Bad Bites: Donut Mystery #16 (The Donut Mysteries) (15 page)

Once we were all gathered in the living area again, I handed Jake his
sandwich.
 

“Thanks,” he said as he took it from me.
 
He must have noticed something in my
eyes, though, because he asked me softly, “Is everything all right?”

“It’s fine,” I said.

“Suzanne,” he prompted.

I did my best to offer him my brightest smile.
 
“This is the wrong time and place for
this particular conversation.
 
How
about a rain check?”

Just as I asked the question, there was another flash of lightning,
accompanied almost immediately by a pretty impressive explosion just outside.

“Whew.
 
That was a close one,”
Kevin said.

“Everybody eat up,” Jake said.
 
“After dinner, it’s time to talk.”

“Are we going one on one again?” Maggie asked, clearly unhappy about the
prospect.

“No, not this time.
 
This is
going to be a group discussion that involves everyone,” he said.

“About what?” Nathan asked.

“What else is there to discuss?
 
I think it’s time that we all laid our cards out on the table and talked
about our connections to our missing guest of honor, Chester Martin.”

Chapter 22

“Sure thing,” Vince said sarcastically.
 
“Why don’t you go first, Chief?”
 

Jake shook his head slightly.
 
“As the leader of this little session, I think I’ll reserve my comments
for the end, but since you seem so eager to talk, why don’t we start with you?”

Vince looked at him warily for a few seconds, and then he shrugged.
 
“Why not?
 
I don’t have anything to hide.”

“I doubt that very much,” Maggie Hoff said softly, though I was pretty
sure that we all heard her, which had probably been her intention all along.

“No interruptions, please,” Jake said, phrasing it in the form of a
request, though it was clear to everyone there that it was an order, plain and
simple, and it was meant to be obeyed.

“Go on, Vince,” Jake said.
 
“Tell us about your relationship with Chester.”

The man hesitated, looked at the fire for a moment, glanced over at me,
and then he finally spoke.
 
“I’m
beginning to realize that the truth is probably going to come out sooner or
later now that he’s dead, so I might as well get it off my chest.
 
My problems with Chester were nothing
but smoke and mirrors.
 
If anything,
the guy did me a favor ten years ago by pulling out of my land deal.
 
It took a lot of heat off me to be able
to blame it on him.
 
Maybe I milked
it a little harder than I should have, but the truth of the matter is that I
didn’t care about him one way or the other.”
 

“But you’ve been telling anyone who would listen to you for years that he
cheated you,” Jake said, pressing him further.
 
It amazed me that Vince was actually
repeating the story that he’d told me earlier, but I wanted to see if he
continued to stick with it.
 

Vince looked around the darkened room as he explained, “I’m not stupid
enough to incriminate myself, but I wasn’t really mad at the man, and I
certainly didn’t kill him, and that’s the truth.”

“How can we be sure of that?” Shelly asked him gently.

“Just like what everyone else here says, you’re going to have to take my
word for it.”

“What about the last time you saw him?” Jake asked.
 
“When was it, where did it take place,
and what did you say?”

“This is starting to sound more like an interrogation than I was led to
believe,” Vince said, and I saw a few of the others nodding in agreement.

“Think of it any way that you want to, but we’re not going to get
anywhere unless you all cooperate.
 
If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t mind answering a few simple
questions.”

I could almost see the wheels turning in Vince’s mind, but he came to a
decision with barely a pause.
 
“Fine;
if you want to play, then I’ll play.
 
It’s true that I saw Chester at the library on the day that he was
murdered. At least Zelda got that much right.
 
She’s your source, isn’t she?”

Jake just shrugged, not confirming or denying the fact.

Vince smiled a little.
 
“That’s what I thought.
 
Anyway,
after a while, blaming Chester kind of got to be a game for me.
 
I enjoyed watching him sweat, and I
never missed a chance to tweak him.
 
That might not make me a good person, but it doesn’t make me a killer.”

“So, you’re admitting that you threatened Chester the day he was
murdered?” I asked, forgetting my place for a moment.

“Suzanne,” Jake said in warning, the way he said my name stinging a
little.

“Take it easy on her,” Nathan said.
 
“It’s something that I’m sure that every last one of us is
thinking.
 
Suzanne just had the
courage to say it out loud.”

“That’s enough out of you, Nathan,” Maggie said.

“Oh, blow it out your ear, Maggie,” Nathan said in a simple voice that
grabbed everyone’s attention instantly.

“Excuse me?” Maggie Hoff asked her formerly submissive husband.
 
“What did you just say to me?”

“You heard me, but if you’d like me to repeat it, I’d be more than happy
to do it.
 
Maggie, I’ve put up with
a lot of garbage from you since we first got married, but I’ve finally reached
my limit.
 
If Chester’s murder has
taught me one thing, it’s that life is too short to put things off that need to
be done until tomorrow.”

“You’re going to live to regret this,” Maggie said, trying to get some of
her cool demeanor back.

“I doubt it, but even if you’re right, this is something that I need to
do for myself.
 
From this moment on,
you and I are through.”
 

Maggie started to speak again, but instead, she just stood and moved to
the other side of the room.
 
Nathan’s smile was unmistakable.
 
He’d just proclaimed his emancipation from a bad marriage, and he
clearly couldn’t be happier about it.
 
If nothing else, at least Chester’s murder had given him the courage to
do what he probably should have done years earlier.

“That’s all well and good,” Kevin said, “but let’s not change the
subject.”
 
He turned to look at
Vince as he added, “Why are you admitting to threatening Chester the day he
died?”

“I never said that I threatened him. I was just yanking his chain again,
and he finally got fed up with my taunting.
 
I knew that I’d pushed him too far this
time, so I finally decided that it was time for me to back off.
 
I told him I was through blaming him
once and for all, and when I left, he was more relieved than anything
else.
 
As a matter of fact, I think
he was still in some kind of shock that I was finally going to drop it.”

“So you say,” Kevin said.

“Think about what Zelda told you and see if it all doesn’t fit,” Vince
told Jake.
 
“If she told you the
truth, then you’ll see that I’m not lying right now.”

If Jake minded this new interplay, he was keeping it to himself.
 
Maybe he was just as fascinated by the
display of human interaction as I was, or perhaps he was just trying to give
the killer enough rope to hang him or herself.
 

Either way, I sort of wished that I had a bowl of popcorn for the
exchanges.

“We only have your word that you decided to let him off the hook for
something that didn’t bother you in the first place,” Maggie said.
 
“I know for a fact that Chester was
afraid of what you might do to him someday.”

“How could you possibly know that?” Vince asked her.

“Because he told me so himself,” she said.

Vince wasn’t about to allow her to paint him with that particular brush,
though.
 
“I don’t think pillow talk
counts, sweetie.”

“Watch yourself, Vince,” Nathan said, clearly angered by the man’s
taunting words.

“Why should it bother you?
 
I
didn’t think you cared about her anymore, sport.”

“That doesn’t mean that you can talk to her like that,” Nathan said.

“Thank you, dear,” Maggie said, clearly surprised by her husband’s sudden
rush to her defense.

“Oh, shut up, you nit.
 
I’m
not talking to you,” Nathan snapped, and I let a laugh slip out before I could
keep it in.

Maggie stared at me for a second with an angry intensity that was
frightening before she finally broke it.

“Whether your story can be confirmed or not, I’d like to thank you for
your candor,” Jake told Vince.
 

Kevin decided to chime back in as he turned to Maggie.
 
“You had a reason of your own to want to
see him dead, didn’t you?
 
After
all, he dumped you just before he was going to leave town.”

I glanced over at Nathan and saw that he was fighting another outburst,
and who could really blame him?

Maggie Hoff sneered at Kevin for a moment, and then she looked at Jake
triumphantly.
 
“The police chief
knows that’s not true.
 
As a matter
of fact, I showed him the proof of my innocence earlier today.
 
I’m the one who ended the affair with
Chester because I love my husband.”
 
The last bit she said as she looked up and stared straight at Nathan.

“I wish with all of my heart that I could believe that,” he finally
responded.

“You have to, dear.
 
It’s the
complete and utter truth,” she said.

“Don’t try to sell that junk here,” Shelly interjected.
 
“For once in your life, be honest with
yourself, if not the rest of us.
 
Everybody
here knows that you’re a liar and an adulterer.
 
You don’t get to behave like a virtuous
woman, Maggie.”

“You’re just jealous that Chester loved me and not you!” Maggie lashed
out, the words thrusting at the lodge owner like knives.

Shelly just laughed, a reaction that I wasn’t expecting.
 
“Love?
 
You were nothing more than a cat toy for
him, something to be played with and then discarded.
 
Spin it all you’d like, but he dumped
you, plain and simple.
 
Anything
else is just a lie you keep telling yourself so you can get to sleep at night.”

Maggie started to stand, her fists clenched in rage, but all it took from
Jake was one command to put her in her place again.
 

“Don’t,” Jake said simply, but with enough force to drive his warning
home.

“We’re not finished with this, you and I,” Maggie said fiercely to Shelly.

“Bring it on—any time, any place,” Shelly said icily.
 
Up until that moment, I hadn’t thought
her capable of murder, but now I wasn’t so sure.
 
Sure, she had an alibi, but it was an unconfirmed
one at this point.
 
If Maggie had
been murdered, my money would have been on Shelly, but it was her boyfriend who
had died, not the other woman, so I still wasn’t sure who had done it.

“Nathan, how about you?
 
Do
you have anything to add to the conversation?” Jake asked.

The man threw his hands up in the air as he spoke.
 
“As I said before, I didn’t know about
the affair until Chester was already dead, and I wasn’t really positive about
that until Maggie just admitted it, even after you told me about it yourself,”
he said wearily.
 
The day had taken
more out of him than he had, and he looked really beaten down to me.
 
“Believe it or not, and frankly, I don’t
care one way or the other.
 
I liked
Chester, and I’m sad that he’s dead, even if he did sleep with my wife.
 
I just want to get out of here and start
my life over.”

“You don’t mean that,” Maggie said, her voice nearly pleading with her
husband.

Nathan didn’t even glance in her direction.

“Well, I certainly didn’t do it,” Kevin said.
 
“Our feud was so minor, it was
laughable.
 
I wouldn’t kill anyone
over a million dollars, and I certainly wouldn’t do it over ten bucks.
 
Besides, our dispute was resolved once
and for all, so even that petty a motive was no longer a valid one for me.”

“What are you talking about?” Jake asked him.

Kevin looked truly surprised.
 
“Didn’t Suzanne tell you, or haven’t you compared notes yet?
 
I thought you two were working on this
case together.
 
No matter.
 
I’ve got the proof right here.”
 
Chester again pulled out his wallet and
handed the signed bill to Jake.
 
“I’m going to be needing that back.”

“Hang on a second,” I said, and then I took the bill from Jake and showed
the signature to Shelly.
 
“Does that
look legit to you?”

She glanced at it and then looked at me.
 
“That’s Chester’s signature.
 
There’s no doubt about it in my mind.”

“How can you be so sure?” Grace asked.
 
“After all, it could be a forgery.”

“But it’s not,” Kevin insisted.

“He’s right,” Shelly replied.
 
“Chester had an odd way of signing his name, one that would be extremely
tough to duplicate.”

“I told you,” Kevin said as he snatched it away and tucked it back into
his wallet.
 
“There, I’m free from
suspicion now.”

“I don’t know about that,” Vince snapped.

“But I just showed you all the proof!” he protested petulantly.

Vince was clearly not all that impressed.
 
“Just because it might be hard to forge
his signature doesn’t mean that it was impossible.
 
Those two things are worlds apart.”

“What do you want from me, a signed absolution from the murder victim?”
Kevin asked.

“That would probably do it, so unless you’re able to produce it, you stay
on my list,” he answered.

“Is that the way you feel, too?” Kevin asked Jake.

“I’m reserving comment until the end, remember?” he asked.
 
“Now, who does that leave on our list
who hasn’t spoken?”

“How about her?
 
She hasn’t
said anything,” Maggie said as she pointed to Shelly.

“I’m in the clear.
 
I have an
alibi,” the lodge owner said smugly.