False Impressions Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  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

  Stamping Project

  Praise for the Stamping Sisters Mysteries

  Inked Up

  “Hard to put down . . . keep[s] you guessing as to who the murderer is (and mystery fans should like the fact that there is a second murder as well).”

  —Associated Content

  “This cozy mystery contains romance along with ever-present situations many Americans are now dealing with. A delightful story . . . [includes] instructions for a charming stamping pattern.”

  —Reader to Reader Reviews

  Stamped Out

  “Packed full of family drama and small-town charm, Thayer’s enjoyable mystery series debut outshines most other crafting cozies . . . Twists and turns keep the story fresh and compulsively readable, and the characters feel like family by the time the last page is turned. Thayer and the Stamping Sisters are worth keeping an eye on.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Great . . . a fresh tale . . . The protagonist is a likable, loyal yet flawed person.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Well written . . . I’m hoping this series goes on for a very long time.”

  —BestsellersWorld.com

  “This is a great book. Well-written, fast-paced, descriptive, and well-developed . . . Enjoy, as I did!”

  —MyShelf.com

  “A fast-paced read that will keep you guessing until the very last page . . . An author to watch.”

  —Deb Baker, author of Ding Dong Dead

  “A quite pleasant read.”

  —Critical Mass

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Terri Thayer

  STAMPED OUT

  INKED UP

  FALSE IMPRESSIONS

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  FALSE IMPRESSIONS

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / August 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Terri Micene.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18860-6

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, thanks to my fabulous critique group, Beth Proudfoot and Becky Levine, and Jana Mcburney-Lin. I learn to write with your help.

  Thanks to Holly Mabutas of Eat Cake Graphics for her wonderful stamps. You can’t help but smile at her designs.

  Thanks to Andrea Chebeleu of A Work of Heart studio for providing a space for messy creativity, the best kind.

  And thanks to Michael Glass, for his fabulous titles.

  CHAPTER 1

  April spotted the box as soon as she opened the cupboard door. A beam of light caught on the red lacquer and bounced off the crystals that dotted the surface. The box was pretty, a jewel in the midst of the other plain brown shoe-box-size cardboard containers.

  She looked for Deana, but she was not in the laundry room anymore. April was working in the newly repurposed room in the basement of the Hudock Family Funeral Home. Deana and Mark, her good friends who ran the business together, had moved their washer and dryer up a level next to their main bath and turned this room into storage space for their business. April had been hired to sort files and move them into their new home.

  She probably shouldn’t have opened this particular cupboard. In her defense, it didn’t have a lock on it or anything like that. It was just that the rest of the room was covered in open shelving and curiosity had gotten the best of her. She’d wanted to see what was behind the closed doors.

  Besides, she might need the space for last year’s accounting records.

  The box glowed. She knew it wasn’t really glowing, but the paints and designs that covered the surface made it look as if it were. She had to see more than just the part that was visible. April gave it a shove with her pinky, moving it slightly. Dust rose up like fog. She coughed.

  The box surface was slightly sticky from the finish used. When she got closer, she saw the lid had been collaged with faded pictures and a high school graduation program. In one of the pictures, she could see a young man holding up a trophy. Her gaze didn’t rest there long but rather flicked from one image to the next. There was so much to see.

  The base continued the theme. A motorcycle key graced the side. Stamped images of abstract shapes formed a border. The top and bottom of the box were tied together with a twisted braid of leather. Her fingers itched to untangle the cord.

  She could make out a date on the side of the box: 2/22/09. And the initials JBH.

  “Deana?” she called. No answer. This box was out of place, looking like a jeweled cup next to the plain household plates in an Egyptian tomb. It was art, with a capital A. Art among ordinary file boxes. Art in a funeral home.

  Deana must have gone upstairs to refill their coffee.

  The room was warm and dry, a huge old furnace keeping the place toasty despite near-z
ero temperatures and howling winds outside. She was happy to be inside, happy to be doing paid work. The restoration work she’d been doing had slowed and then ground to a halt as the snow and ice piled up. Aldenville was having its worst winter in years. Of course it was. This was her first January in fifteen years not spent in California.

  Deana returned with two cups and two pieces of banana bread on a tray. She set it on top of an empty shelf.

  “Mark told me to tell you the temperature has gone down another three degrees. It’s eight now.”

  “He’s too funny.” Ever since Mark had come across a picture of Deana and April with Tom Clark, a local TV meteorologist who had come to their sixth-grade class, he’d teased her about the weather. April had had a major crush on the lanky weatherman.

  The indoor-outdoor temperature gauge with digital barometer she’d given Mark for Christmas had seemed like the perfect gift, but now he was subjecting her to weather reports every chance he got.

  Deana closed the cupboard door. “Oh, you needn’t bother. I’ll take care of those.”

  Curious. Nothing so far had been off-limits, although April had stayed away from the embalming room on her own. “Why? What are all those boxes? And that red box? It’s gorgeous. It looks like something one of us would make.”

  By “us,” April meant their weekly stamping group: Rocky Winchester, Suzi Dowling, Mary Lou Rosen and sometimes her daughter, Kit. And April and Deana.

  Deana handed her a mug and stood in front of the door she’d just closed. She tried to make it look like a casual decision to block access, but April knew better. Deana didn’t want her in there. Which, of course, drove April nuts. Deana could be so proper at times.

  “Did Rocky go into the box-making business?” April asked.

  She better not have, April thought as she sipped her coffee and broke off a piece of banana bread. Rocky had her hands full as the new owner of Stamping Sisters. April wanted her to concentrate on selling her line of California Dreamin’ stamps so that they could move on to the home décor line April had been dreaming about.

  Deana just shook her head.

  “Seriously, you’ve got to see this thing,” she said. April reached to open the cupboard again. Deana put down her coffee and put her hand onto her friend’s arm. She lowered her voice and spoke firmly. April recognized it as her business voice. Deana was quite adept at the let-me-tell-you-how-to-behave tone.

  “Those are cremains, April.”

  April’s hand drew back quickly. Cremains? April knew her best friend, the funeral home owner and part-time deputy coroner, dealt with a lot of things she did not, but cremains? What were they doing here? Didn’t they have their own special room?

  “Why do you have ashes of dead people stored here? Don’t you give them to their . . .” She searched for the word. “Owners?”

  Deana said, “I send the bodies out to be cremated. They get returned to me. Usually we have a service and the family takes their loved one home. Sometimes, they don’t.”

  “What do you mean, sometimes they don’t?”

  April took a step away. She remembered what she’d seen inside. Six narrow shelves, two boxes to a shelf. There were at least twelve people in here. Bodies. Cremains.

  She shuddered. “Why would people not pick up their loved ones remains?”

  “It’s complicated, April. Some folks can’t deal.”

  “Like how?”

  Deana looked at April, as if trying to judge how serious she was. She knew April was not a gossip and was curious about life here in Aldenville, their hometown. She made a decision and slowly opened the door.

  Deana pointed to the top shelf to a plain cardboard box. April scrubbed an image of Vanna White from her head. Deana was honoring her request. She fixed her face in an appropriate expression.

  “This old guy has no living relatives,” Deana said. She patted the box sadly and moved her hand to the next. “That one, the family moved out of the area. They left me a forwarding address, but it was wrong. They’ve never paid their bill. So I have Grandma.”

  April felt a lump grow in her throat. She didn’t know how Deana coped sometimes, dealing with so much pain and anguish. Luckily, she had her husband, Mark, to partner with in the business. That helped.

  But April wanted to hear about the fancy one. If that meant hearing a dozen sad tales, so be it.

  The box seemed to glow inside the dim cupboard. She saw stamped images on the side, symbols meaningful to the resident that made no sense to her. Her fingers twitched. She wanted to study it.

  Deana’s hand was on the shelf above the red box, telling her the story of a fireman whose family was still getting used to the idea that Daddy had died in a neighbor’s bed.

  Deana moved down to the last row, began describing the sad tale of two sisters locked in mortal combat over their mother’s remains.

  “You skipped this one.” April pointed to the shelf holding the red lacquer box. It was at hip height, so they had a good view of the intricate designs on the lid. Deana had just ignored it. Someone had decorated this box lovingly. How could the ashes get left behind?

  Deana shut the door. “If you’re just interested in gossip,” Deana began, letting the sentence die an unnatural death. Her lips were turned down almost in an unnatural shape, almost like a scowl. Deana didn’t scowl.

  April’s hand snatched back. She was surprised by the sharpness of Deana’s tone.

  “You’re not going to tell me, Dee?”

  Deana walked out of the room, into the file room next door. She pulled open a drawer. The screeching noise hurt April’s ears.

  “Come on, we’ve got work to do,” Deana called. “As soon as I’m done with the taxes, I’ll want to move 2009 in this drawer here. So clear it out. Any records earlier than 2004 can go into this box and get moved onto the shelves in the other room.”

  Coffee break was over. April reluctantly joined her friend. It was mindless work; any drone could do it. But she needed the money Deana was paying her. The plan was to box up old records, rotating the oldest files and moving last year’s files into the top drawer.

  Deana came back in, carrying more files. “How are the Stamping Sisters designs coming?” she asked.

  April saw her question for what it was—an effort to make up for Deana’s earlier curtness.

  April grabbed a handful of folders and checked the names on the files. She moved those that were out of alphabetical order. “Rocky has her own ideas, I’ll tell you that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That means she doesn’t give a hoot about the creative side of things. She just wants me to produce.”

  Deana had experience as a Stamping Sisters rep. She’d sold the line of stamps and inks. “You should be glad she’s a businesswoman. Don’t forget she’s been making a living as an artist, selling her own collages, for years. She manages to combine both art and commerce. What’s wrong with that?”

  April knelt down and opened the bottom drawer. “Making money would be fine, but I haven’t seen any. I need income.”

  Deana set to vigorously dusting the drawers she’d emptied. April knew Deana was giving her space to vent if that’s what she wanted. Since she’d been back in Aldenville, she’d leaned on Deana a lot.

  April sighed. “I have to get out of the barn.”

  “I thought Charlotte and Grizz living with you at the barn was temporary.”

  When she’d escaped from California, her father, Ed, and his partner, Vince, had allowed her to move into their newly renovated barn. A few months after she’d settled in, Vince’s parents, Charlotte and Grizz Campbell, lost their life savings and their home. Out of options, they’d moved in with April.

  “It was supposed to be short term, but I don’t see how things are going to change. They’ve lost everything. All they have is their Social Security. Vince has no choice but to keep them in the barn. Besides, I need my own place. Don’t you think?”

  Deana sat back on her haunches, her supe
r microfiber cloth in her hand. She had a smudge of dust on her nose. “Your own place? Without Mitch?”

  “Mitch and I don’t need to live together. I’ve never lived on my own, you know. Well, barely, if you count the couple of months in the barn before the Campbells arrived.”

  “I know.”

  April had gone from her mother’s home to college to marriage. Her first four months back in Aldenville had been the first time she’d lived on her own. And she’d been too busy to enjoy it.

  “I like the idea of fixing up a house of my own. Just me, no input from anyone.”

  “You’d like a bedroom to bring Mitch home to.”

  April felt herself blush. She and Mitch had a hard time finding alone time with their busy schedules. With Charlotte and Grizz in her barn, she couldn’t exactly lure Mitch up to her sleeping loft.

  “I’m sick of spending the night at his place, or worse, getting up in the middle of the night and driving home. At first, it was kind of fun, but now with the bad weather, I’m only doing it once a week.”

  Deana chuckled. “Like an old married couple.”

  “We’re busy,” April protested. “If I had my own apartment, I could cook him dinner and he could hang out for as long as he wanted to.”

  “Before driving home in the middle of the night,” Deana said. “I thought you were more liberated than that.”

  “It’s not a question of liberation. I don’t mind being the one to drive home once in a while, but not every time. Shared responsibility.”

  “Have you started looking?”

  April nodded. “Mary Lou’s on the case.” Mary Lou Rosen was the top-earning local Realtor. She sold most of the homes that went on the market in Aldenville. “She left me a message, saying she might have one or two for me to look at. She’s bought up a few foreclosures in the last couple of months.”