Sugar Coated Sins by Jessica Beck Read Free Book Online

confession we found, and one
person still on my list.”
    “So, who wrote the last letter,
the one we’re all interested in?” I asked.
    Phillip shook his head.   “The real question at that point was who had
the last slot, not who wrote the confession.”
    “Aren’t they one and the same
person?” Jake asked.
    “No.   There’s absolutely no chance of that.”
    “You seem pretty confident about
that,” Jake said.
    “Okay, I’ll bite.   Who was invited to include the last letter in
the capsule?” I asked him.
    “That’s where things start to get
muddy.   It turns out that it was Emma,
your assistant at the donut shop,” he said gravely.

 
    “What?   Emma?   She was five years old when they buried that capsule.   I doubt that she could have even written her
own name.”
    “That’s the beauty of it.   She didn’t write anything, but she did create
a drawing in crayon that they were supposed to include.   There was a lottery at every level of the
local school system with every child’s name entered, and they drew Emma’s.”   Phillip stopped and turned to look at my
husband.   “Jake, we didn’t miss anything,
did we?   I searched the contents of that
capsule thoroughly, but I didn’t see anything like the artwork Emma described
to me over the phone twenty minutes ago when I asked her about her entry.”
    “I can’t imagine that we overlooked
anything like a small child’s drawing, but let’s look again to be certain,” he
said.
    Phillip gathered up his copies of
the letters again, and we spread the contents of the time capsule out on his
desk once more.
    There was nothing that even
vaguely resembled a child’s drawing in the pile.
    It appeared that we were back at
square one.

 
    “So, where does that leave us?”
Phillip asked us.
    “Clearly someone substituted their
confession for Emma’s drawing at the last minute,” Jake said.   “They must have buried it with everything
else, figuring no one would actually notice the switch.   After all, why would they, unless they were
looking specifically for Emma’s artwork?   To the casual bystander, it would look like it was ten letters from ten
submissions.   We need to find out who had
access to that time capsule before they buried it.   More importantly, did any of our suspects so
far have any way of adding anything to the stack before it was buried?”
    “Jake, how can he possibly know
the answer to that?   We haven’t told
Phillip what Gabby shared with me yet,” I reminded him.
    “That’s right,” Jake said before
my stepfather stopped him.   “We need to
talk.”
    “Hold on.   I agreed to help out behind the scenes, but
if you tell me those names, I’m going to be involved in your current
investigation, whether I want to be or not.”
    “You can walk away right now if
that’s what you really want to do,” Jake said.   “Nobody’s forcing you to do anything that you don’t want to do.”
    Phillip was clearly wrestling with
his desire to be a part of this and my mother’s need for him to stay out of
it.   I started to say something, but then
I knew enough to keep my mouth shut.   My
stepfather needed to come to his own conclusions without any advice from
me.   After all, he was the one who would
have to live with the consequences of his actions.   After a few moments, he reluctantly
nodded.   “Go ahead and tell me.   As long as I stay behind the scenes, I should
be okay.   I’ll give you any advice I can
about whoever you’ve been able to come up with, but I won’t go out into the
field anymore.”
    “Will you at least help us with
our research?” Jake asked.   “I’m not
talking about interviews.   I’d like to
have someone dig into the town’s archives to see what they can uncover.   It might be helpful to look through old
newspapers, too.   What do you say to
that?   Are you up for it?”
    “That’s right up my alley these
days,” he said, clearly excited about the prospect