A day in my life in Johnson City, Tennessee, is as simple as these four steps: Get up. Get going. Keep going. Go to bed. In between those basic steps I study freshwater mussels in local creeks and rivers, work part time in the children’s department at the public library, do some storytelling, and write picture books. Underlying the basic steps and everything in between (and sometimes washing over all of it) is the still fresh grief for my husband, Jeff, who died in an accident a year ago.

But today has been different. It’s the first day of my island vacation in a shell collector’s paradise. The place where Jeff and I camped for our honeymoon thirty years ago. The place we brought our two boys for so many sandy, sunny, windswept, and wave-walloped visits. Ahhh, Ocracoke.

Except I’m not just here for the shelling. I have an ulterior motive. I want to find out why the guy who owns the shell shop in Ocracoke has been writing letters to Jeff. The letters started arriving before Jeff died and the most recent one arrived last week. They’re all pretty much the same—friendly, though formal, and they tell Jeff to come to the island to learn something to his advantage. Gee, that doesn’t sound at all scammy, does it? So my plan is to see if I can find out what this guy’s game is without letting on who I am.

The day began with a boat ride to Ocracoke off the coast of North Carolina. Again, a simple step, except that a hurricane just blew through and visitors aren’t allowed back on the island yet. So the boat ride, courtesy of a friend, while not exactly illegal was definitely in the iffy category. It was also nerve-wracking. The sea was rough and I spent most of the trip hoping we didn’t sink and watching for circling shark fins. But we made it to the dock on Ocracoke, and I found the tiny cottage I’m renting, and then I decided to forget scammy letters long enough to see what kind of shells the hurricane washed onto the beach at Springer’s Point Preserve.

That’s when things got really different. I can only give you the short version because I don’t remember the long one. I sat on the beach, waded into the waves to snag a huge, amazing shell, hallucinated a three-masted sailing ship, started back through the woods as the rain and wind kicked up, and . . . woke up on the floor of the shell shop with no idea how I got there. And no idea who the two people fussing over me were or why they couldn’t find my pulse. Or who the third guy was—the one with the British accent who kept singing about drunken sailors—or why the two incompetent pulse-finders didn’t seem to notice he was there. I had a lot of questions.

So did everyone else, it turns out, including the two who eventually did find my pulse, the sheriff’s deputy, and the fellow with the lovely tenor who might or might not exist.

That’s how my day went. How was yours?

Come Shell or High Water, A Haunted Shell Shop Mystery Book #1
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Release: June 2024
Format: Print, Digital, Audio
Purchase Link

When widowed folklorist Maureen Nash visits a legendary North Carolina barrier island shell shop, she discovers its resident ghost pirate and the mystery of a local’s untimely death . . .

As a professional storyteller, Maureen Nash can’t help but see the narrative cues woven through her life. Like the series of letters addressed to her late husband from a stranger—the proprietor of The Moon Shell, a shop on Ocracoke Island, off the coast of North Carolina. The store is famous with shell collectors, but it’s the cryptic letters from Allen Withrow, the shop’s owner, that convince Maureen to travel to the small coastal town in the middle of hurricane season. At the very least, she expects she’ll get a good story out of the experience, never anticipating it could end up a murder mystery . . .

In Maureen’s first hours on the storm-lashed island, she averts several life-threatening accidents, stumbles over the body of a controversial Ocracoke local, and meets the ghost of an eighteenth-century Welsh pirate, Emrys Lloyd. To the untrained eye, all these unusual occurrences would seem to be random misfortunes, but Maureen senses there may be something connecting these stories. With Emrys’s supernatural assistance, and the support of a few new friends, Maureen sets out to unravel the truth, find a killer, and hopefully give this tale a satisfying ending . . . while also rewriting her own.

About the author
The Boston Globe says Molly MacRae writes “murder with a dose of drollery.” In addition to the Haunted Shell Shop Mysteries, Molly writes the award-winning, national bestselling Haunted Yarn Shop Mysteries and the Highland Bookshop Mysteries. As Margaret Welch she writes books for Annie’s Fiction and Guideposts. Molly’s short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and she’s a winner of the Sherwood Anderson Award for Short Fiction. Connect with molly at mollymacrae.com.