Chapter 1

It is summer in Gasper’s Cove when an excavator digging a new water line turns up a skeleton wearing a town inspector’s windbreaker. Kenny McQuarrie, the municipal inspector, is a quiet man happiest with his files, his rules, and his bulldog Max, and he is exactly the wrong person to be handed a secret. Asked to find out who the dead man was, he quickly discovers his own boss would rather he didn’t. Here is the first chapter of this Nova Scotia cozy mystery.

Skeletons don’t drop out of the sky along the coast of Nova Scotia.

Not very often.

It is even rarer for this to happen on a person’s own street. And even more unusual if the skeleton is dressed exactly like you are. Wearing a municipality of Gasper’s Cove, Nova Scotia navy windbreaker, muddy but intact, with the town crest, a lobster and herring entwined, on the chest.

As he stepped closer to the trench, Kenny McQuarrie accepted this was not going to be just another day on the job. Strange things sometimes showed up in digging—spoons, broken pottery, the odd bike wheel—but nothing like this. Nothing in his inspector’s course covered what to do when the bucket of an excavator caught a buried tarpaulin, raised it up, and unrolled a dead body like some giant unwelcome present into the dirt.

As soon as the remains fell, the excavator operator turned off the machine. He climbed down out of the cab and walked over to stand beside Kenny. Both men stared down into the ditch. All they wanted was to put in a new water line from the street to the house.

“You better call the police,” the operator said, who wished he had called in sick. He should have said yes when his brother asked him to go out on the boat.

Kenny nodded. His phone was already out of his pocket.

* * *

When the RCMP cruiser pulled up, Kenny was relieved the detachment had sent Wade Corkum. He didn’t know the female officer driving the vehicle, but he knew Wade. He and Wade were in the same bowling league at the Starlite Lanes. As the only two men in the league without families, they often talked after a game, before they each got into their cars to drive home alone.

This morning Wade was in his summer uniform, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police/Gendarmerie Royale du Canada badges sewn to the short sleeves of his grey shirt. When he arrived, he strode up to the edge of the trench, looked down, and gave them his professional assessment.

“Dead body,” he said. “Looks like it was buried here, and you guys dug it up.”

“Not my fault.” The operator looked out at the water. His brother had made the right choice to go fishing.

“We know that,” Kenny said, searching for a fragment of routine to hold on to in the unsteady circumstances. He kicked a lump of mud with his foot, as if encouraging it to tell its secrets. “They put in this street thirty years ago. Whoever this is was likely buried then.” He didn’t mention the jacket. Neither did the other two men.

The female officer, her name tag said Nolan, walked up. She took the excavator operator off for a statement, reassuring him that his unearthing of a person who had been in the earth was not his fault. Kenny, because he was, in some sense, also an official, helped Wade lay out the Crime Scene Tape around the site. Then he waited until the ambulance, more squad cars, and the unmarked medical examiner’s van arrived. Only then did the RCMP officer mention the jacket.

“We’re going to have to dig deep on this one,” Wade said, then catching himself. “Sorry, that was poor taste. What I mean is that there is an obvious connection to the town. There has to be a record somewhere of who this is. Can you help us with that, Kenny?”

Kenny was already ahead of him. He knew he was often underestimated. He understood that his stolid appearance, short and broad, with a jowled face like his bulldog Max, made him look like a plodder, but he wasn’t. He had a quick mind he could rely on, diligent on detail, and excellent at making connections other people missed. That was why he was such a good inspector. He was ready for Wade’s question.

“I’ll go in and pull the files. We still have the job reports,” he said. “I’ll find out who worked here and get back to you.” It was a relief to reel this upsetting situation back into systematic procedure, something he knew how to do. He looked down the short street to his own house, separated from this one only by Annette LeBlanc’s. Max had been walked. Kenny could go to the municipal offices immediately and get to work.

“That would be great,” Wade said. “This all has to be confidential, of course.”

Kenny was mildly offended. Didn’t Wade know he was a trusted civic employee too?

“Just between us,” Kenny said. “Not to worry.”

* * *

The truth was, Kenny was happy to go back to the office, particularly when it was closed to the public on the weekend. Next to the bungalow he shared with Max, or out in the woods birdwatching, he felt most at home in the Gasper’s Cove Municipal Offices building. He loved the order of his workplace. He enjoyed its industrially cleaned and shiny green linoleum floors and the “No entry without Authorization” sign over the door he walked through because he had the authority. But most of all, he loved his own office down the end of the hall. From it, he ran what he secretly thought of as his empire. There he made sure anything constructed, out of wood, brick, earth, rock and gravel, within his jurisdiction, was as safe and well documented as in any municipality in Nova Scotia, and maybe anywhere east of Montréal too.

He would apply that diligence to his research mission for the RCMP. Kenny was happy to be useful but disappointed to see he would not be alone to do it. A large RAM truck was in the municipal lot when he pulled in, parked in the spot marked “Chief Operations Officer.” This was a complication Kenny didn’t need. The truck belonged to his immediate supervisor Harvey Carter, a man whose mission in life was to interfere with Kenny’s systems. Harvey had come to the job from the big city and maybe that was the problem. More political than capable, the manager had his own ideas of who counted and who didn’t. At council meetings, the man was a charmer, quick to enquire about the councillors’ hobbies, weekends and children, and smooth at presenting the work staff had done as if it were his own. His employees knew a different Harvey. The boss they knew vetoed requests for new office chairs, banned birthday cakes in the lunchroom, and exercised his power to approve vacations like a guillotine— ready to fall and divide two weeks off in August into one at the end of November, and one at the beginning of February. No one invited Harvey home for dinner and the man was a newcomer, and this was Gasper’s Cove. That was unusual.

With his boss in the building, Kenny knew he had to be quiet. So once inside the door, he tiptoed behind the reception desk, put his briefcase down softly on her desk, eased open the drawer where the keys were kept, and gently extracted the one marked “Archives.” The room with old records was at the end of the hall. Harvey’s door was closed. Kenny walked past it as quietly as a man with his wide feet could. The key jangled in the locked door but was easy to turn. Kenny reached in, turned on the light in the small windowless room, and looked up at the high metal shelves. Somewhere in these dusty files, he would find the information Wade needed. Gasper’s Cove wasn’t a big place; 2,000 people tops, an island connected by a causeway to the larger town of Drummond on the mainland. It shouldn’t be hard to locate the building reports for the address where the body was found. Kenny hesitated. With Harvey on the premises, should he look at the files here or take them home? He made up his mind. When he found the folders for the year he needed, he tucked the bundle into his briefcase and he turned to leave.

Harvey was standing in the open door of the archive room, blocking his way.

“McQuarrie? Why are you here on the weekend?” Harvey was dressed in shorts, a pullover, and deck shoes. He looked like a man who had stopped in on his way to the yacht club. “Trying to fix up a mistake when no one is looking?” he asked, his attempt at a joke undone by the sneer on his face. His eyes were on the briefcase in his employee’s hand.

Kenny struggled for words. He never lied to anyone. He remembered his promise to Wade. Just between us.

“I don’t make mistakes, or try not to,” he answered. “But maybe someone did. It’s worth finding out.” Satisfied that he said neither the truth nor a lie, Kenny pushed past his boss, headed to the lobby, tossed the key on the desk, and rushed through the glass doors out to the warm air outside. Behind him, he heard Harvey call out his name. Kenny ignored it. Something felt off. Why was Harvey in the office today? His boss liked to come in late and leave early. Harvey wasn’t a working on the weekend kind of guy. Was he crazy or had there been something vaguely threatening about the way Harvey had stood in the Archives door?

Was it possible his boss was interested in the identity of the dead inspector, too? Or did he already know who it was?

Keep reading. Inspection Deception is available as an ebook, exclusively on Amazon and free to read in Kindle Unlimited, and in paperback. You can find it here.

Inspection Deception is one of four seasonal Gasper’s Cove novellas. All four are collected in Gasper’s Cove Quick Cozies Books 1–4: Witty and Whimsical Nova Scotia Amateur Sleuth Mysteries, available as an ebook, a print anthology, and an audiobook.