Another Woman's Treasure Read online

  Another Woman’s Treasure

  Book 3

  JB Lynn

  Copyright © Jennifer Baum ANOTHER WOMAN’S TREASURE: Psychic Consignment Mystery 3

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted by US copyright act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in any database or retrieval system, without prior permission of the author.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, establishments, or organizations, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously to give a sense of authenticity. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Another Woman’s Treasure is intended for 18+ older and for mature audiences only.

  © 2020 Jennifer Baum

  Cover designer: Leiha Mann

  Editor: Parisa Zolfaghari

  Proofreader: Proof Before You Publish

  Formatting: Leiha Mann

  For David Hanak,

  the kind of reader who inspires writers to keep at it!

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Author’s Note

  Also by JB Lynn

  About JB Lynn

  1

  “Are you spying on him?”

  Startled, Amanda Concordia jumped back, bouncing against the wall behind her. She gave Rupert, the ghost in a seersucker suit watching her, a dirty look. “No, I’m not spying on him.”

  Rupert raised his ghostly eyebrows, signaling his disbelief.

  Amanda’s gaze drifted back to the man she was accused of spying on. Detective Tom Keller, in yet another gray dress shirt, was deep in conversation with Piper, the owner of the PerC Up coffee shop. She looked upset. He looked unhappy.

  Maybe there was trouble in paradise. A tiny part of her, she was slightly ashamed to admit, wanted to do a jig.

  “They look like they’re deep in conversation, and I didn’t want to interrupt,” she told Rupert.

  “And yet, you’ve been standing here for the last five minutes, staring at him,” he teased.

  Amanda shrugged, not needing to justify herself to a ghost. She couldn’t even explain what she was doing to herself. Not for the first time, she wondered how Detective Keller, a man who seemed to wear his sense of responsibility like a medal of honor, could be attracted to Piper, who, although a nice person, insisted on wearing her hair in pigtails, even though she was a grown adult.

  As though he realized he was being talked about, the detective looked up and caught Amanda’s eye. He offered her a curt nod.

  Piper, following his line of sight, gave Amanda a huge smile and an enthusiastic wave.

  Feeling like she’d got caught spying, because she had, Amanda waved back weakly, trying to lift the corners of her mouth into the semblance of a smile. She ducked back into the One Woman’s Junk consignment shop and took a deep breath, the familiar scent of orange and cinnamon comforting her.

  Nutmeg, the rescue dog she and her sisters had adopted, gave her a single bark. Amanda didn’t know whether that meant the dog was hungry, wanted to go for a walk, or was just asking her if she was okay. She decided to go with the third option. “I’m fine,” she muttered. “I’m just fine.”

  “She doth protest too much,” Rupert said, having taken up his usual spot leaning against the bookshelf.

  Amanda considered taking off the rose quartz earrings she’d inherited from her godmother, Letty, considering they seemed to be the reason she was able to see and hear the ghost. There were times when she really didn’t want to listen to him. She glanced around the store and was surprised to see that neither of her sisters were there.

  “Where are Bea and Winnie?” she asked Nutmeg.

  The dog quickly raced up the stairs, to the apartment above the shop, and then back down.

  Winnie was probably drawing at Letty’s desk upstairs.

  Her brows drew together in concern. Their mother had been extremely obsessive with her hobby of needlepoint just before her death. Her sisters had been too young to remember that, but Amanda recalled all too well the impulsive stitching.

  Feeling as helpless to assist Winnie as she had their mother, Amanda turned her thoughts to their youngest sister.

  No doubt, Bea was spending time with Ash Costin, the carpenter in the nearby shop who she was now staying with. He seemed to be a stabling influence on her wilder sister, and she was glad they’d found happiness together.

  With a sigh, Amanda crossed her arms over her chest and surveyed the contents of One Woman’s Junk. Like her life, everything was just a little bit off. Not quite organized, not in the best of shape. Still, like her life, it worked.

  She’d come to Sarasota when Letty had passed away. She’d stayed, mostly because she had nowhere else to go, and she really wanted a chance to bond with her sisters. For the first time in their lives, the age differences between them didn’t seem to matter as much, and she was able to connect with them as real people.

  Since Winnie was only five years younger than her, they’d had an okay relationship over the years, but their younger sister, Bea, had been harder for Amanda to connect with. Ten years seemed like a generation. She was pleased that they were working together to run the shop.

  “The investigator lad is here,” Angus, the Loch Ness Monster statue who held the front door of the shop, warned in his thick Scottish brogue, jolting her out of her musings.

  Amanda grinned, suddenly excited, for just a moment, before she remembered he was taken. Feeling guilty for wanting another woman’s man, she scowled.

  “You want his help,” Rupert reminded her, appearing by the front door. “No need to be such a sourpuss.”

  Realizing the ghost was right, she did her best to adopt a neutral expression as Detective Tom Keller strolled into the shop.

  Nutmeg barked an excited greeting at him.

  Amanda forced herself to smile. “Good morning, Detective.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t we know each other well enough now that you can call me Tom?” He offered her a steaming hot cup of coffee from PerC Up. As she took it, their fingers brushed against each other. A spark of electricity flowed between them, igniting physical sensations in
Amanda that she thought were a thing of the past.

  Flustered, she moved away, wondering if he’d felt it, too.

  “I wanted to give you a bit of an update,” Keller said when she didn’t respond to his request to call him by his first name.

  Needing Nutmeg’s steadying presence, Amanda put the coffee down on the counter and scooped the dog up into her arms. She hugged him close, bracing herself for whatever the detective was going to reveal about her godmother’s murder.

  “We searched Richardson’s house,” he said.

  Amanda nodded. Richardson, the local fire inspector, had confessed to her and her sisters, when he’d been about to burn them to death, that he’d been the one to kill Letty.

  “But we still don’t know who his employer is.”

  Amanda winced. “Can you not call him or her an employer?” she asked. “Whoever they are, they’re a soulless fiend that stole the woman who raised us.”

  Keller nodded sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”

  Sensing his apology was genuine, Amanda offered him a real smile in response. “Please don’t think we don’t appreciate everything that you’ve done,” she said.

  Tom Keller had been the one to find the murder weapon, and he was the one building a case against Letty’s killer. If it hadn’t been for the detective, doggedly working a case that he’d never been assigned to, they would have never known for sure that Letty had been murdered. They owed him so much—she owed him so much. She just wished there was something she could do to help his investigation. She and her sisters had been trying to figure out the clues their “powers” were giving them, but so far, they only had more questions than answers.

  “If we could figure out who she had upset…” Keller began slowly.

  “There’s a journal,” Amanda blurted out.

  She glanced upward, wondering if Winnie could hear her. She and her sisters had been keeping it a secret from him. “It didn’t belong to her,” Amanda explained. “But it did belong to a woman who seemed to be in an abusive relationship. If Letty was trying to help her escape…”

  Tom nodded and glanced at his watch. “I’d love to see it,” he said. “But I’ve got to get to court. I’m testifying in another case today.”

  Amanda nodded, trying to hide her disappointment.

  “What if I bring over a pizza when I’m done with work for the day, and we can go over it,” he suggested.

  “You want to have dinner?” she squeaked like a nervous teenager, wondering what Piper would think of that.

  “Dinner won’t kill anyone,” he said with a teasing smile.

  “In this town, I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Amanda quipped. “But come over,” she said. “I’ll make sure that my sisters are here and that we have the journal available for you.”

  He blinked. “Um, yeah, sure.”

  She told herself that she was imagining that he looked slightly confused, maybe even disappointed.

  But then, he recovered, raising his coffee cup in a half-hearted toast. “I’ll see you later, Amanda.”

  Her heart skipped, thrilled at the sound of her name on his lips. She nodded dumbly, unable to speak.

  He tilted his head, a knowing smile spreading across his features before he turned to leave.

  When he was gone from the store, Amanda put Nutmeg on the ground, no longer needing to use him as a shield.

  “Thanks for the coffee, Tom,” Rupert mocked.

  “Shut up,” she retorted.

  “Man would have to be a pretty bad detective to not see how attracted to him you are,” the ghost pointed out, laughing.

  2

  Winnie bounded down from the upstairs apartment, waving a piece of paper. “I’m drawing us a treasure map.”

  Amanda frowned. “A treasure map?”

  Winnie nodded enthusiastically. While she’d always been an artist, she’d put it aside for many years. At least, until she’d received her “powers”. Now, she seemed to be drawing things she’d never seen before. She held it out to Amanda with a wide grin. “See? It’s a treasure map.”

  “And why are we looking for treasure?”

  Winnie shook her head and climbed onto the stool behind the cash register. “Think about it,” she said. “Bea has been seeing a pirate flag practically since she got here. And then she saw Letty burying a box. Now, I’m drawing a map. So, it has to be a treasure map.”

  Amanda nodded slowly, grudgingly following the logic.

  Bea strolled into the shop, throwing over her shoulder to Angus, “And good morning to you, too.”

  Amanda noted that, despite still using crutches, she was moving much easier and steadier now, and that the physical therapy was obviously working. She was glad to see her younger sister back on her feet.

  “You didn’t say good morning to me,” Pim, the toy black sheep, complained from where he was perched on a bookshelf.

  “Good morning, Pim,” she replied easily. “What’s everyone up to this morning?”

  “I’m drawing a treasure map,” Winnie informed her.

  Bea reacted in the exact opposite way than Amanda had. “That’s great! Let me see it.”

  The two of them pored over the drawing that Winnie had made. Meanwhile, Amanda straightened up some items around the shop.

  “It’s weird that she buried it under trees,” Bea murmured.

  Amanda glanced over and, despite her best intentions, found herself going to look over her sisters’ shoulders so she could see the map.

  There was definitely an X marking the spot, beneath some sort of large tree covered with Spanish moss. Knowing how much their godmother had feared trees, it didn’t make much sense that that was where she had chosen to bury her treasure.

  Then again, it didn’t make sense to hide something on a beach where there were no landmarks, like pirates did.

  Amanda let out a shaky sigh. At least, if her sisters insisted on going to look for the treasure, they wouldn’t be by the water’s edge. As much as Letty hated trees, Amanda was terrified of water. She’d been ten when their parents had drowned, and she could still remember the screams, the splashing, the sense of utter helplessness, as her mother and father had been dragged below the surface.

  She’d been told to stay on the beach and watch her sisters, and that’s what she had done. Not that, as a child, she would have been able to save them, but that feeling of standing on sand, feeling your entire world shift beneath you, was something that still haunted Amanda’s nightmares.

  She obviously wasn’t the only one with nightmares, as Bea announced, “Hank’s coming to take the locks off all the doors.”

  Amanda caught Winnie’s eye over Bea’s head, and slowly mouthed, “Let her.” Bea had been jumpy about locks ever since Richardson had locked them in a storeroom as he prepared to burn the shop, with them in it, to the ground.

  “I don’t understand why Letty had everything locked up here,” Bea complained. “At home, she never even locked the front door. Here, everything is hidden and locked away.”

  “It is a business,” Winnie said gently.

  Amanda knew that they were both avoiding discussing why Bea wanted the locks taken off the door. Bea, who’d never liked being constrained in any aspect of her life, had reacted the worst to being locked up. Rena, the homeless girl she’d taken under her wing, and who shared a bedroom with Bea at Ash’s place, had confided she had nightmares.

  “Jim and I think that it’s Peter Perkins who put Richardson up to everything,” Winnie said, steering the conversation away from the locks on the doors.

  Amanda nodded; the same thought had occurred to her. “He does seem to have the most to gain.”

  Bea frowned. “I don’t understand why Richardson just doesn’t tell the police why he did it, who hired him.”

  Amanda wrapped her arms around her younger sister and gave a squeeze. She understood the sense of helplessness she felt. It seemed so unfair that Letty’s life had been snuffed out, and they didn’t even understand wh
y. “Detective Keller is doing his best.”

  Winnie began to fold up her map. “So, you’ve decided to stop alienating him?”

  Amanda shook her head. “I wasn’t alienating him,” she said. She watched as Bea and Winnie shared a look.

  “You like him,” Bea said.

  Amanda shook her head even as her cheeks began to warm. “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do,” Rupert interjected from across the room, where he stood in front of the bookshelf. Amanda’s gaze rocketed over to Rupert, but she didn’t respond to him.

  “He seems like a nice guy,” Winnie suggested.

  “He seems like somebody who’s already involved with someone,” Amanda retorted sharply. “Besides, we have a very professional relationship with him. We’re going to show him the journal tonight.”

  Bea’s eyebrows shot up. “We are?”

  “Not me,” Winnie said, stuffing the folded map into the back of her jeans pocket. “I have a date with Jim. We’re going to go on a sunset cruise.”

  Amanda shuddered at the thought of spending an evening on the water.

  “And Ash and I already have plans,” Bea said.

  “You’ll have to deal with the detective on your own,” Winnie told Amanda.

  Before she could open her mouth to protest, Harmony breezed into the shop, effectively ending the conversation. She wasn’t looking forward to dealing with the detective on her own, especially if she behaved like a love-sick, tongue-tied teenager again. Rupert would never let her live that down. But if she wanted to solve who wanted Letty dead, she was willing to do it.