Custard Crime: Donut Mystery #14 (The Donut Mysteries) (15 page)

What could it be?

I was about to ask Grace her opinion when I glanced
over at her and saw something that made the question die in my throat before I
even had a chance to ask it.

Evidently our breaking and entering hadn’t gone
unnoticed after all.

Someone was standing at the corner of the house,
staring at us with the most disapproving expression that I’d ever seen in my
life.

Grace must have seen my face at the instant I spotted
our unwelcome guest.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

All I had to do was point.

“Ladies, what are you up to now?”

It was a question I wasn’t really prepared to answer,
especially not to the person asking.

Chapter 14

“Shh,” I said softly to Jake.
 
“Creep on over here.
 
You’re going to want to see this.”

“I’m not going to skulk around in the bushes,” he
said in his normal voice.
 
“I asked
you a question, and I expect an answer.”

“We’re watching Chief Martin,” I whispered as I
gestured inside.

Jake looked surprised by the news.
 
He frowned as he asked us, “The chief’s
inside?
 
He shouldn’t be in there.”

As he disappeared around toward the front of the
house, I grabbed Grace’s arm.
 
“Come
on.
 
We need to see this.”

Jake was at the front door by the time we got
there.
 
I was going to tell him
about the key, and the alarm, but I wanted to wait and see what happened
first.
 
There was no reason to admit
to what we’d done earlier if we didn’t have to.

The front door was unlocked when he tested it, and I
tried not to let the relief show on my face.

“Stay here,” he commanded as he turned to us for a
moment before going inside.

I wanted to follow him anyway, but after the way he’d
ordered us to stay put, I knew instantly that this wasn’t one of those times
that I could afford to disobey him, not as Jake, but as the acting investigator
in a murder case.

I didn’t have to make a decision though, because the
chief must have been ready to leave.
 
Jake was two steps inside the house as Chief Martin was making his way
out, so while we couldn’t see the men as the conversation occurred, at least we
could hear them.

“Chief, have you lost your mind?
 
You know that you can’t be here,” Jake
said plaintively.
 
If his voice
hadn’t sounded so disappointed, I might have enjoyed the scolding nature of his
tone.

“I’m sorry,” Chief Martin said, the apology clear in
his voice, as well as his words.
 
“I
had to come by.
 
We were together
for a long time.”

“I know what it’s like to lose someone you love,”
Jake said, and I thought yet again about his dead wife, and the unborn baby
she’d been carrying the day of her car accident.
 
It had wounded him to the core, and
sometimes I wondered if he’d ever be able to fully move on and start a new life
with me.
 
It had taken him ages to
confess that his wife had been pregnant when she’d died, and it had nearly
killed Jake to finally fill me in on the details.
 

“I know enough to realize that you can’t compare my
situation to yours,” the chief said.
 
“Evelyn and I were divorced, but I still felt something toward her, you
know?
 
We had a lot of years
together, and some of them weren’t all that bad.”
 
It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement
of his first marriage, but at least it was believable.

“That still doesn’t justify this behavior.
 
Are you telling me that is the reason
that you were here?
 
You just came
by to reminisce about old times?
 
I’m not sure that I can buy that.”

“Well, I also thought I might be able to find
something that you might have missed.”

Jake’s tone was clear disapproval now.
 
“Why am I not surprised?
 
I haven’t even had a chance to thoroughly
search the place myself, but a few of your people have already been and gone.
 
So, did you find anything?”

“Nothing,” the chief said, and I knew that he was
lying.

I didn’t even hesitate, though saying something now
was clearly going to cause me some trouble down the road.
 
“That’s not entirely true,” I said.

Grace looked at me with her mouth agape.
 
She whispered, “You just ratted out your
stepfather to the state police.”

“No, I told Jake something that he needed to know for
his ongoing investigation,” I answered.

“It’s the same thing.”

“Maybe so,” I said as Jake and the chief stepped
outside.
 
“But I didn’t really have
any choice, did I?”

“What’s this about?” Jake asked me with a furrowed
brow.

The chief was staring at me with bullets in his gaze,
but I wasn’t about to back down.
 
“We
saw him take something from the back of their wedding photo.”

“How could you possibly know that, unless you were
spying on me?” the chief asked me.

“Hey, don’t try to turn this around on us.
 
You’re the one who was inside when you
weren’t supposed to be, not Grace and me.”
 
I couldn’t rightfully take the moral high ground, but neither man knew
that, and I was pretty sure that Grace wouldn’t set them straight.

Jake looked long and hard at the chief before he
spoke.
 
“Is what Suzanne just said
true?”

Chief Martin nodded, and then he reluctantly reached
into his shirt pocket and pulled something out of it.
 
“This has nothing to do with the
case.
 
It’s just something that has
some sentimental value to me, that’s all.”

I could see that it was an old-style hundred-dollar
bill when he handed it to Jake.
 
Could that have been what had fallen to the floor?
 
I couldn’t be sure, since I hadn’t had a
good view of it at the time.
 
I
supposed that it was possible, but was it the truth?

“Is that what you saw him take?” Jake asked me.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted.
 
“Grace?”

“I didn’t see it,” she said.

“How is this significant to you?” Jake asked the
chief as he held the bill up.

“My mother gave us that hundred on our wedding day to
put aside for a special occasion.
 
We never touched it through the years, and I never expected to find it
still there in the back of the picture frame, but when I opened it, sure
enough, there it was.
 
Like I said,
it was strictly sentimental.”

“I’m sorry, but you know that I’m going to have to
keep this for now,” Jake said as he put the money into an evidence bag he
pulled from his pants pocket.
 

“I know the drill,” the chief said as he
frowned.
 
“Technically, it wasn’t
mine anymore, anyway.
 
I should have
gotten it back before we divorced, but I was so relieved for the marriage to be
over that I forgot all about it.”

“That still didn’t make taking it right,” Jake said.

“Hey, take it easy on him,” I said, surprising myself
coming to the police chief’s defense.
 
“He explained why he took it.”

“Suzanne, I’ll deal with you later.”

“What did I do?” I asked him in a voice as innocent
as I could muster.
 
In my mind, I
added the phrase, “that you know of,” but I kept that part to myself.

“You were snooping around where you didn’t belong,”
the chief said.

“Hey, I just took your side, remember?” I asked.

“After you told on me,” Chief Martin said
grimly.
 
He turned to Jake and asked,
“Am I free to go, or are you going to arrest me for trespassing?”

“If you come back here again without my knowledge or
permission, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

“But for now?”

Jake showed the hint of a grin as he said, “The door
was open when you got here, and you thought you heard someone in trouble
inside.
 
As the police chief for
April Springs, it was your duty to investigate.”

Chief Martin laughed for a moment.
 
“And the bill I just gave you?”

“The way I see it, you were turning over some evidence
you found to the proper authorities.
 
There’s nothing illegal about that, either, is there?”

“Thanks, Jake,” the chief said somberly.
 
“I don’t know what I was thinking coming
over here like this.”

He put a hand on Chief Martin’s shoulder.
 
“I know that this has to be tough on
you, but you have to let me handle this, Phillip.”

“Okay,” the chief said.
 
I looked around, and I noticed that he
hadn’t parked anywhere near Evelyn’s house, either.
 
As he started to walk away, I stepped in
front of him.
 
“I’m sorry.
 
Whether I should have done that or not,
Jake needed to know.”

“And your boyfriend takes precedence over me.
 
I get it,” Chief Martin said, though
there was more sadness than ire in his voice.
 
“I can see where you’re coming from, but
what happened to looking after family?
 
Or don’t you think of me as being a part of yours now, even after I
married your mother?”

“I’ll tell you the same thing that I once told
Grace.
 
If I ever had evidence that
she did something she shouldn’t have, I’d turn her in, and then I’d find her
the best lawyer that I could, and she’s the closest thing to family besides my
mother and father that I’ve ever had.”

“It’s true,” Grace said with a smile.
 
“Suzanne here has a really warped sense
of right and wrong.
 
It’s an impossibly
high standard to live up to.”

“I like to think that it’s exactly what it should
be,” I said.

“Fine.
 
Whatever,” the chief said as he walked away.
 
I had some serious fences to mend with
the man, but none of it would be done right now.

“As for you two,” Jake said as he locked the door
behind him, “I’m not sure what to do with you.”

“A neat shiny medal would be nice,” Grace said, “or
maybe you could name us crime-busters of the month or something.”

“Grace, this is serious,” he told my best friend,
though I could see the ghost of a smile forming on his face.
 

“In the end, what did we really do?” she asked
him.
 
“We reported a possible crime
to the police.
 
How is that a bad
thing, Jake?”

“You were here snooping around and you happened to
catch the chief doing something that he shouldn’t have been doing, either.
 
How does that make you two any better
than him?”

“Hey, we didn’t take anything,” Grace said.

“That I know of,” Jake replied.

It was time to defuse this situation.
 
“Listen, for what it’s worth, telling
you about that potential clue cost me something with the chief and with my
mother.
 
I didn’t try to protect
anyone.
 
That should count in our
favor, at least.”

“It does,” Jake admitted.
 
“It’s just that I’m not used to having
my investigations hijacked like this.”

“We’re facilitators, not interferers,” Grace said
with a smile.
 
“It might help if you
thought of us as assets and not liabilities.”

“How I wish that I could,” Jake said with a wry
smile.
 
“Where are you two
troublemakers off to now?”

“We thought we’d have chats with Conrad and Violet,”
I readily admitted to him.

“Tread lightly, okay?” Jake asked.

I couldn’t believe he was going to let us go ahead
with our plans.
 
Was he going to use
us to soften them up, or had he already spoken with them and struck out?
 
Whatever the case was, I wasn’t about to
complain about it.
 
“We will,” I
replied.
 
“What are you going to do
now?”

Instead of answering, Jake just smiled at me, and
then he saluted us both before he walked to his squad car.

After he was gone, Grace said, “Well, that certainly worked
out better than either one of us had any right to expect.”

“What makes you think that part of it is over?” I
asked her just as my cellphone rang.
 

No surprise, it was my mother, and I was certain she
wasn’t calling to inquire about my general health.

“Hello, Momma,” I said when I answered the phone.

“Suzanne, you need to accept this marriage between
Phillip and me, do you understand?
 
I thought we were already past this juvenile behavior, but now I’ve
learned that’s not the case at all.”

“He started it,” I said in childish protest, probably
a little ill-advised at the moment.

“Suzanne, this is not the time for your questionable
sense of humor.”

“Momma, I’m sorry that I ratted your husband out to Jake,
but I thought that there might be a real chance that he was hiding
something.
 
In my defense, when Jake
asked him if he’d found anything, the chief denied it to his face, even though
I knew better.
 
What choice did I
have?”

“Phillip told you the rationale for his behavior,”
she said.