by Jessica Beck
“It’s probably nothing,” I said.
“Tell me anyway.”
“This afternoon, I saw Gray near the city hall. He looked haunted by someone or something. When I turned around, I could swear I saw someone ducking behind the other side of the building, but when I got there, whoever it was that might have been following him was gone.”
“Do you have any idea of who it might have been?”
“She would have said so if she had, don’t you think?” Grace asked crossly.
“Bear with me for just one more minute,” the chief said. “Any impressions at all? Man or woman? Young or old? Anything you might remember could help us find his killer.”
I searched my memories to see if I could answer his questions, but I kept drawing a blank. “I’m sorry. I don’t know who it was.”
The chief nodded. “It’s okay. You’ve had quite a shock. Both of you have,” he added, including Grace with a soft smile.
She didn’t respond in kind. It was as though she were a mother lion looking after one of her kittens.
The chief frowned for a moment, but then he continued, “If you think of something later, call me, day or night, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “There’s one other thing.”
“What’s that?” he asked eagerly.
“I ran into a man before the movie who described Gray and asked if I knew where he could find him. It struck me as a little odd at the time, but I forgot all about it until now.”
“Tell me about him,” the chief said.
After I gave him a general description of the man, I said, “There was something about him that I didn’t like. I didn’t tell him a thing, and he didn’t linger.”
“Could he have been the same person following Gray earlier?” the chief asked.
“I couldn’t say. I’m sorry. That’s really all that I know.”
“Thanks. We’ll see if we can track him down,” he said as he closed up his notebook.
“Come on, Suzanne. I’m getting you home,” Grace said. It was clear there was no overruling her this time. It felt odd getting into the Jeep’s passenger side. Jake usually didn’t even drive my Jeep, but I wasn’t in any shape to put up a fight.
As Grace drove, I asked, “Why aren’t you as shaken as I am by what we found out there?”
“Believe me, at the first opportunity I get, I plan on collapsing into a ball of mush. Right now, I have to be strong for you. I didn’t try to get him down; in fact, I didn’t even touch him. You’re the one who had the guts to check for a pulse.”
“For all of the good it did him,” I said, remembering with a shudder the feeling of Gray’s dead skin as I’d searched for any sign of life.
“At least you tried. That’s what counts,” she said. “You should close the donut shop tomorrow. You need your rest.”
“Funny, I was thinking just the opposite. I’ve got a feeling that I’m going to be needing the shop to take my mind off what we just saw.”
“Will you at least be able to get a nap before you have to start making donuts? You’ve got four hours before you need to get to work. It’s not much, but it might help.”
“Grace, I can’t imagine going to sleep tonight after what we just saw. Can you?”
“No,” she quickly admitted. “We could always watch a movie at your place, since Jake’s gone.”
“You don’t have to babysit me,” I said, though the idea of having her company actually lightened my heart a little.
“How do you know I’m not doing it as much for me as I am for you?” she asked me with a grin.
“I don’t,” I answered. “Okay. We’ll make it a party. Strike that. There’s not going to be anything festive about it, but I wouldn’t say no to having you at the cottage with me.”
“And there’s no place on earth I’d rather be,” she said as she reached over and patted my knee.
We settled in on the couch back home and put a movie in the DVD player. At least we’d have each other for company until it was time for me to go to work again.
The truth was that the opening credits hadn’t even finished rolling before I found myself drifting off to sleep. The strain of the current events had clearly taken more out of me than I could have imagined.
The next thing I knew, my internal alarm clock was waking me up.
It was time to make the donuts again.
I glanced over at Grace, but she was sound asleep herself, and I didn’t have the heart to wake her. I got up as quietly as I could manage, got ready for work, and left her a note before I took off, flashing back for an instant to the one I’d gotten from the recently dead man.
To my surprise, there were lights on at the donut shop when I got there.
Had Emma decided to show up early, or was someone else paying me a visit?
I thought about calling Chief Grant, but when I looked through the front window, I saw that everything appeared to be intact, and to my surprise, Emma’s coat was hanging up on the rack.
Chapter 6
“Emma, I thought for sure that you would be sleeping in today. After all, you won the bet last night, fair and square.”
“Honestly, after what you went through last night, I didn’t think you’d be coming in today,” she admitted. Emma was washing the last of the dishes from the night before, but at least she hadn’t started on the day’s cake donuts yet. “Dad told me what happened at Gray’s. I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”
“It was pretty horrible,” I admitted. It didn’t surprise me that Ray had heard about Gray’s murder. I didn’t doubt that he had a source on the police force, but if Stephen Grant ever found the leak, one deputy was going to be out of a job on the spot. “You shouldn’t have come in,” I said as I took my own coat off and put it beside Emma’s.
“But you’re glad that I did, right?” she asked with a grin.
“More than you’ll ever know. The truth is, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“No worries on that count. You won’t have to find out anytime soon,” Emma said. She had left me briefly once to go away to college, but she’d quickly come back home. I knew that her time of employment at the shop wouldn’t last forever, but I’d take every minute I could get until it was time for her to move on permanently. “I should have figured that you’d be here right on schedule, come what may.”
“Sometimes it’s the only thing in my life that makes sense,” I said as I started accumulating the ingredients I’d need to make the cake donuts. Running the donut shop required two different sets of skills for donutmaking. The cake donuts were made using one method, while the raised yeast donuts were something altogether different. I didn’t mind, though. I enjoyed both processes more than the actual selling, though it was usually a pleasure seeing my customers too—many of them my friends—every day.
I’d been right. The work helped take my mind off of what I’d seen just a few short hours before. Soon enough, it was nearing time for our break. As Emma and I walked outside the donut shop in the darkness, I saw a police cruiser head up Springs Drive toward us. At least the lights and siren were off.
Who could be paying us a visit this time of morning? To my surprise, it was Chief Grant himself.
As he got out of the squad car, I asked him, “Have you been up all night?”
“So far,” he said with a shrug. “Right now I’m going home for a quick nap, and then I’ll be back at my desk before dawn.”
“We have fresh cake donuts and hot coffee inside,” I offered. “You’re welcome to whatever we have.”
“I’ll skip the coffee, but I wouldn’t mind a donut or two,” he admitted.
“What kind would you like?”
“Plain cake will be fine,” he said, and then he turned to my assistant. “Emma, would you mind gr
abbing me a couple for the road? And take your time. I need a few minutes with Suzanne.”
“Of course,” my assistant said, and she quickly disappeared back inside.
“What’s up, Chief?” I asked him.
“It’s about earlier.”
“What about it?” I asked. I’d been trying to get rid of the image of Gray tied to that trellis since I’d first seen it, but it just wouldn’t go away.
“I’m sorry if I was a little abrupt with you at the crime scene,” he said softly.
“You were just doing your job,” I replied. “Did Grace put you up to coming by and apologizing to me?”
“No, but I know what she’s going to say the second I see her, so I thought I’d fire a preemptive strike by coming by to see you first. This way, it makes it look as though it was my idea, and not hers.”
“Sorry about that. She’s a little overprotective of me.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” the chief said, and for a moment he looked his age. It vanished just as quickly as it had appeared, though, and the police chief was quickly back. “Anyway, I shouldn’t have been so hard on you.”
“No worries,” I said with a smile. “I appreciate the gesture, though. Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill Gray Vincent?”
“I’m afraid it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“How so?”
“I don’t suppose there’s any reason to keep it a secret, though if you could keep it to yourself for a few hours, I’d greatly appreciate it.”
“You know you can trust me. What’s up?”
“The truth of the matter is, Gray Vincent doesn’t exist.”
“What are you talking about? I know, knew, the man personally.” Had the police chief bumped his head at some point this evening? Or was it possible he was simply sleep deprived?
“You saw someone who’d been recently murdered, but his name wasn’t Gray Vincent.”
“Chief, Gray has been coming into my shop since I first took over, and he hasn’t missed ten days since. I know him nearly as well as I know you.”
“You might think so. I knew a man going by the name of Gray Vincent as well, but it turns out that he’s just someone’s fabrication. All of it is fake: his driver’s license, birth certificate, social security number, all of it. A week before he came to April Springs, a man about our mysterious friend’s age died suddenly, and Gray took over his identity. We don’t know who he is, but it’s dead certain that he’s not Gray Vincent, or wasn’t, at any rate.”
“I can’t believe it,” I said.
“I’m having a little trouble swallowing it myself,” the chief said. “We’re running his prints with the feds, but it takes a while. Right now, we’re looking for a killer. I have a feeling Gray’s identity may have something to do with why he was murdered, but we won’t know that right away, so we’re doing the best we can with what we’ve got. I don’t even know what to call him. I opened the case as Gray Vincent, but now I know that’s not true. I can’t stand the thought of putting John Doe on the file; whatever the man’s name was, we knew him for a long time.”
“You do what you want; I’m going to keep calling him Gray,” I said, wondering about the story he’d told me about his name. It had been a clever way of explaining the oddity of it. I was pretty sure that he would have liked a more generic name to start his new life with, but it couldn’t be that easy coming up with one from someone who’d been recently deceased.
“I know. It feels right, doesn’t it? I’m not going to sit around and wait for proper identification. It’s still a homicide committed in my jurisdiction, so that makes it mine, and I plan on finding out who did it. Have you had any luck remembering anything else? The truth of the matter is that right now, I’m grasping at straws.”
“Was there nothing in his cabin that helped?” I asked.
“No, it looked as though he could have walked away from it at a moment’s notice. There weren’t any personal photos, documents, or anything that might help figure this out. I’m stumped.”
“I’m just sorry I can’t help. I’ve been trying to come up with anything that might shed a little light on the situation, but I’m drawing a complete blank myself. I think I’m still in shock.”
“To be honest, I was surprised to find you working this morning,” he said.
“There’s no place I’d rather be. By the way, Grace is sleeping on my couch. Neither one of us thought we’d be able to rest, so we popped in a movie. The next thing I knew I was waking up at my regular time, and Grace was snoring softly beside me. I didn’t have the heart to wake her up.”
“She was worn out by the ordeal, too,” he said. “Are you two thinking about diving into this case?”
“We don’t have much choice,” I said honestly. “It was bad enough that he asked us for our help and we couldn’t provide it, but finding him like that makes it even more personal.”
“I get it, but you know I can’t sanction your investigation,” he said gravely.
I smiled at him. “I would have been shocked if you did. We’ll do our best to stay out of your way.”
“I’ve got to admit that I could use some help on this one. If Jake were in town, I’d try to deputize him.”
My husband would have readily accepted the assignment; I knew that without even asking. “Sorry, but you’re stuck with Grace and me this time.”
“I’m not underestimating your abilities to get folks around here to talk to you. I knew it as a cop, and even more so as the police chief, that a lot of people in April Springs are reticent to share anything with members of law enforcement.”
“While a donut lady and a makeup saleswoman are completely harmless,” I said with a laugh.
“Don’t forget who you’re talking to. I know for a fact that you two are about as harmless as a pair of copperheads,” he said, unguarded words springing from his exhaustion. “No offense intended.”
“Are you kidding? That’s a compliment, and I know it. We’ll stay out from underfoot, but we can still poke around the edges and see if there’s anything we can find out from our end of things. If we do, I promise that we’ll come straight to you with it.” It was a fairly new concession on my part, but if it helped the chief of police give us a little leeway in our investigations, it was worth it.
“Fair enough,” he said as he motioned to Emma. She’d been standing by the front counter watching us, for how long I didn’t have a clue.
“You called?” she asked as she joined us.
As Chief Grant handed her a pair of singles and a quarter to cover the tax, he said, “Thanks.”
“You’ve got a little change coming back from this,” Emma said.
“Save it for the next guy who comes in a little short,” the chief said.
“Will do,” she said, and then he got into the car and drove off.
“What was that all about?” Emma asked me after the police chief was gone.
I’d promised not to say anything just yet, and though I believed I could trust Emma, I wasn’t entirely sure she’d be able to withstand the temptation of telling her father the blockbuster news about Gray. “He came by to apologize for something that happened earlier.” It was true, too. It just wasn’t the complete story.
“That’s sweet. Did Grace put him up to it?” Emma asked with a mischievous grin.
“No, evidently he came forward all on his own.”
She was about to ask me something else when the timer went off. I was, quite literally, saved by the bell.
“Time to get busy making more donuts,” I said, and we walked back into the shop together.
I was going to have to talk with Grace about what had just happened, but it would have to wait for now. Not only was she most likely still asleep, but I had other t
hings to do at the moment, like take the dough I had waiting for me and transform it all into delicious donuts to share with anyone in April Springs who had a yen for a sweet treat this morning.
Chapter 7
Five minutes before we were set to open for the day, my cellphone rang.
It was Jake.
I slid the last tray of donuts into the display case and took the call.
“Hey, Jake. How are Sarah and the kids?”
“Not great,” he said, and I could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “My sister has gotten herself tangled up with yet another bad boy, and I’m trying to break her free.”
Sarah had a habit of going for the worst possible men she could find, something that had a negative impact on her kids. It was one of the reasons Jake had paid so much more attention to them than he had his other nieces and nephews.
“Why does she keep doing that to herself?” I’d never understood the impulse to date guys who were trouble, if you excluded Tommy Thorndike in the sixth grade. Then again, Tommy and I had dated again a little in high school, and if anyone in our class had been destined for trouble, it had been Tommy. I’d known in my heart that I couldn’t change him, but I quickly saw the folly in even trying. He’d disappeared just before graduation, and I hadn’t heard from him since. For all I knew, he was in Raleigh dating Sarah now, but somehow I doubted it.
“She swears that she’s going to change as soon as she’s free of this one, but I’ve heard that before,” Jake said. “We’ll see. In the meantime, do you mind if I extend my stay here a little while longer?”
“No, of course not. Take all the time you need.” I felt a little selfish letting Jake stay in Raleigh without me, but I had my reasons. If he were home, it would be twice as tough investigating what had happened to Gray with Grace. I loved my husband dearly, but he was still having a tough time getting used to the fact that I was a decent investigator myself.