Scary Sweets

by Jessica Beck

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Recipes

  Other Books by Jessica Beck

  JESSICA BECK

  THE DONUT MYSTERIES, BOOK 34

  SCARY SWEETS

  Donut Mystery #34 Scary Sweets

  Copyright © 2017 by Jessica Beck All rights reserved.

  First Edition: September 2017

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Recipes included in this book are to be recreated at the reader’s own risk. The author is not responsible for any damage, medical or otherwise, created as a result of reproducing these recipes. It is the responsibility of the reader to ensure that none of the ingredients are detrimental to their health, and the author will not be held liable in any way for any problems that might arise from following the included recipes.

  The First Time Ever Published!

  The 34th Donut Mystery.

  Jessica Beck is the New York Times Bestselling Author of the Donut Mysteries, the Classic Diner Mysteries, the Ghost Cat Cozy Mysteries, and the Cast Iron Cooking Mysteries.

  For P, home is indeed where the heart is!

  It’s Fright Week in April Springs, a time filled with special events leading up to Halloween, but the celebration is in jeopardy when a body is found in the middle of the night on the platform of the dunking booth under the town clock. Suzanne and her mother decide to investigate, and soon secrets from the past resurface and threaten the present in a very real way.

  CHAPTER 1

  When I looked out into the darkness from my donut shop front window, I saw a face leering in at me from the other side of the glass.

  I’m not usually prone to screaming, but I’m not ashamed to admit that I lost it when I saw a set of bloodshot eyes staring right back at me.

  It had been time for my morning break, if you could call four-thirty a.m. “morning,” and since I was working alone, I wasn’t going to have any company. Emma Blake, my assistant at Donut Hearts and a good friend as well, was no doubt home asleep, where most folks with any sense probably were at the moment.

  Not me. I was up making donuts for the citizens of April Springs, North Carolina, just like I did five days a week. On those glorious two days out of seven that I wasn’t working, Emma and her mother, Sharon, took the reins of Donut Hearts, not that I was known for sleeping in, even though I could have. My husband, retired state police inspector Jake Bishop, was a morning person as well, but I still beat him up by at least two hours every morning I wasn’t working. While he slept, I usually worked a crossword puzzle, read one of the cozy mysteries I loved so much, or spent my time daydreaming about new donut treats I could make.

  It took me a second to realize that I wasn’t looking at a person on the other side of the window after all. It was simply a Halloween fright mask, though why anyone would choose to buy one, let alone try to scare me to death with it, was beyond me. I cautiously opened the front door and saw that someone had popped the mask onto an old broom handle, and then they’d leaned it against the glass in such a way that I was sure to see it when I came back out into the dining area of the shop. If that had been their goal, they had succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. What troubled me most about the mask’s presence was that I knew it hadn’t been there when I’d come in a short hour and a half earlier. I might not be the most observant person in the world when I first wake up, but that I’m sure that I would have noticed.

  I tried to look around, but I couldn’t see much of anything at all until I stepped outside into the cool night air. It was October, and I knew that before long, the light jacket I’d grabbed on my way out of the shop would no longer be heavy enough to battle the chilly air. Once I was out in the darkness after I’d carefully locked the front door behind me, I could see that the Boxcar Grill sported a single porch light that provided barely any illumination at all. Directly across the street, Paige Hill’s bookstore had a pair of small candlestick lights in the front window that served to highlight all of the spooky titles she’d chosen for the week of scary festivities. As I took a step farther out onto Springs Drive, a safe enough thing to do at that time of night since there was rarely any traffic, I realized that the spotlight pointed to the dunking booth was lit up.

  That hadn’t been on when I’d come in earlier, either. Odd. I decided to investigate, but not before double-checking to be sure that I’d locked the front door behind me. It paid to be careful, especially when I was all alone.

  Walking down the street toward the lights, I started to wish that I’d brought the baseball bat I kept under the cash register for protection with me. It would feel good in my hands at the moment, but I wasn’t going back for it. As I approached City Hall and then neared the Town Clock where the booth had been set up, I could hear carnival music playing softly in the distance.

  Evidently I wasn’t the only one out at that time of day.

  The booth, a brightly colored display piece featuring a glass front panel, had been spooked up a little from its normal carnival appearance, with tiny rubber bats hanging from it, loads and loads of fake spider webs strewn all about, and dark-blue lights that gave everything around it an eerie shadow.

  Had some bored teenager flicked the ON switch that generated the music and the lights after leaving me a nasty little surprise at my window? I started looking for a way to turn the entire display off when I saw that the booth’s bench seat, rigged to collapse the moment the center target had been struck by a softball, wasn’t empty.

  A hefty man dressed in a suit was sitting there, wearing a pumpkin mask that the folks who allowed themselves to be dunked for charity wore.

  “Excuse me,” I said, my voice quivering a little as I said it. The reason for the tremor in my voice wasn’t just because it was the last week in October in our little section of the mountains of North Carolina. “Are you okay?”

  There was no answer.

  “Hello? Sir?” I asked again, being a little more insistent this time.

  Again, there was no response.

  The way I saw it, I had three choices. I could climb up the ladder myself and check on the masked man from behind, I could hit the target and send him plunging into the water where he’d be easier to identify and retrieve, or I could call the police.

  I knew that I had a reputation in town for doing some foolhardy things, but I opted to call the police instead of taking direct action myself. Besides, it was an easy decision to make, since the station was less than ten yards away from where I stood.

  Officer Dan Bradley, a relatively new policeman on the force, answered at once. “April Springs PD, Bradley speaking.”

  “Officer Bradley, this is Suzanne Hart. Somebody’s perched on the dunking-booth bench, and I’m not at all sure if he’s still alive.”

  He snorted once before he replied. “Ms. Hart, I’m getting tired of this foolishne
ss, and it’s only just started. I can’t believe we have another six days of this. Whose idea was it to have a Halloween Fright Week, anyway?”

  “The mayor’s girlfriend suggested it, but I don’t really want to talk about that right now. What are you going to do about the body?”

  “Ten bucks says that it’s just another dummy rigged up to look like a person, but I’ll be right there to see for myself.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Just in case, don’t touch anything.”

  “I’m not climbing up on that ladder, and as far as I can tell, it’s the only way I can get to him, so you don’t have to worry about that,” I said.

  After I hung up, I found myself really wishing that I’d something to defend myself with. I felt vulnerable standing there in the darkness. The policeman might have thought it was just something rigged up to look like a dead body, but I knew better. We were dealing with something far more serious than a dummy.

  Less than a minute later, Officer Bradley showed up, looking peeved as he rubbed his hands together. “It’s gotten colder.”

  “It usually does this time of year,” I said as I pointed to the body. It certainly didn’t look like a stuffed dummy to me, but then again, I didn’t have an expert’s eye for that type of thing, regardless of what some folks in town might have thought. Lately I seemed to be a magnet for murder, as much as I wished that it weren’t true.

  Officer Bradley climbed the steps of the dunking booth, but as he got to the top and was in a position where he was finally close enough to the body to see it in detail, he stiffened a little. “It’s the real thing,” he said as he reached forward and pulled the body toward him. His position on the ladder was precarious at best, and he and his charge both nearly tumbled into what had to be freezing water, but he managed to correct himself, and a minute later, he had him safely on the ground.

  “Who is it?” I asked as I leaned over the officer’s shoulder for a better look. Whoever it had been was clearly dead, but I was surprised about something.

  I didn’t recognize him.

  On closer examination, I saw in the eerie blue light that his suit was threadbare at the pant cuffs, and his tie was clearly faded. His hair was in need of a trim, and there was evidence on his chin that he’d botched shaving, or else he’d used a dull razor. To top it all off, he had a bit of a moon-shaped face that somehow fit with the mask I’d found on him when I’d first seen him.

  “Do you recognize him?” I asked Officer Bradley.

  “No, but then again, I don’t know everyone in April Springs.”

  “Well, I just about do, and he’s a stranger to me. What do you suppose killed him?”

  As I leaned forward to see if I could get a better look at the body, the police officer put a restraining hand on my shoulder. “Ms. Hart, maybe you should head back to the donut shop. I need to call the chief and see how he wants to handle this.”

  “He really is dead, isn’t he?” I asked, ignoring the request.

  “I can’t find a pulse,” the officer said a little more abruptly. “Let me do my job, okay?”

  “Fine. I’ll be at the donut shop if you need me,” I said.

  “I’m sure Chief Grant will be along later,” the officer replied.

  “If he does, he knows where to find me,” I said.

  As I started back down the street, I thought about the mask leaning on my window, and I wondered if it could possibly be related to the murder. I turned back to tell Officer Bradley about it, but he was already on his radio, summoning his boss, no doubt.

  I’d mention it to the chief when I saw him, but in the meantime, the police officer was right.

  I had donuts to make. The timer in my pocket went off as I approached the front door of the shop, and as I went back inside, I decided to take Smiling Jack back in with me. That was the nickname I’d just given him. Making it funny and trite somehow took the sting out of the way I’d found him staring at me earlier.

  As I dove back into the dough for the raised donuts, I couldn’t help wondering who I’d seen and how he’d died. I doubted that it had been natural causes, though I hadn’t seen any wounds or telltale blood on him. It was hard to guess how he’d managed to get himself up onto that dunking bench in the middle of the night, one of the oddest places to die I’d ever seen, but at least it wasn’t my job to figure it all out.

  As I worked to create the yeast donuts to complement the cake ones I’d made earlier, I couldn’t help wondering if the dead man would be the end of the Fright Week festivities before they had even had a chance to begin. The entire concept had been the mayor’s new girlfriend’s idea, and Cassandra Lane had turned out to be a force to be reckoned with. She’d come up for an extended visit from Charlotte after George had unsuccessfully tried living there first and, surprising all of us, not the least of all our dear mayor, she’d taken to small-town life as though she’d been born to it.

  As I worked with the yeast dough, I lost myself in the process, doing my best to forget about the sight of the man’s dead body as I cut out the rounds and holes and allowed them to rest before dropping them into the boiling oil in rapid order.

  As I finished up the last of them, I was surprised to hear the front door open. Had I forgotten to lock it behind me? Only two other keys existed, at least that I was aware of. Jake had one, and Emma had the other, and I wasn’t expecting either one of them.

  Grabbing a roll cutter, I peeked through the kitchen door to see who was visiting Donut Hearts before I was officially open for business.

  “What are you doing here on your day off?” I asked my assistant as I eased my roller down from its attack position.

  Emma looked at me sheepishly as she explained, “I couldn’t sleep, and I had a great idea we could try before you open the shop for the day.”

  “You’re getting as bad as me. You know that, don’t you?” I asked her with a grin. “This place has a way of consuming your life.”

  “Hey, I have a life,” she protested feebly. “Besides working here, I go to school, and I also have a boyfriend. Don’t forget that.”

  “How is Barton doing?” I asked. Emma was dating a culinary miracle worker who had aspirations of opening his own restaurant someday. In the meantime, he was providing delicious fare at the hospital cafeteria, much to everyone’s delight.

  “He’s itching to get started on opening a location of his own,” she said. “Now that Emily is back at Two Cows and a Moose, he was wondering if you might allow him to make that space into a restaurant.”

  My dad had left me a building along Viewmont Avenue. It had been a lawyer’s office at one point, Jake had taken a turn there with an aborted attempt to be a private investigator, and it had even served as an emergency location for my friend’s newsstand while she’d had her place renovated due to a broken water pipe, but I wasn’t at all sure about having it be a restaurant, no matter how good the cause might be. “I’ll have to think about that,” I said as diplomatically as I could muster, trying to think of some way to decline her request graciously.

  When I looked at Emma, I saw that she was grinning at me. “I was just teasing, Suzanne. It wouldn’t work at all.”

  “I’m relieved you know that,” I said.

  After Emma shrugged, she said, “Your name did come up in our conversation last night, but I told him that he was crazy.”

  “He really wanted to use that building for his restaurant?” I asked her, surprised that Barton would even consider it.

  “No. He wants Donut Hearts.”

  “What? But he can’t have it. It’s mine,” I said.

  Emma nodded as she explained, “During the morning, sure, but his idea was that this place is empty from the time for lunch all the way to the dinner hour. He thinks it’s a perfect solution to use this space when it’s empty. Don’t worry. I told him that he was crazy.”

  I started to agree with her when I thought about it for a moment. Was it really that bad an idea? “Am I wrong, or does that make sense in a way?” I
asked her. Once I got over the shock of sharing my space, I knew that it could work. I hardly ever used the building after eleven in the morning, so why shouldn’t Barton get some use out of it, too?

  “Suzanne, it’s crazy,” she said. “Isn’t it?” she added after a moment’s pause, sounding unsure of herself now.

  “Tell you what. Let me think about it first, okay? Don’t say anything to Barton about it quite yet.”

  “There’s no worry about that. I’m still not sure it’s a very good idea,” she said.

  “Speaking of good ideas,” I said, “what did you have in mind earlier?”

  “About what?” Had she already forgotten about why she was there?

  “I presume you didn’t get up, get dressed, and come over here in the dark just to ask me about Barton using my office building for a restaurant,” I said.

  “No, I have what I think might just be a great idea,” she said. “Come back into the kitchen and I’ll show you.”

  I followed her into the workspace, and as I iced the donut holes still waiting for their sweet drenching, Emma moved to the supply closet and gathered a few things together as though she owned the place. I suppose that two days a week she did. I’d had a little trouble at first sharing my space with her. How would it feel to have Barton working there, too? I wasn’t sure if I could bring myself to do it, but I was a big fan of the man, and if I could help him out, maybe I should.

  Emma grabbed some confectioner’s sugar, some vanilla extract, a cup of water, and a few piping bags and tips. Her last stop was for food coloring, and I wondered what she was up to. It didn’t take long to find out. After Emma mixed up a sizable batch of icing, she divided it into five small bowls. To four of these she added drops of orange, black, red, and blue, leaving the last bowl white.