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  Sweet Masterpiece

  The First Samantha Sweet Mystery

  By Connie Shelton

  Copyright © 2010 Connie Shelton

  All Rights Reserved

  Get another Connie Shelton book—FREE! Click here to find out how

  To Dan, always. I am your #1 fan.

  And to Susan, Serena and the Writers Guild members who have been so supportive and helpful in all my endeavors.

  Mostly, to all my loyal readers over the years.

  I couldn’t have done it without you!

  Chapter 1

  Chocolate icing shot out of the pastry bag as Samantha Sweet tested the consistency of her newest batch. The ridges held shape. Perfect. She picked up a triple-chocolate Kahlua cupcake and proceeded to pipe a thick base of chocolate buttercream on it. On top of that, a smaller cone, which she built up then tapered to form a snout. Two perky ears. Switching to a small round tip she quickly added short fur and watched as the cupcake became a shaggy puppy’s head. White chocolate eyes with dark chocolate irises. White chocolate tinted pink for its tiny tongue.

  Sam smiled at the happy little face she had created. Set him down and started another. The order was for the Tuesday night book group and local chapter of Chocoholics Unanimous. Every detail, right down to the dogs’ collars, had to be chocolate, and Sam enjoyed matching the theme of the weekly treats to that of the book they were reading, in this case a story featuring a dog walker. Unlike typical ‘anonymous’ twelve-step groups, this bunch celebrated their addiction. They reveled in the utter enjoyment of all things chocolate. There was absolutely no intention of overcoming their mutual habit. Sam wasn’t complaining—the weekly order gave a nice boost to her fledgling little home business. And someday . . . a shop . . . Sweet’s Sweets.

  She added the final touches to a schnauzer, then covered the bowl of chocolate cream and put it in the fridge. Chided herself as she licked a gob of the frosting from her finger—where did she think those extra pounds came from? She ran hot water and detergent into a bowl and tossed all the implements into it to soak until she could get back.

  She had to break into a house and she was running late.

  Sam rechecked the address, debated hitching up her utility trailer and decided against it. This wasn’t supposed to be that big a job. The pickup should handle it fine.

  The house turned out to be a flat-roofed adobe with traditional two-foot-thick walls, on the south side of Taos. She backed into the driveway, a long one that led to the back of the place. Getting out, she circled the whole house, checking doors and windows for anything inadvertently left open. She couldn’t remember how many times she’d gone to a huge effort to pick a lock or drill a deadbolt, just to find out that the back door was unlocked all along. Talk about frustrating.

  No such luck this time. The traditional blue-painted doors were all buttoned up tight. She pulled out her tool bag and analyzed the lock on the back door. They were almost always less beefy than front doors, for some stupid reason. And that held true at this place. Rather than drill the lock, which then required that she replace it before leaving, she decided to see if she could pick this one. One of these days she would see about getting one of those little triggered pick guns, but at the moment all she could afford were standard picks, which take two hands and a lot of patience to operate. It was nothing like it looked in the movies, she quickly discovered when she began this line of work.

  She worked the picks for close to five minutes before feeling the telltale release of the tumblers. Blew out a breath. That was another part of success at this—seemed like you had to be holding your breath to make it work. She grabbed the doorknob and got that tweaky feeling in the gut, that uncertain what-lies-behind-this-door question, each time she entered a strange house.

  She’d envisioned a recalcitrant homeowner, refusing to leave, shotgun in hand, or maybe a wall-high stack of newspapers ready to topple onto her. Everyone’s read about some weird old man who had a house full of them. But none of that had happened to her, yet.

  Breaking into houses for a living—all perfectly legal and sanctioned by the U.S. government. The USDA hired folks like Samantha to clean and maintain abandoned properties where the homeowner defaulted on their loans. Sadly, there were a lot of them these days.

  She noticed that a thin crust of dirt covered the door and all the glass panes on this side of the house, remnants of New Mexico’s famous “mud storms” where blowing dirt and a small amount of rain combined to coat every surface with a haze of brown. Sam actually liked this part of the job, assessing the situation and imagining how good it would look after she’d applied Windex and hot water. The knob twisted in her hand and the door swung open with a hellish creak. A little oil would take care of that. She brushed her hands on her jeans and stuffed the lock tools back into her canvas bag, leaving it sitting just inside the back door. Flipped on the lights. At least the power had not been cut yet.

  Here’s where the surprises usually showed up. In this case the kitchen was remarkably untrashed—sometimes kitchens were a nightmare. A few crusted dishes sat in the sink but the table was clear, trashcan still had its top firmly in place, and no roaches scurried away. No noxious odors from the fridge. She would come back to that.

  She walked through a doorway into a living/dining L and saw that the home still contained furniture. Three doors opened off a short hallway—a little pink bathroom was visible but the other two doors were closed. A starter home for a young family, certainly adequate for a retired couple. She’d seen quite a few similar, and it wasn’t a whole lot smaller than her own place on Elmwood Lane.

  In the living room an ancient sofa looked like prime real estate for dust mites and a round coffee table held several red pillar candles with hard wax drips down their sides. Dusty-looking bundles of dried herbs lay among the candles, and an open book sat on the sofa, as if the reader had simply gotten up in mid-chapter and planned to return. The rest of the room was cluttered with a lifetime’s accumulation—shelves held stacks of magazines and cheaply framed photos of children in 1940s attire. An old fashioned wooden radio had cobwebs lacing its speaker and trailing between the knobs.

  Sam wandered through the room, trailing her fingers across the fringe on the shade of an old floor lamp. Then she heard a thump.

  The hair on her neck rose. I’m getting too old for this.

  She searched for a weapon of any kind. The floor lamp looked heavy but completely unwieldy. She edged back to the kitchen and pulled the biggest wrench, a crescent only ten inches long, from her tool kit.

  “Hello?” she called out.

  The thump came a tiny bit louder this time.

  “Hello? USDA caretaker. Anyone here?” She tiptoed into the hallway, her steps silent on the worn saltillo tile.

  This time she swore she heard a moan. No way this could be a good thing. She should call 911, she thought, even as she reached out to the first closed bedroom door and turned the knob.

  The smell of illness and old-person emanated from the room as soon as the door opened. Sam held her breath for a moment. The place was so dim she had a hard time finding the source of the sound. A wooden bed took up most of the space, while a high dresser on the far wall and a nightstand cluttered with bottles, drinking glasses and wadded tissues filled the rest of the space. Crumpled blankets created waves on the surface of the bed and it took her a moment to realize that a tiny, shriveled woman lay under them.

  Another moan, barely above a whisper.

  “Ma’am?”

  A thin hand fluttered upward. Sam stepped closer to the bedside.

  “I’m sent here by the USDA,” she said. “I’m supposed to clean up the house, but I’m sure they didn’t realize anyone was living here.”
/>   The toothless mouth opened and a sound emerged, something like a piece of cellophane being crushed and then ripped. The old woman wiped at her forehead and made some more throat-clearing noises. Finally, words emerged. “Not . . . for . . . long.”

  “What? Can I do something for you?” Sam reached for one of the water glasses on the nightstand but the clawlike hand waved her away.

  “I have . . . something . . .”

  Sam leaned in a little closer, and the woman cleared her throat noisily. She jammed a tissue at the scrawny fingers and stepped back. When the woman spoke again her voice was noticeably stronger.

  “I have something for you,” she said.

  “I don’t think you even know me, ma’am.”

  The birdlike woman raised up on one elbow and her tiny eyes lost their blurry look for a moment. “I know . . . you were meant to come here . . . today. You are to possess the secret.”

  What on earth did that mean?

  She fell back against her pillows, clearly tired from the effort.

  “Quickly, girl. The bottom . . . drawer . . . in the dresser.”

  “You need something from the dresser.” Sam turned toward it.

  “A wooden box. Bottom drawer . . . look . . . under . . .”

  Sam went over to the dresser, stooped clumsily, and fumbled at the cheap brass handles, pulling it open. It seemed to be stuffed full of cloth—bedding, knitted items and such.

  “Get . . . the . . . box. Under—” The words caught in her throat.

  Sam glanced up at the sick woman. She lay against the pillow, eyes closed, breathing shallowly through her mouth. Sam dug through the fabric, feeling for anything that might be the box she wanted. In the back left corner she felt a hard surface and pulled at it.

  It was about the size of a cigar box, with a crude metal clasp and a lumpy, carved surface. She picked it up and went back to the old woman’s side.

  “Here you go. Here’s your box.”

  The eyelids fluttered but didn’t really open. “No . . . for you.”

  “Me? Are you sure?”

  From somewhere deep inside, the ancient woman called up the strength to raise her head again. “The box has . . . special powers. It holds . . . many truths.”

  Sam stared at the ugly, lumpy thing. “What’s in it?”

  The old head fell back to the pillow. “Quickly . . . take it. Put it in a safe place.”

  Sam stood there, uncertainly, wondering what the woman was telling her.

  “Now, girl. Take it.” A labored breath. “No one must know.”

  The lady needed medical attention but the poor thing wouldn’t be satisfied until she thought Sam had taken the box to a safe place.

  “I’m going to call an ambulance for you. I’ll put this in my truck for safe keeping.” Sam’s voice shook, worried that the woman would go into cardiac arrest at any second.

  The pained expression on the old woman’s face relaxed. The answer seemed to satisfy her.

  “Okay, just rest. I’ll have some help here for you soon.” Sam patted the woman’s shoulder, shocked to feel sharp bones under the papery skin. She rushed outside.

  But by the time she’d put the box on the backseat of her truck and returned to make the 911 call, the old woman was dead.

  Chapter 2

  In her fifty-two years, Sam had never been alone with someone recently deceased and standing by the bed gave her the willies. She stepped outside and dialed her USDA contracting officer’s number. She’d never met Delbert Crow in person but she imagined a gray-haired fussy bureaucrat who was a year or two from retirement. At times he was so by-the-book that he drove her crazy with details; other times she got the impression he didn’t want to be bothered, that he couldn’t wait to be out on his fishing boat on a lake a hundred miles from nowhere. Somehow she had a feeling that finding a dying woman at one of her properties would be something he’d want to know about.

  “Have you called the police?” he asked.

  “The Sheriff’s Department, actually. We’re just outside the town limits here. Well, I just dialed 911 and—”

  “Fine, fine.” She heard papers rustling, as if he were looking in the procedures manual for an answer. What could this be listed under—discovery of dead body on premises? “Ms. Sweet, it will be all right. Just wait there until the authorities arrive. I’m sure they can handle it. If the sheriff needs to speak to me, I’m at my office all day.”

  Sam paced the front porch, unable to make herself go back into the house with the dead woman. A Sheriff’s Department SUV, an ambulance and a private car arrived within minutes of each other. The man in the private car introduced himself as the county’s Field Deputy Medical Investigator before he bustled into the house.

  The lean guy who unfolded himself out of the SUV walked over to her. “Ms. Sweet? Deputy Sheriff Beau Cardwell.” There was definite Southern in the accent and the way he said her name made it sound like an invitation to dance a waltz. The last guy she knew named Beau was way back in her teen years in Texas, but that was a whole other story involving a girl with lusty hormones and a football player whose kiss would send any good girl off the deep end. She firmly shut that image out of her head.

  The deputy was staring at her.

  Awkward moment. “Uh, yes. I’m Samantha Sweet. Just call me Sam.”

  He sent a lopsided grin her way, as if he’d just read her mind.

  “Okay. Sam.” He cleared his throat and flipped open a small notebook.

  At the back of the ambulance, two EMTs snapped on latex gloves and yanked out a gurney, which they wheeled toward the house.

  “The mortgage on the house was government guaranteed and was in foreclosure,” Sam told the deputy. She gave the basics of how she’d gotten inside. She told him the old woman had spoken to her very briefly and died while she’d stepped outside to summon medical help for her. Remembering the woman’s warning, she didn’t mention the wooden box although she felt a little funny about that.

  “Do you know who she was?” Sam asked.

  “Bertha Martinez. She lived alone.” He scratched notes as he talked. “We think there’s a grandson in Albuquerque. He may have been the one who talked her into signing a mortgage to get some cash out of the property. Can’t imagine why she would have done it otherwise. Place has been in her family for a couple hundred years. She refused to go to a care home when her neighbors recommended it. I’d been out here several times, but never could convince her. Last five years or so she used to chase me off. Met me on the porch with a shotgun a couple times.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. A real sad thing. Local stories ran wild. Some say she was a witch, some just held that she was crazy. Got old and sick but never would see a doctor. Just wanted to be left alone, I guess.”

  “USDA sends me to clean out abandoned places so they can be sold. I’ve never had one where anyone was still living in the house. I’m sure they thought she’d moved away or already died.”

  He wrote on his forms, filling out the address of the property and noting what she’d just told him.

  The M.I. came out of the house, stuffing his stethoscope into the black bag he carried. “Natural causes, old age,” he said. “Albuquerque OMI will confirm that and issue the death certificate at the morgue.” He got into his vehicle and drove away.

  “So, what should I do?” Sam asked Deputy Cardwell. “Ordinarily, the owners have taken away whatever they want and I just clean the place up.”

  “Can it wait a day or two? Give us time to remove the body, do a quick check of the house to be sure nothing’s out of order. Make one more run at finding the grandson. Maybe you could come back on Thursday?”

  “Sure, no problem. I’ll leave a sign-in sheet on the kitchen counter. Anyone who comes in is supposed to sign it and state what they’re doing here.” She hoped following that bit of protocol would satisfy Delbert Crow.

  Cardwell didn’t look especially happy about complying but he nodded.

 
She retrieved her tool kit from the kitchen, found a house key in a dish near the front door and, after verifying that it worked in the lock, placed it in a lockbox and went out to her red Silverado.

  The day was still young—not quite noon. Sam drove through town, past Wal-Mart and the movie theater and turned right on Kit Carson Road, at the plaza. Zigzagged a couple of blocks south and east to her little lane. Her house felt cool under the shade of the huge cottonwoods that grew everywhere in this part of Taos. She went into the bathroom and washed her face and hands thoroughly, eager to rid herself of the morning’s disturbing experience. A brush taken to her hair only made the graying, short layers stick out in all directions with static electricity. Giving up on that, she went to the kitchen and made a quick sandwich from leftover ham and decided she could still earn a little money today, even though one of her jobs was on hold.

  She grabbed the wide platter of chocolate puppy-dog cupcakes she’d made earlier and headed out to Mysterious Happenings, the bookstore where the Chocoholics group met to solve mysteries, and gorge. They liked to choose a mystery novel, read up to the final chapter, and then meet to guess at the ending. They read the ending of the book together and then there was some kind of prize for whoever came closest to figuring it out. One of the members, a British born little slip of a thing, always seemed to come away with either the prize for eating the biggest quantity of the evening’s chocolate treats or for figuring out the mystery. As a female who had always carried about thirty pounds more than she wanted, Sam had no idea how Riki managed to stay barely above the weight of a Doberman.

  A bell tinkled over the bookshop door when she entered, balancing the tray of cupcakes and squeezing past a display rack of jigsaw puzzles.

  “Madame Samantha!” The bookshop owner, Ivan Petrenko, spread his arms wide and stepped from behind the counter. “Is looking most fabulous today!”