Drop Dead Chocolate (29 page)

“Grace, I shouldn’t even have to say this, but I’ve got all of the time in the world for you,” I said as I settled down on one side of the couch.

She nodded as she sat beside me, and then she started to talk.

“I just found out that Peter Morgan is a liar and a cheat,” she said, her voice now strangely calm as she blurted the information out matter of factly. “I knew he seemed to be too good to be true when we first met, and in the end, it turned out that I had been right all along.”

It wasn’t a huge secret to the world that I’d never been all that big a fan of Peter’s, though Grace had clearly been crazy about the man. I’d done my best to accept him, but it hadn’t been easy. He’d been a little too slick for my taste, and a bit more manipulative than I’d liked, but I couldn’t say that to Grace, especially now that he’d broken her heart and proven my doubts about him had all been right. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“At first, it was a lot of little things that didn’t add up,” she said. “He wouldn’t answer his phone sometimes when we were together, and he’d be late for no real reason when we were supposed to have a date.”

Surely there had to be more than that. “Go on,” I said.

Grace bit her lower lip, and then continued. “I caught a whiff of someone else’s perfume on his shirt collar last night. It might have been innocent enough, and I was going to do my best to forget it, but I couldn’t. I decided that I was going to talk to him about it at dinner tonight. Something happened before that, though. About an hour ago, we were at my place getting ready to go out. We’d been sitting on the couch discussing where we were going to eat, and he’d asked to wash up a little before we left for the restaurant. While he was gone, I heard his phone ringing, and I realized that it must have slipped out of his pocket and was buried under a seat cushion.” Grace looked at me intently as she added, “Suzanne, I wasn’t snooping. Honestly, I didn’t think a thing about it. When a phone rings, I answer it. It’s some kind of compulsion I have.”

“I don’t see how anybody could blame you for that. Who was calling?” I asked. “Did you look at the Caller ID?”

She nodded, and I could see her fighting back another onslaught of tears. I touched her shoulder lightly. “Grace, do you need to take a second? You don’t have to tell me all at once, you know.”

She took a few moments to collect herself, and then nodded. “It’s okay. I’m fine. At least I will be.” After blowing her nose, she explained, “It was Leah Gentry.”

I knew Leah, and she wasn’t one of my favorite people in April Springs. In her early twenties, Leah worked at her uncle’s hardware store down the street from Donut Hearts; there wasn’t a man in all of April Springs she hadn’t made a pass at at least once. I’d had my own run-ins with her uncle, Burt Gentry, enough times in the past to realize that bad attitudes must run in their family, and that particular apple was sitting pretty close to the tree.

“I hate to ask this, but could it have all just been innocent?” I asked, playing Devil’s advocate for a second. I wasn’t at all interested in defending the man, but I didn’t want Grace to jump to any conclusions either, at least not without all of the facts.

“Actually, she tried to make it sound that way when I answered Peter’s phone,” Grace explained. “Leah made up something on the spur of the moment about a part he had ordered coming into the hardware store, but it was clear to me that she was lying. When I pushed her on it, Leah mumbled something incoherent and hung up just as Peter came back into the room. Do you want to know what his first reaction was when he saw me holding his cell phone? He looked angry when he saw that it was in my hand, and he tried to grab it from me. I held it away from him, though, and asked him about Leah. For a few seconds, I saw him searching for any excuse he thought I would buy, and as he tried to come up with something I might accept, I hit the menu button and checked his recent calls.” Grace looked down at her hands, and then said, “I shouldn’t have done that. I know that now. But I just had to know just how big a liar he actually was.”

I wasn’t about to let Grace beat herself up for doing something to stand up for herself. “Are you kidding? I think that was brilliant. I’m not at all sure that I would have been smart enough to do that, not under those circumstances. What did you find in his records?”

Her voice died a little as she said, “Leah wasn’t the only woman’s name there, not by a long shot, though she was listed a dozen times. When I think about it now, I don’t know how he had time to date me at all.”

“What did you do when you saw that list of women?” I asked, dying to hear what had happened next. Well, that wasn’t entirely true; I knew the end result. What I didn’t know was how it had come about from that initial discovery to her sitting on my couch with me.

“I confronted him about it,” Grace said, “and you won’t believe this, but the jerk actually admitted it. I guess he just couldn’t be bothered with coming up with an explanation that I might swallow. Peter told me that he’d made a few mistakes in the past, but that I was important to him. He even promised me that he’d drop every one of the other women he was seeing in a heartbeat if I’d forgive him and try to work things out between us.”

“But you couldn’t do that, could you?”

Grace shook her head. “He lied to me so much, how could I ever believe him again? I was about to break up with him right then and there when his phone rang again.”

“Was it Leah calling back?” I asked. “She doesn’t give up, does she?”

“No, but it was another woman.”

“What did you do then?” I knew my best friend had a big and generous heart, but I also knew that if someone crossed her one too many times, she could be as hard as stone, and cold as ice.

Grace shook her head gently, as though she was trying to delicately dislodge a bad memory. “I opened the front door, threw his phone out into the front yard, and then I told him that we were through. I’m done with him, and he knows it.”

“I still can’t believe that Leah would do something like that to you,” I said. “She’s no one I’d ever be friends with, but there are rules about this sort of thing, you know? She had to know that the two of you were dating. It’s not like it was a big secret or anything.” I suppose the young woman was pretty, in a brassy kind of way, and some men seemed to enjoy her attention, but she couldn’t hold a candle to Grace, inside or out. What would cause a man who had Grace’s heart to go after a woman like Leah? He’d traded gold for lead, and my friend’s heart was broken because of it.

“I’m not happy with her either, that’s for sure, and I won’t make a single excuse for her, but I can’t help thinking that Peter’s the real snake here.” Grace hesitated, and then added, “You know what? If she wants him, she can have him. I’ll be just fine without him. I don’t have to have a man in my life.” She broke down again, and as I hugged her, I knew that she had loved this man, and he’d betrayed her. I couldn’t imagine how I’d react if I’d caught Jake Bishop doing anything like that, but then again, I couldn’t even fathom the circumstances where he would think about it for one split second. Jake was many things, sometimes frustrating me beyond explanation, but he was loyal and trustworthy; I knew that in my heart.

It was close to eight when Grace finally stood. Had we really been talking for over an hour? “I’ve kept you up long enough, Suzanne,” she said. “You need your sleep.”

“I’m okay, honest,” I said as I stood. Unfortunately, a yawn slipped out just then, though I tried my best to kill it.

She smiled at me. “Suzanne Hart, you’re the best friend I could ever ask for, but you’re a terrible liar. It’s time I leave you to your sleep. I’m feeling a lot better now.”

“Is that really true?” I asked, looking deeply into her eyes.

She considered it for a moment before she answered. “Well, maybe not yet, but I will be. I’m going to go home, eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, and then I’m going to watch sad movies until I fall asleep. Maybe I’ll have myself a Nicholas Sparks marathon and cry out all of my tears. You can count on him for one thing for sure; somebody’s not going to make it until the end.”

We’d laughed in the past that someone always seemed to die in one of the movies based on his books, but we were proud that he was from North Carolina, too, and we never missed reading his latest novel together in a kind of small, two-woman book club, nothing like the ladies I hosted at my donut shop. While that group thrived on serious discussion, Grace and I weren’t above mocking anything we found scorn-worthy in any book we read. “That sounds great,” I said. “I’d be more than happy to join you.”

“You’d fall asleep before the opening credits of the first movie, and we both know it.” Grace hugged me, and then said, “Get some sleep, Suzanne.”

I couldn’t deny that I was beat. “If you’re sure,” I said.

“Go on. You’ve been wonderful. It’s great having you as my best friend.”

“I think so, too,” I said, and then realized how it might have sounded. “Reverse that. What I should have said was right back at you. You know what I meant.”

Grace smiled again, briefly, but it was there. Maybe I really had helped.

“Remember, call me if you need to talk,” I said as I walked her out onto the cottage’s front porch. “I don’t care what time it is.”

“I promise,” she said, and then Grace walked up the road toward her house.

*   *   *

If I had it to do over again, I would have gone with her, and neither one of us would have gotten into the mess we ultimately did, but hindsight is always twenty-twenty, so I watched her until she was gone, and then I went upstairs to bed. Jake was tied up on a case, so I knew he probably wouldn’t have a chance to call. As much as I would have loved hearing his voice as a reassurance of what we shared after hearing of Peter’s betrayals, I didn’t need it. I trusted him with my heart, and with my life.

It was the only way I knew how to love, and I fully understood that Grace felt the same way, no matter what the consequences were. We both went all in when we were in a relationship, and while that meant we got hurt sometimes like she had been tonight, finding real love was always worth the risk. This time, she’d gambled and lost, but I knew that she’d find it in herself to try again someday.

*   *   *

Grace must have found a way to make it through the night, because I didn’t hear from her after she left my place. When I woke up the next morning, too early as usual, I quickly got dressed and headed to Donut Hearts to start working on that day’s donuts with a little lighter touch to my step. After all, it was a big day for me. Emma’s replacement, Nan Winters, was starting her first day of work. Sure, she’d trained with us for a few days before Emma left, but then she’d had to go visit an old friend while she had the chance before she started helping me make donuts six days out of every seven. With just one day off a week, she knew she wouldn’t be getting any more time off for a while, so she’d taken advantage of it. I just hoped Nan remembered what Emma and I had taught her, but I had my doubts. Then again, maybe a fresh start would be better for all of us. I had resisted the impulse to pick up the phone and call Emma a hundred times since she’d been gone. In a way, I felt as though my own daughter was going off to school, and not just an employee. Honestly, she was much more to me than that, and everyone knew it. But I’d promised to give her a month of finding her way at her new school before I started pestering her so she could get settled in and used to her new life, and I was going to respect that. Emma had signed up for spring classes with the college’s unusual schedule, and while I hated losing her too early, she had every right to go out into the world and find her own way.

I drove to Donut Hearts in the darkness, and as I went past the front of my shop, my headlights picked up something odd about the front of the building. My business was housed in an old railroad depot, and once upon a time the tracks had been right beside it. One of the reasons I’d bought the business was for the old weathered bricks up front. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination or not, but I could swear the bricks looked different somehow in the light from my high beams. I stopped and backed my Jeep up onto the grass of the nearby park, not really worrying about getting in anyone’s way on Springs Drive, since most folks with any sense at all were home in bed instead of out on the road in the middle of the night.

When my headlights hit Donut Hearts again, I saw that it hadn’t been my imagination.

Someone had splattered bright yellow paint on the front of my building, obscuring not just the brick, but the new front window I’d just had repainted with our logo. My heart sank as I saw the mess. I was pretty sure the paint would come right off the window without too much of a fuss, but the bricks might be another thing entirely. I moved my Jeep into one of the parking spaces on Springs Drive, grabbed my flashlight, and then walked back toward Donut Hearts to see if things were as bad as I feared.

When I saw the paint-spattered bucket lying empty beside the front door, I figured it might be time to call the police. If the vandals could be identified by their fingerprints, I wanted to make sure they were caught and got what they deserved. If they were arrested and convicted, and the judge felt like giving them community service, I wanted to see if I could get the perpetrator assigned to me. By the time I got done with them, they’d think twice about vandalizing another business.

To my surprise, I got one of my friends on the line as I dialed the police night desk. I figured there was no reason to tie up 911, since this was clearly not an emergency. Whoever had defaced my building was long gone.

When Officer Stephen Grant answered the phone, I idly put a finger on the brick, testing to see if it might still be damp.

No such luck. It was pretty clear that it wasn’t going to come off without a great deal of work.

“Officer Grant, I’ve got a problem,” I said when he picked up and identified himself.

“Suzanne, is that you?” he asked. He should know my voice by now. The man had been in my donut shop, on official business as well as on his free time, plenty of times over the years. Even though he was a slim young man, he had a surprising appetite for donuts, and we were slowly building a friendship on his frequent visits to my shop. “You didn’t lock yourself out of the donut shop, did you?” he asked hopefully. “Please tell me that I’ve got an excuse to leave the duty desk and come out there.”