Stakes, Cakes and Mandrakes (Three Tomes Bookshop Book 3)(Paranormal Women's Midlife Fiction)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be sold, copied, distributed, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or digital, including photocopying and recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of both the publisher, Oliver Heber Books and the author, Colleen Gleason, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. COPYRIGHT 2021 © Colleen Gleason Published by Oliver-Heber Books 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Created with Vellum 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 Updates! About the Author Also by Colleen Gleason CHAPTER 1 In cozy Button Cove, spring pirouetted into May on tiptoes of warm weather, swirling with skirts of soft rains that brought colorful tulips, daffodils, azalea, lilacs, hellebore, and more. The early farmers’ market was in full swing, and there were planter pots of herbs, flowers, and vegetables for sale on tables all along Camellia Court. The street was blocked off from vehicular traffic on Saturday mornings through Memorial Day, after which time the market moved to a larger area during tourist season. There were booths with homemade jellies, honey, and syrups for sale, along with crafty garden decorations like birdhouses and metal stakes, and wreaths woven from dried or silk flowers. Someone was even selling frozen pierogi from an ice cart, and another enterprising soul had set up a table offering homemade jerky and smoked whitefish. Jacqueline Finch, owner and proprietress of Three Tomes Bookshop, didn’t have potted plants or jellies or spreads to offer during the farmers’ market, but she had—in her mind—something even better. Books. So, during the farmers’ market hours, she propped the door to her shop wide open and settled a huge pot of perky red geraniums and spilling purple petunias outside the entrance. Next to the flower pot was a table offering samples of hot tea from the store’s tea room upstairs. Shoppers were enticed to come inside the store when they stopped for the steaming samples—for early mornings in northwestern Michigan in May were still often chilly—and saw the large round table just beyond the doorway. It was filled with a display of beautifully photographed books about gardening, grilling, and farm-to-table cooking. On a different table within eyesight of the casual passerby, Jacqueline had put together a “Beach Read” arrangement that offered everything from Nora Roberts to Hank Philippi Ryan to Harlan Coben to Alyssa Cole and more. Jacqueline would have preferred to offer coffee samples as well as tea, but Mrs. Hudson—who ran the tea room at Three Tomes and who also happened to be landlady of 221B Baker Street, London—firmly refused. “This ’ere is a tea shop,” Mrs. Hudson had told her theoretical boss firmly two days ago when Jacqueline broached the subject yet again. The older woman gestured around the café on the second floor of the bookstore where she reigned supreme. “Not a coffee shop. Plenty o’ places to get the demon bean for them who wants it,” Mrs. Hudson went on with a forbidding glint in her eyes. “And who wants to cut their belly up with all that strong, nasty brew? When they do, then they’re needing to come here for a nice, civilized cuppa, won’t they now?” Jacqueline had mostly given up arguing with Mrs. Hudson over the tea-versus-coffee issue, so every morning she brought an insulated travel mug downstairs from her apartment on the third floor. It was filled with a brew made from the “demon bean”—coffee, or, in her mind, the Elixir of Life. Over the last five or so weeks since she’d moved to Button Cove—located on Lake Michigan in the “pinkie” area of the Michigan mitten—from Chicago, Jacqueline had learned to pick her battles when it came to running the bookshop. Especially when it included conflicts with Mrs. Hudson (who really was Sherlock’s landlady and who had somehow come out of the book and become flesh and blood) or her counterpart and nemesis, Mrs. Danvers—the condescending, sometimes scary, and always dour housekeeper from the gothic novel Rebecca. Literally from the gothic novel. Jacqueline had come to accept the fact that other literary characters popped in and out of books on whims or fancies and made their appearances at or near her store, but it was Danvers and Hudson who were permanent fixtures in the place. In some ways, it was a godsend, for the two women knew everything there was to know about running the store, and they worked for free. Three Tomes Bookshop was housed in a large, square brick house on shady Camellia Court. The bottom two floors, filled with tall, narrow windows and somehow spacious and never-ending rooms despite their Victorian heritage, displayed the wares offered by Jacqueline’s store: books—new, vintage, and antiquarian—as well as sundries such as crystals and other New Age accessories, along with the tea room and its offerings. Each room on the first floor showcased a different genre, and on the nonfiction side of the shop, rooms wound into warrens of shelves and alcoves, and more shelves and alcoves. It was amazing how many nooks and crannies could be found by a shopper browsing books, getting lost in a seemingly infinite labyrinth of cozy, tome-crammed spaces—all of which had the space for convenient chairs, benches, or stools on which to sit and peruse. The second floor was the café, as well as hosting a large children’s section and the New Age room. And the third floor was Jacqueline’s apartment, where she’d been