“Yeah, and she’ll probably be using a walker and I’ll even deliver the cake and give her a ride home in the process. Just call me sucker.”
He reached for her hand and squeezed it. “I love that about you, your kindness.”
So maybe some of Nina Rae’s preaching about manners had stuck. Sam had to admit that she had a hard time being forceful.
About the time it looked like Beau was going to really get all mushy, his phone rang. He groaned and headed toward the kitchen.
He came back after a couple minutes, tightening the sash on his robe. “Well, it doesn’t seem to matter that I officially have a day off. Two deputies who live in the higher elevations where the snow’s a lot deeper couldn’t make it to work so I need to get into town. You’re welcome to stay here and wait for me, but it may be a long day.”
“No, I better just have you give me a ride home. I’ll retrieve my truck and get some extra work done at the shop.” She walked to the front of the house and stared down the long drive. A stone fence had created some drifts but, overall, conditions didn’t look too bad.
Thirty minutes later they’d showered and dressed, and Beau insisted that Sam wait inside while he swept the snow from his official county SUV and let the heater begin to produce some warm air. It was slow going as they headed toward town. Several vehicles were off the sides of the road, apparently late-night travelers who probably should have skipped the last call at the bars. Beau switched on his strobes and pulled over at each one, checking to be sure no one was frozen inside. Luckily, they were all abandoned.
Once they passed the intersection that led to the Pueblo, the town streets showed signs of more traffic. Road crews had sanded the intersections, although there was little evidence of problems.
Sam rode along quietly as Beau took radio calls. Taos winters enchanted her. Although this snow would melt off quickly, she delighted in the view as they passed the plaza. White ridges on adobe walls, houses with their traditional blue doors that stood in bright contrast to the damp brown adobe, pine trees that could have posed for Christmas cards, evergreen wreaths with sugar-like sprinkles on them, and the tan luminarias that topped the roofline of the entire plaza. She rolled her window down a few inches and took a breath of the ice crystals that floated through the air.
Beau turned down Sam’s lane and made his way carefully toward her driveway.
“Are you sure you want to go right back out?” he asked, eyeing the undisturbed expanse of white.
She looked at the snow on her truck and driveway. Staying in for the day was a lot more tempting.
“I’ll think about it. Maybe later.”
“I know better than to try to talk you out of it, but be careful.” He leaned over to kiss her as she reached for her door handle.
Inside, Kelly was snuggled into a corner of the sofa with some weepy woman’s movie on the tube. She smiled up at Sam and went right back to dabbing her eyes with the corner of her blanket.
On the kitchen table sat the box of files from Montague’s place. She and Beau had gone through them carefully Friday night and he’d taken the ones he needed for his case. At some point she should take the rest back and put them in the desk, but a ride out to Talpa didn’t seem very appealing. She spotted a note next to the file box.
“Kel? What’s this?” It was a scrap of newspaper with Kelly’s handwriting trailing around the margins.
“Some lady called. Something about a cake for her party.”
Sam turned the note around, reading the string of words. Bunny Fitzhugh. Her heart stopped. Bunny’s winter party cake was due this afternoon and she’d completely forgotten it. She let out an expletive and grabbed up the coat and pack that she’d just shed.
“Mom?”
“I gotta go. Call this woman back and tell her that I will have the cake there on time.”
“What if she has a ques—”
But Sam was out the door. She grabbed up an old broom she kept on the service porch, gave two angry swipes at the snow on her truck and flung the broom to the ground. The big red pickup groaned into four-wheel-drive and the oversized wheels chewed their way down the long driveway and onto the road.
Sam’s thoughts flew. What time had Bunny said she needed the cake? It was after ten already—how on earth was she going to bake, cool, decorate and deliver the thing on time? Normally it wouldn’t matter if the dessert arrived after the guests were there, but she remembered Bunny saying she wanted the cake to be the centerpiece of the table. Maybe she should have taken an extra minute to call upon the powers of the wooden box, but there wasn’t time to go back for it now. She was on her own.
She steered onto Kit Carson Road, pleased to see that it was slushy now. A fender-bender at the next intersection forced her to make a right turn and go two blocks out of her way but she forced herself to go cautiously. She could not afford to be out of commission now.
Sweet’s Sweets was on night-mode, the holiday decorations and window displays adding a note of cheer to the otherwise dark shop. Sam drove to the alley in back and parked by the door, her shoes filling with snow as she leaped down from the truck. She rushed in, switching on lights and turning on the oven.
A frantic search through the pending orders revealed that Sam’s notes for Bunny’s cake had gotten shuffled to the wrong stack somehow. She stomped around the work table once, cursing at the incompetence of everyone in the place, then forced herself to relax. It had been a crazy month and no one was any more to blame than herself. She was just trying to keep up with too many things at once. At least she now had the right equipment and large ovens to get all the layers done at once. Had this been last year, when she was working out of her home, she would have had to scale the design way back or admit to the customer that she couldn’t fill the order. In the case of someone as well connected as Bunny Fitzhugh, it would have been a business disaster.
All these thoughts ran through her head as she dumped ingredients into the huge mixing bowl and started blending them. While the hexagon-shaped layers baked, she tinted fondant a wintry ice-blue and whipped up the basic icings she would need. Her hands were too shaky for fine detail work like piping, and every time she looked at the clock the problem got worse.
She thought about calling Kelly for extra help, but she hadn’t really taught her daughter the finer points of decorating yet, and Becky, who was a wonder with the pastry bag already had attitude problems about working when she was supposed to get days off. Sam shook out the tension in her arms and sat for a minute at her desk, hands in her lap, doing a mini-meditation to calm herself down. When the oven timer went off, she felt better.
While the cakes cooled in the fridge, she rolled fondant, cut out snowflakes, and cut strips of white fondant to form into a gigantic bow for the cake’s topper. Then she lined up the tools she would need to put it all together. She’d originally told Bunny that she would deliver the cake by noon, but that just wasn’t happening. The open house started at four and Sam was beginning to feel like she might make that deadline. She pulled the cakes from the cooler and began to frost and decorate like she’d never done before.
At 3:42 she rolled up the driveway to Bunny’s mountainside villa, thankful that the snowfall had, indeed, melted away. She was a little out of breath and certain that she had dabs of frosting on her face, but she was there and it didn’t appear that the guests had arrived yet. She spotted a caterer’s truck on the north side of the house and pulled her own in next to it.
Staff people were bustling about with huge trays and sprigs of evergreen for the tables, and Sam was able to talk one of the men into helping her maneuver the large cake up the inclined walkway. When they made it to the door without slipping and creating a real disaster, she breathed a sigh of relief.
Don’t ever get yourself into another pinch like this, she told herself.
The caterer seemed in charge of setting out the lavish buffet—as Bunny herself was nowhere in sight—and she pointed Sam toward the table where the cake wa
s to be.
“You’re running late,” the sharp-faced woman noted. “We’ve had to hold off the decorations because everything on this whole table is based around your piece.”
Sam shot her a look. You’ve never had a crisis in your business? But she didn’t say it.
Bunny’s voice interrupted, high and excited, from the front hall. “Darling! So wonderful to see you!”
Sam craned her neck and caught a quick glimpse of a slender figure in an emerald green jumpsuit with wide gold belt, embracing Bunny, exchanging air kisses. The woman’s dark hair caught her attention. She knew that haircut.
Chapter 23
Sam started to head toward the two women, wanting to say something to Tiffany Wright, although she hadn’t a clue what that would be. The caterer with the ferret-like pointed nose stopped her.
“Where are you going?” she demanded. “We don’t mingle.”
Sam’s mouth flapped open but she was interrupted by one of the younger staff members.
“Excuse me, ma’am? Is the red truck yours?”
Sam nodded mutely.
“Another delivery is here and they need for you to move your vehicle.” The girl said it apologetically, with one eye on her boss.
“Sure, no problem.” Sam backed out of the dining room, feeling like the unwanted dog at the feast. When she reached the kitchen she covered her embarrassment by marching toward the door with purpose.
Tiffany Wright and Bunny Fitzhugh were friends? She pondered this as she backed her truck around. It might have made sense if Tiffany were really related to William Montague, as she’d claimed, but Beau had already proven that untrue. Unless maybe . . . Tiffany might have convinced Bunny that she was a relative of Montague, while the two of them were an item. That didn’t entirely wash either. Montague would have blown her cover immediately.
At the front of the house, two men in short monkey-jackets, inadequate for the chill weather, were seeing the guests out of their cars and valet parking them in an adjacent lot. Sam scanned the lot as she drove past but didn’t spot any red Nissan sedans. As she negotiated the turns on the steep downhill road, she began to wonder whether she’d imagined the whole encounter just now. Bunny hadn’t called the female guest by name—only her trademark ‘darling!’ And any number of women could have dark hair styled the same as Tiffany’s.
She decided to banish the whole encounter from her thoughts as she approached the bakery. She’d left a huge mess of dirty bowls and utensils and it would be well past dinner time before she got the kitchen in decent shape for tomorrow’s business.
As it turned out, she was elbow deep in suds when a tap came at the back door. Checking through the peephole, she saw that it was Beau.
“Saw your truck and thought I’d see how things were going,” he said, wiping mud off his boots before entering.
Sam explained the nearly-forgotten order that would have landed her in big trouble, and the confusing near-encounter at Bunny Fitzhugh’s home.
“It was probably just the fact that I was all keyed up over the cake delivery that I thought one of Bunny’s guests was Tiffany Wright.”
Beau picked up a dish towel and started drying the pieces Sam had already washed.
“I don’t know what to tell you on that,” he said. “This Montague guy seemed to be in the middle of a lot of things. I’m still trying to find out who Tiffany Wright is and what her connection is with that import company in Albuquerque. Mainly, I have to concentrate on finding Will Montague, now that his brother has turned up and we’ve officially started our investigation.”
“Beau? What was your impression of Robert Montague?”
His forehead crinkled. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know exactly. I mean, he seemed sincere and all. It just seemed like . . . well, I got the impression something was just a little off.”
“I got identification from him. He willingly gave a DNA sample. How much more legit could the guy be?”
“Yeah, you’re right. I think I’m just tired.”
“You’re working too hard these days,” he said, edging toward her and ruffling her hair. “You need a vacation.”
“Ha! Like that’s going to happen right now. The very, very soonest might be sometime after New Year’s day.”
“Can I take that as a promise?”
“What do you have in mind?” She glanced sideways at him. “You mean you could actually get some time off from the department?”
He set the last of the clean decorating tips with the rest of the gear on the work table. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Sam dried her hands and started storing the clean cake pans. The stack of unfilled orders caught her eye, an untidy pile she’d left on her desk while she was panicking over the cake for Bunny.
“Let’s talk about it after Christmas, can we? I can’t even think straight this week.” She held up the bunched pages. “First thing, I need to sort these and get a better system in place. I’ll have a heart attack if there’s another mess-up like today’s.”
“Deal,” he said. He hung the soppy dish towels over a rack and picked up his coat. “I need to run by and check on Mama again.”
Sam felt a stab of guilt that she’d still not made time to visit Iris in the hospital. She promised to stop by before going home.
“I’ll be glad to wait. Take you to dinner afterward.” His voice sounded hopeful.
She raised the order sheets again. “It’s going to take awhile.”
“No problem.” He kissed her with his usual warmth and she thanked him for his help and for being so understanding.
“Just in case I don’t get there tonight before visiting hours are over, give Iris my love, okay?” She watched him drive off, barely registering that it was already completely dark out.
As it turned out, Sam got to the hospital five minutes before the close of visiting hours and found Iris sound asleep. Beau had gone, the nurse said, about fifteen minutes earlier. She stood by the old woman’s bedside and watched her gentle breathing. Iris’s hands lay folded across her chest and Sam reached down and lifted one of them. It was cool to the touch. Sam held the wrinkled hand between both of her own until warmth began to flow between them. She tucked that hand under the blanket and did the same with Iris’s other hand.
Sam chided herself for being so completely wrapped up in her business and promised to be better about attending to friends and family. And that thought reminded her that she’d not mailed her parents a gift yet either. Sheesh. Life was just getting too busy.
* * *
Monday morning’s alarm went off way too early for Sam, especially as she remembered the leisurely awakening and sumptuous breakfast with Beau on Sunday. She cruised through the pre-dawn streets, watching for icy patches, finding few. Secretly, she hoped for more snow in time for Christmas, but wanted it to hold off until business slowed down a little.
As the morning scones, tarts and muffins baked, Sam assembled a couple of gift boxes and gathered goodies she knew her father would love. Mom would nag at him for eating so much sugar, but she’d been known to relax her standards a little at the holidays. Sam pulled the assortment together and tied each box with a purple ribbon. A box of Bobul’s custom chocolates topped the stack, and Sam found a big shipping box to handle it all.
By the time Bobul arrived at six-thirty, she’d taped and labeled the box and scheduled a pickup online with FedEx, who would get it to the family home in Texas in good shape and in time for everyone to enjoy. She felt a little guilty that she’d not actually shopped for gifts, but realistically, she couldn’t think of anything they would enjoy more.
“Is last week of holidays,” Bobul said as he laid out his chocolate molds. “Soon to be gone.”
“It always seems that way, doesn’t it? We work like mad to be ready, then it’s over so quickly,” Sam said. From the look on his face, she wondered if he understood half of what she’d said. She turned to her newly organized filing system and pulled out the orders fo
r the day.
Kelly arrived in time to take the freshly baked breakfast pastries out to the display cases, and Sam concentrated on cakes and cookies for the next few hours. She was just finishing a dozen cookie trays, tying bows around them when Beau called. She explained about their near-miss at the hospital the night before and promised to get there around midday.
“I hope your mom is allowed to have cookies?” she said. She remembered how Iris always lit up at the sight of goodies from the shop.
Beau assured her that Iris would love the gift and said that he would try to be there when Sam went to visit.
“Mainly what I called about was to let you know that we got some interesting information on that Global Imports Company. The state corporation commission shows Larry Lissano and Bunny Fitzhugh as owners.”
“What? Surely not. It was a very bitter divorce, according to Rupert,” she said. “I can’t imagine them staying in business together.”
“Just letting you know what the paperwork says. No guarantee that it’s accurate, I guess.”
Sam couldn’t help brooding about the information while she worked. What was Larry Lissano doing with a business in Albuquerque anyway? He lived in Dallas. And Bunny seemed financially set for life from her settlement—she certainly didn’t need a business in order to support herself, if Rupert’s stories were true. Tiffany Wright—where did she come into the picture? The thought niggled at her brain that the business somehow provided that missing connection between Bunny and Tiffany, but Sam couldn’t imagine what it would be. And imports? What were they importing? She pictured furniture from Mexico or rugs from India or some such thing, but none of it made sense.
She filled and frosted layers for a caroling party cake and set it into the fridge. Becky had created small figurines in chocolate for the carolers on Friday, and it would be a quick matter to make sugar cone pine trees. Sam formed a couple of lampposts and dusted the globes with luster powder to make them glow with light.
Sweet Holidays: The Third Samantha Sweet Mystery (The Samantha Sweet Mysteries) Page 15