Sugar and Vice: Cupcake Truck Mysteries

by Emily James

  “You’re right. I did dial the same number, so there was no way it could be the wrong number. I guess I was hoping I’d misdialed.”

  Her clenched jaw didn’t release even a micro-inch. It was like my words hit her anger barrier and bounced right back. I could almost feel them smash into my chest, threatening to knock the air out of me.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  I’d been right. It had to be about the fact that she felt I was rushing her after Harold’s death. “I wanted to tell you how sorry I am about your grandfather. I—”

  She held up her hand. “Coming to express condolences to me won’t convince anyone that you weren’t part of this. You need to leave now.”

  That I wasn’t part of it? Part of what?

  She couldn’t mean that I played a part in Harold’s death, but there didn’t seem to be anything else she could mean. “Why would I have wanted to hurt your grandfather?”

  “I’m sure someone paid you to put the almond butter into the ketchup after I hired you to cater the party for us. You knew he was allergic. I told the police that when they asked me what I knew about you, so don’t think you’re going to get away with it. The only people there who weren’t friends or family were you and the hotdog vendor.”

  My vision blurred slightly. If someone put almond butter into the ketchup, they really had wanted to kill Harold Cartwright. No store-bought ketchup that I knew of included almond butter on the list of ingredients, and I’d always been a label-reader because of all my dad’s allergies.

  My fingerprints were all over the ketchup bottles. Telling the truth wouldn’t help me. Borrowing them for holding together my display while the glue dried could easily be an excuse I’d come up with to hide my real reason for taking the ketchup. I’d had unfettered access to them for plenty long enough to put almond butter into all of them. Claire would insist when questioned that she’d told me ahead of time I’d have to set up a proper display for the cupcakes. It’d look like I’d pretended to misunderstand in order to give myself an excuse to handle the ketchup.

  “I hope whoever hired you paid you well,” Claire was saying. “You won’t get a penny from me.”

  Getting paid was suddenly the least of my concerns. If the newspaper article didn’t lead Jarrod straight to me, a police investigation would. My prints were probably already in the system. They wouldn’t come back to Isabel Addington. She didn’t exist.

  Amy Miller did. And her husband had promised to kill her if she ever tried to leave him.

  Jarrod had been a lot of things, but one thing I knew about him—he always kept his promises.

  I backed away from Claire. There was nothing I could say or do that would convince her of my innocence. Staying longer would only heighten her anger at me and make her more determined to see me convicted of Harold’s murder.

  I climbed into my truck and pulled out of Claire’s driveway a little faster than I should have. Claire didn’t chase after me or yell or anything as unseemly as that. She didn’t have to. The look she sent after me said it all.

  I was enemy number one. If Jarrod came looking for me, she’d not only believe whatever lies he told her about me, she’d point him right to me.

  The problem was, I still didn’t have the money to run. It wouldn’t do me any good to end up stranded somewhere because I couldn’t afford to put gas in my truck.

  My options for getting money any other way were slim. I’d do a lot of things to avoid Jarrod, but stealing wasn’t one of them. I wouldn’t hurt someone else to save myself. I also wouldn’t sell my body.

  I didn’t have the time to pick up an outside job, even if I could get one without a social security number and references.

  I drove to a park that I knew would be almost empty this time of day and shut off my truck. I wasn’t safe to drive at the moment. The last thing I needed was to get into an accident and then have a warrant out for my arrest because I fled the scene.

  Oh no.

  I dropped my head forward onto my steering wheel. Even if I had what Claire owed me, I couldn’t leave Lakeshore as long as I was a person of interest in a murder investigation.

  Fleeing town would make me the prime suspect, and the police would issue a be-on-the-lookout for me and my truck. There’d be no explaining my way out of running, and I wouldn’t be safe no matter where I went.

  If Jarrod found me before the police did, he’d have a built-in reason to shoot me. I was a murder suspect, a guilty one clearly, who’d tried to escape. He’d warned me, and I didn’t listen. He had no choice but to kill me.

  I couldn’t ditch my truck and my current name and start over, either. Buying a new identity and repainting a food truck took money. I might have enough to replace my name once more if I wasn’t picky about where the new name came from, but not if I also wanted to rename my truck, too.

  The life insurance my dad left me was the only money I’d had that Jarrod didn’t control. After my dad died, I’d put it into an account, but I couldn’t bear to touch it. I hadn’t even told Jarrod about it when we married. I knew he’d say it was a waste not to use it. I’d finally emptied it to buy my truck and my name the first time.

  I propped my chin on my steering wheel so I could see out the front windshield.

  The wind had shifted, causing the waves to lap against the shore. My first night in Lakeshore, I’d walked this beach, picking up beach glass left behind by the storm the night before. I felt a lot like one of those pieces of glass. Broken. Tossed around by circumstances outside my control. Worn down.

  They weren’t what they once were, but they were still beautiful. Collecting a few of them had given me a little hope. Like maybe if I held on long enough, I’d make it through the storm too.

  I didn’t know how long I could keep doing this.

  For once, Fear didn’t have an answer for me. He was telling me it wasn’t safe to stay, and it wasn’t safe to go.

  Since I knew I had to go, the only thing I could do was to make leaving safe again.

  To do that, I had to somehow show that I wasn’t the one who killed Harold Cartwright.

  And the only surefire way to do that was to prove someone else did.

  It seemed unreal to consider investigating this crime. I’d always been an avid reader—a side effect of having a dad who taught English—but I’d never wished I could solve crimes like the sleuths I read about. I wasn’t brilliant like Sherlock Holmes.

  I didn’t even have the skills of the real-life investigators I knew. I wasn’t as good with people as Nicole Fitzhenry-Dawes, whose wedding I’d catered in the last town I’d stayed in.

  I didn’t see what other choice I had, though. I’d have to take whatever skills I did have and use them to figure out who killed Harold Cartwright.

  And I had to do it fast. The longer I stayed in Lakeshore, the greater the chance that Jarrod would find me.

  Chapter 6

  All the way back to the farmer’s market where I liked to park the truck to sleep, I chewed on the question of why someone would kill a hundred-year-old man. It seemed almost silly. At that age, it was a miracle that he woke up in the morning. All the person who killed him had to do was wait a little longer and the natural process of life would have done their job for them, without the risk of prison time.

  There had to be a reason they couldn’t wait. Maybe someone needed their inheritance? I couldn’t think of any other reason to kill someone so old. Even revenge seemed unlikely. Anyone who wanted revenge would have taken it long ago, when it would have stung more for Harold to die.

  As I pulled into the farmer’s market, the parking lot was empty, as usual for a weekday. It only ran Friday to Sunday.

  I drove around back and off the gravel lot, into the trees. I’d discovered this spot when I came to see about renting a booth at the market. It turned out to be too expensive, and they prohibited food truck vendors from selling out of their truck. But I’d learned that this spot existed and almost completely shielded my
truck from sight. As an added bonus, the back lock on the building didn’t work, allowing me easy access to the bathrooms.

  I parked my truck, went around to the back end, and set up my lawn chair so I wouldn’t have to sit on the floor. I grabbed the paper and pencil I’d used to calculate my numbers, crossed them out, and wrote MOTIVE below. I added the word inheritance.

  One motive was a pretty pathetic start, but I had to start somewhere.

  So, working off the assumption that getting their inheritance was the motive, the people who’d be most likely to benefit from Harold’s death were his immediate family.

  I opened the Internet browser on my phone and searched for Harold Cartwright’s obituary. Obituaries always listed the deceased’s family.

  His name came up alongside Ryder Funeral Home. I tapped the link.

  His funeral wasn’t until later this week. That seemed like a long time between death and internment, but the delay was probably due to the need for an autopsy since police believed he’d been murdered. They wouldn’t have released the body to the funeral home until they felt they had all the evidence from it that they might need.

  That also meant I still had time. The investigation was in its early stages. My name could be one of many, and they might not have started officially investigating me yet.

  I scrolled down the page to read his obituary. It didn’t list his cause of death, only that he’d passed away at the age of one hundred.

  The paragraph listing his family members was one of the longest I’d seen. Harold Cartwright had six children, all of whom had married and produced grandchildren. He even had great-grandchildren. Any of them could be a suspect for an inheritance.

  All I could do was start narrowing it down.

  I followed the list, writing down the name of each person who hadn’t predeceased Harold. It turned out he’d outlived three of his children.

  Claire’s name was listed as one of the grandchildren, but her name was given as Claire VanDyke, and her husband’s name was in parentheses behind her name. Because she’d given her name as Claire Cartwright, I’d assumed Harold was actually her husband’s grandfather. The Claire listed had to be her. She was the only Claire.

  I tapped my pencil on the spot on my list where Claire’s name would go. Claire didn’t seem like someone who needed to murder for money. Her house was brick and had to be at least three or four bedrooms based on the size, and her car was newer than anything I’d ever owned before I married Jarrod.

  But maybe the motive wasn’t money. Claire had been very quick to want to point the finger at someone else, and she had been the one bringing Harold his food the day of the picnic, while he sat in a place of honor.

  I wrote her name down even though my instincts told me Claire wasn’t the one. Her anger at me had seemed to genuine.

  Then again, I’d been played before.

  I finished off the list. Dan Holmes—Janie’s dad—was also on the list of grandchildren.

  That one was surprising. Based on his picture, he was late thirties at best, and Claire was approaching sixty.

  I put his name down, too, despite him seeming even less likely a suspect than Claire. If he’d put the almond butter into the ketchup, he wouldn’t have let Janie eat any of it.

  I set my phone aside. My list was eighteen people long. There was no way I’d have time to poke into all their lives. It’d be hard enough if I had only a single suspect.

  My hand strayed to my phone as if it had a mind of its own. If I called Nicole—my former catering client who was the closest thing I had to a friend—she might have a suggestion about where to start. She’d also probably want to make the two-hour drive to Lakeshore to act as my legal counsel, just in case.

  I couldn’t have her doing that. Not only did I not want her finding out that I was still living in my truck, but I’d only texted her once since I left Fair Haven. I always made sure not to leave any trails from one town to the next for Jarrod to follow. If Nicole knew where I was now, or worse, came to see me, it’d put her in danger. I refused to do that.

  I pushed my phone away. For now, at least, I had to do this on my own. It was safer that way.

  Which still left me with the problem of deciding where to start.

  I ran my finger down the list. Eenie meenee miney moe didn’t seem like a very logical or methodical way to approach it.

  I needed to think, and the best way to clear my head had always been to bake something.

  The carrot-cake cake pops I’d been forced into making because the cupcakes were destroyed had been a little too moist to hold together the way I wanted them to, but the flavor had been delicious. If I could get the ratio of icing to cake right, and maybe add a touch of something to the chocolate coating to give depth to the flavor, they’d be a great addition to my menu. A cake pop was easy for people who were on the move to buy and eat while they went. It’d also be a frugal use of the cupcakes that didn’t sell each day. If I turned them into cake pops, I wouldn’t have to reduce their price as day-olds.

  I pulled the leftover ones I’d baked for yesterday out of my fridge and scraped the icing off into a bowl.

  With the ones I’d salvaged for Harold’s party, I’d hadn’t had the luxury of experimenting with the cake-to-icing ratio. I’d dumped it all together into a bowl and hoped for the best.

  I froze with a cupcake in one hand. I hadn’t had a chance to experiment in part because of what happened to the cupcakes when the man smashed into me in the parking lot.

  The man had seemed nervous, like he wanted to get as far away from the party as possible. He might have somehow put the almond butter into the ketchup and then wanted to get away before Harold ate it.

  He’d looked too young to be Harold’s grandchild, but given the gap in age between Claire Cartwright and Dan Holmes, it was possible.

  I set aside my cupcakes and picked up my phone and list again. I typed each male grandchild’s name—except Dan Holmes, since I knew what he looked like—into my search bar one at a time. About half of them had a professional page or social media account that showed a public picture. None of them were the man who’d run into me.

  It’d been hoping for too much that finding out his identity would be that easy. I tossed my phone and pad of paper back into my chair.

  I pulled on latex gloves and broke the cupcakes up into a bowl. The problem with my theory was that, without a name, it wasn’t enough to take to the police. I had a random guess at a motive. If I went to the police and told them about a nameless man who bumped into me in the parking lot, it’d only make me look guiltier. It’d sound like I made him up to throw suspicion off myself. They’d end up investigating me more closely, which was exactly what I hoped to avoid.

  What I needed was a name and a solid motive. Then I could take it to the police without seeming questionable, and they could take it from there. Once their attention was directed toward him, I should be able to leave town without arousing suspicion.

  But that left me with a catch-22. I couldn’t find him because I didn’t know his name, and I couldn’t find out his name because I didn’t know how to find him. It made the blood pound behind my eyes just thinking of it.

  I measured out how much cake I had, measured some icing, and dumped it together. I gave the mixture a few exuberant squishes, and my blood pressure dropped.

  Baking really was better than therapy. You didn’t have to bare your soul to anyone, and you ended up with something delicious to eat afterward. It was a win-win.

  Unfortunately, baking wouldn’t help me find my mystery man.

  The fact that he’d been trying to leave before Harold ate the ketchup might mean he had some sense of guilt for what he’d done. It could also just mean he thought leaving would give him a better alibi since he wasn’t around when it happened, but I didn’t think so. He’d been smart enough to come up with putting an allergen into a safe food item, so he had to realize the police would know that could have been done at any time. The killer didn’t
have to be around when Harold ate the tainted ketchup.

  Leaving suggested that he didn’t have the heart to watch it happen.

  Logically, then, he might show up at the funeral as an act of penitence. Even if he wasn’t remorseful, if I was right and he was a grandchild, it’d look strange to everyone if he didn’t attend the funeral.

  Attending the funeral as well seemed like my best chance to find out who he was. I’d recognize him if I saw him again, and all I’d have to do was introduce myself to him under the guise of expressing my condolences. None of the grandchildren had the same first name, so if he matched one of the first names, I’d have his last name as well.

  My plan sounded great in theory, but in practice I’d have a major obstacle. I had to do all of that without Claire spotting me.

  Chapter 7

  The best word I could think of to describe the church where Harold Cartwright’s funeral was being held was quaint—and I meant it in its flattering sense. The building was sided in white clapboard and topped with an impossibly skinny steeple that looked like it couldn’t be strong enough to support the giant bronze bell at the top.

  I didn’t sign the guestbook on the way in, nor did I take one of the bulletins. Doing either of those things would have been disrespectful to the actual mourners. It was bad enough I’d be taking up a seat. Had it not been for the fact that I didn’t want to make myself easier for Claire to spot, I would have chosen to stand and allowed someone else to sit.

  All the pews were already filled with so many people they sat with their arms touching. Based on the number of pews and size of the sanctuary, the church could probably comfortably accommodate a hundred and fifty people. The church had to be filled well past the amount allowed by the fire marshal.

  Extra chairs lined the wall behind the final pew. I slid into one of the few remaining seats. Before the service had a chance to start, people were standing along the wall.

  My dad’s funeral had been much smaller. He’d been an only child, and he’d had to quit teaching before I was even out of high school because of his heart.