The Mysterious Disappearance of Marsha Boden

Chapter Seven

Hi everyone -

I hope you are enjoying my novel, The Mysterious Disappearance of Marsha Boden, which I am writing as I go here on Rosy’s Ramblings, posting two chapters a week (for my paying subscribers) - one on Wednesday and one on Saturday.  If you are not already a paying subscribing but are enjoying the instalments, why not consider becoming a paid subscriber?  I would really appreciate it.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Young and impressionable, Brian Jamison had had a crush on Marsha Boden since his first day at Boden’s, seeing her playing with her dog.  Her long, ash blonde hair was tousled and slightly unkempt, but that added to her charm.  She had an amazing hourglass figure and was always well turned out, usually in jeans or corduroy trousers, and wore what his mother would describe as ‘sensible’ shoes – funky trainers or smart Sketchers.  She looked great in a checked shirt which she usually left open and wore over a white tee-shirt.  She had beautiful teeth and lovely sparkly eyes,  bluey-grey-green in colour.  Not that he had ever looked into them, but he saw her laughing once with a colleague, Mrs Jones, and her whole face lit up.  He had been nearby washing the hearse and his heart had skipped a beat. She was a beautiful woman in every sense of the word and he couldn’t help thinking how lucky Mr Boden was to sleep next to this beautiful creature every night.

His attempts at finding a beautiful woman of his own had failed miserably, although he was quite fond of Lucy, his current girlfriend.  Slightly overweight, she was good fun to be around and she was very keen on him.  She worked in Mudlowe as an assistant in Boots, but she desperately wanted to become an estate agent and one day, she assured him, she would run her own estate agency business.

When he turned up on Saturday morning to collect his car, he had been hoping to catch a glimpse of Mrs B as he called her, but his luck was out and he ended up feeding his bike into the back of his small hatchback himself.  It wouldn’t go all the way in, so he had to tie the door down with some twine that he found in Mr Boden’s office in the courtyard, where the shelves were covered with unusual things like blocks of oasis, rolls of thin green wire, coffin handles, a top hat, a small watering can and various other paraphernalia associated with burying the dead.  If Mrs B had been around, she would have given him a hand and invited him in for coffee and cake.  But she was nowhere to be seen.