A Burned Out Baker: Classic Diner Mystery #7 (The Classic Diner Mysteries) (8 page)

I ran back along the hose looking for the faucet, and when I found it, I turned it on and raced back to the fire.

It was too late, though. The wood in the barrel was still burning brightly, but the papers on top had been burned beyond any hope of recognition.

Whatever Susan had really been burning was now gone forever.

Once Elizabeth arrived, we were quickly ushered out of the house.

Moose looked hopefully at me as he asked, “Were you able to save anything?”

“The papers were all burned completely by the time I got the faucet turned on,” I admitted.

“It wasn’t already turned on?” he asked me. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Why is that important?”

“Victoria, you’ve had enough fires yourself to know that you always make sure you have a ready source of water handy in case things get out of control. She had the hose nearby, but it was anything but ready. What was she burning?”

“Maybe that’s not what was so important about the fire after all,” I said as I got a sudden idea.

“What do you mean?”

“Moose, what if her having that fire was just an excuse?”

“I don’t follow you,” my grandfather said.

“Hear me out. If she started the fire at the bakery earlier, she most likely would still smell of smoke, and trust me, it’s a tough scent to get out of your hair. Susan might have purposely set this fire to cover any traces of the smell from the earlier fire.”

Moose thought about it, and then he nodded. “That’s good thinking, Victoria.”

“So, where does that leave us?”

“It’s still way too early to say,” he said as he reached for his phone.

“Who are you calling?”

“After my conversation with Edgar Croft earlier, I’m letting him know what happened with Susan right away.”

“Is that how it’s going to go from here on out?” I asked my grandfather.

“Maybe it should be,” Moose said. “Victoria, I have to tell him about this.”

“Agreed,” I said. “Does that mean that you’re going to tell him about what we found hidden in Barry’s outdoor office, too?”

My grandfather paused, and then he nodded. “You’re right. I should have told him about that earlier. To be honest with you, I’m kind of surprised that he hasn’t found it yet without our help.”

Moose made the call, and after an awfully brief conversation, he hung up.

“What did he say about Susan?” I asked. “I noticed that you didn’t tell him anything about the clues that we found earlier at Barry’s.”

“He’s on his way, and he even thanked me for the tip, if you can believe that. You’re right; I didn’t say anything about Barry’s shed. Maybe we can tell him together.”

“Do you think we should hang around here and wait for him?” I asked.

“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.” Moose looked down into the barrel, and then he added, “Who knows? Maybe his crack team will be able to find something in this mess. All I know for sure is that we won’t be able to.”

“So, what should we do now if we’re not going to hang around?” I asked.

Moose sniffed the air, and then he smelled his shirt. “I’ll tell you one thing. We’ve got to do something about the way we both smell.”

I smelled my shirt as well, and the distinct aroma of the fire hit me. “You’re right. We can’t go around investigating an arson case when we both smell like smoke. Why don’t you drop me off at my place so I can shower and change clothes, and then you can go home and do the same?”

He frowned as he nodded. “We probably need to, though we can’t really spare the time.”

“I don’t think we have much choice,” I said. “I know we’re losing the element of surprise the longer we wait to talk to all of our suspects, but there’s really nothing that we can do about that.”

Moose shrugged. “I guess that it was bound to happen sooner or later. The sheriff’s going to be tracking the rest of our suspects down before we can get to them, so we’ll just have to do the best that we can.”

“At least Rob Bester won’t be hard to find,” I told Moose after he picked me up at the house. It had felt good washing the smoke off me, even if most of it had just been in my imagination. At least that’s what I’d thought until I’d stripped down and stepped into the shower. As I shampooed my hair, the smell of the fire was strong, and it took a few rinses to get most of it out. Some of it would take a few days to finally leave. Did that make Susan brilliant in disguising her part in the fire, or was it just a coincidence? I wasn’t ready to name her a killer yet, but if it
had
been a cover-up, she’d done a brilliant job of it.

“If he’s at work,” Moose said.

“Why wouldn’t he be?”

“Victoria, that fire was right beside his building. What are the chances that his customers could get in there even if they wanted new tires?”

“I would think they’d come back,” I said. “Tire shopping usually isn’t that urgent.”

“On the contrary, I’ve rarely shopped for tires when I didn’t absolutely have to have them.”

“I wouldn’t know. Greg takes care of our cars, from tires to windshield wiper fluid to everything else in between.”

“That’s kind of sexist, isn’t it?” Moose asked with a grin.

“Seriously? You can’t honestly be asking me that.”

“Why not?”

“Moose, in case you’ve forgotten, I own the diner, and I run it every day. My husband works for me as a fry cook, and he has no problem with me being in charge. Besides, he enjoys keeping up with the cars, so why shouldn’t I let him?”

“Take it easy. I didn’t mean to step on any toes.”

“You didn’t,” I told him with a grin. “Besides, we both know who really runs your family.”

“Funny, I like to think of it as a democracy,” Moose said.

“You might like to think of it that way, but we both know that it’s a benevolent dictatorship, with your wife in charge when it comes to the things that really matter.”

Moose smiled at me. “I never denied it for one second. Hey, he’s open after all,” Moose added as he swung into the tire shop’s parking lot. The barricades on the street were all down, though the crime scene where the fire had occurred was clearly roped off with police tape.

As we walked in, we found Rob standing by the front door, and we actually got a bonus as well.

Rob was deep into an intent conversation with Mike Jackson, the late Barry Jackson’s brother, and as far as we knew, his last living relative, and more importantly, his only heir.

“We’re so sorry for your loss,” I told Mike Jackson as my grandfather and I approached the two men. The overwhelming smell of cologne washed over me as we neared, and I had to wonder which man was wearing enough fragrance to make my allergies kick in. Maybe it was both of them. No matter, I was afraid to get much closer than we already were for fear of breaking out in hives. Besides, I’d just cleaned myself up, and I didn’t want to go around town smelling like men’s cologne. Whatever they were discussing so intently ended abruptly.

“Moose, Victoria,” Rob said. “What brings you by my shop? Are you finally going to break down and get new tires for that truck of yours?”

“If I did that, the tires would be worth more than the truck, and we can’t have that.” Moose turned to Mike and offered a hand. “Sorry about your brother.”

“So am I,” he said. Mike was a run-down, beat-up version of his older brother, and if you’d asked me the week before, I would have said that there was no way that he was younger than Barry. It showed that he’d had a hard life, that was for sure, and it most likely hadn’t gotten any easier with his brother’s recent death.

“It can’t be easy losing someone you were so close to,” I said. “When was the last time you saw him?”

“We shared a drink at the house after he got home from the hospital last night,” Mike said as he looked at me oddly. “Don’t worry. I won’t be pursuing the lawsuit.”

“To tell you the truth, that hadn’t even crossed my mind,” I said, which was true enough.

“You probably couldn’t even if you wanted to, could you?” Moose asked. “After all, it was his word against ours, and now he’s not around to testify.”

“That worked out pretty well for you then, didn’t it?” Mike asked loudly enough for a few of the other customers to notice.

“Let’s all take a deep breath here,” I said. I loved my grandfather dearly, but sometimes I wished that he had a few thoughts that he didn’t feel the need to express so openly. “Mike, it’s important that you know that we didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Barry.” I looked over at the charred remains of the bakery, a sight that was obvious from our position at the tire shop. “What’s going to happen to the space now?”

“Well, as a matter of fact—” Mike started to say when Rob interrupted him.

“Nothing’s in stone yet, Mike, so we don’t want to jinx it, do we?” The tire man didn’t look all that pleased about the subject being brought up, though I still wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

That’s when I got it.

“You’re buying the lot after all, aren’t you?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Rob asked me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He may have tried to brush me off, but Mike wasn’t about to allow it. “Let her explain,” Mike said to Rob, and then he turned to me. “What are you talking about, Victoria?”

“Barry didn’t tell you about it?” I asked.

“Tell me what?”

“Rob tried to buy the bakery last month so he could expand his tire business, but Barry turned him down cold.”

Mike looked at the tire man with fresh suspicion in his gaze. “Is that true?”

“It’s all one big coincidence,” Rob said as he tried to backpedal as quickly as he could. “Your brother and I just had an informal conversation a few months ago, that’s all there was to it.”

“It was more than that,” I said, recalling the offer sheet we’d found in Barry’s office that he’d torn up. “You made him a written offer, and he tore it into tiny little pieces.”

“How could you possibly know that?” Rob asked as he stared openly at me.

“We found the paper, Rob,” Moose said.

“This changes everything. I need to rethink things, Rob,” Mike said as he abruptly started to leave.

“But we had an agreement,” Rob said angrily.

“Yeah? Try to prove it. I haven’t signed anything yet,” Mike said as he walked away.

Rob wanted to go after him, but he still had to contend with my grandfather and me. “Thanks a lot, you two. What good is an empty lot going to do him? I was going to take it off his hands and expand my showroom, but now I’m not so sure that’s going to happen because of your meddling.”

“Sorry about that,” Moose said, clearly not upset at all. “Where were you when the fire started?”

“I was sitting at home by the fireplace enjoying a cup of coffee. There must have been some kind of plug in the chimney, though, because I got a backdraft and it blew smoke all over my living room. Who knew that as that was happening to me, poor Barry was dealing with a fire of his own?”

It was a convenient time to have a fireplace emergency; that much was certain. “Was anyone there who can confirm that?” I asked him.

“Sadly, since Rita left me, I’m all alone these days,” he said.

“But I saw you at the fire soon after it must have started,” I said.

“Like I said, I found out the bakery was on fire, so I rushed right over here to see if I could help. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to talk some sense into Mike.”

“Why don’t we all go together?” I asked. “Moose and I want to talk to him again ourselves.”

Rob looked at us for a few moments, and he must have seen that we weren’t going to back down. In frustration, he waved a hand in the air as he said, “Forget it. I’ll catch up with him later.”

“Then we’d better be going,” Moose said.

As we were walking away, I asked Moose, “That was interesting, wasn’t it?”

“I imagine Rob will pay a great deal less for an empty lot than he would have for the entire bakery,” he said. “Could he have been that cold blooded just to expand his business, though?”

“Why not? If Barry wasn’t cooperating, maybe he figured that his heir might.”

“That’s assuming that Mike gets everything now,” Moose said.

“Who else could it go to? I doubt that Barry left it to any of his girlfriends.”

“You never know,” Moose said as he looked around. “By the way, where did Mike go?”

I pointed to the lot next door, now a leveled charred ruin. “He’s right over there.”

“I feel kind of bad pouncing on him like this when he’s clearly in mourning,” Moose said.

“If it makes you too squeamish, you could always wait in the truck,” I told him.

“I don’t feel
that
bad about it,” Moose said. “Let’s go have a talk with our last suspect and see what he has to say for himself.”

“Mike, do you have a second?” I asked the man softly after he failed to see Moose and me approach. Despite what I’d said to my grandfather earlier, I wanted to handle this as delicately as possible. After all, if Mike hadn’t had anything to do with his brother’s murder, the last thing he needed was someone accusing him of being involved, especially just after it had happened.

“What do you want?” he asked, clearly distracted by the remnants of his brother’s former business.

“I know it’s not easy, but we need to know something,” I said.

“Listen, can’t you two leave me in peace? I just lost my brother. We had an argument last night, and I said some things that I regretted almost instantly. I was going to apologize to him today, but now I’ll never get the chance. Can you even imagine how that makes me feel?”

I was about to comment when my grandfather did it for me. “Was the fight about the money you owed him?”

I looked at Moose and shook my head, but he just shrugged. He was right. I’d been about to back off completely, but we couldn’t afford to do that, especially not given the sheriff’s timeline for calling in outside help. I knew that a state police inspector wouldn’t be nearly as forgiving of our investigation as Sheriff Croft was.

“What money are you talking about?” he asked. “I didn’t owe my brother a dime.”

“That’s not what he thought,” Moose said.

Mike pivoted around and stared hard at my grandfather. To his credit, he didn’t even flinch as he faced Moose down. “That’s a lie.”

“Show him the picture, Victoria,” Moose told me.

“What picture?” Mike asked.

I got out my phone and found the photo I’d taken of Barry’s bank statement. It was tough to see what he’d written beside it, so I tapped my phone and enlarged the photo. “If you still can’t read it, let me do it for you. It says, and I quote, ‘Get the money Mike owes you. Just because he’s your brother doesn’t mean that he can bankrupt you.’ That’s his handwriting, isn’t it?”

Mike stared at for a few seconds, and then he looked away. “So what? That doesn’t prove anything.”

“You’re kidding yourself,” Moose said. “That’s motive enough for murder right there, not to mention the fact that you’re most likely going to inherit everything your brother had.” My grandfather was guessing, but it was a likely enough scenario.

Mike just laughed, though there was an empty ring to it. “Do you think it’s a prize inheriting my brother’s estate? The way things look right now, there are more debts than assets. All I’m going to get from this is one big headache.”

“What about this property?” I asked him. “Isn’t it a part of his estate? It’s got to be worth a small fortune all by itself.”

“In the end, that’s the only thing that’s going to save me,” Mike said. “I hadn’t realized it, but he put the deed in both our names when he bought the business. I had a small slice of the bakery and I didn’t even know it. Thankfully, it’s not part of the estate at all, since there’s a survivorship clause. It was Barry’s way of reaching out to me.” As he said that last bit, Mike’s face clouded a little, as though he’d instantly regretted sharing that particular tidbit of information with us.

“Do you expect us to believe that you didn’t know about it beforehand?” Moose pressed. “If you didn’t, how did you find out about it so quickly now? Your brother’s just been dead for a few hours.”

“His attorney came by to see me,” Mike said. “He wanted me to know the score before I did anything stupid. Barry told him that he didn’t want me to know that I owned a small part of his business. It was going to be a surprise once things really took off.”

“So, he didn’t want you to do anything stupid like selling the land to Rob Bester; is that what you’re talking about?” I asked.

Mike looked at me sharply. “Something exactly like that. The man turned out to be some kind of ghoul, if you ask me. He came out the second I got here and started hammering away at me about selling off this useless land to him.”

“It’s not as useless as he might like you to believe,” Moose said. “It’s a prime location, and there’s a clean slate here now, so it will be easy enough to start over with something new.”

“Probably, but I’m not going to be the one to do it. I just want this nightmare over with.”

“I can understand that,” I said. Rob’s actions didn’t make him all that great of a human being, but it didn’t make him a killer. That was still to be determined.

“We both get it,” Moose added, “but we’d still like to know about that money you borrowed from your brother.”

I could see in Mike’s gaze that Moose had finally pushed him just a little too hard that time. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

He started to walk away as Moose said, “We might not be able to make you talk, but the police certainly can.”

“Then I’ll save my answers for them,” he said.

Before he could get completely away, I called out, “Where were you this morning when the fire started?”

He didn’t even look back at us as he got into a beat-up old Honda and drove away.

“I probably shouldn’t have asked him for an alibi,” I said.

“Don’t blame yourself. I’m the one who ran him off.”

“Why did you ask him about the money he owed Barry?” I asked my grandfather. “Do you think it’s relevant?”

“It very well could be, but the real reason I asked was because I was curious. Aren’t you?” Moose asked me.

“Maybe, but there were other things we needed to find out more urgently, and now we’ve lost the opportunity.”

“Victoria, I’m sorry about that, but I have a hunch he wasn’t exactly in a sharing mood after he told us about the land. Did you see his face after he let that slip? I’m positive that he didn’t want us to know that.”

“Well, it does supply him with more of a motive for murder, doesn’t it?”

“As if owing his brother a small fortune and not having to pay it back wasn’t enough before,” Moose said.

“Maybe so,” I said. “Have we spoken with all of our suspects?”

“The ones we have so far,” Moose said.

“And where do we stand?”

My grandfather smiled as he admitted, “Right where we usually are at this stage of our investigations.”

“And where exactly is that?”

“Dazed, Confused, Overwhelmed, and Clueless,” he replied.

“That sounds about right,” I said with a grin. “So, what do we do now?”

“I say we go back to The Charming Moose and get a little work done there until something else turns up,” my grandfather said.

“Does that mean that you’re going to work at the diner today, too?” I asked him.

“Heck no. I’m collecting my wife and we’re going home. Running a diner is for you young folks.”