Custard Crime: Donut Mystery #14 (The Donut Mysteries)

by Jessica Beck

  “Who’s at the door, Violet?” a familiar man’s voice asked from the other room.

  “Nobody important,” she told him, and then she faced us again. “Go away. Now.”

  To punctuate her demand, she slammed the door in our faces.

  “Did you hear that man’s voice inside?” I asked Grace as we left the porch. “It was Conrad Swoop, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s who it sounded like to me. It didn’t take him long to come back to Violet, did it?”

  “If he ever left her in the first place,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Grace, what if he was always interested in her more than he was in Evelyn? He could have played the chief’s ex-wife for a fool, swindled some money out of her, and then got rid of her so he could be with Violet. It might have been his plan all along.”

  “I suppose it’s a possibility,” Grace said a little uncertainly.

  “You don’t buy it?”

  “I’m not sure,” she answered as we got into the Jeep. “Tell you what. Why don’t you drive around the block, and then park somewhere out of sight up the street?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “To be honest with you, I’d like to see where Conrad goes after he leaves here,” Grace answered.

  “What if he’s settled in for the rest of the day?”

  Grace shrugged. “Tell you what. We’ll give him half an hour, and if he hasn’t left her place by then, we’ll go on to the next thing on our list. How does that sound to you?”

  “It’s a better idea than anything I’ve got,” I said as I proceeded to do just what she’d suggested. I parked far enough down the block to see Violet’s front door, but not be obvious to anyone looking out the window from inside.

  After half an hour of surveillance, there was still no sign of Conrad.

  “That’s it,” Grace said. “We can go now. Sorry my idea was a bust.”

  “Hey, I still think it was worth a shot. Shall we go look for Beatrice now?”

  “We might as well,” Grace said, and then she grabbed my hand before I could start the Jeep back up. “Hang on a second. Look over there.”

  I did as she suggested, but nothing was going on near Violet’s front door. The movement was coming from behind her house. Slinking around the corner trying his best to look inconspicuous was none other than Conrad Swoop himself.

  “Who exactly is he hiding from?” Grace whispered, even though there was no way that he could hear us from where he was at the moment.

  “I don’t know, but he looks pretty guilty, doesn’t he? The real information I want to know is where exactly is he going now?”

  We watched as Conrad went to his car, slid inside quickly, and then drove off.

  “Don’t follow him too closely,” Grace said as I started the Jeep’s engine.

  I grinned at her. “Don’t worry about me. After all, this isn’t my first rodeo.”

  We followed Conrad from a distance, but in the end, it turned out to be another disappointment. After stopping at a fast-food restaurant window for takeout, he headed straight home, and from the look of things, that was where he was going to stay.

  “I guess we should go see Beatrice now,” I said as we watched him duck inside.

  “Why not? I can’t believe that this idea didn’t pay off.”

  “You know how this goes, Grace. We run into a lot of dead ends when we investigate, and besides, we learned something valuable.”

  “What, that Conrad was still with Violet?”

  “That, and the fact that he doesn’t want anyone to know about it. Why else would he have slipped out the back door like that?”

  “Maybe he was afraid that we were still watching him,” she answered.

  “A fear that turned out to be well founded,” I said.

  We found Beatrice working out in her garden when we neared her house. “At least we know that she’s home,” Grace said.

  “Yes, but that doesn’t mean that she’ll be willing to talk to us any more than Violet was.”

  “Maybe not, but she can’t exactly run away, can she?”

  At that moment, I spotted something odd, so I kept driving past Beatrice’s house without slowing down.

  “Where are you going, Suzanne?”

  “Did you see what she was doing just then?” I asked.

  “All I noticed was that it was kind of odd the way she was looking around so furtively, but what does that prove?”

  “Grace, I was watching her hands. She was burying something in her garden in plain sight.”

  “How can you be so sure of that?”

  “I watched her drop something in a hole and quickly cover it back up. What on earth could that mean?”

  “Are you sure she wasn’t just planting something?”

  I shrugged. “In the walkway and not in the bed?” I asked. “Why would she plant anything there?”

  “What should we do about it?”

  “I say we go somewhere and kill a little time,” I said. “After that, we can come back here and dig up whatever she was just burying.”

  “Suzanne, how sure are you about what you just saw?”

  “I’m fairly certain of it,” I said.

  “My question is, are you sure enough to try to explain it all away if we get caught disinterring something that’s none of our business?”

  “Hey, we’ve talked ourselves out of worse situations than that before,” I said.

  “That’s true enough, but there might be a time when our charm doesn’t work. I know, it’s hard for me to believe even as I’m saying it, but still, it could happen.”

  “You’re right. If we come back later, Beatrice might catch us, or worse yet, someone else might see what we’re up to. Grace, we have to find out what she buried, and I mean right now.”

  “How do you propose we do that?” she asked me.

  “One of us needs to distract her while the other one recovers the buried treasure.”

  “Which one do you want to do?”

  I grinned at her. “Hey, it was my idea. I’ll let you pick.”

  “I’ll always take action over talk. You find a way to keep her occupied, and I’ll do the digging.”

  “I was afraid that you’d choose that option,” I said. I circled the block, but when we got back to Beatrice’s place, she was no longer in her garden at all. “Has she gone already?”

  “Let’s go knock on the front door first,” Grace said.

  “Tell you what. I’ll go to the door by myself. If she’s there, we don’t want her to know that you’re with me. It should make sneaking into her garden and digging up whatever she’s hiding a little easier.”

  “Good plan. I’ll duck down as you walk to the door, and then I’ll slip out once we know where she is. How does that sound to you?”

  “It’s as good a strategy as any,” I said. “Wish me luck.”

  “Right back at you.”

  I walked to the front door, and as I waited for her to answer her doorbell, I tried to come up with something that might keep Beatrice from noticing Grace sneaking into her garden. I still wasn’t quite sure about how to do that when she finally came to the door.

  “Suzanne, what are you doing here?” Beatrice asked me as she answered her door.

  It was a fair question. I just wished I had an answer for it. After a brief hesitation, I blurted out the first thing that I could think of. “I’m here about your building.”

  “My home?” she asked, clearly puzzled by my statement.

  “No, the one in April Springs. Since you said that your plans to open a candle shop weren’t going to work out, I thought you might be interested in selling the place.” As I spoke, I hoped that Grace was in action, but it took all of my willpower not to look over in the direction of Beatrice’s garden. Hopefully Grace was skulking her way toward it, but I wasn’t about to draw Beatrice’s attention to her if she was.

  “Why on earth would you want to buy it?”

 
; It was another fair question. Stalling, I said, “I’ve been thinking about opening a shop there myself.”

  “What kind of shop?”

  “Soap,” I said, blurting out the first thing that had come to my mind.

  She looked surprised. “But I thought you were a donutmaker?”

  “I am, but it wouldn’t hurt to diversify. Donut Hearts is doing really well, and I thought it would be good to branch out into something else.”

  “I had no idea that a donut shop could do that well,” she said.

  Neither did I, but since I was bluffing, I might as well go all the way. “You’d be amazed by the profits I generate on a daily basis.” That was probably true. She’d be amazed by just how little I actually made, but I wasn’t about to clarify. “My mother has long dabbled in many different directions, so I figured it was high time I started growing my portfolio myself.” Wow, I was just glad that I didn’t have Pinocchio’s nose at the moment. It would have been growing beyond reach with every word.

  “It’s a sound idea, but I’m afraid that I can’t help you.”

  “I thought the business was yours to sell now,” I said.

  “It may be someday, but it will be tied up in Evelyn’s estate for several months, if not years, before I get free title to it, and that depends on when they find and convict her killer. There’s no way that the property is going to be released before then.”

  “I see,” I said, trying to hide my faux disappointment. I finally risked a glance in the direction of the garden and saw Grace slipping back into my Jeep. “Well, I understand, but keep me in mind, okay?”

  “I will,” she said. “And thanks for stopping by.”

  “You’re most welcome,” I said.

  I was three steps away from her front door, and that much closer to the Jeep, when Beatrice said in an icy voice, “Hold on. Stop right where you are.”

  What had just happened? Had she seen Grace digging up her treasure?

  It appeared that we were busted.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked as I turned back to her. I kept my most innocent expression plastered on my face as I faced her.

  “Something’s not right,” she said sternly as she looked steadily over at her garden.

  “What do you mean?”

  Instead of answering immediately, she passed me and started for the Jeep. I thought Grace had made a clean getaway, but when I looked at the ground, I saw that she’d tracked a bit of mud on one shoe. The trail clearly led from the garden straight to my Jeep.

  I followed along, but there was nothing else that I could do to stop her, though I tried, though it was to no avail. “What’s going on?”

  As Beatrice pulled open the Jeep’s passenger door, she said, “That’s what I’d like to know.” Then she spotted the small package in Grace’s hands and her face drained of all color. “I can’t believe that you just did that. What’s wrong with you? You two need to come inside right now.”

  “What is this?” Grace asked as she refused to move and held the packet up. “Why shouldn’t we ignore you and take this straight to the police?”

  “You’re welcome to do just that, but if you want to know the truth, then you’ll have to come with me.”

  I looked at Grace and asked her, “What do you think?”

  “No way I’m going anywhere with her. I think we should drive as fast as we can to the police station. How about you?”

  I couldn’t imagine being stupid enough to go inside with a woman who might be a killer. Then again, if she hadn’t done it, didn’t she have the right to explain herself before we did something too rash? That’s when I made up my mind. “Beatrice, neither one of us is crazy enough to go inside with you, but if you’d like to explain what’s going on out here, we’ll give you the opportunity. I’m sorry, but that’s the best that we’re going to be able to do.” I was willing to bet that Beatrice didn’t have a weapon on her, and if we stayed outside in the open in front of anyone who might be looking in our direction, Grace and I would likely still be safe.

  At least I hoped that was the case, but I knew as well as anyone that sometimes, desperate times called for desperate measures, and if we’d just stumbled onto something that might implicate Beatrice in Evelyn’s murder, the woman before us might be more dangerous now that she’d been cornered than Grace or I could ever know.

  “What do you say?” I asked her.

  Beatrice seemed to think it over, and finally, she shrugged, looking as though she was on the brink of hysterical tears. “Why not? I don’t see what I have to lose at this point.” She looked around at her neighbors’ homes and added, “Could we at least go over to my garden bench? It will be better if I don’t have to look at either one of you when I tell you this.”

  “What do you think, Grace?”

  “I don’t see what it could hurt,” she said, and then she turned to Beatrice. “Don’t try anything, though. We’ll both be watching you.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not going to do a thing,” she said.

  But could we trust a possible killer, maybe even with our lives?

  In the end, there was only one way to find out.

  Chapter 20

  “So, what’s in this packet?” Grace asked Beatrice as we walked over to her garden bench.

  “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather start at the beginning and tell this in my own way,” she said.

  “Why not? Go on. It’s your story,” I said.

  She took a deep breath, and then she began to talk. “Last year I met a man in Asheville, a tall, handsome, charming man who was too good to be true. To make a long story short, it turned out that’s exactly what he was. I didn’t find out until nine months after we’d begun to see each other that he was married, and by then I was too addicted to him to break it off, even though I knew that I should do exactly that.”

  “What’s that got to do with Evelyn?” Grace asked.

  “Be patient. I’m getting to that. As I said, I kept seeing him, breaking it off, and then starting up again. He’s been like some kind of drug to me.” She took in a deep breath, and then she let it out slowly before she continued. “In a moment of weakness, I confessed everything to Evelyn the day that she died.”

  “You mean that she was murdered,” I said, correcting her. I wasn’t about to let her refute the distinction.

  “Murdered,” Beatrice amended. “Evelyn told me that if I wanted to start a new life, a new business with her, I’d have to end it with Bryce. We fought, and I stormed out of the building. It didn’t take me long to realize that she’d been right, though. I drove to Asheville, and I confronted Bryce, telling him that we were through forever. He laughed at me; he laughed as though I was nothing to him. Can you imagine how cruel that was?”

  “What did you do?” I asked, forgetting for the moment about Evelyn’s murder and focusing on Beatrice’s pain instead.

  “What could I do? I hurried back here, only to find that Evelyn was dead. Two dreams died that day, and now I’m lost and all alone.”

  “I’m sorry that happened to you,” Grace said, not entirely unsympathetic herself. “But what’s that got to do with this?” She held the packet she’d dug up for emphasis.

  “Open it if you need to,” Beatrice said with calm resignation. “Inside it, you’ll find a few brief notes, a couple of photographs, some receipts, and the card from the flowers the one time Bryce cared enough to send them. It’s our whole relationship in there. I was going to burn it all, but then I decided to bury it instead.” With that, she began to cry.

  I put an arm around her as Grace slit open the packet to confirm Beatrice’s story. At first I was surprised by the move, but in an instant, I knew that it had been the right thing to do. If Beatrice were lying to us, we needed to know, but if she were telling the truth, then this would give her an alibi, even though she clearly hadn’t realized it yet. Grace glanced through the materials inside the packet, then nodded to me as she closed it back up.

/>   “Beatrice, you’re about to be very glad that we found this,” I said as I patted her shoulder.

  “I don’t see how. I’m completely humiliated by what I’ve done.”

  “We all make mistakes, and as you said, you didn’t know that he was married at first. That should give you at least a little absolution.”

  She wasn’t about to accept that, though. “Would you still feel that way if it had been your husband I was seeing and not someone else’s?”

  That was a little too close to home. I had indeed been on the other end of that situation, and my feelings toward the woman who’d cheated with my husband hadn’t eased much to the day that she’d been murdered herself. “It happened to me, and I didn’t forgive her when I had the chance,” I admitted.

  “Could you forgive her now?” Beatrice asked me.

  “Believe me, I would if I could, but she’s dead now,” I said. “That’s no excuse, though. I did manage to forgive my ex-husband finally, but it was a long, slow, and painful process.”

  “There you go, then,” Beatrice said.

  Grace wasn’t having any of it, though. “Hang on a second. You need to stop being so hard on yourself, Beatrice. You made a mistake, and you compounded it based on what you just told us, but that doesn’t mean that you’re condemned by it forever. Make amends if you can, forgive yourself for messing up, and then get on with your life.”

  “I don’t see how I can do that,” she said in a whisper.

  “Beatrice, don’t you see? This is the perfect time. You have no ties now, nothing holding you back. Move forward and get on with the rest of your life.”

  I wasn’t sure how she was going to react, but after a few moments, she nodded and looked directly at Grace. “You’re right. I’ve got to quit beating myself up about what I did in the past. The important thing is that I never do it again in the future.”

  “Are you going to be able to do that?” I asked her gently.

  Beatrice smiled gently. “I’ll manage, even if it kills me.” She let out a long and deep breath. “Truthfully, I feel better already. I’ve been carrying this around with me for a very long time. They’re right when they say that confession is indeed good for the soul.”