Beyond a Reasonable Donut

by Ginger Bolton

  I guessed, “Maybe it was because she had to quickly come up with an address in Fallingbrook, and the only one she knew was for where she’d been working, Suds for Buds, but she gave the building a nonexistent second story. Buddy from Suds for Buds has been trying to reach her, too. She left there Friday night for a break and never came back.”

  “Wait. Wasn’t that woman murdered Friday night?”

  “Yes, around the time that Kassandra left Suds for Buds. Across the street from Suds for Buds.”

  Summer’s eyes widened. She took a deep breath. “Uh-oh.”

  Quietly, I told her about the man who’d been at Suds for Buds and had left about the same time Kassandra did. “I don’t know if Kassandra was with that guy after he left Suds for Buds.”

  “We saw her after that, so if he murdered Zippy Melwyn, he didn’t murder Kassandra. At least not then.”

  We stared into each other’s eyes. Summer whispered, “He could have done away with her after she left here yesterday afternoon.”

  I added, only slightly louder, “Maybe he was afraid she suspected him of murder.”

  “Maybe she helped him do it.”

  “That’s hard to imagine, but . . .”

  Summer finished my sentence. “Not impossible.” She glanced toward the door again, and I looked too. The door was glass. People were out on the sidewalk, but there was no Kassandra running toward The Craft Croft and apologizing for being late. Summer returned her gaze to me. “Could she be sick, or did something happen to her? Like an accident and the hospital wouldn’t know to call me?” Her eyes were aqua like her dress, but about two shades deeper.

  “I told my detective friend Brent about her. I suspect that if she’d been arrested or hurt or worse, he might have asked me for more information.”

  “I might have to report that she’s missing, but it seems a little soon, especially since she seems to make a habit of leaving jobs with no notice.”

  “She’s left at least two nice employers without warning.”

  “Thanks, I think. She could have run away, like if she knows who the murderer is and saw him following her or something.”

  I tried to combat my rising unease about whether the man had caught up with Kassandra. “She wrote on our application form that she lived in Lapeer, Michigan. That’s sort of near Detroit. If she’s commuting to and from there, you can expect her to be late.”

  Summer let out a sigh that was almost a laugh. “Like a day or two.”

  “I can tell Brent about our concerns without filing a formal report. I saw both Kassandra and Zippy for the first time on Friday the thirteenth, and Zippy was also from Lapeer.” I knew I shouldn’t tell anyone that the address Kassandra had given me was also the late Zippy Melwyn’s address, so I didn’t mention it. Instead, I explained why I’d come. “Aside from worrying about what might have happened to her, I’m sorry that she’s not here. I was hoping for a sample of her handwriting.”

  Summer snapped her fingers. “I have one. I was going to have her compose a letter, but she wanted the exact wording, so I dictated it and she wrote it down. She said her handwriting was faster than her hunt-and-peck keyboarding. She was going to type it for me today. Maybe she was scared to come in and have to use a keyboard.” Summer opened the desk drawer again. “It should be in here.”

  “If you find it, can you handle it by the edges?”

  Summer glanced up at me from underneath raised eyebrows. “I’ll try.” She carefully lifted papers out of the drawer, and then looked through the inbox. “Aha. Here it is. It’s not personal, only a letter to a sculpture garden about one of our sculptors.” Summer was good at handling things without putting fingerprints on them. She slid the paper onto the desk.

  I leaned over and studied it. My heart rate sped. “I’m no expert, but I think this matches the handwriting on another letter. The police should probably see it.”

  “Unless Kassandra shows up here, I’m the only one who can say for certain that she wrote this letter. Can they get fingerprints off paper?”

  “They can if they soak the paper in a chemical called ninhydrin. The prints show up purple.”

  “That sounds like an interesting art project, maybe.”

  “I don’t think anyone should spend a lot of time around possibly toxic chemicals.”

  “Well, there is that. But playing with color is an obsession.”

  I got out my phone and took a picture of the letter. I wanted to compare it right then and there to the photo I’d taken earlier of the torn, threatening letter, but I knew I shouldn’t tell Summer things that the police and I and possibly no one else—except, perhaps, Kassandra—knew.

  Summer again glanced toward the door. “I kind of hope she doesn’t come back. I’d be scared to have her around.”

  I teased, “I’ll stay here and protect you while I call Brent. He’ll probably want to keep this letter.”

  “He can have it. I know what it says. I’ll type it from memory.” She drummed her fingernails on the desk. “Meanwhile, how about if I lock up while you’re calling your detective friend? I’ll hide in my office and eat lunch.”

  “Okay.”

  She locked the glass door, turned her OPEN sign to CLOSED, and went into her office.

  I called Brent’s personal line.

  He answered immediately. “Hi, Em.”

  I asked him if he’d caught up with Kassandra yet.

  “I was just about to look for her at The Craft Croft.”

  “That’s where I am. She was supposed to work here today, but she hasn’t shown up. Summer has a sample of Kassandra’s handwriting. It’s a lot like the handwriting on the torn-off letter I found in the donut car. The letter’s here.”

  “Tell Summer I’d like to talk to her. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  I was still in The Craft Croft when he parked an unmarked police car in front. He wore khakis with a matching blazer, a white shirt, and a dark green tie with tan tortoises crawling across it. Despite the whimsical tie, his face was serious and businesslike. I let him in, introduced him to Summer, and left.

  Striding up Wisconsin Street, I muttered, “At least he’s not with that icy-sharp detective.” Luckily, no other pedestrians were close enough to hear. I added, “Summer’s tall, gorgeous, and caring. Maybe she’ll distract him from Kimberly Gartborg.”

  Tom went for a short lunch as soon as I returned to Deputy Donut. I fried donuts while Jocelyn waited tables. Tom returned, but Jocelyn refused to go out. The dining room was almost full of kids, and she liked watching them enjoy their milk and donuts. Lots of them ended up with milk mustaches to go with the filling and frosting they couldn’t help smearing on their cheeks when they bit into their donuts.

  I was drawing espresso for one father when Jocelyn came into the kitchen for Earl Grey tea and glanced toward the front door. “Hey, Emily, is that . . . ?”

  Brent? Or Nina, set free, after all?

  I whipped around but was disappointed. I turned back to Jocelyn. “It’s Marsha Fitchelder, the organizer of the Faker’s Dozen Carnival.”

  Jocelyn giggled and whispered, “She’s here to tell you that you can’t park the donut car in its garage, and you have to move it.”

  Tom asked out of the corner of his mouth, “Want me to talk to her?”

  I raised my chin. “I can do it.”

  “That woman’s impossible,” he muttered. “Signal if you need me.”

  I grinned and went out to the dining area. Although smaller tables were available, Marsha was settling herself at one of our biggest ones. Today’s flowing floral dress, without a black vest over it, was quite pretty. Even seated she was intimidating, though.

  I gave her my best customer-service smile and asked cheerfully, “What can I get you?”

  She put on her forbidding block-the-entryway-to-the-carnival face. “Nothing. I came to talk to you.”

  She was sitting with her back to the window. I eased into a chair beside her where I could watch most of th
e dining area and kitchen in case anyone needed me. “What’s up?”

  She aimed an index finger, revolver-style, at me. “You need to stop going around telling people that I had an argument with that mime. It was merely a friendly discussion.”

  She must have been jumping to conclusions based on questions the detectives had asked her. I was certain that other witnesses told them about her argument—or friendly discussion—with Zippy. I kept my jaw from dropping, but I couldn’t prevent my eyes from opening wider.

  She must have taken my silence and questioning surprise as encouragement. “I know you want that murderer to come back and work here,” she claimed, “but I’m warning you. You’ll be sorry if you do.”

  “We . . .” My voice dwindled to nearly nothing. I cleared my throat. “We know her. She’s not a murderer. She would never harm anyone.”

  Marsha gave her index finger several adamant shakes. “She could poison all of your customers and wipe you out financially.”

  What a bizarre idea. “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “You don’t know what I do. Your friend the murderer caught that mime removing a bucket of something from your car and hiding it under a blanket in her car.”

  At the carnival, I had noticed a lumpy blanket behind the seats of Zippy’s car, and later, in an alley near Nina’s loft, the blanket had still been in place, but the heap underneath it had shrunk. “Did you see the mime take something from our car and put it into hers?”

  “I did.”

  “And are you telling me that Nina caught her doing it but didn’t stop her?” That was hard to believe.

  Marsha looked past my donut hat instead of into my eyes. “I did.”

  “Where was I?”

  “You were right in front of your murderous assistant, carrying loads into the carnival, which, if you’d been organized and prepared, you could have avoided by coming the night before when you could have driven to your allotted spot.”

  I ignored that jab. “Do you mean I had my back to the mime and didn’t see her steal from my car?”

  “Or you were pretending not to.” Marsha squinted toward me, making her dark eyes even smaller. “Maybe it was all arranged beforehand between the three of you.”

  That suggestion was so ridiculous that I didn’t respond. I took my pen out of my apron pocket and pulled one of our printed Deputy Donut paper napkins closer. “I’m trying to picture this.” I drew a diagram. “Here’s the mime’s car and our car, and here’s the gap in the fencing, the entryway where you later put turnstiles. Where were you when the mime removed the sugar from our car?”

  Marsha grabbed my pen and stabbed it down into the center of the entryway where she’d stood blocking Nina and me from driving into the carnival. The pen went through all four layers of the napkin.

  I asked, “Where was I?”

  She made a heavy dot that tore through only the top two layers of the napkin. If she was right, I’d been heading toward our tent but had not yet made it to the entryway.

  “Where was Nina?”

  “Here.” She drew an X between me and the donut car. I was pretty sure that Nina and I had walked beside each other. She had certainly never lagged that far behind.

  I had another question. “Where was that big black van with no windows?”

  She drew a rectangle at the spot where I remembered seeing the van next to the donut car. With a triumphant look on her face, she slapped the pen down onto the glass table.

  I grabbed the pen before it could roll off the table. I drew a line between where Marsha had said she was and where our car had been, between the mime’s car and the black van. “The van was blocking your view of our car.”

  “It hadn’t arrived yet or had already left. Or I was farther from the entryway than where I put that dot. But I know what I saw. That mime removed a white plastic bucket from your car.”

  That was the only part of her story that I believed, except that I still wasn’t sure that Marsha herself hadn’t removed the sugar from our car. She could have put it into Zippy’s car. I asked, “Did you see the mime put anything into our car?”

  Marsha paused as if wondering how to answer the question to suit her purposes, whatever they were. “I might have, but I didn’t particularly notice.”

  In other words, she hadn’t seen Zippy drop that envelope into the donut car, but she was hedging her bets so, if it could help her own case later, she could definitively say that she had or hadn’t seen Zippy put something into our car. I went back to the more obvious way of poking holes in Marsha’s story. “Are you saying that when the mime took the bucket out of our car, Nina and I were both walking away and had our backs to it?”

  “All you had to do was turn your heads, and you’d have seen her. And your car doors aren’t exactly silent. Any normal person would have looked toward the sound of their car door slamming. You could have, but according to you, you didn’t. And your assistant was even closer. If neither of you looked when your door slammed, do you know what that says about you?”

  Probably that we weren’t as close as you’re claiming. I slipped the pen into my apron pocket. “No.”

  “It says that you two knew that woman was taking something from your car, but you didn’t say anything because you had thought of another way to punish her, later, when your assistant, and maybe you, too, invited her to visit your assistant in her apartment.”

  “I really don’t think Nina heard or saw any of this. I certainly didn’t.”

  “You can deny it all you want. I saw what I saw. And I didn’t have an argument with that mime, and no one can say I went to your assistant’s apartment that night and killed anyone. Why would I do that? I don’t know your assistant. I didn’t know the murdered woman. Why would I have wanted to spend time with either one of them?”

  I let her ramble on with her denials. Tom peered over the half-height wall. Judging by the concerned look on his face, he was about to come out and prevent Marsha from doing whatever it was he might have thought she was contemplating doing to me. I winked at him with the eye that Marsha couldn’t see.

  Marsha leaned forward and spoke in a quiet, conspiratorial tone. “What do you know about that murdered mime, besides her name? I know she called herself Zipporah Melwyn, but that name sounds as fake to me as her supposed clown name, Zippy the Mime.”

  “I don’t know her at all. Didn’t know her. The first time I saw her was at the Faker’s Dozen Carnival. I guess she worked as a mime other places, too, since her car had MIME MOBILE painted on it.”

  “Those were magnets. I stuck a fingernail underneath one. And that is the only fingerprint I left near her car. If anyone says there are others, that’s because they can’t tell one fingerprint from another.”

  I tried not to let my eyes bug out.

  Maybe I wasn’t succeeding. As if reacting to the faces I was trying to prevent myself from making, Marsha’s eyes went beadier. On a long, slow breath, she asked, “Did your assistant kill her for her money?”

  “Did she have money?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you. I mean, her car might have been little, but it was nice. How much money could she make going around to carnivals and acting like a clown, and not a very good one? She must have had a source of income on the side.”

  I thought, Like helping a pickpocket steal and then dividing the ill-gotten gains, until the pickpocket decided he wanted it all for himself and killed her to get it.

  “Like family money,” Marsha asserted. “That proves I didn’t kill her. When they finally get around to reading her will, they’ll discover I’m not mentioned.”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. The only reply I could think of would have sounded something like, “Buh, buh, buh.”

  Marsha swept her capacious faux leather bag off the table. “No one can say I murdered that woman. I was at the carnival from eight in the morning until midnight that night. People saw me there.” She nodded toward Tom. “Your boss saw me there.”

  I
didn’t bother to inform her that Tom and I were equal partners.

  She stood up and looped the bag’s strap over one shoulder. “So, a word to the wise—don’t go spreading lies.”

  She glared at me for a second as if deciding whether the look on my face was guilt.

  I was only trying to hide the laughter wanting to bubble up because her threat had sounded like a silly rhyme.

  She stomped out.

  In black sandals like the ones she’d worn on Friday. The soles were black.

  Chapter 24

  The sight of the black soles that could have marred Nina’s new ladder didn’t stop me from wanting to giggle. Attempting to keep a straight face, I rushed back to the kitchen.

  Tom asked, “What are you grinning about? It didn’t look like you were exactly enjoying that discussion.”

  I parroted in a sing-song voice, “ ‘A word to the wise—don’t go spreading lies.’ She could have added another line. ‘About my alibis.’ ”

  Jocelyn put the finishing swirls on a lemon-frosted zesty lemon donut. “What she actually said sounds like a threat.”

  Jocelyn was too interested in solving crimes for my comfort, so I wanted to dismiss the possibility of a threat. Tom, however, despite always wanting to protect everyone around him, couldn’t help going into detective mode. “Did she tell you she had an alibi?”

  “She said she couldn’t have murdered Zippy because she was at the carnival from eight in the morning until midnight that night, and people saw her. Including you, Tom.”

  He lifted a basket of golden donuts out of the fryer and shook the basket. “When did you see her at the carnival, Emily?”

  “Nina and I saw her several times in the morning between about nine thirty and ten. I saw her again about three thirty when I returned to the carnival after Brent and I toured the parking area. She claimed to have seen Zippy leave the carnival an hour or so before she talked to us, but I don’t know if that was true. The uniformed officers Brent called in would know if, when, and where they saw Marsha. When Nina and I left the carnival shortly after nine in the evening, Marsha wasn’t at her post in the entryway. I didn’t see her again until just now.”