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  Praise for Lost Luggage

  2018 Macavity Award nominee for Best First Novel

  2018 Lefty Award nominee for Best Debut Mystery

  “Thomas makes a rollicking debut with this comic mystery featuring an unconventional protagonist who proves to have the skills of MacGyver. With its sexy overtones, this fun, character-driven novel will appeal to Janet Evanovich fans.” —Library Journal (starred review)

  “A breath of fresh air in a world gone mad . . . has my vote for one of the best new characters in mystery/crime.” —Kathy Boone Reel, The Reading Room

  “Thank heavens! I’ve been waiting for years to find a successor to Janet Evanovich, and I’ve finally found one.” —Cathy G. Cole for Kittling Books

  “Ms. Thomas has an absolutely lunatic talent for plot and one of the funniest first-person voices I’ve read in years . . . what kept coming to my mind as I read this were comedy films from the 30s—for me, the golden age of American film humor.” —Timothy Hallinan, Lefty winner and Edgar and Macavity Award-nominated author of the Junior Bender and Poke Rafferty novels

  “Thomas packs a whole franchise’s worth of adventures into her heroine’s debut . . .” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Laugh-out-loud funny and enchantingly ridiculous . . . highly entertaining . . .” —Jessica Howard, Shelf Awareness

  Praise for Drowned Under

  2020 Anthony Award nominee for Best Paperback Original

  2020 Lefty Nominee for Best Humorous Mystery

  “The passenger list in Wendall Thomas’s Drowned Under is a cavalcade of randy former nuns, gigolos, stowaways, near-extinct marsupials . . . and one brilliantly sexy disaster of a globetrotting travel agent named Cyd Redondo. Thanks to her wildly creative mind, the fruits of which produce frequent affronts to her dignity, Cyd is easily one of my favorite amateur sleuths in fiction today. Thomas’s writing flows effortlessly, and her plotting is complex but perfectly tied together. This is a remarkable novel in what is shaping up to be an exciting and hilarious series. Don’t miss Drowned Under or its predecessor, Lost Luggage. You’ll love Cyd, perhaps the funniest heroine out there. Highest recommendation.” —James W. Ziskin, Anthony, Barry, and Macavity Award-winning author of the Ellie Stone Mysteries

  “Bravo. Cyd Redondo, Redondo Travel, is at it again. What a wonderful sequel to Lost Luggage. With her clever mind, tart comebacks, and Balenciaga tote bag, Cyd is a fearsome force. I love her pluck, the way she digs her way out of trouble, and her willingness to do everything she can—even die—for her clientele. What a heroine for the modern age. Do not miss this!” —Daryl Wood Gerber, Agatha Award-winning national bestselling author of the Cookbook Nook and French Bistro Mysteries

  “Drowned Under is laugh-out-loud funny. With its finely tuned timing and zany, emotional protagonist, this novel puts Thomas in a class with Carl Hiassen and Janet Evanovitch.” —Nancy Tingley, Lefty-nominated author of the Jenna Murphy Mysteries

  “Fans of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum will cotton to Cyd.” —Publishers Weekly

  Books by Wendall Thomas

  Cyd Redondo Mysteries

  Lost Luggage

  Drowned Under

  Fogged Off

  Title Page

  

  copyright

  Fogged Off

  Wendall Thomas

  Copyright © 2021 by Wendall Thomas

  Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs

  Beyond the Page Books

  are published by

  Beyond the Page Publishing

  www.beyondthepagepub.com

  ISBN: 978-1-954717-52-7

  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.

  Dedication

  For Grady Thomas, my dad and my compass.

  I would give anything to be able to travel to where you are.

  Acknowledgments

  First and always, I’m grateful to James Bartlett, who dropped whatever he was doing to read pages, let me talk through a story problem, tell me whether the Tube was capitalized, or laugh at my jokes. His love, support, patience, good humor, and regular delivery of wildflowers during the writing of this novel was monumental. There is no better husband to be had.

  I also have a sister for the ages. I could not have finished the book without Kim Thomas Stout’s belief, counsel, imagination, good sense, and lightning-fast turnaround. Thank you, Belina.

  This novel also would not have been possible without the kindness of Emily Richard and Edward Petherbridge. Thank you for taking me to Kenwood and to Gordon’s, and for giving me a home away from home in West Hampstead for so many years.

  Thank you Daryl Wood Gerber, Rochelle Staab, Nancy Cole Silverman, Howard Michael Gould, Nancy Tingley, Smith Richardson, Gabriel Valjan, and Patty Smiley for crucial notes and support and to Paige Shelton, Jim Ziskin, and Catriona McPherson for the early reads. I will never forget your generosity during a time when everything was a struggle for everyone.

  I am eternally grateful to Bill Harris at Beyond the Page for being my dream editor and publisher. Your particular combination of professionalism and enthusiasm has been positively inspiring and I am so happy the series will live on with you.

  Thanks, as always, to the readers, book sellers, bloggers, and reviewers who have been so kind to Cyd and her purse.

  Finally, in many ways this book is an ode to libraries and museums, so sincere thanks to all the wonderful, heroic librarians, curators, scholars, artists, architects, and taxidermists who have created and protected the spaces where I have learned so much and been so happy.

  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

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  January 2007

  “Jack the Ripper had it made.”

  “Cyd! If you’re going to babble, babble en route.” Debbie Pinkowski slapped a twenty on the deli counter, grabbed our Italian heroes, and shoved me out the door.

  “I’m not endorsing spree killers or anything. It’s just, you know, no surveillance.” I could hear Debbie’s eye-roll over the click of my kitten heels. “Seriously. The man, if it was a man, sliced up five women, in public, walked home drenched in blood and entrails, and is still getting away with it, hundreds of years later. I have one drink, one drink, with Sally Jessup’s cousin—in Queens, for God’s sake—and it winds up in the Bay Ridge Sentinel. Now I’m a pariah. Again.”

  “He’s off-limits. Everybody knows that.”

  “He’s off-limits for sex or marriage. Not bourbon.”

  “Bourbon leads to marriage.”

  “I am living, breathing, 150 percent proof that that’s not true.”

  I checked my watch. It was street cleaning day. We sped up. Debbie and I had race-walked in synch since the first day of kindergarten, when we both sprinted for the thirty-foot rectory wall to escape Sister Ignatius Clara Clegg’s lead-filled ruler. We bonded over matching broken ankles and had been avoiding punishments and parking tickets together ever since.

&n
bsp; We turned onto 77th Street. It was still lopsided. I might be lucky. Bay Ridge Brooklyn’s “alternate side parking” meant when the city cleaned one side of the street, everyone double-parked on the other, making the whole neighborhood list to one side. This inevitably led to “neighborly altercations”—i.e., assaults—in the hours when half the neighborhood was blocked in. The instant the time was up, if you hadn’t moved, they’d hit you up with a huge ticket—like the one on the windshield of my emerald green 1965 Ford Galaxie 500.

  One of my New Year’s resolutions had been to swear less. Well, that didn’t last. As the youngest—and only girl—in a family of ten macho, overprotective cousins, I tended to swear a lot, especially when the object was the Department of Parking Services. I use the word services loosely.

  “See? This is what I’m talking about. How can I be the only person with a ticket? It’s Big Brousin everywhere I go. I can’t sneeze without a client dropping by with Benadryl.” Bay Ridge still felt like a small town, made smaller by the fact that I either was related to, had gone to school with, or dated about seventy percent of the population and booked the other thirty percent for their Golden Retirement Getaway. “How can everyone know I ate a whole box of Wheat Thins in one sitting last week? Is someone going through my recycling on an hourly basis?”

  “You ate a box of Wheat Thins in an hour?”

  “So?” I glared at her, then at the ticket, tempted to tear it up. But if I did, there’d be no chance my brousin Frank, newly restored to Detective status, could fix it for me. I rammed it into my red vintage Balenciaga bag and considered relocating to Iceland, which was thirty percent off at the moment on Lufthansa.

  I unlocked the door for Debbie. We were due at an underground poker game I needed to win and no one in my family needed to know about. I checked the rearview mirror every six seconds for familiar vehicles and tuned my scanner for the 68th Precinct’s radar. We were almost through Fort Hamilton when my new cell phone rang. Debbie held it up to my ear.

  “Cyd Redondo, Redondo Travel.”

  Debbie commandeered the wheel while I repeated a few “Rights” and “Okays,” and finally, “Thank you, bye.” She sighed as I took the wheel back and started the fifteen-point turn the acre-wide Galaxie required.

  “What is it this time? The Gottis leave their CPAP at Euro Disney?”

  “Nope. Body.”

  Chapter Two

  “A body. Right.”

  “Shep Helnikov. Heart attack. Isn’t that awful? He keeled over in his bedsit in London.”

  “Bedsit? Who are you, Tiny Tim?”

  “Sorry, I’ve been bingeing Prime Suspect. Anyway, he was there for his yearly trip and I guess his heart or something else vital gave out. I’m his emergency contact. I need to handle the paperwork and make some calls.”

  “What’s the hurry? He’s not going anywhere.”

  I finished my turn back toward the neighborhood. “That’s not the point. He’s a client.”

  “If you go by the office, we both know what’s going to happen.” I chose not to look at her, for obvious reasons. “So what do you actually have to do? Ship him back? Who pays for that?”

  “I always get my clients full repatriation insurance.”

  “Does that come with auto?”

  “I’m serious. It’s not like the British government has a special slush fund to transport aging lotharios who ignore their cholesterol back home.”

  “Shep Helnikov? A lothario? Seriously?”

  “Well, according to him and, well, Sister Ellery.”

  “No.”

  I shrugged. “She called it a blip.”

  “Well, if anyone knows about blips, it’s you and Sister Ellery.”

  “Really? What about Nathan O’Connor?”

  “More of a bleep than a blip, to be honest.”

  “Ha.”

  “Well, can you at least drop me at Food World? I’m out of Babybels.”

  I swerved into the Food World parking lot, which was crammed, as per usual, since Wednesday was “stale bread on sale” day. I asked Debbie to snag me some baguettes.

  “They’ll be weapons by the time you get them.”

  “Croutons in progress. Aunt Helen will love me.”

  “No, she’ll just tolerate you. You can always come stay with me, you know.”

  Debbie had lost her parents when she was fifteen and moved to Coney Island to live with her grandmother, who’d passed two years ago. Debbie kept the walk-up and the furniture, which smelled like gravy and home.

  I understood. I could totally see myself hanging on to Uncle Leon’s Barcalounger and Gary, his bison head, or Aunt Helen’s Dutch ovens and sherry glasses, not to mention my mother’s collection of trendy gardening tools. After all, I still drove my late father’s car and kept his compass in my purse at all times.

  “I’ll keep it in mind.” I wouldn’t, but I loved her for asking.

  She air-pecked me so as not to waste our shared supply of Wet & Wild’s discontinued Responsible Raisin—no animals were killed making this lipstick—and opened the car door, then froze.

  “Duck!” She squatted down below window level and jerked me to the seat.

  “What?”

  “It’s Pam Owens.”

  “They let her out?”

  “I think she’s working at the craft store on day release. Incoming, ten o’clock.”

  I looked left. “Oh God.” Pam Owens was Chip Jessup’s former fiancée and headed for the driver’s side.

  “Traitor! Slut! Slut traitor!”

  The entire parking lot turned to watch Pam, in a flowered smock and an unplanned ombré color job, bang on my driver’s-side window, then climb on the hood.

  “It was business!” I said, grateful the Galaxie was built like a battleship.

  “Yes! Whore business!”

  A gray-haired man in a golf shirt and khakis arrived, grabbed Pam by her waist, and pulled her down.

  “You have customers waiting, Pam. We don’t want to have to let you go.”

  She burst into tears, then leaned back toward my window. “How did he look? Was he wearing that pink shirt I gave him?”

  The man touched her arm. “Pam? Register.”

  She gave me a double middle finger salute and headed back toward the shopping center.

  I rolled my window down. “Sorry, Jerry. It was just a drink, honest.”

  “You should be ashamed of yourself.” He shook his head and walked away.

  Well, anyone who hadn’t witnessed this scene would hear about it at the Third Avenue Businessperson’s Association meeting, where Jerry, owner of Artsy Fartsy, was a member-at-large.

  Debbie pushed off the seat to standing position.

  “Thanks for sticking up for me,” I said.

  “You did fine. Let the governments handle the Shep stuff, you’ve got enough on your plate.” Several cars honked at me as I pulled out of the lot.

  I swung into the parking spot behind Redondo Travel. Due to a recent break-in, we had double dead bolts, which froze up if it went below forty degrees. In the old Bay Ridge, no one locked anything. If something got taken, everyone knew who did it, or knew exactly what the stranger looked like. Nonresidents were subjected to stares worthy of a police lineup.

  Maybe the old Bay Ridge was over. After I WD-40’d the lock open and entered, I hung my coat on the rack, flipped on the lights, and headed to the front of the office and my desk/sanctuary. Redondo Travel was started by my great-grandfather, Guido Redondo. My Uncle Ray had run it until a few months ago, when he’d had to make an unexpected change of residence, and, at least for the next eighteen months, or ten for good behavior, it was all mine.

  At least I didn’t feel like a complete fraud anymore. For my first sixteen years as a travel agent, I’d never actually been farther than New Jersey. It hadn’t been from lack of trying. I’d booked dozens of holidays for myself, from Winnetka to Bora Bora, but every time, something would conveniently come up with the business or the family, or my mother would lay on the guilt about leaving her “drowning in Redondos,” and I’d be forced to cancel. I’d tried to overcompensate with research but now, with two international trips under my belt, at least all of my knowledge wasn’t theoretical. I could look my clients straight in their cataracts and say Business Class was worth it and Global Entry wasn’t.