Custard Crime: Donut Mystery #14 (The Donut Mysteries) Read online

  Her nightstand was a little more yielding. Inside it, I found more notes from Connie, but more significantly, buried in the pile was one from Violet Frasier. She’d written a short but nasty note telling Evelyn to drop Conrad, or there would be consequences. It sounded a little desperate to me, so I was careful to get a good shot of it as well. I decided to check the trash, and I found something interesting there. Buried under a few papers, I found a belated birthday card from Julie Gray. Not only had Evelyn thrown it away, but she’d torn it in half first. That was a significant statement in and of itself, so I took a photo of the torn card and tried to put it back just like I’d found it. That left her dresser, after I carefully examined Evelyn’s bed, between the mattress and the box springs, and even under it. Nothing. In the dresser, I found something that looked like a date book. Had it been possible that Jake or one of his temporary team members had missed this? Flipping through it, I saw a few interesting facts scrawled inside it. One was about a meeting she was supposed to have with her attorney for that very day. It wasn’t the one she’d mentioned to Momma, either, so this lawyer had to be about something besides the partnership. Flipping through the other pages, I also found a notation that she would be meeting with the chief himself in a few days. Why hadn’t he mentioned that to anyone? Did Momma even know? How about Jake? It raised more questions than I could answer, so I decided to take another photo and then I returned it to the drawer. I looked around the room, and if there was another possible clue hiding anywhere in there, I’d missed it. It was time to see if Grace had any more luck than I had.

  “Were you able to find anything?” I asked as I joined her.

  Grace was so startled, she looked as though she’d just seen a ghost. “Don’t sneak up on me like that,” she said as she held her heart. “You just about scared the life out of me.”

  “Sorry, I’ll try not to be so stealthy in the future.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” she said with a wry smile. “Did you have any luck?”

  “I found a few little tidbits,” I said. “How about you?”

  “Nothing. Zilch. Nada.”

  “Then let’s tackle the rest of the house together,” I said as I heard a key go in the front door lock.

  “What do we do?” Grace hissed at me.

  “We run,” I said as I headed for the back door.

  As Grace went through, I slid the locking mechanism on the knob to lock automatically, but the door alarm pinged as the door opened. Had the person coming in heard it? I hoped not, but I didn’t exactly have any time to hang around and quiz them about it. If they noticed that the alarm had been disabled, that was just too bad. At least there hadn’t been any security cameras inside. Not that we’d seen, anyway. If we’d been captured on film, I’d have to figure out a way to talk myself out of the trouble, but until then, I wasn’t going to worry about it.

  Grace was waiting in the bushes for me as the door closed, and I hurried toward her. “Let’s go,” I whispered fiercely.

  “I want to see who’s in there,” she said.

  “We can’t afford to be caught anywhere near here, remember?”

  “Let’s hang around for a few seconds. This could be important,” she said, so I had a decision to make. Should I follow my own instincts and run for the next-door neighbor’s yard and escape, or should I join Grace and share her fate, no matter what that might be? In the end, it wasn’t really a decision at all. If my best friend was going down, then I was going, too. I ducked into the shrubbery with her and poked my head over the top so that I could see inside.

  It took a moment or two for the person who’d gone in to show themselves, but when they finally did, I knew that Grace had been right to stay. I had to admit that it kind of shocked me to see who was there, though.

  Who would have thought that Chief Martin would be doing a little breaking and entering himself after all of the times that he’d told me that I shouldn’t be doing it?

  Chapter 13

  “What do we do?” Grace asked in a whisper. “Should we barge in and see what he’s up to, do we call Jake, or do we leave and pretend that this never happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, whispering back. “None of those options sound like good ones to me.”

  “Well, we don’t have much time,” Grace said. “We don’t know how long the chief’s planning to stay in there.”

  “Let’s give him a minute and see what he does,” I urged.

  “You’re the one who wanted to run away in the first place, remember?”

  “That was before I knew that the burglar was our police chief,” I replied. We watched as he walked over to the kitchen, peered into a few cabinets, and then headed off toward Evelyn’s bedroom. “Let’s go.”

  “Are we honestly going to just leave without seeing what he’s up to?” Grace asked me.

  “No, we’re going to see if we can get a better look through the window in there,” I answered.

  “Now you’re talking,” Grace said.

  We hurried over to the bedroom window and tried to peek inside. Only a part of the shade was pulled, so it was tougher to see in there, but when I looked through the glass, I saw the chief holding the framed photo of him and his late wife on their wedding day. Was it purely sentimental? I thought so at first, but then I saw him turn the frame over and quickly remove the back of it. I’d never thought of searching there for anything! As Chief Martin took the backing off, something fluttered to the floor, but I couldn’t see what it was. I had been within inches of that frame just moments ago, not to mention whatever clue that might be hiding there, but I hadn’t been smart enough to look behind the picture.

  What could it be?

  I was about to ask Grace her opinion when I glanced over at her and saw something that made the question die in my throat before I even had a chance to ask it.

  Evidently our breaking and entering hadn’t gone unnoticed after all.

  Someone was standing at the corner of the house, staring at us with the most disapproving expression that I’d ever seen in my life.

  Grace must have seen my face at the instant I spotted our unwelcome guest.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  All I had to do was point.

  “Ladies, what are you up to now?”

  It was a question I wasn’t really prepared to answer, especially not to the person asking.

  Chapter 14

  “Shh,” I said softly to Jake. “Creep on over here. You’re going to want to see this.”

  “I’m not going to skulk around in the bushes,” he said in his normal voice. “I asked you a question, and I expect an answer.”

  “We’re watching Chief Martin,” I whispered as I gestured inside.

  Jake looked surprised by the news. He frowned as he asked us, “The chief’s inside? He shouldn’t be in there.”

  As he disappeared around toward the front of the house, I grabbed Grace’s arm. “Come on. We need to see this.”

  Jake was at the front door by the time we got there. I was going to tell him about the key, and the alarm, but I wanted to wait and see what happened first. There was no reason to admit to what we’d done earlier if we didn’t have to.

  The front door was unlocked when he tested it, and I tried not to let the relief show on my face.

  “Stay here,” he commanded as he turned to us for a moment before going inside.

  I wanted to follow him anyway, but after the way he’d ordered us to stay put, I knew instantly that this wasn’t one of those times that I could afford to disobey him, not as Jake, but as the acting investigator in a murder case.

  I didn’t have to make a decision though, because the chief must have been ready to leave. Jake was two steps inside the house as Chief Martin was making his way out, so while we couldn’t see the men as the conversation occurred, at least we could hear them.

  “Chief, have you lost your mind? You know that you can’t be here,” Jake said plaintively. If his voice hadn’t sounded
so disappointed, I might have enjoyed the scolding nature of his tone.

  “I’m sorry,” Chief Martin said, the apology clear in his voice, as well as his words. “I had to come by. We were together for a long time.”

  “I know what it’s like to lose someone you love,” Jake said, and I thought yet again about his dead wife, and the unborn baby she’d been carrying the day of her car accident. It had wounded him to the core, and sometimes I wondered if he’d ever be able to fully move on and start a new life with me. It had taken him ages to confess that his wife had been pregnant when she’d died, and it had nearly killed Jake to finally fill me in on the details.

  “I know enough to realize that you can’t compare my situation to yours,” the chief said. “Evelyn and I were divorced, but I still felt something toward her, you know? We had a lot of years together, and some of them weren’t all that bad.” It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of his first marriage, but at least it was believable.

  “That still doesn’t justify this behavior. Are you telling me that is the reason that you were here? You just came by to reminisce about old times? I’m not sure that I can buy that.”

  “Well, I also thought I might be able to find something that you might have missed.”

  Jake’s tone was clear disapproval now. “Why am I not surprised? I haven’t even had a chance to thoroughly search the place myself, but a few of your people have already been and gone. So, did you find anything?”

  “Nothing,” the chief said, and I knew that he was lying.

  I didn’t even hesitate, though saying something now was clearly going to cause me some trouble down the road. “That’s not entirely true,” I said.

  Grace looked at me with her mouth agape. She whispered, “You just ratted out your stepfather to the state police.”

  “No, I told Jake something that he needed to know for his ongoing investigation,” I answered.

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “Maybe so,” I said as Jake and the chief stepped outside. “But I didn’t really have any choice, did I?”

  “What’s this about?” Jake asked me with a furrowed brow.

  The chief was staring at me with bullets in his gaze, but I wasn’t about to back down. “We saw him take something from the back of their wedding photo.”

  “How could you possibly know that, unless you were spying on me?” the chief asked me.

  “Hey, don’t try to turn this around on us. You’re the one who was inside when you weren’t supposed to be, not Grace and me.” I couldn’t rightfully take the moral high ground, but neither man knew that, and I was pretty sure that Grace wouldn’t set them straight.

  Jake looked long and hard at the chief before he spoke. “Is what Suzanne just said true?”

  Chief Martin nodded, and then he reluctantly reached into his shirt pocket and pulled something out of it. “This has nothing to do with the case. It’s just something that has some sentimental value to me, that’s all.”

  I could see that it was an old-style hundred-dollar bill when he handed it to Jake. Could that have been what had fallen to the floor? I couldn’t be sure, since I hadn’t had a good view of it at the time. I supposed that it was possible, but was it the truth?

  “Is that what you saw him take?” Jake asked me.

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Grace?”

  “I didn’t see it,” she said.

  “How is this significant to you?” Jake asked the chief as he held the bill up.

  “My mother gave us that hundred on our wedding day to put aside for a special occasion. We never touched it through the years, and I never expected to find it still there in the back of the picture frame, but when I opened it, sure enough, there it was. Like I said, it was strictly sentimental.”

  “I’m sorry, but you know that I’m going to have to keep this for now,” Jake said as he put the money into an evidence bag he pulled from his pants pocket.

  “I know the drill,” the chief said as he frowned. “Technically, it wasn’t mine anymore, anyway. I should have gotten it back before we divorced, but I was so relieved for the marriage to be over that I forgot all about it.”

  “That still didn’t make taking it right,” Jake said.

  “Hey, take it easy on him,” I said, surprising myself coming to the police chief’s defense. “He explained why he took it.”

  “Suzanne, I’ll deal with you later.”

  “What did I do?” I asked him in a voice as innocent as I could muster. In my mind, I added the phrase, “that you know of,” but I kept that part to myself.

  “You were snooping around where you didn’t belong,” the chief said.

  “Hey, I just took your side, remember?” I asked.

  “After you told on me,” Chief Martin said grimly. He turned to Jake and asked, “Am I free to go, or are you going to arrest me for trespassing?”

  “If you come back here again without my knowledge or permission, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  “But for now?”

  Jake showed the hint of a grin as he said, “The door was open when you got here, and you thought you heard someone in trouble inside. As the police chief for April Springs, it was your duty to investigate.”

  Chief Martin laughed for a moment. “And the bill I just gave you?”

  “The way I see it, you were turning over some evidence you found to the proper authorities. There’s nothing illegal about that, either, is there?”

  “Thanks, Jake,” the chief said somberly. “I don’t know what I was thinking coming over here like this.”

  He put a hand on Chief Martin’s shoulder. “I know that this has to be tough on you, but you have to let me handle this, Phillip.”

  “Okay,” the chief said. I looked around, and I noticed that he hadn’t parked anywhere near Evelyn’s house, either. As he started to walk away, I stepped in front of him. “I’m sorry. Whether I should have done that or not, Jake needed to know.”

  “And your boyfriend takes precedence over me. I get it,” Chief Martin said, though there was more sadness than ire in his voice. “I can see where you’re coming from, but what happened to looking after family? Or don’t you think of me as being a part of yours now, even after I married your mother?”

  “I’ll tell you the same thing that I once told Grace. If I ever had evidence that she did something she shouldn’t have, I’d turn her in, and then I’d find her the best lawyer that I could, and she’s the closest thing to family besides my mother and father that I’ve ever had.”

  “It’s true,” Grace said with a smile. “Suzanne here has a really warped sense of right and wrong. It’s an impossibly high standard to live up to.”

  “I like to think that it’s exactly what it should be,” I said.

  “Fine. Whatever,” the chief said as he walked away. I had some serious fences to mend with the man, but none of it would be done right now.

  “As for you two,” Jake said as he locked the door behind him, “I’m not sure what to do with you.”

  “A neat shiny medal would be nice,” Grace said, “or maybe you could name us crime-busters of the month or something.”

  “Grace, this is serious,” he told my best friend, though I could see the ghost of a smile forming on his face.

  “In the end, what did we really do?” she asked him. “We reported a possible crime to the police. How is that a bad thing, Jake?”

  “You were here snooping around and you happened to catch the chief doing something that he shouldn’t have been doing, either. How does that make you two any better than him?”

  “Hey, we didn’t take anything,” Grace said.

  “That I know of,” Jake replied.

  It was time to defuse this situation. “Listen, for what it’s worth, telling you about that potential clue cost me something with the chief and with my mother. I didn’t try to protect anyone. That should count in our favor, at least.”

  “It does,” Jake admitted. “It’s
just that I’m not used to having my investigations hijacked like this.”

  “We’re facilitators, not interferers,” Grace said with a smile. “It might help if you thought of us as assets and not liabilities.”

  “How I wish that I could,” Jake said with a wry smile. “Where are you two troublemakers off to now?”

  “We thought we’d have chats with Conrad and Violet,” I readily admitted to him.

  “Tread lightly, okay?” Jake asked.

  I couldn’t believe he was going to let us go ahead with our plans. Was he going to use us to soften them up, or had he already spoken with them and struck out? Whatever the case was, I wasn’t about to complain about it. “We will,” I replied. “What are you going to do now?”