Have a Nice Day and Homicide, page 1
Have a Nice Day and Homicide
Fleming Family Cozy Mysteries: One
Patti Larsen
© Patti Larsen 2025
Find more at https://pattilarsen.com
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License Notes
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Chapter One
Who knew Crew Turner was so good at flipping pancakes? And could look so freaking adorable doing it? To be fair, I’d thought he was as delicious as the stack of aromatic rounds he added to with a casual flick of his spatula long before making breakfast became a regular occurrence, but honestly.
How lucky was I to have my gorgeous, talented, brilliant and amazing husband doing all the mundane and yet remarkable-because-he-did-them things that I was still grateful for every single day?
So lucky, yo.
You bet that rough with scruff cheek got a soft kiss as I relieved him of the plate to turn and dish up the cooling and yet still yummy offering to the pair of girls who watched me with eager intensity. Iris’s blue eyes, a perfect match for Crew’s, watched me with the same level quiet that her father seemed to have also passed on to her, while Flora’s sweet, innocent giggle as I ladled a pancake onto her plate had me grinning back at the green-eyed and red-haired twin who was my spitting image.
The girls were the best eaters, always had been, though Iris’s penchant for investigating her food first always meant Flora was done long before her. Good thing the dark-haired of the pair didn’t mind sharing and, in fact, often offered when she noticed her younger-by-five-minutes sister had already finished.
Twins. Such a delight.
Crew turned off the burner with a click, spinning to hand me a plate, our more adult-sized versions of the girls’ smaller breakfast smelling like heaven, the hint of cinnamon he’d added to the buttermilk batter the kind of detail that reminded me why I loved him so much.
“Dawn should be here any minute,” my husband told me, the head of new client acquisitions for our family business, Fleming Investigations, taking a seat next to Iris and helping her to apply a small squirt of syrup over the handful of blueberries she’d pointed to when I’d held out the bowls of fruit. Flora was already fist-deep in the strawberries, far too many of the sliced bits tumbling, though I knew better than to worry about where the cascading discards might end up. Not with the vacuum cleaner precision of the wide-eyed pug who lurked under the twins’ highchairs for just this reason, Her Ladyship Petunia the Fifth’s training ensured that she not only caught every bite, but that she made sure to lean in the direction of the redhead and not the more fastidious brunette.
There would be face licking and giggling later, no doubt, and the pug farts?
Epic. Naturally.
“She’s working out, I think?” I took my own seat in our sunny kitchen, still in love with the big foursquare that Crew and I had built. Was it only two and a half years ago that the girls were born? A year after we moved into this very vision of family domesticity? I still struggled to believe that it had only been seven years since I moved back to Reading, Vermont, and my hometown, because it felt like yesterday.
And, in many ways, like forever. Now, to make it last that long… the girls were growing up so fast. I couldn’t let myself think about it without getting misty-eyed.
“I know you’re eager to get back to work full-time,” Crew told me, sipping his coffee, leaning back in his chair as Iris delicately placed a single, syrup-covered blueberry in her mouth while Flora crammed a fistful of crushed pancake and berry slices into hers. If anything epitomized the difference between my stunning husband and myself, it was the development of our twin girls as startling copies of their parents, and I was here for it.
One hundred percent.
“So far, so good.” I sighed over my breakfast, because he wasn’t wrong. It had become rapidly apparent that my time off was coming to a close, not because work demanded it but out of my own feelings of distance from the job that I loved so much. Yes, I adored my girls and would do anything for them. But the lure of the office had already drawn me back into the periphery of cases and it was definitely time for me to start fieldwork again before I permanently damaged my brain with another round of children’s TV shows played on repeat.
There were only so many times I could hear the alphabet sung by a puppet before I started to lose my mind.
The front door opened after a polite knock, Petunia whuffing and trotting off to find out who the visitor was. Dawn Miller appeared a moment later with the happy pug on her heels. And yes, that same pug quickly returned to her station under Flora’s highchair, noisily slobbering up the remains of discarded breakfast as the twenty-one-year-old we’d recently hired to test out as our nanny waved hello.
“Good morning,” Dawn said, her voice with that same level kindness as her father and grandmother. As the youngest daughter of our veterinarian, Dr. Fred Miller—and beloved granddaughter of our former receptionist, Toby Miller—Dawn came not only highly recommended because of her family connections, but due to her recent graduation from child education. While her older sister, Hilly, was following in her dad’s footsteps, Dawn’s passion for kids meant Crew and I had the perfect opportunity to test out if my going back to work full-time was what I really wanted.
“Hi, Dawn,” Crew said, standing to take his plate to the dishwasher. “Can we offer you breakfast?”
She shook her head, taking his seat, making faces at the girls before flashing me a smile. “I ate already, Crew, thank you. Hi, Fee. Hello, gorgeous ladies. And Lady Petunia.” Dawn’s sweet nature matched her round cheeks, her genuine air, and I felt more comfortable by the day with having someone who wasn’t me take care of the twins.
At least, so I thought. Letting go completely to focus on other things without having the girls in the office with me or alternating bouncing one or the other on my hip during calls? Was going to take some getting used to.
“Why don’t I clean up the twins and get them ready for the morning,” Dawn said. Crew and I had both encouraged her to take charge, and I was happy to see her doing so. Okay, Crew encouraged her. I did my best to stand back and not make faces of my own as I unconsciously held out my hands just in case and fought the urge to move in and take over. I was getting better at it, I swear, and even remained seated while Dawn lifted Iris down to the floor, then Flora, before taking the girls’ sticky fingers in hers and leading them away down the hall toward the stairs and their bedroom.
I exhaled a long breath, Petunia completing her cleanup job of the floor, the pug looking up and meeting my eyes with her small, velvet triangle ears perked. “It’s going to be okay, sweet girl,” I said.
“Yes,” Crew said, pausing from clearing more dishes to the counter to press his lips to my forehead, “it really is.”
I stood and helped him with the rest, waving him off when he tried to start loading the dishwasher. “Let me,” I said. “I’m going to head over to The Iris in a bit, but I have a few minutes. You had those calls you wanted to make this morning.”
Crew hesitated. “I don’t like leaving you with the mess,” he said. We’d been a team for so long that it was second-nature to have him carry his share, but I didn’t mind, and a few minutes on my own a short distance from the twins—but still in their orbit—might be a good thing.
I kissed him, leaned into him when he hugged me, the familiar scent of him so much a part of me now that I didn’t ever want to be without him. And there went the waterworks, a common reaction since I became a mom, though he’d stopped teasing me about it and instead just snuggled me a little longer.
Made it worse. And better. How could it do both at the same time?
Crew was magic, I tell you. That was how.
I finally pushed him toward the door, Crew laughing, one last sparkling smile for me at the door, his blue eyes alight with the joy I felt, too. “Love you, Fiona Fleming,” he said, suddenly intense and yet not serious, leaving me breathless like only he could.
“Love you too, Crew Turner,” I said, stealing one last kiss that lingered before he left me there, closing the door behind him.
While I breathed out in a long, giggling breath and danced my way back to my kitchen.
Again, how lucky was I? So lucky. I really had the perfect life.
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Chapter Two
Petunia followed me, her toenails clicking on the hard surface flooring, reminding me that I needed to file them at some point. “Let’s go check in on Mom,” I told the attentive dog, who meow-yawned her agreement. While she loved the girls, and they her, this latest iteration of the beloved line of Petunias had been with me before the twins were born and was as bonded to me, I liked to think, as the last one had been. While Petunia the Fourth had been originally raised by my Grandmother Iris, in this very place where my house now stood, when she’d passed and left her bed and breakfast to me, her pug had been part of the deal.
I’d know her pugs, of course, had grown up in their presence, knew my grandmother loved the breed and always had one of the same name as her prized B&B. But it had taken the kind, caring and persistent presence of the previous Petunia to bind my heart to keeping up the tradition. And, when I’d lost her to a tragic event that forever made her my hero, I’d been so bereft without her that I’d surprised myself with the depth of my grief.
Inconsolable was a thing I knew now, thanks to the loss of my old, dear girl.
Crew’s gift of this darling furchild who followed me everywhere—as long as Flora wasn’t eating something, that was—renewed my connection and ensured that I, too, would have a Petunia in my life for as long as I was able.
And with the quiet that had fallen over what was still marketed as the cutest little town in America, it had been easy to fall into a peaceful lifestyle that meant thinking about the future in positive terms—rather than lurching from crisis to murder to looming disaster—was now commonplace.
As I reentered the kitchen and finished cleaning up the breakfast dishes, Petunia gifted the remains of the berries the girls hadn’t eaten, I caught myself scowling over the fact that a few local residents had made it a point to comment to me over the quiet interim since I’d stopped working cases that wasn’t it funny that no one had died in our fair town…?
Like it was my fault that so many homicides had rolled into Reading. In fact, I’d solved many of them and helped put away a number of truly horrible people, thank you. What state would their precious Reading have been in if I hadn’t come home?
Don’t answer that. Just don’t.
Still, I couldn’t help but accept (privately and with anxiety) the correlation between my extended maternity leave and the lack of death that put us on the map for all the wrong reasons.
“Just a coincidence,” Crew had said when I’d brought it up for just the comfort he’d delivered. That from a man who, as a trained FBI agent turned sheriff turned private investigator, didn’t believe in coincidence any more than I did.
I would not ruin my day by thinking that way. The cloth I wiped the counter with left the surface satisfyingly tidy, something I never thought would bring me a peaceful kind of contentment like it did, and I nodded to it like the job well done was all that mattered.
“All right, Petunia,” I said, addressing her as I often did, another sign I’d been alone with children too long and was ready for adult interactions, surely. Never mind I talked to the other Petunia, too, because reasons. “Let’s take a walk to The Iris and see if Mom needs help for the party, shall we?”
The pug spun in a circle in her enthusiasm because the word “Mom” meant one thing and one thing only.
Snacks. Because once a sucker for a pretty face, Lucy Fleming, always a sucker.
I leashed the dancing pug, tucking her sleek body into her harness. Unlike her predecessor, who’d already been pushing seniority by the time we’d joined forces, I’d raised this Petunia from puppyhood and had been careful enough with her diet and encouraged sufficient exercise so that she remained somewhat slim and energetic at just over three years old. I hoped to keep her that way for as long as possible, knowing that the twins would encourage her to run and play even if they accidentally overfed her thanks to their own eating habits (looking at you, Flora Felicity Fleming-Turner).
Whatever came of things, she was still very much young of body and mind and though we’d done some training, pulled against her harness as she tugged me toward the fence and the small gate that divided the old Petunia’s property from that of The Iris next door.
She did pause to say hello to the three koi in the pond on the way past, Fat Benny and his friends rising to kiss her nose like they always did, as they had with her predecessor, enjoying the handful of fish food I dropped to them before cruising away. The warm June sunlight made everything glow, the Green Mountains looming over town like always a remarkable sight I didn’t take nearly enough notice of anymore. There had been a carriage house at the far end of the garden once, now gone and replaced with storage for The Iris, the fence simple slats transformed into a gorgeous piece of artwork thanks to local painters and Mom’s insistence that the border we shared be as lovely as it was serviceable. A lot had changed and nothing had, really, since my mother took over what used to be Petunia’s annex, the former home of the Munroe family transformed thanks to the talent and skill of local builder, Jared Wilkins. Reminding me yet again as I paused for Petunia to sniff something that had her interest, of that day seven years ago when everything in my life changed abruptly thanks to Jared’s father, Pete.
“I haven’t thought about that in a very long time,” I told the pug who sat on my foot to wait and see what I had planned. Nostalgia was the name of the game today, and for good reason, I admitted as I carried on, my pug excited to continue our journey to the gate. After all, it wasn’t just the cusp of my choice to go back to field work, was it? The party that I was right now on my way to offer assistance for was a very special celebration, after all.
The five-year anniversary of the opening of The Iris was going to be a special night indeed.
I pushed open the way between yards, the pug preceding me with a prancing step that made me laugh. Petunia’s antics were all that kept me from bursting into tears. Not out of sadness, just old memories that seemed to have crept up on me despite the fact that many of them hadn’t plagued me in a long time. I fought off more as I let Petunia lead the way, stumbling a little while I cleared my throat when it tightened. I would not look back at my house, the gorgeous place Crew and I built (with Jared’s help), because I knew I’d see the ghost of something entirely different standing in its place, if only in my memory.
Petunia’s, the bed and breakfast that brought me home, almost killed me many times over and ultimately saved my life. And gave me this happily ever after.
Now gone, ashes and dust and never to be fully forgotten.
Not as long as I lived, at least.
“I’m a silly noodle,” I told the pug. She glanced back at me, panting her happiness, big, dark eyes bulging as she snorted a soft spray into the warm air. As I firmly turned and smiled at my house and the memory of the big Victorian place my grandmother used to lure me home, I saluted the phantom of the past as the sadness of all that came to pass lifted.
“Thanks, Iris,” I whispered. Then squared my shoulders and headed inside, past the black wrought iron furniture Mom placed artfully about for guests to enjoy, climbing the low steps to the long, flat deck and through the back door into the big, bright kitchen.
Where I heard a deep, rumbling voice say, “—won’t be a better time than right now.”
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Chapter Three
If anyone else stood in front of my mother saying something like that to her, I’d have been curious but not concerned. The fact that it was my father? The man who’d been making decisions most of my life—especially since I returned home—that altered the course of my existence without so much as a will ye, won’t ye?
Skeptical suspicion at the ready, sir.
Hey, I loved my dad, don’t get me wrong. But the man’s penchant for as much trouble as I had (came by it honestly, turned out) didn’t always foster fuzzy safety feelings, to be honest.
Which meant this little interaction I’d just witnessed between the two who’d given me life in Reading’s fair environs had me instantly side-eying the both of them.
“What’s up?” I lingered in open wariness, watching them both with the natural suspicion of a daughter who’d been lied to, shuffled about, manipulated (for her own good? I think not) and roped into starting a business with the very tall, mountainous and normally stoic aforementioned John Fleming. And yes, all of that squinty-eyed reflection was aimed directly at my father, Mom’s participation in the aforementioned for-my-own-goodness very rarely my mother’s decision and precipitated by dad’s uncanny need to make sure he was in control of things, all the things, whether I liked it or not.
Not. For the record. You’re my witness.
Yes, the fact that all of the previous had also, indeed, worked out to my ultimate benefit and that Dad might—I say might—have known what he was doing at least some of the time (argh) while maneuvering me about like a pawn on a chessboard was, well.
