Gnarly New Year (Corsario Cove Cozy Mystery #2) (12 page)

“Here’s one thing I don’t get, Brien. It’s hard work being a crook like Simpson or Davis or Larry. Why not just put all that effort into making money on good things—like building this gorgeous resort?”

“I don’t know, Kim. That Mr. P you worked for was the same way. He had so much talent, produced great music—so why run all those nasty sidelines? They don’t call it dirty work for no reason, do they?”

“You’re right about that. Larry had to crawl through bat guano to do his dirty work. I mean, how much worse could it be to work for a guy like Bob Goddard at the bar or in some other regular job?”

“I see it like this, Kim. Some people just like doing bogus stuff—get this ‘hee-hee-hee’ feeling when they put one over on someone.” Brien and I were lounging, side-by-side, with a cold drink in one hand I still had one hand free. I spoke as I reached out to cover Brien’s hand with mine.

“Yeah, Jessica calls it ‘duper’s delight.’ I saw it on the face of that screwy rich chick, Libby Van Der Woert one day when she was destroying all the good things in her life.” 

“Then there are guys like Opie, in a hurry to score big even though he already had—scored big, I mean. He had it all and didn’t even know it.”

“Willow tried to tell him that. He wasn’t the first guy to pass through Sanctuary Grove who got restless with the little grass shack way of life. She would have done just about anything for that dope.”

“He found out too late what real happiness is. All this luxury is awesome, don’t get me wrong. I’d be stoked living anywhere as long as I’ve got my Gidget. I’d work hard to do that, too, wouldn’t you? Love is the most excellent adventure of all, isn’t it?”

“How’d you get so wise, Moondoggie?” I gave the man no chance to answer that question. I jumped up and set upon him, smothering him in kisses. I vowed to do everything in my power to make this the gnarliest new year ever! Brien had told me that sometimes the gnarliest waves aren’t just the best waves but the most challenging. Who knew where the new year would take us or what we’d face? We’d surf whatever wild waves life offered up together! Later that evening as we watched the sun set I had a new question for Brien.

“Brien, where do you think that walled off passageway leads?”

“Whoa, you won’t believe this but I was wondering the same thing, Gidget. Fine minds think alike, don’t they? How about that GPS device—where do you think that went?”

To be continued…

Thanks
for reading
Gnarly New Year Corsario Cove Cozy Mystery #2
. I hope you’ll leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads with feedback about Brien and Kim’s latest adventure in Corsario Cove.

Join me at my website
http://www.desertcitiesmystery.com
to keep up with all the news, giveaways, blog posts and new releases. Brien and Kim will be back in
Epic Easter
Corsario Cove Cozy Mystery #3, soon!

In the meantime, why not check out the books in my other series? Here’s the first chapter from Murder at Catmmando Mountain, Georgie Shaw Cozy Mystery #1…just to get you started.

murder at catmmando mountain

by

anna celeste burke

1 purrfect murder

“It’s such a marvelous world...

a MARVELOUS MARLEY world!”

Doing PR—public relations—for a cat isn’t easy. Working in any capacity for a very famous cartoon cat might sound like a dream job, but it’s not. The Furry Caped Avenger, Catmmando Tom, may be a superhero, but his megalomaniacal creator is an altogether different kind of character. Maximillian Marley loves animals. People, not so much, even though they’re the lifeblood of Marley’s pastoral theme park, Arcadia. It’s the two-legged visitors that pay the $100 admission fee for adults and $50 for children under twelve.

On occasion, their pets are welcome, too. All of the enchantment produced by other divisions of Marvelous Marley World Enterprises relies on hard-earned cash people dole out. That includes visits to the Marvelous Marley World Resorts, as well as purchases of videos, movies, and merchandise featuring Marvelous Marley World characters.

As I reviewed our current PR agenda, I straightened my posture to shoulder the burden. Super cat cartoons, movies, and merchandise had made Max Marley very wealthy. A host of animated animal characters had followed on the furry heels of Catmmando Tom’s acclaim. A few human characters, often cast in supporting roles, were included in the projects produced at Marvelous Max Studios. The theme parks and resorts were next. The first Arcadia was built here in Orange County, California, near our World Headquarters. Each iconic character has a special place in Arcadia, a fantasyland of dreams and adventures, built around relationships between super pets and their owners. In Max Marley’s imagination, it wasn’t always clear who owned whom, however. Most of the time his stories involved super pets rescuing their beloved humans and endangered animals from ne’er-do-wells of one species or another.

Uncle Max, as he prefers we call him, demands that his theme parks and resorts be kept in perfect order. Nevertheless, a surprising number of “faux paws,” as we refer to them around here, require attention day in and day out. Inadvertent offenses to park guests, like when the beloved Sir Dartmouth the Lion-Hearted Lion bumped into a toddler, knocking him to the ground. Characters stepped on toes, whacked guests with an unguarded tail, or otherwise offended them. Birthday parties didn’t always measure up to expectations. Guests panicked about stolen items that turned out not to be missing at all, or to have been lost, not stolen. Food that was too hot, too cold, or too something, required rapid intervention by park rangers. In their spiffy Legion of Purrfect Park Rescue Ranger outfits, they roamed the park assisting guests. They were on the front lines when it came to catching problems, or when called into action by another Marvelous Marley World “family” member who spotted a problem.

Once in a while, a dysfunctional member of the Marley World family caused a problem deliberately. Pirate Pete, a smart-mouthed parrot, had become too mouthy, several times before Marvelous Marley World management replaced the guy wearing the brightly colored feathered suit. The use of profanity by “associates” or “family members,” as Marvelous Marley World’s corporate handbook refers to employees, is forbidden in the park and resorts. A drunken Poacher Pierre, perhaps too much into the role of the bad guy character he portrayed in animated films, had gone on a bottom-pinching spree one day. It had taken a whole squad of park rangers to escort the cackling character out of the park. That had been a mess to clean up, although many of the women had been more amused than angered by the incident.

What on earth had I been thinking when I gave up my job in the Food and Beverage Division at Marvelous Marley World? All things food-related had been my first love, and I had started in the park as a chef, straight out of culinary school. Despite the increasing number of women training as chefs, a decidedly male-oriented culture had prevailed in the theme park and hotel kitchens. One of the worst insults meted out was, “You do that like a housewife.” The statement was typically delivered by a European chef while slashing the air with a French knife for emphasis.

I loved being a chef and succeeded in working my way up to Sous Chef quickly. It’s at that point I completed a degree in business administration, with a minor in communications, and made the leap from the kitchen to Food and Beverage Management. The move into management gave me the opportunity to influence the overall quality of food in the park, to oversee hiring, training, and professional development of kitchen staff, and do what I could to find creative ways to provide excellent food to the guests while heeding the constant drumbeat to cut costs.

After twenty-five years at the “Cat Factory,” our insiders' term for the corporation founded on Catmmando Tom’s success, I made another leap. The decision to move out of the Food and Beverage Division into Public Relations wasn’t an easy one. What had I been thinking? For one thing: that I wasn’t getting any younger. The likelihood of obtaining the senior position in the Food and Beverage Division before I retired had dimmed when I was passed over for promotion by Max Marley’s daughter. Mallory Marley-Marston, in my book, bore a resemblance to Cruella de Vil, alluding to a figure from another well-known distributor of animated tales. Maybe that resemblance was because the woman hated animals and people.

Her anorectic thinness and aversion to food made it difficult to understand how she had chosen the Food and Beverage Division as her bailiwick. She spouted a lot of hooey about bringing healthy eating to the parks and resorts while claiming to have a background in nutrition. According to gossip, that “background in nutrition” came directly from lectures in rehab where she ended up after her eating disorder and pill-popping got the better of her.

More than once I had seen the pill-popping for myself. “Vitamins,” she had said as she knocked back a couple during a meeting. “Allergies,” she had told us at another event. At one point, during the first year of her rule, she had taken an unexpected absence. Twenty-eight days to be exact, as in rehab. It was supposed to be hush-hush, of course. But people still speculated on the timing. While the cat’s away, the mice will play, so that old adage goes. Those were 28 glorious days, despite the challenge of having to step in to fill her shoes without notice. Too soon, though, she was back at the helm, waving a finger in my face and speaking to me in a shrill voice. I can’t remember what accompanied the finger-pointing, since all I heard was that line from the Wizard of Oz: “And your little dog, too!”

I was considering early retirement when a position opened up, here, in PR. Because of my minor in communications, I had been more engaged in PR than most execs in the Food and Beverage Division. For years, I had worked with key people in PR and knew what went on in the division very well. The director, Doug Addams, invited me to apply when his second-in-command made a sudden mid-career move to a “real PR firm.” Doug was not unaware of my plight having dealt with Mallory-the-Worm-Hearted, as he called her, many times. He was more than happy to facilitate my move.

PR is a smaller division than Food and Beverage. The move had been a lateral one rather than a move up, but the Hallelujah Chorus had gone off in my head the day that option opened up. Despite the constant troubleshooting, my new job involves, I am still inclined to do a little mambo whenever Doug and I leave a meeting in which Mallory is present. The absolute worst meetings are those in which her daddy was also in attendance. She affects a slight Southern drawl in his presence, and a giggly, demure demeanor, with her claws and fangs retracted. The Southern accent is inexplicable, given she was brought up in Los Angeles.

“Southern California,” Doug once offered with a shrug of his shoulders and a shake of his head. Even the Southern accent is easier to take than that obsequious little-girl routine.

I had just finished perusing my email, checking for any new hot spots on the “faux paws” radar, when all the trouble broke loose. My office phone rang, my smartphone pinged, an alert popped up on my desktop computer, and Doug Addams burst through my office door. He did not even knock—a breach of protocol for the oh-so-proper director of PR.

“We’ve got to get to Catmmando Mountain, now! They’ve found a body.” With that, he was gone. I grabbed my smartphone, made sure I was wearing my corporate name tag and set off in hot pursuit.

“A body—as in a human one—a real dead person?” I ran to catch up with Doug as he reached the elevator and hit the down button.

“Yes, a body. One of our maintenance guys found it and called it in. The police are on their way. Security has already shut down Catmmando Mountain Conquest and cordoned off the area. I’ve also sent a team from Crowd Control to set up a perimeter and redirect guests away from the scene.”

~~~~~

Find Murder at Catmmando Mountain Georgie Shaw Cozy Mystery #1 @
http://smarturl.it/georgie1
in paperback and kindle eBook format.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Life is an extravaganza! Figuring out how to hang tough and make the most of the wild ride is the challenge. On my way to Oahu, to join the rock musician and high school drop-out I had met in San Diego and married in Tijuana, I was nabbed as a runaway.

Eventually, the police let me go, but the rock band broke up. Our next stop: Disney World, where we “worked for the Mouse” as chefs, courtesy of Walt Disney World University Chef’s School. More education landed us in academia at The Ohio State University. For decades, I researched, wrote, and taught a number of gloriously nerdy topics.

Retired now, I’m still married to the same, sweet, guy and live with him near Palm Springs, California. I write mysteries set in sunny California! The Jessica Huntington Desert Cities Mystery series set here in the Coachella Valley and the Corsario Cove Cozy Mystery Series set in California’s Central Coast, The Georgie Shaw Mystery series set in the OC, and coming soon, The Misadventures of Betsy Stark also set here in the desert.  Join me at:
http://www.desertcitiesmystery.com
where you’ll find me

Snooping into life’s mysteries with fun, fiction, & food—California Style!

Books & Anthologies by Anna Celeste Burke

Cowabunga Christmas,
Corsario Cove Cozy Mystery #1
http://smarturl.it/cove1

Gnarly New Year
, Corsario Cove Cozy Mystery # 2
http://smarturl.it/cove2

Epic Easter
, Corsario Cove Cozy Mystery #3 Out Soon!                                                       

~~~~~

A Dead Husband
Jessica Huntington Desert Cities Mystery #1
http://smarturl.it/deadhus

A Dead Sister
Jessica Huntington Desert Cities Mystery #2
http://smarturl.it/deadsis

A Dead Daughter
Jessica Huntington Desert Cities Mystery # 3
http://smarturl.it/deaddau

A Dead Mother
Jessica Huntington Desert Cities Mystery #4 Out Soon!

Maddie’s Project
based on an episode from
A Dead Mother
, out now in
Mother’s Day Magic with Love
http://amzn.to/1Tt9YTH

Love A Foot Above the Ground
Prequel
to the Jessica Huntington Desert Cities Mystery Series
http://smarturl.it/loveabove
 

~~~~~

Murder at Catmmando Mountain
Georgie Shaw Cozy Mystery #1
http://smarturl.it/georgie1

[Abridged version,
Happy Homicides 2: Thirteen Cozy Mysteries (Crimes of the Heart
)

http://amzn.to/1WJwH3J

Love Notes in the Key of Sea
Georgie Shaw Cozy Mystery #2 out in Kindle and Paperback editions August, 2016
http://smarturl.it/georgie2
Available in abridged form now, in
Stories of Sun, Sand and Sea~~11 beaches…anything can happen  
http://amzn.to/1s4hRaZ

All Hallows’ Eve Heist
Georgie Shaw Cozy Mystery #3
.
out fall 2016
http://smarturl.it/georgie3
and in
Happy Homicides 5.