Gum Drop Dead: Cupcake Truck Mysteries

by Emily James

  I couldn’t see Dan’s face. His lips pressed against my forehead, light and warm, and then he was gone.

  20

  Claire daintily chewed a forkful of her southwestern salad. “I’m going to bed early tonight.”

  We’d recently decided to take turns cooking meals rather than continuing to eat separately. Whenever it was her turn to cook, it was some variation on salad. The child I’d once been missed cupcake leftovers for every meal, but the grown woman already felt how much more energy I’d had since my diet began regularly including fresh things.

  “With Donald Wells’ murderer in prison,” she said, “I’m finally going to be able to sleep.”

  The human brain didn’t always work that way. Sometimes, even after the danger was gone, a person could remain hyper-aware of everything around them. Claire might find there were still times when something triggered those memories, and she couldn’t focus or couldn’t sleep.

  Besides, if she only felt safe because she thought the murderer was locked away, that restfulness would be short-lived. A man like Elijah was probably already out on bail. It’d only be a matter of time until Claire learned he was walking free until his trial.

  But I hoped I was wrong. If Claire found peace from Elijah’s arrest, that’d be one of us at least. Maybe I was in denial the way Dan had implied, but I still couldn’t imagine Elijah killing his uncle.

  I rolled a black bean around on my plate. “Dan told you Elijah Wells was arrested?”

  Claire made an affirmative noise, her mouth full.

  Dan hadn’t contacted me since our conversation in Elijah’s office that afternoon. I probably shouldn’t have expected him to. I’d basically told him that we had no future. Whatever I felt for him, whatever he might feel for me, couldn’t go anywhere as long as I was married.

  We’d both known that from the start. I don’t know how I’d let my emotions run out of control. Maybe I’d been so busy denying to myself that I felt more than friendship for Dan that I hadn’t paid enough attention to what I actually felt. Maybe if I’d acknowledged it to myself, I could have smothered those feelings earlier, when they were weak and easy to kill.

  And maybe tomorrow I’d wake up and the sky would be green and the grass would be blue.

  Regardless of all of that, despite knowing Dan was making the right choice in backing off, I missed him already. I missed our regular texts and the way he’d call at the end of the day to see how I was. I missed hearing his voice and the way it made me feel calm. And it’d only been a couple of days.

  If we couldn’t find a new normal in our friendship, I’d miss a lot more things in the coming days.

  And I didn’t know where this left Claire and me with Elijah’s company. Was I still supposed to bring cupcakes? Would there still be a fundraiser to cater?

  All selfish thoughts.

  “Stop playing with your food like a five year old,” Claire said.

  I straightened in my chair and obediently shoveled a bite of food into my mouth.

  Claire removed her empty plate from the table. A yawn split her jaw, and she covered it with her hand. “I’m going to take a long, hot bath and climb into bed early enough that I could be a five year old.”

  I put another bite of food into my mouth so that she didn’t feel the need to stay and make sure I finished my dinner.

  She rinsed her dinnerware and placed it all in the dishwasher.

  Then I was alone with my thoughts.

  It wasn’t a place I enjoyed being right now. In the same way that Claire hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Donald Wells plummeting to his death and his murderer walking free, I wasn’t able to stop thinking about an innocent man potentially going to prison for it. That didn’t benefit anyone. Convicting an innocent person didn’t get justice for Donald Wells.

  It also meant that all the good work Elijah had been doing for charities would stop, at least temporarily. Whoever took over for him might not have the same heart for it or the same skill with it.

  Elijah didn’t deserve to go to prison if he didn’t do this.

  That’s his lawyer’s job, Fear said in my brain. You need to stay out of it now.

  I should have never let Fear back out of his box.

  But he wasn’t wrong. Elijah would hire a lawyer. That lawyer would defend him. That lawyer would also drain a lot of money, either from the family business if they voted to support him or from Elijah personally. Besides, as I’d learned from Nicole, my lawyer friend, most lawyers didn’t care if their client was guilty or innocent. Some of them didn’t even want to know.

  Elijah needed a lawyer like Nicole. Lakeshore was a little far for her to travel in her current condition, but she might be willing to do it anyway.

  But she wouldn’t do it unless she was absolutely confident that Elijah was innocent. Nicole only defended innocent clients. That was one of the things I respected so much about her.

  Before I asked her to come all this way to meet with Elijah and consider his case, I needed to be certain I was referring an innocent client to her.

  I needed that reassurance too. Dan had been right that I had a lot of friends now, and I didn’t need to feel like I was lacking. All those friendships depended on trust, though. I had to believe I could tell good people from bad and that I’d picked good people to be my friends. I had to know I wasn’t so easily deceived. I’d been wrong about Jarrod, and that needed to have taught me something.

  I forced down another bite of salad. All I had to do was figure out what that step should be.

  The reporter who’d been investigating the case wouldn’t give me any information, even if I asked. He’d already turned over everything he had to the police, and that led to Elijah anyway.

  I couldn’t get access to Elijah while he was in jail awaiting bail. Dan certainly wasn’t going to share details of the case with me.

  That left me one person who knew what Donald had been doing and who might know who else knew about it or had been in on it.

  Rebecca Wells.

  The trick would be convincing her to talk to me.

  21

  I took Claire’s car since I knew she wouldn’t need it to go to the gym for once and drove to Rebecca Wells’ house. I couldn’t risk calling first. She’d never agree to talk to me if I called and asked permission. I’d have a hard enough time convincing her to help me help Elijah as it was. Based on what I’d seen, there wasn’t any love lost between them.

  I parked behind the cars in the driveway. A pack and move container also sat near the garage. The estate must have been settled, and Rebecca was preparing to move. My timing was perfect. If she’d moved already, I wouldn’t know where to find her, and I certainly couldn’t ask Elijah.

  Hopefully Rebecca would answer the door herself rather than someone else. I didn’t know if she kept a housekeeper or a cook, but it seemed likely.

  I rang the doorbell.

  The door opened almost immediately. Rebecca stood in the doorway, one manicured hand resting on the door frame. A frown pursed her lips.

  “Who is it?” a man’s voice asked from inside.

  I’d heard that voice before, but I couldn’t pinpoint where. It wasn’t Elijah’s. I knew that much at least.

  “It’s the woman who’s been following me.”

  I wanted to crinkle up my nose, but I forced myself not to. With an introduction like that, I wasn’t likely to be able to win over whoever she was with to my side—assuming she was willing to talk in front of him.

  “Invite her in,” the man said.

  Rebecca’s lips pouted slightly. “We don’t need to talk to her.”

  “We do if she’s snooping around in your private affairs. We need to resolve this.”

  “Fine.” Rebecca opened the door wider and stepped out of the way. “Come in.”

  I entered. The door snicked shut behind me, and a gun pointed at my face.

  My mind went numb, and my vision blurred. I put my hands up automatically to show I wasn�
�t armed and I wasn’t a threat.

  “I don’t understand.” The words came out almost without me willing them. “I’m not here to threaten her, I promise.”

  I drew a deep breath. My vision cleared slightly. Leon Schwab stood in front of me, holding the gun pointed at my heart now instead of my face. Rebecca moved around to stand beside him.

  This didn’t make sense. She’d broken up with him, hadn’t she?

  Leon poked the gun toward me. “Then why are you here?”

  Honesty seemed like the best policy when faced with a deadly weapon. “I wanted to talk to her about her husband’s death. About who might have wanted him out of the way. I don’t think Elijah did it, which means whoever did is still loose.” Rebecca didn’t strike me as the altruistic sort. If I made this all about Elijah, she wasn’t as likely to help me. It needed to also be about her. “If you tell me the truth, I can help you stay safe.”

  Rebecca’s face went pale even under her make-up. “Was that a threat?”

  What? How could she interpret that as a threat?

  Leon’s eyes narrowed slightly, as if he were trying to see through me. “Are you an undercover cop?”

  “No. I’m not even comfortable around police.”

  “That’s a lie,” Rebecca whispered. Maybe she thought I couldn’t hear her, but I was close enough she would have had to speak right into his ear if she didn’t want me to know what she was saying. “She’s living with a cop’s relative, and he’s always around.”

  A shiver ran over my skin as if someone had swapped out the blood in my veins for freezing rain. Rebecca knew who I lived with. If she researched our business after Claire and I showed up at the funeral luncheon, she would have been able to learn Claire’s name. Claire’s photo was on the website. A simple internet search would have turned up the rest. Claire was still listed in the online phone directories.

  She could have learned all that about Claire from the internet, but she couldn’t have known that I lived with Claire. Or that Dan was always at our house.

  She could have only known that if she’d been following me. If she knew where I lived.

  The handwriting on the card tied to the rock had been all loops. It could as easily have been a woman’s writing as a man’s. And I’d handed Rebecca one of my cards to prove who I was the day we met in the restroom.

  If Rebecca had been the one to try to scare me away, she might also have been the one to kill Donald. Except that she didn’t have a motive. It didn’t make sense.

  I edged backward toward the door, keeping my hands up. “If you let me leave, I won’t come back, and I promise I won’t seek Rebecca out again.”

  I prayed they’d hear the honesty in my words and not sense the deception underneath. I wouldn’t need to seek Rebecca out again because I’d tell Dan about this, and he’d take over from there.

  Rebecca and Leon exchanged a look.

  “She might be a cop or a reporter,” Leon said, “or just some busybody, but she knows too much if she came here to talk to you.”

  Rebecca nodded slowly, as if she knew he was right, but she didn’t like the implications of what he was saying.

  The words she knows too much never boded well for someone with a gun pointed at them.

  “I don’t actually know anything.” I shifted another inch toward the door. It was closed, but it was my only hope. I’d never get my phone out and dial for help faster than Leon could pull a trigger. If I got outside, they’d be less likely to shoot me. One of the neighbors might see. “I thought Rebecca might know of someone else who might have wanted Donald dead because of his embezzling.”

  Leon’s face hardened, all remaining soft edges gone. “If you figured out the embezzling, you already know too much.”

  Rebecca put a hand on his forearm, as if she didn’t want him to do whatever he was considering. “I didn’t take part in that. It doesn’t matter what she knows.”

  “The police will take everything if they find out, and then it’ll all have been for nothing.”

  My heart beat so hard that I could feel it at the bottom of my throat and in my temples. Rebecca enjoyed her lifestyle, but she hadn’t been comfortable with the way her husband was supplementing it. That felt like it should be important, but I couldn’t put the pieces together.

  Possibly she killed him to stop him from embezzling more money, but that didn’t quite work either. She’d still lose her style of living in his death, the same as if he was arrested and the police took back the ill-gotten funds. At least if he went to prison, she’d still have been able to continue living in this house, and she’d have Donald’s inherited wealth.

  “We can’t shoot her.” Rebecca’s hand was still on his forearm. “The neighbors will hear. We’ll never be able to get the blood cleaned up before the police get here.”

  Leon jerked his head in the direction of the back of the house. “Not if we take her into the woods. We’ll be far enough away people will think it was a car backfiring or a kid shooting off fireworks.”

  Rebecca’s gaze darted between Leon, the gun, and me. I couldn’t tell if she genuinely didn’t want him to kill me or if she just didn’t want to be caught.

  Either way, I needed to feed her fear. “If you leave my body in the woods, they’ll still track it back here. Proximity matters.”

  Rebecca’s hands shook. “She’s right.”

  “You could tie me up and leave me here. By the time someone found me, you could be out of the country.”

  That might be true, and I might be letting potential murderers get away by suggesting it. But the odds seemed good that I could either get out of the ropes, make enough noise that the neighbors would call for help, or be missed before they could actually leave the country. The odds were better than if they shot me anyway.

  “Do you think we’re stupid?” Leon’s grip on the gun tightened.

  I flinched instinctively, but he didn’t fire.

  “We’d have to leave our whole lives behind, and we’d never be able to stop looking over our shoulders.”

  Rebecca was shaking so hard her ear rings swayed. “It was an accident. We could tell them it was an accident.”

  She couldn’t mean what he planned to do to me. My death wouldn’t be an accident.

  She’d also used the past tense. She had to mean Donald’s death, but you couldn’t accidentally give lime juice to someone who knew they shouldn’t have it. Especially since he needed a large dose.

  My mind was calm the way it sometimes went when I used to think Jarrod was about to kill me and I’d considered which parts of my body to try to protect to prevent my death. The state wouldn’t last. It never did once the pain and adrenaline kicked in. Still, for the tiniest moment, it gave me a feeling of control.

  “An accident means you’ll get manslaughter. You’d be out of prison in a few years. If you kill me, it’ll be premeditated murder. You could get life.”

  I had no idea if any of that were actually true, but it sounded good. All I needed was two more steps to the door and I could reach the handle.

  I slid my foot back.

  “Stop. Moving.” Leon emphasized each word in a sharp staccato. His gaze flickered to Rebecca too quickly for me to take advantage of his gap in attention. He kept the gun trained on me with one hand and laid a hand over her hand with the other. “We’ll go far enough into the woods that we can dump her body in the lake. We’ll burn our clothes when we get back so there’s no chance of evidence turning up on us.”

  A trickle of panic filtered into my mind. The door wasn’t an option anymore, and he had a solid plan now. I didn’t have an equally solid plan for getting loose.

  “Show her out the back way, Rebecca,” Leon said.

  Rebecca went first, keeping enough distance between us that I couldn’t grab her and use her as a shield. Leon pressed the gun against my spine.

  I should probably try to get away anyway, Make as big a mess in this house as possible, so they weren’t likely to get away with t
his.

  The problem was that I didn’t want to die. As long as I was still breathing, there was a chance I could get out of this. It’s what I told myself for years with Jarrod. It’s what kept me hanging on to the hope that I’d get away from him some day rather than simply giving up and overdosing on a cocktail of whatever I could put together from the medicine chest.

  We went through the kitchen and out through a small door at the back. A sidewalk led around to the front of the house, suggesting this was the servants’ entrance. The back of the house butted up to a wooded lot, just as Leon had said. The trees were thick, but the start of a trail was clear. Rebecca headed straight for it. She didn’t strike me as the outdoorsy type so perhaps they’d used the trail to meet before.

  I had to keep them talking. Maybe I could make Rebecca second-guess this choice.

  “You’ll still have to get rid of my car. If you get in, all it will take is a single hair for the police to connect you to it.”

  “I grew up with a guy who breaks down cars for parts and doesn’t ask too many questions. He’ll handle it.”

  If Leon knew a man like that, he hadn’t grown up wealthy like the Wells. Maybe that was why he was so determined to be with Rebecca. Taking a woman from a man like Donald would have proved he was finally one of them.

  Unfortunately for me, that seemed to mean he also knew all the steps they’d need to take to get away with killing me. My only hope was to turn them on each other. Leon was ready to kill me and move on, but Rebecca seemed hesitant. If it hadn’t sounded like the contrary was true, I would have thought Leon killed Donald and Rebecca was the unwilling accomplice there too. But it sounded like Rebecca had somehow accidentally killed Donald and Leon knew.

  Rebecca was the one who least wanted to kill me now.

  The trees grew more densely along the edges of the path. We were probably halfway to the lake, if I remembered my geography correctly. The trees would thin as we got closer.

  I had to drive a wedge between Rebecca and Leon. She’d broken up with him. In hindsight, that was likely out of guilt, but she’d still done it.