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Evening Bags and Executions(27)

By:Dorothy Howell


“I thought your cousin Belinda was helping you,” I said.

“Help? You call what she’s doing help?” Darren’s face flushed a deep red. “Sticking her nose into something that’s none of her business. Coming around, making demands, telling me Lacy would want her to have her personal belongings. It’s a lie. All of it.”

I could see that Darren was getting angrier and angrier, and while most people would have backed off, I saw this as the best time to push forward and antagonize him further in hopes of gathering more info.

I’m pretty sure that’s how all the great detectives do it.

“If Lacy and Belinda were close, wouldn’t you want Belinda to have her things?” I asked.

“Close? Who said they were close? Is that what Belinda is telling everybody?” Darren demanded. He made a little snarling sound under his breath. “I doubt they’d spoken to each other in years after what happened.”

Come to think of it, all the great detectives bring backup with them for occasions such as this.

I’ll be sure to remember that next time.

“Lacy left home right after high school. Just walked out with no thought to what it did to our family,” Darren said. “She came to Los Angeles and—and I don’t know what she did for years because we seldom heard from her. Then she ends up with this bakery, and still we almost never heard from her. Broke my mother’s heart. Left me to try and keep Dad’s cabinet shop going, and figure a way to pay for their medications, their care.”

“That was really crappy,” I said.

“Darn right it was,” Darren said. He huffed for a couple more minutes before his anger eased away. “Growing up, Lacy and Belinda were like sisters. Did everything together. Went everywhere together. Typical kid stuff, then typical teenage stuff. Listening to records, buying those magazines and all that other stuff, all that nonsense with the long hair. England this, British that—like all of it was so damn important. Who knows the Dave Clark Five now, anyway?”

I sure didn’t, and I really hoped Eleanor and Rigby weren’t going to quiz me on whatever it was.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Something stupid,” Darren said, and waved his hand as if he could wipe away whatever it was that had happened. “Belinda got tickets to some concert—won them in a radio station contest, or something—and took her boyfriend. Lacy went through the roof. They never spoke again.”

Wow, that must have been an awesome concert.

“But Belinda moved to Los Angeles, like Lacy did?” I asked. “Why would she do that if they weren’t friends anymore?”

“How the heck should I know?” Darren said, and flung both arms into the air. He sighed heavily. “All I know is that I’ve got another mess to clean up—because of Lacy.”

“You could probably use some money,” I said, as delicately as I can ever say anything. “The cake I need costs twelve thousand dollars, so if you—”

“Twelve grand?” Darren’s eyes flew open. “For a cake?”

“Actually, that’s probably one of the least expensive cakes Lacy made,” I said. “Most of them were way more than that.”

Darren muttered under his breath and shook his head. “Lacy was making that kind of money? And she couldn’t send anything home to our parents? Or to me for taking care of them? Not one red cent?”

He fumed for a few more minutes, and, really, I couldn’t blame him.

“I can’t turn down that kind of cash,” Darren said, though it didn’t seem to please him in the least. “Tell that girl—what’s her name?—that girl at the shop to go ahead with it.”

“I’ll let her know,” I said.

“But I don’t know what I’m going to do with the business,” Darren said, his anger rising again. “So don’t let her think this means she can keep working there. She already went ahead with a couple of orders without discussing them with me. You ask me, she’s awful anxious to take over the place herself.”

“Maybe she just needs a job,” I said, remembering what she’d told me about leaving her previous employer.

Darren shook his head. “She wants to run it, and now that you’re telling me the kind of money it brings in, I can see why. You ask me, it’s suspicious. Makes me wonder.”

It made me wonder, too. Paige claimed she’d been hired away from Fairy Land Bake Shoppe by Lacy, but how did I know if that was true? Had she seen a better opportunity at Lacy Cakes and gone for it? Had her ambition taken her further—all the way to murder?