Kerning to Crime Read online

  Kerning to Crime

  A Hand Lettering Mystery

  Jessa Archer

  Archer Mysteries

  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

  Epilogue

  More Jessa Archer Cozies

  About the Author

  Kerning to Crime

  Kit Perry is a rich, handsome rogue with a scandalous past. He's also Cedar Valley's newest businessman. But is he their newest murderer? When hand lettering amateur sleuth Jamie Lang stumbles upon Kit with a beautiful woman dying in his arms, he sure looks like it.

  Almost everyone in town is convinced Kit is guilty—of being a devastating charmer and murdering his half sister, Steph. But Steph has almost as many enemies as the entire population of Cedar Valley, and a million little reasons for any of them to want her dead. Kit proclaims his innocence and asks Jamie for help. Despite Kit's killer smile, Jamie isn't convinced he murdered his sister. Now it's up to Jamie to uncover the truth and stop the killer from striking again.

  Chapter One

  Cedar Valley, WA

  Jamie Lang

  My name is Jamie Lang. Welcome to Do It with Flourish.

  I sat at the drafting table in my home studio, lettering the words in flowing script on my favorite marker pad. That pad was fantastic—semi-transparent, heavy weight, acid-free, white, and no bleed-through. No bleeding, either. Both so important when working with markers. I always recommended the pad in the comment section of my vlog along with the rest of the list of my favorite hand-lettering supplies.

  I was showing off and flourishing the words to my heart's content, especially the word "flourish." I mean, it was made for it, right? The f. The h. Loop. Swirl. I did love a good flourish. Flourishing was freedom and breezy hand movements. Flourishing made life fun.

  "If you enjoy these lessons, subscribe to my YouTube channel. Leave a comment and be automatically entered for a chance to win this week's giveaway. I'm giving away one of my summer subscription boxes. These are sold out, people. This is the only way to get one. Don't miss your chance to win one. And be sure to look for the signup for the fall box coming soon!"

  My eye suddenly itched. I blinked. That didn't help. I needed both hands for my lettering, so I rubbed it with my shoulder. And brushed one of my false eyelashes loose.

  I was filming my vlog. My best female friend in the world—Nora Nash—had a camera positioned over my shoulder, playing director and cameraperson at the same time. I have two best friends—one male, one female. I like variety, what can I say? My best male friend is Ridge Calhoun, Cedar Valley chief of police. The problem with Ridge is that there are times when we both think about crossing the line from friendship into something more. And that is dangerous territory for both of us.

  Because my vlog was all about hand lettering, the camera was on my hands ninety percent of the time. In preparation for filming, I'd gotten the full deal manicure at Nancy's Nail Salon in town—hand wax, massage, moisturize, and manicure. My hands and my lettering looked great.

  Unfortunately, my makeup suddenly did not. One of my eyes was watering. The false eyelash I'd shoulder-rubbed was flapping and threatening to fall off, obscuring my vision. I kept blinking in a vain attempt to get it back in place, winking like I was making a bad attempt at a come-on.

  Nora did my makeup for important events and vlog filming. She was one of the best makeup artists in King County and beyond. This particular morning, however, she'd been running behind, so I'd tackled part of the job myself.

  I wasn't as good as Nora. But after years of watching her do my makeup and learning tricks from her, I was usually pretty competent in a pinch. Unfortunately, I had never mastered the art of applying false eyelashes. Fortunately, Nora had arrived in time to apply the lashes. Which was why I was surprised that I was able to knock one loose so easily.

  In the lettering vlog space, I had a friendly rivalry going with London calligrapher Hot Hugh and his YouTube channel. I had to look good. It was hard enough competing with his sexy British accent, tight black T-shirt, and bulging biceps. Now I imagined I looked like a woman with a big spider about to fall off her eye.

  Both eyes started watering, even the one with the good eyelash. I blinked, blinked, blinked. I couldn't see my paper. I squinted the good eye. If I could only get through the intro, we could fix the makeup before starting to film the main body of the show…

  "Today's lesson is on kerning." Blink. Blink, blink. Sniffle. "How to kern and kern and kern. Kerning is the spacing between letters."

  I blinked again and the eyelash seemed better. "In calligraphy and many forms of typography, kerning is supposed to be even and perfectly uniform. In hand lettering, we have more leeway and freedom of expression. Ours is an art form, not true handwriting. Because of that, we need to think of kerning as spacing the letters to please the eye—"

  Plop. A big black false eyelash—the ultra-thick glamour model—fell onto the page, right into the middle of my name.

  "Cut!" Nora reached over my shoulder and plucked the eyelash from the page between two fingers. "I knew I should have gone back for my own eyelash glue. How old was yours, anyway?" She was testy. Everyone was tense today.

  Nora had run out of glue from her travelling makeup kit after attaching my first eyelash. She'd had to use an old tube of mine that had been lying around in the bottom of my makeup drawer since the dawn of time. She hadn't been happy about it. But I was insistent that there was no time to lose and no reason to go off after a new tube.

  I shrugged. "I don't keep track." A lady never admits to either her age or the age of her makeup. Especially her eye makeup. It's probably even rude to ask her about it. "Did we make it through the intro before the lash fell off?"

  "I think so." Nora screwed her mouth to the side as she studied the lash and pulled the dead glue from it. "And your eyelash curler! Didn't I tell you that you needed a new one weeks ago? It was on its last hinge last time we used it." She gave me a penetrating look that convicted me of crimes against good makeup practices. Without even a trial.

  Yes, my eyelash curler had broken during the application, too. Getting new eyelash curlers wasn't high on my list of things to do.

  "How do you expect eyelashes to stick to straight lashes with bad glue?" Nora blew out an exasperated breath.

  I hoped it was a rhetorical question, because I had no answer. No good one, anyway.

  "Before we can continue with the video, we need fresh glue and a new eyelash curler. If only I'd brought mine." She replayed the video she'd taken, watching it closely. "Yeah, we got the intro before the eyelash fell in."

  I relaxed. "Good."

  She glanced at her watch and bit her lip. "Shoot. I'm pressed for time. We can try to shoot the rest without showing you." She shot me a hopeful look.

  I shook my head. "That's a no-go. Crazy as it sounds, my subscribers like to see me at some point during the video. If they don't, I hear about it. I don't understand it either. I'm not Hot Hugh, that's for sure."

  "In that case—can we pick this up again later? Say this evening? I barely had time today in my schedule for a smooth filming with no delays. I have to be in Seattle by ten."

  She was a volunteer. There wasn't much I could say to keep her from her paying gig without looking like a bad best friend.

  "Sure," I said. "More time for me to practice. As long as we finish up in time for my usual Thursday release." In my world, everything seemed to happen on Thursday.

  "Good." Nora glanced out the window and frowned. "This awful smoke and heat. August weather used to be so beautiful here when we were young. Clear and hot. Lake weather. Remember that? We showed off in our bikinis and flirted with all the guys? Rut and you—" She cut herself off.

  Ridge's identical twin, Rut—Rutledge—Calhoun was my late fiancé. His death was the main thing keeping Ridge and me in the friend zone. Rut had died fighting a forest fire. He was only twenty-one. I still wasn't over his death. Did a person ever really get over a sudden, violent, terrifying death like his? It had cracked my world. And Ridge's. The scars still remained in both of us. The forest fire smoke hanging in the air was an ugly reminder.

  Nora put her camera away. "What happened? We're suddenly buried in smoke every August now. What's it been? At least eight years now?"

  "Something like that," I muttered.

  "Someone needs to get a handle on their forest management."

  By which she meant Oregon and Canada. Smoke was hitting us from both south and north.

  Smoke from a distant, or many distant, forest fires had rolled in like fog several days ago. I'd seen the aerial pictures on the news. The air was hot, stagnant, and still. The best we could hope for was an onshore flow—a breeze coming from the west off Puget Sound—to clear the air. Or rain. But August was historically one of our driest months.

  In Cedar Valley, and the rest of the Puget Sound area, the air glowed orange where the sun was daring enough to try to penetrate it. There were some days it felt like we were living at the base of Mount Doom. The sky had that gloomy, ominous quality.

  Hardly anyone in Western Washington has home air conditioning. We usually don't ne
ed it. Not for more than a few days or weeks a year. Because of the smoke, most people were cooped up in the homes with closed windows and only fans for cooling.

  The smoke was killing the previously robust Cedar Valley August tourist season. And let's not even talk about what it had done to the wedding industry here. Since almost everyone's livelihood depended on tourism, the smoke had the town on edge. Tensions were high and tempers tightly strung. The air quality had gotten so bad that people were advised to stay inside if possible. Which meant no one wanted to go camping, or glamping, or hiking, or bike riding. The smoke was so thick that you couldn't see Mount Rainier through the giant picture window in the Cedar Valley Bakery. And outdoor weddings and gardening events at Lighthouse Gardens were out, too.

  Little bits of ash floated in the air. If you left your car out too long, you came back to find it covered in a thin layer of soot. And people with asthma or COPD had to wear masks.

  The situation was dire. There really wasn't much reason for me to even open Flourish in this smoke. Which was why I'd decided to film my vlog from home.

  "Is the air quality in Seattle any better?" I asked Nora.

  She shook her head. "Worse, I think. All the outdoor photo shoots have been put on hold until further notice." She grabbed her purse. "See you tonight?"

  "Sounds good. Drive safely." I gave her a quick hug.

  She turned over her shoulder as she reached the door. "Go into Covington to the new strip mall and get some lash adhesive and a new eyelash curler. A good one! Don't cheap out on me." She gave me a stern look and dashed out into the smoke toward her car.

  I went to the bathroom and took a look at myself in the mirror, hoping I looked exotic with only one lash. I mean, why shouldn't I? People and pirates wore only one earring and looked cool. I sighed. Nope. I looked more unbalanced than glamorous. It wouldn't do to go out with only one lash on. I gently removed it and peeled the glue from it. That was better. I put on a touch of mascara and grabbed my purse.

  Was I going to go all the way into Covington? A whole fifteen-minute drive? And be overwhelmed with makeup choices? Of course not! I headed out the door to Cedar Valley Drug, owned and operated locally right here in Cedar Valley by the Dutt family since 1962. Support your local businesses was my motto.

  Cedar Valley Drug was a short walk from my house. Everything in town was a short walk from my house. The air wasn't good for breathing, but I couldn't see taking the car. The drugstore was located on the corner a block from Lighthouse Gardens and a few doors down from what used to be Culp's Stationery. This spring, Culp's had been sold to a mysterious new owner who was modernizing and expanding the building. Construction had been going on all summer, further adding to tensions and worries about the tourist season. Progress and change were inevitable, but in the meantime, the inconvenience and eyesore of construction worried people. And the new owner was keeping the nature of the new business a secret.

  The people of Cedar Valley had plenty of secrets of their own. But they didn't trust outsiders in general, and trusted secretive outsiders with plenty of money to throw around even less. Fear ran rampant that the new business would upset the equilibrium and compete with some of the tried and true businesses in town, businesses that ran on a shoestring margin.

  I ignored the construction and swept into the drugstore, focused on reaching the makeup aisle. It had all the usual drugstore brands, just not in abundance. The selection ran more toward what hikers, campers, bikers, and tourists might run out of on vacation. Most of those categories weren't interested in lash glue and eyelash curlers. But I was in luck—Cedar Valley Drug carried one kind of each.

  The eyelash curlers hung on a rack in the middle of a display of tweezers, emery boards, and nail clippers. I pulled one off and smiled. Eyelash curlers always reminded me of my late grandma, Auntie Opal's sister. She used to let me play "makeup" and use her curler to get glammed up. I still remembered the frustration of trying to catch my short lashes in the curler. Grandma patiently encouraged me, letting me use her two-sided swivel vanity mirror while I practiced. My, how big my eyes looked in the magnifying side.

  But how beautiful I felt strutting around, batting my curled lashes so people would notice. Eyelash curlers, at least the kind the drugstore carried, hadn't changed much since then. Same design. Same cheap, silver-colored metal. I loved it.

  I grabbed the lash adhesive as well and spun on my heel, turning toward the cashier. Looking down, I took a step right into a rock-hard chest. I looked up into the devilish eyes of Kit Perry.

  Chapter Two

  Kit Perry was gorgeous and hard to mistake for anyone else, even dressed in regular street clothes. Very few men on the planet could make a woman's pulse flutter the way he did. The only other time I'd seen him in person, he'd been dressed in leather pants and a jerkin, looking like a medieval lord or knight. He was also hard not to drool over—tall, blond, beautifully handsome, broad-shouldered, and rich. He wasn't from Cedar Valley. He was an interloper, not a tourist. I'd just found out recently from Wanda Paul that Kit was the secretive new owner of the Culp building. Her husband, Paul Paul, was on the city council and had the inside scoop. Since then, there had been rumors and sightings of Kit skulking around the construction site in a hard hat. But this was the first time I'd seen him out in the wild, hat-less.

  I'd met Kit only once—at billionaire Brandon Watson's mansion on Lake Washington. He'd trained a crossbow on me. Kit had been a suspect in the murder of my dear friend Ralph Coggins. Kit had been cleared, of course, and the real killer caught. But I still wasn't sure I trusted Kit. Or his sister.

  "Jamie, isn't it?" Kit's mouth curved into a gorgeous grin, the kind that tickled hearts and made toes curl. His gaze traveled to my eyelash curler and lash glue. He lifted an eyebrow.

  "Good memory. Nice to see you again, Kit. I'm filming my hand lettering vlog today. I must look glamorous. I have a reputation to maintain. Because, hand letterers are next to actresses and princesses on the glamor scale, obviously." I grinned. "Mascara alone won't do, and I ran out of lash glue." I waved the glue around. "Adding insult to injury, my antique lash curler broke."

  Why was I explaining all this to him? I had a habit of running off at the mouth around attractive men. Like he cared about my lashes. Kit had a way of making me feel fifteen again. And not in a good way.

  "Is that so?" He was such a scoundrel with that sexy voice.

  "No. But my followers like to believe it, so I humor them."

  He stared into my eyes. "Your lashes look perfectly adequate to me."

  Damned by faint praise.

  I made a point of looking him over and looking around him. "What? No crossbow today? How very disappointing."

  He laughed and held up a box of latex gloves. "No. Left it at home. I'm wielding another lethal weapon today."

  "Latex gloves?" I looked at him skeptically.

  "I have a hereditary latex allergy. Severe one." He leaned close. "Should this box somehow rip open and spill gloves on me, my life would be in danger. Anaphylactic shock."

  Everyone knew about latex allergies. I knew they could be painful. But I hadn't realized they could be fatal. Then again, from the devious look on Kit's face, he could be pulling my leg. "Living dangerously. I hope you're carrying an epinephrine pen."

  He shook his head. "I have enough junk I have to carry around in my pockets. I'm living on the wild side."

  "Hope your life insurance is up to date."

  He laughed again. It was a deep, masculine sound, so full of joy that it was hard not to imagine he was flirting with me. But that was crazy. A man like him?

  "One might ask why a man who's so allergic is buying latex gloves."

  "Not only latex gloves, but the last box in town." He sighed. "How do you live like this? The shopping is terrible here."