Sinister Sprinkles (3 page)

CHAPTER 2

I saw Max start to wobble a little at the news, so I moved in quickly to support him before he hit the floor.

He steadied himself in my grasp, then pulled away from me, as if he were suddenly embarrassed by the close contact.

“Are you sure it was Darlene?” Max asked the chief.

“There’s no doubt about it. Can you tell me why she was walking around the Winter Carnival wearing Muriel Stevens’s jacket and a wig that made her look thirty years older?”

“I don’t have a clue,” Max said, and I knew instantly that he was lying. How odd. I was considering calling him on it, even with the chief of police standing right there, when he beat me to it.

Chief Martin asked him, “You’re not putting on some kind of production right now, are you?”

Max ran our local theater group, and Darlene had joined it to be closer to him, or so I’d heard from the rumor mill around April Springs. Max had sworn their affair had been a one-time event, but Darlene’s constant zeal for an encore made me doubt it.

Max ran a finger along his nose, a sure sign he was evading the truth. I just wished I’d learned to read him that well while we’d been married. He finally said, “We’re doing
A New Year in Love
, and there’s one part for an older woman, but she wouldn’t have tried out for that. I haven’t started casting it yet. Auditions aren’t until tomorrow.”

The chief wasn’t about to let it go that easily, though. “Was Darlene’s name on your list?”

Max shrugged. “To be honest with you, I haven’t even studied it yet. Hang on a second. I’ve got it right here.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a sheet of yellow legal pad notepaper.

“Why are you carrying that around with you?” I asked.

Chief Martin shot me a dirty look, but it was pretty clear that he wanted to know as well.

“I’ve got to make some hard choices, so I thought I’d walk around the carnival and think about who signed up,” he said. “I purposely didn’t look at it so I could save it for today. You know my process, Suzanne.”

I wasn’t about to respond to that.

Max scanned the list, and sure enough, Darlene’s name was on it. “What do you know. She was going to try out for Penelope. What I can’t figure out is why on earth she would want that part.”

“What’s so special about that?” I asked.

Max said, “It’s an older woman, and Darlene was obsessed with her fear of getting old. She thought it was worse than dying.”

“Somebody saved her the trouble of finding out,” the chief said, a little too callously for my taste. Then again, he wasn’t exactly vying for my approval.

“Who else was trying out for the role?” I asked.

The police chief said, “Suzanne, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your crazy questions to yourself. No one’s going to kill somebody for a role in a community theater group.”

“Don’t be so sure. These things get pretty heated,” Max said.

He looked at the list, then shook his head. “There’s no way that’s right. It’s got to be a coincidence.”

“Whose name is on there, Max?” the chief asked.

He frowned, then admitted, “There are two other names written here. One is Trish Granger.”

“Who’s the other?” Emma asked. I’d nearly forgotten she was standing behind me.

Max shook his head as he said, “It’s Muriel Stevens.”

“I think I’d better go talk to her next,” the chief said. As he started for the door, he turned back to Max and added, “In the meantime, you need to stay in town. You don’t have any reason to leave, do you?”

“My calendar’s wide open at the moment,” he said. “I don’t have any jobs outside of April Springs, or any plans to go anywhere.”

“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

After the chief was gone, Max slumped down onto one of our sofas. “I can’t believe somebody killed Darlene.”

“I didn’t think you two were all that close,” I said before I had a chance to realize how cold that made me sound. I was going to have to get over what Darlene had done to me, once and for all. It didn’t sit right with me, holding a grudge with a dead woman.

Max stared at me a second, then said, “Suzanne, you know in your heart that’s not fair. Someone was murdered today.”

“You’re right,” I said, my voice a little softer than it had been before.

Max stood abruptly, and as he headed for the door, I said, “Max, I’m sorry.”

“So am I, Suzanne.”

After he was gone, I kept watching him as he walked down Springs Drive, oblivious to the falling snow. Max was in pain, and more than that, he was in trouble. I just wasn’t sure what I could do about either situation.

*   *   *

My best friend, Grace Gauge, was waiting for me on the front porch of the house I share with my mother when I drove home around one in the afternoon.

“Don’t you ever work?” I asked her with a laugh as I approached, getting my key ready for the front door.

“Why don’t we save the question-and-answer session for inside? I’m freezing out here. The snow’s awfully pretty though, isn’t it?”

I looked back toward the park that touched our property, and took in the view of the trees and pathways covered with snow. It looked like a Christmas card, with swirling sparkles of white filling the air. It was no wonder that I cherished snowfalls so much in April Springs.

“Come on, quit stalling. I’m cold,” Grace said, her teeth chattering.

“If you carried a few more pounds on you, you’d be better insulated,” I said as I smiled and opened the door.

As she pushed past me inside, she grinned and said, “No, thanks. I’d rather buy a bigger jacket.” Grace put her coat by the door, then settled down in front of the fireplace. Though my mother was absent, there was still a few glowing embers in the hearth.

Grace studied the fireplace a moment, then asked, “Any chance you can throw on a log or two?”

I did as she asked, then said, “Now it’s your turn. Why are you here in the middle of a workday?”

She grinned at me. “They sent me home, can you believe it? My supervisor doesn’t want a repeat of last year, when Anita Ricco crashed her company car in an inch of snow. The company has decided they’d rather pay us all for goofing off than take a risk with their property. I’m all for it, myself.”

“I was wondering where your car was,” I said as I put a pot of coffee on.

“That’s why I’m so cold. I walked over here from my house. That Jeep of yours is four-wheel-drive, isn’t it?”

“Why, do you want to borrow it?” I said as I put a handful of cookies on a plate and set it in front of her. They were my mother’s favorite, peanut butter cookies with Hershey Kisses in the middle of each one, placed there just before they came out of the oven.

“Hardly, but if we need provisions later, I want to be sure we can get to them at the store. There are some necessities I’m not willing to live without.”

I turned on the lights of our Christmas tree, then said, “I can’t wait to hear what made that list.”

“Why don’t you leave your tree on all the time?” she asked, ignoring my question.

“Momma’s afraid we’ll burn the house down,” I said.

Grace leaned over and touched one of the branches. “It’s worth it, if you can have a live tree like this.”

“I like them, too. You have a live one, don’t you?”

She mumbled something, and I asked her to repeat it.

Defiantly, Grace said, “I didn’t put a tree up this year, all right? It just seemed kind of pointless, since I’m the only one who’d see it.”

“That’s not like you,” I said. “You usually love the holidays.”

“I do,” she admitted. “But putting a tree up this year just felt kind of pointless. Listen, I know neither one of us has to have a man in our lives to make us complete, but they can be a nice accessory, don’t you think?”

“I do,” I said as I got two mugs and filled them with coffee.

“Where’s Jake at the moment?” Grace asked. Jake Bishop was my boyfriend, a state police investigator who traveled all over North Carolina looking for killers. He had an important job—and nobody knew how to do it better than he did—but his travel schedule didn’t exactly make it conducive for a steady relationship.

“He’s on the road again,” I said.

“What about David Shelby?”

David was a man who’d come to April Springs earlier that year, and it had taken us quite a while to figure out that we’d gone to summer camp together as kids. I couldn’t deny that there was some kind of attraction there, but with Jake in my life, I hadn’t done anything to act on it.

“He’s just a friend,” I said as I went through a stack of cards and mail that always seemed to accumulate on our mantelpiece during the holidays. I found the card I was looking for and handed it to her. “Read this.”

In a man’s firm handwriting, the back of the card said,

“Suzanne, I’m off to find my last chance. David.”

Grace looked at the back—a picture of the Alaska wilderness—then tapped the writing on the card with her finger. “That’s cryptic enough, isn’t it?”

“I’m sure the explanation was too complicated for a postcard,” I said.

“Then he should have written a letter, or at least phoned before he left town.” Grace shook her head, then added, “It’s probably all for the best.”

“You know what? He’s been gone less than a week, and I already miss seeing him come into the donut shop. He was there every day, did you realize that?”

“That certainly sets him apart from Jake, doesn’t it?”

I shrugged. “I care for him, honestly, I do, but sometimes I think he should find a nice lady truck driver. He’d have a better chance of seeing her than he has me.”

Grace bit into a cookie, then said, “Don’t worry. I’m sure he’ll be here before Christmas.”

“That’s the plan right now, unless business calls him away,” I said as I handed her a mug of coffee and then sat beside her. “Strike that. His business is probably going to bring him here by nightfall. I hate the reason he has to come to town, but at least I’ll be able to see him again.”

Grace put her mug down on the coffee table. “Suzanne, is there something you’re not telling me? Did something happen today at your booth?”

I couldn’t tell if she was teasing or not, then I realized that the entire time we’d been talking, she hadn’t brought the murder up, something I should have realized was greatly out of character for her. “You haven’t heard, have you? There was a murder at the Christmas Carnival today.”

She didn’t believe me at first—it was clear in her expression—but when I didn’t back down, she finally accepted it. “What happened?”

“Darlene Higgins was killed under the town clock,” I said. “The thing is, she was dressed in Muriel Stevens’s jacket, and she was wearing a black-and-gray-haired wig when she was murdered, so it didn’t even look like her.”

After I finished bringing her up to date on what I knew, Grace put a hand on mine and asked gently, “Suzanne, are you all right?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” I asked.

“Come on, I’m your best friend, remember? I know how you feel about Darlene Higgins.”

“That all happened a long time ago,” I said. “I’ve decided to put it behind me.”

Grace arched one eyebrow. “You don’t really expect me to believe that, do you? Remember who you’re talking to.”

I let out a deep breath, and hadn’t even realized that I’d been holding it in. “Maybe. I don’t know. Sure, I’ve been angry with her for a long time. After all, she broke up my marriage.” I stared at the flames in the fireplace for a few seconds longer, then added, “But it was Max’s fault, too, and I’ve managed to just about forgive him, even if I doubt I’ll ever be able to forget what happened between them.” In spite of my effort to wipe the image out of my mind of finding them together, it still came back unbidden at the slightest provocation.

Grace frowned as she stared into the flames. “Has the chief asked you for an alibi yet?”

That thought hadn’t even occurred to me. “No, why would he?”

“Come on, Suzanne. Think about it. You had a motive to want her dead, and you were at the carnival selling donuts. That just leaves the means. How did she die?”

It was unsettling to hear Grace’s litany of reasons I might be guilty, but she had a point, one I’d been unwilling or unable to face. “You know what? I don’t have a clue. I just realized that the chief didn’t say how she was murdered, just that she was dead. Hang on a second, this won’t take long.”

I reached for the phone and dialed George’s number.

When he picked up, I said, “Hey, it’s me.”

“Hello, Suzanne. What can I do for you?”

“I know things might be a little strained right now between you and the police force, but do you think you could find out exactly how Darlene was murdered?”

There was a pause, and then he said, “I honestly don’t know, but I can try.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it. Don’t do it if it’s going to get you in trouble.”

“Now, what fun would that be? If I lived by that rule, I’d never get to do anything.”

After I hung up, Grace asked, “Did you just call George?”

“Yes, I thought he might be able to find out what’s really going on. I can’t help wondering what Darlene was doing going around town dressed up like Muriel.”

“I thought you said she was getting ready for her audition.”

I shrugged. “That’s just one theory, but no one really knows, do they? Is it possible that whoever killed Darlene was really going after Muriel?”

“It’s possible, from the way you described her wig and that coat. Somebody should warn Muriel that she might be in trouble.”

As Grace reached for the phone, I stopped her. “There’s no need to call her. The chief was heading for Muriel’s house when he left Donut Hearts. I’m sure she knows what’s going on by now.”

“Where does that leave us, then?”

I looked at her for a second for some kind of clue what she was talking about. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“We’re going to investigate this ourselves, aren’t we?” Grace looked surprised I hadn’t suggested it myself.

“No, ma’am. I’m staying out of this case, and you should, too. Let the chief find the killer this time. Darlene’s death doesn’t involve me.”

Grace stood and began to pace as she ranted, “You aren’t serious, are you? Let’s list the reasons you need to get involved. First, the victim is the woman who broke up your marriage. Next in line, we have your ex-husband, a man you are still on good terms with, though why I can’t imagine, as one of the lead suspects. Do you honestly need anything more than that? Suzanne, you’re involved with this up to your eyeballs.”