“It’s okay. You’re finding some good stuff now. We’ll be able to compare the prints in various parts of the house with what’s on the will. At least connect those. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get very good prints from the body because of decomposition. But we can certainly get them from the nephew.”
He asked Sam to go through the entire house once again, paying attention to anyplace she hadn’t noticed earlier. On the back of the kitchen door she saw the clearest prints yet, a full palm print and fingers that wrapped around the edge of the surface. As if someone had pulled the door closed as he left.
While Lisa packed up her lab kit, Sam asked Beau if he thought the information was valuable to solving the case.
“First off, the lab will test to verify this is the fatal poison. That way, if the prints are Bart Killington’s we can tie him to the poisonous plant. That’s something. I’m going to have to find a plant expert who can give us an idea whether there is enough of the substance here to be fatal. If not, all Bart has to do is claim that yes, he picked some of the plants and then came inside and touched a variety of places in the house.”
“But the green stuff is also on the will,” Sam pointed out.
“That’s certainly more damning,” Beau admitted. “But we already know that Bart handled the page and the envelope. It was in his house.”
“But the poison wasn’t in his house . . .” She paused. “Actually I don’t know that. I couldn’t
Beau gave her a stern look. “Do not go back there on your own, Sam. Not unless you want to admit to breaking and entering, which is going to get you into a whole bunch of trouble.”
She fumed. Wasn’t she already in trouble on that score?
Beau and Lisa were headed for the door.
“Is it okay if I clean the place thoroughly now?” Sam asked, as he lingered to say goodbye. “It doesn’t seem smart to leave a poisonous residue around the house now that there could be potential buyers coming to look at it.”
“We’ve got everything we can use,” he said. “Go ahead.”
She surreptitiously squeezed his hand and watched with mixed emotions as he walked out to the cruiser. She knew he was just doing his job when he cautioned her about going back to Bart’s place in Santa Fe, but still . . . she felt strongly that Cantone’s nephew was about to get away with murder.
She spent two hours vigorously scrubbing away the traces of green, hoping the scientific tests would back up her intuition.
The afternoon was still young, with a brilliant September sky and the leaves on the cottonwoods showing a hint of the golden autumn yet to come. She grabbed a chicken sandwich at the first cafe she came to, then headed up the ski valley road to check on her property up there—the only one of her current three that hadn’t thrown a huge dose of drama at her. A quick check verified that all was well there.
She drove home as the shadows were lengthening across the valley and found Kelly’s car in the driveway, back from her clothing foray in the city.
“Hey, Mom.” Kelly greeted as Sam walked into the kitchen. Her blue-green eyes sparkled. “Wait till you see—I got some great bargains at the mall.”
“Good.” Sam automatically glanced at the light on the answering machine, hoping for another bakery order to add to the week’s income. Nothing.
“Everything okay?” Kelly was pouring pretzels from a bag into a small bowl. She held it up to Sam, who waved away the snacks.
“Yeah, fine.” She wasn’t ready to go into the whole story of her involvement with the investigation.
Kelly carried the pretzels to the kitchen table, where several large plastic bags appeared to be stuffed with clothing. “Look at these.” She proceeded to pull out slacks and sweaters, a warmup suit and a puffy winter coat, holding each item up to herself to show how it would look. “I found most of these on sale racks. Amazing, at this time of year.”
Sam put on a happy face and worked to let go of the nagging concerns about Cantone and his crooked nephew. She congratulated her daughter on her clothing buys.
“Shall we have the rest of that pasta you made the other night?” she asked, as Kelly started to carry her purchases to her room.
She studied her hands to be sure she’d washed off every trace of the green dust. All clear. Preoccupied with thoughts of that, she pulled pasta and sauce from the fridge and poured two glasses of wine. Kelly came back into the kitchen to slice and butter bread and spread it with garlic. While the bread toasted, they raised their glasses.
“I’m really excited about my new job,” Kelly said as she set the table. “Iris seems like such a sweet lady.”
“I hope it works out well—all the way around,” Sam told her. As much as she wanted to add some motherly advice about working hard and doing her best for Beau and his mother, she held her tongue. Realizing that Kelly had been out on her own for a long time was a hard thing to accept. But if Kelly messed up, her own chances with Beau might be finished.
The phone interrupted her thoughts, just as they were finishing their dinner. An order for a specialty cake. The customer’s daughter was celebrating her quinceanera and the family wanted to do it up big. Sam suggested a tiered cake, which always made a girl feel like a bride, and she could color-coordinate figures of the girl’s attendants to the dresses they would wear in the actual ceremony. The longer they talked, the more elaborate the cake became and the woman didn’t flinch when Sam quoted her the price. It was only after she’d hung up that Sam began to wonder if she could pull it off.
Okay, she told herself, it’s not very different than a wedding cake and you’ve done plenty of those. She could order the figurines online tonight and they would be shipped tomorrow, arriving in a couple of days. She had a supply of risers and separators, to set off the elegant tiers. The cake wasn’t needed for a week yet, so she had plenty of time to get her supplies lined up and pre-make most of the flowers and other decorative elements that needed time to set up. She grabbed a pencil and sheet of paper and began to sketch out the design as the idea took hold. A success here could very well secure her a lot of business among the Hispanic families in town, and it would be worth her while to give this one a lot of attention.
She drifted into the living room and sat at her computer desk in the corner, getting her supply order done in no time. A quick check of her email and she saw two more responses to her queries about vans for sale. One was in Eagle Nest, a small village about forty minutes away, on the other side of the mountains. A quick phone call, the right answers to her questions, and she told the seller that she would drive over in the morning to take a look.
As if the cosmos had heard her plea for more bakery business, the phone rang again, Ivan at the bookstore reminding her of their annual open house tomorrow evening. He wanted to know if she could deliver their cake by mid-afternoon. Sam’s knees almost buckled. He’d spoken to her about the event almost a month ago and she’d completely forgotten. She put a smile in her voice and reassured him.
“Kelly! Help!” she yelled, the second the phone disconnected. “I’ve got to turn out a special cake— tonight!”
Sam flipped through her recipe box for her special red-velvet. Since everything she baked at Taos’s 7,000 foot elevation required special altitude adjustments, she didn’t dare use a recipe from any old cookbook. “Can you whip this up and get it into the oven now?” she said, handing the card over to Kelly.
Bless her heart, Kelly didn’t skip a beat. She turned the oven dial to preheat and began pulling ingredients from the shelves. Sam muttered as she reached into her storage cabinets on the service porch. There were book- shaped pans somewhere in here and that would be the perfect thing for the store’s needs. After a heart-pounding moment in which she began to wonder if she’d given the pans away, she found them. Two pans, representing the halves of an open book. The overall size would be nearly twenty-five inches wide and three inches thick.
“Wash these out before you use them,” she told Kelly. “And as soon as you get the cake into the oven, we need the mixer for a batch of buttercream.”
Sam pulled another large mixing bowl from the shelf and the moment Kelly had finished beating the cake batter, Sam washed the beaters and started on the icing. As she whipped the creamy mixture to piping consistency she visualized the finished confection.
The cake would be an open book on a large board. Ivory frosting for the pages, a brown border to look like a
