Sugar Coated Sins (5 page)

Gabby looked as though she were
about to cry when she spoke again.
 
“Tell
him that I’m sorry.”

“Excuse me?”

“Suzanne, I shouldn’t have
stonewalled him when he was here earlier.
 
The sheriff had every right to ask me about Ben, and I was a fool not to
share everything that I knew with him.
 
Sometimes my stubbornness seems to get in the way of doing the right
thing.
 
I should have treated your husband
better when we spoke earlier.”

“Gabby, it had to have been a
shock learning that what you thought was an accident was in actuality murder.”

“Maybe, but I’m still sorry for my
behavior.
 
Would you tell him that for
me?”

I wasn’t entirely sure that he
would believe me, but I at least owed the attempt to her.
 
“I’ll tell him as soon as I see him.”

“Thank you,” Gabby said, and then
she surprised me again by grabbing my hands in hers.
 
“Suzanne, I know that Jake is in charge of
things in April Springs now, but you need to help him in any way that you can.
 
Ben deserves the best that the entire town
has.”

“I’m doing what I can, but I’m
mostly just staying out on the edges of the investigation,” I admitted.

“In whatever way you can
contribute, I’d greatly appreciate it,” she said.

As I left her shop, I marveled at
the twists and turns our conversation had taken.
 
I wished that I’d had the foresight to tape
it, if nothing else so I could replay Gabby’s apology to be sure that I hadn’t
heard it wrong, but as things stood, it was a fact only in my memory.
 
I thought about going to get Grace and
sharing what I’d learned with her, but updating her was going to have to wait.

Jake needed to hear this new
information, and he needed to hear it immediately.

I wasn’t going to give it to him
over the phone, either.

Mostly because I wanted to see his
reaction when I conveyed Gabby’s apology to him.

Chapter
7

“She said what?” Jake asked
incredulously after I relayed Gabby’s apology.
 
I’d saved that part for last, touching upon the suspects she’d mentioned
first.
 
Jake hadn’t even raised an
eyebrow when I listed the people Gabby had mentioned, not even the judge.
 
He’d just made a few notes in his book
without revealing much emotion at all.
 
“Suzanne, I’m having a tough time believing that Gabby has ever been
remorseful about anything in her life.”

“Trust me, I just about choked on
my own tongue myself when she said it,” I said, “but she sounded sincere.
 
You caught her off-guard when you first told
her about what happened to Benjamin.
 
She
felt bad about rebuffing you the way that she did.”

“Well, no harm done in the long
run, since she clearly felt comfortable opening up with you.
 
We’ve got some new leads now, so that’s never
a bad thing.
 
I’m expecting Phillip any
second, and I have a feeling that he’s going to want to hear what you
uncovered, too.”

“Despite my mother’s desire that
he stop investigating murder altogether?”

Jake shrugged.
 
“He’s already got his toe in the water.
 
Besides, I’m not asking him to do anything
that he’s not comfortable doing.”

“Do you really need him, though?”
I asked my husband.
 
Was he having a
crisis of confidence or something?
 
That
was more impossible for me to believe than Gabby’s earlier apology, though I’d
heard it with my own two ears.

“Phillip might not have been
sheriff back then, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have valuable insights
into the folks Gabby mentioned to you.”

“Maybe so, but let’s at least try
to leave him out of it, okay?
 
For me?”

Jake looked at me for a full ten
seconds before he spoke again.
 
“Is it
really that important to you?”

“Not to me personally, but it
matters to Momma, so that means that it matters to me.”

“Okay.
 
I get it.
 
I can’t make any promises, but I’ll try.”

“That’s all I’m asking,” I said.

“You might get some arguments from
Phillip about dropping him, but that’s going to be on your head.”
 
Jake studied what he’d written for a moment
before speaking again.
 
“So far, we’ve
got a spurned love, greedy sister, and a judge whose motive is yet to be
determined.
 
Does that about sum up what
we know at this point?”

“Don’t forget Gabby herself,” I
added.

That caught Jake by surprise.
 
“Do you actually suspect her of murder?”

“If you’re asking me if I think
she did it, I’d have to say no, but that doesn’t mean that her name doesn’t
belong on our list until we can prove that it’s fact and not just wishful
thinking.”

“To be honest with you, I added it
in my head, but I wasn’t certain how you’d react if I said it aloud.”

“It’s a possibility, so her name
belongs with the others,” I said.
 
“We can’t
let anything else influence our actions.”

“Good.
 
I’ve got to say, you’ve come a long way,
Suzanne.
 
I’m impressed.”

“Thank you, kind sir.”
 
I enjoyed getting praise for my abilities as
much as anyone else did, whether it was coming from my husband or a total
stranger.

Stephen Grant popped his head into
Jake’s office.
 
“Boss, did you need me
for anything?”

“Not yet, but after I talk to the
sheriff, come find me,” Jake said.

“Will do, but I thought you were
the sheriff now.”
 
It wasn’t said with
any malice or rancor, even though Jake had replaced him in the office.

“For the time being.
 
No, I’m talking about Sheriff Martin.”

“It’s getting to be that you can’t
turn around in here without bumping into a sheriff one place or another,” I
said with a smile.

He turned to me and grinned for a
second.
 
“What can I say?
 
We’re just lucky that way, I guess.”

After he was gone, I asked Jake,
“How’s Stephen handling his demotion?”

“Nobody’s calling it that,
Suzanne.”

I frowned for a moment before I
spoke.
 
“That’s funny; he was sheriff,
and now he’s not.
 
How else could you
describe it?”

It was Jake’s turn to frown.
 
“Stephen Grant is a fine officer.
 
He may need a hand right now, but as soon as
he’s ready, I’m going to turn things back over to him.”

“And whose job is it going to be
to determine that he’s ready?” I asked.

My husband took a deep breath, let
it out slowly, and then said, “Suzanne, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think
you were trying to pick a fight with me.”

I looked at him as I hastily shook
my head.
 
“I’m sorry.
 
I didn’t mean it to sound that way.
 
I’m just worried about him.”

“Well, there’s no need to be.
 
He’s fine.”

“If you say so, then that’s good
enough for me,” I said, and then I kissed my husband’s cheek.
 
“I really wasn’t trying to be mean.”

“I know that.
 
It’s not in your nature.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” I
replied with a grin.

Jake was about to answer when the
former sheriff hesitated at what had once been his door, knocked, and then
waited to be asked in.

“Come on in, Phillip.
 
Did you have any luck?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, and then he
said hello to me before he settled into one of the visitors’ chairs.
 
Phillip took out a notebook much like the one
Jake used, flipped through the pages until he got to the appropriate entry, and
then began to explain just what he’d uncovered so far.
 
As he spoke, Phillip reached into his
briefcase and pulled out a handful of copies.
 
“That was smart making copies of all of the letters, not just the
confession.”

“You would have done it yourself
if I hadn’t suggested it,” Jake replied, though I wasn’t entirely sure that
would have been the case.

Spreading them out on the
now-empty desktop, Phillip asked, “What did you do with the other things that
were in the time capsule?”

Jake pointed to one corner.
 
“I put them all over there.
 
Thank goodness we have a mayor who used to be
a cop.
 
The Historical Society wanted to
put it all back in and rebury it so the clock tower could be replaced as soon
as possible, but George refused.”

“George is a good man,” Phillip said.
 
After he had the letters spread out on the
wide oak top, he started consolidating them into small piles.
 
“These five letters were from people who
signed them at the time they were buried, so I didn’t bother checking on any of
them.
 
The other five are a little more
interesting.
 
Two of the folks who wrote
letters have since died, so I figured that we didn’t have anything to worry
about them, at least not immediately.
 
I
focused on the last three that were still alive.
 
If we end up eliminating the living suspects,
we can investigate the others later.”
 
As
Phillip spoke, he pulled the letters in question to the front and added the
others to the main stack.

“So, did any of the final three
living letter writers know Benjamin personally?” I asked.

“Hang on.
 
I’m getting to that.”

I wished my stepfather would speed
up his presentation, but it was clear that he was enjoying his role as
investigator too much.

“Sorry,” I said contritely.

“Don’t apologize, Suzanne,” Jake
said.
 
“I was wondering the same thing.
 
Go on, Phillip.”

“Understood.
 
Of the three folks remaining, I found
references in each of the letters that strongly suggested two of the identities
without having to question either person.
 
That left me with one letter, which was the confession we found, and one
person still on my list.”

“So, who wrote the last letter,
the one we’re all interested in?” I asked.

Phillip shook his head.
 
“The real question at that point was who had
the last slot, not who wrote the confession.”

“Aren’t they one and the same
person?” Jake asked.

“No.
 
There’s absolutely no chance of that.”

“You seem pretty confident about
that,” Jake said.

“Okay, I’ll bite.
 
Who was invited to include the last letter in
the capsule?” I asked him.

“That’s where things start to get
muddy.
 
It turns out that it was Emma,
your assistant at the donut shop,” he said gravely.

“What?
 
Emma?
 
She was five years old when they buried that capsule.
 
I doubt that she could have even written her
own name.”

“That’s the beauty of it.
 
She didn’t write anything, but she did create
a drawing in crayon that they were supposed to include.
 
There was a lottery at every level of the
local school system with every child’s name entered, and they drew Emma’s.”
 
Phillip stopped and turned to look at my
husband.
 
“Jake, we didn’t miss anything,
did we?
 
I searched the contents of that
capsule thoroughly, but I didn’t see anything like the artwork Emma described
to me over the phone twenty minutes ago when I asked her about her entry.”

“I can’t imagine that we overlooked
anything like a small child’s drawing, but let’s look again to be certain,” he
said.

Phillip gathered up his copies of
the letters again, and we spread the contents of the time capsule out on his
desk once more.

There was nothing that even
vaguely resembled a child’s drawing in the pile.

It appeared that we were back at
square one.

“So, where does that leave us?”
Phillip asked us.

“Clearly someone substituted their
confession for Emma’s drawing at the last minute,” Jake said.
 
“They must have buried it with everything
else, figuring no one would actually notice the switch.
 
After all, why would they, unless they were
looking specifically for Emma’s artwork?
 
To the casual bystander, it would look like it was ten letters from ten
submissions.
 
We need to find out who had
access to that time capsule before they buried it.
 
More importantly, did any of our suspects so
far have any way of adding anything to the stack before it was buried?”

“Jake, how can he possibly know
the answer to that?
 
We haven’t told
Phillip what Gabby shared with me yet,” I reminded him.

“That’s right,” Jake said before
my stepfather stopped him.
 
“We need to
talk.”

“Hold on.
 
I agreed to help out behind the scenes, but
if you tell me those names, I’m going to be involved in your current
investigation, whether I want to be or not.”

“You can walk away right now if
that’s what you really want to do,” Jake said.
 
“Nobody’s forcing you to do anything that you don’t want to do.”

Phillip was clearly wrestling with
his desire to be a part of this and my mother’s need for him to stay out of
it.
 
I started to say something, but then
I knew enough to keep my mouth shut.
 
My
stepfather needed to come to his own conclusions without any advice from
me.
 
After all, he was the one who would
have to live with the consequences of his actions.
 
After a few moments, he reluctantly
nodded.
 
“Go ahead and tell me.
 
As long as I stay behind the scenes, I should
be okay.
 
I’ll give you any advice I can
about whoever you’ve been able to come up with, but I won’t go out into the
field anymore.”

“Will you at least help us with
our research?” Jake asked.
 
“I’m not
talking about interviews.
 
I’d like to
have someone dig into the town’s archives to see what they can uncover.
 
It might be helpful to look through old
newspapers, too.
 
What do you say to
that?
 
Are you up for it?”

“That’s right up my alley these
days,” he said, clearly excited about the prospect of digging into our town’s
past.
 
The mere thought of it nearly put me
to sleep, so he was more than welcome to that line of investigation as far as I
was concerned.
 
“I’d be happy to help.”

“Good.
 
Here’s what we know so far.
 
Gabby was able to give us three suspects, and
Suzanne suggested that we include her in our list as well.
 
After all, if she was dating Benjamin Port
when he was murdered, then she might have motive of her own that she didn’t
share with us.”

“It makes sense,” Phillip said as
he nodded his acknowledgment in my direction.
 
When I’d first started sleuthing, he hadn’t been all that impressed with
my instincts or my abilities, but over time, he’d learned that I could
contribute to an investigation as well.
 
“Who else made your list?”