Sugar Coated Sins

by Jessica Beck

  “The real question, then, is who gave the poison to him, and why did they write that note afterward?” I asked. “Is remorse enough to motivate someone to confess like that?”

  “Remember, the killer never believed that the note would be discovered in their lifetime,” Phillip said.

  “Well, we’re not going to solve it sitting around here,” Jake said as he began to stuff the contents of the time capsule back into the container. “Phillip, how soon can you get started on your research?”

  “I’m already on it,” he said with a grin as he stood. “I’ll let you know what I find.”

  “Thanks,” Jake said, and after he was gone, I asked my husband, “What do the two of us do now?”

  My husband shrugged. “I don’t know about you, but I’m calling Stephen Grant in here so I can explain what we’ve been up to. After that, he and I are going to start digging into Benjamin Port’s life a little harder.”

  “That sounds like a good plan, but where does that leave Grace and me?”

  “I don’t suppose there’s the slightest chance that you two will just leave this to me and my investigators, is there?” Jake asked me with a grin.

  “Do I really even need to bother answering that question?” I asked with a hint of laughter in my voice.

  “Probably not. Tell you what. If you and Grace could stay out on the edges of this case and look for things that my people and I might miss, that would be great.”

  “You’re not just asking me to do that to keep me safe, are you?”

  “Would it be all that wrong if I were?” Jake asked me.

  “I’ve done this before, remember?”

  “Not on my watch, you haven’t,” he answered.

  I knew that my husband had a lot more to worry about than me. Was I being selfish insisting on digging into Benjamin Port’s murder, too? Maybe, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d been involved since the beginning, and there was no way I could just bow out now. “I’ll tell you what I am willing to do. I’ll be careful, and so will Grace.”

  “Good.”

  As I started to leave, Jake caught Stephen Grant’s attention, which wasn’t hard to do, since the officer was hovering around outside the office. As Stephen headed for the door, I left, giving my husband one last smile before I was gone.

  It was time to find Grace and see what we could uncover about the murder victim. The trail was the coldest we’d ever tackled, but between the two of us, I had a hunch that we’d be able to come up with something that would help track down a killer.

  Chapter 8

  “Hey, partner. Are you up for a little digging?” I asked Grace after she let me in through her front door.

  “I’m raring to go,” she said. “How did things go with Gabby?”

  “How do you think?”

  “Did she make you beg for information? I hate when she does that,” Grace said as she grabbed her house key.

  “As a matter of fact, she couldn’t wait to tell me all about Benjamin Port,” I said as we walked outside.

  “How did you manage that?” Grace looked suitably impressed, but I wasn’t going to spoil it with facts.

  “Let me have a few secrets of my own,” I said with a grin.

  “If you’re willing to tackle that woman head on, you’re entitled to whatever you want. What did she tell you?”

  “As far as Gabby could come up with, there were three people who might have wanted to see Benjamin dead, but after I left, I had four people on my list.”

  “Are you including Gabby herself?” Grace asked. “If you haven’t, we have to at least consider her a potential killer, no matter how unlikely it might feel to us.”

  I tried to hide my disappointment. “I feel the exact same way. Are we both brilliant, or do we just think along the same lines?”

  “Why can’t it be both? I’ve been around you a lot when you’ve been investigating murder, so it makes sense that great minds might think alike,” she said. “Do you really believe that Gabby might have poisoned him?”

  “I don’t like to admit it, but it’s something we have to consider. She was awfully forthcoming about her own list of suspects. She told me about Hilda Fremont from the Boxcar Grill, Benjamin’s own sister, and Judge Hurley, of all people.”

  “You act surprised. I don’t have any trouble seeing him doing it,” Grace said, shocking me a little with how confident she sounded.

  “Honestly? I couldn’t.”

  “That’s because you’ve never been judged by him in court.”

  “Oh, that’s right. He tried your speeding ticket case, didn’t he?” I asked. I remembered that it hadn’t gone well for Grace, and she’d lost her license for three months for driving forty-five miles an hour in a twenty-five-mile-an-hour zone. The new limit signs had just been placed that morning, and her attorney had asked for mercy. What Grace had gotten was the harshest penalty the law allowed. She would have lost her job, but one of her coworkers had broken her left leg just the month before. She could manage driving well enough, but climbing in and out of the car had been too difficult for her on a daily basis, so they’d balanced each other out, though the company had docked each of them half their pay during their time together.

  “The man’s a sadist,” Grace said, her voice suddenly filling with anger. “Let’s go tackle him first.”

  “Slow down. Now that Jake is in charge, we aren’t going to speak to any of his suspects until he’s had a chance to interview them himself.”

  “Then what are we going to do, dig around the edges again?”

  “We don’t have much choice. If it’s any consolation, Jake has Phillip doing the same thing, only in the past. Everybody’s been relegated to second team on this one.”

  “Even Stephen?” Because he was her boyfriend, there had been some friction between them when he’d been acting sheriff, but now that he was second in command, things had gotten a lot gentler between the two of them.

  “No, your guy and my guy are running it together,” I said.

  “Then I suppose that I can live with it if you can,” Grace conceded. “So if we can’t go after our list of suspects, what can we do?”

  “Think about it. There are some questions we can ask that might just lead us to new suspects that no one else has even thought of yet, and if we can come up with fresh names, I don’t see any reason we can’t do a little preliminary footwork ourselves.”

  “I like the way you think,” Grace said with a smile. “The question is, where do we start? After all, it’s been fifteen years.”

  “I’m not saying the case isn’t a little cold.”

  “Cold? Are you kidding? It’s absolutely icy,” Grace replied.

  “Maybe so, but there could still be clues out there.”

  “Where is the question,” she said.

  “Off the top of my head, I can come up with a few ideas about where we might get started. Where was Benjamin Port living at the time of his murder? Where did he work? Who did he associate with besides Gabby Williams? Did he have any trouble with anyone he knew?”

  “What I want to know is who gave him that chicken,” Gabby said.

  “I don’t think it was what killed him,” I said. “No one believes that it was poisoned now.”

  “Maybe not, but what if the killer gave it to him as a smokescreen to cover up the fact that they were about to poison him with something else? What better way to make a murder look like an accident than that?”

  “I hadn’t really thought of it that way,” I admitted. “You’re making a good point. It’s at least something that’s worth finding out.”

  “But how? Who can answer the questions we have?”

  “Well, one thing is for sure; I can’t go back to Gabby,” I said.

  “I don’t blame you for that one bit,” Grace said, “but I have an idea. Give me ten minutes on the Internet. I might be able to come up with a few answers myself without having to ask anyone else.”

  “Need I remind you that fifteen year
s ago, the World Wide Web was just a baby compared to what it’s become now?” I asked her.

  “I get that, but it doesn’t mean that information isn’t still out there. Besides, what can it hurt? Let me look around a little and see what I can find.”

  After double the allotted time she’d requested, Grace closed her computer with a sigh. “All I got was his obituary, and it wasn’t one of those flamboyant ten-paragraph ones, either. It told more about the mortuary that was handling the services than about the man himself. That was a wash.”

  “Maybe so, but I’ve got another idea. Who do we know who has been following the news in April Springs for the last twenty-five years?”

  “I don’t know, your mother?” she asked.

  “Maybe, but I’m not going to her first. I was thinking that perhaps we should speak with Emma’s father, Ray Blake.”

  Grace looked unhappy about my suggestion. “Do you honestly think he’s the best source for us to tap into? The man sees conspiracies behind every bush. How are we going to know that we can trust anything he tells us?”

  “Granted, we’re probably going to have to read between the lines,” I said, “but unless you have a better idea, I say we talk to Ray.”

  “Ray, do you have a second?” I asked the newspaper writer/editor/publisher/ad man when Grace and I walked into the tiny offices of his paper. The space was so small that I was surprised that the glass door had enough room for the April Springs Sentinel’s name to be spelled out without using any abbreviations. I had to give him credit, though. While many small-town newspapers were shutting down all over the country, Ray had managed to keep his alive. More of that was due to his ability to sell ads than to write news stories, but the man was persistent in his dream to scoop everyone else in sight on every story.

  “That depends,” he said as he looked up from a stack of old newspapers spread out on his desk. A computer monitor was off to one corner, but it was pretty obvious that he was doing research the old-fashioned way. “Do you have a story for me?”

  “Not really,” I said at the same time Grace said, “Not yet.”

  That caught his interest. “Okay, you’ve got my attention. Which is it?”

  I looked at Grace, who shrugged slightly, leaving it to me to combine our answers in a way that made sense. “What we should say is that we’re digging into something right now, but who knows where it might lead?”

  “Suzanne, forgive me if I’m a little skeptical, but you’ve been reluctant to share much with me in the past,” Ray said. It was the biggest overstatement he’d ever made in his life, and that was saying something. I’d balked at his daughter, Emma, saying anything at all to him about the cases I’d investigated in the past.

  “I’ve never really had to ask you for your help before, either.” I’d used him a few times in the past, but I’d always gone through Emma before.

  “True. Okay, what do you want to know?” As he asked it, he leaned over and nonchalantly turned on a small tape recorder sitting on his desk.

  “Hang on a second,” Grace said. “Give us a minute to confer, Ray.”

  He shrugged and went back to his research as Grace pulled me out of his hearing for a moment. “What’s going on, Grace?”

  “I didn’t mean to make you commit to something you aren’t willing to do,” she said. “I don’t know what I was thinking when I said that earlier.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it. We both know that Ray’s not going to give us anything without us giving him something in return. You just reached that conclusion before I did.”

  “Are you sure about this, Suzanne? He’s going to tape everything we say, use it, and then claim that it was all on the record.”

  I looked at her for a second before I answered. “Do we really have any choice?”

  “No, probably not,” she answered. “I just wanted to be sure.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  When we came back, Ray looked up again. “Did you two finish your little conference?”

  “We did. Ray, what do you know about Benjamin Port?”

  He nodded in satisfaction. “So it’s true.”

  “What’s true?” Grace asked him.

  “Port was murdered after all. I thought so at the time, but no one would listen to me.”

  “What makes you think that’s why we’re here?” I asked him, trying not to give too much away too soon.

  Ray chuckled. “I’ve been at this too long not to know what’s going on when I see it. Ever since I heard about what they found in the time capsule, I’ve been waiting for your husband to come by. I have to admit that I’m a little surprised that he sent you instead.”

  “He doesn’t even know that we’re here,” I said.

  Ray smiled a little too smugly for my taste. “Really. Is there trouble in paradise, Suzanne?”

  I couldn’t do it, no matter how much I needed his information. I reached across the desk and turned off the recorder, much to his chagrin. “We need to establish some rules before this goes any further. None of this is officially on the record.”

  The newsman frowned. “I don’t follow anyone else’s rules, and no one gives me orders. If I learn anything in the course of my investigation, I won’t let a soul tell me what I can and cannot print. As far as I’m concerned, everything you say is on the record, always.”

  “Then we’re done here,” Grace said, tugging lightly on my arm.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Ray, if we can talk to you off the record without that tape recorder running, then maybe we can work together on this. Otherwise, we’re not saying another word.” I wasn’t bluffing, but I hoped that it didn’t come to us walking out without anything, either. My bet was that Ray was more interested in what we had to say than in sticking to his own personal guidelines, but I wasn’t positive about it as we headed for the door. I’d tried that tack earlier with Gabby because I’d known her well enough to gauge her response. Ray Blake was another matter entirely.

  “Suit yourself,” Ray said as I opened the door. “I’ll be here when you change your mind.”

  “He didn’t stop us,” Grace said in bewilderment once we were back outside again. “I can’t believe that he didn’t give in.”

  “I’m willing to bet that he’s counting on us being the first ones to cave.”

  “Well, if that’s what he’s hoping for, then he’s about to get his wish,” Grace said as she turned back to his office door. “Like you said before, we really don’t have much choice, do we?”

  “As a matter of fact, maybe we do,” I said. This time I was the one restraining her.

  “Suzanne, where else can we go for what we need?”

  “Grace, Ray’s not the only one around here who can help us,” I said.

  “I’d love to hear who else you have in mind.”

  “We need to speak with Karen Harris.”

  “The old librarian?” Grace asked.

  “I wouldn’t call her old to her face, but yes, that’s who I’m talking about.”

  “You know what I mean. Didn’t she retire five years ago?”

  “She did,” I said, “but the day after they forced her into retirement, she came back to work as a volunteer.”

  “I never did understand that,” Grace said.

  “Why shouldn’t she do what she wants when she’s retired?”

  “But it’s the same thing she did for a paycheck before.”

  “Grace, I’m not entirely certain that it was ever about the money for her. The woman loves to be around books, and what’s more, I know for a fact that she’s handling all the newspaper and magazine archives at the library.”

  “How did you happen to know that?”

  “She comes into Donut Hearts once a month and buys treats for the other volunteers. I’m willing to bet that she knows more about what happened fifteen years ago than anyone else still in town, including Ray Blake.”

  “Then by all means, let’s go ask her.”

  The only problem was
that when we got to the Research Room, the doors were locked and the lights were out.

  I found a library assistant and asked her, “Excuse me, do you know when Karen is coming back?”

  The young woman bit her lower lip before she answered. “You haven’t heard the news, have you?”

  A bolt of dread shot through me. Had something happened to her? “No. What’s going on?”

  “That’s the thing. Nobody knows. She was here this morning same as always, but around one, she locked the doors and told Mrs. Benchley that she wouldn’t be coming back, ever again. We’re all a bit in shock, to be honest with you.”

  “Did she at least tell anyone where she was going?” I asked.

  “You run the donut shop, don’t you? Why do you want to know?”

  It was a fair question, but I didn’t have a good answer ready, so I said the first thing that came into my mind. “The last time she was at my shop, I accidently overcharged her, and I have to pay her back immediately or I won’t be able to get to sleep tonight.”

  “That was a few days ago, and it was just a dozen donuts,” the assistant said. “How much extra could she have paid?”

  “It’s not the amount, it’s the principle involved,” I replied, realizing that it was lame as I said it, but I was going to have to stick to it.

  “Wow, you really go the extra mile to be honest, don’t you? I admire that, to be honest with you. She’s still at her place on Wickham Street, at least as far as I know.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  As Grace and I were leaving the library, she asked me, “You didn’t really overcharge her, did you?”

  “Me? No, I’m pretty careful about the change I make, but I had to come up with something.”

  “It made you sound like a nut job; you know that, don’t you?”

  “What do I care? We need to get over to Karen’s place and see what’s going on.”

  Grace looked at me oddly. “Suzanne, you don’t really believe that this has anything to do with what you and Jake found in the time capsule, do you?”

  “How can it not be related?” I asked. “If we’ve learned anything in our investigations, it’s not to trust coincidences. I just hope that we’re not too late.”