Powdered Peril (19 page)

“We do have our moments,” I said with a grin.

“And great minds think alike. That happens to be one of the few things Chief Martin did ask me.”

I felt a little bit deflated knowing that he’d gotten there before me, but at least we were on the same page. “What did you tell him?”

Trish reached into her pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Actually, I had to make him a list. He’s coming back to get it in half an hour.”

I spied the names, and then asked Grace, “Do you have any paper and a pen on you?”

She supplied them, and I quickly jotted down the names. Sadly, none of them were on my suspect list, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. If a friend of a friend had been there at the time, it would just have taken one telephone call to get the killer onsite while Peter was so obviously helpless.

I was just finished copying the list when I heard a familiar voice say, “I’ll take that, if you don’t mind.”

Chief Martin had come to collect Trish’s list early, and in the process, he’d gotten confirmation that I was indeed digging into his homicide case with both hands.

*   *   *

“Find anything interesting?” he asked as he took Trish’s paper from me.

“No, not really. I think it’s about what I expected,” I said.

“Suzanne, this isn’t nearly as amusing as you’re making it out to be.”

“Trust me,” I said. “I know there’s nothing funny about it. You don’t think I actually
want
to be digging into this murder, do you? It’s not exactly a regular thing for me, Chief.”

“You sure act like it is sometimes,” he said.

Grace said, “Don’t blame her, Chief Martin. She’s doing all of this for me. I need to know what happened to Peter.”

The chief’s tone of voice changed into a softer range as he said to her, “Grace, I understand your frustration, but my department is doing everything in its power to find Peter’s killer. We’ve got resources you can only dream about, and we’re putting them all to the test.”

“But there are people who will talk to us who won’t be candid with you,” Grace said. “You’ve said so yourself in the past.”

He shrugged. “Maybe once or twice, but as a matter of course, I’m still the law around here, and I’m the one who investigates any crimes that happen in April Springs.”

“Tell you what,” Grace said. “We’ll let you have that list to yourself for a day. You can talk to anyone you want to and we won’t interfere. Right, Suzanne?”

I didn’t want to agree to that, not for one second, but Grace had put me in a position where I really didn’t have much choice. “I promise.”

“Now hang on one second,” Chief Martin said. “You two are in no position to try to make bargains with me. I’ve been willing to give you a little leeway in the past, but it’s not something you should ever take for granted.”

“I don’t know. Their offer sounds reasonable to me,” Trish interjected.

“I don’t recall asking you your opinion, either, young lady,” Martin said.

Trish grinned at him. “Then think about how much better it is when I just volunteer it. Chief, you know these two almost as well as I do. Frankly, I’m amazed they’re even giving you a day before they start snooping. It’s got to be a hardship for them, and the only way you’re going to stop them is to put them both in jail, and you know that won’t work, for more reasons than I should have to explain to you.”

Trish had thrown my mother into the mix, no matter how indirectly, and I wasn’t sure how the police chief was going to react. I always did my best to tread very lightly when Momma came up in our conversations, since I never wanted my relationship with her jeopardized by something I said to the police chief.

He looked at her narrowly, and then nodded. “It’s against my better judgment, and I’ll deny it if any of you lunatics ever repeat it, but I’ll find a way to live with that.”

I stuck out my hand. “Let’s shake on it, then.”

The chief took my hand briefly, and then dropped it just as quickly.

Before he could get away, though, I asked him something that had been gnawing at me since Peter had been thrown out of Trish’s place. “I’m guessing you did an autopsy,” I said.

“It’s a matter of course, yes,” the chief admitted reluctantly.

“Did they happen to check to see if Peter was actually drunk when he was killed?”

Before the chief could answer, Trish said, “Trust me, the man was plowed. I can tell when someone’s faking it, and he was the real deal. Besides, what did he have to gain by getting thrown out of my place?”

“With Peter, the only thing that’s certain is that you can’t take anything for granted. If he thought someone was on his tail, it might have made more sense to him to act more vulnerable than he really was. If he made a public showing of being falling-down drunk, he may have intended to bait his attacker into making his move.”

“Actually, that’s not a bad thought,” the chief said. But before I could let the warm and fuzzy feeling run through me, he added, “But sorry, he was nearly twice over the legal limit of public intoxication.”

Whether the chief realized it or not, he’d just given me something I could work with. I’d been thinking about an entirely different line of questioning, but I could forget about that for now.

It was pretty clear that the chief wasn’t all that interested in having a question-and-answer session with us, despite a few other things I wanted to ask him. He took the paper I’d given him, folded it up, and put it in his breast pocket. “Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I’ve got a list of potential witnesses to go over with my force.”

After he was gone, Trish said, “Whew, that was a close one. For a second there, I thought we were all going to jail.”

As much as I appreciated my friend’s help, there was one thing we needed to get cleared up immediately. “Trish, thanks for stepping in, but don’t ever use my mother as a lever against that man again. Understand?”

“I’m sorry,” Trish said, instantly contrite. “I just couldn’t get him to budge, so I thought that might be a handy way to get him to agree.”

“If anything like that ever comes up again, trust me; I’ll find a way to handle it myself.”

“I’ve got it, and I’m sorry, Suzanne,” she said.

I did my best to smile brightly. “It’s forgotten.”

She nodded, and then asked, “What are you two going to do now, since you have to wait twenty-four hours?”

“Actually, we never promised that,” I said. “Grace made it a point to say one day, and as far as I’m concerned, every new day starts at midnight.”

Trish shrugged. “Okay, but who are you going to call at that time of night?”

“I don’t know. I can’t look at the list until then.” I stared at the paper in my hand, knowing full well every name that was printed there, since I’d copied it myself so recently. I wasn’t going to use them to pursue any leads, though. A deal was a deal, and if Chief Martin caught me breaking my word to him, all possibilities of cooperation in the future were gone. Not that I’d go back on my word anyway. The way I was raised, a handshake is better than any signed contract, and my good name meant more to me than I could ever explain. In a great many cases, in my opinion, contracts were for cowards who wouldn’t keep their word otherwise.

“So, what do we do now?” Grace asked as I folded the list up and put it in my back pocket.

“Well, I’ve been thinking. I believe we should talk to Rose White and see how much of what we’ve been hearing about her is true.”

Trish stood and brushed off the seat of her jeans. “Well, I’d love to tag along, ladies, but I’ve got a business to run. Keep me informed, though. I’m interested in what you find.”

*   *   *

Grace and I drove to Union Square, but it was all for naught. Rose was gone, or not interested in answering our repeated knocks on her door.

Either way, it didn’t appear that we’d be talking to her anytime soon.

“I think we should probably just call it a day,” I said as Grace and I headed back to April Springs. We’d been putting in some miles today, but mostly it felt as though we’d been spinning our wheels again. Every time we found something that might be a lead, it just got more and more convoluted. “We can attack that list tomorrow when we’re fresh.”

“Do you mind if I see it for a second?” Grace asked. I suddenly realized that she hadn’t had a chance to read it since I’d copied it down from Trish’s original.

I started to hand it to her, but I hesitated as I asked, “You’re not going to start digging on your own, are you? We made a promise to the chief of police, Grace.”

“I’ll abide by what we agreed on,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t start thinking about the best ways to approach these people first thing tomorrow. They might be a little gun-shy after talking to Chief Martin, so we might not be able to come at them all so directly.”

“Okay,” I said as I handed the list to her, “but don’t do anything without me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she said.

So, why did I have the feeling that she might, anyway?

I knew that I couldn’t babysit her, though. Grace was a grown woman, and if she wanted to do something she thought was right, I couldn’t stop her.

I just hoped that she wouldn’t.

As we drove home, Grace looked up at the sky and said, “It looks like a storm is on its way, Suzanne.”

I glanced up at the quickly darkening sky, and saw flashes of lightning in the distance toward April Springs. We got fierce spring thunderstorms sometimes in our part of North Carolina, blackening the day as though it were nighttime; the lightning was particularly intense at our cottage. Since it was surrounded by so many trees, it wasn’t all that unusual to hear the cracks of lightning even as the thunder exploded, and we’d lost a few trees over the years in powerful storms. I would have given just about anything to be safe in my room at the moment, though. I had a bad feeling about just how much of a punch this particular storm might have.

The rain came then, suddenly and in waves, slapping fists of water at the car. I couldn’t imagine how Grace was able to drive in it. “Maybe we should pull over and wait this out,” I suggested.

“It’s fine, Suzanne. I can still see,” she said, just a little intensely since she was concentrating so hard on keeping her company car on the road. I could see her hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly that her fingers were nearly white.

Then the hail hit, pounding down within the rain, round balls of ice the size of pennies beating down on us like hammers.

“Pull over,” I ordered, having a hard time making myself heard over the sound of the icy attack.

“I’m going to, as soon as I can find a spot!” she answered frantically.

I searched the side of the road as well for some kind of refuge, but the two-lane road was hemmed in by trees on both sides of that stretch. We’d passed the one place where we could have stopped safely two hundred yards back. As Grace slowed her pace, she put her emergency blinkers on, signaling anyone who might be coming that we were on the road as well.

“Up there,” I said, pointing through the pounding rain and hail. “There’s a spot just ahead.”

“I see it,” Grace said. “We’re going to make it.”

And as she slowed and got ready to pull her company car over to the side of the road, I felt the first slam from the back of her car.

Someone had just plowed into us from behind.

The car was still rolling from the impact as I turned around to see who was behind us, but I couldn’t make out any details of the driver in the storm. All I could see was a white pickup truck, but it was impossible to make out who was behind the tinted windows with the low level of visibility I had. For some odd reason, it was easier seeing in front of us than it was behind.

“Are you okay?” Grace asked me.

“I’m fine. How about you?”

“Just dandy,” she said.

Just about then, the car hit us again, this time much harder, driving us into a stand of trees just shy of where we’d hoped to turn off. The front of Grace’s windshield shattered on impacting a low-lying branch, and I felt the airbag explode in my face as we finally came to a full stop.

“Are you all right?” someone said a minute later as he tapped on the passenger side window of the car.

“I think so,” I said, turning to look at an older man wearing a bright yellow rain jacket and a matching hat, even though the rain had suddenly, inexplicably, stopped. The storm had passed, leaving behind an eerie green glow in the sky that looked as though a tornado might be nearby.

I took a quick inventory of myself, realized that the airbag had deflated just as suddenly as it had appeared, and found that my ears were ringing and my nose was a little sore; besides that, I was fine.

I looked over at Grace. “How are you doing?”

“I’m not sure,” my best friend said, and her voice sounded a little hazy to me through the pounding in my ears. “All I know is that suddenly I’ve got a splitting headache.”

And that’s when I saw the blood on her forehead.

PROBABLY NOT THE WORST DONUT IN THE WORLD YOU’LL EVER EAT

I know, high praise, right? The thing about this donut is that it has its fans, enough for me to go to the trouble to make it, but I’m not among them. If I were doing these just for me, I’d double the chocolate, add some butter, and change the buttermilk to chocolate milk instead, but I make these for someone else in my family, so I don’t touch the mix.

INGREDIENTS

MIXED

1 egg, beaten

½ cup sugar, white granulated

½ cup buttermilk

½ cup canola oil

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

SIFTED

2 cups flour, unbleached all-purpose

1
⁄
3
cup cocoa powder

2 teaspoons baking powder

¾ teaspoon cinnamon

¼ teaspoon baking soda

A dash of salt

INSTRUCTIONS

In one bowl, beat the egg thoroughly, then add the sugar, buttermilk, canola oil, and vanilla extract. In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the wet, mixing well until you have a smooth consistent dough. Knead on a lightly floured board 4–8 minutes, until the dough bounces back at the touch.