Vangie Vale and the Murdered Macaron (The Matchbaker Mysteries Book 1)

by R. L. Syme

  “I’m not. I’m trying to go to work, and you need to get back inside and get some shoes on.”

  “Stop. Will you, just stop.” He reached out his hands like he wanted to grab me by the shoulders and shake me. I thought he showed admirable restraint by staying on the sidewalk.

  “I told you. I didn’t see who it was.” Frustration rose inside me, and my hands balled at my sides. “This is supposed to be your job. Figuring out who the bad guys are. You go do your job. I need to go do mine.”

  The words appeared to land on him a little harder than I’d intended, and his features crinkled up. His jaw worked at something he was holding back, and I felt a little of that killer instinct crop back up. I wanted to say something to just crucify him—something that would get him to back off and leave me alone. Instead, I took a long breath. Did I really want to hurt Malcolm?

  No. I wanted him to figure this all out. Who had been in my yard. Who had killed Claire and Henry.

  “I’m sorry, Malcolm. I didn’t mean to insinuate you weren’t doing your job. I’m just…it’s been a hard week.”

  He shifted from side to side, the first sign that his feet were getting cold. “I’m going to find out who killed her, Evangeline. You have to let me do my job.”

  “I will.”

  “And no more hanging out with Derek Hobson,” he added, with a touch of bitterness in his voice. “That man is a criminal.”

  “How do you…” I started to ask, but thought better of it. Getting into a conversation about Derek at this point might lead to revelations about what we had been doing while we were hanging out, and I didn’t want to get him—or me—in trouble.

  “Stefan is pretty convinced that he had something to do with Claire’s death, and I want you to back off and let us investigate.”

  “Well, that must make it true, then,” I said with a sarcastic edge to my words. “If Stefan is pretty convinced.”

  Malcolm’s brows came together and he took a step toward me. “I trust Stefan Van Andel with my life. He has some of the best instincts in my department.”

  “That’s a pretty low bar, Sheriff. So far, everyone you’ve brought in for Claire’s murder has been innoce—”

  “Watch it, Evangeline.” He pointed a finger at me, stopping my words. “We do the best with the evidence we have.” But I could tell he was shaken. His features had gone tight as soon as I brought up the topic of him being taken in by the planted evidence.

  Although… Malcolm hadn’t detained Henry until Scarlet confirmed his suspicions about Henry covering up the assault. That evidence hadn’t been planted.

  There was still something that didn’t sit right with me about all of this, and Malcolm seemed to scratch the itch, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was wrong.

  Malcolm walked away after warning me to be on the lookout, and jogged around the hedge and back to his front door. The light went on in the little bedroom with the open window, and Malcolm stared at me as he pulled the curtains closed. The invitation to spy on his life was rescinded. The light went off, and I closed my door and headed back into the kitchen. I picked up my purse and walked through the kitchen, trying to make sure I had cleaned up sufficiently before heading out for the day.

  It felt like I was missing something. Still cold from standing in the open door, I put on my jacket. I was ready to go, but the feeling that I was forgetting something still niggled at me. I walked one last circle around the kitchen. Looked at the empty table one last time.

  What was I forgetting?

  I walked through the mud room and found the source of the chill. The back door was open—the one that led to the other side of the house, where the Tank was parked.

  Suddenly, I realized what I was forgetting, and my whole body went cold from more than the winter air.

  My heartbeat rocketed up to practically marathon pace.

  The journal. Scarlet’s journal was gone. Someone had broken in and stolen it while I was talking to the sheriff. And besides Scarlet and me, there was only one person who knew about it.

  I got into my vehicle and drove to Derek Hobson’s house.

  It took almost a full minute of me pounding on his door for him to answer. His long hair was mussed from sleep, his eyes bleary. He was pulling on a shirt and yawning, but I didn’t buy it.

  “What were you doing in my house?” I yelled, pushing him back into his dark living room. Tears pressed at my eyes. “You could have just asked me for the journal, Derek.”

  He backed up so quickly he nearly tripped over his feet. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “The journal, Scarlet’s journal. It’s gone.”

  “What?” He held me at arm’s length, blowing out a breath that had a sour smell. But it wasn’t only his breath that smelled bad. The whole house had a new kind of reek to it. It stung my nose.

  Had he really been sleeping?

  When I recoiled, he released me and I backed up onto one of the couches, sitting down almost as a reflex. Tears pressed a little harder, and one slipped onto my cheek. Derek sat down beside me, keeping a respectful distance. His hair was a curtain, blocking my vision of the rest of the room, but something stuck in my head. Bags. There were three black duffel bags, stacked across the other side of the room.

  I pushed him away, pointing to the bags. “Were you leaving? Is that why you wanted to take Scarlet’s journal? So you could skip town and no one would ever know that you tried to get money out of her?”

  He grabbed my hand. “Vangie. Stop. You’re not making any sense.”

  But I wrestled out of his grip and pushed myself off the couch, crossing the room. “What are these?”

  “I’m packing up Claire’s things,” he said, his voice dropping. “I do plan to leave this house, but not because I want to skip town. I just need to get out of this place, where she and I were together. It makes me…” His words broke, and raw emotion washed across his features. “There are too many memories.”

  Another tear slipped down my cheek as I leaned back against the couch. I was so tightly coiled, I couldn’t think straight.

  There was an open, half-finished water bottle on the table next to the bags, and one of the pillows from the couch had been dragged down onto the floor. It had a wet spot in the middle, like he had just been laying on it.

  “Did you sleep here last night?” I asked, touching the pillow with my foot.

  “Yeah. I was packing Claire’s things, and I just got so…” He yawned, moving his head slowly back and forth. “So tired.”

  I reached down and nudged the water bottle with my knuckle. A few little white flecks were jostled up from the bottom, like a disturbed residue.

  “Why did it take you so long to answer the door, if you were sleeping right here?”

  He yawned again. “What are you talking about? As soon as I heard you, I jumped right up.”

  But he hadn’t, and I knew it. I’d jarred him out of a pretty deep sleep. Maybe too deep. I looked around for the source of the smell. Near the kitchen, it got a whole lot worse. It smelled like…almost like rotten eggs.

  Something clicked in my head. Sulfur.

  Gas.

  Derek reached for the light switch, but I jumped at him, wrestling him back toward the still-open front door. “Don’t touch that!” I screamed.

  I pulled him outside just as I heard the heater’s pilot light kick on. The explosion was so immediate, but everything in my head seemed to have turned to slow motion. I sailed through the air from the force of the blast, landing with a hard thud on the ground.

  We lay on the dry grass outside Derek’s house, watching a plume of smoke rise from the living room. He pulled me to my feet and pushed me toward my vehicle. Somehow I managed to get inside.

  “Drive!” he yelled, heading for his bike. “You can’t be here when the cops get here.”

  “But…I….I can’t leave you….alone…Derek,” I sputtered, my throat raw, vision blurry.

  “Just trust me. I’ll fin
d you when this is over.” His eyes wide and white, chest heaving, he looked like a big hulk of a superhero, and he pointed down the street. “Vangie. Go!”

  In my rearview mirror, I saw him scrambling to get his bike across the road. The fire was in the back of the house, away from the road, where the living room had smacked up against the kitchen. Derek had his phone out and was hopefully calling 9-1-1. My ears were ringing, and I already had a headache, but I couldn’t help saying a grateful prayer that I’d come when I had. If I hadn’t opened the door just then, the gas would have kept collecting and Derek would likely be dead.

  But a darker, more sinister thought had me by the throat. Someone had drugged Derek and then come back after he was asleep to open his gas line.

  Someone wanted him dead.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I texted Derek when I got to the bakery to let him know I’d arrived. A benign, one-line text—something I might have sent if I hadn’t just seen his house explode. But I wanted him to know where to find me. I hoped he would—and soon. I needed to know what had happened. I had so many more questions.

  It was still dark, but I could hear sirens, so at least the emergency vehicles were on their way. I felt horrible for leaving him like that, but I knew why he’d told me to go. There was no non-Claire-related reason for me to be there.

  Leo’s car wasn’t in the parking lot, even though it was after 3 a.m. It wasn’t like him to be late, although it was possible he wasn’t coming at all, after his uncle had seen me with Derek Hobson. That jig might be up.

  I turned on only the kitchen lights and started sifting the almond flour and sugar, feeling relaxed by every little act of control in the kitchen, every tiny measurement, every step I already knew. This was my haven. After a few minutes of listening to sirens, my nerves edging back up, I put my audiobook on my phone and stuck the earbuds deep in my ears to keep me company. I could practically make these cookies in my sleep if I could drown out the sirens.

  I kept my phone on the counter, waiting for Derek to text me back. But it was 3:22, and there was still no response. Who knew when he would be through with the emergency crews, with the sheriff? I couldn’t afford to contact him again until I knew the emergency had passed.

  The events of the last several days had permanently amped up my resting heart rate. I was well on my way to being jumpy. As I separated the eggs to make the meringue, I started recounting what I knew in my head, trying to puzzle through this feeling that there was still something I was missing. There were still two things bothering me.

  First, the Stefan and Mike conspiracy theory worked for Henry’s death. But it did not work for Claire’s. If Stefan was really Austin’s father, then he would have no reason to want Claire dead.

  Second, the replacing of the knife in Frances Barnett’s house still didn’t make sense to me. If Jenna had put Claire’s knife—supposedly the murder weapon—in a bag that she thought Derek would just pack and take out of town, then was the purpose really to frame Derek? Or to dispose of the murder weapon?

  I was just about to turn on the mixer when I felt a chill creep across my neck, pebbling every inch of my skin. I turned to look out into the dark dining room, and saw the edge of the trash bag window flapping in the wind. My mouth went dry and my muscles froze.

  There was someone in the bakery with me.

  Tears tickled at my eyes. I opened my mouth to call out for Leo, but I knew it wasn’t him. He would have used the door. He would have called out to me. I stopped myself and turned back to the meringue. If I acknowledged someone was there, would they attack me faster? Or run away? On the other hand, if I pretended not to hear them, I’d have time to look for a weapon.

  My heart thudded in my ears and my movements were wooden. I tried to relax my muscles, but I couldn’t. Everything was moving too fast for me to control. I looked around on the counter for anything that could be used as a weapon. The bowl itself wasn’t very big. The whisk had no leverage. The mixer was too heavy. None of the bags of flour or sugar were going to do any damage.

  A movement caught my attention—a shadow slipping toward me from near the coffee bar. There wasn’t enough light outside for me to see much definition.

  I took the whisk and started to move my arm, trying to keep an eye on both the shadow and the table, desperately seeking a weapon, when I heard the hammer of a gun cock.

  “Don’t move,” said a female voice from the shadows.

  I knew that voice.

  Nikki Krantz stepped inside the kitchen, pointing a gun at me. I was so shocked, I couldn’t even speak.

  She wore all black, and her hair was tied up in a severe bun that made her cheekbones stick out like weather-beaten rocks on a cliff face. I instinctively put my hands up, just like I had done with Stefan.

  “I said, ‘Don’t move.’” Her voice shook, and she took another step into the kitchen, turning off one of the lights. It dropped the whole front side of the room into darkness. The lights for my prep station were behind me. She’d either have to cross in front of me, or let me move closer to the knives in order to get those off.

  “Nikki,” I whispered. “What are you doing?”

  “You have interfered for the last time, Vangie Vale.” The tremor was gone, and her voice was so calm, so eerie, it gave me chill bumps. “Why couldn’t you just leave it alone?”

  “I don’t want to cause trouble for you, Nikki. You can just walk away, and we’ll pretend this never happened. I won’t even tell Malcolm.”

  Her laugh cut the air with a slick, crazy arpeggio. “You think Malcolm will believe anything you say about me? But it won’t matter, anyway. Derek is dead by now, and you’ll die in a tragic robbery, and everything will go back to the way it was before Henry Savage ever came back to town.”

  I opened my mouth to tell her that Derek was still alive, but thought better of it. I didn’t want to risk upsetting her when she had a cocked and loaded gun pointed directly at me.

  “Who’s going to rob this place? You do my deposits. You know I don’t make that much cash money every day. Most of my business comes from credit card transactions, and—”

  “Stop!” she squealed. “Just stop talking. There will be no negotiation. It’s your own fault for leaving your building unsecured. We’ll break in next door, too, just to make it look legitimate.”

  “I have to hand it to you,” I said. “You had me fooled, Nikki. I never would have pinned this on you. The straight-laced war widow raising her sister’s son as her own.”

  Her eyes went wild, and in the half-dark, she looked like something out of a horror movie, all craggy faced and shadowed. “How did you know that?”

  “Math,” I said, shrugging, trying to sound as conversational as I could manage. “Austin was born more than thirty days too late for Auggie to have been his father, and then I saw the pictures of you in Europe. You should have been pregnant, but your bikini showed abs a supermodel would envy.”

  A look of pure agony flashed across her face and tears slid onto her cheeks. “Austin is my son. Mine.” But the break in her voice told me even she didn’t believe that statement.

  “Of course he is,” I said, sweetly. Always agree with the psychopath.

  Nikki wiped at her cheeks, using the gun like a finger, pointing to the counter just out of my line of sight. “Move over here, by the cash register. Right now.”

  I complied, moving forward as she backed into the real darkness of the dining room. The trash bag window was still flapping in the wind, and on one of its outward flaps, I saw a hand pull it open. Another figure stepped inside and hope bloomed in my chest.

  Someone was here to save me. Please, God, don’t let it be Leo.

  I couldn’t bear it if he got hurt.

  “Nikki?” another woman’s voice came from the front of the dining room, and the hope in my chest deflated. It wasn’t salvation at all.

  “Mom?” Nikki turned, the tiny amount of light outlining her sharp features. “Hurry and help me. I need y
ou to hold the gun while I—”

  “We have a problem, honey,” said Frances Barnett, stepping all the way inside. “Derek Hobson is still alive.”

  While the two women were looking at each other, I felt for my purse with my toe and slid it past the opening of the kitchen, moving it into a shadow. If I could just get to the Febreeze, maybe I could spray them in the eyes, maybe…ugh… my phone was back in the kitchen, on the counter, still blasting The Cost of Discipleship into my headphones.

  “That’s far enough, right there,” Nikki ordered, waving the gun at me. “Don’t move another muscle, or I’ll shoot you.”

  “Honey, we have to go. Right now. Derek survived the explosion.”

  Nikki’s frustrated sigh gave me the tiniest breath of relief. Not everything was going according to their plan. There was still a chance. I could still feel my purse with my foot, just barely out of reach. I was at a disadvantage; if I tried to move it again, with my body backlit, she would see me for sure, but I could barely see the two of them.

  “We can’t go anywhere, Mom. I have to take care of her. She knows about Austin.”

  “But she doesn’t know anything else right now,” Frances said. Her tone was condescending, like she was talking to a toddler.

  “You don’t have to do anything to me, Frances,” I said, pleading with her better judgment. “I’m not going to tell anyone about Austin.”

  “Shut up,” Frances hissed.

  “Don’t you see, mother,” Nikki said, taking a step toward me, raising the gun. “Claire was right. If even one person knows the truth about Austin, everything we’ve worked so hard for is going to unravel. It was hard enough when she told Henry. And Stefan. But Mike was the last straw! Everything is coming apart.”

  “No, it’s not.” Frances took a step toward her daughter with her hands raised.

  “Yes.” Nikki pressed her free hand to her forehead. “All the lies are eating at me. I can’t keep track of who thinks what anymore, and I just want everyone to stop talking about this so we can go back to the way things were.” Her voice had ratcheted up with every word. “I need my life back!”