Practical Sins for Cold Climates Read online

  Praise for PRACTICAL SINS FOR COLD CLIMATES

  “A strong plot and engaging characters make for a well-crafted mystery, and Val’s humorous attempts to cope with the wilderness do much to lighten the tension. The core of the story is Val’s discovery of her own self-worth.”

  – Publishers Weekly

  “Costa hits all the right notes—vulnerable but likable characters, a compelling plot, a clearly drawn setting, and a tangled web of past and present events.”

  – Sheila Connolly,

  New York Times Bestselling Author of A Gala Event

  “Taut, well written and suspenseful, Practical Sins for Cold Climates draws readers into a community where the past haunts the present and residents’ motives are buried deep...just like the truth.”

  – Kylie Logan,

  Author of And Then There Were Nuns

  “An engaging, deftly-plotted mystery with a smart, tough-minded heroine. Shelley Costa delivers a terrific series debut.”

  – Daniel Stashower,

  Author of The Hour of Peril

  “Very well-written…this book reads as longer than typical cozies because it needs to, for honest character evolution. The mystery has a very satisfying conclusion…This is the first book I have read by Shelley Costa, and I am very impressed.”

  – Librarian at Jefferson-Madison Regional Library System

  “A brooding, atmospheric story, you can almost feel the weight of a blizzard bearing down. Highly recommended.”

  – For the Love of Books

  Books by Shelley Costa

  PRACTICAL SINS FOR COLD CLIMATES

  A KILLER’S GUIDE TO GOOD WORKS

  (September 2016)

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  Copyright

  PRACTICAL SINS FOR COLD CLIMATES

  A Mystery

  Part of the Henery Press Mystery Collection

  First Edition | January 2016

  Henery Press, LLC

  www.henerypress.com

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

  Copyright © 2015 by Shelley Costa

  Author photograph by Portrait Innovations

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Related subjects include: cozy mysteries, women sleuths, murder mystery series, whodunit mysteries (whodunnit), book club recommendations, amateur sleuth books.

  Trade Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-943390-41-0

  Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-943390-42-7

  Digital epub ISBN-13: 978-1-943390-43-4

  Kindle ISBN-13: 978-1-943390-44-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  For Miriam

  All of the moments

  All of the years

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to editor Kendel Lynn for warmth and latitude; editor Rachel Jackson for just the right touch; agent John Talbot for a couple of superlatives when I most needed to hear them; Marnie Albers for putting her estimable mind to the plot; Jessica Bloomfield for her close, early reading of the book; Tom Kelly for the float plane side of things; and my husband Michael for pushing the envelope on our canoe trips. Thanks, finally, to the great silences of the Northwoods. Lake Wendaban is fictitious, and so are its inhabitants. But northern lakes like it exist. It’s good to know there are lakes clean enough for drinking, and forests old—and protected—enough that we can still make discoveries in them about our world and ourselves.

  Quote

  You have to meet the enemy to appreciate him.

  – Grey Owl

  1

  Val Cameron stepped off the Ontario Lakeland train from Toronto and onto the wooden step the conductor had slung into place. He grabbed her elbow when her heel got caught in a space between the boards and held on while she wiggled it loose. It had been a six-hour ride north to this place called Lake Wendaban, where her assignment was to get a signature on a book publishing contract. The train came through, in either direction, just once a day, and Val planned on making the return trip to Union Station in Toronto the day after tomorrow. From there, Pearson Airport, from there, LaGuardia. And finally, a cab back to her place on E. 51st St., where her plants were waiting to be watered and life was beautiful all day long.

  She had passed the time on the train by eating two toasted cheese sandwiches in what was loosely called the dining car and, after watching a road trip movie about the buddies’ hilarious scrapes, she napped. Then she spent the rest of the trip wondering one more time why she had agreed to this particular assignment. But that line of thought only flung her right back into the murky gumbo of her personal life.

  Brushing off her skirt, she watched the train speed northward at a pretty good clip, like it couldn’t wait to get to its final destination, a place the timetable told her was actually called Moose Factory. While she stood wondering whether that was where they either processed or assembled moose, Val adjusted her purse, her briefcase, and her small overnight bag. Then she picked her way across the gravel parking lot in her Prada shoes.

  She slowed down as she eyed the place.

  There had to be some mistake. Where was the town?

  When Peter Hathaway, her boss, first told her she had to get to the town of Wendaban, Ontario, she figured on awnings and sidewalk café seating. Some charming cross between Fire Island and Bedford Falls. Signs pitching all-you-can-eat fish fries every Friday night. Barbershops and garden clubs. People. At the edge of the parking lot she set down her briefcase and overnight bag and looked around.

  Had the train let her off prematurely, say, at a whistle stop? Some little pre-station station where you just had to wait while the moose crossed the tracks? She had sudden misgivings and whirled around. No, it was definitely a train station and the sign said WENDABAN. The town looked like the outskirts of itself. But, then, she had got out of her bed that morning in Manhattan and, happily, had very little basis for comparison.

  She looked up and down the main drag, which was also the only drag, called Highway 14, just as a semi flew through like a windstorm, kicking up dust and tossing around her Donna Karan skirt. Apparently, if she wanted to buy moccasins, a fishing license, trolling motor, tackle, or something called a Bee Burger, she was in the right place. But her next iced decaf quad venti three pump soy no whip white chocolate mocha would just have to wait until she got home. And she wasn’t even going to think about where to find a good kosher dill.

  Across the road, a couple of elderly tourists tottered into a restaurant painted black and yellow and called HONEY BEE MINE. And two doors down, a burly, bow-legged guy in baggy shorts emerged from a place called LCBO clutching a case of Labatt’s to his sizeable chest. So maybe this wasn’t The Town That Time Forgot, after all. No, Val rolled her eyes, in two days that would be her job.

  Just get yourself to Bob’s Bait Shop on the municipal dock, Peter Hathaway had
said. For a man who micromanaged everything including which sugar packets to stock in the office break room, he was curiously unhelpful on the big stuff. Work, for one. Love, for another. And, as usual, she was left having to fill in some pretty important blanks. But get herself to a bait shop in this weird little fishcentric Brigadoon? This she could do. And it wasn’t like she had to buy anything. She preferred her fish smoked, slathered across half a bagel, and slapped down in front of her on a plate at the Carnegie Deli. Any other choices in terms of fish apprehension and delivery held no interest for her.

  Bob’s Bait Shop was just a means to an end in this two-day assignment to sign a bestselling old hermit. It was there she was supposed to meet up with her ride to the Hathaway family cottage that Peter had arranged for her. Still, there was a glimmer of a bad feeling that hanging out around bait—bad as that was, considering she had an ick problem with invertebrates—could turn out to be the least of her problems.

  She crossed Highway 14 and headed toward the place where sun glinted softly on a body of water, which seemed totally promising. Could a bait shop and a dock be far behind? Her deductive skills were something to behold. On her way down the boardwalk, Val passed a gas station, where she figured fishermen could gas up their bass boats, a public library, where they could read about “angling,” and a community center, where they could get together and exaggerate the day’s catch.

  Truly a breed apart.

  A glass-covered community bulletin board sported hand-scribbled signs advertising boats for sale, psychic readings (will I catch fish?), taxidermy (can you stuff my fish for me?), and a Friends of the Lake meeting on August 10 (Camp Sajo Lodge, 7 p.m., come discuss our mutual interests and bring your ideas!). No matter where you went on the planet, Val decided, jiggling her foot, someone would be having a meeting. Was her heel possibly a little loose, after all? Since the likelihood of finding a shoe repair shop in this Wendaban place was nil, she’d ignore the slight wobble until she could hold the shoe in one hand and the heel in the other.

  Rocking softly at the dock were two houseboats—one called The Love Boat and the other Rock Me Baby—painted in psychedelic swirls, next to two small planes and half a dozen banged-up motorboats. At the end of the boardwalk, there it was: Bob’s Bait Shop. It was a hut with rough-cut shingles, slanted boards, and the kind of windows you prop open with sticks. She could think of at least three books she’d edited in which the kinds of things that happen in places like Bob’s Bait Shop usually include dismemberment.

  Val stepped inside and lingered near the door as her eyes adjusted to the dark. Behind a sagging wood counter was a stocky young man placidly reading a magazine. “Hi.” She was surprised to hear herself sound quite so chipper. “I’m looking for Wade Decker.” With her luck, the guy balancing a case of Labatt’s on his gut.

  The young man looked up. “He went to the bee for poutine.”

  After a moment, she murmured, “I see,” kicking herself for not bringing along a Canadian phrase book.

  His eyes flickered at her, and Val knew he had figured she wasn’t a bait-buying kind of gal. She could tell he was about to add something. How long could she pretend before she had to admit to this kid that she didn’t understand? She could be missing something vital, like where to get a Reuben sandwich. The kid’s eyes suddenly got wide as he discovered something helpful to say. “You can wait for him on the dock.” Which came out sounding like dawk.

  If the language barrier didn’t go much beyond bees and poutine, she’d be able to pull it off. She smiled at him like she had caught it all, and sauntered over to the rack holding brochures about houseboat vacations, which only some combination of bondage and chloroform would get her to try. But she felt bad for the kid behind the counter, trapped with old issues of Walleye World in a dark hut on a summer afternoon.

  Val shot him another smile meant to convey something about how city girls with expensive Italian leather briefcases really do take an interest in any Canadian wildlife less than two inches long, and she swaggered over to the smelly bait tank. She lifted the lid and got past the stink just long enough to stare at what was inside. Some kind of flatworms undulated their way through the water. “What are these?” she asked in a way that nicely suppressed her gag reflex.

  The kid grunted. “Leeches.”

  The lid slipped out of her hand and clattered into place.

  When the kid turned away so she couldn’t hear him giggle, which she did anyway, Val noticed that across the back of his head someone had shaved the words GO JAYS. She wondered if he was aware of it. With a breezy “Well, thanks,” Val stepped back out into the afternoon sunlight and walked twenty feet to the municipal dock.

  She crossed her arms and leaned against the piling. There was a stillness to late afternoons in August, past the heat of the day, when everything seems suspended. Wind dies, the air settles, and voices are drawn away to other places. She watched a family in a boat the kind of white you only ever see in rich people’s teeth purr into a vacant slip. Past them, beneath a spread of low, flat-bottomed clouds, the lake began.

  Where it went from there, she didn’t care. In the briefcase at Val’s feet was a book contract from her place of employment, one of only a handful of publishers in New York City that had yet to be bought out by a cookie conglomerate, where twelve years ago she had landed her first job straight out of college and had finally become a senior editor.

  Nearly all of her work life at Schlesinger Publishing had been in the adult trade division, where she had plodded alongside her colleague Peter Hathaway. Until six years ago when he had the luck to acquire that blockbuster, InCubeOps: America’s Secret Program to Destabilize its Allies, by Anonymous, a well-placed source who turned out to be the Deep Throat of the Millennial Generation.

  Twelfth printing and a Pulitzer Prize in the firestorm of government outcry—and Peter Hathaway was deemed a wunderkind, rocketing to the top of the editorial heap. In short order he became such an institution that CEO Henry Schlesinger had finally given him his own imprint, Fir Na Tine, which Peter chose for some obscure reasons of personal ancestry.

  It took Val by surprise, just how philosophical she was about Peter’s success. Her business in this outpost of civilization, which was located somewhere between the CN Tower and God, was to sign the reclusive old Charles Cable, who was writing a big novel about a celestial disaster, when he wasn’t monitoring the effects of lake water levels on loon nests. For whom, no one knew. What she did know was that the man didn’t even own a telephone and only came into town—presumably, this mother of all backwaters—once a month to collect his mail.

  Val looked up.

  Down the boardwalk came a tall man dressed in a faded teal t-shirt, khaki-colored nylon shorts, and blue Adidas slip-on sandals. Between his teeth was a long, thin cigar. The man moved with the kind of loose grace that comes from everything hanging together in just the right way, stepping back instinctively a few times when the brown mutt dashing around his feet stopped short to snap at horseflies.

  When Val straightened herself away from the piling, the man noticed her, and squinted.

  “Are you Wade Decker?” she asked him.

  He came over to her, slid the cigar out of his mouth, and shook her hand. “That I am,” he said. “And you’re…” he drawled as he unfolded a crumpled piece of paper he had pulled out of his pocket, “Valjean Cameron.”

  “Val.”

  “I figured.” His light olive skin had tanned and peeled and tanned again, with a raw pink spot along the long ridge of his nose, where a dried line of Nosekote didn’t seem to be doing any good. He had hazel eyes, a wide mouth, and light brown hair cut long in the front and combed back. He glanced at her briefcase and overnight bag. “Is this all you’ve got?”

  “That’s it. Two days, two nights.”

  A slow nod. “So here you are,” he said, sizing her up, “for an errand in the frozen North.” Deck
er’s voice had the same musical quality of all the Canadians she had heard since she’d arrived north of the border. They always sounded surprised—surprised she wanted a ride from the Toronto airport to the Royal York Hotel, surprised she wanted to change American money, surprised she was taking the train north. It must be nice to be shot through with the kind of wonder that has nothing to do with senility.

  “Believe it or not,” she told him, “there aren’t all that many of us who think you get around on dogsleds.” Her own more practical view of the neighbors to the north was that they drive like lunatics, smoke with abandon, and wear funny hats, only she wasn’t about to say that to the man who was loading her briefcase into one of the small planes. She couldn’t tell whether she was swaying from stepping onto the floating dock or being overcome by the kind of fear that homogenizes her internal organs.

  “I thought we were going by boat.” She sounded accusatory.

  “Oh, did you?” he said, thrusting her briefcase in the space behind the pilot’s seat. She casually walked alongside the plane, wondering whether she should just sandbag him and call a water taxi and trying damn hard to look as jaunty as Amelia Earhart. The plane looked like it had all its rivets, although she wasn’t sure she could say the same for the pilot. But she wasn’t about to come off like some kind of Yankee baby, so when Decker held out a hand, Val grabbed it, stepping onto the float and through the open door. She slipped across the pilot’s seat to her own, where the red leather was old and cracked.