“If you’re going to handcuff me like that, then I might as well come home with you,” he said, still grinning, though it was clear he didn’t mean one word of it.
Out on the sidewalk, I pulled my coat closer and told my mother, “You’re welcome to come back to the cottage with me if you’d like.”
“Thanks, but you need your rest, and I’ve got some contracts I need to go over before morning. If you need me, don’t hesitate to call.”
“Right back at you. I love you, Momma.”
“And I, you,” she said with a gentle smile I knew so well.
I headed back to the cottage driving Jake’s truck, since there didn’t need to be any indication that the donut shop was now being occupied by three proficient lawmen, even if two of them were retired. I flipped on the lights inside my home, added another log to the fire, and then I crept off to bed.
I couldn’t sleep, though.
I’m usually quite thankful for my imagination, but tonight, it was giving me fits, coming up with a dozen different scenarios that all ended badly for three men I cared so much about. I got out of bed, walked out into the living room, and curled up on the couch to watch the fire, hoping it might help ease my mind somehow.
In less than a minute, I was sound asleep. There was something about a cold winter wind outside and a fire crackling inside that always seemed to knock me out.
It was a good thing I’d set the alarm on my cell phone. Otherwise, I might have slept for another hour or two past my time to get up. As it was, I woke up and had to get ready in a rush to make it to the donut shop in time, all the time wondering if anything had happened the night before, even though I realized that I would find out soon enough.
I went outside and tried to crank up the Jeep, but the cold must have killed the last of the life left in my battery, because it wouldn’t start. I’d have to get Jake to replace it while I was at work, but there was no way I was going to walk through the park in the dark during the first part of January, especially with the possibility of a killer lurking somewhere in the shadows. Fortunately Jake’s truck started up on the first try, and as I drove the short distance to work, I wondered what I’d find at Donut Hearts. I parked in my usual space, but it suddenly occurred to me that it might not be the smartest thing in the world to do to walk into a dark building where three armed men were waiting.
I pulled out my phone and dialed Jake’s number.
“I’m here,” I said.
“I know. I watched you drive up,” he said as he stepped outside through the unlocked door.
“Wow, I need this kind of service every morning,” I said as I walked into the shop. The lights in the kitchen were on, but I flipped the ones out front on as well.
The three men shielded their eyes, and I reached for the switch immediately. “Sorry about that,” I apologized as my mother came out from the kitchen. “Momma, what are you doing here?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she confessed. “Don’t worry, I didn’t jeopardize the stakeout. I just got here myself.”
“I take it you didn’t have any luck,” I said as I walked into the kitchen and turned the fryer on, always the first order of business of any donut-making day.
“Well, we shared a few good stories while we waited, and we decided a few things as well,” Jake said with a shrug. “It was a long shot, anyway, but we at least had to try.”
“Sorry you didn’t catch any bad guys,” I said as I patted his shoulder.
“No worries. At least we managed to come up with a plan while we were waiting,” Phillip answered. “The chief is going to go ahead and check out all of the area pawnshops this morning, and then the four of us are going to do the same thing this afternoon after you close Donut Hearts for the day.”
“Why are we all doing the same thing after you if you’re already going around asking the questions first?” I asked Chief Grant curiously.
The chief replied, “Sometimes the answer to an official question isn’t the same as one asked off the record by civilians who are in the buying mood.”
“If nobody admits to getting an inquiry, we’re going to show each pawnshop a few emeralds ourselves as proof of our sincerity,” Jake said with a grin. “That should bring out their greed if civic duty isn’t enough.”
“That’s the sticking point we were going over just before Dorothea arrived,” the chief of police said. “I don’t want these emeralds leaving my sight until we resolve this mess one way or the other.”
“They may not have to,” Momma said softly.
“I don’t see how.”
“What if each team had two emeralds apiece, purely for show?” she asked him. “Do you think that would be enough bait?”
“I just said I don’t feel comfortable using these as lures to unmask a killer,” Chief Grant said as he held the bag up in front of him.
“And fakes won’t work,” Jake added. “We discussed that already, too.”
“We won’t use fakes, and those aren’t the only emeralds in North Carolina, you know,” Momma said.
“I understand that, but where are you going to get substitutes on such short notice?”
“All I need to do is go by one of my safety deposit boxes when the bank opens, and then we’ll be set,” my mother answered.
“Are you telling me that you have loose emeralds just lying around somewhere?” Phillip asked his wife, clearly surprised by the latest twist.
“I wouldn’t say they were just lying around, but yes, I happen to have four stones that will do as substitutes for the ones found earlier. I’m sorry I didn’t mention having them before.”
Phillip grinned at his wife. “Dorothea, I didn’t marry you for your money or your jewels. I love you.”
“And I love you, too,” she said with a smile, “but it doesn’t hurt that I’m rich, does it?”
Phillip just shook his head and laughed. “I’ll take you any way I can get you, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health.”
“So, it’s settled,” Momma said. “We take two teams out to canvass local pawnshops in the afternoon after the chief has had his crack at them first.”
“And you’re okay with this?” I asked Chief Grant.
“Officially, I don’t have an opinion one way or the other.”
“How about unofficially?” I followed up.
“What could it hurt?” He smiled at me on his way out. “As long as we don’t use the emeralds you found here in the shop, I’m good with the plan. Thanks for the coffee, Suzanne. Gentlemen, it was a real pleasure.”
“For us, as well,” Phillip said. “We’d better be going, too, Dorothea.”
“We’ll see you later today, Suzanne,” Momma said as she ducked out along with her husband.
After they were gone, Jake said, “It was nice of you to bring my truck by.”
“Actually, the Jeep battery died,” I confessed. “Is there any chance you can get it fixed for me while I’m at work this morning?”
“Fixed? No. Replaced? You bet.” Jake looked around the shop. “Do you need me to hang around and help out?”
It was obvious the request wasn’t sincere, and I had half a mind to take him up on it just to see what he’d say, but he was sleep deprived as it was, so I saw no need to pile on. “Go home and get some rest. I’ll see you a little after eleven, and we can start hitting pawnshops together.”
“That sounds like a plan to me,” Jake said. “Who knows? Maybe one of us will get lucky.”
“As far as I’m concerned, I already did,” I said as I kissed him good-bye.
“I meant in the investigation.”
“So, you don’t agree with me?” I asked him, laughing.
“Oh, no. We both got lucky. There’s no doubt about that. I’ll see you later. Happy donut m
aking.”
“Thanks.”
After Jake was gone, I took the cups they’d drunk from and put them in the sink in the kitchen. After that, I emptied the last of the coffee and started a fresh batch, as was my habit. It was time to get things back to normal and get into my daily routine. The men might not have captured the killer, but I still had a job to do.
April Springs was going to be expecting donuts in three hours, so I’d better get busy making them.
“Wow, this place is a real mess! I can’t believe someone was murdered here yesterday,” Emma said as she walked in an hour after I’d arrived.
“It’s tragic, isn’t it?”
“It surely is. In fact, there’s only one good thing about the first of the year as far as I’m concerned.”
“What’s that?” I asked her, curious about her statement.
“No more pumpkin donuts!” Emma said with enthusiasm.
“I thought you liked them.”
“To eat, yes. To clean up after, no thank you. I’m perfectly happy seeing them gone for another year.”
I’d already made a nice selection of cake donuts before she’d arrived, but pumpkin donuts were now officially off the menu until October first. I could have probably sold them year round, but I liked having certain seasonal treats for sale at Donut Hearts. For example, come May when the local strawberries were harvested, I’d offer strawberry shortcake donuts, and in September, I made a special apple cinnamon cake donut with apple cider icing that was one of my own personal favorites. Unfortunately, January brought us snowball donuts, one of my least favorite personal selections. It was really nothing more than a plain cake donut dipped in icing first and then smothered in shredded coconut. I wouldn’t eat one on a dare, but some of my customers adored them. “That’s fine, but now you have to deal with shredded coconut everywhere,” I warned her.
“We all have our own personal trials and tribulations,” Emma said with a shrug, and I hoped she was just kidding. In the scale of world problems, donuts shouldn’t have even made the top one thousand list.
“What’s your dad think about the murder happening here?” I asked her as I prepped the yeast donuts by mixing the ingredients in my massive floor mixer. The sound of the motor was loud, but we’d grown used to it over the years, and now it was second nature talking over the drone of the machine.
“He thinks someone’s going after contractors,” Emma said. “Did you hear about the plumber who drowned in Lenoir last week?”
“The way I heard it, he was kayaking on the Catawba River,” I said, “and now they’re saying he had a heart attack in the cold weather and tipped over and drowned. He wasn’t even wearing a life jacket.”
“You know my father. He has his own unique way of looking at things,” Emma said. Truer words had never been spoken. “What do you think about Snappy’s murder, Suzanne? Do you think someone local did it?”
I wasn’t about to tell Emma about the emeralds we’d found last night, but I decided to hold onto that particular piece of information. “I suppose it’s possible,” I told her, knowing that it was the farthest thing from the truth, at least in my opinion.
“Are you and Jake digging into it?” Emma asked me, and then she quickly countered with, “Strike that.”
I just smiled at her. “Consider it stricken.” We’d worked out an arrangement in the past where I didn’t tell Emma anything I didn’t want her dad to hear and possibly print. “It’s almost time for our break. It’s not too cold out for you, is it?”
“I think it’s going to be refreshing,” she replied with a grin.
“Okay, if you say so,” I answered.
Once the dough was ready to be left alone, I set my timer, and we walked outside. My customers were back to making do with folding chairs since the construction had started, since there was no way on earth I was going to leave the nice new things my book-club friends had given me during our remodeling and repairs. We grabbed a pair of folding chairs and walked outside together.
“Do you know what we really need?” Emma asked me as she rubbed her hands together.
“A trip to the Bahamas?” I asked her.
She laughed. “I mean besides that. If there’s any room in the budget after the remodel, we should get one of those portable propane heaters out here for our breaks in the cold weather.”
“Emma, we’ll be lucky to be able to afford a pack of matches after everything’s finished, but I’ll keep it in mind.”
At that moment, a car drove past us slowly, one I didn’t recognize. When they realized Emma and I were sitting out front watching them, the driver hurried down the road toward my cottage. “What’s up with that?” Emma asked me. “Grace is still out of town, so it can’t be for her. Is it possible it’s a friend of Jake’s?”
“I don’t think so. Not at this time of night, anyway. Let’s give it a second and see if they turn around and come back.”
Sure enough, two minutes later, the sedan whizzed back past us, going much too fast for Springs Drive day or night. The windows were tinted, and I couldn’t get a good look at who might be inside, so I got my phone out to take a picture of the license plate.
Whoever had been driving had put a paper bag over it, obscuring the letters and numbers completely.
“That was odd,” Emma said after the car was gone.
“Agreed,” I answered. Had someone been out cruising April Springs a little after four in the morning by coincidence, or had they come to see if Donut Hearts was empty? If it had been innocent, then why had the license plate number been so artfully obscured? “Did you catch the make or model of that car, by any chance?”
“It was blue, I think. Maybe black. I suppose it could have even been dark red. It was honestly too dark to see. We need another streetlight out here, don’t we?”
“I’ll talk to the mayor, but I think his budget is even tighter than ours,” I replied. I wished I’d snapped a photo of the car anyway while I’d had the chance, but I’d been so thrown by the bag that I’d forgotten to. I wasn’t very good with car models either, and I wasn’t entirely sure if I could have identified the strange car in the daylight. My timer chose that moment to go off, so I stood, grabbing my chair and folding it before we went inside.
“If they want donuts, they’re just going to have to come back when we’re open,” Emma said with a grin.
“Do you think they were on a treat run?” I asked her.
“Why not? What else could it be?”
I wasn’t about to tell her that it might be the killer returning to the scene of the crime to search for more emeralds. That was all I needed, to have Ray Blake mucking about in our investigation. Was that how the police chief felt about my cohorts and me? Probably, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I’d mention it to Jake later, but for now, it was once again time to make new treats.
Chapter 10
My new contractor didn’t even have to wait for me to open the front door a little before five a.m. “You must be Mr. Young. Sorry, but I didn’t get your first name,” I said as I offered him my hand.
“Just Young is fine,” he said gruffly. He was clearly not used to being up at this hour of the day, though I was just hitting my stride. I had fifteen minutes of free time before the yeast donuts started going into the oil, so it was the perfect time for me to show him around.
“Okay,” I said, thinking it odd to call the man by his last name only. “You can see what you’re dealing with.”
He looked at the plasterless walls in the front and nodded his approval. “This looks good. As a matter of fact, it’s better than I was expecting. This is going to save us from patching things up and trying to make the new and the old match. We can do it, but it takes more time and costs more as well. Do you want plaster again?”
“Actually, I thought shiplap boa
rds painted white and antiqued in spots would be nice,” I said. “I’ve cut a picture from a magazine to show you what I had in mind.” I’d been perusing home-improvement magazines for days looking for something I liked, and I’d come across the horizontally mounted decorative wide boards in one. In some ways, it matched the building better than the original plaster had. “Can you do that?”
“Sure. It’ll be cheaper, too. How about the outside?”
“I’d like that to match the old work if it’s at all possible.”
“I don’t see why not,” he said as he jotted a few things down onto his clipboard.
“Do you want to keep the picture?” I asked.
“No thanks. I don’t need it.” After a few more moments, he asked, “What about the floor? Do you want that to be the same?” He kicked at a few spots where the falling tree had gouged out a few chunks. “Are we just doing a patch and paint here?”
“I would like it patched, and there are a few places that need to be leveled, but instead of plum, I’d like a mottled gray instead.”
“Got it. Battleship-gray floor,” he said as he wrote it down.
“No. Mottled, like weathered barn board,” I repeated, not sure that he was getting my vision at all. “If you don’t mind, I’d like a sample of the wall and the floor finishes before you do anything else to make sure we’re on the right page.”
He looked at me as though he was massively annoyed with me, but I didn’t care. I’d be looking at the donut shop’s interior for years to come, and I wanted it to be right. A deep, lustrous weathered gray with layered highlights on the floor would be soothing. Battleship gray would remind me of my elementary school cafeteria. Granted, it might be a fine line, but I wanted to make sure he abided by it. He frowned at me a moment before saying, “Most of the job should be fairly straightforward, but the floor is going to be the real problem.”
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