8 Sweet Payback

by Connie Shelton

  Sweet Payback

  The Eighth Samantha Sweet Mystery

  Connie Shelton

  Chapter 1

  A bright pink bunny stared upward at Samantha Sweet with blank white eyes. She picked up her pastry bag of dark chocolate frosting and added pupils, giving the last of the two dozen Easter cupcakes its own little perky personality. A tray of the fluffy cottontails, in shades of pastel yellow, lavender, pink and green waited on Sam’s worktable to be sold away to homes all over Taos county and devoured by sugar-hyped children. She picked up the tray and carried it to the showroom of Sweet’s Sweets.

  “Those are adorable!” exclaimed her slender assistant, Jennifer Baca, who turned from the cash register and slid open the glass door on their vintage display case. She made space between the half-empty tray of Sam’s secret-recipe amaretto cheesecake and another of spring-chick cookies which the shop’s decorator, Becky Harper, had finished only minutes before.

  “Three days to go,” Sam said. “I hate to say this, but I’m glad we don’t have another complicated holiday for awhile.”

  Jen sent Sam a sideways glance. “I think you said the same thing after Christmas and again at Valentine’s Day. But when each new season comes along you’re right in there, coming up with fantastic new pastries.” She gave her boss a wink. “You love this.”

  Sam had to admit it—she did love her work. Opening her own pastry shop had been a lifelong dream and eighteen months into the venture she was still thrilled with the results. Her location, just two blocks off the famed Taos Plaza, was ideal for attracting tourists as well as locals. The winter ski season had been good and the crowd of spring-breakers exceptional this year. Traditionally, the northern New Mexico ski areas closed right after Easter weekend and the locals took their own vacations, getting away from the bipolar moods of the weather, seeking out warmer climes along the Gulf Coast or Mexico. But this year the spring temperatures had risen earlier than normal; skiing was finished by the end of March and now in early April everyone was ready to toss aside heavy coats, break out pastel cottons and enjoy some time outdoors. Apparently the cakes, cookies and chocolates from Sweet’s Sweets were to play a big part in the upcoming weekend festivities—Sam and crew couldn’t seem to bake and decorate fast enough.

  “I took two more orders for the Easter Basket cakes,” Jen said, handing the forms over to Sam as soon as she had set down the cupcake tray.

  “Woo. Maybe I’d better make up a few extras. I have a feeling people will be popping in for them right up to the last minute on Saturday.”

  “Think you created a monster?” Jen asked with a chuckle, pointing to the complicated display model in the front window.

  Sam had come up with the idea of sculpting a large layer cake into the shape of a basket, frosting it a golden tan and piping it with a basket-weave pattern. She’d filled it with hand-crafted chocolates, decorated Easter egg petit fours, an assortment of their pastel cookies and cupcakes, and topped it with a handmade chocolate bunny. Crowning the whole thing was a curved handle formed of white modeling chocolate and tied with a huge fondant bow. The entire confection was edible and from the moment she’d placed one in the window display, the orders had come non-stop.

  After attempting to bake, decorate and assemble each one herself Sam realized she had to streamline the process. Her head baker, Julio, could crank out cake layers, cookies and cupcakes by the dozens but Sam and her assistant decorator, Becky, were running ragged to keep up. They’d finally gotten a little ahead of the rush last week by devoting one entire day to making chocolates and cookies so they would have a supply on hand. But the cakes could only be done a day or two before delivery, so there was still a push to turn out a dozen or more each day—in addition to their normal flow of birthdays and weddings and other special occasions. Sam had shifted the kitchen duties a little, enlisting Julio’s help in a few aspects of the decorating and bringing in a part-timer just to keep the dishwashing under control and provide that necessary extra pair of hands when there were heavy cakes to be moved around and delivered.

  She surveyed the display case from the front, satisfied that there was enough stock to get them through the morning. Grabbing a cup of coffee and the order forms from Jen, she headed back to the kitchen.

  “Sam, can you take a look at this?” Becky called out. “I don’t think I’m getting the spray right.”

  On the worktable in front of her sat a small two-tier cake—a six-inch layer topped by a very small four-inch one—covered in smooth white fondant. A trail of tiny pink rosebuds cascaded down the side and Becky had done a nice job of arranging them so they appeared to pool at the base of the cake into an almost-liquid puddle of flowers.

  “I wanted it to be similar to the one you made for yours and Beau’s six-month anniversary. That’s the occasion for this couple too. But that little spray of flowers you did on top of yours . . . I’m just not getting it.”

  Sam smiled and reached for a package of thin, nearly-invisible floral wire. A celebration for six months of marriage had seemed a little silly, but she’d wanted to mark the occasion with something nice. The girls in the shop had thought it the most romantic gesture ever and had begun selling their customers on the idea of having their own done.

  “All you do,” she told Becky, “is clip the wire to the length you want. Not too long or it will overwhelm the design. Then take your little bits of pink fondant, like so. Give a twist. Attach the petal to the wire . . .” She pinched the malleable sugar dough into petal shapes and stuck them to the thin wire. “When it’s fairly full of petals, just bend it into the littlest bit of an arc. And don’t put too many on the cake. Half a dozen should be plenty for the size of this piece.”

  Becky quickly mastered the technique and within a few minutes carried the finished cake to their big, walk-in fridge for storage until the customer came to pick it up. Sam told Julio about the extra layers they would need for the Easter Basket cakes and was pleased when he immediately began loading the ingredients for the batter into the big Hobart mixer. The tattooed biker had startled her a bit when he first applied for the job, but his expertise in a commercial kitchen quickly became evident and now she wasn’t sure what she would do without him. He didn’t much engage in the friendly chit-chat with the women, just quietly and efficiently did his work.

  Sam surveyed the room. Her desk looked, for once, fairly organized. She picked up the stack of order sheets and was in the process of checking them against the contents of the fridge when the back door opened.

  “Hey, Mom. Hi, everybody.” Kelly walked in and dipped a finger into a smear of chocolate frosting that hadn’t yet been wiped off the stainless steel worktable, popping it into her mouth. “Ooh, yum.” She went back for a second swipe at it.

  “What’s up?” Sam was getting better about not jumping to conclusions, but since Kelly often showed up with an unsolved crisis she’d learned not to assume it was just a friendly visit.

  “Oh, not much. Things are slow next door, so I thought I’d leave a little early and get a head start on dinner at home. And, I’m inviting you and Beau if you’re not doing anything else.”

  “You want to cook for us? Wow—I’m impressed.”

  “It’s kind of an experiment. I found a recipe in a magazine for this way to do pork tenderloin with a maple glaze and some kind of pecan crust. It looked so good in the picture . . .”

  “Let me make sure Beau isn’t going to be tied up.” Sam picked up her phone and hit the number for her husband.

  As sheriff of Taos County, Beau never knew what each day would bring and that always left Sam unsure what their dinner plans might be. More often than not, she either picked up something ready-made at the store or they ate out. It was far from a healthy lifest
yle and she had vowed more than once to be more diligent. Now, with the offer of a home-cooked meal, even one labeled ‘experimental’ by her thirty-five-year-old daughter, she hoped he would have the evening free.

  “I will be out of here by six,” Beau said, “and you can tell Kelly that I am looking forward to her meal.”

  Sam turned to Kelly. “He can make it, and I don’t have any houses to break into this week, so we’ll be there. Want me to bring dessert?”

  “Whatever you made that has this on it,” Kelly said with a smile and another swipe at the chocolate frosting. She left as quickly as she’d arrived, saying she had to brush out a cocker spaniel’s new haircut and then she was leaving for home.

  “At least it’s convenient that she got the job at Puppy Chic,” Becky said.

  “Sometimes more than others,” Sam answered, scanning the room to see where those chocolate Kahlua cupcakes had gone.

  She caught the expression from her part-time holiday employee. Whenever someone learned that Sam also broke into houses for a living, there were always raised eyebrows. The fact that Sam was under contract to the Department of Agriculture to get inside abandoned houses, clean them up, and maintain the property until it could be sold usually answered most of those questions. She quickly ran through all that once again.

  “At the moment, I’m blissfully free of that obligation,” she said. “Foreclosures are down a bit, and that’s good news for everyone.”

  She boxed up a half-dozen Kahlua cupcakes as she talked, then checked with Jen out front to see if everything was ready so they could close for the night. A half-hour later she pulled up beside her old house, the home she’d bought more than thirty years ago and left in Kelly’s care when she married Beau and moved out to his ranch property on the north end of town. His department cruiser drove in beside her bakery van before she had reached the back door.

  “Hey you,” he said, pulling off his Stetson and bending toward Sam for a kiss.

  She balanced the bakery box on one hand, enjoying the kiss and marveling that this movie-star-handsome man had fallen in love with her. Good looking, romantic, kind and considerate, even law-abiding. And, he respected her opinions, sharing details from some of his cases and asking her ideas on them—what more could she have wished for? Maybe all new brides felt that way, but Sam never wanted to forget just how lucky she was.

  A sound at the back door, and Kelly was standing there with a teasing look in her eye. “Newlyweds. You know I can only let this behavior slide for another few months. By the one-year mark you’ll have to start acting like old, married folks.”

  “Have to?” Sam asked.

  Beau just laughed. He took the bakery box and handed it over to Kelly.

  Inside, Sam noticed more changes. Kelly had obviously been thrift-store shopping and added a shelving unit in the living room for the stereo that used to be in her bedroom. Sam felt some pangs about leaving this home and its convenience to the plaza and her shop. But Beau’s log home, with acreage, dogs and horses, was so spacious and nice that she’d been happy to let Kelly take over the little two-bedroom adobe near the center of town. New placemats at the kitchen table, some kind of potpourri and the house was scented with a new ambiance. She sniffed the air. Potpourri wasn’t the only enticing fragrance; her stomach growled a little as she realized how appetizing the dinner smelled.

  “Come on in,” Kelly said, setting the cupcakes on the countertop. “I’m just finishing the salad, veggies are going into the steamer right now, and the meat will be out—” An oven timer dinged. “Right about now.”

  Sam offered to help and Kelly steered her toward an unopened bottle of wine and three stemmed glasses.

  “Beau, if you want to escape the kitchen, someone left a Santa Fe newspaper in the shop today and I brought it home. I think I left it beside the big easy chair in the living room.”

  “Haven’t seen one of those in ages,” he said. “I’ll leave you ladies to it if you don’t need any help in the kitchen.”

  Sam filled wine glasses and the meal went together quickly. When she stepped into the living room to tell Beau it was ready, she caught an exclamation from him.

  “Look at this,” he said. “The Taos Sheriff’s Department got a mention.”

  “Really? What’s up?”

  He held up the lower half of the front page for her to see. The headline read, “Two Taos County Men Get Early Prison Release.” She took the paper and was about four words into the story when Kelly peered around the corner.

  “Hey, guys? Dinner?”

  Sam sensed that Beau wanted to discuss the story further, but it would be rude to keep Kelly’s meal waiting. She folded the page and carried it to the kitchen, laying it beside her backpack so she would remember to take it home. Kelly handed Sam the bowl of steamed vegetables and Beau the platter of sliced tenderloin.

  “So, Mom, you said you were fresh out of caretaking jobs at the moment?” Kelly posed the question while she swabbed a piece of the meat in the accompanying maple glaze. Minutes into the meal, they had all pronounced the new recipe a keeper.

  “Delbert Crow hasn’t called in weeks, and I’m hoping it stays that way.”

  “Ever since our honeymoon, those duties seem to have tapered off,” Beau said.

  “Well, I had asked him to cut back on my workload, offer more cases to his other contractors. I just didn’t think he would really do it.” She speared a tender-crisp carrot. “I’m not complaining.”

  Kelly entertained them with a story of a terrier who, determined not to have a bath this morning, had hidden himself behind one of the dog crates at Puppy Chic and how she and the owner, Erika Davis-Jones, had nearly gone into a panic that he might have gotten outside somehow in the crazy traffic near the plaza.

  “I finally came up with the idea of giving all the other dogs a liver snack. The minute he smelled those he showed up for his and we nabbed him. He had the most forlorn look on his face when he figured it out.”

  “Maybe we should get Nellie and Ranger in for baths,” Sam suggested to Beau. The two ranch dogs mainly stayed outdoors, and she suspected they might be allowed inside more often if they didn’t smell quite so much like a horse corral.

  He nodded agreement, but she could tell his attention was split. Shortly after their coffee and cupcake dessert she suggested they better make an early evening of it. Since they had come in separate vehicles they didn’t get the chance to talk until they got home. He headed immediately for the corral to check on the two horses, while Sam went inside.

  By the time he came in she had settled in the living room and picked up the newspaper to read the short article about the two prisoners.

  “I only vaguely remember that case,” he said. “I was still pretty new with the department back then, which meant Orlando Padilla assigned me traffic duty and domestic disturbances more than anything else. But this one, it was the abduction and murder of a young woman and it turned into a pretty big deal. Angela Cayne was her name, age twenty, lived with her parents as I recall.”

  Sam nodded, sliding over to make space on the couch. The names in the news article seemed vaguely familiar to her, too, but other than the facts that Lee Rodarte and Jessie Starkey had now left the state penitentiary, their convictions overturned, the article was surprisingly slim on details, and Sam was too weary to turn on the late television news to learn more.

  “Padilla handled it himself, I suppose?” The former sheriff had left the department more than a year ago in disgrace, but before that he’d been a real glory-hog, taking the high-profile cases if and when he might get his picture in the paper. With friends in high political places, he’d hoped one day to run for a state senate position and eventually governor. Despite his affair with a married woman and covering up crucial evidence in a murder, who knew—in this state he still might make a comeback.

  “He did,” Beau said. “Now, if there’s trouble over this, I suppose it will fall right into my lap.”

  Chapter 2
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  Sam’s alarm clock went off at the usual hour—four-thirty—and she suppressed a groan. This part of it never got easier, although she had, before the Easter rush, begun sleeping in an extra hour so she could awaken when Beau got up. However, today she had a half-dozen Easter Basket cakes to assemble and decorate, and their Good Friday sales would probably go through the roof.

  She rubbed at her grainy eyes as she stumbled toward the large master bath. A quick, hot shower before slipping into her standard bakery attire of black slacks and her white baker’s jacket. She opened the lid of her jewelry box, poking through the contents for her favorite earrings. As she fastened the wires on the gold hoops, she caught herself staring at the oddly carved wooden box on the vanity. They had a history together, she and this box which had been a gift from an old woman who many claimed was a bruja. The box certainly had some kind of power, scary at times, but Sam still didn’t know if the old woman had really been a witch.

  Occasionally, the thought nagged at her that perhaps she could locate someone who’d known old Bertha Martinez, someone who might know more of the box’s history. But there’d been no time to investigate that angle and there was certainly no time to do it this week. She snapped the lid of the box closed, turned out the bathroom light and tiptoed through the room so Beau’s extra bit of sleep wouldn’t be interrupted.

  Downstairs, she paused at the kitchen doorway. Cereal and fruit would certainly be healthier choices for breakfast, but with the amount of work facing her she decided one or two more days of grabbing a pastry and coffee at the shop wouldn’t mean the end of the world. She picked up her parka and backpack from the coat rack near the front door and walked out into the frosty morning. The calendar might say it was spring, but that meant nothing in the mountains at 7,000 feet. Her van made a little vapor cloud in the chilly air as she let it warm up and within minutes she was on the nearly empty road toward Taos.

  True to form, Julio was already there when Sam arrived, and the scent of blueberry muffins filled the kitchen. His skills in the kitchen continued to impress her. The baker worked quickly and efficiently; without having to be assigned a task he simply knew what needed to be done. While Sam had been away on her honeymoon she’d entrusted him with a key to the shop, knowing he would get there early and have most of the breakfast pastries ready by opening time. Since she’d been home again—other than the holiday seasons when the workload seemed to quadruple—she’d left that arrangement in place. She greeted him with a thanks for being so vital to the business, then she picked up the first of her order forms.