Read Online The Missing Dough by Chris Cavender - Free Book Online Page A

Maddy had found, into the drawer and put the false bottom in place. Upstairs, it sounded as though whoever was trying to get in was getting closer. There was a loud click as the right key hit home, and I hurried to catch up with Maddy.
    She was standing by the basement door, waving me on. “Hurry up,” she whispered.
    I raced for the back door as I heard footsteps upstairs, and I was sorry that I hadn’t at least closed the door from the first floor to the basement. As the footsteps neared, I nearly dove out the basement door, and Maddy eased it shut just as we heard someone on the steps coming down to where we’d just been.
    “They’re going to see the mess we left,” Maddy said as we hurried away.
    “We can’t do anything about that now. Maybe they’ll think the cops did it. Nobody’s going to suspect us.”
    As we hurried around the house and down the street, Maddy finally eased her pace and said, “That was good thinking, parking away from the place.”
    “Thanks. I get a good idea every now and then,” I said as I glanced at my watch. “We need to get to the Slice. I still have time to make fresh dough, so we don’t have to rely on our frozen stash. We can look at what we managed to get out of there after we finish our prep work for the day.”
    “Or I could start digging into it right now while you drive us to Timber Ridge,” Maddy suggested.
    There was no way that I could make her wait, nor did I really want to. “Go on, then. Let’s see what we were able to come up with.”
    As she looked through the stack of papers we’d retrieved, she said, “You left the money, I see.”
    “I told you I was going to,” I said.
    I was about to tell her about the other cash I had found when she added, “How much do you want to bet that dear, sweet Rebecca takes it all and fails to disclose it to anyone else?”
    “That might be kind of hard for her to do,” I said with a grin.
    “Why’s that?”
    I told her about the other cash I’d found and what I’d done with it, all on a whim.
    Maddy laughed as she applauded. “That’s brilliant. What do you suppose was valuable enough to hide with the cash?”
    “I don’t know. I never really got the chance to check it out, but it’s sitting right there in your lap.”
    “Then let’s check it out right now.”
    Maddy took off the bands holding the letters in place and then started going through them.
    “Hey, the least you could do is read them aloud as you go through them.”
    “Sorry. I got caught up in what I was doing.” She started flipping through the letters and then looked up at me. “I don’t get it. Eleanor, they aren’t anything.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Apparently, he really was fond of Vivian. These are all letters she wrote him over the past year.”
    I shook my head. “Seriously? That’s kind of odd, isn’t it? Grant never struck me as being all that sentimental when the two of you were together.”
    “He could be when he wanted to be,” she said. “Not that he kept any letters I ever wrote him, I’m sure.”
    “In all fairness, did you ever write him any?” I asked.
    She laughed slightly. “Now that you mention it, not that I can remember. I did leave him a few notes over the years, but there wasn’t anything newsworthy in any of them.”
    “So the hidden drawer was a bust,” I said.
    “I wouldn’t say that. There’s ten grand still in there. I wouldn’t exactly call that a dead end.”
    “Maybe not, but why would he keep that kind of cash on hand, especially if Vivian had drained him?”
    “I can think of some reasons,” Maddy said. “He could have been hiding it from her, paying off a debt, or maybe he just won a bet. Then again, he might have planned on using it to get out of town in a hurry.”
    “Why would he do that?” Maddy was my expert on the topic of her ex, so I had to rely on her gut feeling about Grant’s reasoning for doing anything.
    “He was always up to something shady,” she said. “Who