Cherry Filled Charges

by Jessica Beck

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Recipes

  Other Books by Jessica Beck

  JESSICA BECK

  THE DONUT MYSTERIES, BOOK 33

  CHERRY-FILLED CHARGES

  Donut Mystery #33 Cherry-Filled Charges

  Copyright © 2017 by Jessica Beck All rights reserved.

  First Edition: July 2017

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Recipes included in this book are to be recreated at the reader’s own risk. The author is not responsible for any damage, medical or otherwise, created as a result of reproducing these recipes. It is the responsibility of the reader to ensure that none of the ingredients are detrimental to their health, and the author will not be held liable in any way for any problems that might arise from following the included recipes.

  The First Time Ever Published!

  The 33rd Donut Mystery.

  Jessica Beck is the New York Times Bestselling Author of the Donut Mysteries, the Classic Diner Mysteries, the Ghost Cat Cozy Mysteries, and the Cast Iron Cooking Mysteries.

  For Emily, you are simply the best!

  It’s finally time for Barton Gleason’s pop-up bistro, but the grand opening is marred when a fellow chef and rival from culinary school is murdered nearby in one of the staging areas. Suzanne stumbles across the body, and while Jake is away dealing with his own family issues, she and Grace tackle the job of tracking down the real killer before someone else’s goose gets cooked.

  Chapter 1

  “Suzanne, would you mind grabbing more dishes from the donut shop?” Barton Gleason asked me as he tried to do four things at once in his temporary kitchen setup outside. His pop-up bistro was finally happening, and Emma and I were pitching in, as well as a few of Barton’s other culinary friends and coworkers from the hospital.

  “Happy to help,” I said as I stowed the dirty plates in a cart, ready to take them back to Donut Hearts. Barton had decided to have his first trial run in the parking lot behind ReNEWed, Donut Hearts, and Patty Cakes. It was amazing what he and Emma had been able to do to the outdoor space, but then again, they’d been planning it for months. A hodgepodge of tables had been outfitted with quirky mismatched place settings, and the fire department had even loaned him the use of six dozen folding chairs. The bistro would be open only two nights, and then it would go away as though it had never been there at all.

  Sharon Blake, my assistant’s mother, was due to start washing dishes soon at the donut shop, so I knew I’d better hustle if I was going to get Barton his plates in time.

  Wheeling the dirty dishes behind the scenes, I marveled at just how well it all had come together. I especially liked the twinkling Christmas lights they’d strung from a temporary arbor set up on the perimeter, giving the outdoor space a sense of walls that didn’t confine the dining area. I was glad they’d chosen to do it in the evening. It was still warm, but the first hint of the cooler weather that was sure to come was in the air.

  I parked the cart and grabbed the door handle to wheel it into Donut Hearts, but the rarely used back door wouldn’t budge.

  I hadn’t locked it by accident, had I? No, the handle turned freely.

  Then why wouldn’t it open?

  Something must be blocking it, but I couldn’t imagine what it might be. No matter how hard I shoved, it wouldn’t move an inch. Frustrated, I left the cart where it was and walked around to the front of the building. At least there was no trouble opening that door. I’d left it unlocked to allow the staff easy access in case they needed anything. Walking through the darkened dining area and into the kitchen, I flipped on the main light as I entered my daily workspace and looked to see what could be blocking the door.

  In an instant, the happy occasion suddenly lost every bit of its joy for me.

  There was a young man lying against the door, and what was worse, one of my kitchen knives was plunged into his back.

  Was it possible that it was Barton Gleason? Even though I’d just seen him, the resemblance was striking, at least from my angle. It surely looked like him from where I stood, and I felt myself feeling sick with grief.

  I rushed to the body, hoping and praying that I was wrong.

  No matter who it was though, it appeared that the party was over.

  I knelt down to check for a pulse even as I pulled out my cell phone. Dialing the chief’s number with one hand, I tried in vain to find the faintest glimmer of life in the body. With a guilty sense of relief, I realized that it wasn’t Barton after all as I recognized the murder victim.

  That made it better, but only by a little. After all, a young man had still just died violently, and in my donut shop, no less. The body was still warm to the touch. I had a sinking feeling that I hadn’t missed the murder by more than a few minutes. If I’d come just a tad earlier, there might have been two bodies waiting to be discovered there instead of just one.

  The chief answered on the second ring. “Hey, Suzanne. I’m just finishing up some paperwork, but I’ll be right over. I just told Grace the same thing. Don’t you two ever talk?” He was clearly in a good mood, one that I was about to ruin.

  “Chief, someone just killed Simon Reed in my kitchen,” I said, doing my best to avoid the pool of blood seeping out of the body.

  “Who is Simon Reed?” he asked. “Never mind that. Why would he be in the kitchen at your cottage? Did you invite him there? How well did you know him? I thought you were at the bistro with everyone else.” After a brief pause, he asked, “Suzanne, is there something I need to know about?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that, Chief. I’m not talking about my kitchen at home. I’m at Donut Hearts. I brought some dirty dishes over here to be washed, and I found him. To answer your other questions, I never met the man until a couple of hours ago. I’ll meet you at the front door. Call an ambulance, just in case I’m wrong.”

  “Don’t touch anything else. I’ll be there in less than a minute,” the police chief said, and then he hung up.

  I looked down at my jeans and saw a smudge of the young man’s blood on one knee. I hadn’t known him for more than a few hours, so he was mostly a blank page to me. Who would kill him, and why would they choose Donut Hearts as their crime scene? I had my phone out anyway, so out of habit more than anything else, I took a few photos of the body, the crime scene, and the surrounding kitchen work area while I was at it. After all, I never knew when a snapshot would be helpful later on. It was sad seeing someone barely out of his teens have his life snuffed out so soon. What would cause someone to do such a thing? I heard some
one pounding at the front door, and I realized that I hadn’t unlocked it as I’d promised. Even though it had been unlocked when I’d arrived, it was second nature for me to always lock that door behind me if I wasn’t open for business, and evidently I’d done it again.

  I opened the door to find the police chief and two EMTs waiting impatiently for me.

  “Sorry about that,” I said as I stepped aside before they ran me over. “He’s back there.”

  I started to follow when the chief suggested, “Suzanne, why don’t you sit out here for a minute? Should I call Jake for you?”

  “He’s in Raleigh,” I said. “His nephew’s in trouble again.” Jake’s sister, Sarah, had a bad history with the men in her life, always choosing the worst available option. Unfortunately, Jake’s niece and nephew suffered from their mother’s bad decisions, and Paul, a teenager full of hormones and angst, was acting out in a major way. Jake had asked for my blessing to go try to straighten him out, and I’d readily agreed.

  “I’ll call Grace, then,” the chief said.

  I didn’t even fight him on it. The truth was that I didn’t want to be alone.

  My best friend came in three minutes later and offered me a hug before she even said a word. “I’m so sorry,” she finally said. “It’s never easy finding a body, is it?”

  “Honestly, I’m kind of glad I’m not used to it,” I said, feeling the shakes that often came after something traumatic happened. I usually kept my cool in the midst of a crisis, but when it was over, that was usually when I fell apart.

  “Stephen told me it was a young man, but that was all that he said. It wasn’t Barton, was it?”

  I shook my head. “I thought so at first, but no, it was one of his friends helping out for the evening.” I couldn’t imagine how Emma would have taken it if her boyfriend had been the victim.

  “Who would do such a thing?” she asked me.

  “I have no idea,” I admitted. “I saw Emma having words with Simon earlier, but there’s no way it can be related to this.”

  “Words? Do you mean they were fighting?”

  I knew I’d have to tell Chief Grant what I’d seen, but it made me feel like a traitor to my friend and lone employee to repeat it to Grace. “I’m sure it had nothing to do with this.”

  “Suzanne, I know you better than that. What happened? You can trust me. Surely you know that by now, after all that we’ve been through.”

  “Emma slapped his face,” I said softly.

  “What? Why would she do something like that? It doesn’t sound like her.”

  “Grace, I wasn’t spying on them or anything, but I saw him reach out and pat her rear as she walked past him. Emma reacted much the same way either one of us would have. There’s another problem. I think Barton saw what happened too. He looked mad enough to spit fire.”

  “I thought you said this guy was his friend.”

  “Clearly he wasn’t that good a friend, or he wouldn’t have done what he did,” I said. “I’ve got to tell the chief what I saw though, and the thought of doing it is killing me.” It was a poor choice of words given the circumstances, but it was true enough.

  The EMTs wheeled the body out past us, covered in a sheet. They must have put Simon on the gurney sideways, since the knife wasn’t sticking straight up from the cover. I got up and held the door for them, and one of the EMTs actually thanked me. It was all much too polite and civilized for my taste, given the circumstances.

  The chief walked out a few minutes later, and he headed straight for us. “Thanks for coming,” he told Grace. “Would you mind waiting outside for a minute?”

  Grace frowned at him, and then she looked at me. I nodded, and she reached out and patted my shoulder before she left.

  The chief pulled out a little notebook and said, “Now tell me everything that happened.”

  I took a deep breath, and then I got started. “I was bringing in some dirty dishes for Sharon Blake to wash when she gets here in about half an hour, but I couldn’t get the back door open. I had to walk around to the front, and when I came into my kitchen, I saw the body. At first I thought it was Barton, but when I checked for a pulse, I realized that it was his friend, thank goodness for small favors.”

  “You said his name was Simon Reed?” the chief asked. The use of the past tense and the way they’d removed his body both made it clear that the young man had been dead indeed when I’d found him, but it was still hard to take in.

  “That’s right. From what I understand, he was a friend of Barton’s from culinary school helping out for the next two nights,” I replied.

  “Do you know any reason anyone would want to kill him?” the chief asked.

  “No, I don’t know why anyone would want to kill him,” I said. That much was true. A pat on the fanny might have made Emma and Barton mad, but it wasn’t a capital offense.

  “But you know something, don’t you?” the chief asked as he looked at me closely. “Suzanne, I can’t do my job if you don’t tell me everything you know.”

  There was no getting around it. I was going to have to come clean with what I’d witnessed. “Earlier, I saw Simon pat Emma’s bottom, and she slapped him for it. Barton saw the entire thing, and he was pretty angry about the whole thing. Really, who can blame him?”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Less than half an hour ago,” I admitted. “Chief, Barton and Emma are both just kids, and good ones at that. Neither one of them is a cold-blooded killer.”

  “There was nothing cold about the way that boy was stabbed in the back,” the chief said. “It was clearly done on the spur of the moment. Am I missing my guess, or was the murder weapon one of your knives?”

  “It’s mine,” I admitted, afraid that I wasn’t helping my friends any with my admission. I’d had no problem recognizing it immediately, since I used it every day. Past tense. Even if I ever got it back, I would never use it again, not after what had happened.

  “So it was probably a spontaneous reaction to something,” the chief said. “What else do you know about young Mr. Reed?”

  “Not much,” I admitted. “You’ll have to talk to Barton about him. They were friends.”

  “Oh, I plan to,” he said as he looked around my workspace. “Don’t worry about your kitchen. You should have it back in time to start making donuts in the morning.”

  I hadn’t actually even thought about that. I glanced at the clock and saw that in less than seven hours, it would be time for me to make the donuts yet again. I wasn’t all that happy about doing it in the aftermath of a crime scene, but I wasn’t going to shut my shop down voluntarily, either. After all, I couldn’t stop my world just because of what had happened, but that didn’t mean that I was going to take it lying down, either. Whoever had killed Simon Reed had violated my space, my inner sanctum, and I was angry beyond words. I might not have known the young man well, but he’d become a part of my world simply because of the place where he’d been murdered. In some ways, it was really none of my business, but that wasn’t the way I was taking it. It felt as though it was a direct slap in the face, a challenge daring me to catch whoever had done it on my home turf. I quickly realized that might be the only way I’d be able to erase the memory of what I’d just stumbled across and recapture the joy I felt about my donut shop again.

  “Is that all you need from me?” I asked him as I stood.

  “For now. Hang around, though. I might need more information later.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not going anywhere,” I said as I headed for the door.

  “Suzanne,” he called out before I could escape.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry you had to be the one who found the body,” the chief said sympathetically.

  “That makes two of us. Thanks, though
,” I replied.

  “I’ll see you soon,” he answered, instantly dismissing me from his thoughts and already focusing on who might have stabbed the young man whose body I’d just literally stumbled upon. I wasn’t sure that Chief Grant was going to like it, but he was about to have some company in his investigation, and if I could talk Grace into helping me, so much the better.

  But either way, I was determined to find out who had killed Simon Reed in my donut shop.

  Chapter 2

  “How did Stephen react to the news?” Grace asked me the moment I joined her outside.

  “Are you talking about me telling him what happened between Simon and Emma? I couldn’t say. He’s hard to read sometimes, isn’t he?”

  “You don’t have to tell me. That’s not what I’m referring to, though. I have a hunch I know exactly how he took that particular tidbit of information. I’m talking about the fact that we’re going to investigate this case ourselves,” she said calmly.

  “Are we?” I asked her.

  “Suzanne, you aren’t losing your nerve, are you? Someone killed a man in your donut shop. Aren’t you outraged?”

  “Of course I am,” I said, trying to keep my temper in check. “Grace, you realize that we can’t snoop around into every murder that happens in April Springs, don’t you?” I’d already come to the same conclusion that we were going to investigate the homicide, but it still surprised me a little to see that Grace felt the same way.

  “Maybe not, but I don’t see how we can ignore this one. Whether you like it or not, you’re in this one up to your eyebrows. Not only is Emma going to be one of Stephen’s main suspects, but the scene of the crime alone should be enough to get you involved.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” I asked her, trying to hold back my tears. The emotions stemming from finding Simon’s body were welling up in me, and it was all I could do not to break down right then and there. There was also the added stress of knowing that my assistant, whether I liked it or not, was hip deep in trouble at the moment, and so was her boyfriend.