Hallow Haven Cozy Mysteries Bundle Books 1-3 by Mara Webb (books to read fiction .txt) 📕

with her fingernails, inspecting the cuticle beds or something, and then looked up to make eye contact with me. “Take a picture, it’ll last longer!” she joked.

That was it! Picture. Her face had been one of the photographs on the weird wall in the dining room, Greta’s photo. That was when I dropped the sauce container and it cracked against the tiled floor, cheese leaking slowly from the split plastic like lava trickling from a crack in the earth.

“You know I can’t help you clean that up, you're on your own with that,” she grinned.

“Greta?” I stammered.

“That’s me!” she replied, straightening up and stepping away from the oven. There was a tall table in the center of the kitchen acting as an island, it had storage underneath, a few recipe books and some utensils. Greta walked right through it. I staggered backwards into the fridge which was still open. The force of my collision caused a few of the water bottles to tumble out and roll across the ground.

I side-stepped to get towards the door, never taking my eyes off Greta. The shock of seeing her body was causing havoc in my brain and I just needed to get out of the kitchen, shut the door and go to bed. Once I had a fresh mind, I would be able to process the events of the day, but I was obviously too tired to do that now.

Greta’s smile was the last thing I saw as I backed into the hallway and closed the door.

“You know a door won’t keep me in here, right?” she called. I grabbed hold of the handle and held it firmly, that way she couldn’t pull the door open from her side. She had just walked through that table as if it wasn’t there though. She was right, a door wouldn’t stop her…

I closed my eyes firmly, then opened them again. Nope, it was still happening. I felt scared, but nothing necessarily scary had happened. She wasn’t chasing me or threatening me, she had just spoken suddenly, and I had thought the room was empty, that was all.

Maybe Greta had an identical twin, one that wasn’t dead, one that I hadn’t found floating in the cemetery. That wouldn’t explain her walking through solid objects though.

“Sadie, I know this is a lot, but I don’t have time to waste today,” she called again. I looked left then right, inspecting both exit doors from the corridor. I could either run back through the door into the café or out onto the sand. Either way I would still be far from anyone that could help me. The Greta-like person stepped through the kitchen wall into the corridor beside me.

“No!” I shouted.

“No?” she replied, a sly smile on her face.

“No, I don’t want you to chase me and freak me out and give me a nightmare. Or maybe I’m already in the nightmare. No!” I yelled again. She laughed.

“Sadie, take a breath. I said that I didn’t have time to waste, not that you had to talk at a million words per minute. It’s okay, you’re safe,” she said.

“But you’re a ghost, and they don’t exist, so a blood vessel has burst in my brain or something. I’ve conjured up these images from things that happened today but really I’m lying in a hospital somewhere,” I groaned. I released my grip on the door handle and pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes.

This didn’t seem fair. I was just taking a brave, independent move towards a new life on a picturesque island and now I was having a stroke. I hadn’t even checked if they had a hospital here before I moved, I hadn’t registered with a new physician yet either... urgh this was not good.

“Sadie, for crying out loud, stop it!” she snapped. “Yes, I’m a ghost, but it’s not a problem and if you are freaked out by this then you are going to have a really tough time here.”

I took my hands away from my face and looked at her.

“You found me today in the cemetery, you have my café and my house. This is happening and I need your help,” she declared.

“Greta?”

“Yes, Greta,” she sighed, clearly frustrated with me. “I know that you have been raised away from the island, but you were born here. You are a child of the island and there were reasons that you were sent away and you will learn all about it soon enough. I know you think you have no family, but you do.”

“Are you really my cousin? Were you? I don’t know which tense to use,” I said, my mouth flickering slightly at the edges into a gentle grin as I considered that I was conversing with a ghost.

“Present tense,” she laughed. “I am your cousin. I will explain everything to you as best as I can, just not tonight because I have a thing.” That made me laugh as I realized the dead woman in front of me had a better social life than I did.

“You said you want my help?” I finally asked.

“Yes, I need you to find out what happened to me. I remember being on a boat, or I was walking somewhere... the details are fuzzy, but I shouldn’t be dead right now and I need you to find out who killed me.”

“You think you were murdered? Miller said—” I began.

“Never mind what that human thinks, I need you to find out the truth because I can guarantee that the police have gotten it wrong,” Greta interrupted.

“He said your car was beaten up on a mountain road, you must have died from the cold after you got out of the car,” I explained.

“I don’t crash cars; I don’t accidentally die on mountains. The cold is only problematic near the peak, do the police think I accidentally staggered up to the peak after a car crash? How do they explain this?” she said, pulling her shirt down at the front and revealing a