A Hard Day's Fright Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE PEPPER MARTIN MYSTERIES

  Dead Man Talking

  “There’s no savoring the Pepper Martin series—you’ll devour each book and still be hungry for more!”

  —Kathryn Smith, USA Today bestselling author

  “My favorite ghost hunter, sassy Pepper Martin, is back in another hauntingly good mystery.”

  —Shirley Damsgaard, author of The Seventh Witch

  Night of the Loving Dead

  “Gravestones, ghosts, and ghoulish misdemeanors delight in Casey Daniels’s witty Night of the Loving Dead.”

  —Madelyn Alt, national bestselling author

  “Pepper proves once again that great style, quick wit, and a sharp eye can solve any mystery.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] well-plotted paranormal mystery that…shares some answers that fans have had since we first met this entertaining character, and adds several surprising twists along the way.”

  —Darque Reviews

  Tombs of Endearment

  “A fun romp through the streets and landmarks of Cleveland…A tongue-in-cheek…look at life beyond the grave…Well worth picking up.”

  —Suite101.com

  “[A] PI who is Stephanie Plum-meets-Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw…It’s fun, it’s ‘chick,’ and appealing…[A] quick, effortless read with a dash of Bridget Jones–style romance.”

  —PopSyndicate.com

  “With witty dialogue and an entertaining mystery, Ms. Daniels pens an irresistible tale of murder, greed, and a lesson in love. A well-paced storyline that’s sure to have readers anticipating Pepper’s next ghostly client.”

  —Darque Reviews

  “Sassy, spicy…Pepper Martin, wearing her Moschino Cheap & Chic pink polka dot sling backs, will march right into your imagination.”

  —Shirley Damsgaard, author of The Seventh Witch

  The Chick and the Dead

  “Amusing with her breezy chick-lit style and sharp dialogue.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Ms. Daniels has a hit series on her hands.”

  —The Best Reviews

  “Ms. Daniels is definitely a hot new voice in paranormal mystery…Intriguing…Well-written…with a captivating storyline and tantalizing characters.”

  —Darque Reviews

  “[F]un, flirtatious, and feisty…[A] fast-paced read, filled with likeable characters.”

  —Suite101.com

  Don of the Dead

  “Fabulous! One of the funniest books I’ve read this year.”

  —MaryJanice Davidson, New York Times bestselling author

  “There’s not a ghost of a chance you’ll be able to put this book down. Write faster, Casey Daniels.”

  —Emilie Richards, USA Today bestselling author

  “One part Godfather, one part Bridget Jones, one part ghost story, driven by a spunky new sleuth…A delightful read!”

  —Roberta Isleib, author of Asking for Murder

  “[A] humorous and highly entertaining expedition into mystery and the supernatural.”

  —Linda O. Johnston, author of Feline Fatale

  “A spooky mystery, a spunky heroine, and sparkling wit! Give us more!”

  —Kerrelyn Sparks, USA Today bestselling author

  “[F]unny and fast-paced; her sassy dialogue…her bravado, and her slightly off-kilter view of life make Pepper an unforgettable character…The only drawback is waiting for book two!”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “[A] fun cozy with a likeable heroine and a satisfying plot.”

  —Suite101.com

  “Fans of ‘Buffy’ ought to enjoy this one…Original, funny, and shows plenty of scope for future books (all of which I aim to read)…[A] highly enjoyable debut.”

  —MyShelf.com

  Titles by Casey Daniels

  DON OF THE DEAD

  THE CHICK AND THE DEAD

  TOMBS OF ENDEARMENT

  NIGHT OF THE LOVING DEAD

  DEAD MAN TALKING

  TOMB WITH A VIEW

  A HARD DAY’S FRIGHT

  A Hard Day’s Fright

  Casey Daniels

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  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.

  A HARD DAY’S FRIGHT

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2011 by Connie Laux.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be re-produced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-47759-5

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  For Leslie Wey,

  as good a brainstormer as she is a friend.

  Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Prologue

  August 14, 1966

  Here’s the thing people didn’t get about Lucy Pasternak, I mean people who never met her: Lucy sparkled.

  Back when the rest of us Baby Boomers where white bread ordinary, Lucy was one of the beautiful people. Inside and out. She wasn’t afraid to let it show, either. Lucy let her personality shine through, no matter what people said or thought about her. Like that time the kids in her sophomore class were picking on a newcomer simply because she was new, and Lucy
stood up for the girl and welcomed her to her lunch table (which, because it was Lucy’s, was the lunch table).

  Or the night we went to the Beatles concert at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, and Lucy wore a miniskirt seven inches above her knees. Nobody was doing that then. I mean, nobody but the models in the fashion magazines. My mother practically choked when Lucy walked in to pick me up to go the concert. And me? I don’t think the word dork had been coined yet, but I didn’t need a word to explain how I felt standing next to tall, reed-thin Lucy in my turquoise and white plaid skirt, my blue blouse, my kneesocks, and the matching cardigan my mother insisted I wear in case it got chilly. Oh yeah, I was a dork, all right, and I could only pray that by the time three years passed and I was seventeen—as old and mature as Lucy—I’d be half as cool.

  Yes, we did use the word cool.

  I remember that distinctly, because I remember the first words Lucy spoke when we all piled onto the train (only, here in Cleveland, we call it the rapid) to head home after the concert.

  “I am cool! I am brave! I am, my dear friends, groovy, neat, and really something else!”

  Lucy flopped into the seat beside me. When most girls were still wearing their hair teased up into a beehive and hair sprayed to within an inch of its life, Lucy’s sweet corn-colored hair was past her shoulders and as straight as she could get it with the help of her mom’s iron and ironing board. She swung her head, and her hair gleamed. She was wearing golden lipstick and her nails glistened with gold polish, too, only Lucy called it “nail lacquer,” the way the English girls we read about in Seventeen did.

  Like I said, Lucy was cool.

  And she was so hyped-up that night, she wasn’t about to let anyone forget how cool.

  Just before the train lurched forward, Lucy jumped out of her seat and squealed the news for all the world to hear. “I am the bravest person in the world! The bravest…” She heaved a sigh and touched one finger to her golden lips. “And the luckiest!”

  When the old lady sitting across the aisle gave her a dirty look, I signaled Lucy to sit down. “You’re already in enough trouble for getting that F in your summer school poetry class,” I reminded her, sure to keep my voice down. The kids we were with were Lucy’s friends, and all of them were older than me. I didn’t want them to think I was some kind of reject, or worse, a know-it-all. “You’re lucky you got to go to the concert tonight. If your mom finds out you were acting up on the rapid—”

  Lucy threw back her head and laughed, completely ignoring my warning.

  “I kissed Paul,” she told the woman sitting across from us, and I guess she figured it was all she needed to say, because she laughed again and turned away from the lady so she could tell us what she’d already told us a couple dozen times since we walked out of the concert. Not that I minded or anything. As far as I was concerned, Lucy could go right on telling the story forever. It was that amazing.

  “I got out of my seat and ran onto the field and jumped up on stage and…” Her sigh heaved the pink blouse she was wearing with her khaki-colored mini. “I kissed Paul McCartney. Right on the mouth.” Lucy giggled and I did, too. Before that night, there was no way I could ever have imagined anyone getting that close to one of the Beatles, much less my very favorite Beatle, and when the anyone in question was the girl who had once been my babysitter and now considered herself my friend…

  A shiver of excitement raced up my spine just as Lucy crooned, “Oh yeah, I’m brave, all right. And I’ll never let anything or anyone…” Lucy didn’t look my way when she said this, but she did glance around at the other kids who were with us. She looked at Janice Sherwin and Bobby Gideon, in the seat in front of us, and then to the seat behind ours where Will Margolis and Darren Andrews sat side by side. “I kissed Paul McCartney! I’ll never let anyone else’s lips touch mine again. Ever.”

  “Get over yourself!” Bobby turned around and knelt on the seat so he could boff Lucy on the arm. “A couple thousand people stormed the stage at the concert. You weren’t the only one.”

  “I was the only one who made it all the way up on the stage. I was the only one who kissed Paul. And…” Lucy knew a thing or two about pausing for dramatic effect. I’d tried it myself a couple times and always came off looking more like a goofball than dramatic and brooding like Lucy. “I was the only one of all of us who had the nerve to get out of my seat and dodge the cops out on the field.” Lucy gave each of them another appraising glance, and yeah, she looked as superior as she was feeling. But then, she had every right. No way I could hold it against her, especially when she patted my knee to show she understood why I hadn’t joined her when she took off running. Lucy knew my parents would have killed me if they found out I ever did anything that reckless. That—along with the fact that I was a born chicken—meant I’d never have the nerve, and Lucy knew it. But then, compared to Lucy and her friends, I was just a kid. “I didn’t see any of you up there on stage with me and the Beatles,” she told her friends.

  “Thanks to you, the concert almost got canceled.” The comment, just a little icy around the edges, came from Janice, and I wasn’t surprised. Truth be told, Janice Sherwin terrified me, but then, Janice pretty much terrified everybody. In her tailored clothes and with her carefully bleached and ratted hair, Janice was a force to be reckoned with and not somebody who would tolerate the kind of chaos we’d all seen break out soon after the Beatles took the stage. The next day’s paper would call it a riot, and they were pretty much right. In fact, the concert had been stopped for about half an hour. That is, until some man finally came out on stage and threatened to cancel it altogether if everybody didn’t get back in their seats.

  I was fourteen and more than a bit of an idol worshiper. I was convinced that if Lucy hadn’t decided to sit back down, nobody else would have, either.

  Silently, I thanked her for coming to her senses and allowing the show to go on so I could hear Paul sing “Yesterday” live and in person.

  “If they hadn’t let the Beatles come back on stage, I never would have forgiven you.” This time, there wasn’t just a tinge of ice in Janice’s words, they were positively frozen. She tossed a look over her shoulder at Lucy that was just as cold. And twice as surprising. As the two most popular girls at Shaker Heights High School, Lucy and Janice had always been best friends, even though Lucy was going to be a senior that year, and Janice was a junior. I hadn’t seen them together much over the past few months, but that wasn’t all that unusual. Lucy worked a part-time summer job at the Shaker Heights Country Club, and Janice had spent a good part of June and July traveling in Europe with her parents. It wasn’t my imagination, though—Janice was frosty but Lucy was just as cold right back.

  Their icy clash put a chill on what had been, up until that moment, the most exciting night of all our young lives.

  “Hey, but the show did go on, right? So everything’s copacetic.” I wasn’t surprised that Will was the one who jumped in to smooth things over. Will was what the other kids called “sensitive.” I was just going into my freshman year at Shaker and I didn’t know much about boys, but I knew I liked the sensitive ones.

  When I smiled at him over my shoulder and Will smiled back, I turned around—fast—before everyone on the train could see that my cheeks had turned as red as a fire engine.

  “Leave it to Lucy to go where angels fear to tread.” It was safe for me to turn around again, because Darren said that, and I could look his way—and Will’s—without looking too conspicuous. “Lucy is my hero.”

  If Darren Andrews had said something like that about me, I would have melted into a puddle of mush; he was that much of a dreamboat. Darren had sandy hair. It was a little long, and he’d have to get it cut before school started again in a few weeks, but for now, Darren’s shaggy hair and his sparkling blue eyes made him look like the star of one of those surfer movies. That night, Darren was dressed just like a surfer, too. He was wearing shorts made out of that bleeding madras fabric that faded and ran a little e
very time it was washed, and a shirt that was open enough at the neck to reveal the Saint Andrew’s medal that was his prized possession.

  Yes, I know, I was only an almost-freshman, and Darren, who was going to be a senior, was way out of my league. But thanks to my friendship with Lucy, I knew things about the older kids, and I knew that Darren and his family liked to flaunt their connections to old Scottish royalty and that Saint Andrew, as the patron saint of Scotland, represented their blue-blooded roots. Who could blame him for showing off?

  “You gonna tell your parents what you did tonight?” he asked Lucy.

  Her jaw went rigid. But then, Lucy was always up for a challenge. “Maybe I will.”

  “Maybe you’ll get grounded for life.” Since he knew it wasn’t nearly as likely that Lucy’s hip mom and dad would punish her the way I knew my stodgy parents would have done, Bobby laughed. “Maybe we all will if our folks find out what you did and think we ran out on the field, too.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Unlike the easygoing surfers in the movies, Darren had a way of lifting his chin and straightening his shoulders that pretty much said he was better than everybody else. From what I’d heard, it was true, so I didn’t take it personally. “My parents know I’d never do anything like that,” he snapped. “After all, people like us—”

  “Don’t mingle with folks from the lower classes.” Bobby said this like it was a joke, but we all knew it was true. Maybe joking about it was what made it possible for Darren and these other kids to remain friends. Shaker was anything but a second-rate community, and none of our families was destitute. In fact, kids we met from other schools always assumed we were rich, just because of where we lived. But in the great scheme of things, none of us was in Darren’s class. The fact that he hung out with us, anyway (or at least that he hung out with Lucy and the others—I was pretty much invisible in Darren’s eyes) said a lot about Darren.