Cake Tastings and Killers

by A. R. Winters

  A paved walking path ran the length of the property, looping at a wall of trees that hid the parking lot and highway beyond. Palm trees and bushes flanked the path on either side.

  Danielle tried to replicate the feel of the grounds in the colors of the parlor, but there was no competing with Mother Nature. When you walked that path, it was like stepping into your own piece of heaven.

  I loved that path. I was learning to love the house if only because my sister did. Why couldn’t I keep my mouth shut until Charlie left? The thought brought on another flicker of guilt. I kept walking.

  As I approached the loop in the path, I saw a man near the gap in the bush wall that led to the parking lot. He wore a seafoam green polo shirt and loose khaki trousers over thick black athletic sandals. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a smartphone. The heavy silver watch strapped to his wrist glinted in the sunlight as he pointed the camera at the grounds. Except for a lobster-red sunburn on his nose and forearms, his skin was pale.

  Was he a member of Caroline’s wedding party? He didn’t look old enough to be her father. What had that poor woman done to deserve a day surrounded by groomsmen?

  Well, if he was a groomsman, it was probably best to send him to Danielle. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to help, but I didn’t see how he could make things worse.

  I jogged over to the man, waving my arms to get his attention. He turned away, aiming his camera at the path behind me and taking another photo.

  “Umm, excuse me?” I stepped in front of the man, right into his viewfinder. Now he couldn’t ignore me. “Are you with the wedding party?”

  The man lowered the camera and shook his head. “No weddings. Brides are a nightmare. The mothers are worse.”

  I blinked in surprise. “O… kay. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Yes! You can tell me who let those trees get so tall.” He gestured to the row that lined the walking path. “It spoils the view of the water. People pay extra for those kinds of views.”

  Something about his tone irritated me, but I wasn’t going to do more harm by snapping at another mouthy client.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but what was your name?”

  The man reached into his pocket and produced a silver case. He popped it open and whipped out a card with two fingers.

  “And there’s a big issue here with wasted space.” He offered the card to me. “What is this, ten acres?”

  I glanced at the card. Nicholas Lloyd, Miami. No titles. No job description. Just a phone number and an email address. Something didn’t smell right.

  “Thereabout, yes.” I slipped the card into my pocket.

  “All that land and they turned it into a glorified park? Do you know what tourists would pay for a studio with a roof? All you’ve got to do is call it a bungalow. Most owners don’t know that.”

  “The land belongs to Andrew and Danielle Loper. They make decisions about the grounds, Mr. Lloyd.” I forced myself to smile. “If you like, I can pass your advice on to them.”

  “No need,” he said, waving a hand. “I’d rather they didn’t make changes. That was Loper, you said? Hello?”

  For half a second, I thought Nicholas was still talking to me. Then he held a hand up to his ear as if to block the ambient noise. Not that there was any noise except for a few birds, the breeze, and my voice.

  “I don’t care what sob story they gave you, Brian. Don’t be so sentimental.” Nicholas turned his back to me. “I’ve met their grandson. He’ll lose that house to debtors inside of five years. May as well unload it now while they’re alive to spend the money.”

  Nicholas wasn’t a client. He was a developer. Suddenly I had the urge to rip his card in half and grind it into the pavement. But that would only make more work for me to clean up later. Besides, I didn’t have the right. The Paradise had grown on me, but it didn’t belong to me. It belonged to Andrew, and he told anyone who would listen that he hadn’t planned it that way.

  Andy and Danielle met while he was home for Christmas break one year. They married just before he entered law school. Over their long courtship, Mrs. Loper passed away. Andrew’s grandparents bought the land and built the house, but it was his parents who turned the Paradise Bed and Breakfast into a success.

  One year after Andy graduated from law school, his father died. I knew Andrew loved the house and its legacy, but he never planned to be an innkeeper. He was a lawyer.

  Nicholas still hadn’t turned around. Clearly, he had decided our conversation was over. It wasn’t my most mature move, but if a total stranger was rude enough to ignore me, I had no problem ignoring him right back. In fact, I might ignore all men. Forever. Except for maybe Baby Ben and Andrew.

  I had more important things to do than worry about men. Things like figuring out how to tell Danielle I found a developer nosing around her property. And how much groveling Charlie would demand to help defuse the bomb I’d set.

  I slipped the card into my pocket and continued on the path. An iguana lay on the pavement. It ambled toward the grass as I approached, breaking into a run as it crossed the edge, taking my third missed-shot of the morning with it. I should have brought my phone back to the big house with me, but it needed a charge.

  No, that wasn’t it. I let myself get flustered by Charlie Porter like a lovesick teenager. Of course I had. I ran all the way to Seattle to get away from the pain of that heartbreak. I had been a naive eighteen-year-old girl then with nothing more than a vague plan to be a wildlife photographer.

  Breaking into wildlife photography was harder than young me imagined, but I’d learned to make a steady living shooting events. Frequent walks gave me new material for my portfolio. Events kept my bills paid. After ten years, I was pretty good at them.

  At least, I had been. That’s why Danielle asked me to come home and help her. Somehow, I had to make this up to her. And to Baby Benjamin and Andrew. And Caroline. Poor Caroline.

  If I hurried, I might make it back to the house before anybody left. I picked up the pace, mentally composing my apologies.

  Paige came down the other side of the walkway. She moved like a woman desperate to get the last hour of her life behind her. Jason, the groomsman, jogged behind Paige with a single cake box in his arm. Uneaten sample cupcakes? Was the tasting over? I hadn’t been gone long enough for them to finish.

  I kept going, whispering silent pleas that I hadn’t blown the contract. Halfway between the back and front of the house, a figure slumped in one of the lawn chairs. It was Charlie.

  Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure of my plan. Apologizing sounded great in theory, but Charlie could be mean when he wanted. There was no way my behavior wouldn’t earn a vicious insult in kind. And I’d given him so much material to work with.

  Take your lumps like a big girl, Laura. You owe it to Danielle.

  I crossed in front of the lawn chair and braced myself for the attack.

  “Hey, Charlie? Can we talk?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Charlie Porter’s green eyes stared at the patch of grass in front of him, but they didn’t seem to see.

  He was dead.

  Chapter Four

  It took longer than I’m proud of for my senses to come back to me.

  For a while, I stared at Charlie fully expecting him to hop out of the chair, spread his arms wide in triumph, and laugh at my foolishness for having believed his dirty prank. But he didn’t move, his vacant gaze stayed focused on the patch of lawn in front of him.

  I went back to the Paradise’s parlor in a daze and beckoned my sister into the hall. In the lowest volume I could manage, I told her what I found. The look of horror felt like a condemnation, even though the rational part of my brain knew this had nothing to do with me. It was just my rotten luck to go on a walk to cool down and find a corpse instead.

  Danielle and I quickly agreed that we shouldn’t tell the clients or Granny what we knew. Granny would insist on covering the body to give Charlie some dignity and hide the scandal f
rom prying eyes. Caroline, Simon, and Jason were better off hearing the news from professionals.

  But with the cake tasting over, we didn’t exactly have a good reason to keep them there either. Danielle had a simple solution for that problem. She ran to the office down the hall, returning with a file in her hand and her business face on. I put a hand on her shoulder but Danielle shrugged away.

  “I’ll go over the contracts with them and have Granny serve drinks,” Danielle whispered. “That should keep everyone in the same room. You call the police and wait for them on the porch.”

  She disappeared into the parlor without waiting for a response. Her plan would only work until the first officer arrived, and it relied on nobody leaving the room, but it was the best we had. At least the parlor and the body were on opposite sides of the house.

  The next twenty minutes passed in a haze.

  After calling the cops, I waited dutifully in the parking lot and led them to the main house. The first arrival, a uniformed officer with a baby face and stiff posture, ushered me into the parlor with the rest of the guests.

  And then, every officer in the county descended on the Paradise.

  I would have preferred to stay outside. The parlor smelled like lemon cleanser and Charlie’s cologne.

  It seemed like a dozen more followed the first officer inside, but I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight long enough to count them.

  Granny offered each of them cocktails twice, as if she hadn’t heard the first refusal. Danielle kept glancing at the door, as though waiting for Andrew to come home. My eyes kept moving between Danielle and Caroline.

  My baby sister didn’t deserve to have her business threatened like this. I’d only met Caroline that morning, but I couldn’t see her doing anything meaner than sending a made-to-order dish back to the kitchen. She didn’t deserve to have the pall of Charlie Porter hanging over her special day.

  One of the officers broke the news about Charlie—to gasps of surprise and shock from everyone but me and Danielle—but nothing seemed to change. Until a few minutes later, when a tall man in a button-up shirt and gray trousers came into the parlor. Everyone turned to acknowledge his presence. It was impossible not to. He had to have been over six-feet-tall with the body of a quarterback, but his easy demeanor made me feel like he never used his size to threaten. Only to protect. He reminded me of the heroes in the police procedurals Granny loved to make me watch: tall, dark, and cozily handsome.

  The new arrival stood in the blue door frame with his hands on his hips. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m Detective Conner Reid, Paraiso Island Sheriff’s Department. Thank you for your patience. I’m sure you’ve had a terrible shock—”

  “That’s an understatement,” Caroline whispered into her second gin and tonic.

  “And we’ll have you back to your normal lives as soon as possible.” Detective Reid’s gaze swept the room. “But before we can do that, we need to ask everybody a few questions. Is this everyone who came here today?”

  “The baker,” Danielle and Caroline said at the same time.

  Reid nodded and gestured to one of the uniformed officers who moved to his side. “What was her name?”

  “Paige Hawkins,” Danielle said. “Sin-sationally Good is the name of her bakery.”

  The uniformed officers walked through the parlor door faster than I’d ever seen anyone move.

  “Which one of you is Laura Fisher?” Reid asked.

  I raised my hand. “That’s me.”

  He flashed me a tight smile. “I’d like to speak with you myself, Ms. Fisher. Someplace private, if you don’t mind.”

  It was a moment straight out of one of Granny’s cop shows.

  Except everything about the moment felt wrong.

  As if the director of photography chose a narrow lens that left no breathing room in the frame.

  I nodded and led Detective Reid to the kitchen. Sometime in the early 2000s, when times were still good for the family, Andrew’s parents had torn out the original fixtures and stainless steel. The oven, refrigerator, shelving units, and cookware were all industrial grade. So were the dishes but, according to Danielle, that didn’t make them any harder to break.

  Granny’s voice zapped into my brain, though the woman herself was three rooms away. Laura Fisher, act like you’ve got home training and offer that handsome man some refreshment!

  “Can I get you something to drink, Detective Reid?” I asked. “I heard the others tell Granny they can’t drink on duty, but we have water and sweet tea.”

  Reid pulled a notebook and pen from his pocket. “Tea’s fine, thank you.”

  My body moved to the gleaming gray refrigerator on autopilot and grabbed the plastic gallon pitcher. Granny would have insisted I transfer the tea to a glass pitcher before serving it, but what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. I grabbed two glasses from the drying rack, plopped in ice from the dispenser, and filled them nearly to the brim with tea.

  I set Detective Reid’s tea on the metal serving tray beside him. My mouth watered at the sticky-sweet aroma. Without a word, I brought my glass to my lips, drinking a third of it in three greedy gulps.

  “Thirsty, Ms. Fisher?” Reid asked. When I looked at him to respond, I realized he’d been watching me the entire time.

  It made me uncomfortable, though I couldn’t explain why. Detective Reid was one of the good guys. After my encounter with Charlie, I could definitely use one. My own Officer Friendly.

  “Event prep days get busier than you would think.” I took another small sip—though what I wanted to do was drain the whole thing—and set my glass on the stove. “We’ve been working since breakfast.”

  “Sounds like a slog,” he said. “Are you local?”

  “Not anymore. After high school, I moved to Seattle.”

  If that news surprised Reid, he gave no outward sign. The man must have been a nightmare to play poker with.

  “For school?” he asked.

  “No, to become a wildlife photographer. I ended up doing events and portraits instead. I’m only back now, temporarily, to help my sister. She just had a baby.”

  “So you’ve been operating the bed and breakfast with your sister?” He scrawled a note on his pad before looking back at me.

  “Granny helps too. You might not think it looking at her, but she’s still spry.” And if anyone dared to say different, she’d give them a good kick in the shins.

  “So both of them can account for your whereabouts this evening?”

  I nodded. “And I can account for theirs.”

  Reid lowered his chin. Something about his demeanor changed. His jaw twitched in a small, almost unnoticeable way.

  “Are you sure that’s accurate, Ms. Fisher?”

  From his tone, I must have been wrong. “I guess so… oh! Right, I took a walk during the tasting. I was alone for maybe half an hour. Forty-five minutes at the most.”

  “Was there a particular reason you took that walk?”

  I didn’t want to admit I’d thrown a tantrum in front of guests, not to a stranger. But I knew better than to lie to a cop. Besides, the sooner this was settled, the sooner we could all put this behind us.

  “There was a… moment of tension during the tasting. It happens during weddings, you know? Emotions are high. I didn’t handle it well, so my sister suggested I take a walk.”

  “For twenty minutes?”

  “Brides tend to remember when people make a scene during their wedding events.” I could only hope Caroline would accept my apology whenever I could give her one. “I thought it was best for everyone if I stayed gone until everyone left.”

  Reid watched me closely as I answered. “Did you meet anyone on your walk?”

  “A real estate developer. He was a real peach.” Just the thought of Nicholas Lloyd made my stomach turn. Or maybe that was the icicles in Detective Reid’s eyes. When had he turned so cold? Why?

  “What about the deceased?”

  I flinched before I could stop
myself. “I’m the one who found Charlie.”

  “Yes, but did you see Mr. Porter before that? Maybe earlier in your walk?”

  “No, the last time I saw him, he was in the parlor with the others.”

  “That’s interesting. Because Mrs. Loper said Charlie Porter left the parlor not long after you did.” Reid clicked the top of his pen and cupped it in his fingers. “She said he went looking for you.”

  Something in my brain finally clicked. Reid wasn’t conducting a witness interview. This was a suspect interrogation. That’s why he watched my movements so closely. He’d been watching me since we left the parlor. Maybe before.

  I was a suspect in Charlie Porter’s murder. The prime suspect, judging by the chill radiating off Detective Reid.

  My mouth went dry. I wanted to reach for my glass of sweet tea and take another sip, but something told me Reid would notice if I moved too fast. The only safe thing was for me not to move at all.

  Should I drop the “not without a lawyer” line?

  Andrew was the only lawyer I knew, and I couldn’t afford anyone else. Reid didn’t seem to think Danielle was involved. After all, she was technically the one pointing the finger at me. The farther I kept Andrew, Danielle, and Benjamin away from this, the better.

  The breath I took trembled more than I would have liked, but I managed to keep my voice even when I spoke. “If Charlie came looking for me, he didn’t find me. The only person I saw was Nicholas Lloyd.”

  “Did you and the deceased have history?”

  And there it was, the wham line before the kick to commercial. When the show came back, the detectives would spend the rest of the episode proving their case.

  No thanks. I preferred to skip right to the end.

  “Am I under arrest, Detective Reid?”

  He flipped his notebook closed and slipped it back into his pocket. “Right now, there’s not enough evidence for anyone to be a suspect, Ms. Fisher.”

  “It doesn’t sound like that, Detective Reid.” I gestured to his posture and the untouched glass of sweet tea beside him. “Doesn’t look like it either.”