Murder with a Cherry on Top

by Cynthia Baxter

  “Like the Corvette?” I asked.

  “Exactly. I can’t imagine what the monthly car payments are on that thing.”

  Aha. So Tad didn’t know that Ashley had paid cash for her seventy-five-thousand-dollar toy.

  “Did you ever ask her about it?” I inquired. “Where she was getting all that money?”

  Tad shook his head. “I didn’t think it was any of my business. But that was something else I noticed. She got kind of, I don’t know, mysterious, if that’s the right word. And it wasn’t only the way she was spending money. She was more secretive, somehow. We’d make a plan and she’d show up late. Or she’d be at Greenleaf, sitting alone at her favorite table in the corner, and she’d spend the whole evening texting. Or going out onto the sidewalk to talk on the phone.

  “Whenever I made a comment about it—teasing her, most of the time, about how much work the bakery business seemed to be—she’d just laugh and brush it off without giving me a real answer about what was occupying her time so much.” He shrugged. “I was definitely getting the feeling that there was something going on with her, something she wasn’t willing to talk about. Not to me, anyway.”

  “Okay, folks,” Brian Whitman called out, instantly causing most of the conversations buzzing around the room to end. “Why don’t we get back to business. We don’t want this to turn into too late a night. . . .”

  I turned my attention back to Tad, but our tête-à-tête was over. I’d lost him. I could tell by the way his eyes were traveling around the room. I surmised that he was checking out the other attendees, evaluating whether by allowing me to monopolize his time he had missed out on any worthwhile networking opportunities.

  “Hey, you didn’t get a chance to try any of my ice cream,” I whispered to Tad as Brian once again became the focus of everyone else’s attention.

  “That’s okay,” he replied. With a wink, he added, “I’ll come by for a private tasting some time.”

  Whoa! I thought, wishing I’d turned up the air-conditioning.

  The dude certainly possessed more than his share of charm, charisma, and good old-fashioned sexiness. It was no surprise that Ashley had fallen for him.

  But at the same time, I wondered if her entanglement with the man she had thought of as Mr. Right had, in the end, gone miserably—fatally—wrong.

  Chapter 15

  In 1997, the Ben & Jerry’s factory in Waterbury, Vermont, created a Flavor Graveyard, complete with granite headstones and witty epitaphs for each flavor. It began with four flavors: Dastardly Mash, Economic Crunch, Ethan Almond and Tuskegee Chunk. As of 2015, it included 35 flavors.

  —BenJerry.com

  I didn’t sleep very well that night. And the amount of sugar I’d consumed over the course of the evening, thanks to the magnificence of my mini cupcakes and the other Ice Cream Incidentals, had nothing to do with it.

  In the past week and a half, since Ashley’s murder, I had gathered together what I thought was an impressive amount of information about the woman and her life and the people around her. But I had yet to make any real sense of what it all added up to. I hadn’t come close to figuring out who could have wanted Ashley dead—or why. I had a few suspects. I had plenty of loose ends and innuendos and hearsay. But I had nothing solid.

  The one thought that ran through everything I’d learned, the notion that had hummed in the background during every conversation I’d had with someone who’d known her, was that there had to be something else going on in her life. And my gut feeling was that it was something that was related to her business.

  Ashley may have been running a successful bakery, but my hunch was that she was running some other operation on the side.

  How else would she have had all that money?

  The question was, what was it—and how had it led to her murder?

  Drugs were one obvious possibility, since that particular industry was well-known for its high profits and preference for cash over MasterCard or personal checks. On the one hand, it was hard to picture Ashley Winthrop as a drug lord. But on the other hand, I’d binge-watched Weeds on DVD, so I knew that folks in that line of business didn’t always look the way you’d assume they’d look.

  That theory wasn’t my first choice, but I decided I couldn’t rule it out completely.

  Especially since I didn’t have any second choice, much less a third or a fourth.

  As I lay in bed, listening to the house creak and the occasional owl let out a spooky hooting sound, I mulled over other possible ways of getting even more information about Ashley. And I suddenly remembered having read an article about her and her business in the Daily Roost a few months earlier, not long after I’d moved back to town.

  It wasn’t much, but it was one more rock to look under.

  So first thing the next morning, after opening Lickety Splits and whipping up a batch of Cinnamon Bun ice cream and making sure Emma was ready to take charge, I headed over to the Wolfert’s Roost Public Library.

  The library was a big, old, brick building that I’d always loved. When my mother and sisters and I had first moved in with Grams, it immediately became a refuge for me. I headed over there every chance I got. The building may have looked stately and maybe even a little forbidding on the outside, but inside I would invariably find hundreds of friends waiting for me: the beloved characters I got to know in the pages of the books I devoured.

  On this particular day, however, I headed straight for the research desk. The woman stationed there reminded me of the old-fashioned image of a librarian: dark hair streaked with gray pulled back into a bun, glasses on a chain around her neck, a plain dark dress that looked like she’d borrowed it from a headmistress in a Roald Dahl novel.

  “May I help you?” she asked, not coming even close to cracking a smile.

  “I’m doing some research, and I’m looking for an article that appeared in the Daily Roost a few weeks ago.” I hesitated before adding, “It’s about Sweet Things, the bakery in town. And its owner.”

  She frowned. “The microfilm reels are sorted by date, not by subject.”

  “In other words,” I asked, “no one ever created an index?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Now it was my turn to frown. I’d just assumed I’d be able to look up “Sweet Things” or “Ashley Winthrop” in some directory and easily find the date and page number of the article I remembered seeing, as well as any other articles that had ever been written about Ashley or her shop.

  Not that easy.

  So when the librarian led me over to a drawer filled with boxes of microfilm reels, I grabbed the box of microfilm that included editions of the Roost from March. Then I went into a small room, got comfy at the microfilm machine, and followed the diagram that showed how to thread the film.

  I skimmed through each edition of the Roost that lit up on the screen, page by page. I’d expected the process to be tedious, but it was actually going pretty fast. It certainly helped that I remembered exactly where that annoying article about Ashley’s successful business had appeared: within the first few pages, probably page three or page five, on the right-hand side.

  Finally, I spotted it. March 14, page three.

  HOW SWEET IT IS! the headline cried. LOCAL WOMAN CELEBRATES FIVE YEARS IN THE BAKERY BIZ.

  I groaned at the cliché. Really? I thought. “ ‘How sweet it is’?” Whoever wrote this couldn’t come up with anything more original?

  But I wasn’t there to do a literary critique. So I kept reading.

  “It doesn’t get any sweeter than this,” says Ashley Winthrop, the proprietor of the Sweet Things Pastry Palace, located at 112 Hudson Street.

  Winthrop, a lifetime resident of Wolfert’s Roost, just celebrated the five-year anniversary of her shop, a favorite with locals and visitors alike.

  To commemorate the occasion, Winthrop gave a free mini cupcake to every customer (minimum purchase required). Nearly three dozen cupcakes were given away.

  “Now that’s genero
us,” I mumbled. “A mini cupcake. Not even a mile-high one. And a minimum purchase required? Really?”

  I read on. The article gushed about what a great businesswoman Ashley was and what an asset to the community Sweet Things was. You would have thought she was feeding the poor instead of loading carbs into every passerby with a credit card.

  The ending made me groan.

  “Running a bakery isn’t something I ever thought I’d do when I was growing up,” she says. “I just kind of fell into it.”

  And those of us with a sweet tooth are glad she did!

  “Doing okay in there?” the research librarian called in.

  “Doing fine,” I assured her.

  I sat hunched over the screen, studying the photos that accompanied the article. There was one of the exterior of Sweet Things, probably taken from the sidewalk right in front of Lickety Splits. There was also a close-up of the shop, which featured the words “Home of the Mile-High Cupcake” written in swirly letters on the awning.

  The third photo was an interior shot. The picture featured the bakery’s Mother Teresa–esque proprietor, standing proudly in front of a display case. She was holding one arm out, gesturing toward the pastries that were neatly lined up in the case, as if to say, “Here they are. Check ’em out!”

  Interestingly, she was wearing an apron, which of course was festooned with the shop’s logo. But she was also wearing spindly high heels, a short skirt, and enough makeup that I’d personally worry that flakes of blush or eyeshadow would fall into the cake batter.

  Still, there were no surprises there.

  Yet I continued to study the photo, thinking that maybe if I stared at Ashley’s picture hard enough, somehow I’d be able to see something I’d never seen before. Crazy, I knew, but I was getting desperate.

  I’d barely had that thought—about being crazy—when my entire body jolted.

  I suddenly felt as if I’d been struck by another one of those lightning bolts.

  I blinked hard a few times, wanting to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing.

  I did. I absolutely did. And it wasn’t Ashley that had gotten my attention. It was the display case right behind her.

  The glass case was filled with humongous chocolate chip cookies, nut-studded brownies, gingerbread boys, and layered rainbow cookies. There were less sugary pastries, as well: muffins, scones, and what looked like an assortment of croissants.

  The selection of goodies looked ordinary enough, exactly the kind of assortment you’d expect to find in any bakery you walked into.

  Yet something was wrong. Very wrong.

  Not one of the baked goods on display appeared to be one of the pastries that Ashley’s suppliers claimed to bake.

  And it was that fact that was making my heart pound so loudly that I was afraid the librarian would come in to check on me.

  How can this be? I thought. Could this photo have been taken before any of the women I talked to started working for Ashley?

  But I remembered Lindsey saying she’d been baking for Ashley for almost a year. I was positive she’d told me that she’d started working for her soon after her husband had lost his job. And Allison had definitely said she’d been working for her since last fall, right after she started law school.

  I was starting to get a very strange feeling about all this.

  I pulled out the list of Ashley’s suppliers and checked it against the photo, my eyes darting back and forth between the two. I could clearly see a double row of chocolate chip cookies. But scanning the list from top to bottom, no one was listed as making chocolate chip cookies. The same went for gingerbread boys, brownies, and croissants.

  And then I tried doing the reverse. I studied the display case in the photo, searching for cheesecake. I didn’t see any. Not slices, not entire cakes. There was nothing there that even vaguely resembled cheesecake.

  Okay, so maybe Lindsey hadn’t made any that day because the Ninja Turtle in her life had a cold.

  So I looked for something that could be called a blackberry tart.

  Nothing.

  Maybe some unusual pastry that could be labeled a Licorice Twist?

  I came up short once again. Nothing in the display case had any black dots on it, in it, or around it to signify licorice. And nothing was twisted, either.

  I continued going down the list, looking for the other pastries that were written next to the women’s names. No Sugar ’n Spice Delight. No Cherry Jubilee. No Charlotte Russe. No Whipped Cream Éclair.

  And then I was struck by another lightning bolt.

  Had I remembered this correctly or was I just imagining things . . . ?

  My hands were trembling as I stared at the list I held, and my mouth had become uncomfortably dry. Yet I forced myself to focus on the names printed on the list. Actually, not the names as much as what was printed right after them.

  “Lindsey Mather, Cheesecake.”

  No problem with that. But then I looked at the second name on Ashley’s list of suppliers, Allison Chibuzo. Written next to it was “Blackberry Tart.”

  Not “Blackberry Tarts,” the way I would have written it if I were making a list like that. In fact, when I’d jotted down the list of Ice Cream Incidentals, figuring out how many of each type to make, I’d written, “Mini Cupcakes—24. Ice Cream Sandwiches—30.”

  Plural. Not singular.

  I’d have expected Ashley to do the same thing. It was like making a shopping list. You didn’t write “banana.” You wrote “bananas.”

  I checked the list one more time, wanting to make sure I was getting this right.

  Sure enough, next to Brandy DiNapoli’s name, she’d written, “Licorice Twist.”

  The pieces of this puzzle I’d been agonizing over for almost two weeks, ever since Ashley had been murdered, were starting to snap into place.

  I could be wrong about this whole thing, I told myself, trying to stay focused despite the fact that my thoughts were whirling around inside my head like the flakes inside a snow globe.

  But I didn’t think I was. In fact, I now had an entirely new possibility to investigate: the possibility that the kind of sweets that Ashley had been peddling didn’t require a fork to enjoy.

  * * *

  My new theory was making my head buzz as I left the library. I needed to find out more. And I couldn’t wait.

  So instead of heading back to Lickety Splits, I went home. I knew that on Tuesday mornings, Grams met with her book group. That meant I’d have the house to myself.

  Digger was excited to see me, as always. Chloe was in a bit of a snit, for some reason, so she chose to ignore me. But that was fine with me. I wasn’t in a mood to socialize.

  Instead, I sat down at the kitchen table, but not until I’d armed myself with a cup of coffee and a big dish of Cappuccino Crunch—a natural accompaniment, after all. True, the last thing I needed was a caffeine rush, given the rate at which my brain was racing. Even so, there was always a chance it would help me focus. And at the moment, that was exactly what I needed.

  I opened my laptop and immediately began typing words into the search engine: “Hudson Valley Wholesale Suppliers Baked Goods.”

  I was shocked when after hitting Search, a long list of wholesale bakeries popped up. I’d had no idea there was so much baking going on all around me.

  I opened the Web site of a place called Huffernan’s Baking Company.

  “We supply restaurants, banquet halls, country clubs, and bakeries,” its About Us page informed me.

  Doesn’t anyone ever bake from scratch anymore? I wondered.

  I clicked on the Our Products page—and was astonished by all the offerings. The list of Bundt cakes alone was mind-boggling: Chocolate Bundt Cake, Vanilla Bundt Cake, Carrot Bundt Cake, Marble Bundt Cake, Walnut Bundt Cake, Blueberry Bundt Cake, Strawberry Bundt Cake....

  And that was just the ten-inch size.

  There were also sheet cakes, cupcakes, sponge cakes, layer cakes, pounds cakes, and babkas
.

  I clicked to the Cookie page. And found that Huffernan’s offered chocolate cookies, chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter cookies, gingersnaps, snickerdoodles, chocolate chocolate chip cookies, white chocolate macadamia nut cookies . . .

  So much for that one supplier.

  There were half a dozen more that were less than an hour’s drive away. I methodically wrote down the name and phone number of each, determined to get in touch with as many of them as I needed to until I found what I was looking for.

  Then I shoveled in the last of the Cappuccino Crunch in my dish, took a final few swigs of coffee, and called the first number on my handwritten list.

  “Hudson Bakery,” a woman with a pleasant voice answered. “This is Lena. How can I help you?”

  I reminded myself of something I’d once heard: To be a good liar, stick as close to the truth as possible.

  “My name is Kate McKay,” I began, “and I currently run an ice cream business. But a bakery in town has recently come on the market, and I’m thinking of expanding my business.” I hesitated, then added, “The bakery is called Sweet Things. It’s on Hudson Street in Wolfert’s Roost.”

  “We supply bakeries and supermarkets all over the Hudson Valley,” the woman replied. “What exactly would you like to know?”

  Thanks to Lena’s helpfulness, I got a quick tutorial in how the wholesale bakery business worked. There was a minimum order, I could modify the details anytime I wanted, and I could pick up my order or pay a small extra fee to have it delivered.

  No surprises there.

  But what I’d really been looking for was something much more specific.

  And it wasn’t until I called the fourth supplier on my list that I got what I was looking for.