A Death in Duck: Lindsay Harding Cozy Mystery Series (Reverend Lindsay Harding Mystery Book 2) by Mindy Quigley

Christmas.”
    Simmy and Lindsay sloshed up the front steps to the covered porch. Although Aunt Harding had the house painted regularly, the elements were always one step ahead of any maintenance regimen. Over time, the front door had taken on the weathered appearance of driftwood. The narrow covered porch that wrapped around the house on two sides did little to shield them from the pelting rain.
    Lindsay had made the long walk carrying her large travel backpack over her shoulders and holding a Tupperware box containing her Jell-O mold. She handed the Tupperware box to Simmy and tried the door, but, to her dismay, she found it locked. She pounded with her fist, hoping to be heard over the sound of the wind. As her knocks announced their presence, the staccato barking of a large dog bore down on them from inside the house. They could hear the dog thundering toward the door like a charging rhino. Lindsay looked at Simmy in wonderment. Aunt Harding had never kept a pet, and had always seemed far more likely to shoot an animal than keep one in her house. Simmy didn’t meet Lindsay’s gaze; her eyes were fixed on the door, as if she doubted its ability to contain the animal on the opposite side.
    “Hush, Kipper! I said hush!” Aunt Harding’s sharp command silenced the dog. The old woman opened the door. But only a crack. “Who’s there?” she called suspiciously.
    “It’s me, Aunt Harding. Did you forget I was coming?”
    “Who’s that with you?”
    “Simmy.”
    “Why’s she here?”
    “Let us in. We’re soaked.”
    Aunt Harding reluctantly backed away from the door and allowed them to pass. Lindsay’s eyes first fell on the menacing visage of a black and orange Doberman. It stood rigidly alongside Aunt Harding, coiled like a cobra about to strike. Her eyes flitted around as she tried to remember if it was best to make or avoid eye contact with a fierce dog. She settled for avoidance. There was no way on earth she was going to convince that creature that she was the Alpha dog.
    As she took stock of her surroundings, she saw that the addition of the ferocious dog wasn’t the only dramatic transformation the house had undergone since she had last visited. In the past, the furnishings had reflected their owner—Spartan, hard, and not designed to entertain. The dominant piece of furniture in the house was a large steel gun safe, which stood in one corner of the dining room. Aunt Harding had always kept a collection of a few dozen guns, mostly antiques and rifles for duck hunting. Lindsay had been fascinated by the weapons when she was a child—by the way Aunt Harding caressed them with a cleaning cloth with a gentleness she never showed to people, by the way their disassembled components would lay in orderly lines across the dining room table like soldiers mustering for battle. Lindsay was never given the combination to the safe, and she never asked for it. Even when Aunt Harding gave her a rifle for her tenth Christmas, she had to relinquish it to be locked away for safekeeping whenever it wasn’t in use.
    The house still held little in the way of soft furnishings—it remained the only home Lindsay had ever seen that didn’t contain a sofa. Yet, it had undergone an undeniable softening. Flowered curtains hung in the windows. A fleece blanket was draped over the back of one of the wooden chairs which served as the living room furniture. There was even a two-foot tall, plastic Christmas tree on top of the gun safe. It rotated in its stand and lit up with a rainbow of LED colors.
    Most surprising of all, the smell of home cooking filled the house. Aunt Harding’s culinary repertoire had consisted mainly of oatmeal, baked potatoes, and cheese on toast. If she’d had a good day fishing, she was occasionally known to fry up a fillet of black drum or king mullet in butter. Even all these years later, Lindsay felt slightly cheated that she had spent the best years of her childhood in a place that was totally devoid