Doughnuts & Deadly Schemes - Culinary Competition Mystery #3

Chapter 4

(Amy)

Amy yawned as she steered her Mini into the parking space next to Sophie's brown sedan. After opening Riverbend, which started life as a small coffee shop then expanded to a full-fledged café, the predominant color theme in the pastry chef's life was coffee brown—from the aprons that all of the café workers wore to the car Sophie drove. The color really did go nicely with the cream-colored logo and coffee-centered business. It just was much mellower than the bright colors that Amy used to decorate her life. Her car was dark blue, but her closet looked like a rainbow inside. Carla said a trip into the walk-in closet was like attending a tie-dye convention.

She wasn't supposed to work at the café that morning. Sophie had given her the day off. Amy needed to make her cake so she could drop it off for the bridal expo competition the next day, on top of whatever help Carla would need with the wedding. But all of the stress had left her wide-awake at 3:00 a.m. So she'd decided to go into work anyway. At the café, there was no such thing as too many workers. Maybe kneading some bread dough would give her energy and jump-start her brain.

Sophie must have discovered some kind of secret superfood energy booster. Somehow she always made it into the café before 5:00 a.m. and, after taking a break in the afternoon, came back to help with the dinner shift. She was the Energizer Bunny of pastry chefs. Or maybe a lot of pastry chefs were like her. Amy didn't know any others well enough to inquire about their sleep habits or lack thereof. There were half a dozen employee parking spots behind the café that eventually filled as more employees came in throughout the morning. However, she and Sophie were always the first ones to arrive. They liked it that way.

In the quiet kitchen each morning, they chatted about anything from Sunday suppers to what to do as a special date night while doing the prep work, like warming the ovens and mixing batters and doughs. Luke's murder would most likely be the morose topic of conversation once again that morning. The tragedy was too fresh to avoid.

Amy fit her key into the lock of the heavy, metal security door. She yanked on the handle. It wouldn't budge. She twisted the key again and gave a hearty tug. The door opened so easily she almost fell backward on her butt. Why had it been unlocked when she arrived? She and Sophie always locked it behind themselves when they were working alone.

Amy stepped inside. The windowless door thumped shut behind her. She blinked as her eyes adjusted to the bright lights reflecting off the stainless steel work surfaces and appliances. Sophie wasn't at her usual spot in front of the humongous floor mixer preparing bread dough. In fact, she wasn't anywhere in the kitchen.

Something was wrong. A coil of fear wrapped around her chest. Amy quietly set her purse on a nearby counter and grabbed a large butcher knife from the magnetic strip on the wall behind the sandwich prep area. She patted her jeans pocket to make sure her phone was there. Her mind was in full-tilt bad scenario invention mode. Luke's killer could be in the building with Sophie or the café's owner could be in one of the other rooms of the restaurant checking on something before starting the food preparation. Amy hoped for the innocent, danger-free situation, but she didn't want to holler out a greeting to reveal her presence if there was someone keeping Sophie away from the kitchen.

She tiptoed across the room and peeked into the dark office. Dense shadows loomed like ghosts in the corners, but there was nobody in the tiny space that held a desk and a couple of file cabinets. Amy took a deep breath and moved to the swinging metal doors that led to the dining room. The round windows weren't positioned low enough for petite people to look through, so she would have to use a more conspicuous method of seeing what was happening in the next room.