A Taste of Magic (A Sugarcomb Lake Cozy Mystery Book 1) (14 page)

It sounded like Chase knew something incriminating about Adam.

Maybe, during his time working for Adam, he had witnessed unethical business practices.  Maybe he even knew firsthand that Adam was stealing from the company.  That, of course, was purely speculation on Clarissa’s part.  But the argument in Adam’s office gave credibility to her theory that the businessman had been stealing from the firm.

When Adam’s office door flew open unexpectedly, Clarissa had no choice but to race off to the ladies’ room.  Otherwise it would have been way too obvious that she had been eavesdropping.  She would have loved to hear more, but she had already gotten quite an earful. 

And when the door opened, she realized something.

As it turned out, Adam Burke was on a completely unprofessional tirade when he flew out of his office.  He was cursing left, right and center.  And some of his “unique” language choices struck a chord with Clarissa. 

She remembered those vulgar obscenities. 

They were the same ones she had heard in the woods the night of Jed Black’s murder.

She had no doubt about it:  Adam Burke was the man who had run past her the night of the murder.  He had been racing through the woods shortly after the shooting, agitated and cursing.  He had come from the direction of Jed Black’s cabin. 

If that wasn’t compelling evidence, Clarissa didn’t know what was.

But, being a good journalist – and a sucker for a juicy scoop – she wanted more.

She exited the ladies’ room and quickly retrieved her purse and gigantic cup of coffee from the waiting area.  Then, because Liz was completely distracted by her phone, Clarissa took it upon herself to rap on Adam’s partially-closed office door.

“Come in,” he called, sounding defeated.

“I hope this isn’t a bad time,” Clarissa said, poking her head in.  “I’ll be quick, I promise!”

Adam was slumped over at his desk looking dishevelled.  “Have a seat,” he said wearily.

She sat across the desk from him and plunked her purse and coffee down in front of her.  She wished she had actually prepared a spiel of some sort because at the moment, she had no idea what to say.  She would simply have to wing it – she had no choice. 

She reminded herself that she was a writer.  She made her living turning words into sentences – or at least she had before the Gazette had been shut down.  True, she didn’t know a thing about investing.  But how hard could it be to come up with something convincing?

“I want information about stocks and portfolios,” she announced, hoping that made sense.

“Okay…what specifically do you want to know?”

“Say I had a hundred thousand dollars,” Clarissa replied, presenting a hypothetical scenario to him without having to actually lie
or
admit she was living paycheck to paycheck.  “What would you recommend I do with that kind of money?  You know, to uh…make the most of it.”

“That depends on a variety of factors,” Adam began to explain.

Clarissa chose that moment to give her coffee a little nudge.  She had already loosened the lid to make sure it would do nothing to prevent spills.  Thankfully, her devious plan worked like a charm.  Lukewarm coffee splashed all over Adam’s desk
and
his expensive dress shirt and tie.

“Oh!” Clarissa gasped, hoping she was a convincing enough actress.  “Oh, I’m so sorry!  What a klutz!  I’ll clean up the desk,” she assured him, pulling a wad of tissues from her purse.  “You go get yourself cleaned up.”

The second Adam stepped out of the room, Clarissa leapt into action.

She pulled out the flash drive she had stashed in her purse, jumped onto Adam’s computer and copied its contents.  Then, moving as quickly as she could, she opened up his filing cabinet and scanned the folders inside.  Thankfully they were all as meticulously labeled as those in Adam’s home office had been.

Most of the folders were work-related – and boring.  Clarissa skipped over them.  She was more interested in the one at the very back that was labelled “Personal.”  It really was lucky that Adam was so obsessive compulsive about organization.

She took the folder out and opened it up.  The good news was that it wasn’t overly full.  The bad news was there were still far too many papers for her to read through before Adam returned and caught her snooping.  And she definitely didn’t want to be caught snooping!

Thinking fast, Clarissa spread the papers out on the floor as she had yet to clean the spilled coffee from the desk.  She whipped out her phone and hurriedly photographed as much as she could.  She was sure she was breaking all sorts of confidentiality laws but in her opinion, solving a murder trumped that.

She managed to put the papers back in the folder and return it to the filing cabinet before Adam walked in – barely.  He found her kneeling on the floor and gave her a quizzical look.

“Lose something?” he asked.

“My uh…my contact lens!” Clarissa replied, thinking quickly.  She didn’t actually wear contact lenses, but Adam didn’t know that.  What followed was a lengthy – and pointless – examination of the carpet.  While the businessman was busy looking, she slyly popped her flash drive out of his computer and tucked it into her pocket.

As Adam – in his damp, coffee-stained dress shirt – crawled around on the floor in an attempt to help, Clarissa felt a teensy little pang of guilt.  Then she reminded herself he was almost certainly a cold-blooded killer.  That definitely helped assuage her guilt.

“Oh, you know what?” Clarissa piped up after silently counting to one hundred.

“What?”

“This is so embarrassing,” she giggled sheepishly as she made a big show of blinking her eyes and squinting.  “The contact lens was in my eye the whole time!  Whoops!  I feel like such a big dummy now!”

Adam looked annoyed, but said nothing.  He climbed to his feet.  Then he sat down at his desk.  When he saw that Clarissa had yet to clean up the spilled coffee, she saw a fresh flicker of irritation in his eyes.

“Let me get that,” she offered, reaching for the box of tissues on the corner of his desk.

“It’s fine,” he said sharply.  “But I think we ought to reschedule for another day.”

“Yes, I think you’re right,” Clarissa agreed at once. 

She felt a strange sense of satisfaction that she had managed to be so annoying that Adam now wanted to kick her out of his office.  Under different circumstances it would have been all kinds of mortifying, sure.  But since her clumsiness and absentmindedness had all been a clever ruse, she felt nothing but pride in her performance. 

“Send Liz in after you book your appointment, would you?” Adam said as Clarissa slung her purse over her shoulder and prepared to exit his office.  “And tell her to bring cleaning supplies,” he added, still sounding exasperated.

Clarissa did as she was asked, though she didn’t bother to make an appointment.  She already had what she needed from Adam – or at least she hoped she did.  After leaving Black & Burke Investors, she raced back to Sugarcomb Lake so she could comb over the information that was now in her possession.

As it turned out, the files on Adam’s computer were all business or poker related. 

That wasn’t to say they were boring.  On the contrary, Clarissa was transfixed by what she found.  She sat in her living room hunched over her discoveries, the rest of the world forgotten as she picked through the information with a fine tooth comb.

The documents confirmed that Adam without a doubt had an addiction to online gambling.  But in addition to that, Clarissa found out all sorts of fascinating information about Adam’s clients.  Some of people were even residents of Sugarcomb Lake whose names Clarissa recognized.

“Whoa,” she whispered under her breath when she inadvertently saw that Mrs. Meddler was, in fact, loaded.  That made the old woman’s well-established stinginess even more infuriating!  Then again, Clarissa supposed one didn’t get rich by giving away one’s assets.

“Meow,” said the cat, announcing its presence as it walked over.

“You’re right,” Clarissa said guiltily, closing out of the open documents on her computer.  “I shouldn’t snoop.  I’m investigating Adam Burke, not looking into other people’s finances.  This isn’t getting me anywhere.”

The cat looked at her briefly before giving chase to a dust particle.

“Way to remind me I haven’t vacuumed in ages,” Clarissa grinned, amused by her four-legged companion’s playfulness.  “But chores will have to wait,” she added as she pulled out her phone.  “This is more important.  Hopefully there was something interesting in Adam’s filing cabinet.”

Taking pictures of the documents in Adam’s office had been a really good idea.  It allowed the opportunity to go through them carefully and thoroughly, without having to worry about being caught in the act. 

Clarissa couldn’t help but feel proud of herself for her quick thinking.  She wished she had someone to brag to, but unfortunately the cat was far more interested in stalking imaginary prey than in applauding her accomplishments.  Really, the only person who would be able to relate was Parker. 

Clarissa sighed at the thought of the handsome newspaper heir. 

Then, getting back to business, she plugged her phone into her computer.

The photos she had taken came up on her monitor one by one.

There were some irrelevant documents about Adam’s house insurance and medical records.  It looked like he had tended to some mundane personal matters from work, which was hardly an earth shattering revelation. 

But what really caught Clarissa’s interest was a photocopy of a letter.

The correspondence was from Adam, and it was addressed to Jed.  It was dated a week prior to Jed’s untimely death.  And what it said made Clarissa’s jaw drop.  In fact, she had to reread the letter’s contents twice in order to wrap her head around what she had just learned. 

The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place.

“Adam was blackmailing Jed!” she informed the cat excitedly, eager to share what she had discovered.  “He knew about Jed’s affair with Liz and was going to go public if Jed didn’t pay him!  Bonnie said herself that Jed was obsessed with his reputation.  He wouldn’t have wanted to be known as a cheater.”

The cat must have sensed the importance of Clarissa’s discovery.  It stopped protecting the house from dust particles long enough to glance over at her.  It was difficult to tell whether the cat looked impressed, annoyed or simply sleepy. 

Clarissa paid the cat no attention.  She was lost in her own world.  Her mind was racing as she processed the new information that had come to her attention.

“Adam is still in debt,” she remembered.  “That suggests Jed
didn’t
pay him the money.  And yet Adam didn’t go public with what he knew.  If word had gotten out about Jed having a fling with his secretary I would have heard about it long before now.  Everyone in town would have been talking about it!  So…what happened?”

Clarissa read the letter yet again.  There was no mention of a death threat or anything of the like.  And murder seemed rather extreme given that Adam was simply trying to come up with enough money to pay off his gambling debts and settle his divorce.

The cat head-butted Clarissa’s ankle and began to purr.

She reached down and absentmindedly scratched the top of its head.

“What if Jed was so enraged by the attempted blackmail that he decided to take Adam out?” Clarissa theorized, looking down at the cat as if seeking approval.  “What if Jed pulled a gun on Adam that night at the cabin but Adam managed to wrestle it away from him?  Then he ended up shooting Jed…”

Clarissa stood up so abruptly that the cat looked startled.

“That’s it!” she declared triumphantly. 

The cat stared up at her curiously.

Clarissa scrunched up her nose in contemplation.  “That
has
to be it, right?  The explanation makes perfect sense.  Adam was trying to blackmail Jed but Jed wasn’t having it.  He arranged to meet Adam at the cabin and brought along the gun from Bonnie’s father, maybe just to try to intimidate Adam.  There was a struggle and the gun went off.  That’s why I heard Adam running through the forest cursing that night.  And that’s why he seemed so shaken when I met with him shortly after Jed’s death.”

She was so excited she did a little victory dance right then and there.

The cat gave her a weary look before curling up in Clarissa’s favorite chair and going to sleep.

“What do I do now?” Clarissa murmured, sitting back down with a thud.

Going to the police would probably be an exercise in futility.  Those useless cops didn’t seem very interested in the truth – all they wanted was to close the case as quickly and easily as possible.  To say that Clarissa didn’t have much faith in their ability to serve and protect was a massive understatement.

“I’m going to have to take matters into my own hands,” she realized.

She thought for a moment.

“I need a confession,” she decided. 

It was a gutsy move, confronting Adam Burke.  Some might even say it was reckless.  But Clarissa Spencer was, first and foremost, a journalist.  Sometimes that meant getting into uncomfortable situations in order to reveal the truth and get justice. 

Besides, she had promised herself she would do whatever she could to help Bonnie. 

An innocent woman was in jail awaiting trial.  Clarissa
had
to do something!

She immediately called Adam’s office. 

When Liz picked up, Clarissa demanded an appointment for first thing the next morning.  Liz said Adam’s morning was all booked up and suggested they set something up for later in the week, but Clarissa was insistent.  Thanks to the rapport she had developed with the secretary, she managed to sweet talk her way into a 10 o’clock meeting.

“The busier it is in the office, the better,” Clarissa told herself after hanging up the phone. 

She had watched her fair share of horror movies as a teenager and she knew the worst possible thing she could do was meet Adam somewhere secluded.  If she confronted him at work where there were lots of people around, he wouldn’t be able to retaliate with violence.

Even so, she sent Liana a quick text.  Clarissa knew her best friend had bought pepper spray on a recent trip to New York City.  There was a good chance Liana still had it.  Maybe pepper spray was a bit excessive, but it didn’t hurt to be cautious.

After texting Liana, Clarissa set to work drafting the front page article of her newspaper.

She would have a few blanks to fill in after the meeting with Adam, of course.  But she wanted the article to be as close to done as possible.  It was ambitious, yes.  But it wasn’t impossible.  And Clarissa wasn’t one to shy away from a little hard work.

Her intention was to put out the very first issue of her homemade newspaper immediately after confronting the murder victim’s business partner.  There was no time to waste.  As soon as she had her confession, assuming Adam broke down and gave one, she would publish it. 

That would show the residents of Sugarcomb Lake that Clarissa was a serious journalist.  There would be no question in their minds that her newspaper was the number one source for up-to-the-minute local information.

“It has to work,” Clarissa whispered under her breath.  “It just has to.”

***

Liana must have raced over to Clarissa’s place the second she read the text.

She pounded on the door with urgency and then, after apparently deciding Clarissa wasn’t answering fast enough, she barged in.  It was difficult to tell if she was actually panicking or simply hyped up on massive quantities of coffee.  With Liana, there really was no difference between the two.

“What’s wrong?” Liana demanded as she tumbled in the door and saw Clarissa. 

“Hi to you too,” Clarissa replied, a bit startled by her friend’s extreme reaction.

“Here’s the pepper spray,” Liana said, pulling a small nondescript canister from her purse.  “What do you need it for?” she asked with urgency in her voice.  “Are you okay?  Do I need to beat anyone up for you?”

“What?  No!” Clarissa laughed.  “I’m fine, I promise.”

“If you’re fine then why do you need pepper spray?” Liana pressed.

“I’m working on a story,” Clarissa explained.

She hoped she could satisfy her best friend’s curiosity without divulging too much information.  Liana was awesome and meant well, but Clarissa couldn’t afford to have anyone tip Adam off.  If he knew she was onto him, he could easily disappear into the night before she had a chance to confront him.  That would ruin everything.

“Working on a story, huh?  Is that why I’ve hardly seen you lately?” Liana asked.

“Yeah,” Clarissa nodded, realizing it had been far too long since she’d had a proper visit with her coffee-obsessed, slightly neurotic best friend.  “Things have been kind of hectic lately.  I’ve been keeping pretty busy with plans for the newspaper and gardening.”

Liana gave her a knowing smirk.  “I hear that’s not all that’s been keeping you busy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play coy,” Liana teased.  “Word around town is you were chatting with a
very
good looking guy at the grocery store!”

Clarissa scowled.  “Can’t
anything
stay private in this town?” she grumbled.

“Nope, it sure can’t!” Liana replied cheerfully.  “So who is he?  I need details.”

“He’s no one,” Clarissa said firmly.  Then, because she knew that answer wouldn’t satisfy her best friend, she elaborated.  “Actually, his father is the reason the Gazette closed down.  His name is Parker Tweed.  He’s a journalist from Green City, which basically makes him my rival.  And I kind of hate him.”

Liana raised an eyebrow.  “If you hate him then why are you blushing?”

“I am not blushing!” Clarissa insisted vehemently. 

“You so are.”  In a singsong voice, Liana trilled, “Parker and Clarissa, sitting in a tree –”

“Want me to pepper spray you?” Clarissa joked, shaking the canister menacingly.

“Ha okay, I’ll stop.  But first, why do you hate him?  What, exactly, did he do?”

“He offered me a job,” Clarissa huffed in indignation.  “Can you believe that?  He took me out to dinner at a place that had actual linen napkins and cutlery that wasn’t plastic.  Then he asked me to move to Green City and work for the Chronicle.  Obviously I said no.  He’s got some nerve!”

“He took you out to dinner?” Liana asked, immediately honing in on the most interesting part.  “So you two went on like, a date?”

“It wasn’t a date,” Clarissa insisted.

“If you say so,” Liana replied, sounding completely unconvinced.  “Anyway, I should be going.  I just wanted to come make sure you were okay since you texted me asking for pepper spray.  I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Thanks,” Clarissa smiled, grateful Liana wasn’t going to stand there and grill her about Parker.

Liana headed toward the door before pausing.  She stopped and turned around.  “Hey, when is the first issue of your newspaper slated to come out?” she asked curiously.

“With any luck, I’ll be handing out free samples of the first issue tomorrow in the town square.  The web site is all set up and ready to process subscriptions.  Now let’s hope that a few people actually subscribe!”

“They will,” Liana said with confidence.  “I’m sure of it.  Call me tomorrow when you’re ready to go.  I’ll help you hand out the newspapers.”

“You’re the best,” Clarissa said gratefully.

“No you are,” Liana grinned.  “Thanks to you I don’t have to stare at my neighbor’s eyesore of a front yard anymore.  Thank you, thank you,
thank you
!” she said, bowing down.

Clarissa swallowed hard at the mention of Adam Burke.  A cold blooded killer lived right across the street from her best friend.  That was an extremely unsettling realization.  She wished she could tell Liana what was up, but it was probably wiser to keep her mouth shut. 

“What’s Adam like, anyway?” Clarissa asked curiously, struggling to keep her tone light.  She didn’t want to make her best friend panic – but she did want to make sure Liana stayed safe.