A Captivating Cozy Mystery

Deadly Latte

By Terence Burgess

I was trying to convince the espresso machine not to make my last week at The Old Brew personal when Tofu sneezed at a stack of moving boxes and knocked over my farewell cards.

“That is not helpful,” I told him.

He blinked up at me from the corner of the café, all ears and stubby legs and complete innocence. A corgi could deny a crime with his entire body. Tofu had elevated it to performance art.

The Old Brew opened at six thirty every morning, which meant I had spent the last three years of my life learning to function before sunrise. The café sat on the corner of Maple and Third in Somerset, wedged between Bea Crampton's flower shop and a narrow accounting office.

Inside, everything smelled like coffee, cinnamon, old wood, and the kind of secrets people told baristas because they forgot we had ears.

This was my final Wednesday shift.

In five days, I would pack the last of my life into a rental van and drive to Millbrook, where I had signed a lease on a small storefront I could barely afford and ordered a sign I still was not sure I deserved.

Grounds for Gossip. Every time I said the name in my head, my stomach lifted and dropped like an elevator with unreliable cables.