Murder in the Mix Boxed Set 28-30: Cozy Mystery Addison Moore (the reading strategies book .txt) 📖

last week, she handed the keys to her B&B to Cressida Bentley and Cormack Featherby for less than a song. My mother is merely in charge of the event they’re hosting tonight. She’s gone from proud owner to grunt working scullery maid all in one fell swoop.

A chill runs down my spine just thinking about it. My mother let her dubious boyfriend, Wiley Fox, Noah’s con man of a father, talk her into selling her dream in an effort to fund his dream.

Wiley started up a publishing company a few months back in order to help my mother sell her steamy romance books, and in typical Wiley fashion, he’s turned everything into a spectacular mess. Not that there’s anything spectacular about this nightmare.

“No freaking way!” Evie says as we pull into the parking lot of the B&B. “Look, Mom. They changed the sign.”

“What?” I squawk as I lean as close to the steering wheel as my bloated belly will allow, and sure as heck, gone is the warm wooden signage that once read Honey Hollow Bed and Breakfast, and in its place is a large black plaque with a hot pink fancy font that reads Rendezvous Luxury Resort and Razzle Dazzle Day Spa. “Ugh, I can’t believe this. I’m going to head in there and demand they give the keys back to my mother. I have money. I have plenty of money. I’ll have them name their price. Everyone has a price.”

Evie shrugs. “Good luck with that. Cormack and Cressi-duh both have enough purchasing power to buy all of Vermont. Who knows? Maybe they’re going to. And they’ve decided to start with Glam Glam’s B&B.”

I glance over at Evie. She’s not wrong.

Everly Evie Baxter shares her father’s midnight-colored locks, which flow right down her back in thick, luscious coils, and she shares his cobalt blue eyes and cunning wit, too.

Evie has only been a part of our lives since last spring, but so far she’s enjoying her first year at Honey Hollow High. She’s made some friends, a few boyfriends whom she’s recently winnowed down to one, and she’s even made the cheer squad.

The poor thing has been through so much already in her young life, no thanks to Cressida, her biological mother. And I’ve got a feeling Cressi-duh and her blonde bestie are about to expose her to even more horrors once we step inside their new real estate acquisition.

“Hey, Mom? Do you think the ghosts will leave now that the ditzy duo has taken over?”

“I hope not.”

Evie doesn’t know anything about my transmundane abilities. Not many people do. Noah and Everett know all about them, and so does Carlotta, primarily because she happens to share my strange gift. Carlotta and I are technically supersensual, a set of powers that fall beneath the transmundane umbrella. In other words, we can see the dead.

Spotting the disembodied among us has been an odd quirk of mine for as long as I can remember. In the past, when I used to see those ghostly visitors, I’d find them clinging nearby someone who was once near and dear to them. In the beginning, it didn’t mean much more than a skinned knee was on the horizon for the person the ghost was clinging to. But as of late, it almost always means murder.

I park my minivan right outside the door of the glass conservatory my mother had tacked onto the B&B a while back. This very B&B is where my mother, the one who raised me, Miranda Lemon, and my saint of a father, Joseph Lemon, God rest his soul, had their honeymoon. And when he passed away all those years ago, she used the money from his insurance payout to buy the place. She sold the family home, moved in, and converted this place from a ho-hum B&B to a bona fide hot spot for all things supernatural.

Okay, so the ghosts that haunt this place had a little something to do with that, too. But my mother played off of their spooky shenanigans like the successful businesswoman she is and sold tickets to eager tourists looking to have their socks scared right off of their toes. She charged eighty bucks a pop for what she dubbed The Haunted Honey Hollow Tour. And once she was through with them, she sent them to my bakery for what she calls The Last Thing They Ate Tour.

And now that the B&B is out of her hands, a part of me wonders if that good time is over.

The parking lot is teeming with cars as Evie and I gather the platters of my raspberry tarts and tread through the snow in through the back door of the conservatory.

It’s wall-to-wall bodies in here. A tall blonde woman is having a spat with a man in an ill-fitting suit by the refreshment table, and I choose to tune them out for now.

The music is lively, and if I’m not mistaken, French. There are food stations along the back end of the room featuring all sorts of culinary masterpieces, and oddly, the food looks so fancy, so geometrical, so microscopic, I can’t seem to identify it.

My eyes dart around the room I’ve been in more than a hundred times and something isn’t right.

“Oh my goodness.” My stomach turns as I get a good look at the floor. “Why is the floor hot pink?”

Carlotta comes barreling at us and takes the platters from my hands and sets them on the dessert table next to us.

“You’re late, Lot Lot.” Carlotta is essentially a preview of what I’ll look like with a sprinkling of gray hair and wrinkles. For the most part, we both have caramel-colored waves that end just below our shoulders, hazel eyes, and bowtie lips. “Just wait until you see how many women have lined up to buy my new book!”

Evie gasps. “You’re hocking your new book here?”

“Yup.” She smacks her belly as if she happened to eat one of those literary tomes. “Cormack and Cressie are hosting a