Free Sugar Coated Sins by Jessica Beck Page A

her hands.   What was worse was that she saw me, too.”
    “Did you tell anyone about what
you saw?” Grace asked her.
    “What business was it of
mine?   The police called it an accident at
the time, remember?” Karen asked.   “I
asked Hillary about it the next day when she came into the library, and she
said that she’d gotten it at the farmer’s market.   She seemed truly bereft about what had
happened, so I tried my best to forget all about it.”
    “I imagine the police followed up
on that,” I said.
    “You said there were two things
you saw,” I reminded her.   “What was the
second one?”
    “It was a fight I wasn’t supposed
to have witnessed,” she said.
    “Between?”
    “Benjamin and Hilda Fremont.   She was giving him an ultimatum.”
    “What did she say?”
    “Either he had to drop everyone
else in his life and focus on her, or he’d regret it,” she said
breathlessly.   “It sounded like a threat
to me at the time.”
    “How did you happen to overhear
them?” I asked, curious about it.
    “It was pure accident,
really.   My dog, Toby, got loose, and I
was searching for him.   I checked near
the Boxcar because he loves to play in the park, and I overheard them talking
in back of the diner.”
    “Did they see you?”
    She frowned before she spoke
again.   “I was trying to make a quiet
exit before they could, but Toby saw me and started barking as he ran to
me.   There was nothing I could do about
it.”
    That was interesting information
as well.   There was just one more fact we
needed from Karen before we could let her go.   “By the way, who was the third woman?” I asked her.
    “Well, I imagined that it had to
be Hillary Mast.   After all, she was
taking him food, and isn’t that one of the ways that women court men?”
    “Some women probably do,” I
said.   I remembered an older cousin when
I’d been growing up who’d loved to proclaim that if you could bake a cake, you
could get a husband, and she’d proved it later by marrying a man well above her
who had a sweet tooth that drove him into matrimony.   “Is there anything else?”
    “I’ve told you everything that I
know,” Karen said.   “Suzanne, I really
need you to move your Jeep right now.   I’m getting out of here.”
    “Aren’t you going to at least hang
around and have your window fixed?” I asked.
    “Right now, all I’m determined to
do is to keep breathing.   Everything else
can wait until I know for a fact that I’m truly safe.”
    I had no choice but to accede to
her request, but before I moved my vehicle, I handed her one of my cards after
scrawling my cellphone number on the back of it.   “If you think of anything else, no matter how
trivial it might seem to you, call me, okay?”
    “Of course.   Now I really must go,” she said as she
continued to scan up and down her block.
    I moved the Jeep, and Karen Harris
drove speedily out of town with nothing more than an overnight bag and a
determination to escape a killer’s attention.
    When I considered it later, I
realized that it was probably the most rational thing that I’d ever seen, and I
envied her decisiveness.   Could I abandon
everything in the face of that kind of danger?   I knew from experience that I couldn’t bring myself to do it.   The old “fight or flight” scenario always
played out for me with opting for direct confrontation instead of fleeing.
    It might be the end of me someday,
but it wasn’t as though I had any choice.
    “Where should we go now?” Grace
asked me.
    “Do we have any choice?   We can’t speak to Hilda until we get it
cleared through Jake, but he didn’t say anything about us talking to Hillary
Mast.”
    “Could that be because he doesn’t
know about her ties to the case?” Grace asked me with a grin.
    “No comment,” I said in reply, and
we headed over to the town hall to speak with someone new.

 
    Hillary was in her office, though
there weren’t any elections scheduled