Cinnamon Twisted

Book 7: Deputy Donut Mystery

by Ginger Bolton

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Culinary Cozy Mysteries; Female Sleuths; Mystery

Synopsis

Ginger Bolton returns with the latest installment of her Wisconsin-based Deputy Donut cozy culinary mystery series!

Weeks before summer begins, Deputy Donut Café owner Emily Westhill has it all—a tabby cat by her side, cinnamon twists powdered to perfection, and a murderer on her case . . .

An ordinary late-spring afternoon for Emily becomes one that will remain baked into her memory from the moment a customer gives Emily’s cat a toy donut and then flees Deputy Donut, dropping an earring in her panic. Concerned about the customer, Emily attempts to return the earring . . . only this time the customer doesn’t have a pulse. Things get more complicated when an ambitious police detective finds the earring and an unsealed envelope addressed to Emily at the murder scene. The envelope contains a cryptic letter and a fading photograph of a woman standing in front of Emily’s house.

Why did the customer grab her cinnamon twists and flee Deputy Donut? With the detective eying Emily as a prime suspect, Emily is determined to find out. But once a donut-shaped murder weapon is discovered in her own backyard, Emily has no time to lose as she pulls apart the connection between the victim and the strange history of her property—while stopping the real culprit from ensuring her fate is done and sugar-dusted . . .

Praise for Deck the Donuts

“Well-defined characters match the sufficiently complex plot. Delectable doughnut recipes are a plus.” —Publishers Weekly

“Ginger Bolton does a fine job of laying down her plot and obscuring whodunnit.  A can’t miss for series fans or even for more casual readers who enjoy romance with their cozy mysteries.”
—Criminal Element

Includes delicious recipes!
 

Release date: April 25, 2023

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

For the second afternoon in a row, the pinch-faced woman sat alone with her back to the wall at a two-person table in Deputy Donut. Our café was crowded and noisy, with locals and summer visitors teasing one another. The pinch-faced woman didn’t join the fun.

She barely moved except to cross her ankles and tuck her feet close to the legs of her chair. She didn’t need to try to hide her chipped neon orange toenail polish and once-white flip-flops. Fallingbrook was one of northern Wisconsin’s many charming and hospitable tourist villages, and her flip-flops, blue denim cutoffs, and pink tank top weren’t out of place here on a mid-June afternoon.

She had been at that table most of the afternoon, long enough to sip at her coffee and empty her mug twice, slowly eat a large serving of pesto and mozzarella twists, and order cinnamon twists to go.

Her eyes, heavily lidded and ringed by thick eyeliner and mascara, moved back and forth in a sort of tense watchfulness. Judging by the deep lines on her face, she had been miserable for months, maybe years. I couldn’t pinpoint her age. She could have been anywhere from her early forties to her middle fifties.

Hoping to cheer her even a little, I smiled as I took her the bag of cinnamon twists and again refilled her mug with our coffee of the day, an almost chocolatey blend from Yemen. Her shoulder-length, wavy brown hair was tousled, as if she’d been untangling it with her fingers. A strand of it was caught in the hole in the middle of one of her gold earrings. The earrings were shaped almost like donuts, but flat and shiny like polished coins.

She turned her head and stared toward the large window into our office, which, like our kitchen, was at the rear of our building. As usual, I’d brought my shorthaired tortoiseshell tabby cat, Dep, to work. For health reasons, we kept the cat in the office. To prevent her from being bored, my business partner Tom, who was also the father of my late husband, had helped me build a kitty playground in our office. Ramps and mini stairways led to catwalks and tunnels near the ceiling. Large windows on all four sides of the office also provided Dep’s entertainment. We’d painted her climbing structures and the office’s walls in shades of apricot, peach, café au lait, chocolate, and vanilla.

At the moment, Dep was on the back of the office couch, a favorite perch where she could peer into our dining area. Although she sat up straight, her eyes were nearly closed. She was slightly smaller than the average house cat, and totally adorable.

The woman brushed crumbs off the glass tabletop and spoke in a voice so soft I had to bend forward to hear her. “That was a great late lunch.” She smelled of woodsmoke. A camper?

I thanked her. “Are you in Fallingbrook on vacation?”

“I live here, but like, not in town. I’m renting a cabin on Deepwish Lake until I get settled.” Red lines spider-webbed the whites of the woman’s washed-out blue eyes.

I repeated, “Deepwish Lake. I should know where that is.”

“It’s out near Fallingbrook Falls.”

I set the coffeepot down. “That’s one of my favorite places near Fallingbrook. My parents stay there during the summers.”

“Maybe they know the people who own the place I’m renting. The Peabody-Smiths.”

“I don’t know about my parents, but Summer Peabody-Smith manages the local artisans’ co-op.” I waved my hand toward the artwork on the peach-tinted white walls of our dining room. “We display some of their members’ works. The Craft Croft is another fun place to visit.”

“I did go there. Summer’s the one who opened the cabin for me and showed me around. She said her parents are the actual owners, but they’re on a cruise. She told me about The Craft Croft.” The woman dug around in an off-white canvas tote bag and pulled out a faux-fur donut. It was almost identical to the ones fastened to the front of the fake police caps that Tom and I and our employees wore at work. Our summer uniforms were knee-length black shorts, white polo shirts, and aprons. The shirts and aprons were embroidered with our logo, the silhouette of a cat wearing a Deputy Donut hat. The woman nodded toward the office. “That torbie is beautiful with those tabby stripes and tortoiseshell colors.”

“She’s my cat, and I agree that she’s beautiful. Not everyone knows that we call tortoiseshell tabbies ‘torbies.’” It wasn’t difficult to show admiration for the woman’s knowledge.

“An ex had one. I love cats, but I’m allergic, so I’m glad you have a place where I can look at one, but she can’t come in here and make me sneeze. I noticed her yesterday, so I brought her a catnip toy. Can she have catnip?” Like her toenails, the woman’s fingernails had been polished orange, but not recently. The polish was almost entirely scraped off her left thumb.

“Yes, and she’ll love it.”

Fiddling with her wallet, the woman didn’t return my smile. “Can you give it to her?”

“Sure.”

The woman put bills on the table. She glanced toward the front windows, and the blood seemed to drain from her face. She quickly turned her upper body and again faced our office. She asked in a hoarse and almost breathless whisper, “Can I give it to your cat, Emily?”

How had she known my name? By watching and listening during most of two afternoons in Deputy Donut? And why had she changed her mind about who would give Dep the toy? She had also turned her back to the front windows as if she didn’t want someone in the sunlit street to see her.

I didn’t see anything remotely alarming on our section of Wisconsin Street, the main street running north and south through Fallingbrook’s downtown.

Tourists window-shopped.

Diana, a blond-haired, goddess-like woman whose name suited her perfectly, strode along the sidewalk toward Thrills and Frills, the bridal boutique where she worked, across the alley from Deputy Donut. As if she didn’t want anyone on our side of the street to notice that she wasn’t at her job while Thrills and Frills was open, Diana shielded the right side of her face with her hand. A gust blew the skirt of her yellow chiffon sundress against her legs.

A compact, sandy-haired, twentyish man in cutoffs, loosely tied work boots, and a dark green T-shirt jaywalked across the street toward our patio. I felt like I’d seen him recently, but not in Deputy Donut, and I couldn’t place him.

Another man hesitated beside one of our patio tables and peered toward our front windows. His black suit looked too hot for the warm afternoon, but it was Sunday. Maybe he’d needed the suit, white shirt, and narrow black tie for morning services and afternoon meetings.

The most sinister-looking thing out there was the shiny black SUV creeping past. I was sure it was the one that Fallingbrook had purchased for our new police chief.

I asked the woman, “Will your allergies let you be in the room where my cat spends her days?”

The hand clutching the toy donut trembled. “A few seconds won’t hurt.” She slipped out of her chair and stood. Like me, she was barely more than five feet tall and had some serious arm muscles.

“Come meet Dep, then. It’s short for Deputy Donut, partly because of the cute donut-like circles on her sides. She let us use her name for our shop.”

Most cat-lovers laughed or smiled when they heard the connection between my cat’s and our café’s names. This one merely ducked her head and grabbed her tote bag. Shuffling behind me as if trying to walk quietly or keep her flip-flops from sliding off, she bumped into the heels of my sneakers. I detoured to our serving counter and set the nearly full coffeepot down, then let her into the office and closed the door.

My sociable cat bopped her head against the woman’s extended hand. Scratching the orange stripey patch between Dep’s ears, the woman offered the fuzzy donut. “Do you like catnip?” Her voice was still soft, but now she was cooing, a tone Dep understood. Dep sniffed at the toy and rubbed one side of her mouth on the fake fur.

The woman glanced toward the front door. The man in the black suit was opening it as if about to come inside.

The woman opened her hand and let the toy drop. It landed on the couch beside Dep. “Is it okay if I go out your back door to the parking lot?” The woman’s voice rasped. Had Dep given her sudden asthma, or had the man in the black suit startled her into breathlessness?

“Sure.” I tried to sound encouraging. The man in the black suit was now standing just inside the door. He was staring toward us. I asked the woman, “Are you okay? Is my cat bothering you?”

Gazing down toward her flip-flops, the woman shook her head. “I’m fine. I just don’t want to accidentally carry allergens where your other customers are sitting.”

Without commenting on her hasty and not quite believable excuse, I unlocked the back door. Like our front doors, it was mostly glass. “Okay. Thank you for the toy for Dep, um . . .”

The woman didn’t take the hint to give me her name. She rushed out onto the porch.

What had caused her to panic? I guessed it was the man in the black suit. But why? I closed the door and watched the woman through the glass.

She barely made it off the porch when Diana, still holding the palm of her hand against her cheek, showed up at the end of the alley between our shops. My customer halted for a second, stared toward Diana, and then pivoted away and hurried north, away from Diana and out of my sight but not out of Diana’s, at least not right away. Diana stopped and gazed toward the woman. Diana’s hand dropped from her face, and she looked perplexed, as if she recognized the woman but didn’t remember her name, and then she might have called to the woman, but she barely opened her mouth, and I didn’t hear anything through the glass. Diana must have spotted me watching her. Frowning, she pointed toward where the woman had disappeared and lifted both hands, palms up, in a gesture of puzzlement. Did Diana want to ask me a question?

I stepped outside. A gust nearly slammed the door.

Diana turned and walked quickly south, the opposite direction from the one the woman had taken. Like our shop, Thrills and Frills had a back door. I thought Diana might head inside and return to selling bridal gowns, but she almost ran to a car, got in, and sped north as if she were hoping to catch up with our fleeing customer. Her right hand again covered her cheek.

I walked farther from our building. The customer had disappeared, and Diana’s car was turning toward Wisconsin Street.

Something glittered on the pavement next to our loading dock. I walked over to it.

The wind must have blown the customer’s hair, and when she brushed stray strands out of her face, she hadn’t noticed that the dangly part of one of her gold donut-like earrings had come loose and fallen to the pavement.

Wishing that the woman had told me her name, I called, “Hello?”

Nobody answered, and the woman didn’t reappear.

I loped through the parking lot to the next street. The woman was nowhere in sight. I plunged her partial earring into my pocket in case she came back for it.

I returned to the office and glanced through the window between the office and the dining room. The man in the black suit had seated himself in the chair that the pinch-faced woman had occupied during the past two afternoons. He stared toward me as if he were hoping I would go out and serve him, but one of our assistants, Jocelyn, was taking his order. She cleared the woman’s dishes and headed toward the kitchen.

The man in the black suit was still watching me.

Her pupils wide in bliss, Dep rolled around on the catnip donut on the couch cushion. I asked, “Aren’t you lucky?”

Lying on her side, she flipped the donut into the air, caught it with her front paws, and kicked it vigorously with both back feet. I closed her into the office and went back into the dining room.

The man in the black suit suddenly became interested in his tabletop. Our tables were circular, and we had painted a donut on each one and covered them with glass. The donuts were all different. The one on the man’s table was pale orange with white sprinkles.

With an uneasy sense that he had lifted his head and was watching me again, I turned my back and went between the serving counter and the half-height wall and then on into the kitchen. Jocelyn was pouring boiling water into a teapot. Standing at our kitchen’s marble island, our other assistant, Olivia, coated old-fashioned fudge donuts with fudge frosting and topped them with sparkling flakes of edible gold. Tom lifted a basket of raised donuts from a deep fryer. “Who was that in the office with you, Emily?” Tom had been Fallingbrook’s police chief, and before that, a detective like Alec, my late husband, Tom’s only child. Tom couldn’t help being curious. And protective.

“I don’t know. She was here yesterday and then again today. She gave Dep a catnip-filled toy donut.” I raised my voice to let Jocelyn and Olivia hear me. “If the woman I let out the back door just now comes in looking for a shiny gold earring shaped like a flat donut, I have it. She dropped it in the parking lot.”

Tom nodded, Olivia smiled, and Jocelyn gave me a thumbs-up.

I went into the storage room and washed my hands. When I returned to the kitchen, I asked Olivia if the man in the black suit had his order yet. She pointed at a plate with one of her gold-decorated donuts on it. “That’s it. And Colombian coffee.”

“I’ll take it to him. Jocelyn’s chatting to that couple in sunglasses about their tea.”

Unlike the woman who had previously sat at the table, the man in the black suit was smiling and talkative. “I’m Gregory,” he told me. He pointed at the black briefcase he’d set on the floor beside his chair. “I’m a pharmaceutical sales rep.”

I welcomed him to Fallingbrook. “I hope you enjoy your visit.”

His smile caused his nose to wrinkle, almost hiding some of his freckles. “I just moved here. I’m killing time until my appointment with the head pharmacist at the Fallingbrook hospital. Do many of the doctors who work at your hospital take their coffee breaks here?”

I poured his coffee. “No. The hospital’s about a fifteen-minute walk from here, not really close enough for breaks even if they drove. But a few hospital employees eat their lunches here.”

“Are there lots of doctors in the area?”

“I guess so. Because of the hospital, we might have more doctors than other nearby small towns do.”

“I figured.”

Wouldn’t an actual sales rep know? And it was Sunday, almost four thirty, a strange time for making sales calls. Returning to the kitchen, I reminded myself that I was lucky not to understand how doctors and hospital pharmacists worked. Still, I wondered why a pharmaceutical sales rep would move to a smallish town surrounded by forests, rivers, and lakes. How many potential buyers could he find around here?

I waited on other customers and cleared tables. It was nearly closing time.

Gregory finished his donut and coffee and paid me. Tucking his charge card into his wallet, he stared toward the office. Dep was again on the back of the couch, but she was disheveled, as if she’d finally managed to subdue the catnip donut and had not yet smoothed her ruffled fur. Gregory put his wallet into the chest pocket of his suit jacket. “I miss my torbie. She’ll join me here after I get settled. Can I pet yours?”

I tried not to show how startled I was. Our customers loved Dep, but they usually merely admired her through the window into our office. In the past half hour, two customers had asked to meet her, and both of them knew she was a torbie. They’d also moved here recently and had used the term “get settled.” And the man had said that he had a torbie, while the woman had said that an ex had one. And although they hadn’t acted like they knew each other, she’d seemed frightened of someone, possibly him. It seemed like an unusual number of coincidences.

However, I liked showing off my cute and friendly cat, and she appreciated attention. “Sure,” I said. “Come meet her.”

Unlike the woman, Gregory laughed at my explanation of Dep’s name.

I opened the office door. Dep had shoved her toy donut between couch cushions. Waggling her head in a clownish way, she pawed at the donut as if she couldn’t get it out, one of her favorite games. She looked up at us. “Meow!” Her pupils were huge, like she was imagining herself as a bigger, wilder cat.

“Uh-oh,” I said to Gregory. “She might be in a playful mood.”

He thrust a hand toward her. “Here, Dep, let me help.”

“Watch out!” My warning was too late. Reaching toward the donut, Dep grazed Gregory’s hand with her sharp little claws.

He yanked his hand away.

Dep spun the donut off the couch, jumped down, grabbed the toy in her mouth, and trotted up one of her little stairways to the catwalk that circled the room just below the ceiling. She scooted into a tunnel up there and came out the other side. Without the donut.

I wanted to laugh, but a droplet of blood was beading up in the middle of a thin scratch on the back of Gregory’s hand.

I apologized. “She’s usually gentle, but catnip can make her silly.”

“I see that. I should have known. My cat’s the same.”

“You didn’t know she had catnip.”

“I should have, from her eyes.”

“Let me clean and bandage that for you.” I opened a desk drawer. “We have first aid kits.” I’d been a 911 operator until Alec was shot. After that, I had no longer been able to stand working at 911, but I had kept up my first aid training.

“It’s nothing. I have all the stuff I need to clean it up in my van. It’s out back. Mind if I go out that way?”

Another coincidence.

“Not at all.” I unlocked the back door. “Are you sure you don’t want first aid?”

His lopsided grin contrasted with his serious-looking outfit. “Don’t worry. I’m on my way to the hospital.”

I opened the door. His phone rang. Stepping out on the porch, he looked down at his phone and then turned back to me. His eyes were almost as wide as Dep’s, and they were very blue. His smile was suddenly huge. “Maybe I’m not going to the hospital, after all.”

“You made the sale?”

“Something like that.” He ran down the porch steps and answered his phone.

I closed the door and watched him through the glass. The sale—or whatever—was apparently exhilarating. However, he didn’t go far before he turned around and looked up toward our porch roof. His smile turned to a frown, then he strode north, the direction that the earlier torbie-loving customer had walked and that Diana had driven.

Our remaining customers left, and the four of us tidied the kitchen and dining room. Some time after midnight, four retired policemen who called themselves the Jolly Cops Cleaning Crew would come in and thoroughly clean everything.

I was meeting my friend Brent for dinner at my parents’ site in the Fallingbrook Falls Campground, so I paid for leftover cinnamon twists and tucked them in their bag inside my backpack. My parents would undoubtedly share them with us.

Brent had been Alec’s detective partner and also his best friend. After Alec was killed, Brent and I had spent years circling around each other and around our grief and our survivors’ guilt. Finally, we had accepted that we meant more to each other than supportive friends. Alec would have been happy for us. Brent was more or less on call most of the time, and he occasionally needed to rush off to work, so as usual, we planned to drive separately to my parents’ campsite.

First, I had to take Dep home. When she was a tiny kitten, Alec and I had trained her to wear a harness and walk on a leash. I snapped her into her harness, shouldered my backpack, said goodbye to the others, and started home. The wind had diminished, and the evening was pleasantly breezy and still warm. Dep hadn’t quite come down from her catnip high and was extra frisky, especially when gusts inspired her to bounce and pounce.

We walked south on Wisconsin Street to our street and turned right. Maple was a pretty street, lined with Victorian homes, the older, larger ones close to Wisconsin Street. Farther along Maple, the homes were smaller and newer, but even the newest ones dated from around 1900.

Mine had been built in 1889. The sweet cottagelike home had never had a carriage house or garage, but finally, a detached garage was being built at the end of the existing driveway. The garage’s fragrant lumber framework was nestled against the yellow brick wall surrounding the lawn and flower borders at the rear of my property. Work wasn’t going as quickly as I’d hoped and, since it was Sunday, wasn’t happening at all. The contractor had been trying to hire at least one more worker.

My small white SUV was in the driveway, along with a mess of construction materials in front of the partially built garage.

Turning up the walk toward my yellow brick home, I couldn’t help smiling. With a covered porch spanning the entire front, ivory-painted gingerbread trim, and stained-glass panels over the front window and door, the house was charming. I took Dep into the living room and removed her harness and leash. “Your kibble and water are in the kitchen, and your litter tray is upstairs in the bathroom,” I told her. She scampered toward the kitchen. I didn’t take time to change out of my Deputy Donut shorts and polo shirt. Still wearing my backpack containing the paper bag of cinnamon twists, I grabbed a jacket from the closet on the landing two steps up from the living room and then went out to the front porch and locked Dep inside the house.

A new neighbor had moved in across the street. I hadn’t met him yet. Most mornings when I left for work, a large dark green pickup truck was in his driveway. The logo on the door was a pine tree encircled by the words Ever Green Forestry, all in white. That truck wasn’t there now, even though it was Sunday. Picturing the truck, I remembered why I’d recognized that afternoon’s jaywalker, the sandy-haired man in the dark green shirt, cutoffs, and loosely tied work boots. He was the man I’d seen carrying boxes and furniture into the house.

I put my backpack and jacket on the passenger seat and started the car. Figuring that I would probably arrive at my parents’ place before Brent did, I chose the longer, prettier route. Outside town, the road narrowed and wound through forests and between meadows in their fresh June greenery. I kept the car windows closed to prevent anyone who might be lurking in the forests lining the road from hearing my singing. I cringed each time I hit a wrong note, but I kept singing. It had been over twenty-four hours since I’d last hugged Brent. I could hardly wait to see him again. Maybe smiling while singing was throwing me off key.

I stopped singing when an Ever Green Forestry pickup truck passed, heading toward Fallingbrook. I didn’t catch a glimpse of the driver, but the truck seemed identical to the one my new neighbor drove. I wondered how many pickups like that the company owned.. . .