Sweet's Sweets: The Second Samantha Sweet Mystery ssm-2

by Connie Shelton

  “So, what do you think happened to him?”

  “Don’t know. They’re faxing the full autopsy report. I should have it waiting for me at the office on Monday morning.”

  Sam continued to tear little bits off the herb bread, eating some and dropping a few to the plate in front of her.

  “This might sound really weird, but do you know the first thought that just came into my head?”

  He looked straight at her.

  “Private investigator. Trench coat.” She dropped the bread and dusted the crumbs off her hands. “I know, way too cliché, huh.”

  “Could be. But it’s an interesting possibility.”

  Chapter 8

  Sunday morning Sam woke up with Beau’s conversation running through her head. What if the private investigator really was murdered? And what if the trench coat she’d found belonged to him? She rolled over in bed twice, willing the thoughts away, hoping to grab a little more sleep before Jen arrived.

  Today would be their only chance to get enough product made up for the store’s soft opening and since it appeared that the guy in Albuquerque truly would deliver her ovens and the other kitchen equipment tomorrow, it was important that she accomplish a lot, not get herself distracted by one of Beau’s cases. Just because the coat had come from one of her properties didn’t mean she had to get involved.

  Thinking of the Adams property again reminded her that she’d not submitted her invoice to Delbert Crow. It could easily get lost in the shuffle of everything else in her life right now. She threw off the blankets and dragged her aching bones out of bed. The lumpy wooden box sat benignly again on her dresser. She reached a hand out toward it, then pulled back. What if she were becoming addicted to its power?

  Her hand wavered—closer, then away.

  Finally, she picked it up. As warmth from the wood began to saturate her tired arms, she hugged it more tightly to her body. Soon the colored stones glowed and she felt the infusion of energy she always got from the strange artifact.

  As soon as the bakery was open, she promised herself, she would put the box away forever.

  She dressed quickly and went to her computer in the corner of the living room, which was gradually becoming clearer, where she figured up her hours and submitted the bill to her supervisor by email. There. Done.

  “Morning, Mom,” Kelly said, moving sluggishly from her room to the open bathroom door.

  Sam started a pot of coffee and looked around the kitchen. She’d not bothered to put away the large bins of flour, sugar and spices from yesterday’s baking spree. The dishwasher was full of clean utensils, ready for another round today. With her newfound energy Sam unloaded the mixing bowls and beaters and began to set up for the first batch of seasonal quick breads and cakes that were usually a hit in the fall.

  Through the kitchen window she spotted Jennifer’s little Toyota just about the time Kelly emerged from her room, dressed and ready to help.

  “If I can get you girls to start with these recipes,” Sam said, pulling out three cards and indicating which pans were to be used for each. “I’ve got Darryl and Zoë coming over in a few minutes with their truck and we’ll load both pickups with the tables and chairs I’ve stored in the garage. Meanwhile, I’m filling the van with everything from the service porch.”

  Kelly gave her a little salute. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  Sam answered with a flick of a dish towel aimed at her daughter’s rear end.

  The service porch attached to the back of the kitchen contained a lot of stuff, Sam realized, as she began pulling things from the shelves. She didn’t remember buying half of these special-shaped cake pans and separators for the large tiers she used for wedding cakes. She found a whole box of disposable pastry bags and a plastic case of decorator tips she’d completely forgotten about. In the new place she would have space to organize all this, rather than simply cramming her tools into every cranny.

  “Knock, knock.” The voice of Rupert Penrick, the friend who’d helped her recently discover the missing work of a famous artist, came through the screen door. Without that bit of fortunate luck she would not have the money to be opening Sweet’s Sweets now.

  “Hey, come in,” Sam answered. “You’re just in time.”

  “Aren’t I always?” Rupert offered a hug. “Ooh—you’re certainly tingling with energy! Myself, I’m just happy to take a day off from my writing.” Little-known to most locals, Rupert was a prolific writer who remained perennially on the bestseller lists under the pen name Victoria DeVane. He was usually very disciplined in his work, but Sam knew him to also look for frequent excuses to skip out on his writing duties in search of other diversions. He’d been one of her staunchest supporters of the bake shop plan, from the moment she first told him about the idea. Today, the large man had shown up for work in loose knit pants and a shirt with billowy sleeves--his trademark style in his trademark purple.

  “The van is nearly full so maybe you could drive it over to the new shop? The rest of us should be along within a half hour or so and we’ll all pitch in to unload.” She handed him keys to the van and shop and he headed down her long driveway.

  Kelly shouted from the kitchen, a small crisis when she couldn’t find the baking powder, and then Sam spotted Darryl’s pickup truck in the driveway. As helpers began piling from the truck, she was thrilled to see that Troy and Gus had come along. She gave each of them a hug and a thanks for coming to her aid. Within twenty minutes every bit of the extra furniture for the shop was loaded into the two pickup trucks.

  Sunday morning traffic was light around the center of town and they arrived at the shop in under ten minutes. Another reason, Sam realized, that this was such a great location for her business. If you had to live half your life at work, at least having it close to home was a huge plus.

  Rupert greeted them at the front door, propping it open so the boxes containing unassembled tables and the stacks of café chairs could be brought inside.

  “Sam, let me know what you think about the back,” he said as the others hustled to unload the two trucks.

  She followed his purple-clad back into the dimmer interior of the workroom.

  “Rupe, I can’t believe it! You’ve organized everything!”

  “Is it okay? I didn’t mean to presume . . . But I just felt so energetic this morning.”

  Energetic? She gave him a long look, but his attention was elsewhere.

  “These shelves seemed just the right spot for your pastry bags, tips, colors, and little items like cookie cutters—”

  She stared around at the storage room that was now organized exactly as she would have done it herself.

  “And over here . . .” Rupert showed racks containing all her cake pans, muffin tins, spring form pans.

  “How did you—?”

  He shrugged.

  “The van is empty?”

  Another shrug.

  “I’m impressed.” He was going to start questioning this—real soon—if Sam didn’t cover. Although her mind was spinning at the possibility that somehow her own energy from the box had rubbed off on her friend, she hustled him into the front of the shop to see how the others were doing.

  Darryl and Troy already had three tables assembled and were well on their way with the fourth. Gus carried a large box in and set it near the counter with a thump. Zoë had wiped all the chairs clean and was placing them along the wall opposite the display cases, just the way Sam had envisioned them. This was getting too spooky.

  “Guys, this is so awesome!” Sam said. “I definitely owe you all lunch.”

  She glanced at her watch while Darryl and Troy set the final table on its legs. It was only ten-thirty.

  No one seemed to notice the time.

  “Hello all,” came a female voice from behind Sam. Riki Davis-Jones appeared, carrying an insulated carafe and a paper sack. “I called your house and Kelly told me you were here. I wasn’t sure whether it was time for breakfast or lunch so I brought egg sandwiches and c
offee.” She held up the bag.

  Sam introduced Riki all around and as the others dug into the sack, she remembered that she hadn’t eaten any breakfast, herself. Looking around the shop, which only needed product in the display cases to be ready for business, she marveled at their accomplishment. The box? She tamped down the thought.

  “May we christen your new tables?” Zoë asked with an impish grin.

  The men had already taken seats and were in the process of unwrapping their sandwiches. Sam smiled at them and extended her arms wide. “Absolutely. Sit. Eat.”

  Sam nearly had her own sandwich unwrapped when she felt her cell phone buzz inside her pocket. She carried the sandwich to the back room.

  “Hey there,” Beau said. “Just thought I’d check to see how it’s going.”

  “Amazingly,” she said, giving a quick overview. “I woke up thinking about that private investigator, though. Did you get a chance to read the report yet?”

  “Too busy this morning with Mama,” he said. “It’ll keep for awhile. If my boss weren’t so busy hitting the campaign trail, taking the local important people out for breakfast and such, I might get more than one day off this week. But since I only have the one day, I decided to spend it with her, maybe take her out for a drive this afternoon. We might still catch some of the fall leaves. I wanted to ask you to come along, but this has to be a crazy day for you.”

  “Well, actually, things are just about done here.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  How, indeed? She didn’t want to get into her suspicions about the powers of the box. “We got an early start and everyone just pitched in.”

  “So you might be able to break away for an afternoon drive?”

  “It sounds wonderful, Beau, but I better not. I left Kelly and Jen baking at home today. They’re probably up to their ears in it by now. But thanks for the invite. Enjoy your day with Iris.”

  She ended the call and walked back to the front of the shop to find the others readying to leave.

  “I don’t know how to thank you, everyone.”

  Zoë and Darryl needed to get back to their B&B—more guests arriving in a few hours. They took Troy and Gus with them. Rupert said he would take Sam’s van back to her house, trade it for his own car, and get back home where Victoria’s characters were in some kind of romantic mess that he needed to straighten out in the current manuscript. Riki offered to stay longer, but Sam couldn’t really think of much else that needed to be done. The dog groomer helped clear the remains of their impromptu brunch and then walked back to her car.

  Sam locked the front door behind the rest of them and stood in her shop. Tomorrow the paper signs would come off the windows, to be replaced soon by her logo painted in purple and gold. Jen would be behind the counter, the shelves filled with all the new goodies, and Sam would actually ring up her first dollars in sales in her real shop. A lump formed in her throat at the realization that her dream was about to become reality. She quickly swallowed that lump as her phone rang again.

  “Mom, help!”

  Chapter 9

  Sam’s heart raced. “Kelly, what’s wrong?”

  “The oven quit on us. We had two pans of pumpkin bread in there and it’s just not baking. The oven is barely warm.”

  Oh god, a baking disaster.

  “I’m on my way.”

  Sam rechecked the lock on the back door, switched off lights and headed out to her truck. She arrived at home to find Rupert in the kitchen with Kelly and Jen, staring into the oven at pans of flat pumpkin bread with a much too liquidy sheen on top.

  “Call Zoë and see if we might get these into her oven. Quick! We might still be able to save them.”

  While Kelly made the call, Sam fiddled with the buttons on the oven. These electronically controlled things had always spooked her.

  “Zoë says yes. I’ll take the pans right over.” Kelly set both partially cooked loaves onto a tray and headed out the back door.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Rupert asked, looking sort of helpless. Art, writing, cooking—he could handle those things. Electronics, forget it.

  “No, we’ll sort it out,” Sam said. “Go on and get back to your book.”

  He looked relieved as he practically dashed out the back door.

  “Jen, looks like you’ve got the rest of the day off,” Sam said. “Get some rest and be ready for tomorrow. I’ll bring all the stuff we’ve already baked and we’ll get set up. Meet me there at six, we’ll open the doors at seven?”

  Jen gave her a high-five and left.

  Now what?

  Sam stared at the blank readout on the oven where digital numbers normally gave the status of the appliance. Rats. She pulled the range away from the wall and reached behind to unplug and re-plug the cord, hoping that something might reboot and get it started again, but no such luck. A baker without an oven isn’t going to be very successful, she thought. She put all she could into praying, wishing, hoping that the guy from Albuquerque showed up as promised and installed her new ovens tomorrow.

  Meanwhile, she surveyed the results of the past two days. Dozens of cookies and brownies waited in bakery boxes on the kitchen table. In the fridge, six cheesecakes in four flavors looked delicious with their crumb crusts of chocolate, vanilla and ginger. Sliced and arranged in the cases, she hoped they would entice the midday customers. For the early crowd (ha—she hoped), breakfast quiches, crumb cake, pumpkin bread and apple streusel should work. She closed the refrigerator door and hoped she’d guessed correctly on the quantities. Either too much or too little could spell disaster.

  So far, all her bakery business had been custom order; now she was guessing at what it took to fill the needs of the walk-in trade. With Jen at the counter, she planned to work in the back and produce decorated cakes that could be ready for spur-of-the-moment purchases. Each day might be an adventure until she got this whole thing figured out.

  She placed a call to an appliance repair shop and left a voice message to the effect that she needed to set up an appointment. So many other things needed to be addressed but a Sunday afternoon wasn’t the time to reach a lot of people. After a quick call to find out how the baking was going at Zoë’s and leaving Kelly with instructions for the finished pumpkin breads, Sam decided this might be her best chance to do what she could to finish the cleanup job at the Adams place.

  For the first time in days Sam felt like the bakery wasn’t the top thing on her mind as she drove through town. Most of the golden leaves had fallen from the cottonwoods that normally shaded Paseo del Pueblo Sur. October would soon be gone and the grayer days of November would begin. Her birthday would be here in less than three weeks. She felt startled at that realization, that she’d not even remembered a date that used to be all-important. She supposed that birthdays and the passing years either became less important or more important to a person after fifty. She squeezed the steering wheel of the Silverado, reminding herself that some of the best times of her life had happened these past few years.

  After a frankly boring childhood in small-town Texas, an adventure working in a pipeline camp in Alaska and then arriving in Taos—pregnant and single—more than thirty years ago, Sam’s life settled into the routine of raising a daughter and simply staying employed. Being a line cook in a restaurant, taking in sewing at home while Kelly was an infant, working at a family-owned insurance firm where the owner allowed her to bring her preschooler along. That lasted until old man Sanchez died and his wheeler-dealer son sold the agency to a big Albuquerque firm. Sam, then the mother of a teen, couldn’t ever seem to blend the stresses of corporate demands with those of teenaged hormones on the rage. She’d hung in there—barely—until Kelly graduated and then began baking and living off her savings until the job with the USDA came along. What the Department of Agriculture had to do with home mortgages, she never quite understood, but the money was good enough to see Sam past her days of complete frugality. Telling people that she broke into houses for a li
ving elicited reactions from shock to laughter. What she didn’t tell them was about some of the weird, strange and awful things she learned about people in those houses.

  Now she pulled into the driveway behind the coyote fence at the newest of her break-ins, wondering once more what had gone on here. The blood on the saturated trench coat didn’t belong to the female owner of the house, and Sam’s half-joking idea that the coat was tied to Beau’s dead PI had no proof to back it up.

  Sam retrieved the key from the lockbox on the front door and opened it. Ever since the discovery of the bloody garment, a nagging doubt had hovered at the edges of her consciousness. Had she inadvertently thrown out some important clue that would help solve Beau’s newest case?

  The house had the stale smell of dust and old food, of meals prepared a long time ago, of things that children had left behind, like dirty mouths wiped on a towel and the towel thrown into a corner and forgotten, of diapers and spit-up. Although Sam had spent hours working on the place already, there was still much to be done before it could hope to appeal to a buyer.

  She sighed and wondered where to start first. Beau probably wouldn’t want her to throw out anything more, now that he was actively looking for the homeowner’s whereabouts. Although he knew Cheryl Adams wasn’t the victim, he couldn’t exactly rule her out as a suspect.

  Perhaps she could help. Sam summoned up residual energy from her morning encounter with the wooden box but the initial burst of energy had dissipated. Odd. Just when she thought she’d pegged the results; normally she got about twelve hours of vigor after handling the box. Had she somehow given it away? All her friends had certainly moved at top speed this morning. Maybe Sam had transferred power to them in some way. She wandered into the kitchen, frustrated with the uselessness of dwelling on it.

  Jerking open the first of the kitchen drawers she rummaged through mismatched flatware and utensils. The next contained two rolls of plastic wrap and a wadded paper napkin and seventeen twist ties. Sam berated herself for actually counting them. The third drawer was the junk drawer.