Mercury Rising (Tin Can Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  MERCURY RISING

  Tin Can Mystery #1

  Jerusha Jones

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Jerusha Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  For more information about Jerusha Jones’s other novels, please visit www.jerushajones.com

  Cover design by Elizabeth Berry MacKenney.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  Chapter 22

  Notes & Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jerusha Jones

  CHAPTER 1

  “Eva, I left three rolls of toilet paper in the cupboard under your bathroom sink,” Sloane said. “And a roll of paper towels on the kitchen counter and a bottle of Windex—just until you find yours, you know. You have all that glass.” She sounded breathless, reeling off items from the revolving checklist that perpetually resided in her mind. “We could order you a pizza, have it delivered. I’m so sorry we can’t stay late to help you with those crazy instructions.” In the background, Sloane’s nine-month-old son objected mightily to being strapped into his car seat and her two little girls chattered in short piping tones.

  I shook my head and grinned into the phone. It hadn’t been more than five minutes since my sister and her family had left, and already her call sounded like a zoo in a minivan. “Thanks for everything. But no. Get your munchkins into bed and put up your feet. I’m an adult, which means I can handle assembling a few IKEA bookcases by myself.”

  Sloane snorted. “More power to you.” There was a muffled interruption, and then she returned to the line. “Riley says to tell you that he stashed the toolbox with all the screwdrivers and hammer and stuff in the coat closet.”

  “Give him a big hug for me.”

  “Oh, I will.” Sloane trilled off into her infectious laugh. “And more,” she added huskily.

  “La la la la la,” I hollered. “TMI. But thanks.” I hung up with a smile that was immediately replaced by a hefty sigh.

  Boxes. I was sick of boxes. And all I could see were boxes, like cancerous growths heaped over the floors and against the walls of my new abode. Riley had insisted that they be dispersed evenly so the floating house (not a houseboat since it didn’t have its own propulsion system) wouldn’t list to port—or was it starboard?—with the extra unbalanced weight.

  I had to climb over boxes to make my way to the kitchen. Like Sloane, I also had a mental checklist, and forging a clear path from room to room jumped to the top spot on it. Making up a bed for the night dropped to second place, mainly because I was certain I’d be able to fall asleep just tipped against a wall at this point.

  Food had marquee billing, regardless. The offer of hot pizza made by someone else had been tempting, but if I relaxed for two seconds, there’d be no reviving my will to work—my muscles would seize up and not regain any sort of functional mobility until I’d had at least twelve hours of sleep.

  During my supervision of the ragtag team of movers that afternoon, I’d nabbed a couple boxes of pantry items and loaded the contents into a cupboard. Tuna on saltines it would have to be. With green olives. Dinner of champions and the recently displaced.

  But the upheaval in my life meant I now got to live within actual gossip-over-lunch distance from my sister. That I got to be a babysit-at-a-moment’s-notice aunt to my nieces and nephew and to appreciate—or endure, depending on how you looked at it—my brother-in-law’s quirky sense of humor firsthand.

  Meals would also get much, much better than I’d had time for during the past several months. If only I could find the Le Creuset Dutch oven, not to mention a can opener. So close and yet so far—the tuna would have to wait. Instead, I doused the crackers with Tabasco sauce while I leaned over the kitchen sink and watched the sunset turn to magenta over the Willamette River’s opposite shore through the window. Nothing like a little heartburn to keep a person productive late into the night.

  oOo

  The next morning, I rolled out of bed. Mainly because it took some strategic levering and deep breaths to get myself upright. But I’d made good progress the night before, demonstrated primarily by the fact that I’d actually slept between clean sheets on a fully assembled bed which happened to be located in the correct room.

  The same could not be said for my clothing. But I eventually found the duffel bag full of jeans, T-shirts, underwear, and workout clothes that had made the cross-country trip stuffed behind the driver’s seat of my old Volvo. For some reason, the bag had been wedged in the utility closet between the furnace and the hot water heater. Probably my oldest niece’s idea of a logical spot for safekeeping. I remembered seeing her lug the thing along the dock, her silhouette puffed up to twice its normal size by the life jacket her father, mother, and I had all insisted she wear while she trooped back and forth like a cheerful little pack mule, her arms full of my possessions. The kid was a workaholic. It was in her DNA.

  I pulled on a pair of stretchy pants and a tank top, then opened the glass French doors that led from my bedroom onto a wide stretch of wood-planked deck. It was that magic breath in time barely before sunrise when the world is just coming into focus. The river made little gurgling sounds as it rippled past the pilings my house was lashed to.

  I stepped outside in my bare feet and flopped down a yoga mat. It was chilly and misty and must have rained in the night, although I’d been too comatose to hear raindrops plopping on the metal roof.

  I cranked out the Five Tibetans, twenty-one repetitions of each, and savored the sensations of strength and limberness as my muscles warmed up. I don’t truly practice yoga, but a lot of the yoga stretches and poses feel really good. The Five Tibetans had become my buddies during the uncertainty and insanely short deadlines that are typical in the world of high-tech but which become even worse when the company you work for has been sold for an astronomical sum to a group of power-hungry venture capitalists and is being restructured to capitalize their investment even further.

  Who can even count that much money? Who even cares?

  Not me, apparently, because I’d been laid off. And suddenly I’d had absolutely nothing to do except sign the stifling non-compete agreement that Kris, my friend and lunchtime power-walking pal from the human resources department, had slipped into my in-box so that I would qualify for a modest severance package. I found out later that she, too, had been laid off the next week, after she’d completed her duty of filing the termination paperwork for eighty percent of her coworkers. The whole thing had felt like a nosedive into the Grand Canyon.

  I took it as a sign that it was also time to get the hell out of Dodge.

  “Isn’t that classy,” said a whiny, adenoidal voice from the river. “Sticking your ass up
in the air like that. Just what I wanted to see while I was communing with nature.”

  My downward-facing dog hit the deck so fast that the yoga mat did nothing to cushion the collision my knees had with the wood underneath. My eyes watered with the pain, and I ducked to peek underneath my elbow at the intruder.

  She had violently blue hair that scraggled down to her shoulders and a little scrunched-up face with a chin that was tucked way back under her nose. Her hands were resting on the shaft of a double-bladed paddle which was balanced across the bow of a neon-orange kayak.

  She must be really good at maneuvering that kayak, because I hadn’t heard her approach. I pivoted to sitting cross-legged on the yoga mat and studied her. “I know you. At least, I recognize you.”

  “That would be my Great Bluedini Kool-Aid hair.”

  I nodded. “Hard to miss. I suppose it’s on par—speaking of nature—with my having my ass in the air.”

  The girl snorted. With one quick flick of her paddle, her kayak bumped up against my deck, and she stuck out her hand—the fingers of which were tipped with turquoise nail polish—like the grownup she wasn’t yet. “Willow Ratliff. You signed a moorage lease with my grandmother yesterday.”

  I shook the proffered hand. “Eva Fairchild.”

  “I know. I do Gran’s filing. Otherwise nothing would get filed and some stupid auditor would have a heyday with her. Which means I also know your driver’s license number, your social security number, that you’re currently unemployed, the name of your last employer, and your previous address. D.C. huh? What’s it like? What’d you do there?”

  I blinked. There was no way I could tell this punk child that I’d worked in the security industry. I’d be a justifiable laughing stock forever. So instead, I told her the other part of the truth. “Vicious. Like a bunch of zombies dressed up in expensive suits who live in concrete bunkers and only come out when it’s time to eat money.”

  Willow snorted again, but differently. The sound seemed to be a significant, and rather expressive, part of her vocabulary. “I don’t go for that apocalyptic dystopian junk. I’m into near-future space opera.”

  Was this some kind of contest? I had no idea how to answer her. So I shrugged and said, “I’m into béchamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise, and tomate.”

  That earned me a squint and even more scrunching of the little face. “Huh. At least you’re more interesting than the old miser who lived here before. Don’t let Doc catch you with your ass in the air. He’d think it was a suggestion.” She shoved off and paddled smoothly away.

  A pair of raucous, darting birds with wide white bands across their throats streaked overhead, slinging insults at each other like a pair of arguing lovers. Cottonwoods on the bank shivered in the almost nonexistent breeze, and a spreading warm glow rose above the eastern dike, turning the river from inky blue to sparkling in a matter of moments.

  Despite Willow’s esoteric perspective on genre fiction, she had the right idea about observing nature. One of the things I was most looking forward to about living here was experiencing nature up close and personal, bobbing on the river, buffeted by the wind, and hopefully not drowning. I wanted—no, I needed—to learn how to manage a kayak by myself. And to obtain a field guide to Pacific Northwest birds pronto.

  An army of one showed up as I was gnawing on a Clif bar for breakfast—Sloane.

  “Riley’s taking the kids to the science museum for a little daddy time, and to keep them out of our hair. So we can really bust our chops today,” she announced as she sidled through the front door past me, several reusable grocery bags hanging from each arm. “What are you eating? Yuck. And you—” She stuck out her tongue at me. “Of all people, you should know that a proper breakfast is mandatory.” She giggled. “I also knew you wouldn’t have found your supplies yet. Hey, paths.” She waltzed along the trail I’d cleared through the living room. “Am I a terrific sister, or what?” she asked as she plunked the bags on the kitchen counter and turned her happy smile and glittery green eyes toward me.

  I couldn’t help grinning back. “Yes.”

  Sloane freed her arms from the bag handles and wrapped herself in a tight hug. She bounced on her toes. “I just can’t believe it still,” she squealed. “I’m going to make myself a nuisance before I do fully believe it. You’re really here. Like old times, before you went away to college.”

  There are eight years between Sloane and me. I’m older. Technically, we’re half-sisters. We look nothing alike because we take after our different mothers with regard to coloring and complexion, but we both inherited our father’s tall and lanky physique. Sloanie has filled hers out a little more than I have, probably because she’s a mother herself. But she’s still gorgeous, maybe even more than back in the days when she modeled. She was never a big league supermodel; mostly she posed for in-house department store labels and home furnishings ads. Her heart never was in the glitz and itinerancy of that lifestyle, so I hadn’t been surprised when she’d opted to quit and put her paralegal training to work instead.

  Neither had I been surprised that Riley Tillman had been gobsmacked by the bombshell who’d been sent by the temp agency to fill a vacancy at his small firm. He’d won Sloanie’s heart and put a ring on her finger before her six-month contract was up. And now they were busy making and raising beautiful babies.

  I crossed the kitchen quickly and wrapped Sloane in a hug of my own. “I’m not a phantom. Which means you can hug me, like, for real, instead of pretending. I’m having a little trouble soaking in the reality myself. What did you bring to eat?”

  Sloane started pawing through the bags and pulled out a container of Greek yogurt and little tubs of dates, pecans, and coconut.

  “Oh boy,” I groaned.

  “What did I tell you?” Sloane winked at me. “This is going to be soooo great, us living near each other. What do you think of the house?”

  “Smaller. I need your help downsizing.” I grunted as I ripped the foil off the yogurt container. “Which I’d wanted to do anyway. I just didn’t have time to get rid of the stuff I don’t need before the move. But perfect, otherwise. I love the view and how quiet it is. I met a neighbor already this morning. She referred to the previous owner as a miser.”

  Sloane laughed and opened packages of plastic bowls and plastic spoons. “That’s an understatement. He pinched his emotions as well as his pennies. His relatives hated him. They just wanted whatever cash could be wrangled out of the estate without having to deal with it themselves, which is why they hired Riley’s partner to handle probate on their behalf. He was happy I lined up a buyer so fast.”

  “Isn’t that a conflict of interest?” I sprinkled dates and nuts into my bowl.

  “Nope. Generally, floating houses are in demand in the Portland real estate market, but this one’s odd.” Sloane snickered. “Seeing as how it’s made out of a few shipping containers stuck together. People immediately imagine rusty sheet metal with big letters spelling Hanjin or COSCO on the side. About the same as living in a sewer to their way of thinking. The real estate agents he tried to list it with pretty much laughed in his face.”

  “But it’s nothing like that,” I spluttered, then paused. “Well, maybe it needs some paint.”

  “Cosmetics,” Sloane agreed before shoveling a spoonful of yogurt in her mouth. “I knew you’d see the diamond in the rough.”

  CHAPTER 2

  I clutched my bowl of chickpea and mint salad, stood on my doorstep for a moment, and took a deep breath. The little bony twig of a woman with a smooth, chin-length bob of flaming orange hair had given me directions to her house at the other end of the marina. The passage involved several left turns along floating walkways and crossing through the locked gate that split the marina into its north and south halves. How hard could it be? I already had the numerical code for unlocking the gate memorized.

  The way she’d described the marina community’s de rigueur habit of holding a welcome party for each new resident—tag,
you’re it!—had almost hinted that I’d also be navigating from the slum side to the posh side in order to attend. Or maybe I’d read her wrong. After all, she’d had to crane her neck way back to peer into my face. Maybe that much stretching had altered her normal tone of voice into a sort of breathless snootiness.

  Besides giving Willow a run for her money in the unnatural hair color department, Bettina Godinou, my distant-north neighbor, had also been dressed in sleek black designer togs and bejeweled on just about every visible digit plus earlobes plus neck. She was a walking, clanking, jangling costume jewelry exhibit. You could hear her both coming and going from several yards away. But maybe noise carries farther over water.

  After Bettina had stopped by with her invitation and spent an additional several minutes ogling my sprawl of unpacked possessions with the air of one sent on a reconnoitering mission, Sloane had started chuckling to herself but refusing to offer any sort of analysis on this unexpected bolt of hospitality.

  “Spit it out,” I finally grumbled.

  “You’re so in for it now,” she’d tittered. “I want a full report tomorrow. You’re going to learn that people in the Portland area are a little bit different. Flavorful. Whimsical.”

  “Alien?”

  Sloanie released her pent-up laughter in a prolonged peal. “That too. It’s nothing like where we grew up.”

  Meaning submerged in stodgy East Coast middle-aged money. The Fairchilds weren’t Old Money by any means—because it hadn’t all been spent yet. Dad was far from an aristocratically veneered pauper. He was still making deals and rolling around in the dough pretty thick. He was also on his sixth wife. Sloanie and I had given up counting all the girlfriends who’d been slotted between the wives. Sometimes we barely learned the first names of the wives before they absconded with a chunk of Dad’s spare change and a house of their own in the next divorce.