A Sheetcake Named Desire (16 page)

Nineteen

Steering my thoughts away from last night’s fiasco and onto the issues facing Zydeco, I parked in the employee lot and let myself in through the back door. With the bid deadline coming up next week, I had to spend some time searching for that missing design, but then I wanted to get to work on something artistic and constructive.

We had three cakes scheduled for delivery today. The first was the monkey cake that Sparkle had been working on yesterday. The second, a sweet-sixteen birthday cake, was a three-tier whimsical stack covered in colorful fondant stripes and dots, topped off with a huge fondant bow. It would be challenging in several ways, not the least of which would be controlling the weight of each tier and making each layer perfectly even so the cake would look as if it were about to topple over without actually doing so.

The third cake on the agenda was a sculpted cake that the client wanted to look like a crab boil, complete with fondant painted to look like newsprint covering the sheetcake base, cobs of corn, crab claws, and mallets—all sculpted out of modeling chocolate.

Not only was I anxious to do the work I loved, but spending time with the staff would allow me to assess their strengths and weaknesses so I could offer Miss Frankie suggestions for how to go on from here. And it would give me an opening to ask about the other strange things that had been happening without pulling them off task. And with Ox out of the picture, someone had to make sure the operation ran smoothly. All in all, it was a bad day for a hangover.

After stowing my gear in Philippe’s office, Edie and I arranged for a couple of staff members to retrieve Miss Frankie’s car from the Dizzy Duke and return it to her, while we spent some time hunting for the missing cake design in her office, the supply closet, and the break room. We gave Philippe’s office one more toss and turned the conference room inside out before moving on to the design room. The staff, minus Ox, were all present and accounted for, with everyone working on some aspect of the cakes. I felt reassured, knowing the group was all professional enough to do the work without someone cracking the whip every second.

Dwight, who was covered in white from the net covering his shaggy hair to the beard restraint on his chin, finished prepping the base for the whimsical birthday cake, while Burt applied edible paint to the crab claws with an airbrush. Across the room, I spotted Estelle cutting geometric shapes from a sheet of fondant and Sparkle at the table next to her using a veining tool to create lifelike kernels on a corncob made of modeling chocolate.

Burt spotted Edie and me as we came through the door and put down the piece he’d been spraying. He turned off the sprayer and turned on the charm, flashing a dimpled grin as I walked toward him.

“This was Ox’s project,” he said to me. “Do you want to take over now?”

I waved away the offer. “You’re doing fine. Right now, I’m worried about finding the design that’s gone missing. Have you seen it lying around anywhere?”

“The one for the bid on the fifteenth?” Burt glanced uncertainly at Dwight. “Not me. What about you?”

The part of Dwight’s face I could see looked annoyed at the interruption. He inserted a dowel into the bottom tier of cake and stepped back to make sure he’d centered it correctly. “I came in early and took this room apart this morning. No sign of it in here.”

My head was still pounding after last night’s binge, so I pulled a stool to his table and made myself comfortable. “I just don’t understand how it could disappear so completely.”

Dwight pulled out a measuring tape and stretched over the next tier to measure width, height, and circumference. “That’s no mystery,” he said when he had the figures he needed. “Somebody took it.”

It was looking more and more like he was right, but I wanted to exhaust every other possibility before I went down that road. “You don’t think maybe Philippe left it somewhere?”

Dwight smiled as if I’d said something funny. “You knew Philippe better than anyone. You know how he was about things like that.”

“I thought I knew him once, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

“He didn’t change that much,” Dwight assured me.

I found that strangely comforting. “Okay, so who took the design, and why? Any guesses?”

He raised one eyebrow. “You want the whole list?”

“The whole list,” I said.

Dwight stopped working and leaned against the table, crossing one foot over the other. “Okay, start with Dmitri Wolff. He’s a competitor, and he’s bidding on the same project. He’s the most likely suspect, if you ask me.”

“He’s got my vote,” I said, “except for the fact that nobody saw him around that morning, so I don’t know how he could have taken it.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. He could have come in through the back gate. It’s usually locked, but it wouldn’t be that hard to get around.”

“The one by the rose garden? It was locked that morning. I saw it myself. You think he attacked Ox, killed Philippe, stole the design,
and
got away without anyone spotting him?”

Dwight shrugged. “Maybe. Or not. It doesn’t seem very likely though, does it?”

“Not really. So who else is on your list?”

Dwight didn’t even hesitate with his next suspect. “Ox. He’s been acting weird for weeks.”

“But why would he take the design? What could he possibly have to gain?”

Dwight used his shoulder to adjust his beard shield. “It’s no secret that he’s been unhappy for the past few weeks.”

“That’s what everyone keeps saying, but nobody will tell me why. What could possibly have come between Philippe and Ox?”

“Two things,” Dwight said. “Quinn for one. Dmitri Wolff for the other.”

The first name didn’t surprise me. The more I learned about Quinn, the more I thought she’d brought about some big changes in my ex. But the second name was a bit of a shock. “Dmitri came between Philippe and Ox? How so?”

Dwight spent a minute stacking the second tier on the cake before he answered. “Dmitri’s been trying to drive Zydeco out of business since the day we first opened our doors. I think he’s talked to just about everybody on staff about jumping ship, but as far as I know Ox is the only one who listened.”

I couldn’t have been more stunned if he’d thrown the cake to the floor at my feet. “Ox was thinking about going to work for Dmitri? Are you sure about that?” Dwight gave me a tight-lipped nod, but I just couldn’t believe it. “He
told
you that?”

Dwight sized up the work he’d done and clipped three more dowels to size. “Things got rough for Ox after Quinn started hanging around,” he said. “She had issues with how close he and Philippe were—probably thought Ox was going to get the business, but she had her heart set on keeping it where she could get her hands on it eventually.”

“So she tried to destroy their friendship?”

Dwight locked eyes with me. “She didn’t just try.”

“But I don’t understand. Why did Philippe listen to her?”

“He was head over heels for her, Rita. She had him wrapped around her little finger. When she said ‘jump,’ he asked how high.”

I felt a little flash of hurt, but I pushed it aside. “So Ox considered accepting Dmitri’s offer because of Quinn?”

Dwight’s gaze darted to mine for a heartbeat. “He said he could see the writing on the wall. She wanted him out, and he was pretty sure she’d get her way in the end. He tried to fight it for a while, but he finally realized it was a losing battle.”

I felt a little sick to my stomach hearing that. “Then why didn’t he just leave? Why stick around and fight a losing battle?”

“I’ll give you three guesses.”

The look on Dwight’s face made it easy to figure out what he meant. “You think he stayed around to sabotage the business and get back at Philippe.”

Dwight picked up a ruler, took a measurement or two and carefully shaved a millimeter-thin slice of cake from the bottom of the tier. “I think that’s exactly what he did.”

“After everything they’d been through together?”

“
Because
of everything they’d been through together. They both thought the other one was stabbing them in the back. So maybe Ox decided to take things a step further.”

“So you think Ox is responsible for all the accidents, the broken and missing equipment? And you think he killed Philippe?”

Dwight looked around the room with another shrug. “I think it’s possible.”

“Maybe,” I admitted reluctantly. “So who else is on your list? Is there anyone else around here who’d want to sabotage Philippe?”

Dwight smoothed the jagged ends of the dowels he’d just clipped. “You think the saboteur and the murderer are two different people?”

“Maybe,” I said again. “The police are working on the murder. I’m just trying to help Miss Frankie figure out who was trying to hurt Zydeco. Whoever’s sabotaging the company, it has to be someone with access to the building, right? So who has keys? Maybe we can narrow it down that way.”

“Nice try, but we all have keys to this area,” Dwight said.

“You know how it goes in this business. If your part of a project takes longer than you expected or something goes wrong, you might have to pull an all-nighter.”

And Philippe had never been one to babysit his coworkers. That at least hadn’t changed. “Did all of the accidents happen in this part of the bakery?”

Dwight nodded again. “Pretty much.”

“Who has keys to the front offices?”

“Edie. Ox. Philippe. That’s it as far as I know.”

I felt a faint glimmer of hope. “Then maybe it wasn’t Ox. He could have done anything, anywhere, but the accidents were all confined to this area.”

“Ox isn’t stupid,” Dwight said. “He wouldn’t leave that kind of calling card.”

He was probably right, but the “evidence” against Ox was circumstantial, at best. “So Ox is the only person at Zydeco who had an issue with Philippe?”

Dwight didn’t answer immediately, and that was enough for me. “Who else?”

“It’s probably nothing,” he said as he lowered the second tier back to the table.

“Who else?”

He met my gaze, but only for an instant. “It’s crazy. I know that. But you know how protective she’s always been of Philippe.”

“Edie?” The name squeaked out too loud. I lowered my voice and asked, “You think
Edie’s
been sabotaging Zydeco?”

“I know, right? Crazy. But you asked.”

“Maybe you should fill me in on what’s been going on with Edie and Philippe.”

“You know that Edie had a thing for Philippe back in pastry school. Everybody knew it.”

I’d always suspected as much, but I’d never let it bother me. But what if I’d been wrong? What if Edie’s feelings had run deeper than I suspected? I forced myself to ask, “Did he have feelings for her, too?”

“Not that I know of. It was a one-sided deal as far as I know.” Dwight fell silent while he lowered the second tier onto the first. Satisfied with the way it looked, he leaned against the counter and eyed me for a minute. “Does that bother you?”

I shook my head quickly. “Not really. I suspected her feelings for him in pastry school, but I never took it seriously, and I always thought she’d gotten over him.”

“Edie doesn’t get over things,” Dwight said. “She doesn’t forget or forgive.”

The hair on my neck stood up. “You know that from experience?”

Dwight carefully inserted dowels through both tiers before he answered me. Had I made him nervous, or was he just focused on the work? Hard to tell. “I guess there’s no harm in telling you,” he said at last. His voice was so low I could barely hear him. “She and I had a thing back in pastry school. Nothing serious—at least not in my book. We went out for a few weeks, but I decided she was too intense for me. I wasn’t interested in settling down and tying myself to one person.”

I tried not to look shocked, but I had as much trouble picturing Dwight and Edie dating as I’d had visualizing Ox and Isabeau together. “I’m guessing she didn’t feel the same way.”

“Not even close. After our second week together, she was already reading bride magazines and talking about names for our kids.”

“So you ended it.”

“As gently as I could. We went our separate ways after pastry school, and I never saw her again until I came here.” He swiped at his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket. “Let’s just say she wasn’t happy to see me.”

“What did she do?”

“She tried to convince Philippe to get rid of me. When that didn’t work, she tried to drive me away. It was just little things at first—something missing from the kitchen, my keys disappearing for most of one day—minor annoyances, really. Nothing serious.”

“Did you tell Philippe?”

Dwight nodded. “I didn’t run to him and snitch, if that’s what you’re asking. But I did tell him about it later, after she gave up trying to drive me away.”

“What did he do?”

“What could he do? I didn’t have any real proof, but I knew it was her.”

“And you think she’s pulling the same kind of stunt now.” It was possible, and my own suspicions about her just added weight to his. “I have to admit that I’ve wondered for a while if she was diverting my messages to Philippe,” I said. “But it doesn’t really make sense. If she had a thing for Philippe, why would she stand in the way of our divorce? And she seems pretty loyal to Zydeco, so why would she do something that would destroy her career and put Philippe’s legacy at risk?”