Sugar and Vice: Cupcake Truck Mysteries

by Emily James

  I tried to tell myself to stay calm and answer normally, but my heart was beating so hard that the words couldn’t seem to find a way out around it. It was possible Jarrod had gone through the police to find me. Possible, but unlikely. Another police officer would ask too many questions and might see through any story Jarrod told. This call had to be about Harold Cartwright’s murder.

  “Good morning, Detective. I’m on my way to my next stop, so I have you on speaker. I apologize for any background noise while I drive.”

  I used the tone that I used to say good morning to Jarrod. Upbeat enough to keep from sounding stressed or tired, but not so chipper that it sounded forced or my listener would wonder what I was so happy about.

  “I’ll keep this brief, then,” the detective said. “I’m overseeing the investigation into Harold Cartwright’s murder, and I’m contacting everyone who was there to give a statement.”

  His voice said no big deal, all routine.

  I knew better.

  I knew enough about law enforcement investigations to know that they weren’t going to be talking to me merely as a witness. Everyone who’d been there was both a potential witness and a potential suspect. They’d be watching to see if I was nervous—and I would be, but not because I killed Harold—and to see if my story matched up.

  Detective Labreck was still talking, and I forced myself to pay attention.

  “We’re also asking everyone to give us their fingerprints. We just need to be able to eliminate the fingerprints of people who were supposed to be there. I was hoping you could come down to the station today.”

  A request, but not a request. I knew that much too. If I refused, I’d look guiltier.

  My hands shook, making it hard for me to control my truck. I pulled off onto the shoulder of the road and put my hazard lights on.

  I couldn’t give them my fingerprints. I couldn’t even give them my full name, and they were sure to want it. Lying to the police about your name and possessing a fake identity were both crimes. Not only would they realize Isabel Addington was a fake name, but they’d be able to match my prints up to my real identity.

  The best I could do was stall. “I can’t come today. I have scheduled events until late tonight, and then I need to get to bed and be up early tomorrow for another.”

  “I understand. We all have to work. How about we make an appointment for a time this week that would work?”

  Shoot. He hadn’t even hesitated. That meant he was expecting me to try to avoid it.

  My last hope that I was part of a list evaporated. If I wasn’t their sole primary suspect, I was at least one of them. The list couldn’t be a long one.

  Worse, if I tried to evade a meeting a second time, he’d stop playing nice.

  The best I could do was try to buy myself enough time to gather evidence on Claire.

  “The soonest I can make it is Friday afternoon. Is there a time then that would work for you?”

  Yeesh, I sounded like I was making an appointment for a pedicure or something.

  “I’ll expect you Friday at two.”

  That gave me fewer than five days to prove I hadn’t killed anyone and to put as much highway between me and Lakeshore as possible.

  As I parked my truck, my mind kept chewing on what I’d learned from Blake the same way it chewed on a recipe that wasn’t turning out quite right.

  Claire had seemed genuinely upset at Harold’s death, but it was possible she was simply a good actress. That made more sense of her vendetta against me than anything else.

  If she’d killed Harold, she’d need to make sure the guilt pointed somewhere else. What better means of doing that than by targeting me. I already had things about me—including being new to town, never giving my last name, and not having a permanent address where I could be found—that made me look shady.

  She’d even been smart about not trying to frame me herself. She’d convinced Dan that something wasn’t right about me, and she was using him to gather as much evidence as possible to point the finger at me. Dan would be extra-motivated since whoever killed Harold also almost killed his daughter by accident.

  I set out the cupcakes. Today’s array included tiramisu even though I’d had it on the menu late last week. One of my regulars had said it was her birthday today, and I knew tiramisu was her favorite.

  I took one out of the fridge, added the mascarpone whipped cream on top, and dusted it with cocoa powder. I only put out one of each type for people to see and kept the rest ready to go once someone purchased. Hot weather and whipped cream or hot weather and real buttercream didn’t always mix.

  I’d been in this spot long enough that some people seemed to be walking down to grab a cupcake and head straight back to work. Even so, the traffic pre-lunch was light enough that I had plenty of time to mull over what to do about my newest discovery.

  I obviously couldn’t just go to the police with an accusation and no evidence. It’d look like retaliation. Claire wanted them to investigate me, and I wanted them to investigate Claire.

  Besides, I needed something solid enough that I could give it to the police and leave with the security that they weren’t going to put a BOLO out for me. A hunch that Claire might have killed her grandfather because he was becoming a financial drain and didn’t look like he was going to die anytime soon wasn’t enough.

  I just didn’t know where to start. I couldn’t follow Claire around the way I had Blake. She’d spot my truck immediately. No one at her bank, or even Harold’s senior’s home, was going to talk to me. I wasn’t family, let alone Power of Attorney for her or Harold.

  A woman I’d seen a few times before stopped at the window and pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head. “Can I have a Cherries Jubilee?”

  I had a feeling that running down to grab a cupcake was the only break she took based on the fact that she always came alone and headed immediately back in the same direction she’d come from. She also didn’t pull out her phone while waiting like most people, almost as if her eyes needed the short break from screens.

  I assembled the Cherries Jubilee and handed it to her, then pointed to the email address on the chalk board. “If you have any suggestions for making the cupcakes better or for new flavors, make sure to let me know.”

  She was one of my experimenters—the ones who tried a new cupcake every time they came rather than defaulting to a trusted few flavors. Those were the best people to get suggestions from. From my experience, they seemed to be on top of the latest trends.

  She headed off. Before I could put her cash away, her head bobbed into view again.

  She raised up like she was standing on tiptoes to get a better look at me. “Excuse me?”

  My heart did a strange double beat, and I concentrated on slowing my breathing before my heart rate ran away with me and made me light-headed. It was probably nothing more than that she’d seen the article and wondered if that was me. Or she’d changed her mind, which wouldn’t be great but wouldn’t be an end-of-the-world tragedy either.

  “It’s Isabel, right?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  She pushed her sunglasses up onto the top of her head again and met my gaze. “Are you okay?”

  My vocal chords felt like they were broken. That was the last thing I’d expected. It’d been so long since someone asked me about my well-being that I didn’t know whether to laugh it off or be truly concerned that a near-stranger thought to ask. What I would have loved to do was sit down with someone for just a minute and tell them how not okay I was, but I couldn’t do that. Not now. Probably not ever again.

  “What makes you ask?”

  She lifted up on her toes again and set the cupcake on the counter. “I can’t be sure, but I think that’s BBQ sauce, not cherries.”

  I bent down slightly for a closer look, but I didn’t need it. I could smell the difference as soon as I got close.

  My face felt tight and hot, like I’d fallen asleep out in direct sunlight for a couple of h
ours.

  I’d been experimenting with a savory breakfast cupcake full of bacon and chives. The “icing” was BBQ sauce. I must have been so distracted that I grabbed it instead of the cherries out of the fridge.

  I swooped the offending cupcake out of sight. “I’m so sorry. I’ll make you a new one.”

  The woman waited without tapping her foot, putting her sunglasses back down in a show of impatience, or even pulling out her phone.

  When I handed her the cupcake, she opened her mouth and then shut it again as if she were thinking about repeating her question about my welfare.

  Instead she quietly accepted the cupcake and held my gaze again. “I’ll be back tomorrow. Take care of yourself.”

  I couldn’t tell her I was trying to and seemed to be failing. It felt like there was an awful lot I couldn’t tell people, and I was starting to realize how much I missed it. To have someone, anyone, who I could say to “I’m having a bad day today” or “Today was a great day.”

  They all blurred together into mediocre days because I had no one to share them with. My life had no one to witness it.

  I scooped up the BBQ-iced cupcake and brought it over to the trash can, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. Weird flavor combination or not, I’d eat it as lunch. I wouldn’t have lunch otherwise, and then at least I wouldn’t have wasted it.

  I unwrapped it and bit down. The combination of the BBQ sauce with the rum-flavored cupcake wasn’t that bad, but it would have been better if it’d actually had cherries with it too.

  It was a good thing that my customer hadn’t eaten the cupcake for more than one reason. My BBQ sauce still tasted too much like ketchup.

  I choked slightly on my bite of cupcake and coughed.

  Ketchup. The almond butter that killed Harold Cartwright was in the ketchup. That meant that Claire either had to have brought the ketchup herself—which seemed unlikely since she was angry at the other food truck vendor for not bringing enough ketchup and mustard—or she’d hired someone who worked for the other vendor to do it for her.

  It was an angle the police might not have considered. Even if they had, the person working with Claire wasn’t about to confess the moment the police came asking questions. I didn’t know what leads the police were following for sure. If they were considering Claire, without a clear connection between Claire and the vendor, the police probably assumed Claire did it herself.

  If she’d been smart, she’d have kept her fingerprints off most of the bottles of ketchup, thereby providing herself with an appearance of innocence. None of the vendor’s employees would have to explain their fingerprints on the bottles. The police would expect the employees to have touched the bottles while purchasing them, packing and unpacking them, and setting them out.

  All of that was presently speculation. I still needed more. I’d sound crazy saying one of the vendor’s employees maybe possibly knew Claire and could have been hired by her.

  If I could point to a specific employee for them to look at, though, it might be enough.

  It was a slim hope, but it was also the only one I had. Time was running out for me.

  While I served the rest of the post-lunch crowd, I debated with myself over my options.

  The best way would have been to get hired by the burger truck. It’d give me some extra cash and I’d be able to poke around without drawing a lot of attention to myself.

  The problems with that approach seemed to outweigh those benefits though. That would only work if they were hiring, and it would take time—more time than I had.

  Plus, I’d have to give them my real SSN. I’d made that mistake once. The first town I’d gone to, I’d gotten desperate and I’d had to take a job.

  And Jarrod found me.

  I’d barely escaped. Had it not been for the construction worker who forgot his lunch box at the site and came back for it, I wouldn’t have escaped. He’d thought Jarrod was trying to rape me, and he’d run to my rescue wielding a crowbar.

  The look Jarrod gave me as he ran off was the reason I knew he’d never stop hunting me with the intent to kill me this time. The last time, he’d planned to take me back. My second escape, accompanied by the wound to his pride of how it happened, was something he’d never forgive or forget.

  I couldn’t be sure the job I’d taken was how he found me, but it seemed the only logical path. I wouldn’t take that risk again.

  Which left me with going to the other vendor and pretending I wanted to hire them.

  I called Serial Grillers and found out their current spot, explaining I was considering hiring them, but that I wanted to speak to them first. I’d noticed that business names weren’t as creative here as in Fair Haven, but it would have been unusual if they had been. Fair Haven was one of a kind. Serial Grillers was one of the few that could have fit right in.

  I parked my truck a block away and walked to the coordinates I’d been given. I’d also taken a few steps to disguise myself, letting my hair down out of its ponytail and putting on a pair of sunglasses and a ball cap.

  Like most food trucks, the owner was also the operator, so there was a good chance he’d have recognized me as the cupcake lady from Harold Cartwright’s party if I showed up looking like myself. Thankfully, the warm sunshine made the glasses and hat believable.

  I strolled up to the truck like I was completely relaxed and stopped at the window. Alongside the owner, whose name was Vinny according to the sign on the side of the vehicle, I spotted two other guys inside. I knew which one was Vinny because he had to be the one Claire spent so much time yelling at. She wouldn’t have chosen an employee over the boss.

  “What can I get for you?” Vinny asked.

  “I’m…” Great. I hadn’t thought up a fake name. I couldn’t say Isabel. I’d been in the paper after all. He might put it all together. “I’m Amy.”

  Wow. That was actually worse. It took all my years of holding emotions in to keep from covering my face. Of all the names that I could have used, I’d defaulted to my real name under pressure.

  Now I definitely had to make this worth the risk.

  “I’m the one who called,” I said.

  “Right, right.” The man’s face had heavy jowls, and when he smiled, they lifted up, reminding me of a grinning bulldog. “Let me come out and you can ask me whatever question you need to.”

  That wouldn’t work. I needed to mention Claire’s name around the full number of truck employees to see how they reacted.

  I moved for the door. “Actually, could I come inside for a second. I’m OCD about cleanliness, and one of the reasons I wanted to meet was so I could see your truck.” I giggled like I expected him to think I was silly. It felt unnatural. “Too many bad experiences with hot dog stands I guess.”

  That last part made me sound even more inane than the giggle. Hot dog stands didn’t have much to keep clean.

  But Vinny didn’t let on if he was thinking I was a few grains shy of a full salt shaker.

  He popped open the door from the inside and stepped out of the way. “Be my guest, but it’s a tight fit in here with four.”

  It’d be a tight fit to even squeeze past him into the truck.

  I looked up at him, and my feet felt like my shoes had melted into the concrete. Intellectually, I knew that not all men were dangerous. Not all men were like Jarrod. Not all men would hurt me.

  But there was this part of me that had to fight every time to remember it because I knew that most men were strong enough they could hurt me if they wanted to.

  I’d take this one step at a time because I had to. If I turned back now, I had no way to continue my search for the person who really killed Harold Cartwright.

  I forced my feet into action and focused on details rather than my fear. Like how Vinny smelled like relish and onions, and how both his employees wore hair nets even though one was bald, and how shiny all his equipment was.

  If I’d actually been there to inspect the cleanliness, I would have been impressed
. No wonder Claire had chosen them. This part of the operation at least would have easily met her exacting standards.

  But I wasn’t here to inspect cleanliness, and this was my best chance to catch his employees off guard.

  I shot a smile back over my shoulder at Vinny and then turned so I could watch his employees’ reactions. “I’m actually here because Claire Cartwright recommended you.”

  The bald employee furthest away from me snorted—and not a little snort either. The man closest to me, who should have been wearing a hair net on his mustache as well given the length of it, cast me a look that said he must be in a Bush’s Baked Beans commercial because he’d just seen pigs fly.

  Vinny pushed past me, bumping my shoulder. The action was likely accidental given the tight space, but I had to swallow hard to keep from ruining the cleanliness of his truck by throwing up all over him. Fear was screaming so loud in my head for me to get out that I could barely focus.

  Vinny grabbed a bottle of ketchup and a jar of relish from a shelf and slammed them down next to the nearly empty ones on the counter. “If you’re a friend of Claire Cartwright’s, I’m gonna have to ask for full payment up front instead of a deposit. I still haven’t been paid.”

  Maybe Claire wasn’t paying him or me because she couldn’t. The financial trouble caring for Harold put her in might be more serious than even I imagined. Perhaps she threw his party despite not being able to afford it because she needed a place to poison him that would be full of potential suspects.

  Vinny swiped up the old containers and heaved them into the garbage. The ketchup was the same cheap generic brand of the extra bottle at the birthday party, not the specialty brand of all the other bottles.

  I’d thought the difference at the party was because of Claire’s insistence that they hadn’t provided enough. At the time, it’d seemed logical that Vinny sent one of his guys to the nearest store to buy the first ketchup they could lay their hands on and return fast.