Sweet Somethings (Samantha Sweet Mysteries) (2 page)

Sam drove home, her thoughts
leaping every direction. With the hundreds of unfinished tasks for the
chocolate festival and Sarah’s enticing statement about having known Bertha
Martinez so well, her mind wouldn’t settle on one thing. She picked up a pen
and tried to jot a note when the name of another possible contest judge came to
mind, but the flash of oncoming headlights warned her that writing and driving
do not mix. She tossed the pen onto the passenger seat and concentrated on
watching for the turnoff to the ranch home she shared with Sheriff Beau
Cardwell, her spouse of eight months.

“Hey, darlin’,” he greeted her at
the front door, “you look whupped.”

Their border collie and Lab rushed
out to nuzzle her hands, seeking out the sugary essence that followed her
everywhere after a day at the bakery. Beau pulled her into his arms and stroked
her back as she melted into his chest.

“I’m so sick of working with this
committee,” she mumbled into his soft plaid shirt. “I thought a couple of them
would come to blows awhile ago.”

“Come inside. I’ll get you
something to eat while you shower.”

She couldn’t remember the last
time she’d eaten anything more substantial than a muffin—probably breakfast,
fourteen hours ago. No wonder she looked and felt like a limp rag. So, why was
it that she could never seem to shed these extra twenty pounds?

Beau handed her a wine glass.
“Relax, sweetheart.”

She dropped her backpack purse
onto the sofa in their big log-walled greatroom and headed upstairs, sipping
the cabernet.

Ten minutes later she descended to
find a TV tray set up in front of her favorite chair, a sandwich and bowl of
soup waiting.

“It’s nothing fancy,” he said,
holding up the wine bottle with an offer of a refill.

“It’s fantastic just to sit down
and eat,” she said. “I used to stand in front of the fridge and snack on cheese
and pickles before I met you.”

He settled in the corner of the
sofa nearest her. “So . . . festival planning getting you down?”

“We’re just so far behind. And
then there’s this one woman who wants to micro-manage everyone else. She’s
criticized Kelly’s choice of radio ads, Harvey’s choice of contest judges, and
started to give Rupert a little flack. He withered her with one of his famous
stares.”

“How’d you get stuck with her
anyway? She somebody important in town?”

“No—that’s the thing. Nobody knows
her. She just showed up. I get the impression she just moved here, she’s
traveled a lot—or gives that impression—and wants us Taos locals to be in awe
of her sophistication.” She took a huge bite of her turkey sandwich.

“Maybe she’s just lonely—new in
town and all that. She wants to pitch in and get involved.”

“Yeah, probably. Just pure luck
that I’m the one she gets to drive crazy.”

“Hey, it can’t be as bad as
dealing with the Flower People. We got word that they’ve chosen Taos County as
the rendezvous point for their summer love-in or whatever they call it.”

Sam pictured the number of aging
hippies who had settled in the area after the ’60s, most of them now with grey
hair and crusty, sandal-clad feet. They shopped at the health food store and
plastered their cars with bumper stickers protesting everything but were generally
good citizens.

“I assume you aren’t talking about
the locals,” she said between sips of her soup.

“I should be so lucky. What I
hear, this bunch numbers in the thousands and they show up to camp out and
salute the sun or pray toward the moon, or some such thing.”

“That sounds harmless enough.”

“Probably is, except they don’t
exactly respect fences or bring their own bathroom facilities or park their
vans in designated areas. In Idaho, where they camped one year, the town spent
thousands of dollars cleaning up after them—trash by the truckloads, human
waste in open pits and trampled crops didn’t exactly endear them to anyone
nearby.”

“Can’t you just chase them out?”

“Me and four deputies? If they
choose public land I can probably get some help from the Forest Service.
Problem is, those agencies usually issue them a permit when they’re told it
will be a ‘family reunion’ of twenty people. By the time they figure out how
many have really arrived, they’re overwhelmed too. And, of course, all it takes
is one landowner to give them permission to use private property. The ranchers
love the offer of money—we hear that the group usually puts up a deposit of a
thousand dollars or so with a promise to pay more when they arrive—then the guy
figures out what a mess will be left behind, and the little bit he collects
doesn’t begin to cover the cleanup.”

Sam wiped her mouth with a napkin
and stood to carry her dishes to the kitchen. Suddenly, Carinda Carter didn’t
seem like such a bad deal.

 
Beau took over kitchen duty, suggesting that
Sam go on to bed. Upstairs on the master bath vanity sat the carved wooden box
Sarah Williams had mentioned as belonging to the old
curandera
. Sam thought back to the day it had come into her
possession, the day she had unsuspectingly broken into Bertha Martinez’s
supposedly abandoned house to find the old woman there, dying. She’d hesitantly
accepted the odd, ugly box as a gift from the old woman and brought it home.

The first time she opened its lid
and ran her fingers across the interior edges an electric-like shock zapped
through her body. That night was still a blur, but the strange artifact had
changed her life forever.

Now, her thoughts turned again to
Sarah Williams and the older woman’s comment about the box. Should she admit to
Sarah that the old
curandera
had
given it to her? She snuggled under the quilt and fell asleep contemplating the
question.

* *
*

When her alarm went off at
four-thirty, Sam suppressed a groan, sorely tempted to roll over and let Julio
handle the bakery. The baker she’d hired last fall, despite his arms full of
tattoos and the deafeningly loud Harley he roared up on each morning, had a key
to Sweet’s Sweets and could certainly handle the pre-dawn duties. He’d quickly
mastered all of her standard pastry recipes and could turn out enough muffins,
scones, coffee cake and croissants to satisfy the breakfast crowd, giving Sam
the chance to sleep in until Beau awoke. Never an early riser, Sam appreciated
the extra couple of hours.

However, these last four weeks had
become so full of festival duties that the only hours of the day in which Sam
managed to decorate cakes and test new recipes were those early mornings before
her phone began to ring incessantly. Today, she wanted to work on a batch of
chocolates with a Taos motif—flavored with chile and shaped like miniatures of
the famed Taos Pueblo, she hoped they would appeal to locals and visitors
alike. The challenge had been to tweak the recipe so that the bitter-dark chocolate
wouldn’t melt in the early June heat. Each time she thought of it, she wanted
to snarl at the Chamber of Commerce genius who’d chosen the date for the event.
Clearly, the person was no chocolatier.

She splashed cold water on her
face and finger-combed her short, graying hair, grabbed an apple from the bowl
on the kitchen table and patted each of the dogs on the head before starting
her van and heading for town.

In the alley behind her shop she
found Julio’s motorcycle in its usual spot and the scent of cinnamon and sugar
wafting out the back door. He greeted her with his usual quiet “morning” and
went on inserting trays of blueberry and cranberry scones into the bake oven.
Sam slipped into her baker’s jacket and grabbed ingredients from the shelf
above the stove, along with her favorite saucepan.

Within a few minutes the cacao,
sugar and butter were bubbling softly. Sam kept one eye on the candy
thermometer as she reached for a small tin box on the upper shelf. In it she
had stashed three small cloth pouches—secret ingredients given to her a year
ago by the quirky Romanian chocolatier who had shown up one Christmas and
vanished just as mysteriously. She had no idea what the mysterious translucent
powders contained, only that they made her chocolates irresistible to the
palate. When Julio walked to the showroom with a tray of apple muffins, she
quickly took a pinch from each pouch and stirred it into the mixture on the
stove. A moment later the chocolate was ready for tempering, that all-important
process of rebinding the fats in the cocoa butter, the reason good chocolate is
resistant to the whitish bloom that can mar its appearance. She poured the
molten mixture onto the cold surface of her tempering stone on the worktable
just as the back door opened and her daughter’s face appeared.

“Hi, Mom. Just thought I’d check
in and see if it’s okay if I smash the face of that Carinda Carter?”

“Not until after the festival,
Kelly,” Sam said without missing a beat. She smoothed the cooling mass of
chocolate with her spatula. “What’s the problem?”

“Last night I was assigned the
radio spots, right? Coordinating and approving the ads?”

Sam nodded, not taking her eyes
off the chocolate.

“So, this morning I call the
station and find out that Carinda was there yesterday. She’s changed everything
I did! And she never mentioned this at the meeting, at all.”

“Did you change it back? Or did
she have some valid ideas?”

“Well, some of her stuff wasn’t so
bad . . . it’s just so . . . so frustrating and embarrassing to have her
override me like that.”

Sam judged that the chocolate was
ready to rest. She turned toward Kelly.

“I know. Carinda comes across as a
little sharp in her manner.”

Kelly’s mouth opened.

“But—maybe she just wants to fit
in here in town. I gather that she hasn’t been here long and she’s probably
just wanting to join in, to help.”

Kelly gave a little growl.
“Maybe.”

“If the ads don’t contain any
actual errors, we could let them ride. There’s enough new work to be done that
it’s a waste of time to go back and re-do other tasks, right?”

“Okay, okay. But I’m keeping an
eye on that woman.”

Becky Harper, Sam’s chief
decorator, arrived just as Kelly stomped out the back door with an expression
that didn’t exactly indicate the Carinda matter was closed.

“What was that about?” Becky asked
as she hung her purse on one of the wall hooks and slipped into her white
baker’s jacket with the Sweet’s Sweets logo embroidered on it in purple.

“More chocolate festival
dramatics,” Sam said. “Why is it that doing anything by committee is such a
pain in the neck?”

She handed Becky a stack of pages,
the bakery’s normal orders for the next couple of days, then reached for her
candy molds. While she gently poured the newly tempered chocolate into small
pueblo-shaped molds, Becky organized the written order sheets.

“Looks like we have two weddings
this weekend and a birthday cake for a guy whose hobby is competitive shooting,”
Becky said, spreading the pages on the worktable.

“Julio has already baked the
layers for one of the weddings—the square ones. He’ll bake the other cake once
the stock breakfast items are done. You’ll need two dozen sugar daisies and a
bunch of full-blown pink roses for the first one. The other requires a lot of
string piping—you want to give it a try?”

Becky sent her an uncertain look.
“Strings? They’re so tricky.”

“It’s okay. I can do those if
you’ll just pre-make all the flowers and get them into the fridge to set up.”

Becky sent her a grateful smile and
arranged the order sheets in the sequence they would be completed. “For the
competitive shooter, his wife brought those photographs that Jen copied and
attached to the back. The lady didn’t really have any idea what she wanted, but
Jen and I talked about it. I think I could make the shapes of the metal targets
they use in his competitions. They’re just outlines of simple animal shapes—a
chicken, a pig, a turkey and a ram. We could make them out of chocolate and put
them up on a stand on top of the cake. Unless you think some type of a bulls
eye target is better? And, of course, his name and all that.”

“I like your idea of the
silhouette targets,” Sam said, carrying her tray of molds to a cooling rack to set
up.

Down in her pocket her phone rang
before she had turned around.

“Sam, hi, it’s Carinda Carter.”

Goody. Sam felt her smile go a
little frosty.

“Just wanted to report that I made
all of
Rupert’s
changes and I’ve sent
the art files off to the printer in Albuquerque. They’ll have our finished
posters, the tickets, the badges—the whole works—done by the end of the week.”

“That’s great, Carinda, but
weren’t you going to send them to me first? Just to double check everything?”

“I didn’t see much need for that.
These guys have a great reputation and said they could get right on the job if
they had the materials this morning.”

Sam took a deep breath. “Okay,
then.”
It’s not as if I need the extra
tasks on my own list.

“I just need to know where to have
the invoices sent.”

As far as Sam remembered, they had
not yet discussed the budget for the printing; this question should have been
asked way before Carinda took it upon herself to give the job to a printer. She
took another deep breath. They were so far behind schedule that details such as
costs would have to work themselves out. She gave Carinda the name and address
of the Chamber’s treasurer.

Stuffing her phone back into her
pocket, she had to agree that Kelly had a valid point about Carinda’s pushy
ways. A shriek from the kitchen grabbed her attention. A large tub of
buttercream icing lay splattered all over the floor and Becky stood with a look
of shock on her face.