The Emma Wild Mysteries: Complete Holiday Collection Books 1-4 (Cozy Romantic Mysteries with Recipes)

by Lin, Harper

  “Actually, Lena always used to take the cash,” Larson said nonchalantly. “Not sure why. I always wanted to go on the vacations, but she just said she needed the money.”

  “Any idea what for?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe she wanted to invest in something,” Mirabelle suggested.

  “Nothing I can think of,” said Larson. “She makes a good living selling her handicrafts online. Although, I think she mentioned once about making a charitable donation, but she wouldn’t tell me what for.”

  Larson began spreading the fudge frosting over a layer of the cake on a cake stand. We watched, our mouths watering. It was hypnotizing to watch a cake being made. Even though Mirabelle worked with desserts, she was salivating as much as I was.

  Larson’s cake was pretty delicious at the taste test. I might’ve even voted his the highest, since I was such a big chocolate lover, but Lena won the judges over with originality with her caramel cheesecake, which was just as good, but a bit too sweet for my liking.

  Larson reached into the drawer for a knife to cut the cake with. As the blade sliced through the three layers of cake and fudge, it reminded me of Lena’s murder. We had to keep focused. We weren’t here to enjoy ourselves, but to solve a murder case, no matter how delicious and moist the cake looked.

  “Here you go.” Larson gave us each a huge slice.

  “This is delicious.” I said. I dug in with my fork and took a huge bite. “So, Larson, were you upset that you weren’t able to go on those trips?”

  Larson grimace, but shrugged.

  “Well, it was her winnings after all. I couldn’t tell her what to do with it. It’s not my place.”

  “But you were together for a while, no?” I asked.

  “About four years,” said Larson. “But we were too similar, and we both worked from home, which drove each other crazy. I mean, I loved her and thinks she’s great as a friend, but we were more like roommates who couldn’t stand each other’s bad habits after a while. Maybe it was a good thing that we didn’t go on those resort vacation. We would’ve spent 24/7 together on those trips.”

  He chuckled. Was he chuckling out of nervousness? I thought I saw his hand shake as he lifted the fork to his own piece of cake.

  “So who do you think would do this to Lena?” I asked.

  “I thought they caught the killer, Cherry Anderson.” He shook his head. “Kids these days.”

  Mirabelle frowned. “How do you know that?”

  “I thought it was common knowledge,” he said.

  “Cherry’s a minor,” I said. “She wouldn’t be reported on the news if she was taken in.”

  “I heard a bunch of ladies talking about it at the cafe this morning.”

  Mirabelle sighed. “This town. Does everyone know everything?”

  “Yes, well, it’s hard to keep a secret for too long here,” said Larson. “I don’t know much about Cherry. Do you think she did it?”

  “No—” Mirabelle said.

  “We don’t know,” I interrupted. “Anything’s possible, right? What do you think?”

  “Jealous aspiring baker killing a three-time baking champion? It could happen.”

  “What did you think of their interactions during the bake-off? Were there a lot of tension between them?”

  “I don’t know,” said Larson. “I was so focused on my own recipes that I didn’t pay much attention. Cherry did give me some advice about the oven. She was nice, too nice that I suspected her of trying to sabotage my work.”

  “Did she?” Mirabelle asked.

  “No, I don’t think so. I just thought it was odd that she was so nice and helpful to everyone. Except to Lena, that is.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “Lena gets grumpy whenever anyone gets in her space, so she must’ve said something to Cherry. I didn’t hear what she said, but her tone wasn’t nice.”

  “How would you describe Lena as a person?” I asked.

  “Lena, well…you have to know her to like her. She can be very competitive in certain atmospheres. But she’s sweet as a kitten once you get to know her.”

  “Would you say that she has a lot of enemies?”

  “Just whoever gets in her path.” Larson chuckled again. “But seriously. Sure, there are people who don’t like Lena. She has her own bubble and doesn’t like to be disturbed. Heck, she wasn’t even talking to me a lot when I made it to the top four with her.”

  “Why?” Mirabelle asked. “Is she that petty?”

  “Like I said, she needs her focus to be the best. There’s nothing she likes better than being the best.”

  “What made you decide to enter the contest this year?” I asked.

  “The love of baking,” he said. “I’ve always baked too. That was one of the things I had in common with Lena.”

  “Would you say you were competitive with her?”

  “No. I wasn’t anyway. Lena’s competitive with everyone.”

  “So when you entered, you just did it for fun?”

  “Yes. In the past, I didn’t enter because it was Lena’s hobby and I didn’t think want to compete with her as a boyfriend. But now, why not? We had both moved on with new partners. I liked baking too. Why not have a friendly little competition?”

  I smiled. “Yes. And you would finally be able to take a vacation with a girlfriend you want to spend time with.”

  “For sure. Amy’s great. We’ve been seeing each other for four months, but we’re already pretty serious.”

  “Congrats,” said Mirabelle. “And to stay friends with a ex too, that takes skill.”

  “When you live in a small town, you have to stay friends because there’s no avoiding them.”

  Larson chuckled again.

  I had asked all I needed to ask…for now. We finished the cakes and thanked him. We gave him Charles’s card from Sunstream Travel and passed on the message that he should call to redeem his vacation package.

  “Fantastic,” said Larson. “Thanks girls. Come back anytime.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “That was some cake,” Mirabelle said. “I should commission him to bake some for the cafe.”

  “Let’s figure out who the murderer is before we do that,” I said.

  “What, you think it’s him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I mean, he had the right answers for everything. The murderer is always someone you don’t expect, right?”

  “Except, you are suspecting him, so does that mean he’s not guilty?”

  “I still don’t have the pieces yet,” I said. “This money issue might give us a clue. What was Lena doing with it?”

  “Suzy works at the bank. Why don’t we ask her?”

  Suzy was one of Mirabelle’s best friends. She came to one of our girls’ sleepovers last month and we all had a great time catching up. She was married to her boss at the bank, and would probably be able to help us.

  “So let’s go then,” I said.

  “It’s lunchtime and I’m not hungry,” Mirabelle said. “We shouldn’t have had so much cake.”

  Mirabelle called Suzy and asked her if she was at the bank. Suzy had just been out grabbing a salad, but met us back early at the bank. It was perfect timing because she was booked with appointments and meetings all afternoon.

  We parked on the street and went inside. Suzy came out to meet us. She was a perky blonde in a baby blue dress suit. When we were growing up, she’d been a frequent visitor to the Wild house, so she knew both of us well.

  “How are you girls?” Suzy asked. “Mirabelle, you’re even bigger than the last time I saw you.”

  “Watch it,” Mirabelle joked.

  “I’m throwing a baby shower for Mirabelle,” I said. “Here’s the invite.”

  I gave her the envelope. She opened it and laughed when the baby popped out of the egg-shaped card. “Cute! Of course I’ll be there. Come into my office.”

  Her office was very bare. No window and just
a desk and a computer like all the other offices in the hall. The doors were transparent glass so we could see through them. We sat down and Mirabelle explained why we were here.

  “Lena Mumson? The woman who got stabbed?”

  We nodded gravely.

  “We just want to know a tiny piece of information from her banking transactions,” I said.

  “Oh gosh. Okay. And you’re investigating her murder, naturally?” Suzy gave us a wry smile.

  Mirabelle pointed to me. “She is. I want very little to do with murder investigations, actually.”

  “Come on,” I said. “You think this is as fun as I do.”

  “I could be kicking back with a glass of apple juice and reading baby books right now,” Mirabelle joked. “But anyway, any idea what Lena would do with that money?”

  Suzy did a search. “This information is confidential…but since it is to help find a murderer on the loose, why not?”

  She grinned and began typing furiously on her computer. After scrolling through Lena’s banking transactions, she found what we were looking for.

  “She did deposit a cheque for $6840 from Sunstream Travel around this time last year, and then she made out a cheque a couple of days later for the same amount.”

  We both peered at the screen.

  “To who?” I asked.

  “Demi Williams.”

  “Oh my god,” Mirabelle exclaimed.

  “And the year before that, the same thing.” Suzy said. “It was $6690 then. Also to Demi Williams.”

  “So every year Lena wins, but gives the winnings to Demi. But why?” Mirabelle furrowed her brows.

  “They’re either working together or working against each other,” I said. “Blackmail?”

  Just then my cell phone rang. It was Aaron.

  “Let’s meet,” he said. “I’ve got some information on Cherry.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  When we drove back to the house, Aaron was already on the porch waiting for us.

  “Have you had lunch?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said with excitement. “I haven’t even thought about lunch. I’ve been busy all morning.”

  “I’m sure we have something to eat inside,” I said. “Come on in.”

  In the kitchen, I heated up dad’s curry stew from last night on the stove.

  “So shoot,” I said. “We have plenty to tell, but you go first.”

  “Well the police weren’t saying anything. They wouldn’t even let me in the building. So I went to the library for a couple of hours to see what I could find on Cherry in the archived newspapers. She’s pretty much perfect.”

  “Perfect?” I wrinkled my nose. “That sounds completely suspicious. Murderers and psychopaths often have a perfect facade. Nobody’s perfect.”

  “Well, she’s a straight-A student, always running charitable fundraisers for her high school, and she’s very keen on baking. There’s even a story in Hartfield High’s school paper about her bake sale. Other students participated, but her pies and cakes got their own article because they were so good. She organized the bake sale to raise money for students in Pakistan to receive school supplies.”

  “I’m telling you,” Mirabelle said to me. “Cherry’s great. Plus she’s super skinny even when she eats all that junk. I would hate her if I didn’t like her so much.”

  “She is 18,” I said. “Her metabolism is through the roof.”

  “Cherry said in an interview that her ambition is to ultimately get her own cooking show about desserts,” Aaron continued. “She sounded very ambitious in her interview. She’s one of those rare kids who knows exactly what she wants to do and nobody can stop her. I thought it sounded pretty suspect as well. It’s plausible that she could’ve lashed out at Lena from jealousy.”

  “Is that all you found?” I asked.

  “No. I thought I’d try to go back to the station to see if there was anything more I can find out about Cherry and the case. It was impossible, because there were hoards of reporters and TV crews at the front door, but I did catch Cherry’s parents sneaking out the back of the police station. At least, I recognized them from one of the pictures in the paper. Her mom had the same corkscrew dark blonde hair. I followed them in my rental.”

  “You creep,” I joked.

  “Yup,” Aaron said. “I followed them home and I knocked on their door and told them that I was helping you with the investigation.”

  “You did?”

  “Sure. Like I said, you have a reputation now for detective work. People trust you. Cherry’s parents did, and they were more willing to give me more information. They said that Cherry was detained as a suspect and there were no other leads. Things are not looking good because Cherry doesn’t have an alibi. She walked home alone that night, and she left around the same time that Lena did.”

  “All the contestants pretty much left around the same time, didn’t they?” Mirabelle asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I thought so.”

  “Anyway,” Aaron continued. “They said that Cherry had been upset when she lost and called home when she was packing up. Her egg beater had malfunctioned, and she’d been stressed out. Her cake had tasted salty and she’d realized that she’d mixed up the sugar with the salt. Then she had to start from scratch, and everything was done in a hurry. Her cake wasn’t as good as it could’ve been. She was really hard on herself.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Cherry doesn’t sound like the type to mix up her ingredients. She’s super organized, right?”

  “Yes,” said Aaron. “I thought the same.”

  “Foul play,” I said. “Somebody was trying to screw up her cake.”

  “You think it was Lena?” Mirabelle asked.

  “There is definitely a Lena-Cherry connection,” I said. “After all, why would Lena have Cherry’s pins in her pocket?”

  “Well, Cherry’s hair is so unmanageable that she probably loses them. In fact I found a few at my cafe. She must lose them all the time. It’s why she uses the cheap kind. I bet she has a whole box of those pins.”

  “Now, what would Lena be doing with it?” I thought about it. “It could be that Cherry was the attacker, and Lena had pulled some pins out when she was defending herself…but wouldn’t there be more hair in the stall where Lena was, instead of two stalls away?”

  “Unless opening the door caused a breeze for the hair to move,” said Aaron.

  “But Sterling said it was just a couple of strands. It wasn’t a clump of hair, which would fall out if they had been in a physical struggle,” I said. “If he found a couple of strands, it could’ve just meant that she just happened to use the washroom sometime in the afternoon that day.”

  The ringing phone interrupted my string of thoughts. Mom and Dad were both at work, so I went to answer it. The number was unknown on the display and I almost didn’t answer it because pesky telemarketers often called at this time of the day. Something compelled me to however, in case it was the police station or someone else with news.