Sugar and Vice: Cupcake Truck Mysteries

by Emily James

  Silence filled the other end of the line, and I cringed. That’d come out a lot harsher than I’d intended.

  “I understand and respect that.” He cleared his throat. “Those aren’t the type of articles I write. I’m the Positivity Project columnist. All my articles are good news.”

  Great. Now I felt like a real jerk. This guy was doing exactly what my dad always said reporters should do more of. Yeah, we needed to know the truth about what was happening in the world, and that meant the bad stuff too. But my dad always felt there should be an equal balance of good in the news because there was good happening all the time in the world.

  There was a time when I agreed with him. Older, grown-up me had gotten a bit jaded, thinking that people only wanted to read about the blood and violence the same way gawkers snarled up traffic when there was an accident. Then I’d found the Positivity Project. It helped me keep hoping that tomorrow would be a better day and reminded me that not everyone was like Jarrod.

  “I’m a fan of your column,” I said lamely. “Sorry I didn’t recognize your name right away. I’m just not sure why you’re calling me. A cupcake makes every day better, but that’s not enough to write a column about.”

  He chuckled. The paper didn’t have a picture of him to go along with his column, but that laugh and his career choice made me think he must have dimples, a full head of untamable hair, and a permanent smile. Lean, athletic, and probably still in his early twenties, right out of school.

  “I can always tell the ones who are going to make my job hard by being too modest,” he said, the laugh still in his voice. “My sources told me that you made sure another life wasn’t lost at Harold Cartwright’s birthday party. You saved—” There was a bit of rustle and clatter in the background like he was moving things around on a metal desk, looking for a handwritten note. “You saved Harold’s great-granddaughter Janie Holmes from dying from an allergy attack.”

  I knew it was bad when so many people spotted me. I never would have imagined it would get even worse by a reporter contacting me. “I recognized it as an allergy attack, and I knew what to do. That’s not exactly story-worthy.”

  “Saving a little girl’s life is pretty special. Besides, it’d be great publicity for your truck.”

  If I were anyone else, in any other situation, I’d have been flattered. In fact, I’d have jumped at the free marketing for my truck. The more people who knew about a business, and heard positive things about it, the higher income tended to be.

  Instead, his insistence made me feel queasy. The last thing I wanted was my name and picture in the paper. I’d been reading the column long enough to know that he wouldn’t be satisfied with a picture of my truck. The photos that went along with his articles featured smiling faces. He’d want a picture of me with Janie.

  I couldn’t have a picture of me in any paper, especially since the Lakeshore Daily had an online version. I was certain Jarrod would have a program set up to recognize my face if I showed up anywhere online.

  None of that was something I could tell Alan Brooksbank. As The Incredibles had wisely said, your most valuable possession was your identity. I had to guard it at all costs.

  What could I tell him to get him to back off? “Normally I’d be thrilled, but right now it would make me feel like I was benefiting from the family in their time of grief.”

  “I think the family would like to have the focus be on something happy that came from that day as well.”

  Had to give him points for persistence. “I’m not willing to take that risk.”

  “What if I checked with the family first?”

  This man had no quit in him. Part of me admired it. The other part knew he’d be trouble if I gave him any encouragement. “I have customers I need to take care of, but thanks for thinking of me. I really do love your column.”

  I disconnected the call. Sometimes you had to be a little rude when your survival was on the line.

  Sometimes you have to lie, too, Fear whispered in my head.

  Knowing he was right didn’t make me feel better about how often I lied to people in big and little ways. Even my name was a lie.

  I hung out my chalkboard sign of the day’s available cupcakes before any customers actually showed up. Each day, I alternated between having chocolate and vanilla cupcakes on the menu, since those were the two perennial favorites, and then I’d bake up two less-traditional flavors to keep people coming back to try something new. I drew a little picture beside each flavor to give people a hint of what they were in case the name didn’t make it obvious.

  Today I drew a white flower beside the vanilla, a cup of steaming coffee, and a lemon.

  Two of my regulars walked by and waved.

  “Save me a tiramisu, Isabel!” one of them called out, a grin on her face.

  Then they went right back into their chatter. The all-too-familiar bite of loneliness gnawed at the edges of my heart.

  I kicked it down and made sure I attached the name Reporter to Alan Brooksbank’s phone number in my cell. If he called again, I’d let it go to voicemail.

  And before my customers showed up, I’d call Claire Cartwright to ask her when I could pick up my payment. I’d planned to give her at least a week before contacting her out of respect for her loss, but with a reporter poking around, time was a luxury I no longer had. As the old phrase said, it was time to get the heck out of Dodge. Or, in this case, the heck out of Lakeshore.

  Chapter 4

  A week later, I opened up the Positivity Project column on my phone, and a picture of my truck filled my screen. My hand went numb, and I lost my grip on my phone. It tumbled into my lap, barely missing sliding off onto the metal floor of my truck.

  Alan Brooksbank wrote the article anyway, without my permission and without a quote from me. I’d ignored three of his calls this week. He’d left a voicemail the first two times. His initial call was him trying to convince me to meet with him for an interview. I’d deleted the second voicemail without listening to it, assuming it was more of the same. He hadn’t left one on the third.

  I should have listened to his second message. He probably said he was going forward with the article. He seemed like a nice guy for a reporter, so he might have even asked that I call him if I had any other objections. If I’d listened to that message and called him back, I might have convinced him to write about something or someone else instead.

  Though that seemed unlikely given how determined he’d been to write about what happened, and I couldn’t go back in time—even if I could have, there were a lot of other things I’d have wanted to change first.

  I sucked in a couple of deep breaths. Maybe I didn’t even need to panic. He hadn’t interviewed me. That could be my saving grace. I hadn’t posed for any pictures. In fact, he might not even have my last name. I didn’t advertise it, and all payments were made out to my business rather than to me. I couldn’t remember if I’d even given it to Claire.

  I picked up my phone and scrolled through the article. It was a good piece, making me like and relate to Dan and Janie Holmes despite the threat it posed to me. He’d talked to Janie and Dan about how much they looked forward to Harold Cartwright’s birthday every year because it was like a big family reunion.

  A picture of Dan and Janie, their cheeks mashed up together, came next. I could see the family resemblance. Dan had dark brown hair instead of Janie’s blonde, but they had the same blue eyes, the same narrow nose, and the same impishness to their smile, even though stubble surrounded Dan’s.

  Seeing that smile on Janie’s face, so different from when I’d last seen her, created a warm, bubbly feeling in my chest. I hadn’t wanted credit for what I’d done, but it felt good to have done it. To have done something truly good after so many years of hearing how I never did anything right.

  Alan continued the article with how, while Dan was trying to save Harold Cartwright’s life, he hadn’t realized his daughter’s life was in jeopardy as well.

  And then there
I was. My face. Not just my truck.

  I’d noticed the photographer milling about, but I’d assumed he’d only be taking pictures of the guests, not the hired help. I’d thought I’d managed to keep my back to him just in case.

  I’d been wrong.

  There I was, setting cupcakes onto my display, my cheeks still red from rushing back and forth. I’d been so distracted by what I was doing that I hadn’t constantly watched for the photographer. Failure to pay attention was fatal error number one when it came to survival. It was what led to women being grabbed while out running alone, and it might hand me to Jarrod.

  The picture wasn’t a straight-on shot. A stranger wouldn’t have been able to pick me out on the street from it. There was a chance Jarrod wouldn’t recognize me, either. He’d liked my hair long and straight, and he hadn’t been satisfied with my natural chestnut brown. He’d preferred I dyed my hair platinum. He’d also made sure I knew how haggard and old I looked without makeup on.

  I hadn’t purchased anything other than Chapstick since making my break from him. I’d also chopped my hair up to my shoulders and dyed it black, letting my natural waves take care of the rest of the transformation. It’d been so long since he saw me with anything other than the look he liked that he might not know it was me if he saw the article in passing.

  But haircuts and makeup, or the lack thereof, couldn’t fool facial recognition software. Not even the fifteen pounds I’d lost from skipping meals could fool it. My bone structure and the spacing between my eyes and nose and lips hadn’t changed.

  Jarrod had made a point of telling me how it all worked so that, if I ever thought about leaving him, I’d know that he’d eventually find me.

  What I didn’t know was how often he’d run a check for me. Was it automated, or did he have to run it himself? If it was something he did manually, I might have a little time, a few weeks, since he was only one person and he wouldn’t want to get caught. If it were automatic, I had until the weekend. He wouldn’t risk leaving a trail, so he wouldn’t take time off or fly. He’d drive roundtrip from Miami, Florida, stopping only long enough to kill me and dispose of my body. He’d be at work on time on Monday with no one the wiser.

  I slid out of the folding chair I set up in the back of my truck and went to the drawer where I kept all my paperwork. Claire Cartwright hadn’t answered my calls any more than I’d answered Alan Brooksbank’s. If I had enough money to change towns without what she owed me, I’d leave now.

  Otherwise, I’d have to make a trip to visit Claire in person, insisting on being paid today, and then I’d head out of town and figure out where I was going next once I was on my way.

  If I hadn’t been afraid of breaking something, I might have slammed the drawer while putting my records away.

  People might lie, but numbers don’t, and the numbers said I couldn’t afford to leave Lakeshore and start over without what Claire Cartwright owed me. I technically had enough to cover food and fuel while I relocated, even if I left Michigan entirely. What I didn’t have was enough of a reserve to hold me over while I scoped out the best spots to set up on a daily basis and built a client base from the ground up—without any references, since I couldn’t leave a trail from Lakeshore to my new location.

  I also didn’t have enough money in savings to change the name of my truck. At a minimum, I’d have to change my truck’s name as soon as I set up someplace new. If Jarrod found my picture, he’d also have the name of my truck, making it that much easier for him to track me wherever I went. It’d be safer to repaint my whole rig, but I definitely didn’t have enough money for that. Fortunately, the article never mentioned my assumed last name, calling me only Isabel, the owner/operator of the How Sweet It Is cupcake truck. At this point anyway, I shouldn’t need to buy a new identity.

  I tried calling Claire one final time. It rang until her voicemail picked up. Instead of leaving a message again, I hung up, climbed into the cab of my truck, and headed for her house. I needed what she owed me—now.

  Chapter 5

  An unsettling thought hit me as I drove to Claire Cartwright’s. She might be intentionally avoiding me. She’d threatened to not pay the other food truck operator over fried onions and a lack of ketchup. Maybe she planned to withhold my payment because Harold collapsed before most of her guests had eaten my cupcakes.

  I’d assumed she’d been too busy or grief-stricken to deal with the practicalities yet, and that was why she hadn’t returned my calls.

  That’s because you’re still too trusting, Fear whispered in my head. You should know better by now. You can’t trust anyone but yourself.

  At times like this, it was hard to decide whether Fear was right or wrong. If my dad were still alive, he’d tell me I shouldn’t give my fear more power by personifying it in my imagination. He used to say that fear only existed to be conquered.

  He’d never known Jarrod. Standing up for myself had only made things worse. Had it not been for Fear, I’d likely be dead already.

  I pulled my truck over to the curb at the end of Claire’s street. Her house was halfway down. Close enough for me to see her working outside in her front garden.

  It seemed like a strange thing to be doing, planting flowers, when her grandfather had just died. In the weeks following my dad’s death, I’d been too exhausted to do anything non-essential. I’d hadn’t baked anything even though that was usually how I coped with stress. Some days, I hadn’t even had the energy to eat.

  But everyone reacted to grief differently.

  I dialed Claire’s number again.

  The phone rang in my ear, and then she glanced down. She pulled a small rectangle that must be her phone off her waist. She looked at it and hooked it back onto her pants.

  I disconnected the call before it went to voicemail again. There wasn’t a point in leaving a message. She wasn’t going to return my call no matter what I said on the message.

  A normal businessperson would have been able to threaten sending her to collections or whatever people did when someone defaulted on what they owed. I couldn’t even threaten it. I’d never follow through, and Claire seemed like the type of person who’d see right through any lie I’d tell her.

  I didn’t want any sort of confrontation with Claire. Just the thought of it sent tremors up my legs, and normally I’d have wanted a couple of weeks to rehearse what I’d say to her.

  But I needed that money. The margin was too narrow without it, and if I couldn’t afford to run my truck, I’d be on the street, vulnerable to more dangers than Jarrod.

  I sucked in a breath to the count of three and let it out the same way. I had to do this. It wasn’t like I was asking for something I wasn’t owed, right? I’d spent the time and money on preparing the cupcakes. I’d delivered them as promised. I set them up.

  That’s what I’d tell her if she tried to argue that she shouldn’t have to pay for cupcakes her guests didn’t eat.

  It wasn’t as good an argument as I might have come up with if I had more time, and I wouldn’t be able to prepare for any other arguments she might make, but it was what I had available.

  I put my truck into drive and crawled down the street at a pace barely above what I would have used in an underground parking garage. I parked behind Claire’s car in her driveway.

  She looked up from her flower garden, and her expression shifted into one that looked like I’d tossed trash at her rather than simply parking my truck on her property. It couldn’t be that big a breach of whatever etiquette rulebook she lived by for me to show up unannounced.

  I put my hand on the door handle, but it was like trying to work a puppet that I couldn’t see. My body didn’t want to get out of my truck. It wanted me to put the truck back into reverse and leave, money or no money, rather than go out there with Claire glaring at me that way.

  You also like to eat, I reminded my traitorous body. And bake.

  I shoved the door open and hopped down. I’d read an article once about how body posture
could make you feel braver, so I forced my shoulders back even though I’d much rather have hunched, making myself seem smaller.

  “I tried to call,” I said as I came around the front fender. I wanted her to know that I wouldn’t have shown up uninvited if she’d answered my calls. I also needed to give her a way to save face. “But I think I must have the wrong number.”

  Claire didn’t move from her spot beside the flower bed, either to meet me or to block my path. She didn’t even pull her dirt-covered gloves off. “We both know you called the right number. I imagine you have my number programmed into your phone.”

  I stuttered to a stop one step from the line where her cement driveway met her lawn, where not even a single dandelion dared to grow. The sharp edge of her driveway felt like a barbed wire fence.

  I hadn’t expected her to essentially admit to ignoring me. I had no answer for that. Maybe she hadn’t called back because she was still grieving, and she considered my arrival a rude intrusion. She’d probably planned to pay me, but I’d rushed things.

  I should have waited more patiently. Now all I’d managed to do was make her angry.

  You couldn’t have waited, I reminded myself. That article put a spotlight on you that Jarrod might see.

  But that didn’t fix the fact that I’d rubbed Claire’s feathers the wrong way, as my dad liked to say in his funny way of mixing metaphors. A perturbed Claire was a Claire who wasn’t going to be easily convinced to pay me today.

  If there was one thing I was relatively good at though—other than baking—it was soothing an angry person. I certainly had enough practice at it. If I could sometimes calm Jarrod down enough to avoid a beating, I could certainly smooth things over with Claire.