Vanilla Cream Murder: A Donut Hole Cozy - Book 44 (Donut Hole Cozy Mystery)

by Gillard, Susan

  “Mmm.” Amy swallowed. “There. The ‘connect to cloud’ option.”

  Heather clicked on it and a password box pinged onto the screen.

  You have three attempts remaining. It said that in the bottom left-hand corner. Oh boy. The nerves hit home, now. What if Norma had changed the password in the past week?

  It’d been months since they’d had the conversation in Geoff’s store.

  “Uh?” Amy nudged her. “You going to put in the password or…?”

  “What if it’s changed?” Heather asked.

  “Then we’ll have to find another connection between Judy and the crime scene. Or the mystery lover and the murder scene,” Amy said. Because she was right: they didn’t know who the cheater had been.

  For all they knew, it was Roadkill Rodney who’d come to Texas then traveled back up to Key West months ago. But no, that didn’t seem likely.

  “We have to try, hon,” Ryan said. “What did Geoff say was the password?”

  “Judy’s pet dogs.”

  Amy laughed. “You’re kidding. Old Pablo and Fifi?”

  “That’s right.”

  Heather typed FifiandPablo, then hit enter. The password box vibrated and produced a white cross on a red sign. “Oh, heavens.”

  “Try the other way around?” Ryan suggested.

  PabloandFifi. She hit enter again. The password box gave a second soundless vibration. You have one attempt remaining.

  “This is not good. We’re going to lose our chance,” Heather said.

  “It’s either this or nothing.” Ryan ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ve tried to get the Big Brother people to cave but it’s not happening and it’s not going to happen for a long time.”

  Heather certainly didn’t want to wait a long time to solve this thing.

  “And it won’t take any longer to get the password from them if this doesn’t work. It’s our shot. Take it.”

  Heather typed her last option. PabloFifi. Her finger hovered over the Enter key. She hit it and the password box disappeared. A folder opened with the heading: Welcome to the Cloud, Miss Young.

  “It worked!”

  “Yeehaw!” Amy pumped her fist into the air and the half-eaten toppled off her plate and splatted onto Ryan’s desk.

  “Keep it together, Givens,” he growled.

  “Oops, sorry.” She scrambled it back onto the plate. “What have we got?”

  “Footage.” Heather scrolled through the files and to the latest additions. She halted on the recording from Monday 3rd April. “This one.” She double clicked and it opened up in VLC media player.

  Heather forwarded through the day’s events to the evening. Norma Young skittered across the screen, through the back end of the warehouse, back and forth, pacing. She hurried out of sight and returned with the antique register.

  “Here,” Ryan said.

  Heather slowed it down to normal speed and held her breath.

  Norma hovered around the cash register, smiling, preening. She placed her fists on her hips, tilted her head to the side.

  “She really liked it,” Heather said. “Poor woman.”

  Norma jerked upright and spun around, toward the back entrance of the warehouse. The angle of the office camera didn’t show them much. Ryan would trawl through the rest of the footage later, but this was the important part.

  This was what they’d anticipated.

  A beat passed. A man strode into view from the direction of that ‘escape route’ where the four-wheeler had been parked.

  Pete Sampson through his hands up in the air, face puffy with anger. Norma gave as many shouts as she received. They paced around each other. Norma gestured for him to leave – a flick of her fingers to the exit.

  Except Pete didn’t leave.

  Norma made to walk out of the warehouse and into the store. She never made it.

  Pete hefted the chunky register and brought it down. Heather shut her eyes at the moment of impact.

  “I guess we have our answer,” Amy whispered. “Pete was having the affair.”

  “What?” Heather turned to her bestie. “How do you figure that?”

  “The four-wheeler. Either it’s hers and he borrowed it for the murder,” Amy said. “Or it’s his and she borrowed it for her little jaunt at the antique shop the other day.”

  “Of course. I forgot about the four-wheeler.”

  “I haven’t,” Ryan said. “And I’m pretty sure it’s a stolen vehicle. I spoke with Ballistic Bob at the gun store. Yeah, he sold a four wheeler, same color you described with matching treads to Heavy Freddy Locke and it was stolen months ago. I’ve got the police report.”

  “I don’t see Judy as a thief,” Amy said.

  “Yeah, well, we didn’t pin Pete as a murderer, either.” Heather pointed to the screen where Sampson bent over the computer to delete the surveillance recordings. Norma Young lay just out of the viewfinder, her right shoe the only evidence of her presence.

  “I have an arrest to make,” Ryan said. His phone rang before he got the last word out. He picked up the receiver. “Detective Shepherd –” His eyes widened. “What? Hoskins, slow down.” Another long pause. “I’m on my way.” He dropped the phone with a clack.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Disturbance on Main Street,” Ryan said. “A fight between our murderer and the unrequited lover.”

  “Rodney?” Amy asked.

  “No, the other one. The disturbing fellow from the trailer with the woolen road.”

  “Danny Turnbull?”

  Ryan didn’t answer – he rushed from the office, stopping only to grab his hat from the top of a cabinet.

  Chapter 17

  Ryan parked his cruiser in an open spot ten feet from the crowd of people on Main Street. They blocked traffic both ways and the road was thick with yells and honking horns. It wasn’t New York, but darn it if people didn’t have some place to be on a Saturday afternoon.

  Heather and Ames jogged along behind the detective and the crowd parted before them, closed up behind too. They were surrounded by a sludge of murmurs. Finally, they popped out of the press of bodies and emerged into a circle of clear tar.

  Two men dominated the space.

  Danny Turnbull in his fluffy bathrobe. Pete Sampson towering over him, dressed in an orange smock – work clothes.

  “You killed her!” Danny screeched, spittle flying. “I know you did. She sent me a message right before the end. She warned me that you were trouble.”

  “You’d better shut up before I make you,” Pete growled.

  “You cheated on her.” Danny had lost control. His slippers pounded across the tar and the front of his robe drew back around his belly. “I know you did. She told me.”

  “Oh yeah? That why you bring her those roses? Thought because we broke up you could step in and sweep her off her feet?”

  “She was my wife!”

  “Your ex-wife, Dumbo. Ex,” he said.

  Danny reeled as if he’d been punched. Silence passed through the crowd, a ripple of it which thickened and boiled out under the hot sun.

  “Oh yeah?” Danny hissed, at last. “Well, she was your ex too.”

  Pete’s placid expression transformed. A mask peeled back and revealed the monster underneath. His lips curled back over sharp, white teeth. His eyes blazed like two coals. And every line in his skin deepened as if etched from stone.

  Breaking point had arrived.

  “You little –” Pete raised his fist and drew it back.

  “Freeze!” Ryan, who’d been as entranced as the ladies and other folks in the crowd, raised his gun. “Neither of you move.”

  Hoskins burst out of the crowd on the opposite side of the circle, panting and gripping his side. “Eesh. Eesh.” His breaths wheezed and he snatched a pair of cuffs off his belt loop, rattled them up. “Eesh. Got ‘em?”

  “Hoskins, clear the crowd away, please. And call for back up,” Ryan said.

  The crowd groaned a few of th
e older ladies shook their fists. After all, this was the best hometown entertainment they’d had in months. They cleared off, though, folks in Texas didn’t have to be asked twice. The law was the law.

  Until it wasn’t in Pete’s case.

  Heather stepped forward. “Why did you kill her?” She asked, softly.

  Danny and Hoskins didn’t hear, but Sampson twitched.

  “Why?”

  “She didn’t want me anymore,” he said. Pete Sampson seemed to shrink in front of them. Every last bit of fight ran out of him and burned up.

  Heather took Amy’s arm and led her friend away from the fray and the murderer. Ryan handled this part. It never seemed right to stick around and gloat over the capture of a murder.

  The cases weren’t really about them. They were about justice for the person who’d been murdered.

  Roadkill Rodney stopped them on the corner which led to Donut Delights. “Is it over?” He asked, watering from the eyes rather than crying. There weren’t droplets, just a constant trickle which coursed over his cheekbones and dropped to his plain, white shirt.

  “It’s over,” Heather said. “It was Pete Sampson.”

  Rodney slung his arm around a lamppost and held himself upright. “Why? How?”

  “That’s not important, now,” Heather said. “She’s resting, Rodney. She’s happy up there and she wants you to be happy to. Come with us. Let’s go get a donut.”

  Rodney shook his head. “Not today, Mrs. Shepherd. Thank you. I’ll see you soon.”

  “You’re staying?” Heather asked.

  “If you’ll have me,” he said.

  Heather patted him on the back, gently. “Of course. Welcome to Hillside, Roadkill.”

  Chapter 18

  “And this is the one about Tyrannosaurus Vex,” Lilly said, and slipped a sheet from her pink typewriter and foisted it on her friend, Nick. “She’s a crime-fighting T-Rex. Get it? She vexes her enemies.”

  “What does vex mean?” Nick asked, from the sofa. He accepted the story page from her and read the first line. “Hey, this is funny.” He giggled.

  “It’s like bother. That’s right, mom? Vex is bothering someone.”

  “Annoy, yeah,” Heather said. “It vexes me when Dave insisted on putting his muddy paws on our furniture.”

  Dave whined and shifted on the sofa. He didn’t have muddy paws this time, but only because she’d checked him when he’d come in and carted him upstairs to wash them off.

  Nick laughed again. “This is so funny, Lils.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, is there anymore?”

  “No, that’s just the first page. It was an idea I had this morning but I can write more. Hey, do you want to help me with this one?”

  “Uh, yeah!”

  They hunched over her typewriter, whispering secrets and ideas to each other. “Have fun guys. Dinner in twenty minutes, okay?”

  “Got it,” Lilly called out.

  They’d invited Nick to dinner from the children’s shelter for a reason. Lilly had told the family that he’d had some trouble with the other kids there. They picked on him because he was scrawny, his hair was too curly, and he was too tall. Cruel kid things.

  Heather loved having the house full of happy people. She’d waited for Lilly to ask her the question she’d have to say ‘no’ to, though. She’d dreaded it. But that question had never come.

  She trooped out of the living room and left the kids to their Jurassic collusions.

  “Has she asked?” Ryan waited in the hall, holding out a glass of red wine.

  “No.” Heather accepted it but didn’t take a sip. “What are we going to say when she does?”

  They strolled down the hall and toward the open arch which led into their kitchen. Leila and Eva waited there – Amy had a date with Jamie and couldn’t make it.

  “I don’t know. It’s an awkward situation. I don’t want to say no to something like that but I know we can’t afford it.”

  “Can’t afford what?” Leila asked. “Do tell. My ears are waggling.”

  “You know what they say about little pitchers,” Eva said and winked at the other woman.

  “They hit hard?” Leila balled up a fist and winked right back. The pair had more energy than two women half their age. No mean feat since they were both over 80. “What can’t you afford?”

  Ryan and Heather exchanged a glance. “We get the feeling that Lilly is going to ask us a really difficult question to answer.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “That she wants Nick to live here with us,” Ryan said. “We can’t afford it and we don’t have space, but Nick doesn’t have any parents. Well, he does, but his mother wasn’t a good example. I don’t want to go into too much detail but things got rough for him at home. Court emancipation rough.”

  Leila’s face fell. “Oh no,” she said.

  “We’d love to take him in,” Heather said and kept her voice as low as she could. “But it won’t work for us and it’s putting us in a tricky spot.”

  The kitchen fell into silence. The scent of the roast in the oven didn’t smell as appetizing to Heather as it would’ve minutes prior.

  “We could foster him,” Eva said and lit up like a candle at Christmas. “Wouldn’t that be lovely? A little boy in the house?”

  “We’re too old. I don’t think we’re any position to adopt or even foster, Eva. Let’s be practical. It was touch and go getting my granddaughter to let me move in with you. No one would believe we’re capable,” Leila said. “And it would be irresponsible too. What would happen if one of us died? Or both of us? He’d be shunted right back into the system he’d just left.”

  “You didn’t have to be quite so harsh, dear,” Eva replied, the excitement fading fast. “And wouldn’t it be better he had at least comfort and a home, even if it was only until we kicked the bucket?”

  “Please, can we stop talking about you two dying?” It would be terrible to lose either of them.

  “We have to be realistic.” Leila drew her hand through the air – a quick slash. “It’s not fair to him and we’d never pull it off.”

  “This is horrible,” Heather said. “I really want him to have a home.”

  “I do have a home.” Nick’s voice sent a spear of quiet through the room so sharp, and so fast everything shuddered.

  Heather swiveled in the doorway, flushing hot and cold. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You weren’t meant to hear any of that.”

  Nick shrugged. “It’s okay. I do have a home. The shelter is my home. They’re helping me and when a family picks me I’ll be in foster care and have a home there too.”

  Heather pressed her lips together. “You’ll always have a home here too. Even if we can’t put you in a room. You’ll have us as a family. If you need someone to talk to we’ll be here, Nick. And so will Eva and Leila. Amy too, if you can stand her weird jokes.”

  Nick hadn’t been exposed to as many of Amy’s jokes. He’s mostly stuck to chatting with Lils and playing with Dave and Cupcake. “Thanks.” It came out choked. “Could I get a glass of water?”

  “What about some chocolate milk?” Ryan asked.

  Leila scraped her chair back and hurried to the fridge to get it for him.

  “Sure, that sounds great.” And then he did something that made Heather’s insides curl into a warm ball. He put his arms around her waist and hugged tight. “It all sounds great,” he said.

  THE END

  A letter from the Author

  To each and every one of my Amazing readers: I hope you enjoyed this story as much as I enjoyed writing it. Let me know what you think by leaving a review!

  I’ll be releasing another installment in two weeks so to stay in the loop (and to get free books and other fancy stuff) Join my Book club.

  Stay Curious,

  Susan Gillard

  tery)