Sour Crime Donuts, page 5
A man called out, “Is Nofftry running for mayor against you?”
Jerry shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid so. You know me. I’ve been your mayor for a long time. I know the people of Fallingbrook, and I work hard for you.”
First, Ramona from TWIG had requested that we hand out her flyers, and now we had a politician making speeches. He even had a handful of leaflets. When he seemed to run out of things to say, temporarily, at least, I joined him in the middle of the room and asked him, “Would you like a table, or would you prefer to sit at our serving counter?”
His face reddened. “As delicious as your coffee and donuts are, I don’t have time to stay. Can I buy some donuts to take out?”
I led him to the display case. “How many, and which ones?”
“Six. You choose them.”
A new batch of peachy donuts was ready, cooled, and frosted. I told him, “I’m putting in four of today’s special sour cream donuts with chunks of peach in them, and two chocolate donuts with fudge icing.”
“Excellent. Mind if I leave some of my brochures here?” Without waiting for my response, he set his leaflets on top of Ramona’s. He paid me and left with his box of donuts.
Later, in the kitchen, Olivia sidled to me. “Izzy must be lonely. She’s been here for two hours already. I know lonely when I see it, though she’s extroverted, and I was introverted and hardly ever got out to meet people. Mind if I go talk to her?”
“Go ahead!” I cocked my head back toward Tom. “We’re happy when people feel comfortable enough here to treat Deputy Donut as a second home. That is, when they’re not delivering speeches.”
Olivia laughed and went off to sit at the table with Izzy. With their heads bent over the photo, they chatted together and moved pieces of paper around.
The front door opened, and Mr. Mystery came in.
I was standing at the serving counter. In the kitchen behind me, on the other side of the half-height wall, Tom was mixing dough for the next day, and Jocelyn was frosting the latest batch of our peachy sour cream donuts.
Walking toward the serving counter, Mr. Mystery glanced at me and then past me toward Jocelyn. He seemed to freeze for a second, and then he turned his head as if considering running away. Izzy and Olivia were now in his view. He probably recognized them, too. With a visible gulp, he continued to the serving counter.
“I saw your sign outside,” he told me. “And I developed a craving for donuts.”
“For here or to go?”
“I, um, to go, I guess. A half dozen?”
I pointed. “Come over here to the display case and tell me what you’d like. Our special donut today is baked, not fried. They’re sour cream donuts with chunks of fresh peach and peach-flavored sour cream frosting.”
“Sounds good. And do you have anything with chocolate?” He blushed and smiled. “I see that you do.”
He chose four peachy sour cream donuts, a chocolate-glazed maraschino cherry donut, and a peanut butter donut with chocolate fudge frosting.
I smiled. “Are you planning to eat these all yourself?”
His blush never seemed to quite go away before he needed to blush again. “I don’t . . . well, yes, probably.” His laugh sounded uneasy.
A woman I’d never seen before strode into Deputy Donut. She was small, with dark hair sleeked back from her heart-shaped face. She wore a perfectly tailored black business suit, the kind with an above-the-knee skirt, in a rich-looking fabric that was probably a blend of silk and wool. Her black high heels struck down hard on our rock maple floor.
Mr. Mystery paid me and turned around.
Izzy stared expectantly toward him.
The woman who had just come in stopped walking. “Landon! What are you doing here?” I couldn’t quite place her accent. Izzy lowered her head as if again studying the enlarged photo. Beside her, Olivia watched the two newcomers.
Mr. Mystery—Landon—held up the box. “Buying donuts.” His voice sounded slightly strangled.
The woman let out a brittle laugh. “All for you?”
“Maybe you’d like to share them?”
She inserted her wrist into the crook of his elbow. Her fingers were elegantly long and perfectly manicured. “Ugh. No, thanks. I detest gooey sweets. Let’s go.”
They walked out, turned right, and headed south.
Jocelyn and I hurried to Izzy’s table.
Izzy pushed her mug aside. “So now we know Mr. Mystery’s name. It’s Landon, but we don’t know if that’s his first or last name. Did I manage to look like I couldn’t care less who he is or what he does?”
“Welllll . . .” Jocelyn began.
I finished for her. “Yes. You ignored him when he was leaving with that woman.”
Izzy let out a dramatic sigh. “How disappointing that he already has a girlfriend.”
I edged one of her greenhouse cutouts away from one it was overlapping. “She seemed surprised to see him.”
Izzy straightened both cutouts. “But he blushed like he was interested in her. I wonder if he planned to meet her here. Do any of you know who she is?”
We all said that we’d never seen her before.
Izzy gazed toward the front door. “The funny thing is that she reminded me of my cousin Hope. I haven’t seen Hope since I was about ten and she was in her mid-teens.”
I suggested, “Maybe it is Hope, and she’s here to see you.”
Izzy scrunched one of her small rectangles of paper. “Hope wouldn’t come to Wisconsin to see me. The last time we were in touch, I lived in Chicago, but I went away to college and then moved to Gooseleg, and our families haven’t been close since our fathers, who are brothers, stopped communicating with each other after my father refused to work any longer for their father, the grandfather who sent me the money, and my parents moved to Spain. The last I knew, Hope’s father was an executive in at least one of my grandfather’s companies, and Hope works for our grandfather, too. She would never venture this far from New York City.”
Olivia pointed an index finger toward the ceiling. “Aha! I’m sure the woman who was in here had a New York accent.” She looked at Jocelyn and me. “Remember, yesterday, I guessed that the man, Landon, had an accent from the Northeast? He could be from the New York City area. I doubt that he’s actually from Duluth.”
Izzy looked down at the piece of paper she’d wrinkled. “Maybe he recently moved to Duluth.” She smoothed the paper. “He’s a mystery, but I’ll probably never see him again, and that’s totally okay.” She rolled up the photo and inserted it into the tube, and then she gathered her cutouts and drawings and put them into her briefcase. “If you still have a half dozen of those donuts, I’d like to buy them to take home.”
We’d sold all but four of the peachy sour cream donuts. Izzy pointed into the display case. “They all look yummy! Give me a strawberry donut with strawberry frosting and strawberry-shaped sprinkles and one of those chocolate-walnut donuts with fudge frosting.”
I joked, “That’s a lot of donuts for one person. Maybe you should run out there and try to coerce Landon’s friend to try some of the ‘gooey sweets’ she claims to detest.”
“Nope. She doesn’t deserve to find out how wrong she is. Maybe I’ll be like Landon and eat every single one. Not all at once.” Calling a cheerful goodbye, she left.
Olivia looked at the clock on the wall. “I thought she was going to stay until we locked the door.”
Jocelyn cleared Izzy’s dishes. “If her greenhouse project doesn’t work out, maybe she’d like to work here. Not now, but after I start teaching.”
I threw my hands up in mock horror. “Which is all too soon.”
She gave me one of her brilliant smiles. “But I’ll be working here weekends and summers.”
Later, serving our last customers, I thought that the shop, now that Izzy was gone, seemed especially quiet. Her enthusiastic and friendly personality would make her a wonderful employee if she ever wanted to work for someone else, which seemed doubtful. Then again, drama seemed to follow her, and maybe we could do without drama at Deputy Donut.
After work, I put Dep into the car and started north toward home. I was on County Road C when a call from Izzy came through my car’s speakers. “Emily, I’m at the road beside my property, and I’m afraid that something’s wrong. Adam Nofftry’s car is here, and it’s covered in dust as if it’s been here ever since we left last night. You said I should be cautious about coming here by myself, and I’m freaking out. I gathered from something Olivia said that you live north of Fallingbrook, so I wondered, if it’s not too much to ask, well, could you come here and help me try to figure out what’s going on?”
She sounded close to panic.
Chapter 8
Feeling guilty for possibly ruining Izzy’s carefree confidence about visiting the acreage she was buying, I told her, “I’ll be there in a few minutes.” I had my car call Brent. He didn’t answer. Dictating a message that I would be home a few minutes later than expected, I raced to County Road H, turned west, and drove past the dirt track that Mr. Mystery—Landon—had veered onto the previous evening. The dust his car kicked up had settled. Surrounded by browning grasses, the packed-earth track baked in the late-afternoon sunshine. I sped on, around curves and up the gradual incline.
Izzy’s dark red sedan was on the right shoulder behind the black SUV that Adam Nofftry appeared to have driven the previous evening.
This time, Izzy wasn’t jumping up and down and waving her arms. Where was she? Had she decided to explore the hillside by herself, after all?
My tires crunching on gravel, I pulled up behind her car. Dep let out a wail. I got out, snapped her leash onto her harness, and carried her toward Izzy’s car.
Its driver’s door inched open. Peering back toward me and then checking the road in the other direction, Izzy edged out onto the shoulder. She was still in the slashed jeans she’d worn in Deputy Donut earlier, but now she had unbuttoned the boxy green sweater. She wore a white cropped top underneath it. She met Dep and me between our two cars. “Sorry to bother you, Emily, but do you see what I mean? His car doesn’t look like it moved, and he doesn’t seem like the type to camp out on vacant property.”
I could barely see beyond the sunlight shimmering off the top of Izzy’s car, but I understood. “My husband has a black SUV similar to that one, but not as huge. Even small amounts of dust show up. But that SUV does look like it’s where it was when we left yesterday. Maybe Adam’s a creature of habit.”
“Creature,” Izzy repeated, making a disgusted face. “He probably left his SUV here as a show of ownership, for all the good that will do him.”
We started up the former driveway between the walls of evergreens. I took a deep breath. “What a great place. I love the smell of the pines and the way their branches whisper in the breezes.”
“Don’t worry. Except for needing to widen the entrance to the driveway, I’m not touching a needle of the trees between the driveway and the road. I love them.” High up, a woodpecker hammered into wood. Izzy laughed. “Woodpeckers have to eat, so they can do whatever they want to the trees. Ramona and TWIG can’t complain about that.” By the time we neared where the driveway curved into the meadow, I didn’t know whether to be relieved because we had not yet encountered Adam Nofftry or worried that he might be hiding and planning to ambush us. I murmured, “I’m glad you called me. Both of us, with Dep’s help, can watch for Adam in case he means you harm.”
“I’m not going to let him intimidate . . .” Her voice dropped off. She stared at the base of the rocky outcropping on the outer edge of the curve. “Ugh. Just because he thinks he’s going to own this property is no reason for him to leave litter here. He’s carrying his territory marking too far.”
The previous day, I’d noticed that the outcropping hovered over a cave-like niche. Now something was in that tiny cave. A pinch of white cardboard stuck out beneath recently piled-up pinecones and pine needles. Pulling at her leash, Dep strained toward the debris. I followed her and squatted for a closer look.
A box? It was like someone had attempted to hide it but had not quite succeeded. Dep reached a tentative paw toward the box as if she wanted whatever was inside it. Catnip? I swept debris off one corner of the lid.
And uncovered our Deputy Donut logo.
I rocked back on my heels and laughed up at Izzy. “Did you hide treasure here like someone did years ago at Fallingbrook Falls, and then you called me so that I could be the one to find it?” If so, she’d been a good actor when she’d sounded scared.
“No. Are you sure you didn’t hide it for me to find?” Instead of returning my teasing tone, she sounded tense.
“I couldn’t have. I just got off work.”
“Then Adam Nofftry must have put it there. Like he already owns the place.”
“I don’t think he could have. As far as I know, he has never been inside our shop.”
Izzy’s eyes were wary. “I certainly did not put it there. And I’m sure it wasn’t there yesterday. I glanced at this boulder as I ran down the hill during the quarrel between Adam and Landon, and I remember thinking that this tiny little cave was darling. I could almost see elves inside it.”
“I noticed it, too.” Still half expecting to find glittery stickers or gaudy beads, I opened the box.
Two of our peachy sour cream donuts were inside, along with smudges of frosting, both chocolate and the peach-flavored sour cream frosting from the peachy donuts.
Neither Izzy nor I would have put food out where wildlife might find it, and we wouldn’t have heaped dirt and dead leaves over an unsealed box containing food. I flicked an ant out of the box. “Today was the first day ever that we made these donuts, so this box landed here today. I’m sorry that litter from Deputy Donut is marring this beautiful spot. Here, take Dep’s leash, and I’ll get rid of these”—I made a phony tragic face—“sob, sob, unwanted gooey treats and the box.”
“Thank you. Why would anyone throw out your donuts? They were delicious. Mine are already gone. I shared them with the neighbors, and then I ran out to the road and put the box in the trash only seconds before it was collected. But thank you for getting rid of this. C’mon, Dep, let’s look around while we wait for your mother to come back. Maybe we’ll find actual hidden treasure.”
I closed the box. The tape on it held, mostly. I carried the unwanted litter down the trail, jumped over the water-filled ditch, and locked the box with its contents in my car. Heading back toward the property’s former driveway, I took a few seconds to peer as well as I could through the tinted windows of Adam’s SUV. Nothing seemed out of place. Although tempted to try the doors, I didn’t touch anything.
On the hill above me, someone let out a piercing and prolonged scream.
Chapter 9
“Emily! Help!” Izzy’s voice was both shrill and quivering. And she had my precious kitty. . . .
I leaped over the ditch and dashed up the trail.
Izzy and Dep weren’t near the elfin cave. The scattered remains of the pile of pine needles and cones showed where the box had been. I kept going.
“Emily!” The frantic call came from higher up and farther west.
I sprinted up to the meadow. I didn’t see Izzy and Dep. I shouted, “Where are you?” I was nearly out of breath.
“Here! Come here!” A hand waved beside cattails near the pond on the far side of the meadow.
Had Dep fallen into the water?
I ran.
Stumbling over stony and uneven ground, I called, “Are you okay?”
Izzy came out from behind the curtain of cattails. She was clutching Dep in her arms. “Hurry!”
Dep was okay, wasn’t she? Fifteen or so feet from Izzy and Dep, I could see that neither of them was wet. Dep blinked. She looked fine.
Izzy, however, was a peculiar shade of grayish-green. I ran to her, plucked Dep out of her arms, and guided her to sit down on a rock. “Put your head between your knees. You’re about to faint.”
She protested, “I’m okay.” But she obeyed.
I felt Dep’s legs and around her ribs. She wasn’t purring, which was just as well. Cats sometimes purred when they were injured. Holding her in one arm, I bent and rubbed Izzy’s back. “What’s wrong?”
She raised her head but didn’t look at me. She seemed to be staring at where an ATV trail ran up the hill toward the next plateau. She whispered, “It’s Adam Nofftry. He’s over there by the pond, and he looks dead. But maybe you shouldn’t go look, or we’ll both faint.” She hadn’t entirely lost her sense of humor.
I took a deep, steadying breath. “I’ll check.”
“Want me to come? Or hold your kitty?”
“Just stay there with your head down.”
Carrying Dep underneath one arm, I stepped gingerly past the cattails.
In his khaki pants and tailored but casual navy blazer, now rumpled and muddy, Adam Nofftry lay unmoving at the edge of the pond. One of his loafers had fallen off. His socks were navy and khaki in an argyle pattern.
He looked dead to me, too.
I yelled to Izzy, “Call 911. Ask for police and an ambulance.”
“Okay.” Her voice had strengthened, but it still wobbled.
I made my way to the man lying with one navy-blue sleeve in the water. Still clutching Dep, I felt the wrist that wasn’t in the pond. I couldn’t find a pulse, but his skin was not as chilly as I’d expected. Was that because it was a warm day? Or because I felt suddenly about to freeze? Dep struggled as if wanting to be set down to do her own investigating. I tightened my grip on her and returned to Izzy.
She calmly gave the emergency dispatcher directions and described the three cars parked on the shoulder. “There’s a former driveway, but I don’t think anyone should attempt to drive up it unless they have an ATV.” She had again buttoned the green sweater.
