Sweet's Sweets: The Second Samantha Sweet Mystery (The Samantha Sweet Mysteries)

by Connie Shelton

  That seemed like the best plan. They ended the call with a few suggestive ideas but Sam knew they both had more on their minds besides getting romantic.

  She’d no sooner hung up the phone than there was a tap at her front door. Oven guy. With a quick comment about the encroaching weather, he bustled into the kitchen.

  “Got the part for your oven right here,” he said, applying a screwdriver to the control panel. “Should just take a minute.”

  It was longer than a minute, but not by much. Three hundred dollars later, he was on his way. Sam made the entry in her checkbook absentmindedly, thoughts still bouncing around in her head, puzzling over what had really happened to Elena Tafoya.

  At eight o’clock she peered out the window and noticed that it was, indeed, a white world out there. She went to bed wondering how much snow might possibly accumulate overnight, remembering that she’d not been out to check the Adams property in nearly a week and making a mental note to do that. She had two other properties under her care right now, but she’d thoroughly winterized them when the first of the cold weather came along.

  By four a.m. she’d come to the conclusion that sleep was not coming back. A glance out the window showed that about four inches had fallen. The silent sky was black with pinpoint dots of light. In the distance she heard the grind of a snowplow, blocks away, probably clearing the intersections and major roads. If she left soon and took the back streets she could get to the shop before anyone else was out. The fresh snow and her four-wheel-drive pickup truck should make for easy traveling. Once the sun came out everything would clear by noon. She dressed quickly and reached into the wooden box for her watch and earrings.

  Sweet’s Sweets looked like something from a Kincaid painting with its softly glowing nightlights, snow sprinkling the awning like powdered sugar. Along the roadway and parking area the trees and shrubs stood as frosty sentinels with white icing mounded upon their branches. She cruised past them, circled the building and cut a path through the alley with the truck’s wide tires.

  Inside, she preheated the ovens and adjusted the salesroom’s thermostat so it would feel cozy for the early customers. Becky’s planning paid off—Sam added eggs and milk to the dry ingredients for muffins, divided batches and added spices and fruit, and soon had four dozen little golden pastries ready for the front room. Scones followed. Napoleons, chocolate cream puffs, apple strudel, and fruit tarts. She stayed in her own zone and relished the enjoyment of pure creation.

  By the time Jen arrived at six, the place was filled with the scents of sugar, fruits and spices.

  “Looks like all I have to do is add the coffee,” she said. “Too bad we don’t have a giant vent fan to send this heavenly smell all over town. We’d have customers lined up out the door.”

  As it turned out, they nearly did. It seemed that everyone who worked in the center of town and the plaza area had the same thoughts: warm, comfort food for breakfast on a day like this. The coffee, chai, hot chocolate and cider went out by the gallons. Office staff came in with orders and left with boxes neatly tied in purple ribbon and stuffed with dozens of assorted pastries. Riki walked over from her grooming shop.

  “Hi luv, the scent of this place is driving me crazy over there, you know.”

  She browsed the cases and chose a blueberry tart and a hearty square of Becky’s Pennsylvania Dutch crumb cake. Sam poured her a large latte and said, “On the house. Just send your customers our way, while they wait for their dogs.”

  “I’m already doing that, Sam. In case you hadn’t noticed, you are the favorite spot on the block now.”

  Sam gave the slender British transplant a quick hug before she departed. She stayed in the front long enough to rearrange the displays and neaten things up before heading to the kitchen again to see how Becky was doing.

  “Got it under control here, I think,” Becky told her. “I’ll have more muffins ready in a jiff.”

  “Okay. That’s great. If you can handle things here, I need to get out to one of my properties and check it over.”

  As she’d assumed, in the midmorning sunlight the streets had quickly cleared, with brownish runoff in the gutters the only sign of the nighttime winter wonderland. The final spots of white were on the shady sides of buildings and shrubs. Sam climbed into her truck and headed south on Paseo del Pueblo Sur.

  When she reached the turnoff to the narrow lane where Cheryl Adams’s house stood, she remembered the downside of life on the edges of town. Hickory Lane showed deep, muddy ruts that threatened to be slick. She shifted the truck into four-wheel mode and steered carefully. At the Adams house a set of tracks veered into the driveway behind the coyote fence. Sam tensed. Someone had already been here.

  But there was no vehicle in sight. Maybe they’d just chosen this spot to turn around. Pulled in and backed out again. She aimed her truck at the center of the small parking area and firmly established dominance of the space.

  No footprints crossed the snow on this shady side of the house, no sign of disturbance in the frozen crystals that remained on the small porch. Sam crunched across them and unlocked the door.

  Inside, the house felt cold, empty, and stale. She walked through to the kitchen at the back, surveying the living and dining rooms, checking the sign-in sheet that she’d left on the kitchen counter. No one else had logged in. Sometimes her contracting officer, Delbert Crow, checked the houses where she’d worked. Occasionally a Realtor showed a place. But no one had been here.

  She went to the utility room where she verified that she had drained and turned off the hot water heater. The home’s heating system was electric baseboard heat and each thermostat Sam checked showed that those were turned off. She remembered shutting off the main water valve, and now she poured a little antifreeze into each drain as she walked through, a little extra insurance against the pipes freezing as temperatures began dipping toward zero in December and January.

  A peek into each of the bedrooms. Checking latches on windows as she went, she came first to the smaller room, the one which had housed the Adams children. All was neat and clean here. Then she heard a sound.

  She froze.

  There it was again, the faint scrape of something metallic. She edged toward the master bedroom door, realizing the only weapon at her disposal was the plastic jug of antifreeze that she’d used in the kitchen and bathroom. A gallon jug, roughly half full of liquid—well, it might effectively clobber an intruder in the head. She gripped it tighter and nudged the bedroom door with her left hand.

  Mini blinds at the windows cast thin stripes of sunlight across the brown carpet. The squeak sounded again, tiny, as if a wire hanger were slid along a metal rod. Her eyes darted to the closet.

  A man stood at the open bi-fold doors, reaching into the closet as if he were hanging up a garment.

  “Sir? What are you doing?”

  The figure ignored her, just continued his perusal of the closet.

  “Sir, you can’t be in here. This house is under the care of the USDA.”

  He slowly began to turn. Then he simply vanished.

  Chapter 22

  Sam’s heart stopped.

  “What the hell—” She held up the plastic jug, a last-defense battering ram. But there was simply nothing there.

  Her gaze sped around the room. Nothing.

  She looked behind her, wondering if he could have possibly gotten past her. But how could that be? She’d never left the doorway.

  She set the jug on the floor and edged her way into the bedroom. The closet was completely empty. What had made the metallic sound, what she’d taken to be a hanger on the rail? She rubbed at her eyes with her fists, realizing how cartoonish that move would seem to anyone observing.

  Taking several deep breaths, she worked to steady her heart. I know what I saw. A man. Standing right there. Putting something in the closet—or looking for something. He looked absolutely real. About my height, sort of round in the middle, dark clothing . . . a cap . . . She struggled to re
capture the vision but it was fading quickly, just as the man himself had vanished.

  She strode to the window and pulled the cord to raise the mini-blinds. Dust motes drifted through the air as the room flooded with light. A perfectly ordinary room. An empty room. She lowered the shade.

  Sam edged toward the door, keeping her eyes on the open closet doors, switching to stare out into the hallway as she neared it. Nothing. Not a shadow, not a sound, not a breath. She rushed down the short hall and out the front door, locking it and stashing the key in the lockbox.

  Inside her truck, she locked the doors and blew out her pent-up breath. Okay, Sam, think this through.

  There’d been one other time when she saw something strange—another time after she’d handled the magical wooden box—a greenish plant residue that provided an important clue in one of Beau’s cases. And now she’d spotted this strange man near the place where the bloodied trench coat had once hung. So, that’s what I’ll do, she thought. I’ll tell Beau about this and see if it has any bearing.

  The truck started with a roar, the wheels losing traction as Sam gunned it too hard on the muddy road. She slowed, deciding it would be stupid to slide off the road because of a vision that she couldn’t even really explain.

  As she drove slowly through town she began to question herself. What had she actually seen; how would she explain it to Beau? At the street where she would normally turn to go to her shop, she almost did. Almost convinced herself that simply going back to work, ignoring ephemeral visions, creating visions instead in sugar—that would be far better than bringing this up to anyone else.

  But then she looked down at the seat beside her, at the plastic bag holding Elena’s journal. Her friend’s words came back to her, the desperation in Elena’s voice when she’d told Sam how she’d slashed out at the man following her. How panicky she’d felt when the knife connected with his skin, when he began to bleed all over his coat. And then Elena’s final words, words of hatred for the husband who’d betrayed her with another woman, the husband who had likely hired that man to stalk his wife. If Sam could offer any assistance at all, any small clue that could help Beau find the answers, then she owed it to him and to Elena’s memory to offer it.

  She drove past the square and turned left on Civic Plaza Drive. Beau’s cruiser sat near the entrance, as if he’d been the first to arrive this morning and had managed to snag the best parking slot. Sam didn’t get quite that lucky; the closest spot was more than a block away.

  Crunching through little patches of ice in the shady spots, she hugged the plastic-clad journal to her chest and entered the sheriff’s department. The clerk at the front desk recognized her and nodded toward the long hall that led to the offices and small lab.

  “He’s in Sheriff Padilla’s office,” the dark haired Hispanic girl said.

  Sam took that as permission to go searching for Beau so she followed the hall toward the back of the building. Beau’s own desk sat in an open room where several deputies normally took care of paperwork and did whatever computer research necessary for their current cases. The room was unoccupied at the moment.

  Voices came from an open doorway on her right.

  “. . . for the record,” said Beau’s voice.

  Sam moved closer

  “For the record, Deputy Cardwell, I want no record of this.”

  “Sheriff—”

  Sam paused outside the door, blatantly eavesdropping but ready to dash to the safety of one of the visitor’s chairs if either man made a move.

  “It’s nothing, Deputy. I’ve visited the Tafoya home on several occasions. My prints could have been there for months. You know those Indian maids don’t clean thoroughly.”

  Beau shuffled uncomfortably. “In the bedroom? It doesn’t look right. If you’re refusing to make this part of the record, Sheriff, it has to be reported to I.A.”

  “I’m not worried about Internal Affairs,” Padilla said. “I’ve been in this town and in this department a lot longer than you.”

  Was he threatening Beau’s job because of incriminating evidence against himself? Sam held her breath.

  “Listen to me, Cardwell. I have an excellent track record as sheriff of this county. I clear my cases quickly and cleanly. And I’m not answering to you!”

  “You have to answer to the voters of the county,” Beau responded. “And I think they’d rather know their sheriff is an upright man, somebody they can trust.”

  Padilla seethed. “They do trust me. You’re going to find that out when they go to the polls. This meeting is done.”

  Beau came stomping out the door and jolted to a halt when he saw Sam. He didn’t speak but motioned with his head for her to follow him. She trotted along behind as he strode through the squad room and out a back door to the parking lot.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, his color high.

  She held out the bag containing Elena’s journal. “I brought this back.”

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to bite your head off.” He puffed out his cheeks and exhaled sharply. “Did you hear much in there?”

  “Some of it. I gathered that you found the sheriff’s fingerprints in the Tafoya’s bedroom. He didn’t have any explanation for that?”

  “Said he’d been there once for a party and probably walked through the master bedroom in search of a bathroom.”

  “Once. As in, a long time ago? Would fingerprints be there after a long time?”

  “Depends. On certain surfaces, under the right temperature and humidity conditions . . . yeah, we can sometimes get latent prints. Might expect them on a light switch, doorknob, bathroom fixtures . . . okay, that might fit the sheriff’s story. What I didn’t tell him is that these came from the cover of that journal you’re holding. Which we found taped to the underside of a nightstand drawer on Elena’s side of the bed.”

  “So he’s held this book.”

  “Maybe in the bedroom, maybe somewhere else. I didn’t tell him everything; I was hoping he’d come up with a logical explanation. But you heard how he was.”

  “Kind of it’s-you-or-me, this town ain’t big enough for the two of us.”

  “Yeah.”

  Maybe this was what the warning had been about. Sam thought about it, but she didn’t say it. She changed the subject.

  “Did you read any of the entries in this?” she said, holding up the journal.

  He shook his head. “Lisa found it, printed it and bagged it.”

  “The final entry is dated the day before she died. In it, she’s thinking of going to the press with Carlos’s threats, revealing that he was having her followed and that he’d had a child by another woman. Elena rants about the unfairness of his double standard and it looks like she seriously considered wrecking his career because of it.”

  “Whoa.” Beau stared at her.

  “Motive enough?”

  “It sure helps to establish it. I’ll push the state crime lab to get any evidence they can off that boot lace.” He glanced toward the building. “Quietly though. I can’t risk Padilla pulling me off the case. For now, I think I better just keep my mouth shut and work around him.”

  “Be careful. Please?”

  He gave her a light kiss. “I will. You know that, darlin’. I’d better get back inside.”

  Sam watched him go in, and it wasn’t until she was in her truck, halfway back to Sweet’s Sweets, that she remembered she’d hadn’t told him about the ghostly image she’d seen in Cheryl Adams’s house.

  She debated whether to call him right back or to wait until this evening and talk to him at home. The latter won out, as she figured he was already in enough hot water with Padilla that he didn’t need her adding more fuel to his boss’s fire. Instead, she stopped in at the bakery and was pleased to see that everything was going smoothly there. Her final job for the day was to finish Tafoya’s victory cake. The big party was to be held tomorrow night in the ballroom of the Arroyo Grande Lodge and as long as she had the cake there by five p.m. her d
uties would be done.

  Becky helped her bring the large tiered cake out of the fridge and Sam set to work piping borders, creating a New Mexico zia symbol of gel and then surrounding it with the red and yellow roses Becky had made yesterday. She finished it with Elena’s chosen wording “Tafoya, THE Answer for New Mexico,” glad that she didn’t have to write Congratulations.

  Elena. How could anyone have known that the woman who ordered this cake such a short time ago would never live to eat a slice of it, to be at the very party at which the beautiful cake would serve as centerpiece? Sam worked with the frosting carefully, giving the confection her special touch, in memory of her friend.

  “That’s amazing,” Jen said, standing back to look at the cake as Sam put her tools away.

  “Very New Mexican, isn’t it?” Sam said.

  “Just what the customer wanted.”

  “I hope so.” Sam considered the finished cake. “I really hope she would have liked it.”

  Jen put an arm around Sam’s shoulder. “She would have loved it.”

  Beau called as Sam was pulling into her driveway at home.

  “Hey there,” she said. “I was thinking of calling you tonight. What’s up?”

  “Just saying hi. And, uh, wanting to apologize for being kinda short earlier in the day.”

  “What—a guy can’t be grumpy when his boss is crawling up his rear?”

  “Well, you know.”

  “It’s fine, Beau. Really.” She unclipped her seat belt and gathered her pack. “Did you get a chance to look over those journal entries that I mentioned?”

  “Yeah, briefly. I’d have to agree with you. Carlos Tafoya’s political career could have been toast if Elena had followed through on her threat.”