M&M Surprise Murder: A Donut Hole Cozy Mystery - Book 17 Read Free Page A

Maricela, grasping her donut boxes and
staring up at the manor.
    They walked up the path together, and
Heather dropped back to Jung’s position at the back of the group. She took a
few boxes from him, then matched his pace.
    “How are you feeling?” Heather asked.
“About the competition being canceled, I mean.”
    “It’s only postponed, for now,” Jung
replied, but a frown crept across his forehead. “Right?”
    “I hope so. I’d really like to watch
you shoot,” Heather said. “Is shoot the right word for it, when it’s arrows?
Archery?”
    “I guess so.”
    They fell into silence, surrounded by
the twitter of birds in the trees and Amy’s laughter at the head of the group.
    “Jung, I need to ask you a few
questions. Would that be okay?” Heather asked, at last. Thoughts of Jinx
Laverne and Lori Henson swirled through her mind. What did Lori have to hide?
    Hating her husband hardly seemed like
a good tactic right after he’d been murdered.
    “Anything for you, boss,” Jung
replied.
    “What do you know about Jessica
Laverne?” Heather asked.
    “Jinx? She’s the favorite to win in
the competition if it ever happens.” Jung snorted. “She’s sweet and everything,
but there’s something I don’t like about her. It’s like the niceness is an act.
Maybe I’m a little jealous.”
    “Do you know what type of arrows she
uses?” Heather asked. It was a stretch, but Kyle had been shot with a carbon
arrow.
    “Uh, I think graphite? It’s better
than the aluminum kind I use, but then, she can afford it. There was a rumor
that she was going to get into the Olympics, once, but then something went
wrong, and it never happened.” They stopped in front of the stairs.
    The others hurried through the big,
wooden front door ahead of them.
    “What happened?”
    “Well, Jinx was being coached by Kyle
at the time, then all of a sudden she just quit. Or he fired her. No one knows
what happened, but her hopes for being in the Olympics kind of dropped off
after that.” Jung shifted the boxes, then glanced back at Ken’s van in the
distance.
    Heather crunched gravel underfoot.
“Wow, so Kyle was Jessica’s coach?”
    “Yeah, but that was ages ago. Years
and years, when she was still in Hillside High, and he was the head coach
there. He disappeared after that too. He just left town and never came back.”
Jung sighed. “I got a couple of good years of coaching from him before he left,
at least.”
    Heather turned the facts over in her
mind. Jessica Laverne had been coached by the head judge of the competition.
Shouldn’t there have been a rule against that? Perhaps not.
    What if Jinx had been bitter about
missing out on her shot at the Olympics and had taken it out on Kyle. Surely,
no one held onto a grudge for that long, though.
    “Do you know what happened between
them? Kyle and Jinx, I mean.”
    “Not really. I just know that one
second she was the golden girl and the next she was off the team and out of the
limelight. Her parents kicked up a fuss too.” Jung bent and placed the donut
boxes on the top stair.
    Amy hurried out, collected them, then
disappeared inside Hillside Manor again.
    “Any idea who’s Jinx’s new coach?”
Heather asked. Perhaps, she could squeeze a little information out of them.
    “Yeah. His name is Coach Hardy. He’s
some big shot up in Dallas, but he came down with her for the competition.”
Jung laughed. “Weird. All these big time folks coming down to Hillside for our
archery competition.”
    Heather turned and put her boxes on
the top stair, too. She tapped her chin and stared at them, envisioning targets
and arrows. “Weird. Or maybe, somebody had a debt to pay.”
    The assistants piled out of the front
doors to collect more donut boxes from the van.
    “And?” Amy asked. “You think you can
slack off just because you’re the boss? Shake a leg, woman.”
    Heather swatted her bestie on the arm,
then picked up her share of the boxes. She scooted up the front stairs