Vanilla Vices

by Jessica Beck

  That caught her off guard. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Exactly what it seems to,” I answered smugly.

  Clearly Belinda didn’t like that at all, but I didn’t care. If she had killed Dan to protect her secret, then I was going to uncover the truth and let the entire town know about the relationship she still guarded so fiercely.

  “Sorry about this,” Gabby said softly to me as she started to close the back door in my face.

  “You don’t have anything to apologize for, and neither do I,” I said. “Thanks for making this happen.”

  “I hope it helped,” she said.

  “Let me put it this way: it didn’t hurt,” I answered.

  After the door was closed and I heard the deadbolts slide into place, I stood there a moment trying to process what I’d just learned. There was one thing that still bothered me about the scenario in which Belinda had killed Dan in order to keep his mouth shut. If she’d murdered the man, why had she been so willing to speak with me at all? On the surface of it, it didn’t make any sense. But what if someone else already knew about their tryst? Was she hedging her bets by coming to me before I found out about it from another source? If she suspected someone else might tell me about her relationship with Dan, she might have been trying to get in front of it and put her best spin on it while she could. Playing the part of the remorseful lover might have worked at that if she hadn’t slipped up by letting her temper show through her ruse. Then again, maybe she was justified in her anger. If she truly believed that I’d been taking a shot at her, and she’d loved Dan after all, then she had a right to be outraged. Had she overplayed it, or was her ire legitimate? I honestly couldn’t say. All I knew was that Belinda Carson had just made it onto our list of suspects.

  Whether or not she was the real killer still remained to be seen.

  Maybe Grace would have a better take on things once I shared everything that had happened with her. I headed straight to her house, not only so we could talk about my interview with Belinda but so we could go grab some lunch, too.

  Detective work made me hungry, but to be fair, so did just about everything else.

  Grace was on the phone when I knocked on her front door. She held up one finger toward me as she said, “Valerie, what’s your schedule look like this afternoon? Okay. Good. Why? I might be in your area, so I want to know how I can find you if I decide to pop in on you. Great. Bye.”

  “Are you working this afternoon after all?” I asked her as she hung up.

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  I looked at her oddly for a moment before I spoke. “It just sounded as though you were making plans to meet up with one of your reps this afternoon.” Grace’s position as supervisor allowed her an open schedule as long as her team was producing, which it usually was.

  “I said that I might be in her area,” Grace replied with a grin. “Goodness knows I have no problem with my people skipping out of work now and then as long as they get their work done, but I’ve got it on good authority that Valerie has been slacking off entirely too much lately. Before you say anything, I realize that I’ve played fast and loose with standard working hours myself, but my work never suffered because of it. It just so happens that I’m a highly organized individual who doesn’t need eight hours every day to accomplish my set tasks at work.”

  “I’m not about to say a word,” I replied. “Your system works for you, and as an added bonus, you can spend time detecting with me. It’s a win in my book any day of the week.”

  “Speaking of detecting, how did it go? Who did this mystery woman turn out to be? Please tell me that it wasn’t your mother, Suzanne. I don’t think my heart could take it.”

  I was shocked by the mere hint that Momma might be cheating on her husband. “What makes you even say something like that? I’m still not entirely sure why, but Phillip Martin seems to make my mother happy, and that’s good enough for me.”

  “Thus the secrecy,” Grace said. “That’s a relief. Still, I’m willing to bet that she’s married to some poor unsuspecting fellow.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She hid the affair. Isn’t it that simple?”

  “Sorry to burst your bubble, but she happens to be single.”

  “Then why all of the secrecy? Wait. Don’t tell me. She was ashamed of dating Dan. That means she’s not someone we’d naturally suspect would be with him. Since we’ve ruled your mother out, along with all of the rest of the taken female population of April Springs, I’d say that it’s most likely either Belinda Carson or Samantha Longstreet.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said.

  “Am I right? Which one was it, then? It’s Belinda. No, I’m changing my vote to Samantha. Definitely Samantha.”

  “It’s Belinda,” I told her.

  “I knew it!”

  “You just said that it was Samantha.”

  “I was just testing you,” Grace said. “I knew that it was Belinda all along. I’m curious about something, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If she was so ashamed of dating Dan, why did she want to see you to reveal the news? Wouldn’t she want that particular secret to die with her lover?”

  “I wondered about that myself,” I said as I started to explain my reasoning.

  Grace beat me to the punch. “Unless she is remorseful about hiding their relationship, and now that he’s gone, she wants vengeance for his murder.”

  “You’re really good at this, Grace. I’m beginning to think sometimes I don’t give you enough credit.”

  “Do you mean that I’m right about that, too?”

  “That’s what she claimed.”

  Grace studied me for a moment before she spoke again. “But you don’t believe her.”

  “I’m not sure what to think at this point,” I said. “I’m having my doubts. What if she reached out to me for a reason other than her remorse? If someone else in town knew she and Dan were seeing each other, there might be a reason that Belinda could be a suspect in his murder. For instance, what if he threatened to tell everyone about their affair? Could Belinda have killed him to keep him from talking?”

  Grace seemed to ponder that for a moment. “It’s possible. She’s pretty wrapped up in her social status around here. Her reputation is pretty important to her, so yes, she might kill to protect it. It’s not going to work out for her, is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She had to come clean with you in order to cover her own back,” Grace said. “By revealing her relationship with Dan to you, doesn’t that destroy her motive for murder?”

  “Not if I’m discreet, which is something she’s counting on. Besides, what if someone else suspects that she might have killed him, too? Is it possible that someone else knew about the relationship?”

  “To be honest with you, I’m pretty surprised that we didn’t know about it,” Grace said.

  “I know. I thought we had our fingertips on the heartbeat of April Springs,” I said with a soft smile. “And now I come to find out that we might not be as well connected as we think we are.”

  “That’s not it,” Grace answered. “What we are is uninformed, at least about Belinda and Dan. I’m still having trouble imagining it, even after you told me.”

  “Stranger things have happened in the name of love,” I said.

  “And that doesn’t even cover the acts committed out of lust,” she said. “Now that we have this new information, what do we do about it?”

  “That’s a fair question,” I said, “but sadly, one that I don’t happen to have the answer for at the moment. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think all that well on an empty stomach.”

  “Then eat we shall,” she said. “I’d offer to make you something here for lunch, but I don’t feel like cooking. Why don’t we go to the Boxcar? That wa
y we can look around for suspicious-looking characters while we’re eating.”

  “If we keep watching everyone else while they’re trying to eat, doesn’t that make us the suspicious-looking characters?” I asked her.

  “Suzanne, are you seriously going to argue semantics with me when I’m offering you a rationale that allows you to eat?”

  “You’re right. The hunger must be clouding my judgment. Let’s go.”

  “I thought you’d come around to my way of thinking,” Grace said as we left her place and she carefully locked the door behind us before we headed over to Trish’s diner.

  Chapter 7

  “Did you have any luck finding Benny?” Trish asked us the moment we walked back into the Boxcar Grill. It was a great deal more crowded now than it had been earlier.

  “We did. Thanks for the tip. Is there any chance we can get a table?”

  She looked around. “Sorry. We’re really jammed right now. I can’t speak for him, but I’m sure you could sit with the mayor.”

  I hadn’t seen George Morris, mainly because his back had been turned to us. “Has he been here long?”

  “Quite a while, but he just ordered. It wasn’t because I was slow. He had a meeting. The more I think about it, I’m sure he’d love to see you after what he’s been through. I swear, the way some of the town council acts toward him, I’m amazed he’s willing to keep being our mayor.”

  “Was it really that bad?” I asked. George had been a cop once upon a time, and before his first stint as mayor of our nice little town, he’d helped Grace and me in our investigations. Since he’d become mayor, his participation had scaled back quite a bit, not by his choice but by ours. The last thing we wanted to do was involve him in anything that might hurt his chances of being reelected, and our investigations, by their very nature, tended to upset a lot of folks in town. Grace and I tended to ask some tough questions, and we’d garnered a little resentment over the years.

  “Don’t bring the meeting up if he doesn’t,” she said. “I’ll be with you in a second.”

  We approached George’s table, and found him frowning as he scribbled in a little blue notebook. His hair was thinning, and he had more lines in his face than I remembered. Was his back hunched a little more as well from the weight of his responsibilities? “Want some company?” I asked him as I put on my best and brightest smile.

  George looked up from his notes, and the frown disappeared. “Suzanne. Grace. Please. It’s nice to see a couple of friendly faces.” He stood and tried to hold our chairs out for us at the same time.

  “You’re going to need longer arms than that, but we appreciate the thought,” I said with a grin. “We can do it ourselves. How’s it going?”

  “Why? Did Trish say something to you?”

  “No. Well, maybe. You don’t look very happy, Mr. Mayor.”

  “The council, or at least a few of its members, want to change April Springs into one giant strip mall,” George said. “They want to take every ounce of character we have and bulldoze it under. Well, I’m not going to let that happen, not as long as I’m mayor.”

  Grace looked at me and grinned. “I just love it when he says something mayoral, don’t you?”

  “I’m a big fan,” I said, and then I turned to the mayor. “Is there anything we can help with?”

  “Thank you, but your mother is a powerful ally. Without her support, I’m not sure I’d be able to stand up to them all.”

  “It’s only fair that she helps you out, since she’s the one who tricked you into running for mayor the first time. The second term is all your fault, though.”

  “I know. Sometimes I’d like to chuck it all and go back to working with you two. How’s it going so far, by the way?”

  “How’s what going?” I asked, doing my best to appear innocent. It was a stretch, and everyone at the table knew it.

  “Seriously? Do you think you can fool me for one second? You’re both digging into Crazy Dan’s homicide,” George said. “Please tell me you came here today looking for me so I could help you.”

  “Would you honestly rather dig into a murder than deal with the city council?” Grace asked him. “Are they that bad?”

  “Try me,” George said with a faint grin.

  “We’re doing fine, but thanks for offering,” I said. I didn’t want to drag George into our investigation. There was another reason it might not be the best idea having the mayor work with us. It could backfire if folks thought that he was trying to do Jake’s job behind his back, though my husband had been removed from this particular case.

  “Why don’t I believe you?” he asked me.

  “Okay, maybe we’ve run into a snag or two, but it’s nothing that we can’t handle,” I said. “You know how these things go. We go along collecting as much information as possible from as many sources as we can find until something clicks. Sometimes it’s easy, but most times it’s not.”

  “The least you could do is use me as a sounding board. I know you both want to keep me at arm’s length for my own good, but you should realize by now that I’m not all that concerned with my own good these days.”

  “How’s your love life treating you?” I asked him. George had lost two secretaries in the past two years, each of them acting as his love interests as well.

  “I’ve decided that I’m done with women,” he said as he shook his head.

  “Should we sit somewhere else, then?” Grace asked as she pretended to stand.

  “Not you two. You’re the exceptions to the rule.”

  “It doesn’t hurt that we’re both already in relationships, either,” Grace said. “Otherwise, you might be in trouble. If things don’t work out with Stephen, I might go after an older man next time.”

  George knew that she was just teasing him, but he wasn’t going to let it just slide. “Be careful, Grace.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You know what they say. Just because there’s a little snow on the roof doesn’t mean that the fire inside has gone out.”

  “Why, Mr. Mayor, are you flirting with me?” Grace asked, batting her eyelashes at him.

  “What? No. You know what I mean. I’m just saying.” He’d clearly grown uncomfortable about their exchange, which just served to egg Grace on even more. I had to stop her before the mayor became completely flummoxed.

  I playfully smacked Grace’s hand. “Don’t tease our friend. It’s not nice.”

  “Hey, he’s the one who started it,” Grace replied, grinning broadly.

  “You did, you know,” I told George.

  “Are you two ganging up on me now?” he asked us in turn.

  “Haven’t we always?” Grace asked.

  “I heard Jake was taken off the case,” George said, getting a little more serious. “How’s he handling it?”

  “How do you think? He’s not happy about it, but he’s occupied for the search for Linda Harold right now,” I said in a gentler voice. “She’s married to Trish’s cousin. Did you know that?”

  “I did, but I’m a little surprised that you didn’t.”

  “Is that a crack about how nosy I can be most of the time?” I asked him softly.

  “No, it was more of a dig about how well you do or do not know one of your best friends,” George said. For a mayor, he still needed a few lessons in diplomacy, but I wouldn’t change him for the world myself. “How is it really going?”

  “We have a few leads,” I admitted.

  “Don’t keep me hanging,” the mayor said. “Share.”

  “Guys, I’m not so sure we should be discussing it right here,” Grace said. I looked around and saw that several people were following our conversation more closely than it might have appeared.

  “Could we swing by your office later?” I asked.

  “I should be able to squeeze you in,” George said.
“I’ll let Reg know you’re coming by.”

  “Reg?” I asked. “Not Reg Miles.”

  “Yes, he’s agreed to help out with my office until I can find someone more permanent.”

  “Smart. Get a man in there. That way you won’t be so tempted to toy with another woman’s affections,” Grace said.

  George looked at her askance, and I realized that she’d pushed him a little too far, which Grace had a penchant for doing every now and then. Sometimes her way of finding the line was to cross it heartily before she took a step back.

  “Why don’t we all walk over to your office together after we eat? That way we can have some privacy, and we don’t have to interfere with your schedule, either.”

  “That sounds like a good plan,” he said, and then he turned to Grace. “For the record, this thing with my employees hasn’t been my fault. My secretaries both left town for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with me.”

  “I know, George. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have teased you like that.”

  George frowned a moment, and then he turned to me. “Is she being sarcastic right now or serious? I can’t always tell.”

  “The truth is that neither can I,” I answered.

  Grace was about to respond, hesitated, and then nodded. “I’d like to throw a fit right now, but in truth, that’s fair. For the record, my apology was completely sincere.”

  “Then I accept it,” George said.

  Trish came up to the table after she delivered two plates to a couple nearby. “I took the liberty of bringing you all sweet tea. If you want something else, the kitchen is back there,” she said as she gestured back over her shoulder with her pen.

  “Tea sounds great,” I said.

  “Fine with me,” George added.

  Grace was about to say something funny, but after our earlier conversation, she quietly reached out for the glass. “Just what I wanted.”

  “You three are being awfully agreeable today. What’s going on?”

  “Maybe we all just decided to be cordial,” Grace said. “We can see how busy you are, so we’re acting on our best behavior.”