Sweets Galore: The Sixth Samantha Sweet Mystery (The Samantha Sweet Mysteries) (21 page)

“That’s recent enough that a
scorned woman might still be angry enough to retaliate,” Sam mused.

“That’s only one half of the
news,” Beau said. “Each week I review the county traffic citations—checking to
see if any new warrants might have been issued against someone we’ve had
contact with—and I remembered yesterday seeing a female driver from California
listed, speeding through the red light at the ski valley road—”

“Beau! Bottom line.”

“Doralee Wickham Calendar.”

“Jake’s most recent ex was here,
in Taos County.”

“Yes. She got the ticket four days
ago.”

“What would she be doing here
unless it had something to do with Jake?”

“Exactly.”

Sam chewed at her lower lip. “I
wonder how we might track her down and find out what was going on.”

“I was getting to that. She registered
at the Taos Inn.”

“I need to talk to her,” Sam said,
turning the ignition on the truck and putting it in gear. “Do you know her room
number?”

“Sam, slow down,” he said. “We
don’t even know if she’s still in town. She gave that as her local address when
she got the ticket.”

“Still . . . it wouldn’t hurt to
check. And I can ask questions that your deputies wouldn’t, like whether she
and Jake were legally divorced yet.”

Obviously, Beau realized there was
no use arguing with her. He wished her luck. She arrived at the Taos Inn,
pulling into the crowded parking lot with its overhang of green, copper and
golden cottonwood leaves. A rippling breeze caught them as Sam locked her truck
and headed for the lobby.

She picked up a house phone and
asked to be connected and was almost surprised to find Doralee in her room and
agreeable to a meeting. Five minutes later the woman entered the spacious lobby
from one of the side corridors. She might have been a carbon copy of Sam
fifteen years younger, with more brown in her hair than grey at this point and
a dozen pounds lighter. She wore a blouse printed with emerald green geometric
patterns, a dark brown skirt and a pair of brown pumps. It was something Sam
might have chosen for herself at an earlier age. Doralee eyed Sam as if she
were seeing her older self.

“I couldn’t believe it about
Jake,” Doralee said once they’d settled into a pair of heavily carved Mexican
chairs at one end of the huge room. “I’ve just been sitting in my room,
thinking I should go claim his things.”

“You weren’t divorced?” Sam didn’t
mention that Jake’s brother had already done the claiming. It would be
interesting to see where Doralee was going with this.

“Sadly, we were in the process. I
. . . well, I think Jake had found someone else. For awhile I thought it might
be you. It’s why I came to Taos. To see what you were like. ‘Samantha Sweet,
Sam this and Sam that’ . . . he talked about you a lot. I had to think maybe .
. .” She rubbed the palms of her hands along the chair’s arms. “After a day or
two I realized you weren’t the threat. His big interest was obviously in that
teenager
who was hanging on his arm.”

 
“You mean you saw me before today?”

“At your bakery. I knew the name
of the place. Jake had jotted it on a note at home. I knew the young lady at
the front counter couldn’t be you, but when you walked out front once, wearing
a white jacket, I knew that had to be you.”

Doralee was
watching
her? Okay, that was a little creepy.

“But then I caught sight of Jake
with Little Miss Cutie in Pink.”

“So, you came all the way to Taos
to get a look at whoever Jake was leaving you for?”

Doralee nodded. “I had to know.”
She pinched the fabric of her skirt into pleats, working them with her fingers
but the instant she let go the material fell back into its original smooth
shape.

“It’s hard being the third wife,
you know. You’re never sure why those earlier tries didn’t work—did they leave
him, did he leave them, was it always for a younger woman?”

Was it because you’re so insecure that you drove him nuts?

“Did you actually speak to Jake,
here in town?”

Doralee gave up on pleating the
skirt and began picking at her cuticles. “I tried to. Thursday evening he and
Pinky
were having drinks at some little
bar about a block away from the plaza. I saw them go in there and I wanted a
public place to talk to him, you know, so he couldn’t ignore me. I took the
divorce papers he’d already signed and asked him to tear them up so we could
get back together.”

Sam could only imagine how well
Jake would appreciate that.

“He got real mad at me, and it
became sort of a scene. When the cops came I just left.”

Cops?

“I never saw him again.” The voice
went soft and
Doralee’s
eyes got moist. “I can’t tell
you much more than that.”

Doralee stood up and had
disappeared down the corridor before Sam could think what else to ask her.

Sam went out to her truck. A scene
where the police were called? There had to be a record of it. A mere argument
wouldn’t bring the cops; there had to be more to the story.

Sam left the Taos Inn, realizing
that it was nearly two o’clock and she’d never eaten any lunch. She was
debating whether to succumb to the call of fast food or go home for something
or try to skip eating until this evening. About the time she drove past
McDonald’s with that irresistible scent of French fries wafting through the air
her phone rang.

“Mom, oh my god, I don’t know what
to do!” Kelly’s voice went high and squeaky, near panic.

A million thoughts went through
Sam’s head. Her parents, a wreck, some road emergency. “What happened,
Kel
? Slow down.”

“I can’t believe— It’s a mess. My
stuff.”

“Kelly, breathe.”

Sam heard a deep breath on the
line. “Someone broke into the house.”

Chapter
18

Sam whipped the truck into a U
turn at the first possible chance and arrived at her house minutes later. Kelly
stood beside her car in the driveway and rushed into Sam’s arms as soon as the
red pickup came to a halt.

“They aren’t still in there, are
they?” Sam asked, one eye on the back door.

“No. I’m pretty sure not. It just
shocked me to walk in there. I don’t want to go in by myself.”

“I’ve called Beau and he’s—” His
cruiser’s siren finished the statement.

With a hand on his holster he told
the two women to wait outside. He came back two minutes later saying it was
okay to come in.

From the moment they stepped
through the back door they faced chaos. In the kitchen drawers had been dumped,
strewing cutlery and knives across the counter tops. Food packages were opened,
leaving cereal and crackers and coffee and sugar in a crunchy, sticky mess on
the floor and across the implements on the work surfaces.

“This is unreal,” Sam said. “More
like vandalism than a robbery.”

Beau came in from the living room.
“Oh it was a robbery too. Your computer is gone.”

Sam had taken her new laptop to
Beau’s, leaving the older desktop model for Kelly. She tried to think what
might be on it. Basically, everything.

“Did you have it password
protected?” Beau asked.

“Yes. At least that will stop
them.”

“Slow them down. Anyone who really
wants the information can find somebody with the skills to hack into it. If you
ever did any banking or shopping on there, you’ll want to change all your
accounts right away.”

Sam followed him to the desk in
the corner of the room. Papers lay everywhere but she found the little flowered
diary where she’d written her various passwords in her own coded system so that
they looked like addresses and phone numbers. She grabbed it up and put it in
her pocket.

“Kelly, where are your
grandparents? Did they see this?”

“Fortunately, no. I took them by
Beau’s after we finished our drive.
Grampa
looked
like he wanted a nap.”

Thank goodness. Sam didn’t need to
try explaining to her parents that Kelly would be perfectly safe. She wasn’t all
that sure of it herself.

“Here’s where they got in,” Beau
said, showing her that the small side window by the front door had been smashed
in. “They reached in and twisted open the deadbolt. I’ll get someone out to
repair it and change the locks.”

“I can do the locks,” Sam said.
“I’ve got spares out in the truck.” Knowing how to break into places had taught
her a few valuable skills.

“Oh, god,” Kelly wailed from a
distance.

Sam followed her daughter’s voice
and found Kelly in her own bedroom. The mattress lay halfway across the room,
where someone had upended it to look under. In the process it had crashed into
her dresser top and broken two bottles of perfume, which saturated the carpet
and bedding. The room smelled like an intense flower garden.

“That was my favorite,” Kelly said
as she picked up the crystal heart-shaped top to one of the bottles.

“You can get new ones. I’m sure
our insurance will cover a lot of this.”

Sam rushed across the hall to her
old room. Her heart raced. In here the mattress had been slashed and stuffing
lay in tufts like a big indoor snowstorm. All the empty dresser drawers gaped
open at odd angles. The few things she’d left in the closet lay in heaps on the
floor; someone had obviously gone through pockets and then tossed them aside.
Her wedding gown looked as if it had been trampled. Sam fell to her knees and
gently scooped it up. Shaking it carefully she saw that it appeared intact,
only wrinkled. She reached for the padded hanger to re-hang it.

“The bathroom too,” Kelly called
out.

“Don’t start cleaning things up,”
Beau cautioned. “You’ll need to file a police report.”

“I don’t want anything to do with
them,” Sam said. Pete Sanchez had already ruined her week.

“Your insurance will require it.
Kelly could make the call.”

They stood in the relatively
unharmed dining room while Kelly spoke to someone who was obviously asking
whether she was in danger at the moment, were the burglars still on the
premises and other things that seemed designed to waste time when someone could
be on the way. Finally, Beau got on the phone and threw a few cop-code numbers
at the dispatcher and was told an officer would be there soon.

Soon
turned out to be forty minutes but it was better than nothing.
Beau met the police officer—luckily, not one that Sam knew—and walked him
through the house telling him what they’d noticed was missing at first glance.
Meanwhile, Kelly had the presence of mind to walk around snapping pictures with
her phone. Sam leaned one hip against the dining table, her foot tapping and
her mind going a thousand directions. This was no random grab-a-TV burglary;
they had been after something specific. People don’t slash mattresses and dump
cereal boxes unless they’ve got some time and are searching. But for what?

Money? Did Tustin Deor really
believe what Jake had told him—that Sam had a lot of ready cash? Could he have
possibly done this? Even if she’d agreed to invest in his project, did he
honestly think she kept cash in the mattress? All her files and banking
paperwork were at Beau’s now, but she thought of the missing computer. She
would have to take care of that as soon as possible.

She pictured Deor in his thousand
dollar wristwatch and designer jeans with that prissy little short jacket he
wore. Ripping and digging through drawers hardly seemed his style. Still, you
never knew. He did have his little entourage with him and that one big guy
could bully his way through a brick wall, she’d bet. She mentioned it to Beau
while the officer got information from Kelly.

“This has to be aimed at me,” Sam
said in a low voice. “This address is under my name in the phone book. It’s
where anyone who doesn’t know me very well would naturally come looking.”

“You think that Hollywood guy came
out here?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. He
certainly got pushy about the money he thought I should give him. But a lot of
people connected me with Jake. Doralee Calendar could have come looking for
something, although if she did she was certainly cool about it an hour ago.
Maybe those rough guys that Jake owed money to . . .”

Beau bit at the corner of his lip.
“This seems extreme but I’ll check it out.”

He stood in the corner of the
kitchen and quietly made a few phone calls. When he looked up the uniformed
officer was finishing his report.

“I’ll have this typed and you can
pick up a copy anytime after tomorrow morning,” he told Kelly and Sam. He
walked out to his cruiser and drove away.

“Tustin Deor is still registered
at the La Fonda,” Beau said, “but no one answers in the room. I’ve got my men
watching out for his car. If we can pull him over we might get the chance to
talk to him. That’s about all I can do for now so I guess I’ll head home.”

“See you there,” Sam said. “Can
you see that my folks get their usual happy hour treats? I’ll be along after I
help Kelly with this mess. When we get a chance to talk I’ve got more.”

“It’s all right, Mom. You don’t
have to hang out here. I can clean up. I wasn’t doing much tonight anyway.”

Sam stayed long enough to find a
board in the garage and nail it over the broken window and assure that the
deadbolt locks were functioning. They closed the door on Sam’s old room with
the shredded mattress—it could wait until later—and put Kelly’s bed back
together. Sam’s earlier energy came in handy as she organized the kitchen while
Kelly worked in the living room.

“I don’t want you here alone
tonight,” Sam told her. “If you can’t find a friend to come stay with you, at
least come out and take the couch at our place.”

“Thought of that already. Jen’s
free and she’ll come by right after work.”