Chocolate Peanut Brittle Murder: A Donut Hole Cozy - Book 45 (Donut Hole Cozy Mystery) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  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

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  Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright 2017 by Guardian Publishing Group - All rights reserved.

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  Table of 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 1

  Eva placed her tote bag on top of the glass counter in Donut Delights with a rattle of metal beads. She clasped her hands to her chest and eyed the glazed beauties cuddling up to one another.

  Strawberry Creams beside the Chocolate Revolutions. Oh, and the Peaches and Cream Donuts of course. Colors spanning the rainbow and flavors to match. Each donut had its own unique allure.

  “What is it this week?” Eva asked. “Oh goodness, is it that one?” She tapped the case with her fingernail, just above the newest creation in Heather’s repertoire.

  “That’s it,” she said and grinned at the elderly woman. “Do you want to hear about it? Oh, but wait – where’s Leila?”

  “We went shopping this morning,” Eva said, “but she wanted to go to this new fashion boutique place and I wasn’t in the mood. She’ll come over in a minute.”

  Already, Leila and Eva argued like an old, and happily married couple. They were Heather and Amy in a few years from now, except they had more patience for each other’s quirks.

  “Should I wait until she’s here to divulge the secret of this week’s donut?”

  “No, dear, you go ahead,” Eva said. “I’ll certainly be eating one of those donuts before she gets here, so you’d better tell me what I’m in for.”

  “I call them Chocolate Peanut Brittle Donuts. A rich chocolate batter base, coated in light choc glaze and sprinkled with handmade peanut brittle. That should provide a nice crunch.”

  “I’ll take four,” Eva said. “I know Leila will want to taste them and one is never enough.”

  Heather rang up the order on their new computer system. She slapped the register drawer closed, then bent and got two plates from the shelf beside the counter. “How about some coffee?”

  “Yes, please,” Eva said. She fiddled with the dainty watch on her wrist and frowned.

  “Problem?” Heather used a pair of silver tongs to retrieve the donuts. She placed them carefully, one at a time, on either plate.

  “Nothing, nothing, I just expected Leila to –”

  The glass front door crashed inward and several screams rang out through the store. Heather jumped and one of the donuts flopped off the plate and rolled across the boards, squelch, squelch, squelch, and came to a halt.

  Leila stood on the threshold, a spring breeze fluttering her skirts. She gripped the jamb, her other hand pressed to her pallid cheek. “I – I – I –”

  “Leila?” Heather started forward.

  The kitchen doors swung outward and Amy appeared. “What’s going on?” She spotted the pale elderly woman and rushed to her side.

  Heather reached Leila at the same moment Amy did. Together, they helped her across the interior of Donut Delights and into a chair at a table closest to the front.

  “Are you all right?” Heather asked, and clicked her fingers at Ames, then at the remaining donuts on the counter.

  Leila shook her head, lips drawn into a thin, white line.

  Eva sat down next to her and took her hand. “She’s clammy.”

  “Ames, a glass of water too, please.”

  Amy didn’t complain. She rushed around and saw to matters behind the counter, then summoned Maricela from within the kitchen to take care of any customers while they were busy with poor Leila.

  Leila swayed on the spot and shut her eyes so tight her lids wrinkled.

  Finally, Ames delivered the donuts and the water.

  Leila drank from the glass, trembling all the way, then set it down and exhaled, slowly. “We need to call the police,” she said.

  “Why?” Heather asked. Already, the slow creep of dreadful certainty had started in the pit of her belly – the same feeling she got every time a case presented itself.

  “There’s a dead man in our house,” Leila said. “Right in the middle of the passage, half in and half out of the living room entrance. I can’t – I can’t –”

  “It’s all right,” Heather said. “Take a bite of the donut. It will help you calm down.”

  Leila did as she was told and groaned a sigh around a mouthful of chocolatey goodness. “Great,” she said. “Just great.”

  “Good,” Heather replied.

  Amy took a seat and scooched the chair as much as possible. She succeeded in making horrible scraping noises on the boards and not much else – they were wrought iron chairs, after all.

  Leila finished off her bite of donut and placed the rest of it back in the plate – oh boy, she had to be shaken to do that. She usually ate all of Heather’s donuts without stopping to sip coffee or talk. “I bought a lot of clothes at that fancy new boutique down the street. I had so many bags and I didn’t want to carry them here and have them crowding my feet.”

  “Feet sweat,” Eva agreed.

  “Pardon?” Amy and Heather asked that together.

  “Oh, you know, the feet sweats. My tootsies get claustrophobic in these pumps and I can’t wear sandals. You wouldn’t believe the size of my bunions,” Leila said and flapped her hands. “But that’s beside the point. I went home to drop off the bags, but when I got up the front stairs, the door was already ajar.”

  “I locked it,” Eva said. “I know I locked it.”

  “The lock was broken. I figured it was a thief and they’d forced the door then made off with all our stuff. That new TV I bought,” Leila said. “Oh gosh, I haven’t even checked if it’s still there, but – oh, I’m getting sidetracked.”

  “That’s all right.” Heather patted the back of her hand. “Walk us through it.”

  “Right, so I went up the front stairs and opened the door.”

  “Have you lost the last of your brain cells?” Eva asked, and shook her head in a show of uncharacteri
stic disapproval. She hadn’t even thrown in a ‘dear’ to soften the blow. “You could’ve been murdered yourself.”

  “I have an inquisitive streak. I can’t help myself,” Leila said, which wasn’t much of a defense. “And tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.”

  “Yes, well, that’s neither here nor there.” Eva picked up the bite-free donut on the plate and tucked into it.

  “And when I opened the door there he was. The corpse man. The thing. Oh gosh.” Leila grabbed a napkin from the dispenser and dabbed her forehead. “I didn’t see much but there was a lot of blood.”

  “In our house,” Eva said, and swallowed. She took a napkin herself and cleaned chocolate and peanut brittle crumbs from her lips. “Unheard of. Invading an elderly woman’s home like that.”

  “Two elderly women,” Leila said. “And you’re missing the point, Eva, dear.

  “The dead body, of course.”

  “I’ll call Ryan,” Heather said. “And an ambulance, just in case.”

  Leila paled again. “I think it’s too late to save him, dear. I’ve never seen that much blood in my life. And I was a nurse.”

  Chapter 2

  “This is just too weird,” Amy said. She leaned against the mailbox which poked out of the ‘crete in front of Eva and Leila’s house. Wind hushed her, traveling between the flowers in their loamy beds and the tall trees at the perimeter of the garden.

  Eva had maintained it throughout the winter and that work had born fruit in spring. Quite literally. Small green fruit hung from the crab apple tree nearby.

  Heather shrugged. “I’ve progressed past weird when it comes to Hillside. Anything can happen here. It’s like we’ve become the new murder capital of the world.”

  “What’s the actual murder capital of the world?” Amy asked, and shuddered.

  “I have no idea,” Heather said. “And I’m not sure I want to.”

  Ryan trooped down the front stairs of the house with Hoskins hot on his heels. “We’re ready, ladies. Everything’s been cleared out.”

  “It’s sleuthin’ time,” Amy cried and pumped her fist into the air. She looked around at them. “Really? Morphin’ time? Does no one remember the Power Rangers?”

  “I do,” Hoskins said, for once missing his obligatory candy bar – though, the outline of one pressed against the fabric of his pocket. “I just don’t think you’re funny.”

  “Hold my handbag.” Amy thrust it toward Heather.

  “Ladies,” Ryan said and patted Hoskins on the shoulder. “Let’s move past our disagreements and focus on the crime at hand, shall we?”

  “Speaking of the crime.” Heather fell into step beside her husband. “What do we have? Who’s our victim and why on earth did he break into Eva’s place?”

  Ryan led them all up the front stairs they’d traversed hundreds of times, apart from Hoskins, of course. “Atticus Beyer,” he said. “We found his driver’s license in his wallet. Front pocket. And a wad of hundred dollar bills tucked into his back pocket.”

  “The motivation for his murder clearly wasn’t theft, then, or the thief would’ve taken the payload,” Heather said.

  Ryan opened the front door and let them into the house proper. “They’ve cleaned most of it up, but I – uh, I’d avoid walking through the living room.”

  Amy grimaced. “That bad?”

  “He was stabbed in the throat with an engraved letter opener. It’s been taken into evidence,” Ryan said. “Did Leila or Eva own a letter opener by chance?”

  “We’ll have to ask them because I sure don’t know,” Heather said. “Do you?”

  Amy snorted. “Oh yeah, that’s high on my list of topics. Letter openers. Engraved letter openers.”

  “That kind of sarcasm coming from a woman who converses with men who spit on cats?” Heather arched an eyebrow. Granted, Amy’s connection to the cat spitting weirdo from their last case had helped them solve the murder. Without it, they’d never have found out about the hidden surveillance videos in an online cloud.

  “I see your point,” Amy said, “Okay, so the victim had a name that would’ve choked a linguist. And someone killed him. Why? And why in Leila and Eva’s home? What’s the connection there?”

  “We’ll have to speak to the two lovely ladies and find out if they knew our victim,” Ryan said. “So far, we’re not sure of anything. We don’t have fingerprints. We’re checking for DNA profiles from the letter opener and underneath the victim’s nails. Our assumed point of entry for the murderer and the victim is through the front door.”

  “It was broken?” Heather asked, though she technically knew the answer already. They had just entered it.

  “The lock. It was forced with enough power to splinter the wood.” Ryan clicked his ballpoint and brought his notepad out of his pocket. He flipped through it. “We have no leads except for the name of our victim, the possibility that the next door neighbors heard something and uh, that letter opener.”

  “And the cash,” Amy said. “There’s got to be a reason he was carrying so much of it around. That’s pretty suspicious.”

  “Agreed,” Ryan said. “I’d suggest we start by interviewing the neighbors and Leila and Eva. Who, by the way, will have to stay with us during this investigation. The house needs to be cleaned up after we’re done. And we’re not done with it yet. It’s still an active crime scene.”

  The ladies would have to sleep in the living room. Heather would head on down to the store and get them an inflatable mattress. Lilly would be in seventh heaven about this. And Dave and Cupcake would host a little pet party of their own.

  “All right,” Heather said. “I’ll chat with Eva and Leila about Atticus. We need to find out more about him.” And who’d want to kill him.

  “Hoskins you can interview the next door neighbors –”

  “Not there,” the candy-loving cop replied. “Checked already. Have to do it another day, y’know?”

  Heather buried her frustration at the detective. She’d never liked him, in part for his donut comments – always suggesting she bring some – and because he didn’t take anything seriously.

  “It’s fine,” Heather said. “We’ll come back tomorrow and talk to them.”

  “I’ll get to work figuring out why Atticus came to Hillside,” Ryan said.

  “How do you know he wasn’t a local?” Amy asked.

  “Arizona license,” Ryan replied and clicked his pen again.

  So, a man from Arizona had ended up dead in their best friends’ home with a wad of cash in his back pocket and a letter opener rammed into his neck. Once again, the week had started off with a bang.

  Heather could’ve done without it but she wouldn’t back down from a challenge. Judging by the grim determination on her bestie’s face, neither would Amy.

  “We’re on it,” she said.

  Chapter 3

  “Comfortable?” Heather asked, and placed a tray of refreshments on the coffee table in their living room. They’d left Donut Delights in the capable hands of the assistants to deal with the fallout of the murder.

  Amy sat on the sofa opposite Leila and Eva, who each held a glass of lemonade in one hand a donut in the other. They eyed the bowl of chips and dip on the tray, as well as the extra donuts but didn’t move to take them.

  “As comfortable as we can be, given the circumstances,” Eva said and sighed. “I can’t believe this has happened, dear. First that Larkin fellow and now this.”

  “What Larkin fellow?” Leila asked.

  “Oh, he was some Chamber of Commerce man who hit me over the head a while back. I stayed in the hospital for a while because of it. Nothin’ serious.”

  “Nothing serious?” Heather shook her head. “We were worried sick about you.”

  “I vaguely remember something like that,” Leila said. “I’m sure you spoke to me about it.”

  “Head bashings aside,” Heather said, “this is a shock.” Hillside had changed in the last few years. They’d never had this man
y murders before, though she might not have noticed back then since she hadn’t been investigating.

  “Let’s get to the matter at hand.” Amy held Heather’s tablet in her lap, the screen on. “Do either of you ladies know the man in question? His name was Atticus Beyer.”

  “No,” Eva said. “I’ve never heard that name before.”

  Leila took a little longer. She worried her bottom lip with her teeth and tilted her head to one side and then the other. “I – no.”

  “Are you sure?” Heather asked. She’d hesitated there and that had to mean something.

  “I swear I’ve heard that name somewhere before. I’ve definitely never met anyone by that name but –”

  “Ah!” Eva tugged her handbag into her lap, then dug around inside it. She pulled out a miniature umbrella, which she dropped onto the unwitting Davey-dog next to her. He didn’t notice and snored on.

  She brought out two tubes of lipstick next and dropped those on the puppy too. Then came a bag of hard, boiled candies, a pair of tennis shoes and what looked like a lacey scarf complete with two knitting needles.

  “Just a second,” Eva said, head in the mouth of her cavernous tote. Dave didn’t stay another minute. He rose from the pile of extraneous materials and leaped onto the floor. He padded off with a muted bark.

  “Ah, here it is.” Eva drew a folded edition of the Hillside Reporter and flapped it open. She handed it over to Leila. “This is where you saw it.”

  “How do you know?” Heather asked.

  “It’s the only newspaper I read,” Leila said. “And I haven’t listened to radio in years.” She paged through the newspaper. “Yes, this rings a bell. Wait, it was in an advert or something in –” She flipped through faster and faster. “Here!”

  “What does it say?” Amy asked, finger poised for the type. She loved playing on Heather’s tablet, whether it was Candy Crush, a hidden object game or typing out notes for one of their investigations.

  “Atticus Beyer,” Leila said, and her voice cracked.

  “Are you sure you want to read it, dear? I can do that for you.” Eva paused midway to packing the mini-umbrella into her purse.