Deadly Sweet Dreams

by Connie Shelton

  But the screen full of icons appeared, and the one for text messages showed new ones waiting. Her heart rate picked up as she checked the path to the barn again.

  Okay, I’ll only look at the ones he’s already read.

  Yeah, so he won’t know you snooped.

  She opened the app and found a thread from yesterday.

  Lila: Hey baby, I’ve missed you. I’m in Taos and need to see you. Today?

  Danny: Taos seriously? Sorry, I’m busy today.

  Lila: Tonight then. I’m at the Fernandez Inn. Call me.

  From the look of it, she was dictating what she wanted. And why was he apologizing to someone who’d shown up unannounced? Sam scrolled upward to the earlier part of the thread.

  Danny: I can’t talk about marriage right now. Look, we just don’t know each other that well.

  Lila: Baby, I know this is right. Like I said, I got a message from my guardian angel. It’s God’s will that we belong together.

  Sam read that part twice. Angels relaying God’s will? Really? Danny had said he’d only known Lila a few months. Still, she supposed, for some people the attraction is immediate—she and Beau had felt very strongly about each other right away. Except that the further back she scrolled, the more the messages showed that this whole marriage idea was definitely Lila’s.

  Danny: I need time and space to think.

  Lila: You’re overreacting, trying to throw me off track. We have wedding plans to make.

  At the end of each day, she’d signed off with Sweet dreams, baby.

  Poor Danny. And his attempt to get away had now failed. She thought back to the lunchtime encounter today. Lila had seemed animated as she talked and planned, while Danny had been a man of one-syllable responses.

  A beam of sunlight came through the window as it began to set behind the trees on the far side of the pasture, reminding Sam of the time. She exited the texts and set the phone back exactly where she’d found it.

  She stepped out the door and saw Danny walking toward her. Oops—close.

  “Hey, Danny, I just dropped off your clean linens.”

  “Thanks, Sam.”

  “It was nice to meet Lila today. She seemed nice—and pretty too. Funny how we all ended up in town at the same time.”

  “Yeah, funny about that.”

  “Danny?”

  “Well, how did she do it? Happen to arrive in Taos and then happen to be in the same hardware store at the moment I was sent there by Beau?”

  Yeah, the same thought she and Kelly had shared on the way home. Could Lila have some method of tracking him?

  “Anyway, yes, she was very nice at lunch today. She just seems so different at times. Like, she’ll be super pushy, and then other times she seems to completely understand me. Maybe I’m just being too sensitive—do you think?”

  What could she say without admitting she’d just sneaked into his private messages?

  “I think you’re wise to take your time to think about this. If a person’s moods switch around a lot, I’d take that as a warning sign.” The sun sank out of sight and the temperature immediately dropped. Sam crossed her arms and rubbed the chilly places.

  “Thanks, Sam. I’ll let you get back inside.” His smile was genuinely grateful. For what, she didn’t know. She felt as though she hadn’t exactly offered any great epiphany for him.

  She quick-stepped back to the house and pulled out the steak she planned to broil for Beau’s dinner. The gist of those text messages ran through her mind as she chopped greens and tomatoes for the salad. Some kind of divine message had told Lila she should marry Danny?

  Okay, lots of young women got starry-eyed ideas about guys. And sometimes, the earlier in the relationship the more unrealistic the dreams. But this felt like something more. Danny’s uncertainty about what he had actually promised Lila, versus what she claimed he said. And his apologizing for his own feelings. What type of relationship prompted those things?

  Chapter 8

  Kelly flipped the switch on the electric kettle and measured loose tea into a strainer, an afternoon habit she’d cherished since she and Scott spent their honeymoon in England. The attic room had come to hold the most interest for her, of any space in the old Victorian house. Here, she kept the carved box, Manichee, which had come into her possession also during that trip to England. Knowing the box had once belonged to her great uncle was a tie, of course, but learning of the box’s power and how it was related to the one her mother owned—there was the magic.

  As the kettle heated she opened the leather-bound book, which she kept on the highest shelf in the room. Golden sun filtered through one of the attic’s dormer windows, where Eliza lay stretched out in feline contentment. Just outside the door, on the landing, Ana played contentedly with two dollies, serving them pretend tea from her little china tea set.

  Through the window, Kelly saw Sam’s new little SUV coming up the long driveway, disappearing behind one of the gables. Downstairs, the sounds of movement in the kitchen. The kettle clicked off. Kelly, following the English method for tea, swished the boiling water into the pot, poured it out in her small work sink, and then poured more water over the leaves in the strainer.

  Sam arrived at the attic door just as the three-minute timer went off. She held a bakery box from Sweet’s Sweets.

  “Perfect timing.” Kelly set the book aside and picked up the two tea mugs she’d purchased at Harrod’s.

  Sam pulled a stool up to the heavy wooden table Kelly was now using partly as a library table, sometimes for experiments and to test ideas she found in the book of runes, as they’d come to call the volume that they’d learned had once belonged to a Romanian witch—supposedly. Since the book and the two boxes had come into their lives, they’d learned to remain open to almost any possibility.

  “So, I have a confession to make,” Sam said as she opened the bakery box to reveal a dozen decorated Easter egg cookies.

  “You’re hitting Easter early?”

  “Becky’s idea. They’re selling well, so who cares if the holiday is more than three weeks away.” Sam took one to Ana, who proceeded to break it into small enough pieces so her dolls could eat some.

  Eliza joined the little party on the landing, and Ana proceeded to explain why cats don’t generally like tea. Eliza watched her hostess with head cocked, ears perked forward.

  Sam started to sip her tea but backed away when it proved too hot. She pointed to the book. “Do you suppose this has spells or potions or something to fix relationships?”

  “That’s your confession? Is there something at home you’re not telling me?”

  Sam laughed. “Guess I’d better start over. My confession is that I snooped on Danny’s phone. My question stems from my suspicion that things are seriously messed up between him and Lila.”

  “Really? What was your first clue?” Kelly said, giving her mom the dagger eyes.

  “Do you believe a person can receive a divine sign that they are meant to be with someone?”

  “What, like lightning strikes them or something?”

  Sam told her about the messages on the young man’s phone, quoting several.

  “So, which was it—God or an angel that gave Lila this edict from heaven?” Kelly was smirking into her mug.

  “I know, right? And then … saddest thing is that he’s apologizing to her! She gets him thinking it’s somehow his fault that he doesn’t want to commit to marriage after knowing her just a few months. I tell you, the lady is unbalanced.”

  Kelly held up an index finger. “Hang on … I’ve read something about this. It’s a thing.”

  She set her mug down and picked up her tablet. With a few clicks, she had come up with an article.

  “Does Danny seem to be second-guessing things he knows to be true?” she asked after a couple of minutes.

  “I’d say so. I watch him around Beau and he’s confident and assured. When we’ve had conversations, he seems to know what he wants, knows he wants to break it off
with her. But then she says something—like that whole heavenly message bit—and he’s dithering again. He asked me if I thought he was being too sensitive, but from what I’ve seen she completely ignores his wishes. Her messages just sort of talk right over him, telling him what’s going to happen despite what he states to her.”

  “So he’s questioning his own decisions?”

  “Yeah, I think he’s even questioning what his actual words were. He says he never proposed to her, but she’s almost convinced him that he did.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m finding here. Her social media pages are all full of claims about him and their plans together. She puts incredibly personal stuff out there for the world to see.” She held up the screen for Sam to take a look. “And now, in these recent posts she’s going on about how much she loves him and how it’s breaking her heart that he wants to delay the wedding, as if it was all set.”

  “What wedding? The girl is off her rocker.”

  “Yeah, this stuff is over the top,” Kelly murmured, switching to another screen. “Okay, here’s the article I read a while back. Gaslighting. That’s what this is called, quote ‘when a person manipulates or controls someone else in ways that make them question their memory of events or even their sanity’.”

  “Gaslight, that old movie with Ingrid Bergman … Wow. That was powerful stuff.”

  “Exactly. The husband gradually drove her crazy by playing little tricks and then telling her she was imagining everything. That’s what happens. Lila’s got all their friends believing they are this super close couple, the fairytale romance, and the wedding will be happening soon, and Danny’s caught up in wondering if he did actually propose and agree to all this.”

  “Can we do anything to help him?” Sam wondered.

  Kelly shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. How often does anyone believe what outsiders are telling them about their relationships? He may just have to figure this out for himself.”

  “If the genders were switched—if this was a woman friend being manipulated by a man, I wouldn’t have any trouble speaking up and suggesting she get herself out of there. But with a guy, I just don’t know how much to say. They’ve got their pride.”

  “I’ll print this page and maybe you can find someplace to leave it for him—his truck or in the casita. What do you think?”

  “He’s already tried to get himself away from her, but maybe if he sees it spelled out in black and white … Anyway, it’s worth a try.”

  Sure. What could go wrong with that?

  Chapter 9

  Sam decided not to say anything to Beau about what she and Kelly had found. The texts, the social media posts, and Danny’s distress over Lila showing up were all pretty compelling, but at the end of the day it was Danny’s problem to solve. Beau would give her a hard stare and tell her it was none of their business.

  So she did what most wives would do and kept the printed page from Kelly’s research a secret. The folded paper, left inconspicuously on the casita’s kitchenette countertop, might at least give Danny the knowledge that he wasn’t alone, that others had experienced similar problems. Sam was tempted to jot a note to suggest he block Lila’s calls and messages so he wouldn’t even see them, but she felt sure he’d already thought of that. He had gone so far as to move to another state to get away from her. She wasn’t sure what else to advise, so she went to bed that night determined to put everything out of her mind.

  Beau was reading a biography of the frontiersman Kit Carson when the distinctive sound of tires on gravel sounded outside. Sam watched him set his book aside and step over to the window that overlooked the front of the property.

  “Someone coming up the driveway,” he said. “It looks like a small sedan—we know anyone like that?”

  “No one I’d be expecting after ten o’clock at night.”

  “It’s heading for the casita. Stopping beside Danny’s truck.”

  Sam had a bad feeling about this. She jumped out of bed and joined him. By the casita’s porch light she saw a woman with long dark hair, wearing jeans and puffy jacket, step out of the car and approach the door. More than a minute passed and Danny didn’t open up. Then they caught the sound of Lila pounding on the door. It opened suddenly.

  “Doesn’t look like he’s gotten through to her yet,” Sam said.

  Raised voices, then Lila went into the casita and the door closed.

  “Sam … you gotta leave this alone. Danny has to figure it out for himself.” Exactly what she’d known he would say.

  “I know.”

  They crawled back into bed and turned out the bedside lamps. But Sam couldn’t take her eyes off the numerals on the clock. She imagined herself casting a spell, flinging lightning bolts from her fingertips to chase away the unwanted visitor. As if she actually knew how to do such a thing. But the image comforted her, made her feel useful. Fifteen minutes passed, and then she heard the sound of the car driving away.

  In the morning Beau called Danny. “Come up to the house. I need to give you some cash to pick up our order at the feed store.”

  Sam was at the kitchen window when the ranch hand arrived. He stood on the front porch, stroking the sideburn on the left side of his face. Beau went out and she watched him hand Danny a piece of paper and some money. When he reached out to take the cash, Sam saw marks on his face.

  “What happened to Danny’s face?” she asked Beau two minutes later, when he came inside.

  “He didn’t explain and I didn’t ask. Looked like scratches.”

  They exchanged a look, both thinking the same thing. Lila.

  “Beau, if this is getting physical, shouldn’t we say something?”

  “Sam, leave it. He’ll figure it out.” Beau put on his work jacket and headed out toward the barn, and she saw Danny’s truck pull out onto the county road.

  But she couldn’t get the image of those red lines out of her mind. She took a long breath. Today was her morning at the bakery, with an important wedding cake to finish. She needed to follow Beau’s advice and just get on with her own business.

  The drive into town calmed her. Spring was in the air and, although she knew the weather could turn any direction at this time of year, she savored the clear sky and noticed the tender buds on the trees. Coming in on Camino de la Placita, she slowed to look at the front of her pastry shop.

  Sweet’s Sweets had been her dream for many years and now it had become exactly what she wanted, the place to stretch her creative baker’s muscles, although not with the intensity of the early years when she’d worked nearly around the clock. The purple awning and attractive window display brought customers off the street, as well as her diehard loyal fans.

  She had just slowed for the stop sign at the corner when she spotted a woman leaving the shop—dark hair, puffy jacket, and those expensive boots. Lila got into a white sedan that screamed rental, and backed out. This didn’t seem like a coincidence. Sam debated following, but didn’t see the point. Plus, she had a wedding cake with a deadline. She pulled into her normal spot in the alley behind the bakery and went into the kitchen.

  “Hey, Sam.” Julio, her star baker, was dumping flour into the big Hobart mixer. “The layers for that big cake are ready.”

  “Thanks. I’m going to grab a coffee up front.” Sam pushed through the curtain that separated the kitchen from the sales room, not even pausing to take off her coat first.

  Jen was alone, taking a moment between customers to wipe down the bistro tables.

  “That young woman who was just in here …” Sam said, approaching the beverage bar. “What did she want?”

  Jen’s forehead furrowed for a moment. “Long, dark hair, pretty, about twenty-five?”

  “I saw her leaving.”

  “Yeah, she was looking at the wedding cakes in the window display, asking prices and stuff.”

  “Did she actually order a cake?”

  “Oh, no. Said she was just gathering information, real preliminary questions. You know the
type.”

  Sam nodded. “Did she mention me or Beau? I wonder if she knew this was my shop?”

  “Nope, not at all. Like I said, just general questions. She ended up buying one cupcake, a triple chocolate.” Jen chuckled. “Admitted to being a real chocoholic and we laughed over that. She seemed nice.”

  Sam nodded as she poured a mug of her signature blend coffee for herself. “Okay, thanks.” So, maybe there were coincidences after all.

  In the kitchen she hung up her coat, washed her hands, and took out the layers for the new cake, a four-tier confection in pink and burgundy. She began by rolling rose-pink fondant and draping the tiers with it, then creating swags and ruffles tinted a slightly darker shade. It was the type of work she loved getting lost in, the draping and shaping of the swags.

  At some point Becky informed her she was taking the bakery van to make a couple of deliveries and asked if Sam wanted her to bring back something for lunch. Had the morning slipped by so effortlessly?

  A familiar male voice joked with Jen in the front room, and within a minute or so her friend Rupert Penrick walked through to the kitchen.

  “Greetings, my dear,” he said, sweeping in and planting a kiss on Sam’s cheek. Today’s outfit consisted of flowing purple pants and bright yellow tunic, a purple beret, and a flowered scarf. If she had to bet, he had a new boyfriend. Or his work was going really well.

  “You’re in a great mood. Must have finished that book you were agonizing over when we talked at Ana’s birthday party?”

  “I have, and it’s the most glorious feeling. Typing ‘the end’ must be for me somewhat like placing the topper on that fabulous cake will be for you. A creative endeavor well done, and happily so.”

  Sam laughed. He was so right.

  “So, what’s this one about?” she asked.

  “About? What they’re always about—love and romance. There are times I feel like killing off a character, but my audience buys them for the happily-ever-after ending.” He was always so modest about the fact that every one of his books, written under the pen name Victoria DeVane, was a top bestseller before even hitting the stores.