Cakes and Mistakes (Sweets and Secrets Cozy Mysteries Book 3) Read online

  Cakes and Mistakes

  A.R. Winters

  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

  Untitled

  Sneak Peak: Innocent in Las Vegas

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Cakes and Mistakes

  Copyright 2021 by A. R. Winters

  www.arwinters.com

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  Thank you for downloading this book!

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  Chapter One

  “Just... a typical wedding cake? Nothing special about it?” I asked, mixing blue with the right amount of red, hoping to get the adequate amount of purple frosting I needed for the order.

  “That’s what they want, Jean. Some people know what they want their wedding to look like when they’re six years old. They won’t let being the same as everyone else stop them.” Janelle, meanwhile, was going around the edge of the cake, making a fluffy pink border for every layer.

  All of it was done by hand with the tender loving touch that my aunt guaranteed with each and every order placed at the Shepherd’s Falls bakery. Baking wasn’t my professional calling by any means, but with all the freebies I got, I was hardly going to complain about my English degree going to waste.

  “Since when are you one to complain about the artistic integrity of your work?” Janelle asked, starting on another cake tier.

  “Maybe I’m just a bit jealous of Cleo and the artist’s retreat that she’s supposedly on.”

  “Supposedly? That’s a strangely accusatory tone for a best friend.”

  “You know how it is, Janelle. Italy, the cradle of western civilization.”

  “I thought that was Greece.”

  “Sure, whatever. There’s a bunch of art there, and she’s an artist, right? But the tagline for the trip was ‘Love, Eat, Art’, and they aren’t chowing down on bronze statues.”

  Janelle stopped what she was doing to cock an eyebrow at me. Her reddish-brown hair was slicked back into a ponytail, and she looked all business, even if she was as easily distractible as anyone else in the bakery’s kitchen. “So, you think she’s not there for the artistic appreciation, huh?” As ditzy she could sometimes appear, Janelle had earned her head baker job title. She was one of the few people in the bakery to actually have gone to a culinary school.

  “It’s Italy, Janelle. They advertised the food, and they know that’s what people are going after.”

  “Jealous, aren’t we?”

  “Just a little. Only a little.” I’d had my own share of international food adventures in the past, and I had to admit, I missed them at times. But here, at least, I was working at a bakery, and for things that weren’t out of an oven, my Dad was able to do pretty well.

  “I have to admit I’m a little jealous too. I wish I could run off to Italy sometimes. I hear the men there are a lot more romantic and caring than the ones here in America.”

  I nodded along in agreement, having had more than my own share of trouble with American men in the past. “Have you run into another issue with the male population of our dear hometown?”

  “Ayup. Robert Knox.”

  I stared at her in disbelief. “You’re dating Robert Knox?”

  “No, I’m not, and that’s sorta the problem.” She giggled, continuing to talk as she encircled every layer of the cake with a thick coating of buttercream. “The jerk stood me up last night. Left me sitting and drinking at a restaurant alone, feeling the shame of loneliness.”

  I just shook my head at her. “I’m not surprised he’d stand a girl up, but what I am surprised at is that you, of all people, would even accept a date with him. You’re too smart for a guy like him, Janelle.”

  She shrugged as she refilled her cone with more buttercream. “I know he’s a bit of a lecherous guy who changes women more often than most of us change our underwear, but hey, I’m in a bit of a dry spell. Besides, someone has to be the one to tame the beast, and who says it can’t be me?”

  Darn, I’d run out of the blue. I fished around for more ingredients. “I guess you’ve got a point there. He’s cute. You can say that about him at least.” That was about the only positive thing I could say about him.

  “You need to know what women like to be able to charm so many of them.”

  “Then, you realize faithfulness isn’t a trait he has and not one that you expect he’ll learn easily?”

  “What, you don’t think he’ll be seventy and still hopping between women, do you?”

  “Oh, yeah,” another voice said. A fellow employee held a tray full of cupcakes in one hand and dropped it on the table next to us. “There are totally septuagenarian cheaters. My grandma complains about them all the time.”

  Kimberly was one of the other bakers my aunt employed to keep the bakery running smoothly. Fresh out of college, she was still clueless about what to do with her life, a story that I was all too familiar with.

  “Besides,” she continued. “I’m pretty sure I saw Robert with Marianne recently. Hanging out, sharing a scone. Isn’t that what passes for romance here in Reedville?”

  Our small town wasn’t a huge place by any stretch, probably not even having enough people to officially qualify as a town.

  Janelle blew a hair out of her face. “It figures he was probably off with another woman. Oh well, it was a nice fantasy.”

  I was hit with a sudden bit of shock as I remembered who Marianne was, and watching Janelle, it appeared she was having the same realization that I was.

  “Wait, isn’t Marianne married?” I asked.

  Kimberly nodded. She was Janelle’s opposite in a lot of ways. Sure, she still had the regulation ponytail—because no one wanted random strands of hair in their baked goods—but while Janelle could sometimes stay silent and focus on getting the job done, Kimberly was always a leaky faucet of gossip, never able to keep entirely quiet even when she should. “Yep. Local dentist’s wife. I thought they’d been a thing for a while, really.”

  “Wait, a while?” Janelle spoke up, abandoning even the pretense of continuing to work on the cake.

  ‘Why are you looking at me? I was sure it was some sort of open secret. When I got back from college, I nearly walked in on them, let’s just say, committing adultery.”

  Janelle threw her hands up. “All right, I don’t need any more details than that. It figures I can’t just be let down. I have to have my dreams utterly and completely destroyed.”

  She sulked, leaning on the table. “I don’t know what I was hoping for. I’ve been cheated on before. I know they never change.”

  “People can change. They just usually don’t,” I added.

  “It’s just as well he stood me up. It’s for the best. If I found out that he was using me to cheat on a married woman who was in turn cheating on her husband, I’d probably grab that lecherous idiot by the hair, turn the oven up to maximum, shove him in, and leave him in there until he was cooked to a nice golden brown.”

  Janelle was smiling quite ecstatically at the thought of her fantasy. She said she knew the pain of being cheated on, and if there was any doubt about it, her expression made that perfectly clear.

  “I think that’d be maybe a bit too merciful,” she said, continuing. “Cheaters deserve only the absolute worst for their crimes. Just killing him is probably letting him off too easily.”

  As she continued her little spiel, now happily encircling the cakes with frosting once again as she talked, she appeared unaware of the new visitor to the room, someone Kimberly and I had just noticed.

  Dean Wheeler, a detective with the county sheriff’s department, was assigned here due to his ties with Reedville. We had both grown up in town and had a somewhat problematic shared past. Even so, he usually didn’t have permission to barge into the kitchen area of the bakery unless, well, things had happened.

  He cleared his throat, looking right at Janelle as she continued voicing her over-the-top violent fantasies. He wasn’t as amused by them as Kimberly and I were. Instead, he was standing there seriously, a stern, down-to-business look firmly on his face.

  “Uh, Dean. What’s going on?” I asked, and Janelle and Kimberly dropped what they were doing to give him their full attention. “What can we help you with? I’m going to make the wild guess that if you’re back here, it’s not be
cause you’re after baked goods.”

  “Afraid not.”

  Janelle grimaced. She was being smarmy and sarcastic with her words, but she knew better than to persist with her murder fantasy in front of a cop.

  “I’m here to talk to Janelle.”

  “Look,” I started. “There’s no law against overwrought revenge fantasies, Dean, and—”

  Dean shook his head. “Not that. Although it’s not really the best impression to start with.”

  Janelle grinned nervously toward him. “So, uh, then what can I do for you, Detective?”

  “I need you to come with me, Janelle. I’ve got a few questions to ask you about the death of Robert Knox.”

  Chapter Two

  Janelle stared at Dean as if she were a deer in headlights, absolutely shocked by his words.

  I wasn’t as immobilized. “Wait, what? Robert is dead?”

  Dean let out a long sigh. “I probably should have led with that, shouldn’t I?”

  “You can’t seriously think Janelle would kill him. Or kill anyone. That’s absurd. And especially not in our oven. It would cause a huge mess, and she freaks out when she spills water all over a table. She wouldn’t consider baking a dead body.”

  Janelle looked over to me, her eyes wide. “I have no idea if anything you’re saying is helping, Jean.”

  “Whatever.” I rolled my eyes. “The point is, she’s not violent, and over-the-top words aren’t incriminating. You told me that yourself.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes. When Chris was saying he’d kill for something, you said hyperbole is not evidence. Remember?” I gave him a pointed stare.

  Dean shrugged. He was a prototypical jock in a lot of ways, well built, handsome, with sort of buzzed brown hair. He was still clean shaven for now, but I wouldn’t put it past him to grow the requisite cop ‘stache when he turned forty.

  “It isn’t. And I’m not here to arrest Janelle for potentially baking our late friend Robert alive.”

  My face drooped.

  “I’m just following procedure. There are rumors going around that Janelle here was talking with Robert a few days ago, and that’s currently the last known public appearance of the deceased. So, I have to ask her a few questions. That doesn’t mean I’m going to take her in and lock her up, Jean.”

  Also like a prototypical jock, he was kind of a simple-minded jerk who didn’t seem to hesitate in arresting or ‘detaining’ my friends and loved ones for questioning.

  “Well, I guess that’s a bit of a relief.” I was still testy with him after the whole Adler Bakery affair. He knew us all well, but he treated us like he didn’t.

  Which I guess was fair for a cop, but it was still quite infuriating.

  “Don’t worry Jean,” Janelle said, slipping off her apron and hanging it up. “I’ll answer his questions. I have nothing to hide, and I’m sure this all just a big nothingburger.”

  I crossed my arms. I had been growing a bit more on edge about things lately. This was hardly the first sudden death to occur in Reedville recently. I’d been a bit too close for comfort to some of them, and people I thought I knew turned out to be people I didn’t know well at all.

  Regardless, Janelle seemed to be someone I knew pretty well. As the head baker at my aunt’s shop, she was almost like family. Her turning out to be some sort of murderer would have been out of left field, and even if she secretly was one, I had serious doubts our ovens were involved.

  “Come on, Detective. Ask me what you need to ask me. These cakes aren’t going to decorate themselves,” she said.

  “It’ll take a bit. You should get someone to cover for you.”

  Janelle sighed and looked my way. I nodded, letting her know I had her covered. I didn’t technically have a title at the bakery. I just did whatever was needed, and that seemed to work out fine for my aunt and me. Plus, being the niece gave me a bit of unearned authority.

  “I’ll go let Aunt Betsy know,” I said as Janelle and Dean headed for the door. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

  “Thanks, Jean.”

  Dean led her off, and I turned to Kimberly. “Mind if I delegate finishing that cake’s borders to you? I do need to check in with my aunt.”

  “Fine, fine. So heroic of you to take on the responsibility and immediately pass it on to me,” she said with a wry grin.

  I gave her a wink. “It’s called management, Kim. It’s a skill.”

  Leaving Kimberly to finish her work, I headed back to the office where my aunt was already waiting for me.

  She was the closest thing I had to a kindly old grandmother, even though she would never let anyone call her that, insisting it made her feel old. Despite her protests, she was nearing retirement age and had been about to do just that until the bakery came into the picture. Now, she was spending her twilight years running one of the most successful small businesses in Reedville, balancing the books, and providing her wisdom to whoever asked. Which was a surprising number of people in Reedville. Small towns had characters, and Aunt Betsy was one of those characters.

  “So, what brought the detective in?”

  I ran my finger across my throat in a slashing motion.

  “Oh. That’s a shame. Someone Janelle knows?”

  I nodded. “Robert Knox.”

  “That young man? He was in here a lot, always with a different girl. Certainly, Dean doesn’t think Janelle is responsible for it, does he?”

  “He says the questions aren’t related to that, but Dean’s made some poor calls in the past.” A lot of those poor calls had nothing to do with police work, granted, but he had some work-related ones as well. He meant well, but his record was far from golden.

  “Oh, I hope this was all just an accident and questioning her is just procedure,” she said. “After all the nonsense I’ve dealt with recently, I wouldn’t wish that level of finger pointing on anyone.”

  It had recently been suggested that Aunt Betsy was perhaps a far more ruthless businesswoman than she actually was. As in cutthroat levels of ruthless and ‘this town isn’t big enough for two bakeries’ ruthless.

  It hadn’t been fun for her, and it seemed just as absurd to think Janelle could have killed someone as it was to think Aunt Betsy had.

  “Dean sounded pretty serious about the whole thing,” I said. “So, I don’t think Janelle is going to be back in today. I’ll focus on picking up what she was doing, I guess.”

  “That’s fine, Jean, but before that, could you come in here for a second?”

  I raised an eyebrow and followed her into the office proper where she closed the door behind the both of us.

  “Something the matter?”

  “I just want another brain in on this bookkeeping. I don’t think I’m getting the math wrong, but I want to be sure.”

  Oh, yeah.

  The bakery’s finances hadn’t been making a whole lot of sense recently.

  Granted, we were a small town bakery. That could be a precarious position, but business was doing more than well enough to keep the balance sheet in the black. Aunt Betsy had noticed the numbers going south, though, and in a way that made her suspicious.

  I took a seat next to her and her laptop and studied a spreadsheet showing endless rows of numbers and names.

  “The supply order is due, and I want to the get payroll squared away. I just need someone who is a bit more computer savvy than I am to make sure I’m doing this right.”

  I had plenty of faith in my aunt’s abilities. For a sixty-year-old woman, she knew what she was doing and had the right programs for the job. She was equipped with everything a small businessperson should have in the modern day. Looking over her shoulder, I hated that my mind was drifting toward there being something unscrupulous with the accounting, but Aunt Betsy had already picked up on it.