Murder Long Ago (A Murder Posse Mystery Book 2) Read online

  MURDER LONG AGO

  A MURDER POSSE MYSTERY

  BOOK 2

  J. A. WHITING

  Copyright 2022 J.A. Whiting Books and Whitemark Publishing

  Cover copyright 2022 San Coils: www.coverkicks.com

  Formatting by Signifer Book Design

  Proofreading by Donna Rich: [email protected]

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, or incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to locales, actual events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from J. A. Whiting.

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  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

  Thank you for reading!

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  1

  It was an unseasonably warm spring evening in the pretty New Hampshire seacoast town when Jennifer Meadows, Peggy Hunter, and Nadine Powers walked along the brick sidewalks from the library to a cozy pub on Main Street to have dinner together.

  “That was a good meeting tonight,” Peggy said. “Lots of great discussion about the book.”

  “Even people who regularly don’t say much got into it.” Nadine opened the door to the pub for her friends.

  “It was fun. I liked hearing who everyone thought was the killer.” Jennifer took off her light jacket and hung it over her arm.

  Over the past five years, the three women had developed a strong bond with one another ever since first meeting at the mystery book club held at the town library twice a month. Quite a few unexpected things had happened during those years. Peggy’s husband had passed away from a sudden heart attack, Jennifer’s husband took off with a younger woman, and Nadine and her husband went through a divorce. None of them had been used to being on their own, but they’d managed and adjusted ... with each other’s help.

  “I’m starving.” Jennifer pushed at the blond strands of hair that a breeze off the ocean had pushed into her eyes. “I didn’t expect the mystery meeting to go on so long.” A real estate agent, Jen was fifty-four-years old, short and strong with chin-length dark blond hair. She did weight training and worked out five days a week, and one time only, had run the Boston Marathon and swore she would never do it again. She had three grown kids.

  The hostess recognized the women as regular customers and sat them at a round table near the fireplace.

  “I love this table. The fire feels so nice and cozy.” Peggy opened the menu and scanned it even though she knew exactly what she wanted. Sixty-years old, with short, light brown hair cut stylishly around her face, she was slim and fit since taking up running right after her husband passed away. The exercise had helped her cope with her grief and kept her from losing her mind so she’d kept it up. For over thirty years, she’d been an educational consultant, but retired shortly after her husband died and fulfilled a life-long dream of buying and running a bakery. She had two daughters, one a dentist and one who owned a business.

  Nadine sipped from her glass of wine. “My day has been so busy. Constant emails and calls. I barely ate lunch. I didn’t think I was going to make it to the book club, but I said the heck with it, everything can wait until tomorrow.” Forty-eight-year-old Nadine was of Indian, African, and Irish descent. The woman was a real beauty, had a medium build, gorgeous caramel-colored skin, and long dark brown hair with a hint of a wave in it. Nadine had earned a degree from MIT and ran her own cybersecurity company. She was the mother of twins … a boy and a girl who were away at college in Boston for their freshman year.

  Peggy gave the waiter her order and closed the menu. “The bakery was really busy, too. It seems tourists are showing up earlier and earlier each year.”

  “I love the tourists,” Jen admitted. “Living in a beachside town in good weather can sometimes be a pain with traffic and congestion, but I love the festive atmosphere of the late spring and summer. I think it’s energizing.”

  Their conversation stopped when a nervous-looking woman approached the table. “Excuse me.”

  The three friends looked up. They didn’t recognize the person standing near them.

  “Hi, there.” Peggy gave the woman a warm smile.

  “You’re the Murder Posse, aren’t you?” With short blond hair and a stocky build, the woman looked to be in her mid-sixties.

  A while ago, the middle-aged friends had helped the head librarian when she was attacked by a killer in the town library, and their rescue of the young woman had earned them the nickname, The Murder Posse. The account of the rescue had been described in the local news and had been picked up by a Boston news outlet. The town reporter was the one who had coined the name.

  “I’m Jen Meadows. These are my friends, Peggy and Nadine.”

  The woman nodded. “I recognized you. I saw that article about how you saved the town librarian from getting killed.”

  When she didn’t say anything more, Peggy leaned a little forward over the table. “Is there something you’d like to ask us?”

  The woman blinked. “Yes. Well, I don’t know if I should.” She wrung her hands together. “I don’t know.” Her eyes teared up.

  “Why don’t you join us.” Nadine gestured to the empty chair. “Have a seat.”

  “Would you like to order some food?” Peggy asked. “Have dinner with us.”

  “No, no. I don’t want to take up your time.” The woman sank onto the chair. “I’m Jessie Baker. I’ve lived in Peachtree for a long time. I raised two kids here.” She paused to take in a breath. “I apologize for barging in on you like this.”

  Peggy noticed the lines around the woman’s eyes. She looked like she was exhausted and worn out. “Can we help with something?”

  Taking a deep breath, the woman spoke. “My daughter has been missing for fifteen years. She disappeared right here in town one night. The police have investigated for years, but have turned up nothing. I’ve carried my grief all this time.”

  A sense of dread tugged at Peggy … for the woman’s loss, but also for what she thought might be coming next.

  Jessie went on, “My daughter was twenty-five when she disappeared. How can someone just vanish? Without a trace? How is that possible?”

  “You know we’re not investigators, right?” It seemed Nadine had the same concerns that Peggy harbored.

  “I know that, but you did help the librarian when that guy attacked her.” Jessie looked at the women, one by one.

  “We helped stop the attack,” Jen clarified. “But we’ve never investiga
ted a crime.”

  Jessie took a long breath. “You have experience working on cold cases. The three of you assist on those websites that use crowdsourcing to help solve old crimes. I read that in the article that was in the news.”

  “We do research online for some of those cold case websites,” Jen explained. “Sometimes, we find something that helps the case. But we’ve never investigated a case in person. I think the two things are very different.”

  Peggy looked kindly at the woman. “Are you here to ask us if we’ll look into your daughter’s disappearance?”

  Jessie hesitated for a moment. “Yes. You’re my last hope. I don’t know where else to turn.”

  The meals, and Jessie’s drink order arrived.

  “Do you mind if we eat?” Nadine questioned.

  “I’ve already had my dinner. Please, go ahead and enjoy your meals.”

  “Tell us about your daughter,” Peggy encouraged as she picked up her fork.

  Jessie’s shoulders seemed to relax and she reached for her drink. “Elana had finished her graduate work in law and had passed the bar exam. She started working for a medium-sized firm here in town. It was a temporary position and she’d only been there for about two months. Elana and some colleagues went out for dinner and then to a pub for drinks. She went to a friend’s house party after that. She was living at home with us to save money. She was also applying for work at firms in Portsmouth and Boston.”

  “And she never came home that night?” Jen asked.

  Jessie shook her head. “Usually, Elana would come downstairs in the morning about fifteen minutes after I got up. That morning, she didn’t. I went upstairs thinking her alarm never went off. When I went into her bedroom, the bed was untouched. She hadn’t been home all night.” The woman moved her hand around. “My first thought was she stayed at a friend’s place overnight. She did that plenty of times, but she always texted to let me know. I checked my phone for a message, but there was nothing. I assumed she would come in the door any minute, but she didn’t. I knew she didn’t have a change of clothes with her. Then I wondered if she would just borrow something to wear from the friend she’d stayed with. I was sure I’d hear from her later in the day.”

  “You didn’t?” Nadine knew what the answer would be.

  “I left for work. I felt … odd … as if I knew something wasn’t right. The feeling picked at me for most of the day. I never heard from her. It was late afternoon when I decided to call the law firm.” An expression of long-suffering grief came over Jessie’s face.

  The three friends waited for her to go on.

  “They told me Elana hadn’t come in to work that day. They hadn’t heard from her. They assumed she was sick and stayed at home.”

  “When did you contact the police?” Peggy asked.

  “As soon as I hung up the phone.” Jessie shook her head and took a drink from her glass. “You can probably guess what they told me … my daughter was a grownup, it’s not unusual for a person in their twenties to go off for a couple of days without telling their parents, call back in a few days if I hadn’t heard from her.” She sighed. “I have never in my life had such a feeling of helplessness. My daughter always told us where she was going. Even when she was away at college and in law school, she always told us her plans. I knew something was terribly wrong.”

  Jessie looked down. “I don’t know how, but in that moment, I knew that I would never see my daughter alive again.”

  2

  After leaving the restaurant, the friends decided to go to Peggy’s house for some tea so they could sit and talk about Jessie Baker and her missing daughter. Peggy’s place was set on a side lane off of the main street and was within easy walking distance from the center of town. Her pretty white Cape had a white picket fence around the front yard where two pink flowering trees were in bloom. Daffodils and red-orange tulips filled the beds near the fence and along the walkway to the door.

  Inside, two black cats, Cupcake and Cookie, greeted the women. Peggy put on the teakettle and they took seats on the comfortable living room sofas facing the fireplace.

  “So, that was unexpected.” Nadine pushed her long hair over her shoulder.

  After the kettle tweeted, Peggy carried in a tray with the teapot, mugs, cream, sugar, and spoons. “Do any of you remember Elana Baker going missing?”

  The cats jumped up and snuggled next to Jennifer.

  Jen said, “It was way in the back of my mind, but I recalled the incident as Jessie relayed the details. When it happened, I was busy with the kids and getting established as a real estate agent. I didn’t pay much attention to the case.”

  “Same with me.” Nadine poured some cream into her tea. “The twins were about six years old when Elana went missing and I was working full-time. I didn’t have much mental energy to pay attention to anything else.”

  Peggy leaned back against the sofa. “My girls were young teens back then. I remember reading about Elana in the news. It hit home because my kids were becoming young women and what happened frightened me. I recall thinking how utterly horrifying it would be as a mother to be in that situation. I think the story fell out of the news pretty fast, but maybe I was just too busy with everything to keep following it.” Peggy frowned. “Or, I didn’t want to know the outcome because it hit me hard thinking of my own daughters. No matter how vigilant and careful we are, sometimes terrible things happen, and that thought really shakes me.”

  “And once the kids leave the nest, it can be so hard worrying about them and hoping that they’re safe,” Jen added.

  “I’d like to know more about Elana,” Peggy said. “Who were her friends, boyfriend, coworkers? Was she a risk taker? Had there been any trouble between her and someone prior to her disappearance? What was going on in her life? There must be people still living here in town who knew her.”

  Nadine tilted her head. “It sounds like you’ve decided we should look into the case.”

  “I don’t mean that. I’m still on the fence about it.” Peggy drank from her tea mug. “I don’t know if we should try to help or not.”

  “Why are you hesitating?” Jen ran her hand over the cat’s soft fur.

  Peggy sighed. “I think it will be really hard to find out anything that hasn’t already been discovered. It will be even harder on Jessie if we don’t come up with something.”

  “Jessie knows her daughter is no longer alive. She just wants someone to find the body so she can give her a proper burial.” Jen shared her thoughts. “I’d be willing to look into the case, if you two are on board.”

  Nadine looked across the room at nothing, thinking. “We have good research skills and that’s what this case needs. We’ve been able to help with the online cold cases. I feel like we have an obligation to help someone from our own town try to find closure.”

  “When you put it that way….” Peggy shrugged. “I guess we should give it a whirl. No promises, though.”

  Jen nodded. “Jessie knows that. I’ll text her to say we’ll look into it.”

  The next morning at Peggy’s bakery, she and her assistant manager Lori Benton worked in the backroom preparing the desserts while two young employees got the front counter set up. While they worked, Peggy told Lori about her meeting with Jessie Baker the prior evening.

  Lori was forty-years old with chin-length wavy brown hair, brown eyes, and a perky personality, and like Peggy and her friends, she’d lived in Peachtree for almost all of her life. “I remember that case. Just awful. Elana and I were the same age. We weren’t friends, but we were friendly. She went to the public school and I attended the small girl’s school one town over so we hung around with different people. It scared me when Elana went missing. For a while, I stayed in most of the time. My apartment mates felt the same way … too worried to go out much. We stayed home and watched movies or played cards, had friends over. We were afraid a killer was on the loose.” Lori gave a shrug. “But the feeling waned and we went back to our activities. It did give
me a chill whenever I thought of Elana. It could have happened to any one of us.”

  Later in the day, one of the area detectives, Matt Crawley, came in and Peggy sat with him at a table, and while he ate a piece of blueberry pie and drank a cup of coffee, she asked him questions about the case.

  In his late fifties, Matt was stocky and strong-looking. He had light blue eyes and some gray was showing in his brown hair. “That case. It got under my skin. Like any parent would be in a situation like that, Jessie Baker was a mess. She pulled at my heart strings. I was in my early forties back then, and I had the delusion that nothing so terrible could happen in our town. I was sure Elana was off on a jaunt with some guy and would turn up in a few days.” He slowly shook his head. “How terribly wrong I was.”

  Peggy told him, “Jessie Baker talked to me, Nadine, and Jennifer last evening. We were at the pub and she came over to our table.”

  An expression of surprise washed over Matt’s face. “Do you know Jessie?”

  “Only from reading the news from fifteen years ago about Elana’s disappearance.”

  “What did she want?”

  “She saw the article about us helping the librarian fight off her attacker and wanted the three of us to research her daughter’s case.”

  Matt’s mouth fell open slightly as he stared at Peggy. “Why?”

  A tiny bit of annoyance picked at Peggy that the detective questioned why Jessie might want help closing her daughter’s case. “She wants to find her daughter.”