marjory Chipper, the head P.E. teacher at Cheerville High School.

  It was eight a.m. on a Saturday morning, a time most high school freshmen are winding down from a long night of texting and gaming, and we stood in the gravel parking lot at the entrance to Muggy Mountains State Park. Before us rose the wooded peaks of the Muggy Mountains. The leaves were just beginning to turn, and the green slopes were brightened by swaths of yellows and reds.

  The mountains weren’t terribly high, but there sure were a lot of them, stretching north and west for a good hundred miles. It was all state park except for a couple of places where coal mines had been given concessions to turn mountains into craters. I hoped none of those operations would be on our hiking route.

  “We have a fan-fun-tastic three days ahead of us!” Ms. Chipper said. “We’re going to start at the trailhead right over there and follow Benson’s Creek for five miles until the trail takes us up and over Miner’s Ridge. There, we’ll see some old mining equipment and the entrances to some nineteenth-century mines. I’ll be giving a lecture on the history of mining in this area—”

  Groans from the teenagers. Not only did they get woken up at this ungodly hour, but they had to endure a history lecture too?

  “—then we’ll hike three miles down the back side of Miner’s Ridge and along Coal Valley to our first campsite. The next day, we’ll go deeper into the wilderness, following Coal Valley for seven miles before going up the side of Widow’s Peak and camping there for the night. The third day, we’ll do a loop around the peak and come back here by a shortcut. Is everybody ready?”

  The adults took that as a signal to cheer. The teens took that as a signal to act sullen. Someone farted. Martin giggled. Ms. Chipper pretended she didn’t hear.

  “Okaaay. So now here’s the part you’ve all been waiting for, at least the parents have been waiting for.” The P.E. teacher shot us a grin. “Everyone coming on the trip, hand over your cell phones, iPads, computers, and any other electronics to Mr. Bradford.” She indicated Martin’s history teacher, a red-eyed little man who stood to one side. “He’ll keep all your devices safe and will meet us at the parking lot when we come out of the wilderness.”

  I imagined a mob of Internet-deprived teenagers swarming over the poor man, tearing him apart in their rush to grab their devices and start texting, gaming, sharing, uploading, downloading, emojiing, LOLing, and whatever else they did when they stared at the darn things twelve hours a day.

  The teens stared at Mr. Bradford. Mr. Bradford stared back at the teens. It was like a Mexican standoff. I could practically hear the Ennio Morricone music.

  I decided to break the deadlock.

  I pulled out my phone and walked over to him. “Here you go.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Bradford replied, wafting me with a cloud of last night’s booze. Whiskey, from the smell of it, and not the good stuff either. Now that I was taking a look at him, he had quite the red nose and cheeks. He looked tired, too, with bloodshot eyes and slumped shoulders. He moved and spoke all right, so he was hungover, not drunk.

  At least he wouldn’t have a head-on collision as he drove home, scattering our phones all over the highway.

  Still, he hardly acted like a good role model for these teenagers. I was glad he wasn’t coming along.

  The other adults started collecting phones and iPads from their moaning offspring. One teenaged boy put on a Southern accent and yelled, “You can have my phone when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!”

  “That can be arranged,” his father said. The boy gave up his phone.

  I went over to Martin. He stood amid his friends, looking mournfully at all those wonderful electronic gizmos moving into a big bag Mr. Bradford held out. Briefly, I wondered why they had bothered to bring their devices here at all when they knew they’d have to give them up. Then I remembered that they’d surely wanted to use them on the drive over. Deprive a teenager of a whole hour of texting while being driven to the middle of nowhere? Silly me.

  When Martin saw me approach, he got a deer-in-the-headlights look. I gave him my best “Grandma loves you” smile and held out my hand. He rolled his eyes and gave me his phone, which I promptly gave to Mr. Bradford before he changed his mind, snatched it from me, and ran for the hills.

  Then I noticed not every parent was giving their children’s devices to the history teacher. Most were bidding their kids goodbye and getting into their cars.

  “Where are they going?” I asked.

  “Parents don’t have to come if they sign a waiver,” Mr. Bradford said. “Didn’t you get one?”

  I glanced at Martin, who started looking as shifty as a used-car salesman trying to convince a potential customer that the bargain 2003 Lexus only has twenty thousand miles on it. Then I understood. He had removed that form from the package he’d had to take home, hoping that his parents wouldn’t want to go, and thus he wouldn’t have to. Never underestimate the low cunning of your average teenager.

  “Okay, everybody ready?” Ms. Chipper asked in her most chipper voice. “Let’s go see some nature!”

  A dozen pairs of teenaged shoulders slumped in unison. The class shuffled toward the trailhead, accompanied by only three parents, including me, plus the P.E. teacher and the Cheerville High School photography teacher, who would be preserving the kids’ happy experience for the yearbook. I breathed in the fresh air, adjusted my pack, and fell in beside Martin.

  I had to admit that I felt a bit nervous. Despite my bravado, I was not in the peak condition that I used to be. There was a time when I could have done the three days’ worth of hikes the school had planned in a single day, toting an M16 and a sixty-pound pack. But those days were far in the past. All those marches, all those fights had begun to catch up with me. Now I had various aches and pains and got tired far more easily than I used to.

  It was a bit of a rip-off, I must say. I had been one of the most fit women in the CIA, and now I wasn’t much better off than many senior citizens who had spent their lives sitting in front of the television and eating potato chips. I’d worn my body out.

  Sadly, I had to admit, I had also let my body slip. After my husband died, I had stopped exercising entirely, and that had hastened my physical decline. You can’t stop when you get to my age. The gym is just as important for people in their seventies as for people in their forties—perhaps more so.

  For the past year, I’d been getting back into exercise, but had I recovered enough? This hike was a one-way trail going deep into the mountains, with no side trails to get us out quickly. If I ended up hurt or exhausted one day i
n, I’d have a very difficult time getting out.

  Then there was the pinched nerve in my back. It had acted up a few months before, a new ailment coming out of nowhere right in the middle of a case. Luckily, I had discovered Mr. Chong, proprietor of Get To The Point Acupuncture. I’d never tried acupuncture before, but I figured a six-thousand-year-old civilization might know a thing or two, and it turned out that it did. A few sessions of looking like a porcupine had made me as good as new.

  But as far as I knew, Mr. Chong didn’t have an office in the Muggy Mountains. If my back acted up, I’d be in serious trouble.

  I set those worries aside. In the CIA, we always said that you should only worry about the things you could control. I’d maintain a steady pace, watch where I stepped, keep myself fed and hydrated, and leave the rest up to fate.

  But as it had many times in my career, fate decided to play some tricks on me.

  THREE

  The first few miles were easy and pleasant. We followed a clear trail along a burbling creek as birds twittered in the trees. The air was rich and moist, full of forest smells. The temperature was in the low seventies, although the humidity made me sweat a bit. I noticed the area was fairly thick woodland, with a fair degree of underbrush that reduced visibility, perfect for setting up an ambush. From what I could see through occasional breaks in the trees, the valley had steep sides with many gullies and plateaus, perfect for mortar emplacements. I tried to turn off my military mindset and simply enjoy my surroundings. The chances that anyone would want to shell our little group of hikers with a mortar were slim to none.

  The trail was narrow enough that we walked single file, at least the adults. The kids all paired up. Martin quickly abandoned his backstabbing grandmother, the cause of all his present troubles, and walked beside a girl I heard him call Melanie. They kept up a constant chatter, looking at each other more than where they were going.

  Nature played a cruel trick on teenaged boys. Just as they began to find girls as interesting as or even more interesting than baseball or television, they developed pimples all over their faces. Martin’s complexion wasn’t as bad as most, but he had a real honker right on the side of his nose that looked just about ripe for popping. Several smaller spots created a constellation across his beardless chin.