Sugar and Vice: Cupcake Truck Mysteries

  Sugar and Vice

  Cupcake Truck Mysteries Book 1

  Emily James

  Stronghold Books

  Copyright © 2018 by Emily James

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author. It’s okay to quote a small section for a review or in a school paper. To put this in plain language, this means you can’t copy my work and profit from it as if it were your own. When you copy someone’s work, it’s stealing. No one likes a thief, so don’t do it. Pirates are not nearly as cool in real life as they are in fiction.

  For permission requests, write to the author at the address below.

  Emily James

  [email protected]

  www.authoremilyjames.com

  This is a work of fiction. I made it up. You are not in my book. I probably don’t even know you. If you’re confused about the difference between real life and fiction, you might want to call a counselor rather than a lawyer because names, characters, places, and incidents in this book are a product of my twisted imagination. Real locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, and institutions is completely coincidental.

  Editor: Christopher Saylor at www.saylorediting.wordpress.com/services/

  Cover Design: Mariah Sinclair at www.mariahsinclair.com

  Published September 2018 by Stronghold Books

  ISBN: 978-1-988480-23-7

  Contents

  Also by Emily James

  Free Tips for Amazing Cupcakes

  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

  Recipe: Carrot Cake Cupcakes

  Letter from the Author

  About the Author

  Also by Emily James

  Maple Syrup Mysteries

  Sapped: A Maple Syrup Mysteries Prequel

  A Sticky Inheritance

  Bushwhacked

  Almost Sleighed

  Murder on Tap

  Deadly Arms

  Capital Obsession

  Tapped Out

  Bucket List

  End of the Line

  Cupcake Truck Mysteries

  Sugar and Vice

  Free Tips for Amazing Cupcakes

  Each book in the Cupcake Truck Mysteries includes a cupcake recipe, but even when you have a great recipe, baking the perfect cupcake can sometimes be hard.

  To receive the top 10 tips for amazing cupcakes (inspired by the Cupcake Truck Mysteries sleuth, Isabel), sign up for my newsletter at www.subscribepage.com/cupcakes.

  (If you’re already a member of my newsletter, no need to worry. I’ve emailed you a link to the tips too!)

  Chapter 1

  After a year of running my cupcake truck, I was beginning to think my motto should be Never trust a client.

  Or, at least, never trust a client when they tell me what they’ll have on site for me to create my cupcake display.

  When Claire Cartwright hired me to provide cupcakes for her grandfather’s massive 100th birthday party, she’d assured me they’d have “everything I needed” to set up my display. Everything I needed apparently only included two bare picnic tables.

  My second mistake after trusting that what I’d need would be on site was asking Claire about it.

  She planted her hands on hips narrow enough to tell me she probably rarely ate a cupcake. “Of course we wouldn’t have anything else here,” she said. “That’s your job, not mine.”

  It often was my job, which was why I’d confirmed with her twice that I’d only be required to bring the cupcakes, lay them out, and stay to serve them if asked. Decorating hadn’t been part of our verbal contract.

  But I’d already overheard Claire threatening not to pay the food truck vendor catering the hot dogs and hamburgers if they ran out of fried onions for the burgers. I couldn’t afford to have her not pay me because I failed to provide a display. After the lean winter months, my cupcake truck was one flat tire or mechanical malfunction away from going under. I probably should have weathered the winter in the town of Fair Haven where I already had established clients, but it hadn’t felt safe anymore.

  Hindsight is only useful for making you regret the choices you’d made, though. Right now, I needed a practical solution. “There’s enough space here for me to pull my truck up and serve the guests that way. Would that be alright?”

  “Obviously not.” Claire’s lip practically curled. “This isn’t a baseball game.”

  Before she could get any more riled up, I stepped back and dipped my head in a sign of submission. In my experience, most battles weren’t worth fighting. “I’ll figure something out, and it’ll be ready as promised before your guests finish their first hotdog.”

  “It better be. I refuse to pay for services that aren’t properly rendered.”

  She tossed me a look that suggested she didn’t have time to deal with my incompetence anymore and scurried off toward where a young man on a ladder was hanging streamers from the gazebo.

  If I screwed this up, I’d never see a nickel of what I was owed. The reasonable woman who’d hired me for this job seemed to have transformed into the birthday party form of a bridezilla.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t keep display material stored in my truck. I might have been able to if I wasn’t also living in it, but my sleeping bag, portable heater, and few other personal items ate up any extra room.

  On the drive to the park where the birthday party was being held, I had passed a dollar store not too far away. It seemed like my best bet to get the supplies I’d need to salvage this. I also didn’t have money to throw away on items I wouldn’t be able to keep, and a dollar store provided items on the cheap.

  I jogged out to my truck. As short on time as I was, I still stuck to the speed limit. I was probably the safest driver in all of Michigan. The name Isabel Addington should come up clean if anyone ran it, but I’d already discovered the hard way in the last town I’d been in that my fake identity could only withstand so much scrutiny.

  I should have picked a more common alias. That’d been an emotional miscalculation on my part, picking the name of the woman who wrote the cookbook I learned to bake from alongside my grandma. It’s hard to explain the situation away when the only two Isabel Addingtons in the United States are a child and a deceased woman—the latter of whom I’d assume donated her no-longer-needed identity to me. Other than insisting I didn’t want to steal the identity of anyone living, I hadn’t asked too many questions when I bought my fake ID. I hadn’t even asked how they’d managed to get me the name I’d hoped for.

  It took me less than five minutes to get back to the store, even sticking to the speed limit and making complete stops at stop signs.

  The dollar store was a small one, only five aisles, one of which was entirely devoted to candy. Not that I had anything against candy, mind you, but if
I used it to decorate my cupcake display, I could already hear Claire’s voice reminding me this party was for a man who’d lived a century, not for a five-year-old. Could someone even eat candy with fake teeth? My parents and grandparents hadn’t lived long enough for me to find out.

  I walked up and down the aisles once before putting anything into my cart. Had I had more time, I would have at least found out the guest of honor’s favorite color and a few things that represented him. As it was, all I knew was that his granddaughter wanted his birthday party to be a chic BBQ.

  I filled my cart with some glass platters, candle holders, acrylic gemstones meant for fish tanks, fake flowers, white tablecloths, and a couple tubes of Super Sticky glue. My selections didn’t scream man’s birthday party, but they were the best I was going to be able to do to satisfy Claire on short notice and without bankrupting myself. If nothing else, it had to be better than putting cupcakes out onto naked picnic tables. I was pretty sure I’d noticed some white spots that could only be bird poop on the wood.

  Now the question was whether I could pull it all together and set up my cupcakes in the hour remaining to me before the party was scheduled to begin.

  The moment I pulled back into the parking lot, I knew my promise to Claire to have the cupcake display ready before the guests were looking for dessert would be impossible to fulfill. Harold Cartwright’s progeny seemed to have a genetic predisposition to punctuality. Cars filled the parking lot even though the party wasn’t scheduled to begin for almost an hour. I had to park my truck at the edge farthest from the park because all the closer spaces where I could fit were filled.

  I’d be getting my exercise today carrying things back and forth. The walk to the section of the park where Harold Cartwright’s party was taking place would cost me at least five minutes each way.

  Arms piled full of my dollar-store haul and a heavy-duty pair of scissors, I speed walked back to my designated tables.

  By the time I set down my load onto my two picnic tables, the other food vendor wore a look that said he regretted ever taking this job. Claire was hassling him about the fact that four containers of ketchup and six squeeze bottles of mustard wouldn’t be enough to serve the two hundred or more people she expected.

  I almost snipped off a finger with the scissors I was using to cut the plastic stems off the dollar-store flowers. Two hundred people. Fifty more than what she’d commissioned me to provide cupcakes for. I always rounded orders up by a quarter since some people would take more than one, and often more people showed up for events than expected. But fifty additional planned for people that I didn’t know about left me with no wiggle room.

  I was starting to think Claire Cartwright hired me despite my being a relative newcomer to town because none of the established businesses would work with her.

  Whatever her reasons, I needed the money. Starvation and the threat of losing my truck motivated me to tolerate a lot.

  I organized my supplies, my stomach turning itself into a boiling pot of nerves as guests congregated around where they would queue up for their hotdogs and burgers. The photographer Claire had hired to document the event was already snapping pictures. Time was not on my side.

  I’d picked Super Sticky glue not only because it was what the dollar store carried, but also because it worked fast on glass, and I needed to glue the candlesticks to the platters to create a multi-tiered display. The only problem was, Super Sticky glue had to have pressure applied to it while it set. Otherwise, I risked my display crumbling under the weight of my cupcakes if anyone so much as brushed it with their sleeve. I couldn’t stand around and hold each piece together as the glue hardened. I needed to transport my trays of cupcakes from my truck.

  I also wasn’t about to ask anyone for help. Claire seemed like the kind of woman who wouldn’t appreciate me putting her guests to work, and besides that, I preferred it when people noticed my cupcakes and forgot about me. One of the best ways to make sure Jarrod never found me was to remain invisible or easily forgettable.

  The next best thing to a human holding the pieces together would be to use something heavy but not too heavy. Since the hotdogs and hamburgers had only just gone on the grills, I sneaked over and grabbed up the five ketchup containers and a few of the mustard bottles. The hotdog vendor was clearly as scared of not being paid by Claire as I was because he’d somehow managed to produce additional condiments since Claire’s lecture.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d now get another lecture because the new bottle of ketchup was a different brand from the ones originally set out. It sounded like the kind of thing that might set Claire off, especially since the newest bottle was a cheap generic brand and the originals were some fancy specialty ketchup.

  Once I had everything glued and weighted down, I sprinted back across the parking lot. Thank goodness Michigan was cooler in early May than Florida was. Had I been jogging around outside in Florida right now, I’d be a sweaty mess not fit to serve food to anyone. I’d always found it disgusting to watch chefs sweating into their food on the competition shows I used to watch on TV.

  By the time I got back with my first tray to the spot in the park where Harold Cartwright’s party was taking place, even more guests had arrived. The line for food snaked out of sight behind the gazebo, and a group of around ten children ages six to twelve played a game of Red Rover while waiting for their families to reach the front of the line.

  Someone had removed the ketchup bottles from my display, and they now sat back in their place next to the mustard and relish. With everyone already lined up to eat, I didn’t have long before they’d be coming my way for dessert.

  I shifted position to keep my back to the photographer as he moved closer to my area and wiggled my display. Whoever had removed the ketchup bottles had left them there long enough for the glue to set at least. I quickly glued the flowers and stones in a way that hid the spots where the candlesticks connected to the serving trays. I didn’t bother holding them in place while the glue set. If they weren’t stable, the worst that would happen was one would come loose.

  I arranged my cupcakes, sprinted back to my truck, and returned with another tray.

  Surprisingly enough, Claire had left most of the decisions about flavors up to me.

  You’re the expert, she’d said. The only flavor we have to have is carrot cake because it’s Grandpa’s favorite. But make sure you don’t include nuts. He’s allergic to nuts.

  His nut allergy was something else she’d forgotten to mention when I’d done my initial questions with her about the event. It was a good thing she’d dropped it in later or I might have accidentally managed to kill the guest of honor at his 100th birthday party. That would’ve guaranteed my truck went under.

  I’d already set out the raspberry cupcakes with white chocolate frosting, my coconut with mango curd tropical cupcakes, and the s’mores cupcakes—all popular warm-weather selections. All that I still had to carry were the specially requested carrot cake cupcakes.

  Given that the guests were already eating, I piled my arms full with the remaining three trays from my truck. My eyes barely peeked over the top, and I knew my arms would ache tomorrow. The stack had to weigh 20 or 30 pounds.

  I carefully picked my way through the parking lot. I came around the back of the final van before the cement gave way to grass. A man appeared seemingly out of nowhere and crashed into me.

  Hard.

  My three trays of carrot cake cupcakes flew into the air.

  Chapter 2

  I stumbled sideways from the impact, sure I was going to end up on the ground beside my cupcakes. The man grabbed my upper arm, keeping me on my feet.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  I wasn’t. I wouldn’t be as long as his hand was on my arm. Because, for a second, I wasn’t standing in front of a man ten years my junior who’d run into me in a parking lot. It was Jarrod’s face I saw, and Jarrod’s hand on my arm keeping me from escaping.

  “Ma’a
m?”

  Stay calm, Amy…err, Isabel. I had to remember to think about myself as Isabel. If I didn’t, one day I’d slip up in my speech as well.

  Stay calm, Isabel. This man isn’t Jarrod.

  Adrenaline continued to race through my body, making me feel as if I’d drunk three pots of coffee today rather than a single cup.

  I edged away far enough to force him to release my arm. “I’m fine.”

  He glanced back toward the park in a way the sent another rush of nervous energy crashing over me. It was the motion of someone who didn’t want to be seen.

  “Do you need help bringing this”—he waved a hand at the disaster that used to be my trays of cupcakes—“back to your car?”

  Why wouldn’t he have simply asked if I needed help? He might not be Jarrod, but for all I knew, Jarrod had hired him to bump into me as a ruse to lure me away from other people.

  “No thanks. I’ve got this.”

  He backed up a step. “You sure?” Another step backward. “I’m really sorry.”

  I nodded, and he spun on his heel and trotted away. My heart slowed down to a semi-normal rhythm. It was much more likely that he’d stopped by to say happy birthday to Harold Cartwright and wanted to make his exit before anyone spotted him and wanted a long chat. It wasn’t unusual for people to pop into one of these events for a few minutes, just to say they’d come, and then leave.