Drop Dead Chocolate: A Donut Shop Mystery

by Jessica Beck

  “I guess this is it, then,” she said as she handed me her apron.

  “You’re coming to the victory party in city hall, aren’t you?” I asked. A great many of us had decided to have another party, two in one day. This one was for election night results. It wouldn’t be on television, announced breathlessly to a waiting world. Marybeth Jenkins would walk down the steps with the results, and we’d know who our new mayor was, hopefully Momma.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be there.”

  I took her apron from her, gave her another hug, and then said, “I’m really going to miss you.”

  “Nan will be fine,” Emma said. I’d hired a middle-aged woman to work with me, and she’d spent the last three days training with us. Nan had skipped the farewell party, though. She’d gone out of town while she still could get away, and she wouldn’t be back for several days. In the meantime I’d run Donut Hearts by myself, a fitting transition.

  * * *

  The party at the city hall wasn’t anything like the farewell to Emma. There were no banners, though there were plenty of balloons. There was a punch bowl and a cake, but everyone was waiting to eat until we found out the results. Even Evelyn was there, though she stayed in one corner with her pack of friends.

  Emma was standing with her folks to one side, and I asked her if I could have a moment of her time.

  “I wanted to give you something before you left,” I said as I reached into my jeans and pulled out an envelope.

  “You already gave me a bonus,” she said. “What’s this?”

  “Just open it,” I urged her.

  She did, and then saw the size of the check. It wasn’t much from most people’s standards, but it was all I could afford.

  “Suzanne, I can’t accept this,” she said.

  “You’d better. I’ve been saving it for nearly a month. Good luck, Emma. I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too,” she said. “No matter where I am, you’ll always be in my heart.” As Emma started to cry again, she headed for the bathroom to wipe away her tears.

  When Marybeth finally tottered down the steps with the results, she had a confused expression on her face.

  She faced us from the third step, and the room quieted instantly.

  “I’m not sure how to say this, but something has happened that is unprecedented in town history.”

  “Was there a tie?” someone asked from the back.

  “No, the results were absolutely conclusive, and I’ve just certified them, so the election is official.”

  “Who won, then?” another woman asked.

  “Yes, I should get on with the announcement, shouldn’t I,” Marybeth said. She cleared her voice, and then read from the sheet of paper in her hands. “In an overwhelming majority vote, our new mayor is … a write-in candidate.”

  “What?” a dozen of us asked at the same time. I was standing beside Momma, ready to congratulate her, when I saw the broad smile on her face.

  “What did you do? You never wanted the job, did you?”

  “Neither did Evelyn,” Momma said. “We were both motivated for the wrong reasons.”

  “Who won, then?”

  “Shhh,” she said as she pointed to Marybeth. “Listen and you’ll find out along with the rest of us.”

  “Quiet down, folks. If you give me the chance, I’ll tell you the name of our new mayor.”

  For a brief second, I was horrified by the thought that Marybeth was about to read my name. I could never be mayor, and it wasn’t just because of my business hours. I didn’t have the temperament to do it.

  When Marybeth finally did read the winner’s name, it took me a second to realize who had won, I was so relieved that she hadn’t called my name.

  And then it sank in.

  My dear friend George was the new mayor of April Springs.

  And he looked as surprised to hear the news as everyone else.

  It was indeed a new day in my hometown, some good, some bad, and some just different, but I loved living there, and couldn’t imagine myself being anyplace else.

  As we all congratulated George, he looked shell-shocked by the announcement, but he didn’t say he was turning it down.

  I smiled for a moment, realizing that I now had a very important friend in city hall.

  It might just help keep me out of trouble in the future, but somehow, I doubted it.

  And now a look at the next Donut Shop Mystery,

  POWDERED

  PERIL

  —available soon from

  Jessica Beck and St. Martin’s / Minotaur Paperbacks!

  CHAPTER 1

  The dead body was hard to see at first in the deep shadows that surrounded it. Soon enough, as darkness faded into the edges of light, a false dawn would spread over the crime scene and reveal some of its secrets; photographs and video would be taken, notes would be written, and the careful study of not only the victim, but the area around it, would occur. An amount of intense activity like no other would consume the investigators as they fought to solve the murder in the early hours of discovery.

  But none of that would happen for hours yet.

  For now, only one person knew about the crime, and they weren’t about to tell anyone.

  One thing was certain; the lives of the people in April Springs, North Carolina, would never be the same once they knew that murder had come back to visit their sleepy little town nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  CHAPTER 2

  My name is Suzanne Hart, and I’ve lost boyfriends in the past in as many ways as you can imagine; at least that’s how it feels to me sometimes when I look back on my life so far. I hope I never lose my current beau, State Police Inspector Jake Bishop, but I can honestly say that I’ve never lost one to murder.

  And hopefully, I never will.

  I just wish I could say the same thing about a good friend of mine.

  If I think about it, that’s when everything started to fall apart in town, and it took all I had to keep the world from crashing down around me.

  And more importantly, to save someone I cared for more than I could express.

  * * *

  It wasn’t all that late in the day for most of the folks I knew, but for a donut maker, it may as well have been midnight. My crazy schedule often precluded me from staying up much past dark by the time spring rolled around. I was just about to go upstairs for bed when the doorbell rang at the cottage I shared with my mother in April Springs, North Carolina. It was nearing seven in the evening, and I’d had another exhausting day making donuts by myself at my shop, Donut Hearts. Nan Winters, the woman I’d hired to replace my dear friend and longtime assistant, Emma Blake, was starting work tomorrow, and while I knew that I would miss Emma for a very long time, I needed someone there with me, because doing all the work at the donut shop alone was getting to be way too much for one person to handle.

  I answered the door, ready with an excuse that would allow me to beg off and get my much needed sleep, but all thoughts of rest vanished when I saw my best friend, Grace Gauge, standing there, an emotional wreck. It was pretty obvious that she’d been crying for a while, and it broke my heart to see her like that.

  “Grace, what happened?” I asked as I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around her. She was the sister I never had, and I liked to think that I was the same to her. On the outside, the two of us were pretty different, Grace being blonde and trim while I was a brunette with a bit more than my share of curves, but inside, we were two peas in a pod. She was my oldest and dearest friend, and I hated seeing her so upset.

  As I stroked her hair gently, I asked softly, “Are you okay?”

  “Peter and I just broke up,” she whimpered, and the tears started in full force. I could feel her shaking as she cried, and I held her tight, stroking her hair lightly and doing my best to offer her what comfort I could.

  “Come on inside,” I said. There was a break in her sobs and she fought to catch her breath as she pulled away a minute late
r. “I can make us some coffee and we can talk all about it.”

  Grace wiped her nose with a tissue as she shook her head. “I shouldn’t have come at all. I know it’s getting late for you, Suzanne. You need your sleep. I just didn’t have anyone else to talk to.” She sniffed again, as though she were holding back more tears by sheer willpower alone, and then she added softly, “You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll be okay. I promise.”

  “Don’t be silly. I wasn’t going to go to bed for hours,” I said as I led her inside into the living room.

  She stopped dead in her tracks. “Don’t lie to me, Suzanne, especially tonight. I’ve had just about all of that I can take from the rest of the world.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry; you’re right. I shouldn’t have said that. The truth is that I was heading off to bed when you knocked, but I don’t have to go to sleep this instant. I’ve got time to talk, at least a little bit, anyway.” I had to get Grace talking. Once she started, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to stop until I had the whole story. If I paid for it later and was drowsy tomorrow at work, then so be it. Grace came first in my mind, on an equal level at the top of my life with Momma and Jake. Without any one of the three of them, my life just wouldn’t be the same, and I knew it. There were people who floated in and out of my life and others who always seemed to hang just around the edges, folks I cared about, but those three were my core.

  Grace looked around the cottage as she tucked the tissue away in her hand. In a low voice, she said, “I hate to be a pain, but is there any way that we can we talk somewhere else? Your mother doesn’t need to hear all of my problems.”

  “No worries,” I explained in my normal voice. “She’s off on one of her dates with Chief Martin, so we’ve got time to talk before I have to go to sleep. Honestly, I don’t expect them back for hours.” I took her hands in mine and added, “Grace, I promise you that you’ve got my undivided attention as long as you need it. If I have to go totally without sleep tonight, you’re worth it. I’ll find a way to manage tomorrow.”

  “I’m not doing that to you, or your customers,” she said. “I know how grumpy you can be when you’re sleep-deprived,” she added, even managing a slight grin. It was good to know that her spirit was still in there somewhere, despite the temporary pall that hung over her.

  “I’d say that was patently untrue if I could do it with a straight face, but we both know that you’re right,” I admitted. “I always shoot for seven thirty as my bedtime, but how many times do I actually make it? Trust me; I’m wide awake right now. Even if you leave this instant, there’s no way I’m going to be able to go straight to sleep.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked hesitantly.

  “Grace, I shouldn’t even have to say this, but I’ve got all of the time in the world for you,” I said as I settled down on one side of the couch.

  She nodded as she sat beside me, and then she started to talk.

  “I just found out that Peter Morgan is a liar and a cheat,” she said, her voice now strangely calm as she blurted the information out matter of factly. “I knew he seemed to be too good to be true when we first met, and in the end, it turned out that I had been right all along.”

  It wasn’t a huge secret to the world that I’d never been all that big a fan of Peter’s, though Grace had clearly been crazy about the man. I’d done my best to accept him, but it hadn’t been easy. He’d been a little too slick for my taste, and a bit more manipulative than I’d liked, but I couldn’t say that to Grace, especially now that he’d broken her heart and proven my doubts about him had all been right. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

  “At first, it was a lot of little things that didn’t add up,” she said. “He wouldn’t answer his phone sometimes when we were together, and he’d be late for no real reason when we were supposed to have a date.”

  Surely there had to be more than that. “Go on,” I said.

  Grace bit her lower lip, and then continued. “I caught a whiff of someone else’s perfume on his shirt collar last night. It might have been innocent enough, and I was going to do my best to forget it, but I couldn’t. I decided that I was going to talk to him about it at dinner tonight. Something happened before that, though. About an hour ago, we were at my place getting ready to go out. We’d been sitting on the couch discussing where we were going to eat, and he’d asked to wash up a little before we left for the restaurant. While he was gone, I heard his phone ringing, and I realized that it must have slipped out of his pocket and was buried under a seat cushion.” Grace looked at me intently as she added, “Suzanne, I wasn’t snooping. Honestly, I didn’t think a thing about it. When a phone rings, I answer it. It’s some kind of compulsion I have.”

  “I don’t see how anybody could blame you for that. Who was calling?” I asked. “Did you look at the Caller ID?”

  She nodded, and I could see her fighting back another onslaught of tears. I touched her shoulder lightly. “Grace, do you need to take a second? You don’t have to tell me all at once, you know.”

  She took a few moments to collect herself, and then nodded. “It’s okay. I’m fine. At least I will be.” After blowing her nose, she explained, “It was Leah Gentry.”

  I knew Leah, and she wasn’t one of my favorite people in April Springs. In her early twenties, Leah worked at her uncle’s hardware store down the street from Donut Hearts; there wasn’t a man in all of April Springs she hadn’t made a pass at at least once. I’d had my own run-ins with her uncle, Burt Gentry, enough times in the past to realize that bad attitudes must run in their family, and that particular apple was sitting pretty close to the tree.

  “I hate to ask this, but could it have all just been innocent?” I asked, playing Devil’s advocate for a second. I wasn’t at all interested in defending the man, but I didn’t want Grace to jump to any conclusions either, at least not without all of the facts.

  “Actually, she tried to make it sound that way when I answered Peter’s phone,” Grace explained. “Leah made up something on the spur of the moment about a part he had ordered coming into the hardware store, but it was clear to me that she was lying. When I pushed her on it, Leah mumbled something incoherent and hung up just as Peter came back into the room. Do you want to know what his first reaction was when he saw me holding his cell phone? He looked angry when he saw that it was in my hand, and he tried to grab it from me. I held it away from him, though, and asked him about Leah. For a few seconds, I saw him searching for any excuse he thought I would buy, and as he tried to come up with something I might accept, I hit the menu button and checked his recent calls.” Grace looked down at her hands, and then said, “I shouldn’t have done that. I know that now. But I just had to know just how big a liar he actually was.”

  I wasn’t about to let Grace beat herself up for doing something to stand up for herself. “Are you kidding? I think that was brilliant. I’m not at all sure that I would have been smart enough to do that, not under those circumstances. What did you find in his records?”

  Her voice died a little as she said, “Leah wasn’t the only woman’s name there, not by a long shot, though she was listed a dozen times. When I think about it now, I don’t know how he had time to date me at all.”

  “What did you do when you saw that list of women?” I asked, dying to hear what had happened next. Well, that wasn’t entirely true; I knew the end result. What I didn’t know was how it had come about from that initial discovery to her sitting on my couch with me.

  “I confronted him about it,” Grace said, “and you won’t believe this, but the jerk actually admitted it. I guess he just couldn’t be bothered with coming up with an explanation that I might swallow. Peter told me that he’d made a few mistakes in the past, but that I was important to him. He even promised me that he’d drop every one of the other women he was seeing in a heartbeat if I’d forgive him and try to work things out between us.”

  “But you couldn’t do that, could you?”

  Gr
ace shook her head. “He lied to me so much, how could I ever believe him again? I was about to break up with him right then and there when his phone rang again.”

  “Was it Leah calling back?” I asked. “She doesn’t give up, does she?”

  “No, but it was another woman.”

  “What did you do then?” I knew my best friend had a big and generous heart, but I also knew that if someone crossed her one too many times, she could be as hard as stone, and cold as ice.

  Grace shook her head gently, as though she was trying to delicately dislodge a bad memory. “I opened the front door, threw his phone out into the front yard, and then I told him that we were through. I’m done with him, and he knows it.”

  “I still can’t believe that Leah would do something like that to you,” I said. “She’s no one I’d ever be friends with, but there are rules about this sort of thing, you know? She had to know that the two of you were dating. It’s not like it was a big secret or anything.” I suppose the young woman was pretty, in a brassy kind of way, and some men seemed to enjoy her attention, but she couldn’t hold a candle to Grace, inside or out. What would cause a man who had Grace’s heart to go after a woman like Leah? He’d traded gold for lead, and my friend’s heart was broken because of it.

  “I’m not happy with her either, that’s for sure, and I won’t make a single excuse for her, but I can’t help thinking that Peter’s the real snake here.” Grace hesitated, and then added, “You know what? If she wants him, she can have him. I’ll be just fine without him. I don’t have to have a man in my life.” She broke down again, and as I hugged her, I knew that she had loved this man, and he’d betrayed her. I couldn’t imagine how I’d react if I’d caught Jake Bishop doing anything like that, but then again, I couldn’t even fathom the circumstances where he would think about it for one split second. Jake was many things, sometimes frustrating me beyond explanation, but he was loyal and trustworthy; I knew that in my heart.