Read Sweet Taffy and Murder: Sweet Taffy Cozy Mysteries Book #1 for Free Online

paint of the porch railing as Ethan’s truck grumbled down the driveway. She sighed loudly, just to make a noise in the country silence, until a nearby rustling in the bushes made her tense up. Was that the cat? Or the coyote Ethan thought might have eaten the cat? Taffy slipped into the safety of the house and shut the door.
    Standing in the foyer, she couldn’t get over the fact that someone had died here. It sent shivers down her spine every time she thought about it.
    Taffy wandered from room to room examining the knickknack shelves, photos and prints on the walls, the china cabinet, and a few pieces of old furniture. There were a few valuable items. If Janet had been planning to move to Arizona, she certainly hadn’t gotten around to packing much.
    She continued to explore the main floor rooms. With some careful strategy, she managed to avoid crossing the foyer where Janet’s body had been discovered. She stood in the arched threshold connecting the foyer and the living room and looked toward the closet. Ethan had done a great job cleaning up the body outline, but Taffy could still see it in her mind’s eye, and she couldn’t help but imagine the older woman lying in a lifeless heap in front of her hall closet. What a tragic demise. You open your hall closet to get your coat, and thunk, your own bowling ball falls on your head and kills you? Taffy shivered.
    She wandered back into the living room, which adjoined the dining room. A swinging door led to the large kitchen that took up the back of the house. By going through the kitchen, she could move through the house in a u-shape and avoid the foyer almost completely. Taffy noticed a door in one corner of the kitchen that must lead to a basement. Somewhere in the house there must be access to the attic. She could see that the angled rooftops didn’t match up with the rooms on the second floor.
    Off the foyer and adjacent to the living room was a kind of parlor that housed a baby grand piano, a wall of bookshelves, a settee, and some chairs.
    Taffy perused the parlor shelves. In addition to old books, mostly Readers Digest editions, Taffy found a collection of gardening magazines going back twenty years and a large jar full of marbles. She picked out a marble, tossed it in the air, and caught it in her palm. She did it a few more times until she missed the catch and the marble fell to the floor. It rolled across the room…and kept rolling. When Taffy eventually retrieved it from under a chair, she set it on another part of the floor, and it rolled away again. It was such an old house, the floor wasn’t level anymore, and it was dented or scratched in many places. She dropped the marble back in the jar and opened a horizontal cupboard set at hip height.
    The door flipped down to make a small desk. Inside were cubbyholes for papers and bills and an old mug full of pens, pencils, and a gold-filigreed letter opener that looked identical to Mr. Davenport’s. She picked it up, felt its sharp edge, and then stuck it back in the mug.
    Taffy sat on the piano bench and plunked out a few notes. She’d taken lessons as a kid, at her father’s insistence, but had forgotten most of what she’d learned. She adjusted the bench to get a bit closer. The floor creaked and the bench seat nearly bit her finger. It was one of the lidded kinds that could store music sheets, and it lifted and snapped shut as Taffy repositioned it. She opened the lid of the bench seat. In a messy jumble she found sheet music, a few recipe cards, letters, receipts, a composition notebook—for writing, not music—a couple of cancelled bank checks, and several unopened letters.
    The composition book intrigued her. On the title page she saw the words: The Magpie Baking Bowling Club. The word Bowling was written over a crossed out “Baking.” Inside, she found a list of letters, in pairs like initials, and on a second page a list of numbers. None of it made sense to Taffy.
    She looked at the unopened