Nutella Crunch & Murder Read online

  Heather and Amy followed the source of the sound and found a ringing cell phone that had fallen behind a cabinet. It appeared to be Rudolph Rodney’s.

  The Body

  “You know that bad feeling that you had?” Amy asked. “Now I have it too.”

  Heather bit her lip. They were certain that the cell phone they found at the carpenter’s shop was Rudolph Rodney. However, they were not certain at all what had happened to him.

  “I think I should call Ryan,” Heather said. “But before I get the police involved, maybe we should make one more check to see if Mr. Mapleson is around. Maybe there is an explanation for Rudolph Rodney’s things being here.”

  “Like what?”

  “Probably one we won’t like,” said Heather. “Like something that involved a trip to the hospital.”

  “You’re right,” Amy said. “I don’t like that. But it might be a little more cut and dry than foul play.”

  “Mr. Mapleson,” Heather called out again.

  However, this time she headed towards the workshop in the back. She pushed open the door that said, “Employees Only” and called again.

  There was still no response.

  “That bad feeling got even worse,” admitted Amy.

  “His car is still here,” Heather said, more to herself than anything else.

  “Well, maybe he left it behind,” Amy said. “Either to get lunch or to ride to the hospital.”

  “I don’t think he would have left his shop unlocked,” Heather said. “I still lock up Donut Delights if no one was there. Even if I only expected to be gone for a few minutes. And I’d leave a note on the door explaining that I would be back soon.”

  “Well, that’s because you’ve had too many experiences with killers who like to lurk in the shadows and poisoners who sneak things into food.”

  “I still think most business owners would lock their shops up when they leave,” said Heather. “Especially if the shop is filled with furniture pieces as nice as these.”

  “Yeah,” Amy said. “When I’m not terrified out of my mind, I’d love to do some shopping for my home here. But now I’d just like to see if there’s a wooden baseball bat I could grab.”

  “You’re acting more scared than when we were talking about tarantulas,” Heather said.

  “Why did you have to mention tarantulas?” Amy asked, cringing. “I was already scared enough.”

  “I’ll go first,” Heather said.

  She had to admit that Amy’s idea of wanting a wooden weapon was starting to enter her mind too as she walked further into the workroom. There were large tables and shelves that could easily conceal someone hiding behind them.

  She noticed a restroom to the side of the space and then noticed something else. She ran towards it.

  “I guess when you gotta go, you gotta go,” Amy said. “But I wouldn’t want to use the facilities here if I could help it.”

  Heather didn’t remark on Amy’s bathroom comments. She was too focused on finding a hat on the floor. She picked it up and showed it to her friend.

  Amy looked pale. “That’s Rudolph Rodney’s hat, isn’t it?”

  “It looks like it,” Heather said.

  She turned it over and saw two initials sewed into the hat, proclaiming it to belong to RR.

  “Something bad happened, didn’t it?” said Amy.

  Heather tried to reassure her friend in the same way that Amy had tried to cheer her up earlier.

  “We don’t know that yet,” Heather said as they continued to search the workroom. “Maybe there is a perfectly innocent explanation for what happened. Maybe Mr. Mapleson was still at work when Rudolph Rodney needed to use the restroom. Maybe Mr. Mapleson was using a power tool that was loud and couldn’t hear him tell him that he lost his cell phone in the store, the power tool released a gust of wind that blew Rudolph Rodney’s hat away. And he didn’t want to get near the tools, so he just left.”

  They walked around the table. Amy held her scream in but turned to hug her friend, quickly.

  “Or Mr. Rankle was right,” Amy cried.

  Based on the angle of some shelves, they could only see his legs and some blood on the floor, but it appeared that a man was dead in front of them.

  “Poor Rudolph Rodney,” Amy cried. “He was just alive. We just spoke to him yesterday. He was talking about icky spiders. I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Can you call Ryan for me?” Heather asked, gently.

  “I guess so. Sure,” said Amy, loosening her grasp on her friend. “But why? What do you want to do?”

  “I want to look closer at the body,” Heather said.

  “That’s the grossest part of crime solving,” said Amy. “Can’t you let the medical examiner do that part?”

  “It’s not the cause of death I want to see. I want to be sure about who it is.”

  “You mean, you think it might not be…?”

  Instead of answering, Heather took a step towards the dead man. She needed to know if she had just lost a friend.

  As she looked at the man, she felt bad about how relieved she was.

  “It’s not Rudolph Rodney,” she said.

  “Then who is it?” asked Amy.

  “I’m guessing it’s Mr. Mapleson,” said Heather. “And the next question is who killed him?”

  Carpentry Crime Scene

  “I wish you would have called me sooner,” Ryan said as he appeared at the crime scene.

  Heather didn’t like appearing at the scenes before the caution tape was hung up, but she sometimes did find herself stumbling across a case like this. She and Amy had been waiting outside Mapleson’s Woodworks for the police to arrive. They didn’t want to contaminate the crime scene anymore and, truthfully, they didn’t want to stay too close to the dead man’s body. Because they had already touched Rudolph Rodney’s hat, they were still holding onto it. Somehow it was reassuring to keep something of his close by.

  Heather walked closer to Ryan and hugged him.

  “Now I wish I did too,” she replied. “But we were hoping that we could find Rudolph Rodney on our own. We weren’t expecting to come across a murder.”

  “It ended up being a terrible morning,” said Amy. “Even worse than I thought it would be when we supposed to look at spider toys. But now we’ve found a body, and we’ve lost a friend.”

  Ryan’s partner, Detective Peters, approached them. He was a young man who was eager to prove himself as a capable detective. He was sometimes unsure about the best course of action to take on a case but was becoming more confident in his abilities.

  He faltered as he looked at the hat in Amy’s hands.

  “That looks like Rudolph Rodney’s hat,” he said, solemnly.

  “Yes,” Heather said, quickly. “But he’s not the victim that we found.”

  “Or, at least, he’s not the dead guy,” Amy said, frowning. “We don’t know that he’s not a victim of something.”

  “The medical examiner is on his way,” Ryan said. “Why don’t you update us on what you know so far?”

  Heather recapped how they knew that Rudolph Rodney was supposed to arrive at the carpenter’s shop that morning to pick up his order and then was going to see them. They believed that he did make it to the shop because his cell phone and hat were found there. However, they didn’t know where he was now. He wasn’t at any of the places they expected he might be at. They weren’t sure who the victim was but assumed it was Mr. Mapleson.

  “We’ll make sure to confirm his identity as soon as we can,” said Ryan.

  “And then we’ll begin finding suspects,” said Peters. “Of course, we do know one person who was here today.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Heather.

  “I like Rudolph Rodney as much as you all do,” said Peters. “I think he’s a nice guy. But we know he was here and that a man was killed. We have to consider the possibility that he was involved.”

  “You think he could be the murderer?” Amy asked inc
redulously.

  Peters looked down at the ground.

  “It’s our job to consider all the possibilities,” Ryan said, defending his partner. “And if we didn’t know Rudolph Rodney, we would consider the fact that he fled the scene to be suspicious.”

  “I understand,” Heather said. “But we don’t know that he fled the scene. In fact, he might be in danger.”

  “I’ll make sure that all officers are on the watch to find him,” Ryan said. “And maybe then, we can have some more answers.”

  Heather nodded. “I can’t believe Rudolph Rodney is a killer. I hope we find him soon.”

  They heard a vehicle approaching, and Ryan waved.

  “That’s the medical examiner.”

  Heather and Amy weren’t anxious to see the body again, so they let Ryan and the medical examiner go into the workroom without them.

  They stayed in the front of the shop and showed Peters where Rudolph Rodney’s cellphone had been found. It was behind the furniture piece that was near the “Employees Only” door.

  “How did it get back there?” Peters mumbled to himself as he wrote something in his notebook.

  Noticing the Amy had no intention of going back into the workshop while the body was still there, so Heather suggested that they examine what was behind the counter.

  “Maybe we can determine if Rudolph Rodney made his purchase or not,” she said.

  “Good idea,” Peters agreed.

  They looked behind the counter and found many items that you would expect a business to have. There were register tape and bags. There were gloves and devices to make moving furniture easier. Inside the register, they found one receipt for the morning. It showed that R. Rodney had paid for his purchase at 9:05 a.m.

  “Look,” Amy said, showing them yesterday’s copy of Key West Key News that was still on the counter. “They have the article about Rudolph Rodney here too. I guess the next newspaper story isn’t going to be as happy.”

  “Let’s wait to tell Hope about a story until we know more details about it,” said Heather.

  She continued looking near the counter area until she found a bag that had fallen on the ground. She carefully removed the items from the bag. They were artistic renderings of branches crafted into shapes. One had a heart carved into it with the initials RR & CK.

  “I think these must be the items that Rudolph Rodney ordered,” said Heather. “And paid for.”

  “So, why did he leave without them?”

  “He also left without his hat and cell phone,” said Heather. “I don’t think these are things that he would willingly leave without.”

  “So, you think he was forced to leave?” asked Amy.

  “Unless he went on the run,” Peters added.

  Heather was grudgingly forced to admit, “I suppose that is a possibility.”

  Walking and Talking

  Usually, walking with her dog, Dave, cheered Heather up, no matter how difficult the case she was working on was. However, her concern for Rudolph Rodney wasn’t something that could be distracted.

  Dave would move close to his owner and lean on her every so often in between sniffing the sand and grass to show his support. Heather would lean down and pet him to reciprocate.

  Cupcake, the kitten, couldn’t contain her enthusiasm on these walks and was bounding ahead with Heather’s daughter, Lilly, trailing behind her, holding tight to the leash.

  Heather’s two senior friends, Eva and Leila, had offered to walk with them. She suspected that they wanted to keep an eye on her and present her with tissues if she began to cry. She appreciated the concern, but she didn’t feel like crying. She felt like taking action. Unfortunately, she didn’t know what other action to take at the moment.

  She was waiting for Ryan to call her back and let her know more about the autopsy results or if the police had found Rudolph Rodney while on patrol.

  She was trying to spend the time waiting productively by taking care of her animals and checking on her loved ones. However, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong with a different loved one – with the man who believed in her business and helped it to flourish here and who also felt like a member of the family.

  “Do you want to talk about it, dear?” Eva asked.

  “I think Lilly is far enough ahead that we won’t worry her,” Leila added.

  “Thanks,” Heather said. “But I don’t know what else to say. Rudolph Rodney is missing. He might be a suspect in the murder of Peter Mapleson. Or he might be in danger.”

  “You think that the two events are definitely connected though?” asked Eva.

  Heather nodded. “Based on what he saw at the scene, the medical examiner estimated that the time of death was between eight thirty and ten thirty this morning. We know that Rudolph Rodney paid for his items around nine o’clock. If Peter Mapleson was the one to ring up the order, then it proves he was alive at that time. Rudolph Rodney might have been there at the time of the murder. And, well, the police think it’s a possibility that he could have been the murderer.”

  “I can’t see a nice man like that being a killer,” said Eva.

  “I don’t want to believe it either,” said Heather. “He’s done so much for me.”

  “His actions weren’t completely selfless though. He is also making money due to your success,” Leila pointed out. “And your donuts are so delicious that they have a way of making people do crazy things to continue having them. Look at us!”

  That caused Heather to laugh. Eva and Leila had been her friends and loyal customers in Texas and had moved to Key West when her family did. They liked to joke that they came just for the donuts, but Heather knew it was also for the tropical climate and to be close to the people who felt like their second family.

  Heather’s cell phone rang, and she quickly picked it up. Dave stayed patiently by her side as she answered it. Eva and Leila acted as if they weren’t eavesdropping.

  “Do you have any news?” Heather asked.

  “Not about finding Rudolph Rodney, I’m afraid,” Ryan said. “But I do have some news about the murder weapon.”

  “That’s still something.”

  “The medical examiner feels confident that a hammer was used to kill the victim.”

  “There should be plenty of hammers in a carpentry shop,” Heather said. “I think I remember seeing several.”

  “I took an inventory of what was there,” said Ryan. “There were sixteen hammers in that shop of many different sizes and several different handle colors. There were eight with black handles, seven brown handles, and one red one.”

  “So, the killer might have grabbed one of the hammers in the shop and killed Peter Mapleson? It didn’t have to be a premeditated crime,” said Heather.

  “And that makes Rudolph Rodney even more of a person of interest in this case,” Ryan said, sadly.

  Heather thanked him for the information and turned back to her friends. She updated Eva and Leila as they walked to catch up to Lilly and Cupcake who was still bouncing around.

  “It sounds as if they think he might really have done this,” said Eva.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Heather. “But it doesn’t make sense to me. If he left his cell phone behind because he was afraid it could be traced, then it would show that he was cognizant of what was happening and made a plan not to get caught while escaping. But then why would he leave his hat behind where it was easily found?”

  “You don’t think he's on the run, do you?” asked Leila.

  Heather shook her head.

  “Oh dear,” Eva said. “And we didn’t even get a chance to tell him how much we liked reading about him in the paper.”

  “The paper!” Heather said, suddenly.

  Everyone turned to look at her, even Cupcake who was losing interest in a butterfly.

  “The paper with Rudolph Rodney’s picture on it was on the counter,” Heather said, thinking aloud. “And we don’t believe that Rudolph Rodney is a killer.”


  “That’s right,” said Eva.

  “If he didn’t kill Peter Mapleson, then someone else was at the shop that morning. And I think that person kidnapped Rudolph Rodney.”

  “Kidnapped?” Leila said, raising a hand to her mouth.

  “That would explain why he lost his hat and why it was by the bathroom. It was knocked off when he was being abducted after using the facilities,” said Heather. “I think that Peter Mapleson rang up Rudolph Rodney’s order and then let him use the employee bathroom. Then, someone came in to hurt Mr. Mapleson. He didn’t realize that anyone else was there at the time. Then, the killer learned that Rudolph Rodney was there. When he saw that he was an important man because of the paper, he decided to take a hostage.”

  “Poor Rudolph!” said Eva.

  Heather bit her. “If that’s the case, then we need to find the killer even quicker than usual. Rudolph Rodney’s life could depend on it.”

  The Apprentice

  Tim Morris looked nervous when he entered the police station the next day. He was Peter Mapleson’s apprentice, and Ryan had asked him to come in bright and early.

  Heather was anxious to talk to him too. She was certain that finding Peter Mapleson’s killer was the key to finding Rudolph Rodney. While the detectives tracked down Mr. Mapleson’s out-of-state family to inform them of the death, she was glad that she thought about whether there had been other employees who worked at the shop. When she checked in with Ryan, she told him about her idea, and he had found Tim.

  Heather closed the box of Nutella Crunch Donuts that she had brought to the police station that day much to the delight of the police chief. He had taken a few of the snacks back to his office, while the others waited for the witness.

  Amy and Peters quickly finished the donuts that they were eating when Tim entered the station. Ryan thanked the young man for coming in to talk to them.

  “Well, I had to,” Tim said. “If Mr. Mapleson is really dead, then I had to.”