Hope Hadley Eight Book Cozy Mystery Set Read online

  Daniel gave me the kind of smile I wouldn’t soon forget. I had a feeling it was the first of many to come. With this kind of a start, I could only imagine what wonderful surprises awaited us. Either way, I was eager to find out.

  The End.

  Drowning In Deceit

  Chapter One

  “Buster, what’s wrong?” I asked.

  My trusty Labrador Retriever was not the kind of dog who barked at the wind. I had always known him to be a patient little furry sidekick with a calm demeanor. So on the rare occasions when he did bark, especially this loudly and frequently, there was usually a very good reason for it. That morning, he was really worked up about something that was going on in the kitchen.

  I sprang up in bed as his bark gave way to a growl. Uh-oh. Was my house being broken into? If so, surely Buster’s menacing growl would scare them away, wouldn’t it? Or was I just being overly optimistic?

  Those were not questions that I had expected to entertain at seven thirty in the morning. Originally, I had fully intended to sleep for at least another hour or so. I really needed to catch up on my shuteye. The last few days had thrown my entire sleep schedule out of whack. Unfortunately, with all of Buster’s barking and growling, there was no going back to sleep for me. Naturally, this had to happen on a morning when I was having a particularly good dream about my boyfriend.

  Before I had time to complain too much about the rude awakening, my senses went on high alert. After all, if there was trouble afoot, I couldn’t afford to ignore it.

  I called out to Buster again, talking to him like he was a human instead of a dog.

  “Honey, what is it?”

  I wasn’t quite sure why I had posed a question for him when, as a dog, he clearly wasn’t going to answer it. That was what severe grogginess did to me. It made me behave irrationally. Ultimately, it didn’t matter why I had done it. I didn’t change a thing. Buster kept growling away.

  My anxiety level began rising. My hand trembled as I thought about what awaited me in the kitchen. It was important to be prepared for anything. I grabbed the baseball bat that I kept beside my bedside table for protection and prayed that I wouldn’t have to use it.

  In case it was a burglar who was carrying a weapon, I tiptoed down the hallway from my bedroom to the kitchen so I wouldn’t draw attention to myself. In cases like that, maintaining the element of surprise was crucial.

  My muscles tensed up as I reached the doorway to my kitchen. I peeked my head around the corner, as nervous as could be. That’s when I spotted what Buster had been barking at all this time. My eyes darted open in disbelief at what I saw. Much to my surprise, it was infinitely more terrifying than a burglar.

  What was it exactly? An alligator. Yes, you heard that right—a scaly, slimy, cold-blooded alligator. Or at least the snout of one, trying to push its way through my doggy door. Luckily, the beast was too huge to fit its entire head and body through the door.

  I never thought the sight of an eight-foot alligator would make me thankful, but given these unique circumstances, size meant everything. If the alligator was just a little smaller, it could have squirmed its way inside my kitchen, making a meal out of both Buster and myself. As the reptile was too large to push its way through the door, just its snout and teeth protruded into my kitchen. That was terrifying enough. Those teeth were so jagged and scary that they could give me nightmares for weeks to come.

  I stopped dead in my tracks, overcome with both disbelief and terror. Buster’s growl snapped me out of my funk and made me realize that I had to act—and quickly. The gator had its mind set on eating Buster for breakfast, and I had to make sure that didn’t happen.

  I grabbed Buster’s collar and slid him as far away from the door as I could.

  “Stay back, Buster.”

  Dogs were fiercely loyal creatures. Sometimes to a fault. Buster viewed it as his responsibility to protect his home at all costs. There was a lot of fight in my dog, but despite his courage, I knew that he was no match for a gator. Then again, who was? These were prehistoric creatures we were talking about.

  Suddenly, the sequence of events that had led to this alligator’s snout poking through my doggy door came together in my mind. Buster was most likely in the backyard doing his business when the gator had caught sight of him. Figuring Buster was an easy breakfast for him, the gator had dashed at my dog, who had made a hasty retreat into the kitchen.

  Not content to let a meal scurry away, the alligator had given chase, following Buster, only to hit a snag at the doggy door. Alligators were doggedly determined creatures. This one wasn’t going to give up without a fight. At the same time, neither was I. It was clear what I needed to do. Priority number one was to find a way to force the alligator to back away so I could secure the doggy door.

  With a baseball bat in my hand, I thought I had a solution. I approached the doggy door, gave the gator’s snout a few whacks with the bat, then watched as the gator moved backward. Knowing I had little time to work with, I pushed my kitchen garbage can in front of the door.

  That was just the beginning. A single garbage can wouldn’t be heavy enough to keep the gator from poking its snout back through the door. For reinforcement, I pushed my kitchen table toward the door and pressed one of the table’s legs as tightly against the garbage can as I possibly could. That should be enough weight behind the garbage can to keep the gator out.

  Before I had the chance to catch my breath, I realized the ordeal was far from over. Sure, the alligator couldn’t get inside my kitchen, but that didn’t mean it had given up trying. The creature lingered on my back patio, scheming. It was in no hurry to leave my yard.

  I stared out the window, getting a good look at the entire body of the gator for the first time. It had dark, killer eyes and a set of teeth that sent a shiver down my spine. I also happened to notice that the gator was drenched. It looked like it had recently taken an uninvited dip in my pool.

  Gross. My pool was going to need a good cleaning and a whole lot more chlorine in it before I ever went for a swim in it again. If I ever went into my pool again.

  Seeing that the gator wasn’t going to leave my property of its own volition, I grabbed my cell phone and called for help.

  Chapter Two

  My brother, Joe, the local police detective in town, was the lucky one to get my call.

  “Joe,” I said.

  He could tell by the panicked tone of my voice just how rattled I was.

  “Hope, what’s wrong?” Joe asked.

  I clutched Buster tight, as my heart was still beating out of my chest. I looked out the window again, hoping against hope that the alligator would get tired of hanging around my patio and would return to the nearest swamp. That was not the case. It was incredible to think that only a single pane of glass currently separated a gator from me.

  I was barely able to get the words out. “There’s an alligator in my backyard.”

  There was dead silence on the other end of the phone line. I didn’t blame my brother for being at a loss for words. Even though what I had said was a hundred percent true, the statement sounded ridiculous coming out of my mouth. It was the kind of thing someone said as a joke. As if I was trying to crank call him. If the roles had been reversed and he had called me up and told me there was an alligator in his backyard, I would have assumed that he was pulling my leg.

  The phone line had been quiet for too long. I had to make sure that the call hadn’t dropped.

  “Joe, are you still there?” I asked.

  My brother finally spoke up. “Yeah. I’m sorry. Did I just hear that right?”

  I reminded myself that it was still early in the morning and that not everyone had been woken up by a huge reptile trying to break into their kitchen. By that same token, I didn’t have time to mess around. I had to make sure my tone conveyed the seriousness of the situation.

  “Joe. This is not a drill. It is very real. There truly is an alligator in my backyard, and I need to get it out of
here immediately.”

  There—I had made myself perfectly clear. After that, there should be no question in his mind that I wasn’t just joking with him.

  While Joe still sounded blown away by my statement, he did not hesitate with his response. “I’ll call a gator wrangler and be right over.”

  Chapter Three

  As far as I was concerned, an alligator wrangler could not come soon enough. Every second that ticked by during which that gator remained in my backyard made me increasingly more concerned that it would try to break through my kitchen window and try to attack me ferociously. Whether my thoughts were irrational or not didn’t matter to me. This was anything but a rational situation, and my worries exemplified that.

  Fifteen minutes later, my brother’s car pulled into my driveway. Two professional gator wranglers arrived shortly afterward. As Clancy and Travis Sumpter got out of their pickup truck, I couldn’t help but question whether my brother had called the right people for the job. Clancy was the older of the brothers, but they both had that same rough-around-the-edges look to them. They were both muscular men in their thirties who looked like they frequented dive bars a little too often.

  The differentiating feature that allowed me to tell the brothers apart was that Clancy’s hair was long, greasy, and pulled back into a ponytail. Travis, meanwhile, had a thick beard and sleeves of tattoos up and down his arms. What they were both noticeably lacking, other than a sense of professionalism, were work uniforms. There they were, with no identification indicating that they were from animal control. Instead, they were wearing just T-shirts, jeans, and tennis shoes.

  If I hadn’t already gotten the sense that they were grossly underprepared to wrangle an alligator, when they got out of their pickup truck without any equipment, I became even more baffled. Had they brought no tranquilizer gun or net or anything that would help them subdue the gator?

  While I was at a loss for words, the wranglers were not.

  “I’m Clancy, and this is my brother Travis,” Clancy said.

  “I’m Joe Hadley,” my brother replied. “This is my sister Hope.”

  “Nice to meet you. Now, where’s this gator of yours?” Clancy asked.

  “In the backyard,” I said.

  “All right. Leave this to us. We’ll take it from here,” Clancy said.

  I stopped him. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  Clancy looked at me quizzically. “Like what?”

  “Like, I don’t know, a tranquilizer gun or a net or something?” I replied.

  Clancy snickered at me. “Are you kidding? The only thing we need is our keen intellects and a roll of tape, which we got.”

  Travis pulled a roll of electrical tape out of his pocket and showed it to me.

  I had to give the brothers this: they did not lack in confidence. Whether that audacity would come back to bite them in the future was still to be determined.

  At the same time, their brashness did not do much to reassure me. I tried to express my concern for their safety, but they wouldn’t listen.

  As I opened my mouth to reply, Clancy interjected. “Like I said, we’ll handle this.”

  While Clancy and his brother went around back to confront the gator, I turned to my brother.

  “I thought you were going to call animal control,” I whispered.

  “Trust me, these guys are professionals,” Joe assured me.

  I waited for some indication that my brother was joking, but none came. He was dead serious. That only made me more incredulous. Had I been transported to some crazy parallel dimension where these guys qualified as professionals? They looked like they should be operating a carnival ride, not removing an alligator from my backyard.

  I questioned my brother. “Who shows up to work wearing jeans and a T-shirt—with no equipment?”

  Joe disputed my point. “You don’t exactly look the part of a shrewd homicide detective, yet look how many murder cases you have solved in your life.”

  He had me there. I couldn’t argue with his point. Then again, I didn’t try to wrangle an alligator with a keen intellect and a roll of electrical tape.

  ***

  Joe and I watched the proceedings from the safety of my kitchen while Clancy and Travis sized up the gator in the backyard. I said a little prayer for the Sumpters. Their brazen attitudes aside, I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them. They were out there, risking life and limb against a prehistoric beast, to help me. The least I could do was pray for their safety. Besides, I figured they needed all the help they could get, divine or otherwise.

  My pulse started pounding as I imagined the various outcomes to this situation. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t stop my heart from racing. How could it not? As far as I could see, there were so many ways things could go sideways. Yet with all the possible negative outcomes, there was only one way this could go right. Those were some terrible odds to be staring down.

  I wasn’t the only one who was filled with anxiety. My brother rubbed his hands together nervously as he stood beside me and peered through my kitchen window. I found it rather curious that Joe was inside the house with me rather than outside with the Sumpters. After all, he was a man who always operated with such a tough exterior and took on criminals with a steely resolve. Yet he looked all too happy to be in the kitchen with me right then, completely out of danger.

  I was not about to let that go unmentioned. “Shouldn’t you be out there helping them?”

  “I’m fine right here,” Joe replied.

  “Joe, you are the only one here with a gun,” I insisted.

  Joe wasn’t going anywhere. “They said they could handle this.”

  My brother could not deflect my point fast enough. It was clear he wasn’t about to leave my kitchen with a gator roaming around the backyard. So much for the fearless police detective façade that he had spent years building up.

  I joked with him. “All this time I thought you were a tough guy.”

  My brother defended himself. “Against criminals, yes. Gators are a whole different animal.”

  “Tell me about it. That’s the kind of animal that’ll give you nightmares.”

  Ironically, standing in the safety of my kitchen, my brother and I were the nervous ones, while the Sumpters looked as calm as could be as they stared down certain danger. Professionals or not, Clancy and Travis had nerves of steel.

  They were the real tough guys—two men willing to take on an alligator with their bare hands. I still couldn’t believe what they were doing. Part of that was because I had a much different vision of what alligator wrangling truly entailed. I figured one of the brothers would try to sneak up on the gator from behind and pin it to the ground while the other brother forced its mouth shut. I had awful visions of one of the brothers losing a hand or even an arm in the process. That’s why I was so short of breath as I watched.

  Apparently, I had pictured things all wrong. Clancy stared the gator down in the backyard, full of confidence, not taking his eyes off the beast for even a second. Travis circled around behind the gator and stood five feet behind the reptile’s tail.

  Clancy remained completely calm but had a razor-sharp focus in his eyes. Amazingly enough, the gator didn’t immediately lunge at him. Like two boxers sizing each other up in the ring, they both waited for just the right time to strike.

  Back in the kitchen, I was a bundle of nerves. “Oh, dear. Here we go.”

  Clancy made the first move. While keeping complete eye contact with the gator, Clancy reached his arm forward with the palm of his hand facing upward. He tried to put his palm under the gator’s bottom jaw.

  The gator then quickly snapped his jaw shut. Luckily, Clancy was able to just pull his hand back in time before being bitten.

  I jumped back in horror as I watched. When I saw that Clancy’s hand was still safely attached to his arm, I breathed a big sigh of relief. “That was close.”

  If I were Clancy, I would have pulled up stakes right then and there
and headed for the hills, but Clancy didn’t panic. Surprisingly, he refocused and made deep eye contact with the gator once again.

  When he had stared the alligator down long enough for his liking, Clancy made his move again. He reached his palm out and slowly tried to place it under the gator’s lower jaw, hoping the beast wouldn’t lunge at him.

  This time, he was successful. Against all the odds, Clancy had successfully placed his palm against the gator’s lower jaw. At the same time, that was only half of the equation.

  There was still the gator’s upper jaw to deal with. Clancy took his left hand, held it up above the gator’s upper jaw, and then tried to put his palm on top of the gator’s mouth.

  If the gator made any sudden movements, Clancy would be in big trouble. This was the most intense, nail-biting moment I had ever witnessed in my life. This could still go south in a hurry if he wasn’t careful.

  That’s why Clancy remained completely focused and slowly placed his palm on top of the gator’s upper jaw.

  Incredibly enough, he was successful. With his palms on both the gator’s upper and lower jaws, Clancy pushed the gator’s mouth shut.

  I was all ready to take a deep breath until I realized there was more to come. Clancy moved one of his hands so that he was holding the gator’s mouth shut with only one hand, then signaled for his brother.

  “Travis,” he said.

  Travis tossed the roll of electrical tape to his brother, who caught it with his free hand. From there, Clancy wrapped the tape around the gator’s mouth a couple of times to make sure it was securely taped shut.

  Once that was done, Travis came over, grabbed the gator from behind, and picked it up, then the two of them loaded the gator into the bed of their pickup truck.

  While all of that was occurring, my brother and I stood in our kitchen, looking completely stunned. I couldn’t believe what I had just seen. It had happened right before my eyes, yet it didn’t seem real. I felt like I had just watched a magician performing an unbelievable trick, only I had no idea how he had just pulled it off.