Sweet Masterpiece - The First Sweet’s Sweets Bakery Mystery

by Connie Shelton

Beau followed her red truck out the county road and up to the Cantone property. Sam waited as he and Lisa got out of his cruiser, then she unlocked the front door and led the way into the house. The place smelled of loneliness. She tried to imagine how it must have been when Cantone first moved in. Had he immediately set up his work area and begun some new paintings? Had the house held a vibrancy because of the old man’s creative energy? If so, it was gone now.

  “Take your time and tell me each place we should test,” Beau said.

  Sam wondered how much of her story he’d explained to Lisa on the way out here. The tall girl with cropped dark hair and pale skin didn’t comment on anything. She set the lab kit down on the living room floor and opened the lid, busying herself by pulling out some bottles and swabs. A stack of small evidence envelopes went in one pocket of the apron she’d put on.

  Sam walked slowly through the living room, finding one semi-circular green mark on an end table.

  “Here,” she said. “It’s about the size and shape that a wet drinking glass might make.” The green was much more vivid than what she’d seen on the envelope with the will in it.

  Lisa took a clean swab and ran it over the area Sam indicated, then placed the swab into one of the little envelopes.

  They moved on into the dining room, but Sam didn’t spot any marks there. The kitchen was just as she’d left it the last time—green swipe marks on the table and countertop. Faint traces showed near the drain, and Sam remembered washing dishes there, running quite a lot of water down the drain as she cleaned the place. She was amazed that any residue was left at all, she told Beau.

  On to the bedrooms. In Cantone’s room she didn’t find any trace of the green. A glance toward the open closet reminded her that she still needed to get some paint and cover the drywall patch where they’d cut the small mural out. In the second bedroom her pulse quickened.

  “Beau, it’s all over the place in here.”

  “Do any of them look like fingerprints?” Lisa asked. “Point those out to me.”

  Bless the girl, Sam thought. She didn’t question.

  Sam spotted green prints at the light switch and on the back edge of the door. Lisa quickly pressed fingerprint tape over them and lifted them off.

  “Here’s something that could be a handprint,” Sam said. “Well, part of one.”

  She showed them the area and Lisa lifted that as well.

  “Some of the smudges on the furniture are blurry. Probably my fault. When I cleaned the house I dusted everything.” She looked up at Beau. “Sorry. I didn’t see the marks that first day.”

  “It’s okay. You’re finding some good stuff now. We’ll be able to compare the prints in various parts of the house with what’s on the will. At least connect those. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get very good prints from the body because of decomposition. But we can certainly get them from the nephew.”

  He asked Sam to go through the entire house once again, paying attention to anyplace she hadn’t noticed earlier. On the back of the kitchen door she saw the clearest prints yet, a full palm print and fingers that wrapped around the edge of the surface. As if someone had pulled the door closed as he left.

  While Lisa packed up her lab kit, Sam asked Beau if he thought the information was valuable to solving the case.

  “First off, the lab will test to verify this is the fatal poison. That way, if the prints are Bart Killington’s we can tie him to the poisonous plant. That’s something. I’m going to have to find a plant expert who can give us an idea whether there is enough of the substance here to be fatal. If not, all Bart has to do is claim that yes, he picked some of the plants and then came inside and touched a variety of places in the house.”

  “But the green stuff is also on the will,” Sam pointed out.

  “That’s certainly more damning,” Beau admitted. “But we already know that Bart handled the page and the envelope. It was in his house.”

  “But the poison wasn’t in his house . . .” She paused. “Actually I don’t know that. I couldn’t see the green in his house. I only spotted it on the will today, after I handled the box again.”

  Beau gave her a stern look. “Do not go back there on your own, Sam. Not unless you want to admit to breaking and entering, which is going to get you into a whole bunch of trouble.”

  She fumed. Wasn’t she already in trouble on that score?

  Beau and Lisa were headed for the door.

  “Is it okay if I clean the place thoroughly now?” Sam asked, as he lingered to say goodbye. “It doesn’t seem smart to leave a poisonous residue around the house now that there could be potential buyers coming to look at it.”

  “We’ve got everything we can use,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  She surreptitiously squeezed his hand and watched with mixed emotions as he walked out to the cruiser. She knew he was just doing his job when he cautioned her about going back to Bart’s place in Santa Fe, but still . . . she felt strongly that Cantone’s nephew was about to get away with murder.

  She spent two hours vigorously scrubbing away the traces of green, hoping the scientific tests would back up her intuition.

  The afternoon was still young, with a brilliant September sky and the leaves on the cottonwoods showing a hint of the golden autumn yet to come. She grabbed a chicken sandwich at the first café she came to, then headed up the ski valley road to check on her property up there—the only one of her current three that hadn’t thrown a huge dose of drama at her. A quick check verified that all was well there.

  She drove home as the shadows were lengthening across the valley and found Kelly’s car in the driveway, back from her clothing foray in the city.

  “Hey, Mom.” Kelly greeted as Sam walked into the kitchen. Her blue-green eyes sparkled. “Wait till you see—I got some great bargains at the mall.”

  “Good.” Sam automatically glanced at the light on the answering machine, hoping for another bakery order to add to the week’s income. Nothing.

  “Everything okay?” Kelly was pouring pretzels from a bag into a small bowl. She held it up to Sam, who waved away the snacks.

  “Yeah, fine.” She wasn’t ready to go into the whole story of her involvement with the investigation.

  Kelly carried the pretzels to the kitchen table, where several large plastic bags appeared to be stuffed with clothing. “Look at these.” She proceeded to pull out slacks and sweaters, a warmup suit and a puffy winter coat, holding each item up to herself to show how it would look. “I found most of these on sale racks. Amazing, at this time of year.”

  Sam put on a happy face and worked to let go of the nagging concerns about Cantone and his crooked nephew. She congratulated her daughter on her clothing buys.

  “Shall we have the rest of that pasta you made the other night?” she asked, as Kelly started to carry her purchases to her room.

  She studied her hands to be sure she’d washed off every trace of the green dust. All clear. Preoccupied with thoughts of that, she pulled pasta and sauce from the fridge and poured two glasses of wine. Kelly came back into the kitchen to slice and butter bread and spread it with garlic. While the bread toasted, they raised their glasses.

  “I’m really excited about my new job,” Kelly said as she set the table. “Iris seems like such a sweet lady.”

  “I hope it works out well—all the way around,” Sam told her. As much as she wanted to add some motherly advice about working hard and doing her best for Beau and his mother, she held her tongue. Realizing that Kelly had been out on her own for a long time was a hard thing to accept. But if Kelly messed up, her own chances with Beau might be finished.

  The phone interrupted her thoughts, just as they were finishing their dinner. An order for a specialty cake. The customer’s daughter was celebrating her quinceañera and the family wanted to do it up big. Sam suggested a tiered cake, which always made a girl feel like a bride, and she could color-coordinate figures of the girl’s attendants to the dresses they would wear in
the actual ceremony. The longer they talked, the more elaborate the cake became and the woman didn’t flinch when Sam quoted her the price. It was only after she’d hung up that Sam began to wonder if she could pull it off.

  Okay, she told herself, it’s not very different than a wedding cake and you’ve done plenty of those. She could order the figurines online tonight and they would be shipped tomorrow, arriving in a couple of days. She had a supply of risers and separators, to set off the elegant tiers. The cake wasn’t needed for a week yet, so she had plenty of time to get her supplies lined up and pre-make most of the flowers and other decorative elements that needed time to set up. She grabbed a pencil and sheet of paper and began to sketch out the design as the idea took hold. A success here could very well secure her a lot of business among the Hispanic families in town, and it would be worth her while to give this one a lot of attention.

  She drifted into the living room and sat at her computer desk in the corner, getting her supply order done in no time. A quick check of her email and she saw two more responses to her queries about vans for sale. One was in Eagle Nest, a small village about forty minutes away, on the other side of the mountains. A quick phone call, the right answers to her questions, and she told the seller that she would drive over in the morning to take a look.

  As if the cosmos had heard her plea for more bakery business, the phone rang again, Ivan at the bookstore reminding her of their annual open house tomorrow evening. He wanted to know if she could deliver their cake by mid-afternoon. Sam’s knees almost buckled. He’d spoken to her about the event almost a month ago and she’d completely forgotten. She put a smile in her voice and reassured him.

  “Kelly! Help!” she yelled, the second the phone disconnected. “I’ve got to turn out a special cake—tonight!”

  Sam flipped through her recipe box for her special red-velvet. Since everything she baked at Taos’s 7,000 foot elevation required special altitude adjustments, she didn’t dare use a recipe from any old cookbook. “Can you whip this up and get it into the oven now?” she said, handing the card over to Kelly.

  Bless her heart, Kelly didn’t skip a beat. She turned the oven dial to preheat and began pulling ingredients from the shelves. Sam muttered as she reached into her storage cabinets on the service porch. There were book-shaped pans somewhere in here and that would be the perfect thing for the store’s needs. After a heart-pounding moment in which she began to wonder if she’d given the pans away, she found them. Two pans, representing the halves of an open book. The overall size would be nearly twenty-five inches wide and three inches thick.

  “Wash these out before you use them,” she told Kelly. “And as soon as you get the cake into the oven, we need the mixer for a batch of buttercream.”

  Sam pulled another large mixing bowl from the shelf and the moment Kelly had finished beating the cake batter, Sam washed the beaters and started on the icing. As she whipped the creamy mixture to piping consistency she visualized the finished confection.

  The cake would be an open book on a large board. Ivory frosting for the pages, a brown border to look like a leather cover, and she could dust on a whisper of edible gold powder to make the page edges appear gilt. Ivan’s favorite book of all times was Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities and she would borrow the opening line and pipe it on one of the cake’s open pages . . . “It was the best of times . . .” Roses in the store colors of burgundy and gold, with deep green leaves, would add drama and elegance.

  She spooned out lumps of frosting for each of the colors. A tiny hint of brown to create the ivory, a small amount to be tinted green for the leaves, another little bit made black for the writing, and a good-sized glob that would become the burgundy roses. She worked them first, piping them onto small squares of waxed paper and setting them onto a cookie sheet to harden in the refrigerator. A few half-sized ones became rosebuds.

  When the oven timer dinged to signal that the cake was done, the two women stared at each other in relief.

  “That was a miracle,” Sam said. She set the timer again to remind her when to remove the cakes from the pans. At that point she set them on cooling racks on the service porch counter, to cool a little more quickly.

  Kelly glanced up at the kitchen clock. Ten-fifteen. “Oh, boy. I better get to bed. I’m supposed to report for my new job at seven-thirty in the morning.”

  “Thanks for your help, Kell. I couldn’t have done all this without you.”

  “Sure, Mom.” She sent a little kiss across the room.

  Sam debated whether to try to finish the cake before retiring, herself, but decided that she was too tired. The day was catching up to her quickly.

  In her room, she looked at the wooden box on her dresser. Like her own energy, the colors had faded once more.