Murder By Muffin (Lucy McGuffin, Psychic Amateur Detective 3)

What am I doing here?

A memory of Paco running around in circles, barking, flashes through my head. I told him to be quiet, but he wouldn’t stop. Huh. It must have been a dream.

I stretch my arms over my head and blink at the TV screen. The local morning news anchor points to a map of north Florida. A cold front has come through, and the temperature this morning has dropped to the low fifties. Sunshine streams in through the blinds on my living room window. My mouth feels dry and my stomach … Yuck.

Using the remote, I turn off my TV.

Paco barks at me.

“I know, I know, you want to go on a walk.” I go to the bathroom and quickly brush my teeth. Paco continues to bark at me like he’s going crazy. “Will you hold on a—”

I look over at him.

This isn’t his I-have-to-go-pee bark.

It’s his …

No.

We’re all through with dead bodies here in Whispering Bay.

“Hold your horses,” I tell him before clipping on his leash.

He drags me down the stairs, but before we get to the kitchen door, he pauses to look at me. Then he begins barking again, only it’s an aggressive sort of barking that makes my blood go cold.

“What’s wrong, boy?” I whisper.

He turns his head to the side and begins to whimper.

I swallow hard. If history has shown me anything, it’s that I don’t want to know what’s on the other side of this door. Except I have to see if I’m right.

I carefully open the door, and I’m immediately hit with a blast of chilly air. I turn on the lights. Everything looks okay. Except … my kitchen door is wide open.

No wonder it’s so cold in here. Did I forget to close the door last night? I know I was tired, but surely, I couldn’t have been that careless.

Paco sits and calmly watches me, which creeps me out, because this is exactly how he acts when he’s leading me to a dead—

Someone is lying on my kitchen floor.

I rush forward to kneel by the body. It’s Tara. She’s pale, and her lips are blue-tinged. I place my fingers on her neck. There’s no pulse.

Holy wow.

Tara is dead.

A scream splits the air, making me jump. Paco starts barking again.

I turn to see Gilly standing in the kitchen doorway. Her gaze goes straight to Tara’s body. “Oh my God! Lucy! What have you done?”

Chapter Six

Wouldn’t you know it would be Travis who answers the 911 call? He’s accompanied by Zeke Grant, Whispering Bay’s chief of police, as well as half the force plus a forensics crime team. I recognize the team immediately. It’s the same group who came to the rec center when I discovered my first dead body. Even though it’s only been a few weeks, it seems like that was forever ago. Probably because since then I’ve been hit on the head with a frying pan by a sociopathic serial killer and threatened at gunpoint by a crazy mob hit person.

So yeah, lots going on in my life.

The technicians wipe the place down for fingerprints and take pictures. They took Tara’s body out on a stretcher a while ago. How did she die? And what on Earth was she doing in my kitchen?

“Tell me exactly what happened,” says Travis. He whips out that confounded little notebook of his that he likes to write in so much.