Sweet Masterpiece - The First Samantha Sweet Mystery (20 page)

“But the green stuff is also on the will,”
Sam pointed out.

“That’s certainly more damning,” Beau
admitted. “But we already know that Bart handled the page and the
envelope. It was in his house.”

“But the poison wasn’t in his house . . .”
She paused. “Actually I don’t know that. I couldn’t
see
the
green in his house. I only spotted it on the will today, after I
handled the box again.”

Beau gave her a stern look. “Do not go back
there on your own, Sam. Not unless you want to admit to breaking
and entering, which is going to get you into a whole bunch of
trouble.”

She fumed. Wasn’t she already in trouble on
that score?

Beau and Lisa were headed for the door.

“Is it okay if I clean the place thoroughly
now?” Sam asked, as he lingered to say goodbye. “It doesn’t seem
smart to leave a poisonous residue around the house now that there
could be potential buyers coming to look at it.”

“We’ve got everything we can use,” he said.
“Go ahead.”

She surreptitiously squeezed his hand and
watched with mixed emotions as he walked out to the cruiser. She
knew he was just doing his job when he cautioned her about going
back to Bart’s place in Santa Fe, but still . . . she felt strongly
that Cantone’s nephew was about to get away with murder.

She spent two hours vigorously scrubbing away
the traces of green, hoping the scientific tests would back up her
intuition.

The afternoon was still young, with a
brilliant September sky and the leaves on the cottonwoods showing a
hint of the golden autumn yet to come. She grabbed a chicken
sandwich at the first café she came to, then headed up the ski
valley road to check on her property up there—the only one of her
current three that hadn’t thrown a huge dose of drama at her. A
quick check verified that all was well there.

She drove home as the shadows were
lengthening across the valley and found Kelly’s car in the
driveway, back from her clothing foray in the city.

“Hey, Mom.” Kelly greeted as Sam walked into
the kitchen. Her blue-green eyes sparkled. “Wait till you see—I got
some great bargains at the mall.”

“Good.” Sam automatically glanced at the
light on the answering machine, hoping for another bakery order to
add to the week’s income. Nothing.

“Everything okay?” Kelly was pouring pretzels
from a bag into a small bowl. She held it up to Sam, who waved away
the snacks.

“Yeah, fine.” She wasn’t ready to go into the
whole story of her involvement with the investigation.

Kelly carried the pretzels to the kitchen
table, where several large plastic bags appeared to be stuffed with
clothing. “Look at these.” She proceeded to pull out slacks and
sweaters, a warmup suit and a puffy winter coat, holding each item
up to herself to show how it would look. “I found most of these on
sale racks. Amazing, at this time of year.”

Sam put on a happy face and worked to let go
of the nagging concerns about Cantone and his crooked nephew. She
congratulated her daughter on her clothing buys.

“Shall we have the rest of that pasta you
made the other night?” she asked, as Kelly started to carry her
purchases to her room.

She studied her hands to be sure she’d washed
off every trace of the green dust. All clear. Preoccupied with
thoughts of that, she pulled pasta and sauce from the fridge and
poured two glasses of wine. Kelly came back into the kitchen to
slice and butter bread and spread it with garlic. While the bread
toasted, they raised their glasses.

“I’m really excited about my new job,” Kelly
said as she set the table. “Iris seems like such a sweet lady.”

“I hope it works out well—all the way
around,” Sam told her. As much as she wanted to add some motherly
advice about working hard and doing her best for Beau and his
mother, she held her tongue. Realizing that Kelly had been out on
her own for a long time was a hard thing to accept. But if Kelly
messed up, her own chances with Beau might be finished.

The phone interrupted her thoughts, just as
they were finishing their dinner. An order for a specialty cake.
The customer’s daughter was celebrating her quinceañera and the
family wanted to do it up big. Sam suggested a tiered cake, which
always made a girl feel like a bride, and she could
color-coordinate figures of the girl’s attendants to the dresses
they would wear in the actual ceremony. The longer they talked, the
more elaborate the cake became and the woman didn’t flinch when Sam
quoted her the price. It was only after she’d hung up that Sam
began to wonder if she could pull it off.

Okay, she told herself, it’s not very
different than a wedding cake and you’ve done plenty of those. She
could order the figurines online tonight and they would be shipped
tomorrow, arriving in a couple of days. She had a supply of risers
and separators, to set off the elegant tiers. The cake wasn’t
needed for a week yet, so she had plenty of time to get her
supplies lined up and pre-make most of the flowers and other
decorative elements that needed time to set up. She grabbed a
pencil and sheet of paper and began to sketch out the design as the
idea took hold. A success here could very well secure her a lot of
business among the Hispanic families in town, and it would be worth
her while to give this one a lot of attention.

She drifted into the living room and sat at
her computer desk in the corner, getting her supply order done in
no time. A quick check of her email and she saw two more responses
to her queries about vans for sale. One was in Eagle Nest, a small
village about forty minutes away, on the other side of the
mountains. A quick phone call, the right answers to her questions,
and she told the seller that she would drive over in the morning to
take a look.

As if the cosmos had heard her plea for more
bakery business, the phone rang again, Ivan at the bookstore
reminding her of their annual open house tomorrow evening. He
wanted to know if she could deliver their cake by mid-afternoon.
Sam’s knees almost buckled. He’d spoken to her about the event
almost a month ago and she’d completely forgotten. She put a smile
in her voice and reassured him.

“Kelly! Help!” she yelled, the second the
phone disconnected. “I’ve got to turn out a special
cake—tonight!”

Sam flipped through her recipe box for her
special red-velvet. Since everything she baked at Taos’s 7,000 foot
elevation required special altitude adjustments, she didn’t dare
use a recipe from any old cookbook. “Can you whip this up and get
it into the oven now?” she said, handing the card over to
Kelly.

Bless her heart, Kelly didn’t skip a beat.
She turned the oven dial to preheat and began pulling ingredients
from the shelves. Sam muttered as she reached into her storage
cabinets on the service porch. There were book-shaped pans
somewhere in here and that would be the perfect thing for the
store’s needs. After a heart-pounding moment in which she began to
wonder if she’d given the pans away, she found them. Two pans,
representing the halves of an open book. The overall size would be
nearly twenty-five inches wide and three inches thick.

“Wash these out before you use them,” she
told Kelly. “And as soon as you get the cake into the oven, we need
the mixer for a batch of buttercream.”

Sam pulled another large mixing bowl from the
shelf and the moment Kelly had finished beating the cake batter,
Sam washed the beaters and started on the icing. As she whipped the
creamy mixture to piping consistency she visualized the finished
confection.

The cake would be an open book on a large
board. Ivory frosting for the pages, a brown border to look like a
leather cover, and she could dust on a whisper of edible gold
powder to make the page edges appear gilt. Ivan’s favorite book of
all times was Dickens’
Tale of Two Cities
and she would
borrow the opening line and pipe it on one of the cake’s open pages
. . . “It was the best of times . . .” Roses in the store colors of
burgundy and gold, with deep green leaves, would add drama and
elegance.

She spooned out lumps of frosting for each of
the colors. A tiny hint of brown to create the ivory, a small
amount to be tinted green for the leaves, another little bit made
black for the writing, and a good-sized glob that would become the
burgundy roses. She worked them first, piping them onto small
squares of waxed paper and setting them onto a cookie sheet to
harden in the refrigerator. A few half-sized ones became
rosebuds.

When the oven timer dinged to signal that the
cake was done, the two women stared at each other in relief.

“That was a miracle,” Sam said. She set the
timer again to remind her when to remove the cakes from the pans.
At that point she set them on cooling racks on the service porch
counter, to cool a little more quickly.

Kelly glanced up at the kitchen clock.
Ten-fifteen. “Oh, boy. I better get to bed. I’m supposed to report
for my new job at seventy-thirty in the morning.”

“Thanks for your help, Kell. I couldn’t have
done all this without you.”

“Sure, Mom.” She sent a little kiss across
the room.

Sam debated whether to try to finish the cake
before retiring, herself, but decided that she was too tired. The
day was catching up to her quickly.

In her room, she looked at the wooden box on
her dresser. Like her own energy, the colors had faded once
more.

Chapter 24

Twelve hours, Sam calculated. That was about
how long the power of the box seemed to stay with her. She fell
into bed, completely exhausted.

The alarm woke her Saturday morning. She’d
remembered to set it, thank goodness, or she’d never get everything
done today. She rushed to the kitchen and retrieved the cooled cake
from the service porch. By the time Kelly appeared at seven, the
ivory frosting was in place and Sam had scratched lines along the
sides of it to represent the pages of the book.

She wished Kelly a good day on the new job
and insisted she at least take along a granola bar or something to
give her the energy to start the day.

Sam caught herself yawning as she dusted the
edges of the pages with edible gold powder. Maybe it would help if
she went in and held the magic box for awhile. She stopped herself.
What if the thing were somehow addictive? What if she got so used
to the energy it gave off that she couldn’t get through the day
without it? The thought scared her. She brewed some coffee instead
and downed a cup before proceeding with the cake.

By eight-thirty, she’d finished the wording
and flowers and was putting the large sheet into the spare
refrigerator to cool thoroughly and set up nicely before delivering
it.

Still feeling like she was moving in slow
motion, she scrambled a couple of eggs for herself and made a
sandwich with them on whole wheat toast. She would not depend on
the wooden box for energy.

Beau called just as she was finishing her
sandwich.

“Hey there.” He had a sultry tone in his
voice and she guessed that he wasn’t calling from home or office.
They exchanged a few suggestive ideas that might have actually gone
somewhere (she was home alone for a change), but he said he was up
to his eyebrows in paperwork today and she was, almost literally,
up to hers in frosting.

“Just wanted to let you know that we got the
tox reports back on the tissue that the M.I. took from Cantone’s
body. Your plant—the deathcamas—matches.”

“Oh gosh.” Sam got a sinking feeling. No
matter how much her gut told her that Cantone had been murdered,
she’d really hoped that he was merely an old man who got sick and
didn’t recover. The idea that his own nephew killed him and buried
him was repugnant.

“We still don’t have that proof,” Beau
reminded her when she voiced her thoughts. “But I’m going to try to
work with Santa Fe County to get Bart Killington brought up here
for questioning. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

She cleaned the decorating tools and put
everything away, thinking about Beau and wondering what questions
he would ask Bart. The guy was so smooth, she couldn’t imagine him
just buckling down to confess. But you never knew.

A quick call to Ivan, who said he was ready
to take delivery on the cake, and she was out the door. His helpers
at the bookstore were thrilled when she carried the cake in and set
it on a table they’d prepared for it.

“Sam, you are the best!” Ivan said, bowing as
he handed her a check. “Cake is better than I ever expect. The
customers are to love it!”

Before leaving, she confirmed with him that
the Chocoholics would be meeting again on Tuesday. He suggested
another book-shaped cake for them, smaller, and done all in
chocolate. She assured him she could do it.

On the front sidewalk there was a flurry of
activity as Sam walked out. Two men were in a heated argument next
to the bookstore, in front of a gourmet shop where Sam occasionally
bought flavorings. She’d nearly passed them when a phrase caught
her attention.

“I’ll have the Sheriff’s people out here with
an eviction notice,” the shorter of the two men yelled.

“Well, go ahead,” said the other, turning on
his heel. He nearly bumped into Sam, muttering under his breath,
“Good luck in finding me.”

She sent a tentative smile his way but he’d
already walked back into the shop and slammed the door.

Sheriff’s office, huh. Poor Beau, he must get
every crummy job out there. She thought of him trying to solve
murder cases while stepping in to deliver eviction notices and who
knew what else.

She got to her truck and decided to give
Rupert a call. “How would you like to skip out on writing for
awhile and take a mountain drive with me?” she asked.

He agreed so speedily that she could only
guess that Victoria DeVane’s characters were giving him fits.