Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 2: Books 4-6

by Emily James

  I had to stop three kids before one of them could direct me to his room. Not exactly keeping a low profile, though I’d bet none of them wanted to take the time to report an interloper to the office even if they did suspect I hadn’t checked in.

  Room 103 turned out to be a science room, if the sinks in the desks and the row of practically antique Bunsen burners along the shelves were any indication. Shawn had his back to the door, facing a projector. A projector screen covered the chalkboard.

  I groaned inside. I’d planned to stop by under the guise of offering his family a free tour, and now I might have to stall. And pray that he’d used the chalkboard sometime today.

  I rapped my knuckles against the door frame.

  He turned around, and an expression I couldn’t quite interpret flickered across his face. It was probably nothing more than that he’d been expecting a student, and I clearly wasn’t that. It disappeared as quickly as it’d been there.

  Seeing him now, apart from his winter gear, he was the kind of teacher that all the female students probably had a crush on, tall and lean, with blue eyes and a haircut that did a good job of hiding his slightly receding hairline.

  “Kristen did give me your message, and I meant to give you a call last week, but I’ve been grading exams.” He pointed to a pile of papers on the corner of his desk. His cell phone and keys rested on top like paperweights. “Still ongoing, as you can see, and I don’t think I have anything useful to add to your hunt.”

  That’s right. I had asked Kristen to have him call me. I’d forgotten to follow up when he didn’t call back. If I pursued that now, though, he’d find it suspicious when I tried to get a look at his chalkboard.

  “Actually, I came because I wanted to offer your family a free tour to make up for the…eventful one you had last time.” Why wouldn’t I have simply told Kristen that? Why would I have had to make a trip here to offer it when I knew their phone number? “I, uh, didn’t want to offer it to Kristen in case the kids overheard. I thought it might be something the two of you would want to decide.”

  That sounded plausible, right? I smiled to add believability to my words.

  He gave an upward-chin-jut nod. “Thanks. I’ll talk it over with her.”

  He took the Bunsen burner off his front counter, stepped around the projector, and carried it to the far wall.

  Aaand that should have ended the conversation if offering a free tour was why I’d really come, but he hadn’t yet moved the projector screen. I hadn’t planned for this contingency. What kind of a school used dinosaur-age projectors anyway?

  “Do you need help cleaning the chalkboard?” I blurted. I stepped past the projector toward the board. “I always liked wiping them down when I was in school.”

  Heat snaked up my neck and into my cheeks. My mother’s shame-sensors were probably going off all the way in DC. That sounded so silly even to me that my ego had cringed up into a ball inside and was dying a slow, agonizing death.

  I blasted him with an even bigger smile. Maybe he’d think I was smitten with him the way his students probably were. I prayed Mark would never hear of it because he really didn’t like when I acted interested in suspects to wheedle information out of them.

  In Shawn’s defense, he didn’t give away that he noticed my goofiness, probably a skill you had to develop to survive as a teacher or you’d have kids complaining to their parents that their teacher had mocked them. He walked over to the screen and pulled it up. It retraced with a whoosh.

  “Nope,” he said. “Looks all clean.”

  An electric jolt zinged through me like I’d shocked myself. It wasn’t all clean. He’d written a homework assignment in the corner. A dull ache replaced the jolt. If the writing on the board was his, it didn’t match the handwriting on the note. I had to be sure.

  My parents would never forgive me if they found out, but playing dumb seemed like the smartest move.

  “I was terrible at chemistry in high school, but my parents insisted on straight A’s. When I found out I’d gotten a B+, I went to my teacher and argued my way up to an A.” I pointed to the writing. “Is that all for one day of your class? I don’t think I would have even gotten a B as your student if it is.”

  My giggle could have been interpreted as either inane or unbalanced. It was a toss-up.

  He gave me a tolerant smile, so it seemed like he’d heard inane. “Yup, that’s what I expect them to have done for tomorrow. This is AP chemistry.”

  That clinched it. He couldn’t have written the note either. Time to make my exit before I made an even bigger fool of myself.

  I backed up a step and turned around. My ankle caught on something that felt like a thin rope and I pitched sideways toward the counter. My arms shot out to stop the fall, but I missed. My hands connected with the papers and something else more solid on the desk, sending them flying, and I smashed ribs-first into the edge of the counter.

  Pain burned through my side, and all my air rushed out with an oomph. I barely managed to grab the counter edge in time to keep from landing in a heap. The projector wobbled precariously next to me. I must have tripped on the cord.

  Shawn swore low in his throat and scrambled to my side. He stretched out his hands but didn’t make contact, like he wanted to help but couldn’t overcome his training on not touching students to do it. “Are you okay?”

  Debatable. My ribs felt like someone had painted them with burning coals. The heat flaming in my face almost rivaled the heat in my side. Forget clumsiest person on the planet. If aliens existed, I’d win clumsiest being in the galaxy.

  It was one thing to have Mark realize that—he was my boyfriend. It was quite another thing to have someone else know it and have it spread around the entire town. “I’m fine.”

  Breathing deeply hurt. I inched around the counter. What were the chances this was a bad bruise and not fractured ribs? I couldn’t hide fractured ribs. My baby steps brought me to the end of the counter. His phone lay on the floor alongside the papers. Crap. I’d probably broken it, and I’d have to buy him a new one.

  I eased as slowly as possible onto one knee, trying to keep my torso mostly straight. “Let me help you clean this up.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Shawn was saying. “I can do it.”

  His phone dinged, and I swept it up. If it was still receiving texts, it couldn’t be entirely destroyed. I went to pass it to him, but my gaze snagged on the screen.

  A string of seemingly random letters and numbers, exactly how Amy had described the text she’d been told to send to the dealer to prove she wasn’t a police officer.

  I sucked in a breath and nearly dropped the phone. My hand shook slightly.

  My mind screamed that I had to pull it together. Shawn couldn’t have missed my reaction, and if he figured out that I knew he was dealing drugs, he could destroy any evidence of what he was doing before I could convince the police to look into him. My only hope was to pretend whatever expression he thought he saw on my face came from pain.

  I handed over the phone and clutched my throbbing ribs with my other hand. “I don’t feel well. The pain’s getting worse. I think I should go for an x-ray.”

  His face didn’t give away whether he believed me or not. It’s a good thing all teachers weren’t criminals. They had too much practice at hiding when something bothered them.

  I eased up to my feet, making sure to favor my ribs even more than I was already inclined to. The best thing to do to substantiate my claim was to call someone to take me to the hospital.

  The pain was making it increasingly hard to breathe, so that might be the smartest move anyway. Please God let me not have hit the counter hard enough to puncture a lung or some other vital organ. Would I still be able to stand if I’d done that much damage?

  Shawn pulled his chair over to where I was. Either my ruse worked or I was starting to look pale.

  “Should I call an ambulance?” he asked.

  I didn’t want strangers. I wanted Mark.
For more reasons than one.

  The part of my brain that still seemed to be thinking rationally and wasn’t convinced I was about to die whispered that I should keep working to disarm Shawn’s suspicion. I handed him my phone. “My boyfriend. He’s a doctor. Please call him. Under Mark.”

  15

  “What were you doing at the school in the first place?” Mark asked as he helped me back out to my car after I’d been x-rayed and examined until I was sorry I’d come.

  The doctor and Mark both agreed my ribs were only mildly fractured, not broken. I didn’t seem to have any more serious damage, but I’d still need to rest.

  Unfortunately, with so many people around at the hospital, I hadn’t had a chance to explain how I’d ended up in a high school chemistry room and what I’d discovered.

  “It’s possible that I was there trying to see if Shawn’s handwriting matched the writing on the note since they didn’t find any fingerprints.”

  Mark turned one of his eyebrows into a triangle. “It’s possible?”

  “Depends on how mad you’ll be if I admit to it.”

  His hands clenched around the steering wheel, turning his knuckles white. “Will you at least tell me next time before you head off into a potentially dangerous situation?”

  “Will you try to stop me?”

  His dimple peeked out and his grip on the steering wheel relaxed slightly. “It’s possible.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be a dangerous situation. I did this to myself.” I adjusted the seatbelt so that it didn’t put as much pressure on my chest and filled Mark in on what I’d figured out. “Except it feels like I’m trying to fit together pieces that belong to two different puzzles. The text message I saw makes it look like he’s the one Drew was investigating for dealing drugs, but his handwriting doesn’t match the note.”

  “We don’t know Drew was investigating anything. We’re guessing. If Drew was putting together proof that Shawn was dealing, the police should have found some evidence. They took his computer, his camera, everything that could have been evidence for a motive.” Mark’s lips thinned. “Erik’s been keeping me updated on the case, and they didn’t find anything unusual.”

  Working through a puzzle like this with Mark again felt good. I don’t think I’d realized how much I missed it in the stretch that we hadn’t been speaking to each other prior to dating.

  More than that, I don’t think I’d realized how much I’d missed investigating in general even though the last case I’d been part of hadn’t been that long ago.

  A pain beat in my chest that had nothing to do with my ribs. I felt the most like myself when I was working on solving a crime. I’d come to Fair Haven, to Sugarwood, to escape being a lawyer. If Chief McTavish looked more carefully at my history, he’d see that I’d been a terrible criminal defense attorney and he’d probably want me defending all the criminals he’d like to lock away. I’d never been the lead on a case because I sounded like an awkward seventh grader with a stutter whenever I tried to speak in front of a jury. And your clientele was going to be small when you insisted on defending only the innocent. My dad had once told me they were all guilty. He’d only been a little bit wrong. Where did that leave me?

  Mark was giving me a look that said he was worried about me fainting.

  I pulled myself back to the problem at hand. Figuring out my life could wait. Right now, proving Holly was innocent so that she’d still have a life outside of prison was what mattered most.

  “They didn’t find anything in Drew’s belongings.” I repeated what we knew, giving my subconscious a chance to hear it again. It felt like I was stretching as far as I could reach and my mental fingers kept brushing the edge of the answer as it floated away. “They didn’t find anything on Holly’s computer either?”

  Mark shook his head.

  Maybe the police weren’t the only ones looking. “Both houses were broken in to. I know the chief thinks it’s part of the B&E streak that’s been happening, but if it wasn’t, it suggests the thief was looking for something. They managed to take the family desktop from Holly’s house. Do you know what was taken from Drew’s?”

  “They didn’t have a lot to steal, according to Erik. The Harris’ were still sorting through to see if anything small had been taken the last I heard, but their computer was gone as well.”

  The way the corners of Mark’s lips drooped down told me he saw the connection too.

  I shifted around again. My chances of getting comfortable anywhere until my ribs healed seemed about as good as someone stepping forward unbidden and confessing to Drew’s murder. “So assuming the thief was also connected to Drew’s murder, they might have been hoping to find the evidence Drew’d collected.”

  “Theoretically,” Mark said. “But if that’s true, then whatever evidence Drew collected is gone, and we might never be able to prove who he was investigating or why.”

  And Holly might go to prison for a crime she didn’t commit.

  It turned out that large dogs with a lot of pent-up energy and a person with cracked ribs were a bad combination. My stubborn attempt to take Velma out for a bathroom break on her leash resulted in a howl of pain from me and Mark insisting he’d sleep over on the couch for a few nights to watch over me. The rumor factory would have a bestseller if anyone found out—there’d certainly be assumptions that the couch wasn’t where he was sleeping—but I hurt too much to care.

  Before heading out the next morning, Mark even called Russ to make sure someone would come to walk the dogs and check on me while he was at work. The text I got from Mark said not to lock my door because he didn’t want me having to get up to let anyone in.

  The knowledge that my door was unlocked would have been enough to keep me from resting, but by one o’clock the next afternoon, it was clear Russ had panicked about me being alone and arranged some sort of rotating schedule for the Sugarwood employees. My front door barely closed behind one visitor before another dropped in. Stacey brought a get-well card for the boy who’d been in the hit-and-run accident the week before that she was having everyone at Sugarwood sign—his dad worked for her dad. Dave read me the start to his new fantasy story, and our cook at the Short Stack dropped off lunch. Nancy delivered snacks and the news that Holly was cleared to receive visitors, but that the chief had agreed to wait one day to question her so I could recuperate.

  That was quite the concession, and the second in a row. It had to be a psychological game. He wanted me to drop my guard.

  I must have dozed off after Nancy left because I woke up to knocking on my door and a mouth dry enough from the sweets she left that the dogs’ water bowl almost looked appealing.

  We’d had so many visitors throughout the day that Toby didn’t even break his snore. Velma lifted her coned head for a half-hearted woof and continued slurpily licking her stuffed monkey.

  “Come in,” I called and shimmied back up into a sitting position. I probably had an atrocious case of couch-cushion head, but I’d discovered this morning that raising my arms up felt about as comfortable as popping one of my ribs right out. It was probably Russ anyway since the clock said it was close to the time the dogs would need another trip outside.

  Instead of Russ, Kristen came in, followed closely by Shawn.

  I instinctively raised a hand to my hair and bit back a yelp. I sucked in a rapid breath and nearly keeled over. I had to be more careful. My mind slowly cleared to the realization that a possible murderer-drug dealer was in my home.

  I started to reach for my phone just in case—I couldn’t have even fought off a two-year-old in my current state—but rational thought returned before I found it. My dogs were here, and Kristen probably had no idea what her husband was doing on the side. Even if he did suspect I’d figured out the truth, he wasn’t going to do anything with her around. I’d just have to make the long trip across the room to lock the door after them once they left.

  Kristen’s walk would have been better described as a slink, as if she we
re afraid of my reaction to them. “I hope we didn’t wake you.”

  No, my hair always looks like this is what I wanted to say, but I was certain she’d interpret that as snottiness rather than as teasing. “That’s no problem. I’m supposed to take deep breaths every so often anyway, and it’s hard to make sure I’m doing that if I’m asleep.”

  Kristen flinched. “Shawn told me about what happened, and we wanted to bring a little care package.” She pulled a card and a bottle of ibuprofen out of her bag and passed them to me. She pointed to the card. “There’s a gift card in there to download some audiobooks. In case you get bored. I thought listening would be easier on you than trying to hold up a book.”

  She mimicked holding a book with her upper arms plastered to her sides. It took every ounce of self-control not to crack up, and, horrible as it sounds, I did it more for the sake of my ribs than for her. People got so goofy around someone who was “sick.”

  She glanced back at Shawn and her eyes did that rapid sideways movement that said your turn.

  He looked less contrite than Kristen, but he stepped forward on cue anyway. “I wanted to apologize on behalf of myself and the school. I should have been more careful about the cord.”

  I drew in the slow, deep breath the doctor had instructed me to. He said it would seem counterintuitive, and it did, but, apparently, it decreased my risk of pneumonia or a lung collapse, both complications I’d love to avoid. It did increase the throbbing ache, though. I rubbed a hand over my side, and Kristen shot a frightened rabbit look at Shawn.

  And then I got it. They were afraid I was going to sue Shawn, the high school, or both. “It was really nice of you to come, but there’s no need to feel bad. I should have been paying more attention.”

  Based on the way Kristen’s shoulders came down from their position near her ears, that eased her fears at least a little.