by James, Emily
Or perhaps she didn’t realize that things like that actually still happened to anyone. She could have thought that the way Anthony treated her was an isolated event because they were dating.
“He gave me a poor reference, which is worse. I didn’t even realize it until I’d interviewed for three jobs, and the last place told me I would have gotten the position had it not been for my references.”
“Mr. Green would have given you a great reference.” The look on Eve’s face said she took some responsibility for what had happened, as if it might have made some difference if she’d stood up to Anthony sooner. “He didn’t even wait a week to hire you back.”
Harper’s face changed, softened like she didn’t know whether to be hurt or grateful. “Mr. Green wouldn’t give me a reference at all. He hired me back as a form of penance. I called him as soon as I heard about Anthony.”
Eve put a hand to her forehead, pushing her hat back. “That doesn’t sound like him. I don’t understand.” She held her hand up quickly. “Not that I’m doubting you or trying to downplay it. I just don’t understand.”
Harper shook her head. “I went in to talk to him personally, and he refused without giving me a reason. He looked like he wanted to cry when he did it.” She clenched her jaw, making a muscle jump in her cheek. “I passed Anthony on my way out, and he smirked at me. He might have only been the co-owner, but he controlled everything and everyone in the office.”
Her voice wasn’t even spiteful. She spoke as if Anthony’s iron rule was a well-known fact.
Eve’s head was bobbing as if she couldn’t deny Harper’s assessment. They both seemed to have momentarily forgotten I was there. Which was fine. I’d always been better at observing before coming to a conclusion.
My conclusion in this case was that Harper was a perfect suspect. Her message on Anthony’s answering machine made complete sense in context. He’d refused to give her a good reference, and he’d blocked her other boss from supplying her with a reference. In the current job market, good references mattered more than experience. You couldn’t get a job that paid higher than minimum wage without them.
She must have been calling to tell Anthony that he couldn’t keep destroying her life simply because she’d refused to work for him. She’d told him he’d regret it.
The problem was I didn’t want Harper to have killed Anthony any more than I wanted Eve to have killed Anthony. She’d been treated poorly, and he’d continued to persecute her even once he wasn’t her boss anymore. What he’d done wasn’t fair.
But if she’d killed him, I couldn’t protect her at my expense or at Eve’s expense either. As soon as I could get away, I’d call Dan and let him decide what to do with the information.
9
Summer in Michigan wasn’t supposed to be hot enough that I couldn’t make a proper buttercream or batch of cupcakes.
I pressed my clean thumb into the butter again to see if it had warmed up to the perfect consistency yet. Since the weather grew hot, I hadn’t been able to simply leave my butter in the shelves so that it’d always be room temperature and ready to use. Unless I had the air conditioning on in my truck, “room temperature” butter ended up solid but shiny and greasy looking—a sign that it was too soft and wouldn’t whip up properly—or completely melted, which I couldn’t use at all unless I wanted to bake a batch of chewy chocolate chip cookies.
This wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d had somewhere else to bake the cupcakes. But, as the old saying went, if wishes were horses…
My cell phone vibrated across the countertop, and I scooped it up. Watched butter didn’t soften any quicker than watching a pot of water made it boil faster.
Dan name flashed on my screen. I swiped my finger across to answer.
I’d called him last weekend with everything I’d learned about Harper as soon as I got another break in customers. I hadn’t been completely honest with him about how I came by the information. What I’d said was that I was near Rigman & Associates booth at the sandcastle competition, and I’d overheard them talking. Technically, it was true. I had been standing next to the booth listening. I’d just left out the part where Eve invited me there in the hope that we’d get some good information out of Harper.
Once we’d spoken to her, Eve hadn’t looked any more excited than I was to think Harper might be the murderer. Assuming the worst of a person you barely knew was easy. Still wanting that person to turn out to be a murderer once you’d met them and heard their story was a lot harder.
“I passed the name you gave me along to Detective Strobel,” Dan said. “I had to come at it sideways since he’s not known for liking other detectives meddling in his cases without invitation.”
I poked the stick of butter again just to be sure. I couldn’t quite make the easy indentation I needed. If I used it before I could easily leave a thumbprint, my sugar wouldn’t be able to aerate my butter properly, and I’d end up with dense cupcakes. Creating air pockets in the butter was part of the science of baking. Knowing when your butter was at the perfect stage of softness was part of the art.
“Do you think he’ll tell you what he finds out?”
Dan’s end of the call crackled, and I almost missed what he said. The words I caught were he did, didn’t, and pan out.
I was about to ask him to repeat that when the call cleared.
“Harper Castle was out of town,” Dan was saying, “staying with her parents in Detroit for a job interview, the weekend of the original sandcastle competition. She left on Thursday night because the interview was on Friday. Her parents and the company she was interviewing with confirmed her alibi.”
The job interview explained her angry call to Anthony. If she’d gone out of town for an interview, she was getting desperate for a job. She knew that if the interview went well, her potential employer would call her references. That could have been a motive. With Anthony gone, Mr. Green would have likely given her a good reference.
All that aside, she hadn’t had the opportunity to kill him. In light of her interview, her phone call actually spoke to her innocence, even if she had been in town during the window of opportunity. She’d called to threaten him to give her an honest reference. Her interview was on Friday. Reference checks wouldn’t have happened until the following week at the earliest. By then, Anthony was dead. Unless Harper’s thinking was completely convoluted, it wouldn’t make sense for her to call him about references and then kill him before she could find out if he gave her a good reference or a bad one.
A tangled knot of relief and panic flooded through me. They wouldn’t be arresting Harper. But that meant Eve and I were still the primary suspects. I didn’t know whether I should respond to what Dan told me with that’s good for Harper’s sake or with that’s too bad for Eve and me.
“Are you worrying about this case?” Dan asked, his voice gentle. “I’ve been trying to figure out why else you would’ve been hanging around the Rigman Insurance booth when you should have been manning your truck.”
I leaned back against my fridge. I knew I wasn’t that transparent. I’d learned not to be. So either Dan was starting to know me better than I realized, or he was using the skills that had served him well when he’d been an undercover detective.
“Yes,” I said.
The word came out before I could consider whether honesty was the best policy in this case. Maybe he would think I was worried because I’d had something to do with it after all. I couldn’t remember if I’d told him that I’d met the dead man or not.
I didn’t want to give him any reason to doubt me and consider restricting my access to Janie. I’d even picked her up from school a couple of times before summer break, which meant he’d added me to the list of safe people the school could release Janie to. Having someone trust me that way meant more than I could ever explain.
“You don’t need to worry. Detective Strobel’s…hard to work with, but he’s honest.” A gust of wind rustled across the speaker on Dan’s cell ph
one. He must have gone outside to call me. “He won’t plant evidence. He won’t arrest someone with shaky evidence just to close his case.”
He’s not like Jarrod.
I could almost hear Dan thinking the words even though he didn’t seem to want to say them. Detective Strobel wouldn’t arrest me without conclusive evidence, and he would never have conclusive evidence because I hadn’t killed Anthony.
A warm little bubble formed in my stomach, making me want to smile. Not only had Dan guessed that I was worried, but he’d taken the time to reassure me again that he knew I hadn’t murdered anyone.
What had I done to deserve that kind of a friend?
“Thank you.” I whispered the words so softly that I wasn’t sure if he would be able to hear them or if I’d have to clear my throat and try again.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “You can return the favor next time Janie needs to bring something to a party or bake sale at school.”
I grinned wide enough that my cheeks hurt. “That’s a deal.”
In fact, it was one where I benefited all around.
10
“You’re going to love me forever.” Eve’s voice sounded the way champagne bubbles looked. “I did it.”
I put my phone on speaker and propped it up so that I could continue forming the buttercream roses for my brown butter cupcakes.
The more I got to know Eve, the more her energy level and enthusiasm reminded me of a squirrel or a puppy. She hadn’t seemed so exuberant the times she’d come to my cupcake truck. Granted, buying a cupcake didn’t show anything about a person except whether they were adventurous or a creature of habit, but I couldn’t help but think this was also a result of Anthony being gone from her life.
As great as it was for her personally, it wasn’t good for her appearance of guilt. If Detective Strobel saw that she was happier now than before, the real murderer would have to confess to take Eve out of Number One Suspect spot.
Had Detective Strobel heard her right now, he might have even taken her words as a confession. Even with her newfound freedom, I doubted Eve would sound so jubilant had she decided to confess to murder. Especially to me, since I’d been trying to help prove that we were both innocent.
“You did it,” I said cautiously.
“I got you the job catering our annual company barbecue.”
Her tone said it should have been obvious. I hadn’t realized she was serious about trying to get me a gig. I thought that was a ruse to explain why she’d brought me to meet Harper.
“Harper raved about your cupcakes so much when we went back into the office on Monday that the few holdouts who I haven’t convinced to eat cupcakes for lunch changed their mind.”
Catering the entire barbecue wasn’t quite the same as supplying cupcakes for dessert. “Sweet and savory?”
“Of course. That’s what the caterer we’ve always hired up to this point did so everyone will be expecting it.”
I looped the buttercream to form the final petal and placed the tiny rose into the fridge. I’d found that the best way to handled buttercream flowers was to create them ahead of time on small slips of parchment paper. I simply snipped the parchment paper base off when I was ready to use them, and the flowers were less likely to be damaged than if I placed them right on the cupcakes and then had to store the decorated version.
As much as I appreciated Eve actually putting me forward for the catering job, I wasn’t a savory chef. Or, more precisely, I didn’t have a tried and tested set of recipes and routines ready to go. My skills were rusty.
And yet, I could always use the money and the referrals that came from doing an event like that. Maybe I could handle it if it wasn’t too big an event. “How many people come and what’s the date?”
The number of people and date Eve gave me made me squirt a dollop of icing off the side of my parchment paper and ruin the flower I’d been working on. When I’d tentatively prayed, asking God for more work, I hadn’t meant please drop lots of jobs into my lap on short notice. I couldn’t be ready to cater that size of an event in that amount of time. Not alone anyway. I’d either have to work with another food truck, halving my profit, or get help with the prep work.
I had no idea Rigman & Associates was such a big firm.
Something niggled at the back of my mind. I set aside my piping bag so that my brain wouldn’t be trying to talk, think, and work at the same time.
The fully formed thought pinged to the front. If this was such a lucrative event, why had the caterer who’d been working the event for years suddenly quit?
“I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful—”
“Don’t say no.” I could almost see Eve gripping her phone and rising up onto her tip toes. “This is a great opportunity to grow your business. Trust me, I know. I’m in marketing.”
Eve probably was able to sell a lot of things—ideas included—simply by the force of her excitement.
“I’m just wondering why the previous caterer quit. Was there a problem with payment or unreasonable requests? My margins not large enough to handle something like that.”
“Mr. Green is fastidious about doing the right thing.” Eve’s voice was so confident it was hard to doubt anything she said. “I think it was a personality conflict between the catering service and Anthony.”
That I could believe. The man seemed to have a “personal conflict” with almost everyone he met.
Eve quoted the amount Rigman & Associates was willing to pay.
It was probably foolish of me to consider accepting, but Janie’s birthday was coming up. I wanted to be able to do more than bake her birthday cake as my present.
“And if that wasn’t enough to sway you,” Eve continued, clearly interpreting my hesitation as what it was, “it’ll be a chance for us to figure out who else in the company might have had a reason to kill Anthony. There’s always alcohol, and people get a little tipsy and talk too much. Trust me, no one hated Anthony as much as the people working for him. It’s out best chance.”
Eve was right. Based on what Dan had said, I got the impression that Eve was still at the top of Detective Strobel’s list and I wasn’t far behind. Even though he wouldn’t be able to find concrete evidence against us, that didn’t mean one of us wouldn’t end up arrested. Strobel might be the kind of man Dan said he was. But he had superiors. Superiors who would want the case closed eventually and might not have the same qualms about arresting someone based on circumstantial evidence as Strobel did.
As long as Eve and I were under investigation, we had to keep investigating, and her company’s barbecue was the best place to talk to and eavesdrop on people who’d had to work with Anthony and might—like Harper—have had reasons to want him dead.
11
This was one conversation with Claire that I wanted to have in person. I hadn’t even had the courage to call her first and ask if I could come over. I might lose my nerve if she said no. I’d barely been able to sleep last night rehearsing over and over how I’d ask her to help me cater the event and let me use her freezer to store the prepared food.
By the time I turned onto her street, I was almost hoping she wouldn’t be home so that I could put it off. She might not want to help, even though she’d told me she was the one who taught Dan how to cook. Then I’d have to try to partner with another food truck, and it would cost me at least half my profit.
She might also see through my lie about why I couldn’t store all the food we needed to prepare in advance at my own place. If I couldn’t use her freezer, I’d have to give up the job entirely.
I slowed to a stop in front of Claire’s house. If possible, her gardens were even more perfectly manicured than they had been before. The purples and yellows of the flowers looked like they’d been carefully selected to enhance each other when side by side, and her lawn didn’t have a single dandelion or other weed.
There was also a FOR SALE sign out front with the name and phone number of a local Realtor on it.
<
br /> Claire hadn’t mentioned that she was trying to sell her house.
I rested my hand on the gear shift. Maybe this was stupid. Clearly I didn’t know Claire. She didn’t feel comfortable sharing things with me. Why would she be willing to help me? Catering this event was a big ask. It was hours of preparation, not to mention the time spent at the event itself. I planned to offer to pay her, of course, but if she was preparing to move, she might not even have time. This was a lot more than her offer to help me sell at big events if I couldn’t handle serving a crowd.
I shouldn’t have come.
I put my truck back into drive, but Claire’s front door opened before I could pull away from the curb. She made a come here motion with her hand.
She probably couldn’t see my face. I could pretend I hadn’t seen her.
The memory of her expression when she’d been trying to solve my financial problems popped into my head. She’d wanted to help me then. Not in the same way, but perhaps it showed that I shouldn’t cross her off without trying.
I shifted my truck back into park and turned it off.
Claire was already down her front steps, her shoulders tense and a frown on her face. “Are you alright?”
“No…err, yes.”
Claire stopped and planted her hands on her hips.
Is this what it would have been like to have a mom or an older sister? My dad had been the best dad in the world, but he hadn’t known how to be both a mom and a dad for me. I hadn’t known what I was missing when I was young. It wasn’t until I was in my late teens and watching other girls with their moms that I realized.
Claire’s expression said go on, I’m waiting.
“I was hired for a catering job, but it’s sweet and savory, and it’s too much for me to handle on my own.”
I explained everything Eve had told me about the event, leaving out the part where I’d accepted in order to check out possible suspects for Anthony’s murder.