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  A Bite of Blueberry

  Priscilla Pratt Mystery #2

  Melissa Monroe

  Copyright © 2018 by Cinnamon Cozies

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Stunning Book Covers

  Recipes by Jennifer Weiss

  For information and rights inquiries contact:

  www.cinnamoncozies.com

  [email protected]

  About the Author

  Melissa Monroe grew up in a small Missouri town where dogs outnumbered people, and the biggest monument it had to boast was a four-way stop. Melissa’s highest aspiration as a child was to become a vampire. Despite the fact she crisps in the sun, it wasn’t to be. In college she came to be something close, staying up all hours and consuming an unholy amount of warm caffeinated beverages to attain a journalism degree at Missouri Western.

  A habitual insomniac and coffee addict, Melissa spends her days penning works of fantasy, romance and mystery, occasionally emerging from her office to feast on the snacks of the living. She currently lives in Saint Joseph, Missouri, with her husband Matthew.

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Death by Blueberry

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Red, White and Blue Fruit Salad

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Poison Apple Turnovers

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

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  1. Catnip & Culprits: A Pets Reporter Mystery

  A small-town pets journalist gets her first taste of amateur sleuthing — and a taste of just how pets-crazed her hometown has become.

  2. Fangs & Fairy Dust: Priscilla Pratt Mystery #0

  A vampire baker —before she opened shop — sinks her teeth into a local mystery.

  3. The Case of the Disappearing Dame: A Ruby Martin Mystery

  A 1920s historical cozy in which the heroine must prove her mystery-solving skills when a young girl disappears at the fair.

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  Chapter One

  Priscilla Pratt’s day began fairly normally, all things considered. After waking at five to start the evening off, she discovered her store of vanilla extract running low and popped next door to buy some from Landry’s convenience store. When she returned, she found herself in the middle of a strange tableau.

  Anna was standing on top of the counter. The candy dish she routinely kept for the smaller children that came into the shop was overturned and suckers had been strewn across the floor. The cash register was partially open, and if she’d been a betting woman, Priscilla would have said that Anna had been starting the evening ritual of counting the money in the drawer before the store opened. Further evidence for that theory was the roll of quarters Anna was clutching as if it was a projectile weapon that could save her.

  Befuddled, Priscilla contemplated the large, vibrantly green bullfrog hopping from tile to tile. Upon her arrival it began to hop toward her. Anna let out another shriek as it jumped, brandishing her roll of quarters.

  “Stay back!” Her voice shot through two octaves and came out at a pitch that only dogs and vampires could hear.

  Priscilla cringed. This was already shaping up to be a bad day, and she didn’t need hearing loss to compound the early morning she was going to be forced to endure. She didn’t usually serve breakfasts, as a rule, and staying up for this one was going to be a nightmare.

  “What’s wrong, Anna? It’s just a frog.”

  Priscilla knelt and seized the amphibian around its middle. It struggled mightily, and she didn’t want to squeeze it, for fear of crushing its guts. It squirmed out of her grasp and landed on one of her tables, hopping angrily in place. At least, it looked like an angry gesture. She couldn’t quite tell what sort of emotions the frog might or might not be feeling. She was barely fluent in human interaction, and cross-species communication was beyond her limited capabilities.

  “That ... that thing was in the mixing bowl when I went to put the muffins in the oven!”

  Priscilla frowned and rounded the counter, setting her purchase on the counter. She hoped the creature hadn’t been in the bowl of banana nut mix. She’d had a last minute addition to the order placed by the Debutante Society of Worcester County, and would have to make three dozen additional muffins to accommodate the escorts that were expected to arrive alongside their sisters, mothers, or significant others. If that mix was ruined, she’d have to scrap it and start all over again.

  Sure enough, when she peered into the bowl she saw two distinct prints where the frog’s legs and feet had rested inside her batter. She pulled the trash can over to the counter with a groan of protest, ignoring Anna’s continued whimpers and admonishments at the frog.

  “How did it get in here?” Priscilla asked.

  “I don’t know!” Anna answered, voice quavering. The girl honestly sounded like she was going to cry. “I came in five minutes ago and was going to check the register and get ready to open. When I pulled the bowl out the fridge, it was inside!”

  So not only had the frog been in her bowl, it had also been in her fridge. Fighting not to groan in frustration, Priscilla wondered if she was going to be forced to throw out everything she’d pre-mixed.

  The frog issued a loud sound and its throat swelled to twice its normal size. Anna squeaked and chucked the roll of quarters at the frog. It landed harmlessly, inches away from the large amphibian, and Priscilla could have sworn the frog gave her assistant a scornful look.

  “Would you please get off the counter, Anna?” Priscilla asked, trying not to let her mounting irritation show in her tone. It wasn’t Anna’s fault that things were going so disastrously wrong. “I’m going to have to scour this place as it is.”

  “B-but what if it comes over here?” Anna asked, turning to face her. Priscilla felt a pang of sympathy for her assistant. Anna was clearly scared. It was the same sort of look Priscilla herself sported when a hairy spider had crawled out of her drain and into her sink—mixed horror and revulsion.

  “You can go out the back way,” Priscilla said with a sigh. “And I’ll call you when I’ve sorted out this mess.”

  “But—” Anna said, biting her lip. Anna knew she had a large order due today, and had too much of a work ethic to abandon her to it.

  “Give me an hour,” Priscilla soothed. “Take a walk and see if the pet store is still open. I think we may have one of their patrons.”

  Anna climbed carefully down from the counter and sprinted for the
back exit. Priscilla let out a gusty sigh as soon as she’d gone. What a nightmare. She was going to have to throw everything she’d pre-mixed out, just to be safe.

  As if she didn’t have enough on her plate already. Priscilla had been contacted by the head of the Debutante Society only a week ago, when their preferred caterer had been unable to provide their breakfast spread for the upcoming meeting. She’d reluctantly taken the job, simply because she couldn’t plausibly say no.

  Priscilla was being boycotted by the members of the Bellmare Historical Society for helping the police catch a murderer who sat on their board. Some of the old ninnies held sway in Bellmare’s upper echelons, so her catering business had been slow of late.

  Catering was usually her bread and butter, and there were only two reasons she’d yet to go under. Firstly, and most significantly, Olivia Baker had set up shop at the back of the building that housed her business, Fangs in Fondant, adding on another wing to accommodate her own restaurant. A bank loan had covered most of the cost, and her friend was well on her way to paying off the remainder of the debt. The Big Bowl, Olivia’s new business, was immensely popular with the residents of Bellmare, and kept up a steady stream of traffic throughout the day.

  With Becca Peckman, a recent human hire, watching the shop while Priscilla and Anna slept, Priscilla was doing a modest trade during the daytime. It was enough to keep her lights on, at any rate. The most demand for cookies came with the after-dinner crowd, so Priscilla didn’t feel totally superfluous anymore.

  Priscilla turned to glare at the frog, who was making quite a fuss on her table.

  “Now what did you have to do that for?” she asked him, brandishing the bowl. “Now I’m going to have to start over. Do you know how long it’ll take to get everything mixed again?”

  “Not long,” a high, feminine voice said from the stairs. “At least it won’t if you let me help you.”

  Priscilla spun quickly to face the intruder. Before she located the diminutive figure crouching at the bottom of her stairway, she knew what she’d see. Avalon hadn’t changed a bit since she’d last seen her. Her fair hair had a slightly silvery sheen that some might have called platinum blonde. Priscilla knew it grew that way from her head, and wasn’t the result of any salon or dye bottle.

  Priscilla also knew that the wings that were folded across her back were no decoration. They were real, if not exactly functional. Avalon had only ever learned to hover, never to fly.

  Her morning had just been upgraded from annoying to intolerable.

  “What are you doing here, faerie godmother?” she asked through clenched teeth.

  Avalon rose from her perch with all the dignity of an elder statesman. If she was abashed about her choice to break into Priscilla’s shop, it didn’t show in her demeanor.

  “Now is that any way to talk to me, dear? I’ve told you a million times to call me Ava.”

  Priscilla stared her down. She wasn’t going to engage the fae in this game. She didn’t have time for it today. Avalon would get to the point, or she’d leave.

  Avalon’s dainty shoulders drooped slightly. “You’re in a bad mood. Is it because of the frog? I didn’t know where else to put him, dear.”

  “You?” Priscilla blurted. “It was you? You put the frog in my fridge?”

  “He was hopping all over the place, trying to get up your stairs. I couldn’t have him waking you, dear. Not after all the trouble he’s been putting you through.”

  A horrifying thought occurred to her then. “Avalon ... the frog isn’t human, is he?”

  “Of course not. Right now he’s a frog. Though I meant to turn him into a horned toad. Much uglier, in my opinion.”

  Priscilla buried her face in her hands and let out a little cry of frustration. “Avalon, no! You can’t turn any of my customers into animals! Did you even try to turn him back?”

  Avalon chewed her lip. “Well, I was going to. But then that little girl unlocked the back door and I had to hide for a bit.”

  If Priscilla had been less in control of herself, she’d have screamed. She might also have thrown the useless faerie out the front window. Instead she scrubbed her face with her hands, hard, wondering if it would be too much to scratch off the top layer of skin. She needed to do something to relieve the frustration.

  “Ava, you’ve just cost me hours of preparation by putting that frog in there. At least if he’d been left on the counter, he’d only have ruined one dish. Now I have to trash everything.”

  “Why?” Ava asked, cocking her head to one side in apparent bewilderment. “He can’t hurt anything more than himself.”

  “Some of us aren’t stuck in the Dark Ages, Avalon,” Priscilla said testily. “I happen to know that amphibians and reptiles often carry salmonella on their skin. If I feed people anything it has touched, I’m violating federal regulations.”

  Avalon’s full lower lip jutted out in a pout. “How was I supposed to know?”

  “You could have just, I don’t know, not turned a patron of my shop into a frog!”

  “I had to, dear,” Ava protested. “He was trying to sneak in. That odious man was infringing on your privacy.”

  “And what, pray tell, were you doing, godmother? I doubt your intentions were as pure as the driven snow.” Priscilla paused, absorbing the last portion of her godmother’s tale with sudden dread. “What did that man look like, Ava?”

  Ava stroked her chin thoughtfully. “Well, he was fairly good-looking, all things considered. He had dark hair and a pointy beard.”

  Priscilla groaned. “No. You didn’t. Ava, please tell me you didn’t turn Joseph Reed into a frog!”

  The second, and more distressing, reason that her business remained afloat at the moment was the addition of one very persistent customer. Joseph Reed, a television executive she’d met during the course of the murder investigation, had been trying for months to get Priscilla to sign away the rights to her life’s story. As an incentive, he had put in regular orders for her baked goods, paying extra to have them shipped quickly to Los Angeles, where he lived.

  She wondered sometimes if he ate all two hundred confections himself, or shared them with members of his staff. If it was the former, he was going to be very fat by the end of the year, because she had no intention of saying yes to his proposal.

  She’d been expecting a visit from Joseph any day now. He popped into her store at least once a month, trying to persuade her with increasingly outrageous offers of assistance. His most recent pitch had been to offer her advertising money to take her brand nationwide. As tempting as it had been, she’d had to turn him down. There were too many secrets in Bellmare, and there would be literal hell to pay if she revealed even half of what she knew.

  “Was that his name? He looked like a devil to me, dear. He could have meant you harm.”

  “He will now!” Priscilla snapped. “I had things perfectly under control. What do you think he’s going to do, faerie godmother? If he ever becomes human again, he’s going to blacklist me. And that’s the best-case scenario! Turn him back, now.”

  Ava’s wings blurred into motion and she was suddenly hovering a few inches off the ground. “Well, about that …”

  Priscilla threw her hands up in the air in disgust. “You mean to tell me that in the last 353 years, you haven’t improved one bit? You’re still as big a bumbler as you were in 1665?”

  “Now you take that back. I never bumble anywhere, Priscilla Pratt.”

  “You’re still a complete hack!”

  Ava’s cheeks colored in sudden fury. “Take it back or I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” Priscilla taunted. “You were cursed to follow my family until we found a loophole. You don’t have to be here. Find a way to turn him back and get out of my life. For good, this time.”

  Ava’s hands clenched into tiny fists at her side and her slipper-clad feet kicked in midair. “That’s just the point, Priscilla. That loophole only works when you’re using an assumed name. You’re usi
ng your true name once more, and it’s gained enough clout to have sway over me again.”

  Ava finally landed on the counter and sat atop it like a queen officiating over her court. “That’s why I’ve come. It’s time to get you married, Priscilla. After 353 years, you should not be single. I think we’ve gone well past old maid. You’re a withered crone at this point. Metaphorically speaking, of course. You’ve still got lovely skin, even if the rest of you is plain.”

  Priscilla resisted the urge to reach for the flyswatter that hung on a hook near her stove. It wouldn’t hurt Ava unduly, but it would make Priscilla feel better about this whole situation. At least she could try to rid herself of the pest.

  Instead, she marched past Avalon, bumping the divider that stood between her and the front lobby of her store. She picked up the frog in mid-hop, seizing it around the middle before it could get any funny ideas about making its way outside. This time it didn’t struggle. That almost made things worse. Was Joseph Reed, arrogant executive, still in there? Was he aware of everything that was going on?

  She hoped not. If he was lucky, he’d come away with no memory of what she was about to do.

  “Where are you going?” Ava spluttered as Priscilla wrapped the amphibian in one of her spare coats.

  “Warming him up. Amphibians are cold-blooded, which means I can’t expose him directly to the January air.”

  “Why are you taking him outside?”

  “If he’s going to stay like this for any length of time, the least I can do is make his life comfortable. There’s a pet store down the block from here. I’m going to get him some food and a place to sleep.”