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

density of the trees made it hard to get a good understanding about the geography of the place, but as they began to thin out, we realized that we were somehow nearing a cliff top.

“Honey, this place looks even more beautiful than it did the last time I was here,” Miller said.

“Nature does the hard work for me,” she laughed. The guest house was built overlooking the ocean, only a dozen or so feet from the sheer drop of the cliff. It was west facing, looking out over the golden hues of another island sunset. “Would either of you care for an herbal tea? I have all of them!”

“What would you recommend?” I asked.

“I’ll whip you up a fine one,” she shouted as she disappeared into the house.

“What do you think?” Miller asked, looking out at the setting sun as it let out it’s last few moments of light.

“This place is gorgeous,” I replied. “Pete’s pretty weird though.”

“Yeah, but you shouldn’t judge a place based on it’s weirdest resident. Everyone else is almost normal,” he laughed. “Wanna sit for a minute?”

Miller sat cross legged on the grass and I sat down beside him. The stars were beginning to puncture the night sky and the chill in the air caught me off guard.

“Wow, the heat dropped quick!” I gasped, looking at the bumps on my arms like goose flesh.

Miller wrapped an arm around my shoulder and pulled me into him. Was this our first date? If you ignored the part with the weird pirate guy, then it was a pretty romantic place to be. “It’s nice to be alone,” he said, kissing the top of my head.

“Two cups of tea,” Honey announced as she walked back out of the house carrying a silver tray. “I’ve left the keys on the tray for you both too. Miller I’ve got you in Room 1 and Sadie you’re upstairs in Room 3. Enjoy!”

She lowered the tray to the ground and then began to walk back into the house.

“Oh,” she said, clicking her fingers as if she’d just remembered something. “Breakfast is served at eight!” She carried on walking two more steps before clicking her fingers again. “Oh, and I sprung for a few new movies if you want to take a couple of VHS cassettes to your rooms. Your separate rooms.”

She hurried back into the house and I was left to contemplate why she had emphasized the word ‘separate’, and why Hallow Haven was the only place left on earth that used VHS tapes so frequently.

I guess I had already assumed we would be sleeping in separate beds, but hearing Honey specify it out loud was a little odd. Miller reached out to the tray and handed me my cup of tea. Holding the ceramic mug was enough to fill my body with heat again, and after a sip or two I felt much warmer.

“Well,” Miller said, grabbing the key for Room 1. “I guess we should turn in, unless you want to watch a VHS of a movie they made in the late ‘80s?” He was smirking and I smiled back at him. Miller hadn’t grown up on Hallow Haven, he’d moved here years ago and still was able to react to the strangeness of the place in the same way I did. He clearly agreed with me that VHS tapes belonged in the distant past.

“Is breakfast going to be weird? Are we going to be suspended upside down and made to eat a palm leaf or something?” I joked.

“Hey, stranger things have happened,” he smiled. We stood up and walked towards the house. There was a wooden picnic bench on the grass outside and a few sun loungers that faced out over the cliff. I didn’t know if Honey ran this place by herself, but whoever had decorated this place had done a beautiful job.

The windows on the ground floor were trimmed with fresh flowers in boxes beneath the glass, the front door was carrying a floral wreath and as we walked inside it seemed that the flowery theme continued.

The entrance hallway was adorned with potted plants and paintings of trees, so many that I couldn’t actually see the walls that they were hanging on.

“I’m this way,” Miller smiled. He kissed me on the cheek and walked off to the left, leaving me facing the staircase that would lead up to room three. I walked up the steps, baffled by the sheer number of paintings on the walls, and found room three on the top landing.

I unlocked the door and was immediately hit by a breeze rolling in through an open window. I locked the door behind me and walked over to close the window, but something caught my eye in the darkness outside. It looked like someone was running away from the house towards the trees.

I blinked a few times and tried to search for the mystery figure again, but I couldn’t see anything. Maybe it was a trick of the light, a tree shadow or something.

I closed the curtains and turned back to the bed. There was a piece of paper folded over on the pillow with my name on it. Had Honey left this here? If not, who else would know where I was?

3

I woke up and immediately grabbed the folded paper from the nightstand to stare at the words again. It was a short letter, but it had kept me awake for an hour before I had managed to drift off. ‘Sadie – you’re not safe here.’

If it had been Honey that had wanted to tell me this, then why would she have left a note on the bed? I wasn’t on the ground floor, so if someone had in fact climbed in through the open window to leave this on the pillow then they would have to have scaled the building. No mean feat.

The clock on the wall told me that I had twenty minutes before breakfast would be served downstairs. In my sleep it