Here’s a little snippet from the first chapter of Reporting is Murder: A (Ghostly) Paranormal Cozy Mystery (Evangeline Moon Reporting). Enjoy!
“Come on,” she said to Sterling. “Follow me.”
Then she started up the front steps of the tall, stately house. A covered porch wrapped around the front and both sides, and her footsteps echoed brightly against the whitewashed boards.
“Are you insane?” Sterling asked her, not bothering to whisper anymore now that they were alone. “Did you not just hear the overbearing cop just now telling us that we couldn’t go near the house?”
“No,” she corrected him, “that’s not what he said at all. What Sergeant Stick-up-his-Butt said was that we couldn’t go inside the house. That’s fine. I promise we won’t go inside. I have something else in mind.”
“Oh really?” He sounded skeptical. “And what would that be, exactly?”
“Well, nobody said anything about us looking in the windows.”
Which was technically true, and he couldn’t argue it. She was well aware that trespassing at a crime scene was serious business. Looking in through the windows couldn’t hurt, though. Just a little peak. If she was lucky they would find something that Sterling could record. Something newsworthy.
Eva walked around to the left side of the porch and found a tall, four-paned window just waiting for her, like the house knew she was coming. Perfect. A quick glance inside showed her a spacious living room with bookshelves and couches and…yes, there was the fireplace. This was where the gardener had found poor Mister Victor Pellion, according to the brief fact sheet the police had handed her earlier. He’d been stabbed in the chest with the poker from that very fireplace.
She was no police detective but she was pretty sure that ruled out natural causes.
From where the window was situated, she couldn’t see the recliner chair where the murder happened, but what she did see made her clap her hands. The fireplace tool set was right there on the hearth in front of gaping, blackened recess where fires burned on cold nights. Best of all, she could clearly see the poker was missing! This was going to make a great shot.
“Sterling,” she directed, slapping her hand against his back over and over in her excitement. “Get some footage of the fireplace set. Focus in so we can really see how the murder weapon is missing.”
“Ow, Eva,” he griped as he rubbed his shoulder. “Okay, okay, I got it. You want a closeup of the barrier tape on the door before we leave?”
“It’s like you read my mind.”
She watched over his shoulder as he got the interior shot, craning her neck to see if there was anything else for her reporter instincts to cue in on—
A shadow raced from one side of the room to the other.
No, actually the dark shape sort of…bounded from place to place.
She blinked and stepped back in surprise. There was the momentary impression of a dog. A golden retriever, maybe, and a curved tail wagging furiously.
Then it was gone.
Rubbing her eyes she looked again, but there was nothing there now. Just the empty living room with its old furniture. Of course there was nothing there, she told herself. What did she think, the police were going to take all the evidence but leave behind the family pet?
Still, she knew what she saw.
“Hey, Sterling?” she asked, hesitantly. “Do we know if Victor Pellion had a dog?”
He stood up from the window, lowering the camera to balance it down by his hip. “To be honest I don’t know much about him at all. Up until yesterday, I didn’t even know the guy existed.”
She made a thoughtful noise, looking back to the window.
“I know this house though,” Sterling continued. “This place is practically a historic landmark. People gossip about its history.”
“What history?”
“Things like how it changes hands so often. Mister Pellion bought it just last year. Before that it had something like a dozen owners since the turn of the century. The twentieth, century, I mean. Not this century.”
She blinked at him, wishing she’d known any of this before she started her broadcast. “Why? I mean, a beautiful place like this on all this property, why would it be bought and sold so often?”
“Oh, that’s right,” he said with one of those easy smiles he did so well. He had a kind face, wide hazelnut-brown eyes and that scruff on his cheeks and jawline gave him a boyish quality. “You know, Eva, we work so well together that I forget you’re not actually from here. See, this house is even older than the town of Verdant Falls. A house that old collects history like layers of dust, and not all of it is good. Some people died here, I guess, and of course there was that one family that just went missing. When I was younger, and the house was vacant, us kids used to dare each other to run down the driveway from the road and touch the front door.”
She tried to picture Sterling as a kid, running and scared and grinning like a fool, dashing up the front steps and slapping the front door just so his friends wouldn’t think he was a coward. “How many times did you do it?” she asked.
“Just once.” He shivered like a cold breeze had ticked the back of his neck. “That was enough for me.”
“So people died here, and a family really went missing?”
“Sure. I mean, that was back in the nineteen-fifties, I think, but people still remember things like that. You know how it is. Tragedy sells. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? If Victor Pellion was still in his living room, living his best life, then we wouldn’t be out here doing a news piece on him. Same with the house’s history. People remember the bad, and forget the good.”
He had a point, and it kind of bothered Eva that it was so close to the same point that arrogant cop had been trying to make with her. You shouldn’t be here, trying to capitalize on this dead man’s tragedy… He couldn’t be further from the truth. No, she wasn’t happy the man was dead. The cartoonish image of reporters as vultures, sitting over the sick and the dying just waiting to pounce, had gone out of style with tailfins on cars—or so she’d thought. All she wanted was to do her job. After all, Sergeant Fellows was doing his job, and he was only here because of a murder, too. Why couldn’t he just let her do hers?
She looked up at the sturdy walls of Heathcliff House. Her job was finding stories, and here was one standing right in front of her. A house with a history.
A spooky history at that. Exactly how many owners had this place had? What happened to the family that disappeared? Why was there so much tragedy in one place? Every door and every room might open a new mystery. It was more than just gabled windows and wide eaves, tall brick chimneys and a manicured lawn that looked like something out of a Better Homes and Gardens magazine. People had lived here. People who had done amazing things, and ordinary things as well.
This was what she had been looking for. Something interesting. Something intriguing. Stories. Truth.
News.
She looked back through the window but this time she didn’t just see a room. She saw a literal window into the past. She saw history waiting to unfold and voices waiting to speak and—
Her thoughts snapped off abruptly as a dog jumped up at the window, smiling with its tongue hanging out, paws up against the glass.
Then, in an instant, the dog was gone again.
Like it had never even been there.
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