by Jessica Beck
“That’s all that matters,” my husband said as he pulled out his handgun. “I don’t suppose there’s a chance in the world you’d be willing to stay out here while I go in alone, is there?”
“What do you think?”
“Just stay behind me, then,” he ordered, a command that I had no problems complying with.
Together, we walked into the building single file, and then we headed slowly up the stairs.
We were halfway there when we both heard the back door slam on the first floor behind us. Blast it all, whoever had been there had moved downstairs from the second floor while I’d been outside waiting on Jake, and now they’d gotten away. We were still racing for the back door when we heard someone screech their tires as they drove quickly away. “I can’t believe that we missed them again,” I said in disgust. “I should have followed my first instincts and gone after whoever it was by myself.”
“No, you shouldn’t have,” Jake said. “You were right to call me.”
“But now whoever was here is gone.”
“Maybe so, but if we got lucky, we might still find something. They must have heard you earlier, so they could have left before they were able to find what they were looking for.” We walked back up the stairs together, and Jake stopped me at the top as he knelt down and studied the floor with his flashlight.
“What do you see?” I asked him, straining to catch a glimpse of whatever he was looking at.
“Footprints,” he said as he pointed to a dusty edge.
“Does that mean that we can’t investigate?” I asked him.
“No. Just be careful where you put your feet, and try to match my footsteps as closely as you can.” He moved to the edge of the floor along the outside wall and started toward the main area. “Suzanne, where exactly did you hear that noise before?”
“It had to be somewhere over there,” I said, pointing to a small room that must have been an office once upon a time when the factory had still been a going concern. “It’s right above where I was standing.”
“Come on. Let’s check it out,” Jake said, carefully walking toward it. As he drew the door open, I held my breath. What would we find there? Was it another body? I hoped with all of my heart that it wasn’t, but given my history, I knew that I couldn’t bank on it.
I let out a deep sigh of relief when I realized that the room was empty, at least of people, dead or otherwise.
Instead, there were half a dozen wooden crates of varying sizes stacked in there, clearly recently disturbed. “Do you think there’s something inside of one of these?” I asked Jake, still whispering for some odd reason.
He was about to answer when another flashlight beam illuminated the area where we stood.
“Drop your weapon,” a voice commanded from the darkness, and I had to wonder if whoever had been there before had circled back to get the drop on us.
Chapter 10
Jake didn’t immediately comply with the command, and I wondered if he was going to take a stand and have a shootout right then and there. Instead, he held his hands up in the air as he said, “Everything’s okay. It’s just us, Chief.”
“Jake, what are you two doing here?” the acting police chief asked as he reached over and turned on an overhead light.
“Suzanne saw someone wandering around up here as she was driving past, so she called me,” he explained.
“Is there any reason that you didn’t think of calling me first?” he asked me as he frowned. “And this place is nowhere near your donut shop.”
“Are you honestly all that surprised that I called my husband first?” I asked him. “If it’s any consolation, you were next on my list. As to why I was here, I was curious to see if you still had a guard posted outside. I wasn’t ignoring you, I promise.”
“I wish I could say that it helped, but it doesn’t.” As he looked around, he asked, “Did you happen to see who it was?”
“Sorry. Whoever it was beat it out of here after they realized that Suzanne must have called for reinforcements.”
“So, there’s nothing new that you can add to the investigation?” the chief asked, the weariness heavy in his voice.
“I wouldn’t say that. There are some pretty good prints in the dust over there,” Jake said as he pointed to the stairwell. “But I can’t say for sure when they were made.”
“We’ll get some shots of them anyway,” Chief Grant said as he reached for his radio and called in his team. After he’d summoned his staff, I asked, “How did you even know that we were here? Is there some kind of alarm system in the building we don’t know about?”
“You’d have to ask your mother that,” Chief Grant said. “Someone reported seeing lights coming from the upstairs of the building, so I thought I’d check it out.”
“You’re working awfully late, aren’t you?” I asked him.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he admitted. “Murder has a way of doing that to me. Suzanne, tell me everything that happened since you first showed up, and don’t leave anything out.”
I brought him up to date, including being sure to mention that I hadn’t been the one who’d cut the crime scene tape. When I was finished, he asked, “I wonder what they were after?”
“I have no idea, but I’d love to get a look inside those crates,” I admitted.
“Is that what the tire iron is for?” he asked me.
“This? No, it was more for self-defense, but I don’t see why we can’t use it to open these, too.”
The interim chief laughed. “We’ll do this by the book, if you don’t mind. Shouldn’t you be at the donut shop getting ready for your day?”
I glanced at my watch. “I can push it a few more minutes if I need to.”
“Why don’t you go on? I’ll take over from here,” the chief said.
“Don’t worry, Suzanne. I’ll stop by when we’re through here,” Jake told me.
The chief looked at him oddly. “Jake, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to leave, too. You don’t have any official standing here, remember? I hate to be by the book about this, but this is still a crime scene, so no civilians are allowed.” He looked at Jake as though he were seeking his approval, and my husband quickly nodded.
“Of course. You’re right, Chief. Suzanne, let’s get out of here and let the man do his job.”
“Thanks for understanding,” Chief Grant said.
“You bet,” Jake replied.
My husband guided me away from the footprints he’d found earlier, and we were back outside soon enough. “Ouch. That was kind of harsh,” I said.
“You can’t blame him. He’s just doing his job. If our roles were reversed, I would have done the exact same thing. Do you need a hand at the donut shop this morning?”
“Thanks for offering, but I’ve got it covered,” I told him, surprised by his offer.
“Then if it’s all the same to you, I’m going back to bed,” my husband said, and then he kissed me. “Thanks for calling me.”
“I’m sorry it turned out this way,” I said.
“No worries, Suzanne,” he replied. I watched him walk back to his truck in the dim light coming from a nearby streetlight. Was he hanging his head down, or was it my imagination? It couldn’t have been easy being thrown out of an investigation like that. I made up my mind to make it up to him. Jake had been put in an awkward position because of me, and I didn’t like it the least little bit.
He followed me back to the donut shop, and I waved as he drove past me on his way back to our cottage.
For the moment, I needed to forget about murder and who had paid an early-morning visit to the wagon factory.
It was time, yet again, to make more donuts.
Chapter 11
For most people, it might have been difficult to go back to work after what had just happened, but I didn’t have any trouble starting my day making donuts as though Jake and I hadn’t just been so close to a possible killer. Measuring out flour, sugar, and other ingredients was almost done by muscle-
memory at this point. It was time to come up with a new cake donut, so I leafed through my recipe book for different ideas. I’d been meaning to play with savory donuts for some time, but I always seemed to go back to sweet offerings. What would my customers think about a bacon-filled donut with crumbled bacon in the batter and maybe a maple glaze on top? I was fairly certain that my husband would love the outcome, but would anyone else? How about one with ham? And maybe some pineapple frosting spread on it? Someday I’d try something that different, but not today. I kept skimming my recipe book’s sections on new ideas, but nothing really caught my eye. Then I remembered that Jake had added a new staple to our pantry at home, one that I’d never tried until he’d come into my life. I knew that he loved the unusual cherry tart spread on toast, so why not try it in a donut? I’d brought some with me a few days before, so I incorporated it into one of my plain donut batters and made half a dozen at the end of the batch. Emma, my assistant, came in as I was glazing one, so I offered her a bite as I grabbed a pinch for myself.
“What do you think?” I asked her as I tasted it for myself. It was dreadful. There was something about the deep-frying process that had somehow curdled the spread.
“It’s… interesting,” she said after she took a nibble.
I spit out the bit in my mouth, and then I took a deep drink of water. “It’s putrid,” I said. “Don’t you dare start lying to me, young lady.”
“Okay, you’re right. What was that? I can’t believe that I actually swallowed my bite.”
I showed her the container I’d brought from home. “Jake loves this stuff.”
“Have you thought about simmering some on the stovetop and using it as a glaze?” Emma asked after she’d bravely tasted a bit of it on the tip of her finger. “It’s clearly not suited for being mixed in batter, but it might make a good topping.”
“We might try it another day, but for now, I’m sticking to the basics.”
“It’s always worked for us in the past,” Emma said with a grin. “How has your morning been otherwise?”
“More exciting than I normally like,” I admitted without thinking as I threw away the rest of the failed experiments.
“Really? What happened?” My assistant was suddenly eager to hear my story, but I knew better than to share it with her. The one bone of contention we ever seemed to have was where her father, the newspaperman, was concerned. A few times in the past, what I’d told Emma in confidence had come back to bite me, and I’d become reluctant to share anything concerning my investigations with her.
“Nothing,” I said lamely. “Never mind.”
“Is it about the murder? Suzanne, you can trust me. I won’t say anything to dad unless you give me your specific approval to share it.”
I knew that it wasn’t fair to keep holding her past sins against her. “Jake and I were at the wagon factory before work this morning. I swung by on my way over here, and I saw flickering lights coming from the second floor.”
“Do you think that it was a ghost?” she asked me with bated breath.
“Most likely it was more like a prowler,” I said. “Emma, you don’t honestly believe in ghosts, do you?”
“How can you not?” she asked me. “As far as I’m concerned, there are more things going on in this world than can be easily explained or dismissed.”
She’d sounded remarkably like Gabby when she’d said it, and I had to wonder if I’d just run into another true believer in ghosts. “Well, whether you are right or you are wrong, this was no spirit. Someone was there, all right.”
“What could they possibly want in an old building being renovated?”
“That’s what we were trying to find out,” I said.
“Did you have any luck?”
I was willing to share some of the generalities of what had happened, but I wasn’t about to mention the crates that had been moved. “Not so much. Whoever was there left before Jake could get there.”
“At least you didn’t go into the building by yourself,” she said. “That could have been really dangerous.”
I didn’t tell her that I’d done just that before I’d had a sudden change of heart. I decided that it was time to change the subject, so I glanced at the clock. “You’re running a little behind schedule this morning, aren’t you?”
“Sorry. I don’t know how it happened, but my alarm didn’t go off. It’s amazing to me that I woke up at all.”
“More out of habit than anything else, probably.”
“I’ll stay late today if you’d like me to,” she offered.
“I wasn’t scolding you, Emma,” I said with a smile. “I was just curious.”
She looked around at the mess in the kitchen. “Since you’re finished dropping the cake donuts, I’ll get started on the dishes.” As she began to run the warm water in the sink, she asked, “Does this mean I don’t get my break?”
“Why would I do that? It would be more like I was being punished if I deprived myself of your company,” I said happily. “Half the fun of taking a break is hanging out with you outside, braving the cold temperature together.”
“I can’t wait until it starts to warm up again,” she answered.
“Just wait. In July we’ll be wishing for chillier weather again. Just you wait.”
“I don’t doubt it, but we could use a bit of that heat now, if you ask me.” As Emma started washing the pots and pans I’d used making the earlier batters, I got started on the yeast donuts. No real surprise, I finished my first round of work before she did.
“Are you ready for our break yet?” I asked her.
She looked glum as she replied, “I’ve got at least another fifteen minutes to knock these out. You go on without me.”
“Come on. You can finish them after our break is over. Yeast donuts wait for no man, or woman, for that matter.”
“If you’re sure,” she said as she pulled her hands out of the soapy water.
“I’m positive,” I said.
We bundled up and headed outside. The wind had picked up, adding considerably to the chill that I’d experienced earlier. Spring was in the air, but it was easier to believe that at noon than it was in the middle of the night. Emma and I never let the weather stop us from our breaks, and we’d even shoveled snow from our seats on more than one occasion in the past to keep from missing our time together outside.
“So, how’s your love life these days?” I asked her as a conversation starter.
“Actually, I met a new guy recently,” she said.
“Is it serious?” I asked her.
“I thought that it might be at first, but I’m not going to go out with him anymore.”
“That’s fast, even for you,” I said with a smile. “What was wrong with him?”
“He was just too nice for my taste, if you know what I mean,” she admitted after a long pause.
“What? Since when was that ever a problem?” I asked her.
“The guy wouldn’t argue with me about the little things, even when he was right. He’d just change the subject to avoid having a direct confrontation. It didn’t take long before it started to drive me crazy.”
I laughed. “That seems reasonable enough,” I said, letting a hint of sarcasm leak through.
“I know it sounds petty, but it was really getting on my nerves.”
“Hey, I’m not one to judge. At your age, you can afford to be as picky as you want to be. As you get older, though, some things might not seem as important to you as they are now. Believe me, I’m speaking from experience.”
She frowned for a moment, and then she asked me, “Do you think I was too hard on him?”
“All I’m saying is that there are worse things in the world than being too nice,” I answered. “It would be one thing if he was a doormat, but a little consideration can go a long way in my book.”
“I don’t know. I suppose that it wasn’t that bad. He never backed down unless he didn’t consider it important. Maybe I should give him another cha
nce,” she said uncertainly.
“Don’t do it on my account,” I said. I shouldn’t have butted in, but it was hard not to give her my opinion sometimes, even when she wasn’t asking for it. “How’s school going?” Emma was taking classes at the community college with a plan of someday going away again to a university. She’d already tried it once, but she hadn’t liked it, so she’d come back home, something that had been a great boon for me and my donut shop. I’d missed her, and having her with me again was awesome.
“Good,” she said. “You know, it’s school. What can I say? At least I get to sleep in my own bed at night.”
I was happy that Emma was still close by. Sometimes I felt selfish about being happy that she was home again, but I couldn’t help myself. Emma was so much more than just my assistant; her presence was something that I looked forward to every day she worked at Donut Hearts.
We were nearly ready to go back in when I saw a squad car go past. Chief Grant was driving, and he tapped his horn lightly as he passed us.
“What is he up to this early in the morning?” Emma asked.
“Jake and I called him before. No doubt he’s been checking out the wagon factory since we left,” I said.
Emma nodded. “From the sedate way he was driving, I’m guessing that he didn’t find anything there.”
“I can’t help believing that whoever was there tonight was the person who killed Sully Jackson. I just wish I knew why.” I had my own theories about the killer’s motivation, but it was nothing I cared to share with Emma.
My assistant hesitated, and then she finally said, “Dad might have a few ideas about that.”
I was starving for information about the murder, but I knew in my heart that the line that was between us shouldn’t be crossed from either side. “Emma, you shouldn’t tell me anything your dad wouldn’t want you to. Our information blockade is a two-way street.”
“I don’t see how it matters. He can’t print any of his theories, and goodness knows he has enough of them.”