Sweet Masterpiece - The First Sweet’s Sweets Bakery Mystery

by Connie Shelton

Sam awoke in her bed, with no recollection of getting there. Bright sunlight came through the east-facing windows. She started—was she late to meet the sheriff’s people at eight? She rolled toward her bedside clock and found that it was only six-thirty. Normally with that kind of time to spare she would roll over and let herself drift off again. But she felt curiously wide awake.

  She sat up and took stock. She was fully dressed in yesterday’s clothes. The last time that happened was twenty years ago after a bad encounter with several shots of tequila. She was not obsessive about routines, but she did at least brush her teeth, wash her face, and put on a nightshirt before falling into bed. Always.

  Wandering into the living room she noticed that she’d not locked her front deadbolt; two lamps were burning; and on the kitchen table sat that wooden box.

  It has special powers. The box holds many truths.

  Bertha Martinez’s final words buzzed in her head.

  Too weird. Sam shook off the feeling. She’d just been overtired, loaded with sugar from her stopover at Zoe’s, and she had some kind of strange . . . episode. She didn’t know what. She’d probably just dozed off at the kitchen table and then automatically wandered off to bed. That made the most sense.

  A shower and fresh clothes were the answer. She bustled into the bathroom and rushed through her routine, feeling an eagerness to get on with the day. Normally a slow riser and groggy morning person, she knew this energy was proof positive that all was right with the world. Grooming consisted of finger-combing her shaggy, graying hair and touching on a little lip gloss. She donned a pair of jeans and one of her work shirts, ready to face the cleanup job at the county property once Beau Cardwell got whatever formalities out of the way.

  She didn’t want to waste any time. As it was, her arrival would probably coincide with the deputy’s. She packed a little cooler with a peanut butter sandwich, two apples and a half-empty bag of corn chips, plus a granola bar that she was going to call breakfast. Two diet Cokes rounded out her stash of lunch and snack food to last the day.

  By the time she pulled up in front of the property, still known to her as #23 County Road 4, a cruiser and another county vehicle were already there. Beau Cardwell stood at the open door of the cruiser in his crisp dark uniform and Stetson, speaking into the mike on his shoulder. Sam approached, pocketing the key to her truck. He made some kind of over-and-out remark to the microphone. When he turned, he sent a smile her way—impersonal at first but then it became a long, assessing look.

  For the first time she noticed that he had incredible shoulders and Sam guessed him to be a bit younger than herself, probably in his late forties. Dark hair with sprinkles of gray and sideburns nearly white. Blue eyes, the color of deep ocean, distracted her as he pulled out a clipboard with some forms on it.

  Stop it, she admonished herself, you are not interested. She tugged her shirttails down and turned her attention away from Beau.

  Two men, both in uniform, were approaching. The one in charge was about her height, maybe five-five or –six, Hispanic, forty-ish, with a solid paunch. Cardwell quickly introduced him as Sheriff Orlando Padilla.

  “There’s no permit on record for that grave,” Padilla said to Sam. “We also checked county death records for the past six months and cross referenced them with burial records. We don’t have any death certificates without records of where burial took place. That’s why we’re treating this as a potential crime scene. We’ll need to take a look inside the house.”

  “The grave is actually out at the back edge of the lawn,” Sam said.

  Cardwell sent her a wry grin. “Let’s take a look out there first, then you can unlock the house.” He gestured toward the backyard. “Show us what you found.”

  She led the way, noticing how she’d cut the grass yesterday. Nice clean rows near the house, one trail toward the back, an abrupt stop. The mound of dirt was still mainly surrounded by tall grass but she stood aside and pointed toward it. While the three men poked around in the tall grass Sam went back and unlocked the front door, crossed through the living room and kitchen and came out the back.

  Padilla stood with hands on hips, glanced at the ground, looked at Beau. Sam stood by, wishing she could just get on with her job.

  “Do you know when Anderson vacated the place?” It took Sam a second to realize Beau was talking to her.

  “I think our records indicated that the owner left sometime in March or April.”

  Padilla turned to him. “Well, no permit, we have to dig.” He stared at the younger deputy, a stout kid in his twenties, who grimaced and headed for his patrol car. He came back a minute later with a shovel. Sam got the feeling the pudgy young guy would rather that the more physically fit Beau do the digging but he didn’t say anything.

  “Start on this,” Padilla told him. “Cardwell, you take a look in the house. I have to get back to town.”

  Beau touched Sam’s elbow in a gentlemanly way. She looked up at him, but he’d turned back to be sure the other deputy was shoveling. She headed toward the house and let him in the back door.

  It led directly into the kitchen. People who skipped out didn’t seem to feel the need to wash dishes or clean up. A trash can in one corner overflowed, primarily with fast food wrappers, pizza boxes and paper plates. All the real dishes were stacked in the sink and on counters. Sam didn’t even want to guess at the guck that had dried onto them.

  She felt a little embarrassed by the mess, as if she’d invited a guest into her own home and they’d found it in this condition. But Beau didn’t seem to care. He gave the kitchen a glance, ignoring the trash and the table, which she’d just noticed was covered in beer cans with a half eaten pizza dried to a crisp in its box. He’d walked into the living room.

  Almost on auto pilot, Sam went to the sink and tested to see if there was hot water. After a minute the cold stream became warm, then hot, then steamy. She found a nearly empty bottle of dish detergent under the sink and squirted it liberally over the haphazard stack. Stoppering the basin, she let the whole thing fill with hot water.

  “Sam?” The deputy’s voice came from another room. “You’re not moving anything, are you?”

  Oh shit. In her haste to make the place presentable, she’d forgotten that the whole house might be considered part of the crime scene.

  He strode in from the other room. “Don’t tell me you’re washing away our evidence. Please don’t tell me that.”

  She’d turned off the faucet but the sudsy basin gave her away. “Deputy, I . . . should I let the water out?”

  He stared down at her from his six and a half feet, eyes dark beneath the Stetson. “No, it’s okay.”

  She felt like a complete idiot. Hadn’t she watched enough episodes of CSI to know that you didn’t touch a thing at a crime scene?

  He glanced out the back window, noticing that the younger deputy had quit digging. He opened the back door. “Relax. And just call me Beau.” He seemed about to say something more but turned away instead.

  She watched him walk to the back of the property. Suppressing the urge to bag the trash, she jammed her hands into her pockets and stepped out to the back porch. She could see that the deputies had found something. The shovel stuck up from the ground and the young guy was squatting at the edge of the hole, tugging at something. Beau, too, hunkered down examining the object. Curiosity piqued her interest but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the details, close up. After a minute or two Beau stood and spoke into his shoulder mike. He brushed dirt off his hands and walked back toward the house.

  From the porch step Sam was exactly eye level with him as he stopped to speak.

  “There’s a body, all right,” he said. “It’s wrapped in blankets, not exactly a funeral director’s style. We’re going to need to exhume and identify it.”

  Exhume, as in dig up and bring out into the open. Sam really didn’t want to know too much about that.

  “It would take me probably another week to get a team of crime lab
folks out here from Santa Fe, and this isn’t exactly a fresh scene. It’s just that Padilla and myself will be the only qualified ones in the office the rest of the week—”

  “Could I help in some way? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “Well, yeah.” He actually scuffed the toe of his boot in the dirt. “It would just be to go through things in the house and try to get more information about the owner.”

  She shrugged. “It’s what I do.” As long as she didn’t have to get a good up-close look at a decomposing body, she was happy with any other little task. Plus, the sooner this whole thing was resolved, the sooner she’d finish her real job here and be able to submit her invoice. And that meant a check. And that meant groceries.

  Damn Kelly, Sam thought. It’s an awful way to feel about my own daughter, but cleaning out my checking account was a shitty thing.

  She suppressed that line of thought and stepped back into the messy kitchen.

  “What kind of information do you want me to look for?” she asked. “Anderson’s relatives, that kind of thing?”

  He grinned at her. “You’re getting the idea. You’ll make a great assistant deputy.”

  “Isn’t a deputy already an assistant?”

  “Yeah, but we’re kind of winging it here. Unless you want to go out there and help pull the body out of the grave, you’ll have to be content without an official swearing in.” Was he flirting?

  “Trust me, I’m very content not to be sworn in. Just tell me what I have to do to get on with cleaning this place up.”

  “Okay. We need papers, bills, checks—anything that might let us know more about Anderson. How long ago since anyone last heard from him. That sort of thing.”

  “There’s a desk in a corner of the living room. I can start with that.” He handed her a pair of surgical gloves and she cut through the kitchen, refusing to look at the heaping trashcan and piles of food-encrusted dishes. Beau followed, poking at the bathroom door, using a ballpoint pen to pull drawers open, scanning the rooms quickly to get a general feel for the layout.

  “He must have had someone else living here,” Sam observed. “Both bedrooms look lived in. I mean, one guy living here alone—even a husband and wife—there’s going to be one bedroom used and the other as a spare, right?”

  “Good observation, assistant.” He was flirting! Sam noticed how there was the tiniest gap near one of his incisors; he had a habit of smiling slightly wider on that side of his mouth. It had the effect of making him human, dimming slightly the otherwise near perfect looks. Stop thinking about that!

  “Both beds are rumpled, there are clothes in both closets,” he said, stepping back into the hallway. “I’ll canvass a few of the neighbors later. The medical investigator should be getting here soon.”

  Like a prophecy coming true, they heard a vehicle pull up to the house. Beau went out the front door while Sam turned back to her work. Through the open drapes at the back bedroom window she could see him showing a man in a suit out to the gravesite, the same guy who’d been at Bertha Martinez’s yesterday. The men were standing over a bundle of cloth, the blankets Beau had mentioned. The bundle hardly looked large enough to contain a person, she thought with a pang.

  She pulled open the first of the desk drawers. So, Mr. Riley Anderson, who were you? Are you the sad little heap out there in the yard now, or did you put someone else there?