Sweet Masterpiece

by Connie Shelton

  On to the bedrooms. In Cantone’s room she didn’t find any trace of the green. A glance toward the open closet reminded her that she still needed to get some paint and cover the drywall patch where they’d cut the small mural out. In the second bedroom her pulse quickened.

  “Beau, it’s all over the place in here.”

  “Do any of them look like fingerprints?” Lisa asked. “Point those out to me.”

  Bless the girl, Sam thought. She didn’t question.

  Sam spotted green prints at the light switch and on the back edge of the door. Lisa quickly pressed fingerprint tape over them and lifted them off.

  “Here’s something that could be a handprint,” Sam said. “Well, part of one.”

  She showed them the area and Lisa lifted that as well.

  “Some of the smudges on the furniture are blurry. Probably my fault. When I cleaned the house I dusted everything.” She looked up at Beau. “Sorry. I didn’t see the marks that first day.”

  “It’s okay. You’re finding some good stuff now. We’ll be able to compare the prints in various parts of the house with what’s on the will. At least connect those. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get very good prints from the body because of decomposition. But we can certainly get them from the nephew.”

  He asked Sam to go through the entire house once again, paying attention to anyplace she hadn’t noticed earlier. On the back of the kitchen door she saw the clearest prints yet, a full palm print and fingers that wrapped around the edge of the surface. As if someone had pulled the door closed as he left.

  While Lisa packed up her lab kit, Sam asked Beau if he thought the information was valuable to solving the case.

  “First off, the lab will test to verify this is the fatal poison. That way, if the prints are Bart Killington’s we can tie him to the poisonous plant. That’s something. I’m going to have to find a plant expert who can give us an idea whether there is enough of the substance here to be fatal. If not, all Bart has to do is claim that yes, he picked some of the plants and then came inside and touched a variety of places in the house.”

  “But the green stuff is also on the will,” Sam pointed out.

  “That’s certainly more damning,” Beau admitted. “But we already know that Bart handled the page and the envelope. It was in his house.”

  “But the poison wasn’t in his house . . .” She paused. “Actually I don’t know that. I couldn’t see the green in his house. I only spotted it on the will today, after I handled the box again.”

  Beau gave her a stern look. “Do not go back there on your own, Sam. Not unless you want to admit to breaking and entering, which is going to get you into a whole bunch of trouble.”

  She fumed. Wasn’t she already in trouble on that score?

  Beau and Lisa were headed for the door.

  “Is it okay if I clean the place thoroughly now?” Sam asked, as he lingered to say goodbye. “It doesn’t seem smart to leave a poisonous residue around the house now that there could be potential buyers coming to look at it.”

  “We’ve got everything we can use,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  She surreptitiously squeezed his hand and watched with mixed emotions as he walked out to the cruiser. She knew he was just doing his job when he cautioned her about going back to Bart’s place in Santa Fe, but still . . . she felt strongly that Cantone’s nephew was about to get away with murder.

  She spent two hours vigorously scrubbing away the traces of green, hoping the scientific tests would back up her intuition.

  The afternoon was still young, with a brilliant September sky and the leaves on the cottonwoods showing a hint of the golden autumn yet to come. She grabbed a chicken sandwich at the first café she came to, then headed up the ski valley road to check on her property up there—the only one of her current three that hadn’t thrown a huge dose of drama at her. A quick check verified that all was well there.

  She drove home as the shadows were lengthening across the valley and found Kelly’s car in the driveway, back from her clothing foray in the city.

  “Hey, Mom.” Kelly greeted as Sam walked into the kitchen. Her blue-green eyes sparkled. “Wait till you see—I got some great bargains at the mall.”

  “Good.” Sam automatically glanced at the light on the answering machine, hoping for another bakery order to add to the week’s income. Nothing.

  “Everything okay?” Kelly was pouring pretzels from a bag into a small bowl. She held it up to Sam, who waved away the snacks.

  “Yeah, fine.” She wasn’t ready to go into the whole story of her involvement with the investigation.

  Kelly carried the pretzels to the kitchen table, where several large plastic bags appeared to be stuffed with clothing. “Look at these.” She proceeded to pull out slacks and sweaters, a warmup suit and a puffy winter coat, holding each item up to herself to show how it would look. “I found most of these on sale racks. Amazing, at this time of year.”

  Sam put on a happy face and worked to let go of the nagging concerns about Cantone and his crooked nephew. She congratulated her daughter on her clothing buys.

  “Shall we have the rest of that pasta you made the other night?” she asked, as Kelly started to carry her purchases to her room.

  She studied her hands to be sure she’d washed off every trace of the green dust. All clear. Preoccupied with thoughts of that, she pulled pasta and sauce from the fridge and poured two glasses of wine. Kelly came back into the kitchen to slice and butter bread and spread it with garlic. While the bread toasted, they raised their glasses.

  “I’m really excited about my new job,” Kelly said as she set the table. “Iris seems like such a sweet lady.”

  “I hope it works out well—all the way around,” Sam told her. As much as she wanted to add some motherly advice about working hard and doing her best for Beau and his mother, she held her tongue. Realizing that Kelly had been out on her own for a long time was a hard thing to accept. But if Kelly messed up, her own chances with Beau might be finished.

  The phone interrupted her thoughts, just as they were finishing their dinner. An order for a specialty cake. The customer’s daughter was celebrating her quinceañera and the family wanted to do it up big. Sam suggested a tiered cake, which always made a girl feel like a bride, and she could color-coordinate figures of the girl’s attendants to the dresses they would wear in the actual ceremony. The longer they talked, the more elaborate the cake became and the woman didn’t flinch when Sam quoted her the price. It was only after she’d hung up that Sam began to wonder if she could pull it off.

  Okay, she told herself, it’s not very different than a wedding cake and you’ve done plenty of those. She could order the figurines online tonight and they would be shipped tomorrow, arriving in a couple of days. She had a supply of risers and separators, to set off the elegant tiers. The cake wasn’t needed for a week yet, so she had plenty of time to get her supplies lined up and pre-make most of the flowers and other decorative elements that needed time to set up. She grabbed a pencil and sheet of paper and began to sketch out the design as the idea took hold. A success here could very well secure her a lot of business among the Hispanic families in town, and it would be worth her while to give this one a lot of attention.

  She drifted into the living room and sat at her computer desk in the corner, getting her supply order done in no time. A quick check of her email and she saw two more responses to her queries about vans for sale. One was in Eagle Nest, a small village about forty minutes away, on the other side of the mountains. A quick phone call, the right answers to her questions, and she told the seller that she would drive over in the morning to take a look.

  As if the cosmos had heard her plea for more bakery business, the phone rang again, Ivan at the bookstore reminding her of their annual open house tomorrow evening. He wanted to know if she could deliver their cake by mid-afternoon. Sam’s knees almost buckled. He’d spoken to her about the event almost a month ago and she’d completely f
orgotten. She put a smile in her voice and reassured him.

  “Kelly! Help!” she yelled, the second the phone disconnected. “I’ve got to turn out a special cake—tonight!”

  Sam flipped through her recipe box for her special red-velvet. Since everything she baked at Taos’s 7,000 foot elevation required special altitude adjustments, she didn’t dare use a recipe from any old cookbook. “Can you whip this up and get it into the oven now?” she said, handing the card over to Kelly.

  Bless her heart, Kelly didn’t skip a beat. She turned the oven dial to preheat and began pulling ingredients from the shelves. Sam muttered as she reached into her storage cabinets on the service porch. There were book-shaped pans somewhere in here and that would be the perfect thing for the store’s needs. After a heart-pounding moment in which she began to wonder if she’d given the pans away, she found them. Two pans, representing the halves of an open book. The overall size would be nearly twenty-five inches wide and three inches thick.

  “Wash these out before you use them,” she told Kelly. “And as soon as you get the cake into the oven, we need the mixer for a batch of buttercream.”

  Sam pulled another large mixing bowl from the shelf and the moment Kelly had finished beating the cake batter, Sam washed the beaters and started on the icing. As she whipped the creamy mixture to piping consistency she visualized the finished confection.

  The cake would be an open book on a large board. Ivory frosting for the pages, a brown border to look like a leather cover, and she could dust on a whisper of edible gold powder to make the page edges appear gilt. Ivan’s favorite book of all times was Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities and she would borrow the opening line and pipe it on one of the cake’s open pages . . . “It was the best of times . . .” Roses in the store colors of burgundy and gold, with deep green leaves, would add drama and elegance.

  She spooned out lumps of frosting for each of the colors. A tiny hint of brown to create the ivory, a small amount to be tinted green for the leaves, another little bit made black for the writing, and a good-sized glob that would become the burgundy roses. She worked them first, piping them onto small squares of waxed paper and setting them onto a cookie sheet to harden in the refrigerator. A few half-sized ones became rosebuds.

  When the oven timer dinged to signal that the cake was done, the two women stared at each other in relief.

  “That was a miracle,” Sam said. She set the timer again to remind her when to remove the cakes from the pans. At that point she set them on cooling racks on the service porch counter, to cool a little more quickly.

  Kelly glanced up at the kitchen clock. Ten-fifteen. “Oh, boy. I better get to bed. I’m supposed to report for my new job at seven-thirty in the morning.”

  “Thanks for your help, Kell. I couldn’t have done all this without you.”

  “Sure, Mom.” She sent a little kiss across the room.

  Sam debated whether to try to finish the cake before retiring, herself, but decided that she was too tired. The day was catching up to her quickly.

  In her room, she looked at the wooden box on her dresser. Like her own energy, the colors had faded once more.

  Chapter 24

  Twelve hours, Sam calculated. That was about how long the power of the box seemed to stay with her. She fell into bed, completely exhausted.

  The alarm woke her Saturday morning. She’d remembered to set it, thank goodness, or she’d never get everything done today. She rushed to the kitchen and retrieved the cooled cake from the service porch. By the time Kelly appeared at seven, the ivory frosting was in place and Sam had scratched lines along the sides of it to represent the pages of the book.

  She wished Kelly a good day on the new job and insisted she at least take along a granola bar or something to give her the energy to start the day.

  Sam caught herself yawning as she dusted the edges of the pages with edible gold powder. Maybe it would help if she went in and held the magic box for awhile. She stopped herself. What if the thing were somehow addictive? What if she got so used to the energy it gave off that she couldn’t get through the day without it? The thought scared her. She brewed some coffee instead and downed a cup before proceeding with the cake.

  By eight-thirty, she’d finished the wording and flowers and was putting the large sheet into the spare refrigerator to cool thoroughly and set up nicely before delivering it.

  Still feeling like she was moving in slow motion, she scrambled a couple of eggs for herself and made a sandwich with them on whole wheat toast. She would not depend on the wooden box for energy.

  Beau called just as she was finishing her sandwich.

  “Hey there.” He had a sultry tone in his voice and she guessed that he wasn’t calling from home or office. They exchanged a few suggestive ideas that might have actually gone somewhere (she was home alone for a change), but he said he was up to his eyebrows in paperwork today and she was, almost literally, up to hers in frosting.

  “Just wanted to let you know that we got the tox reports back on the tissue that the M.I. took from Cantone’s body. Your plant—the deathcamas—matches.”

  “Oh gosh.” Sam got a sinking feeling. No matter how much her gut told her that Cantone had been murdered, she’d really hoped that he was merely an old man who got sick and didn’t recover. The idea that his own nephew killed him and buried him was repugnant.

  “We still don’t have that proof,” Beau reminded her when she voiced her thoughts. “But I’m going to try to work with Santa Fe County to get Bart Killington brought up here for questioning. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

  She cleaned the decorating tools and put everything away, thinking about Beau and wondering what questions he would ask Bart. The guy was so smooth, she couldn’t imagine him just buckling down to confess. But you never knew.

  A quick call to Ivan, who said he was ready to take delivery on the cake, and she was out the door. His helpers at the bookstore were thrilled when she carried the cake in and set it on a table they’d prepared for it.

  “Sam, you are the best!” Ivan said, bowing as he handed her a check. “Cake is better than I ever expect. The customers are to love it!”

  Before leaving, she confirmed with him that the Chocoholics would be meeting again on Tuesday. He suggested another book-shaped cake for them, smaller, and done all in chocolate. She assured him she could do it.

  On the front sidewalk there was a flurry of activity as Sam walked out. Two men were in a heated argument next to the bookstore, in front of a gourmet shop where Sam occasionally bought flavorings. She’d nearly passed them when a phrase caught her attention.

  “I’ll have the Sheriff’s people out here with an eviction notice,” the shorter of the two men yelled.

  “Well, go ahead,” said the other, turning on his heel. He nearly bumped into Sam, muttering under his breath, “Good luck in finding me.”

  She sent a tentative smile his way but he’d already walked back into the shop and slammed the door.

  Sheriff’s office, huh. Poor Beau, he must get every crummy job out there. She thought of him trying to solve murder cases while stepping in to deliver eviction notices and who knew what else.

  She got to her truck and decided to give Rupert a call. “How would you like to skip out on writing for awhile and take a mountain drive with me?” she asked.

  He agreed so speedily that she could only guess that Victoria DeVane’s characters were giving him fits.

  She picked him up ten minutes later and they drove east on Kit Carson Road. The winding drive put her in a bucolic mood and she gave herself over to enjoying the brilliant yellow black-eyed Susans and purple asters that lined the pavement. Elm trees cast dappled shadows over the occasional adobe cottages and log cabins that appeared along the winding Rio Fernando.

  Rupert was in a chatty mood and he kept Sam entertained with stories about the celebrities who’d attended an art academy fund raiser the night before. She laughed at the right places, embarrassed to admit t
hat she didn’t recognize half the names and wouldn’t have known any of the faces. She probably hadn’t looked at an issue of People in five years, and her days of avidly following who was who had waned soon after the Beatles broke up. But Rupert was in his element in that environment.

  They crested Palo Flechado Pass at more than 9200 feet and started down the opposite side of the mountain, the ski runs of Angel Fire visible in the distance. Ten miles through a wide green valley took them past Eagle Nest Lake, which sparkled in the midday light, and into the little town of Eagle Nest. Sam always marveled at how different this terrain was than her side of the mountain, only a few miles away. They cruised the main street with its quaint western-styled shops and restaurants, and then found the turnoff the man had described. In a plain little residential neighborhood sat a white van parked beside a house with wood siding, which was painted tan and green.

  “This looks like the place,” she said, pulling in behind the van. Her eyes sparkled. The vehicle looked like exactly what she wanted.

  “Honey, you better tone down the enthusiasm. The guy’s going to double the price.”

  “Ah, but he already quoted it in his ad,” she pointed out.

  Rupert shrugged and got out of the truck.

  An older man came out of the house, hitching up his jeans and making tucking motions at a red plaid shirt that was already tightly tucked in.

  “Howdy. Bill Hutchins.” His voice immediately reminded Sam of her father. She greeted him in the same tone. They went back and forth with a little where-are-you-from chat and learned that they’d grown up less than fifty miles apart. He’d bought the small van because his wife loved antiquing and wanted to open a shop. They’d planned to make buying trips all over the area but then she’d broken her hip last winter and it soon became clear that the business would never get off the ground. He’d decided to sell the van since it was a painful reminder to his wife that her dream wasn’t going to happen.