Brownies & Betrayal (Sweet Bites Mysteries, Book 1)

by Heather Justesen

  He jammed his hands into his pockets. “In the morning, I knew I’d screw up. I refused to be alone with her again after that, but it was too late. Her husband was waylaid with some problem with a contract and didn’t make it home for almost a month. I didn’t think about it again. Then she came to Prescott to see Valerie.”

  He rolled his shoulders and looked at his mother, then at me. “Lidia came to me and admitted that she was pregnant. She was worried her husband would divorce her if he realized the child wasn’t his, and not being an idiot, he would’ve known. She didn’t want a divorce and we didn’t want to get married anyway—we’d had a nice time together when we’d gone out, but the chemistry wasn’t strong enough.”

  I wanted to make a comment about the fact that the chemistry had been plenty strong that one night, but held myself back. Sometimes my self-control even impresses me. “So whose idea was it to pass the baby off as Valerie’s?”

  Tad leaned back against my car, his hands stuffed into the pocket of his Dockers. “Valerie’s, of course. She’s so helpful and good-hearted.” He grimaced. “At the time I thought I must have misjudged her, that there must be much more to her than I thought. Lidia stayed around for a while, then moved to Mesa for the end of her pregnancy since her husband was out of the country yet again. Valerie started talking about her new addition and how excited she was. I guess she bought or rented a couple of prosthetic wombs or whatever—you know what I’m talking about, the ones that go under your clothes and make it look like you’re pregnant.”

  I nodded, though I’d never heard of such a thing. People actually made stuff like that? Where would you rent a fake womb? A theater costume shop? Did they really do long-term rentals?

  “Anyway, when the baby got close to delivery, Valerie drove to Mesa to be with her sister. Dahlia was born and Valerie showed up the next week with Dahlia in her arms.” His voice softened, his eyes took on a faraway look and his face grew wistful.

  “Was that hard for you?”

  “It was agony. As soon as I saw Dahlia, held her, I wanted to raise her myself, but it was impossible. I was still in school, didn’t have a lot of extra money and no time.” He looked at his mom, his expression pleading. “I know you and Dad would’ve helped out, but it would mean the end of my plans for a career in politics, and Valerie seemed to love my daughter. This way I got to see Dahlia often. Valerie let me take her for visits whenever I wanted.”

  The longing in his voice made my heart ache. He slid the photo from his pocket, outlined the image with his index finger. “I didn’t realize then that Valerie was leaving almost all of Dahlia’s care to a succession of nannies who rarely stayed around for more than a few months. Since Dahlia turned three, she’s been in daycare, probably sixty or seventy hours a week.” His voice cracked. “It’s not right.”

  He looked at me now, the picture still tight in his fingers. “When she asked me for more money Friday night, I told her I’d need a few weeks to get it. I needed to help pay for Dahlia’s expenses. I knew Valerie spent a good chunk of the money on herself, but I figured that’s the way things were. No harm, no foul, right? She didn’t want to wait, though. She wanted the money before the end of the week. I told her I couldn’t get it that fast—my pocketbook isn’t bottomless, and I’d had wedding expenses.”

  Again he looked at his mom, whose expression had softened, and tears glistened in her eyes—though I imagine she was far too dainty to shed them. Perhaps she would cry gentle, lady-like tears one could sop up with the edge of a handkerchief without marring one’s makeup.

  Tad continued, “She knew I’d gotten money from my parents when I’d been tapped out before, so she pressed me. After we argued for a few minutes, I said I’d see what I could do and left.” His gaze swung back to me. “I swear, she was fine when I went back upstairs. I returned to my room and didn’t leave it again.”

  Though I knew he couldn’t prove it, I believed him. “And that’s why you and Lidia have been in a tug-of-war over who gets to raise Dahlia.”

  “Yes. Since she can still claim Dahlia as her niece, her husband wouldn’t know anything unless we told the truth. I know she’d be a good mother and Don would be good to Dahlia, but I don’t want them to take my daughter away. I’m used to seeing her and taking her out for ice cream or to the park at least twice a week. I don’t want to lose her.” His eyes pleaded with me to believe him. “The thought of her moving to Long Beach and me possibly not seeing her again for years was too much. I don’t want that to happen.”

  “So the only way to get normal-ish visitation is to admit that Dahlia’s your daughter,” I said. “Which won’t make things easy.” Not least among the complications being the possible destruction of Lidia’s marriage and maybe of Tad’s future career.

  “And Analesa would have a fit,” Caroline said. “You should have told her about all of this before now. She’s confused and deserves to know.” Despite the harshness of her words, Caroline touched her son’s arm, giving it a loving squeeze.

  I decided to put in another plug for Bridezilla, as I could guess how I’d feel in her place. “She should know why you want Dahlia living with you, even if it is hard for her to deal with it.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair. “Yeah. I don’t know what to do. I’m about ready to make an announcement and let the chips fall.”

  I let his comment go for a few seconds before shifting the conversation. “So who do you think killed Valerie, if she was alive when you left? Did she say anything about seeing someone else that night?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Valerie made her share of enemies, not the least of which was her sister.”

  “Valerie and Lidia were fighting?” I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, Valerie offended almost everyone on the planet. Why not her sister? And he had hypothesized that Lidia was being blackmailed for the other half of Valerie’s ‘child support’.

  “Lidia wanted custody and Valerie wasn’t having it, which meant Lidia couldn’t push the point. It would make too many waves and her husband would definitely have found out—Valerie would have ensured that he did.” A touch of bitterness crept into his voice.

  “Unless Valerie was dead and out of the way,” I suggested. “And Lidia would be free to take custody of her daughter without anyone knowing the truth.” Assuming he didn’t fight her in court to keep their daughter or get visitation. It was a reasonable supposition, and made as much or more sense than the other reasons people wanted Valerie dead.

  “Yeah, but Lidia was in California Friday night. It wasn’t until Saturday evening that she arrived here in town. I spoke to her on the house phone myself,” Tad said.

  That stumped me. I was running out of suspects—or were they multiplying and I was crossing them off the list too soon? I straightened and smiled at him. “Thanks for answering my questions, and I promise, I won’t spread gossip about it.”

  “I appreciate it.” He glanced at his mom.

  I couldn’t help giving one more piece of unsolicited advice. “And Tad, you ought to tell Analesa about everything as soon as possible. This could all come out with the murder investigation, and she’d take the news much better from you.” Hey, I didn’t have to like the woman to feel bad for her. Secrets, especially ones this big, could hurt.

  “Thanks.” He straightened and moved away from the car as I reached for the handle. “I plan to fight for custody, if Ana will support me, so I’ll tell her today.”

  “That’s a good idea, and good luck.”

  Caroline came around behind me, wrapping her son in a hug. It was sweet, and made me ache with missing my own mother. I opened the door and climbed in, and Caroline moved her car so I could leave. Before I pulled onto the road, I glanced back and saw Tad and Caroline heading to his condo, arm in arm.

  As I drove along, I replayed Tad’s words in my head. I thought they were true, but were they? And could Lidia have come into town a day earlier than we thought and killed her sister? He’d called her
at home, though, so she must have been there. My cell phone rang and I picked up.

  The voice on the other line wasn’t familiar. “Hi, Tess, This is Lois Hardcastle. I heard you were opening a bakery and I wondered if I could book a cake for my parents’ anniversary party next month.”

  I felt my heart leap with excitement. I wasn’t even officially open for business and this would make two major events—assuming she came up with the deposit. “Sure, what’s the date?” I asked and pulled over to the side of the road to check my planner. The date would work well, as it was the week after Easter and I should have everything ready to go in time. “How about if you stop by in the next couple of days and we’ll talk about budgets and the number of people you’re feeding and what kind of design you want.”

  “I’ll swing by this evening, if it’s okay by you.”

  “Great.” I penciled in a note on the date she wanted, already excited.

  “Is this the best number to reach you? Are you going to add another line for the business once you open?” Lois asked.

  It occurred to me that I didn’t know how she’d been able to reach me. “How did you find this number?”

  “You’ve never taken the line out of your grandma’s name. It’s in the phone book. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

  I’d forgotten that I’d forwarded the house line to my cell. “That’s fine. I appreciate you thinking of me for this special occasion. This will be a cake to remember, I promise.” I jotted her name and number, and made a mental note to call her back the next day if she didn’t pop by that night.

  When I hung up, I realized the only way we knew Lidia had been in California the previous weekend was because Tad said he’d called her at home. But if she’d forwarded her home calls to her cell as I did . . . I pulled back onto the road. I had no idea how I was going to discover if Lidia was in Silver Springs on Friday night, but I’d figure it out.

  Of course I found Honey at home, pounding away on someone’s website while the kids ran amok around her.

  “How do you get anything done?” I asked as I lifted my arms to prevent them from being taken off by Chance and one of his friends as they zipped around me in a game of tag.

  “I mostly do this at night, but I have a deadline. George is supposed to be here to corral them, but he got called down to the store on a bottled water emergency.” She rolled her eyes, giving the impression that he responded to a lot of emergency calls from work. The joys of running a business.

  “There are emergencies about bottled water?” I was amused, despite my brimming excitement.

  “Apparently.” She hit a couple more buttons, then slid away from the computer desk and looked up at me. “So what did Tad say?”

  I pulled over the soft, cushy ottoman that matched the sofa and sat on it. When Zoey toddled over, I scooped her up, covered her face in kisses, then released her to run off again. During this, I filled Honey in on all the details.

  “So you think Lidia came up Friday and killed her sister that night, then holed up somewhere and waited to be notified of her sister’s death?” Honey scribbled notes on a piece of paper—she’d always done that, claiming it helped her process information.

  “That’s what I think. She probably headed for either Prescott or Phoenix, though the second choice would be smarter, since she’d have less chance of running into someone she knew. The problem is proving she wasn’t in California when they called her.” What did I know? Maybe I was headed in the wrong direction. Millie had the jewelry—maybe she did kill Valerie. Would Lidia really kill her own sister?

  “You should tell Detective Tingey. He can subpoena cell phone records and stuff.”

  “True.” I sighed. The detective would have a fit when I told him I was still digging. At least I’d be able to diffuse things somewhat, telling him that I was voluntarily turning over what I knew. I pulled out my cell phone and asked him to meet me back at my apartment, and said goodnight to Honey.

  It wasn’t long before the detective showed up, though he wore blue jeans and a T-shirt with the Phoenix Suns logo on it instead of his usual dark suit. “What can I do for you, Miss Crawford? You do realize we’ve caught the murderer, so you don’t have to keep calling me anymore.”

  In that case, I was surprised he’d bothered to see me instead of taking the information over the phone. I let him into my apartment and we took seats, then I threaded my fingers together on my lap. “I wasn’t sure if you knew and decided I needed to tell you, just in case. Lidia is actually Dahlia’s mother.”

  His brows lifted. “That’s an interesting tidbit. How do you know that?”

  “I’ll tell you, but you have to promise you’ll keep Dahlia’s parentage secret unless it’s important to your case.”

  He gave me a look that asked if I was for real, and who did I think I was fooling, anyway? He was a detective, I was a peon. A peon who had information he hadn’t gathered himself. “Demanding an awful lot, aren’t you?” he asked. “Do you know the consequences for impeding a murder investigation?”

  “I’m not trying to get in your way.” I paused to scowl at him when he snorted in response. “Look, Valerie, Lidia and the father went to a lot of trouble to keep this a secret. If it’s important to the case, that’s fine, but if it’s irrelevant, I don’t want to mess up all their lives. It may come out anyway, but that should be their choice.”

  He nodded. “I understand, and I promise to be discreet.” His notebook appeared almost out of thin air and he poised a pen on a page, looking at me for the news.

  I nodded and filled him in on what I’d learned in my conversation with Tad, and on my conjectures about Lidia.

  “That’s a nice thought, and it would tie it all up in a nice bow. She’s sick of paying child support—and I use that term loosely since it’s more like extortion—and wants to raise her own kid, so she offs the sister, who’s in the way. No one’s looking at her because she’s in another state, and she ends up with custody, clearing the way for her to introduce her husband to Dahlia.” He tucked the notebook back in his pocket without writing anything on it. “There’s just one problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We didn’t call Lidia to tell her about Valerie. We sent a couple of uniforms to her house to tell her instead. She was in Long Beach.”

  My heart sank. “What time was that?”

  “You didn’t even find the body until after ten, and it was a good hour or more after that before we sent someone to tell Lidia. So eleven o’clock our time.”

  I tried to figure out how she could have done it, my mind racing through the options. “That’s ten hours after Valerie died, plenty of time for Lidia to hurry back to her home in Long Beach before the police arrived.”

  He gave me a disbelieving look. “I think you’re stretching, but I’ll look into it.” He stood. “Now, if you don’t have anything else to tell me, I have to get back to my family.”

  He didn’t believe me. He thought I was ‘stretching.’ Apparently nothing I’d told him so far had been worth consideration—well, except for Millie having the jewelry, which was purely circumstantial. “No, that was it.”

  “Fine. Try to stay out of trouble, will you? You’ve had enough problems the past week without digging even deeper into this.” He crossed the room to my door.

  “Yeah. Okay,” I lied. There was no way I’d leave it to him, not when he didn’t believe me.

  The bland expression on his face said he saw the lie. “Sure, you’ll totally stay out of things. Because you’re smart like that.” He walked out, pulling the door shut behind him.

  I retrieved my cell phone and called Honey to fill her in while I double-checked the doors and windows. The chances of being bothered again tonight were slim, but I wasn’t going to take a chance.

  “Do you know how far it is to Long Beach from here?” she asked when I told her everything.

  “No. I guess I could check.”

  “Give me a minute.” There was silence on the line fo
r a long moment, and Honey came back. “The online mapping program says six and a half hours.”

  “So she could easily have gotten back home again.” This was my strongest lead so far.

  “Yes, but can you believe she’d do this? She seems so nice.”

  I had to agree that it was hard to believe, “But, the jails are full of people who seemed way too nice to be pedophiles and serial killers.”

  “I know.” Honey sighed. “I hate that we’ve been suspecting everyone we know of being murderers.”

  “Not everyone we know,” I suggested. “I don’t think George had anything to do with it.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “Sorry. Hopefully it won’t be a problem much longer.” I grabbed some crackers from the cupboard to soothe my hungry stomach, then paused with one halfway to my mouth. I had an image of the oil change sticker in Lidia’s windshield. What had it said? “I have an idea. I need to go check something on Lidia’s car. I may have proof that she’s made the trip twice.”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?” Honey asked.

  “Doubtful. I’ll call when I get back.” I grabbed a Dr. Pepper from the fridge and headed out the door with my snack.

  When I reached Prescott, I went straight to Valerie’s building. I found Lidia’s car in the parking lot and immediately located the window cling I’d remembered from my ride with her. My eyes practically crossed as I stared at the backwards numbers written on the oil change reminder. Didn’t they date those three months out? I smiled as I realized my memory was correct and her oil had been changed on Thursday—the day before the wedding rehearsal. Unfortunately, the car had a digital odometer so I couldn’t see how many miles she’d driven, but maybe with the information I had, Detective Tingey could check on it. I reached for my cell phone.