Sunny Side Up by Kathryn Elizabeth Jones

Watch for Sunny Side Up  coming soon on all Amazon sites.

Sunny Side-Up will be available for purchase at Amazon in October. 

Excerpt from Sunny Side Up by Kathryn Elizabeth Jones.

The old man wore a black suit, a starched white shirt and a black bow tie, the standard fare for men of his age. They were both on a cruise ship, and though she didn't really know him, they’d been speaking. At least, she'd been speaking. The man was drunk and could hardly stand; he'd kept asking her to repeat herself.

She'd been speaking about her divorce and subsequent trip when his blue-gray eyes had clouded over and he'd collapsed in a heap in front of her.

She'd reached for him, of course. But his body had slipped through her fingers like a fish in shallow water.  He'd tried to breathe, taking in two shallow gasps. But he was lying there now, his blistered face to the sky, his eyes staring, his left leg bent behind him in some sort of twisted leap. He was dead, Susan was sure of that.

            “Help!” she screamed, watching the dance floor for someone, anyone...

            And then suddenly, she was there, an old woman in a gold dress, her bronzed skin twinkling against the burnished fabric. She leaned over the man.

            “What happened?” the old woman's voice quivered. It reminded Susan of a child’s.

            As the salty air caressed Susan's cheeks, she looked out at the great blue ocean for only a moment and thought of Henry.

            “I…I don’t know, we were just talking.”

            The woman in gold, her hair perfectly coiffed, reached for the man’s wrist. And in that moment Susan saw Henry James as John Middleton, lying dead by the old coal burning stove at the Hotel Camaro.

            The woman was sobbing, leaning over the man, trying to shake him awake.

            “What did you do?” she wailed. Her eyes were a blotchy black and mascara was running down her naked neck.

            Susan looked away.

The champagne glass near the deck’s railing had spilled. The place where it lodged was a red and sticky, wet.

            “I can’t wake him!”

            The waves must have crashed against the large cruise ship, but Susan hardly noticed; she barely saw those who had suddenly gathered around her including the face of Charles, one of the officers on board ship. He pronounced the man dead.

            “But, how can he be…dead?” the old woman gasped, holding her chest, breathing in the sea air in shuddering gasps.

Susan stood next to the railing. She looked out at the sea and wasn't sure when the old man was taken away with his sobbing wife. How had she gotten to the railing anyway? Why was the man dead? And just as important, who had killed him?

Bio:

Kathryn Elizabeth Jones is a lover of fiction and nonfiction. Her Susan Cramer Mystery series stems from her love of Nancy Drew Mysteries read as a teen and her love in later years for the popular television program, Murder She Wrote. When not writing mysteries, Kathryn dabbles in Christian fiction and nonfiction and helps other writers to live their writing dreams through the establishment of Idea Creations Press. You can contact Kathryn at: kathy@ariverofstones.com.