Natural-born Grillers (Australian Amateur Sleuth Book 2) Read online

  Natural-born Grillers

  (Australian Amateur Sleuth Book 2)

  Copyright © 2016 by Morgana Best

  All Rights Reserved

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The personal names have been invented by the author, and any likeness to the name of any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book might contain references to specific commercial products, process or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, specific brand-name products and/or trade names of products, which are trademarks or registered trademarks and/or trade names, and these are property of their respective owners. Morgana Best or her associates have no association with any specific commercial products, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, specific brand-name products and / or trade names of products.

  By this act

  And words of rhyme

  Trouble not

  These books of mine

  With these words I now thee render

  Candle burn and bad return

  3 times stronger to its sender.

  (Ancient Celtic)

  Table of 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

  Connect with Morgana

  Next Book in this Series

  Other books by Morgana Best

  About Morgana Best

  A Note From the Author

  Chapter 1

  I was sitting in the largest, mustiest room on the longest, most boring day of my life. Early afternoon sunlight was filtering through old and yellowing curtains and shining onto the enthusiastic faces of those sitting around me. I was at the monthly philosophy club meeting, no matter how much I wished I wasn’t.

  Philosophy was never my strong suit, and I very much wanted to keep it that way. I found the whole thing immensely boring, but my landlady, Cressida, had insisted I come along, and eventually I had caved. I found myself sitting there, not knowing how much time had passed. It felt like hours, but I knew it had probably been minutes.

  Everybody was discussing Immanuel Kant’s works on esthetic interpretation. Up until now, I had always thought philosophy was the study of existence, reality, and life. It turns out it was more likely designed to kill people through boring monologs and abstract notions involving cats in boxes. I sighed and looked out one of the massive Victorian windows of the boarding house.

  We were all sitting in one of the largest rooms of the boarding house into whose grounds I had moved in recent weeks. Through the window I could see the beginnings of a majestic garden, beautifully maintained by the new gardener who had taken over from Mr. Buttons, a resident of the boarding house. Mr. Buttons hadn’t actually been hired to be the gardener, but seemed to have some kind of obsessive tendency toward cleaning and maintenance, and thus had pulled out as many plants as he had weeds. The end result had resembled the Sahara Desert.

  The boarding house itself was Victorian era, and of the Italianate style of architecture—so I’d been told. I was no more an architect than I was a philosopher. It reminded me of Phryne Fisher’s house in the TV series, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, although nowhere near as grand. It probably had been, back in its day, but it was no longer in a good state of repair. The tessellated pavements were largely intact, as were the decorative patterns etched into the exterior render, but the intricate old Victorian cast iron lacework was damaged.

  Since the arrival of the new gardener, the lawns had turned green, and newly-planted flowers were blooming, transforming the boarding house from a wreck in a desert landscape into a wreck in a green oasis. Still, the garden would have fared better had Mr. Buttons been banned from it in the first place. With my thoughts turning to Mr. Buttons, it dawned on me that he had been in the meeting earlier, but now he was nowhere to be seen.

  “Well, Sibyl? What do you think?” Cressida asked me earnestly. Cressida owned the boarding house, and even though we didn’t have too much in common, we had gotten along very well since I’d moved to the small Australian town of Little Tatterford. I hadn’t been paying attention at all to their discussion, and that fact was becoming increasingly obvious.

  “Oh, I, uh...” I stammered. “Could you repeat the question?”

  Cressida shot me a disappointed look, but repeated it anyway. “We were discussing whether objective morality can exist without a God. What are your thoughts?” She seemed quite eager to hear my answer.

  Not only did I not know, but I couldn’t care less. “Yes,” I answered.

  Cressida didn’t seem particularly excited by my answer or lack of an explanation, but at least she moved on and asked the man sitting next to me, Martin Bosworth.

  Martin was a new boarder. He was the stereotypical academic in appearance: slightly eager-looking yet at the same time wearied, slim and stooped, with worn clothes in shades of mustard brown and faded forest green.

  An irritable man, Martin had moved here temporarily in order to have some peace and quiet away from his annoying university students and staff, as he put it, while organizing a conference on the ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates. So far, he had been polite enough in conversation, although he seemed to try to avoid socializing as much as possible. The philosophy club was one of very few exceptions. I attempted once more to pay attention to the discussion, before I realized that I still couldn’t care less.

  I counted myself lucky that I had not been subjected to one of the monthly philosophy club meetings until now. Cressida was particularly excited about this meeting, as the leading lights of philosophy from the universities on the east coast of Australia had descended upon the nearby city of Pharmidale in readiness for a big philosophy conference on Socrates, a conference organized by Martin Bosworth.

  As I listened to the conversation, I remembered why the ancient Athenians had ordered Socrates put to death. There is only so much philosophy one can take.

  I looked around the room. If it weren’t for the shiny laptops scattered around, I would think I had fallen into an old English movie, set over one hundred years ago. The antique furniture was as imposing as it was gloomy, and there was far too much of it crammed into the room. It looked like an antique store, and smelled like one too. I was sitting next to an ancient pump organ, and the musty odor was all but overpowering me. The fading sunlight fell along one side of the organ, and had apparently done so for years, given the way in which the laminated wood veneer had peeled away.

  I resisted the urge to check my phone for the time, and instead took another look out the window. The sun was hovering over the euca
lyptus trees, which in turn were hovering over a herd of Hereford cattle happily grazing away in the neighboring farm. It seemed to be roughly two or three in the afternoon, which meant that the meeting was hopefully coming to a close. The focus of the conversation had moved to Colin Palmer, one of the other new boarders at the house. I didn’t know much about him, as we had barely talked, but he seemed nice enough.

  Other than some members of the club I didn’t recognize, the only other member present was Lord Farringdon, Cressida’s fat cat. He was sleeping soundly on a chair. If only I could be so lucky.

  Mr. Buttons returned, holding a tray of cucumber sandwiches and cups of tea for everybody. When he began to portion out the food and drinks, one of the men I didn’t know spoke up. “I must say, this is quite unusual. Do you not have a maid?” As he asked the question, he seemed genuinely bewildered.

  “Oh, no,” I replied. “She was sent to jail for fatally poisoning the food of a boarder.” It only occurred to me that this explanation might upset some, when everyone stared at their food and simultaneously set it aside.

  Cressida looked up at me and asked, “Are you okay, dear? You seem distracted.” I knew she was just trying to change the subject, but she was probably genuinely concerned with my well-being too, given the look on my face.

  “I’m fine,” I answered, forcing a fake smile. “But to be honest, philosophy just isn’t really my forte. Lord Farringdon here seems to be into it more than I am.” I picked up Lord Farringdon as I said this, and he meowed angrily in response.

  Chapter 2

  I stood at the sink, dumping a pot of steaming spaghetti into a strainer. The spaghetti fell in coils into the bottom of the strainer and the water kept going. I set the pot next to the sink and reached for the strainer, flicking my wrist and tossing the pasta slightly so any trapped water would be drained. I then dumped the pasta back into the pot and set the strainer down.

  I reached for a smaller pan filled with bubbling, hot, red sauce—straight from a jar, of course. As I’m not gifted in the cooking arena, I was concentrating hard and about to tip the sauce onto the noodles, when my cell phone rang from the living room.

  I sighed, content to ignore it until I was finished with dinner. The ringtone played out, and then there was silence, and I tossed the noodles with the sauce. I set the pan on the stovetop again and killed the burner, before opening my cabinet and pulling out a plate. I had just set the plate on the counter next to the stove when the cell phone rang again.

  A screech startled me. “Answer the phone, you butt-ugly bimbo.”

  “Max!” I shook my head. In the few months that my ex-husband had custody of Max, my sulfur-crested cockatoo, he had taught him to say a long list of rather rude words as well as insults, much to my dismay. I never knew what was going to come out of his beak next.

  I left my plate empty on the counter and stomped like an annoyed child into the living room to answer my phone. I looked at the screen, and saw it was my landlord, Cressida, calling. What would Cressida want at this time of evening? I wondered, fearful that Cressida would want to discuss philosophy again.

  I figured I had better answer it, so I swiped my finger to the right across the iPhone’s screen and put it on Loud.

  “Hey, Cressida,” I said.

  “I need you here now!” Cressida’s voice was tight and breathless.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Just get here, okay? To the house. Please hurry!”

  The line went dead, and I was left looking at the phone until the screen went dark. I went back into the kitchen, threw a lid on the pot of spaghetti, and tossed it into the fridge before crossing to the front door.

  I pulled my jacket off the hook behind the door, slid on the jacket, and hurried out, stepping down the steps of my small porch and starting down the path toward the large house in which Cressida and her boarders lived.

  It was evening and the sun almost gone, blocked by the ancient eucalyptus trees that rose eerily like sentinels of the land on either side of the wide dirt path. The surrounding fields were dark, and the pink and gray galahs fluttered this way and that, calling it a day and heading for wherever they called home. The air was brisk, with a sharp coolness that chilled me to the bone whenever the wind picked up. I found the zipper of my jacket after the third such gust and pulled it up to my neck. I slid my hands into the jacket pockets and fell into a jog, but without the benefit of socks, my cheap canvas sneakers rubbed sore spots on both of my heels. I would have worn sandals, only for the dire warnings of the locals that the deadly Eastern Brown snakes strike at foot level. Apparently the district was full of them.

  The boarding house loomed over me, impressive and gothic-looking through the trees. When I reached the front of the house, the dirt path became a paved one, with the small lot for cars to the left, and a staircase leading up to the wrap-around porch directly to the right. I hustled up the stairs and opened the front door.

  Cressida was there as I was still pushing open the door, pulling the door handle so hard that the door flew open and I stumbled inside. The warm stale air hit me, contrasting with the clean cool air outside.

  “What’s wrong?” I said at once, alarmed by the expression on her face.

  “Oh, it’s happened again. It’s happened again!”

  I looked past the frazzled woman, and saw Mr. Buttons standing near the staircase, shaking his head softly, holding a small saucer with a teacup perched upon it and a silver spoon resting next to the cup. His face was white and drawn.

  Cressida took my hand and pulled me to the staircase. The two of us hurried up the stairs, with Mr. Buttons right behind us. We went down a short hall and stopped outside a closed door.

  “Take a deep breath,” Cressida said, but before I could do any such thing, Cressida let go of my hand and threw open the door.

  The room within was impossibly messy, with a writing desk against the wall next to the door, topped with a shiny laptop and sheets and sheets of hand drawn notes. There were piles of clothes around the room, and more notebooks. There were trays with empty plates on them, and empty glasses. And lying face down on the bed, amidst covers thrown this way and that, was a dead man.

  “Mr. Bosworth,” I said in shock, averting my eyes. I turned to Cressida. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, wringing her hands.

  “Were you the one who found him?”

  Cressida frowned. “Yes, I did. I was bringing up his dinner. He didn’t eat downstairs with us. I always brought up his dinner. Tonight, he didn’t answer, so I pushed open the door, and there he was.” She pointed to a tray, and to food spilled over the floor.

  “You should have called the cops!” I said, throwing my hands in the air.

  “She did.”

  I looked down the hall to see Sergeant Blake Wessley making his way toward us. He stepped past the three of us and went to the bed. We all followed him into the room. I clutched Mr. Buttons’ arm and tried to avoid looking at the body.

  “What’s that?” Blake said, gesturing to a note pinned to the back of the Bosworth’s suit.

  The three of us inched forward. On a piece of notepaper were the words, Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius.

  “What on earth does that mean?” Cressida said to no one in particular.

  “It’s just nonsense words,” Blake said.

  I cleared my throat. “Actually, those were the last words Socrates uttered before his death, which was caused by drinking hemlock.”

  Everyone stared at me.

  Mr. Buttons was the first to speak. “Sibyl, how did you know that? I thought you didn’t like philosophy.”

  I nodded. “Yes, and that’s why. I did a semester of ancient philosophy when I was at university, and it was all about Socrates. It was simply ghastly.”

  “Well, that’s all well and good,” Blake said, “but what specifically does that have to do with Martin Bosworth? He’s a professor at the university, isn’t he?”

 
“Yes,” Cressida said, “and he was the one who organized the big conference on Socrates that starts next week. That’s why I have so many boarders at the moment—they’re all speaking at the conference. Most are from out of town, but the others live in Pharmidale and are staying here on a philosophy retreat.”

  I peered at the note again. “It’s clear he was murdered by someone who knows something about philosophy,” I said, “as they knew enough to quote Socrates’ last words.”

  Blake readily agreed. “But what does Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius mean?”

  I shrugged. “Crito was Socrates’ friend, and Asclepius was the god of healing. As for the meaning, that’s been debated for centuries. However, I think that the murderer wanted us to know that Martin Bosworth was poisoned by hemlock.”

  Cressida gasped. “Sibyl, how on earth did you jump to such a conclusion?”

  “Don’t tell me you can smell it,” Blake said, his eyes narrowed.

  I glared at him. I happened to have the genetic ability to smell cyanide, which is how I recognized the method of murder used on the last victim at the boarding house.

  “Of course not,” I snapped. “It’s simple Philosophy 101, critical reasoning.” I held up four fingers and counted them off. “One, Martin Bosworth was murdered. Two, he was a leading Socratic scholar. Three, the note quoting Socrates’ last words was pinned to his suit. Four, Socrates was killed by hemlock. What better way to kill an eminent Socratic scholar than with hemlock?”

  Mr. Buttons nodded, but Blake and Cressida looked at me as if I was making no sense. I don’t know why. It sure made sense to me.

  Blake pointed to the door. “The three of you go and wait out there. Don’t leave the house. I’ll stay here to secure the scene and wait for forensics, Constable Andrews, and the detectives.”

  An hour later, the three of us were sitting at the old iron and Formica table in the middle of the kitchen, sipping hot tea laced with copious amounts of sugar in an attempt to get over the shock. The kitchen was my least favorite room in the house. It was small and cramped, despite having a high ceiling. I suppose the fact that the ceiling was painted bright orange did not lend itself to an airy effect. The only light, such as it was, tried to peek through one small window from which hung a dingy orange floral blind. Today, the blind was up, but the wide veranda outside the kitchen blocked most of the light.