Part 1: A Cozy Murder in a Cozy English Village (It’s Cozy)

(This is part ONE of a serial short story I will be dropping in installments on my website, sarahzwriter.com. If you haven’t already, subscribe and you’ll get alerts in your inbox when they’re up. Brew yourself a cuppa and enjoy, “A Cozy Murder in a Cozy English Village (It’s Cozy).”

Everything was always wet here. It had been since Allison and her wife, Joan, moved to this tiny English town six months ago for a Joan’s job with the government. They had been to England before they moved, obviously, but it was always on one of those European city tours and they hadn’t really known what to expect of the culture, the food, the weather. Now that they had been residents in rural England for a while, Allison knew that the people were polite but distant, the food was bland, and the weather was wet.

Looking out the window over her kitchen sink, at the smeared gray sky, Allison pouted. Her tea kettle went off and she made a cup. She’d gotten into the rhythm of tea, and she drank an absurd amount of it. Sometimes twenty, thirty cups a day. In her mind, when they’d decide to move from their life in New England to a life in…Old England?…she’d decided that she’d take a sabbatical from teaching and try her hand at writing a murder mystery novel set in a tiny, wet, English village. She would do so in the window of an old ivy-covered…