Custard Crime: Donut Mystery #14 (The Donut Mysteries) (3 page)

How bad must the place be if she was that reluctant
to let me see it?
 
I was tempted to
follow the mother and daughter back to the shop, but that wouldn’t do anyone
any good.
 
I’d given Emma and Sharon
time to clean things up, so it would be doing them a disservice peeking in now,
no matter how much I wanted to.

As good as her word, Emma found me five minutes later
as I stood vigil waiting for something else to happen in front of the crime
scene.
 

My assistant shoved the last month’s worth of receipts
into my hands.

“Does this include everything?” I asked.

“Right up to today’s receipts,” she said.
 

“Then I’ll work on this today and let you know where things
stand tomorrow,” I said.

“Like I said, there’s no hurry.”

“Nevertheless, we’ll take care of this
tomorrow.”
 
I had a sudden
thought.
 
“If your mother would
like, we could even do this
before
work tomorrow.”

Emma smiled, and then she said, “Thanks, but you
heard her before.
 
I think she’s
looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow morning.”

“I can’t blame her for that a bit.”
 
I myself still hadn’t really gotten used
to my later waking hour, but ironically, I’d just started to adapt when it was
time to go back to my former schedule of getting up when anyone in their right
mind would still be sound asleep.

“Well, I’d better get back to the shop and finish
cleaning up,” Emma said.
 
“Suzanne, I’ll
see you bright and early tomorrow morning.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” I said, and I realized
as I said it that it was true.
 
Getting back to the daily routine at the donut shop was exactly what I
needed.
 
My life had been a little
rudderless in my time away, so it would be wonderful to get back to work.
 

I just hoped that Jake felt the same way, now that he
was officially responsible for finding Evelyn Martin’s murderer.

Chapter 4

I realized that Grace must have still been at work as
I walked past her place and saw that her driveway was empty, so I decided to
head straight to the cottage and get started on the Donut Heart receipts.
 
At least my place would be quiet.
 
As a matter of fact, it would probably
be a little
too
quiet with Momma and
Jake both gone, so I decided to turn on the radio when I got home.
 
I finally managed to find a broadcast of
soft rock that served as a perfect buffer to the silence.
 
After that, I made myself a cup of tea,
and then I spread everything out on the kitchen table and organized the reports
for every day of the month that I’d been absent from Donut Hearts.
 
After studying each individual report
from the register, my hunch was that they didn’t do too badly at all while I’d
been gone.
 
I went through the
totals a little more thoroughly the second time around, and then I figured out
what my average daily expenses were.
 
I knew this number fairly well already, so it was easy to calculate just
how much profit I’d be splitting with Emma and her mother.
 
I knew better than anyone the razor-thin
profit margins I worked with at the donut shop, and I hoped that Emma and
Sharon would realize that I was doing the best that I could when I wrote their
checks.
 
I considered padding the
amount that I owed them for one second, but then I realized that I wouldn’t be
doing anyone any favors if I did that.
 
In the end, I wrote out a statement that showed the donut shop’s income
for the past thirty days, deducted the expenses, and then I tallied the final
profit.
 
After splitting that in
half, I split their share again and wrote one check for Emma and another one
for her mother.
 
It had taken us
some time to work out the details, since Emma usually drew a salary from me
independent of sales.
 
My assistant
came out ahead running the shop for a month, but not by much.
 
It was clear that she would have been
better off with things the way they usually were, earning a little less money
in exchange for a great many fewer headaches.
 
I wasn’t looking forward to having that
particular conversation with her the next morning, but it turned out that I
didn’t have to wait that long after all.
 
The ink on both checks was barely dry when there was a knock on my front
door.

“Hey,” I said as I opened it and saw Emma and Sharon
standing at my doorstep.
 
“I thought
we were getting together tomorrow after work.”

“We decided that we needed to talk about the split
before then,” Sharon said gravely.

Oh, no.
 
Were they going to ask for a bigger cut?
 
I could probably live with it, but it
was going to seriously hamper my ability to run the business for the next few
weeks.

“Come on in,” I said as I stepped aside, putting on
as brave a face as I could manage, given the circumstances.
 
“I just had a cup of tea, but I’d love
to join you in another if you’re interested.”

“There’s no need to do that.
 
This won’t take that long,” Sharon said.

“Mother, I’m still not sure that we should—” Emma
said before her mother cut her off.

“Emma, I’ve made up my mind.”
 
She then turned to me and said, “Suzanne,
we need to have a serious discussion about our earlier arrangement.”

“Would you at least like to sit down?” I offered.

“That won’t be necessary.
 
We don’t want to take up too much of
your time,” Sharon said.

“But we’d love to sit down and relax while we’re here,”
Emma insisted, plopping herself down onto my sofa despite her mother’s refusal.

“Now, what exactly did you have in mind?” I asked
Sharon after they were both settled in on the couch.
 
“There’s no reason that this has to be
tense.
 
I’m open to any reasonable
request you might have.
 
After all,
you both did me a huge favor keeping Donut Hearts open while I took care of
Jake.”

“It was fun,” Sharon said, “but ultimately, the donut
shop is a business, so we need to be businesslike when we discuss this.
 
Suzanne, Emma and I have given this a
great deal of thought, and we’ve decided that the percentage split you’ve
offered isn’t entirely fair.”

Ouch.
 
I’d
be lying if I didn’t say that stung a little.
 
“To be fair, I tried to talk you both
out of splitting the profits with me fifty-fifty from the very start, but you
insisted.
 
It’s fine if you want a
bigger share now.
 
I understand
completely.
 
What did you have in
mind?”

Sharon looked at me oddly, and then she smiled.
 
“Is
that
why you think we’re here?
 
Suzanne,
we don’t want more, my dear; we’re asking for less.
 
All we did was keep the shop open in
your absence; you’re the one who built it from nothing.
 
Fifty percent of your profits is too
much, not too little.
 
Would you
settle on keeping two thirds of the profits for yourself and letting my
daughter and me split the remaining third?”

“I would not,” I said sternly.
 
“Ladies, a deal is a deal.
 
When you see the small amount that you
both actually earned, you might reconsider your kindness altogether.”

“Whatever you can spare is fine with us,” Sharon
said.
 
“Right, Emma?”

“Don’t look at me,” my assistant said.
 
“I told you how Suzanne would react, and
I agree with her one hundred percent.
 
We made a deal to split the profits right down the middle, and it’s not
fair to try to change that now, in either direction.”

I laughed at Emma’s insistence, knowing that I would
have done the exact same thing if our roles had been reversed.

“What’s so funny?” she asked me.

“I don’t know which one of us should be more proud of
you, me or your mother,” I replied as I stood.
 
“Let me grab your checks, since you’re
already here.”

I went into the kitchen and collected both checks, as
well as the statement I’d made out as an explanation.
 
As I handed each woman her earnings for
the month, I said, “Here’s the breakdown, if you’d care to see it.”

“That won’t be necessary.
 
We trust you,” Sharon said even as Emma
was reaching for the sheet.
 

“Remember, we need to trust, but always verify, Mom,”
she said with a smile.
 
After
studying the document for a minute, Emma said, “Suzanne, this isn’t right.”

I looked at the sheet and studied it for a few
seconds.
 
“What’s wrong with
it?
 
It looks fine to me.”

“Our daily expenses were a little higher than this
while you were gone.”

“How could you possibly know that?” I asked her.

Emma admitted, “I’m taking a business accounting
class at my community college, so I put everything into a spreadsheet so we
could track our expenses better.”
 
She paused a moment before adding, “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Mind?
 
I
think that it’s terrific,” I said.
 
“But keep the checks I wrote you.
 
It can’t be a big enough difference to make up for the hassle for me to
rewrite them.”

“Okay,” Emma said.
 
“Thank you.”

“I’m just sorry that it’s not more,” I said.
 
“But then again, that’s the business
that I’m in.”

“That
we’re
in,” Emma said, stressing the fact that we were in it together.
 
“Don’t worry.
 
I warned Mom that it probably wouldn’t
even be this much.”

“I don’t know what you two are talking about.
 
I’m delighted to add this much to my
travel budget,” Sharon said.
 
She’d
developed a taste for Europe lately, and since her husband was married to his
newspaper as much as he was to Sharon, she’d found a female friend who loved to
travel as much as she did.
 
In the
end, everyone had been delighted with the arrangement, none more than Ray
Blake, though I suspected that Sharon was a close second.

“Now, are you sure that I can’t get you something to
drink?” I asked.

“No, we’ve got some things to do, but thank you,”
Sharon said.

“The first place on our list is the bank,” Emma said
with a grin.
 
“I’ve been living on
savings this past month.”

“You haven’t missed any meals, young lady,” Sharon
answered with a smile.
 
“As a matter
of fact, it’s been nice having you eat at home with your father and me.”

“Well, get used to seeing me gone again, because I’m
planning to eat out the rest of the week.”

After I saw the two women off, I pondered just how
lucky I was to have such good friends around me.
 
Sharon and Emma were just the
beginning.
 
Nearly everyone who even
remotely touched my life had helped out one way or another when I’d been taking
care of Jake, and I appreciated every last one of them.
 
I wished that there was some way I could
repay each and every person, but the task would have been too daunting.
 
In the end, all that I could do was to
make sure that whenever any of them needed me, I was there for them.
 
And honestly, that was the best way to
repay their kindness, anyway.

With that straightened out, I decided to fix myself a
little something to eat, since there was no telling when Jake would make it
back to the cottage.
 
I was just
about to take out the last of a ham someone had brought over when I saw a
police cruiser pull up outside.

Oh no!
 
Had something else happened?

And more importantly, was Jake safe?

Chapter 5

I needn’t have worried.
 
It quickly turned out to be Jake, currently
driving a car from the April Springs Police Department.
 

As I went out onto the porch, I said, “That’s one sweet
ride you’ve got there, mister.”

He shrugged.
 
“They insisted that I drive it, and I got tired of fighting them, since
I don’t have a car at the moment.
 
If you’ll remember, you’re the one who drove me here in the first
place.”

“I’m not likely to forget that,” I said, remembering
the ride home from the hospital in Hickory.
 
It had been almost exactly one month
ago, and in many ways, my time at the cottage with Jake had flown by.
 
Discounting a few run-ins with the
criminal element along the way, we’d had a fine time of it as he’d recovered.

“Are you hungry? Because I’m starving,” Jake asked.

“I was just about to make something,” I replied.
 
“I can do it for two just as easily as
one.”

“Tell you what.
 
Why don’t we skip that, as tempting as it sounds, and go grab a bite at
the Boxcar?”

“You don’t have to ask me twice,” I said as I closed
the cottage door behind me and locked it.
 
“It’s a beautiful afternoon.
 
Let’s walk through the park, shall we?”