A Warm Mug of Cozy Anthology: Volume 2
By RG Clark, Andre DeCuir, Anne Elliot and
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About this ebook
Welcome to A Warm Mug of Cozy Anthology: Volume 2!
A Warm Mug of Cozy was launched in October 2022 to promote the cozy mystery genre through interviews, reviews, resources, and news for readers and authors alike. Its creators, Cendrine Marrouat and David Ellis, are established multi-genre authors themselves who love promoting books, stories, movies, shows, and art that inspire people.
A Warm Mug of Cozy Anthology: Volume 2 features nine tantalising tales that are the embodiment of the genre itself. Not only are they a lot of fun to read but also very unique in their storytelling too. There is plenty of warmth, humour and unusual settings in these wonderfully imaginative stories to keep you on your toes. You will be still guessing the twists right up until the end.
Contributors to A Warm Mug of Cozy Anthology: Volume 2 are: RG Clark, Andre DeCuir, Anne Elliot, Denise Johnson, Lisa M. Lane, Sam Morris, Julie A. Sellers, & Ian Tucker
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A Warm Mug of Cozy Anthology - RG Clark
INTRODUCTION
After our wonderful first volume in the Warm Mug of Cozy Anthology series, it gives me great pleasure to type this: Here we are again!
Old friends are back (Ian Tucker, Julie A. Sellers, Sam Morris, and Denise Johnson) and new ones have joined us (Anne Elliot, RG Clark, Lisa M. Lane, and Andre DeCuir), allowing us to create one of the most thrilling collections of short cozy mysteries of 2024.
Like last year, what I really like about this volume is its broad appeal. The diverse settings and storylines will keep you entertained for hours.
My deepest gratitude goes to the eight writers who sent us their work. Without them, there would be no Warm of Cozy Anthology. And of course, thank you to my co-editor David for his hard work and dedication to our yearly project.
Now, time to sit down and relax. I hope you will enjoy this year’s volume!
Cendrine Marrouat (Winnipeg, Canada) – Co-founder A Warm Mug of Cozy
Welcome to round two of the Warm Mug of Cozy Anthology! We hope that you have already thoroughly enjoyed reading the first volume in this series, we are extremely proud to be involved in another dynamically fun anthology. In this unique collection, you will find all sorts of Cozy Mysteries to savour and will encounter plenty of humorous adventures, all with classic cozy twists that keep everything fresh and original.
Time and again, I am so enamoured with this particular genre and how superbly creative/inventive our writers have been with their material. We are honoured to have both some familiar and new faces for this volume and judging by the quality of their work, I sincerely hope they continue to submit to us for many years to come.
Get yourself a nice hot or cold beverage (depending on when and where you are reading this), along with some decent treats, put up your feet and let the cozyness commence!
David Ellis (Tunbridge Wells, Kent, UK) – Co-founder A Warm Mug of Cozy
STORIES
Whispers in Bars
Ian Tucker
I t’ll be an evening for gin and reminiscence, old friend,
said Alain Priest above the rhythm of the train he was riding.
I met him fifteen minutes later at the hotel he had nominated. He was pre-authorising his credit card at reception, wearing a bespoke single-breasted suit in blue twill that was almost arty, almost professional and apparently new. No one noticed him. On the other hand, I turned a few heads with my silk blazer. It was blush pink and the right attire for a long, light evening.
We sat in the tea garden at an Alice in Wonderland curly-iron table and drank gin with ice, lemon and very little mixer. My role was mostly to listen to the rolling anecdotes and witticisms.
What’re you doing outside the City?
I asked, in the lull at the end of a repackaged story about an entrepreneur who had sold his business for a fortune, stripped out of his suit on the spot, donned a Hawaiian shirt and board shorts and demanded a taxi to take him to a beach for the rest of his life. I didn’t realise you knew the rest of the country existed.
On a mission, mate,
he said. Undercover. Your modern-day spy. That’s me.
I let the dizziness spin around my eyes. I was out of practice with spirits, unlike Alain. He was making sure his drink was shaken, not stirred, and pretending not to take the image of himself as Bond seriously.
Some people I know,
he continued, heard about a place near Balinty where they’re planning to build some whacking great wind turbines without telling the locals. Special planning permission. These people don’t like that sort of thing and wanted someone to go check it out.
And they sent you?
Sure. They trust me.
What is it you do these days with your first-class degree and undoubted people skills?
I asked.
He rightly guessed I was referring to his drinking addiction and changed the subject in the way at which he was superb. I weaved back to my flat before the bar closed and I ruined my shoes by throwing up.
Alain was an old friend and I still liked him, but he had managed to fit a full year of words into one evening. I felt no compulsion to see him again for at least that long and had consequently forgotten him entirely when my mobile rang two days later. He was calling from his London flat and his tone was unusually uncertain.
Mate, you didn’t give anyone my address, did you?
he said.
I had not .
It’s just, I saw someone on the street here, looked a lot like a guy I met at that wind farm site down your way.
I don’t even know where that place was,
I said. And no one’s mentioned you, let alone asked for your address.
Faithful Hill, near Balinty.
His attention was elsewhere and he was only talking to cover the gap. And it turns out that the ground’s too soft, so they were only building little windmills. Invisible behind the hills and hardly any noise.
Nothing in it, then?
I asked.
Yeh. Well. Maybe. Wouldn’t say that exactly.
He rang off. I lost myself in the stitching of a golden chasuble.
(It was excessively elaborate. Faith makes people take disproportionate efforts and makes them unaware of how ridiculous they look. Rather like freemasonry. My obsession with patterns and fabrics was, of course, not the same at all.)
At breakfast, I found a voicemail from Alain left in the small hours of the morning. One of those where someone would press the last number redial and all you would get is background sounds. I hovered my finger over the delete button but paused. The recording was not just blank background or drunken clattering. There was something discernible going on. A heavy object falling and shouting and something smashing. Then there were other voices and a door slamming.
The recording continued the full five minutes permitted, but there was nothing further than the kind of street noise which lasts all night in London.
I called Alain back. No answer. I skimmed the haphazard list in my SIM and pressed an old name. Rubina Tyler-Street was a mutual friend who valued her brash legal career enough to wear soft-collared blouses and two-piece skirt suits all day. I had not seen her in five years. She answered on the second ring. Being constantly contactable is an occupational habit in such circles.
Hamilton,
she said, as if we had just resumed an interrupted conversation. Have you finally decided to measure me for a dress?
From her point of view, it was a running joke that I had never offered to design her a ball gown. From mine, her request was equivalent to my asking her to convey my flat.
I told her about Alain.
Not sure I’d want a recording of what he got up to in the middle of the night,
she said, with all the prurient interest of someone who would have loved a video recording of exactly that.
Have you seen him recently?
"Last week actually. In Brut. It’s a wine bar near Temple. We’d just agreed on a big refinancing for Ninepillars and he was bar-flying about, like he does. Somehow insinuated himself with us all night. You know what he’s like when he turns on the charm."
She agreed to go past Alain’s flat on her way into the office. Not a big deal. I suspect that she had been there a lot.
I did what I usually do on these occasions. I put the chasuble aside and resumed chalking out a pattern for a millionaire’s wife who was going to a murder mystery weekend set in the 1920s. Costumes were normally not my thing, but studios and museums had not called for a while, so I was paying the rent with bespoke commissions. I hoped Rubina would not find the website because I could hardly refuse her if she placed an order. And it was just the sort of thing she would do—and then not pay.
I was reading about infrastructure investment on Ninepillars LLP’s internet page when Rubina called me back.
He’s not answering,
she said. What did you say happened on that voicemail? Did you say he left at the end?
I said I heard a door slam. But the mobile stayed in the room.
I know,
she said. I just called it and you can hear it ringing in the flat.
I imagined her standing in the hallway with her ear pressed to the door.
Can you see through the keyhole?
I asked.
She started telling me that it was a Yale lock before she cottoned on. Got to get to work completing docs for that refinancing this morning. I’ll post him a note and drop in later. Let me know if you hear anything.
I put on some deck shoes and a porkpie hat and drove to Balinty.
Faithful Hill wasn’t hard to find. Like everything else intended to be respectable, it appeared on my SatNav map. There was a big sign outside announcing ‘considerate construction’ and a hoarding with a watercolour-effect picture of toy-sized turbines. At the moment, the only thing they had built was a pattern of oblong concrete blocks, which I presumed were foundations but looked more like a giant’s game of hopscotch.
I asked a man who seemed to be doing something at the gate booth and he looked me up and down in my boiler suit and chlorine-coloured jerkin. I think it was the sequins along the seams which threw him.
Yeh. Wind power,
he said.
Yeh,
I said.
It’s the future,
he said, for form’s sake.
So’s global warming and the heat death of the universe. What make are you putting up?
He looked me over more carefully. I said nothing. There might be many explanations for a random visitor asking that question but I did not feel like giving him one lie over another. Eventually, he just told me that the turbines were made by Harmattan, and walked away.
Across the road was a gastropub opened for morning coffee and early lunchers. The Don Quixote was likely to exert an irresistible lure on Alain, so I went in and sat near the bay window looking across the road to the turbine site where nothing was happening.
The internet told me that Harmattan was a respected Japanese company that sold residential wind turbines for about £10,000 each, 100kW ones for about £200,000 each and a 3.2MW monster for an undisclosed king’s ransom. I could not picture the big ones fitting on the foundations that I had seen. They would be too close together, anyway. So, whoever had induced Alain to snoop around the site could probably rest assured that the panorama would not be blotted by anything larger than the middle-sized towers. It was, nonetheless, probably still a million pounds of kit.
When the barman brought me a pork pie to go with my hat, I showed him a picture of Alain on my mobile.
Yeh. Friend of yours? He was here a few days ago, I think.
Was he memorable?
I asked.
"Not really. But he was writing a letter and his taxi turned up just as he finished it, so he asked me to