Red Velvet, Dead Velvet (Sky High Pies Cozy Mysteries Book 3)

  Red Velvet, Dead Velvet

  Sky High Pies Cozy Mysteries / 3

  Mary Maxwell

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  © 2015 Mary Maxwell / 11302015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, recorded or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a review.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 1

  It was late afternoon on an overcast Tuesday in November. I was sitting behind my desk in the tiny, windowless office at Sky High Pies, the bakery café that I run in Crescent Creek, Colorado. Julia and Harper, my powerhouse two-member team, had left for the day, and the old Victorian that housed the business was silent and serene. After locking the front door and fixing a cup of blackberry currant tea, I was getting ready to transcribe Nana Reed’s scribbled recipe for Cherry-Rhubarb Cobbler when the phone rang.

  “Thank you for calling Sky High,” I said. “This is—”

  A hushed voice interrupted with a mumbled declaration that was so faint I only caught one word: murder.

  “I’m sorry,” I told the mystery caller. “Can you please repeat wha—”

  “It’s Ivy Minkler,” rasped the head librarian from the Crescent Creek Public Library. “I need your help, Kate!”

  For a split second, I wondered if the copy of Murder on the Orient Express that I’d checked out in a moment of Hercule Poirot nostalgia was overdue. But then I remembered returning the book on my way to the bank a few days earlier. As Ivy began to snivel, I asked her to tell me more.

  “I found s-s-something,” she said in a voice as delicate as spun sugar. “I hate to bother you, Kate. But I didn’t know who else to c-c-call.”

  I waited while she stammered a few more garbled words. Then I asked her to take a deep breath, collect her thoughts and tell me what she’d found.

  “A letter,” she whispered. “I found a letter here at the library!”

  With her light brown hair swept into a chignon, an ever-present strand of pearls around her neck and a pastel cardigan draped over her shoulders, Ivy was as steadfast and bookish as the Dewey Decimal System. She stopped at Sky High Pies every Friday morning to buy a loaf of Chocolate Banana Walnut Bread for the library’s weekly staff meeting. Her teenaged daughters were named Anne, Emily and Charlotte in honor of the Brontë sisters. And the license plate on her Jeep Wrangler read ILUVBOOKS. I’d only known Ivy to be demure and reserved; the frantic, breathless individual on the phone was the exact opposite of the town’s chief literary champion.

  “What’s going on, Ivy?” I asked. “You don’t sound like yourself.”

  “How could I sound like myself?” she demanded. “I found this…l-l-letter!”

  I pushed aside my grandmother’s cobbler recipe. “Okay,” I replied in a calm, gentle tone. “I think we’ve established that you found a letter. What I don’t understand is why it’s made you so upset.”

  “Oh, Kate!” she gasped. “It’s horrible! It’s awful! And it’s just so very…”

  Her voice vanished beneath another wave of muffled sobs. As I waited for the weeping to subside, I twirled my ballpoint pen on the desktop and reviewed Mildred Pupkin’s special order for Candy Cane Caramel Muffins. She’d called earlier in the day to request three dozen peppermint-flavored goodies for the annual Pupkin family reunion. I made a note to order extra candy canes as Ivy’s tearful sobs faded into a feathery whimper. When it seemed like she’d finished crying, I asked her to tell me more about the letter.

  “I found it in a large white envelope behind the copy machine.” Her voice splintered again with a fearful gasp. “Like it had slipped down the back and whoever it belongs to didn’t notice. Or as if they were trying to hide it there for some reason. Either way, I’m pretty sure that it was written by…a murderer!”

  For a brief moment, I wondered if she’d been drinking. A quick glance at the clock revealed the time: half past five. While I suspected that plenty of other Crescent Creek residents were already enjoying their second or third cocktail of the day, I knew that Ivy abstained from her beloved triple-strength peach daiquiris until after seven o’clock.

  “And whatever else you’re thinking,” she blurted suddenly. “I haven’t been hitting the hooch!”

  I smiled at her uncanny remark and added telepathy to her list of talents—alongside amateur yodeler, bookworm extraordinaire and eternally tolerant mother to three unruly adolescents.

  “That thought never once crossed my mind,” I told her. “Now, back to the letter; does the so-called killer identify their victim?”

  “Walter Shipp!” Ivy cried. “I think they’re threatening to kill him!”

  A gruff curmudgeon and relative newcomer to Crescent Creek, Walter Shipp was also a Sky High regular. He came in every Monday and Thursday at noon for one of my grandmother’s cherished Coconut Cream Crazy cupcakes. The confection was a vanilla-frosted gem covered with coconut flakes and drizzled with a bourbon-brown sugar glaze that once took top honors at the Greater Colorado Cooking Contest. I smiled at the memory of Nana Reed’s victory before asking Ivy if the suspicious letter mentioned Mr. Shipp by name.

  She heaved a sigh. “Well, not exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They were sneaky, Kate! They used a code.”

  “What kind of code?”

  “Abbreviations and initials!” Ivy answered nervously. “And some little squiggly diagram thingies on the back! The letter is addressed to someone with the initials ‘WS’ and it warns them to…” I heard paper rustling in the background. “Let me read that part to you,” she continued. “It warns them to, and I quote, ‘tell the truth about London and Whetstone Gulf or else there will be deadly consequences.’” She muttered briefly to herself. “I’ve heard of London, but I have no idea about that other place.”

  “I don’t know the name either,” I said. “But I do know that Walter Shipp isn’t the only person in town with those initials. There’s also Warren Slocum.”

  Ivy didn’t say anything.

  “And Wilhelmina Sullivan,” I offered, remembering the elderly Russian émigré who ran The Crescent Creek School of Ballet. “The letter could be addressed to her.”

  A deflated sigh came through the phone. “Well, you’ve got a point,” Ivy said. “I just assumed it was Walter Shipp because he
was on my mind. I saw him earlier in the day having a heated conversation with Eugene Crisp outside of that cute little coffee shop on Westminster. Walter stops by the library on a pretty regular basis, usually in a foul mood. I thought he was nice enough when he first moved to town, but I soon realized that he was nothing more than a smug, arrogant and greedy rat.”

  “Enough of a rat that someone would threaten to kill him?”

  “Oh, most definitely! To tell you the truth, with his reputation around town, I’m sure there’s a long list of people who would love to see him stretched out in a pine box. For one thing, he hits on every woman wearing a wedding ring, even when they tell him that they’re not interested. And then there’s his rinky-dink Ponzi scheme. Some of my best friends lost all of their life savings in his latest catastrophe!”

  “I’ve heard rumors,” I answered. “But don’t you think this letter could just be someone’s idea of a prank?”

  “I know it sounds absolutely nutty,” Ivy gushed in her singsong warble. “But I don’t think it’s a prank. I’m looking at the letter right now, Kate.” I heard the sound of paper crunching in the background again. “It’s here on my desk. Should I read it to you?”

  “Maybe you should call the police,” I suggested. “Or, if you’d like, I can call Deputy Chief Walsh for you.”

  She unleashed another string of garbled words in a faint murmur that was so quiet I understood only part of the sentence: mad as a hatter.

  “Someone told you that?” I asked.

  “Told me what?”

  “That you’re mad as a hatter?”

  Ivy snorted into the phone. “I’m talking about you!” she said. “Not me! If you call Trent Walsh and report an anonymous death threat, I bet he’ll think you’ve gone totally Froot Loops.”

  I took a sip of tea and waited.

  “And to be completely honest,” Ivy continued, “I’d feel a whole lot better if you’d just take a quick peek at it, Kate. I know you don’t officially work as a private detective anymore, but it would be so reassuring to get your opinion about whether or not it’s a real death threat.”

  I sighed. “Okay,” I said. “But you’ve already heard my opinion; I think you should call the police. If there’s any validity to the warning, Trent and his team will know what to do.”

  She cursed under her breath. “Pardon my French,” she said. “But don’t you know what to do in these situations?”

  The line crackled with static as I decided how to answer the barbed query. Before returning to Colorado to take over my family’s bakery café, I’d worked as a private investigator in Chicago for ten years. Even though I’d left that life behind, I still received the occasion request to do a little sleuthing on the side.

  “Ivy?”

  She sniffled. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “I believe that you’re upset,” I said slowly. “And I also believe that maybe we should talk a little to work this thing out.”

  There was a soft reply, a faint buzz that I interpreted as Ivy consenting to my suggestion.

  “You mentioned that the letter was anonymous,” I said. “So it isn’t signed, right?”

  “I wish the killer had signed it!” she gushed. “Then I could call the police and tell them who to arrest.”

  “Are there any distinguishing marks or telltale hints about the author’s identity?”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Is the stationery monogrammed? Does it have a watermark? Can you detect any particular scent if you hold it to your nose?”

  “Are you suggesting that I smell it?”

  “Clues come in many forms,” I answered. “Sometimes they’re visual. Sometimes they’re a background noise on a recording. And sometimes they—”

  “Well, I’m not going to put this thing anywhere near my nose,” Ivy snapped. “What if the killer put poison on the paper? Maybe that’s the whole idea, Kate. They’ve poisoned the letter so that some poor, unsuspecting librarian will press the sheet of stationery from the Moonlight Motel right up against their nose so they—”

  “What did you just say?”

  She sniffled again. “About the poor, unsuspecting librarian whose feet are throbbing more than you’ll ever know because the Treadwell triplets came in again and left three-hundred and six—”

  “Not that part,” I interrupted. “Did you say something about the Moonlight Motel?”

  She made a derisive sound with her mouth; the familiar tsk, tsk, tsk that signals impatience or annoyance.

  “Well, yes I did,” she said sharply. “But I still don’t see why you want me to smell the thing, Kate.”

  “That’s a clue, Ivy.”

  “What is?”

  “If the letter is on a piece of paper from the Moonlight, then perhaps whoever wrote it is staying at the motel.”

  She responded to my statement with silence, a long and impenetrable moment of quiet that gave me a chance to make sure the contacts on my phone included Earl Dodd at the motel.

  “Are you still there, Ivy?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I didn’t mean to be critical,” I said. “It’s just that detectives examine every possible clue and each potential angle when they’re working a case.”

  “Well, I’m not a detective, Kate.” Her voice was weightless and delicate, like a hummingbird in flight. “I’m a librarian.” She paused and took a breath. “A librarian who happens to be scared out of her wits right about now.”

  “Everything will be alright. There’s always a chance that it’s simply part of a prank.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “Well, I hate to be a bother, Kate,” Ivy said. “But can we please get together for a few minutes so you can look at the letter? I really need your help figuring out what to do next.”

  “How about the library?” I glanced at the clock on my desk. “You close in another hour or so. I could come by then.”

  She gasped. “Heavens, no! The killer might come back to get the letter!”

  “Okay, then,” I said. “Where would you like to meet?”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Wagon Wheel Saloon sat on the corner of Juniper Street and Boulder Avenue a half block from the Crescent Creek Public Library. It was among the most popular places in town to have a beer, shoot a few games of pool and luxuriate in the guilty pleasures of loaded potato skins. It was also a primo spot to catch up on whatever local gossip you missed earlier in the day at Sky High Pies. As I paused just inside the front door, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the murky gloom of the low-ceilinged tavern, I heard a rumbling voice bellow from behind the bar.

  “What are you thirsty for, Miss Reed?”

  It was Red Hancock, towering over the long expanse of glossy wood with one hand curled around the neck of a Wild Turkey bottle and the other cradling a copy of Ski & Snow. In his mammoth fingers, the magazine looked like a postage stamp and the bourbon resembled one of the in-flight miniatures that airlines dispense to thirsty travelers.

  “Could I have a glass of Sonoma Coast chardonnay, please?”

  The brawny bartender peered at me through his rimless glasses. “You sure we carry that?” he asked as I approached the bar. “Sounds like it might be one of those fancy high-class vinos, Kate.”

  “It’s the wine I always drink here.”

  “Well, la-di-da!” A judicious wink followed the curious remark. “Ivy told me you’d probably order a daiquiri or one of them fruity things with an umbrella it. I guess that Minkler dame was wrong this time!”

  Red was a fan of hardboiled detective novels. In his world, women were dames, guns were bean-shooters and boozehounds made up half the population of our little Rocky Mountain Shangri-La. In truth, I didn’t usually like any woman being called a dame, but I made an exception for Becca Hancock’s lovable husband. While she ran the town’s only vintage clothing store, Red watched over The Wagon Wheel like a sociabl
e hawk.

  “Where is Ivy?” I asked, scanning the room. “I’m meeting her for a drink.”

  Red chuckled. “She’s waiting for you in my office. She didn’t spill the beans, but it’s pretty obvious something’s got her real spooked. She told me to send you back with a fresh peach daiquiri and a plate of mozzarella sticks.”

  My stomach tilted at the mention of fried twigs of cheese. I knew that Ivy often turned to greasy snacks and sweet cocktails whenever she was distressed. Although she was usually upset about things at the library—like the recent day when Otis Grubb scribbled obscene haiku in a copy of Green Eggs and Ham—instead of an anonymous death threat.

  “Gimme a sec,” Red said. “I’ll open a fresh bottle of vino and check on the cheese thingamajigs.”

  “Thanks, bartender.” I took a seat and reached for my phone. “I’ll keep this stool company in the meantime.”

  While he went into the kitchen, I checked voicemail. There was a new message from my parents in Florida. “Hi, honey! How’s everything at Sky High? We sure hope you’re not crumbling under the pressure of following in our footsteps!” My finger hovered briefly over the Delete button. It had only been a few months since I moved back to my hometown to take over the family business, but my mother and father called a few times every week for an update. I was still trying to decide whether to keep or discard the message when Red reappeared.

  “You’re all set, Kate.” He carefully placed a small tray on the bar with my wine, Ivy’s cocktail and a mountain of fried cheese surrounding a bowl of marinara sauce. “Anything else you need right now?”

  I wrinkled my nose at the caloric snacks. “How about some antacid tablets? I can get indigestion just smelling fried food.”

  Red laughed. “Ah, c’mon, Katie! You’ve got to indulge every now and then. After all, you know what Steven Wright said.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure I know who that is.”

  “The guy’s a comic genius, Kate. He was big a while back.”