Madeleine Murder Read online

  Madeleine Murder

  Sandi Scott

  Contents

  Madeleine Murder

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Letter from the Author

  Praline Murder: Book 4 in the Seagrass Sweets Cozy Mystery Series.

  VANILLA-SCENTED MADELEINES

  Madeleine Murder

  A Seagrass Sweets Cozy Mystery

  Book 3

  Copyright © 2017 Sandi Scott and Gratice Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at [email protected]

  Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction

  Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Megan Theodoro.

  Created with Vellum

  1

  Ashley Adams’s stomach growled. She was starving, which was made worse by being surrounded by delicious food. But she and Patty had spent too many hours cooking and baking for her to eat their wares—she’d already taste tested everything to death. Plus, she wanted to try and see what the competition had to offer.

  The Seagrass Days annual festival, held the last weekend in July, had grown from a handful of tents for local businesses to a real summer social event that drew in people from all over the county and state. Two rows of vendors, charities, and businesses stretched along Cleveland Park, with a third row dedicated to food and drink.

  Ashley Adams and her friend Patty LaFontaine were sharing a tent for their two businesses, both based on French cuisine, Ashley’s Seagrass Sweets and Patty’s The Southern Bird. It was a good setup and they were full of excited energy, even if they had been up all night doing prep work for the last several days.

  Ashley’s offerings included a variety of macaron flavors, French yogurt cake topped with peach or praline sauce, sour cream chocolate espresso cake, key lime tartlets, madeleines with salted caramel-chipotle sauce, and shortbread cookies decorated with Texas flags. She always considered it a success when someone stopped by to buy a dessert and then stopped back again a few minutes later. It had happened three times already, and it was only two o’clock Friday afternoon.

  “What do you think about food trucks?” Patty asked, picking up an earlier conversation. She was dressed in a blue-and-white Breton shirt, capris, sandals, and black sunglasses that looked like they belonged on Audrey Hepburn.

  “It’s a big investment,” Ashley said. “But if we got a food truck together, we’d have a lot more opportunities to work with local wineries that don’t have their own kitchens.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Patty said. “Actually, I was mostly thinking about the wine.”

  Ashley’s stomach growled again. Patty laughed. “Want me to fix you a plate? You’re sitting at the table of one of the best French caterers in Seagrass.”

  “The only French caterer in Seagrass,” Ashley corrected her. Patty’s menu today was roast chicken, salade niçoise, a chilled tomato soup with crème fraîche, and a charcuterie plate with grilled french bread slices or lemon-chipotle aioli potato salad on the side.

  Too bad that Ashley had been eating from the same delicious menu for two days straight.

  “I think I’m going to wander around the festival for the next half hour or so. Is that okay?”

  Patty smiled and glanced over toward another food truck, Smokeground Barbecue. The owner, Smoke Daddy Lee, saw her looking and waved from the window. The two of them were a new couple, still basking in the flirtatious fun of early romance.

  “As long as you don’t eat with the enemy,” Patty said drily.

  Ashley tried not to sound too concerned. “Everything going okay between you two?”

  “Only that he’s the most competitive man I’ve ever met. Including our old chef in Paris.” Ashley and Patty had met working together at L’Oiseau Bleu, a medium-sized bistro in Paris, France.

  Ashley said, “Ah, Chef Lemaire. The man who once threw a tray of my macarons across the room for being too perfect when his had all cracked. All because he was angry over a failed love affair. Thanks for reminding me.”

  Ashley’s stomach growled a third time.

  Patty said, “Go on, get out of here. I have it. Don’t you trust me?”

  “I would trust you with an oven full of soufflés in an earthquake, you know that,” Ashley said.

  “If we got a food truck, we could sell crêpes,” Patty called out as Ashley started walking away.

  “Stop torturing me!” Ashley laughed.

  She took a quick trip around the food trucks, seeing a few familiar faces but also a lot of trucks from out of town and even out of state, according to their license plates. Because of all the events she’d been catering lately, she was less surprised than she would have been even a few months ago. Seagrass was growing a big enough appetite to draw in food vendors from outside their small town.

  She waved at Smoke Daddy as she went by, but settled on a red Cajun/Creole food truck called Betty’s Bayou Cuisine, where she bought a crawfish pistolette—a fried french bread roll stuffed with crawfish étouffée filling.

  “It looks delicious!” Ashley told the woman working the truck. She had short white hair, silver-rimmed glasses, and an infectious smile.

  “Thanks! I’ll tell the chef. Who is, by the way, me. Betty Remondet.” She reached out of the window to give Ashley’s hand a shake. “You’re the sweet little thing from Seagrass Sweets, ain’tcha?”

  Ashley raised an eyebrow but shook Betty’s hand firmly. “Those are my desserts, yes.”

  “Gimme a business card, why don’t you? And hold on to one of those slices of chocolate cake. I’ll need a free sample before I start passing your name around the festival circuit as a go-to dessert girl.”

  Ashley fluttered her debit receipt between her fingers. “Sorry, free samples are to noncharging food trucks only.”

  Betty grinned wider as Ashley dug out a business card from her wallet. “Couldn’t hurt to try.”

  Ashley gave her a friendly wave and moved down the line of food trucks toward an empty picnic table with a view that went past a few sandbars and all the way out to the Gulf. The sandwich was very good, crunchy on the outside and hot in the center. The french bread itself was okay, but had an inconsistent crumb—hers was much better. To be fair, though, it might just be due to the excellent ovens at the shared commercial kitchen space that she and Patty used, Fresh Start Kitchens.

  She finished the sandwich, then decided to look through the vendor area. If she was being honest with herself, she wasn’t just shopping—she was looking for Ryan.

  They were old friends who had recently started dating.

  However, they hadn’t kissed yet, and she was starting to get worried.

  At any rate
, he was working as an orange-shirted volunteer at the festival, helping to keep the vendors’ computers and debit-machine wireless transactions secure so that their money matters stayed organized and out of trouble. He’d stopped by first thing that morning, but she hadn’t seen him since.

  Looking around, she caught sight of someone in an orange shirt, but it wasn’t Ryan. A handsome, dark-haired hunk of a guy was talking to a woman at one of the ATM machines set up for the festival. The woman had a double-wide stroller with two differently sized toddlers, and all three of them were crying.

  “But I had three hundred dollars in my account, and now it says it’s all gone!”

  “I understand, ma’am. These things happen to all of us. I can’t have you pounding on the ATM, though. That won’t solve anything. You need to speak to your bank or the police.”

  Ashley felt sorry for the woman and double-checked her wallet to make sure she still had it.

  She turned around at the end of the row of booths to the next aisle over and caught the sound of the open-mike tent. At one end of the festival was a stage where professional musicians serenaded an audience; at the other end was the open-mike stage, where amateurs crooned karaoke to the crowd. One moment a singer with an operatic voice might be tackling a Dolly Parton number, the next a tone-deaf howler might try to conquer Guns N’ Roses.

  A woman in a teal crocheted cap with seashell-blonde dreadlocks and a sea glass dolphin necklace chewed on a knuckle as she paced outside the tent. Ashley smiled in encouragement at her, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. Inside the tent, a guy was singing a George Strait song—perfectly in tune but completely off tempo.

  She kept wandering.

  About halfway up the next aisle of booths and tents was a man who seemed dedicated to the art of taking it easy. His handmade lawn chair was not only fully reclining, but it also had a drink holder, a portable electric fan, and an umbrella. The older man wore a battered black leather top hat decorated with a small red-brown feather sitting on his light brown dreadlocks, and his full beard was streaked with gray. He wore a khaki fisherman’s vest with about a thousand pockets, and when he smiled at her, his mouth was full of bright, white teeth.

  “Hello there, missy,” he said.

  “Um, hello?”

  “You’re looking for a dog collar, aren’t you?”

  Ashley blinked at him—she hadn’t had anything in mind as she was walking around the vendor area, but as a matter of fact she could use a new one. Dizzy, her pet Labrador-hound cross, had a habit of wearing out her collars pretty quickly.

  She looked down at the tables surrounding the man; his appearance was so distracting that she hadn’t even noticed what he was selling. What he sold was hemp products—lots of twisted, knotted jewelry, clothing made out of hemp, hemp soap, hemp seeds, hemp moisturizer, hemp sunscreen, hemp oil, and pretty much all other things hemp, too.

  The man had leaned forward so that his reclining chair snapped upright without spilling his drink. His hand hovered over a few different types of colorful dog collars. He clucked his tongue as he talked to himself.

  “Not the chicks in the baskets, not the red stars, not the plain one, not the one with the tribal marks, not the paisley one…”

  Ashley interrupted him. “How did you even know I had a dog?” she asked.

  He tapped the side of his nose.

  She did not smell of dog. She had even changed pants in the changing room at Fresh Start Kitchens. If there was a dog hair on her, it was from one of the many dogs at the festival, not Dizzy.

  “This one,” he said. He’d picked up a multicolored collar, one printed with a cute blue-and-white design that looked more like Provençal pottery than paisley. Fat little birds touched beaks, surrounded by green leaves.

  It was cute.

  “How much?” she asked.

  “Sixteen dollars,” he said. “You can get it off the internet for twelve ninety-nine plus shipping, if you care to look it up on your phone. I’ll wait. Shipping’s six dollars, though.”

  Ashley snorted. She felt like she was getting scammed into buying exactly what she wanted. She took out her wallet. “Do you take cards?”

  “That I do, little missy,” the man said. Ashley was relieved. She didn’t want to have to venture back to the scene with the angry mom beating the ATM.

  Pulling a stuffed animal that looked vaguely doglike to Ashley from under the table, the man continued, “I may not look it, but I’m a modern businessman.”

  The stuffed animal had a credit card reader between its paws. Cute.

  “I didn’t mean to imply differently,” Ashley said. “Is this your first year here?”

  He leaned forward farther and took her card, then shook her hand. “My name’s Sparrow Soulbrother. And you are…” He checked her debit card. “Ashley Adams. Nice to meet you. And no, this isn’t my first year in Seagrass. I’ve been coming to camp and eat BBQ at the Smokeground for years now. Might come back down in the winter and see if it’s worth renting a storefront for a few months while it’s cold up north.”

  Ashley took the machine from him to enter her PIN, carefully shielding the machine from prying eyes as she did so. “I really like your machine holder—it looks like a floppy-eared puppy.”

  She declined the receipt and then handed the machine back to him. Just then, a young man with beads in his hair and a weather-beaten guitar across his back walked by and said, “Hey, Sparrow. Your van has a flat.”

  Sparrow made a face. “Did not know that,” he said. “Spare’s flat, too. You know anybody that might be able to help me out?”

  The younger man said, “I’ll ask around.”

  “You could ask one of the volunteers,” Ashley said. “They’re in the orange shirts.”

  “You see one, send ’em my way, would ya?” Sparrow asked the young man.

  “Will do,” the man responded as he walked away.

  Sparrow wrapped up the collar in a paper bag and handed it to her. “When you sell things by hand, missy, you have to learn to size people up in a heartbeat. Who just wants to browse, who’s got the itch to buy. What kind of person they are. What tastes they might have. I knew you loved dogs by the way that you were barely noticing the people around you—but you did notice each and every one of the four dogs that you passed on the way to my tent. I didn’t know you had a dog until you blinked at me like I was some kinda magician. If you hadn’t had a dog, or if you didn’t need a dog collar—well, you would have given me the ‘no, thank you’ smile and walked on by. After that it was just a matter of noticing that you were wearing chef clogs and picking out what looked like a dish pattern that I remember from my grandma’s house when I was a kid.”

  “That’s incredible,” she said. “I mean, really, really impressive.”

  He nodded at her and leaned back in his lawn chair so that the feet kicked up. Taking a drink out of his water bottle, he added, “You want to impress your friends with how quick I can size ’em up, just bring ’em on by.”

  “I just might.” She left him with a smile on her face.

  2

  The memory of the strangely insightful hemp products seller stuck with Ashley all day. She caught herself watching the people passing by their booth and trying to guess what they would order, either from her and Patty, or whether they would order from them at all.

  Toward the end of the evening, after the afternoon sun had faded a little, the supper rush was dying down and—more to the point—most of their wares were completely sold out, they started to pack up and load their equipment onto the small trailer they’d borrowed for the weekend.

  Patty said, “You’ve been quiet all day. Something on your mind?”

  Ashley blinked. She hadn’t realized that her intense scrutiny of the festivalgoers was showing. Sparrow Soulbrother had made it look easy to take in a person with a glance; she was having more trouble. In fact, she had given herself a headache from staring at people all day.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I�
��ve just had one of the most intense people-watching days ever.”

  She explained about the hemp collar that she’d bought for Dizzy, who was being watched by a high school neighbor, Maia Pineda, for the day. “And then, after some musician came up to him and told him that he had a flat tire, he explained exactly how he knew what I wanted.” She repeated the explanation.

  Patty lifted one delicate eyebrow with a skeptical twitch. “You mean, he guessed, and you confirmed it by your reactions.”

  “Yes. He was a real Sherlock Holmes.” Ashley chuckled and started to wipe down the tablecloths. “You know, I wish I’d had Dizzy with me so I could see if she liked him or not, too.”

  “Why? Don’t you think he would have charmed her?”

  Ashley laughed again. “Probably. He likely carries around doggie treats just to put the dogs’ suspicions off the scent.”

  Patty lifted the last of her electric warming pans off the table and sighed. “It’s been a long day, and the weekend has only just started. I did a lot more prep work for tomorrow than I thought I would need, but if the crowds are anything like today, it’s not going to be enough.” She laughed at herself. “Listen to me. I broke even for the whole weekend at two o’clock this afternoon, and I’m complaining.”

  “Can you make it through lunch rush tomorrow at least?” Ashley looked around and realized both of them had emptied their stacks of reserve trays and pans already.

  “I hope so. What about you?”

  “Oh, I’m gonna be up all night,” Ashley said. “I’m almost completely wiped out. I have some things in the freezer at Fresh Start, but definitely not enough to make it through the day.”