Sweet's Sweets: The Second Samantha Sweet Mystery (The Samantha Sweet Mysteries)

by Connie Shelton

  She set the nearly full mug on an end table. “Beau, I feel like I might have pushed her too hard. Maybe she was so scared that—”

  “Sam, you can’t start thinking that way. You did not make Elena Tafoya kill herself.” He sat beside her on the sofa and put an arm around her shoulders. “She admitted that she was really unhappy in her marriage. That was the whole reason for the affair, right?”

  She nodded against his shoulder.

  “She might have done this anyway, even if she’d never talked to you about it.” He kissed her hair. Then her temple. Then her mouth.

  After his kisses had worked their magic for a few more minutes they found themselves in the bedroom, and an hour later Sam felt a lot better. She snuggled against his solid chest, wishing he could stay right in this spot all night. But it was not to be.

  “Poor Kelly,” he said after awhile. “She was supposed to get the day off. I’m sure she’s got other things she’d rather do than care for an old woman.”

  “She loves Iris,” Sam assured him. “I know my daughter. She wouldn’t have taken the job if she wasn’t happy to do it.”

  “But still . . .”

  “Yeah, still. She probably would like to get out with some of her friends now and then.”

  Beau pulled himself away, leaving the warm quilt tucked around Sam. She stretched luxuriously and watched him put his uniform back on, admiring the way the fitted shirt hugged his shoulders, the way his jeans fit just right. She stifled that line of thinking before she could reach out and drag him back into her bed.

  Grabbing a robe, Sam walked him to the back door and watched as his cruiser pulled away. As the languor of great sex began to fade, Sam found herself thinking about Elena again. She switched on the TV set in the living room and tucked herself into one corner of the sofa.

  The nightly news was just coming on and, even on the Albuquerque channels, Elena’s death was the top story. Cameras focused on Carlos Tafoya and reporters gathered around him at the little impromptu news conference on the steps of the county courthouse. After a few of the usual absurd “how do you feel” questions, the press got to the meat of what they really wanted to know.

  “Mr. Tafoya, does this mean that you’ll be dropping out of the race?” “Do you feel that you can still serve in office at this point?”

  Carlos looked solemnly out over the gathering, waiting for a pause in the rush of questions. “My beloved wife’s death has deeply shaken our family. We are understandably distraught. But my entire life has been devoted to public service and I shall press on and continue with my duty. Pain subsides with time and I can make it through this. So, yes, my name will still be on the ballot next Tuesday.”

  In a display of utter bad taste, someone asked how soon the funeral services would take place. Less than eighteen hours after Elena’s death—Sam cringed at the tactlessness.

  Carlos had the good grace to duck his head and say that a private memorial would be scheduled.

  Sam hoped to go, to honor Elena’s memory. She could surely find out what the plans were from Beau. She flipped among the four local stations, wondering if there was any additional information but they all had identical film and no new questions.

  When Kelly came in, Sam was nodding off.

  “Mom, you okay?” Kelly leaned over the back of the couch and landed a gentle kiss on Sam’s cheek.

  “Yeah, I will be. Eventually.” She groaned her way to her feet and switched off the TV. “I better be getting some sleep. The bakery opens pretty early in the morning.”

  It was hard to imagine getting back into a normal routine, but Sam moved on autopilot through her nightly ritual for bedtime.

  When she arrived at Sweet’s Sweets at five-thirty a.m. it was to find Jen and Becky already at work.

  “We thought you might want to sleep a little late this morning,” Jen said, taking a tray of cinnamon scones from the oven. She turned to slide three pans of muffins inside.

  “I would have loved that,” Sam said, “if I’d actually been sleeping.”

  “We heard about Mrs. Tafoya,” Becky said. “It was so shocking, her just being at our party the night before.”

  “I took her home,” Sam said. “I was worried that she’d had too much to drink and might have an accident.”

  Little did I know.

  “Is it true, what they’re saying on the news?” asked Jen. “That she killed herself?”

  “I don’t know. Deputy Cardwell is investigating. He seems to think that’s what happened.” Sam walked absentmindedly to the tray where she placed orders to be filled. “It’s—well, it’s complicated.”

  She caught a glance at their inquisitive faces. No way would she spread stories of Elena’s troubles. “Okay, let’s get this place organized. We need a chocolate creation for the Chocoholics group at the bookstore. Becky, can I turn that one over to you? Put your imagination to work, as long as everything on the dessert is chocolate.”

  She came to the order form she’d filled out for Elena’s order—the victory cake for her husband’s celebration. They’d first talked about it almost two weeks ago. Now, although everything had changed, it had also stayed the same. Carlos was still on the ballot, the election would take place in a few days . . . and Elena wouldn’t be there. A tear dropped onto the sheet of paper.

  Sam hastily wiped it away. She took a deep breath. Cleared her head. Elena had paid for the cake and it was up to Sam to deliver it. She filed the order form and sketches so she would come back to them the day before the election.

  Sam took a look at the creation on which Becky was working, a chocolate headstone over a chocolate grave, complete with cookie-crumb dirt and a rising ghost of white chocolate.

  “I hope it’s—I didn’t mean to be morbid,” Becky said. “Mr. Petrenko said they’re reading a ghost story this week, and with Halloween and all . . .”

  “It’s perfect,” Sam said. “Business must go on, and I’m happy to see how well you’ve captured their theme. And I love the little sculpted spiders and bats. Great job.”

  She walked out to the sales floor, where Jen was doing a brisk business in breakfast pastries and coffee, the Monday crowd needing a little something extra to wake them up on the way to their jobs in nearby shops and offices. Sam recognized quite a few faces from the Saturday night gala, happy to see that people were returning.

  The goodwill created by the party was definitely paying off. She mingled, said hello to several, made sure the coffee was plentiful and the plate of samples filled with variety. The phone had been ringing all morning and Jen clearly could use a break from it, as she waited on customers.

  “I’ll grab that in the back,” Sam said, hurrying to the other extension. “Sweet’s Sweets.”

  “Hi, darlin, it’s me.”

  “Beau. Have you found out anything new?”

  “One thing you might be interested in. There’s a memorial for Elena tomorrow afternoon at the funeral home chapel. Carlos is skipping a church funeral mass and has arranged for cremation.”

  “Already?” Sam felt a rock fall to the pit of her stomach.

  “Seems rushed to me, too. But with the election coming up . . . well, I don’t know if he’s just overwhelmed with things to do right now, or if he’s trying to jump while the sympathy factor is high.” He paused. “I’m sorry, that was not a kind thing to say.”

  “It might be true, though.” Sam remembered her own uncharitable thoughts about whether she wanted to bake a victory cake for Carlos. “I don’t know, Beau. I’m kind of numb about it. Guess I’m just moving through the day as best I can.”

  “I know. Look, maybe we could go together? There’s a wake at his campaign manager’s house after. At least he understood what poor taste it would be to invite people to the very rooms in which . . . it happened.”

  “Are we invited, to the wake?”

  “I don’t much care. I want to watch Carlos Tafoya in action, to see if I can judge the level of his grief. Because I have a real
hinky feeling about this, especially with all the things Elena told you on her last night.”

  “I’ll bake a memorial cake and we’ll take it. They’d have a hard time turning us away.”

  Chapter 17

  The pain was still too raw. It revealed itself on the faces of every person in the chapel. Elena’s portrait depicted a calm and polished woman. It was the official, candidate’s-wife shot that had been widely circulated along with Carlos’s own photos during the campaign. The flowers were large and showy and impersonal. The actual cremation probably hadn’t taken place yet, Beau told Sam, since the medical investigator’s office only released the body this afternoon. It was just as well, she thought, that they didn’t all have to stare at some metal urn up there.

  Sam and Beau sat in the back row, the better to watch the crowd, he said. A law enforcement habit, she supposed. But why was he thinking along those lines?

  From what Beau had told her about the circumstances of Elena’s death, he’d concluded it had happened at her own hands. The office of the medical examiner agreed, finding elevated levels of alcohol and sleeping pills in her system, but not fatal amounts. Sam herself could attest to the amount of wine her friend had drunk. And after her shocking revelation about killing a man, it wouldn’t come as a big surprise if she’d taken a little sleep aid before going to bed. But then she hadn’t gone to bed.

  Had she been depressed enough to end her life?

  Sam couldn’t quite rest easily with that theory.

  The speaker’s words droned on, a blur to Sam. Carlos Tafoya sat in the front pew beside his father, Sam’s landlord, Victor Tafoya. The next several rows were reserved for family but most of the chapel seemed to be filled with Carlos’s political entourage and a selection of the curious and morbid. Sam found herself hoping that no one thought that of her.

  With no graveside service to end the observance, goodbyes were said in the form of a reception line at the front of the chapel. Sam noticed that Carlos handed some of the people a small card, presumably the address of the wake.

  “I already know where it is,” Beau whispered to her. “Go forward if you want, but I can skip this part.”

  Sam decided that she could, as well.

  “I took the cake to my house,” Sam told him as they left. “We need to stop by and pick it up on the way.”

  In her kitchen she handed Beau the half-sheet, decorated in white-on-white with Elena’s portrait reproduced in edible color on top and touches of her favorite turquoise woven into the decorations.

  “I’ll be right there,” she said. She went into her bedroom, slipped into more comfortable shoes and glanced at the wooden box.

  The lumpy old thing, which had once seemed almost grotesque to her, warmed her with comfort when she picked it up. She hugged it to her and let her pain over Elena’s death retreat. Like a tangible thing, the dark feeling left her heart, traveled down her arms, through her fingertips and—unbelievably—into the box. Sam held it out, balanced on the palms of her hands, and stared at it.

  Elena, I will find out what happened, I promise.

  The red stones winked back at her, brighter this time than their green and blue counterparts. Puzzled, Sam set the box on her dresser and backed out of the room.

  “Everything okay?” Beau asked, reaching out to give her a hug.

  “Yeah. I’ll be fine.” Actually, she felt better than fine. For the first time in days she had a feeling that everything would turn out all right. They would figure out what really happened to both Bram Fenton and Elena and how to set her spirit free.

  They rode silently for a few minutes in Beau’s Explorer, headed for the wake at the home of Carlos Tafoya’s campaign manager. No one, it seemed, could face a visit to the house where Elena’s death had happened, barely thirty-six hours earlier.

  “You know, there’s a lot about this that still bothers me,” Sam said, finally. “Aside from the fact that I don’t believe Elena killed herself over it.”

  Beau stared steadily at the road ahead. “It bothers me too. I’ve told Sheriff Padilla that we need to launch a more thorough search for the knife and I want a warrant to search Elena’s possessions for clues, before Carlos clears out her stuff and moves into the governor’s mansion.”

  “And?”

  “And I have a feeling he’s shuffled the request to the bottom of the stack.”

  “But why?” Sam had never especially warmed up to Beau’s boss, the sheriff who seemed more show than substance.

  “Politics? Well, everything’s about politics this time of year. He’s so overly conscious of getting re-elected right now . . . and it probably wouldn’t be a good move for him to drag the Tafoya name through the mud right now either. If—I should say, when—Carlos Tafoya is elected governor, he’ll have power to sign a lot of funding for the county. If we’re ever to get our own crime lab, or even an extra assistant or two to help at crime scenes . . . well, the funding has to come from higher up.”

  “So you think that Padilla and Tafoya are buddies, kind of helping each other’s campaigns, for that reason?”

  He shrugged.

  “Aren’t there internal investigations for this sort of thing? To discover whether a law officer isn’t playing by the rules?”

  “I’ll push harder for the warrant after the election. It’s only a few more days. It’s just that evidence can disappear or be tampered with . . . oh, hell, what am I saying? Fenton’s death happened weeks ago. If something was going to vanish, it probably already did.” He slowed as they reached the road they were looking for. “Plus, selfishly, I’ll take a lot less flack from Padilla if I wait awhile. The guy’s been jumping down everyone’s throats recently. Pre-election PMS or something, I guess.”

  Sam snickered at the image of the squat Padilla storming around the office like a wild woman on hormone overload.

  “Control that grin of yours,” Beau cautioned. “He’s here.”

  Sure enough, Padilla’s county car was parked among the dozen or so in front of the traditional adobe that sat overlooking the Rio Fernando from a bluff lined with brilliant yellow cottonwoods. Sam retrieved the cake from the back of Beau’s vehicle and they walked through an entry gate, past plantings of flowers and shrubs that looked as if they received daily tending by a master gardener.

  The first person they encountered, just inside the front door, was Orlando Padilla’s wife, Margaret. She greeted them warmly and suggested that they place the cake on the dining table where a buffet of catered food interspersed with homemade dishes was set up.

  “This is beautiful,” Margaret said. “Such a nice tribute to Elena’s memory.” She moved a couple of casseroles around, making space for the cake. “I didn’t know her very well, myself, but my husband says she was a classy lady.”

  “Yes, she was,” Sam agreed. “I’d only recently gotten to know her.”

  The sheriff approached just then, greeting Beau and Sam in his offhand manner. He turned to his wife and steered her toward the kitchen. “Excuse us a minute,” he said, almost as an afterthought.

  Beau raised an eyebrow toward Sam. “See what I mean about his total self-absorption,” he murmured.

  Another couple came into the dining room just then; Beau took Sam’s elbow and they turned toward the large living room where most of the crowd were standing around chatting in small groups. She recognized the publisher of the local newspaper and the wife of a town council member as two of the important people in the gathering. She also spotted Martin Delgado and Kevin Calendar from the Tafoya campaign among the guests. For the most part, it wasn’t her usual social set at all.

  The recent widower mingled with the guests. With friends he seemed to be genuinely grieving. But Sam noticed that with others he immediately went into a low-key version of campaign mode. She caught herself watching him, remembering things Elena had said—the difficulty of life in the limelight, the stresses her husband’s career placed upon her. The affair. Sam felt her throat tighten. So sad. Maybe the life
style, as much as Elena’s guilt over the affair and Fenton’s death, had driven her to desperation.

  Orlando and Margaret Padilla stepped into the room just then. Tafoya’s voice trailed off momentarily and he stared toward the sheriff. Sam felt a hum begin in her ears. She pressed her fingertips to her temples. Beau had turned to speak to someone else. She glanced back toward Padilla who was intent on filling a plate. Tafoya’s conversation had resumed and everyone seemed unaware of the strange current that Sam felt.

  She shook her head and the hum faded away.

  What was that all about?

  Her arms were covered in goose bumps. Her scalp itched from them, as if her hair were standing on end. In a split second, the bumps disappeared and her hands felt on fire.

  “Beau—” But he didn’t hear her. She gave him a vague wave to indicate that she was going to step outside.

  A set of French doors stood open to a patio, letting in the mild autumn afternoon. She edged her way through the crowded room and took a deep breath of chrysanthemum-scented air. A waist-high adobe wall enclosed the free-form flagstone patio, providing a safety barrier from the drop-off behind the house. Sam stood at the wall, soaking up the views of the ravine beyond, placing her hands against the cool mud surface.

  “It was a little close in there, wasn’t it?”

  Sam’s hand flew to her chest at the sound of the male voice behind her. Orlando Padilla stood less than three feet away, trying to stick a fork into an olive on his plate.

  “Sam, isn’t it?” he said. “Beau talks about you a lot.”

  She nodded, trying to force her heartbeat back to normal.