Houses and Homicide: A Bakery Detectives Cozy Mystery

by Stacey Alabaster

  “Hello there. My name is Rachael Robinson,” I started to explain as I approached the desk.

  “If you want to book a room, we only do it via the online booking service,” he replied, looking down at me over his long nose. He was tall, and I thought I could pick up a faint hint of a French accent when he spoke.

  “I’m not after a room,” I told him. “I just want to visit one of your guests. Cheryl Spellman? Can you tell me what room she is staying in? She’s not answering her phone and I don’t have her room details.”

  “Certainly not!” he said with annoyance, acting like I had just asked him for the nuclear codes.

  “I know you can’t give out information about your guests,” I stated. “But I am worried about her safety. Gravely worried. I’m worried that something might have happened to her.”

  The manager, whose name was Anderson, was not buying my story.

  “Yes. I hear that one all the time. What has she done?” he asked me. “Has she stolen money from you? Came after your boyfriend?”

  Okay, okay. He was right. Not about either of those scenarios, but I wasn’t actually worried about Cheryl’s life being at stake. “I’m worried she might have skipped town,” I lied, because her red BMW was right out the front. But I was hoping that Anderson didn’t know that. “Which would be very bad for you. I’m sure you don’t want to be dealing with two weeks’ worth of unpaid bills.”

  That did seem to move Anderson a little bit. “Yes, well, the safety of our guests is our most paramount concern,” he stated, slowly moving towards the phone and picking it up. I leaned over the desk tying to see what room number he dialed, but he scowled at me and turned it away so I couldn’t quite make it out.

  “There is no response,” he said simply, as though he was pleased at having to disappoint me. “And I don’t wish to disturb a slumbering client.” He was talking about her like she was a bear.

  He tapped his fingers against the desk for a moment, deep in thought. He was suddenly distracted, and seemed to forget I was there at all.

  I could tell he was worried about the bill. The Golden Medallion charged eight hundred dollars a night for their best rooms and Cheryl had been there for almost thirteen.

  “Perhaps I will just go up and check on her,” he said. “Just to put my mind at rest.”

  He abandoned the reception desk and scurried away like a child in trouble.

  Sweet, I thought, checking around that I was truly on my own. The lobby was entirely empty at that time of morning—after checkout time, I assumed—and there was no other staff around.

  I made sure Anderson was firmly in the elevator and the door was closed before I made a move of my own. I raced behind the desk and stared down at the computer screen. It was all green and grey, ugly to the eye, and the font was so small that I had to lean in close to even be able to read it. It was running on a system I didn’t recognize, but there were a few programs sitting on the home screen. One was labeled ‘security camera’ and another was labeled ‘reservations.’ I quickly opened the second one, keeping one eye on the elevator in anticipation of Anderson’s return.

  “Aha!” I said, locating Cheryl’s name in the list of guests. She was on the third floor, in room fourteen. The hotel had no room thirteen, which was a fairly common thing. Trying to avoid bad luck.

  Well, I was in luck. All I had to do was wait for the coast to be clear, and then I could sneak up to the third floor and find Cheryl on my own, without having to go through the gate-keeper.

  I heard the elevator open and quickly closed the screen down and ran out from behind the desk. Was I too slow? Had he seen me?

  Anderson returned to the lobby, white as a ghost.

  He was walking just about as slowly as one too, staggering towards me like a zombie.

  He struggled to sputter the words out.

  “Miss Spellman is…Miss Spellman…is….is dead.”

  Pippa finally picked up her phone.

  “Sorry!” she said gleefully. “Rachael, we just found THE cutest set of shelves for the new home. You have got to see them. They are hot pink and match my hair perfectly. Marcello hates them of course, but…”

  “Pippa,” I said, cutting her off. “Cheryl is dead.”

  I paced back and forth across the hotel lobby. Who in Belldale could possible have wanted Cheryl Spellman dead? She’d only been in town thirteen days. How many enemies could she possibly have made in that time? And from what I’d seen from her, Cheryl was kind, friendly, and bubbly. Not the kind to make enemies. She was a little flaky maybe, I’d give her that. And she had a habit of avoiding conflict or giving straight answers. But she was super friendly, and personable, and she always greeted everyone with a smile. Who would want to kill her?

  “So she was just laying there in her hotel room, dead?” Pippa asked, her voice shaking through the phone line.

  I shook my head even though she couldn’t see me. I was still pacing. “Not her room. The hotel pool, apparently. It had been locked all night so she could have been there for a while. It’s just terrible, isn’t it?” I asked, still shaking my head. “And it wasn’t an accident either, Pippa. Someone pushed her into the pool.”

  “Who would do that?” Pippa cried. She didn’t sound upset, though. Well, not exactly. She sounded angry. “Don’t they know that she was in the middle of an important business deal?”

  “Pippa,” I scolded her, quietly. “Cheryl deserved better than to be left there all night, only to be found by a hotel manager. She certainly deserved better than to be pushed into a pool and drowned.”

  Pippa was quiet for a moment. I knew she was upset about the deal being up in the air now, but we really had to be a little more respectful. We might have lost a business deal, but Cheryl had lost her life.

  Pippa finally responded. “So…where does this leave us?”

  It left us with a dead body and a bakery to save.

  We’d been here before. Maybe not in circumstances as dire as these were, but we could handle it. I took a few deep breaths and tried to stay calm.

  But Pippa was concerned about something else.

  “What about my new house! I just signed the contract with my real estate agent! The first payment is due next month. Rachael, he is not the kind of man who is going to be understanding about this.”

  “We can handle this, Pippa,” I said firmly. “Just like we have every time before.” I could hear police and ambulance sirens. “I’d better go,” I said. “I’ll call you as soon as I know more. Just stay calm, okay?”

  Behind me, Anderson slithered away before the police could enter the lobby.

  That’s strange, I thought, narrowing my eyes as I watched him crawl out of sight to a hallway out of the way.

  I placed my phone back in my purse quietly and crept through the lobby to follow him.

  He walked down a set of stairs that led to an underground staff parking lot. I tried to keep my feet light as I trailed behind him.

  When he reached the end of the stairway, he took his cell phone out of his pocket and made a call.

  I hung back, pressed against the cold concrete of the parking garage. I peered around the corner, only the slightest bit, so that he wouldn’t spot me. I needed to see what he was up to.

  He suddenly didn’t look so white and panicked after all. And he definitely wasn’t staggering around like a zombie. He strolled back and forth with confidence, and purpose.

  There was a grin on his face.

  I shivered, and pulled back when he quickly turned towards me.

  I closed my eyes and hoped he hadn’t seen me. He mustn’t have, because he was suddenly having a conversation with someone on the other end of the line.

  “It’s all taken care of,” he said into the phone. “You don’t need to worry about a thing. Miss Spellman is gone.”

  Chapter 3

  Business deals might have moved at a snail’s pace in Belldale, but property deals moved at the speed of light. Or at least they did when you wer
e dealing with agents as pushy as Carl Tillman.

  Pippa, along with Marcello and baby Lolly, had already moved out of my house and into the big purple cottage six blocks away. Even though I’d never had a reason to visit the place, I knew of it because it was a distinctive building. There weren’t many bright purple houses in Belldale. And there weren’t many with such a very large backyard, even though it was still in a built up residential area.

  No wonder Pippa had rushed to snap it up. Bright colors were her thing, and large yards were very much her thing. She loved gardening and I assumed she’d have it full of fruits, vegetables, and flowers in no time.

  I just wondered if it was a move she was going to live to regret.

  I pulled up in the driveway and only just managed to avoid hitting Pippa with the car when she jumped in front of it.

  “Ohhh, this is bad, this is bad…” Pippa muttered, stomping back and forth across the driveway. I noticed one of the next door neighbors pulled the curtain back a little and looked out curiously at the new, angry resident that had moved in beside them.

  It definitely was bad, but I needed her to calm down, so that her new neighbors didn’t think she was a total nutcase at the very least.

  “It doesn’t mean the deal is off,” I pointed out. “With Cheryl gone, there’ll be someone else to quickly step up and fill her position. The Pastry Tree is a big company; she didn’t run it single handedly. She didn’t even run it at all. She was just in charge of overseeing the new franchises.”

  “But Cheryl was the one who courted us!” Pippa exclaimed in frustration. “She was the one who put the whole deal in place…who knows if the new guy will still want to work with us…”

  She stopped pacing for a second, but only because she looked like she was about to pass out.

  “I think there’s a bigger issue here,” I stated.

  “And what is that?” She honestly could not fathom what that could possibly be. She started stomping back and forth again.

  “Cheryl is dead, Pippa. Someone killed her. Shouldn’t we try to find out who?”

  Pippa looked a little embarrassed. “Right,” she said sheepishly. But her face was still flustered. “We should focus on that.” She stopped stomping. “Besides, it could benefit us, to find out who killed her. The quicker, the better. Let’s get started right away.” She seemed a little frantic, a little wild-eyed.

  Behind her, Marcello, holding Lolly in his arms, stuck his head out. “Pippa?” he called. “I think you might be making a scene in front of the neighbors.”

  I’d wanted to point that out as well. I was just glad Marcello had to be the bad guy. She looked around and saw the eyes peeking from behind the curtain next door.

  “Great.” Pippa threw her hands up into the air. “Even if I can keep the house, I’m not exactly making new friends around here, am I?” She stopped and looked at me. “Rachael, we’ve got to try and get this mess sorted. We need to find Cheryl’s killer.”

  I agreed. It had to be our first priority.

  “Okay,” I said. “But we need to keep this quiet, okay, Pippa? The whole thing. On a need to know basis, if you catch my drift.” I didn’t want anyone else to know we were in trouble. Didn’t want to hear their gloating.

  Simona glanced up at the two of us as we entered the bakery. I could have sworn she was trying to fight off a smirk while she bent down and rearranged the new batch of blueberry pastries, counting them out into lots of half a dozen and then placing them into bags. I’d overestimated demand and actually made far too many that week, so we were giving them away at a discount if customers bought them in packs of six.

  “Everything all right?” Simona asked.

  “Fine,” I answered with a quick smile, trying to hurry through to the kitchen before she could quiz me any further.

  “Did you find Cheryl Spellman?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s why you ran out of the bakery earlier, isn’t it? To find Cheryl Spellman?”

  I stopped and sighed.

  “I, um, did find her, actually,” I said, still trying to smile.

  Simona counted out another six pastries and carefully tied a ribbon around the bag. “And is she coming in today?” she asked casually. She had made a little display for the packs of six and painted a little sign as well, in matching colors of dark purple and white, so that the writing looked like the glaze. “6 for $10” was a pretty good deal.

  “She, uh, can’t make it today. We’ll just have to carry on without her.”

  The display looked amazing, I had to admit. Simona placed the final bag down on the counter and stood back to admire her work.

  She looked back over at me. “But everything is okay?”

  “Everything is fine!”

  “I think she knows,” Pippa whispered when we were back in the kitchen.

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. There’s no way she can possibly know.” And it did kind of seem impossible, unless she was in direct communication with Anderson from the Golden Medallion.

  But I had to admit that she had seemed suspicious when we’d walked in. What was with all the questions?

  Maybe if we hadn’t acted so darn suspiciously ourselves when we’d snuck in. We probably gave ourselves away; she didn’t need to be in direct contact with Anderson to know that we were up to something.

  There was another reason I didn’t want Simona, specifically, to know that we were in trouble. The only reason Simona and I knew each other in the first place was because she’d been the manager of a bakery franchise that had once operated down the road. That chain company had been called Bakermatic, and we’d been friendly—and at times not so friendly—competition for years before Bakermatic folded.

  Simona came to work for me, but I’d never shaken off the feeling that she still held loyalty to her old company. And maybe it was all in my head, but I couldn’t help feeling that she considered me a hypocrite for now making a deal with a different franchise, even though The Pastry Tree was a far more ethical company than Bakermatic had ever been.

  So if she found out that the deal was going to fall through, I had a feeling she would be the first to gloat.

  The second would be Kenneth.

  But I didn’t have time to worry about either of them right then. We had to get to work. The bakery, especially the kitchen, had always been our home base any time we’ve had to tackle anything like this. And we’d had quite a few murder mysteries to solve. Somehow, the kitchen of the bakery had become our de facto detective agency headquarters.

  “I can’t figure out who would have a motive to kill Cheryl,” Pippa said, taking a seat on a kitchen stool in front of the large silver bench we used to roll dough on. I saw her put her black sleeves right in a little pile of the white powder. I shook my head and sat next to her. There really was no escaping the stuff, was there?

  “I can,” I said.

  Pippa looked surprised. “Really? You move quickly. How do you have a suspect already?”

  I’d been thinking about that phone call for the past couple of hours, wondering what it could have possibly meant. Had Anderson’s act of concern—for both Cheryl and her hotel bill—all been for show? Did he really ‘discover’ her dead body? Or was he the one who put it there in the first place?

  “Well, not a motive, per se.” I tried to avoid putting my own elbows in another erstwhile pile of flour. I was going to have to have a chat with my apprentice baker, Bronson, about cleaning up after he was done at the end of a shift. “But I heard the manager of the hotel acting very suspiciously on the phone.”

  Her shock expanded as I filled her in on what I had heard.

  “That’s all I heard, though. As soon as he ended the call I had to run to get out of there before he spotted me. My thighs are still aching from how fast I had to take the stairs,” I said, reaching down to rub them.

  “What did he mean, Miss Spellman has gone?” Pippa said, leaning forward, emphasizing the word ‘gone.’

  I shook
my head. “I don’t know. But he sure seemed happy that Cheryl was dead.”

  Pippa frowned and thought about it. “Maybe she was a terrible hotel guest? Maybe she annoyed one of the other guests? Maybe that’s who he was talking to on the other end of the line.”

  I had no idea. I had been wracking my brain, trying to figure it out. I just wish I’d had more of the phone conversation to listen to. As soon as I’d gotten back to the lobby, the police were there and I’d quickly ducked out. I didn’t want to be caught at yet another crime scene, especially not by one detective in particular.

  Pippa leaned back on her stool and almost toppled over. “Well, we have reason to suspect this hotel manager, but we still need a motive. A firm one, not just a bunch of guesses.”

  I nodded. She was right. And we were going to have to find one.

  Meanwhile, my phone had been blowing up with texts and emails all day after I’d listed my spare room for rent on Craigslist. I’d been pretty simple with my ad. I’d just said that I had a spare room, no furniture included and uploaded one very simple photograph.

  But there must have been an accommodation shortage in Belldale at that time because I’d received over twenty replies, which was about twenty more than I’d expected in such a short space of time.

  One of them was particularly troubling. “How many people can fit inside the room? There are five of us in total.” If that wasn’t enough to scare me, a brief scan of the rest of their email revealed that they were just traveling through town and would only need the room for six weeks.

  What, was I renting my spare room out to a traveling circus? I deleted the inquiry immediately. The rest of them weren’t much better. There were a lot of couples enquiring about the room. Even though I’d just lived with a couple—Pippa and Marcello, plus Lolly—I didn’t want to be third wheeling a pair of strangers all the time. It was one thing to house share with a couple you actually know, but putting up with the arguments and…other things of a strange couple, no thanks. That was not appealing.

  Then there were the responses that were just plain creepy. Asking personal questions about me and whether or not I was single. Those responses all ended up in the trash folder as well.