Bitter Sweet (14 page)

“Thanks,” he called out.

She gave up on the garage and got
into her van as the young man walked to the blue car. They both rolled out at
the same time.

As she drove back to the center
of town, Sam couldn’t help thinking about the strange encounter with Marshall
Gray. Although they’d only spoken on the phone he looked familiar, but how
could that be? She was certain they’d never met. His story was even more
suspect. On his way to the funeral home? The newspaper had said that there
would be no service for Sadie Gray. A private memorial was planned for later,
with cremation and interment of the ashes somewhere in Santa Fe. And what did
he take from the garage?

She should have checked it more
thoroughly on her previous visits or stopped him and asked more questions just
now.

Beau was at the bakery treating
himself to a cup of coffee and chatting with Jen when Sam walked in. The
display case was well stocked, with just enough items missing to show that
there had already been some early business.

“Hey there,” Beau said. “I hope
your mother didn’t call you again last night. You looked really beat.”

She stretched up and kissed his
cheek. “I was. But I slept fine.”

“It was a long day. I was just
telling Jen.”

“Speaking of my mother, although
I really don’t want to . . . She’s going to call back and the pressure to set
the date is getting really intense. Can you take a look at the calendar with
me?”

He followed her to the kitchen,
eyed Julio’s tattoos for a fraction of a second too long.

“I’ll tell you more about all of
it later,” she said conversationally, picking up the calendar, “but for now can
we see if any of these dates will work?”

Beau agreed that the summer
months were impossible. It wasn’t fair for Sam’s family to pressure her to
their schedules. She was the bride-to-be, she got to choose the date, and the
rest of them could work it in. Or not.

“Thank you,” she said. “Mother
has a way of making me feel selfish for wanting things my way.”

“Seriously?” His eyes edged
sideways.

She laughed. “Okay, you’re right.
I outgrew a lot of that when I left
Cottonville
,
never to return. This is more of a self-preservation thing. I don’t want to
start a war within the family.”

“Pick a date.” He stabbed his
finger on the second week of September.

She scooted the finger down by a
line. “Third week. The twenty-first?” She looked up and he nodded. “I shall
send Mother a text so she can’t talk me out of it. We’ll have invitations
printed before she can react.”

“I love it.” Beau kissed her. “I
love you.”

“And let’s plan a spectacular
honeymoon. Well, whatever we can budget. I’m thinking far away from either New
Mexico or Texas. It would be so nice to have a week or so with no bakery and no
emergency calls.”

From across the room Becky
started up with applause and some raucous cheers. Julio looked puzzled. Jen
came through the doorway.

“The wedding is September
twenty-first,” Sam said.

They decided to celebrate the
decision by taking a small cake from the display case, picking up sandwiches
along the way, and driving out to the spot where they’d gone for their first
date.

The rocky promontory overlooking
the Rio Grande Gorge might have been on another planet instead of only fifteen
minutes from the center of town. Miles of land, dotted with blue sage, broken
only by the jagged split in the earth. They spread a blanket on a rocky shelf
and stared down into the depths of the six-hundred foot gorge, where a skinny
brown ribbon of water wound its way southward, with tiny white tufts the only
indication of the massive rapids where rafters loved to test their skills. In
the midday heat of June it wasn’t quite the same romantic ambiance as it had
been on that autumn evening at sunset but Sam loved the place anyway.

They toasted each other with
lemonade and shared their sandwiches. Sam gazed fondly at the antique garnet
ring on her left hand.

“I’ll get you something more
impressive—you should get to choose your own,” Beau said. “You know that Mama
only insisted that I give you her ring as a token, so you would have something
to wear home that night.”

“I love this one. I was just
thinking of Iris—the ring always reminds me what a special lady she was.”

He squeezed her hand then faced
the steep rock walls and let out a cowboy whoop. It echoed back and forth
across the wide, empty space.

“You did that on our first date,”
she said. “Seeing your playful side might have been the very thing that made me
fall in love with you.”

“Aw, shucks, ma’am,” he said. He
doffed his Stetson, sweeping it low.

“Uh, you don’t have to take it
quite that far.” She poked him in the ribs and he reached out as if to tickle
her but then he slipped his arms around her waist and pulled her close for a
long kiss.

“Umm . . . it would be really
tempting right now to sneak away and take the afternoon off,” she said. “Except
we did that yesterday and I’ll have desperate customers if I don’t get back
soon.”

“I know. My phone has been going
almost nonstop since we got here. I just didn’t want to interrupt the mood.”

“You better see who it was. One
of your deputies is likely to put an APB out on you.” She gathered the remains
of the impromptu picnic and started to fold the blanket.

Beau pulled the phone from his
pocket and scrolled through the messages. “Well, darn, I would have liked to
catch this one. The others can wait.”

“Something to do with the trip yesterday?”

“Yeah, I hope so. I put in some
calls to the names on Debbie O’Malley’s list. This looks like the right area
code for Ted’s cousin in Reno.”

He pressed the redial button
while Sam put their things in the cruiser and buckled herself in. As Beau pulled
onto the winding path to the road she could hear a voice come through.

“Yeah, Mike. Thanks for returning
my call. I’m driving at the moment so I’m going to put you on speaker.” He
pressed a button and set the phone into a little cradle mounted on the dash. “I
don’t know if your wife told you, but I’m trying to get hold of your cousin
Ted. Wonder if you’ve seen him lately.” He’d adopted the tone of a friend.

“Teddy?” The voice on the other
end came through pretty fuzzy, a male that was probably about Ted’s age and may
have had a couple of beers already. “Yeah, actually. You just missed him.
Didn’t Marsha tell you he was just here?”

“Oh, damn,” Beau said. “I need to
catch up with him. I owe him some money.”

“I doubt he’ll miss it,” the guy
named Mike said. “He’s doing real well now. Stayed at the MGM Grand—except it’s
got some other name now. Anyhow, Ted took us out for a real nice dinner. He’s
driving a brand new Cadillac. Man that thing was sweet. He let me drive us all
around.”

Sam felt her teeth grind. Hadn’t
she predicted this? Out on the town with the proceeds from Lila’s estate and
he’d still taken Debbie’s small stash of cash, probably out of habit.

“Really?” Beau said. “Where’d he
get that kind of dough?”

“Said some old gal left it to him
in her will. Hell, I didn’t care. I was just having a blast driving that car.”

“So he left Reno already? Did he
say where he was headed?”

There was a pause on the line.
“He kept talking about how he was
gonna
move to
London and go look up the Queen. Hey, man, I’d had a few scotches by then—the
really good stuff. But then some guy called him while we was driving around.
Teddy just said, ‘Hey Marshall, great. I’ll meet you in Albuquerque.’ That’s in
New Mexico, right?”

Beau stayed quiet, hoping Mike
would remember some more but he only seemed interested in talking about that
new red Cadillac. Finally, he cut in. “Well, thanks, man. Look, if you do hear
from him again find out where he is and give me a call back. I still owe him
this money.”

“Well, you can always send it to
me,” Mike joked.

Beau said goodbye and clicked off
the call. “Yeah, right.”

“He said Marshall—as in Marshall
Gray? They know each other?” Sam asked. “I ran into him this morning and he
seemed to be in a real hurry.”

“The two of them are meeting up in
Albuquerque. Do you suppose they plan to head for London now? Gray was trying
to get out of the country a few days ago.”

Sam worked to piece it all
together. “So if these two are friends . . . and they both just happen to have
been married to older women, and both women died within a week of each other?”

“Seems really hinky to me.” He
steered the cruiser onto the paved highway and coasted along, pondering the new
information.

“Well, can’t you get the
Albuquerque police on it? Bring the men in and question them?”

“We tried that with Marshall Gray
before. There just wasn’t any real evidence. We might get Ted O’Malley for
stealing Debbie’s little cash hoard, but he’s going to deny it altogether or
claim she gave him the money. I need more than this before I can really nail
either of them.”

“What about the real possibility
that the two wives were murdered? I mean, this is looking worse by the minute.
Way too many coincidences.” She looked at him. “Don’t you think?”

“I do, Sam. But I’ve already
inquired about the cause of death in each case. Lila Coffey died of heart
failure, Sadie Gray was nearly ninety and just went peacefully in her sleep.
There’s not a shred of evidence that either of them were murdered.”

Sam chafed at the situation. This
felt all wrong and yet there was no viable reason to arrest either of the
husbands. They would simply have to dig deeper.

They passed open ranch land on
the north end of town and Beau slowed the cruiser as they approached the
scattering of gas stations, artisan shops and grocery markets which
characterized the outskirts of town. By the time they reached the Plaza and
Beau turned toward Sweet’s Sweets to drop her off, her mind automatically began
the shift to bakery business and the fact that all this time away wasn’t helping.
Within an hour she found herself immersed in her little world of sugar and
chocolate.

“Sam,” Jen said, interrupting her
reverie. “Ivan’s here for the Chocoholics order.”

The weekly mystery book club met
at the bookstore next door and Sam had provided them with decadent treats for
as long as she could remember. The only criteria was that the creation live up
to the group’s name, Chocoholics Unanimous.

Sam placed the final dark
chocolate rose on the white-chocolate covered cake and scrutinized it quickly
before picking it up to carry to the front.

“Ah, Madame Samantha, is another
of your fantastical makings,” Ivan Petrenko, the bookstore owner exclaimed. He
handed a check to Jen while Sam placed the cake into a box. Ivan smiled widely
as he picked it up.

“I am making recommending to a
friend of your shop,” he said. Despite butchering the finer points of English,
Ivan’s heart was in the right place. “A lady, most recently married.”

“Thank you, Ivan,” Sam said. “Who
is it? I’ll be sure to personally help her.”

“Renata is her name. Come
original from the old country, near my home in Russia. Have been in America
many years.”

Ivan’s own history was still a
little sketchy. Rumor said he was a Russian with a ballet-dancer wife who’d
defected to France, and somewhere in there he’d worked in a diamond mine,
apprenticed with a Cordon Bleu chef and lived in New York. Sam had no idea how
much of it to believe.

“Well, you can tell Renata to ask
for me and I’ll take good care of her,” Sam told him. She watched as he walked
out with the chocolate creation, feeling a small twinge of regret that she’d
not found time to continue attending the book club since she’d opened the
bakery.

“Sam, what do you think about
this bridal shower cake?” Becky asked as she walked back into the kitchen.
“Does it need more flowers?”

“It’s gorgeous,” Sam said. “I’d
leave it exactly the way you have it.”

She watched Becky lift the sheet
cake and carry it to the walk-in.

“What else is on the schedule
this afternoon?” she said, reaching for the stack of orders.

She’d no sooner verified that
they had sufficient layers baked for the weddings that would come due in the
next two days than Jen stepped through the curtain.

“Ivan’s friend is here already,”
she said, sotto voce. “Renata.” She grinned and gave the name a flashy accent.

Sam picked up her order pad and
hurried forward.

“Madame Samantha?” A slender
redhead stepped forward, extending a well-manicured hand with copper polish
that matched her shoes and handbag. Her vivid turquoise sheath practically glowed
in contrast. “I am Renata Fai—, um, Renata Butler. I just love saying my new
name,” she added with a giggle.

If she’d come from Russia, it was
a long time ago. Barely a hint of accent remained. Sam guessed that she might
be in her fifties, but a lot of that time must have been spent under the care
of masseuses and skin care specialists. She was absolutely gorgeous.

Sam shook her hand. “Just call me
Sam. Ivan tends to be a bit formal, but it’s not necessary.”

“Perfect. Sam, this is my
husband, James.” Renata turned to the man Sam had hardly noticed, a
good-looking guy in khaki slacks and a navy blue knit shirt. The white skin on
his neck showed that his dark hair had been recently cut, and he twirled the
shiny gold ring on his finger as if he were still getting used to it. Sam got a
quick vision of him in jeans and a T-shirt, very casual, longer hair. When she
blinked, the image went away. Where had that come from?

“Please, have a seat at one of
the tables,” Sam said. “Ivan didn’t mention what type of cake you wanted.”