Hallow Haven Cozy Mysteries Bundle Books 1-3 by Mara Webb (hardest books to read TXT) 📗

“Pretty gross, but I’ve seen worse,” he replied. “This person has been dead for a while so, you know, not much but bones left.”

“Any chance it’s just one of those plastic skeletons that people hang up for Halloween?” I asked.

“Ha, you’ve not had a Hallow Haven Halloween yet, have you?” he laughed. “Let me put it this way, hanging up a plastic skeleton would be incredibly tame compared to what folks round here usually do.”

“Right…” I groaned, quickly doing the mental math to work out how far away Halloween was.

“I called them,” Honey yelled from the porch, she didn’t seem to have any interest in joining us by the bunker after what she’d seen. “They said they need to speak to you.” She pointed at Miller and waved a phone in the air. I offered a hand to help him out of the pit, but he had already pulled himself up in one slick move that made me realize just how strong he really was.

He jogged across the grass and took the phone from Honey before pacing up and down as he spoke to the police station. I could vaguely hear him say things like, ‘you’ve got to be joking’ over and over. It didn’t sound like it was going well.

I was standing at the edge of the pit and felt an overwhelming urge to inspect the inside of the bunker for myself. I jumped down onto the metal door and crouched to look through the glass. Surprisingly, I didn’t flinch when I saw the body. It was just as Miller had said, a skeleton. For some reason that bothered me less than any of the other dead bodies I’d seen.

The skeleton was clothed, some type of fabric that hadn’t disintegrated over time. The handle for the bunker door was still covered with earth that hadn’t been dug away yet. I wondered what the plan was to deal with it, surely, we couldn’t just leave a body down there. But would we retrieve the entire bunker? That sounded like a lot of work.

A figure standing at the edge of the pit blocked out the light and I looked up to see Miller’s silhouette. “What’s the plan?” I asked.

“They’re not coming,” he groaned. “The preparations for Shell’s Day have begun and it seems that someone has butchered every rose on the island. They’ve had the petals pulled off or been spray painted brown. I know it sounds stupid, because it is, but people could riot if the event gets messed up.”

“But there’s a dead person here!” I said, almost doubting that Miller had communicated that properly with his colleagues.

“Yeah, but this is an old crime. It’s still a problem, but this clearly happened a long time ago so it’s currently not at the top of the priority list,” he explained. “Like I said, this Shell’s Day thing is very important to a lot of people, making sure it runs smoothly will reduce crime, believe it or not. One year they ran out of heart shaped chocolates and someone went round letting the air out of everyone’s tires.”

“Great,” I said sarcastically. “Do we need to get back to the main island then?”

“No. They have it under control, or so they say. We still haven’t gotten to the bottom of why Pete was firing a cannon at Skerry and now we have this,” Miller said. “We need to get into this bunker somehow, see if there are any clues.”

I already knew that this would be entirely on us as there was no forensic branch of the Hallow Haven police department. They didn’t have the fancy crime scene teams come in and dust for fingerprints or check for DNA on potential weapons. We had to come at everything like a couple of detectives from the distant past.

If we got in there and there was no confession note, or a photograph of the killer committing the crime, then we were probably in for a rough ride. The first issue was the fact that the door was stuck under several feet of earth.

“My friend with the spade is still planning to come, but I told him what had happened, and he has had to go into his happy place to find inner peace, or something…” Honey shouted. “He guessed that he’d be an hour at least.”

After what I’d done to my hair, I was wary of trying to use magic to clear the dirt away. I would much rather manually dig than risk destroying the crime scene. Miller helped me up from the pit and pulled me close to him when my ankle wobbled on the edge of the dirt. His eyes were so dreamy… not the time!

I let go of his hand and stepped back so that my mind could be free of the thought of kissing him. I needed to work out how best to approach the problems we were faced with.

“Could you, you know, make a spade appear?” Miller asked.

“Not confidently,” I smiled. “If we are waiting on the guy to help with the digging anyway, then why don’t we go see what Pete is doing with a cannon?”

Miller nodded and we relayed our plan to Honey.

“You’re going to leave me alone with a boney corpse?” she winced. “What if it leaps up and attacks me?”

“Then we have a zombie apocalypse on our hands, and I wouldn’t know how to help anyway,” I shrugged. “I thought you were a…” I wasn’t sure how to end my thought out loud.

“A witch?” she guessed. “Of course I am, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get spooked!”

“Could you tell us where we can find Pete?” Miller asked, hoping to steer the conversation back to a relevant topic.

“He’s probably on his boat, if not moping down by the lagoon. We’ve had a bit of an incident, but I think Pete is the best one to explain it to you. Do you know how to get to the lagoon?” she