Murder Gone A-Rye (A Baker's Treat Mystery) (14 page)

“S
o, tell me, what have you learned in your investigation into Lois Striker’s death?” Todd Woles, the owner of the only men’s store in town, came into the kitchen carrying his coffee and sat on a stool. “Spill.”

“I am not investigating Lois’s death.” I could feel my tone of voice rising with my frustration. My hands kept busy folding boxes for the afternoon’s delivery. “Why does everyone think I am?”

“Because you solved the last murder so nicely.” Todd sipped his coffee. “We are all certain you are also looking into this one.”

“We?” I stopped folding and gave him a meaningful stare-down. “Who is ‘we’?”

“Me and the mouse in my pocket, sweetheart,” he said, ignoring my stare. “Seriously, the entire town is on pins and needles. All of the downtown stores are working on their floats for the Homer Everett parade. No one can get anything done with the specter of Lois flying over our heads.” He waved his hand in the air in a sad imitation of swatting at a flying Lois.

Todd and I had met during my last investigation. We had become fast friends. When you lived in a small town like Oiltop and you were a little—how shall I put it . . . different?—you tended to find the others in town who were different and stick together.

It helped that Todd’s store was down the block from mine. He had made it a habit to come down for coffee and a tasty treat on his morning break.

“I also noticed you seem to be done decorating yours.”

“Yeah, I’ve been busy in my kitchen with orders. What do you think of ours?” I know the question sounded suspiciously as if I were fishing for a compliment. Todd had a good eye for design. If the float was a complete disaster, he would tell me.

“It could use a good edit,” he admitted. “Once you do that it will look fine.”

“Okay to be in public fine, or might challenge the Rotary club for first place kind of fine?” I raised an eyebrow and put my hands on my hips.

“That depends completely on the edit,” Todd said.

“Right.” I chewed on my bottom lip. “Would you come and edit it for me?”

“Oh my god, I thought you’d never ask.” He slipped off the stool and dug his tiny calendar out of his pocket. Thumbing through the pages, he stopped on this week’s page. “I can make some time today at four
P.M.
Shall I meet you at the fairgrounds?”

“Yes.” It felt as if a huge weight were lifted off my shoulders. “I’ll be there. Text me if I’m not.”

“Oh, trust me, honey, if you care about your float at all, you will find the time to meet me today.” He took a small pen out of the spiral of his notebook and wrote down a note. “For the first time, I do believe your float might stand a chance of winning. For a while there I thought you would have to have a dead body on it. . . .”

“Don’t say that!” I went back to my stack of dessert boxes. “I want people to come for the tasty baked goods, not for dead people.”

“They would come for both if you catered funerals.” Grandma Ruth came rolling in the back door, clearly pleased with herself, Aunt Phyllis behind her.

“And I’m out of here.” Todd jumped off his stool and brushed a kiss on my cheek. “Thanks for the coffee and donut.”

“You’re welcome every day,” I said as he sauntered off. Todd wore a gray Armani wool suit, pale pink shirt, and hot-pink-and-white striped tie. At first I had been afraid for him to come into the kitchen in such nice clothes, but Todd had reassured me that nothing would dare touch his Armani. I shook my head as he reached the doorway, his clothing as clean as if he’d come straight from the dry cleaner. How did he do that?

My own clothes were covered in rice flour and glazes of all flavors.

“I expect to see you at four,” he said, and with his back to me, waved his hand in a good-bye gesture as he left.

“What are you doing at four?” Aunt Phyllis asked as she picked up a white mug and poured herself coffee.

“Todd has agreed to come over and edit my float so that I have a chance of winning.”

“Why would he do that? Doesn’t the men’s store have a float?”

“Not this year.” I puffed out a breath, sending my bangs flying out of my eyes. “Todd promised to help me instead.”

“Be careful.” Grandma scowled. “That man has an agenda.”

“What?” I scoffed. “Todd does not have an agenda. He’s a good friend. I won’t have you talking about him like that.”

“Agenda or no agenda”—Aunt Phyllis sat down at the table with a good bit of groan and tasted her coffee—“you need help with your float.”

“You’d better not edit me out of it.” Grandma Ruth sat down with a great deal of slow-motion effort. “I’ve been looking forward to it all year.”

“I won’t edit you out,” I said, a bit perturbed. “As long as you stay out of jail. Where have you two been since I spoke to you last night? I was up all night expecting a call from the police.”

“You’ll be happy to know we did not break into Lois Striker’s place,” Aunt Phyllis announced.

“Wonderful,” I said. “So, what, you slept in this morning? Did you take Bill out to breakfast? Stop at the Y for swim class? Take those journals to Chief Blaylock?”

“No, no, no, and hell no.” Grandma pulled a paper napkin out of the holder on the table and set it down in front of her. She snatched one of the day-old donuts off the rack behind her. “Chief Blaylock has no idea how to conduct an investigation. He’d take these journals and lock them up—not read them.”

“Besides, we need them to compare to Lois’s diary.” Phyllis pulled a tattered book out of her tan suede shoulder bag. She leaned back and opened the pages.

“I thought you said you didn’t break into Lois’s house.” I walked over to see what the book was and possibly discern where she got it.

“We didn’t,” Grandma said with her mouth full of donut. “Didn’t have to. The door was open.”

“Grandma! Don’t tell me you walked into someone’s house and went through her things.”

“She’s dead—what does she care?” Grandma shrugged and licked her finger, then picked up the crumbs from the table and ate them.

“It’s not right.” I put my hands on my hips and glared at them both. “You both know better than that.”

“It’s okay, dear.” Aunt Phyllis patted my arm. “Someone else broke in first. As far as we were concerned, we were looking to see if anyone was hurt or bleeding.”

“That’s right.” Grandma nodded and gave me her most pious look. “We happened to find the diary while we were ensuring no one was hurt.”

“Hmmm.” I tightened my mouth into a single line. “Where was the diary?”

“In a secret cubby between her bathtub and the closet wall.” Aunt Phyllis was back into the book, thumbing through the pages.

“Oh, my . . .” I shook my head and didn’t finish the thought. Those two were hopeless.

“No worries, we were wearing gloves,” Aunt Phyllis said absently as she slowed her page-turning.

“And we called the police.” Grandma snagged another donut. “Barney Fife came and took over the scene.”

“Stop calling him that.”

Grandma shrugged. “Why? You have to agree that he is a bit of a self-important nitwit.”

“Because someday you are going to call him that to his face and he’s going to press charges for slander.”

“Not a jury in the world would convict me,” Grandma said and defiantly bit into another donut. This one was apple spice with maple frosting.

“Wow, listen to this.” Aunt Phyllis adjusted her reading glasses and lifted the book to eye level. “November tenth: That nosy Ruth is investigating again. Why can’t people just leave us alone?”

“Us?” Grandma asked.

I leaned over to see the book. “What year is that? For all we know it was written ten years ago and has nothing to do with her murder.”

“It’s this year.” Aunt Phyllis put her finger on the page and closed the book to show me the year embossed on the cover. “It seems Lois was a regular journal writer. She has each day noted. This is the first one that doesn’t list what she ate and who she talked to that day.”

I frowned. “But why would she hide her journal and not write in it the last two days of her life?”

“The better question to ask is who broke into her house and what they wanted.” Grandma Ruth sat back in her chair. “Why did she hide this journal and not the other twenty piled on her bedroom floor?”

“Right.” Aunt Phyllis nodded. “This was the only journal in her hidey-hole. Whoever broke in must have been looking for it.” She glanced at me. “The place was tossed. There was stuff everywhere. The pictures were even crooked, as if they knew about her hidey-hole and were looking for it.”

“Wait, her house was not only broken into but ransacked? And you two waltzed in and found her stashed diary?” I was aghast. “Whoever broke in could have still been inside.”

“We were careful,” Aunt Phyllis said.

“Plus, we called the cops,” Grandma said.

“After you found her cubbyhole,” I pointed out and shook my head. “You both could have been hurt or worse. Neither of you do me any good if you’re dead.”

“Worried about your float?” Grandma asked. “I’m sure your Lucy would take my place should I die.”

“I told you, Lucy is leaving for New York tonight so that she will be there to watch the Macy’s parade.” I snatched the diary out of Aunt Phyllis’s hands.

“Hey!”

I flipped through the pages. “How do you know this wasn’t planted?”

“For us to find?” Grandma narrowed her blue eyes. “Who would do that?”

“Better yet, who would know we were going to be there to look?”

“Maybe it wasn’t hidden for you, but for whoever should be investigating,” I said and thumbed through the pages. “Is there anything in here that no one else would know?”

“How would we know that?” Grandma asked.

“Exactly,” I said. “Which is why you should have turned this straight in to the cops. We have no idea if this is even really written by Lois. It could have been planted.”

“Yes, we do.” Aunt Phyllis pulled out Grandma’s sample of Lois’s handwriting as an old woman. “The handwriting is a match. See?” She held up the papers.

I took one and placed it on the book next to the carefully written entry for October thirtieth of this year. The handwriting was a little shaky, but Phyllis was right. It was a dead-on match.

“Okay, let’s just say that Lois wrote this current journal. What exactly does that mean?” I asked and sat down on one of the stools in the kitchen.

“It means that Lois was a regular journaler. Not only did she write her own journal but she wrote Homer’s as well. We all read where the woman who wrote Homer’s journal had Homer’s child,” Grandma said smugly. “Which means that Hutch is Lois and Homer’s child, not Homer and Susan’s.”

“That explains why she stuck around,” Aunt Phyllis said and sipped her coffee. “She wanted to be close to her love child.”

“Wait, Homer’s wife knew Hutch was Homer and Lois’s love child when she adopted him. Why did she tolerate Lois’s presence in town?” I asked.

“Good question,” Grandma said. “Why would you tolerate Lois’s presence in town?”

“Maybe she didn’t,” I suggested.

“Susan’s been dead for ten years,” Aunt Phyllis said. “She couldn’t have killed Lois, my dear.” She patted me on the knee.

My head hurt. Small-town politics were crazy and part of the reason I’d run off to Chicago in the first place. Sure, Chicago was notorious for its politics and gangsters, but at least they were honest about it. People in Oiltop acted as if they were simple small-town people with Midwestern values, and all the while they were scheming in the background.

“So wait, let’s start from the beginning.” I rubbed my temple. “Grandma, you were investigating Homer Everett, right?”

“Yes, dear.” Grandma snatched a third donut.

“And you suspected him of murdering his best friend, Champ Rogers.”

“Yes,” Grandma said. “We know that Champ was killed and that no one ever found the murder weapon. We also know that during that time the courthouse was mysteriously renovated so that there is space between the walls in the judge’s chambers.

“I merely surmised that Homer was involved and that Lois knew the truth.” Grandma leaned back in her chair.

“When you went to Lois with your suspicions, she denied them,” I said.

“Of course she did.” Grandma ran her hand over the table. “I expected her to, which is why I had a private investigator follow her.”

“You what?” I straightened up. “Who is the private investigator, and why am I only now learning about him?”

“You mean her,” Grandma said. “The private investigator is a her.”

“Grandma, why are you investigating if you hired a private investigator?” I rubbed my temples.

“Because I don’t want her to have all the fun.” Grandma shrugged.

“Do you hear yourself?” I said. “You sound as crazy as this scheme.”

“Oh, come on, you have to admit you’re hooked. You want to find out who killed Lois, and why, as badly as we do.”

“What I want”—I slipped off the stool and put the diary on a high shelf—“is to know that you two are safe. Why don’t you go to the senior center and play cards or go swimming at the Y? Something safe and normal for people your age?”

“Old people are boring.” Grandma put her hands on her hips.