Pumpkin Pleas (The Donut Mysteries Book 26) Read online

  “You arrested him? What did he do? Is that why he disappeared all of a sudden?” My questions came out in a rush. This was a side of Tom Thorndike I hadn’t expected.

  “One night he asked his mother if he could borrow her car, and evidently they had a fight when she said no. I don’t know if you remember, but Tom had quite a temper back then. He grabbed the keys anyway, and she called us to report that her car had been stolen. I was on the police force back then, and I happened to catch the call.”

  “Did you actually arrest him for stealing his own mother’s car?” I asked. I knew George could be strict at times, but that sounded a little harsh to me.

  “If that was all there’d been to it, I would have done my best to talk her out of it, but the car needed gas, and Tom didn’t have any money. He was in the process of holding up a gas station out on the highway when I found him, and that was something I couldn’t overlook.”

  “Was he actually armed?” I asked, incredulous that the boy I’d known had done something so reckless.

  “No, but you know he’s always been big and muscular. He threatened the clerk with a beating, and the kid behind the counter wasn’t going to take the chance that he might not be bluffing. Tom was leaving the building as I was going in. He didn’t put up a fight, but I still had no choice. I had to arrest him.”

  “I’m shocked to hear all of this so many years later,” I said, fascinated that I’d never heard this story before. That was the way with small towns sometimes. The most innocuous things spread like wildfire, while a legitimate story got buried in the weeds.

  “The courts were backed up here, so the case was tried in Union Square. I testified on Tom’s behalf, and the judge took it into consideration. His mother was furious with me. She wanted her boy taught a lesson; she was a real piece of work. He still had to do jail time, but Tom and I kept in touch. Prison wasn’t an easy place for him to be, and he kept getting himself into trouble with that temper of his. By the time he got out, we were friends. Then he vanished, and I didn’t hear another word from him until he came back into town a few months ago.”

  “Does that mean that you honestly don’t know where he got the money?” I asked.

  “Like I said before, I don’t have a clue.”

  “But you suspect something, don’t you?” He did; I could see it in his eyes.

  “Suzanne, he was a kid who did something stupid once, and he compounded his mistake with an overactive temper. That didn’t make him a bad person then, or now, for that matter. He paid his debt to society, so as far as I’m concerned, he’s square with society.”

  This was the George I knew and loved, gruff on the exterior, but caring and compassionate underneath, though he would have denied possessing those traits with his dying breath.

  “I’m curious about something. How did Ray find out about your connection to Tom?” I asked him.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe he found out about Tom’s past. If he did, and he started digging, I’m betting that he saw the visitor’s log at the prison. My name was written there four times a year for every year Tom served.”

  A sudden thought chilled me. “George, do you think Tom could be involved with Ray’s disappearance?”

  “No. I don’t believe that for a second.” It was clear that I’d pushed him a little too far, but I couldn’t back off yet.

  “You said it yourself, though. He had a temper back then,” I reminded him. “There’s no reason to assume that he still doesn’t. If Ray pushed him too hard, is it that hard to imagine him pushing back?”

  “He’s a grown man, Suzanne. People can change, or don’t you believe that?”

  “As a general rule, I’d have to say no, I don’t, but I realize that there are exceptions.” Max, my ex-husband, was one such example. He’d been a womanizer even during our marriage, but since he’d started dating my friend Emily Hargraves, he hadn’t strayed once, at least as far as I knew. There were a few other folks I knew who had also proved that they could change, but mostly, old habits and ways seemed to die hard in folks.

  “Well, he’s one of the exceptions, at least in my book,” George said. “I’d better go see if I can find him before this thing gets out of hand.”

  “I’d say it’s a little too late for that,” I said as George started to walk out of the donut shop empty-handed.

  “Hey, you forgot your donut,” I reminded him.

  “Thanks, but I suddenly lost my appetite,” the mayor said.

  “You still need to eat,” I said as I bagged an old-fashioned donut for him and grabbed a paper cup. As I added coffee to it, George offered me money. I just shook my head. “Don’t worry about it. It’s on me.”

  “You know as a matter of principle that I don’t accept anything free from anyone,” he said as he left three single dollar bills on the counter. “I’m the mayor. How would it look if I went around accepting things from you on the house?”

  “Oh, I don’t know; it might look as though you were my friend,” I said, but I took the money anyway. “Don’t forget your change.”

  George graciously accepted it, and as he headed out the door, I asked, “Let me know if you find Tommy, okay?”

  “Sure thing. Just don’t spread what I told you about him around town.”

  “You know that I’m going to tell Jake, but that’s it,” I said.

  “I figured as much. Okay. Talk to you soon, Suzanne.”

  After George was gone, I marveled at the story he’d just told me. Why hadn’t I heard about Tom’s arrest and incarceration when it had happened way back when? Sure, our lives had gone in different directions, but it still surprised me to learn of the life he’d led after we’d parted ways. Just when I thought there was nothing else I could ever learn about the townsfolk of April Springs, something happened to prove just how wrong I was.

  George was barely out of sight when I reached for my cell phone and called my husband. He needed to know about this latest development. I probably should have called Chief Grant first, since he was officially handling the case, but I’d let Jake do that. No doubt our police chief already knew about Tom’s record, but he might not know about the possible connection between him and the missing newsman.

  “Hey, do you have a second?” I asked when he answered my call.

  “Sure. Sorry I haven’t called you, but I’m striking out everywhere I look.”

  “I just found something out that might be helpful,” I said. “George Morris came by the donut shop, and he told me something in confidence that you should know.”

  “Hang on a second. I don’t want you to violate his trust on my account, Suzanne,” Jake said, stopping me before I could say anything else.

  “I’ve got his permission to share it with you, but only you.”

  “Am I bound to that as well?”

  After I thought about it for a few seconds, I said, “I don’t see why you would be. It’s not exactly a secret. Just before Ray disappeared, he called George and asked him about Tom Thorndike.”

  “Your grade-school crush?” he asked me lightly. I’d forgotten I’d told him about Tom long ago.

  “Hey, we went out in high school, too,” I said.

  He must have heard the edge in my voice. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make fun of you. What about him?”

  “It turns out that Tom went to prison for robbing a gas station just before we all graduated from high school, and George was the one who arrested him.”

  “You never told me that part of the story,” Jake said, his tone going from playful to serious in an instant.

  “That’s because I didn’t know about it. Somehow it escaped the town’s gossip mill, if you can believe that. Anyway, Tom came back into town a few months ago flashing a lot of money around. He bought a new truck with cash, and that made Ray suspicious.”

&nbs
p; “Does George think the two of them may be connected?”

  “He seems pretty sure that they aren’t, but I’m not convinced myself. Apparently Ray found out that George had befriended Tom while he was in jail, and he called him around six yesterday, digging into Tom’s background. Anyway, I thought you should know.”

  “Thanks for calling, Suzanne. It’s a solid lead.”

  “Just be careful, okay? Remember, you’re not a cop anymore.”

  “You don’t need to remind me of that. I’m painfully aware of the fact each and every day,” he said. Was there a wistful tone in his voice as he said it? I had a feeling that my husband missed being in law enforcement, but he’d never come right out and said anything about it to me. I didn’t ask him, either. I figured if he wanted to talk about it, he knew where he could find me.

  In the meantime, I had donuts to sell. My customers were starting to make their way into Donut Hearts, and I aimed to do my best to take care of them.

  Chapter 3

  Half an hour later, Jake came into the shop.

  The expression on his face told me everything that I needed to know.

  Something had clearly happened, and it was bad.

  Chapter 4

  “Ray’s dead, isn’t he?” I asked Jake as I slumped back against the display case.

  “No.”

  “Tom, then?”

  Jake nodded. “They just found his body at the bottom of Laurel Falls.”

  Laurel Falls was a small cascade that could barely be called a waterfall, though I knew that there was a twelve-foot drop from the edge that led straight down to the rocks below. It managed to make quite a racket as it hit the bottom, but I’d never thought of it as being particularly deadly, though there were posted signs to that effect all along the trail up to it, and the small collection pool above where the water collected before it fell. “That’s terrible. Did he fall over the edge from above?”

  “That’s what it looks like, or so the police chief told me on the phone a minute ago. If it’s any consolation, it appears that he didn’t suffer. He must have slipped on the wet rocks above the falls and gone over the edge. If I had to guess, based on what I heard from the police chief, his neck must have broken instantly. Those rocks can be tricky, especially in the evening.”

  “How can they be so sure that it happened last night? He could have been there for a while.” The thought of his body bobbing up and down in the falling water made me shiver. Sometimes it felt as though Death had zeroed in on April Springs, and I could feel a target itching on my back every now and then myself.

  “It turns out that Gary Timberlake was there last night just before dark, and he didn’t see anything.”

  “What was Gary doing out there by himself?” I asked. Gary was a senior at the high school, and though he had a fondness for my donuts that neared obsession, his young metabolism seemed to burn the calories up as fast as he could consume them.

  “Who says he was by himself?” Jake asked me with a shrug.

  “Who was with him?” I asked. Gary was a bit of a ladies’ man, so it didn’t surprise me that he’d visited the bottom of the falls with a girl. I was curious about his latest conquest, not out of some prurient interest, but because whoever was there could back up his story.

  “He’s not saying. I give him chops for keeping her name out of it. Maybe honor isn’t completely dead.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “That still doesn’t explain what Tom was doing at the top of the falls all by himself with darkness approaching.”

  “I’m not convinced that he was by himself any more than Gary was,” Jake said.

  “What makes you say that? Jake, do you think someone might have pushed him?”

  “I don’t know, Suzanne,” he said as he rubbed his chin in thought. “Maybe it’s nothing more than my gut wanting this to be something more than it is, but it seems unlikely that Tom Thorndike would be there alone, especially that time of evening.”

  “Do you think he was meeting a woman as well? It might make a lovely rendezvous, if you found a woman who wasn’t afraid of a hike.”

  “There’s no reason to suspect that he wasn’t there on a romantic mission as well,” Jake said simply.

  “But you don’t think so, do you?”

  “Woman, get out of my head,” my husband said with the hint of a grin.

  “Jake, you don’t think it’s possible that Ray pushed him off the edge, do you?”

  “Suzanne, I’m not even going to speculate about that. All I know is that Ray Blake is still missing, and now Stephen Grant has a dead body on his hands.”

  I handed him some coffee and a plain cake donut. “Here you go. You look like you could use something.”

  “I won’t say no to any of your treats,” he said as he took a big bite and then washed it down with a gulp of coffee. “Anyway, I wanted you to know what happened before you found out from someone else. I’m sorry. I know that once upon a time, he meant something to you.”

  “I appreciate that. It’s not as though I knew him anymore, but it still makes me sad.”

  “I get that,” Jake said as he finished his donut and polished off the coffee as well. “I’d better get back to the search for Ray, now more than ever.”

  “Why the rush?”

  “The newspaperman is still missing, and now the police are going to be tied up with investigating what happened to Tom. That cuts the search party dramatically, and I know that Sharon and Emma are going crazy with worry.”

  “You’re a good man. You know that, don’t you?”

  “If you say so,” he said sheepishly. “Thanks for breakfast.”

  “You’re very welcome. Let me know if you find anything about Ray,” I said.

  “You bet.”

  After Jake was gone, there was a bit of a lull, and I had time to ponder what might have really happened to Tom. Had it been an accident, or was Jake right? Could someone have pushed him? It seemed odd to me that Tom would decide to go hiking to the top of a waterfall as darkness approached, especially alone. Had someone gone with him, or had he been meeting someone there? For a surreptitious meeting, it wasn’t as bad a place as it might have seemed at first. After all, though there was a narrow path that led to the top, the common spot to observe the waterfalls was at the base, where the water made its dramatic tumble back into the stream. It would be difficult to see anyone above unless they were standing on the very edge, and the sound of the falling water alone would have made overhearing a conversation up there difficult. But who would want to see Tom dead? Was it about the money he’d come into, as these things sometimes were, or perhaps it was from an unsettled account in his past? I hated to think that it might be true, but could Ray have been the one meeting him up there? Had they struggled, and had Tom fallen back, or could it have been something more deliberate, more sinister? I didn’t want to think of the possibility that Emma’s dad might be mixed up in what had happened to Tom, but I couldn’t exactly rule it out, either.

  I was pulled from my thoughts by the front door opening as some of the members of the search party started straggling into the shop. They were all full of talk about the discovery of Tom’s dead body, but there wasn’t much mention of Ray’s absence at all. No one had put it together yet that they might be connected, and I hoped that Ray would be found alive before anyone did. I’d been the cause of suspicion coming from the town in the past myself, and I knew how hard it could be, not only on me but on my family as well.

  That just left me with one burning question.

  If Ray was innocent, then where was he?

  Chapter 5

  “Did you hear the news?” Marla Humphries asked me after walking into the donut shop an hour later.

  “Are you talking about them finding Tom Thorndike’s body at Laurel Falls?” I asked her.

&n
bsp; Marla waved a hand in the air. “That’s old news, Suzanne. Ray Blake is in the hospital. He’s been found.”

  “The hospital? What happened to him?”

  I wasn’t even positive that Marla had come into the donut shop to order anything, though she’d been known to place large orders in the past. She loved being the first to deliver gossip, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if she were going door to door. “Nobody knows for sure.”

  “Marla, why is he in the hospital?”

  “Apparently he got conked on the head with a rock, and he can’t remember a thing about the last twelve hours! Can you imagine?”

  “I can’t,” I said, wondering if my husband had heard the news yet. “Can I get you anything, Marla?” I asked her before I called Jake.

  She looked at the display cases and then shrugged. “Sure. Give me half a dozen donuts, your choice.”

  “It’s not much more to go ahead and get a full dozen,” I prompted her. I wanted to find out about Ray, but I still needed to make a living.

  “Okay. A dozen it is. Make it quick, though. I’ve got other errands to run,” she said as she pulled her wallet out and slid a twenty across the counter.

  I boxed her donuts, made her change, and the second she was out the door, I got out my cell phone to call Jake.

  It rang in my hand before I could make the call, though.

  “Suzanne, they found Ray,” my husband told me.

  “I just heard. How bad is he that he has to be in the hospital?”

  There was a puff of air on the other end of the line. “How could you possibly have heard about it that quickly? I just found out myself three minutes ago.”