Chapter One
“Chief, we have a situation,” came over the radio.
“Code?” Adrian Skehan, Alden's sheriff, asked, tapping on the steering wheel impatiently.
“Unclear. Old McPherson is seeing blinking lights in the wilderness,” Holly, the dispatcher, explained. “Couldn't find a code for that.”
Of course not.
“Stationary or moving?” he asked without even flinching.
That was something he would never have said in his previous life as a Boston police detective.
A scoff. “Stationary, boss. Stationary. We have a code for moving lights, don't you remember?”
True. They had come up with it after Mrs. Hayden got into documentaries about extraterrestrial life and believed her lapses in memory had nothing to do with her fondness for cherry liqueur, but that she had actually been kidnapped by aliens.
Kids playing with a laser pointer hadn’t helped at all.
CIA was the code. Cherry-Induced Abduction.
How he’d ended up in such a crazy town, where law enforcement needed a special code list, he had no clue.
Well, he did. He just didn’t want to think about it.
“He said it’s coming from the old B&B. Sparkly, bluish-white lights.”
“On my way.”
Probably teenagers messing around.
Alden’s B&B had been closed for many years, but now that it had a new owner, it was being renovated and would reopen in a couple of months.
He parked the patrol car in front of the building and walked toward the swimming pool area, where, as reported, a bluish flickering light was coming from. As he approached, he heard chatter, the clicking of glasses, and someone yelling, “LOLOOO!”
Shit. Shit. Shit.
The dispatcher had been wrong. They did have a code for this: OG WMD, “Original Grandmas Weapons of Mass Destruction.” In his previous life, he’d chased terrorists and narcos. Now? Now he chased senior citizens. And more often than not, they managed to escape him. Not by running, though—simply by smiling and patting him on his arm as they faked ignorance.
The banes of his existence, Rebecca, Wilma, and Greta, were in the swimming pool, on the Jacuzzi side, wearing flashy flowery bathing caps and drinking what looked like champagne. They’d turned the lights on and the bubbles too. Music played from somewhere—one of the grannies’ cells, probably.
Man. He’d thought that once this bunch had got Mike, Rebecca’s grandson, and Kyra, his first love, hooked up, they would calm down, but no.
The second they saw him, the grannies glanced at one another, each drawing in a big breath. Then, with cheeks full of air, they dove, looking like crazed chipmunks.
For the love of God.
He crossed his arms and stood by the pool, waiting for them to come up for air.
It took a while before those damn bathing caps resurfaced. He had to give it to them: for eighty-year-olds, they had great pulmonary capacity.
“Well?” he asked with a glare, his voice as stern as he could muster.
Silence. Then Wilma, the one with the bright red roses on her cap, turned to her partners in crime. “Didn’t work, girls. He’s still here.”
“Never seen this place from this point of view,” Wilma said, sitting on the holding cell’s bench and glancing around. “Rather inhospitable.”
Rebecca and Greta, on the bench next to her, nodded.
“You know what’s missing? Curtains,” Greta suggested. “Some festive theme. In red. There’d be no view, but the bars would stay hidden. Would boost morale.”
Wilma assented. “And pillows. This bench is too hard.” And now that they were on the topic, an in-depth cleaning would do this place a world of good.
“In hindsight, it was a good decision to keep the bathing suits on,” Rebecca said.
Wilma also thought so. Or they would have been facing charges for breaking and entering, indecent exposure, and giving an officer of the law a heart attack.
“He got mad this time,” Greta murmured. “The bottle of champagne didn’t help.”
Neither had all the run-ins they’d had with Adrian lately.
“I can’t believe you arrested them,” they heard Rachel yelling from the office.
“Your granddaughter is here to rescue us,” Rebecca informed Wilma. Then she frowned. “We didn’t get a free phone call, like in the movies. Or did we get it and I spaced out?”
“I don’t remember calling anyone,” Greta mused, shaking her head.
Neither did Wilma, but whoever had phoned Rachel had had their best interests in mind. Rebecca’s grandson, Mike, would have bailed them out but would have given them a talk and taken the sheriff’s side. Greta’s son, Grady, would probably have paid to keep them behind bars. Rachel was the only one carrying the senior flag. She always took their side, no matter what. Even when they were in the wrong.
She’d rushed to their defense when the sheriff tried to get Wilma’s driving license revoked—which, taking into consideration that they had been driving twice the allowed speed and about to turn into oncoming traffic, kind of made sense. In their defense, though, Wilma hadn’t had her glasses on, so she hadn’t seen the speedometer. And the oncoming traffic consisted of an empty street with a couple of cars parked on it.
Rachel sounded outraged. “You can’t keep eighty-year-olds in a holding cell.”
“And I wouldn’t have if they hadn’t tried to convince one of my officers to release them.”
“Since when is it a crime to try to conv—”
“Slipping him money,” Adrian cut Rachel off.
“I told you it was a bad idea,” Rebecca mumbled to her friends. “Fifty bucks was too little.”
“Trying to bribe an officer is illegal. Breaking and entering is too,” Adrian stated, his voice calm. So far.
Rachel’s snort was loud. And rude. “There was nothing broken, and they didn't enter the building. They just used the outdoor facilities. You could say they were rehearsing for the opening, making sure everything worked.”
Wilma looked at her friends. “Why didn’t we think of that?”
The conversation outside seemed to grow louder and louder. Rebecca lifted her shoulders. “In between the champagne and the chlorine I ended up guzzling, I was a bit fuzzy. Still am.”
Greta pointed at the toilet in the far corner. “It’s the smell coming from that. As soon as we get out of here, we’re organizing a fundraiser to get this place in tip-top shape.”
Wilma couldn’t stifle her laughter. “You plan on visiting often?” At her friend’s shrug, she dug into the pocket of her bathrobe and produced her cellphone. “Let’s immortalize the moment. Just in case.”
“You had your phone all this time?” Rebecca asked.
“I just remembered. Let’s do a selfie. With the bars as the backdrop. Ladies, get your duck faces on.”
“I really don’t understand it,” Greta said with a sigh. “All our lives we were told small lips are beautiful, and look at us now. Right when we need them, they’ve deflated.”
“Like everything else,” Rebecca commiserated. “No lips, no boobs, no ass. Just shriveled-up skin.”