The Candy Cane Cupcake Killer Read online

  With his hand still clasped around her arm, Sam swung Phyllis around and said, “Come on!”

  She had no choice but to go with him as he ran toward the parking lot where they had left the pickup.

  “What are you doing?” she asked breathlessly.

  Sam had fished his keys out of his blue-jeans pocket with his other hand and pushed the button on the attached fob to unlock the pickup’s doors. As he threw the driver’s-side door open, he told Phyllis, “Get behind the wheel and go after that carriage!” He pressed the keys into her hand.

  “What?!”

  “We’ve got to stop it before somebody gets hurt!” Sam said as he ran to the back of the truck. He climbed into the bed and added, “Come on, Phyllis!”

  Though it seemed crazy to her, she knew he was right about one thing: Somebody was going to get hurt if that runaway carriage wasn’t stopped. She slid the container of cupcakes across the seat and pulled herself behind the wheel.

  She wasn’t sure what Sam had in mind, but she cranked the pickup’s engine to life, threw it in gear, and wheeled out of the parking lot. The carriage was a block away, and the horses were picking up speed now that the marching band had cleared the street. The team weaved around one of the floats, causing the carriage to sway back and forth dangerously.

  “Run over those cones!” Sam shouted through the pickup’s back window.

  Phyllis stopped thinking about it and acted. She pushed the gas pedal down and the pickup leaped forward, crushing the plastic traffic cones under its wheels.

  Chapter 2

  A few of the uniformed band members had started to come out into the middle of the street again to stare wide-eyed after the carriage that had nearly run over them. But they scurried out of the way again as Phyllis drove toward them.

  Actually, she wasn’t going very fast yet, but the pace already seemed breakneck to her. I’m not some . . . some Hollywood stunt driver, she thought. What sort of lunacy was going through Sam’s mind right now?

  She honked the horn to warn the drivers of the floats to pull over to the side of the street as much as they could. The pickup flew past them.

  Phyllis’s pulse pounded. She hoped she wouldn’t have a heart attack right here and now.

  A sharp rapping on the window beside her made her jump a little. Sam was trying to get her attention. She rolled the window down and called, “What?”

  He leaned down and said through the open window, “Pull up beside those horses and get as close as you can!”

  “What are you—,” she started to ask, but it was too late. He had straightened up already and couldn’t hear her over all the commotion.

  They were right behind the carriage now. She saw Clay Loomis and all the cheerleaders huddled together. She couldn’t hear them, but in the glare of the headlights she could see that their mouths were open, and she figured they were screaming as they hung on for dear life.

  Up ahead, hundreds of people had gathered on the courthouse lawn. The horses and the carriage were headed straight toward them. And though people had started to realize they were in danger and were trying to get out of the way, it didn’t look like all of them would make it.

  Sam was right. Somebody was going to get hurt if they couldn’t stop the runaways.

  Somebody was already hurt. Phyllis remembered the way Barney McCrory had collapsed. He must have had a heart attack, she thought.

  She pressed harder on the gas and turned the wheel. The pickup swung out to the side and began to draw even with the carriage. Phyllis got a good look at the terrified face of Clay Loomis, who had torn off the fake beard and white wig.

  Then she was past the carriage and alongside the frightened horses. Their eyes rolled wildly as they ran.

  “Get closer!” Sam shouted through the window.

  Phyllis didn’t know who was more scared: her, the horses, the people on the square, or Loomis and the cheerleaders.

  But there is a time to be timid and a time to be bold, she told herself, and like it or not, this is a time to be bold.

  She moved the pickup closer to the horses.

  She gasped as she saw Sam’s image appear in the big side mirror. He was leaning far over the edge of the pickup’s bed, clinging to the cab with one hand. A scene from an old Western movie that was one of Sam’s favorites flashed through her mind. She had watched it several times with him, and now she was afraid he remembered it, too.

  Sam clung to the cab with his right hand and reached out his left arm as far as it would go. Phyllis saw that she wasn’t close enough and edged the pickup over a little more. Sam stretched out his lanky form over what seemed like an impossible distance, and his hand closed around the harness of the lead horse on his side of the team. He hauled back on it.

  “Ease off the gas!” he called to Phyllis. “Don’t brake!”

  She understood what he meant. If she stopped too short, it might jerk him out of the truck bed. She took her foot off the gas and let the pickup’s momentum slow some on its own.

  “Now give it some brake!” Sam told her. “Easy!”

  Phyllis’s hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly, it felt like it was going to snap off. She rested her foot lightly on the brake, felt the pickup respond, and then pushed down a little harder.

  She had to stop smoothly. That was the key.

  They were less than a block from the square when the pickup finally came to a halt. So did the team.

  Sam called to the crowd, “Somebody come grab hold of these horses! Be careful not to spook ’em again, though.”

  Several men hurried out and grasped the harness so the horses couldn’t bolt again. Sam let go of it and sat down with his back against the cab, his chest rising and falling rapidly. As Phyllis got out of the pickup, she saw how hard he was breathing and was afraid that he was having a spell of some sort.

  “Sam!” she cried. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, just a mite winded,” he told her. He summoned up a smile. “That was a little nerve-rackin’.”

  “Nerve-racking! I thought you were about to jump out of the pickup and go sailing out over that team like John Wayne in that Stagecoach movie!”

  “Yakima Canutt,” Sam said.

  “What?”

  Sam didn’t answer. Instead he pushed himself to his feet as a worried frown replaced his smile.

  “We got to find out what happened to Barney,” he said.

  For a brief moment, Phyllis had forgotten all about McCrory’s mysterious collapse. She had been so relieved that Sam was all right, she hadn’t been able to think about anything else.

  As he climbed down from the pickup bed, she turned toward the front of the carriage. Sam moved past her and pulled himself up on the metal step the driver used to climb up and down from the box. He reached over and took hold of McCrory’s shoulder.

  “Barney! Barney, can you hear me?”

  But when Phyllis saw the way McCrory’s head lolled limply as Sam shook his shoulder, her hopes sank. She had seen enough dead men to recognize the signs.

  A couple of seconds later, she realized just how bizarre it was for a retired schoolteacher to have such a thing go through her mind.

  That just went to show the kinds of unexpected turns her life had taken over the past few years.

  In the back of the carriage, the cheerleaders huddling around Clay Loomis were still crying and whimpering. They were safe now, but that knowledge hadn’t caught up with their terror. Loomis had stopped yelling, but he was still wide-eyed with shock.

  “Step back!” a man’s voice ordered. “Clear this area now!”

  Phyllis turned to see Chief of Police Ralph Whitmire, along with several of his officers, hurrying toward the carriage. Whitmire, a stocky, graying man and a good cop, stopped short as he recognized Phyllis and Sam.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Wha
t are you two doing here?”

  Although Whitmire had never demonstrated the level of hostility toward Phyllis that the local district attorney had, she knew he wasn’t happy about the way she seemed to turn up at so many crime scenes.

  Of course, this wasn’t really a crime scene—just a tragedy that could have been much worse. She was convinced that Barney McCrory had suffered a heart attack and died.

  “Chief!” Clay Loomis piped up. Lingering fear gave his voice a high-pitched squeak. “Chief, we were almost killed!”

  “You’re all right now, Mr. Loomis,” Whitmire assured him.

  Sam stepped down from the driver’s box and said, “Looks like Barney didn’t make it, Chief.”

  “We’ll let the EMTs deal with that,” Whitmire said. He nodded toward an ambulance that was maneuvering through the crowd at little more than a crawl. The vehicle’s lights were flashing, which washed out the more festive lights on the courthouse and the other buildings around the square.

  Phyllis knew the two young men, Calvin Holloway and Ted Brady, who got out of the ambulance when it came to a stop. They were friends of her son, Mike, who was a Parker County sheriff’s deputy.

  Tonight they wore dark blue Windbreakers with big letters on the back that read EMT. Phyllis couldn’t keep her mind from flashing back to a hot summer day several years earlier when Calvin and Ted had been summoned here to the courthouse square because of another death. She wasn’t likely to forget that time, since it was part of the first murder case with which she’d been involved.

  As the two of them hurried up, carrying handheld cases full of medical equipment and apparatus, Chief Whitmire told them, “Looks like a heart attack.”

  “Anybody else hurt that we need to check on first?” Ted asked.

  “Not that I’m aware of.” Whitmire put a hand on the edge of the carriage and asked Loomis and the cheerleaders, “Anybody hurt in there?”

  Several of the girls shook their heads, and two answered in shaky voices that they were all right. Loomis scrubbed a trembling hand over his face and said, “I’m not hurt, Chief, at least as far as I know right now.”

  Calvin and Ted climbed to the driver’s seat, one on each side of Barney McCrory, and began checking his vitals. Phyllis was pretty sure they would find that he didn’t have any.

  A voice behind her boomed out, “Good Lord, Phyllis. What happened? Eve and I saw you driving like a bat out of— Well, you know where bats fly out of.”

  Phyllis turned to see her friends and housemates, Carolyn Wilbarger and Eve Turner. Carolyn was her oldest friend and also her longtime rival in baking contests. She went on. “You and Sam looked like you were in one of those stupid action movies he likes so much.”

  “I felt like it, too,” Phyllis admitted. “I’d just as soon never do that again.”

  Eve, who was shorter than the other three members of their little circle of friends, rose on her tiptoes and craned her neck as she peered through the crowd of police, paramedics, and bystanders at the carriage.

  “Is that poor man dead?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” Sam said. “He’d just started drivin’ the carriage in the parade when something happened to him.”

  Carolyn looked at Phyllis and asked with a frown, “Where are those cupcakes you made? That man didn’t eat one of them, did he?”

  Phyllis had a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach as she said, “Well, as a matter of fact . . .”

  “I knew it,” Carolyn said. “He ate one of your cupcakes, and then he died.”

  “Oh, don’t make it sound like that,” Eve scolded. “I’m sure the two things don’t have anything to do with each other.”

  Sam snorted and said, “Of course they don’t. Shoot, we all had cupcakes from the same batch, didn’t we?”

  Chief Whitmire turned his head to look at them, as if he had just become aware of the conversation, and asked, “What’s this about cupcakes?”

  Phyllis gestured vaguely toward the pickup and said, “I brought some candy cane cupcakes with me for after the Christmas-tree lighting. Mr. McCrory talked me into giving him one.”

  Calvin leaned over from the driver’s seat, where he had been examining McCrory, and said, “That explains what’s stuck in his mustache, then. I couldn’t figure it out. It’s frosting, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Phyllis.

  “The ME will do a tox screen,” Whitmire said. “But surely your baking didn’t have anything to do with what happened this time, Mrs. Newsom.”

  Phyllis didn’t care for the way the chief said this time, but there was nothing she could do about that. Her reputation was what it was.

  She was distracted from those gloomy thoughts by the arrival of a number of people who had rushed up to the carriage. Some of them were uniformed members of the high school marching band, while others were adults. All of them were intent on the same thing, though: getting to the cheerleaders in elf costumes, who were still on the carriage.

  The newcomers were boyfriends and parents of the girls, Phyllis decided, as a lot of hugging and crying and asking “Are you all right?” went on. Chief Whitmire looked annoyed, which made Phyllis think that he wished he could keep the girls away from everybody until he’d had a chance to question them. In this crowd, though, that was going to be impossible.

  Another couple arrived on the scene, looking upset, but they appeared to be too young to have a daughter in high school. The woman, who had auburn hair and was quite pretty, was trying to push through the crowd to reach the carriage as she cried, “Dad! Daddy!”

  The fair-haired young man with her took hold of her shoulders and said, “You need to stay back, Allyson. You don’t want to get in the way of the paramedics. Let them do their work.”

  Sobbing, she tried to pull away from him, “That’s my father up there!”

  “I know, but there’s nothing we can do to help him. That’s somebody else’s job.”

  Phyllis could tell that the young man was trying to keep his voice calm and steady, but it shook anyway.

  Sam stepped over to them, put a hand on the young man’s shoulder, and said, “It’ll be all right, kids.”

  That was a lie, of course. Barney McCrory was dead. But Phyllis knew Sam was just trying to comfort them the best way he could.

  The young woman turned to Sam and exclaimed, “Coach Fletcher!” And then she pulled him into a hug as she broke down. Awkwardly, he patted her on the back as she said between sobs, “You . . . you don’t understand. When I saw my father earlier today, we . . . we had a big fight. Those angry words can’t be the last thing I ever say to him. They just can’t!”

  That told Phyllis she’d been right when she thought she saw an unhappy look cross McCrory’s face earlier when Sam had brought up the man’s daughter and son-in-law. McCrory had been upset about the argument, too, it seemed. Such an assumption was a bit of a leap, but Phyllis’s instincts told her it was correct.

  One of the EMTs, Ted, hopped down from the carriage and approached Whitmire. He and the chief talked quietly for more than a minute. An angry expression appeared on Whitmire’s face as they spoke. Phyllis couldn’t make out anything the EMT said, but she heard Whitmire’s response as he demanded, “Are you sure?”

  With a grim look on his face, Ted nodded. He said something else, then turned back to the carriage to assist his partner as he started lowering Barney McCrory’s body from the seat.

  Knowing that he probably wouldn’t answer her, Phyllis asked Whitmire, “What was that about, Chief? Mr. McCrory died of a heart attack, didn’t he? I know you’ll need an autopsy to be sure—”

  “We’ll need an autopsy, all right,” Whitmire interrupted heavily. “It appears that the deceased was shot. This is murder.”

  There was still a lot of commotion going on up and down the street, but next to the carriage, a stunned si
lence fell for a moment until Carolyn said, “Well, at least he wasn’t poisoned. Now no one can blame those cupcakes of yours, Phyllis!”

  Chapter 3

  After everything that had happened, the parade couldn’t go on, of course. And the police couldn’t keep the bystanders—and possible suspects—from leaving, either. There were too many people and not enough cops for that. Phyllis saw the frustration on Whitmire’s face, but there was nothing the chief could do.

  Nothing he could do about that part of the investigation, anyway. He turned to her and Sam and said, “The two of you talked to McCrory just before the parade started, right?”

  “That’s right,” Phyllis said.

  “That’s when this cupcake business came up.”

  “Yes. But now that you know—”

  “No offense, but I don’t know anything yet except that McCrory was shot. And I shouldn’t have mentioned that.” Whitmire sighed and shook his head glumly. He muttered, “I guess I should have expected it by now.” He became more businesslike as he went on. “Were the two of you the last ones to speak to the victim?”

  “Maybe,” Sam said. “I don’t remember seein’ anybody else say anything to him before the parade started.” He nodded toward the carriage, where Clay Loomis was sitting alone now. All the cheerleaders had gotten out of the vehicle. “I reckon one of the folks back there could have said something to Barney, but I don’t recall seein’ him turned around, talkin’ to them.”

  “Well, I’ll ask Mr. Loomis about that later,” Whitmire said.

  Phyllis said, “There was a little bit of time right after the parade started when Sam and I were walking in this direction. I wasn’t watching the carriage then.”

  “How long was that?”

  “I don’t know. Twenty seconds, maybe.”

  Whitmire asked Sam, “How about you? Were you watching the carriage the whole time?”

  “I was lookin’ in this general direction,” Sam said, “but I wasn’t really payin’ that much attention to Barney. I was lookin’ at the crowd and the parade and all the lights . . .” Sam frowned in thought. “But I saw him kind of rock back on the seat a little, and then he started to stand up. I knew he wouldn’t be doin’ that while he was drivin’ the team unless something was wrong.”