A Catered Christmas Cookie Exchange (A Mystery With Recipes)

by Crawford, Isis

  Amber favored her with a small smile before going on. “I should have driven her to the Longely Community Center. She asked me to but we were really, really busy at the shop, so I told her I couldn’t. But I should have gotten one of my friends to drive her. I could have done that. Then none of this would have happened.”

  Libby went over and gave Amber a hug. “This isn’t your fault. It truly isn’t. She had an accident.” Libby emphasized the word accident. “This is a bad stretch of road.”

  Amber nodded. “You’re probably right.”

  “As for the someone-is-trying-to-kill-her thing,” Libby continued, “you know how paranoid she can get. Remember when she thought someone stole her ring?”

  Amber let out a strangled laugh. “And it was in the medicine cabinet behind the toothpaste tube?”

  Libby nodded. “Exactly.” She rubbed her hands to warm them up, then pointed to the Buick. It was time to get down to business. “Okay, Amber. Was the passenger side door closed or opened when you got here?”

  “Closed.”

  “So how did you check for the cookies?” Bernie asked.

  “I climbed into the driver’s seat,” Amber replied.

  “All the other doors were closed?” Libby inquired.

  “Yes, they were,” Amber told her.

  Bernie nodded. That should make things simple enough, she thought, because it meant that the cookies hadn’t gone flying out of the car and into the woods, which would have been difficult to search in the dark. This was a prospect she had not been looking forward to, especially since she was wearing her good pink cowboy boots, the ones with the crystals on them. She walked around the Buick, opened the passenger-side door, and played the light over and under the seat.

  She saw that Amber had been correct—not that she had doubted her. There were no cookies on the seat. Then Bernie crouched down and looked under the seat. There was nothing there either, except for one black woolen glove. She left it where it was, straightened up, and backed out of the Buick.

  “See, I told you,” Amber said as Bernie put her hands on the small of her back and stretched.

  “Yes, you did,” Bernie said when she straightened up. She had to start doing Pilates again, because her lower back was starting to give her trouble. “But it’s easy to overlook things when you’re upset.” Bernie opened the passenger-side rear door and played the light along the backseat and the floor.

  “Anything?” Libby asked as she stamped her feet and rubbed her arms to keep warm. It was colder out here than she had anticipated it would be, and she wished she’d worn her parka instead of the fleece she had on.

  “Nothing,” Bernie replied, her voice muffled by the inside of the car.

  “Maybe Millie put the cookies in the trunk?” Libby suggested once Bernie straightened up.

  “Maybe,” Bernie agreed, and she went around to the driver’s side, reached back in, and grabbed the keys out of the ignition.

  “I don’t think they’re in there,” Amber said as Bernie tried to open the trunk.

  Bernie grunted as she twisted the key.

  “She’d never transport her cookies in the trunk,” Amber said. “They were too valuable. She liked to have them where she could see them at all times.”

  “Well, it won’t hurt to check,” Bernie said. “That’s if I can get the dratted thing open. I may need a crowbar,” she said as she banged on the trunk with her fist. A moment later she heard a pop and the door flew open. “Nothing that a little force can’t fix,” she noted, looking inside.

  Libby and Amber joined her. The three of them stared down at the trunk. It was pristine. There was absolutely nothing in it. It looked as if it had been freshly cleaned.

  “My aunt is a very neat lady,” Amber commented.

  “Scarily so,” Bernie replied, thinking of the mess that existed in the back of their van. In fact, Millie made their mother look like a slob.

  Amber grabbed her pigtail and started twirling it around her finger. “So my aunt was right. Someone did steal the cookies. Someone was out to get her.”

  Bernie held up her hand. “Let’s not jump to any conclusions before we look in her house.”

  “Look in her house?” Amber parroted, giving Bernie a quizzical look. “Why?”

  “Maybe she forgot the cookies in her house,” Bernie said. “Maybe she got discombobulated. It happens.”

  “Not to my Aunt Millie it doesn’t,” Amber said. “I think what happened was that someone came along, saw my Aunt Millie lying there, and stole the cookies.”

  “Why?” Bernie asked.

  “Because they wanted to eat them,” Amber replied. “Everyone knows what those tins mean.”

  “Not everyone,” Bernie said.

  “Most people,” Amber said.

  “I guess it’s possible,” Libby agreed. “Nevertheless, we should still go check out her house on the off chance they’re there.”

  Amber let go of her pigtail and started playing with the buttons of her jumpsuit. “I guess.”

  “Do you have any other suggestions?” Bernie asked Amber.

  Amber shook her head. “Not really.”

  “Then let’s go,” Bernie said. She glanced at her watch. It was a little after eight. If they hurried, they might be able to wrap this up by nine and still salvage the evening.

  Chapter 3

  “So the cookies weren’t in Millie’s house?” Sean asked Bernie as he and his daughters tucked into slices of chocolate truffle cake and sipped their coffee.

  Even though it was eleven o’clock at night, Sean wasn’t about to let that stop him from enjoying his daughters’ baking or their coffee. Fortunately, he’d been blessed with an iron-clad digestive system and sleeping after drinking coffee had never been a problem. If it had been, he never would have been a policeman for all those years.

  “No, they weren’t,” Libby said as she sampled the icing on the cake.

  It was made with butter, egg yolks, sugar syrup, 70 percent dark chocolate, and a little bit of coffee, plus a teaspoon of vanilla. In other words, the buttercream was perfect. It was ambrosial. In her opinion, people who made frosting out of flavorings, powdered sugar, and butter shouldn’t call their product buttercream frosting. Because it wasn’t. It was some pale imitation. This, the stuff that she and Bernie made, was the real deal. And even though it was technically tricky to make—you had to be careful not to scramble the eggs when you heated them up or when you added the hot sugar syrup—the end result was worth the trouble.

  Libby was thinking that it was more than worth the trouble when she picked up the truffle that was sitting on top of her slice of cake and bit into it. She’d made the truffles two days ago and stored them in the fridge because they didn’t have a long shelf life—maybe a week at the most—due to the fact that she’d used heavy cream in them.

  They were good too. Really good. Better than the ones Harrods made, in her humble opinion. They literally melted in your mouth. Maybe, Libby thought, we can sell them in A Little Taste of Heaven as a holiday gift or for Valentine’s Day. Get some nice boxes. Maybe something pale green and silver or a rosy pink and gold. Do a variety of flavors. Modern ones. Like lavender and honey. Or lime and chili. Or almonds and sea salt. She was trying to come up with other combinations when she became aware that Bernie was talking and turned her attention to her.

  “And we looked,” Bernie was saying to her dad as she added a little more cream to her coffee. This morning she’d decided she had to go on a diet because her jeans were getting tight around the waist, but not tonight. Tonight she needed cream in her coffee and chocolate cake in her stomach. After all, what was an extra five hundred calories, give or take a few? Tomorrow was another day. “We looked all over the place.”

  “What do you mean by ‘all over the place’?” asked Sean, seeking clarification.

  “I mean,” Bernie replied, “that we looked in the kitchen, the living room, and the dining room.”

  Sean took a sip of coffee, th
en put the cup down. “How about upstairs?”

  “That too,” Bernie replied. She paused for a moment to stretch. She’d had a kink in her back ever since she’d offloaded three fifty-pound bags of flour from the van this morning. “We looked in the bedrooms, and we even checked the basement and the garage in case Millie had taken them out there and forgotten to put them in her car. The cookies weren’t there. They weren’t in Millie’s house.”

  Libby weighed in next. “Dad, it’s the neatest house I’ve ever been in,” she told him. “There is nothing—and I mean nothing—out of place. It’s even neater than Bree’s. If the cookies were there, believe me, we would have found them.”

  Sean took another forkful of cake and let it dissolve in his mouth while he thought over what Libby and Bernie had just said. He was glad that Mr. Evans, whoever he was, hadn’t picked up this cake—thereby leaving it for the family to enjoy.

  Sean frowned and put his fork down. “So what I hear you saying is that someone actually took the cookies.” He didn’t try to hide the skepticism in his voice.

  “I know it’s hard to believe, but it certainly looks that way,” Bernie replied. “I mean they weren’t in the house. To top it off, all the doors and windows were locked. We checked,” Bernie said, forestalling her dad’s next question.

  “So someone really did take them out of the car,” Sean mused. “Either that or Millie just imagined making them.”

  Libby gave her dad the look.

  He raised his hand. “I was just covering all the possibilities.”

  “A highly dubious possibility because she’s been talking to us about the cookies she was going to submit for judging for months now,” Libby said. “Isn’t that right, Bernie?” she asked, turning to her sister.

  “For at least three weeks,” Bernie replied. “And Millie might be annoying, but she’s definitely not crazy, Dad.”

  “I didn’t say she was,” Sean answered.

  “And anyway,” Bernie added. “We found the cookie pans soaking in the sink, so there’s no doubt she’d used them.”

  “You didn’t tell me that,” Sean said. He ate another sliver of cake, then went on to a different topic. “Libby, correct me if I’m wrong, but what I’m also hearing from you and Bernie is that everyone knew about her cookies, right?”

  “Everyone in the Christmas Cookie Exchange Club did,” Libby answered. “No doubt about that. No doubt at all.”

  “Those people would be?” Sean asked. “Refresh my memory.”

  Bernie rattled their names off. “Barbara Lazarus, Lillian Stein, Teresa Ruffino, Alma Hall, Sheila Goody, Pearl Pepperpot, and Rose Olsen. And of course Millie Piedmont.”

  Sean took a deep breath and let it out. “Ah yes. How could I have forgotten. Down at the station we liked to call them the busybody brigade.”

  Libby laughed. “Or worse.”

  “That too,” Sean said, thinking of the time last week when Alma Hall and Sheila Goody had almost caught him smoking outside the shop.

  “Do I smell tobacco?” Alma had asked, wrinkling up her nose as she’d passed by him while he’d been standing in the alley by the shop.

  Sean had pretended to smell the air. “I don’t,” he’d lied as he moved his foot over the butt he’d just disposed of. At the time he remembered thinking that she reminded him of a bloodhound, with that droopy face and big nose of hers.

  Then Sheila had squinted at him. “There must be something wrong with your nose because I can smell the tobacco from here. Are you smoking?” she asked him, making it sound as if he were engaged in some unspeakable rite.

  “Me?” Sean had said. “Never. It must have been from some passerby,” he’d told Sheila, favoring her with his most convincing, boyish smile. “Smoking is a filthy habit. I think people that do that should be tied to the mast and flogged to within an inch of their lives.”

  “You are not as funny as you think you are,” Alma had told him.

  “And you’re not as clever,” Sean had shot back.

  Alma had sniffed, and she and Sheila had walked off. Thank heavens. Because the last thing he needed was for them to tell Libby and Bernie that he was smoking.

  Alma and Sheila liked causing trouble—they lived for it, actually—and since his daughters didn’t know he’d gone back to smoking, the two older ladies would have hit the jackpot. At the time, he’d considered doing a preemptive strike and telling Bernie and Libby, but after further consideration, he’d decided against it.

  Why disturb the balance? Because if he was being honest with himself, he knew that they knew. His daughters weren’t stupid, after all. Far from it. Furthermore, they knew that he knew that they knew. No, on reflection it was better to keep things status quo. That way they didn’t have to have the “Dad, You Have to Quit for Our Sakes” talk. On that note, he turned his attention to the matter at hand.

  “Who else knows about the contest?” Sean asked his daughters.

  “We know,” Libby answered. “The TV crew knows. Amber. There was a small article in the local paper.”

  “I didn’t see it,” Sean said.

  “That’s because it was about four lines,” Libby told him. “When you come right down to it, it’s really not such a big deal except to the Christmas Cookie Exchange Club members, of course. The show doesn’t have a big following.”

  “It’s not exactly as if they’re wrestling alligators.” Sean smiled at the thought. Now that would be a sight to see. He took another sip of coffee. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “Moving on, all of these women are in their late sixties and early seventies, correct?”

  Libby nodded. “Yes.”

  “So what you’re positing,” Sean continued, “is that one of our female senior citizens came along right after Millie’s accident, opened the door, took the cookies, closed the door, and went on her way, leaving Millie seriously injured.”

  “Or caused the accident in order to steal the cookies,” Bernie said.

  Sean ate the last mouthful of cake on his plate. “Don’t you think that, given the age, the gender, and the social class of the people we’re talking about, that seems even more unlikely than the first scenario you proposed?” he asked after he’d finished swallowing. “And that’s saying a lot. Elderly middle-class women don’t do the kind of things you’re proposing.”

  “Not as a rule,” Bernie agreed.

  “But then how do you explain the cookies disappearing and Millie’s comments?” Libby demanded.

  “Millie had an attack and hit the tree and the cookies went flying out the window,” Sean said promptly.

  “The Buick’s windows were closed,” Libby reminded him. “At least, that’s what Matt said.”

  “He was the first responder?” Sean asked.

  Libby nodded.

  “He’s pretty reliable,” Sean conceded as he studied the Christmas lights on Mrs. Sullivan’s notions store across the street. Each year they got more and more elaborate. At this point, the shop looked like a gingerbread house. “Always has been.”

  Everyone was silent for a moment.

  Then Sean asked, “Who called the accident in?”

  “A passerby,” Bernie answered.

  “A local?” her dad inquired.

  Bernie shook her head. “A visitor to the Minces.”

  Sean raised an eyebrow. “He . . .”

  “She,” Bernie corrected.

  “Fine. She. Was a little out of the way.”

  “She got lost,” Libby explained. “She took a left at Route 21 instead of a right.”

  Sean nodded. It was an easy enough mistake to make. “She stayed at the accident scene?”

  “Until Matt arrived,” Bernie replied. “But,” she continued, anticipating her dad’s next question, “she didn’t touch anything or move Millie except to open the door and check and make sure she was breathing. She told Matt that she was afraid to do anything else. She was afraid she’d make matters worse.”

  “Wise choice,” Sean said. Unless it was
absolutely necessary, it was always better to wait until the EMTs arrived. Sean thought for a while. Then he said, “You know what I would do if I were you? I’d go back to the scene when it’s light out and look around and see what I can find.”

  Libby drained the last drop of coffee from her cup. “Any particular thing you’d be looking for?”

  “Obviously, the cookie tins,” Sean replied promptly. “I mean they can’t just have disappeared. Either someone took them or they’re lying on the ground. Besides, then you can tell Amber you’ve covered all the possibilities. You owe her that much.”

  “True,” Bernie said.

  “We owe Millie as well,” Libby added. “Even if she does always make snide comments about our cinnamon rolls.”

  “That’s because she thinks hers are better,” Bernie replied. “Which they are so not.”

  “Agreed,” Sean said. “They’re like hockey pucks.”

  “Plus she uses cheap cinnamon,” Libby said.

  “The cheapest,” Bernie agreed.

  “You mean there are different kinds?” Sean asked.

  “Four,” Libby told him. “Three of them are cassia root.” She stifled a yawn. She was too tired to get into it now. “I guess we should get to bed if we’re going to be mucking around in the woods tomorrow,” she said, changing the subject.

  “And doing all those snowflake cookies,” Bernie added. “Whose idea were those anyway?” she asked. They were extremely time-consuming, what with making the dough, rolling it out, cutting out the cookies, and then baking and icing them. In addition, the pans took up every inch of oven space, effectively ruling out the oven for other uses.

  “Yours,” Libby said.

  Bernie was taken aback. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.” Libby remembered the conversation well. “I tried to tell you not to do them, but you kept telling me they’d go really fast.”

  Bernie didn’t reply. She decided she had to be exhausted because she couldn’t think of a snappy comeback.

  Chapter 4

  It was gray and overcast the next morning as Libby and Bernie left A Little Taste of Heaven and walked outside to the van. They each held cups of French roast coffee, heavy on the cream and light on the sugar, and a petite pain left over from the day before.