Read A Burned Out Baker: Classic Diner Mystery #7 (The Classic Diner Mysteries) for Free Online Page A

payment, you’re going to get a reminder from me that you’re not going to like. This is your last warning. From now on, pay me on time, pay the full amount you owe me, or I’ll take it out of something besides your bank account. I’m not messing around here, Barry .”
    “Well now, that’s not very friendly, is it?” Moose asked me with a grin.
    “I wonder how much Barry owed him?”
    “I don’t know, but it appears that Cliff was pretty eager to get it back.”
    “At least the interest, anyway,” I said.
    “It sounds as though Barry wasn’t going to be able to pay it,” Moose said. “I’ve got to admit that if Cliff burned down the bakery, it was exactly the wrong thing to do if he expected Barry to ever be able to pay him back.”
    “Maybe he was sending a message to the other folks who owed him money,” I said.
    “That might work,” Moose said. “Take a photo of it, and let’s move on.”
    I did as my grandfather suggested, and then I put the note off to one side.
    “What’s this?” I asked as I picked up a stack of greeting cards bound together with a pair of rubber bands. After I removed them, I opened the first four pretty mushy cards, and a fifth that was anything but. Inside the last one, written in angry red letters, it said, “ Stop playing games with my heart, or yours is going to feel real pain .”
    I showed it to Moose, who dropped it on the desk as though it had been on fire. “Where did he get these? That last message is pretty chilling.”
    I looked through the stack, and I saw the name Susan written inside the rest of them. “That’s got to be Susan Proctor,” I said.
    “How could you possibly know that?”
    “The swoop of that S is unmistakable,” I said as I pointed it out to my grandfather. “She pays for lunch at the diner once a week with her credit card, so I’ve come to recognize that signature.”
    “Good enough. Take a shot of the signature on one of these cards,” Moose suggested.
    “Let’s do one of the good ones, and the angry one, too,” I said as I took the pictures. The battery on my phone was getting weak, a problem that I’d been having lately. “I don’t know how many more shots I’m going to be able to take with this.”
    “Then let’s make them count,” Moose said. He picked up four torn fragments of paper and pieced them back together on the desktop. “Victoria, you need to get this one.”
    “What is it?” I asked as I studied the reassembled sheet.
    “It appears that Rob Bester tried to buy Barry out at some point, but he clearly wasn’t all that happy about the offer, or why else would he tear it up?”
    “Do you think that’s significant?” I asked Moose as I took the picture with my phone.
    “I suppose that it could be,” my grandfather said as he looked around.
    “You know, Mom and I saw Rob at the fire this morning. He was standing outside the tire store with a garden hose watching the volunteer firemen.”
    Moose frowned. “It could be a coincidence. After all, if he’s innocent, he’d want to try to protect his property.”
    “It gives him an excuse to smell like smoke, too,” I said.
    “We’ll have to keep him in mind. Is there anything here that we’ve missed?”
    I started looking through the papers again, and I almost missed the final clue. There was a bank statement tucked in with a series of bills, and I didn’t know how those might help us find out who had torched the bakery and possibly killed Barry Jackson in the process. The statement said that Barry was extended over his credit limit, but what was really interesting was what Barry himself had scrawled on it. “ Get the money Mike owes you. Just because he’s your brother doesn’t mean that he can bankrupt you.”
    I took another photo as my cell phone died. “That’s it, Moose. I don’t have any more juice in my phone battery until I recharge it.”
    “It appears to be all that there is to see, anyway,” he said. “Should I shove this all