I was surprised to run into Janet Taylor heading up the steps and into the sheriff’s office, almost running her over in my distraction. She caught herself before I could bump her, scowling at me while I blinked into the sunshine.
“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t see you there.” Not sorry, though. Wished she’d fallen. Because I was a terrible person with Mommy protection issues.
Her pinched expression didn’t lighten up. “I’m sure you did,” she snapped. “Excuse me.”
“Wait a second.” I grasped for her arm but didn’t touch her, catching myself at the last second. I did not need a crazy assault charge against me right now. Oddly, just the motion seemed to stop her as she tried to look down her narrow nose at me despite the fact I had a few inches on her.
“If you’re going to accuse me of ruining your mother’s baking, go ahead.” She sniffed, cold air misting out of her lips as she spoke again. “But I’m the one who’s been sabotaged here! Your mother doesn’t have a nationally recognized reputation to uphold, does she?”
Talk about a puffed up piece of work. “That gave you the right to dose Mom’s sugar with salt, did it?” She was lucky I was clinging to my laptop and didn’t have my hands free.
“She should have tasted her batter.” Was she honestly smirking?
“Sounds like you needed to take your own advice,” I shot back.
Janet’s nasty demeanor faded just a bit. “I did,” she snapped. “Whatever was in my mix, and I can guess from how hard my bake turned out…” she exhaled, anger returning. “We’ll see if your sheriff is interested in justice or not.”
I let her go, hoping Crew bounced her butt out into the cold. Like he could do anything about the disaster that was Cake or Break. But it left me with an interesting tidbit of curiosity to look up when I got home.
Daisy and Petunia were gone when I arrived back at the B&B, Joyce and Bonnie both out. I’d hoped to ask Joyce what Janet was talking about, and instead resorted to my favorite investigative snoop tool, a search engine.
It wasn’t long before I came up with the answer, or what I guessed was the answer. The only ingredient that I could come up with that was odorless, tasteless and in powder form, that could harden a cake without being detectible with a quick taste test of raw batter was gelatin. But how to prove it? That was another story.
I checked the messages as I went over my bookings for the first of February and was surprised to find one from Alicia.
“Called Crew, but thought you should know.” She sounded hurried, like she was walking somewhere, din of voices in the background. “Good call on the other exit door. Someone else was in the dining room, but I couldn’t make out who. Emailed you the short clip from the camera at the front of the room, but it’s pretty blurry because of the distance. We originally dismissed it because no love on the full set, too much crap in the way. I’ll tell Crew when he gets here. Bye!”
My fingers fumbled on the keyboard of my computer while I quickly scanned my email for the message and opened it. The short video she sent seemed to take forever to load, but when it finally did I understood what she meant. All the lights and the tall walls of the set blocked the actual murder scene from the camera. But there was enough space between the fake side of the set and the real wall I could make out the door to the maintenance stairs. I peered at the grainy, dark image taken all the way across the large space and I felt a shudder run through me before I frowned.
I knew exactly who that was, distance or not. Had privately thought this particular suspect cleared despite reservations about their possible guilt and motive for murder. I checked the time stamp and confirmed the death window. That the wavering figure who slipped through the side door with something cylindrical clutched in hand, hurrying onto the set did so at 5:36PM. I’d seen canisters like that in Mom’s show kitchen, full of baking ingredients. Could this particular one have been cut with gelatin, perhaps?
For a brief moment I almost let it go. Crew was there at the Lodge and would be viewing the clip himself. Surely he’d recognize the person in the video and ask the appropriate questions.
Wouldn’t he?
Only one way to find out. But first, I needed to confirm something I’d been told, something I should trust but wanted to make sure wasn’t misleading or untrue. That led me on an internet hunt for a certain name and ties to a particular family while I tried to convince myself my suspicions were totally baseless.
They weren’t. The information I had was accurate and the damning image of the figure at the maintenance stairs door gave me reason to doubt myself to the core one more time.
At least I had what I needed to hand Crew the case and maybe win me another kiss… as long as I wasn’t misreading him as much as everyone else I thought I could trust. Sigh. I headed for the front door, swinging my coat around me, locking the house behind me. Terrible business practice? You betcha. But I was enough my father’s daughter I couldn’t just sit on the sidelines. Crew was right, I was born for this, like it or not.
I’d deliver my evidence in person. And if he already knew what I knew? Awesome. At least I’d be there to see justice done.
It was a tense, short drive to the mountain, a quick text to Daisy gaining me a reply I ignored as I drove up the winding road again. When I pulled into the parking lot, I hesitated over messaging Crew to warn him and decided against it. Not because I purposely wanted to keep him out of it. But because the sight of a tall, broad shouldered former sheriff exiting his truck with a pink-haired woman at his side, the pair heading for the front doors drew my attention more so even than catching a murder.
I reached Dad as he passed through the glass doors, grabbing his arm and dragging him to the side of the lobby in the shade of a fake plant, glaring up at him while Clara, his companion, seemed to sense this was terrible timing to interrupt and headed off on her own before I could stop her.
“Dad,” I snapped, watching the showrunner disappear into the crowd, heading for the elevators, “where have you been?”
He looked uncomfortable, like he would rather be anywhere other than here with me, facing me like this. I’d accused him of cheating on Mom before, with Alicia, of all people. Turned out she was his CI against Pete Wilkins. And here I was thinking terribly of him again, about this Siobhan Doyle woman and now with a quiver of doubt he’d been with Clara. I obviously still harbored a lot of trust issues over Ryan’s infidelity for my mind to take me to such dark places, knowing how much Dad loved Mom. Still.
He had a lot to answer for, apparently.
“Fee,” he said, shuffling his feet like an errant school boy. “What are you doing here?”
“Weak, Dad,” I snapped. “No deflecting. Where’s Mom?”
He looked even more contrite. “Home,” he said.
“Alone,” I said. “Like she’s been since the morning of the damned show. You’ve been missing a lot, Dad. She needs you.” Never mind my guilt Mom probably needed me, too, and I was just as bad running around investigating a murder I didn’t need to poke my nose into because Crew would recognize the figure in the video—and the purpose of the canister carried on set—and I was wasting my time coming here.
Dad didn’t seem to realize I was judging myself as much as him. He cleared his throat in an awkward kind of way that startled me. My father was the picture of cool cucumbers with a huge dose of stoic silence thrown in to season the mix. So what could possibly make him look like he’d been caught with both hands in a cookie jar that didn’t belong to him?
“Dad?” Now he was making me nervous. Really nervous. Like, was I going to have to kill him after all nervous.
“Fee.” He ran one hand through his short hair before exhaling heavily, shoulders slumping. “I wanted to tell you. I was going to, I swear. I just…”
Please don’t be cheating. Please don’t be cheating. Murder, mayhem, fine, I could live with that. But infidelity?
“Fee, I’ve been working.” Um, holy, what? “For Clara. Since the show arrived.” Working? Doing what? I must have blurted again because he answered that question next. “Investigating Ron Williams,” he said. Dad looked about as guilty as I’d ever seen him, face turning red as he rushed on. “Fee, I got my private investigator license a month ago and I’ve been taking cases ever since.”
***