The Once and Future Scream Queen: Marlene Ambrosia Mysteries Read online

  Marlene Ambrosia’s new life coach business was going great.

  Then it wasn’t.

  She would blame Artie Ryan if she could, but she’s been avoiding him ever since he got back to town. Hoping to reinvigorate her business by retaining an old friend as her latest client, Marlene is in for a big shock. Gwen O’Vear, a former promising actress, is found murdered behind her office. As the police investigate the crime, they begin to turn their eye to Marlene and also to Artie, the most popular guy in her class back in high school.

  After serving overseas for many years, Artie returned to town last year and succeeded in getting elected to the local Council. Making waves for bringing a no-nonsense, honest approach to politics in Medboro, a town that has had its share of corruption over the years, Artie has made an enemy out of the one man you don’t cross:

  Mal A. Gant.

  The Mayor of Medboro for nearly three decades.

  Marlene hates politics. So when Artie turns to her for help in challenging the Mayor, she politely declines. But strange things keep happening to Marlene … there’s the owl that starts talking to her … there are the visions she’s having … there’s the strange man that nobody else notices outside the convenience store …

  Then, one fateful night, Marlene is visited by the world’s greatest—but long dead—sorcerer.

  And he explains to Marlene that her destiny is to provide counsel to a good, honest man so that he might one day become a great leader.

  Surely the sorceror can’t be talking about Artie Ryan? The same Artie Ryan who was the cockiest, most self-absorbed guy ever?

  Marlene doesn’t think so. Until she reconnects with Artie and begins to see him for who he truly is. A good man trying to make the town into a better place. Maybe she was always wrong about him back in high school. And just when she decides to help him, he’s arrested for murder …

  Now Marlene has no choice but to take the case and clear Artie.

  Powerful forces are set against Marlene. The Mayor will try to ruin her, but others will try to kill her.

  The Once and Future Scream Queen is a cozy with a mythical twist, sure to delight fans of legends, fantasy, and mysteries. Follow Marlene Ambrosia as she solves crimes, discovers her true identity, and fulfills her destiny …

  The Once and Future Scream Queen

  Brianna Bates

  One

  Marlene Ambrosia screamed at the top of her lungs.

  An owl—yes, an owl!—had just poked its head up out of the ground.

  “What are you doing down there?” she asked.

  The owl had bright, golden eyes set under white eyebrows. Its head was brown, its feathers brown with white spots, and its chest was white. Marlene thought its legs were long for an owl, but where she got this idea, she had no idea. She was no animal lover. A German shepherd had randomly attacked her when she was younger, more than one feral cat had bared its fangs over the years, and raccoons seemed to go out of their way to tear open her trash.

  She and animals? Oil and water.

  Marlene was immediately suspicious of this bird, because owls were supposed to live in trees. Right? They weren’t supposed to come up out of the ground. Not to mention that this was late morning, and she knew with certainty owls were nocturnal creatures. This was indeed strange behavior.

  She wondered if owls could get rabies.

  The owl’s white chin puffed out while the little creature bobbed its head.

  Marlene froze. “Not today. Please. This was supposed to be a good day.”

  She was supposed to meet with a new client this morning. Business had been not so great recently …

  The owl’s head-bobbing quickened.

  Marlene took a deep breath and stepped off the walk in front of her house onto the lawn, giving the owl a wide berth. It had come up out of the dirt of her flower bed, which was in bad need of tending. And Marlene wasn’t about to let this rabid, insomniac animal slow her down. Today was going to be a good day.

  It had to be.

  Keeping her eyes on the creature, Marlene walked slowly across the lawn toward the side of her house. When she was a reasonably safe distance, she took her eyes off the animal and walked briskly to her twenty-year-old Toyota Camry, the car Mom had left before moving to Florida.

  “…need help…”

  The voice was so soft, Marlene at first thought she hadn’t heard anything.

  “…kill…”

  This time she was sure she’d heard someone talking behind her. Marlene whipped her head around, but there was nobody there. All she saw was the bird, with its unusually long legs for an owl, standing on her walk. Its chin was puffed out ridiculously, and it flapped its wings like it was trying to get her attention.

  She was beginning to feel bad for the little guy—or girl. (How could she tell?) Owls weren’t supposed to be out during the day and they weren’t supposed to be hiding in the ground. Especially since there was an abandoned barn just up the road, the ideal place for an owl to make its home.

  She couldn’t help it. Marlene had a bad habit of offering unsolicited advice to people, which most of the time would have proven to be helpful if heeded. She’d never done this with an animal—wild or domesticated—before but there was always a first time for everything, right?

  “Sorry, little guy.” She kneeled and put her hands out. The owl stopped advancing. “But I think you need some sleep. You’re not supposed to be out right now, and honestly, if I was a mouse? Or another kind of rodent? I’d totally see you coming from a mile away in the broad daylight. Listen. What you need to do is play to your strengths: hunt at night. I’m pretty sure you have superior night vision and I’ve heard you can move very quietly. There’s a barn in that direction.”

  She pointed. The owl actually turned its head, like it could understand her! She was beginning to think the little guy was cute.

  “I’d stake it out first, you know, get the lay of the land. There might be a barn owl or two in there already and from what I hear they’re very nasty to non-barn owls.”

  Marlene had another visit from the Random Knowledge Fairy. Stuff like this always popped into her head. She attributed it to being a voracious reader. She’d probably read about owls in National Geographic while in the waiting room at a doctor’s office five years ago … and now here what had seemed like useless information at the time was coming in handy.

  Sort of.

  Her mouth had a mind of its own too, as her mother was fond of saying. So she found herself talking again.

  “This is a great little town. There’s lots of farmland and forest, and a lot of barns. But there are a lot of possums too, and I know they’re natural predators of owls.”

  National Geographic, Wikipedia, some science journal, maybe she was repeating what she’d heard when she visited the Cape May Zoo that time … the point was, she had all this knowledge tucked away inside her mind.

  If only she could use her powers for good.

  The owl stopped flapping its wings and unpuffed its chin. Now it was just staring at her, like she was the craziest person he (or she?) had ever laid huge owl eyes on.

  Marlene smiled. “Listen. Maybe I should call a veterinarian. I really don’t think you should be up right now. It’s the middle of the morn—”

  The owl screeched and Marlene screamed once more. If she had any neighbors close by, she would have woken them all. But she didn’t. She might have lived in New Jersey—a state infamous for many things, including having the highest population density—but this was the Pinelands. There wasn’t anybody else for half a mile in either direction.<
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  Two

  Marlene had been forced to go back inside and put on another outfit. After the owl had screeched, she’d jumped and fallen back on her bottom dirtying her slacks and the back of her blouse. Before stepping outside again, she made sure the owl was gone.

  The Camry started this morning without protest, which was a rare occasion she took as a good omen. Backing out of her driveway, itself in desperate need of repaving, Marlene went slowly and kept her eyes peeled for the bird. Even though the owl had scared the living hell out of her, she didn’t want to turn it into road kill.

  Marlene pulled onto the street without incident. As she slipped the car into gear, she spotted the owl staring at her from the walk. Its bright yellow eyes were locked on her. There was something about this animal…

  The owl seemed to shrug, then turned and hopped into the flower bed. She watched with fascination as it submerged under the ground. Moles ran everywhere on her property and loved especially to burrow in her flower bed. She assumed the owl was using the prefabricated tunnels underground, though she had no idea why. Owls were supposed to live high up off the ground, not under it.

  Normally Marlene stopped for coffee to start her day at the café where her sister Ganny worked, but she was running a little behind schedule and had a meeting first thing with the perfect client: someone with a lot of problems and even more disposable income.

  Gwen O’Vear had had come from money and had left Medboro after high school to pursue an acting career. She’d started out in New York, doing off-Broadway productions, managed to get a few commercials, and then made the big move to Hollywood when offered a badly-stereotypical role in a schlocky horror movie that went straight to DVD. Gwen had seen that role as a stepping stone, but it had turned into a career box for her. From then on, the only roles she got were in B-movies as the stereotypical scream queen. She was tall, blond, beautiful, thin, and … very, very well-endowed.

  Marlene passed the coffee shop where Ganny worked and made a right onto Old Pike. Traffic was New Jersey bad.

  Her phone vibrated in her purse. She knew it was illegal in Jersey to use a cell phone while driving, but for some reason she got a terrible feeling that there was very bad news and the call was important. Trying to keep her eyes on the road, Marlene fished in her bottomless purse for her phone. She had learned to listen to her intuition over the years.

  The phone continued to vibrate and the bad feeling she had worsened. Something was wrong. She didn’t know what, but she was sure of it. This call—

  A truck blared its horn as she began to cross the center line. Marlene cut the wheel and steered back safely into her lane. She waved sorry, hoping the truck driver would see the gesture.

  The near accident and sudden jerk of the wheel had sent her purse flying. It was now opening-down on the floor of the passenger seat, her wallet and makeup spilled out.

  But on a positive note? Her cell phone had ended up on the passenger seat. She got to it before the call went to voicemail.

  “Hello?”

  “You’re late.”

  In her frantic attempt to answer the call, she hadn’t slowed down long enough to check the caller ID. But she knew this voice. It belonged to Bob Balin, a long-term client and one of her first. With her help, he’d managed to make some very positive life changes … until three months ago when everything started going wrong.

  “Hi, Bob. It’s nice to hear from you.” She was nervous about his tone. Normally Bob was even-keeled, but he’d been very short with her. “I’ll be at my office soon, I didn’t expect to see you this morning.”

  “I’m not at your office!” he blurted out. “I tried calling you there but got no answer.”

  There was a hard edge lining Bob’s voice. Marlene laughed like she hadn’t heard it. “Bob, you are never going to believe what happened to me this morning. When I stepped out of my door, this owl—”

  “I want my money back.”

  Marlene’s stomach dropped. If she hadn’t spent it already, her fee for working with Bob was already spoken for. Marlene had dumped her savings into opening the office a year ago. And Murphy’s Law had reared its ugly head. Not long after opening the office, her business had slowed to a crawl.

  No new clients.

  And she’d lost a few.

  Now Bob sounded like he was about to …

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said I want my money back, Marlene. I can’t-can’t-can’t believe I trusted you.”

  He was really worked up. Which was very out of character for Bob. Normally his blood pressure didn’t deviate from 120 over 80.

  “Bob, whatever it is, I’m sorry it happened but we can work through it. Whatever we do, let’s not react. Remember what we talked about? Acting and reacting are very different things. Reaction comes from a state of panic or fear, and the decisions that follow—”

  “Marlene, I told Shelly I loved her and that I trusted her to do what was right. She repaid my trust by sleeping with the other guy.”

  Ouch.

  “Ohhh, Bob, I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  Her mind was racing. Normally Marlene had no problem offering advice. It was what she was best at. She’d been life coaching for six years and had all happy, satisfied clients.

  But lately?

  Not so much.

  To call it a slump was an insult to slumps.

  She was losing her touch. Usually her mind overflowed with endless advice for anyone that would listen and even for those that didn’t want to listen. She loved helping others to make good decisions and positive life changes.

  But Bob?

  She’d been totally blocked with him for longer than she cared to admit. Desperate to spark her creative spirit, Marlene had even stooped to buying an Idiot’s Guide to Life Coaching. She didn’t know what was worse.

  Buying that book.

  Or actually using some of the tips in it.

  “I want my money back,” Bob said. “Nothing you’ve recommended has worked.”

  Now that was overstating it. When they’d first paired up, she’d done him a lot of good. But right now, she was having trouble recalling what those good things had been.

  They had all happened early on in the engagement.

  “Now hold on a sec, Bob. I got you to try that new diet, remember?”

  “Yeah, intermittent fasting. It screwed up my blood sugar!!”

  Oops. “And they detected your diabetes early because of it. So I count that as a win, Bob.”

  “Really?”

  Marlene’s face felt hot. Better to give him his money back and try to mend the relationship. But in order to do that, she needed him to think about the positive changes they’d made.

  “Then we got you back in the gym,” Marlene said. “You lost ten pou—”

  “Until I blew out my knee doing that CrossFit crap! All that bad weight is coming right back!”

  He sounded like he wanted to reach through the phone and strangle her.

  She winced as the image of Bob hobbling in and out his house with crutches came to mind. “Okay, you’re right, Bob. Maybe starting with CrossFit was a bad idea. But I helped you with work. You were on track for a promotion—”

  “THEY JUST FIRED ME!”

  “What?”

  “Because of all these outbursts. I can’t control my temper anymore with literally everything going wrong in my life.”

  Her heart sank. Could anything else go wrong for this guy?

  Oh yeah. His girlfriend, whom he loved.

  “Bob, I’m real sorry.”

  “My life is over and … I was a fool to fall for this woman.” He started to cry. “The other man she fell for? Guess who.”

  Don’t say your boss. Don’t say your boss. Don’t say your boss.

  “My boss.”

  Marlene had to pull over. Tears had filled her eyes. Not because she was losing a client, but because she had failed so utterly at the one thing—maybe the only thing?—she’d ever excelled at: g
iving advice. Now the poor man’s life was in shambles.

  “Bob, I know you’re going through a lot right now. That makes all these things very difficult to manage. But if you take them one-by-one, I know you can solve these problems. Maybe it’s time to take the plunge and write full-time like you’ve always wanted. In the last sixty days, you got halfway through a book and started reworking that screenplay—”

  “Marlene! Enough.”

  Okay. Bob was in no mood right now to hear her out. And what was there to hear anyway? The man’s life was in ruins.

  She felt awful. “Bob, I’m so sorry. I’ll get you your money back.”

  “Ahh, don’t bother.” He’d stopped crying and now sounded despondent. “What good is that going to do? The mortgage is … God, and I’m underwater since the bubble burst … I need a new job, and…”

  Light bulb moment! “Bob, I saw an ad the other day online, I think it’d be the perfect job for you. It’s an inside sales job over in—”

  His voice was sharp. “Marlene?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE ANY MORE ADVICE FROM YOU.”

  “I understand. I’m real sorry, Bob.”

  “Good. Now don’t ever call me again.”

  He hung up.

  She looked at herself in the rearview mirror. “Happy Birthday, Marlene Ambrosia.”

  Three

  Totally dejected, Marlene drove in silence. She should have been excited about her first meeting with Gwen, but instead all she could think about was poor Bob.

  How could she have been so wrong in her advice to him?

  There was an unexpected road closure halfway to her office. As opposed to merely being a few minutes late, this development was going to make her incredibly late. She got her phone out at a light to text Gwen, but saw the woman had already messaged her.

  Going for coffee across street. See you when you get here.

  Marlene typed a quick text, letting Gwen know she was behind schedule because of the construction.

  She had to backtrack and go through the next town over, cut over on a fire road, and wend her way back. Adding that extended commute to the time she lost because of the owl this morning, she was embarrassingly late to her first appointment. She’d gotten no other calls or texts from Gwen O’Vear.