Custard Crime: Donut Mystery #14 (The Donut Mysteries) (14 page)

“Of course she wasn’t,” Grace said.
 
“I still figured that Jake would make
the place off-limits.”

“Maybe he’s already checked it out,” I said as I
turned off the engine and got out.

Grace followed me outside.
 
“Hasn’t he told you?”

“Believe it or not, we don’t discuss every
development in the case.”

“At least that makes one of you,” she said.

“What do you mean by that?”

Grace just shrugged.
 
“I didn’t mean anything by it.
 
All I’m saying is that you have to tell
him everything that we’re up to, but he doesn’t have to reciprocate.”

“Hey, I’m just happy he hasn’t banned us from
investigating altogether,” I said.
 
“We’re lucky he’s being so lenient with us.”

“I know, but I can’t help wishing that somebody would
take us into their confidence just once, you know what I mean?”

“Believe me, I get it,” I said, “but we have to go
with what we’ve got.
 
Since Jake is
working the case officially, we pretty much have to do what he says.”

“How very unlike us,” Grace said with a smile.

“At least we’re not rolling over completely,” I
said.
 
“After all, we’re here,
aren’t we?”

“We are,” Grace said as we approached the front
door.
 
She frowned when we got
there, though.
 
“I’m not exactly sure
what we’re going to be able to do about it, though.”

“Let’s see what we can find,” I said as I ran my hand
over the door trim.
 
I knew that
most folks liked to hide their spare keys in the most obvious places, including
the doorjamb.

No luck there, though.

“Why don’t you check under the Welcome mat?” Grace
asked, obviously joking.

I stuck my tongue out at her as I leaned over and
lifted one edge of the mat off the concrete.

“There’s no key there, either.
 
It appears that Evelyn was prepared to
outfox anyone as savvy as we are.
 
Maybe she didn’t even leave a spare outside.”

“It’s possible, but I’m not finished looking yet,” I
said.
 
There were some stones by the
front door, so I started checking a few of those to see if there were any fake
ones hiding among the real rocks.
 
There weren’t, and we still hadn’t had any luck after five full minutes
of searching.

“How long are we going to keep this up?” Grace asked
me.
 
“The only reason I’m asking is
that someone might notice that we’re lingering outside an awfully long time.”

“Let’s give it another minute,” I said as I
approached a nearby flowerpot.
 
I
tilted the pot at an angle, but there was nothing underneath it.

Maybe it was hiding a little better there than that.

Sticking my fingers in the potting soil, I rooted
around for anything that felt as though it might be a key.

“Really, Suzanne?
 
Is that what this has come down to?
 
Who sticks their spare key in the dirt?”

At that moment, my fingertip brushed a sharp point,
and as I started to dig it out, I said, “Well, we’ve got Evelyn so far.”
 
I got a grip on the key and pulled it
out.
 
After cleaning it off as best
as I could, I tried inserting it into the lock.

The front door opened with ease.

But we weren’t home free, yet.

Something started beeping the second we opened the
door.

Evidently Evelyn had an alarm system, something that
I hadn’t looked for before I’d unlocked the door.

“Let’s get out of here,” Grace said urgently.
 
“We can’t be here when it goes off!”

“I’m not ready to give up yet,” I said.
 
I stared at the keypad and noticed that
the numbers 1, 5, 8, and 9 were the only numbers that were smudged and a little
dirty.
 
What could that mean?

“Suzanne, let’s go!”

“Hang on.
 
I’ve almost got it.”
 
I
rearranged the numbers in my mind and punched in 1, 9, 5, and 8, holding my
breath as I finished the last digit.

“Alarm Off,” a voice said from the panel, and I
finally let it out.

“How did you know the code?” my best friend asked in
clear bewilderment.

“I cheated,” I admitted.

“How did you manage that?”

“Four numbers were a little more smudged than the
others.
 
I tried to figure out what
the different sequences might be, and then I punched in what I’m guessing was
Evelyn’s birth year.”

“Nice,” Grace said.
 
“You’re pretty good at this, aren’t
you?”

“I have my moments, but don’t forget, so do you.”

“Now that we’re inside,” Grace said, “what do we do
next?”

“We hunt for a clue as to who might have wanted to
see Evelyn Martin dead,” I said.

“Well, the house is barely the size of your cottage,
so it shouldn’t take that long to search,” Grace said.
 
“Do you want the master bedroom or the
den and the kitchen?”

“I’ll take the bedroom,” I said.
 
“I don’t know how much time we have, so
we have to make this quick.
 
If you
find something interesting, don’t take the time to bring it to me.
 
Take a photo of it with your phone, and
we can compare notes later.”

“Got it,” Grace said as she went into the
kitchen.
 
“Happy hunting.”

“You, too,” I said as I hurried into the master
bedroom.
 

The place was neat, which surprised me.
 
Knowing Evelyn, even on the periphery,
hadn’t led me to believe that she’d be particularly fastidious, but the bedroom
was almost Spartan in its minimalism.
 
One picture was on the dresser, and to my surprise, it was of her and
Chief Martin on what had to have been their wedding day.
 
It was an odd constant reminder from a
couple who had divorced under less than amiable conditions.
 
Max and I had gone through a similarly
bad breakup, and I couldn’t imagine having his picture anywhere in the cottage,
let alone in my bedroom.
 
I didn’t
have much time to analyze it, though.
 
As I’d told Grace, we were on the clock.
 
I took my own advice and snapped a quick
photo of it with my phone, then I decided that it was time to move on.
 
The closet, where I’d had high hopes,
turned out to be a bust, or so I thought until I searched the jacket pocket of
a blazer hanging in back.
 
Inside
it, I found a small box and wrapping.
 
Inside that was a gold necklace, obviously not all that expensive to my
eye, and a small card that said, “To Evie.
 
Love, Connie.”
 
No doubt that
was Conrad Swoop, her new significant other.
 
How significant could he really be,
though, with the photo of her and the chief out there for all of the world to
see?
 
She hadn’t exactly deemed the
necklace as being all that important, or it wouldn’t have still been in her
jacket pocket.
 
I considered taking
the necklace to show Grace, but in the end, I decided to keep that information
for later.
 
I took a few more shots
and then put everything back where I’d found it.

Her nightstand was a little more yielding.
 
Inside it, I found more notes from
Connie, but more significantly, buried in the pile was one from Violet
Frasier.
 
She’d written a short but
nasty note telling Evelyn to drop Conrad, or there would be consequences.
 
It sounded a little desperate to me, so
I was careful to get a good shot of it as well.
 
I decided to check the trash, and I
found something interesting there.
 
Buried under a few papers, I found a belated birthday card from Julie
Gray.
 
Not only had Evelyn thrown it
away, but she’d torn it in half first.
 
That was a significant statement in and of itself, so I took a photo of
the torn card and tried to put it back just like I’d found it.
 
That left her dresser, after I carefully
examined Evelyn’s bed, between the mattress and the box springs, and even under
it.
 
Nothing.
 
In the dresser, I found something that
looked like a date book.
 
Had it
been possible that Jake or one of his temporary team members had missed
this?
 
Flipping through it, I saw a
few interesting facts scrawled inside it.
 
One was about a meeting she was supposed to have with her attorney for
that very day.
 
It wasn’t the one
she’d mentioned to Momma, either, so this lawyer had to be about something
besides the partnership.
 
Flipping
through the other pages, I also found a notation that she would be meeting with
the chief himself in a few days.
 
Why hadn’t he mentioned that to anyone?
 
Did Momma even know?
 
How about Jake?
 
It raised more questions than I could
answer, so I decided to take another photo and then I returned it to the
drawer.
 
I looked around the room,
and if there was another possible clue hiding anywhere in there, I’d missed
it.
 
It was time to see if Grace had
any more luck than I had.

“Were you able to find anything?” I asked as I joined
her.

Grace was so startled, she looked as though she’d
just seen a ghost.
 
“Don’t sneak up
on me like that,” she said as she held her heart.
 
“You just about scared the life out of
me.”

“Sorry, I’ll try not to be so stealthy in the
future.”

“I’d appreciate that,” she said with a wry
smile.
 
“Did you have any luck?”

“I found a few little tidbits,” I said.
 
“How about you?”

“Nothing.
 
Zilch.
 
Nada.”

“Then let’s tackle the rest of the house together,” I
said as I heard a key go in the front door lock.

“What do we do?” Grace hissed at me.

“We run,” I said as I headed for the back door.

As Grace went through, I slid the locking mechanism
on the knob to lock automatically, but the door alarm pinged as the door
opened.
 
Had the person coming in
heard it?
 
I hoped not, but I didn’t
exactly have any time to hang around and quiz them about it.
 
If they noticed that the alarm had been
disabled, that was just too bad.
 
At
least there hadn’t been any security cameras inside.
 
Not that we’d seen, anyway.
 
If we’d been captured on film, I’d have
to figure out a way to talk myself out of the trouble, but until then, I wasn’t
going to worry about it.

Grace was waiting in the bushes for me as the door
closed, and I hurried toward her.
 
“Let’s go,” I whispered fiercely.

“I want to see who’s in there,” she said.

“We can’t afford to be caught anywhere near here,
remember?”

“Let’s hang around for a few seconds.
 
This could be important,” she said, so I
had a decision to make.
 
Should I
follow my own instincts and run for the next-door neighbor’s yard and escape,
or should I join Grace and share her fate, no matter what that might be?
 
In the end, it wasn’t really a decision
at all.
 
If my best friend was going
down, then I was going, too.
 
I
ducked into the shrubbery with her and poked my head over the top so that I
could see inside.

It took a moment or two for the person who’d gone in
to show themselves, but when they finally did, I knew that Grace had been right
to stay.
 
I had to admit that it
kind of shocked me to see who was there, though.

Who would have thought that Chief Martin would be
doing a little breaking and entering himself after all of the times that he’d
told me that I shouldn’t be doing it?

Chapter 13

“What do we do?” Grace asked in a whisper.
 
“Should we barge in and see what he’s up
to, do we call Jake, or do we leave and pretend that this never happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said, whispering back.
 
“None of those options sound like good
ones to me.”

“Well, we don’t have much time,” Grace said.
 
“We don’t know how long the chief’s
planning to stay in there.”

“Let’s give him a minute and see what he does,” I
urged.

“You’re the one who wanted to run away in the first
place, remember?”

“That was before I knew that the burglar was our
police chief,” I replied.
 
We
watched as he walked over to the kitchen, peered into a few cabinets, and then
headed off toward Evelyn’s bedroom.
 
“Let’s go.”

“Are we honestly going to just leave without seeing
what he’s up to?” Grace asked me.

“No, we’re going to see if we can get a better look
through the window in there,” I answered.

“Now you’re talking,” Grace said.

We hurried over to the bedroom window and tried to
peek inside.
 
Only a part of the
shade was pulled, so it was tougher to see in there, but when I looked through
the glass, I saw the chief holding the framed photo of him and his late wife on
their wedding day.
 
Was it purely sentimental?
 
I thought so at first, but then I saw
him turn the frame over and quickly remove the back of it.
 
I’d never thought of searching there for
anything!
 
As Chief Martin took the
backing off, something fluttered to the floor, but I couldn’t see what it
was.
 
I had been within inches of
that frame just moments ago, not to mention whatever clue that might be hiding
there, but I hadn’t been smart enough to look behind the picture.