Cupcakes and Killing: A Cozy Mystery (Sweet Shoppe Mysteries - Book 2) by Cora Wilkins

Kaye to slap Tori for even suggesting her husband had anything to do with the murder. Instead she simply laughed.
    “Good sleuthing, Tori, but I’d know if my husband was having an affair and then decided to kill the other woman. Besides, he was with us at the reception around the time when the killer must have poisoned Zara’s drink. It couldn’t have been him.”
    Tori’s face went bright red. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to accuse your husband of murder. I don’t know why I even said that.”
    “It’s fine. In cases like this, everyone’s a suspect!” Kaye said with a smirk. “What about Captain Treloar? His last name starts with T. What’s his first name?”
    “Glenn,” I said with a sigh. We were getting nowhere. There were hardly any men in town with the initials DT, and I was beginning to think I was wrong about my theory. Perhaps ‘DT’ wasn’t even a person’s initials. Maybe Zara had been having dinner with a dolphin trainer?
    Suddenly an idea struck me like a bolt of lightning.
    “Oh!” I said. “Remember Zara’s last words to us? When she was lying on the ground trying to breathe, that is.”
    “No, what were they?” Tori said, eyebrows knitted together.
    “She was saying ‘I think it was the…’ but then she never finished her sentence. At the time I thought she was having an allergic reaction to something and trying to say that it was ‘the salmon’ or ‘the cupcake’. But what if that isn’t what she was saying? What if she wasn’t trying to say ‘the’ something at all?”
    Tori looked at me with an expression usually reserved for small children and the mentally unstable, and Kaye furrowed her eyebrows, trying to comprehend what I was saying.
    “Oh,” Kaye finally said. “ Oh .”
    Tori folded her arms. “Mind filling me in on what I’m missing?”
    “Theodore!” I said. “I think she was trying to say ‘it was Theodore’!”
    “Who’s Theodore?” Tori asked, wrinkling her nose.
    “Deputy Ted,” Kaye replied. “His mother and sister came in to the Sweet Shoppe with him a couple of weeks ago, and his mother kept calling him Theodore. Ted is just short for his real name.”
    “Oh…” Tori replied, her eyes widening.
    “So maybe Zara was seeing him, and maybe she called him Theodore as well. After all, Ted did say that he’d been seeing someone recently. We thought he was just saying that to get his mother off his back, but what if it was true? What if it was Zara?” I said.
    “D…T…Deputy Ted. Or Deputy Theodore,” Tori said slowly. “You might be right. He was standing near the table in the photos as well. He could’ve surreptitiously slipped something into her drink quite easily.”
    “Also, Mr. Palmer told us that the gardener who maintains the lawns around the police station had been in recently to buy some fertilizer. Maybe Ted took some from his supply at the station shed to get the cyanide?”
    Kaye pressed her hands into a V-shape on counter in front of her. “This is all just circumstantial evidence,” she said. “Even though it does all fit, we can’t just go and accuse him of it. What if we’re wrong? Then we’re just the three crazy harpies who accused one of our local boys in blue of being a psychopathic murderer.”
    “So what do we do?” I asked, racking my brains for an idea. “We can’t just do nothing. Sure, we might be wrong, but we might be right .”
    She sighed. “I suppose so. Let’s take a break to get this place cleaned up, then we’ll have a cupcake and think about it.”
    I helped Tori clean up the kitchen while Kaye wiped down the tables and counter in the front, and the door tinkled a few minutes later.
    “Kaye, can you grab me a chocolate cupcake when you’re done serving the customer?” I called out. “And a vanilla fairy cupcake for Tori?”
    We were met with silence and then the sound of something crashing to the floor, and we raced out to see Kaye standing there, stunned into immobility. She