Gum Drop Dead: Cupcake Truck Mysteries

by Emily James

  “Do you know how much Claire saw?” Dan asked.

  I shook my head. “She didn’t want to talk about it, and we had Janie around until her bedtime.”

  I should make sure the house was as neat as Claire had left it at least. That way it’d be one less thing to make her feel stressed. I grabbed the throw blanket Janie had been using as a cape earlier and folded it.

  Dan rubbed a hand along the back of his neck. The fine lines around his eyes were more pronounced this morning than they had been yesterday morning, probably because he couldn’t have gotten more than a few hours’ sleep last night. “I’ll check in with her. It might help her to know that it wasn’t a murder.”

  The words sent a jolt through my body, leaving my muscles feeling softer in its wake. I hadn’t realized how much tension I’d been holding until that moment. The hot air balloon operator had been arguing his innocence fiercely. It was nice to know he’d been telling the truth. Maybe the text I’d sent Dan about the flies had helped. I hadn’t heard if he’d talked to Claire about them, but I’d been away most of the day.

  “How did you decide it was an accident?”

  Dan collected up the remains of the snack Janie and I had earlier and headed for the kitchen. “The medical examiner found lime juice in his stomach along with a cough suppressant known as dextromethorphan.”

  My shoulders tightened again. They’d found lime juice in his stomach? That couldn’t be right.

  “The combination of the two can cause a lot of negative interactions,” Dan was still talking. “Sleepiness and hallucinations are the most common. When those results came back, along with what Claire told me when I called about imaginary flies, it corroborated the hot air balloon operator’s story.”

  That explained why he’d been seeing flies and vultures that weren’t there. It even explained why he’d accidentally fallen out of the balloon. What it didn’t explain was how he got the lime juice in the first place.

  He’d asked about lime in my tropical cupcakes. That meant he must have known that whatever medication he was on could negatively interact with lime. He wouldn’t have knowingly eaten any. Since he’d been careful about asking, it didn’t seem likely he’d eaten any by accident either.

  “The hot air balloon operator might not have pushed him out,” I said, “but his death wasn’t an accident.”

  5

  I jerked awake. The room around me was dark, with only the moon shining through the window for light.

  I sat up and stayed perfectly still. Dan had installed an alarm system shortly after I moved in. If someone had broken into the house, the alarm would be going off.

  But something had woken me. The way my skin felt tight told me it wasn’t simply my paranoia.

  A buzzing whine made its way through the noise of the blood pounding in my ears. Was that…a vacuum?

  I checked the clock. It was after one in the morning. And Claire had vacuumed less than two days ago. With the Northern custom of not wearing shoes in the house, the carpet couldn’t have gotten dirty in that length of time. This was getting out of hand.

  I laid back down and pulled my pillow over my head. The sound permeated through as a low drone.

  The noise wasn’t even consistent. It reminded me of snoring, where the sound rose and fell and changed, making it impossible for my brain to adapt.

  Dan had said he would speak to Claire. He’d have done it by now. Dan never put anything off, especially when it came to the welfare of his family. So whatever he’d said to her hadn’t helped or hadn’t been enough.

  I threw off my pillow and rolled over. Claire and I weren’t exactly close. We’d established a professional rapport that allowed us to work well together, but we didn’t even eat dinner together most nights. We weren’t watching shows on TV together in the evenings or discussing our days. The most we talked was at Sunday night dinners with Dan and Janie.

  But our time working together meant she’d spent a lot of time with me recently. Maybe she wouldn’t shut me down immediately if I tried to talk to her. For both our sakes, the all-night cleaning marathons needed to stop.

  I padded out of bed and down the stairs. Claire pushed the vacuum across the living room floor, changing directions to mark out perfect squares in the carpet. She’d pulled her hair back with one of the sweat bands she wore to the gym. Her face was grim and focused, as if she were performing surgery rather than cleaning an already clean floor.

  “Claire?” I said.

  She turned the vacuum again to reinforce the squares as if she hadn’t heard me.

  “Claire!” I yelled.

  She jumped and turned the vacuum off. She turned around. “Oh. Did I wake you?”

  I squashed the sarcasm that bubbled up inside. Sarcasm didn’t come naturally to me. I really must be exhausted.

  Claire hit the button to suck the cord back into the vacuum. “I don’t know how Dan does it.”

  Her back was to me, but she had to be talking to me. She spoke loudly enough that I didn’t think she was talking to herself.

  She turned around and faced me. “How does he stop thinking about everything he sees? Every time I try to sleep, I see that man falling and hear the screaming. How do I move past something like that?”

  I couldn’t answer her question. I’d never asked Dan how he managed. Whether he dealt with it through prayer, a first responder support group, or private counseling, I got the impression that he liked to keep that part of his professional life separate from his personal life. And maybe that was how he managed, by keeping firm lines and leaving work behind as soon as he came home to Janie.

  Claire didn’t have that option of keeping work and personal life divided to deal with what she’d experienced. She was more like me—a normal person trying to deal with unexpected trauma.

  “I don’t know if you ever get over something like what happened.” I sat on the couch, hoping she’d abandon the vacuum and join me. She stayed where she was. “I still sometimes see Jimmy, a homeless man I was friends with, when I close my eyes at night.”

  Since Claire already knew I’d been living in my truck, I told her all about how I’d met Jimmy. I’d shared with him what little I had in terms of food, and he’d shared with me much-needed friendship at a time when I felt more alone than I ever had. He’d been murdered shortly after we met, and I was one of the people who found his body.

  Claire finally took a seat on the couch as well. “How did you manage to keep going after that?”

  With Jimmy, I’d ended up helping investigate his death, somewhat unwillingly but it’d helped. Maybe that was my secret. “I tried to make it right.”

  Claire leaned forward as if she were at a lecture and wished she could take notes. “By investigating? Like you did when Grandpa died?”

  When Claire and Dan’s grandfather died, I’d investigated more as a means to protect myself. The police believed I’d played a role in it. At the time, Claire and even Dan believed I might have had some part in his death.

  But that had been a trauma in itself—the uncertainty and fear. Investigating had helped me then, regardless of why I’d started to do it.

  I nodded.

  Claire stood up sharply and straightened her shirt. “Alright then. That’s what we need to do. What’s our first step?”

  My brain felt like it was cartwheeling down a cliff, and I was scrambling to catch up with it. Claire had gone from distraught and nearly manic to businesslike faster than I could blink.

  “Our first step in what?”

  Claire huffed. “Investigating this man’s death. Dan told me the police thought it was a murder, then an accident, and now it’s officially been declared a murder again. We need to do something to help the police find the killer.”

  I’d seen Claire the Planner in action a couple of times. She’d orchestrated a huge one hundredth birthday party for her grandfather. She’d also helped me plan events on short notice. Having something happen that she couldn’t control or change must have t
hrown her on a deeper level than either Dan or I realized. Latching onto the first proactive solution that presented itself made sense as a coping mechanism.

  That didn’t mean we should do it. “I don’t think Dan will want us investigating. He’s always been against me poking around in murder cases.”

  Claire planted her hands on her hips. “Did I say we were going to tell him?”

  6

  I clicked the seatbelt into place and settled the tray of cupcakes I’d baked to bring to the funeral luncheon on my lap. “For the record, I want to say that I think this is a bad idea.”

  “What record?” Claire glanced over her shoulder and pulled out of the driveway. She’d dressed entirely in dark gray and black, as if she’d been a close friend or family member of Donald Wells, the man who’d died. “No one’s keeping a record. We’re not even telling Dan unless we find something useful.”

  “It’s a figure of speech. I meant that we didn’t know the dead man, so we shouldn’t show up at his funeral.”

  Claire glanced in my direction and raised her eyebrows. “You showed up at my grandfather’s funeral, and you didn’t know him.”

  Fair point. I’d gone to Harold Cartwright’s funeral because I thought that one of his grandchildren might have killed him for the inheritance money. I’d been wrong, obviously, but I couldn’t exactly argue that this was different. We were attending Donald Wells’ funeral because it seemed like the best place to start looking for suspects in his murder.

  Finding out his name hadn’t even been that difficult. All I’d had to do was search for murder at Lakeshore’s hot air balloon festival, and multiple articles had shown up.

  The articles didn’t name the operator of the hot air balloon, but they did say he was still a suspect. That told us that the police knew something we didn’t, maybe a motive. We might be doing all of this running around for nothing.

  I sneaked a glance at Claire. Not entirely for nothing. If it made Claire feel better and allowed us both to sleep at night, it’d be worth it.

  Claire poked a finger at my cupcake tray without taking her gaze off the road. “What are those for?”

  “We’re going to the luncheon, so I baked cupcakes.”

  Claire cast me a sidelong glance. “It’s not like a party. You don’t bring a gift for the hostess.”

  My throat tightened slightly. As hard as I tried to be like everyone else and fit in, I kept showing how much I didn’t know. I’d spent too many years first as a caretaker for my sick dad and then isolated as Jarrod’s wife and then finally on the run and living in my food truck. I was in my thirties, but it often felt like I knew less about life than a twenty-year-old just starting their adult life.

  I hugged the cupcake tray closer to my stomach. “I’ve only ever been to three funerals. Two were my parents. The other one was your grandpa, and I didn’t go to his luncheon.”

  Claire sucked her lips back in slightly as if, for once, she didn’t know what to say. At last, she settled on, “Well. That explains it then.”

  Explained it but also left me with a tray of cupcakes in my lap. Why couldn’t she have noticed what I was doing earlier this morning and asked me about it? “Should I leave them in the car?”

  “Of course not. The buttercream will melt in the heat, and they’d go to waste.”

  I swallowed down a laugh. I was pretty sure Claire hadn’t meant for that to be funny. It did make me feel better, though. Despite my mistake with the cupcakes, her reaction reminded me we had a surprising amount in common. In this case, our frugality.

  Maybe it meant that we could eventually be friends the way Dan wanted us to be.

  The way I wanted us to be. Living in a house with a person I wasn’t sure liked me…well, it sometimes left me feeling like a house guest who’d overstayed her welcome.

  I brought the cupcakes into the service with me and stored them under my seat. The funeral home where it took place was huge, and the room was packed with people.

  Donald Wells hadn’t had any children, but he did have a handful of nieces and nephews, all of whom sat in the front row along with his widow.

  I mistook his widow for another niece until they played a slideshow, and it included wedding pictures. She wore a hat with one of those tiny veils that I thought people only wore in movies. It hid part of her face. Maybe she was older than the pictures made her look, but I would have guessed they had close to ten years between them at least.

  The only other useful piece of information the funeral gave us was that Wells ran a financial services company that catered to wealthy clients. And that the luncheon was being held at the family home.

  I checked the funeral program again as we filed out to be certain. I’d read it right. Donald Wells had been cremated. There wouldn’t be an internment. Instead, mourners should come to the family home to pay their final respects.

  As soon as we exited the funeral home, I pulled Claire by the arm out of the flow of people heading to their cars. “We can’t do this. It’s at their home.”

  Claire pushed the car’s clicker, and a beep-beep answered. “That’s an even better place to see what we can find out.”

  Her face wore the you’re-not-going-to-argue-with-me expression that worked so well on Janie.

  I deflated. I wasn’t going to win this argument any more than I’d won any other disagreement with Claire in the time I’d known her. But if she decided to poke around in their medicine cabinets, I’d go wait in the car.

  We drove through the business sector of Lakeshore, where the multi-story buildings blocked off the postcard-worthy scenery that the city was known for. I’d chosen to come to Lakeshore after Fair Haven because of how much larger it was. It wasn’t until I arrived that I found out the city still managed to have a small town feel despite its size. The one part that felt like any other city was the downtown.

  Claire’s GPS sent us well past the business sector. The closer we got to the lake front, the bigger the homes got. The one with all the cars out front had to be at least three or four times the size of Claire’s house.

  I glanced at the back seat. Maybe I should leave the cupcakes behind after all. This went beyond not bringing a hostess gift to a funeral. These people were probably so fancy they didn’t eat cupcakes. Not unless they were deconstructed and covered in goji berry powder or something.

  “Don’t even think about leaving those behind,” Claire said. “They might help us start conversations.”

  And then she was out of the car.

  We trailed behind a man and woman and followed them in through the door. There wasn’t a pile of shoes at the door, so we kept ours on. Either they weren’t originally from Michigan or the rules were different for rich people who probably had someone else around to clean their house.

  Claire moved into the crowded part of the room. As far as I could see, there wasn’t a buffet set out. I needed to find somewhere to put the cupcakes before I did anything else, otherwise the guests might think I was a server.

  I wandered down a mostly empty hall that was twice as wide as an average hallway and came to a swinging door. A swinging door was the type of thing I could see being on a kitchen in a fancy house.

  I pushed the door.

  “It isn’t right,” a woman’s voice said. Her tone was low, with a hiss to it, almost like she wished she could physically spit at him. “I was his wife.”

  I froze with the door half open. I did not want to walk in on Donald Wells’ widow. Not in the middle of her grief. Not in the middle of a private conversation. And certainly not without a better explanation for how I knew her dead husband than I sold him a cupcake once, right before he died.

  “I know you’re upset, Rebecca, but Uncle Donald left you a generous gift in his will. It’s not the family’s job to make sure you’ll never have to work again. People who are capable of working should work.”

  Unlike her tone, the man’s was calm and straightforward. His voice didn’t carry any malice. He could have been reading
from an accounting statement or a weather report for the emotion in his words.

  At least we could cross Rebecca Wells off our list of suspects. Assuming she knew about the contents of her husband’s will, she wouldn’t have had a reason to kill him. From the sound of it, she’d be worse off as his widow than as his wife. Whatever gift Donald had left her wasn’t enough to let her live in luxury for the remainder of her days.

  “This should still be my home.” Rebecca’s tone had taken on a whine to it now. “Donald would have wanted it to be my home. If you ask the rest of the family for leniency, they’ll listen to you.”

  “If that’s what he wanted, he wouldn’t have had you sign a prenuptial agreement that said our ancestral family home would return to a blood relative when he died.”

  Without seeing the man’s face, I couldn’t tell if the hint of something I heard under his words was sarcasm or humor.

  Rebecca Wells might not be a suspect, but whoever she was talking to could be. He sounded like he hadn’t cared for Rebecca living off of his uncle’s money. If whoever she was talking to felt the money she was frittering away should have belonged to him or a member of his family, that might have been a motive for murder.

  Rebecca said something in a lowered tone. It sounded whiny, but I couldn’t catch the words.

  I leaned forward slightly. The swinging door swung the rest of the way in.

  Rebecca Wells and the man with her both turned toward the door. The man had light brown hair that was curly enough that he clearly used gel to control it. He looked a few years older than me, and a few years younger than Rebecca.

  He smiled at me. It actually looked genuine. “Were you looking for the bathroom?”

  Something in the way he held his mouth told me that he suspected I’d been eavesdropping on their conversation. He didn’t seem upset or annoyed by it. More amused.

  Still, the last thing I needed was to draw the attention of someone who might be a murderer.