Bitter Sweet (26 page)

They asked a few more questions,
but Sally didn’t seem to be able to describe Smith or even remember
specifically who he was. Feeling at a dead end, they thanked her for the
lemonade and left.

“She didn’t exactly confirm that
either the preacher or the lawyer threatened Iris’s life,” Sam said as they
drove back toward Beau’s office. “But obviously, your mother didn’t want them
around. And I do believe that she felt threatened in some way.”

“Mama had good instincts about
people. Before she got sick she would ask me about my cases. She’d say ‘I got a
feeling about that guy,’ and I was amazed at how often her feelings about
somebody turned out to be right.”

Sam rode in silence, wondering
once again about the note she’d found at the bakery this morning. Somebody knew
she was asking questions and that person was afraid enough of the answers to
threaten her.

Beau parked in his reserved spot
at the department and asked Sam if she wanted to come in. But she knew how busy
he was.

“Hey, since this is actually
supposed to be a day off for both of us, how about I get away from here as
early as I can and we’ll do something fun for a change. A movie or a picnic?”

Anything would be better than
constantly worrying about bogeymen lurking around corners and leaving notes
under doors.

“Call me when you’re free,” she
said. “I’ll be home later and we can make a plan.”

For all her desire to stop thinking about
nursing homes and the problems of the older ladies whose lives had crossed her
path recently, she still wanted to check on Renata Butler. If she didn’t try
harder to stress the warning about watching her back, Sam knew she would be
letting her new friend down. A quick visit surely couldn’t hurt.

The parking lot at Life Therapy
was more crowded now and Sam parked her van as far from the administrative
office windows as she could. Encountering Robert Woods after the tense visit
earlier probably wouldn’t serve her present mission. She learned Renata
Butler’s room number with a quiet inquiry at the desk and ducked down the hall.

Renata’s bruises had reached the
yellow-green stage now, but she lay in the bed with her eyes closed. Her legs
were propped on a stack of pillows and the stiff collar still encircled her
neck.

“Renata?” Sam whispered. “Are you
awake?”

She stepped closer to the bed and
watched Renata’s eyelids flutter open.

“It’s me, Samantha Sweet,” Sam
said. “How are you feeling today?”

The patient’s mouth moved but it
took awhile for her to get any words out. “Samantha? Why are you here?” It came
out as
whyr
here
.

“I wanted to see how you’re
doing.”

“Medicine. Sleepy.”

“I won’t stay long. But I’m
worried about you. Has James been here with you?”

Renata’s dark eyes moved back and
forth. “Jimmy, are you here?”
Again
her words were slurred and run together.

“He’s not in the room now,
Renata. Was he here earlier?”

She nodded and started to raise
her head from the pillow. “Ooh. Dizzy.”

“Don’t try to move.”

“Do you remember the accident,
what happened with the brakes not working?”

A cautious nod.

“Had anyone worked on your car
before you drove it that day?”

Renata’s eyebrows drew together
and she winced at the stitched gash on her forehead. “Don’t
rememmer
any work.” She glanced sideways and noticed the plastic cup on the nightstand.

“Water, please.”

Sam picked up the cup and aimed
the straw so Renata could sip. After a couple of long draws she took a deep
breath and became more alert.

“Sorry, Sam. I guess it’s . . .
the medication.” She paused for a breath. “I’m supposed to get much rest so I
can start exercises soon.”

“Honey, I brought—”

Sam turned to see James Butler
stop abruptly in the doorway.

“Hello, James. I just stopped in
to see how Renata is doing.”

“I didn’t realize you were such a
caring friend,” he said, sidestepping around her and standing at the foot of
the bed. He had a blanket draped over his arm.

“I brought you this extra
blanket, sweetheart,” he said to his wife. “Last night you kept talking in your
sleep and saying your toes were cold.”

Renata smiled at him. “I don’t
remember.”

“Well, you’re still a little
loopy from the medicines. But that’s why I’m here. To take care of you.” He
said this last bit somewhat pointedly, letting Sam know she wasn’t needed.

She met his stare, wondering if
he was the one who’d slipped the threatening note under her door. A smile
masked the fact that her teeth were clenched. She’d wanted to tell Renata about
her suspicions, to warn her to be very careful. But what could she say, really?
Nothing, with James standing right there.

He circled the bed, tucking
Renata’s blankets around her, patting her hand, laying his wrist against her
forehead. He clearly wasn’t going anywhere as long as Sam was in the room.

There didn’t seem much more to
say or anything Sam could do, so she wished Renata well and left. At the end of
the hall a nurse stood at a desk, preparing little white paper cups with
medications for each room.

“Excuse me,” Sam said. “Is Renata
Butler supposed to be on strong sedatives?”

The nurse shot her a look. “Are
you a relative, ma’am?”

Sam’s hesitation gave her the
answer and it was pointless to try to bluff her way through with a lie.

“I’m sorry, I can’t share any
information about a patient’s care except with relatives whose names we have in
our charts.”

Well, what did I think?
Sam
fumed.
They weren’t just going to confide in me because I asked.

Sitting in her van while the air
conditioning blew the pent-up hot air out the open windows, Sam went back over
her list of suspects. James Butler seemed the most likely to have sent the
threatening note. He’d just seen her when Renata was admitted, the afternoon
before the note was left. Ridley Redfearn’s name had come up in questions to
both the nursing home director and the nurse, Sally
Roundtree
.
But those queries were made after the note arrived.

And where were Marshall Gray and
Ted O’Malley all this time? It was beginning to look like both of them had
cleaned out their wives’ fortunes and hit the road. Plus, why would either of
them threaten Sam now? Both had neatly ducked around all her inquiries and
probably just thought she was the chubby baker who stuck her nose in where it
didn’t belong. Not an actual threat.

And maybe she was just that—the
outsider who got involved where she didn’t belong. A blanket of discouragement
settled on her.

“This is stupid,” she said to the
bright blue sky. She powered her windows up and drove toward home.

“I am not going to get involved.
Not anymore.” She practically chanted to herself as she pulled into her
driveway and let herself in the back door. “It’s not my business, not my
problem.”

“Mom? Did you say something?”
Kelly was standing in front of the open refrigerator.

“Choose something or close that
door.”

“Geez, sorry.”

Sam hung her pack on the hook
near the back door. “Sorry,
Kel
. I just—”

“I know, you’ve told me a million
times about wasting energy.”

“It’s not that.” Sam shuffled
across the room, turned around, went to the sink for a glass of water.

“Did you find out something bad
about what happened to Iris?”

“No. Well, yes and no.” She took
a long drink from the glass. “I’m not sure.”

Kelly arched her eyebrows and
turned back to the fridge, opening the door a few inches and reaching inside,
coming out with an apple and closing the door immediately.

“Sorry,
Kel
,
I don’t mean to be secretive. We asked a lot of questions but didn’t really get
any good answers. Beau is discouraged because there’s nothing he can change
about it. And I’m seeing killers everywhere, but I can’t really explain why.”
She set the glass down on the countertop. “So . . . I don’t know what to tell
you.”

Kelly reached an arm out and gave
Sam’s shoulders a squeeze. “It’s okay, Mom. Everything eventually sorts itself
out, doesn’t it?”

She went into the living room and
the TV came on. Sam remembered her waning supply of clean clothes so she went
into her room and sorted the heaping basket into two loads and threw the light
colors into the washer. She felt at loose ends but couldn’t summon up the
energy to tackle in-depth house cleaning. After tidying the kitchen and putting
away a few straggler items, she found herself staring at the phone and
wondering what time Beau would call about that movie.

Too high school.
She
dialed him.

“I was about to call,
darlin
’. This day is just getting impossible for me.”

As he’d predicted, two deputies
phoned in sick and he’d been called out to restore order to a concert in the
park that had gotten a little wild. Sam assured him it was okay.

Running through her list of ways
to occupy herself, work always seemed to top it. Hadn’t she just been feeling
overwhelmed at the bakery because there were too many orders, too little time?
So, what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than making up extra flowers
and trims, getting a bit ahead of the game for the coming week?

Kelly gave an agreeable, if
distracted, nod when Sam asked if she would mind transferring the clothes from
washer to dryer and starting the next load. Sam grabbed herself some leftover
chicken salad for lunch and headed out.

Her mood still felt gray.
Disappointment over not having the day off with Beau, that vague unease over
the way she’d left things with Renata, the nagging doubts over Sadie Gray and
Lila Coffey’s deaths. And then there were the terse conversations she’d had
recently with her mother. And maybe, just maybe, she was hormonal as hell.

She let the thoughts ramble
around in her head, hoping they would all vanish once she got to her shop and
started creating. No matter how much work it became, Sam knew she would always
love that artistic rush she got when she began working with her hands. Dough
and sugar and chocolate and fondant were her media, but the satisfaction was
the same as if they’d been clay or paint. She sighed and turned her mind to
those happy things.

The feeling stayed with her while
she pulled into the alley, got out of the van, and walked up the steps. But the
moment she reached the back door something felt wrong. The door wasn’t shut
tight. She pushed against it and the metal was hot. When it swung inward, a
billow of smoke hit her in the face.

Sam reeled away from it,
backward, tumbling down the concrete steps.

She scrabbled to her feet,
started to run up the stairs, realized the futility of it. Smoke obscured the
interior completely. She choked on it and backed down, her heart racing.
Grasping for her phone she punched in 911.

“Fire!” It was all she could
think.

The dispatcher was talking but
Sam could only hear the rushing blood in her head and the crackle of flames
from the building.

“Sweet’s Sweets, my bakery. It’s
on La
Placita
. Get the fire trucks here!”

The female voice said something
about staying on the line. Sam couldn’t make out the words. Panic rose and she
stared up and down the alley, hoping a water hose would magically appear. She
forced herself to slow down and think.

“Tell them to come to the alley
behind the building. I think that’s the worst part.” Truthfully, she had no
idea.

When sirens began to sound down
the street she realized she ought to move the van out of their way. She gave up
on holding the phone to her ear and just yanked the door open and started the
vehicle. At the far end of the alley she made a quick turn and pulled around to
the parking lot in front of the row of businesses.

Ivan’s bookshop.
Riki’s
pet grooming. The little gift shop farther down.
They could all be lost if the fire spread. Not to mention her life savings and
all her work. A lump filled her throat and she couldn’t breathe. She whipped
the van into a spot away from the building, leaped out and ran for her shop.

Two fire trucks roared past the
parking lot and slowed for the alley turnoff.

From the front of the building,
Sam couldn’t see any smoke yet. She raced to the front windows and stared in.
The cakes in the window display sat there as if nothing were happening. Her
antique display cases were empty, as expected. The bistro tables and chairs
were in their normal spots. So far the fire seemed contained in the kitchen,
but it would take nothing at all for it to pass through the curtained doorway
and destroy this room as well.

She could hear shouts behind the
building. She ran toward them.

Men in black helmets and
glow-yellow coats and pants were unrolling hoses. A tall guy of about fifty was
shouting orders. He spotted her at the corner.

“Ma’am, stay back!”

“It’s my business,” she yelled.

“You have to stay back!”

She clung to the corner of the
building, daring anyone to make her move away, refusing to lose sight of her
back door. Water began pumping and the air smelled of smoke and dampness. A
small crowd began to gather. The shouts and sirens and voices blurred into a
solid chunk of noise.

A pair of arms went around Sam,
coming from behind. She swung out, daring whoever it was to make her move.

“Sam, stop!” It was Beau. “
Darlin
’ hold on. It’s just me.”

“Oh, Beau, my place is on fire!
What—”

“I heard the call,” he said. “I
was out on Salazar Road or I would have gotten here faster. What happened?”