A Sampling of Murder: Cupcake Truck Mysteries

by Emily James

  “Oh, yes, umm…” The sounds of her clicking on her keyboard filled the space. “Let me get you the phone number for Mr. Jenner’s lawyer. He’s handling his estate, so he’d be the one you’d need to speak to.”

  From what Claire had told me, Jenner Developments was a small business staff-wise. Mr. Jenner preferred to handle a lot of the business himself, but even he would need a lawyer for legal matters.

  “Thank you. And I’m sorry for your loss.”

  I wrote down the lawyer’s phone number. I called the number, introduced myself once I was connected to the lawyer himself, and explained that we needed the name and phone number of who our new landlord would be.

  “All his property will be going to a family member, but they haven’t decided yet what to do about the property.” The lawyer’s voice was nasally, and his tone sounded annoyed that he would have to deal with someone like me. “They might sell it.”

  That was even worse than we’d expected. If the building was sold, the new owner might not want to rent it out at all. They certainly wouldn’t be willing to give us the same deal as Claire had negotiated with Bob Jenner. Our only hope of getting the same deal was that whoever inherited would want to respect Mr. Jenner’s final wishes.

  “You’ll be contacted once the estate is settled with the family’s decision,” the lawyer said.

  We needed a chance to talk to the person who would inherit before they made any decisions. That way, we could at least plead our case.

  But the lawyer had been careful to not reveal so much as the gender of the family member set to inherit.

  I hadn’t mentioned the vandalism because we’d taken care of it ourselves without even going through our rental insurance. Perhaps that would give me a way in.

  “We’d appreciate knowing what the new owner plans to do. I’d still really like to speak to them in the meantime. We were vandalized last night, and we were hoping to speak to the owner about security.”

  “Already taken care of.” His tone was definitely brusque, as if he were hoping this would finally wrap up the conversation. “A security company will be coming out to install security cameras within the next couple of days. Now, if that’s all, I have clients I need to attend to.”

  Of course, they would already know about it. The police probably called Mr. Jenner’s lawyer as soon as we filed the report since he was handling the estate.

  I was out of ideas at the moment for anything that might convince him to give me so much as a hint about who the new owner might be. “That’s all.”

  8

  Claire and I stared at the clock on the wall. I couldn’t speak for her, but I felt like we were back staring at the spray paint on our windows a few days ago.

  “We gave it our best,” I said.

  “We failed you mean.”

  The words hit me hard enough to make my chest hurt.

  You wouldn’t be able to survive without me, Jarrod used to say. Weak. Failure. Worthless.

  This had been my chance to prove him wrong. More than that, it was the dream I thought I’d never get a chance to have thanks to the bad choice I’d made in my marriage partner.

  And I’d let myself think that this time, finally, what I wanted out of life was going to work out despite the setbacks.

  “Maybe we can still do it. What does your checklist say for how much time we’d need?”

  Claire picked it up from the top of the display counter. The list would tell us if there was any hope at all. Claire had not only written down everything we needed to do. She’d put it in the most efficient order, assigned a time block to it for how long it should take, and came up with a tentative schedule. The last one had been obliterated the day Bob Jenner died. Even with our teenage helper—whose name turned out to be Scott—working with us all day today, we hadn’t been able to catch up. He’d apologized multiple times about needing to leave when he did, and once again, he’d said he’d be back tomorrow, and we could pay him then.

  Claire’s lips moved silently, a sign she was mentally adding totals. “Two days’ worth at best. Maybe as much as three.”

  It was already after five at night, and we were supposed to open tomorrow morning. Even working through the night, we wouldn’t be able to complete two to three days’ work.

  Claire tossed the clipboard back onto the counter. It landed with a clatter. “I’ll text Dan and tell him he won’t need to bring us supper. We might as well go home since there’s no chance we’ll be ready for the opening even with an all-nighter.”

  Claire’s words mirrored my own thoughts so closely that it felt like pouring alcohol into the wound.

  I’d been working on my relationship with God, praying, reading the Bible, and attending church with Dan, Janie, and Claire. But at times like this it felt like God didn’t care about someone like me. Someone who had screwed up her life so badly and had ignored and blamed him for so long. It felt like he was letting me have the consequences of my life choices to make sure I’d learn my lesson.

  That wasn’t the God that the pastor preached about or Dan talked about, but that’s how it felt. How did I even know God was there and listening?

  I sighed and headed back to the kitchen, leaving Claire texting in the front room. There was still work to do. The chances of the business failing because we missed our opening day—with all the press and buzz we’d planned—were higher, but who knew. It’d take a miracle to succeed now, but it wasn’t completely impossible.

  Believing in miracles is a crutch for the weak-minded, Jarrod used to say.

  Sometimes I was afraid he was right. He’d always mocked religion, repeating back to me all the things that were popularly shared in the news and society. As a person who’d grown up in a Christian home, I saw the holes in his logic and the caricatures he painted, but I’d never been brave enough to speak up. Instead, I’d been angry enough at God and already scared enough of my husband that I pretended to agree with him.

  Maybe things would have been different if I’d had faith to hang on to and I could have believed what the Bible said about me more than what Jarrod said about me. Maybe I’d have had the self-confidence to leave him sooner.

  Without a time machine, I’d never know what might have been.

  A knock sounded on the front door. Probably someone thinking we were already open. Claire was out front, so she could handle it.

  I wasn’t sure I could.

  Claire gasped.

  Icy tingles flashed over my skin. Had the person who murdered Mr. Jenner come back?

  I lunged for the door separating the kitchen from the rest of the shop. If someone had forced their way in, I needed to call 9-1-1 before they knew I was here.

  I peeked out.

  Dan, Blake, and three women who looked like family too, based on their features, stood in the shop. Claire had one of them in a hug that was tight enough I was surprised she hadn’t squeezed the woman’s eyeballs out. What was going on?

  I exited the kitchen.

  “Isabel!” Claire practically shrieked my name. She waved at me. “Come here.”

  Her cheeks were damp as if she’d been crying. I’d never seen Claire cry. Not even at her grandfather’s funeral.

  “You know Blake already.”

  He grinned at me.

  Claire pointed at each of the women. “This is Stacey.”

  That was a name I recognized. When I first met Blake, and we were talking about the grandchildren helping with their grandfather’s living expenses, he’d said Stacey had helped until her mom needed an expensive operation.

  “How’s your mom?” I asked.

  She drew her chin back, and her eyes widened slightly as if she couldn’t believe I would remember a detail like that about someone I’d never met. “She’s doing really well, but she hates sticking to her new diet and going to physio.”

  Claire pointed to the next two women in line. The younger one had a nose ring and hair that looked too black to be her natural color. The older woman beside her s
hared her cheekbones and blue eyes. The resemblance between them was even closer than between all the others, probably a mother and daughter.

  “And this,” Claire said, “is Haley and Wendy.”

  I smiled at each of them in turn even though I didn’t feel like it. If they’d come to get a look at the place before opening, their timing was all wrong. Surely Dan would have realized that after Claire’s text.

  “What are you all doing here?” I addressed the question to Dan.

  The smile he gave me made me feel warm down into the tips of my toes. “We couldn’t let you miss your opening day.”

  “What good is having a big family,” Blake said, “if we can’t at least show up when you need us most.”

  That almost sounded like he was including me, but I wasn’t family. He must have meant Claire was their family. As her business partner, I’d benefit as well.

  Stacey waved a hand at the room. “I’ve got my toolbox in the truck, so Danny and I can work on setting up tables, building any remaining shelving, hanging pictures, whatever you need.”

  I smirked at Dan. I hadn’t ever heard him called Danny before. Stacey looked about our age, so my guess was she’d been one of the cousins that he played with as a child.

  He and Stacey exited the shop, presumably to collect the tools she’d mentioned.

  Blake craned his neck to look past me. “She’s a master carpenter, so she’s the one to trust with that.” He edged past me, moving me out of the way by the shoulders so fast that my body didn’t even have time to panic at the contact. “You’d be better off putting me in the kitchen. I have experience now, and seniors can be picky customers.”

  That was right. Dan had mentioned that Blake recently got a job working in the kitchen of a senior’s residence. It had to feel good after he’d been unemployed for so long.

  My heart felt like my chest cavity was too small to hold it. These people weren’t my family, and I’d only met most of them today. So why did they feel so much like family?

  The teenager with the nose ring forged after him. Haley, Claire had introduced her as. “I can measure stuff too, Blake. It’s not that hard.”

  Wendy laid a hand on my shoulder. “Like we told Claire, we’re your hands wherever you need us, for as long as you need us, to make sure this place opens tomorrow like it’s supposed to.”

  I understood why Claire had been crying. My own eyes felt tight and hot. “Thank you.”

  Wendy gave two hearty pats on my shoulder. “It’s not all altruistic. We couldn’t pass up the chance to meet the woman who got Claire out of her funk over that piece-of-dirt husband of hers.”

  “Or the one who got Uncle Dan dating again,” Haley called from the kitchen.

  Heat flared up my cheeks. If Haley meant me, that Dan and I were dating, there’d been a huge misunderstanding.

  I swiveled to face Claire. She knew I couldn’t date. Surely she’d help me by clearing that up. Besides, how did the extended family even know about me other than as Claire’s business partner? Did Dan talk about me?

  Claire gave me a let it be shoulder shrug. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought she was holding back a smile.

  Dan and Stacey set to work out front with Claire directing them. Blake, Haley, Wendy, and I clustered in the kitchen. I set each of them tasks.

  For one heartbeat, I watched them work. Maybe God still heard my prayers after all.

  9

  Haley turned on the oven for our first batch of cupcakes. Or, more accurately, she tried to turn it on. Nothing happened.

  Blake nudged her with his elbow. “I know you break technology by looking at it, but I didn’t know that extended to appliances or I’d have turned the oven on myself.”

  Haley stuck her tongue out at him. “I didn’t break it!”

  My cheeks felt tired from smiling. Even when my dad was alive, it’d been just the two of us. I’d never been in the middle of a larger family with a good, close relationship. I hadn’t realized what I was missing.

  What was going on finally filtered through. I set aside the buttercream roses I’d been piping onto small slips of parchment. “Let me try it.”

  Haley moved aside to give me space.

  I pressed the buttons, but I got the same warning code that Haley had. It’d worked before. I tested all the appliances and other equipment before I paid the former renter for. My limbs felt heavy. We couldn’t survive one more set back. If the oven was broken, we’d really be done. Not even the whole Cartwright family showing up would save us.

  “I’ll call the man who sold them to us and see if he’s ever had a similar problem.” I pulled out my phone and dialed his number. A man’s voice answered on the third ring. “Is this Mr. Wendt?”

  “It is.”

  “This is Isabel from How Sweet It Is. We bought your bakery equipment, and the stove stopped working. I was wondering if you had any ideas about it.”

  There was a squeaking-creaking noise in the background that sounded like him settling into a recliner chair. “It was the stove that stopped working you say.”

  “Dad,” a man’s voice said on his end, faint but not so soft as to be hard to hear, “do you want me to go check on the oven?”

  “Naw, naw,” Mr. Wendt said. “It’s an easy fix. It happened all the time. Has anyone moved or bumped the oven since you used it last?”

  Considering the last time I turned it on was before Bob Jenner died, that was a certainty. The trauma cleaners would have moved it when they were cleaning. “Yes.”

  “There’s a shut-off valve for the gas that’s too sensitive. Every time my Annie cleaned, we had to turn the valve back on.”

  Blake must have heard because he leaned around the oven. “Got it.”

  Haley rushed forward and pressed the buttons. The poof of the oven firing up sounded clearly.

  “You saved us before we’re even open.” I hoped he could hear the smile and the relief in my voice. “I’ll owe you a dozen cupcakes in thanks. What’s your address? I’ll even personally deliver them.”

  He gave me his address. “But a visit would be enough of a thanks. I don’t get out much anymore, and seeing a pretty young lady would brighten my day.”

  I wasn’t really either of those things. I couldn’t begin to imagine what he looked like, but my mental picture was building of a bald man with a mustache and suspenders. “How do you know I’m young? Or pretty? I don’t want to disappoint you.”

  “I’m a seventy-year-old man with age spots and a bum hip. If you’re under fifty-five and can walk without a cane, you’ll be young and pretty to me.”

  I laughed out loud. I’d never tell Claire that she wouldn’t be considered young by Mr. Wendt.

  I ended the call and started on the lemon curd we’d need once the first batch of cupcakes came out of the oven. Haley already had the muffin tins almost filled with batter.

  I’d set a time to visit Mr. Wendt next week, but suddenly I wished it was earlier. I’d assumed he closed his business because of age. And maybe he had. He had said he was over seventy and had a bum hip.

  With everything that happened here so far, though, maybe he’d closed his shop for other reasons. Claire had been so focused on finding us a location we could afford, on a street with enough traffic to make financial sense, that she hadn’t thought to look up crime statistics for this neighborhood. I hadn’t thought about it either. The street looked safe. Neither of us had enough experience with real estate to have considered looks could be deceiving.

  Claire and I were willing to fight through the challenges of crimes taking place in and around our place of business because we had energy, and we were young. If we didn’t work How Sweet It Is, we’d both need to find other work to support ourselves.

  If bad things started happening, and I was retirement age anyway, I might not have fought so fiercely. I might have decided I’d had a good run of it and should leave before anything worse happened.

  Talking to Mr. Wendt would give me the
perfect opportunity to find out if this neighborhood was a crime hot spot or if we were being targeted for some reason.

  10

  “Scott’s coming in again today, isn’t he?” I asked Claire as I unlocked the bakery for our second week.

  The street around us was so quiet this early in the morning that I could hear the electric hum of the street lamps. My voice sounded like a shout with the way it seemed to echo off the buildings. I’d seen Lakeshore at this time of day before, but never in this way. Before I’d been awake out of fear while the city slept.

  Claire yawned so largely that her jaw popped. “We’ll need to make his position official soon. Once he hits full-time hours, we have to make all the government contributions.”

  Only Claire would be able to manage something like that while half awake. But she was right.

  Our first week had been so busy that we’d ended up needing Scott’s help every day so that I could spend most of my time in the kitchen. “If it stays this busy.”

  Claire gave me a look that said don’t jinx it. “We’ll need him to fill out the paperwork regardless today. If we let it go on any longer, we could be accused of paying him under the table.”

  The muscles in my neck tensed at the thought of an IRS agent poking into our business and asking questions. Questions that would require a name and SSN from me.

  “I’ll get everything set out, and he can do it today.”

  If it stayed this busy, we’d likely need to hire someone else as well as Scott. Once he saved up enough to start college and had classes to attend, he wouldn’t be able to work as many hours.

  Claire headed straight for the kitchen, but I turned off into our office.

  I froze halfway to the desk. Something was off. The hair on my arms stood up as if I’d been hit by a gust of icy wind.

  The room was small enough that I knew there wasn’t someone hiding in it. I looked behind that door to be sure anyway.

  Whatever it was, wasn’t as obvious as that.