A Burned Out Baker: Classic Diner Mystery #7 (The Classic Diner Mysteries) (4 page)

“Where are we going?” I asked Moose as he turned in the opposite direction from the diner. “You realize that our diner is back there, right?”

“I built the place, Victoria. Of course I know where it is,” Moose said. “We’re going to Barry Jackson’s house.”

“Now?” I asked incredulously. “How’s that going to look if we get caught there?”

“Not good,” Moose said with a grin. “That’s why we shouldn’t get caught.”

“I can see the logic behind your reasoning,” I said. “But even if we do find something useful there, how’s Sheriff Croft going to feel about us getting to it before he does?”

“We’ll worry about that when we come to it,” Moose said. “There’s something I need to check out before anybody else gets the chance.”

“You know something, don’t you?” I asked my grandfather as he sped up. At the rate he was driving, we’d be at Barry’s in less than three minutes.

“Maybe,” he said with that grin that told me he was indeed hiding something from me.

“Come on. Tell me,” I said.

“I might be wrong,” Moose said. “Then again, we might uncover something that was better left unseen, if you know what I mean.”

“I honestly don’t have a clue what you mean,” I said, getting a little frustrated by my grandfather’s reticence to talk.

“Be patient, Victoria,” he said.

“I’m going to remember that advice the next time that I know something that you don’t,” I said.

“I don’t doubt it for one second. We’re here,” he said as he approached Barry’s house.

“Shouldn’t we stop, then?” I asked as we passed it.

“Not if we’re going to circle around and go in the back way,” Moose said. “Barry’s car is gone, so I’m guessing that he’s not home.”

“That’s probably a safe assumption, considering what they found at the bakery,” I said.

“We don’t know for sure yet that it was Barry,” Moose said.

“No, but it makes the most sense. Who else would be there that time of morning?”

“The arsonist, for one,” Moose said as he pulled down the alley behind Barry’s house.

“I thought you believed that was Barry,” I said as he parked and we both got out.

“It’s the strongest possibility, but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have been anyone else. Victoria, we need to proceed cautiously here.”

“Don’t we always?” I asked as we crept through the yard. Instead of going straight to the house, though, Moose detoured over to an outbuilding. It was eight feet by twelve, and the architecture of it matched the house perfectly, down to the forest-green siding and the cream-colored trim. “Why are we going over here first?”

“Because unless I’m mistaken, this is where all of the secrets are hidden,” Moose said cryptically.

“What are you talking about?” I asked him as we neared the small building.

“I went fishing with a chatty contractor a few years ago,” Moose said. “The man wouldn’t shut up, and he kept scaring away all of the fish, so I never invited him back.”

“Okay,” I said. “I had a friend in high school who started to sing her sentences every time she got nervous.”

Moose stopped and looked at me oddly. “What has that got to do with anything?”

“Not a thing. I just thought we were sharing irrelevant stories,” I said.

“Victoria, there’s more to my story, if you’d let me finish.”

“Go on then,” I said, “because that’s all I have about mine.”

My grandfather shook his head, and then he continued. “One of the things this guy talked about was an outside office he built that matched the main house. It didn’t take me long to figure out he was talking about Barry Jackson, since he kept using different references to baking.”

“Okay, I suppose that’s a little relevant,” I admitted.

“Just wait. It gets better,” Moose said as he stood on the four-by-eight-foot porch. “He told me about a few secrets he’d been told to build into the thing.”

“If they were secrets, why did he tell you?” I asked.

“What can I say? He’s a pretty decent contractor, but the man can’t keep his mouth shut on a bet. Hang on a second. Yes, this must be it.”

I looked where Moose was reaching, and all I saw was a small medallion over the door, a decorative flourish that gave the tiny building a nice architectural touch. To my surprise, Moose reached up and grabbed it, turning it ninety degrees to the right. As he did, something clicked in place, and the front door opened of its own accord.

“How did you do that?”

My grandfather just grinned at me. “That’s just one of the secrets here.”

“How many are there?” I asked as we stepped inside the small eight-by-eight-foot room. The place was sparse, with a simple uncluttered desk under one window and a swivel chair under the other. The walls were blank slates, and the back wall itself had nothing but a coat of paint on it.

“There’s at least one more trick that I know of,” Moose said as he got down on his hands and knees. Instead of the molding going all the way across the floor where the walls met in the corners, there were small blocks of wood on each edge the molding butted into. In the center of each block was a turned wooden button, and as my grandfather pressed the middle of the one on the left, I heard another click, and the entire flat piece of molding along the back wall swung open slightly.

“What is it with people and their secret panels?” I asked, recalling our time at the pickle palace not that long ago with a chauffeur who had ended up being so much more than that in the end.

“That’s what clicked with me when we saw the burned-out bakery this morning,” Moose said with a smile. At least this secret panel wasn’t big enough to lead anywhere. It wasn’t even deep enough for a small cat to crawl into. As I looked at it a little closer, I saw that it was really nothing more than a hidden shallow drawer, and as Moose pulled it out, I saw a collection of papers inside. Evidently this was where Barry had stored anything important to him, and I couldn’t wait to go through the things that we’d just found there.

That’s when I had my first inkling that maybe my grandfather and I should wait for law enforcement. “Moose, should we be going through these papers before the police get a chance to examine them first?”

“Why shouldn’t we?” he asked. “Do you honestly think that Sheriff Croft would have ever found this on his own? If it weren’t for us, this would have all probably been lost forever.”

That managed to make me feel a little better. “I see what you’re saying, but we still can’t keep what we find from him.”

“We won’t,” Moose assured me. “After we’re finished here, we’ll phone a tip into the station, or at the very least, we’ll leave this panel open so that they’ll find it themselves when they get around to checking this place out.”

“I like the second option better than the first,” I said. “One more thing, though. If there’s something interesting, we snap a photo of it with my phone, but we don’t take anything with us that might help the sheriff. Agreed?”

“Okay, I can live with that,” Moose said.

“Then let’s start digging,” I said as I reached for the top layer of papers.

I started to spread things out on the desk as Moose went for the chair. After he sat down and wheeled it over to where I was working, he grinned at me. “Hey, my knees are a lot older than yours are. I need to perch every now and then.”

“I wasn’t complaining,” I said as I started looking at what we had. “Was there anything else in the secret drawer?”

“Just these papers and this,” he said as he put a handheld microcassette player down on the table.

“What do you suppose that’s about?” I asked. “I didn’t even see it.”

“It was buried under some papers. Let’s play it, okay?”

“Fine by me,” I said as I reached out and hit the Play button.

A woman’s voice, small and tinny, came from the tiny speaker and said, “Barry, I know you’re there, so stop screening your calls. It’s Sandy. Again. Why haven’t you called me back? You broke my heart, you know that, don’t you?” At that point, the woman cried a little, but then she quickly got herself back under control. When she spoke again, there was a new resolution in her voice. “If you think you can throw me away for somebody else like yesterday’s garbage, you’re dead wrong. I’m not going to let you get away with it. You’ll pay for what you’ve done to me. Don’t even think about trying to run away from me, either. There’s no place you can go where you’re safe from me, and when I catch you, I’m going to—” Evidently the time on the answering machine cut off, because Sandy was interrupted by a dial tone.

“Wow, she sounded mad,” Moose said.

“Mad? She was homicidal if you ask me. Which Sandy do you think it might have been?”

“It sounded like Sandy Hardesty to me,” Moose said.

I looked at him in surprise. “How do you know Sandy Hardesty?”

“Just because I’m retired doesn’t mean that I’m a hermit,” he said. “I meet people all of the time.”

“I’m sure you’re just a regular social butterfly, Moose, but I really want to know.”

“If you must know, she ran into me with her car in the grocery store parking lot last month,” Moose said. “I was in my old truck at the time, and you could barely see where she hit me, but we got to talking. I remember liking her. She had spunk.”

“Maybe a little too much for her own good,” I said. “I wish we could record that tape.”

“Can’t your magic phone do that for you?” Moose asked me with a grin.

“Not directly, at least not that I know of, but I do know something that might work.” I dialed my home number, waiting for my own machine to kick in.

“Hello? Victoria, is that you?” my husband asked after two rings.

“Greg, what are you doing back home so soon?” Despite what he’d told us earlier, I wasn’t sure that he’d go straight home.

“You and Moose were delivering the food, so I didn’t waste any time heading back here to catch a quick nap before I had to go to work again. The thing is, I can’t fall back asleep, despite my best efforts.” He paused a moment before adding, “Hang on a second. If you thought I wasn’t home yet, why are you calling me here?” he asked.

“I’m trying to do something else. Do me a favor and hang up,” I told my husband.

Before I could explain my odd request to him, he promptly did as I’d requested.

I dialed the number again, and once more, my husband answered the phone. “Is this some kind of new game of tag that I don’t know about?” he asked me.

“You never gave me a chance to explain my plan. I want to record something I found, but I don’t have any way to do it but to call the house and leave it on our answering machine.”

“Then it’s not going to do you any good if I keep picking up, will it?” Greg asked good-naturedly.

“Sorry about that.”

“I don’t mind,” he said. “Call away,” and then, before he hung up again, he added, “I promise I’ll ignore you completely this time.”

I dialed my home number yet again, and this time it made it all the way to the answering machine. When I heard my own voice ask to wait until the beep, I hit the Play button again, and I managed to record the message in its entirety before my own machine cut me off.

After I disconnected the call, my phone rang in my hands.

No surprise. It was Greg. “Did it work?”

“Like a charm,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “Do you care to explain to me what that was all about?”

“How about a rain check?” I asked him.

“That’s fine. Will I see you this afternoon?”

“I’m sure you will at some point, but I might not make it back to the diner by the time you get there.”

“Take your time. I’ll see you when I see you,” he said, and then we got off the phone.

As I’d been chatting with my husband, Moose had been digging through some of the other papers. “Did you find anything else interesting while I was on the phone?” I asked him.

“More than you can imagine. This seemed to be Barry’s favorite hiding place, because it looks like he kept all of his secrets here.”

“Honestly, it’s not that bad a place to stash things you don’t want anyone else to find,” I said. “What are the odds anyone else would have uncovered this stuff if he hadn’t had a talkative contractor?”

“Not good,” Moose said as he laid a note scrawled on lined paper on the desktop in front of me. “Victoria, check this out.”

It was from Cliff Pearson, a man that I’d heard was on the dark side of the law, and after reading the terse note, there was not much doubt about who Barry’s mysterious backer might have been for the bakery. Evidently, expanding the bakery hadn’t been the only thing Barry had borrowed money for. The note said,

I won’t tell you again. The next time you’re late with a payment, you’re going to get a reminder from me that you’re not going to like. This is your last warning. From now on, pay me on time, pay the full amount you owe me, or I’ll take it out of something besides your bank account. I’m not messing around here, Barry
.”

“Well now, that’s not very friendly, is it?” Moose asked me with a grin.

“I wonder how much Barry owed him?”