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

He had grabbed my left hand and the peridot ring was glowing wildly as the little blue lightning bolts raced over my skin towards it.

“Oh yeah, I should have mentioned the one flaw in my business model, Sadie,” Wes called from the driver’s seat. “The car can drive over the water, but the whole place is still flooded. I haven’t figured out a way for my passengers to get out of the car without getting wet. It’s a real problem, man!”

“Thanks for the heads up, Wes,” I gasped.

“Where are you guys heading after this?” Fitz asked.

“The marina, heading back over to Green Holt,” Miller replied.

“I’ll meet you there, no use me getting soaked through to my little cat bones now is there?” he purred. Miller lowered himself into the water next to me. Fitz wiggled his nose and used his magic to shut the door behind him and we watched as the floating car turned and began to drive away.

“I can’t decide if I love or hate living here,” I said. I was treading water and making large figures of eight with my arms, looking at the house in front of us. It was up on stilts just like Kate and Effie’s place.

“At least we don’t have water snakes here,” Miller laughed. “Or…” He stopped laughing and thought for a moment. “Or we have a lot of water snakes here. I can’t remember which.”

“It feels like something you should know about,” I shrieked. I don’t scare all that easily, which is obviously great now that I live in a place with witches and werewolves, but snakes are the worst, and I couldn’t handle the idea that a bunch of them were swimming around my legs.

“It’s probably fine, do water snakes even bite?” he laughed.

“Are you joking? Why wouldn’t they bite? They still have fangs, don’t they? I don’t like it; I don’t like it!” I panicked.

“It’s okay,” he said, realizing that it wasn’t a good topic to joke about with me. “Let’s get up the steps of the house and we can figure it out from there.

He swam ahead of me a few feet and pushed open the gate. Just like Effie and Kate, the mailman had lined the fence of his yard with sandbags, but not the gate area. This meant that the water still rushed in just like it would have done if he hadn’t bothered with the sand at all. As soon as the gate was open, I began swimming like an Olympic athlete towards the steps the climbed up to the front door of the house.

Can you out-swim a water snake? I had no idea, but I was hoping so. I was almost all the way to the top of the stairs before Miller had even gotten out of the water.

“Jeez, remind me not to mention snakes again,” he smiled.

“I don’t think you’ll need reminding,” I teased. Miller jogged up the steps, his clothes once again clinging to his frame, and knocked on the door. I thought briefly about how I would react to two dripping wet strangers knocking on my door, although this place flooded so often that it probably wasn’t all that weird.

I looked back at the flooded area and thought I saw something moving in the distance as if it were swimming away. Was it actually a water snake? My whole body shuddered at the thought and I quickly looked back at the door.

Miller knocked again, but this time the force of his hand nudged the front door open. Makes sense that you wouldn’t lock it in a flood, I guess. What kind of burglar would swim away with a TV?

“Hello? Jeff? Are you in there?” Miller called out.

“Is it normal to know the mail guy’s name?” I asked. Miller scrunched his face up at me as he tried to work out if I was serious. “I mean, before I moved here, I was pretty much always working. When the mail was delivered, I wasn’t even at home, so I didn’t even know what the delivery person looked like, let alone their name.”

“It’s normal in a small community,” Miller replied. “Jeff is a good guy, for the most part. The idea that he has been taking bribes to shuttle paperwork around the islands, I mean… that’s not great, obviously.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But the point was that he was getting passports for people that wanted them. I guess he could have done that without the pay off.”

“Exactly. As soon as secret money starts changing hands things can get messy fast,” Miller said. “I’m surprised a scheme like that has been running for so long without someone letting it slip to the wrong person. The more people involved, the harder it is to keep it under the radar.”

Miller pushed the door open a little wider and we were able to see into the house. The place was a mess, but not the type of mess that someone makes through neglect. This place had been ransacked. Drawers had been pulled out, pictures pulled off the walls and sofa cushions slashed open. It didn’t look good.

Miller reached back to keep me from coming in any further, but I pushed against him. I wanted to get in there to see exactly what was going on. A groaning sound from inside caused us both to flinch. It sounded like someone was in pain. We stepped into the living room and tried to follow the sound.

The house was in a bigger mess than it had first appeared. There was a space where a picture frame had been on the wall, the paint behind it was a different color where the sun had been unable to bleach it. In the center of that space was a small wall safe that was hanging open. What had been taken?

There were wet footprints on the other side of the living room, wet handprints on the walls and pools of water in various other places where someone had stood for too long with their clothes