Powdered Peril

by Jessica Beck

  “Grace, are you serious? Do you really believe that you might have gone back to him after he lied to you?” I asked, having a hard time buying it.

  She thought about it before she answered, and when she finally did, the weight of the world was in her words. “I don’t guess we’ll ever know the real answer to that, will we? Suzanne, you forgave Max a great many things after you split up, remember?”

  “I might have,” I conceded, “but I never did manage to forgive his tryst with Darlene. I kicked him to the curb the moment I found them together, and I haven’t looked back.”

  “And you can’t ever see it in your heart to forgive him?” she asked.

  “There’s no reason to now. I’ve got Jake, and I’m happy,” I said.

  “But what if you didn’t have him in your life and Max came knocking at your door?”

  “I honestly can’t say, but I’d have to guess that I doubt I would answer it. I’m sorry. I know some folks find a way in their hearts to forgive a cheating spouse. I just don’t think that I’m one of them.”

  “I guess my point is that you can never say never, not as long as you both are still alive.”

  I didn’t want to think about my marriage to Max anymore.

  We were at George’s office in another two minutes, and I was surprised to see that Polly wasn’t at her desk. George’s door was ajar, and as I knocked, it swung open. George was sitting at his desk, with Polly leaning over his shoulder showing him something written on a piece of paper in front of them. They looked rather cozy together like that, but I knew better than to tease either one of them about it, and I had a hunch that Grace did as well.

  Polly looked almost guilty as she stood up and moved away from the new mayor as though he were radioactive. “I have calls to make. Just let me know when you’ve signed them, sir.”

  “I keep telling you, it’s George,” my friend said.

  “Not when you’re in this office. I didn’t agree with Cam Hamilton on a great many things, but I do believe the mayor should be treated with respect while he’s sitting behind that desk.” She turned to us and asked, “Is there something we can do for you?”

  “We need a second with George, er, his honor,” I said.

  That was going to take some getting used to, but Polly had a point. George was already working hard for the folks of April Springs, and he deserved a little respect for it.

  Polly turned to him and asked, “Is that acceptable, sir?”

  “Sure, I have a minute,” George conceded as he started to stand.

  “But just that,” Polly said. “You’ve got a zoning meeting downstairs, and you can’t be late.”

  “Why not?” George asked.

  “Because you’re the one who’s running it,” she replied.

  George nodded, and Polly left us.

  The second she was gone, I asked, “You’re not investigating Peter’s murder on your own, are you?”

  “What? Of course not. I told you that I wouldn’t, and I meant it.”

  “Then why did you speak with someone at the hardware store today?” Grace asked.

  “Hang on a second; it’s bad enough following the logic behind one of your questions, let alone both of you together. Teaming up against me just isn’t fair.”

  “The hardware store, George,” I said flatly.

  “I don’t know why it’s such a big deal. If you have to know, I needed a new washer for one of my faucets at the apartment, and they called me back to tell me that they’d have to order one special,” he answered, clearly perplexed by the line of questioning.

  “Did you speak with Leah, or Burt?” I asked.

  George frowned for a second. “What is this about, Suzanne?”

  “Trust me, it’s relevant. We’re interviewing suspects,” I admitted.

  “And you think I killed Peter?” he asked, clearly bemused by the very thought of it.

  I shook my head. “Of course not.”

  He nodded, and added a smile as well. “I thank you both for that. Then you must believe that Burt might have done it.”

  “No, we were thinking more along the lines of Leah,” I replied.

  George shook his head. “Okay, you just lost me again. Why would she kill Peter? I just don’t get it.”

  Grace answered him in a halting voice. “Not a great many folks know this, but they were dating on the side. If there was a rift between the two of them, she might have a motive for killing him.”

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” George answered, slumping back down into his chair. “I didn’t know.”

  “There’s no reason you would,” Grace said. “So, which one did you speak with?”

  “It was Leah,” he admitted.

  “So, it was nothing about the murder, then?”

  “No, sorry to disappoint you,” George said. “Are you two sure you don’t want my help?”

  “You can’t,” I said as Polly walked back in.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as she tapped her watch, “but you really do have to go.”

  George nodded and stood again. “I have to go. Listen, if you two get yourselves in trouble, call me,” he said as he walked out of his office.

  We all watched him go, and then Polly said, almost to herself, “I’m worried about him. He’s working too hard.”

  “It’s got to be a tough job,” I said.

  She looked at me as though she’d forgotten that I was there. “It can be, if it’s done correctly. I’m afraid Cam let a great many things fall through the cracks during his tenure, and George is trying to fix them all himself overnight. I keep telling him it can’t be done, at least not without a great deal more time than he’s got, but he won’t listen to me.”

  “He can be a stubborn man, but he’s worth it,” I said.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” she said, though I saw her cheeks redden slightly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to work myself.”

  * * *

  After we left city hall, I pointed to the hair salon. “We’re this close. We might as well see why someone at the hardware store called them.”

  We didn’t even have to go inside to ask. As we got to the front door of the beauty salon, Marge Gentry nearly knocked us over as she walked out.

  “Hi, Marge. How are you?” I asked. Things had been dicey between us since I’d treated her like a murder suspect, and though she claimed that she’d forgiven me, I wasn’t sure that was entirely true.

  “Suzanne. Grace,” she replied curtly as she tried to brush past us.

  “How have you been?” I asked, refusing to move so that she’d have to talk to me.

  “Fine,” she replied.

  How was I going to be able to stop her long enough to see if she’d just called her husband? I was still struggling for an answer when Grace said, “Your hair looks lovely today. Achieving that splendid look must take forever in a chair. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth looking so glamorous, don’t you?”

  I didn’t know how she could compare Marge to herself, and even more perplexing, Marge seemed to accept it at face value. “We do a great deal to look presentable, don’t we?” As she said it, she shifted her glance to me. Hey, I was just a donut maker. There was no real reason to get glamorous, especially when Jake was away working a case. It was not the time to defend my style choices, though.

  Grace asked, “Does Burt ever get impatient waiting for such perfection?”

  I bit my tongue to keep from barking out a laugh, but Marge just smiled. “As a matter of fact, he called the parlor twice today wondering when I’d be finished. I keep telling him that looking nice takes time.”

  “He’ll be happy enough when he sees the results,” Grace said, and Marge hurried off to the hardware store with a smile.

  “How did you do that?” I asked once she was gone.

  “What, get that information out of her?”

  “No, I’m talking about keeping a straight face the entire time you said those
things,” I admitted.

  “Hey, I didn’t lie. She looked nice, Suzanne. There’s no harm in telling her that.”

  I just shook my head and smiled. “You really are a saleswoman at heart, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t forget, I’m in the beauty business myself,” she answered. “Making women look good is directly tied into my livelihood.”

  “I get it,” I said. Grace had finally gotten tired of wasting her samples on me, since I was a minimalist kind of gal myself. Her makeup, on the other hand, was always expertly applied, to the point where I couldn’t see that she was even wearing any. I suppose it had to be attributed to her skilled touch. If I wore that much makeup myself, I’d look like a recent graduate from clown college. At least Jake liked me just the way I was.

  “So, we have one more name on our list to speak with today, and one more telephone number to investigate. Would you care to take a drive?”

  Grace nodded. “It’s the best lead we have about where Leah might have gone. Do you think it’s just another routine part order from the hardware store, or are we going to uncover something about the girl herself this time?”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” I admitted. A thought suddenly occurred to me. “Hey, isn’t Montview near Spruce Pine?”

  “It’s just a few miles away,” she said, and then it dawned on her. “You want to see Jake while we’re there, don’t you?”

  “It crossed my mind,” I admitted. “Would you care?”

  Grace thought about it a second, and then shrugged. “If we track Ida Belle down first, I don’t see why we shouldn’t pay your boyfriend a visit.” After another moment, she added, “Why don’t you see if you can track him down in Spruce Pine, and I’ll tackle Ida myself.”

  “No, it can wait,” I said.

  “Don’t you trust me, Suzanne?”

  “You I’m fine with,” I admitted. “It’s the bad guys I’m not so sure about. I’d never be able to forgive myself if I let you go there alone and something happened to you. We’ve had close calls before, and we shouldn’t push our luck if we don’t have to.”

  “Okay, I’ll admit that I’m happier if you go with me, but I wanted to make the offer.”

  I hugged her. “I appreciate that. If we find Jake, that would be great, but it’s not why we’re going to Montview. We need to see if this woman knows something about Leah that we don’t.”

  “Do you think she might implicate her in the murder?” Grace asked as we got into her car and started driving.

  “I honestly can’t say, but I would like to cross her name off our list if we can. We’ve got a few other suspects to follow up on, but I have a feeling that Leah might be the key to this.”

  A TASTY CHILLED DONUT

  The reference to chilled in this recipe name is to the time the donut spends in the refrigerator after the dough is created. Two hours may seem like a long time, but it allows all of the ingredients to blend well together, so I recommend that you don’t skip this step. It produces a nice fried donut that’s rich enough to be decadent without too much of the guilt, but they are donuts, after all, right?

  INGREDIENTS

  MIXED

  1 egg, beaten

  ½ cup sugar, white granulated

  ½ cup heavy cream

  2 tablespoons butter, melted

  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

  SIFTED

  2 cups flour, unbleached all-purpose

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  ½ teaspoon cinnamon

  ¼ teaspoon nutmeg

  A dash of salt

  INSTRUCTIONS

  In one bowl, beat the egg thoroughly, then add the cream, sugar, melted butter, and vanilla extract. In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the wet, mixing as little as possible as you go.

  Cover and chill the dough in the refrigerator for two hours.

  Roll the chilled dough out on a lightly floured surface ¼ to ½ inch thick, then cut out donuts and holes with handheld cutter.

  Fry the dough in hot canola or peanut oil (370 degrees F) for two to three minutes on each side. Drain, then top with powdered sugar immediately or let cool and ice.

  Yield: 8–12 small donuts.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Are you sure this is the address Hillary gave us?” I asked as I looked at the house number we’d been hunting for in Montview.

  “It says so right here,” Grace said as she eased her car beside the property. It was a rundown place with chipping yellow paint all over the wood exterior. Weeds grew throughout the yard, and the once-white picket fence was now a dingy shade of gray from dirt and neglect. The only vehicle parked in the stone driveway was an old Chevy from the sixties with faded paint and bald tires, and I wasn’t exactly sure that it even still ran.

  “We need to be as polite as we can when we approach Ida,” I said. “We’re just here looking for information about Leah. Maybe this is another dead end, but it might be exactly what we’re looking for. Once we find Leah, then we can start digging into the possibility that she killed Peter.”

  “Then I suppose there’s no way to find out but to knock on the front door and ask for her,” Grace said.

  We climbed the porch steps together with more than a little trepidation, and I could swear I felt the entire structure sway with every footstep.

  I knocked on the door, and then put on my bravest face.

  No one answered.

  I knocked again, this time louder, as Grace yelled, “We need to speak with you.”

  I was about to tell her that it was no use when a cherry- red Trans Am came racing from the back of the house and through the yard on the other side, nearly taking out a section of fence as it swept past us.

  I only had a quick glance, but that was all I needed to see who was driving so recklessly.

  We’d come hunting for Ida Belle, but instead, we’d found Leah.

  Now if we could only catch up with her.

  The girl surely liked to run, if our contact with her so far today was any indication.

  * * *

  “How fast should I go?” Grace asked as we tried our best to follow Leah down the potholed road. We’d both raced to Grace’s car the second we realized that it was Leah driving, but by the time we got in and took off after her, there was no sign of the young woman anywhere.

  “I don’t even know which way to go,” I admitted as I scanned all around us for any sign of her car. The Trans Am would have been tough to hide, but I didn’t see it anywhere. It was clearly fast, and the driver obviously wasn’t intimidated by the thought of getting a speeding ticket.

  “You might as well just pull over,” I said reluctantly as we hit Main Street. There wasn’t a car like Leah’s in sight, and I’d counted at least four different turns she could have taken in the time it had taken us to go after her.

  “It’s no use. There’s no way we can find her now.”

  “I don’t think it’s as dire as all that. We still have Ida,” I said. “Why don’t we drive back there and see if she’s at home? Maybe she’ll be able to tell us why Leah ran away like that.”

  “Then again, maybe we should wait around here for a while,” Grace suggested.

  I didn’t understand her line of reasoning at all. “Why would we do that? We can’t give Ida the opportunity to get away, too.”

  Grace just shrugged. “Okay, if that’s what you want, we can go back to Ida’s right now. I just thought you might like to see Jake for a second before we did that, though.”

  I looked to where she was pointing, and saw my boyfriend coming out of a diner called the Three B’s.

  “On second thought, you’re absolutely right,” I said with a grin as I jumped out of her car and hurried toward Jake, who still hadn’t seen us.

  I nearly knocked him down with my embrace, and after a long kiss, it took us both a second to catch our breaths before either one of us could talk.

  “Jake, what
are you doing in Montview?” I asked my boyfriend when we finally got untangled. “I thought you were working on a case in Spruce Pine.”

  “I was following up on a lead here, so I decided to have a quick bite while I had the chance. You haven’t been stalking me, have you?” he asked with a grin.

  “You should be so lucky,” I answered with a smile of my own. “This is just serendipity at its finest.”

  He smiled that quick grin of his that I loved so much. “Seriously, what’s going on?”

  Grace had stayed in the car to give us some privacy, something I appreciated even more at the moment. “We’re here following up on a lead about Peter’s murder.”

  “All the way up in the mountains?”

  I nodded. “We found out that Burt Gentry’s niece was dating Peter on the side, along with who knows who else. We tried talking to her in April Springs earlier, but she ran out before we could make any progress. I got the distinct impression that Burt was behind her fleeing.”

  “And you two tracked her all the way up here,” Jake said. “I’m curious about how you managed that.”

  It was time to confess. “When we realized that Leah had skipped out on us, we talked to Burt about where she might be. Grace saw the phone at the front desk at the hardware store, and the display showed the last three outgoing calls. One call was to Cutnip, another was to George’s office, and the third led us up here to a woman named Ida Belle. When we knocked on her front door, Leah tore out past us in her Trans Am.”

  “I’m guessing that you didn’t catch her in Grace’s company car.”

  I shrugged. “We tried to follow, but she was too fast for us.”

  Jake nodded. “She’s certainly not going out of her way to make herself look innocent, is she?”

  “Not so far. Why else would she run?”

  Jake chuckled softly. “Suzanne, you wouldn’t believe some of the things that can make people bolt. Who knows why she ran off like that?”

  “So, you don’t think this makes her look at least a little bit guilty?”