The Missing Dough by Chris Cavender

toward Timber Ridge, she asked, “Do we still have time to go by Sharon’s and snoop around a little?”
    “If the police are finished there, we’ll make the time,” I said.
    “Thanks, Eleanor. I know you don’t really have a dog in this fight. I appreciate you committing yourself to the investigation like this.”
    “Hang on a second,” I said to her. “You need to understand something. Bob might be your fiancé, but he’s my friend, too, and I never let my friends down. I’m almost as eager as you are to solve this case.”
    “I’m glad you said almost, ” Maddy answered.
    “Is it going to be tough on you being around Sharon’s things so soon after learning that she is dead?” I asked her as we now headed toward a stop at her former mother-in-law’s address before we made it back to the pizzeria. “I know you cared about her.”
    “I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it, but what choice do I have?”
    “I could go inside alone, and you could wait in the car and keep a lookout for me,” I suggested.
    “Do you honestly think for one second that I could ever do that?” Maddy asked me.
    “No. I realize that’s never going to happen, but I kind of felt obligated to make the offer, anyway.”
    “Don’t worry about me, Sis. In a very real way, I lost Sharon the moment I found out that her son had cheated on me. We kept our friendship alive, but there was always that unspoken tension between us, no matter how hard we tried to ignore it.”
    “I understand,” I said. Joe’s parents had been dead long before we met, and I’d never had the opportunity of having a mother-in-law, good or bad. Sometimes I wondered what I’d missed out on, but mostly, I didn’t think about it. It was tough to mourn something that I’d never experienced.
     
    We got to Sharon’s house, and thankfully, the police cruisers were gone.
    I didn’t stop in, though.
    “Where are you going, Eleanor?”
    “Think about it, Maddy. What if someone comes by while we’re in there snooping? Even if they don’t, do we really want to advertise the fact to the world that we’re digging around here? I figured that it might be prudent to park down the block a little, in case we need to make a quick escape.”
    “Okay, I can see how that might be a good thing.”
    After I parked, we walked back toward the house like we had every right in the world to be there.
    I just hoped that we could get in.
    If the spare key was still where my sister remembered it had been hidden, Maddy and I were about to do some serious snooping into Grant’s life.
    I just hoped we’d be able to find something that would help.

Chapter 5
    “L et’s get in before anyone sees us,” Maddy said softly as she opened the front door and stepped quickly inside. Just as she had suspected, the key had been buried in the third window box on the right, and she’d pulled it out of the topsoil and flowers as though she used it all the time.
    “Lead the way,” I whispered as she closed the door behind me.
    “Why are you whispering?” she asked in her normal voice.
    “Was I?” I asked, but I knew all too well why I’d lowered my voice upon crossing the threshold.
    There was something eerie about a house when its owner had recently died. Some folks believed that it was a lingering spirit, and though I couldn’t say for sure what I believed one way or the other, I knew that there could often be a presence felt in a place, almost as though something was holding on to a spot where it didn’t belong anymore. I would love to be able to say that I’d never personally been in the home of someone who had recently died, but unfortunately, I couldn’t make that claim. During past investigations, Maddy and I had searched quite a few houses, looking for clues about who might have wanted to kill their former owners, and the range of experiences we’d had did nothing to discourage that belief.
    This was a first, though.
    Sharon had passed away recently—peacefully,