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  FRAMED BY A FORGERY

  (A Lacey Doyle Cozy Mystery—Book Eight)

  FIONA GRACE

  Fiona Grace

  Fiona Grace is author of the LACEY DOYLE COZY MYSTERY series, comprising nine books; of the TUSCAN VINEYARD COZY MYSTERY series, comprising six books (and counting); of the DUBIOUS WITCH COZY MYSTERY series, comprising three books (and counting); of the BEACHFRONT BAKERY COZY MYSTERY series, comprising six books (and counting); and of the CATS AND DOGS COZY MYSTERY series, comprising six books.

  Fiona would love to hear from you, so please visit www.fionagraceauthor.com to receive free ebooks, hear the latest news, and stay in touch.

  Copyright © 2021 by Fiona Grace. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright Helen Hotson, used under license from Shutterstock.com.

  BOOKS BY FIONA GRACE

  LACEY DOYLE COZY MYSTERY

  MURDER IN THE MANOR (Book#1)

  DEATH AND A DOG (Book #2)

  CRIME IN THE CAFE (Book #3)

  VEXED ON A VISIT (Book #4)

  KILLED WITH A KISS (Book #5)

  PERISHED BY A PAINTING (Book #6)

  SILENCED BY A SPELL (Book #7)

  FRAMED BY A FORGERY (Book #8)

  CATASTROPHE IN A CLOISTER (Book #9)

  TUSCAN VINEYARD COZY MYSTERY

  AGED FOR MURDER (Book #1)

  AGED FOR DEATH (Book #2)

  AGED FOR MAYHEM (Book #3)

  AGED FOR SEDUCTION (Book #4)

  AGED FOR VENGEANCE (Book #5)

  AGED FOR ACRIMONY (Book #6)

  DUBIOUS WITCH COZY MYSTERY

  SKEPTIC IN SALEM: AN EPISODE OF MURDER (Book #1)

  SKEPTIC IN SALEM: AN EPISODE OF CRIME (Book #2)

  SKEPTIC IN SALEM: AN EPISODE OF DEATH (Book #3)

  BEACHFRONT BAKERY COZY MYSTERY

  BEACHFRONT BAKERY: A KILLER CUPCAKE (Book #1)

  BEACHFRONT BAKERY: A MURDEROUS MACARON (Book #2)

  BEACHFRONT BAKERY: A PERILOUS CAKE POP (Book #3)

  BEACHFRONT BAKERY: A DEADLY DANISH (Book #4)

  BEACHFRONT BAKERY: A TREACHEROUS TART (Book #5)

  BEACHFRONT BAKERY: A CALAMITOUS COOKIE (Book #6)

  CATS AND DOGS COZY MYSTERY

  A VILLA IN SICILY: OLIVE OIL AND MURDER (Book #1)

  A VILLA IN SICILY: FIGS AND A CADAVER (Book #2)

  A VILLA IN SICILY: VINO AND DEATH (Book #3)

  A VILLA IN SICILY: CAPERS AND CALAMITY (Book #4)

  A VILLA IN SICILY: ORANGE GROVES AND VENGEANCE (Book #5)

  A VILLA IN SICILY: CANNOLI AND A CASUALTY (Book #6)

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  “There you are,” Frank said.

  Lacey took a sharp intake of breath as she stared at him, her father, standing in the doorway of the small, dilapidated cottage she’d tracked him to.

  Words failed her. Because for a moment, she was sure she’d made some kind of mistake. This man was so old. Wrinkled. His nose was much bigger and more crooked than the nose of the father in her memories. His stature so much less imposing. And his once thick, dark mass of curls—the defining feature that he and Lacey shared—was completely gone, leaving a pink, bald head in its place.

  But then Lacey saw it. That twinkle in his dark eyes. That dimple in his left cheek. That mole beside his right eyebrow. It was her father, all right.

  “Hello, Dad,” she managed.

  The background smell of cow manure suddenly became more pronounced as Lacey’s senses heightened, sharp and tangy in her nostrils. Beside her, her patient English Shepherd dog, Chester, nudged his nose into her palm, offering comfort and support as he always did in times of stress.

  “You’ve grown,” Frank quipped.

  “I’m glad,” Lacey replied with a cautious smile. “It would be odd if I was still the same height I was when I was seven…”

  Her voice trailed off, the unspoken weight of her words hanging in the ether between them.

  Her father shuffled from one foot to the other awkwardly. It reminded Lacey of an animal in a zoo. Cornered. Was that how her turning up out of the blue made him feel—like he was trapped?

  “I’m sorry for turning up unannounced,” she blurted.

  Her dad’s expression softened. “Not at all. Don’t be sorry. I was hoping you would.”

  Lacey let the tension she was holding in her muscles loosen a little. Though this meeting was far from the fantasy she’d envisioned, she was at least glad to know she wasn’t a wholly unwelcome visitor.

  “Did you want to come in?” her dad asked, tentatively. “You and…” His gaze fell to the dog sitting obediently at her legs.

  “…Chester,” Lacey said. She patted her canine companion’s head.

  “Chester,” Frank replied, smiling. “I don’t have any dog treats in the house, unless he’s allowed a biscuit?”

  Biscuit, Lacey repeated in her mind, suddenly aware that the thirty-odd years her father had spent living in England would have changed him significantly, not just in terms of his lexicon, but in other more subtle ways, too. In a very real sense, he was pretty much a stranger to her now.

  “Y—yes, he’s allowed one,” she stammered. “I—I mean if it’s not a problem for you?”

  The staccato sentences. The stop-start-stop as she second-guessed every word that came out of her mouth. It was all incredibly uncomfortable, and a piece of Lacey was telling her to run back through the muddy fields she’d trekked through to get to this remote, bleak location, leap into her champagne-colored Volvo, and speed all the way back to the comfort of Wilfordshire. But another, more dominant, part of her told her firmly to stay put.

  “It’s not a problem at all,” Frank replied. He moved back from the door, allowing her entrance.

  After a brief moment of hesitancy, Lacey stepped inside her father’s cottage.

  Right away she was struck by the similarities to her own home. The low ceilings. The dark wooden beams. The inwardly bulging walls from a structure so old it had been built
before the advent of spirit levels. But there were marked differences, too. Where Lacey’s cottage was brimming with life—Chester, Tom, Gina’s daily visits—her father’s seemed small, lonely, and quiet. The only real noise came from the mooing of the cows in a far-off field.

  Chester squeezed into the dark, narrow corridor behind her, and Frank leaned across them both, awkwardly, to latch the door shut. He was close enough for Lacey to smell him, and she couldn’t help but note his scent was now completely unfamiliar to her. Smell and memory were so closely connected—in the past, any time Lacey caught a whiff of his cologne worn by some random businessman on the subway to work she’d be sent into a tailspin—and she was disappointed that the moment of nostalgia had been stolen from her.

  Her father began heading along the corridor, and Lacey followed, with Chester bringing up the rear.

  “This is nice,” she said as she went, gazing at the framed watercolor landscapes adorning the walls.

  No family photos, she couldn’t help but think.

  “It’s all I need,” Frank replied.

  The corridor opened up into a small kitchen, one that reminded Lacey aesthetically of a camper van. The cupboards were dated, made of the same, strange vinyl plastic stuff of caravans. The boiler was exposed. The oven was rusty and dated. It was a simple, basic room.

  “Do you drink tea?” Frank asked, beelining for the kettle.

  Lacey managed a smile. It was a very English behavior—to make a cup of tea for all and every occasion, good, bad, awkward, or in this case… unfathomably monumental.

  “I do,” she said. “I’ve lived in England long enough now to have gotten a taste for it.”

  “So you live here?” her father asked, his back to her as he carried the kettle to the faucet and filled it up.

  Lacey watched him, more than acutely aware of the awkwardness in his tone and movements.

  “I do,” she said. “I live in Wilfordshire.”

  Frank turned, kettle in hand, bushy gray brows raised halfway up his forehead. “Oh yes, that’s right. You live in Wilfordshire. Funny you’d end up there. Did you know we took a vacation there once?”

  Lacey nodded. “I did, I remember it clearly,” she said, before stopping short of telling him that the reason she’d settled there in the first place was because of that vacation. They were the last happy memories she had of her father. Indeed, it was the resurfaced memories of being in Wilfordshire that had prompted her to begin tracking him after thirty years in the first place, despite her conflicting feelings about trying to find the man whose abandonment had caused her years of trauma.

  She’d found plenty of interesting clues about her father’s connection to Wilfordshire during the years following his disappearance, and was immediately struck with the need for him to explain all of them, to fill in all the blanks of his decades-long absence. Who was the woman in the antiques store she remembered from all those years back? How was her father connected to Iris Archer, the wealthy owner of Penrose Manor who she’d discovered posing with him in a photograph? And most importantly why? Why had he gone? Why had he cut off contact? Why hadn’t he checked in once over all those years? Why? Why? Why?

  But Lacey remained silent. She didn’t know where to begin asking her questions, and she balked at the thought of bringing up so much heavy stuff so quickly.

  “Take a seat,” Frank said, gesturing to a ’70s-style picnic table with a blue vinyl top, metal legs, and two white plastic garden chairs tucked beneath it.

  Lacey took a seat. The table wobbled as she rested her arms on it. She removed them, placing them instead in her lap. Chester slunk down at her feet and let out a long, snoozy sigh.

  Frank turned back to the distraction of tea-making, clattering away as Lacey glanced about her at the place he’d made his home. She felt very out of her depth here. Small and childish. All the old feelings of inadequacy she’d felt as a child came back to her, emotions she’d not felt for years, since she was a little girl wondering where her dad had gone and whether he was ever coming home…

  The tinkling of porcelain brought her back to the moment. Frank carried a tray over to the table with a teapot and tea set on it. Immediately, Lacey recognized the distinctive Le Creuset set, and the striking yellow color.

  “Oh!” she gasped, with surprise. “The discontinued Elysees Yellow range! I own it too.”

  Frank’s face burst into a delighted grin. “You do?”

  “Yes!” Lacey gave him an enthusiastic nod, a sudden spark of excitement in her chest that they had found some safe, common ground with which to finally break the ice. “I love crockery. I collect vintage and rare teacups.”

  “You have a keen eye for antiques,” Frank said, sounding impressed.

  “I run a store,” Lacey told him. “It’s my profession.”

  Frank’s brows shot up. “An antiques store? In Wilfordshire?”

  There was a fraught edge to his tone, and Lacey felt the moment of light-hearted reprieve become tense around the edges. She could only guess as to why—the remarkable coincidence that both father and daughter had opened antiques stores, the likelihood that it had been an antiques owner in Wilfordshire who’d lured him away from his family in the first place. The possibilities were endless, innumerable, but Frank said no more on the matter, and Lacey was left to stew.

  “That’s right,” she said, reticent now. “And you live on a farm,” she added, wanting to change the conversation.

  “Yes, me and a bunch of other hermits,” Frank said with a chuckle. “The farmer lets us live here rent free in exchange for manning the farm shop. We have a garden, grow veg together, take it in turns to cook. Oh, that reminds me. I promised Chester a biscuit.”

  He stood, his stiff movements betraying his age, and went over to a small pantry cupboard at the side of the kitchen. He took out a battered tin, lifted the lid, and took out a plain, homemade-looking cookie.

  “Chester, boy,” he said. “Do you want a biscuit?”

  Chester’s ears went straight up. He leapt to all fours and hurried over to accept the cookie, his claws clacking on the scuffed vinyl floor as he scurried excitedly over. Lacey noted the tender smile her father gave the dog, and tried to recall whether he’d always been fond of animals, or whether it was part of his new personality.

  “Lacey?” Frank said.

  She jumped, the sound of her name sounding suddenly foreign. “What?”

  Her father was holding the tin out toward her. “Do you want one? They’re homemade.”

  “Oh, no, I’m good thanks,” Lacey replied, exhaling her nerves. “My fiancé is a chef. Sometimes I feel like I have cookies coming out of my ears.”

  “Fiancé?” Frank repeated. He came back to the table, busying himself this time by fussing over the tea in the pot.

  “Uh, yes, Tom,” Lacey said, her fingers playing nervously with the plasticky tablecloth. “You did get the wedding invite, didn’t you?”

  She wasn’t sure why she felt like she was suddenly dropping a bombshell on him. Her father had received the invitation, she knew that for certain because his RSVP had been a strange empty envelope with nothing but a faint penciled-in return address on the back. Indeed, it was how she’d traced him in the first place.

  “I got the wedding invite,” Frank said with a nod. “I was actually surprised when it arrived. I always presumed you would’ve tied the knot years ago, when you were in your twenties.”

  There was an unmistakable weariness in his voice, the sound of deep, heavy regret. Lacey wondered if he’d spent as much time thinking about how her life had turned out as she had dreaming up ideas about his.

  “I did,” Lacey told him. “Tie the knot. In my twenties. It was a mistake. We divorced a year ago.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” Frank said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lacey replied.

  And it didn’t. Her marriage to David had come and gone without her father’s presence. In fact, she was kind of relieved it had. The person she’d
been when she was David’s wife was not the same person she was now, and not someone she was particularly fond of. It was a relief to know that Frank didn’t need to know anything about the person she’d been in New York City.

  “I’m much happier now,” she continued. “Tom’s just wonderful.” She was about to ask him whether he had anyone in his life, but decided against it. She actually didn’t want to know. Besides, Frank seemed to have become uncomfortable during their conversation. Talking about romantic partners was perhaps a sore subject.

  Then it occurred to Lacey that Frank’s downcast expression may in fact be because she’d once married without him. That in her twenties she’d had no interest in attempting to find him to walk her down the aisle. That it was only now, on her second time around, that she’d decided to reach out. That she’d needed all those years to soften the heart his abandonment had hardened.

  “Are you going to come?” Lacey asked, her tone gentle now. “To the wedding, I mean.”

  Frank looked immediately surprised. Lacey faltered. Maybe she’d misinterpreted his demeanor. Perhaps she’d asked too much, too soon.

  “I—” he began, before halting.

  “Only if you feel comfortable,” she added, hurriedly, trying to ease the pressure she’d evidently heaped on him.

  “I’d love to, I just … “ His voice became small. “I don’t understand why you’d want me there, after everything I put you through.”

  Lacey felt her heart jolt. The elephant in the room had finally been addressed, and now she suddenly didn’t want it to be. She twisted her lips in consternation. Though she had so much to say, and so much to ask, the more important thing to her was that her father be at her wedding to walk her down the aisle.

  She reached across the table and placed her hand on her father’s. “I know we have a lot to talk about,” she said softly. “But first, can we just have that one thing? Can we just push pause on it all until you’ve walked me down the aisle?”