BAKER'S BURDEN

  JESSICA BECK

  THE DONUT MYSTERIES, BOOK 50

  BAKER’S BURDEN

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Baker's Burden (The Donut Mysteries, #50)

  Cinnamon Applesauce Donuts

  When a Donut Isn’t Really a Donut | (But it’s still really good!)

  Momma’s Pot Roast

  Cinnamon Nuggets

  Donut Mystery 50 BAKER’S BURDEN

  Copyright © 2020 by Jessica Beck

  All rights reserved.

  First edition: 2020

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Recipes included in this book are to be recreated at the reader’s own risk. The author is not responsible for any damage, medical or otherwise, created as a result of reproducing these recipes. It is the responsibility of the reader to ensure that none of the ingredients are detrimental to their health, and the author will not be held liable in any way for any problems that might arise from following the included recipes.

  The First Time Ever Published!

  The 50th Donuts Mystery

  BAKER’S BURDEN

  Jessica Beck is the New York Times Bestselling Author of the Donut Mysteries, the Cast Iron Cooking Mysteries, the Classic Diner Mysteries, the Ghost Cat Cozy Mysteries, and more.

  WHEN A WICKED LANDLORD is murdered during a going-out-of-business sale in April Springs, everyone who runs a business in the strip mall he owns is a suspect, including one of Suzanne’s good friends. Not only that, but there are even more folks from town who are under scrutiny as well. As Suzanne and Grace dig into the murder, they must do their best not to be the killer’s next victims, too.

  To you, my loyal readers, for sticking with me through fifty donut books,

  Each one of you is golden to me!

  And of course, always and forever,

  To P and E

  Chapter 1

  IT STARTED OFF AS A day of sadness but also one of celebration, a witness to the end of one dream and the hope of a new beginning taking its place, but all of that took a back seat when murder paid another visit to the small and cozy town of April Springs, North Carolina.

  “Jenny, I need to get into the storage room,” I told the owner of For The Birds, the specialty shop that was going out of business. Jenny Preston had emulated my behavior when she’d opened her store, and there were more parallels between us besides the fact that we’d both had cheating husbands once upon a time. I’d used my divorce settlement for Donut Hearts, and she’d taken my cue and opened a shop of her own, this one following her own passion of feeding the birds. Unfortunately, she’d had trouble from the start with her business. Apparently there just hadn’t been enough demand in April Springs for such a specialty shop, and she’d struggled from the beginning to make her monthly rent. Not only that, but once one of her clerks had been arrested for attempted murder. The best thing about For The Birds had been her discovering her birth mother was working beside her, so all in all, it hadn’t entirely been a bad experience for her.

  But it was all ending now, though we weren’t letting her go out of business without a bang.

  “That’s odd. It shouldn’t be locked,” Jenny said with a frown. “Margaret was back there an hour ago, bringing out some of the last bits of stock that we haven’t been able to move for ages. As far as I know, there are just a few boxes left, and then we’ll be officially cleaned out.”

  “I thought you were calling her Mom these days,” I said.

  Jenny smiled slightly. “We finally decided that it would be Margaret at work and Mom everywhere else.”

  Trish Granger, owner of the Boxcar Grill, joined us. “Paige really needs that extension cord, Suzanne,” she told us.

  “It’s one of the few things that’s still in the storage room,” Jenny said. “I’ll go get it for you.”

  “You need to stay right where you are,” I told her. “After all, this is your last hurrah. Don’t worry. Trish and I can find it.”

  “If you can find the key,” Jenny said as she rang up another sale. The day’s event had transformed from a going-out-of-business sale to a chance for all of April Springs to get together and celebrate the hot late-summer day. The Fourth of July was long gone and Labor Day was just around the corner, and after a long and wet period of rain that seemed to have parked over us every day for weeks on end, people were using any excuse they could come up with for enjoying the lovely sunshine we were having at the moment.

  “Don’t worry. I’m sure somebody has it,” Trish said. “Let me check with Grace. After all, she’s taken this whole sale over.”

  “Since her company’s covering our expenses, she can do whatever she wants to,” Jenny said with a wry smile. “I still can’t believe you’re all pitching in for nothing.”

  “You’d do the same for any of us, and you know it,” I told her.

  “Absolutely,” Trish echoed, “and besides, do you know how rare it is for me to be outside this time of day? I’m usually stuck behind the register at the Boxcar or waiting on tables.”

  Everyone knew how much she loved what she did, but that still didn’t mean she couldn’t complain a little about it, even if she didn’t actually mean it.

  “You don’t have time to do this. You have to work your grill, and Suzanne, you’re still selling donuts, aren’t you?”

  “Not anymore. We sold out,” I told her proudly as I handed her a thick envelope. “This is all for you.”

  Jenny frowned a moment. “I kind of feel guilty taking this,” she said.

  “Maybe you do, but I’m pretty sure Gary Shook won’t,” I told her as I urged her to take the money.

  Another cloud covered Jenny’s face. “He’s already been by twice, asking me when I was going to pay my final month’s rent on the place. He’s just awful.”

  “I know, but relish the fact that after today, you won’t ever have to think of Gary Shook again,” I told her.

  “I guess it’s true what they say about there being a silver lining to every dark cloud,” she answered.

  “Suzanne, you’re going to find Paige an extension cord, right?” Trish asked me. “I really should get back to my grill.”

  “Go on. I’ll be right there,” I told her as Grace joined us.

  “You’ve got quite a line of folks waiting for hamburgers and hot dogs,” she told Trish.

  “I’m on it,” Trish said as she waved good-bye and made her way back to her grill.

  “Do you happen to have the key to the storage room?” I asked Grace.

  “No, but I didn’t think it was locked,” she said.

  “How are we going to get that cord for Paige? She needs it for her cash register.”

  “If you jiggle the handle and push hard, you don’t need a key,” Jenny said as she made change for a woman I didn’t recognize. We must have been drawing folks from out of town, which was no wonder given all that we were offering. Not only was Jenny selling out her stock at rock-bottom prices, but I’d been peddling donuts all morning, Paige was getting set up with her portable bookstore, Trish had switched from sausage-and-egg biscuits to hot dogs and hamburgers, and Grace had been handing out free samples of an absolutely garish shade of lipstick all morning.

  “Come on, Suzanne. I’ll help you break in,” Grace said with a grin. “It’s not going to be as much fun since we ha
ve the owner’s permission, though.”

  “I’m just a renter, I’m not the owner, and I don’t care a bit about Gary Shook’s property,” the shop owner said.

  “Aren’t you afraid you won’t get your security deposit back?” I asked her.

  Jenny just laughed. “Gary Shook has never returned a security deposit in his life. I have half a mind to punch a few holes in the walls on my way out just out of spite.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, no matter how tempting it might be,” I told her. “Knowing Shook, he’d probably take you to court.”

  “That’s right, he’s suing your mother, isn’t he?” Jenny asked.

  “Yes, it’s some nuisance suit he filed because she beat him out of a deal,” I said.

  “That man makes enemies wherever he goes,” Grace said. “Come on, Suzanne. Let’s bust that door down.”

  “We’re going to try to use a little finesse first though, right?” I asked her. I knew my best friend well enough to realize that she took great pleasure in the act of destruction. Subtlety had never exactly been her forte.

  “Sure, but if we don’t get it open on the second try, we’re going to do it my way, right?”

  “Fine,” I said as we made our way through the nearly empty store to the back room. Most of the remaining merchandise had been moved out into the street to take advantage of the beautiful day, and I’d noticed a few confused birds trying to get seeds out of empty feeders hung from the trees around the strip mall where the shop was located.

  As instructed, I jiggled the handle of the storeroom door and put a little pressure on the wood itself, but it wouldn’t budge. “That’s one,” Grace said with a grin.

  I tried again, this time putting my shoulder into it as I tried to twist the handle a little more forcefully. It resisted at first, and I heard Grace say over my shoulder, “Step aside, Suzanne, and let me give it a go.”

  Before I did that, I wanted to keep at it. Applying even more pressure, I practically threw myself against the door as I twisted the handle.

  The flimsy door lock suddenly yielded to the pressure as the door flung open and nearly dumped me on the floor in the process.

  I stumbled inside, fighting to keep my balance as I came face-to-face with something I’d hoped that I’d never see again in my life.

  I was staring straight at a dead body, and worse yet, it was someone I knew.

  Chapter 2

  GARY SHOOK LAY THERE on the floor, his blank gaze staring upward at the ceiling. He might have been simply resting if it weren’t for the small metal pole sticking out of his chest. The post was topped with a perpendicular rod extending out a foot toward his feet, and I knew exactly what it was. The pole’s original use had been to hold a decorative yard flag, though this was a much beefier post than the ones I was used to. I knew what it was because Momma and Phillip still had one in the front yard of their cottage sporting a colorful image of fireworks from the Fourth of July.

  “Suzanne, you nearly killed yourself on that door,” Grace said as she hurried to help me up. Once she was inside, though, all her attention turned to the body. “That’s Gary Shook! Is he ... dead?” she asked me.

  I checked for a pulse, but I knew what I was going to find. There wasn’t any life left in him. How long had he been back there, concealed behind a locked door? It surprised me that he’d gone undiscovered long enough to cool slightly, but how long did it really take for a person to become a body, anyway, especially with the air conditioning turned up to full blast? I’d had some experience with murder victims, but not enough to say one way or the other.

  “There’s no pulse, at least not that I can find, but we need Chief Grant,” I ordered.

  Stephen Grant was not only Grace’s fiancé, he was also the chief of police for April Springs. I’d seen him ten minutes earlier patrolling the crowds that had been hovering around the front of the shop.

  “I’ll go grab him,” she said as she stood. “Are you going to be okay here by yourself?” she asked me as she hesitated at the door.

  “I’ll be fine. Don’t tell anyone what we found, would you? We don’t want to set off a panic.”

  “I’m not going to have any trouble keeping my mouth shut about this,” Grace said, and then she clearly had another thought. “How about Jenny? Should I say something to her?”

  “Don’t tell anyone,” I repeated.

  “Okay. Got it,” Grace said, and then she was gone.

  I stood and took in the scene, taking out my cell phone and snapping a handful of photos of the crime scene more out of habit than anything else. As I looked at Gary’s body through my phone screen, I had to wonder who would do such a thing. Gary wasn’t exactly beloved in our little town, but not liking someone and murdering him were two entirely different things. As Jenny had said, the storeroom was nearly empty of products, so that was something, anyway. Several empty shelves, a few errant boxes, and the extension cord we’d gone in search of were just about all that was there. I glanced in one of the boxes and found five more of the flag display stakes, so the murder weapon had been close at hand. That made me think that it had probably been done on impulse, at least given the use of that particular weapon.

  That didn’t necessarily mean that the murder hadn’t been premeditated, though.

  At least there was no doubt about it being intentional. There was no way Gary could have fallen onto that stake without bending it in the process. I knew those things were sharpened to a point. After all, they had to be in order to drive them into the dense clay soil we had in our part of North Carolina, but whoever had pushed it in hadn’t stopped until they’d buried it a good four inches into the body. I knelt down and got a shot of just how deep it went into Gary’s chest when I heard someone bark behind me. “What do you think you’re doing, Suzanne?”

  “I was just curious,” I said as I stood to face our chief of police. He’d been a young man not all that long ago, but the job had clearly weighed on him since he’d taken it over, and now he was starting to show the signs of stress that he must have constantly been under.

  “You didn’t touch anything, did you?” he asked me as he knelt down.

  “I know better than that,” I said as I backed a few steps away.

  “I know you do, but it doesn’t hurt to confirm it,” the chief said as he checked for a pulse himself. I didn’t mind him doing it. In fact, I felt better knowing that no one was just going to take my word for it that the man was actually dead.

  “Does this mean you have to shut the sale down?” I asked him as he studied the body.

  “What do you think?” he asked me. “This is clearly a homicide. I really don’t have much choice.”

  “Maybe you should rethink that for a second,” I suggested as he called for the paramedics outside on his radio.

  “Why should I do that?” he asked me.

  “Chief, you can seal off this room, even the shop, but do you really want to disperse the crowd, which could very well still include the killer?” I asked him.

  “Suzanne, I can’t just act as though nothing happened here,” he said sternly.

  “No one is asking you to do that, but would it hurt to send a few men out with cameras to take pictures of the crowd so you at least have an idea of who’s there? The longer you can sit on this, the better chance you have of catching someone off guard.”

  “What you’re not saying is that it would help Jenny out, too,” he said calmly.

  “Really? The thought never even crossed my mind,” I said with a shrug.

  “Liar,” the chief said with the hint of a smile. “Okay, I’ll think about it. Now kindly leave me to my crime scene, would you?”

  “I’m more than happy to oblige,” I said as I walked out of the storeroom. Two paramedics hurried past me as I headed out of the shop, and Jenny was taking it all in.

  “What’s happening back there, Suzanne?” she asked, the concern thick in her voice. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m perfectly
fine,” I said.

  “Well, something’s going on,” she replied. “I know for a fact that there’s nothing all that interesting back there.”

  “When was the last time you were back there yourself?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know, maybe an hour ago, right around the time Margaret was there,” she said oddly. “Why?”

  “Was she the last one there, or were you?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Jenny admitted. “Things have been so crazy that this entire day is just one big blur. Is it important?”

  I didn’t want to tell her what I’d found, but she’d learn the truth soon enough, and I would rather she found out from me than from seeing them take the body away. Plus, Chief Grant hadn’t exactly prohibited me from telling anyone about our discovery.

  “It’s Gary Shook,” I said.

  “What’s Gary Shook?” she asked me.

  “You need to keep your cool when I tell you. Promise me you’ll do that, Jenny.”

  “What did he do, make a pass at you, too? He’s a bug, and somebody needs to step on him once and for all.”

  “You don’t have to worry about Gary anymore,” I told her softly. “He’s dead.”

  I wasn’t sure what I thought her reaction was going to be, but it was still odd when her face went white and she said, “I can’t believe it. Now I’m going to go to jail for the rest of my life.”

  Was that a confession, or was it something else entirely? Either way, I was glad that our police chief hadn’t heard that particular statement from a woman who apparently had every reason in the world to want to see the victim dead, had the means, and had had a golden opportunity as well.

  I didn’t exactly have to catch Jenny to keep her from falling, but she did stumble back against the building where she’d placed her register outside. At least no one else was around at that moment, so I was the only one who’d heard her statement. “What are you talking about, Jenny? Did you kill him?” I asked her softly. I hadn’t had to ask that question, but I wanted to know nonetheless. Besides, given what she’d just told me, it was a fair query.