Powdered Peril (28 page)

“And when he did, that’s when you hit him with the post.” It was all starting to make sense now. Kaye had a temper, and she couldn’t believe that Peter would ever choose anyone over her.

“He went down like a bag of sand,” she said with the hint of laughter in her voice. “I kept shoving him with it once he hit the ground, trying to make him get up and tell me that he was acting, but he never moved. I searched his pockets, but the only things I found were his wallet and his keys. I went back to his apartment, but I couldn’t find the packet anywhere, and I was afraid to make a mess. I didn’t want anyone to know that I’d been there.”

“But it was wrecked when we opened the door to clean it out,” I protested.

“That’s because I went back after the cops left. I kept thinking that I must have missed something, and at that point, I didn’t care who knew that I’d searched the place this time. I tore it up, but I still didn’t find a thing. I’ve been dying to know. Where did you find the money and the key?”

“It was stuffed up in the range hood,” I said, “hidden by the filter.”

A look of satisfaction overtook her face. “That was very smart of you, and it brings me back to why I’m here. I’ve already found Grace’s safe, but I still need that key.”

It was time to act. I couldn’t count on Leah anymore.

I pulled the key out of my pocket, but then I let it slip out of my hand, as though I were clumsy, or more likely, nervous. “Sorry, I guess I’m a little unsteady right now.”

“Pick it up,” she ordered.

This was it. Maybe a gunshot would trigger something in Leah to make her help me. I just hoped it wouldn’t be too late, then.

I reached down to get the key, keeping my gaze on Kaye the entire time.

Then I caught a movement behind her, and saw that Leah was suddenly out of her trance. She threw the nearest thing she could find at Kaye, an old Barbie doll sitting on top of a box of other discards. It wouldn’t have done much damage under any circumstances, and I wondered how clearly Leah was thinking to choose that as her weapon, but it did manage to distract Kaye. She swung the gun around and shot at Leah, the explosion bouncing off the concrete block walls of the basement and suddenly filling the air with the unmistakable scent of gunpowder.

I was deafened by the blast, but I couldn’t let that stop me.

I grabbed the steel bar and brought it down on Kaye’s shoulder, though I’d been aiming for the back of her head, a kind of poetic justice. Either she’d shifted slightly at the last second, though, or my aim was off. Either way, the force of the blow still managed to knock the gun out of her hand. As we both scrambled for it, I managed to get there first, just barely, but we were too close for me to use it against her, not that I was sure that I could, even given the circumstances. Kaye and I struggled for it. She had a strength I never imagined that she might possess, and I knew that I was losing the battle. If I let go of the gun, I knew I’d be dead a few seconds later. Right now, I couldn’t worry about Leah, or Grace, or even Jake. I was in the fight of my life, and I knew it. As we wrestled for the weapon, both of us lying on the floor struggling to get final control, I saw a shadow and some movement above us. Had Kaye missed when she’d shot at Leah? Was she running away now, leaving me to die alone? No, the motion was coming down the stairs, I could see that much, but only that.

Then I saw Grace standing near us in her nightgown, the discarded steel bar I’d used now in her hands. She held it as though it were a dagger, and I could see it penetrating Kaye’s heart in my mind.

“Don’t kill her, Grace,” I yelled out. “She’s not worth it.”

“You can’t trick me like that, Suzanne. I’m not stupid,” Kaye said.

Grace seemed to realize what I was saying. She turned the bar from a sword to a club, and hit Kaye a little harder than I would have liked.

It did what it had been meant to do, though. Kaye’s grip eased as she lost consciousness, and I grabbed the gun before she could come out of it.

If she came out of it.

“What happened to Leah?” I asked as I struggled to stand. “Is she dead?”

Grace and I hurried over to see, and I pulled back when I spotted her on the floor, bleeding from her temple.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” I asked through sobs that came unbidden. Leah had tried to help me, and she’d paid for it with her life.

“Hey, don’t cry for me just yet, Suzanne. I’m okay,” Leah said as she struggled to sit up. “It barely nicked me.”

Grace studied the crease on her forehead and then said, “Head wounds are the worst, aren’t they?”

Leah nodded, holding a bit of one of Grace’s old ballet costumes firmly to the wound. “What happened to Kaye?”

“She’s just knocked out. There’s no doubt in my mind that she’s going to be okay,” I said as I heard her start to moan.

Grace patted her gown, and then said, “Do either one of you have a cell phone on you? Mine’s upstairs.”

“Mine’s in her pocket,” I said, not wanting to look for it at the moment.

“I’ll call the police,” Leah said as she reached for hers.

“Ask for Chief Martin,” I said. “He deserves to hear this from us directly.”

As we waited for everyone to show up, I asked, “Leah, there’s one thing that I haven’t figured out yet. Why did you keep running away from us, if you were just trying to solve the case yourself?”

“I knew that no one would believe me. Why should they? I haven’t exactly been acting like I should be taken seriously lately, have I? When you were questioning me at Cutnip, I realized that you had all of the bases covered except for Kaye. I’d seen firsthand how crazy she could be when she was jealous, so I decided to start following her around to see where it might lead me.”

“That’s why you were at Bryan’s. We thought that you were spying on him.”

“That, too,” she admitted. “But mostly Kaye. Honestly, I didn’t know that she did it for sure until I heard her tell you.”

I reached down and picked up the discarded key. “Should we wait for the police, or go ahead and open the safe ourselves?”

“You can do what you want,” Grace said, “but I can tell you right now, there’s nothing there.”

“So then that means there’s no harm in us checking,” I said.

I moved to the safe, conveniently cleared by Kaye earlier, and slid the key into the lock. Without hesitation, it went in and turned smoothly.

Inside it was a packet of the information Kaye had been searching for, along with another huge wad of hundreds.

Grace looked at it as though she didn’t believe it. “That’s not possible,” she said as she started to reach for the contents.

I pulled her back. “We don’t want any of our fingerprints in there right now,” I said, and she pulled her hand back.

“Peter must have taken my key one night and used the safe for his own things. He had a lot of nerve, keeping it here without asking me,” she said.

“Doesn’t that sum Peter up in a single sentence?” Leah asked. “Grace, I’m truly sorry for what I did to you. I knew better, but that didn’t stop me. I’ll do whatever I can to make things right with you.”

To my surprise, she hugged Leah carefully. “When you saved Suzanne, you cleaned the slate between us, as far as I’m concerned.”

“I didn’t do much of anything,” Leah protested, though it was clear that she was happy with the resolution.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” I said. “You distracted Kaye when I needed it, and that’s the only way we managed to beat her.”

“With a Barbie doll,” Leah said wryly.

“Hey, whatever works,” I said as I could hear the police sirens nearing the house. Kaye must have heard them coming for her, too, because she started to try to stand up.

I put a tennis shoe on her back and shoved her back down onto the concrete floor. “The only place you’re going is to jail.”

CHAPTER 19

“Pass the milk shake pitcher,” Trish said the next evening as we all sat in the living room. “I’m getting low.”

I did as she asked, and then I looked around at the other women gathered together there. Along with Trish, Grace was there as the guest of honor, and we’d decided to invite Leah as well. After all, without her, we might not be having this particular party.

Momma was out on a date with Chief Martin, and Jake was due in tomorrow.

For the second, and unprecedented, day in a row, Donut Hearts had been closed for business. Emma and I would reopen tomorrow, but right now, I was there for Grace, and in a way, Leah as well.

“Everyone, fill up your glasses,” I said as I stood. The other women joined me, and I hoisted my own glass in the air. “This was supposed to be a time for Grace to grieve,” I said, “but I propose that we change tonight’s theme to strong women sticking together in times of crisis. Anyone else agree?”

“I do, but I’d like to add something else of my own, if you don’t mind,” Grace said, tapping her glass to mine.

“By all means,” I said as I touched my glass back to hers.

Grace added, “To friendship.”

“To loyalty,” Leah added.

“To us,” Trish finished with a smile, and we all drank deeply.

Read on for a look ahead to

ILLEGALLY ICED

—the next Donut Shop mystery from Jessica Beck and St. Martin’s / Minotaur Paperbacks:

I heard the woman’s scream coming from the park across the street just as I closed the front door of my shop a little after eleven fifteen on a rare chilly day near the first of May. I was ready for warmer temperatures—along with the rest of April Springs, North Carolina, where I ran Donut Hearts—but the unseasonable cold snap had forced us all into our jackets again. The Donuts in the name of my business is pretty self-explanatory, and the Hearts part is, too, if you know that my name is Suzanne Hart. I bought the donut place the second my divorce from Max became final, a decision I was normally pretty happy about, but I had to admit that there were a few trying times that I wished I had it all to do over again. That also could be said for moving back in with my mother after my marriage had dissolved, but that’s a different thing altogether.

The temperature had been in the low eighties just a few days before, but we’d be lucky to hit the fifties today. The weather hadn’t stopped folks from coming out to the park, though. What had that scream been about, anyway? I looked over to see what was going on, but I wasn’t too alarmed at first. After all, a great many folks were in the park taking in the sunshine, not seeming to mind the cooler temperatures at all, and I knew there were times when their rambunctiousness got the better of them, kids and adults alike.

After a split-second though, I knew that it hadn’t been that kind of scream at all when I heard the next one.

This was a gut-wrenching shriek that shouted, “Something is wrong, something is wrong! Danger! Danger!”

I looked up to see two of my favorite customers, Terri Milner and Sandy White, racing toward me with their children in tow. “Suzanne, call 911! Hurry!” Sandy said breathlessly as they neared me.

“What happened?” I asked as I reached for my cell phone.

Somebody just s-t-a-b-b-e-d James Settle.” Terri spelled out the crime to soften the blow for her children, but in her shock, she must have forgotten that her twins had learned to spell.

“He was
stabbed
?” one of the little girls asked. “Why would someone do that?”

Terri and Sandy both knelt down and started speaking softly and reassuringly to all three children, trying to calm their obvious distress.

“Is he okay? How bad is it?” I asked them. I couldn’t believe it. James Settle and I had gone through a rocky beginning when he’d first come to April Springs, but we’d become good friends since the blacksmith had decided to stay. I couldn’t imagine why
anyone
would want to hurt him. I looked wildly around the park and saw a group gathered around something on the ground near the place where he’d been holding his blacksmithing exhibition. Sure enough, it parted for just a moment and I could see our town doctor working on him. I knew at that moment there was nothing I could do to help James.

“I don’t know, but it’s not good,” Terri said sadly, and I felt myself start to react. There were kids there though who didn’t need to see that, and I had a call to make.

I grabbed my phone from my pocket and dialed a number I knew all too well.

“Grant here,” my friend Officer Stephen Grant said as he answered my telephone call; it appeared that he was back on temporary desk duty for another imagined slight by our chief of police. I was beginning to wonder if Chief Martin was holding his subordinate’s friendship with me against him, since he was riding that desk so much lately.

“You need to get over here to the park right away. Someone just stabbed James Settle in front of my shop,” I said, trying to shield the phone with my hand so the kids wouldn’t have to listen to me repeat what they’d just learned.

“What? Speak up; I can’t hear you. Suzanne, is that you?”

I took a few steps away from the group, turned my back to the kids by facing my front store window, and repeated, “Listen, I don’t have any more details, but Terri Milner and Sandy White both told me that someone just stabbed James Settle. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. He was doing a blacksmithing demonstration in the park across from Donut Hearts when I heard the women scream. That’s all I know.”

“I’ll be right there,” Officer Grant said.

“Should I call for an ambulance?”

“I’ll take care of that myself,” he said, and then hung up before I could thank him.

I turned back to the ladies, and saw that the kids were still really upset by what they’d learned. Who could blame them? It was a pretty horrific thing to learn at such a young age. Maybe there was something that I could do to help, though. “Hey, if you guys are interested, I have some donuts left over from today. Does anybody want a treat, on the house?”

That seemed to get their attention, and I saw the glimmerings of a few smiles.

Just a few seconds earlier, Emma had walked outside to see what the commotion was all about, and she looked at me oddly as I made the offer, not knowing what had just happened.