Sweet's Sweets: The Second Samantha Sweet Mystery

the room flooded with light. A perfectly ordinary room. An empty room. She lowered the shade.

Sam edged toward the door, keeping her eyes on the open closet doors, switching to stare out into the hallway as she neared it. Nothing. Not a shadow, not a sound, not a breath. She rushed down the short hall and out the front door, locking it and stashing the key in the lockbox.

Inside her truck, she locked the doors and blew out her pent-up breath. Okay, Sam, think this through.

There’d been one other time when she saw something strange—another time after she’d handled the magical wooden box—a greenish plant residue that provided an important clue in one of Beau’s cases. And now she’d spotted this strange man near the place where the bloodied trench coat had once hung. So, that’s what I’ll do, she thought. I’ll tell Beau about this and see if it has any bearing.

The truck started with a roar, the wheels losing traction as Sam gunned it too hard on the muddy road. She slowed, deciding it would be stupid to slide off the road because of a vision that she couldn’t even really explain.

As she drove slowly through town she began to question herself. What had she actually seen; how would she explain it to Beau? At the street where she would normally turn to go to her shop, she almost did. Almost convinced herself that simply going back to work, ignoring ephemeral visions, creating visions instead in sugar—that would be far better than bringing this up to anyone else.

But then she looked down at the seat beside her, at the plastic bag holding Elena’s journal. Her friend’s words came back to her, the desperation in Elena’s voice when she’d told Sam how she’d slashed out at the man following her. How panicky she’d felt when the knife connected with his skin, when he began to bleed all over his coat. And then Elena’s final words, words of hatred for the husband who’d betrayed her with another woman, the husband who had likely hired that man to stalk his wife. If Sam could offer any assistance at all, any small clue that could help Beau find the answers, then she owed it to him and to Elena’s memory to offer it.

She drove past the square and turned left on Civic Plaza Drive. Beau’s cruiser sat near the entrance, as if he’d been the first to arrive this morning and had managed to snag the best parking slot. Sam didn’t get quite that lucky; the closest spot was more than a block away.

Crunching through little patches of ice in the shady spots, she hugged the plastic-clad journal to her chest and entered the sheriff’s department. The clerk at the front desk recognized her and nodded toward the long hall that led to the offices and small lab.

“He’s in Sheriff Padilla’s office,” the dark haired Hispanic girl said.

Sam took that as permission to go searching for Beau so she followed the hall toward the back of the building. Beau’s own desk sat in an open room where several deputies normally took care of paperwork and did whatever computer research necessary for their current cases. The room was unoccupied at the moment.

Voices came from an open doorway on her right.

“. . . for the record,” said Beau’s voice.

Sam moved closer

“For the record, Deputy Cardwell, I want no record of this.”

“Sheriff—”

Sam paused outside the door, blatantly eavesdropping but ready to dash to the safety of one of the visitor’s chairs if either man made a move.

“It’s nothing, Deputy. I’ve visited the Tafoya home on several occasions. My prints could have been there for months. You know those Indian maids don’t clean thoroughly.”

Beau shuffled uncomfortably. “In the bedroom? It doesn’t look right. If you’re refusing to make this part of the record, Sheriff, it has to be reported to I.A.”

“I’m not worried about Internal Affairs,” Padilla said. “I’ve been in this town and in this department a lot longer than you.”

Was he threatening Beau’s job because of incriminating evidence against himself? Sam held her breath.

“Listen to me, Cardwell. I have an excellent track record as sheriff of this county. I clear my cases quickly and cleanly. And I’m not answering to you!”

“You have to answer to the voters of the county,” Beau responded. “And I think they’d rather know their sheriff is an upright man, somebody they can trust.”

Padilla seethed. “They do trust me. You’re going to find that out when they go to the polls. This meeting is done.”

Beau came stomping out the door and jolted to a halt when he saw Sam. He didn’t speak but motioned with his head for her to follow him. She trotted along behind as he strode through the squad room and out a back door to the parking lot.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, his color high.

She held out the bag containing Elena’s journal. “I brought this back.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to bite your head off.” He puffed out his cheeks and exhaled sharply. “Did you hear much in there?”

“Some of it. I gathered that you found the sheriff’s fingerprints in the Tafoya’s bedroom. He didn’t have any explanation for that?”

“Said he’d been there once for a party and probably walked through the master bedroom in search of a bathroom.”

“Once. As in, a long time ago? Would fingerprints be there after a long time?”

“Depends. On certain surfaces, under the right temperature and humidity conditions . . . yeah, we can sometimes get latent prints. Might expect them on a light switch, doorknob, bathroom fixtures . . . okay, that might fit the sheriff’s story. What I didn’t tell him is that these came from the cover of that journal you’re holding. Which we found taped to the underside of a nightstand drawer on Elena’s side of the bed.”

“So he’s held this book.”

“Maybe in the bedroom, maybe somewhere else. I didn’t tell him everything; I was hoping he’d come up with a logical explanation. But you heard how he was.”

“Kind of it’s-you-or-me, this town ain’t big enough for the two of us.”

“Yeah.”

Maybe this was what the warning had been about. Sam thought about it, but she didn’t say it. She changed the subject.

“Did you read any of the entries in this?” she said, holding up the journal.

He shook his head. “Lisa found it, printed it and bagged it.”

“The final entry is dated the day before she died. In it, she’s thinking of going to the press with Carlos’s threats, revealing that he was having her followed and that he’d had a child by another woman. Elena rants about the unfairness of his double standard and it looks like she seriously considered wrecking his career because of it.”

“Whoa.” Beau stared at her.

“Motive enough?”

“It sure helps to establish it. I’ll push the state crime lab to get any evidence they can off that boot lace.” He glanced toward the building. “Quietly though. I can’t risk Padilla pulling me off the case. For now, I think I better just keep my mouth shut and work around him.”

“Be careful. Please?”

He gave her a light kiss. “I will. You know that, darlin’. I’d better get back inside.”

Sam watched him go in, and it wasn’t until she was in her truck, halfway back to Sweet’s Sweets, that she remembered she’d hadn’t told him about the ghostly image she’d seen in Cheryl Adams’s house.

She debated whether to call him right back or to wait until this evening and talk to him at home. The latter won out, as she figured he was already in enough hot water with Padilla that he didn’t need her adding more fuel to his boss’s fire. Instead, she stopped in at the bakery and was pleased to see that everything was going smoothly there. Her final job for the day was to finish Tafoya’s victory cake. The big party was to be held tomorrow night in the ballroom of the Arroyo Grande Lodge and as long as she had the cake there by five p.m. her duties would be done.

Becky helped her bring the large tiered cake out of the fridge and Sam set to work piping borders, creating a