The Cakes of Wrath (A Piece of Cake Mystery)

by Brady, Jacklyn

  That wasn’t a risk I was willing to take. I just hoped God wouldn’t notice how much I resented having to devote attention to the woman in obvious need when I had so many other things I should be doing. I couldn’t smell alcohol over her flowery cologne, so I had to assume she’d taken some kind of narcotic. In that case, would coffee help or just make things worse? Would it sober her up, or just wind her up?

  I steered her toward a chair in the break room and put on a pot of coffee just in case.

  She propped her chin in her hand and watched me. “You’re nice, Rita.”

  I turned, surprised, and rummaged up a smile. “Thanks.”

  “I’m real sorry about what happened to you last night.”

  “Thanks. Me, too. I haven’t had a chance to check on Moose. He didn’t get hurt, did he?”

  Destiny shook her head. “Naw. He’s like a rock.” She laughed softly and repeated, “Like a rock. Dumb as one, too, sometimes.”

  I blinked a couple of times as I tried to convince myself I’d heard wrong. “I’m sorry? I missed that.”

  Destiny grinned up at me. “Hey, I love the man. He’s got a heart as big as . . . something really big. But sometimes he’s one beer short of a six-pack, if you know what I mean.”

  Yeah? I’ll bet I knew where the other five had gone. Moose had been nothing but nice to me, and my hackles rose in his defense. “That’s a horrible thing to say,” I told her. “He seems like a great guy.”

  Her arm wobbled and dropped to the table. Her head landed beside it, and she grinned up at me from behind a curtain of hair. “You want him? Go ahead.”

  “That’s not what I meant!” I sat beside her and decided to stop dancing around the big pink elephant in the room. “What are you on, Destiny?”

  She lifted her head and stared at me. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it’s pretty obvious you’re either drunk or high. Your words are slurred, you can barely sit up, and you’re talking crazy. What did you take?”

  Very slowly and carefully, she rose to her feet and glared down at me with as much dignity as she could muster. Which wasn’t much. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I took something for a headache, that’s all.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” Some headache. I stood to face her. “I know you were excited about helping with the collection this afternoon, but you can’t do the work in this condition. I’m going to take you back to the Chopper Shop now. Maybe you can help out on another project.”

  I reached for her arm, but she jerked away from me so fast she almost lost her balance again. “I’m fine. You just don’t want me here.”

  There might have been some truth in that, but not the way she meant it. “I’d be happy to have you be part of the team, but clearly you’re not feeling well today.” Okay, so I fudged a little on the “happy to have you” part. But the rest was entirely truthful.

  “I knew you wouldn’t let me do this,” she wailed. “I told Moose you were just like the others.” She stumbled toward the door, ran into a table, and clutched a chair for support. “Remember when I said you were nice? Well, you’re not. You’re like all the rest of the assholes around here.”

  “Destiny, listen—”

  “No, you listen.” She squinted to focus on my face and jabbed a finger at me. “I’ve got something on my side for once. Something that’s going to make a few people very sorry. And you’ll be one of ’em.” And then she squared up, found some balance, and ran from the room. I stood there for a second, arguing with myself about whether to follow her and make sure she was all right, or thank my lucky stars that I didn’t have to sit here with her for the next two hours.

  Guilt is a powerful master. I ought to know. I was raised on it. I couldn’t just let Destiny wander off like that. Anything could happen to her.

  But I want it on record that, so far, the day had been shaping up as one of my worst in recent memory. I couldn’t have known then how much worse it would get before it was over.

  Seven

  Unfortunately, despite my best intentions to follow her, Destiny had disappeared by the time I made it to the front door, and Edie was no help at all in locating her. Eventually I went back to work in the design area and channeled all my guilt and frustration into the petunias. Bad idea. I overworked the buttercream and ended up with droopy petals on several of the flowers. The more mistakes I made, the worse I felt. Everyone has bad days in our industry. Things don’t always work out perfectly. Fondant cracks, buttercream melts, cakes fall. But it’s always maddening when it happens.

  By noon, I had twenty-four usable petunias, ready for the finishing touches. In a perfect world, that would be enough, but it’s always smart to make extras, just in case. I’d have to do that later, though. It was time to channel what little energy I had left into gathering supplies for the neighborhood cleanup.

  I moved the flowers carefully out of the way where they wouldn’t get bumped, limped into the break room for a Diet Coke, and then carried it back to my office. The muscles in my back and neck were screaming, and the scrapes on my arms and legs had started to burn. I’d have a quick lunch of pain pills and self-pity before shifting gears.

  The past sixteen hours had been rough. People kept reminding me that I looked like death warmed over, and as the day dragged on, I was beginning to feel like it. And it was only half-over. I still had work to do prepping for the alliance cleanup. I didn’t want to take Ox or Dwight off their jobs on the golf course cake, and I’d crossed Edie off the list of people I could put to work doing manual labor weeks ago. If she was even still speaking to me, she’d be coordinating our efforts from the comfort of a chair in the shade. I could only hope that I could enlist help from some of the other alliance members as they dropped by.

  Sitting in my office chair, I looked around for the bags I’d picked up at the drugstore that morning. I thought I’d left them both on my desk, but only one—the one holding the Febreze and ibuprofen—was there now. I found my purse in its usual drawer, but the white prescription bag wasn’t with it.

  The bruises on my face throbbed and the headache I’d been trying to ignore for the past couple of hours took hold. I checked my desk, inside, out, and under. I pulled out my chair, pawed through a stack of files on the corner, and even looked inside the file cabinets, but I couldn’t find the prescription anywhere. Terrific. Had the fall last night affected my memory?

  After all that searching, I was too sore to walk all the way into the next room, so I speed-dialed Edie and said, “You didn’t happen to see where I put the small bag from the drugstore, did you? I could have sworn I left it on my desk, but it’s not here.”

  “You can’t find it?” she asked. “Are you serious?”

  “Unfortunately. Did you happen to see what I did with it?”

  Edie disconnected with a click and came to the door so she could talk to me in person. “You didn’t take it upstairs for your meeting with Miss Frankie, did you?”

  “I’m almost positive I didn’t,” I said, trying to retrace my steps in my memory. “I thought I put it here in my office. My purse is here and so is the bag with the non-prescription things I bought, but the prescriptions are gone. I’ve looked everywhere. How could they just vanish into thin air?”

  Edie leaned one hip against the door frame. “Maybe you did leave that bag here. Maybe somebody took it.”

  I looked up in surprise. “Nobody here would do something like that.”

  “I’m not saying it was one of us.” The last word was heavy with meaning, but I was so tired and sore it took me a minute to grasp what she was saying.

  “You think Destiny took it?”

  Edie shrugged. “I found her sneaking around in your office. You tell me.”

  I thought about her dazed, unfocused eyes and slurred speech. I thought about her admission that she’d taken something for a “headache” and wondered if one of my pain pills could take effect that fast. I’d been raised to look for the best in people and always give the
benefit of the doubt, and usually I tried. But under the circumstances, it was difficult to think the best of Destiny. “I think she has a serious problem,” I said. “But Moose said she was changed.”

  Edie glanced over the top of my desk, probably to see if she could see the pills. I could tell she didn’t expect to. “I have one word for you about that,” she said when she’d satisfied her curiosity. “Relapse.”

  I felt a buzz of curiosity. I try not to gossip, but this was different. Two whole bottles of my prescription pills had disappeared. And the woman probably responsible for taking them was running for a position of responsibility, one that could affect the livelihoods of everyone in the neighborhood. I felt a duty to find out what Edie meant. “I guess that means that Destiny’s had trouble with drugs before? I mean besides the arrest?”

  “Duh! Why do you think she missed the first three alliance meetings?”

  I took a guess. “Because she was high?” I couldn’t say that I was surprised after what I’d witnessed in the break room, but I was surprised that no one had said anything about her problem last night. If Edie knew, then surely other people did. “Is that what Edgar meant when he said she’d been ill?”

  “I’m sure it was. As far as I know, she doesn’t have any other health issues—except the ones she makes up to get the drugs she wants.” Edie lifted her chin and gave me a smug look. “Aquanettia told me a couple of months ago that Destiny was in rehab. Obviously, it didn’t work.”

  I thought about Moose and felt a pang of sympathy. “Do you think her husband knows that she’s using again?”

  Edie shook her head. “Maybe. Maybe not. From what I’ve heard, he’s been dealing with this for a while now. It’s hard to imagine that he doesn’t recognize the signs.”

  But he’d still asked me to let Destiny work here? That didn’t seem very neighborly.

  “I’m telling you, Rita, she’s bad news. And if she actually wins the election next month, we’re all in trouble.”

  “I don’t think that will happen,” I said. Inside I was arguing with myself about jumping to conclusions. I couldn’t deny that Destiny had seemed to be under the influence of something, but maybe there was another, more innocent explanation.

  We didn’t get a chance to discuss it further. The front door opened and someone sang out, “Yoohoo! Anyone here?”

  “Sounds like Aquanettia,” Edie said, standing. “Are you ready for this, or do you want to sit it out?”

  “And leave you to do it alone? You must be joking.” I opened the bottle of ibuprofen. Swallowed two. Okay, three. And hoped they’d do the trick.

  • • •

  For the next hour, Edie directed traffic from a lawn chair on the loading dock and I stood by and gave her moral support. Aquanettia had taken one look at me and ordered her son Isaiah to stay and do the heavy lifting. I was grateful for the help, but felt a little guilty at the same time. None of the work would have been challenging under normal circumstances. I should have been able to stack a few cases of water. But Isaiah seemed to be in front of me every time I tried to help.

  He was a good-looking young man, tall, with dark mocha-colored skin and a broad, friendly smile. “Let me, Miss Rita,” he said for the hundredth time. “You shouldn’t be doing that heavy work, especially after what happened last night.”

  I laughed and stepped away from the pallet. “I feel useless just standing here. The water’s not that heavy, and there’s not that much else to do.”

  After spending the past half hour with Isaiah, I couldn’t seriously consider him a suspect in the almost-hit-and-run. His brother Keon, now, was a different story. He’d come with Aquanettia and Isaiah to deliver several cases of water, a bag filled with boxed pastries from the dollar store, and some rusty garden tools. While Isaiah had gone to work with high spirits, his younger brother had grumbled louder with every step. I wasn’t sorry when Keon disappeared with his mother. I just hoped Isaiah could tell me if I had anything to worry about where his brother was concerned.

  Isaiah moved past me with a grin. “You aren’t useless, Miss Rita, but I do think you’re trying to get my ass whupped. That’s what Mama’ll do to me if you don’t sit down and let me move all this stuff where it goes.”

  I laughed softly. “Far be it from me to get you in trouble with your mother. But are you sure you shouldn’t be at work? I hate to take you away from the store if your mom needs you.”

  He shrugged and picked up two cases of water at the same time. “It’s not that busy today. I was supposed to pick up a load of stuff from an estate sale, but I won’t be able to get over there until we get the van back anyway. Might as well do something productive, right? You just sit down and rest. I got this.”

  He disappeared into the storeroom, no doubt thinking the conversation was over, but he couldn’t say something like that about the van and expect me to just sit there. I trailed after him and stood in the doorway while he stacked the water. “Something happened to your van?”

  He stacked the water and turned back toward me with a slight frown. “Nobody told you?”

  It felt like we were playing a game of twenty questions. I could have straight up asked him whether his van had been the one that almost hit me, but I really wanted to hear what he had to say on his own. So I took my turn at the game. “Told me what?”

  Isaiah rubbed his face with one hand and his shoulders sagged. “Somebody stole the company van last night—right out of the parking lot.”

  Which meant that Edgar was right about what he saw. “Is it a plain white van?”

  “Yeah. Just like the one that tried to hit you.”

  Had it really been stolen? Or was Isaiah trying to cover for someone else, like his brother? I tried to recall if Keon had been there at the time of the accident, but I couldn’t remember seeing either of the brothers.

  Isaiah didn’t look like a crazed killer who’d offered to stack water so he could kill me on the loading dock, but crazy isn’t as easy to spot as some people would like to believe.

  “Did you report the van stolen?”

  “Yes ma’am. Mama did that this morning, just as soon as we realized it was gone.”

  “You didn’t realize it was missing last night? Didn’t any of you recognize it as the van that almost hit Moose and me?”

  Isaiah stuffed his hands into his pockets, but his shoulders tensed and he began to look uneasy. “We didn’t have any reason to look. We weren’t using it, and it’s just plain white like a million others. Nothing special.”

  I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable, but I wanted to eliminate the whole family as suspected killer van drivers if I could. “Do you have any idea who took it?”

  Isaiah shook his head. “It could have been just about anybody. We always keep the van locked and the key behind the cash register, but Mama also keeps an extra key in a magnet box behind the tag. She started doing that a couple of months ago after Keon locked the keys inside. I told her to find a better hiding place. I said that’s the first place somebody looking to steal a vehicle would look, but . . .” He gave an elaborate shrug and let me fill in the blanks for myself.

  Obviously his mother had ignored his advice. “Did anyone else know the key was behind the license plate?”

  “I don’t know. Whoever Mama told, or whoever could’ve figured it out, I guess.”

  I assumed that included Keon, but I still couldn’t imagine his reason for trying to run me down. He was little more than a kid. I don’t think I’d ever had a conversation with him. The most we ever did was nod to acknowledge the other’s presence. Okay, so I’m a lousy neighbor. Surely that wasn’t a reason to try to kill me.

  “Were you there last night?” I asked Isaiah.

  “Yes ma’am. I was watching the store during y’all’s meeting.”

  “So then you were inside when the van came around the corner? You didn’t see what happened?”

  “I didn’t see anything but the taillights, and then you and Moose on the ground. Yo
u got any idea who did it?”

  I shook my head. “It’s a complete mystery.” I wanted to believe him about the stolen van. A random act of violence by a complete stranger was more comforting than wondering if a neighbor had tried to kill me. A stranger might not feel compelled to come back and finish the job. “I’m sure it was an accident,” I said, wishing I believed it. “Maybe somebody was in the process of stealing your van and panicked when he saw us all coming outside.”

  Isaiah nodded eagerly. “Yeah. I’ll bet that’s just what happened. Mama’s fit to be tied about it, that’s for sure. She says we’re gonna make sure we get that neighborhood watch going just as soon as the election’s over. If she wins, that is.”

  I didn’t like thinking we needed to take that step, but maybe Aquanettia was right.

  Isaiah jerked his chin toward the cases of water behind me. “It’s getting late. I should finish moving those for you.”

  He hadn’t completely set my concerns to rest, but I didn’t want to push too hard and make him nervous, so I left him to work.

  He disappeared into the storage shed with the last two cases of water and reappeared a minute later, empty-handed. Glancing my way, he sketched a salute and ambled off down the driveway.

  I wanted to believe the stolen van theory, but I had a gut feeling there was more to last night’s incident. I just hoped that my gut wasn’t sending me on a wild-goose chase.

  Eight

  The rest of the day passed by quickly, interrupted only by a call from the police telling me that the van had been found in a park near the Mississippi River but that they hadn’t recovered any evidence that would identify the driver. I drove home after work, soaked my aching body in a hot bath, and climbed into bed before the late news came on. Next morning, I felt even worse than I had the day before. I seriously considered calling in sick, but two things stopped me. One, we had way too much work to do (for which I was extremely grateful); and two, if I stayed home, I wouldn’t be able to ask more people what they’d seen the night of the accident. The more I thought about that van almost hitting Moose and me, the more I wanted to know who was behind the wheel and why we’d been turned into a couple of bull’s-eyes.