A Sampling of Murder: Cupcake Truck Mysteries

  A Sampling of Murder

  Emily James

  Stronghold Books

  Copyright © 2021 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 February 2021 by Stronghold Books

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-988480-25-1; Print Book ISBN 978-1-988480-26-8

  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

  Letter from the Author

  Recipe: Lemon “Meringue” Pie Cupcakes

  Maple Syrup Mysteries

  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

  Slay Bells Ringing

  (also contains a Cupcake Truck Mystery novella)

  Rooted in Murder

  Guilty or Knot

  Stumped

  Cupcake Truck Mysteries

  Sugar and Vice

  Dead Velvet Cake

  Gum Drop Dead

  A Sampling of Murder

  Poison-Spiced Cupcakes (coming April 2021)

  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!)

  1

  From the moment I heard it, I’d had a bad feeling about the unconventional way my business partner Claire had arranged for us to rent a physical storefront. But the insurance money I’d received from my burned-out food truck wasn’t going to be enough to both let us start a physical location and also buy a tiny food truck that we could use for events. Not without resorting to some unusual ideas.

  I flipped through the pages of the contract Claire had negotiated. Even after reading it multiple times, it still all looked like I was trying to read a foreign language. One so different from English that the letters weren’t even the same. I’d never thought I was stupid, but I’d never gone to college either, and the legalese made me feel like I shouldn’t have even graduated from primary school, let alone junior high.

  “Walk me through the idea slowly,” I said. “One more time.”

  Listening to Claire was the least I could do after she’d spent so much time negotiating this deal for us after we found our dream location. A dream location that was well out of our price range for a rental property.

  “In a nutshell, the owner’s willing to give us a break on the rent so we can afford the place.” She planted her hands on her hips. “In exchange for a percentage of the business.”

  Because I’d been hiding from my husband since I’d originally run away, I’d incorporated my business from the start. That had allowed me to have a bank account even though I wasn’t using my real name.

  We could technically sell or trade off some of the business as we wished.

  Doing it just felt like selling one of my kidneys in order to pay for a heart transplant. While I might not need two kidneys to survive, it was still a piece of me. It’d been hard enough taking on Claire as a business partner, and she and I were the closet thing I had to family. Her, her cousin Dan, and his adopted daughter Janie were.

  “A small percentage,” Claire said. “Page two, at the bottom.”

  My expression must have given away my reticence. “What if we want to change locations in the future?”

  “Page five. If we have to leave the location for a legitimate reason—”

  I opened my mouth to point out that language was vague and could come back to hurt us later.

  Claire held up her hand. “There’s a list outlining the valid reasons. If we have to leave for any legitimate reason, his share of the business goes down to a nominal amount. Just enough for him to recoup the lost rent over the course of a few years. If he dies within the first year, his share of the business immediately reverts to us rather than passing to his next of kin since we won’t have gotten enough return on the investment.”

  I turned the pages of the contract and read the sections Claire pointed out. My brain felt like a machine with dusty gears. Normally I was the one using big words thanks to my English professor father, but contracts weren’t written like novels. Authors wrote books in a way that readers could understand. Lawyers seemed to write on purpose to obscure the meaning.

  I read the passages again. Claire did seem to have thought of everything.

  The knots in my stomach that felt as hard as rocks still wouldn’t ease.

  Claire had a better mind for business than I did. It was part of why our partnership was proving to be such a good one, and part of why I’d let her talk me into a physical location in the first place. Up until a few months ago, when Claire first proposed it, owning a bakery had felt like a dream I’d never be able to reach. Up until that point, I’d been happy with my food truck. Claire had convinced me to at least let her try to make a physical bakery possible.

  Maybe my hesitancy about parting with any more of my business came from how hard I’d had to fight to keep my business going since I’d gone on the run from my husband. In a lot of ways, the business was the only
thing that was truly mine. Isabel Addington wasn’t even my real name. I lived in a rented room in a house that belonged to Claire.

  All I had was my truck—once I replaced it—and my business.

  Perhaps I didn’t need the truck part of the equation anymore. The small food truck we’d priced out wouldn’t be big enough for me to live in the way my original truck had been. And I’d made a promise to Dan not to run anymore. My heart had made a promise to Janie, even if I’d never spoken it out loud to her, not to leave her either. She’d already lost her biological parents. She didn’t need to lose anyone else important to her until much later in life.

  Claire tapped her foot. “Are you still reading?”

  I set the contract down. It was making my eyes throb. “What if we didn’t buy a new food truck? We could use that money to pay the additional rent.”

  Claire started shaking her head before I even finished. She pursed her lips into a line so thin that it reminded me of a caricature of an angry school teacher.

  “We need a truck to run events. Our five-year plan still involves depending at least partly on things like the sandcastle competition and hot air balloon festival.”

  Claire flinched slightly over the last words. Our first year at the hot air balloon festival hadn’t exactly been a success. A man had plunged to his death from a balloon, shutting down the event for days and sucking us into investigating his murder.

  Claire did a little shiver-shake as if physically throwing off the memory. “Besides, running a truck at least seasonally is going to be one of our best forms of free advertisement. People see the truck around, at the beach, at events. Even if they don’t buy from us right then, they might seek out the shop later.”

  So if we wanted to open a physical location, taking this deal was it. Our last chance. Months of searching had made it clear we weren’t going to find another location in our price range. Everything else we’d toured was either in a poor location or would have needed more upgrades than we could afford.

  This spot had been a bakery prior to the previous renter’s retirement. We’d even spoken to the previous renter about buying at a discount the appliances he’d had put in. We’d certainly never find that anywhere else within our price range.

  If we didn’t take this chance, I’d have to let my dream of ever owning a bakery die and be buried.

  I’d seen enough death in the past few years. I didn’t need to watch my dream die too.

  Claire reached for the folder where she’d filed all her calculations and projections. “Do you want to go over the numbers again?”

  I shuddered. I’d rather be hung upside down by my ankles. “No. I’m in. Let’s sign the papers.”

  2

  Claire balanced the clipboard bearing the list of everything we needed to do before opening day on her knees. The list was long compared to the short amount of time we had before the date we’d selected for our opening day. We’d be working every day except Sundays to make it happen.

  The new, smaller food truck bounced through a pothole. The clipboard on Claire’s lap barely wobbled. She could have been a tightrope walker had life gone differently.

  She poised a pen over the list. “Did you send the payment to Mr. Wendt?”

  “Yesterday before the close of business.”

  Claire made a neat checkmark in the box she’d drawn next to that item on her list.

  So far we’d basically checked off the big ticket items: buy the new-to-us food truck, purchase the commercial kitchen appliances from Mr. Wendt, the previous tenant, and sign the agreement with the building owner.

  As soon as we picked up our keys—which would be within the next five minutes—we could start on all the smaller items on Claire’s list.

  I turned a corner, and the early morning sun burned into my eyes. I pulled the sunglasses my friend Eve had given me off the top of my head and slid them on.

  Our new landlord has insisted we meet early, which was fine by me. We’d be starting our days early in order to bake everything fresh once we opened.

  Claire squinted and leaned forward. “Looks like you might have to parallel park this thing on your first day driving it after all.”

  After climbing into the driver’s seat of the new truck for the first time, I’d commented how I was glad I’d be able to get a parking spot before the street got crowded. I could parallel park a big truck. I just hated it. I always had nightmares of hitting one of the other cars and the cost of fixing the damage.

  The street shouldn’t be crowded at seven-thirty in the morning, though. Most of the businesses on this street didn’t even open for another hour.

  I looked where Claire was pointing. A bunch of vehicles did seem to be lining the road near our bakery. Shoot. I’d hoped to practice a few times before I had to parallel park for real. I’d been an expert at it with my old truck, but this one handled differently.

  A cloud passed over the sun, and I lifted my sunglasses momentarily for a better look.

  The cars up ahead weren’t just parked on the sides of the road. They were parked all over, haphazardly. And there seemed to be people milling about in the street.

  “Are those flashing lights?” Claire’s voice sounded like she was being strangled.

  They were. I could pick out the colors for both police vehicles and an ambulance.

  Claire pressed both hands down on her clipboard. “That’s not in front of our bakery.”

  If only speaking things could make them true.

  The emergency vehicles were either in front of our bakery or one of the shops directly next door. Most likely they were there for one of the shops next door. They had to be. We weren’t even open yet.

  “An employee probably slipped or…” I couldn’t think of anything else minor that would draw out both the police and paramedics. “I’ll park down the street, so we’re not in the way. We’ll walk in.”

  Claire grasped her clipboard like it was a life preserver in a rough ocean. “We have plenty we can start on without needing the truck for today.”

  Even if we did need the truck, a small walk wouldn’t hurt us. Claire went to the gym more than most people went to their job, and I’d never minded a walk.

  I parked the truck far enough back that it wouldn’t impede the movement of the emergency vehicles.

  We headed toward our bakery.

  A few people clustered near the edge of the building. Yellow Do Not Cross crime scene tape blocked us from going any further.

  The tape marked a neat box the size of our building. No matter how optimistic we wanted to be, there was no denying it. Whatever bad thing had happened to bring our emergency services had happened in our bakery,

  “What’s going on here?” Claire’s voice was demanding. I almost expected her to slap the clipboard against her leg for emphasis.

  “I heard what sounded like a gunshot when I got here to open.” The young woman right next to me pointed at the cell phone store beside us, next to our bakery. “I called the police right away.”

  She looked to be in her mid-twenties. She wore a blue shirt and her hair pulled back in a bandana.

  A police officer emerged from our bakery.

  Claire waved her arm in the air. “Excuse me. This is our bakery. We need to get in there. What’s going on?”

  I cringed, and the young woman next to me stared at Claire with her mouth hanging open slightly. All I could think was that having Dan as her cousin had made her too relaxed with police officers. I wasn’t quite as afraid of officers of the law as I had been before meeting Dan, but I still wouldn’t have approached them with that level of entitlement.

  The officer came over anyway. People always seemed to do what Claire told them to.

  “You said this is your bakery?” the officer said.

  Claire mentioned at me. “Our bakery, yes.”

  Normally I would have taken it as a compliment and a good sign for the future that Claire made sure people knew we were business partners. But this time I would
have been perfectly content to have the police not notice me. I didn’t know anything about what had happened here that could help them, and I didn’t need them putting my name into the system. If I wasn’t careful, it’d only be a matter of time before Jarrod figured out Isabel Addington and his wife Amy Miller were the same person.

  And then he’d find me.

  Paramedics emerged from our bakery building with a stretcher. A white sheet covered the face of the person on it.

  The body on it. You didn’t cover the face of a live person.

  And only one person should have been in our bakery this morning—the owner.

  I must have either let off a sound or lost all the color from my face because Claire cut off mid-sentence. Her gaze swiveled to where I was looking.

  She gasped. “Is that Bob Jenner? We were supposed meet him here this morning. He owns the building.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t divulge the identity of the victim until we’ve contacted next of kin.”

  He had to say that, but the chances that someone else had been in the bakery seemed slim. The young woman standing next to me said she called the police because she heard a gunshot. So someone shot Mr. Jenner. On the morning that we were supposed to pick up the key from him and take over our bakery.

  If I believed in curses, I would have thought someone put one on me.

  The officer Claire had flagged down ducked under the crime-scene tape. “I’ll need both of you to come down to the station to answer a few questions to help us figure out what might have happened here.”