Beyond a Reasonable Donut

Book 5: Deputy Donut Mystery

by Ginger Bolton

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Culinary Cozy Mysteries

Synopsis

Selling her corn fritters at a carnival, Deputy Donut Café owner Emily Westhill faces off against a murderer who doesn’t play fair . . .
 
Emily and her assistant, Nina, are looking forward to manning the Deputy Donut tent at the Faker’s Dozen Carnival in Fallingbrook, Wisconsin—a festival held on Friday the thirteenth to celebrate good and bad luck. But Emily has barely dropped the corn fritters in oil when bad luck boils up. First, their bucket of confectioner’s sugar disappears—and then while a mime creates a distraction, a magician robs their cash register.
 
After the carnival, their misfortune continues. Emily discovers that someone has broken into artist Nina’s loft and vandalized a large painting in progress with the bucket of stolen sugar, which is now on the head of the mime, who seems to have been suffocated. Emily would bet Nina was the intended victim, but the cops think Nina silenced the mime. Now Emily must catch the killer white-handed—before someone else kicks the bucket . . .
 
Praise for Jealousy Filled Donuts
 
“Charming . . . Yummy donut recipes round out a whodunit (or is it a whodonut?) sure to please cozy fans.”
—Publishers Weekly
 
Includes delicious recipes!

 

Release date: May 25, 2021

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 256

Sample

Maybe I shouldn’t have driven our Deputy Donut delivery car to the fairground in Fallingbrook that August morning. The sturdy Ford sedan had been through a lot in its seventy-plus years. With luck, it would survive creeping down this grassy hill even though its springs squeaked with every bump and hollow. I eased it around a grove of spindly trees.

On the passenger side of the wide front seat, Nina pointed ahead. “Emily! Look!”

A village of colorful tents, food trucks, and amusement rides had sprouted up on the flats below us. A jaunty banner fluttered above an opening in the orange plastic fencing surrounding the site. “FAKER’S DOZEN CARNIVAL,” Nina read aloud. “GOOD LUCK ON FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH!” Laughing, she turned toward me. “That sounds like a dare.”

I cranked down my window, letting in sunny breezes and the smell of freshly mown grass. “Or a threat.”

“Mirrors to break, black cats to cross paths, salt to spill, and ladders to walk under!” Although in her midtwenties, my enthusiastic assistant was bouncing almost more than the car was. “Too bad we’ll be selling fritters all day. We could go play with the ladders. I just had a new fourteen-foot-tall one delivered, and now I can safely reach the top of my biggest canvas ever. I walk underneath ladders all the time, and I’m one of the luckiest people in northern Wisconsin, maybe in the whole world! I still can’t believe that the Arthur C. Arthurs Gallery is giving me a one-person show.”

I was almost as excited as she was about her show at the prestigious art gallery in Madison. “It’s not luck,” I reminded her. “Did you finish your paintings in time for the movers last night?”

“All but one, so they crated the others and took them away. All I have to do is put the finishing touches on the biggest and, I hope, most expensive one. And don’t worry. I scheduled time for the preparations for Samantha and Hooligan’s wedding on Wednesday. The florist has already ordered the flowers. We’ll decorate the tent Wednesday morning, and then I’ll help you, Samantha, and Misty with your hair and makeup before I scoot into my seat to watch you all walk down the aisle. I can hardly wait! Samantha and Hooligan are a perfect couple, and it was sweet of them to ask me to design the flowers.”

I steered toward an opening in the fencing. “They’re thrilled to have a real artist doing it.”

“They’re paying me too much.”

“I doubt that.” I knew that Nina was worth every cent, and she could use the extra funds, besides. She worked full-time at Deputy Donut, but the combination loft apartment and artist’s studio she rented had to be expensive, as were art supplies. And she hadn’t yet sold many paintings. She’d been saving for that ladder for about a year.

A tall and imposing woman stepped in front of our pretend police car, thrust out her hand, and yelled, “Stop!” Her bright pink, purple, and yellow floral dress, broad-brimmed straw hat, and black sandals might have given the impression that she was a genteel lady on her way to a garden party. Her severe black vest and belligerent stance—inches from our chrome front bumper—ruined the impression. I stopped the car. Now that we were close to the carnival’s food stands, I smelled popcorn and candy floss.

The woman studied her clipboard. EVENT MANAGER was embroidered in white letters on the black vest. She had to be Marsha Fitchelder, the organizer of the Faker’s Dozen Carnival. She bent down and peered into the car and then looked back and forth from us to her clipboard as if comparing us to the photos on our vendor’s application. The hats we’d worn for our carnival identification photographs, imitation police hats with fake fur donuts taking the place of badges, were on our heads. Still, Marsha should be able to see my dark brown, curly hair and Nina’s lighter brown, shorter hair beneath the caps. Maybe, since Marsha was in dazzling sunlight and we were inside the car, she couldn’t quite make out that my eyes were blue and Nina’s were brown, but she should have been able to see Nina’s high, sharp cheekbones and her amazingly long eyelashes. And although we weren’t standing up, it must have been clear that Nina was tall while I, as Nina liked to tease, could barely see over the old Ford’s big steering wheel. I hoped Marsha wasn’t going to haul out a scale and make us prove we were the weights we’d claimed to be.

“ID,” she demanded.

We handed her our driver’s licenses. She stared at them, examined our faces, and gave me a suspicious glare. “You don’t look all of thirty-two.” Marsha was quick at figuring out ages from birth dates. She must have been doing it all morning.

I thanked her and held out my hand. “I am.”

She plopped both licenses into it. “But your assistant looks twenty-six, like she is on her license.”

Attempting to ignore Nina’s unladylike and very fake coughing fit, I smiled my best customer-relations smile. “We’re from Deputy Donut.” That should have been apparent from more than our hats. A huge plastic donut with white plastic frosting dotted with tiny lights masquerading as sprinkles was mounted flat on the car’s roof where the light bar would be on a real police cruiser. And in case that enormous fake donut didn’t make it clear, our Deputy Donut logo, the black silhouette of a cat wearing a rakishly tilted hat like ours, decorated the white front doors of the black car.

Marsha stuck out her lower lip. “You can’t drive in here.”

I stated what I thought was obvious. “We’re exhibitors.”

“I know that!” She gestured toward the way we’d come. “You have to park back there in the parking lot.”

I checked the rearview mirror. “Back there” was far away, high on that lumpy hill I’d just driven down. And we’d brought large pails of ingredients. I asked politely, “Can we unload first?”

Marsha’s face was close to mine. She’d been eating peanuts. “That was supposed to be done last night.”

I gripped the wheel more tightly. “The large things were brought then, but—”

Marsha interrupted me. “Today, you carry in whatever you didn’t have the foresight to deliver last night.”

I pleaded, “Can we unload here, and then leave the car up there on the hill?”

Marsha either growled or cleared her throat. “Not in front of the entrance.” She pointed toward my left. “You can take one of the spots over there, but they’re reserved for dignitaries, so you’ll have to unload quickly and then park where you were supposed to. We open at ten and it’s already nine.”

She stalked back to the middle of the entryway and stood there with her feet apart, her arms folded, a scowl on her face, and breezes rippling the hem of her flowered dress.

Nina whispered, “Is that her real personality or is that one of the day’s faker’s dozen pranks, like she’s faking being ornery?”

“That would be funny. She’s doing a good job of it.”

“Who are the dignitaries she’s expecting?”

“On Friday the thirteenth? They could be anyone or anything.”

“Today is going to be fun.” The always-cheerful Nina was not being sarcastic.

Leaving space for about three limos between our donut-topped car and Marsha, I parked in front of a RESERVED sign zip-tied to the orange fencing. I asked Nina, “Wouldn’t you rather be at home, painting in your loft?”

“Of course not! If we weren’t here today, we’d be serving donuts and coffee at Deputy Donut, and that’s always fun. Besides, I have to wait for paint to dry before I add to my”—she made air quotes—“masterpiece.” I could tell from the tremor in her voice that she loved that almost-completed masterpiece.

We each carried two heavy pails of fritter batter past Marsha. She was haranguing the driver of a red cube van and didn’t seem to notice our polite greetings.

The walk was long, but we finally arrived at a big red-and-white-striped tent decorated with a Deputy Donut banner draped across the front. The banner, created for the Faker’s Dozen Carnival, featured the black cat from our logo, horseshoes, four-leaf clovers, and donuts. The night before, my father-in-law and business partner, Tom, had persuaded some of his retired police-officer colleagues to help him and the staff from a rental company wrestle three large deep fryers, a fridge, and three sets of stainless-steel counters and cabinets into our tent. The carnival had provided a capacious sink with hot and cold running water. Nina and I put the batter into the nicely cold fridge and went back for more.

Marsha was not at her station. A windowless black van had appeared between the entryway and our donut car.

I muttered to Nina, “Did that van escape from a morgue parking lot?”

She giggled. “Usually our first-responder friends attend events with their fire trucks, ambulances, and police cruisers, just to be ready. A van from the morgue is carrying preparedness a little far.”

I intoned in a sinister voice, “Maybe not on Friday the thirteenth.”

We walked around the back of the van. On the other side of our car, Marsha was beside a tiny pink car with MIME MOBILE written in purple on the door.

Marsha shook a finger. “You can’t leave your car here!” She wasn’t talking to us. She was glowering at a tall, thin woman wearing a black beanie on her fluffy orange hair, a red-and-white-striped T-shirt, pink sandals, and baggy black shorts held up by chartreuse suspenders.

The thin woman turned toward us. She was made up like a sorrowful clown, her face powdery white with a dramatic, downturned red mouth, a red dot on the tip of her nose, and thick black eyelashes painted on her cheeks and forehead. She wore white gloves with red fingernails inked on them. Without a word, she mimicked Marsha’s stance and finger-shaking.

I restrained a smile. People who had been heading toward the entryway had gathered around us. They laughed.

Marsha’s face reddened. “Don’t you shake your finger at me! Move that car.”

The mime sidled closer to Marsha, peered down at Marsha’s clipboard for a few seconds, and then pretended to hold a clipboard of her own. She ran her gloved finger down the top page of her invisible clipboard, jabbed her finger down on it, looked straight at Nina and me, and pointed two fingers at her eyes and then at us as if to warn she was watching us. Then she made a circle with both hands and planted the circle on her forehead, obviously imitating the donuts on our hats. Holding her stomach with both hands, she bent over and acted like she was laughing uproariously, without the roar.

Our hats were funny, but I didn’t think they were that funny.

Marsha clutched her clipboard close to her chest and ordered, “Now move that car!”

The mime made the exaggerated shrug of a person who could do nothing about a tragic situation, patted the car, and motioned with her hands as if outlining an even smaller car.

Marsha balled her free hand into a fist and put it on her hip. “I don’t care how small it is. It’s in the area designated for dignitaries.”

With great exaggeration, the mime cradled an invisible clipboard lovingly against her heart, plunked a fist on a hip, and then thrust her hands into her pockets, turned them inside out, and looked desolated.

The audience clapped. The mime pulled her beanie off and waded into the crowd. Her posture dejected, she held the beanie upside down and pointed into it. Her pockets were still inside-out. People good-naturedly put coins and bills into the hat.

Steaming about as much as the hot dog stand beyond the fence, Marsha stomped back toward the carnival’s entryway, probably to ward off more vehicles.

I turned away from the crowd surrounding the mime, opened the donut car’s trunk, and asked Nina, “Can we take the rest in one load?”

“Sure. It will save us time.” Our arms ended up full, but I managed to slam the trunk, and we carried boxes of donuts we’d made and decorated early that morning to our tent and set the boxes on one of the stainless-steel counters.

I offered Nina the car keys. “Want to drive the car up that hill and park it while I organize here?”

Nina loved driving that car. We all did. “Sure! It can handle that hill just fine.” As coltish and bony as a teenager, a very tall one, she bounded away. We were dressed alike in knee-length black shorts, long-sleeved white shirts, and our donut-festooned police caps. We never bothered to coordinate our shoe colors. She was wearing turquoise sneakers. Mine were red.

In order to make change, we’d brought coins from our shop and brand-new bills from the bank. I sorted it all into the lockable cash drawer’s compartments, and then I put on a Deputy Donut apron, white with our logo embroidered on the bib. I filled the deep fryers with oil, started them heating, stowed away ingredients we wouldn’t need at first, and arranged decorated donuts in a glass-sided display case.

Nina returned. I thanked her for parking the car and asked, “Were Marsha and the mime still putting on a show?”

“No. Turnstiles are blocking the entryway. Marsha and a couple of other people wearing black vests are checking tickets that people bought at the fairground gate where we first drove in, where we showed our vendor’s pass. I didn’t see the mime, but her car was still beside ours.”

When the oil reached the correct temperature, we dropped spoonfuls of fritter batter into it. They were corn fritters, but in honor of the day of luck, fun, pranks, and jokes, we were calling them corny fritters. We were making them small so they’d be easy to eat with fingers, and if people wanted a dozen, they were getting thirteen for the price of twelve. All of the food vendors at the carnival were doing the same thing.

Our timing was good. At precisely ten, I removed the first basket of fritters from the hot oil. A family wanted a baker’s dozen. “The regular corny fritters are ready,” Nina told them. She looked over at me and the fryers. Fritters bobbed in all three of them. “And the peppercorny and turbo-charged spicy corny fritters will be ready soon. We can dip any of them in granulated or confectioners’ sugar.” She pointed at the display case. “And we have donuts, too.” The family opted for non-spicy, non-sugared corny fritters.

Nina and I got into a rhythm. I made the fritters, put them into paper bags, and set the bags on the sales counter for customers. Nina took care of the money. If she needed to touch food, she pulled on a pair of food-handling gloves.

A couple with their arms around each other wanted turbo-charged spicy corny fritters. “What’s with the police car out front?” the man asked us.

Did he mean ours, which, unless Nina was playing pranks on me, wasn’t exactly out front but was up on the hill? I put their fritters into tiny paper bags. “The one with the donut on top?”

Dimples bracketed the man’s grin. “Not that one. I recognize your Deputy Donut car. I mean a real one from the Fallingbrook Police Department. Two officers were talking to one of the people taking tickets.”

The woman in line behind the couple explained, “The event manager was yelling at them to tow away a little pink car because it belonged to an exhibitor, not a paying guest. The officers explained that anyone can park outside the area that was rented for the carnival.” The woman flapped a hand toward tents and booths around us. “Apparently, the carnival doesn’t have jurisdiction outside the orange fence, except for the fairground’s main entry where we bought our tickets.”

The woman beside her added, “I thought the carnival’s manager would blow a gasket, but the police officers were polite and talked her down.”

I wasn’t surprised. Some of my best friends worked for the Fallingbrook Police. That department had a culture of friendly service dating back to before Tom was a detective and then chief.

Nina made change for the couple at the front of the line. “Did the police have the little pink car towed?”

The man pocketed the change. “No. They apologized and left.”

The mime must have been lurking around the side of the tent. She appeared in front of me, pointed at her heart, pretended to lick the index finger of one of the white gloves with the red nails, and made a vertical stroke in the air. I translated the gesture as Chalk one up for me.

The people in line laughed, and the mime went through her routine of being nearly inconsolable while she passed her beanie around.

Nina whispered behind her hand to me, “She could be making more than we are.”

Maybe she wasn’t. People loved our fritters. About mid-morning, a pair of cute teens in shorts and red Fallingbrook High T-shirts asked to have their turbo-charged spicy corny fritters dipped in confectioners’ sugar. We had brought a large covered plastic bucket of it.

Nina and I searched the cabinets underneath the counters. We looked inside the fridge.

The bucket of sugar wasn’t anywhere in our tent.

We explained to the patiently waiting couple that we must have forgotten to bring confectioners’ sugar to the carnival.

“That’s okay,” the girl told us. “Our fritters don’t need to be covered in it.”

I could tell that the boy’s frown was a fake, even before he grinned and agreed.

I offered, “Would you like us to roll them in granulated sugar instead?”

The girl exclaimed, “Sure!” When she tasted hers, she fanned her face with her free hand. “Whoa, you weren’t kidding about spicy.” The boy smiled down at her. They headed into the crowd.

Nina appeared as puzzled about the missing sugar as I was.

What could have happened? We’d told the couple that we must have forgotten the confectioners’ sugar, but both of us knew we hadn’t. Earlier that morning when we’d been ready to leave Deputy Donut, we’d realized that we hadn’t packed any. We hadn’t wanted to make ourselves late by taking time to scoop some of it into a smaller container. Nina had dashed into our storeroom and grabbed a brand-new bucket. I’d helped her cram the bucket behind the donut car’s front passenger seat.

The wrinkles between Nina’s eyebrows deepened. “I checked the label when I got it from the storeroom, but when we were unloading the car, I grabbed pails without reading labels.” All of the pails were nearly identical—large and made of white plastic.

I hadn’t read labels when we were unpacking the car, either, but I had paid attention to them while I stored the ingredients in the tent. I had placed our small container of granulated sugar on the counter near the deep fryers where it would be handy for coating fritters while they were still warm. I suggested, “Maybe we brought it to the tent, and another vendor decided they needed it more than we did.” The only things lockable in the tent were the cash drawer and a cabinet big enough for Nina’s turquoise and purple handwoven tote bag and the cute red backpack I carried as a purse.

Nina asked, “Did we lock the car every time we left it?”

“Maybe not.” Locking and unlocking the doors and trunk of the old car was more of a procedure than pressing a button on a remote or carrying a key fob toward a car. “When we went back for that last load, we were distracted by Marsha Fitchelder and her argument with the mime. I think we emptied the trunk, but I’m not sure about the space behind the passenger seat, and my arms were full of donut boxes, so I’m not positive that I locked the trunk, let alone the doors.”

“Maybe it was still behind the passenger seat when I moved the car. I should have checked.”

“I should have, too.”

She suggested, “We could cross CONFECTIONERS’ SUGAR off our signs.”

We’d stockpiled enough fritters for me to take a break. I frowned. “I hate to eliminate one of the variations we’re offering here today, and besides, I can’t resist a mystery. I’ll go look in the car.”

“It’s pretty far up the hill.”

“I’ll find it.” Still wearing my Deputy Donut hat and apron, I strode to the carnival’s entryway.

Marsha and two other ticket-takers stood underneath red umbrellas beside turnstiles. I pushed my way out through the exit closest to Marsha. She was glaring, maybe because the mime’s pink car was still in the area she’d earmarked for dignitaries. The morgue-like van was gone. Whoever the dignitaries were, they had not yet taken advantage of the spaces reserved for them. The little pink car was the only vehicle there.

I started up the hill. Vehicles kept arriving. A windowless black van similar to the one that had been next to our car in the area reserved for dignitaries was among the parked cars and trucks glittering in the sunshine. The van I’d seen earlier had been plain black. This one had a website address, printed in red letters, near the bottom of the driver’s door.

I didn’t take time to read it.

Farther up the hill, a woman was standing next to our Deputy Donut car. Her right hand was on the driver’s door.

Most of the people at the carnival on that nearly cloudless day were in shorts and T-shirts. This woman wore a roomy dark green twill shirt over a long, gauzy coral skirt. Instead of making her look bulky, the voluminous clothing accentuated how petite she was. Her wavy hair was tied back in a low ponytail that almost reached her waist. The hair on top of her head was pale, gradually shading darker to chestnut-brown at the tip of her ponytail. As I climbed closer, I realized that the pale hair was blond, not white, and she appeared to be in her midtwenties.

She shaded her eyes with her left hand, leaned down, and peered into the car. People often wanted a better look at our authentically restored sedan.

I called out in a friendly way, “Hello! Would you like to see inside?”

The woman jerked upright as if she’d heard me, but instead of turning my way, she hunched her shoulders and scuttled behind the donut car. Possibly heading toward a gray car, she disappeared beyond a white pickup truck.

Had the woman done something inside our car? Had she been trying to open the driver’s door, or had she been closing it?

The doors and trunk were locked. I unlocked them. The bucket of confectioners’ sugar was not in the car, and nothing seemed to have been disturbed.

Starting down the hill, I took a better look at the black van. The website address on the door appeared to be for a health organization for veterans. The lettering was level with the sloping ground, but not level with the bottom of the van, as if the sign had been hastily slapped onto the door.

It could have been the van we’d seen next to the donut car earlier.

If so, our missing sugar might be inside it.

As surreptitiously as possible considering that I was wearing a fake police cap embellished with a fuzzy donut, I pulled my phone out of my apron pocket and snapped photos of the website and the van’s license plate. I slid my phone into my pocket. Still trying to look casual, I eased into the crowd. People walking down the hill chattered about what they hoped to do and eat at the Faker’s Dozen Carnival.

Behind me, a man said, “That’s quite a hat.” I turned around. The man was about my age. He smiled at the donut above the bill of my hat. “Nice.”

Although he wasn’t hard to look at, I couldn’t help glancing beyond him to our donut car farther up the hill. The woman who’d been peering into the car was again beside it. She was looking down toward the carnival, though, and not into the car. As far as I could tell, she wasn’t touching the car. Knowing that it was locked and that if I approached her she might disappear again, I paid attention to the man complimenting my hat. “Thank you. I work for Deputy Donut.”

I did not comment on his panama hat or his dressy black slacks and long-sleeved white shirt. They seemed formal for a carniv. . .