Scary Sweets

by Jessica Beck

  “I am if you are,” he said, though both men clearly had a little less enthusiasm for the project than they’d had before.

  “Is there any chance of us getting something to eat?” Jake asked me.

  “We can do that,” I said. “Carry on.”

  “You heard the lady,” Jake said. “Let’s get to it.”

  As Momma and I walked across the park to retrieve my Jeep, I suggested, “Should we pop into the Boxcar and get them their dinner?”

  “I thought we might go back to my cottage and make something for them,” she said.

  “Momma, no offense, but they’re both probably getting pretty hungry. Do we really have time to whip something up?”

  “You’re right, of course,” she said.

  After a quick trip to the Boxcar Grill, we returned with hamburgers, fries, and sweet teas for all of us. The men barely managed to grunt as they consumed the food, and soon enough, we were on our way to Momma’s place, and the men were back at work.

  We were standing at the Jeep, still conveniently parked in front of Donut Hearts, when I heard someone calling my name softly.

  I looked around to find the source, and to my surprise, Gabby Williams was standing by ReNEWed, peeking out from the back of the shop.

  “Suzanne. Dot. Over here.”

  As she beckoned us toward her, Momma and I shared a furtive look.

  Our search for Gabby might have been in vain earlier, but we were finally going to get to ask her about the scarf that was now tucked firmly into my mother’s purse.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Where have you been?” Momma asked Gabby the moment the three of us were safely locked inside the back storeroom of ReNEWed. “We’ve been looking all over town for you.”

  “What Momma means to say is that we were worried about you,” I said. I didn’t want to rile Gabby up from the very start by scolding her, especially when she’d actually sought us out.

  “I panicked, okay? I’m not particularly proud of it, but it is what it is,” she said. “When you focused in on that scarf, I instantly knew that I’d made a mistake putting it out for sale.”

  “You were out in the middle of the night by the dunking booth, weren’t you?” Momma asked her. She needed to slow down a little, but I didn’t know how to tell her without causing a problem.

  “Me? Nonsense. I know better than to traipse around town in the dead of night,” Gabby said.

  I wasn’t sure why, but I believed her. “If it wasn’t you, then who was it? You must know.”

  “I do, but I can’t tell you. I was sworn to secrecy,” she said, “and don’t ask me again, because I’m not about to break my vow.”

  “Gabby, a man is dead. Need I remind you of that?” I asked her.

  “The last I heard, the police didn’t even know the cause of death. Has that suddenly changed?” she asked me with a glare.

  “Not that we know of,” I admitted. “Still, whoever had that scarf might know something and not even realize it. What possessed you to put it in the window display after you got it back from your friend?” It was a question that was burning a hole in me.

  “I couldn’t bring myself to bury it in back,” she admitted.

  “You probably should have just thrown it away altogether,” Momma said softly.

  “I considered it, but it’s too perfect for the season, you know? I just couldn’t bring myself not to sell it,” she admitted. “It’s too ingrained in me to get every last dime that I can out of my inventory, and this was the perfect time to sell it. Besides, who would have dreamed that someone could have spotted it?”

  “Someone did, though. It is rather distinctive,” I reminded her. “Your friend could be in trouble. You realize that, don’t you? If they didn’t have anything to do with what happened to that man, they may have seen who did without realizing its significance. It’s important that they come forward.” I was acting on the assumption that Carson Winfield had been murdered, but what choice did I have? If he’d died of natural causes, as unlikely as it seemed to me, then this was all for naught.

  “I’m telling you, I can’t say a word,” Gabby said, her voice choking a little as she spoke. Was this stalwart woman about to break down and cry right in front of us?

  Momma moved in deftly, and before I realized what was happening, she had wrapped Gabby up in her arms. “You can trust us, Gabrielle. You know that.” There was the use of her full first name again, but this time it had been meant to comfort, not to scold her.

  “Of course I know it. A promise is a promise, though. The problem is that my friend knew the victim. They were supposed to meet him at the clock, but instead, when they got there, they discovered that he was dead. Can you blame them for not wanting to admit it, given the circumstances?” She’d been careful to use the pronoun “they” instead of “him” or “her.” I wasn’t exactly pleased with myself, but I knew that I needed to work on her a little harder.

  It was time to give her a bit of a nudge.

  “How did they know Carson Winfield?” I asked, repeating her use of “they.” “He’s certainly not a local.”

  “How do you know his name?” Gabby asked me incredulously.

  I wasn’t about to admit that we’d stumbled across his wallet and ID stuffed into a plastic jack o’lantern nearby. “There’s a great deal that we know right now,” I said, mostly bluffing. “That’s why your friend needs to trust us. Isn’t that right, Momma?” I asked as I turned to my mother.

  “There are many worse options than talking to us,” my mother said, ending her hug. “At least we’ll be sympathetic in a way that the police surely won’t.” Momma looked at me with an imploring expression, no doubt demonstrating that she was fresh out of ideas.

  “Gabby, if you won’t tell us your friend’s identity, can you at least ask her to talk to us directly?”

  “I know for a fact that she won’t do that,” Gabby said, and then her softness immediately stiffened. “Hang on a second. I never said that it was a woman.”

  “I just assumed that was the case, given the fact that the scarf is so feminine,” I said, backpedaling as quickly as I could. I’d taken an educated guess, and Gabby had confirmed that it was true. In my mind, it had been worth her wrath to confirm my suspicions.

  At least I hoped so, at any rate.

  “Suzanne, I reached out to you for comfort, and you tricked me! I need you to leave!”

  “Gabby, I didn’t mean—”

  “Now!” Gabby said, her voice suddenly booming.

  “Suzanne, do as she asks. I’ll speak with you later,” Momma said. It was a good idea if it worked. If at least one of us could stay behind, perhaps Gabby would soften her position.

  It was just too bad that it didn’t happen that way.

  “I’m sorry, Dot, but you need to go as well.”

  “Gabby, Suzanne didn’t mean—”

  The owner of ReNEWed softened her voice, but her words still carried steel in them. “I’m afraid that I must insist.”

  There was no room for negotiation, and Momma and I both knew it.

  As we were ushered out the back door, I gave it one last shot. “Gabby, at least try to get her to come to us. We’ll help her in any way that we can. Will you at least try?”

  “I’m not making any promises to you right now,” Gabby said firmly.

  At least it wasn’t a direct no.

  “We didn’t handle that very well, did we?” Momma asked me as we walked back to the Jeep.

  “With Gabby, you take a chance every time you open your mouth,” I said. “We learned a few things before she threw us out though, so it wasn’t a total loss.”

  “I suppose,” Momma admitted grudgingly.

  “Come on. Cheer up. Now we know that a woman Gabby considers a close friend not only knew the dead man, but she was going to meet him at the town clock in the middle of the night. That doesn’t exactly describe a casual relationship, does it? Shoot, before our conversation with Gabby, we weren’t even p
ositive that it was a woman.”

  “Yes, I can see all of that, but what good will it do us if Gabby’s friend won’t identify herself?”

  “We need to identify her ourselves, then,” I told Momma. “Gabby’s list of friends can’t be that long, can it?”

  “I’d say it would be rather brief,” she said.

  “So we start filling in that list so we can figure out who it might be,” I said.

  “Do you honestly believe that someone in town killed that man, Suzanne?”

  “I don’t know, but I want to be ready to move in case they did,” I replied. “I just can’t imagine him dying of natural causes on that dunking-tank platform.”

  “While we’re coming up with our list, would you care to bake with me? It occurs to me that the men could use something special in repayment for their labors.”

  I didn’t usually bake as a part of my sleuthing, but then again, Momma wasn’t normally my partner, either. “What did you have in mind?”

  “In the spirit of the season, I thought pumpkin muffins might be in order,” she said. “What do you think of that?”

  “If I get half of everything that comes out of the oven, you’re on,” I said. My mother’s pumpkin bread recipe, especially when it was converted into muffins, was one of the most amazing quick breads I’d ever had in my life.

  “That’s awfully greedy, isn’t it?” Momma asked with a laugh, clearly pleased by my request.

  “Hey, you’re not the only one in the family who knows how to strike a hard bargain. What do you say?”

  “You’ve got yourself a deal, but we divide them evenly before you’ve had any samples yourself,” she answered.

  It was a tough pill to swallow, given the fact that I liked to stuff myself with muffins the moment they were cool enough to eat. Still, half a batch of muffins was a great deal better than no muffins at all. I stuck out my hand. “Let’s shake on it.”

  Her laughter became even heartier, but she took my hand, and we had a bargain.

  It was the best deal I’d ever get, and I knew it.

  “This has been fun,” I said later as I surveyed the cooling pumpkin muffins now occupying three different large cooling racks on Momma’s kitchen counters. I baked all morning most days when I was at Donut Hearts, but doing it with my mother was an entirely different experience. The muffins were the result of those actions, but the memories I had of our time making them outweighed the finished products by far. Every moment and experience I had with my mother was more important than any treat, no matter how good it might be.

  I think.

  Those muffins were awfully tasty.

  After we delivered an even dozen pumpkin muffins to the workmen, who were more than happy to receive them, Momma and I headed back to her cottage so we could call it a night. After all, I had another big day of donut making ahead of me, and who knew what major wheeling and dealing my mother was going to undertake.

  We never made it back to the cottage though, at least not without a complication that nearly wrecked us, literally.

  As I drove into the growing darkness, I had to slam on the brakes immediately, bringing us to a sudden and jarring stop.

  As it was, I still nearly ran over what appeared to be a dead body lying in the middle of Springs Drive.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Suzanne, are you all right?” Momma asked me shakily after we were completely stopped in the middle of the road just beside the defunct railroad tracks.

  As I got out of the front door to see what was lying in the road, I said, “I’m fine. How about you? Are you okay?”

  “Truth be told, I’m a little rattled,” Momma said as she joined me in front of my Jeep, where I was just beginning to kneel down to check the body in the road. My headlights illuminated the scene a bit eerily as I examined it a little more closely. It had been wrapped in a couple of garbage bags, and then it had been tied up with strong rope around the neck, torso, and legs.

  Only it wasn’t a body.

  Probing the trash bags tentatively, I could feel plastic and paper yield under my touch. This was no doubt one of the dummies Officer Bradley had referred to earlier.

  As I ripped the bags open, my mother said, “Suzanne, you shouldn’t do that!”

  “It’s okay. It’s just garbage, Momma,” I explained. Now that the trash bags were torn open, I could see that a wide array of empty plastic milk jugs, bleach containers, wadded-up newspaper, and an assortment of other debris had been carefully shaped into the form of a body. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to play a very dangerous prank on us. It would have been bad enough if they’d just leaned their Halloween creation against a tree or put it on a park bench, but they’d chosen to dump it in the middle of the road, where it could have easily caused an accident. Was it the same prankster who had left the mask and broom against my window earlier, or was this some other mental adolescent trying to be funny? If this was what Fright Week was going to be like, we were in for several long days.

  I gathered up the garbage, now unrecognizable as a body, and put it all off to the side of the road near the donut shop. Donut Hearts had started life as a train depot, so its proximity to the tracks wasn’t unexpected to anyone who knew its history.

  The identity of whoever was trying to scare me was a complete mystery, however.

  Or should I be taking it all so personally? Maybe I’d just been hit by pranksters twice at random, an odd coincidence that could just be explained away.

  The problem was that I wasn’t a big fan of coincidences.

  “Do you think there’s a chance this was meant specifically for us?” I asked Momma as we got back into my Jeep.

  She looked shocked by the concept. “Why on earth would someone want to scare the wits out of us like that, Suzanne?”

  “Isn’t it clear? We’re asking questions about the body I found this morning. That mask might not have been a warning, but this could certainly be interpreted as one, don’t you think?”

  Momma didn’t answer right away. “I hate to say it, but I need to ask you a question. Is there a chance you’re just being a little paranoid?”

  “Oh, there’s a great big whopping chance of that,” I admitted. “But don’t forget, being paranoid has kept me alive more than once in the past.”

  “The question remains, who knows we’re looking into Carson Winfield’s history?” Momma asked me as I reconsidered just leaving the debris by the road. On a whim, I pulled the Jeep in front of the donut shop and got out again.

  As Momma followed, I said, “At this point, there are lots of people who make the cut. So far we’ve talked to Gabby, Trish, Jenny, and Stevie. Who knows who might have overheard one of those conversations? What if someone wants Carson Winfield’s death to just go away, and this is their way of warning us off?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. As I started collecting the trash, Momma asked me, “Suzanne, what in the world are you doing now?”

  “If this was meant to be a warning, maybe the person trying to scare us off slipped up and included something personal in the parts that make up this body,” I said. “Give me a hand, would you?”

  Momma shrugged and dove right in beside me. I loved that about her. She could take someone else’s idea and run with it, and she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, either. I opened the back of the donut shop, got an oversized trash bag of my own, and stuffed everything into it. I’d look through it later, but for now, it would be safe.

  After we’d washed our hands, we locked the shop’s back door and headed out front.

  To my surprise, Chief Grant was standing beside my Jeep, waiting for us with a grim look on his face.

  “I’ve got news. It turns out that it was murder after all,” he said simply. “Someone shoved a long, sharp needle into Carson Winfield’s heart.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “What? Are you sure? If he was stabbed to death, then why didn’t I see any blood?” I asked, having seen the body myself several hours earlier.
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  “The wooden needle broke off in his chest when he was stabbed, and evidently the tip of it was still in him,” the chief explained. “That’s what stopped the blood from flowing out. The man’s chest was so hairy that I missed the needle fragment completely when I examined him, but the coroner found it soon enough.”

  “What kind of needle was it? Do you happen to know?” Momma asked.

  “It’s one generally used for knitting, I believe,” the chief answered, looking a bit perplexed by my mother’s question. “Why? Does it matter?”

  “Wooden knitting needles are often used by older folks who have joint pain. They are lighter and require less tension than metal ones,” she explained. “Whoever used it on the victim could be older or have arthritis.”

  “How do you know so much about knitting needles?” I asked Momma, forgetting the police chief for a moment.

  “I know things too, Suzanne,” she said with the hint of a frown. Then, turning back to the police chief, Momma added, “I would think that one of those needles would be difficult to break off. I’ve seen them before, and they’ve always felt quite stout to me.”

  “That’s the thing,” the police chief explained. “Whoever did it cut a thin kerf all the way around the needle. My guess is that it was modified to be a murder weapon from the start, so that makes it premeditated. Whoever met the victim this morning knew they were going to kill him before they even got to the town clock for their rendezvous.”

  “So, do you believe the killer likes to knit?” I asked my mother.

  “Perhaps, or maybe they stumbled across the needle and decided to use it for something besides its intended purpose.”

  “Then again, they could have picked one up at a friend’s place, or bought one not caring what it had been originally designed for,” the chief added.

  “I don’t see how that’s possible,” I said. “Knitting needles are not exactly an impulse purchase. Besides, there are lots of things that could be used to stab someone in the heart.”