Wedding Bell Blunders: A Freshly Baked Cozy Mystery - Kathleen Suzette (parable of the sower read online TXT) 📗

then looked at the flavored creamers. They didn’t have anything new or fun in the creamer section at the moment, so I grabbed a vanilla creamer and put that in my shopping cart. I looked up and saw Jodi in the coffee aisle nearby, so I turned my cart around and headed down there. “Good morning, Jodi,” I said, smiling. “Fancy seeing you again.”

She hesitated, a bottle of sugar-free coffee syrup in her hand. She smiled. “Good morning, Allie. How are you today? Your wedding was lovely, by the way. I wanted to tell you that, but in the excitement of what happened to Richard, I completely forgot about it. And then I realized that I didn’t say it when you gave me a ride yesterday. Some days I am so forgetful.” She chuckled.

“That’s so kind of you to say,” I said, nodding. “We didn’t want a big fancy wedding, and we made the decision on such short notice that we didn’t do a lot for it. I was afraid it was kind of plain.”

She shook her head. “Nonsense. I thought it was lovely. You have a beautiful ballroom that was perfect for it, and the balloon animals were fun.”

I chuckled. “That was Mr. Winters. I had sworn to Alec that I did not want balloon animals at my wedding, but they turned out to be a lot of fun, and the guests really enjoyed it. I was just sorry about what happened to Richard. I still can’t get over the fact that he died.”

She frowned. “I can’t get over it, either. He seemed to be in good health, but then he ends up dying like that?” She shook her head and set the bottle of sugar-free vanilla syrup into her shopping cart. “I don’t understand it. I told Della that he must have been desperate to do something like take that medication.”

“That seems to be the mystery, isn’t it? Why on earth would he take that medication if he wasn’t a diabetic?”

She shrugged. “I think he was trying to get high off of it if you want to know the truth. You know how people are these days. There are all kinds of bizarre challenges going on with social media and people doing stupid things. I think it had to be something like that.”

I couldn’t deny that. It seemed like there was some new craze on the news all the time. And some of those crazes were deadly. “That would be awful if he was just fooling around with those drugs and ended up losing his life over it.”

“That’s exactly what I told Lisa.” She shook her head. “Honestly, when people get involved in drugs, they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s not something you can just pick up and put down whenever you want to.”

“That’s right. I’m so glad that neither of my kids ever got involved with them.”

She picked up a bottle of sugar-free English toffee coffee syrup and put it into her shopping cart. “I’ve got a coffee addiction. The only way that I can allow myself to drink all I want is if I use sugar-free syrups. Otherwise, I gain weight like crazy,” she confided and then laughed. Jodi probably carried an extra thirty pounds. I could see where if I wasn’t a runner, I would also carry an extra thirty pounds because of my love of sweetened coffee.

“I know what you mean. That’s why I’m a runner. I’ve got to run or else I’ll pay the price for using real sugar.”

She chuckled. “I’d take up running, but that’s hard, and I’m not into hard work. Oh, wait a minute. I work for a catering company. Apparently, I am into hard work.”

I chuckled with her. “It is a lot of work catering events, isn’t it?”

She leaned on her shopping cart. “You have no idea. Honestly, when I took this job, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I love it though. I like getting to meet new people, and all the cooking is fun.”

“It does seem like it would be fun. How did Richard like working for the catering company?” I needed to ask her about the rumors about him selling drugs at the back of their shop, but I didn’t want to be too obvious about it.

She shrugged. “He seemed to like it all right. But to be honest, he was a little lazy at times. He was always out back taking a smoke break. Or at least that’s what he said he was doing.” She looked at me knowingly.

Here we were now. I was going to find out what I needed to know. “What do you mean?”

She looked over her shoulder and then turned back to me. “He was doing some dicey things out behind the shop.”

“Dicey? I guess I’m not following you. What do you mean by that?”

“If Richard had a little extra something, and somebody wanted some of that extra something, he would sell it to him. I don’t know what kind of drugs he was doing. Honestly, I’ve never been involved in that sort of thing, and I don’t want to be. But before he would go on his break, he would text somebody, and then in a few minutes, a car would pull up in the back. We knew what he was doing. But he always acted innocent.”

“He was selling drugs? Did Della know he was doing that?”

She hesitated. “At first, she turned a blind eye to it. But it just got to be so obvious after a while. She got mad one day, and she fired him.”

“When was that?”

“About eight or nine months ago, I think. But three weeks later, he was back.”

“How did that happen?” I asked. Why on earth would she let him come back if she knew what he was doing?

She shrugged. “Della would never discuss