End of the Line_Maple Syrup Mysteries

by Emily James

  The back door would be armed with the same setup.

  Megan and Grant hadn’t mentioned anything about an attempted break-in. We had to assume the perpetrator knew about the cameras and alarm system. That meant he either had the alarm code and a key to the building, plus knowledge of how to erase the video footage, or he’d gotten in some other way. I didn’t know how their video surveillance worked, but if they could tell whether the recordings had been tampered with, we’d be off to a good start. Then we’d unfortunately also have to look at any of their employees who had a key and the code.

  Megan stood just inside the front doors, asking people who they were here for and directing them. Her white blouse and black skirt and blazer looked so out of place compared to the colorful clothes she usually wore.

  I waited for a slight break in the stream of people and stepped up to her.

  She gave me a smile that looked borrowed from someone else. “As soon as the funeral starts, one of our employees is stepping in to give me a quick break. Do you need me for anything?”

  I wanted to tell her no and that she should use her break to rest, but I did need her help. I explained about the videos.

  “I’ll check,” she said quickly as another group of people flooded through the doors. “We only keep two weeks of footage, but it’ll be easy to tell if it was tampered with by running a system report.”

  I headed down the hall toward the back of the building where Mark’s office and the morgue were located. His office would be locked, and not even Megan and Grant had a key, but he didn’t keep scalpels in his office anyway.

  I swung by the back door and opened it. The key pad flashed, indicating it was still functioning, and the camera looked intact. That meant they hadn’t somehow damaged the system to get in unnoticed.

  Hopefully Megan found something in the system report.

  Halfway down the hall toward where I remembered the morgue to be, Megan caught up with me.

  Her face told me the answer before she spoke. “The video wasn’t tampered with. Maybe they came more than two weeks ago?”

  Maybe. We had to hope that wasn’t the case, though. If it was, it’d be a struggle to prove it happened at all.

  It was also possible I’d given to much credit to the intruder. The murderer might not have come themselves. They could have bribed or blackmailed one of Grant and Megan’s employees to steal a scalpel. That person might not have thought to erase themselves from the video. “Are you able to send the recordings to my firm? I’ll have our intern watch through them to see if anyone came in at a time when they shouldn’t have.”

  A long shot perhaps, but it was still a shot.

  I texted her the email address for our intern and told Megan what to put in the subject line.

  “Excuse me,” a soft female voice said from behind Megan. “Could you tell me where the Ainsley visitation is?”

  A look of exhaustion flashed over Megan’s face. Providing comfort to others when your own heart was troubled had to be one of the most draining things in the world.

  She wiped her expression clean before turning around. “You took a left when you should have taken a right. I’ll show you.”

  I continued on in the direction of the morgue. The best thing I could do for Mark and the whole Cavanaugh family was to stay focused and figure this out. They didn’t need comfort. Mark wasn’t dead. They needed the truth.

  I stopped outside the door marked Staff Only. I’d forgotten to ask Meagan for the key, and she’d likely be busy for a while now.

  At least I could see if there were any signs of someone clumsily picking the lock. Before I’d learned that there weren’t any signs of forced entry into Mark’s house, I’d watched over a dozen videos online about lock-picking and read even more articles. The hope was that I’d recognize signs and know which kinds of locks could be picked and how. It turned out I didn’t need that information for Mark’s house, but it might still come in useful now.

  I dropped to one knee so I was eye level with the keyhole, leaned in, and placed a hand on the door to steady myself.

  The door swung open, and I planted belly first onto the floor like a seal leaping out of the water and onto dry land.

  Oh boy did I hope the floor had been washed recently. Thankfully I’d stopped my fall before my face hit the ground. Even if the floor was perfectly clean, the idea of face-planting onto a morgue floor made my skin want to escape my body.

  I crawled back up to my feet. They must leave the door unlocked during the day while they were moving bodies in and out of the mortuary fridge. Regular people would see the Staff Only sign and keep out.

  The real killer could have pretended they were here for a visitation or a funeral and have stolen a scalpel. That was good in one way for our argument that it could have been planted.

  It was bad in another. I’d hoped we’d be able to narrow down suspects based on who had access to the morgue. Now it seemed like all of Fair Haven could have had access.

  Megan should still send the surveillance video to the firm’s intern, but the odds were good it wouldn’t show anything out of the ordinary.

  I needed to go home and raid Nancy’s maple syrup candy samples. Everything I tried seemed to arrive at a dead end. Then again, if I did that, I’d need yet another fitting with my wedding dress seamstress because I’d have gained weight.

  Either way, it was time to go home. My dogs had been alone all day, and the excited full-body-lean welcome that only big dogs gave would help me almost as much as eating my way into a sugar coma.

  What I wasn’t willing to do was go back out the front door. Going out the back door would mean a longer walk in the cold, but less chance of running into someone I knew who’d have questions about Mark.

  I turned in the direction of the back door.

  A woman’s voice that I didn’t immediately recognize called my name from behind me.

  Too late.

  I turned slowly. If this was someone who simply wanted gossip, I was going to tell them that I couldn’t discuss the case for confidentiality reasons except to say that Mark was innocent.

  Mark’s house cleaner, Bernice McCloud, huffed down the hallway toward me. Mark and I had been talking just last week about whether to replace Bernice when she retired or to clean our house ourselves.

  “I thought that was you,” she said. “I’m glad I caught you. I didn’t know if I should try to call you or Mark or if he was…Henry told me what happened.”

  She twisted her fingers together and broke eye contact as if asking if he was in jail would be as bad as suggesting he’d died.

  If this was the going to be the reaction from people who knew us, I’d found another reason to prove Mark innocent as quickly as possible. I couldn’t stand awkward conversations everywhere I went.

  Though she might be feeling awkward for an entirely different reason. I knew Bernice and Henry had five boys, two of whom were still in college. One was doing his master’s degree. That probably hadn’t left them much money. They might live paycheck to paycheck right now. “If you’re worried about your check, I’ll make sure it’s taken care of. It’s every other Friday right?”

  “It is but…” She pulled at her fingers so hard I worried she might dislocate one. “The thing is I don’t…I don’t do windows, and I don’t do blood.”

  Oh. Right. Having to ask me about that was even worse than having to remind me about her pay. And I might not have thought of it had she not brought it up. Even though I’d worked with people who’d have crimes happen in their buildings, I’d never been the one to hire the professional crew to clean up the biomatter left behind. Had she not thought of it herself, the poor woman would have gone in to clean Mark’s house next week and found a horror scene.

  “Take this coming week off—paid of course—and I’ll make sure to get someone in to take care of it before the following week, okay?”

  She bobbed her head and backed off down the hall, reminding me a bit of a frightened cat who w
anted to run from a dog but didn’t feel safe turning its back on the other animal.

  This day was getting better by the minute—sarcasm most definitely intended. I guess I should look on the bright side. Bernice hadn’t outright quit.

  One foot from the back door, my phone vibrated in my coat pocket. Maybe Anderson had somehow managed to track down the real owner of the disposable phone. A girl could always hope, despite the logical side of my brain knowing there was no way he could have results that fast.

  I grabbed my phone. The name on the screen was Hal’s. I slide my finger across the screen to answer.

  “This might have been the easiest work you’ve ever given me, Miss Dawes,” Hal said. “But I don’t think you’re going to like what I’ve come up with.”

  For the first time, I wished Hal pulled his punches or sugarcoated things or any of the other clichés that meant he’d soften whatever news I wasn’t going to like. “Tell me fast, then.”

  Fast didn’t make ripping a Band-Aid off hurt any less, but it did get the pain over with quicker. Hopefully the same would be true of unpleasant news.

  “Westbay teaches school in Washington State now. I found him online first try in a school directory there. The school says he was at work Thursday and Friday, so unless he hired a hitman on a teacher’s salary, he’s not the guy.”

  And there went the rest of my hope for a lead on who’d done this. “You’re sure you got the right guy.”

  “His last name’s one of the rarest in the U.S., but I called him just in case and pretended I got a piece of his mail, looked important, from the government. Then I read him the address for the guy by the name that lived here in Michigan, and he confirmed it was him.”

  It’d been a long shot anyway. “What about the other name and license plate number I gave you?”

  Please say you found nothing, I silently urged him.

  “That one’s a weird one. Are you sure you gave me the right name? ’Cause the lady you’re looking for doesn’t exist.”

  I drooped back against the wall next to the door. That wasn’t the kind of nothing I’d been hoping for.

  When I took Isabel’s phone number, I’d had her add it and her name directly to my phone. I hadn’t wanted to risk not getting it right and missing my opportunity to have fantastic cupcakes at my wedding. “I’m sure the name is correct.”

  “Well”—I could almost hear him shaking his head on the other end of the call—“I found two Isabel Addingtons. One’s eight years old and lives in Colorado, and the other one died in 1940.”

  13

  I shouldn’t do what I was considering.

  I mimicked Mark’s tactic and drove around in circles rather than going straight home, hoping I’d come up with a better idea. Because my only idea right now required me to break into Isabel’s food truck to find some evidence of who she really was.

  After Hal’s announcement that Isabel basically didn’t exist, I’d given him her license plate number to run—C6H12O6. I’d remembered it because Mark had laughed so hard he inhaled cupcake into his lungs the first time he saw it. When he finally stopped coughing enough to talk, he’d explained to me why it was so funny. Isabel’s license plate number was the chemical equation for glucose.

  Hal came back to me with a response almost right away. Her plates were registered to a numbered company incorporated in Florida. He’d run a search for directors to see if he could locate what Isabel’s real name might be. He’d come up empty.

  The corner to head for Sugarwood came and went, and I turned in the opposite direction again. If I kept this up much longer, I’d need to stop for gas.

  Had I known Isabel wasn’t who she said she was back when she packaged up the cupcakes yesterday, I could have been careful and taken the package straight to the police. They might have been able to take a print from it.

  Though that assumed anyone would have listened to me enough to consider that her prints needed to be run. They wouldn’t waste resources on a hunch. It also assumed that her prints would be in the system. Your average person wasn’t. If she had no criminal history and no military record, her prints would come back without any potential matches.

  Lying to me about her name wasn’t a crime. I wasn’t federal law enforcement. Being in the same locale as a crime, even while a crime was being committed, wasn’t a crime. Unless I could prove Isabel had been directly involved with Troy’s death or Chief McTavish’s disappearance, I couldn’t reliably say she’d done anything wrong.

  My one hope was to find something to tell me her real name and then see if Mark recognized her real name or if she had a connection—however slim—to a case he’d worked. He hadn’t recognized her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t related to someone he’d helped put into prison or someone who hadn’t gotten the justice they felt they deserved. She wasn’t from this area. The connection might even be from something back before Mark returned to Fair Haven. She might have come here seeking revenge.

  That didn’t tell me how Troy and Chief McTavish fit into all of this, but finding a link between Isabel and what was happening would get us headed back in a direction where we could prove Mark hadn’t been behind it.

  My chest suddenly felt full, and my eyes burned. I turned on my hazard lights and pulled over to the side of the road.

  I didn’t want Isabel to be involved. I liked her.

  I’d visited her quite a few times while she created my maple syrup cupcake, and she’d shown me how she came up with new flavors. Even before that, I’d always stood and talked for a few minutes when I bought something from her truck if she wasn’t swamped with customers.

  One time I’d been there, she’d replaced a cupcake free of charge for a girl who’d dropped the one she bought as she was walking away. Another time she’d helped out a mom who was tight on money but wanted a special cupcake cake for her daughter’s thirteenth birthday.

  Neither of those things seemed like something a brutal murderer would do.

  Then again, I’d been deceived before. Isabel also didn’t smile nearly as much as someone who worked around sweets should. That could point toward something in her past that still haunted her—something for which she wanted vengeance.

  I put my car back into drive and headed for Sugarwood.

  I had to find out Isabel’s real name, either to clear her or to find a link between her and the three men. She might be using a different name for some other reason. Hopefully not one that would require me to reveal her real identity to the police—like that she had a warrant out for her arrest in another state.

  And if I was doing this—if I was really going to break into Isabel’s truck—I had to do it on my own. Even though I wasn’t going to take anything other than pictures, breaking into her truck was trespassing at best. Anyone who spotted me could I assume I meant to steal her truck. I wasn’t going to put someone I cared about into that position if we were seen. Besides, I couldn’t think of anyone who wouldn’t try to talk me out of this except Elise, and the stakes were too high for her if she got caught breaking into someone’s vehicle.

  It shouldn’t be dangerous, at least. If I waited until midnight, her truck would be empty. She’d have gone home for the night, and I’d have plenty of time before she came back to start the truck for the next day.

  All my hours spent studying lock picking on the Internet should even let me get in without damaging her truck. I wouldn’t have the skills to jimmy the actual driver’s or passenger’s door, but the door on the back of the truck that she’d let me in the other day had an old handle—she’d said so herself when she’d been worried about the draft.

  All I needed to know was where she’d parked. Isabel had a tendency to leave her truck where she planned to run it from the next day rather than taking it back to wherever she stayed.

  But I knew how to find out where it would be.

  I waited until I stopped my car in front of my house and pulled out my phone.

  I’d like to meet first thing Monday mor
ning to talk flavors, I texted her. Where can I find you?

  On Sunday night, when I pulled into the gravel parking lot, Isabel’s truck hunched in the darkness right where she’d said it’d be.

  This location was one of the most isolated she’d chosen yet. It was one of the small lakeside lots that could only accommodate a couple of cars. Two or three picnic tables—I couldn’t tell exactly how many in the shadows cast by the trees—rested in a clearing to the right. In the summer, it’d be a beautiful picnic spot overlooking the lake.

  I turned off my car, hit the button that turned off my dome lights so the interior lights wouldn’t come back on when I opened the door, and waited to make sure no one had spotted me pulling in. If an officer on patrol had seen me make the turn or saw my lights when I exited, they might follow me to check. They could think my car belonged to kids who’d come here to do things they shouldn’t or someone who was lost or having car trouble.

  I’d have an awfully hard time explaining my presence if they came to check and found me picking the lock on Isabel’s truck.

  The cold crept into my feet first, making my toes ache, and then into my hands, straight through the gloves I’d chosen. I’d selected them because they were thin and I hadn’t wanted bulky gloves impeding my ability to jimmy the lock. Major miscalculation. If I got much colder, my fingers would either be too numb or shaking too hard to manage the lock.

  I climbed out and scurried over to the door that went into the body of the truck. Waiting in my car had given me one benefit. My eyes had adjusted better to the dark than they would have if I’d gotten out immediately.

  The lock was exactly the type I’d remembered. Isabel should look into having it upgraded. Any amateur who wanted to rob her should easily be able to pop the lock if I’d figured out how from studying online.