A Killer Latte Read online

  The shadow of someone waving from the other side put me a little more at ease, since it wasn’t so unusual for someone to show up to hang out while I got the coffeehouse ready to open. By the look of the spiky shadow of hair on the top of their head, I knew it had to be my aunt.

  “Aunt Maxi.” I quickly opened the door to let her in. “Get in here.”

  She put her bike in the bike rack.

  When she hurried past me, I couldn’t help but look down the boardwalk to see if anyone was there. There was a silhouette walking toward the coffeehouse.

  “Roxy, is that you?” Loretta’s voice echoed, making Lake Honey Springs ripple where she’d already scared the fish.

  “Good morning, Low-retta,” I greeted her and held the door open, locking it behind me after she entered.

  “Have you heard anything? What did Stephen say?” Aunt Maxi had already gone around the counter and taken the carafes for the coffee bar and put them in place before fixing herself a cup. It was nice how she knew the opening chores and automatically did them even though she didn’t work here.

  “Low-retta, you want a cup?” she asked.

  Loretta nodded and met her over at the coffee stand, where they poured all sorts of extras into the mugs. They made their way over to the counter, where I’d gotten some of the items from the kitchen to put in the display cases. I had to fill items like our usual quiches, doughnuts, and muffins, along with displaying the small chalkboards with the daily special written on them.

  “I’ve heard nothing about my jewels, and you can print that.” Loretta pointed to Granny’s hobo purse she’d flung on the counter. “I know I’m not going to get those back. What kidnapper would be stupid enough to give them back when they give back Daisy?”

  “If they give back Daisy,” Aunt Maxi noted over the top of the steam rolling up from her coffee.

  Loretta’s fingertips picked at the edges of her short black hair. “You think you can wrangle me up a little breakfast? After all, I’m helping Maxi with finding Daisy.”

  “You two?” I wagged my finger between them when I walked over to the quiches to grab Loretta one of the tomato-and-feta-cheese slices, her favorite.

  Pepper had gone back into the kitchen to finish up the kibble.

  “We got some photos to look after.” Loretta had a funny way with words, and you would never know she was wealthy. “So, you got those photos?”

  Aunt Maxi dug down in the hobo purse and pulled out an envelope, and just as Loretta went to take it, she snatched it back.

  “I want to make sure we have a mutual understanding.” Aunt Maxi’s eyes lowered. Loretta gave her a blank stare. “You give me and only me the exclusive interview when this is all said and done to add to my piece for the People magazine. I mean, every single piece of evidence, shred of detail, nothing is left unturned that they find out about your jewelry.”

  “Yes, Maxi.” Loretta put one hand on her chest and one in the air like she was pledging allegiance. “Hand to God. Now, give me the photos.”

  “Fine.” She smacked the envelope into Loretta’s outstretched hand. “I’ve got them categorized for you from the beginning to the end. Have you talked to Crissy Lane, Roxy?”

  “I have not.” I glanced over at the table where Loretta had emptied the envelope. There were hundreds of photos.

  “It’s gonna take you a few to go through them. But I noticed a few people hung around while the movie was being filmed.” Aunt Maxi started to point out photos she was talking about. “Look at this one.”

  Aunt Maxi handed me a photo of the pregnant woman Patrick had been talking to that morning. “You see that envelope she handed that man?” Aunt Maxi asked. “See anything different?”

  “Yeah.” Upon closer inspection, I said, “It’s like the others.” I saw nothing different.

  “No it’s not. You think it is, but there’s writing on this one.” She pointed out something very faint on the photo.

  “Now you’re grasping at straws.” I shook my head and looked at Loretta. I picked up a couple of more photos. Mostly they were of Daisy talking to the key grip or camera crew. “I guess you’re going to need to give me a description of all the jewels you let them borrow, the agreement you had them sign, and the value,” I said in an exhausted admission that I would take on her case.

  “Agreement?” Loretta’s head jerked up from looking at the photos. Her hands fell to the table. “What kind of agreement?”

  “You did have them sign some sort of contract about using your jewelry, didn’t you?” I asked. She didn’t need to answer. From the pause and the look on her face, there was not an agreement.

  “No. But she’s clearly wearing my jewelry in the kidnapper’s photo.” She jabbed a finger at Aunt Maxi. “Show her, Maxine.”

  “Where did you get the kidnapping photo?” I directed my question to Aunt Maxi.

  “From Stephen’s phone.” She nodded.

  “You have access to his phone?” I questioned.

  “Nope, but he’s been using the Cocoon Hotel’s business center. I’d seen him in there a time or two since I’d been keeping a timeline of the events of filming for my People magazine post.” She looked over at Loretta. “I thought it would be a nice added touch to the bottom of the pages of my spread on how they worked.”

  “That would be a nice touch to an article,” Loretta said. She and Aunt Maxi carried on.

  “Back to my question about the photo.” I hurried her along. I still had the crumb cakes to make and get into the oven before we opened.

  “He has an iPhone and would plug it into the computer in the business center. I wondered if there was anything transferred to the hard drive.” Aunt Maxi had really gotten into this article, and apparently there wasn’t anything that was going to hold her back. “I pretended to be a guest. So when he left the business center, I got on that computer he’d used. He never logged off.”

  “He never logged off?” This had gotten interesting. “What site was he on?”

  “I don’t know. How am I supposed to know that?” Her eyes snapped at me.

  “Oh, I thought you were going to tell me something we could use for Loretta’s case.” I waved her off and headed to the swinging door of the kitchen. “But you still didn’t tell me how you got the photo.”

  “His Google photos were up on the screen.” She acted so nonchalant. “And it just so happened, the photo was up there.”

  “Let me see it again,” Loretta begged. “I’ve got to get those back.” Her brows dipped, and her mouth frowned.

  Aunt Maxi dug deep into her hobo bag and retrieved her phone. She punched the screen with her finger, way harder than she needed to.

  “That necklace was one of my favorites in my collection.” Loretta had taken Aunt Maxi’s phone and used her fingers to enlarge the photo.

  “We are going to need that photo for our case,” I pointed out to Loretta and headed into the kitchen to get the crumb cakes made.

  While they concocted their plan, I gathered the rest of the ingredients that included butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, baking powder, salt, and the blueberries.

  The electric mixer roared to life, letting my stress float away. I could feel my shoulders slipping from my ear lobes, which it felt like they’d grown to over the last twelve hours. The combination of the butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla warmed the air with a fresh scent of happiness that would soon be touching the souls of all customers who came into the coffeehouse today.

  Soon after I added the milk and gently folded in the blueberries, the batter was in the lightly greased baking pans, and into the oven they went.

  I could hear Aunt Maxi and Loretta in what I would like to say was a discussion of something, but their volume told me it was much more of a lively type of discussion, if you know what I mean. I set the timer and headed back out to see what they weren’t agreeing on.

  “What’s going on with you two?” I picked up a few of the photos.

  Aunt Maxi had taken photos of t
he set along the boardwalk from the parking lot. She had photos of the trucks coming in and the big limousine buses carrying the actors when they first arrived in town.

  She had several photos of me standing in front on the makeshift red carpet the Southern Women’s Club. Stephen Lemon had asked me to be the coffee and sweet supplier for the production company. There were photos of us shaking hands.

  The photos did show Stephen doting on Daisy, his hand never leaving the small of her back in any of the photos.

  “Have you no shame?” I asked Aunt Maxi when I noticed she’d taken a photo of Daisy in the coffeehouse’s small bathroom.

  “Girl talk.” Aunt Maxi shrugged. “She needed a bottle of water.” Aunt Maxi pointed to the hobo purse before she dug down and fetched out one of those tiny bottles of water. “She takes all sorts of supplements to keep her appetite suppressed. Keep her body in perfect form, she said. She takes all sorts of homeopathic vitamins, and that’s what she was doing in there, so no one would see her. Takes them the same time every day, she said.”

  “That’s fine and dandy,” I said but quickly noted to ask her husband about those vitamins, because if she was taking some sort of expensive vitamins, maybe the kidnapper knew that too. “But she clearly didn’t pose for this one.”

  “Yeah. I was taking it through the crack of the door while I was in the stall.” She laughed. “Paparazzi style.”

  “These are great,” I said about the photos she’d taken of the boardwalk. “You do have a good eye.”

  I looked through the ones where Aunt Maxi was positioned behind the counter of the coffeehouse that faced the wall of windows to the outside, capturing the sun filtering through and making a natural spotlight on Daisy. “She is beautiful.”

  “Sickeningly so.” Aunt Maxi jumped up and rushed over to the swinging kitchen door when the timer went off. “I’m starving. This detective work makes me hungry.”

  As I laughed at her comment, my eye caught something in one of the photos that Aunt Maxi had taken at the lake, pointing the lens up toward the boardwalk.

  Even though the lens was focused on Daisy standing next to one of the tractor trailers, there was an old pickup truck that looked eerily like the one I’d seen. The one that the kidnapper had put Daisy in.

  “Aunt Maxi.” I jerked around, nearly knocking the hot red velvet cookie from her hand. “Sorry.” I grimaced. “What kind of truck do you see in this photo?” I shoved it in her face.

  “Did you find something?” Loretta had plopped one of the red velvet cookies Aunt Maxi had put on a plate in the middle of the photos on the table. Loretta took a couple of steps toward us and looked over our shoulders.

  “I think this is the truck the kidnapper drove.” I handed it to her.

  “To think that my photos might have the kidnapper’s truck.” Aunt Maxi said it like it was a prize or something. Then Loretta took the photo.

  “I see it. I see the truck.” There was some excitement in Loretta’s tone.

  “In this particular shot, I was going for the light and how Daisy played it like it was a spotlight on her when the camera wasn’t even rolling. She was so good at doing that,” Aunt Maxi said. “I didn’t even notice the truck.”

  “Yeah. I see a red truck.” Loretta nodded, both of us ignoring Aunt Maxi as she talked about the angles and stuff I didn’t know or care to know about at this moment. She took the photo from me.

  “Is there a white strip there?” I asked.

  “Yep. I believe this is an old 1979 Ford.” Loretta brought the photo up to her face a little more.

  “How do you know the year?” I asked and went to the other side of her to look.

  “You see this right here?” She pointed to the bend in the back passenger panel over the top of the exhaust pipe. “That is where a red reflector went. Right here.” She pointed to the front passenger panel over the front wheel. “That is a yellow one. These were made for the 1979 Ford.”

  My jaw dropped. From diamonds to trucks. Who knew Loretta Bebe was so knowledgeable?

  “I grew up with four brothers. Don’t look so shocked. I’m not stupid. Just a lady.” She drew her chin up in the air and looked down her nose at me.

  “Have you ever seen this truck around here before?” I asked and headed back to the kitchen to check on the crumb cakes. I had to cut a couple of them into pieces while keeping a couple whole to display.

  “No.” Loretta answered loud enough for me to hear her. “I pay no attention to things of that nature.”

  “Let me see.” I heard Aunt Maxi’s voice.

  “You’re so rude!” Loretta’s voice carried.

  I shoved my way through the kitchen’s swinging door with both hands carrying the crumb cakes.

  “Where did Aunt Maxi go?” I asked when I noticed she wasn’t in there.

  “That crazy coot. She grabbed the photo from me and took off.” Loretta rubbed her hand. “She’s got no manners. I have no idea how you turned out so good since it was her that you spent your summers with.”

  I smiled, but my mind was reeling. What was Aunt Maxi thinking? I wondered.

  I headed back to the kitchen to retrieve the doughnuts I’d taken from the freezer to the oven, along with more muffins and quiches, so everything would be ready to replenish when the morning crowd came in. I heard the bell ding over the coffee shop door. There was some mumbling.

  “People magazine?” Crissy lifted her hand to her chest and looked at me when I came back out of the kitchen. “Oh my. That is wonderful.”

  “What’s wonderful?” I asked and headed over to the brewing teapots. The tea bar had just been stocked with several different teas, and it was almost time to open.

  “That crazy Maxine Bloom almost ran over poor Crissy a while ago, muttering something about People magazine.” Loretta shrugged. “I do look at People online every morning.”

  I flipped the Closed sign on the door to Open. The three of us continued our conversation about Honey Springs and how awful it was that Daisy had been taken.

  “Are you headed back to work today?” I asked Crissy.

  “No. I’m here because Spencer asked me to come and answer some more questions.” She shrugged.

  We all looked up when Spencer Shepard walked into the coffeehouse along with a couple of the remaining crew members he’d not been able to interview last night.

  “Hey, Roxy.” He nodded. His eyes scanned down the counter and fixed on the red velvet cookies.

  “You can have some.” I had the joy of seeing something as simple as a cookie bring a sheriff like Spencer to act like a little boy. “I’ll get you a cup of coffee too.”

  He and the women had some polite conversation while I asked the crew members if they would like to have some coffee and something to eat.

  “Did you get my jewels back?” Loretta asked Spencer.

  “Did you file a report?” he asked her back.

  “Roxy, did we file a report?” She leaned over and looked at me past Spencer’s shoulder.

  “I don’t know. Did you?” I asked. “I told you all the things we need.”

  “Fine.” She took the last sip from her mug. “I’ll be back. I’m going to the station to file a report.”

  “I hope you don’t mind if I question them in here.” Spencer had come back to the counter where I was putting two mugs of hot coffee, a piece of crumb cake, and a piece of the bacon quiche on a tray to carry over to the couple of crew members. “I don’t want them to leave the scene, and I’m thinking about taking all the police tape down so you can at least try to get back to normal around here.”

  “Normal?” I laughed. “I’m not sure if anything will be normal until Daisy is found.”

  “Crissy, I’ll take your statement first.” Spencer pointed over to the café table nearest the counter. “Please state your name and how long you were with Daisy Lemon and why.”

  “My name is Crissy.” She leaned over the table and spoke very clearly into the tape recorder. “C-R-”


  “No need to spell it,” he told her. “Just talk like we are here having some coffee.”

  “Why didn’t you say that?” Crissy sat back, a little more relaxed. “Like a date?” She winked at the hunky, single sheriff.

  He stared at her.

  “I was contacted by Daisy’s agent, Emma Tomi, something or other. You know those Hollywood types with them funny names.” She talked with her hands. “Anyways, she said they liked to use locals as much as they could when they came to film in small towns and that she would like me to do Daisy’s hair and makeup on the set. Of course”—Crissy’s face was as bright as a new lamp bulb, lit up with pride—“I said yes. But there was a catch. They sent me the dye for Daisy’s hair and the products to use, along with specific instructions. She had to have a special dye. Something about chemicals or something. But I told her I had something better. She told me to use mine because she didn’t care about the chemicals anymore.”

  “You mean to tell me that blond hair of hers comes from a bottle?” I asked, interrupting.

  “Mm-hmm.” Crissy’s lips pinched and her head nodded, scooting herself up to the edge of the chair. “I couldn’t believe it either. But don’t you worry. I didn’t use hers. I used mine, and I think she looked great.”

  “Ladies.” Spencer clapped his hands for us to get back to the interview, and both of us jumped. “Please, Crissy, stay focused and continue.”

  “Fine.” She sat back and crossed her arms. “Anyways, I show up at four a.m. It’s a long day for her.”

  A few customers had come in, the usual teachers that came in before they headed to school. They always used the coffee bar and rarely got a specialty drink, which meant they didn’t need me. Their money clinked in the jar, and off they went.

  “I sit in the trailer and wait for her to come back between takes. Then if there’s a media event, like when she comes out and hands out her photos, I have to go out there and make sure she’s touched up before someone takes a photo.” Crissy’s head slowly turned toward the crew.

  “You mentioned photos. Is that what she was handing out to the crowd?” Spencer asked.