Claire's Candles Mystery 04 - Rose Petal Revenge Read online

  ROSE PETAL REVENGE

  CLAIRE’S CANDLES - BOOK 4

  AGATHA FROST

  CONTENTS

  About This Book

  Newsletter Signup

  Also by Agatha Frost

  Introduction from Agatha Frost

  Pre-order the next adventure!

  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

  Afterword

  Newsletter Signup

  Also by Agatha Frost

  Published by Pink Tree Publishing Limited in 2020

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Pink Tree Publishing Limited.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For questions and comments about this book, please contact [email protected]

  www.pinktreepublishing.com

  www.agathafrost.com

  About This Book

  Released: November 30th 2020

  Words: 53,000

  Series: Book 4 - Claire’s Candles

  Language: British English

  Standalone: Yes

  Cliff-hanger: No

  All Claire’s best friend Damon wants for his birthday is to celebrate with his far-flung friends. At a convention for science-fiction fans. With cosplay. But when Damon’s once close-knit group of online friends splinters in the week before the event, threatening to ruin Damon's birthday and the plans he's been looking forward to for months, it's Captain Claire to the rescue – or it will be, just as soon as her mother puts the finishing touches on her costume.

  Of course, what Claire doesn't know (aside from pretty much anything to do with sci-fi) is that amid the hubbub of meet-and-greets, merchandise, and video game tournaments, it's all fun and games . . . until someone gets stabbed.

  Thrown headfirst into a murderous friend group filled with lies and deception, can Claire solve the case before the bodies pile up?

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  Also by Agatha Frost

  Claire’s Candles

  1. Vanilla Bean Vengeance

  2. Black Cherry Betrayal

  3. Coconut Milk Casualty

  4. Rose Petal Revenge

  5. Fresh Linen Fraud (NEW!)

  Peridale Cafe

  Book 1-10 Boxset

  1. Pancakes and Corpses

  2. Lemonade and Lies

  3. Doughnuts and Deception

  4. Chocolate Cake and Chaos

  5. Shortbread and Sorrow

  6. Espresso and Evil

  7. Macarons and Mayhem

  8. Fruit Cake and Fear

  9. Birthday Cake and Bodies

  10. Gingerbread and Ghosts

  11.Cupcakes and Casualties

  12. Blueberry Muffins and Misfortune

  13. Ice Cream and Incidents

  14. Champagne and Catastrophes

  15. Wedding Cake and Woes

  16. Red Velvet and Revenge

  17. Vegetables and Vengeance

  18. Cheesecake and Confusion

  19. Brownies and Bloodshed

  20. Cocktails and Cowardice

  21. COMING SOON

  Introduction from Agatha Frost

  Hello there! Welcome to another installment of my Claire’s Candles Cozy Mystery series! If this is a return visit to Northash, welcome back, and if this is your first visit, welcome! Since this is the fourth, book in a series with overlapping subplots, I recommend staring with the first book in the series, Vanilla Bean Vengeance, although the mystery in this story can be enjoyed as a standalone (and I never leave a mystery hanging).

  Another note: I am British, and Claire’s Candles is set in the North West of England. Depending on where you live, you may come across words/phrases you don’t understand, or might think are spelt wrong (we love throwing the ‘u’ into words like ‘colour). If that’s the case, I hope you enjoy experiencing something a little different, although I believe that anyone speaking any variety of English will be able to enjoy this book, and isn’t reading all about learning?

  Please, enjoy! And when you’re finished, don’t forget to leave a review on Amazon (they help, a lot), and to check out my other series, Peridale Cafe, which has over 20 cozy adventures for you to enjoy!

  Pre-order the next adventure!

  The next and 5th book in the series, Fresh Linen Fraud, is coming March 23rd 2021! Pre-order your next cozy adventure with Claire on Amazon!

  Chapter One

  Crouched in the corner of her parents’ stuffy attic on a Friday evening after working at the candle shop all day, Claire Harris pulled open another unlabelled box. More brightly coloured tinsel, this time sparkly red with gold foil stars jutting out every which way, spilled out. As pretty as it was, tinsel wasn’t what she was looking for.

  “There’s enough Christmas stuff here to deck the halls of every house in Northash twice over,” she called to her father as she wiped a mixture of dust and sweat from her forehead. “Might have to come back up for my flat when December rolls around. Most of this stuff looks good as new.”

  “This is where the Decorations of Christmases Past come to die.” Alan chuckled, and when he glanced over his shoulder, his face was as red as Claire’s felt. “You know what your mother is like. I once suggested she use the same colour scheme two years in a row.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “She didn’t talk to me for the rest of that day, and then she went out and bought twice as much new stuff as the year before.” He opened another box and clicked his fingers together. “Ah, here it is!”

  Claire abandoned the Christmas graveyard and joined her father on the other side of the attic. Tucked amongst a vast collection of hardback microwave cookbooks, the colourful box of the board game they’d been looking for shone up at them.

  “I knew the name rang a bell.” He plucked out the box and blew a light layer of dust off the protective plastic shrink wrap still encasing it. “Never been opened.”

  The box art was gloriously 1980s. Chunky white text bursting through space announced the title – Dawn Ship – above five characters in different spacesuits, falling through a system of purple and blue stars. Behind them, a long grey spaceship had split in two in a flurry of sparks, and the lines of motion gave the impression it was dropping along with the crew.

  “Can you survive Dawn Ship before time runs out?” Claire read the tagline aloud over her father’s shoulder. “Why do you even have this?”

  “Your mother’s second cousin, Reginald, sent it as a present when you were born.”

  Claire took the box and turned it over. Five male teenagers with dated clothes and haircuts grinned around a board game cluttered with cards and pieces. She scanned the long list of seemingly never-ending rules, but the sci-fi terms went straight over her head.

  “Doesn’t look like a game for kids.”

  “I doubt Reginald even knew what it was.” Alan levered himself upright with the help of the stacked boxes. “Was always buying things in bulk to flog at markets and car boot sales. Gave us a microwave for our wedding present. Thing blew up on the second use.” He laughed as he moved the boxes back into the corner with his good foot. “I wouldn’t be surprised if your mother put it up here the same day it arrived. Funny what the mind remembers, even at my age.”

  “Damon will get a kick out of this.” Claire pushed herself up with her knees. “Can I borrow it?”

  “It might be thirty-five years late, but it was your present, little one.”

  After tugging on the chain connected to the single bulb dangling from the cobweb-covered roof beams, Claire tucked the game under her arm and followed her father down the ladder. She squinted at the bright July light streaming through the window at the end of the hall, sun still high in the sky despite most of the day having passed. Alan grabbed his house cane and tucked the spring-loaded ladder back into the ceiling.

  “You had better not be tracking dust through my hallway,” Claire’s mother, Janet, called from one of the rooms. “I only shampooed the carpets last night.”

  Alan smiled and patted Claire’s shoulder before setting off downstairs, no doubt to return to his potting shed at the bottom of the garden. Box in hand, Claire walked into what had, until very recently, been her bedroom. Her mother was working on a black garment draped loosely over a too-small dress form in the middle of the room. She’d pushed the rest of the furniture up against the walls.

  “What took you so long?” Janet as
ked, peering over her glasses as she tacked up the hems of the black trousers she’d whipped up using an old bedsheet and Claire’s hastily taken measurements. “I was about to send up a search party.”

  “Nothing was labelled.” Claire rubbed her itchy nose. “Might be the first time I’ve ever seen dust in this house, although now I know why the rest of the place is so clean and tidy. Got enough Christmas stuff hidden away up there?”

  “Don’t get smart, dear.” Janet pursed her lips. “It’s not like guests ever have a reason to go up there.”

  The toilet down the hall flushed, and Damon walked in a few moments later, wiping his damp hands on the back of his lumpy blue jumpsuit. The tip of the Warton Candle Factory’s chimney was just about visible atop the hill beyond the farm behind the house. Though Claire missed working alongside one of her best friends, she didn’t miss the ill-fitting uniforms the factory forced their employees to wear. Most people changed clothes as soon as they finished their shifts, but Damon’s convention-related birthday dilemma had sent him straight to Claire, horrid uniform and all.

  “Found it.” Claire tossed the box to Damon. “It’s been up in the attic since the eighties. Still in its plastic.”

  As though passing on a grenade seconds from detonation, Damon put the game straight onto the bedside table. He stepped back, his eyes wider than she’d ever seen them.

  “You’re joking.” Damon forced a dry laugh as he looked between Janet and Claire. “This was in your attic?”

  “In a box with microwave cookbooks.”

  “My cookbooks are up there?” Janet exclaimed, pausing mid-stitch. “Your father said we lost them when we moved here.”

  “Forget the cookbooks,” Claire said, joining Damon in staring at the game. “From the look in your eyes, I’m guessing it’s worth something?”

  “You really have no idea, do you?” Damon’s lips pricked up into a shaky smile as he pushed up his glasses. “Claire, these are as rare as rocking horse . . .” His voice trailed off as Janet glared, daring him to finish his sentence. “Let’s just say I’ve only ever seen two copies of Dawn Ship in person, and they were both used. This looks like you’ve just plucked it from the shelf.”

  “Rare?” Janet scoffed. “It’s just some old tat my odd cousin sent.”

  “How much is it worth?”

  “I-I don’t know.” Damon backed into the edge of the bed, eyes still fixed on the shiny plastic as it caught the orange glow of the sun finally beginning to sink toward the horizon. “It didn’t sell well when it first came out in 1984. Barely made a blip. There were just too many strategy board games back then, and Dawn Ship’s complicated rules required a lot of studying. Minimum three players, too. Think Dungeons & Dragons, but sci-fi.”

  He paused as though they should understand exactly what he was saying, and when neither of them responded, he continued, “It took years for word of mouth to get the game going. From what I hear, people started playing in little local groups that sprung up here and there. The resale market blew up around the late nineties.”

  Damon’s excitement was obvious, but Claire only shrugged. “That’s when I first heard about it on an internet forum. Had a bootleg version I printed off, but nothing beats the real thing. Everyone just plays Dawn Ship 2 now, which is basically the same thing on a computer, but collectors are always hunting for original copies. I’ve heard about them going for thousands.”

  “Thousands?” Janet left the dress form and picked up the game before giving it a shake and turning it over. Damon reached out, but jerked his hand back and bit into his thumbnail. “Reginald was always trying to buy and sell stuff to get rich – not that it ever worked. If only that bus hadn’t hit him in ‘94. We can sell this?”

  “Technically, it’s mine to sell.” Claire retrieved the box from her mother before Damon had a complete nervous breakdown and sat next to him on the bed. “Which one is Captain Murphy?”

  “The man in the middle.” He pointed an unsteady finger at the illustrated character in the centre of the falling crew. His purple spacesuit resembled the one Janet, using bedsheets and cardboard, was attempting to recreate from the pictures stuck to the built-in wardrobes. “Didn’t become a woman until the sequel.” He bit into his thumb again, eyes firmly on the box. “Can I have a proper look at it?”

  “Sure.”

  The gentleness of Damon’s touch as he handled the game almost made Claire embarrassed to feel no reverence for the rarity. Unlike her friend, science fiction had never really interested her, and the only game she ever played was Candy Crush on her phone when she had nothing better to do.

  Even though the computer game market had developed parallel to her upbringing, she’d always been more interested in climbing trees, riding bikes, and building dens and forts in the forests surrounding their small Lancashire village. Damon, on the other hand, played Dawn Ship 2 with a group of friends he’d met on the internet, and being from up and down the country, they tried to meet up at least once a year. This year they were convening in Northash since the weekend of Damon’s thirty-sixth birthday overlapped with a science fiction convention happening twenty minutes down the road.

  Originally, Claire had planned to meet them for drinks at The Hesketh Arms after the convention. Then Damon had turned up, red-faced and flustered, while Claire was having dinner at her parents’ cottage. When he’d all but begged her to come to the convention to fill a role she didn’t understand, she hadn’t been able to turn him down.

  “Unless you’re going to help, clear off,” Janet said, nodding at the door. “You’re putting me off, and I need all the concentration I can get. You’ve given me no time! I don’t know why you thought I could do this.”

  “Don’t pretend like you don’t love a project, Mother.” Claire winked. “Your eyes lit up when I told you how quickly we needed it finished. And there’s no one better for the job.”

  “Why’s that?” Janet barely concealed her smile.

  “Because whenever you had an excuse to put me in costume as a child, I usually won top prize.”

  “Except for that year you were a witch at the Halloween disco,” Janet said around the needle held between her teeth as she dug around the box of trimmings on the dressing table. “That was the first and last time I let your father make your costume. Third place! I was mortified.” She glanced over her glasses at the pictures on the wardrobe that Damon had printed in the dedicated computer room down the hall. “It’ll be a late night, but I think I’ll be able to come up with something by tomorrow.”

  “I believe in you.” Claire kissed her mother on the cheek. “If anyone can do it, it’s you.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Claire caught the momentary twinkle in her mother’s eyes as Janet turned back to the costume she’d barely started. Once downstairs, Claire bagged up the game, called a goodbye to her father in his shed, and set off through the cul-de-sac as the sun set behind her.

  “I can’t wait for summer to be over. It’s a thin person’s season,” Damon said, wiping his red face as he checked his phone. “Taron and Sean have just got to the village. Should probably show them to the B&B. Have you met the new owner yet?”

  Claire shook her head. Considering how involved she’d been in unmasking the previous owner, Agnes Reid, as a murderer, she’d been trying to avoid anything related to the place. That the new owner’s identity remained a mystery was proof of her success.

  “So,” Claire said as they crossed the bridge over the canal on their way into the village, “are you going to tell me what happened with your friends? Last week, you said two weren’t coming, and now a third has dropped out?”

  “Rina,” he said with a sigh. “She’s always been a bit flaky, but she promised she’d come after what happened with Mark and Daniel. It would be the year we decide to do a group cosplay, wouldn’t it? You can get away with none of the other characters if you have a Captain Murphy. Without Murphy, it makes no sense.”

  Though Claire knew Damon’s online friends by name, and she’d met a couple over the years, she had never picked up more than the few morsels of information Damon had sprinkled in. From Damon’s complaints, she knew Mark and Daniel were the ‘childish’ ones in the group. Rina had a lot of money after investing in digital currency, which – despite the number of times Damon had tried to explain it to her – Claire still didn’t understand. Aside from Damon, Taron and Sean seemed the most down-to-earth of the bunch.