Misty tilted her head.
“I thought she fainted from shock,” I said. “Or tight clothing.”
“Could be,” Misty agreed.
Samantha patted Suzanne’s shoulder and joined us. “I don’t think it’s anything serious. Suzanne said she was too hot.”
“Forty-five,” Misty concluded.
Samantha asked, “What? Oh, I get it. Yep, I’ve answered calls after women had their first hot flashes and thought they were dying.”
Misty asked us both, “Think we can let everyone go?”
“I don’t think it’s a matter of letting,” I answered. “It’s seven. Vanessa told me that’s when the meeting ends.” At least half of the attendees had already left, and most of the rest of them were chatting while moving toward the hallway leading to the front door. Many of the women had probably been too busy catching up with one another’s news to notice Suzanne’s collapse.
Samantha said seriously, “You can’t let Emily go, Misty. This is the third person in just over a week who has fainted or collapsed after being near her donuts. And Yvonne Passenmath is leading the investigation.”
Swearing, Misty hauled out her phone. “Hey, Hooligan, can you swing by here and pick me and some non-evidence up?” She disconnected and grinned. “He’s on his way.”
“Hooligan?” Samantha asked.
“My new partner.”
“Did you give him the address?” I asked Misty.
“I already told him where I was going to be and that I might need him to pick me up if I was going to get to work on time. That’s why I wanted to come in your car, Samantha. I left my jacket in it, though. I’ll send him to get it from you.”
I tried to suppress a giggle.
Samantha looked from one of us to the other. “Are you two trying to set me up with a . . . with a hooligan?”
“Wait until you see him,” I said.
She raised her nose in the air. “I need to go to work, too.”
I pointed at Suzanne. “You are working, Samantha.” Well, maybe. Suzanne and Jenn stood up and walked carefully toward the exit, which was no longer clogged with chattering women. Samantha started after them.
Misty called, “If you see a uniformed cop out there, bring him in!”
Without turning toward us, Samantha waved in acknowledgment.
A few minutes later, Samantha returned without Misty’s jacket, but with Hooligan Houlihan. His freckled face wasn’t good at hiding a blush. Samantha didn’t have freckles, but she was blushing, too. She told us, “Suzanne walked outside with no problem and got into a cab. Jenn promised to stay with her and call us if necessary. Suzanne said she didn’t need help. She was going to go home and relax.”
I gave Houlihan a short statement. After he finished writing in his notebook, he put the bakery boxes, leftover napkins, and brochures into the carton, shouldered the carton, and let us lead him out.
Vanessa waylaid us at the door to her boutique. “What’s going on? Are you in trouble, Emily?” She was good at sounding both concerned and empathetic. And a bit judgmental.
“I hope not!” I acted like I was joking, but I wasn’t. Had someone, while taking a donut, dribbled poison on other donuts?
“She’s not,” Houlihan concurred.
“He’s a friend,” Misty explained.
“Okay, kids,” Vanessa said. “Have fun!”
I smiled at her. “We always do.”
“Good.” But her lips thinned, as if she was considering saving us from a life of too much happy hoping and not enough goal achievement. And not enough shopping, either, possibly, although I didn’t think her boutique had been open for business that evening. “Thanks again, Emily.”
Hooligan Houlihan’s squad car was parked next to my “cruiser.” Misty and Samantha headed toward Samantha’s car. Houlihan put my carton in the back seat of his car, shut the door, and watched Misty return, carrying her jacket. “Misty told me that she, you, and another woman have known each other since junior high. Is Samantha the other woman?” He had a delightfully lopsided grin to go along with the blush. “That doesn’t sound right. I mean the third woman.”
“Yes.”
“You’re the one who makes donuts, so Samantha’s the EMT?”
“Yes. She drove the ambulance away early Sunday morning, just before you arrived.”
Misty opened the passenger door. “Let’s go, Hooligan.”
He smiled across the top of his cruiser at me. “She’s actually letting me drive.”
“Only until I’m in uniform again.” She slid into the passenger seat and closed the door.
He glanced at Samantha’s car and then looked at me again. “See you in your donut shop, Emily.”
He threw himself into his cruiser, backed it out of its space, and raced toward downtown and the police station.
Samantha drove past and waved at me.
I got into my donut-topped “police” car. Why were Misty and I matching Samantha with Hooligan Houlihan? I had earmarked Brent for Samantha.
Maybe Hooligan was better for her. Brent’s girlfriends were usually taller than Samantha, and he never stuck with any of them for very long. Besides, I’d enjoyed watching the interest spark between Samantha and Hooligan. Even though I didn’t know Hooligan well, he and Samantha seemed right for each other.
I followed Samantha most of the way to downtown Fallingbrook, but she drove faster than I was willing to push my vintage car, and she was way ahead when she turned off toward Emergency Medical Services headquarters.
In the deepening dusk, motion detectors lit the lights behind Deputy Donut. I backed the Fordor into its garage and started across the lot to my own car. No one else seemed to be around, but downtown was not exactly quiet at seven thirty. The diner across Wisconsin Street was nearly always busy around suppertime, and despite the calendar saying that it was the middle of October, the evening’s warmth must have encouraged the people at the Fireplug Pub, next to the fire station, to open its outdoor patio, complete with live music.
I buckled myself into my car, but instead of starting the engine right away, I sent Jenn a text. She responded that Suzanne was fine, but tired, and they were sorry we couldn’t have the meeting we’d planned after the presentation. She attached the photos she’d taken that evening. I sent a message thanking her and then zoomed in on the photos.
There were clear ones of lots of our faces, including Vanessa’s and April’s.
Vanessa had claimed that the two women could give each other alibis because they’d been together. She’d said they’d driven north of Little Lake Lodge for over an hour until they found a gas station with an all-night convenience store that sold chocolate bars.
Vanessa had also said that she and April had told the police about their chocolate binge, and the police had stopped “harassing” them. Maybe Passenmath had already sent someone to find that gas station and commandeer any surveillance files.
But maybe Passenmath was still systematically reviewing only the videos south of Little Lake Lodge.
I could call Brent and tell him what I’d learned, but if Vanessa had been speaking the truth, she’d already told the police about April’s and her so-called alibi. Judging by Misty’s face when she listened to Vanessa, the alibi was news to Misty. Maybe when Misty began her shift, she would ask the detectives on the case if Vanessa and April really had told them about their chocolate-craving binge.
I didn’t know if the gas station existed, and I was no more eager than Passenmath probably was to send law-enforcement staff up into the north woods on what might be a wild-goose chase.
What had made the owners of Little Lake Lodge name their banquet hall after a cliché describing a fruitless mission? Fruitless, I thought. Maybe they didn’t plan on serving fruit in their banquet hall.
I slapped at my cheeks to stop my aimlessly wandering mind. Maybe I’d eaten something at Vanessa’s studio that was causing me to hallucinate. Or maybe my own bedtime was approaching. Five in the morning w
as going to be way too soon. I wanted to go home, relax with Dep, catch up on chores, and go to bed.
But would I sleep, or would I wonder about that gas station? Would I regret not chasing after some possibly nonexistent videos?
Most surveillance systems automatically wrote over their files after a certain amount of time.
Dep would be fine at home alone for two or three more hours.
I took a deep breath and started my car. At Wisconsin Street, instead of turning south toward the sweet cottage I shared with my sweet and sometimes bossy cat, I turned north.
I passed the town square, the police department, and the fire station. New subdivisions lined the road for about a mile, and then I was in the woods, and Wisconsin Street became a state highway. I stayed on the highway instead of taking the twisty county road that led to Little Lake Lodge, other resorts, and individual cottages, summer homes, and hunting and fishing camps.
The first gas station I came to was only about a half hour north of the turnoff to Little Lake Lodge, so was probably not the one that Vanessa had told us about earlier that evening. I stopped anyway and pumped a few gallons of gas. I went inside. The attendant seemed jumpy, as if afraid of being robbed. Maybe the small amount of gas I’d bought was a warning signal.
I paid him and then showed him my phone screen displaying Vanessa’s and April’s faces. He flinched.
I came up with a very lame explanation. “My cousin was in town last week, and she thought she lost her prescription sunglasses here.”
“No one left sunglasses here.”
“Do you remember if one of these two women bought gas here? Or maybe a chocolate bar?”
“I never saw them.”
“Were you at work here last Saturday night? That’s when my cousin was around here buying candy.”
“I was working, but I didn’t see those people or any sunglasses.” He backed away.
I returned to my car and sat fiddling with my keys. Vanessa had said that she and April had driven north for over an hour. Did I want to drive around that long? But maybe they had zigzagged between lakes, while I was on the most direct route heading north. Surely, the next gas station couldn’t be an entire half hour away from where I was now.
I reminded myself that I wasn’t interfering with Brent’s investigation. If I found the gas station, I was merely going to pinpoint where to send him. Or I was going to tell him that Vanessa might have made up a nonexistent gas station as part of her alibi. But he would still want to follow up and see for himself that the gas station was only a fantasy. If it was.
If I was putting the words “gas station” and “fantasy” in the same thought, maybe it really was time for me to go home for some much-needed sleep.
But maybe the gas station with the chocolate bars was close, and I was about to find it.
I eased away from the gas station where the attendant claimed not to have seen Vanessa and April. I turned north.
“A cousin lost her sunglasses,” I muttered to myself. “At night in October. Can’t you come up with a better story, Emily?”
Remembering Brent’s teasing about arguing with myself about clues, evidence, and suspects, I clamped my lips together.
There wasn’t much traffic going north, but cars, pickups, and campers streamed south, leaving the warmish weekend in the wilderness and heading back to Fallingbrook and nearby towns.
Every five minutes, I told myself to turn around, but I kept thinking I’d find the gas station just over the next rise or around the next curve. “I’m driving myself around the bend!” Considering that I’d just said it aloud, putting it to music, no less, it was probably true, and maybe it was a sign that I should turn around and go home. I had plenty of gas, but if I thought I might run low, I could stop at the gas station where I’d just bought a few gallons and unnerve that poor attendant more. Not a good idea, Emily, I told myself. But I didn’t say it aloud.
And I continued driving north.
I almost missed it, on the other side of a brightly lit motel with a flashing neon VACANCY sign and an arrow pointing toward the motel.
Since buying only a few gallons of gas might have been what scared the previous gas station attendant, I parked near the little store where a sign in the window said, among other things, CAMPING SUPPLIES and PAY FOR GAS HERE.
A bell rang when I entered. Two women, one in her thirties and the other in her fifties, were talking and laughing behind the counter. “Can we help you?” the older one asked. They looked almost identical except for their ages. They even had the same purplish red shade of hair.
“I’m looking for a chocolate bar.” It was almost as inane as the story about the cousin and the sunglasses. Rows and rows of chocolate bars were right in front of my thighs, on the other side of the counter from the two women.
They were polite. The older woman smiled and pointed a finger toward the counter in front of me. “Help yourself, and if you don’t see what you want here, go back there—we have shelves of candy.”
I studied the rows of chocolate bars and picked out two different ones, either of which could have been the one Vanessa described, milk chocolate with a gooey center, and some nuts. “You’re a lifesaver,” I said. “I was craving these.”
The younger woman giggled.
I handed her bills. While she jingled through change in her cash drawer, I said, “Friends told me about this place. Just over a week ago, Saturday night, I think it was, they had a huge craving for chocolate bars, and they found your store and were very happy about it. That started me craving chocolate bars, too.”
The younger woman said, “I remember one woman coming in here about then, talking about craving chocolate. She bought, like, ten bars, didn’t she, Mom?”
That wasn’t quite the way that Vanessa had told it....
The mother grinned. “Lots of ’em, anyway.”
The daughter laughed. “And she said she felt guilty about it!”
The mother added, “I told her not to, that we all need to do something fun for ourselves once in a while, but that seemed to be the wrong thing to say. She was very serious. I was afraid she was going to change her mind and return the candy bars for a refund.”
“Small world.” Considering that I’d already said that I came up here on my friends’ advice, that was another lame comment. I pulled my phone out and showed them a picture of Vanessa and April. “Was she one of these women?”
They looked at the picture. The daughter pointed at Vanessa. “That’s the one!”
I pointed at the tiny image of April. “On Saturday night, the woman who came in here was with this woman. Did she come in, too?” For sure, they were going to think I was a detective. Or nuttier than the candy bars I was melting with my hotly lying little hand.
The mother shook her head. “Just that one woman came in here, by herself.”
The younger woman looked at her mother. “Remember her bag, Mom? What did it say? Something about Happy . . . um . . . Hopers, was it?”
“That was it. We read it wrong at first and nearly had hysterics.” The mother laughed at the memory.
Her daughter joined in. “Then we saw what it really said, ‘Hopers.’ And below that was something else funny, something about shopping.”
The mother swept her hand across the counter. “And as soon as she was out that door, we were rolling on the floor laughing. Something about it made us think that she believed that by buying a dozen chocolate bars she’d accomplished something important.”
“I remember now,” the daughter said. “Her bag said: ‘Goal Achievement Through Shopping.’ ”
The mother snapped her fingers. “That was it! Isn’t it funny?” she asked me.
I smiled. “It sure is.”
The mother swatted at her daughter’s arm. “Here we are, poking fun at this nice lady’s friend.”
“Don’t worry,” I told them. “I thought the words on her bag were both funny-ha-ha and funny-strange.” I told them goodbye and drove to the far si
de of the motel, out of sight of the two women, and switched off my engine. Maybe Brent already knew that the gas station existed and that Vanessa had been there one night recently, buying chocolate bars.
Then again, maybe he didn’t. And I still didn’t know if April had actually been with Vanessa. April could have been back at Little Lake Lodge, pressing crullers into a saucer of arsenic.
Before I could speed-dial Brent, my phone rang.
Brent. Calling from his personal phone.
Chapter 25
How did Brent always seem to know when I was about to call him? He couldn’t be tapping my phone or reading my mind. It was a coincidence. A weird one, possibly, except that Roger’s murder had forced us to get in touch with each other frequently.
“Hi, Brent,” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“Sure.”
“I’m at your house and your car’s not here, and you’re not answering the door. Dep is howling at me, though.” I heard the smile in his voice.
“I’m at a motel north of Fallingbrook.”
“Just checking that you’re okay.” He seldom sounded that formal. Did he think I was with a date at the motel?
“Don’t go,” I said. “I parked here to call you. I gave a presentation at Vanessa Legghaupt’s studio earlier this evening.”
“What?”
“Vanessa has programs about female entrepreneurs, and this evening’s speaker had canceled. Vanessa asked me to give a last-minute talk on starting up a business.”
“Emily, that woman is a, well, not exactly a suspect, but—”
“I was perfectly safe. Misty and Samantha came, too. They weren’t on duty. They came as friends. While we were there, Vanessa told us that she and her client April had an alibi for last Saturday night. She said they told the police they were together buying chocolate bars, but I wanted to make certain that you knew about this supposed candy-buying shopping trip.”
“They did tell us about it.”
“And you don’t believe them.”
“We need to check it out. They took a long time to tell us their story. You’ve said they come into Deputy Donut, right? And that they never buy anything besides organic green tea?”
Goodbye Cruller World Page 21