Pumpkin Spice Lies: A Pumpkin Hollow Mystery, book 16 by Kathleen Suzette (new books to read .txt) 📗

the muffins in it. I turned and looked at Ethan. “What are you up to this morning?”

He grinned. “At the risk of looking like a walking cliché, I came to buy donuts for the station.”

Angela chuckled. “Don’t you worry about anybody making fun of you for eating donuts, Ethan. I eat plenty of them myself.”

“I’m not worried. I’m going to eat donuts regardless of what anybody says,” Ethan said, and wrapped his arm around me and gave me a one-armed hug. “I’ve missed you.”

“I miss you too,” I said, rubbing my nose against his arm. “We need to get together for dinner again. Soon.”

He nodded. “We sure do. I’ll try to get off at a decent time tonight or tomorrow night. Maybe we can go and get something then.”

I laid my head against his arm. “That sounds great.”

Angela finished filling the box of donuts for me and I paid for my order and waited, hanging around for Ethan to buy his. Angela filled three boxes with donuts for Ethan and after he paid for them, we stepped out onto the sidewalk.

“So what’s going on with you?” he asked me, holding the three boxes in one hand.

“Not a lot. But Angela isn’t the first person to tell me about Betty Mays and Hailey discovering that she was having an affair. Her friend Shayna came in to apply for a job at the candy store, and she told me the same thing. Makes me wonder if Hailey was telling a lot of people about it and it made Betty angry.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a possibility. No one would be too happy about someone exposing them if they were having an affair.”

I filled him in on everything I found out of the past couple of days and I waited to see what he would say about it.

“I know Angela would like to believe that her niece was an angel, but there aren’t many people besides her parents and her aunt that believe that. Sounds like she was running around sticking her nose into things that didn’t concern her.”

“I also think you should stop by and say hello to her college teacher, Frank Gillespie.”

“He’s already on my list,” he said. “He was one of the last people who saw her alive.”

I looked at him, one eyebrow raised. “Really? Who told you that?”

“I traced her last couple of days and she had gone to afternoon classes, and then got into her car and left the college. He taught her last class. She was taking summer classes to graduate early.”

“It’s funny that Frank Gillespie didn’t mention she was taking a summer class with him at the college. He said he’d had her in a class last year.”

“That’s interesting. I guess I do need to have a talk with him.”

“I think it’s very interesting.” I shifted the box of donuts in my hands. “I also wonder who had the keys to the heavy equipment at the park? How would they have been able to turn the equipment on and bury her without drawing attention?”

He looked at me in surprise and then smiled. “Didn’t I tell you? They didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“The shallow hole was already dug. They were replacing the dirt around the playground with sand before adding that soft rubber covering over it that we saw Saturday. If the kids fall off the playground equipment, it will be a softer landing than hard dirt. But they realized they didn’t have all the materials to finish the project, and they left the small shallow area they had dug up. The killer put Shayna in it and filled it in with the loose dirt from the hole, using a shovel.”

“Well, that was convenient.”

“It was a stroke of good luck. Or the killer planned it out after having seen the shallow hole.”

“Interesting.”

I didn’t like the way Frank Gillespie made had made me feel when we talked to him and that made me suspicious that he might have had something to do with Hailey’s death. But at this point Betty Mays seemed to have the best reason for killing her. If there was a possibility that Hailey might expose her affair, it might make her angry enough to kill her.

Chapter Fifteen

Christy called me after work the following day. I had just left her at work twenty minutes earlier, and she wanted me to come to her apartment immediately without explaining why. I hurried over, and as I walked across the apartment complex; I knew exactly why she called me. There was a big party going on over at Frank Gillespie’s apartment.

I knocked on her door and she opened it almost before I was done knocking. “What took you so long?”

“I got in the car and came over as soon as you called me,” I said, stepping into her apartment. “What’s going on over there?”

She closed the door behind me and we moved over to her window. “Frank is throwing one heck of a party. I’ve seen young college-age kids going in there for the past hour.” She pulled the curtain back, peering over at his apartment.

“You remind me of a little old lady hiding out in her apartment watching the party across the street,” I said. “It’s sad when you aren’t invited to the party, isn’t it?”

She looked at me, narrowing her eyes. “I do not want to go to that kind of party. It’s crazy how loud the music is. I thought the parties from last month that were going on here were loud, but this is nuts.”

“Do you recognize anybody that’s gone in there?” I asked, looking through the window again.

She shook her head. “No, I don’t recognize any of them. I certainly haven’t seen his wife show up, either.”

“Ex-wife,” I corrected. “She probably had all she could take