Murder at Magic Lake Read online

  Murder at Magic Lake

  An Abigail Ritter Mystery, Book One

  Solar Unicorn Publishing

  Copyright © 2021 by Sandra Ulbrich Almazan

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Sandra Ulbrich Almazan/Solar Unicorn Publishing

  www.sandraulbrichalmazan.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Book Layout © 2017 BookDesignTemplates.com

  Murder at Magic Lake/ Sandra Ulbrich Almazan.—1st ed.

  ISBN 978-1-944437-11-4

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Acknowledgements

  Excerpt From Restaurants and Revenge

  Other Works by the Author

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The sign on Fairy Road said, Welcome to Magic Lake, Wisconsin, Population, 9,000. It might as well have said, Welcome back, Abigail Ritter. You’re a loser.

  Going back to my hometown to celebrate my grandmother’s birthday should have made me feel excited to see my family and eat good food. Even the weather was decent for February. Although it was cold, the sun shone, illuminating every edge of the Ice Age rock lining the road. A few patches of snow lingered in shady spots, giving the air a fresh, crisp scent as I rolled down the window. It cleared my headache, but not the nervous churning of my stomach. If I didn’t eat at the birthday party, everyone would know something was wrong. I’d be forced to confess I’d been fired.

  I drove past the food processing plant, where fruit became jam, jelly, and pie filling. I remembered working on the line in high school, and I shivered. I didn’t want to go back there, where I had to stand all day, wearing itchy uniforms that never fit right. Best thing to do was leave Magic Lake on Sunday, after the party, and keep looking for a new job. It was tempting to ask my extended family for referrals. I had relatives everywhere from Chicago to Milwaukee to Madison, even outside the Midwest. But that would mean telling them I’d lost my job and then listening to them berate me for not going into medicine like my sister, Marianne. Better to spend a few weeks looking through LinkedIn and going to interviews than an hour being lectured by my family.

  I sipped the last of my juice blend, a peach-mango tea with homemade tapioca pearls. Fresher than anything I could buy in a store, tastier than anything I’d had in a restaurant. Maybe I should sell the recipe to one of the food science professors at Magic Lake College. That might pay my rent for a couple of months.

  As I passed the processing plant, I decided to take the long way through town to my parents’ house. It had been a few months since I’d been back, and every time I talked to my mom, she complained about how much the town was changing. I wouldn’t mind seeing it for myself—especially if I could postpone being interrogated about my life at Grandma’s party.

  Fairy Road marked the border between Midsummer Dreams, the new subdivision on the edge of town, and the Schuster and O’Connor farms. The road led straight to the small beach and dock on Magic Lake. March was too early for tourists, but a couple of college students jogged along the walkway and played Frisbee in the park. I turned left into the downtown area. Most other small towns would have had a Main Street, but our downtown was built along Dragon Drive. Acrylic statues of dragons, each as tall as me and coming in different colors, sat at each intersection, serving both as landmarks and photographic opportunities.

  I parked near my favorite dragon, a purple one with wings outspread, ready to fly. It was right next to my grandmother’s apartment building, The Grand. Built in the late 19th century, it was the tallest building in town. Once it had been a multi-level department store, then a hotel. Sometime after World War Two, it had been converted into a ground-level restaurant with apartments on the second and third floors. Grandma still had several tenants, but she’d closed the restaurant last year when she said she didn’t have the energy to run it anymore. Now the large windows were grey with dust, and the sign that had once announced “The Nicest Noodles” was missing several letters. I remembered when my parents used to take our family there for dinner on Sundays, when we wolfed down ice cream for dessert while my parents argued with my grandmother about how much they owed her. In high school, I waitressed there during the summers. Before I left for college, Grandma had told me I could always have a job with her if I needed one. I sure wished that were true now.

  As I reminisced, a black Toyota with a bumper held on by duct tape drove around the corner and into the back parking lot. I shook my head. Cousin Brian still hadn’t gotten his car fixed. He lived in the basement apartment rent-free in exchange for maintaining The Grand and doing odd jobs for her. What was he doing here? Like all my relatives and my family’s friends, he had a standing invitation for every party my family hosted. He should be at the house already.

  I pulled into the parking lot next to his car. Three other cars, including Grandma’s, clustered near the building entrance, while a fourth stood isolated on the other side of the lot. Brian had already gotten out of his car and was back at the trunk, turning the key in the lock.

  “Brian,” I called. “You’d better get over to the house before all the food is gone.”

  He raised the trunk lid a couple of inches but slammed it shut when I spoke. “Abigail, what a surprise.” Unlike me, Brian was full Filipino. He hadn’t shaved yet, and the torn T-shirt and stained jeans were better suited for dealing with the furnace than hanging out in my parent’s back yard. “When did you get into town?”

  “Just a few minutes ago. Got an emergency?”

  “What? Oh, no.” He glanced back at the car. “I was just running some errands. Gotta take care of a couple of things before I come to the party. Please save some of the pig for me.”

  “We will,” I promised. For big parties or extra-special ones, my parents would buy a pig from a farmer in the next town and roast it themselves in the backyard over coal. The rest of the meal would be potluck, with my mother’s side of the family bringing eggrolls and other Filipino dishes while my dad’s relatives brought traditional American favorites like potato salad and pie. No one left our house hungry—or without a bag of leftovers for the next day.

  “Did you bring any food this time?” Brian asked. “I hear Marianne is bringing a cake.”

  “From the store?”

  “No, it’s homemade.”

  Party food didn’t count in our family unless you’d spent half a day or more in the kitchen preparing each ingredient from scratch. When had my sister found the time for that? Either she’d actually had a couple of days off from the hospital, or else she’d cheated and used a box recipe. I hoped it was the later, even if it
tasted like cardboard. Then I realized that if my sister was now adult enough to bring food to the party, I would be expected to as well. All I had with me were a few mouthfuls of lukewarm tea. Looking at my travel mug gave me an idea.

  “I’d better pick up a few things before heading home,” I said, putting the car back into drive. “I’ll see you later.”

  Brian nodded, standing next to his car as if waiting for me to leave.

  As I left the parking lot, another beat-up car, this one blaring heavy metal, entered. I caught a glimpse of Wayne Stillman behind the wheel. He was almost ten years older than me, but I’d seen pictures of him and the rest of the football team still on display when I entered high school. With him as quarterback, our team, the Magic Lake Dragons, advanced farther in state playoffs than we ever had, even if we didn’t win the championship. Unfortunately for Wayne, high school must have been his peak. He’d been divorced twice, and every time I came to town, he was working a different job. I didn’t know how he managed to pay the rent every month or why Grandma let him stay. Wayne had such an angry expression I didn’t wave to him.

  The closest supermarket was a couple of blocks away. I parked, then went in to check the produce. The peaches weren’t ripe enough to use, and the mangos looked like they were on sale for a reason. I grabbed a couple of oranges, then headed to the frozen food aisle for berries. While I was practically climbing into the freezer to grab the bags from the top shelf—I’m five feet two inches—someone called my name.

  “Why, Abigail Ritter! I haven’t seen you in forever. You’re lucky to look so young for your age.” Rosalie Cayene sashayed toward me in four-inch heels, designer sweats, and more makeup than I wore on the most formal occasions. She was about the same age as my grandmother, but I’d heard her claim to be as much as ten years younger. With her hair newly dyed fire-engine red and her facelift, she almost looked it.

  I put on a smile, but my hands tightened on my basket. Rosalie was the kind of woman who made catty remarks about every other woman in existence. I could never think of a good comeback to her insults until hours later.

  “You must be here for Isabella’s party,” Rosalie continued. Isabella was my grandmother’s name. “Did you bring a boyfriend along to meet your family? I’m sure they would consider that the greatest gift you could give your grandmother.”

  My throat tightened. “I don’t have a boyfriend.” My last serious boyfriend, Joshua, had wanted me to do things I wasn’t comfortable with. I had no good luck on any dating site I tried, just a bunch of losers who wanted booty call at midnight more than a real relationship. Samantha, my cousin and best friend, and I had a long-standing debate going about whether a cat or dog would make a better boyfriend. If my dry spell kept up, I’d soon find out.

  Rosalie tsked. “You’d better hurry up, dear. You’re not getting any younger.”

  I wanted to retort that this wasn’t the nineteenth century and I didn’t need a man to take care of me. I wanted to point out that no matter how she tried to hide it, she was old enough to be my grandmother. But Rosalie would complain to my parents, and no matter that I was almost thirty, they would still lecture me about being respectful to my elders. So I grabbed the berries, hopped out of the freezer, and asked, “Are you coming to my grandmother’s party?” Please say no.

  She tossed her head. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  I guessed that meant she and my grandmother weren’t at each other’s throats at the moment. My twin brothers, Matt and Mark, got along better than my grandmother and Rosalie. They’d been feuding on and off for decades, though no one would tell me why.

  “Great,” I said weakly. “I’ll see you there. Just have to finish picking up a couple of things.”

  “Get a different shade of lipstick, something redder,” she advised. “You never know where you might find somebody.”

  “Not in this town,” I said to my reflection as she left. There was a small college on the edge of Magic Lake, but I didn’t want to date someone who was still into keggers. I wasn’t ready for the house with a white picket fence and two-and-some-weird -fraction-of-kids either, but if I could find a guy who I could trust, someone who shared my values, I’d consider it. Especially if he was good-looking and wanted me the way that I was. Joshua had been overweight but had constantly harped on how he’d expected someone who was part Asian to be skinny. It had been a relief when he’d broken up with me for someone else.

  I finished shopping and squeezed the groceries into my trunk. No time to sightsee now. I drove away from Dragon Drive toward my parents’ house. They lived about a mile from the college, where my dad taught food science. They’d bought a small house back in the seventies, but they’d saved up and managed to buy the lot next door when I was a girl. After a major remodeling job that still made my dad swear every time someone brought it up, they’d not only doubled the size of the house, but also added a three-season room, a pool, and a fire pit in the back yard. Small wonder the extended family gathered at our house every time there was a party.

  There were already so many cars on the street that I had to park a block away. I left my overnight bag in the car for now and hoisted two full bags of groceries. Snow still covered part of the sidewalk, but it wasn’t deep. I stepped in other people’s footprints and wove in between cars, automatically noting who was here. The minivan with the “Baby on Board” sign in the back belonged to my sister. I perked up when I saw my cousin Samantha’s hybrid. It would be good seeing her again. Mark’s beat-up sedan was pulled up next to the house to make it less visible from the street.

  The front door was unlocked, so I let myself in and dropped my shoes in a big wicker basket that was already three-fourths full. No one left a family party in a hurry. A banner above the entrance declared, “Happy Birthday, Isabella!” Music from the 40s played from the living room, which was already crowded. I waved to everyone but didn’t go in to say hi. As I hurried to the kitchen, a voice behind me called, “Where are you sneaking off to, Abs?”

  Sam was the only one who used that nickname. I turned around. She flew at me and hugged me so tightly her brown-and-turquoise hair covered my face. I dropped my bags to hug her.

  “I’m adulting,” I told her. “I’m going to blend some fruit tea.”

  “Need some help?” she asked.

  “Are you sure you want to volunteer? We may never make it out of the kitchen.”

  Many of the older women spent most of the party in the kitchen cooking, setting out food, or washing dishes. With the never-ending gossip and laughter, you would think the main party was there instead in the rest of the house or out on the lawn.

  Sam shrugged. “I figure if I’m there helping you, I won’t get stuck doing dishes later. That wrecks my manicure something terrible.”

  We dodged as my mom left the kitchen with a pot of fish soup. “Abigail! There you are.” She studied my outfit critically. I was still in a sweater and jeans with my hair pulled back in a ponytail, while my mother had perfectly curled hair and wore a green dress. Her heels made her slightly taller than me. No matter how many hours she spent prepping and cooking food, she always looked as fresh as though she’d just put on her makeup. I wished I’d inherited that talent from her.

  I forestalled any comment by asking, “Mom, you aren’t using the punch bowl for anything, are you?”

  “I was planning to put the eggrolls in there. We have so many...”

  “Can’t you find somewhere else to put them? I have a surprise for everyone.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “A surprise? What is it?”

  “That would spoil the surprise,” Sam said.

  Mom shrugged, as if it didn’t matter to her either way. “Go ahead. We have plenty of everything anyway.”

  I flashed back to my sixth-grade award ceremony, where I’d won an honorable mention in an essay contest. That was the same year Marianne, then in eighth grade, won top prizes in the science fair and Most Valuable Orchestra member. She got all the atte
ntion at the party that weekend—which made sense when I realized, more than a decade later, that it had been her graduation party. But all our relatives were so busy gushing over her they didn’t even ask me how I was doing in school. I didn’t bother hanging up my Honorable Mention certificate in my room. When it was my turn to graduate from eighth grade, my party was combined with a get-together for some visiting out-of-town relatives. Throughout high school and college, I was always in the shadows of my siblings. But not this time, I vowed. No one else would have thought to make fruit-flavored tea. It would be something different, something bound to get attention.

  I entered the kitchen. Mom had remodeled it a few years ago with stainless steel appliances and a new island in the center of the room. Sunflower motifs on the towels and a few hand-painted tiles gave the area warmth. My mother’s sisters, Aunt Carol and Aunt Bea, were frying eggrolls and transferring cooked ones to a chafing dish. They could have been twins with their dyed hair styled the same way. Aunt Bea tended to dress in more vibrant colors, like the red blouse she wore with several gold bracelets. Aunt Carol wore a simple black dress with a crucifix on a necklace. “Abigail! Samantha!” Aunt Carol sang out. “Come help me bring food out to the buffet!”

  “Sorry, Aunt Carol.” I set my groceries bags on a corner of the crowded table. Savory smells of lasagna, noodles, chicken skewers, and fresh dinner rolls made my stomach gurgle with hunger. I wanted to start sampling everything, but I pulled out my ingredients instead. “I’m making something. Aunt Bea, is there room on the stove to boil water? Lots of water?”

  She shook her head. “We’re already using all the big pots.”

  “In that case, the kettle will do.” I filled it up and squeezed it next to a pot of fish soup.

  Sam had managed to find a clean cutting board and a small knife. “Now what, Abigail?”

  “We need to slice half an orange for decoration and squeeze the rest for juice. And then we have to thaw the berries without warming them too much or making them mushy.”

  I took charge of the berries myself. Luckily, no one was using the microwave, so I defrosted one bag at a time, checking it every thirty seconds. I stopped while the berries were still cool and firm. By the time Sam was done with the oranges and found the cups that went with the punch bowl, the kettle’s whistle shrilled above the kitchen clatter and conversation. I rummaged through the pantry and claimed several bags of tea. Then I had to find a teapot large enough to brew all the tea. While I worked, my aunts kept talking.