“What does any of that have to do with Lois’s murder?” I turned and looked at Grandma, whose blue eyes twinkled. “What?”
“Everyone was surprised when Hutch came along. Susan never looked pregnant until poof, one day she was driving home from a Wichita hospital with a baby in her arms. Homer was deliriously happy, and back then no one was going to say anything bad about him or his wife.”
“You think his mistress had Hutch and Homer took him home as his own? What about Susan? Why would she stand for such a thing?”
“Maybe Susan couldn’t have kids of her own. You know how crazy some women get when it comes to wanting a baby. . . .”
I stabbed the air with my rolling pin. “You think Homer took up with a mistress to get her pregnant and to make Susan happy?”
“I think a lot of things,” Grandma answered cryptically.
“Another one of Homer’s secrets,” Phyllis said. “Not so secret if you read between the lines in the journals. Whoever wrote them was in love with Homer, chronicling his every movement and how wonderful he was.”
“She wrote about their love,” I added thoughtfully. “Until something happened to make her angry. There was about six weeks of anger in the 1959 journal. Then the tone grew . . .”
“Scared,” Grandma added. “That’s what we thought, too.”
“You think the mistress wrote the journals. That she was in love until she gave Homer her child and he abandoned her.”
“Then something happened that scared her.” Aunt Phyllis turned toward me, her tone rising in excitement. “We think when Champ was murdered, the mistress saw it as a sign that even close friends couldn’t cross Homer.”
“She kept her head down and her secrets close after that.” Grandma reached for a muffin. “Until this week, when she was going to tell me the truth.”
“You think Homer’s mistress was Lois?” My eyes grew wide. “Hutch is really Lois Striker’s love child?” I had to work hard to contain the shiver that ran down my back.
“Have you taken a good look at Hutch’s kid? Harold looks every bit of Lois in her youth. I’m surprised more people haven’t put two and two together.” Grandma Ruth took a bite out of a chocolate chip pumpkin muffin.
“Lois always seemed so old to me,” I said and went back to rolling out pie dough. “No one my age or younger would even suspect she was anything but a strange old woman with a habit of spitting when she talked.”
“Whoever killed her, killed her in the heat of passion,” Grandma Ruth said. “I heard from my friends at the morgue that she had seven blows to the head. That, my darling granddaughter, is passion.”
“And Chief Blaylock knew it. He had no excuse to hold Ruth like he did. We think he wanted her to tell him what she saw when she was in the park that day. Tell him why her scooter marks were at the crime scene.”
“Now, why does that make sense to me?” I muttered, and pushed another crust-filled pie plate along the stainless steel counter. I stopped, straightened and turned to face the two ladies at my table. “Grandma, did you witness a murder and keep it to yourself?”
CHAPTER 17
“Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t.” Grandma’s chin grew stubborn and she closed her mouth tight.
“Grandma, if you saw something, you have an obligation to the police and Lois’s family to tell them what you saw.”
“I have an obligation to my investigation first.” She crossed her arms over her ample chest. “Stumbling upon Lois’s body doesn’t necessarily mean I saw anything.”
I grabbed the countertop to keep from beaning Grandma over the head with my rolling pin. Or maybe it was to keep my legs from buckling. Was it possible to do both?
“I saw the picture Ruth snagged on her phone,” Aunt Phyllis piped in. “It was pretty awesome as far as news goes.”
“Grandma took pictures?” My eyes grew wide and I turned on Phyllis. “You knew and kept this from me? Out. Out!” I waved my hands, pulled Phyllis’s chair out, and practically tore the muffin from her hands. “You can’t keep me in the dark and feed me nonsense, then come in here and eat my baked goods. I won’t have it.”
Grandma got up in a huff. Phyllis flew out of her chair as I railed at them with my rolling pin in hand. “Get out!” I pointed at the door. Aunt Phyllis unlocked the door while Grandma grabbed her walker and pushed herself through the open door as if the dogs of hell were at her feet.
I was so mad I didn’t care. “Stay away from me today,” I shouted. “And I’d better not hear a peep about you from the police or Brad, do you hear me?”
Grandma’s mumbling was overtaken by the slamming of the back door. I twisted the locks in place and leaned against it, shaking. I slid down to the floor and hugged my knees as anger turned to laughter and then to despair.
Those two old women were going to be the death of me yet. Here I was working close to seventy hours a week between the bakery and the float. Then to be pulling them from jail—and for goodness’ sake, I broke into the courthouse and stole files!
All because I thought Grandma was being wrongfully accused. When it turns out she was rightfully accused. She had taken it upon herself to write about murder and madness and the end of a hero. In doing so, she had led me astray. This after I thought I was smarter than that.
No more. No more indeed. Grandma and her little investigation had gone far enough. From now on I was out of it. As far as I was concerned I was strictly a baker with a busy bakery to run. Heck, I might even do something crazy and start dating again before the year of divorce was up. That was the kind of thing normal forty-year-old women did. Right?
Let’s face it, no normal forty-year-old would start up a gluten-free bakery in the middle of wheat country. Or deal with an endless array of her family’s wild antics. I took a deep breath, stood, and peered out the peephole. Grandma was outside the door nonchalantly smoking a cigarette. Phyllis paced beside her, puffing out her breath and beating her arms against the cold.
I rolled my eyes and opened the door. “Why didn’t you two leave?”
“Where are we going to go?” Grandma asked. “It’s five A.M.”
Phyllis came up to the door and tried to look contrite. “Can we come back in? I was so enjoying my coffee.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake.” I opened the door wide and waved them through. “Don’t think that you are forgiven. You are going to take those photos to the police this morning. Is that clear?”
“As a bell, sweetie, as a bell.” Grandma rolled out her ashes, stuck the remaining bit of cigarette in her pocket, and patted me on the cheek as she came inside. Her hands were cold as ice and dry to the touch.
“Where are your gloves?” I locked the door behind them.
“I left them in my other coat.” Grandma shrugged.
“You need to make sure she has a pair of gloves for every coat.” Phyllis sat down and hugged her cooled coffee mug as if it would warm her.
I grabbed the pot of fresh coffee and poured them both cups full of the hot brew. “I can’t believe you witnessed Lois’s murder—took pictures—and didn’t tell anyone!”
“Technically, I took pictures of her dead body. I have no idea who killed her—yet,” Grandma said. “That’s where you come in. What are your thoughts on the journals?” Grandma asked. “We know you looked through them.”
“I thought you copied them.” I put the coffee back on the hot plate, washed my hands, tightened my apron, and returned to rolling piecrusts.
“We did copy them,” Grandma Ruth said as she slowly sat her body down on the chair. It creaked under her and I made a mental note to make sure all the screws were tightened. “But they don’t tell us what you think of them, now do they?”
“Fine, I agree with you. It does sound as if they were written by a scorned lover. I would need a copy of Lois’s handwriting before I could verify if she was the mistress or if
it was someone else altogether.” I trimmed another pie shell and set it down on the counter. A quick count told me I had five pies ready to be filled. My recipe called for six. I planned on making pecan and chocolate chip sour cream pie.
When I first started baking I was terrible at piecrusts, until I learned that the secret to creating tender piecrust is to add a small amount of acid, such as vinegar, sour cream, or lemon juice. I varied the ingredient depending on which type of pie I made—lemon for fruit piecrusts, sour cream for cream piecrusts, and vinegar for chocolate piecrusts.
“I happen to have a sample of her handwriting in my purse.” Grandma reached over and pulled her quilted bag off her walker. She dug around in it for a few minutes, then gave up and pulled out the contents one by one. “Got it!” she said, waving a scrap of paper in the air.
“Let me see.” Phyllis grabbed the paper out of Grandma’s hand and studied it through her glasses. “Hmmm.”
“What does that mean?” Grandma bellowed.
“Did you get a recent sample or an old sample?”
“I got a recent sample, of course. What else could I get?”
“This is no good.” Phyllis gave the paper back to Grandma with a sigh. “It looks like an old person wrote this.”
“An old person did write this.” Grandma pouted and put on her glasses to look at the writing. “Huh, you’re right. You can’t tell anything from this.”
“Maybe if we could get ahold of some old documents from the time when she worked with Homer . . . like her property deeds,” I said. “Or even something she must have signed when she was Homer’s secretary.
“Public records!” Grandma and Phyllis said at the same time.
“Exactly.” I couldn’t help but feel a bit smug until I realized that the county records were stored in the courthouse. “Oh, no, you two are not going back inside that courthouse.”
“Why not?” Grandma asked. “We’re taxpayers.”
“Because Chief Blaylock will throw you back in jail, that’s why.” I trimmed my last pie, then washed my hands again. The room was silent for a few long moments until I turned back to the women. “What?”
“You can go into the courthouse,” Grandma said.
“Yes, no one knows you helped me steal that box in the first place. You didn’t tell Brad, did you?”
“No.”
“Then they won’t suspect you at all.” Aunt Phyllis nodded her head, her bright yellow bob swishing around her jawline.
“And who will watch the shop while I’m at the courthouse investigating?” I dried my hands on a towel and put them on my hips, hating where the conversation was going. “I told you, I will have nothing more to do with this investigation. As soon as the police chief gets into his office, you two are going down there, giving him those pictures on your phone, and telling him everything you know.”
“He won’t believe us,” Grandma said, her mouth turning down into a pout.
“It’s true, Toni, he won’t.”
“He’ll believe you when you give him those pictures.”
“It’s only two pictures, and he’ll charge me with hampering an investigation.”
“Then you deserve to be charged. Trust me, it will go far easier if you turn yourself in.”
“He never investigated the remodeled wall like you told him to. How could you expect him to understand this?” Grandma shrugged.
“He didn’t investigate the wall because he had no reason to investigate. The man follows the law, and the law says you have to have a warrant before you can bust down walls in judge’s chambers. In order to have a warrant you have to have just cause. Where is your just cause?”
“In the wall, of course.” Grandma crossed her arms over her chest.
I shook my head. The woman was as stubborn as she was smart. “It will take another remodel before they can open that wall.”
“That’s why we’ve started a petition to update the courthouse next year,” Aunt Phyllis said. “It’s clear they need better security.”
“And updated wiring,” Grandma said. “They have a lot of new gadgets that need to be plugged in, you know. We can’t have computers getting killed by spikes in the electricity, now can we? It is so much more energy efficient to replace the wiring and update the floor plan.”
“That’s thinking.” I had to give them props. It wasn’t like Grandma to hatch a plan and wait for it to happen. She said once you hit the age of seventy, delayed gratification went out the window. She wanted it all and she wanted it now. She could be dead tomorrow, you know.
“We thought you’d be pleased,” Aunt Phyllis said. “Now, the courthouse opens at nine A.M., about the time your morning rush dies down. We’ll stay here and watch the shop while you go there and . . . oh, I don’t know, pay your property taxes or something?”
“My property taxes aren’t due.” I tilted my head. “And you can’t turn yourself in and watch my bakery.”
“Then you’d better hurry and make sure your divorce decree was finalized by a judge.” Grandma took a sip of her coffee. “You never know when things like that could come back to haunt you.”
“I signed my decree and I saw Eric sign his,” I said, trying my best not to let her rattle me.
“That doesn’t mean the judge signed them,” Grandma pointed out. “Why, last year MariJo Johnson had to postpone her second wedding moments before it started all because there had been a mix-up in her divorce paperwork.”
“There wasn’t any mix-up in my divorce.” I played with the edge of the terry cloth towel I had in my hands.
“Go down to the courthouse, dear,” Aunt Phyllis said and picked out another donut. “You’ll feel much better after you’ve checked that little fact out.”
“We promise we’ll turn ourselves in after you get a copy of Lois’s handwriting—preferably from 1959,” Grandma said. “Cross our hearts and hope to die.”
They both crossed their hearts and held up their hands to show they weren’t lying.
I blew out a deep breath. I hated that she was right. I hated that Grandma had put a little niggle of doubt in my head that would not be ignored. If I didn’t go down to the courthouse myself and get a copy of Lois’s signature, I wouldn’t sleep another wink.
“Fine. I’ll go—by myself,” I clarified. “You two have to promise to never keep anything from me ever again.”
“Not even a surprise party?” Grandma asked.
“Not even a surprise party,” I replied.
“Not even if it’s a surprise engagement party?” Aunt Phyllis asked.
“Even then,” I said firmly. As far as I was concerned I was never getting married again, so the last thing I needed to worry about was spoiling some surprise party for an engagement that would never happen.
“Fine,” Grandma said.
“Fine,” Aunt Phyllis agreed.
“Good.” I filled a new platter with pastries and set them on the table. “I’ll go down to the courthouse.” After all, how much trouble could I get into all by myself?
CHAPTER 18
“I heard Ruth Nathers had been spit on one time too many and ran her over with her scooter. And we all know that Ruth isn’t a small thing. A woman that size in a scooter can do a lot of damage.” Helen Bishop had her back to the door when I walked into the public records office. “I can’t believe that Chief Blaylock let her go without so much as a slap on the wrist.”
Sharon Sutton straightened at the sight of me. She nodded and pointed her finger as if I wouldn’t see her telling Helen I was there. “Hi, Toni,” Sharon said, a bit overly loud. “What brings you here?”
“I’m doing some research for my grandma,” I replied, trying to sound like I hadn’t caught her and Helen gossiping about my family. “Hi, Helen. What brings you to records?”
“Oh, Sharon and I take our breaks together every day, isn�
��t that right, Sharon?” Helen shot me an innocent smile. “Look at that, ten thirty already. I must get back to work. Busy, you know, I’m terribly busy. Sharon, I’ll see you at lunchtime?”
“Yes, I’ll be ready at noon, as long as no one stays too long in records.” Sharon gave me the same look her mother had when she was the head librarian at the high school. I simply smiled. The records department was supposed to be open from nine A.M. to five thirty P.M., and if it took me eight hours to find what I needed then Sharon would simply have to eat her lunch at her desk.
“Bye, Toni.” Helen scooted by me. “Best of luck on your float this weekend.”
“You’ve got a float in the Homer Everett Parade?” Sharon leaned on the counter.
“Yes, I thought it would be good to show my community support,” I said. “After all, my family is one of the founding families in Oiltop.”
“Huh, what an odd little fact.” Sharon batted her lashes at me. “Weren’t they missionaries or some such?”
“They started the college here.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” She straightened. “Why is it that the overeducated always end up poor as church mice? Anyway, rhetorical question.” She giggled. “What brings you into the courthouse today? Here to pay your taxes?”
“My taxes aren’t due yet.” I sent her a small smile. “I’m here to do some research.”
“My, whatever for? I thought you had your hands full with that odd little bakery of yours. What’s the matter? No customers over the holiday? I can certainly understand people wanting to eat normal food with their families.”
“To begin with, all the foods I bake with are natural foods. Second, if a person could eat your so-called normal food, they would, but when they can’t eat normal food, they can eat mine, and for a small moment in time feel normal.” I leaned forward into her face.
“I think you’ve gone a little too far, bless your heart.” Sharon leaned back and looked down her nose at me. “I believe I have some work to do in the back.”
Murder Gone A-Rye (A Baker's Treat Mystery) Page 14
