Sweet Somethings (Samantha Sweet Mysteries)

by Connie Shelton

  “Weird about Carinda, wasn’t it?” he said as he dipped out perfect globes of the creamy white chocolate flavor.

  Sam nodded, working for a measure of respect toward the dead woman.

  “It’s too bad that no one really liked her.” That was undoubtedly true, especially based on Carinda’s actions of the last few days.

  Harvey handed over Becky’s cone and started dipping Sam’s. Becky shivered and walked into their booth to serve a customer who had approached. Sam accepted her free cone and joined her. When Sam set her cone into a paper cup to bag two brownies for their customer, Becky’s expression was unfathomable. The customer left and Sam’s eyes met Becky’s.

  “It’s nothing,” her assistant said, giving her cone a lick. “My mother had superstitions about speaking ill of the dead. But this is Carinda we’re talking about.”

  At the dais, Rupert had appeared and picked up the microphone. Sam hadn’t seen him for hours and he appeared fresh enough that she suspected he had sneaked home for a nap. He’d certainly changed clothes and redone his hair. The man managed somehow to never, ever look as bedraggled as she felt right now. She sneaked a look at the time on her phone—an hour yet to go before they could shut down.

  “Hello again, chocolate lovers!” Rupert said with a flourish of the purple scarf draped over his shoulder. “Does chocolate make everybody happy?”

  Like filings to a magnet, the crowd shifted toward the dais, faces upturned to Rupert and the judges.

  “I know everyone has been waiting to find out the names of the contestants whose entries have made it to the top ten, and to give you that delicious information . . . here is our famous Killer Chef—Bentley Day!”

  Sam really needed to talk to Rupert about his choice of wording. What if it turned out to be true?

  Bentley took the microphone and gave a little bow to the audience, followed by a wide smile that showed a lot of perfectly aligned teeth.

  “All right, everyone—here are the finalists!”

  He picked up a folded sheet of paper and began reading.

  “Come up here as I call your names. Farrel O’Hearn of The Southwest Chocolatier! Harvey Byron from Ice Cream Social!”

  It was a short hop for those two, to stand in front of the podium. Seven others joined in quick succession, including the brownie lady and the one with those to-die-for cupcakes. Sam avoided looking directly at Nancy Nash.

  “Danielle Ferguson!”

  Danielle shot Farrel a triumphant look as she took a place on the opposite end of the row.

  “These contestants, ladies and gentlemen, will be further narrowed to the final five tomorrow so you want to be sure and be here for that. Besides, you will have eaten all the goodies you bought today so you’ll need to come back for more, right!”

  A cheer went up.

  “Contestants, the pressure is on you. Bring your best recipes and take off the gloves because the battle is really on!”

  Cameras flashed as the contestants posed with Bentley. Rupert reminded everyone that the doors would open again at ten in the morning and reiterated that all ticket proceeds went to charity.

  “Bring your friends and make your gift shopping lists. This is the place to be in Taos all weekend!”

  Gradually, the gathering at the dais broke up.

  “Let’s organize and cover our product,” Sam told Becky. “Everything will be fine here overnight, and I’ll bring more from the shop. Sleep in, since Jen comes tomorrow.”

  “I’m used to being on my feet all day, so no problem there,” Becky said. “Don’s going to bring the kids by on Sunday, so I’ll take a little break and walk around with them.”

  Sam laid a tablecloth over the open side of their display cases and tucked the zippered bag containing the money into her backpack, fishing for the keys to her van at the same time. The large room had cleared remarkably quickly, most of the vendors accustomed to trade shows where they simply draped something over their displays and beat a path out at the end of day.

  In the adjacent booth, Nancy Nash was stacking plastic bowls of strawberries and looking somewhat dejected.

  “I didn’t sell much,” she admitted. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

  Sam didn’t know what to say. The family’s kindness toward Nancy’s cooking evidently hadn’t been such a favor after all. She wished Nancy better luck tomorrow.

  One more thing to do, she thought as she looked for Auguste Handler. He’d promised that the ballroom doors would be locked overnight and that a security guard would come by several times to be sure they stayed that way. Most of the vendors were leaving expensive equipment and a fair amount of inventory in his care. She located him behind the hotel’s front desk and he assured her he had it covered.

  The quickest way to her van was to take the corridor past the ballroom and go out through the garden. Near the large glass back doors she spotted the silhouette of Bentley Day. A little girl of about seven raced ahead of Sam and called out to him.

  “Mr. Chef, could I have your autograph? Please?”

  Sam was twenty feet away but she heard his response.

  “Bugger off, kid.”

  The little girl came to an abrupt halt. “What?”

  “Get outta here. I’m off work until tomorrow.” He lit a cigarette and pushed out to the garden.

  Sam saw the stricken look on the kid’s face. “Look, sweetie, I’m sorry about that. If you’re here tomorrow you come by my booth for a free cupcake, okay?”

  The girl nodded and trudged back toward the lobby.

  “What was that?” Sam said, confronting Bentley where he leaned against an adobe pillar. “Rude to a kid? How could you think that was necessary?”

  He shrugged and blew smoke toward the rose bushes. “Bloomin’ wears me out sometimes. By the end of the day—”

  “Drop the accent. You’re off work until tomorrow.” She stalked away to her van. What a complete rat!

  Chapter 12

  A frozen casserole would have to suffice for dinner. Sam felt no guilt whatsoever as she pulled the packaged entrée from the freezer, read the directions and stuck the cheap aluminum pan into the oven. A shower and a glass of wine . . . she might begin to feel human.

  She thought again of Sarah, lying in the hospital and how the final encounter with Bentley the chef had capped an already stressful day; she found herself replaying it while the hot water poured over her head. As she scrubbed shampoo into her scalp she forced her thoughts away from the obnoxious celebrity. But then her mind began to go back over the rest of the day’s events—Carinda’s body lying in the garden behind the hotel, the questions from Beau’s investigator, the petty emotional turmoil surrounding the competitors at the festival. How could grownups get so worked up over recipes? And that thought led her back to, how could a grown man treat a little kid so rudely? She rinsed away the suds, determined to put all that behind her for the rest of the evening.

  By the time she walked downstairs, wearing comfy capris and a loose top, the smell of chicken and green chile was beginning to fill the house. Maybe the casserole idea wasn’t such a bad one.

  “Hey, darlin’,” Beau said, coming through the front door just in time to deliver a kiss.

  “You look the way I felt thirty minutes ago,” she teased. “Dinner can be ready anytime, so grab a shower first if you want.”

  He rested his chin on her head and drew a long breath. “You do smell a lot better than me. I’ll take you up on that offer.”

  By the time he emerged, she’d set the table and made a salad to go along with the pasta, chicken and chile combination. He pulled a beer from the fridge. Sam plopped into her chair, hoping the meal would revive her.

  “So . . . long day, huh.” She watched as he scooped up a huge portion of the casserole.

  “Seems that way. The latest was a report of a grass fire up north. Not that my department has to deal with it, but we get notified along with every other agency. BLM dispatched some firefighters. I’
m just hoping it doesn’t spread. There’s no forecast of rain in sight.”

  Poor thing—Sam felt for him—too many things to keep track of.

  “But I assume what you really want to know is whether we’ve figured out who killed Carinda Carter.” He smiled at her, knowing that she didn’t expect an answer this early on. It never went quite that easily.

  “I can tell you that the knife was covered in prints. We identified Carinda’s and Bentley Day’s.”

  Not surprising.

  “But there were a zillion others, none that we could identify.”

  “Anyone involved in setting up the festival could have had access to it,” she told him. “Plus who knows who might have touched it before Bentley even brought it to town.”

  “You’re right. I’m afraid the weapon might not reveal much, from that standpoint.”

  Sam sipped her wine.

  “The autopsy results . . . not all that helpful either,” Beau said. “The cause of death was definitely the knife wound. The killer only had to take one stab at it, so to speak. Death was instantaneous and probably happened only shortly before the body was found. The whole thing probably transpired in a few seconds and the person just kept on walking.”

  Coolly enough to walk right back into the ballroom and proceed to sell chocolates all day? Or to host the show as though nothing at all was wrong? It would take a hard heart and a lot of acting skill to pull that off.

  “Bentley was out of sight when the murder happened,” Sam said after telling Beau how rude the man had been at the end of the day. “And he had another knife handy so the show could go on.”

  “A fact that no one else probably knew—in case the killer planned to frame him by using his knife. You did say that it was in a box in the ballroom where at least fifty people had access to it.”

  “Carinda had insulted a couple of the contestants. The previous day she made remarks about the school Farrel O’Hearn attended—called the place a pretentious, overpriced mill for short-order cooks.”

  “She said that directly to Ms. O’Hearn?”

  “No. She muttered it to Kelly, but I’m sure Farrel overheard. She was staring daggers—uh, sorry, bad choice of words. She gave Carinda hateful looks all afternoon. Still, she would have had to harbor that anger overnight and show up full of rage the next morning.”

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  He offered to clear the plates. Sam picked up the serving bowls and followed him to the kitchen.

  “Nancy Nash was another one Carinda insulted by saying her chocolate-dipped strawberries could be made by a four-year-old.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Actually, they probably could, but anyone with a degree of politeness wouldn’t say so.” She pulled a carton of ice cream from the freezer and found bowls. “Really, the only person there who seems too nice to have hated Carinda is Harvey Byron. The ice cream guy. He somehow manages to put a positive spin on everything.”

  Beau wiggled his eyebrows. “It’s the nice ones who’ll fool you.”

  Sam shut him up by handing him a bowl and spoon. She leaned a hip against the kitchen counter and dug into her own.

  “Does that include my own friends?” Sam asked after her first spoonful of butter pecan. “Because everyone—Kelly, Riki, Rupert—they were all milling around. Things were such a madhouse this morning, anyone could have followed Carinda out the back door.”

  She recalled looking for Rupert right before the show opened, since he was to make the announcements. Neither he nor Bentley had been in the ballroom. But he had come in minutes before ten.

  Beau interrupted that line of thinking. “For now, aside from figuring out who did the crime, we’re looking for Carinda Carter’s next of kin. There’s not a lot to go on. We found her purse, locked away in the trunk of her car. She still had an out-of-state license, but all I’ve gotten from that is verification that she had no criminal record and she hadn’t yet made New Mexico her permanent residence.”

  “What state did she come from?”

  “New York. I don’t have any personal contacts there so all my queries have to go through channels. It may be days before we get anything substantial.”

  “She lived in an apartment in town. There’s probably some personal correspondence or something, maybe an address book.”

  Beau finished his ice cream and set the bowl in the sink. “Yeah, we’ll get to that soon. Meanwhile—” He let out a huge yawn.

  “We should get to bed early. I have to go by the shop in the morning and pick up more stuff that Julio baked. We actually made a lot of sales today, in spite of all this other.”

  Sam put the last of the dishes into the dishwasher while he walked out to the front porch with the dogs. Fifteen minutes later, with all of them safely inside, they went upstairs. Sam lay in the dark, hunting for that pleasant state of doziness but mainly plagued by scenes from the day that kept rolling through her mind.

  Carinda marching through the ballroom, tossing last-minute orders out to the vendors, passing by Farrel O’Hearn’s booth, two flashes of the same shade of blue. Sam’s eyes flew open. She hadn’t made the connection before this very minute. O’Hearn was wearing a blue dress, too, form fitting, a bit low cut, very similar to Carinda’s. Both women were slender, both had reddish hair cut about the same length. The prestigious chef had no shortage of enemies. Danielle Ferguson was chief among them. But she’d battled with Carinda and had belittled a couple of the other contestants as well.

  What if Carinda had not been the intended victim at all? What if someone had really been after Farrel O’Hearn?

  Sam rolled over to tell Beau about her idea but he was snoring softly on his side of the bed and she didn’t have the heart to wake him. He would be only too happy to hear her theory tomorrow rather than tonight. She closed her eyes again but images of the festival continued to fill her head. Was there anyone among the crowd who seemed uneasy, edgy, afraid of being caught? She found herself in an endless loop, rehashing everything she and Beau had discussed over dinner, frustrated that her mind would not shut down.

  When her alarm rang at four-thirty, she felt as if she’d had no more than an hour’s sleep all night. She dragged herself to the bathroom where she quietly slipped into her work clothes and brushed her teeth, trying not to wake Beau.

  Sweet’s Sweets looked a little forlorn and Sam realized her shop had missed having her own touch. She neatened the window display and beverage bar in the sales room, then visited her desk where notes and bits of stuff that didn’t have any better place always seemed to end up. She filed some receipts, paid a couple of bills, and went to the website of her main supplier to replenish her stock of flour, sugar and butter.

  The baked items for the festival, which Julio had finished yesterday afternoon, waited in neat boxes on the worktable. She peeked in and helped herself to a couple of cookies. I’ve got to stop doing this—sneaking treats in lieu of breakfast; I’ll never lose these extra pounds.

  She stuck the second cookie into her desk drawer—as if it might vanish from there and never tempt her again. The back doorknob rattled and Becky came in.

  “Ready for another day,” she said. “Although, I tell you, I completely crashed when I got home last night. Don got the boys a pizza and put them to bed, on his own.”

  “Feel free to close the shop a little early if things are slow,” Sam said. “If it’s like yesterday, most of our customers will have found us at the festival.”

  Becky nodded and picked up the stack of order forms. “I want to finish any special order items before seven. Most likely I won’t get back into the kitchen once the Open sign turns over.”

  The noisy sound of a motorcycle came from the alley and Julio appeared within a couple of minutes. The three of them loaded the bakery boxes into Sam’s van.

  “Okay, looks like you two have this under control,” Sam said. “I’m going to head out.”

  What she really wanted was a decent breakfast before spending the
day surrounded by tempting sweets. It wasn’t too early anymore to call Beau so she got into her van and dialed his cell. He suggested they meet in the restaurant at Bella Vista.

  Probably not the best idea, as it turned out. Sam started to tell him her idea that Farrel O’Hearn might have been the intended victim, but then she realized the restaurant was quickly filling up with other people from the festival. They ordered eggs and kept their conversation neutral.

  Sam was struggling to resist slathering jam over her healthy whole-wheat toast when Beau’s phone chirped to signal an incoming text. He read it quickly and sighed.

  “Looks like I need to check with my dispatcher. I’ll step outside. It’s fine if the server wants to take my plate. I’m probably leaving anyway.”

  It was all Sam needed to pass up the toast. She signaled for the check as he walked out. By the time she’d paid their tab she saw that he was sitting in his cruiser, parked near the high portico. She walked out to say goodbye.

  “It’s the peace-and-love bunch. Looks like things got a little rowdy overnight and we may have to hand out some citations for use of fun-but-illegal substances. Rico’s there but he can use some help. I still have a lot of people to question here, too. Ben Garcia and I will be back after awhile.”

  “I’ll be here all day,” Sam told him. “I can keep my ears open on the Carinda situation, if you’d like.”

  “Keep an open mind, darlin’. It could turn out to be someone completely outside the festival.”

  She nodded. Down inside, she knew that. But so much of Carinda’s life had revolved, in recent days, around the events of the weekend. It seemed a little farfetched that she died here if the murder had nothing to do with anyone in this crowd. She watched Beau drive away, more determined than ever to learn what she could about all the players.

  A line had already formed in front of the ticket table and Sam realized the doors would open to the public in another ten minutes.

  When she entered the ballroom, the first thing she noticed was that Farrel O’Hearn was not in her booth. If Farrel was the intended victim yesterday, she could still be on someone’s radar. Sam quickly took inventory: Rupert was chatting with the two lady judges on the dais; Bentley Day was not there yet, but that probably was no surprise—he’d done the late-appearance thing yesterday; Kelly and Jen were already in the Sweet’s Sweets booth, uncovering the tables and adding new stock to the display; Danielle Ferguson was in her own booth, seemingly occupied with her wares, as were the vendors in all the other booths. Except for Nancy Nash. Her crock pot and strawberries were gone. Evidently, the hurt feelings went deep and she’d decided her time as a festival vendor was over.