A Sampling of Murder: Cupcake Truck Mysteries

by Emily James

  I’d shushed Fear so many times in the past months that his voice in my head was an indistinct moan rather than words.

  I ran my gaze over the desk again. The top lay clear except for a pen, a notebook Claire and I jointly used to jot things down if we were too busy to follow up on them immediately, and a stack of papers.

  On the right side of the desk.

  I’d stacked them on the left. I was sure of it. They’d been on the right side, but I’d gone to write a note before we left last night, and I bumped them. I moved them to the left where they were less likely to end up strewn across the floor.

  I inched around the desk. One of the drawers stood a half inch ajar.

  Someone had been in here. They’d been careful when they finished looking through things. Careful enough that most people might not have noticed.

  I wasn’t most people. I had to notice everything, track everything, because when Jarrod found me, the signs wouldn’t be big. They’d be small. Like this. Something bumped that he hadn’t noticed or placed back slightly off kilter.

  In my food truck, I had a routine. I placed everything in a specific place, in a specific way. No one could have rifled through my belongings there without me noticing.

  I grabbed a pen, stuck it in the drawer handle, and pulled open the drawer. Everything inside looked the way I’d left it.

  I glanced at the door. Claire would be expecting me back in the kitchen any minute. I couldn’t let her know about this. The last time she’d been loosely connected to an investigation, she hadn’t been able to sleep. With our landlord already murdered in this building, and the vandalism before we even opened, one more thing could send her careening back down that unhealthy path.

  But I couldn’t let it pass either. Not after everything else that had gone on.

  I edged the door closed so that Claire would be less likely to overhear and dialed Dan’s number. Even though it was pre-dawn early, he’d be up. He’d be headed to work for an early shift. I knew because we hadn’t been able to take Janie for him, and she’d spent last night having a sleepover with Blake’s kids.

  “Is everything alright?” Dan asked instead of a hello.

  “I’m not sure.” I kept my voice low and explained to him about the papers and the drawer.

  “Could Claire have moved things?” he asked when I finished.

  That was possible. But I remembered being the last one in the office before we closed up and went home. Still, I couldn’t be sure of that without asking Claire. And if I asked Claire, I put her mental wellbeing at risk. Last time, she’d stopped sleeping and had been up in the night cleaning. She’d gone to the gym multiple times a day. Nothing seemed to help until I finally convinced her to see a therapist.

  She was still going months later.

  “I’m not trying to downplay your concerns.” Dan was one of the few people I believed when he said something like that. He’d earned the right to tell me when I was potentially over-reacting because he’d always taken me seriously in the past. “Whoever murdered Bob Jenner and vandalized the store wouldn’t have a reason to riffle through your files and then try to put them back in a way you wouldn’t notice. Everything they’ve done so far hasn’t been subtle. And your files aren’t anything that would interest them.”

  I leaned against the door. The sounds of Claire pulling down metal bowls and opening and closing the fridge came faintly through.

  Dan’s explanation made more sense than my fears. “You’re probably right.”

  But there was one other option for who could have been going through our papers. Jarrod could have been looking for evidence that Isabel Addington the cupcake baker was actually his wife Amy Miller.

  I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to keep bringing Jarrod up. I didn’t want him to still be taking up so much space in my life.

  The card for a divorce lawyer that Dan had given me a couple months ago was frayed around the edges from me taking it out of my pocket and turning it over and over in my hands.

  I bit back a sigh. Unless I was willing to take the risk of divorcing Jarrod the way Dan wanted—and praying Jarrod didn’t kill me as soon as he knew where I was, before I could destroy his reputation—he’d continue to take up space in my world.

  I opened my mouth to suggest it was him.

  “You’re thinking it might have been Jarrod.” Dan’s words came out before I could form mine.

  “Yes,” I said softly.

  “I don’t think he’d take that risk. Not with the trial coming up.”

  I was a key witness for the prosecution in the trial for Janie’s old teacher. The woman had been inappropriate with the children in her care. When Janie spotted her and seemed like she was going to tell someone, her teacher had come up with a plan to kill her and make it look like an allergic reaction. She’d accidentally killed Claire and Dan’s grandfather in the process. When I’d figured it out and tried to stop her, she’d tried to kill me as well.

  My whole body shuddered. I hadn’t been able to keep my name a secret then, and Jarrod had almost found me. Only some skillful lying on Dan’s part had kept me safe.

  But Jarrod knew I’d have to be at the trial. Amy was a key witness. All he had to do was wait.

  Dan was right. Jarrod was too calculating and methodical to risk anything with the trial so close.

  Claire had probably moved the papers. Even though she never left a drawer or cupboard open in the house we shared, she could have easily been too tired to notice the drawer here. We were putting in long hours to launch the business and work out the kinks.

  “You’re right.”

  “And don’t worry about the trial either.” Dan’s voice was so confident I could almost let my worries go. Almost. “I’m working on a plan to get you in and out of the courtroom in a way that will make it difficult for Jarrod to follow you.”

  I nodded than remembered he couldn’t see me. “Thank you.”

  “We’ll keep you safe. It’s going to be okay.”

  His words had softened and his tone deepened as if he meant more than just the words.

  I heard what he wasn’t saying. I heard the promise that went beyond the trial.

  If I chose to file for divorce, he’d find a way to keep me safe then too.

  But he didn’t know Jarrod the way I did. The only way to stay safe from Jarrod was to make sure he never found me.

  11

  Mr. Wendt hadn’t matched my mental description of him. The man who opened the door for our visit had a thick, wild thatch of pure white hair on the top of his head. It’d barely even receded. His glasses took up most of his face, and he wore them on a string. But the most surprising thing was he was table leg-thin.

  His armchair, however, matched my mental image exactly. The threadbare monstrosity groaned every time he moved.

  For the past half hour we’d been discussing the similarities and differences between running a bread bakery and running a cupcake shop.

  Mr. Wendt took a second cupcake from the box I’d brought him. I’d included one of everything we’d made for that day. Our cupcake sampler had become one of the most popular items we offered.

  I’d been enjoying my visit so much that until he took that second cupcake I’d forgotten part of the reason I’d come. But a second cupcake signaled I’d have to leave soon.

  At least with all the shop talk we’d done, the question I’d carefully planned out to lead into what I really wanted to know wouldn’t seem so odd.

  I shifted on the couch so that I was leaning more in his direction as if curiosity drove me. “If you don’t mind me asking, why did you decide to close your shop. It’s obvious that you love your business as much as I love mine.”

  Mr. Wendt nodded his head through my whole question. He set his half-eaten cupcake on a coaster and slid his glasses off. He scrubbed at the lenses with the corner of his sweater as if he couldn’t quite look me in the eyes with whatever he was going to say.

  My muscles tensed to the poin
t of spasm. Up until my question, Mr. Wendt had been smiling so much I wasn’t sure how his cheeks didn’t hurt.

  Whatever he was about to say was hard for him.

  “My wife, she was French.” He eased his glasses back up on his face. “That’s her there.”

  He pointed at the wall behind me. I wiggled around in my seat. The picture was a family photo, the kind where a photographer poses you in a configuration that doesn’t look at all natural.

  A younger Mr. Wendt stood behind a lovely woman with dark hair and dark eyes. One of his hands was on her shoulder. A little girl sat nestled in her lap, and a boy who seemed a fair bit older stood next to his mother.

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “Inside as well as out.”

  The ache in his voice left a dent in my heart. My mother died before I’d been old enough to observe my parents’ marriage, but my dad used to have that same sound to his voice when he talked about my mom.

  I knew from that alone that Mr. Wendt’s wife wasn’t around anymore. “How long ago did you lose her?”

  “Three years.” His tone said he still couldn’t believe it’d been that long. “She taught me everything I know about making bread. We worked the store together our whole married life, through two locations and three different landlords.”

  He paused. I sat in silence with him. I’d give him whatever time he needed. He’d get around to answering my question eventually, and I was in no rush to leave. If he let me, I’d come back and visit him again next week. I couldn’t have explained it, but being with Mr. Wendt felt a bit like being with my dad again. They were almost nothing alike. Mr. Wendt hadn’t finished high school, and my dad taught English. Mr. Wendt was born in Germany, and my dad had a thread of Cherokee blood.

  But there was something about him that made me feel at home.

  “I tried working the store after she passed,” he finally said. “But after a while, I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t the same once it wasn’t a family business anymore.”

  So his closing up had nothing to do with any increase in crime in the neighborhood. It had a much simpler reason. His heart had left the bakery the day it wasn’t something he could do with a person he loved.

  The picture he’d pointed out to me had two children in it, though. “Your children weren’t interested in continuing the business?”

  “My daughter teaches preschool and has two little ones of her own. She loves her job too much to leave it, especially since her hours are the same as the grandkids’ school hours.” Mr. Wendt buttoned his sweater vest up. His fingers shook slightly. “My son…he started taking an interest in the business right after his mother passed, but…things changed.”

  The hesitations and gaps in his words were unusual. Everything I’d asked him before—personal or business—had been spoken with the confidence of a man who had nothing to hide. Like a man who enjoyed telling his story to someone and talking shop again.

  Now it was almost like he had a secret, and he was too honest a man to know how to hide it.

  I didn’t know whether to press or not. His son’s reasons for leaving the business likely didn’t have anything to do with my current problem. It didn’t seem right to intrude when it would only be a matter of curiosity. Maybe when Mr. Wendt knew me better, he’d feel comfortable sharing.

  He avoided my gaze. If we left the conversation like this, he might not want me to come back, but I didn’t know what to say to fix it.

  “It’s not a secret, Dad.”

  The man’s voice that I’d heard faintly on the other end of the call when I’d reached out to Mr. Wendt about the broken stove came from the doorway.

  I turned in my seat. The man in the doorway looked almost like the younger Mr. Wendt in the picture. The only difference was that he had brown eyes instead of Mr. Wendt’s blue.

  “You can tell her,” he said. “It’s better than watching you two sit in silence after you’ve been chattering like squirrels in here for the past hour.”

  He cast his dad a look that made me think he’d been enjoying hearing his dad talk to me.

  The tension seemed to slide off Mr. Wendt in a wave. “I didn’t know if…” He trailed off again.

  The man shrugged. He lifted a hand at me in greeting. “I’m Flynn. Your question made my dad so uncomfortable because I was in prison. Possession of drugs. I started self-medicating to deal with my grief after my mom died.”

  His words were so blunt as to sound scripted. They sounded like they’d been copied right out of the mouth of a therapist.

  If he’d seen one right away, he likely wouldn’t have ended up in prison to begin with, but at least it seemed like he was trying to sort things out now. And he must not have been caught with much in the way of drugs. The sentence for dealing as opposed to possession would have been a lot longer than a couple of years.

  I knew what it was like to lose a parent and make bad choices because of it. “I’m sorry, for your loss and for what came after.”

  He shrugged again. “It was my own fault.” He glanced at the box of cupcakes. “You must be the lady who called the other day about the stove.”

  “I suppose it’s not every day you two have to play repairman over the phone.”

  Flynn chuckled. “I think it brought Dad back to the good-old days. How’s it been going since the stove tried to trick you?”

  Flynn had such a flippant, laisse-faire attitude that it was hard to see him falling into a depression deep enough that he turned to drugs. But that was the danger of people with certain personalities. Robin Williams was a perfect example. No one would have thought that a lauded comedian would be so depressed that he’d kill himself. It was a good reminder about the importance of looking below the surface and trying to see what people really needed.

  The first answer that sprang to my lips in response to Flynn’s question was that everything had been going fine. But that would have been one of those answers that allowed people to hide what was bothering them.

  Besides, I’d come here to find out if the Wendts had any problems when they rented the space. Just because Mr. Wendt retired due to his wife’s death didn’t mean they hadn’t experienced problems with crime during the time they had the shop. It only meant they hadn’t closed up and moved because of it.

  I had to know if the vandalism was a community crime and unconnected to the murder—the way Detective Austen thought—or if our shop had been specifically targeted.

  “We’ve actually gotten off to a rocky start. Our landlord was killed and someone vandalized our window all in the same week. Did you ever have problems with crime while you went renting there?”

  Mr. Wendt’s hands clamped around the ends of his recliner, and he pushed the chair into a full upright position. “No, no problems. It was the best neighborhood. Customers came from the businesses on one side and homes on the other. I felt safe when my wife needed to work there alone.”

  That disproved the theory that the vandalism was something that was happening in the neighborhood. According to what Mr. Jenner told Claire, the shop wasn’t vacant long between Mr. Wendt and when we signed the lease. The safety of the neighborhood couldn’t have changed that much in a couple of months, where a murder and a vandalism would happen so close together.

  We were somehow the target. Mr. Jenner was dead, but the person who’d killed him might have killed him because Mr. Jenner surprised them while they were waiting for Claire and me. Either that, or someone had such a grudge against Mr. Jenner that they wanted to continue hurting his heirs even after killing him.

  No one would want to kill Claire, which meant either Mr. Jenner was the target or I was. Considering the word that Claire thought had been scrawled on our window was slut, Mr. Jenner might have been killed because someone actually wanted to harm me. That sort of derogatory term wasn’t generally used for men.

  My lungs felt too small to provide me with the oxygen I needed.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t stay there, my friend,” Mr. Wendt
said. “It’s not the only location for a bakery in this city. I would not want my daughter or my wife working somewhere that two crimes had taken place.”

  What he didn’t understand was that the only person who would want to hurt me was one who would continue to track me no matter where I went. And we couldn’t find another location. If we lost this one, we lost the whole business, at least for the next few years. We’d put everything we had into it, and we couldn’t afford a more expensive rent.

  Mr. Wendt’s hands quavered on the arms of his chair. I didn’t want to worry him or cause him more stress. Who knew what underlying health conditions he had. If Jarrod had finally found me, frightening Mr. Wendt further over my safety wouldn’t make the situation better.

  “The new landlord put in security cameras. Hopefully that will at least help scare off whoever’s behind this if the neighborhood’s no longer being safe.”

  Mr. Wendt scooted closer to the edge of his chair. “No, no. That’s no good. They could hurt you and destroy the recording.”

  The new owner had thought about any criminal caught on camera wanting to destroy the evidence. “The recording is transmitted off-site. They can’t destroy it. Besides, I read somewhere that businesses and homes with security systems are usually passed over by criminals. We should be safe now.”

  It wasn’t a lie. We should be safe if the person who did this was anyone else but Jarrod.

  A security system wouldn’t deter Jarrod. He’d find some way around it.

  Mr. Wendt was shaking his head like he wasn’t convinced even by security cameras. He truly must be seeing in Claire and I women who could as easily have been his wife and daughter.

  Flynn moved forward and rested a hand on his father’s shoulder. “It could be about me.”

  12

  “What do you mean it could be you?” Mr. Wendt’s voice shook even more than his hands had been shaking before. “You didn’t kill Mr. Jenner. You didn’t put paint on Isabel’s windows.”

  Flynn came around and knelt beside Mr. Wendt. He looked up into his face. “I said it could be about me. Whoever did this might think you were still renting the shop, and they were trying to get to me through you.”