Pumpkin Pleas (The Donut Mysteries Book 26)

by Beck,Jessica

  “You really should,” she said. “So, do we come up with a cover story for Candy, or do we just come out and ask her about the note she gave Tom?”

  “I’m not sure. What do you think?” I asked as I drove us to Candy’s gym. It had gone through rough times since she’d lost her older, and married, boyfriend’s sponsorship, but somehow she’d managed to keep her business afloat when many others failed.

  “I would have said we couldn’t be too subtle before, but since you think there’s a crafty fox hiding in there, maybe we should be a little less direct than usual.”

  “Then again, we don’t want to blow her cover if she is indeed hiding the fact that she’s actually pretty smart. Let’s start by playing along with her ruse and see where that gets us.”

  “You’re the boss. I’m just the hired hand.”

  “You’re more than that, and you know it,” I told her.

  “Hey, I wasn’t complaining. I get enough of being a boss on my regular job. It’s kind of nice to be able to sit back and let you take over our investigations.”

  “But you’ll chime in if you think I’m missing something, right?” I asked her with a smile.

  Her grin was wide and happy. “Do you even have to ask me that question?”

  We pulled up in front of Candy’s gym, and I was happy to see that there were only a few cars there at the moment. Hopefully she wouldn’t be able to avoid us, and we could get her undivided attention.

  Taking a deep breath, I put my hand on the door of the gym and walked inside with Grace on my heels.

  The gym had changed since I’d been there last. Gone were the frilly decorations, the juice bar, and many of the other amenities. Now it looked more like a place to work out instead of socialize.

  “I love what you’ve done to the place,” I told Candy when she greeted us.

  “Is that sarcasm, Suzanne?” she asked. Candy was wearing yoga pants that left nothing to the imagination, a sports bra that was revealing as well, and an oversized man’s shirt that looked as though it had seen better days. I had to give her credit for one thing; if it was possible, Candy looked even better than she had in high school, which was no small accomplishment.

  “Actually, I’m quite serious,” I said. “It looks like a real gym now.”

  “Well, I had to scale back on a few things when I lost my sponsorship.” What she’d really lost was her married boyfriend, but I wasn’t there to quibble about that. Leonard Branch had gone back to his wife and left Candy on her own. Instead of falling flat on her face, she’d risen to the challenge and had found a way to keep afloat, which was a type of success in and of itself. “I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished here. I’d like to think that I’m capable of changing, you know?”

  I suddenly realized that she was right. Though she still dressed provocatively, the ditzy Candy was gone, and the savvy one I’d spotted only glimpses of in the past was out in full force. I realized instantly that it changed the way I needed to approach her. “I think you’ve done well, too.”

  She took the compliment in stride. “I’m wagering you two aren’t here about a gym membership. What can I do for you?”

  Grace was about to speak when I beat her to it, which was a change of pace for us. “We’d like to ask you about this,” I said as I pulled out the pass, as well as the note, from my jeans and handed it to her. Grace looked surprised by my action for a moment, but she quickly hid it. I caught that out of the corner of my eye, but most of my focus was on Candy. How she reacted to the note was just as important as what she might say next.

  She took it from me, still in the evidence baggie I’d gotten from Jake’s stash. Candy shrugged when she saw the pass. “I hand these out now and then. It’s no big deal. Would you each like one?” she asked as she pulled a handful out of a drawer at the check-in desk.

  “Flip it over,” I told her.

  Candy did as I asked, and the moment she saw the message, she frowned.

  “Did you write that note?” I asked her.

  “You know that I did,” she said. “Where did you find this?”

  “It was at Tom Thorndike’s cottage,” I replied. “What does it mean?”

  “It’s personal,” Candy said, but I noticed that she still held on to the pass.

  “May I have that back, please?”

  She didn’t do as I asked, though. “What possible use could you have for this? It was between Tom and me and no one else.”

  “But Tom is dead, and this could be part of a police investigation,” I said. Both facts were true, and even though the police weren’t investigating Tom’s death, that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t if we were able to come up with some concrete evidence and a scenario that might discredit the police chief’s theory that Tom’s death had been accidental.

  “I didn’t kill him,” she said. “I thought he fell.”

  “It has yet to be determined if he fell or if he was pushed,” Grace chimed in.

  Candy took that in. “I don’t have any desire to air my dirty laundry with the two of you. This,” she said as she tapped the note, “was between us. It’s no one else’s business. As a matter of fact, I’m going to keep it.” She clutched the pass and its note in her hands, defying us to challenge her.

  “No worries. We’ve got copies, and photographs of it as well,” I said. I’d made a mistake not showing her a copy instead of the actual item, but I was going to pretend that it didn’t matter. It had been sloppy work though, and I chided myself for not being more careful with what might turn out to be a crucial piece of evidence. “If I were you, I’d take very good care of that if you really mean to keep it. If it were to be accidentally destroyed or lost, the police would take a very dim view of it, and you wouldn’t want them digging into your life any more than they had to, would you?”

  Candy gave that a moment’s thought, and then she flung the pass and note back to me. “Fine. You keep it. I don’t care.”

  “If that’s the truth, then tell us what it meant,” I said. “What was Tom asking you to do, and why were you so reluctant to do it?”

  Candy scowled openly at me. “What possible business is it of yours, Suzanne?”

  “Important people in this town want to know what happened to Tom Thorndike,” I said. “If we report back that you were exonerated, it would serve you well. If we have to say that you weren’t cooperative, it might mean more scrutiny than you’re ready for.” I’d been purposefully vague, hoping that Candy would fill in the blanks with her own demons.

  “He wanted me to sleep with him, okay?” she finally admitted. “I spurned his advances, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. There, are you satisfied?”

  It didn’t sound like Tom to me, but then again, did I really know the man he’d become from the boy I’d once dated so long ago? “Did anyone else witness any of these advances?” I asked her.

  “Not that I’m aware of. He was very careful to make sure that no one else was around when he made his passes at me.” That worked out neatly for her, but I wasn’t at all sure that I trusted her.

  “Why should we believe you?” Grace asked her.

  “I’m not at all sure that I care,” she said. “Now, I have a training session in ten minutes, and I have to get ready for it, if you’ll excuse me.”

  “Sure thing,” I said. “You don’t mind if we come back later, do you?”

  “Why would you need to?” Candy asked me, clearly unhappy about the request.

  “We have several more people to speak with,” Grace said. “New information has a way of coming to light, and there might be some things we need clarified.”

  Before Candy could respond, Grace and I headed to the door, bumping into a pudgy man wearing entirely too much spandex. “I’m ready for my session, Candy,” he said happily.

  �
��Go get warmed up, and I’ll be right with you,” Candy said, and then she turned to us and said, “Good bye.”

  At that point, we really didn’t have much choice but to leave.

  “Do you believe Candy?” I asked Grace once we were outside.

  “I’m not sure. Can you imagine Tom pursuing her?” she asked me.

  “Actually, that part didn’t surprise me. She’s pretty in a flashy kind of way, and Tom always seemed to prefer that type. He had a crush on her back in high school. Why wouldn’t he try to date her now? What I’m having trouble believing is that he’d pursue her so relentlessly that she felt the need to send him a note telling him to stop.”

  “If she’s lying to us about that, then what did that note really mean?” Grace asked me.

  “I wish I knew, but we don’t have enough information yet. She’s changed, though; that much is for sure. Did you notice?”

  “You were right. She’s smarter than I would have ever given her credit for. That makes her dangerous in my mind.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked Grace.

  “If she’s showing us her real side, it could be a warning to us not to mess with her. Nice finesse with the note, by the way. I wasn’t sure we’d ever get that back once it left your hands.”

  “I really messed up showing her the original,” I agreed. “I won’t make that mistake again. Before we speak with anyone else, we need to make copies of all of our evidence and put the originals away someplace safely.”

  “I’ve got a safe at home, and a color copier, too,” Grace volunteered. “Let’s go take care of that before we tackle Mitchell Bloom.”

  “I’m really not sure how to approach him,” I said. “I’d rather not tell him that Trish overheard him fighting with Tom about money in the park.”

  “You could always claim that you overheard it yourself,” Grace said as we headed for her place.

  “What good would that do?”

  “Well, you’ve already got a target on your back since you’re investigating what happened to Tom. Could it really hurt to claim that you were the one who overheard them talking? I could do it myself, for that matter. My house is nearly as close to the park as yours. I can claim that I was taking a walk and overheard everything.”

  “No, I’ll do it,” I said. I wasn’t about to let Grace put herself in any more danger than I had to. I’d made that mistake once with George when he’d been helping me with an investigation, and it had cost him dearly, something that I never wanted to repeat. “It makes more sense, since my place is even closer.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” I said. “Now, let’s get these copies made so we can tackle the next name on our list.”

  It took all of ten minutes to do everything we wanted to at Grace’s place, and that included backing up the images from our phones to the cloud using her computer. Now, if we lost the originals, we’d at least have backups of everything. I wasn’t a huge fan of society’s overreliance on technology, including communication, but sometimes it could be a good thing. With copies of everything we needed in our hands, we were ready to approach Mitchell Bloom about his argument and his newfound wealth.

  Chapter 16

  “Mitchell, do you have a second?” I asked when we walked into the auto-supply store where he worked. It was one of the few chains that had made its way to April Springs, and it had made me uneasy since it had first opened. We’d so far mostly escaped the encroachment of the chain-store mentality the rest of the country seemed so wrapped up in. Our town was just too small for most of them to bother with, and to go to one of the large big-box stores, we had to drive thirty minutes or more, which was fine by me. I was the main source of donuts in town, and folks seemed to love what I offered, but I wasn’t under any delusions that I could stand up under direct competition from Krispy Kreme or Dunkin Donuts. I might even produce better donuts than either one of them managed on their massive scales, but I wasn’t in any hurry to find out if my business model would be sustainable under a direct attack from nationwide competition.

  “Did something happen to your Jeep?” he asked, and I realized that it was a perfect opening. If I could get him to help me with my vehicle, maybe Grace and I could question him without coming right out and accusing him of anything.

  “The wipers are getting old,” I said, something that Jake had commented on more than a few times lately during heavy rain.

  “We can take care of that,” he said with a grin. “What year is your Jeep?”

  “I have no idea,” I admitted. “Should I know that?”

  “We can find out easily enough,” he said, and then he called out to another man at the counter. “I’ll be back in a second, Harry.”

  The man waved a distracted hand in the air as he studied a partially dismantled engine part sitting on his counter. It could have been anything as far as I was concerned, since I wasn’t exactly a mechanic.

  As the three of us walked out to the Jeep, he asked, “Could I see your registration?”

  “Why? It doesn’t need to be inspected,” I told him.

  “It’s got the year, make, and model printed on it,” Mitchell explained.

  “Oh,” I said as I retrieved it and handed it to him. “Folks are still talking about your kindness buying donuts for everyone this morning, Mitchell.” Had it really just been today that Ray had been found and Tom’s body had been discovered? A lot had happened since then, that was for sure.

  “I kind of got carried away in the heat of the moment,” he said sheepishly. “I probably shouldn’t have done that.”

  “It must take you a while to make fifty dollars working here,” I said, and then I quickly added, “I know it takes me quite a bit of time to accumulate that much.”

  “I won a lot more than that in a poker game the other night,” Mitchell said absently. “I believe I’ve got those wiper blades in stock. Follow me.”

  I wasn’t eager to grill him inside with other witnesses. “Can you install them for me, too?”

  “Sure, and free of charge, too. It’s what we do,” he said.

  Once we were at the display back in the store, I saw a selection of wipers that boggled my mind. Not only were there several different brands, but the sizes were staggering as well. “How am I supposed to choose?”

  “It’s not as complicated as it looks,” he said. “Do you want coach or first class?”

  I thought about the low net worth of my Jeep. “Coach,” I said decisively.

  He grinned. “Got it. Now, do you want the cheapest, the middle, or the high end in the coach range?”

  “Let’s shoot for the middle,” I answered.

  “Good choice.” Once he looked up my Jeep’s specs, he got two wipers and headed back outside.

  “About that poker game,” I said. “Who else was playing? My husband, Jake, is always looking for a game.” That was a total and complete fabrication, but I figured Mitchell wouldn’t know that.

  “It was over in Union Square,” he said absently.

  “Can you be more specific than that?” He just shrugged in reply, so as he started pulling off one of my old wipers, I added, “I thought you might have gotten that money from Tom Thorndike.”

  The old wiper arm snapped in his hands.

  “Did you just break my Jeep?” I asked him incredulously.

  “No worries, it’s all part of the blade assembly,” he said as nonchalantly as possible. “What makes you think I got any money from Tom?”

  “I wasn’t eavesdropping or anything, but I was taking a walk in the park since my cottage is right there, and I heard you two arguing about money the other night.”

  Mitchell frowned as he finished installing one blade and got started on the other. “I floated him a few bucks during the game, and he hadn’t paid me back yet. It
was nothing.”

  “If it was nothing, then why did you sound so angry with him?” I asked, pushing him a little harder. “You must have been really upset.”

  “I’m telling you, it wasn’t that big a deal,” he said, though according to Trish, it had been pretty heated. “He paid me back, and that’s all there was to it.” Mitchell took both spent blades and said, “Finished. Let’s go inside and settle up.”

  He rang the sale up on his register, and I tried to hide my astonishment at the cost of new wiper blades. Still, I had needed them, and at least I hadn’t gone for the first-class model.

  “Was that the last time you saw Tom?” Grace asked him.

  “I thought he slipped and fell,” Mitchell said a little testily. “Why all the questions?”

  “We’re just curious, I guess,” I said.

  “Well, be careful. You know what happened to the cat.”

  Grace asked him levelly, “Mitchell, was that a threat?”

  “What? No! Of course not. Listen, I’ve got a shipment in back to unpack. I hope you enjoy your new wiper blades, Suzanne.”

  “I don’t believe him for one second,” I said once we were outside. “Do you?”

  “I don’t know. It sounds plausible,” Grace replied.

  “It’s a little too pat, don’t you think? He’s hiding something.”

  “Are you sure you’re not just jumping at shadows?” Grace asked me as I started driving back to her place. I still wanted to speak with Daryl Lane, but at this point, I had no idea how to find him, and it was getting late. Jake would be home soon, and I was worn out from my extraordinarily busy day.

  “Maybe I am,” I said. “Should we take this up tomorrow? I should be free after eleven-thirty.”

  “That sounds good to me. I’ll come by the donut shop and pick you up,” Grace offered.