Criminal Crumbs (7 page)

“Happy to,” she said.

By the time she was back, the first four donuts were finished, out and cooling on the rack, and the next four were in the hot oil.

“How hard is the icing to make?”

“We’re doing the easy version,” I said. I measured out some powdered sugar, added a touch of vanilla extract I’d found, and then enough cold water to make a slurry from it all.

“That’s it?” she asked. “Can I taste it?”

“Why not?” I put a little on the tip of a spoon and handed it to her.

She smiled brightly after she tasted it. “It’s perfect.”

“Wait until you’ve had a donut with it,” I said.

Just then, the kitchen door opened, and the entire crew walked in.

“We smelled food,” Grace said. “Are you actually making donuts? This wasn’t supposed to be a busman’s holiday, Suzanne.”

“I don’t mind,” I said as I drizzled icing on the first four donuts.

Georgia tried to grab one, but I kept her at bay with the slotted spoon. “Celia gets the first one, since she helped me make them.”

The woman looked as though she’d just won a prize, and after quick consideration, she chose the one with the most icing. After taking a bite, she smiled broadly. “They are absolutely delicious.”

“I’m next,” Georgia said, and she grabbed one as well. Janelle and Dina took the last two, and I could see that Nicole and Grace were a little disappointed at being left out. “Don’t worry, there’s more on the way soon.”

After the donuts and holes were all fried and served, I nibbled on a few holes while Janelle and Nicole did the dishes. I hadn’t protested too hard when they’d offered, and though we’d had to heat the water on the stovetop, everything was clean and back in order before long.

“Now that breakfast is over, we really should decide what to do next,” Nicole said to the group. “I’m open to suggestions, everyone.”

“I still think that we should send someone for help,” Janelle said.

“On foot, through the snow, seven miles, and all of it downhill? Thanks, but no thanks,” Georgia said.

“Aren’t there any phones at the resort? There has to be a landline somewhere,” I said.

“I checked it already,” Nicole said. “The storm must have taken the line out as well.”

“Has anyone tried different places on the property to see if we can get a signal on our cellphones?” Grace asked.

“It’s awfully cold out there to be taking a casual stroll,” Dina said.

I needed a chance to tell Grace what I’d learned from Celia, so I said, “I think it’s a great idea. As a matter of fact, I’ll go with you, Grace.”

“Are you sure that’s wise, Suzanne?” Nicole asked me.

“Don’t worry about us. After all, we’ll be together. Nothing’s going to happen. Are you ready, Grace?”

My best friend seemed a little reluctant about the chilly stroll, but finally, she agreed.

Once we were bundled up in nearly everything we’d brought and standing outside the front door together, Grace said, “Let’s be clear about something. Just because I suggested this idea doesn’t mean that I was the one who wanted to do it.”

“It’s not going to work, anyway,” I told her. “I tried to get a signal yesterday while I was touring the grounds so I could call Jake, but I couldn’t get through anywhere.”

“Then why are we out here in the freezing cold?” Grace asked me.

“We need to talk, and I figured this was the best way to get a little privacy,” I said.

After I brought her up to date on what Celia had told me while I’d made breakfast, Grace nodded. “You’ve still got it, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Suzanne, you always could get people to open up to you. At least now we can take one name off our list.”

“Only if it’s true. Besides, it’s still too early to celebrate,” I said. “We still have Dina, Georgia, and Janelle on our suspect list.”

“Three is always better than four unless we’re talking about donuts,” she said, rubbing her hands together furiously. “How long do we have to keep up this charade?”

“A little bit longer, I think,” I said.

“What do we do in the meantime?”

“I want to go back to Pine Cottage and see if there are any clues I missed yesterday as to who might have tried to get rid of Nicole. Are you game?”

“Lead the way,” Grace said, and we trudged through the snow in search of something that might be able to tell us where to look next.

Chapter 12

“W
hat exactly are we hoping
to find?” Grace asked me as we took our first steps off the porch.

“If I knew that, we wouldn’t have to look, now would we?” I asked her with a grin. At that moment, I saw something that sent chills through me, and I put a hand up to stop Grace.

“What is it? What’s wrong, Suzanne?”

“Look,” I said as I pointed at the freshly fallen snow just behind the overhang of the veranda’s roof.

There were footprints in it, leading toward the cottages.

The problem with that was, at least in theory, none of us had left the lodge all morning.

Chapter 13

“I
s someone else up here?”
Grace asked me as she quickly looked around us.

“How can it be anything
but
a stranger among us?” I asked her as I studied the prints. “If you weren’t watching the group, then I was. Nobody could just take off on their own and start exploring without at least
one
of us knowing about it.”

“I’m afraid that’s not entirely true,” Grace said softly.

“What do you mean?”

“Suzanne, once everyone was awake, they all scattered looking for bathrooms. I couldn’t keep track of everyone at the same time. You were making donuts in the kitchen, so I couldn’t get you to help me watch every last one of them. I’m afraid it could have been any one of them, except Celia, of course, since she was with you.”

It was clear that she felt bad about it. “Grace, it’s not your fault. I just assumed the buddy system we put in place last night would still be working this morning.”

“Getting this group to follow rules is like trying to herd cats,” she said.

“So these could have been made by just about any one of us after all,” I said as I looked more closely at the nearest print. Though it was still quite cold out, the sun had already begun to melt the snow, and the tread marks had partially thawed into obscurity as to specific ways to identify their maker. I put my foot inside one of the prints for scale, but that wasn’t really any help, since there was no way I could know how small it had started. I glanced back at the lodge, but no one was watching us, though I could see the window I’d peered out earlier clearly enough. “At least we can be pretty sure that it was one of us,” I said as I stood fully erect.

“How could you possibly know that?”

“I can’t be positive, but I believe that I would have noticed if there had been tracks in the snow when I first looked out this morning.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean that we weren’t visited later while you were busy in the kitchen.” She frowned a moment before adding, “Suzanne, there’s something else we need to consider.”

“What’s that?”

“What if Hank really isn’t dead, and he somehow managed to climb up that embankment last night?”

It was a sobering thought. “You saw the way his neck was positioned. Is it really possible to fake that?”

“We didn’t have very good light,” Grace said, “and besides, he was pretty far away. Maybe we were wrong.”

“Why wouldn’t he join us at the lodge if that were the case?” I asked her.

“If you’d tried to prevent a murder and ended up being the accidental victim yourself, would you rush back to be with the killer?”

“I honestly don’t know what I’d do in those circumstances.”

“Let’s see how close these footprints come to the lodge,” she said.

It was a good idea, so we tracked the steps away from the cottages, instead of the ones going toward them. Grace’s hunch turned out to be a sound one.

There was a clear set of footprints that led straight up to the side entrance of the lodge.

“Suzanne, he must be inside!” Grace said. “We’ve got to tell everyone right now.”

I put a hand on her shoulder, restraining her. “Take it easy and think about it. We don’t know anything for sure yet, Grace. These footprints could easily have been someone coming and going, stepping in the same spots both ways.”

“I still think we should check the lodge thoroughly,” she insisted.

“I do, too, but it’s going to have to wait.”

“For what?”

“We need to see if Hank’s body is at the bottom of that precipice or not,” I replied.

“What if he’s still down there?” she asked me with a shiver. “What do we do then?”

“We try to figure out who was out walking in the snow alone. They clearly had the same idea that we had to check on Hank’s body. It’s not hard to see that these prints head straight to the cottages from here and to the spot where your district manager fell.”

Grace and I approached the edge carefully, but when I looked over the lip, I couldn’t see anything out of place below; in particular, there were no dead bodies lying there. The snow must have collected and blown sometime during the night, because now there was enough of it down there that I couldn’t tell if it was hiding Hank’s remains or not. “Can you see anything?” I asked Grace.

“He’s either not there, or the snow somehow covered him up,” she said.

“I think he’s still there,” I answered after a minute of thought. “He must be.”

“How can you say that? Did you see something that I missed?”

“It’s not what I see, it’s what I don’t see,” I told her.

“Leave the riddles to Hank, would you? I need you to be a little clearer with me.”

“Look around,” I said as I pointed to the slope below us. “Do you see
any
evidence that someone climbed out of there?”

Grace looked intently for a full minute, and then she finally glanced back at me and shook her head. “I don’t see anything, but there’s another possibility; he might have found another way up.”

“That’s true,” I said, frowning at the thought. If those footprints did belong to Hank and he was now hiding somewhere in the lodge, I was afraid of what might happen next. It was pretty clear that he was in no rush to come forward, so that meant that he was lurking in the shadows, staying out of our way and hatching a plan for revenge of his own. I didn’t want to be the person who had caused him to fall if that were the case.

“What do we do now?” Grace asked me.

“What can we do? We press on.”

I took a step in the direction of the cottages, and Grace put a hand on my shoulder, stopping me. “Suzanne, is that really a good idea? I have a feeling that we should rejoin the others and postpone the rest of this until later.”

“We still have to uncover what’s really going on around here, and the only way to have a chance of doing that is to follow those footprints and see where they take us.”

Grace frowned for a moment before she spoke again. “I know you’re right. We can’t just let this go. There’s too much at stake. Come on. Let’s investigate, but if we see a snowman along the way, I’m running back to the lodge. I’m just warning you ahead of time.”

“I don’t think it’s going to happen, but if it does, I’ll be right behind you,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t think we’d find footprints out here, either, but I was wrong about that, too, wasn’t I?”

“There’s got to be a logical explanation for it,” I told her.

“Remind me of that when whoever we’re following decides to kill us,” she said.

Ignoring the lack of logic in her statement, I pressed on. I had to admit, though, having Grace beside me gave me a great deal more courage than I would have had if I’d been alone. There were more benefits to the buddy system than I’d first realized.

We got to the Hemlock cottage first. “Is there even any reason to go inside?” Grace asked me. “I can say with a fair amount of certainty that neither one of us has been plotting to kill Nicole over the past few weeks.”

“You never know,” I said as I opened the door and peered inside.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Grace said.

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. Someone could have considered this a safe place to stash something incriminating. That way, if we happened to find it, we wouldn’t know who to blame for it.”

“I like the way you think,” she said. “Devious and all, I mean.”

“Coming from you, I’ll take it for the compliment I’m sure that you meant it to be,” I said as I looked around the small room. It was quick work pulling open the drawers, lifting the mattresses, checking the bathrooms, and scanning the small space for anywhere someone could hide something.

“There’s nothing here that doesn’t belong,” Grace said.

“I knew that it was a long shot, but we had to check,” I replied. “Now let’s go see what Fir has to hold.”

“Who was in Fir again?” she asked me as we walked through the snow to the next stone cottage.

“That’s where Georgia and Janelle were supposed to stay,” I told her. “Those two seem to have a real distinct dislike for each other, don’t they? Or is it just me?”

“No, you read the situation correctly,” Grace answered. “It was bad enough before Hank started playing his little mind games, but since he offered the promotion as a prize, they’ve been openly hostile toward one another.”

“What about with Hank?” I asked her.

“What do you mean?”

“Did either one of them show any animosity toward your boss?”

“Certainly not openly, but I know that both women were unhappy with the way he was running things.”

“I wonder,” I said, and then I failed to follow it up.

“What exactly are you wondering about?” she asked me.

“What if Nicole hadn’t been the target after all?” I asked. “Could one of them have meant to send Hank plummeting over the edge on purpose?”

Grace paused a moment before answering. “What good would it do either one of them to kill him? Nobody’s getting promoted to his old job, not even Nicole. There are going to be some big changes if Hank is really dead, and I don’t think anybody will be very excited about them. Besides, what about the earlier attempts on Nicole’s life? As far as I know, nobody’s had the nerve to come after Hank.”

“Yes, of course. You’re right. I was just thinking out loud.”

“Don’t stop doing it on my account. Sooner or later, we might just find the answer we’re looking for that way.”

Since Georgia and Janelle had removed their things from the Fir cottage, it felt as though we were striking out twice in a row with our inspections—that was, until Grace called out to me from one of the bedsides.

“What did you find?” I asked. She pulled out a single printed sheet from behind the headboard, a place that I’d failed to examine in the cottage that we’d been slated to share. “Did you check that space behind the beds in Hemlock, too?”

“Yes, but this one’s got pay dirt.”

“What does it say?” I asked her as I moved closer.

“It’s a sales report from our company. Hang on a second,” she said as she studied it a little more intently. After a few moments, she was still frowning at the document, but unlike me, she hadn’t been sharing her thought process aloud.

“What does it mean, though, Grace?”

“It looks legit at first glance, but someone faked it to make it look real. See the numbers in this column? They always line up on the ones I get. Not here, though.”

I saw what she was talking about. “Okay, so it’s been tinkered with. Why is the real question?”

Grace looked at the top of the sheet. “That’s Nicole’s employee number. The last two digits are transposed from mine, and I remember that we laughed about it when we saw how close they were once when they got mixed up.”

“Why would someone fake one of her reports, though?”

“According to this sheet, she didn’t win the job, at least not fair and square. The numbers just don’t add up. See?”

She thrust the document toward me, so I took it and studied the entries. It could have been reporting the national debt for Lithuania for all that I knew. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“Suzanne, I’m willing to bet that either Janelle or Georgia was going to try to get Nicole fired this weekend. This is a pretty strong motive for murder, if you ask me.”

“Nicole didn’t kill anybody, though,” I said. “How do you read it that way?”

“Maybe motive is the wrong word,” she replied. “What if one of those two women tried to scare her into quitting by making a few clumsy attempts on her life? When that didn’t work, they decided to come after her job directly. If Hank had seen this, it might have been tough for Nicole to explain it away, and knowing the man, I wouldn’t have put it past him to fire Nicole and replace her with someone else on the spot, no matter how much she might protest that the report had been faked.”

“But Hank never saw it, did he?” I asked.

“I doubt it, or we would have heard about it.”

“The question is, whose headboard was it hidden behind, Georgia’s or Janelle’s?”

“It was the one for the bed closest to the front door, if that helps,” Grace said.

“Why don’t you hold onto it for now?” I asked her as I handed it back to her. “We might be able to use it later.”