Sweet Somethings (Samantha Sweet Mysteries) (26 page)

“Touch.”

Isobel reached out and laid her
palm against the top, pulling it back quickly. “It’s hot!”

“Not yet. But it will get that
way.”

The smooth stones began to glow
red, green and blue—brighter and brighter.

“How—?” Isobel backed slightly
away, her eyes wide.

“Don’t worry. This is the good
one, remember? I don’t feel like I have an evil gleam in my eye or anything.”
Sam set the box on the table. “Usually, once I’ve done this, I seem to have
some degree of healing ability. I think it’s the same thing that made Bertha
Martinez such a renowned healer in her day. Sarah Williams confirmed that she’d
seen Bertha do some pretty unexplainable things.”

Isobel seemed fascinated. “I woke
up this morning with a crick in my neck—hotel pillow. Do you think—?”

Sam stepped toward her. “Let me
touch the spot.” She held both hands gently against the sides of the younger
woman’s neck.

“Warm! I can’t believe it.” Isobel
stood perfectly still. When Sam removed her hands, Isobel turned her head side
to side. “There is absolutely no pain! I could hardly look over my left
shoulder this morning.”

She reached up and touched her
neck in amazement.

“I’m not a healer,” Sam said, “I’m
a baker. I have no idea how this thing works or why Bertha wanted me to have
it.”

Isobel fixed a serious stare on
her. “Take great care, Sam. I am still learning about these things, but from
what I gather these boxes come into the possession of the right person at the
right time. There is a reason you are supposed to have this one. Be careful
that the wrong people do not get it.”

Sam felt the weight of her
mission.

“But the other one? If it’s
supposedly evil, why did my uncle have it? He seemed to be a gentle and happy
man. I never heard that he did anything bad. He was certainly kind and generous
with those who knew him.”

Isobel chewed at her lower lip for
a moment. “We don’t know that yet, do we? Perhaps the third box still exists
and it’s the one he owned. Or maybe, as we’ve discovered just now—your box
worked no magic when I touched it—maybe the evil box has no effect unless an
otherwise evil person gets it.”

She laid a hand on Sam’s forearm.
“Just be careful. I can’t warn you enough. Don’t ever forget that there are
others who would love to get hold of this.”

“The institute known as OSM?”

“And perhaps others. I need to go
now,” Isobel said, picking up her file. “Keep that artifact in a safe place.
One day, the answer will come to you—the name of the person who is meant to own
it next.”

Sam watched the grey sedan drive
toward the road, feeling a little shaky inside with this new knowledge. It
seemed the box’s days of sitting on her vanity in the bathroom, filled with
costume jewelry, were over. She shoved aside the coats in the hall closet,
opened the wooden panel at the back, and twirled the dial on Beau’s safe. The
box seemed a little forlorn when she set it inside and closed the door.

“All’s okay?” Beau asked when he
came in ten minutes later. “The historical lady friendly enough?”

She filled him in, including the
parts about the box in Ireland being made by the same carver, the age of the
boxes, and the interest of The Vongraf Foundation. Omitted the parts about the
battle of good and evil and the fact that the box they had left behind in
Ireland could very well be one of the latter. Those were the sorts of things
Beau saw more as movie elements than reality, and for all Sam knew, that was
exactly what they were.

His phone rang as Sam was heading
toward the kitchen with a loose plan to figure out what to make for lunch. When
his voice went still and then he said
uh-oh,
she turned. He clicked off the call and headed for the front door.

“Your friend—Isobel—she was
involved in an accident. Just now, between here and town.”

“I’m coming with you.” Sam grabbed
her pack and trailed about two inches behind him.

His cruiser’s wheels spun a little
on gravel when he put it in gear. Lights on and siren wailing—they came to the
accident scene less than five minutes later.

Isobel’s grey rental sat nose down
in a ditch beside the road, the driver’s side door bashed. Sam felt her breath
catch. Another Sheriff’s Department cruiser was already on scene and a deputy
Sam didn’t know greeted Beau. She flung herself out of his vehicle and raced to
the wrecked car.

The historian hung awkwardly by
her seatbelt, blood running down the side of her face and a nasty gash on her
left arm.

“Isobel! Isobel!” Sam shouted
through the passenger side window, which had broken into a million tiny pieces.

“I’m okay,” Isobel said, fumbling
one-handed at the release button for the seat belt. “I just need to get this—”

“Don’t! You’re at such a weird
angle—you’ll fall. EMTs will be here in a minute.”

“It was Marcus Fitch,” Isobel
said. “He came out of nowhere, behind me. He pulled alongside and I thought he
would crash head-on with this other car . . . but he steered right into me.
Pushed me off the road.”

Her face suddenly went very white
and her eyes rolled back as she slumped limply against the safety restraint.

Sam looked for Beau, who was
talking to a man, apparently a witness, driving an older SUV. She started to
run toward him but nearby sirens told her the ambulance had arrived. She hung
back while emergency personnel crawled into the car, maneuvered Isobel out of
it, and strapped her to a gurney. She was conscious again by that time and Sam
stepped to her side.

“He went through my car,” Isobel
said breathing heavily. “Looking for the box . . . demanding it . . . took my
file . . . and the old photo—from my purse—” Paramedics had laid the purse on
her belly and she patted it. “Watch out. Please be careful.”

One of the paramedics asked Sam to
step out of the way and she watched helplessly as they loaded the woman into
the ambulance.

“Her injuries seem pretty minor,”
he told Sam. “She’ll be in the ER for a little while but they’ll probably let
her go home later today.”

Not to Virginia, Sam thought.

Beau had finished questioning the
witness and he walked over to Sam just as the ambulance pulled away. “The guy
got a plate number,” he said.

“I can do better than that. I got
a name.”

She went into the short version of
how Isobel knew Marcus Fitch, that he worked for the OSM, saying only that
there was an intense rivalry between their employers over some artifacts.

“I should go to the hospital to
see how she’s doing and to give her a ride back to her hotel when they let her
out. She’s all alone here.”

She thought of the wooden box all
the way home and throughout her drive to the hospital. How much harm was the
thing worth? She would be better off to get rid of it, but she had tried that
in the past and every plan backfired. Bobul’s words came back to her, the
things he had told her more than a year ago when he first showed up at her shop
to make chocolates for the Christmas season. The boxes had a long history and
they held immense power.

Good power and evil power. Sam had
been entrusted with one of them, but it was not her job to right all the
world’s wrongs or to step into the midst of a battle between two competing
organizations.

She rounded a curve in the road
and pulled into the nearest parking spot to the emergency entrance. Inside the
ER, she followed the sound of voices until she found Isobel St. Clair sitting
on the edge of a bed, two butterfly plasters across the cut on her temple and a
stretch of gauze encircling her arm.

“She’ll have some facial
bruising,” said the nurse, “but all in all, she cleaned up pretty well.”

She turned back to the patient and
gave some instructions regarding the bottle of pain meds she was handing over,
as well as some basic wound-care information.

“That was a little bit close,” Isobel
said as Sam helped her into the bakery van. “I really didn’t think Marcus Fitch
and the OSM were quite that desperate.”

Sam got into her own seat and
started the engine. “Well, you used the word ‘evil’ before. This looks pretty
mild for true evil.”

“I suppose you’re right. At this
point, all he wanted from me was to know what I knew. Guess he thought that
since he couldn’t butter me up with niceties and lunches, back in DC, that he
would put a little scare into me. Don’t worry, Sam, I did not and will not ever
let them know that I’ve seen one of the boxes or where it is.”

Sam thought again of the term
‘evil.’ Marcus wasn’t going to stop at questioning. Eventually, this would lead
to greater injuries, perhaps even torture, to get the information.

“He got my file,” Isobel said.
“For now, that should keep him happy.”

“But all your work—lost.”

“Everything I brought on the trip
was a copy. The Foundation has excellent security on the premises and we’re
very careful about what actually gets out the door. I will be back behind those
closely guarded doors by this time tomorrow,” she said as Sam pulled up in
front of Isobel’s hotel room.

Sam didn’t feel nearly as
confident as Isobel sounded, but she was happy to drop her off with the
assurance that she would immediately request a move to a different room for the
night.

“He may figure out that I visited
you, might have been watching while we talked yesterday. But nothing in that
file leads to you. I was in town to see Sarah Williams, as he was, and that’s
the only connection he has to you. Stick with your story that you and Sarah had
nothing in common but the chocolate festival.”

Sam drove away, feeling a little
queasy inside. At one point she had wondered if Marcus, posing as Marc
Williams, might have killed Sarah. That probably wasn’t the case—he had nothing
to gain by Sarah’s death without first getting his hands on the box. But the
frightening thought that she had not voiced to Isobel was, had Marcus come a
lot closer than any of them realized? Was he the man Rico had chased away from
their home as the fire was moving in? If he’d not been caught, would he have
broken in and ransacked their place in the same way he’d gone through Sarah’s?

She quelled that thought. The box
was well hidden. The dogs would not be away from the house next time and would
defend the place with all their might. And, since causing Isobel’s accident,
surely the man knew enough to get away and stay away from Taos.

Chapter
23

Sam fell onto the sofa the moment
she got home. When Beau walked in she peered out from under the arm she’d slung
across her eyes to block the light.

“Busy week, huh?” he said, kneeling
beside her to plant a kiss on the tip of her nose.

“Two mysteries solved in as many
days,” she said. “I learned what I wanted to know about Bertha’s wooden box,
you caught a murderer.”

“I hope so.” He sat near her feet.
“I fully believe that Kaycee actually stabbed Carinda Carter, but I’m still not
convinced that Kaycee and Harvey won’t muddle each other’s stories to the point
where neither of them goes to prison.”

“It was really luck of the draw
that Carinda inherited the Julia Joffrey money in the first place, wasn’t it? I
mean, old Julia could have randomly chosen any of her many half-nieces or
nephews. Maybe all she really wanted to accomplish was to throw the entire clan
into a battle.”

“Proof positive that winning isn’t
always a good thing, or a guarantee of happiness. I think you said that to me
recently.”

He smiled and stroked her leg.
“Oh, I meant to tell you . . . I did what I could to get information on that
OSM organization you asked about? Came up with zilch. It’s as if they don’t
even exist.”

Isobel had told Sam the group was
pretty low-key, perhaps even a secret branch of the government. Maybe it was
true.

“I can keep checking,” he said.
“I’ve got a couple of buddies in the FBI.”

“Nah, that’s okay.” What good
would the information do? It wasn’t as if Sam planned to take them on, to track
down Marcus Fitch—for what?—to pin a traffic accident on him? Let that battle
remain Isobel’s quest. She would keep the box locked away until she could
decide what to do—keep it, figure out a way to destroy it, or—better—pass it
along to its next rightful owner.

Meanwhile, the chocolate festival
was finished and Sweet’s Sweets would return to the normal, crazy pace of the
wedding season. The Joffrey fortune would most likely end up being
redistributed to dozens of beneficiaries and, with luck, at least some of them
would put the money to use for some greater good. Life, for Sam and Beau, would
settle—she hoped—into a state of contented bliss, unmarred by the high
dramatics that Isobel St. Clair and her foundation found so intriguing.

She sat up and reached out to her
husband, running an index finger along his jawline.

“Did I ever happen to mention how
happy I am that you’re my partner in this life?”

His deep blue eyes sparkled. “You
might have, once or twice.”

Author
Notes

This
story was great fun because, after all, what could be better than creating an
entire festival that’s all about chocolate! As much as I would love to take
full credit for coming up with all the fabulous cakes and desserts portrayed
here, I must admit to taking inspiration from many sources. The five finalist
cakes in the competition, in particular, were based on photos I spotted in the
lively baking community on Pinterest. Readers can go to my Pinterest board
titled
Cakes That Have
Inspired Me
and see just what I was looking at as I described each of them.

As
always, my undying gratitude goes to those who have helped make my books and
both of my series a reality: Dan Shelton, my partner in all adventures who is
always there for me, working to keep the place running efficiently while I am
locked away at my keyboard. My fantastic editing team—Susan Slater, Shirley
Shaw, and proofreader Kim Clark—each of you has suggested things that help me
see something new in my writing.