Baked Books (The Donut Mysteries Book 30)

by Jessica Beck

“So, what do we do now? Do we brace the last three of our suspects again?”

  I glanced out the window at the bookstore across the street, which was now open to the public again. “We probably should, but I’d like to have a little ammunition before we do. There’s only one problem with that, though.”

  “Only one?” Grace asked me with a grin. “I’d say we were doing pretty well, if that’s the case.”

  “Okay, more than one, but one that’s immediate. I need some advice and information from Paige, but after what happened earlier, I’m not sure she’ll be all that predisposed to giving it to me.”

  “There’s only one way to find out then, isn’t there?” Grace asked. “Put on your big-girl shorts and let’s go ask her. Are you ready to eat a big crow sandwich?”

  “I don’t really have much choice,” I said.

  “Then let’s do it.”

  I noticed that Grace hadn’t taken her box of donuts with her. “Can I buy those back from you?”

  “Getting hungry already?” she asked me.

  “No. I just thought a peace offering might be in order.”

  Grace nodded in approval. “Take them, with my blessings. It’s a great idea.”

  “Hey, donuts have gotten me into more doors than my winning personality ever has over the years.”

  “And why wouldn’t they?” she asked, before quickly adding, “Not that you don’t have your own set of charms as well.”

  “Thanks for adding that, even if it was barely just in time to take the sting out of your first comment.”

  “Glad to. After all, what are friends for?”

  We walked across the street and into the shop. Paige’s smile of greeting quickly evaporated when she saw that I was back.

  Before she could throw me out again, I decided to make a preemptive strike. “Would you accept a peace offering from me for earlier?” I asked her as I held the partially filled box out to her. I would have preferred to have an even dozen, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  Paige frowned, and then a smile slowly crept to her face. “That depends. What have you got?”

  “I admit that it’s just a partial assortment,” I said as I handed her the box.

  She opened the lid and glanced inside. “Why do I have the feeling that these are all of the donuts you didn’t sell today?”

  “That’s not true at all,” I said with a smile. “I sold those, too. Grace bought them, but we decided they’d be put to better use giving them to you.”

  “Thanks, Grace,” she said. “I appreciate it. Would you care to join me in one?”

  “Why not?” Grace asked as she surveyed her choices.

  I just stood there awkwardly until Paige glanced over at me. “I’d offer you one, but you’re probably sick of them by now.”

  “Think again,” I said as I grabbed one of the plain glazed donuts. We should have brought napkins, but I wasn’t above licking my fingers after I finished.

  Paige laughed at me, and the tension seemed to break between us.

  “I really am sorry I was a part of that this morning,” I said.

  “I know you were just an innocent bystander,” she said. “I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

  “Want the chance to make it up to me?” I asked her.

  “What did you have in mind? I can give you a free book, if you’d like.”

  “I’d rather have some insights,” I said.

  “Those I can supply easily, though I don’t know what I can tell you that you don’t already know. I only really know Brad, and it turns out that most of the things I thought I knew about him were wrong.”

  “My book club got me thinking about something earlier,” I said. “We were supposed to discuss people who write based on careful outlining and those who create the story as they go.”

  “It’s an age-old debate among writers, plotters versus pantsers,” she said.

  “Do you know much about the writing processes for Simon Gant, Bev Worthington, and Alexa Masters?” I’d picked up a few snippets here and there, but it would be nice to have outside confirmation from someone in the business.

  “More than I ever need to,” she admitted. “When I found out they were coming to The Last Page with Brad, I did a ton of research on them all.”

  “Then you’re exactly the person we need to speak with,” I said.

  “What does this have to do with John Rumsfield’s murder?”

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe everything,” I said. “Would you indulge me?”

  “Sure. Alexa is a true outliner, from what I’ve read. She uses index cards for everything, and by the time she was ready to start writing her first book, she had seven shoeboxes full of them. Bev is another plotter. Supposedly she uses a plot wheel to come up with her victim, the killer, a list of suspects, and everything else she might need to know. She started as a cookbook writer Rumsfield recruited to write culinary mysteries for him, and it’s clear if you read her books that she’s far better with the recipes than she is with the stories she tells. They have a sameness to them that makes me feel as though she found one plot, and she keeps recycling it from book to book. I’d say that she’s the least creative when it comes to her plot devices. They are extremely simple, and there aren’t any twists and turns in her mysteries at all. Simon is the opposite end of the scale. He claims that he comes up with the barest seed of an idea first, and then he sits down to write without having any idea where he’s going. He claims that he tried to outline once, but he couldn’t write the book, since he already knew how it turned out, and that was the real reason he wrote, to amuse himself.”

  “Okay, that’s all good information,” I said, nodding as I realized that it all fit in to a theory that I’d been toying with since the night before. I had a sudden thought. “Paige, have you ever considered starting a book club here? Or even more than one? You could host one every Thursday night. Mystery could be one week, romance another, science fiction a third, and general literary stuff on the fourth. It would give the most avid of your readers an excuse to come back at least once a month, and while they were here, they’d be bound to pick up some of your latest offerings.”

  “That’s brilliant,” she said. “Do you mind if I steal your idea completely?”

  “You can’t steal something that’s being freely given,” I said. “Are we good?”

  “We are,” she said. “Thanks again for the donuts, ladies.”

  “You’re most welcome,” Grace and I said in unison.

  “What was that all about?” Grace asked me once we were back outside again. “I’m not sure if you suspect the plotters or the pantser. If you take the crime as one of impulse, then it’s Simon you suspect, but if it’s a carefully staged murder meant to look like a frame, then one of the plotters must have done it.”

  “I’m still undecided,” I said, “but I think we can rule Bev Worthington out, at least for the moment. If she uses only one plot, I doubt she’d be creative enough to come up with a frame or to carry it through even if she could plan it. From everything we’ve learned, she’s a cookbook writer at heart, not a mystery author. If she did this on the fly, she wouldn’t have been calm enough to try to frame Brad Winslow, and I can’t see her striking the publisher in the heat of the moment, either. If anything, she seemed relieved to leave her detective behind and try her hand at writing something different.”

  “So, for the moment let’s assume that you’re right. That leaves Alexa and Simon.”

  “We don’t know enough about Alexa’s style after only one book, but if she was planning to frame Brad Winslow with that deadly mushroom book, she failed to execute her plan properly. Whoever marked that book with John’s bloody fingerprint used the wrong hand. Does that strike you as a detail a meticulous planner would miss?”

  “Mayb
e she’s better at murder on paper than in real life,” Grace suggested.

  “You’ve got a point. The women from my book club wanted to see the crime scene photos I took on my phone, but they never even made it all the way to the body.”

  “That reminds me. There’s something I want to check in one of those shots. Can I see your phone for a second?”

  “I must have left my phone on the counter in the kitchen at the donut shop,” I said as I realized what I’d done.

  “Well, let’s go get it,” Grace said as her own phone started to ring. She glanced at the number, and then she said, “It’s my boss. I was hoping she wouldn’t call me today, but this is going to take some time. I have files at the house that I’m going to have to reference for our conversation. Could you meet me at my place in half an hour? Don’t do anything else without me, though. Promise?”

  “I’ll try not to,” I said.

  As Grace answered the phone and hurried up the road toward her house, I headed back to the donut shop. Crossing the street, I couldn’t help but wonder why the frame had been so poorly executed. It didn’t sound as though it was something Alexa might do. She struck me as being extremely competent, and what was more, I doubted she would have chosen that book so clumsily. No, it felt as though it was a last-second thought, a chance discovery when the killer had grabbed the murder weapon to use on the publisher.

  And if that was true, it meant that Simon Gant was the real killer.

  How could I prove it, though? I needed to call the police chief and bring him up to speed on my latest theory. Maybe, if I could point him in the right direction, he could figure out a way to trap Simon. At least in my mind, if the police chief had the killer’s identity, he could dig in and see where it led him. If Chief Grant refused to listen to my idea, then Grace and I could always just do it ourselves.

  I went into the donut shop after unlocking the front door, and I thought about locking it behind me, but then I decided not to bother when I realized I’d only be inside for a few seconds. Grabbing my phone from the kitchen exactly where I’d left it, I picked it up and dialed the chief’s number.

  It went straight to voicemail.

  When it was time to leave a message, I said, “Chief, it’s Suzanne. You need to look at the one author who writes mysteries without plotting them out first. It’s…”

  I stopped in mid-sentence when I saw that someone had used my carelessness against me and had followed me into Donut Hearts without me knowing they were there.

  Simon Gant was standing in front of me with a knife taken from the drying rack, and as he reached out to take my phone before I could name him, I realized that I’d just made my final, and perhaps fatal, mistake.

  Chapter 20

  “You must think you’re pretty clever,” Simon said as he took my cell phone from my hand. “How long have you known that I did it?”

  “Honestly? I’m embarrassed to say that I just now figured it out,” I admitted. “But that doesn’t mean that everyone else won’t be able to work it out for themselves just the same as I did.”

  “I’m curious about something. Where exactly did I slip up? At the time, it seemed like the perfect murder to me,” he said. Simon was closer than I would have liked, and I didn’t have any real weapons at hand. The oil had cooled off enough not to scald him, and he was standing between me and the other knives on the rack. The only thing within reach was a pair of rolling donut cutters, and they weren’t exactly blunt instruments. Made of aluminum and maple, I doubted they weighed more than three pounds apiece.

  Not exactly the perfect weapon to defend myself, but what other choice did I have? I needed to keep him talking, though. If I delayed him from acting long enough, the chief might start to wonder about my message. I didn’t expect him to come by Donut Hearts directly, but if he called me back, it might offer enough distraction to allow me to grab one of the cutters and at least try to defend myself.

  “Really, you were pretty clever,” I said, trying to stoke the man’s ego enough to buy myself more time.

  “Why is that?” he asked, the knife dipping a little as he looked interested in what I had to say.

  “If someone had planned it out meticulously, they would have taken one of Brad’s books and placed it beside the body, but you used a title with ‘deadly’ in its name. It gave a feeling of credibility to the situation.”

  “That was more by circumstance than guile,” he said. “I thought about doing just that, but all of Brad’s books were up front, and I couldn’t take the chance that someone might look through the window and see me taking one. I’d spotted the mushroom book when I’d grabbed the bookend, so it seemed close enough to work.”

  “Using the wrong hand was a bit of a gaff, though,” I said.

  It was clearly a mistake pointing it out to him. Simon clouded up, and the knife seemed to move toward me of its own volition.

  “Can you believe it? I never noticed that the fool was left-handed,” he said.

  “Anyone could have made the same mistake,” I answered, doing my best to mollify him again. It wouldn’t do to anger him if I could help it. Apparently, when Simon felt threatened, even by my words, he became more aggressive toward me. “I’m curious about something, though. Why did you use the bookend? There were plenty of other blunt objects around you could have used.”

  “I’d like to say that it was symbolic of the bookends of my career, and his life, but the truth is that it was the first heavy thing I saw.” The madman actually grinned at me. “If I were writing it, I’d use the symbols, though.”

  “You should turn the whole thing into one of your suspense novels,” I said. “Think how clever you’ll feel when no one guesses that you’re really outlining a murder that you actually committed.” Where was the police chief, and more importantly, why hadn’t he at least called me back? “Speaking of which, why did you kill John? Was it because he was dropping you?”

  “No, not in and of itself. That was bad enough, but I asked him to at least revert the rights of my books back to me if he wasn’t going to publish them anymore, but he just laughed at me. He said that he’d print one copy a year of each title, which was all that he was legally required to do to keep the rights, just to ruin my life. Then he told me that I couldn’t even use my own characters to write more books in the series without him! If I had to start over from scratch, then I knew that I was ruined. My career would be over. I still can’t believe my agent let that clause stand. The more I think about it, after I leave here, I’m heading straight for New York. She needs to be the next one on my list,” he said with wicked satisfaction. It appeared that once he’d gotten a taste of murder, he’d grown to like it. It gave me just one more reason to try to stop him before he could kill again, especially since I was the next victim on his list.

  “Why did you flip the breaker and yet leave the front door open?” I asked him, trying to come up with some way to keep stalling him.

  “I thought it might muddy the waters a little more, and besides, I knew Paige would find the body soon enough. Why not make it more of a game?”

  I was about to answer when suddenly my cell phone rang in Simon’s free hand.

  It was time to act!

  Lunging for the nearest donut cutter, I realized that I had less than a second to pick it up and try to defend myself.

  For a portly older man, Simon Gant was really quick!

  When I looked back at him, I saw that the knife was closer to my chest than I could have imagined, and it appeared that my plan to fight back might just be a case of too little too late.

  Chapter 21

  In desperation, I swung the cutter out anyway, and by some stroke of luck, one of the aluminum rings managed to catch the knife blade before it could plunge into my heart.

  Both weapons clattered to the floor as they got tangled up together, but t
he battle wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot.

  If Simon had gone for my throat with his hands, I would have been a dead woman, but instead, he reached down for the knife.

  For an instant I thought about trying to fight him for it, but then I realized that I would probably lose that battle.

  However, there was still one donut cutter within reach.

  I grabbed it, and, swinging it with all that I had, I brought it crashing down onto the crown of his head.

  It didn’t knock him out, but it did manage to stagger him back a bit.

  When I saw that, I did what anyone would do, given the circumstances.

  I hit him again.

  That blow managed to daze him considerably, and I was about to hit him again for good measure when I heard the chief of police say, “Take it easy, Suzanne. I think that’s good enough.”

  I let the antique cutter fall to the floor once I realized that I was safe.

  Donuts, or more specifically the tools I used to make them, had once again somehow managed to save my life.

  Chapter 22

  “Are you okay?” Jake asked me an hour later as I sat in one of the police chief’s chairs in his office. I leapt out of my chair and embraced him, happy to have the chance to feel his arms around me once more. It turned out that Simon Gant had broken down and confessed everything once the cuffs had been slapped on. The chief had gotten my interrupted message, and he had rushed over, ready to save the day.

  Only I’d already managed to save it, though I appreciated the fact that he’d come when he had. He was conferring with Grace in the other room, and my husband had found me sitting alone in his former office. “I heard about it on the way over here,” he said as he stroked my back lightly.

  “I would have called, but they won’t give me my phone back,” I said as I hugged him again. I always loved my husband’s embrace, but none had ever felt as good as this one. I thought I’d been finished, but here I was, living and breathing and ready to make donuts again and to fight another day.