The Path of the Crooked (Hope Street Church Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  Dear Reader,

  The Hope Street mysteries were originally published by St. Martin’s Press and written under the name Jennifer Stanley. The titles, in order, were Stirring Up Strife, Path of the Wicked, and The Way of the Guilty.

  I have completely rewritten all three novels and am now publishing them under the name Ellery Adams as The Path of the Crooked, The Way of the Wicked, and The Graves of the Guilty.

  If you’ve read the original books, you will find the basic plot of the above titles unchanged. My intention was to polish the writing in each installment and rerelease the novels as crisper, cleaner, more engaging books. Stay tuned for forthcoming novels in the Hope Street mystery series as well!

  Thank you for supporting cozy mysteries.

  Your friend,

  Ellery Adams

  The Path of the Crooked

  Cooper Lee was at a crossroads. Her boyfriend of five years had just left her for another woman, she was living in an apartment above her parents’ garage, and her job as a copier repairperson was feeling a little, well, repetitious. Hoping for a fresh start and a new outlook on life, she joins the Bible study group at Hope Street Church. The last thing she expects while studying the Bible is a lesson in murder.

  When Brooke Hughes, the woman who first invited Cooper to Hope Street, is found murdered in her home, all signs point to her husband as the culprit. But Wesley Hughes was an elder at Hope Street Church, and the members of the Bible study are filled with disbelief that such a kind and loving man could take a life, much less his wife’s. Unwilling to let an innocent man and friend be railroaded into prison, the Bible group decides to investigate on their own.

  As Cooper and this humorously diverse group of people—including a blind folk artist, a meteorologist with a taste for younger women, and a soft-spoken web designer who might be out to catch Cooper’s eye—dig deeper into the clues, they’re about to discover that finding the truth sometimes takes a leap of faith.

  Beyond the Page Books

  are published by

  Beyond the Page Publishing

  www.beyondthepagepub.com

  This is a fully revised edition of a book that was originally published as Stirring Up Strife by Jennifer Stanley, copyright © 2010 by Jennifer Stanley. Revised edition copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Stanley.

  Material excerpted from The Way of the Wicked and The Graves of the Guilty copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Stanley.

  Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs

  ISBN: 978-1-940846-31-6

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Magnolia’s Marvels

  Excerpt from The Way of the Wicked

  Excerpt from The Graves of the Guilty

  Books by Ellery Adams

  About the Author

  Hatred stirs up strife.

  —Proverbs 10:12 (NKJV)

  There should be no strife

  with the vanquished or the dead.

  —Virgil

  1

  Cooper Lee was more comfortable with machines than people. She drove all over the city of Richmond, Virginia, to fix them. By the time she got to these copiers, laminators, or fax machines as they waited in their offices, hospitals, or schools, they were broken. Broken and quiet. Cooper would kneel beside them and meticulously lay out her tools, and as she did so the machines didn’t raise their brows in surprise or barely concealed amusement that a woman worked as an office-machine repairman. A thirty-two-year-old woman dressed in a man’s uniform shirt didn’t seem odd at all.

  Most importantly, they never stared at her eyes.

  Her left eye wasn’t worth a second look. It was a flat, almost colorless blue. No one would have dreamed of comparing it to sapphires or deep seas or cloudless summer skies. But the other eye, the eye Cooper had received through ocular transplant surgery after she’d been smashed in the face with a field hockey stick in junior high, was a shimmering green. It was exotic—invoking images of lush jungles flecked with firefly light or the green shallows of tropical waters.

  That single moment at field hockey practice, when a girl on Cooper’s own team had accidentally swung her stick too high as she prepared to hit the ball with incredible force, made Cooper more self-conscious than other teenagers. Still, she wanted what most people want. She wished for one close friend, to be loved by someone she could grow old with, and for her life to have purpose. Cooper thought she had found all of those in her boyfriend, Drew. Until he dumped her.

  Shaking off her gloomy thoughts, Cooper cut a piece of crumb cake for breakfast, wrapped it in a paper towel, filled her twenty-eight-ounce travel cup to the brim with milky, unsweetened coffee, and tossed a banana onto the passenger seat of her truck. She drove east on I-64, the sun blinding her most of the way. According to Bryant Shelton’s weather report, there wouldn’t be a cloud in the sky this April Friday. For once it appeared as though Bryant might be right, though it didn’t matter much to Cooper. She’d be inside offices most of the day, but could enjoy brief moments of sunshine while driving the work van from one destination to another.

  At ten minutes to nine, Cooper pulled into the parking lot belonging to one of a dozen corporate buildings resembling silver LEGO blocks. The Make It Work! headquarters was on the fringe of an area called Innsbrook, where hundreds of different companies, replete with an abundance of office equipment, depended upon Cooper and her coworkers to keep them operating smoothly.

  “’Mornin’, Coop!” Angela called out a chipper greeting as Cooper approached the reception desk. Angela’s smile, combined with a vase filled with plump yellow roses, created a warm welcome. Few people visited the office as most of Make It Work!’s transactions were conducted via telephone, but Angela bought a dozen roses every Monday, claiming that a good workweek always began with fresh flowers. Angela was in charge of appointments and billing. She was at her desk every morning before anyone else, wearing one of her vintage sweaters, a pencil skirt (both of which were always too tight), and a pair of sexy heels. Angela’s platinum hair, powdered face, and fire-engine-red nails and lipstick were supposed to call to mind an image of Marilyn Monroe, but Angela was older and plumper than the late actress had ever been. Still, Angela was the heart and soul of their small operation. Filled with pluck and boundless optimism, Angela could thaw even the frostiest of customers.

  “You’ve got an emergency waitin’ for you, sugar.” Angela examined her reflection in a small compact that was never out of reach. “Some poor lady has gotten her weddin’ ring jammed in the insides of a copier.” She held out a pink memo pad and ripped off the top sheet with a flourish.

  “At Capital City?” Cooper asked, reading the message. “I have to go over there anyway. They ordered half a dozen Hewlett-Packard 7410 multifunction printers and I have to bring them to Building F and hook them up.” She grinned at Angela. “A wedding ring, you say? I wonder how she got it stuck inside.”

  Angela shrugged. “You know folks like to try to fix things themselves. You’ve fished stranger things out of those machines. ’Member the bologna sandwich last year?”

  “Do I?” Cooper laughed. “That mayo was everywhere. And that obnoxious executive tried to blame it on his administrative assistant. What a jerk.”

  “That’s why I like workin’ for Mr. Farmer. He’s just as kind as he can be.” Angela’s eyes, beneath their curtain of long fake lashes, twinkled as they always did when she mentioned the boss’s name.

  Cooper buttoned up her gray Make It Work! uniform jacket and grabbed the keys to one of the company’s two vans. Ben, the other repairman, was already off on his rounds. He came in an hour earlier than Cooper and was out the door by 4:00 p.m. He was obsessed with developing his naturally thin frame into a walking mass of muscle, so he spent two hours at th
e gym before heading home to his wife—a woman no one from Make It Work! had ever laid eyes on. Ben never spoke of her either.

  “Can you grab some Mexican from Casa Grande for lunch?” Angela asked as Cooper opened the front door, wiggling the van keys until they sounded like metal castanets.

  “Sure. What would you like?”

  “Chicken quesadillas for me, something for yourself, and a Pan Filo burrito for Mr. Farmer. He almost went with a salad, saying that he needed to be more like Ben and watch his weight, but I told him that a little stuffing makes a nicer pillow.” Angela giggled, placed a twenty-dollar bill on the desk, and pushed it toward Cooper. “Lord, he turned beet red when I said that!”

  Cooper thought about her introverted boss being complimented by the effusive Angela. He was a man of few words and usually hid in his office, drooling over the latest issues of Technology Review, Popular Mechanics, and PC Magazine. Cooper couldn’t fathom why Angela found their short, balding, hermitlike employer so captivating. It was like having a crush on Danny DeVito.

  “See you in a bit, Angela.” Cooper saluted the other woman with her coffee cup and headed out to the van.

  A Mrs. Brooke Hughes of Capital City, one of the nation’s largest credit card companies, had placed the call regarding the lost wedding ring. Cooper could tell that Mrs. Hughes was either an administrative assistant or an investigative agent in the Fraud Protection Division by the fact that the copier in question was located on the third floor in Building C. The Fraud Protection Division took up most of that floor, with the exception of a large filing room Cooper had never had cause to enter.

  The second the elevator doors opened on the third floor, Mrs. Hughes leapt forward and latched on to Cooper’s arm like a barnacle.

  “Thank goodness you’re here!” she exclaimed. Looking down, she realized she held Cooper with a viselike grip and that the younger woman was politely struggling to reclaim her limb. “Oh, I’m sorry!” Exhaling loudly, she released Cooper and then raised her hands, which were coated with black toner. “I’ve really made a mess of things, I’m afraid.”

  Cooper could see that the woman had also smeared toner on her ivory blouse and berry-colored skirt. Mrs. Hughes, though agitated, had an open face and kind eyes. “Don’t worry, ma’am,” Cooper assured the woman and then introduced herself. “We’ll get your ring back. Which machine is it stuck in?”

  “Oh, please call me Brooke. The copier’s right outside my office.”

  Although she wore a name tag, Cooper thought it only polite to speak her name aloud since her client had established a friendly rapport, despite her distress.

  It turned out that Brooke Hughes was the head of the entire department. She had her own assistant and a full-sized six-thousand-dollar Sharp grayscale copier at her disposal. The chair at the assistant’s desk was empty and her workstation was covered with mounds of wadded tissues and untidy stacks of paper.

  “Cindi, my assistant, called out sick today. Again.” Brooke’s eyebrows shot up and down suggestively. “I’ve been trying to wrap up this case I’ve been working on and I just needed to pull together a few more documents.” She gestured at Cindi’s desk. “I was attempting to make sense of that mess when I came across a document that was very, very incriminating . . . ” She trailed off, looking abashed. “I’m sorry to go on about all this to you.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “It’s just that it was crucial for me to make multiple copies of this, ah, report so I could quickly store it in more than one location as soon as possible.” Brooke nervously picked at her cuticles and continued speaking in a hushed tone. “I’m concerned that the original document could suddenly disappear.” Her voice returned to normal as she continued. “But then the copier jammed and I was so desperate to make copies that I tried to fix it. When I reached under that panel”—she pointed inside the machine and Cooper noticed that Brooke’s finger was trembling—“and tried to rip out the paper, my ring slipped off my finger and fell down in there.”

  “Were you able to make any copies?” Cooper asked, concerned about the woman’s apparent anxiety.

  Brooke shook her head and made a visible effort to pull herself together.

  Wordlessly, Cooper rolled the copier away from the wall and scanned the carpet. She couldn’t see the ring anywhere, so she knew that meant she’d have to unscrew the machine’s back panel. After retrieving a flashlight from her toolbox, she gestured at the Sharp. “Has this copier been acting up lately?”

  “Yes, I believe it has. Cindi’s cursed quite loudly at it a few times. I also think she’s given it a few solid kicks.” Brooke winced as though she hated snitching on her assistant. “I’m afraid she’s not very good at following directions. Mine or a machine’s. But she’s a single mom and I just don’t have the heart to let her go.” She laughed humorlessly. “I swear I do both our jobs most of the time.”

  Unused to being watched as she worked, Cooper began loosening the screws that secured the back panel to the main body of the copier.

  “Unlike poor Cindi,” Brooke rambled on, “I’ve been blessed. My husband is my best friend. We were high school sweethearts, raised a terrific son together, and are celebrating our thirty-year anniversary tonight. That’s why I’m so desperate to get my ring back today.”

  Cooper glanced up at Brooke’s face. She was gazing out a window beyond Cindi’s desk, a small smile playing around the corners of her mouth. “Wesley, my husband, is picking me up after work today in a white limo. We’re going out to dinner at this little hole-in-the-wall where we had our first date. He doesn’t know that I know, but he also reserved the bridal suite at the Jefferson.” She shook her head dreamily. “We couldn’t afford anything like that when we got married, so I guess he’s trying to make it up to me, but I wouldn’t trade our first years of struggle for anything.” She grinned at Cooper. “Are you married?”

  “No, ma’am,” Cooper said without taking her eyes from her work. “My boyfriend of over five years left me six months ago. Really suddenly,” she added and then instantly clammed up. People didn’t usually speak to her once they had directed her to the machine in need of repair, so she was surprised to find herself sharing such an intimate exchange.

  “I’m really sorry.” Brooke spoke with heartfelt sincerity. “Five years is a long time. Many marriages don’t survive that long, so you two must have been doing something right.”

  “I thought so.” Cooper sighed. “And I’d do anything to have my life with him back. For those five years, he was my only friend, my whole world. I’m living with my parents again and just trying to figure out how to start again.”

  Brooke put a hand on Cooper’s shoulder. “You’re young and pretty and I can tell you must be awfully smart to be able to do what you do. Once time heals your wounds a bit, you’re going to find that men will line up around the block just to ask you out.”

  “You think so?” Cooper looked over her shoulder and grinned ruefully. “Where’s the front of that line?”

  Brooke smiled. “If you can laugh about your pain, you’re on the road to getting the best of it. And I know a place that might help you in the whole recovery process. Hold on a sec.” She pulled open a desk drawer, retrieved a marigold-colored brochure, and handed it to Cooper.

  “This is the church I belong to. I would love for you to attend a service with me. Come as my friend. Any Sunday you’d like. Just walk on in and find me and we’ll sit together.”

  Cooper stared at the yellow brochure. It was from Hope Street Church and simply had the church name, address, and the words Welcome, Friends on the cover. Brooke’s invitation was filled with warmth and hospitality, but the idea of attending an unfamiliar church wasn’t something Cooper felt comfortable doing. “I’ll think about it. Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Please do. And no more of this ma’am stuff. We’re just two women trying to make our way in the world. Brooke and Cooper.” She pointed at the brochure. “Take a look at that when you get a chance and feel free to call me if you have any questions. Now”—Brooke tugged on the bottom of her stained blouse—“I will stop blithering away like a chatty magpie and let you work your magic. I’ll be in my office, so please let me know if you need an extra pair of hands—to hold the flashlight or something.”