Past & Present Read online

  Past & Present

  A Marketville Mystery

  Judy Penz Sheluk

  Praise for Past & Present

  “Psychological realizations and self-inspection are an exquisite touch to this story that keeps readers not only engaged, but completely cognizant of the forces that motivate families, murderers, and investigators alike… The result is a tense, emotionally gripping, multifaceted mystery that serves both as a perfect continuation of Callie's life story and as a fine stand-alone read for newcomers.” — Diane Donovan, Senior Book Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

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  “A well-crafted story that keeps readers engaged as history blends into the present.” — Debra H. Goldstein, award-winning author of the Sarah Blair mystery series

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  “Sheluk nails it with this intriguing mystery that stitches together an investigation into the past with people’s lives in the present—including that of protagonist Callie Barnstable. Treat yourself to a new present-day read—you won’t be disappointed.” — Edith Maxwell, author of the Agatha-nominated Quaker Midwife Mysteries

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  “An intriguing small-town mystery populated by engaging characters you want to spend time getting to know. Ocean liners, immigration, and family ties; the past is always present—an idea Ms. Sheluk explores to great effect.” — Micki Browning, Agatha-nominated author of The Mer Cavallo mystery series

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  “An engaging journey into the past that ripples into the present. Sheluk’s well-written narrative and clever banter follows protagonist Callie Barnstable as she seeks answers for a client; each photo, memorabilia, and news article reveals an intriguing picture of love, family secrets…and murder. A top-notch mystery that keeps you guessing to the end.”— Kings River Life Magazine

  Praise for Skeletons in the Attic

  “A smartly constructed mystery in the good old-fashioned and highly readable sense.” — Jack Batten, The Toronto Star

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  “Callie’s plight grabs the reader from the get-go and, as the plot twists and twists again, you follow her with heart in mouth. Is there any way for this to end well? Yes, there is, and you won’t see it coming!”— Catriona McPherson, bestselling author of The Reek of Red Herrings

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  “A thought-provoking, haunting tale of decades old deception.” — Annette Dashofy, USA Today bestselling author of the Zoe Chambers mystery series

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  “A complex plot, an extremely likeable protagonist, and a bombshell ending you never saw coming.” — Diane Vallere, National bestselling mystery author

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  “A fine, winding investigative piece that redefines the concept of ‘dirty laundry’ and whether or not it should be aired in public or secreted forever” — Diane Donovan, Senior Book Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

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  “Her father’s sudden death. Her mother’s disappearance from long ago. Inheriting the house where her childhood began. These items all connect to the journey that Callie must face and what a can of worms this roller-coaster ride opened in this debut series.” — Dru Ann Love, Dru’s Book Musings

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  “A beautifully crafted page-turner.” — Ellen Byron, bestselling author of the Cajun County Mysteries

  Praise for the Glass Dolphin Mysteries

  The Hanged Man’s Noose

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  “A thoroughly engaging debut mystery… well-plotted, well-paced and just plain well done!” — Elizabeth J. Duncan, award-winning author, the Penny Brannigan and Shakespeare in the Catskills mystery series

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  “A small town with a dark past, its inhabitants full of secrets, a ruthless developer, and an intrepid reporter with secrets of her own come together to create a can’t-put-down-read.” — Vicki Delany, bestselling author of the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop Mysteries

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  “Compelling characters with hidden connections and a good, old-fashioned amateur sleuth getting in over her head.” — James M. Jackson, author of the Seamus McCree mystery series

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  A Hole in One

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  “What fun! A twisty tale chock full of clues and red herrings, antiques and secrets, and relationships that aren’t what they seem.” — Jane K. Cleland, award-winning author, Josie Prescott Antiques Mysteries and Mastering Plot Twists

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  “A bang-up mystery! Two friends, two murders, secret pasts, and a touch of romance. Who could ask for more?” — Lea Wait, USA Today bestselling author, Shadows Antique Print and Mainely Needlepoint mysteries

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  “A captivating page-turner…you don’t have to love golf to love A Hole In One.” — Kristina Stanley, bestselling author of the Stone Mountain Mysteries

  Also by Judy Penz Sheluk

  NOVELS

  Glass Dolphin Mysteries

  The Hanged Man’s Noose

  A Hole in One

  Marketville Mysteries

  Skeletons in the Attic

  Past & Present

  A Fool’s Journey

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Best Laid Plans: 21 Stories of Mystery & Suspense (Editor)

  Live Free or Tri

  Unhappy Endings

  SHORT STORIES

  Plan D (The Whole She-Bang 2)

  Live Free or Die (World Enough and Crime)

  Beautiful Killer (Flash and Bang)

  Saturdays with Bronwyn (The Whole She-Bang 3)

  Goulaigans (The Whole She-Bang 3)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, and events described herein are products of the author’s imagination, or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Past & Present: A Marketville Mystery (Book 2)

  Copyright @ 2018 Judy Penz Sheluk (www.judypenzsheluk.com)

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  Edited by Ti Locke

  Proofreading by Rosemary Graham

  Cover design by Hunter Martin

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  Published by Superior Shores Press

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  ISBN Trade Paperback: 978-0-9950007-3-5

  ISBN eBook: 978-1-989495-04-9

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  First Edition September 2018

  Second Edition April 2019

  Third Edition July 2019

  In memory of my mother, Anneliese Penz

  Foreword

  If you’re the sort of person who reads the dedication at the front of a book, you’ll have noticed that Past & Present has been dedicated to my mother, Anneliese Penz, who lost a lengthy battle with COPD and related health issues in September 2016. Until the very end, she was handing out bookmarks for Skeletons in the Attic and The Hanged Man’s Noose to any doctor or nurse who would take one (and I suspect she may have slipped a couple into their lab coats when they weren’t looking).

  I take comfort in the fact that the last book my mother read was Skeletons in the Attic, the first book in this series. She was so pleased that I’d dedicated the book to my father, Anton “Toni” Penz, who succumbed to stomach cancer at the age of forty-two.

  From the beginning, I planned to include two characters named Anton and Anneliese in the sequel to Skeletons, but I didn’t have a plot, let alone a plan. Quite honestly, I was stuck.

  Then I discovered a small blue leather train case with cream trim, an ivory plastic handle, and brass locks at the back of my mo
ther’s clothes closet. Inside, she’d carefully preserved documents from the past, among them her German passport issued in England in 1952, her landed immigration papers from England to Canada documenting her journey on the T.S.S. Canberra, old photographs and postcards, and some costume jewelry. The idea for Past & Present was born: the past reaching out to the present.

  Although much of the historical data in these pages is based on fact, and Callie’s research often mirrored my own, this story is very much a work of fiction. I like to think my mother and father are together again, handing out bookmarks in heaven.

  Judy Penz Sheluk

  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

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  It’s been thirteen months since I received the phone call, a detached voice on the other end telling me that my father had died in an unfortunate occupational accident. Thirteen months since I sat in Leith Hampton’s Toronto law office for the reading of my father’s will. Thirteen months since I found out that I, Calamity Barnstable, answers to Callie, had inherited a house in Marketville.

  It was a house I didn’t know existed. In a commuter town better suited to families with two kids, a cat, and a collie than a thirty-six-year-old single female who thrived on the anonymity of city life and condo living.

  If that wasn’t overwhelming enough, there was a catch. According to the terms of my father’s will, I was required to move into the house for one year and find out who had murdered my mother thirty years earlier. A mother who disappeared when I was six years old, and one I barely remembered—a state of mind encouraged by my aforementioned father. There had been no photos of her around our house, no fireside chats about how they’d met. In the Barnstable household, it was like Abigail Doris Barnstable had never existed.

  To say that my comfortable, condo-living existence as a bank call center clerk was flipped upside down would be an understatement. One month I was fielding queries about lost credit cards and debit card fraud, and the next month I was acting like some sort of unofficial private investigator. In Marketville, no less.

  The house my father had bequeathed to me was nestled within a cul-de-sac chock-full of mostly well maintained 1970s bungalows, split-levels, and semis, the streets named after provincial wildflowers. Trillium Way. Coneflower Crescent. Day Lily Drive. Lady’s Slipper Lane. You get the idea.

  I say mostly well maintained because my inheritance, 16 Snapdragon Circle, was the singular notable exception. The front lawn had long ago succumbed to dandelions and twitch grass. The roof had been patched without any attention to matching the existing shingles. The windows were spattered with bird droppings, dirt, and bits of egg from Halloweens past. Some houses needed a little bit of TLC. What this house needed was a good coat of fire.

  I might have hopped into my aging Honda Civic and driven back to Toronto that very moment except for four things. First, I no longer had a place to live, having sublet my condo to a co-worker. We’d always gotten on well enough, but we weren’t about to become roommates.

  Second, I’d quit my job at the bank and was in no hurry to return. Working in a fraud unit at a bank might sound fascinating, but the reality was that all the interesting cases were immediately bumped up to my supervisor.

  Third, I’d promised Leith I’d take on the “assignment”—a term I use for lack of a better word—not because I wanted to, but because if I didn’t do it, there was a scheming psychic named Misty Rivers who was more than willing to take on the task. After all, free lodging and a thousand dollars a week—the compensation for taking on the job—were powerful motivators, for me, as well as for Misty. But even with all of that on the table, I still might have taken a runner. And then reason number four sauntered over from the house next door to join me.

  Royce Ashford was about forty, good looking in a rugged handyman sort of way, the kind of guy you’d see on one of those TV home improvement shows. Well-defined biceps, sandy brown hair cropped close to his scalp, warm brown eyes. I imagined six-pack abs under his shirt and hoped my loser radar had taken a leave of absence. When it comes to men, my judgment is sorely lacking. Whatever you do, don’t ask me about Valentine’s Day. My memories have nothing to do with the velvety petals of long-stemmed red roses, and everything to do with the thorns.

  But back to Royce. It wasn’t so much that I was looking for a relationship. I wasn’t. But it had been glaringly apparent that my inheritance was in desperate need of renovations, and judging from the logo on his golf shirt, he owned Royce Contracting & Property Maintenance. According to Leith, a man I semi-trusted, my father had planned to hire Royce, and until this crazy house business, I’d trusted my father’s judgment better than my own. Besides, if you can’t trust your next-door neighbor, who can you trust?

  So that’s how I ended up moving into 16 Snapdragon Circle and living in Marketville. As for finding out what happened to my mother thirty years ago, that’s a long story, one that I’m not quite ready to revisit or retell. Suffice it to say that some things are better left in the past. Maybe one day I’ll bring everything into the present, but today isn’t that day.

  After everything that I’ve uncovered in the last few months, from too many buried family secrets to an actual skeleton in the attic, you’d think I’d want to hightail it back to Toronto. But I find myself enjoying the slightly slower pace of living in Marketville, not to mention a phenomenal trail system that spans three towns. It’s a terrific resource for runners—or should I say plodders—like me. I’ve even managed to find a running group that includes every age and pace imaginable, young to old, slow to warp-speed fast. We like to joke that we’re crazy enough to run in plus thirty and minus thirty. That’s Celsius, for you Fahrenheit folks. On the Fahrenheit scale it’s eighty-six degrees to minus twenty-two. Doesn’t have the same catchy ring to it, does it, but you get the drift.

  Then there’s Royce. We’re still treading lightly, friends first and all of that, but the attraction between us continues to bubble under the surface like a lava lamp. I’m not quite ready to burst that bubble just yet, but I’m also not willing to walk away from it.

  There’s also Chantelle Marchand, my across-the-street neighbor. As an only child of two only children, I am intrigued and amused by Chantelle’s stories of growing up as the fifth kid in a six-kid family. She’s also become a really good friend. The best friend I’ve ever had, if I’m being honest, not that I’ve had a lot of friends. I’ve always been more of a group friend sort of girl. You know the type. Lots of people to hang out with, always up for a movie, or to go out for dinner, but no one close enough to get into the whole true confession thing. When it comes to true confessions, I’m more about getting them than giving them.

  My only other true friend is Arabella Carpenter, and she’s busy running the Glass Dolphin antiques shop in Lount’s Landing, a small town about thirty minutes north of Marketville. We still get together, but it requires planning, not one of my strong suits. With Chantelle it’s as easy as walking across the street and saying, “Hey there.”

>   Not that Chantelle and I hit it off on first meeting, although I’ll admit that was as much on me as on her. Chantelle is one of those women who rocks every look, from blue jeans to bustiers to evening gowns, and she does it as effortlessly as kicking off a pair of sneakers for five-inch stilettos. My eyes are probably my best feature—black-rimmed hazel, in case you’re curious—but Chantelle’s are a smoldering shade of charcoal that scream “come hither.” She’s also got the sort of highlighted blonde hair that looks natural, despite the hundred dollar plus price tag to get it there, and, unlike my own curly brown mop, it manages to stay sleek and stylish in all manner of wind and weather. She attributes her killer body to genetics, but she’s also a Pilates, yoga, and spin instructor at the local gym. Chantelle might be closer to thirty-nine than twenty-nine, but you’d never know it from looking at her. It’s hard not to hate someone like that, you know?