The Drowned and the Fury: A Story Island Cozy Mystery, #2

By Cordelia Rook

For Eliza Crumb and her trusty beagle Mr. Tumnus, the past few months have been smooth sailing. But a storm breaks over their settled life when a hurricane washes the mayor's body ashore, and one of Eliza's best friends becomes the top suspect in his death.

As if the seas weren't rough enough, the victim's even more obnoxious brother blows into town, asking questions and demanding satisfaction. He seems more interested in revenge than justice, and he's not particularly picky about where he gets it.

To protect her friends and her home, Eliza will have to risk everything to bait a killer … or sleep with the fishes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cordelia Rook
• Release date: Nov 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798223621287

Cordelia Rook

Writer, reader, tireless champion of the Oxford comma. I can quote 80's movies with startling accuracy, and name all the Plantagenet monarchs in order. I'm for dogs and donuts. I have no feelings either way about scones. I am terrified of Mrs. Danvers. I write clean, lighthearted dog cozies under the name Cordelia Rook, and clean traditional fantasy under the name J.R. Rasmussen. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, where my household is run by a galumphing fool of a bulldog. Visit me online at cordeliarook.com.

Book preview

Chapter One

Over the course of three decades’ worth of hurricane seasons, I’d seen some odd debris washed ashore after a storm. Dolls. Clothes. A mailbox, once.

But a corpse was a new one for me.

Not that I knew, as I looked out the shop’s front window at not a single drop of rain falling over Bard Street, that the day was to hold a corpse. I was, in fact, mocking the day for its uneventfulness. A temptation of fate if ever there was one.

The leaden clouds broke apart just enough to let a weak ray of midday light through. I shook my head, both welcoming that sunlight and slightly exasperated by it. A lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing, as Mr. Faulkner would say.

My father shot me a look that might have been aiming for disappointment, but his strong resemblance to Santa Claus never did him any favors in the sternness department. That’s Shakespeare, Crumbcake.

I wrinkled my nose. Oh. Right.

You can both be right. My mother came out from the back room, carrying two lidded mugs. She handed one to my father, then offered the other to me. Faulkner did say it. Shakespeare just said it first.

I thanked her and took a sip: piping hot cardamom tea, just in time for fall. It was the first of October; I probably should have been decorating The Seven Ravens for Halloween, instead of looking out the window at the aftermath of basically nothing.

"Is it from The Tempest, at least?" I asked, risking letting my poor father down yet again. My literary knowledge ran more toward C.S. Lewis than Shakespeare. Which was his fault anyway, really. That was what you got when you raised your daughter in a children’s bookshop.

Sure enough, there was that not-at-all-intimidating look again. Macbeth, he said.

It was just as well. Hepzibah hadn’t been much of a tempest, anyway. Something about an eleventh-hour change in her trajectory. We’d duly boarded everything up and stowed everything away and evacuated in an orderly fashion, only to return two days later to a Story Island that was, except for one stretch of the southern edge of the island, largely unchanged. The power was even back on by the time we got back. The full extent of the damage for the Crumb clan was a few shingles off my parents’ roof, one downed tree in my yard, and nothing whatsoever in our shop.

Sometimes we got lucky like that, if you wanted to call the pain in the butt that was leaving all your worldly goods behind and finding a place to stay, with a beagle, for an indefinite amount of time, lucky. Because cars were not allowed on Story Island and everybody had to be funneled onto a single ferry—in other words, because we were your basic logistical nightmare during an emergency—they tended to ask us to evacuate earlier than the other coastal areas, well before the storm was actually upon us. And sometimes the models that calculated all the probable paths predicted wrong.

We were among the first back after this in-hindsight-pointless-but-better-safe-than-sorry-I-guess evacuation. Since it was the weekend and most people had made plans to be on the mainland for a bit anyway, they weren’t in a huge hurry to get home. So the island was mostly empty, and the shop entirely so. Mr. Tumnus, my aforementioned beagle, was sound asleep on his bed in the story-time nook, and the rest of us were getting pretty bored. I was just about to go in search of those Halloween decorations when the bell above the door, one of my favorite sounds in the whole world, rang at last, and Plum Darrow came bounding into the shop at her usual high speed, flaming red braids flying behind her.

Tumnus was awake and up in a nanosecond, dashing to greet Plum. She got down on the floor to rub his belly, while I turned my attention to her father Flynn, who followed her through the door at a much more stately pace.

Turned my attention to him, you understand, as a whole person. I didn’t give the slightest bit of attention, and even less thought, to his remarkable Carolina-blue eyes. Flynn Darrow could have been ordinary looking: there was nothing exceptional about his fit-but-not-a-bodybuilder body, and he hid a fair portion of his face’s perfect bone structure behind a (plain brown) beard. But those eyes.

Which, like I said, I barely noticed. Friends did not dwell on the blueness of each other’s eyes, or the crinkles in the corners of those eyes when they smiled.

I didn’t know they were back already, I said, nodding down at Plum. She’d gone to the mainland with her grandmother. Flynn and his father had stayed behind, being a captain and the chief, respectively, of the Department of Public Safety, which was Story’s police department, fire department, and ambulance service all rolled into one. The evacuation had been recommended rather than mandatory, which left Public Safety to deal with the folks who inevitably refused to go, and frequently found themselves in need of help because of it. I doubted they’d had much trouble to deal with this time, but it didn’t always go that way.

Yeah, well, Plum’s back, anyway. My mom ran back over to Trueport to get some stuff to fix her garden. Flynn scratched the back of his neck, looking from me to the floor and back again. And my father and I are both working⁠—

So you want to know if Plum can hang out here? I guessed.

Yeah, pretty much. Would you mind?

Not even a little. I gestured at my father, who’d taken Plum away from Mr. Tumnus and was now dragging her down an aisle, no doubt to try to force some E.L. Konigsburg into her hands. Again. Plum would have none of it; she never did. As you can see.

My mother came out from the back room again, this time with a travel mug for Flynn.

He smiled at her. Thank you, Miss Sylvia. Eliza just signed you all up to watch Plum this afternoon.

Our pleasure, of course, Mama said.

I could throw some burgers on the grill later, as a thank-you.

My mother shook her head. That’s so sweet, but Dennis and I will have to pass. We haven’t got anyone else to cover tonight. I’m sure Eliza would be happy to join you, though. She could use a burger.

This was, on several levels, a load of nonsense. Bard Street was dead, and unlikely to come back to life today. It was definitely not necessary to keep the shop open all the way until eight, and we all knew it. But fatten Eliza up and throw Eliza at Flynn Darrow with no subtlety whatsoever were both key squares on the Sylvia Crumb bingo card. If she could’ve somehow worked in grow out Eliza’s pixie cut, I might have won a chicken dinner and a personalized Bible.

I accepted the invitation nonetheless—Flynn was a great cook—and kicked it up a notch by promising to bring a pie from our friend Caroline’s pie shop. That settled, Flynn went on his way, and I went to rescue Plum from my father.

I was surprised to find them in a different aisle than I’d expected. Did Mr. Dennis finally give up on Konigsburg? I asked Plum.

"Yep. He’s kind of scandalized that I haven’t read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory yet."

I laughed. Plum was only eight, but words like scandalized weren’t unusual for her. That is kind of a scandal. But it’s only the first of the month. Are you sure you want to commit so early? She was only allowed to buy one book a month.

She pursed her lips, clearly not taking the decision lightly. It does look fun, but it’s pretty short. I don’t know when we can go to the library, and I don’t want to run out of stuff to read.

What do you say I buy it for you, as a present? I offered.

Plum looked hopeful, but hesitant. I don’t know if Daddy and Grandma would want me to take a gift.

If they give you a hard time, tell them you were just being polite. And if that doesn’t work, tell them I bullied you.

Plum snorted. "They’re not going to believe that. Mr. Dennis is the one who’s always trying to make me read stuff."

So tell them he bullied you, I suggested, looking at my father for confirmation.

He tugged on one of Plum’s braids. "I’m not opposed to bullying you, if it would help. Things are really slow today."

Well then, that’s decided, I said. But before you start reading, have you had lunch yet? Because I told your father I’d bring a pie with me when I bring you home later. We could get some hand pies too, and walk Tumnus on the beach while we eat them. Heaven knew there was no inclement weather to stop us.

Walking Mr. Tumnus was one of the few things that could pull Plum away from a book. She allowed that she was in need of lunch, so we suited up Tumnus in his harness, and walked up Bard Street to 3.14. I expected to see one of Caroline’s staff behind the counter, but it was the woman herself.

Have a good storm? I asked her.

She waggled her hand. So-so. I honestly didn’t think I could take another open-ended stay with my sister, after what a pain in the— She stopped and smiled at Plum. "Neck she was last time. So I rented a car and decided to drive up to Asheville. Just make a little vacation out of it, you know?"

Except you never made it to Asheville, because the storm turned out to be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing? I asked. That’s Shakespeare, by the way. Not Faulkner.

Okay, good to know. And yep. Caroline’s sigh was full of regret for her lost mountain holiday. If the island’s open, the shop is open. I had to turn around and come back to work. She made a face like she’d bitten into something rotten, making Plum laugh. "Thanks a lot, Hepzibah."

I gave her a sympathetic look. If anyone could have used a vacation, it was Caroline. Her no-good almost-ex-husband, whose no-goodness rivaled only my own ex-husband’s, had been giving her way too much grief lately. First he’d been trying to rush the divorce because he had a new girlfriend. Then he broke up with the girlfriend and decided he’d rather have Caroline back, and started arguing and contesting every little thing instead.

The more she refused him, the meaner he got. If you asked me, it was escalating into stalker territory now. Just a few days before the storm, they’d had a very public screaming match in Joe’s Coffee, after he demanded to know why she was cozying up to Paul Spicer. (She had, in fact, merely run into Paul in line, and they’d been talking, as one does on a coastal island during hurricane season, about the weather.) I was pretty sure Davis had followed her there.

She definitely could have used a break from him. And from Story. Davis Wilson was the mayor, and most everybody loved him, which meant most everybody was frowning on Caroline. Thanks to a gossip blogger who was blessedly no longer at large, she’d already suffered a lot at the hands of Story the winter and spring before. Poison Penelope had painted her as a Jezebel and Davis as the poor long-suffering spouse. She’d even had her shop vandalized after the post about her came out.

I’d grown up on the island, so I had a healthy respect for storms, and never wanted to see a truly bad one. But it was still kind of a shame that Hepzibah couldn’t have been just a little bit worse.

The look was all Caroline got to convey all that sympathy, so I hoped it was enough. I didn’t want to get into her nasty situation with Davis in front of Plum. Instead I ordered a peach pie for that night’s dessert, and two chicken and two shepherd’s hand pies for our lunch.

Caroline beamed at Plum as she wrapped it all up. And where are you taking this picnic, Miss Plum?

Twain Beach, Plum said definitively, referring to the island’s southern beach, despite the fact that we hadn’t discussed our destination. It’ll have the most treasure. Daddy said that’s where the storm hit hardest.

Caroline’s brows went up. Treasure? Did the storm stir up an old pirate shipwreck or something?

Plum considered this, then shrugged. Could’ve. Grandpa says all kinds of stuff washes up after a storm.

He’s not wrong, I said, but it’s more likely to be Tumnus’s kind of treasure than yours. Gross dead stuff, mostly. Gross dead stuff was right up Mr. Tumnus’s alley. As far as he was concerned, everything was food, and all food was treasure.

Speaking of Mr. Tumnus—Plum gave me a stern look that she might have gotten from her father—he’s been tied up outside an awful long time.

Not so very long, on a cool day, but I agreed anyway, and bought an extra bottle of water for him. I had his collapsible travel bowl in the bag I carried with his treats and poop bags in it. If Plum had her heart set on a treasure-hunting expedition, who knew how long it would take.

As soon as we got to Twain Beach, I took Tumnus’s leash off. Sea turtle nesting season was long over, and leashes weren’t required the rest of the year, as long as the dog was well-behaved and not destructive. Tumnus didn’t always strictly qualify as either, which was why I usually kept him leashed in town, but he had shown a defiance of his breed’s reputation for running off. Apparently your average beagle would follow their nose obsessively and indiscriminately, oblivious to everything but whatever scent they’d caught, until they were well and truly lost. Not so for Tumnus; he loved a good scent as much as the next hound, but he also preferred to keep me where he could see me. Besides, it wasn’t exactly a big island. There was only so far he could go.

He stayed close to us until we finished our first round of pies (sure, he was willing to eat anything, but he knew as well as the rest of us that Caroline’s pie crust was a priority), then ran ahead, sniffing eagerly. Plum and I followed, walking along the shoreline so she could sift through the so-called treasures to be found there—mostly a bunch of wood, mixed with a few pieces of plastic. Hepzibah might not have been all she was cracked up to be, but a storm was still a storm. The surge hadn’t reached most of the mansions up the slope, but it had come close enough to damage a lot of their walkways, and it had completely taken down one private dock we passed.

Plum did manage to find a few good shells, which I gave her a poop bag to carry in. Hey, it wasn’t glamorous, but it got the job done. She chattered away while she hunted, mostly about Meg Murry and her adventures. (I’d known it was only a matter of time before she fell into my father’s Madeline L’Engle trap, and she’d