Deadly Donuts (The Donut Mysteries)

by Jessica Beck

  “What does that have to do with Dad?”

  “Evidently, Thomas’s car was stolen the day before, and though there was enough evidence at the time for the police to exonerate him, Morgan Briar was never convinced of your father’s innocence.”

  “It’s not all that uncommon for folks in hit-and-runs to report their cars stolen, is it?” I asked, my heart sinking a little.

  “Suzanne, your father would never do something so cowardly,” she said sternly.

  “He ran out on you, didn’t he?” I asked, suddenly resenting the man that I had adored growing up.

  “Listen to me, young lady!” my mother snapped at me. “I will not allow you to judge your father for what he may have done in his weakest moment. His integrity was never in doubt. Besides, you don’t know the whole story about our split, and if I have anything to say about it, you never will. Do we understand each other?”

  “Loud and clear,” I said. It was odd, but I’d always thought of my parents as just that, two people who had raised me together, and mostly that was the end of it. The idea that they’d had lives before I was born just never entered my stream of consciousness. Boy, was I going to have to adjust my thinking as far as that was concerned. “I’m curious, Momma. What evidence did Mr. Briar offer you to back up his assertion of Daddy’s culpability in his brother’s death?”

  “All he had with him were a faded police report, an old letter, and a newspaper account of the tragedy. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t proof of anything.”

  “Did he honestly expect you to pay him to keep that quiet?”

  Momma frowned, and then she explained, “Actually, the letter was the linchpin to his blackmail scheme.

  It was from your father to Blake Briar, and in it, he threatened to kill the man.”

  Chapter 4

  “He did what?” I asked.

  “The letter explained that they had started a new business together, and Blake cleaned out their joint account without warning your father what he was doing. Thomas threatened legal action, and if that didn’t work, your father said that the retribution would be worse than Blake could imagine. There was definitely more than a hint of a threat in the tone of that letter. Thomas said at one point that he’d wring Blake’s neck if he didn’t get his money back.”

  “Surely Morgan showed the police that letter,” I said.

  “He said that he did, but he claimed that the chief was one of your father’s cronies, so the police refused to take it seriously. I told him that the entire premise was preposterous, but Morgan claimed to have an ace in the hole that he wasn’t going to tell anyone about, real proof about your father’s culpability.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I slapped his face,” Momma said, “but I never killed the man.” She looked at me oddly, and then she asked me, “Suzanne, why are you smiling?”

  “Truth be told, he was probably getting tired of being slapped by the time you hit him. I took a swing at him myself earlier in the day, and I made pretty good contact.”

  “Like mother, like daughter, I suppose,” she said with a subtle smile.

  “And I’m more proud of it than I could ever say,” I answered. “What happened after that?”

  “I stormed off as he yelled threats in my direction that I’d be sorry, but I didn’t even hesitate to go. The man evidently seriously misjudged the women he was trying to blackmail. I have to wonder if we were his only victims, though.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He wasn’t nervous at all when he asked me for one hundred thousand dollars,” my mother said. “It was as though he’d practiced the request a dozen times before he made it of me, and I have to wonder if the man made it a habit of extorting money from other people. Perhaps one of his other victims caught up with him, and we had the misfortune to have it happen in April Springs while he was pursuing us.”

  “One way or the other, I need to dig into this,” I said as I finished my coffee. “We can’t just leave it up to the police.”

  “I agree. Suzanne, I believe an investigation is in order outside of official channels this time,” she said. My mother hadn’t been all that thrilled with my past snooping, but this was a matter of not just family honor, but our freedom and reputations as well. “Though I admit that I would feel better if Jake were involved unofficially.”

  “I keep calling him, but my calls go straight to voice mail. If I don’t hear from him by noon today, I’m driving to Hickory to speak to him face to face.” I reached out and patted her hand. “Don’t worry, Momma. We’ll figure out who killed Morgan Briar.”

  “I have no doubt that you will,” she said as she stood up. Before she left, Momma said gently, “Suzanne, I know that you confide in Emma quite a bit, but it might be prudent to keep her out of the loop this time.”

  “I’m way ahead of you,” I said. “Why do you think we stayed out here instead of inside where it’s air conditioned?”

  “I’m glad that we’re in agreement, then. We’ll discuss this later, but in the meantime, you have donuts to make, don’t you?”

  “Yes, it seems as though there are always donuts to be made,” I said as I hugged her one last time. “Good bye, Momma, and thank you.”

  “For what? Dredging up the past with painful memories? I’m not entirely sure that you should be thanking me for doing that at all.”

  “I’m thanking you for trusting me enough to share your history with my father, warts and all,” I replied.

  After I walked back into the kitchen, Emma smiled brightly and showed me what she’d done in my absence. We didn’t say a word about my conversation with Momma, and for a couple of hours, everything felt right with the world again.

  “Hey, Chief, how are things going so far?”

  “I’m guessing that you’ve already talked to your mother,” he said, hanging his head a little low. I’d been waiting on customers all morning, and everyone was speculating about the mystery man who’d been murdered, though no one had tied him to me or my family yet. I knew that was just a matter of time, though.

  “As a matter of fact, she came by the shop right after you left our place,” I answered.

  Chief Martin ran a hand through his hair. “I’ve got to tell you, I’m not exactly sure what I should do with this mess. Have you talked to Jake lately?”

  “No, not in the past few days. Why?”

  The police chief nodded. “I can’t get him on the phone either, and truth be told, I could use his advice.”

  I thought about tweaking the law officer a little, but I realized how much it must have cost him to come ask me for help in finding my boyfriend. “If it’s any consolation, I can’t get him to answer my telephone calls, either. When he’s hip-deep in a case, it takes a real emergency to get his attention.”

  “At least I know now that he’s not just ducking me, so that’s good news.” The chief looked at my display cases, and I saw his gaze linger over the chocolate iced éclairs.

  “Would you like one? It’s on the house.”

  He was clearly tempted, but after a few seconds of struggling with his inner demons, the police chief shook his head. “I’d better not. I’ve got seven more pounds to lose before I’m back to my weight in high school.”

  “How much have you lost altogether?” I asked, sincerely curious about his weight loss. It had all begun the day he’d started courting my mother, and the man must have gone through at least three pants sizes since.

  “Not enough,” he replied. “If you talk to Jake, ask him to give me a call, would you?”

  “I’ll try, but can’t make any promises about when that might be.”

  He nodded. “I understand. Well, I’ve got to run.”

  Half an hour after the police chief left, I was thinking about shutting down early for the day when the front door opened, and I nearly propelled myself across the counter when I realized that it was Jake.

  After giving him a big hug and a matching kiss, I asked, “What’s the
idea, ducking my phone calls, Mister?”

  “You know that I’d never do that unless it was important, but I was about to nab a bad guy, so I didn’t really have time to call you back.”

  I leaned back as I asked, “Did you at least catch him?”

  “As a matter of fact, he’s sitting in a jail cell right now, though who knows how long he’ll stay there. The man has more attorneys at his disposal than we do.”

  “What did he do?” I asked. Jake didn’t like to discuss his cases while they were active, but he usually didn’t mind after he’d made an arrest.

  “There are some things that I’d rather not talk about right now, if it’s all the same to you. Has there been anything exciting happening around here since we last spoke?”

  “Well, let’s see. Oh, yes. There was a murder early this morning at the town clock, and Momma and I are both involved it up to our eyebrows.”

  For a second Jake clearly thought that I was joking, but then he saw my intent expression. The joy of making an arrest earlier left him, replaced now by an expression of worry. “Tell me all about it.”

  After I brought him up to date, he said, “Suzanne, this is too big for you to handle on your own. This case spans decades.”

  “I’ve got a hunch the chief of police feels the same way about it himself. He asked me to have you call him the second I saw you.”

  Jake shook his head. “There’s another call that I need to make first.”

  “What could be more important than this?” I asked.

  “I’ve got a hunch that I’d better make a preemptive phone call before my boss gets the same idea about who should be handling this case.”

  “Are you saying that you’re not willing to help me out?” I asked, more than a little disappointed that Jake would duck this.

  “There’s a great deal more to it than that. Suzanne, you know that I’ll give you all of the help I can. It’s the April Springs police I’m planning to turn down.” Jake frowned, furrowed his brows, and then asked me, “How would you feel if I took a week off and helped you dig into this case on my own?”

  “Do you think you can really swing it? You know that I’d love it.”

  He smiled as he reached for his cellphone. “There’s only one way to find out. I’ll be right back.”

  As Jake stepped outside to make the call to his boss, I started getting ready to close the shop for the day. We didn’t have that many treats left, mostly because Emma and I had made smaller batches of all of our donuts and other goodies earlier. That had gotten to be our habit recently after the decline in sales we’d been experiencing. We both hated throwing treats away, but the church had just about stopped taking our donations. It wasn’t the best way to handle the slump, but I couldn’t exactly go out, pull customers in off the street, and make them eat our donuts.

  Jake came in a few minutes later with a frown on his face.

  “No luck?” I asked. “That’s okay. I understand. At least you tried.”

  “It’s not over yet,” he said. “I told my boss that he could give me the week of vacation I’ve got coming to me, or he’ll just have to find another investigator to take my place.”

  “Jake, we’ve been over this before. You can’t jeopardize your job making threats like that.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “I happen to know that he got a memo instructing him to urge all employees to take their vacations this year so the state won’t be in a position where they have to pay the accrued days off in cash at the end of the year. He just needed a nudge, that’s all. Besides, the only thing I have on my schedule for the next few weeks is babysitting the governor. If he needs that done, he can do it himself.”

  Ten seconds later, Jake’s phone rang. This time he stayed close by. “Yes, sir. Very good, sir. I’ll check in with you next week. Thank you, sir.”

  “What do you know? I got it,” Jake said with a smile as he hung up.

  “There were no more waves at all?”

  “In the end, there really wasn’t much that he could do about it. He kind of surprised me, though. He’s going to do as I suggested and take the protection detail himself. So, are you about finished here? We need to get started digging into this case.”

  “You’re a real go-getter today, aren’t you?”

  “Suzanne, the way I see it, the quicker we solve this, the more time we get to spend together not focusing on murder.”

  “That sounds like a great plan to me,” I agreed as I started cleaning the shop at a quicker pace. Frankly, I loved the idea of having Jake focus his skills entirely on my investigation. It would be so nice having him on my side, and not working for law enforcement in any official capacity. I knew that Grace wouldn’t mind Jake’s help, since she’d suggested it a few times herself in the past. I just hoped that we could all work together as well as Grace and I normally did, but only time would tell.

  “I just had a thought,” I said on the spur of the moment. “If we solve this case early, I’ll turn the donut shop over to Emma and her mother for a few days, and we can take a real vacation together. How does that sound?”

  “It’s the best incentive that I’ve ever had to solve a case,” he replied with a grin.

  “So, where should we start?”

  Jake thought about it, and then he said, “First of all, I need to do a little investigative work to see where things stand.”

  “That sounds great,” I said. “Who should we talk to first?”

  “Suzanne, I’m not at all certain that my sources will be forthcoming if you’re with me. Some of the officers I need to speak with may be a little reticent to share what they know around a civilian.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said, being sure to keep my voice calm and level as I spoke. “The first thing you’re going to do on our joint investigation is leave me behind, is that right? I’m not sure that I like the way this is headed.”

  My boyfriend took my hands in his as he said, “Suzanne, you’ve told me on more than one occasion that folks around here will tell you things that they won’t tell law enforcement. Well, that cuts both ways. A great many cops will tell me things that they would never dream of sharing with you.”

  “So then we’re going our separate ways after all?” I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

  “Don’t look at it that way. We’re both trying to solve a murder. We’ll compare notes at the end of every day, and if there’s something I can bring you in on my end of it, I promise you that I’ll do it.”

  I thought about what Jake had just said, and though it made sense on one level, I hated the idea of being shut out of my own investigation. Still, what choice did I have?

  “Okay. You work the proper police angles, and Grace and I will snoop on our own.”

  “Have you even asked her to help you yet?” Jake asked.

  “No, but I doubt that she’ll protest the idea. Grace’s hours are pretty flexible, and she hasn’t turned me down yet. Knowing that my father is involved, I’d be amazed if she didn’t drop everything to lend a hand with the investigation. She was a big fan of my dad’s, and the feeling was mutual. Grace wouldn’t like to see my dad’s reputation tarnished in any way, and I know that she wouldn’t want to see Momma accused of murder. She’ll help.”

  Jake nodded, and then he asked me, “Will you check in with me every hour so we aren’t working at cross purposes?”

  His look of sincerity was so cute that it was almost hard to tell him the truth. “Of course not,” I answered with a grin. “When Grace and I are investigating a case, we almost never seem to know where our leads end up, and we have to follow them wherever they go.”

  “All that I’m asking is that you keep me informed,” he said a little sullenly. “It’s not like you have to ask me for permission or anything before you do something.”

  A full and throaty laugh escaped my lips before I could stop it.

  “What’s so funny?” Jake asked me.

  “I find it amusing that particular thoug
ht would even enter your mind.” I kissed his cheek, and then I said, “Go do your digging, and Grace and I will start with ours. I promise that I’ll call you if we find anything significant, and I’d appreciate it if you’d do the same. We can meet back up at the cottage for dinner tonight and discuss what we’ve been up to. Does that sound good to you?”

  “It does. Are you sure you don’t mind if we handle things this way?”

  “Jake, whatever clears my mother of suspicion and saves my father’s reputation is a-okay with me.”

  He didn’t return my smile. Instead, after a full ten seconds, he asked, “Suzanne, there’s something else that we need to discuss.”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  With great reluctance, he asked me, “What if I discover that what Morgan Briar claimed was true in the course of my investigation? Do you really want to know what happened?”

  “I do,” I said without a moment’s hesitation. “I’m not saying that it’s not going to be painful to hear, but I have to know the truth about my father, Jake. I’m a grown woman; I can take it.”

  “And your mother as well?”

  “She can handle it, too.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Jake said.

  “I know that, but I’m pretending to believe that it was. There’s no doubt in my mind that my mother loved my father, but there’s no way she would kill to protect his memory.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Jake answered solemnly.

  “You can count on it.” Things were strained between us at the moment, and I hated the feeling. I kissed him soundly, and then added, “Now go do some unofficial police work. And Jake?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for helping. It means a lot to me.”

  “There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing in the world,” he said, and then he headed for his car.

  As he did, I grabbed my telephone and called Grace.

  She answered on the first ring. “That’s spooky, Suzanne. I was just about to call you,” she said.

  “I’ve told you before, we have some kind of eerie psychic bond. Are you free right now?”