Troubled Treats (2 page)

“And what happens in the meantime?  Does whoever did this to Sully go free because of his inexperience?”

“Don’t worry, we won’t let that happen,” Jake said as he studied the crime scene.

As they were loading Sully up on the gurney and carting him away, I saw something fall off the stretcher and flutter to the floor.  Without thinking, I reached down and retrieved it before it got lost in the chaos.

“What was that?” Jake asked me.  “You shouldn’t have touched it with your bare hands, Suzanne.”

“If it had any prints on it at all, they were bound to be Sully’s,” I said as I studied the piece of paper in my hand.  “It’s the corner of a bill,” I said.

“What, like an invoice?” Jake asked.

“No, it’s money,” I said as I offered it to him.

“You can’t tell much about it, can you?” Jake asked as he pulled out his hanky and took the torn corner from me.

“We’re not keeping it, are we?” I asked him.

“No, we’ll turn it over to Grant as soon as he gets here,” he said.

At that moment, the acting police chief, Stephen Grant, came into the warehouse, his face rigid and grim.  “What happened?”

Jake proceeded to tell him, rattling off the facts as though he were some kind of robot.  I knew that it was his training kicking in, but it never ceased to surprise me to see my husband go into full investigator mode.  After he was finished, he handed the bill’s corner to the chief.

“Are you sure that’s exactly what he said, Suzanne?” Chief Grant asked me.  “Take a second to think about it if you need to.  It’s important.”

“Jake told you exactly what I heard.  You knew Sully pretty well, didn’t you?”

“I still do, Suzanne,” Chief Grant said stubbornly.  “They’re still working on him, so as far as I’m concerned, he’s not gone yet.”

“I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean anything by it,” I apologized quickly.

“I know you didn’t,” the interim chief said as he loosened up a bit.  “Yeah, we were close.  I worked for him as an unskilled helper over three summers when I was in high school.  He was a good guy and the most honest man I’d ever met in my life.  I can’t believe someone would do this to him.”

“I’m curious about that myself,” Jake said.  “What could anyone have against a harmless old man working as a subcontractor on this project?”

“You’d be surprised.  The construction industry has its share of bad guys, though most of them are decent enough.  Still, Sully banged heads with a few of them when I was around.”

“What were their beefs with him?” Jake asked.

“Sully Jackson demanded only the best of everyone he came into contact with, because that’s what he gave everything himself.  I remember one time when he made me drive back to the hardware store in the middle of a job because the clerk had charged us twenty-five cents less than we owed him.  I tried telling Sully that we could settle up after work, but he wouldn’t have it.  He lost more in my wages than he’d underpaid, but none of that mattered to him.  Things had to be square for him.”

“Don’t worry; we’ll figure out who did this,” I said.

He looked at me askance for a moment before he spoke again.  “Suzanne, does that mean you’re going to meddle in this case?”

“I prefer to think of it as assisting around the edges of the official investigation,” I said.

“I’m sure that you do,” Chief Grant said, and then he turned to Jake.  “How about you?  Are you going to ask the mayor to make you a special investigator again?  Normally I wouldn’t mind it, but this time it’s personal.”

“George told me that after the last time, he couldn’t do that again,” Jake said.  “Short of joining your force, I’m just another civilian, no different from anyone else.”

“I’d never say that,” Chief Grant said.  “Does that mean that you’ll be helping her, now that Grace is out of the picture?”

My best friend, Grace Gauge, was his girlfriend, so of course he’d heard about her decision to retire from our amateur sleuthing, but still, it hurt a little hearing him say it.  “I’m not entirely convinced that she’s really retired,” I said.

“Trust me.  She’s finished,” Chief Grant said.  “So, I asked you a question, Jake.  Are you going to dig into this, too?”

“Would that necessarily be a bad thing if I did?” he asked the acting police chief.

For a moment, there was tense silence that felt as though it were dragging on forever.  Finally, Chief Grant spoke.  “Officially, you understand that I can’t condone anything you or your wife might do,” he said overbearingly before he added with a grin, “but I can’t exactly stop you, either.  All I ask is that you keep me in the loop on everything you uncover.”

“We can do that,” Jake said, but Chief Grant wasn’t finished yet.

“Jake, I know that you are used to taking the lead on the murder cases you’ve investigated in the past, but you have to let me do my job on this one.  That means that the official channels are all mine.  Are we clear on that?  You may be more qualified to hold this job than I am, but until you replace me, I’m going to be the one running the show.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Jake said as he took the chief’s hand and shook it firmly.

“Good.  I’m glad we’re clear on that.  Now, did you get a good look at whoever might have done this to Sully?”

“Not even a glimpse,” Jake admitted.  “By the time I got outside, whoever had been there was gone.”

The chief was about to speak when three of his officers entered the building together.  Grant spoke to us softly before addressing his staff.  “We’ll talk later.”  Then he turned to his officers.  “We need to seal off this building, as well as the alley in back.  Understood?”

As they went to work with their official investigation, Jake took me by the arm and gently led me back out the front door.  Momma was still standing there, clearly distraught about what had just happened.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” she said.  “I was just speaking with Sully this morning.”

“Did he say anything that might be related to what happened to him?” Jake asked her.

“No!  We talked about the weather, if you can imagine that.”

Jake offered her some comfort, and then he said, “Let’s go back to the cottage where we can all deal with this on more familiar ground.”

“Yes.  That’s a fine idea,” Momma said.  She’d driven us to the building, so we all piled into her car and headed back to the place the two of us had once shared.

“There’s something I need to do.  Momma, could you drop me off at Grace’s along the way?” I asked her.

Jake looked at me carefully before he spoke.  “Suzanne, you heard the chief.  Grace is officially retired.”

“I know she keeps saying it, but I’ve got to at least ask her if she wants to help.  You can see that, can’t you?”

“Just don’t be too disappointed if she turns you down,” Jake replied.

“I won’t,” I said, though I wasn’t entirely sure that was true.  Grace and I had dug into more murders than I cared to remember, and there had never been a time when she’d turned down my request for help. 

That had been before we’d nearly died during our last investigation, though. 

Even as well as I knew her, I still wasn’t sure if she’d meant it when she’d told me that she was finished investigating murder with me.

There was only one way to find out for sure, and that was to ask her directly myself.

Chapter 3

“Grace, open up!  It’s me.  I see your car in the driveway!”

I’d been knocking for the past full minute, but my best friend was not answering my summons.  Did she honestly believe that I’d just give up and go away?

The front door finally opened, and Grace stepped aside to invite me in.  She was in her robe, and she was drying her hair with a towel.  “Hey, Suzanne.  I was in the shower.  How long have you been standing out there knocking?  What’s going on?”

“Have you heard the news yet?” I asked as I walked into her house.  On the surface, Grace was everything I was not; she was slim and beautiful, while I was more than a couple of pounds overweight, and though I’d been called cute plenty of times in my life, no one but Jake had ever called me beautiful.  None of that mattered, though.  We were sisters from different mothers, and had been for practically all of our lives.

“What news are you talking about?” she asked.  “It must be serious.”

“How do you know that?”

She grinned at me.  “Because you aren’t giving me a hard time about taking a shower in the middle of the afternoon.”

“Why would I tease you about that?  I take them myself just about every day,” I said.

“That’s because you’ll smell like donuts if you don’t.  My explanation is much less logical.  I just felt like it, so I took one.  That’s one of the great things about being a grown-up.  I can have dessert for dinner and pretty much do as I please when it comes to everything else.”

I laughed.  “When’s the last time you had your treat before you ate your meal?”

“Okay, it’s been awhile, but I could if I wanted to,” she said.  “Come on back into the bedroom.  I’ll get dressed while you tell me all about the big news.”  She hesitated a moment, and then she grinned at me.  “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

I shook my head.  “It’s bad enough that Momma wants to rush things, but you, too?  I haven’t even been married for very long, and folks are already asking me if I’m going to have a baby soon.”

“Well, we both know that you’re not getting any younger,” she said with a grin as we walked back into her bedroom.  I took a seat on the bed while she disappeared into her master closet.  It was bigger than my bedroom back at the cottage, but it still barely managed to hold all of Grace’s clothes.  She needed most of them for her job as a cosmetics sales rep, but even her casual attire was nicer than my best outfit.

“Need I remind you that we’re the same age?” I asked her.

“Maybe so, but I’m not the one who just got married,” she said as she poked her head out of her closet for a brief moment.  “If that’s not the big news, then what is?”

Grace had just vanished again when I told her, “Sully Jackson was murdered this afternoon.”

“What happened?” Grace asked as she poked her head out of the closet again. 

“Momma was showing off the remodeling job they’re doing on the old wagon factory to Jake and me, and we stumbled over him right after someone stabbed him with a small length of rebar.”

“That’s terrible,” she said as she disappeared again.  “Did you see who killed him?”

“No, he managed to escape.  Jake chased him outside, but he somehow managed to get away.”  Grace suddenly appeared, now dressed in stylish slacks and a cute top, looking as though she’d just stepped out of a high-end catalogue. 

“Tell me something; is it hard always looking that good?”

She laughed.  “Please.  There’s nothing easy about it.  It’s a shame about Sully.  You two were friends, weren’t you?  Didn’t he come by the donut shop?”

“You know me.  I get attached to my customers,” I said.  “So, I was wondering–”

“No.”

“Hang on a second.  You didn’t even let me finish asking the question,” I said.

“I don’t need to hear the rest of it to know what my answer is going to be.  Suzanne, I meant what I said.  I’ve officially retired from amateur sleuthing.”

We’d had a close call not that long ago, and in the heat of the moment, Grace had told me that she was finished investigating crime with me.  I’d hoped that once she had time to mull it over, she’d change her mind, but if that was going to be the case, evidently enough time hadn’t passed yet.  “How can you just stop?” I asked her.  “Isn’t it in your blood, too?”

“Suzanne, I’m not about to deny that I enjoyed digging into a few local murder investigations with you, but that last time was just too much for me to take.  We could have died out in that forest.”

“But we didn’t,” I said.  “We outsmarted the killer, remember?”

“We got lucky, and you know it,” she said.

“I’m not denying it, but luck’s a part of life.  The important thing is that we walked away from it unscathed.”

“No, the important thing is that I’m not going to press my luck ever again, and neither should you.”

“Grace, I can’t just walk away.  Sully meant something to me, and besides, it happened in my momma’s building.  That makes me doubly involved.”

“Maybe you should talk to Jake about it,” she said.  “Suzanne, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to your motivation, but it doesn’t affect me.  If you think about it, most of the murders we investigated in the past were because of your ties, not mine.  I’m sorry, but I just can’t bring myself to do it anymore.”

I could see that Grace was deadly earnest in her refusal to help me.  It was time to drop it.

I hugged her for a moment, and then I pulled away.

“What was that for?” she asked me.

“For everything you’ve done in the past to help me on my cases,” I said.  “Don’t worry; I won’t ask you again.”

Grace looked at me tentatively for a moment before she spoke again.  “Hey, are we okay?”

“We’re golden,” I said with a smile.  “There are lots of things we can do together besides tracking down killers.”

“Like lunch.  Or even dinner.  Shopping is fun, too.”

I laughed.  “You’re good for my soul, Grace.”

“We could go do something right now, if you’d like,” she suggested.  “I’m free for the rest of the day.”

“Unfortunately, I’m not.”

“At least tell me that Jake is going to work with you investigating the case,” Grace said.  “If something ever happened to you because I refused to help you out, I’d never be able to forgive myself.”

I looked at her solemnly for a moment, and then I said, “You are officially absolved of any consequences that might come my way due to my investigation from here on out.  How’s that?”

“You never answered my question, though I’ve brought it up a few times now.  Is Jake going to work with you?”

I shrugged.  “I’m not entirely sure what the pecking order is regarding who is working for whom, but yes, we’re working together.”

“Then you don’t even need me, do you?” she asked with a broad grin.

“I never said that,” I answered, smiling in turn.  “And I won’t, not in a million years.”