Cupcakes and Killing: A Cozy Mystery (Sweet Shoppe Mysteries - Book 2) (6 page)

“Still,” Mia said, wiping her eyes again. “I’ve been so horrible. I wish I could take it all back.”

“Would you mind telling us what you were fighting about?” I asked. I didn’t want to upset her by letting her know that we’d actually witnessed her very public fight with Zara the other day. It was better that she just told us of her own accord.

“Well, we’ve always been very different. I know she’s done her best to help me out in any way she can, but you know what small towns can be like…it was just hard for me when all my friends were gossiping about my own mother. She even dated a friend of mine once, even though he was twenty years younger. But that didn’t stop her.”

“It didn’t stop him, either,” Kaye said, trying to keep her voice as gentle as possible.

“Yes, I know. I shouldn’t have blamed her. It was so petty. Especially when she’s done so much to help me out. I’ve been studying software development for years, and I’ve been building this computer program and trying to sell it. She helped me pay for everything I needed, and she even paid my rent and bills when I was desperate. And in return I treated her like dirt.”

Her eyes welled up with tears again, and I knew then and there that she had to be innocent. No one could fake such genuine emotion.

“Mia, is there anything you can think of that might help in identifying her killer?” I asked. “I know it’s hard because it’s all happened so suddenly, but if you could think of anything at all, it might help.”

She shook her head. “Like I said to the police earlier, I don’t know what else to say other than that it wasn’t me.”

“What about Amy McNamara? Do you think she might have had something to do with it?”

Another shake of the head. “No way. Amy’s a friend of mine. I helped her get the job at Mom’s flower shop. I know she was really angry with my Mom over some stuff that happened recently, and she didn’t handle it too well. But she isn’t capable of murder.”

“Were you aware that Amy threatened your mother the other day?” Kaye asked.

“Yes, she told me about it. I was actually really annoyed at her for doing it. But she wasn’t threatening to kill her. She was just angry.”

“What was she threatening then?”

“There’s this website that lets people rate all different kinds of stores they’ve been to. Amy planned on making a bunch of dummy accounts online and leaving terrible reviews of my Mom’s store. It was really petty and juvenile, and I told her not to do it. Basically she just wanted to try to ruin Mom’s business by spreading lies about it.”

“I see. What about your Mom’s love life in recent times? Do you think she was dating someone who might have wanted to hurt her?”

Mia shrugged. “I don’t know. She never mentioned anything about being scared of someone she was seeing. You said you were her friends. Didn’t she say anything to you?”

“We only became friends recently,” I explained. “So we hadn’t had the chance to discuss much about our love lives. Do you know who she was seeing recently?”

“Not really, aside from that one fling with Amy’s boyfriend. It was weird, she was usually pretty open with that kind of stuff…but there was this one guy she talked about sometimes, and she never told me his name. They were on and off for ages.”

I exchanged a glance with Kaye. Why would Zara have been keeping a man she was dating a secret? Like Mia had just said, she was usually quite open about that subject.

Mia suddenly perked up. “Oh my God. I just remembered something. I’ll be back in a sec.”

She returned a moment later with a small leather-bound journal in her hand.

“My Mom always kept a diary in her desk drawer,” she explained. “I totally forgot about it till just now. She didn’t write much in it, but she kept all her appointments and dates recorded in it. Maybe it’ll help?”

She passed it to Kaye, and I leaned over and had a look as she opened it and leafed through it. “Hmm…it says she was having dinner with someone called ‘DT’ four days before the wedding. Any idea who that might be?”

“No. She often wrote people’s initials in there to save time.”

We had a flick through the rest of the diary, but nothing else stood out.

“All right. Mia, thank you so much,” I said. “I really think you should hand that diary in to the police now that you’ve remembered it. It could help them.”

She nodded and gave us a watery smile before walking us to the door, and Kaye and I sat in silence on the drive back to the cupcake shop. Up until now, we’d barely even considered the possibility that the killer was anyone other than Mia or Amy, but now we weren’t sure it was either one of them. Mia had seemed too genuinely upset and willing to help, and from what she’d said, Amy just wasn’t capable of killing. Of course it was still possible that she was wrong about Amy, but I had a strong instinctual feeling that we were barking up the wrong tree after seeing the diary.

Something told me that this ‘DT’ person she was having dinner with a few nights before Mrs. Barnaby’s wedding had something to do with her death. Perhaps it was a man she had been seeing; maybe even the mysterious on and off lover Mia had mentioned.

When we were back in the store, we filled Tori in on what we knew.

“Didn’t the police say the killer was probably female?” she asked. “I still think Amy is the most likely suspect, honestly.”

“Yes, but think about it,” I said. “What’s the best way to cover up a murder?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You make it look like someone else did it. If you’re a man and you want to kill someone, the best way to avoid suspicion would be to make it look like a woman did it. Hence the poison; a very female manner of murder, like Officer Bobby said. I think Zara might have been seeing a man who ended up killing her.”

“Not only that,” Kaye said, nodding in agreement. “In something like ninety percent of cases of violence against a woman, it turns out to be the man she’s involved with who did it. It’s an age-old cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason.”

“Hmm. I guess you guys have a point,” Tori replied. “So who’s this DT person?”

“That’s the million dollar question,” Kaye replied. “What about David Tanner from the post office?”

“He’s seventy-one,” I said. “I highly doubt she was seeing him! Besides, he broke his hip a couple of weeks ago. As far as I know he’s still laid up in bed. There’s no way he made it to the wedding reception and poisoned her drink.”

“What about her ex-husband? She said he used to hurt her. Maybe he came back and asked to meet with her for dinner, and then sneaked into the wedding reception a few days later to kill her.”

I shook my head. “No, his initials are T.K.”

“Your last name is Thurston, right Kaye?” Tori interjected. “And your husband’s name is Daniel.”

My eyes widened, and I half expected Kaye to slap Tori for even suggesting her husband had anything to do with the murder. Instead she simply laughed.

“Good sleuthing, Tori, but I’d know if my husband was having an affair and then decided to kill the other woman. Besides, he was with us at the reception around the time when the killer must have poisoned Zara’s drink. It couldn’t have been him.”

Tori’s face went bright red. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to accuse your husband of murder. I don’t know why I even said that.”

“It’s fine. In cases like this, everyone’s a suspect!” Kaye said with a smirk. “What about Captain Treloar? His last name starts with T. What’s his first name?”

“Glenn,” I said with a sigh. We were getting nowhere. There were hardly any men in town with the initials DT, and I was beginning to think I was wrong about my theory. Perhaps ‘DT’ wasn’t even a person’s initials. Maybe Zara had been having dinner with a dolphin trainer?

Suddenly an idea struck me like a bolt of lightning.

“Oh!” I said. “Remember Zara’s last words to us? When she was lying on the ground trying to breathe, that is.”

“No, what were they?” Tori said, eyebrows knitted together.

“She was saying ‘I think it was the…’ but then she never finished her sentence. At the time I thought she was having an allergic reaction to something and trying to say that it was ‘the salmon’ or ‘the cupcake’. But what if that isn’t what she was saying? What if she wasn’t trying to say ‘the’ something at all?”

Tori looked at me with an expression usually reserved for small children and the mentally unstable, and Kaye furrowed her eyebrows, trying to comprehend what I was saying.

“Oh,” Kaye finally said. “
Oh
.”

Tori folded her arms. “Mind filling me in on what I’m missing?”

“Theodore!” I said. “I think she was trying to say ‘it was Theodore’!”

“Who’s Theodore?” Tori asked, wrinkling her nose.

“Deputy Ted,” Kaye replied. “His mother and sister came in to the Sweet Shoppe with him a couple of weeks ago, and his mother kept calling him Theodore. Ted is just short for his real name.”

“Oh…” Tori replied, her eyes widening.

“So maybe Zara was seeing him, and maybe she called him Theodore as well. After all, Ted did say that he’d been seeing someone recently. We thought he was just saying that to get his mother off his back, but what if it was true? What if it was Zara?” I said.

“D…T…Deputy Ted. Or Deputy Theodore,” Tori said slowly. “You might be right. He was standing near the table in the photos as well. He could’ve surreptitiously slipped something into her drink quite easily.”

“Also, Mr. Palmer told us that the gardener who maintains the lawns around the police station had been in recently to buy some fertilizer. Maybe Ted took some from his supply at the station shed to get the cyanide?”

Kaye pressed her hands into a V-shape on counter in front of her. “This is all just circumstantial evidence,” she said. “Even though it does all fit, we can’t just go and accuse him of it. What if we’re wrong? Then we’re just the three crazy harpies who accused one of our local boys in blue of being a psychopathic murderer.”

“So what do we do?” I asked, racking my brains for an idea. “We can’t just do nothing. Sure, we might be wrong, but we might be
right
.”

She sighed. “I suppose so. Let’s take a break to get this place cleaned up, then we’ll have a cupcake and think about it.”

I helped Tori clean up the kitchen while Kaye wiped down the tables and counter in the front, and the door tinkled a few minutes later.

“Kaye, can you grab me a chocolate cupcake when you’re done serving the customer?” I called out. “And a vanilla fairy cupcake for Tori?”

We were met with silence and then the sound of something crashing to the floor, and we raced out to see Kaye standing there, stunned into immobility. She had dropped a tray, and luckily it was empty, otherwise there would have been crumbs and frosting all over the floor.

“Kaye, are you all ri…” I began to say before looking up and realizing what had startled her. It was Deputy Ted himself.

“Err…hello, Ted. What can we do for you?” I asked, trying to keep my voice as light as possible. Truthfully, I wanted to leap across the counter and pummel his chest with my fists, crying ‘
Did you murder Zara? Admit it, you sociopath!’
, but thankfully I managed to keep myself under control.

“Afternoon, ladies,” he said with a smile. “We’re all working mighty hard on this case down at the station, and it’s really built up an appetite. I thought I’d come down and see what cupcakes you still had left today.”

When none of us moved for a few seconds, he raised his eyebrows. “Is everything okay?”

“Oh, it’s fine,” Kaye said, looking flustered. “We’re just all a bit on edge after what happened to Zara.”

“I understand. It’s a very hard time for all of us,” he said, and I thought I saw a tinge of sadness in his eyes. Remorse, possibly?

“Have you…um…made any progress in the investigation?” I asked.

“We brought in Amy McNamara earlier on. It’s not looking good for her. As you ladies informed us, she threatened Zara only a few days before her murder, and a few witnesses reported seeing her not far from where Zara’s champagne was sitting at the reception. She also recently purchased fertilizer, which we think could’ve been used to obtain the cyanide.”

We already knew all of this, but we played dumb and nodded. “Wow, I see,” Kaye said. “Anyway, which cupcakes did you want? Just whatever’s left?”

He nodded. “Yep, that’ll do.”

She removed the day’s remaining cupcakes from the display case and put them in a white cardboard takeout box, and I noticed her hands were shaking as she did it. Luckily, Ted didn’t seem to notice, and he smiled, paid us and finally left.

“I can’t believe he’s acting so normal,” Tori said, her eyes narrowed.

I held my hands up. “Wait a minute. Kaye was right earlier. We might be wrong about Ted, and we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. We don’t even know if he actually
was
seeing Zara. We need to confirm that he was before we take our suspicions anywhere.”

“How do we do that?”

“Well, his mother and sister are probably still in town. Why don’t we go and visit them? His mother was harassing him so much about seeing someone, so if he really was seeing Zara, he might have told her.”

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