Stella wasn’t paying attention and the road got considerably less well taken care of. There were several potholes and she managed to dip her car off in the biggest one possible. The car didn’t care to make it back onto the road and instead they bumped off and hit a mailbox.
“I’m just going to say it, Stella,” Vivian said. “This was a mistake.”
“We had him,” Stella said, “it was the right move.”
“What were we going to do? Follow him to his house, break in, and take pictures of evidence?”
Stella blinked at her. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s the only way to nail him.”
“Now what are we going to do?”
“Let’s go, we can push this out probably.” Stella said. “Should we try chasing him on foot? No, you’ll just slow me down.”
“Excuse me,” Vivian said, “we need a tow.”
“I am not paying for a tow truck. We’re getting out a different way,” Stella said.
“And what about the mailbox?”
“We’ll leave a note. I’m sorry we hit your mailbox, but there wasn’t any damage. Have a good day. Done.”
“You can’t just leave a note for something like this. We need a tow truck.”
“Coco can come and help, she can bring Scooter,” she said.
“I don’t think that boy has a single muscle in his scrawny bod,” Vivian said.
“Sure, he does, it’s just underneath those baggy t-shirts he wears,” Stella said as she dialed.
Vivian just shook her head wondering how on Earth she ended up being friends with such a nut job. A lovable nut job.
“Coco, yes Vivian and I were on the hot trail of a possible suspect,” Stella said.
“Yes, we are perfectly safe... in Tilletsville.... we were eating at the deli... the car won’t move.”
Stella hung up the phone after telling Coco the road and turned to Vivian. “Now, we wait. Give me a chip.”
Chapter Eleven
The wind whipped my hair into my eyes, and I rolled the window up. Masie’s hair stood straight up and she didn’t bother to smooth it down.
“So, they were following some guy in Tilletsville?” She searched through different dessert displays on Pinterest to set up in the restaurant. We planned to open at three for a soft opening and it was now eleven.
The soft opening was only about twenty people who’d been invited. It was so we could iron out the kinks before the big day. It was only three days away and I was still nervous no one would want to come.
Luckily the wandering grandmas hadn’t gotten too far away. We were multitasking while Scooter and Rose oversaw the decorating and baking that had gotten started at the shop.
The new girl I’d hired, Hilary had been terrified to come into the bakery. She tried to quit. Scooter somehow charmed her into staying and she was making all the preliminary baked goods. Thank goodness the kid was good looking enough to pull her in.
There wouldn’t have been a way to find someone on such short notice with her experience. I didn’t think it would be that much trouble to get Stella unstuck. Her Buick wasn’t in the best shape. The FIAT certainly couldn’t pull the boat out, but I had written down a good tow company's information as a backup plan.
“You know what this reminds me of,” Masie said as we headed into Tilletsville. We drove past a sign that said, 'Come for the bird watching, stay for the view.' It didn’t make sense because the town was just as flat and boring as ours. The view must have been metaphorical. I wasn’t even sure there were that many birds.
“What?”
“When we stalked the brownie guy in high school and almost got shot,” Masie said smirking at me.
“Oh no,” I said, “I try to forget that whole day.”
“How could you, we called him the magic man.” She was laughing now, and I couldn’t help but think back to college when we both were just getting our sea legs. Both of us had not declared a major and were done with our basic education classes.
Neither of us wanted to face the future so we baked. Pretty soon we had bake sales outside our dorm. That was until the school said we couldn’t do so without a permit. After that got shut down, we received permission from the businesses on campus to do bake sells in front of their buildings.
We made great money, had fun, and found our passion. I declared a business major and took entrepreneurship classes. Masie took cooking classes after her regular classes. We had a plan, a future. Then came the magic man.
Mason Dirk started to sell brownies, cookies, and other sweets at the same time we did. It felt like he purposely booked the spots next to ours and he always got all of our business. Masie wanted to beat him up and sabotage his business, but I had a different idea.
“It has to be pot,” I told her one night as we shared a box of ramen noodles and a Fanta.
“What?” she asked having been lost in singing the Fanta commercial and dancing with the can.
“Pot, he’s putting weed or hash or whatever in his sweets. That’s why so many people go to him instead of us.”
“That makes a lot of sense,” Masie said nodding. “The other day I asked him what his secret was during a down time. He winked at me and said, the secret ingredient.”
“Well, there’s even more evidence,” I said.
“Yeah, what a cliché thing to say,” Masie agreed.
“We should follow him. We’ll follow him to his source, and then we’ll see him, you know, putting in the weed,” I said with a shrug. I wasn’t sure how it worked at all.
That afternoon we followed him slowly in our car. I had a blue car I’d named Ice back then. A small mustang from the 80s. I missed old Ice sometimes. We followed him in his van all the way to a house way off the path.
Masie and I parked on the road and hid in a bush. It was the most insane thing to do.
We saw him go into the house and when we snuck up to the window, his grandma was handing him bags of sweets. He never would have known we’d followed him there if Masie hadn’t yelled loudly, “His grandma is the secret ingredient?”
Mason looked up and saw us staring in the window. We both ran back to Ice as fast as we could. No one chased us and as far as we could tell he didn’t call the cops. But he must have been so embarrassed he never set up shop next to us again.
“Turn here,” Masie said pointing to Roundabout Way.
I turned onto the road and slowed down. After the roundabout, the road became bumpy. It was no wonder Stella had gotten stuck. There were huge potholes. We spotted the Buick buried up in a ditch with two ladies bickering at each other behind it.
I couldn’t help but smile.
Getting out of the car I walked around the Buick to see what the damage was. They’d spun the tire so much it was buried in over two inches of mud.
“We’re going to have to call a tow,” I told her.
“I knew it!” Vivian said punching a fist in the air. “I told her we needed one.”
“I’m not paying for a tow,” Stella said. “Get in and Vivian you can push.”
I dialed the tow truck and in the next thirty minutes we all drove back to the bakery to get ready for the soft opening.
“Look who I found,” I told Scooter and the rest of the crew when I walked in. Red and Henry already sat drinking coffee and eating the first batch of Hilary’s cookies. “Hey, those are for the guests.”
“Nope,” Red said, “that little sweetie you hired said we’re her official taste testers.” He puffed his chest a little.
“Where were you two,” Scooter asked? “Breaking some young men’s hearts, I’ll bet.”
“Oh you,” Stella said waving a hand at him. “No, we were chasing a bad guy. We think we know who killed the mover.”
“We need to call the police,” Vivian said as if the thought had just occurred to her. I realized it probably had.
Hilary came out of the kitchen with another plate of cookies. She was a bright-eyed blond with a high ponytail and a lot of energy. I’d bee
n lucky she needed an internship while home from a great Culinary School up north. When she’d tried to quit I almost wept.
“We’ll taste those for you sweetheart,” Stella said and plopped down at one of the tables. Hilary shrugged and set them down in front of her.
“We’re almost ready,” Hilary said. “Everything is either baked to your specifications or the recipe is ready for you.”
“Great,” I told her. “I made a lot of things ahead of time because I couldn’t sleep last night. Most are in the walk-in. Right before three we’ll put them all out and Masie has a way she’s going to display them.”
“Logan is coming over to take our statement,” Vivian said as she sat down across from Stella. “He believes us.”
“Or he wants to come and see Coco,” Masie teased.
I brushed that comment off. I had too much to worry about then to dissect the little quip.
“Okay people, we have less that an hour. Let’s make this a great day to bake!”
I felt cheesy as I took off towards the recipes Hilary had prepared for me. Humming as I started putting things together and into ovens, I tried not to think about anything else. I wasn’t prepared for the first customers to show up early.
I also wasn’t prepared for them to have a camera and what looked like radio equipment. On further inspection, I determined they were paranormal investigators.
“We’re standing in the middle of the bakery where Thomas Nicolas McClain was murdered in cold blood. The police don’t have any leads, but we’re about to see if Thomas himself can tell us what happened.” The guy had a really deep and raspy voice, sort of like he was mimicking Batman.
When he said cut however, he changed to a nasally high-pitched grating voice. “Okay Gil I think we nailed that one. We’ll move onto the murder sight.”
I stepped in front of him and held up my hands. “I’m going to stop you right there. You can’t be here today. In a very short time, I have customers coming. I want them to be comfortable. This,” I gestured to the camera and equipment, “is not comfortable.”
“Lady, it’s a free country. We can be here.”
“You need me to kick them out, Coco,” Red said standing from the table. “I’m full of sugar and piss. Let me at them.”
“I think it’s piss and vinegar,” I told him, “and no thank you I can get them to leave on my own.”
“No,” the guy said crossing his arms in front of him. “You can’t.”
“Is there a problem here,” Logan came up behind the guys and loomed over them. I’d never been happier to see him than I was right then.
“Yes, they can’t do their paranormal investigation before my grand opening,” I told him. I made a point to smirk at the kids as I said it.
“You have to have permission from the owner to do this sort of thing,” Logan told them as he turned their way.
“No way, it’s public property,” Gil said.
Logan started to respond when someone else with a camera came in. Local news man and town playboy Gus Smathers.
“This is Gus Smathers reporting live from the Mad Batter where they are planning a soft opening today. The site is the place were Thomas McClain was brutally murdered. We are here to ask the owners if they have no shame, after this.” He put a finger up and spun it around. “That was great, let’s move on to the interviews. Go get some footage of that back room where everything happened.”
He pointed to the back and his camera guy headed that way. Everything was completely slipping out of my control and my face started to get hot.
“No,” I said, “this can’t be happening.”
“It’s okay,” Logan said putting a reassuring hand on my arm. “I’ll get them out of here.”
“Excuse me sir,” the nasally kid said to Gus. “I’m Stan Roberts and this is my associate Gil Bradshaw. We're here to investigate for paranormal activity, and she wants us to leave. Can you please run a story on how unfair that is?”
“Oh, come on,” Masie who’d been standing by getting redder and redder grabbed Gus Smathers by the collar and drug him out the door. Masie and Gus had a little history we knew about but didn’t ask. Maybe she could get him to leave.
“I should just cancel the soft opening,” I told the people left in the room.
“I think that’s a good idea,” the camera boy said.
“No one asked you Gil,” I said at the same time Stan did. Well we could agree on that. Perhaps we could reach an agreement.
“No, sweetie,” Vivian said, “you can do this.”
I realized it was too late to fix anything when the first customer walked through the door and looked around in anticipation. I was in a lot of trouble and I didn’t know how I was going to have a successful business if this could go so wrong.
More customers showed up and I heard Logan arguing with the paranormal investigators in the back. Masie was out front grabbing Gus’s arm and keeping him outside. The smile on her face was a flirty one. There was no telling what she was telling him for my benefit.
“Hi, welcome to the Mad Batter,” I said to the man, “what can I get for you?”
By some miracle we managed to keep the paranormal team and the newsman occupied for the first wave of customers. The rest of the soft open turned into a circus. Once Vivian and Stella had seated themselves in a booth, Stan started walking around with his weird beeping machines.
“What you got there, young man,” Stella said. “Some type of alien detector?”
“No, Stella,” Vivian said, “he’s clearly hunting vampires in a bakery. They’ve got a sweet tooth.” Vivian laughed so hard at her own joke she had to wipe tears from her eyes.
Stella pulled Stan down into the seat next to her and prepared to distract him while Vivian purposely got up to poke at Gil’s camera to his dismay.
“There’s my girls,” I said under my breath.
Red and Henry joined in the harassing.
“So you mean to tell me,” Red said loudly after listening to Stan for a bit, “that dead guy is floating around in here somewhere.”
I stopped listening and went back to greeting customers. Luckily, everyone seemed thrilled with the confections. I sold a lot, gave away some and felt pretty good about the whole thing.
When I shut the door and turned the sign at a little after five the two paranormal nuts were still being tortured by the geriatric Scooby Gang. I didn’t know where the news guy was but somehow Masie had run him off. I chuckled. Thank goodness for all my friends.
Red and Henry walked the supernatural trackers out the front door. I heard Gil say, “we’ll be back.” There wasn’t a lot of force behind it leading me to believe maybe they didn’t get too much paranormal indications when they were there.
Rose rushed in looking exhausted.
“I tried really hard to get through all my clients but had a poo emergency and had to fit her in,” she said. “I’m so sorry I missed the soft open.”
“I know all about poo emergencies,” Red started, and I held up a hand.
“The dog rolled in it, Red, please don’t go there while there is still food out.”
“I’ll help the most with clean-up,” Rose said.
“No need,” I told her. “We just need to put up the leftovers and throw away the plates.” I was happy I’d opted for paper products instead of my serving dishes for the soft open. “We’ll clean up tomorrow and start getting ready for the real opening.
“Did anyone seem suspicious?” Stella asked coming up beside me.
“What,” I tried to ignore the fact she had a notepad and a pencil. Logan walked back in and I wasn’t really sure where he’d been the whole time. He shook his head and laughed behind her.
“Suspects always return to the scene of a crime. It’s like an ego thing” she said, dead serious.
“Okay, Madam PI, she doesn’t need your help,” Red said coming up to Stella.
“She’s right, they do usually come back,” Logan said, “but I don’t think anyo
ne in here today was our suspect.”
“Alright, well let’s get done and get out of here. I have a hot bath and glass of wine calling my name,” I said. Truthfully, I planned to do that, but exhaustion was setting in and it wouldn’t have surprised me if I just went home and crawled under the covers.
Chapter Twelve
Waking up in the middle of the night I sat up and realized I was sweating. My nightgown clung to me along with my hair. I remembered something. It was something Logan hadn't mentioned again. The guy Tom was fighting with at the restaurant. I'd forgotten all about it and Logan hadn't pressed.
Clearly, he didn't think my information was credible, but the more I thought about it the more it made sense. Bald Sweater Guy could have killed Tom. He could also be the person sneaking around in the back of my bakery. This thought made me angry. I shook my fist at the Bald Sweater guy and then I couldn't go back to sleep.
I called Masie.
"Ow, hello," she said.
"Ow, hello," I said back. "Were you up?"
"No and I hit myself in the face with my club when the phone rang," she said.
"A club...what club?"
"I bought a police club when all this started. I live alone, don't need a man. This is my man, but he hit me in the face. What time is it?"
I hadn't even thought to look and see what time it was. Glancing at the clock I saw it was almost three in the morning. "It's really early...sorry Mase."
"What's wrong," she said sounding more alert. "Is it the guy, is he there? Do I need to bring my club?"
"No, it's just you remember that guy we saw Tom arguing with the day he passed?"
"Yeah Sweatery Bald guy," she said.
"Funny, I've been calling him Bald Sweater guy," I told her. "Anyway, I mentioned him to Logan the first time he questioned me. After that I kind of forgot about him."
"Oh yeah, you thinking he offed the guy?" She yawned loudly.
"I don't know, but the police should be looking at him right? He could be getting away with murder. Should I call Logan?"
A Drizzle of Murder Page 5
