A Catered Christmas Cookie Exchange (A Mystery With Recipes)

by Crawford, Isis

  “That’s ridiculous,” Libby said.

  Clyde leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. “That’s exactly my point,” he said.

  “Then where is Amber?” Libby demanded.

  “How would I know,” Clyde said. “Maybe she ran off with her boyfriend.”

  “She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Bernie said.

  “Maybe she does now. Or maybe she got stoned with her friends and passed out somewhere,” Clyde suggested.

  “She’s straight as an arrow,” Libby told Clyde.

  “Meaning?” Clyde said.

  “That she doesn’t drink or do drugs,” Bernie replied.

  “You could have fooled me,” Clyde said as he unclasped his hands, picked up his fork, and finished the last morsel of the parsnip pie on his plate. “I’m sorry,” he said when he was done. “But I don’t know what I can do to help you here. Millie’s death has officially been ruled an accident, and Amber’s only been gone for less than twenty-four hours.”

  Sean smiled. “That’s what I figured you’d say.”

  “I’ll snoop around, but I doubt if I’ll come up with anything,” Clyde said. Before Libby or Bernie could say another thing, Clyde had grabbed his parka and was out the door.

  Chapter 13

  “He seemed in a hurry,” Bernie noted of Clyde.

  Sean nodded. “Family stuff.”

  “Like what?” Libby asked.

  Sean shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  “That’s so guy,” Bernie observed.

  “That’s because I am a guy,” Sean replied.

  “Do you think he’ll come up with anything?” Libby asked.

  Sean drained his coffee cup and put it back down before answering. “No, I don’t. I think he thinks we’re overreacting.”

  “But you don’t think so, do you?” Libby asked her dad.

  “Honestly, I’m not sure,” Sean replied. “But I think it’s always better to err on the side of caution in cases like these.”

  “So what should we do?” Libby asked.

  “Good question.” Sean pushed his chair back from the table, stood up, and made his way over to his armchair because he got stiff when he stayed in one position for too long. “I’ve been asking myself that,” he said as he gingerly lowered himself into the chair and propped his feet up on the ottoman.

  “And?” Libby inquired.

  “The first thing we have to do is call the area hospitals to make sure she’s not there. I’ll take care of that.”

  Bernie and Libby both nodded. They’d been about to suggest that themselves.

  Sean put a pillow between his lower back and the chair and leaned back, but, dissatisfied, took the pillow out and placed it on the floor. “Damn thing,” he muttered. “It makes things worse instead of better.”

  “Dad,” Libby said, “are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Just trying to organize my thoughts and get comfortable.” Another moment went by, and he said, “Okay, correct me if I’m wrong, but we are going on the assumption that Amber called up one of the Christmas Cookie Exchange Club ladies—at least one and possibly more—and told them that she either had or knew where to get her aunt’s recipe and that she was entering the contest?”

  “And that one of the ladies took exception to that,” Libby said.

  “Exactly,” Sean said.

  “Especially since whoever she is has gone to considerable trouble to get Millie out of the picture,” Bernie added.

  “Yeah,” Libby said, “I can see where Amber coming into the picture would be extremely annoying to that person. Maybe terminally annoying.”

  “If I were you,” Sean said, thinking out loud, “I’d want to have a talk with the Christmas Cookie Exchange Club ladies.”

  “And ask them what?” Bernie inquired.

  Sean stroked his chin. “Just see if you can get them talking. Maybe they’ll let some information out. Even if you don’t get anything out of them, maybe the conversations will stir the pot and get something going.”

  “Hopefully not like someone else disappearing,” Bernie said.

  “Heaven forbid.” Libby pulled a chocolate kiss out of the pocket of her hoodie and popped it in her mouth. “God, I hope Amber’s all right.”

  Bernie shook her head. “I’m still having trouble seeing one of the Christmas Cookie Exchange Club ladies mixed up in Amber’s disappearance.”

  “I am too,” Libby agreed. “It just seems wrong.”

  “And yet,” Sean said, “we’re positing that one of these ladies assembled and dragged a deer target into the middle of the road for the express purpose of running Millie off it.”

  “Yeah, but whoever did that didn’t overpower Millie. Amber is a whole different proposition,” Bernie said.

  “We don’t know what happened with Amber,” Sean pointed out as he leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers together. “Story: This was before you were born, but I remember this eighty-year-old man, a man who couldn’t have weighed more than one-hundred-fifty pounds, bashed his two-hundred-pound grandson over the head with an ax handle. Killed him.”

  “That’s terrible,” Libby cried.

  “Mr. Clark didn’t seem to think so. He thought his grandson deserved it. My point,” Sean went on before either of his daughters could say anything else, “is that you shouldn’t write someone off because of their physical condition or their age. If someone really wants to do something, they will find a way to do it. Age doesn’t necessarily make people nicer. Sometimes it has the opposite effect.”

  Everyone fell silent for a moment.

  Then Libby said, “We’ve got to find Amber. We have to. I just hope nothing bad has happened to her.”

  “She’s a very resourceful young lady,” Sean reassured her. “I’m sure she’ll be able to figure out what to do.”

  “One hopes. But in the meantime we should start looking for her,” Bernie said.

  “Agreed,” Sean answered.

  “But where?” Bernie wondered. “She could be anywhere.”

  “She could be,” Sean replied. “But I think we have to assume she’s relatively close by. Now, can I make a suggestion?”

  Bernie cocked her head and waited.

  “Before you tackle the ladies, why don’t you talk to Amber’s roommates again, maybe take a look at her room. Perhaps she left something behind that could point us in the right direction. And then, after that, talk to the clerks at the strip mall you found her car in and see if they can tell you anything. You might dig something up that will help you when you talk to the members of the Christmas Cookie Exchange Club. At the very least, it might help put a time line on Amber’s disappearance.”

  Libby nodded. “What about talking to Amber’s mom as well?” she asked her dad.

  Sean shrugged. “It couldn’t hurt.”

  “But I don’t think it’s going to help either, considering that she and Amber never speak,” Bernie commented, remembering what Linda had said when they’d talked. She was about to explain when Libby looked at her watch.

  “Bernie, it’s five,” she cried. “We gotta go downstairs and help behind the counter.”

  “That late?” Bernie said, jumping up. Between five and six PM was their second-busiest time of the day.

  “Go on,” Sean said. “I’m going to stay here and cogitate for a while.”

  Bernie smiled. “I see you’ve been doing the crosswords again.”

  Sean laughed and nodded. After Bernie left, he settled back in his chair, closed his eyes, and began to think about where he would stash Amber if he were one of the Christmas Cookie Exchange Club ladies. It had to be someplace that was extremely difficult to get out of. Someplace off the beaten path.

  In the meantime, Libby and Bernie went downstairs to help out Googie and George. Even though the shop was crowded, it wasn’t as crowded as usual, and by six the crowd had dissipated enough so that Bernie and Libby felt comfortable leaving their dad in charge of
the register and taking off on their appointed tasks.

  “Hey, good luck,” Googie called out to the sisters as they went out the door.

  “I have a feeling we’re going to need it,” Libby said.

  “Me too,” Bernie agreed.

  As they walked to the van, Libby admired the shop’s window. She’d created a holiday village out of gingerbread and marzipan. There were skaters on a sugar-glass lake, and a boy and his dog walking home along a gumdrop path to a house decorated with peppermint candy canes. In the back, a marzipan father was sawing a chocolate log in half as sugar-cookie cows looked on and a cat stalked a meringue bird near a gingerbread schoolhouse.

  “We did good,” Bernie said, echoing Libby’s thoughts.

  Libby smiled. “We did, didn’t we?”

  Bernie flicked a feather off her parka and inspected her sleeve for a rip. She’d gotten the jacket in Vail five years ago, and she liked it as much now as she had then. “So are we starting with the strip mall?” she asked Libby.

  “Does white stick to rice?” Bernie responded.

  Libby laughed. “I never understood that expression.”

  “Me either,” Bernie confessed. “I just like the way it sounds. I figure,” Bernie went on, “strip mall first, because that way we’ll get to talk to everyone before the shops close. Then we’ll talk to the roommates, and then we’ll drop in on the members of the Christmas Cookie Exchange Club. That make sense to you?”

  “Yeah,” Bernie said as she pulled out onto the street. “So which of the ladies should we talk to first?”

  Libby shrugged. “I vote for Alma. So far she seems to have the best motive for running Millie off the road.”

  “You mean Millie getting her kicked out of her quilting club?”

  Libby nodded. “And bad-mouthing her cookies.”

  Bernie leaned back in her seat, raised her arms above her head, and stretched. “On second thought, maybe it doesn’t make any difference who we start with.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because the moment we leave, whoever we’ve talked to is going to be on the phone. Those women have a better alert system than the Pentagon.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Libby admitted. “On the other hand, this discussion may be irrelevant. Maybe they won’t want to talk to us.”

  Bernie snorted. “Are you kidding me? They’ll latch on to us like a vampire latches onto a vein.”

  “That might be overstating things a little,” Libby observed.

  “Not by much,” Bernie rejoined. “Remember, you couldn’t get rid of them in the shop.”

  “True.” Libby rat-tat-tatted on the dashboard of the van with her fingers, something she did when she was thinking. “Maybe,” she said after a minute had gone by, “we can make that work to our advantage.”

  “How?” Bernie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Libby admitted. “Yet.” And she lapsed into silence for the rest of the ride.

  Chapter 14

  The strip mall Bernie and Libby were headed for was home to a pizza place and a Chinese takeout joint, as well as a nail salon, a Laundromat, and a yoga studio. Located off the main drag in a poorly trafficked area right outside Longely, the strip mall housed a never-ending turnover of retail establishments. Most seemed to last about a year before they folded and morphed into yet another hopeful business.

  “I haven’t been here in forever,” Libby said as she surveyed the parking lot. It was about a quarter full.

  “That’s because there’s nothing here worth making a trip for, except maybe the nail place,” Bernie replied as she looked for Amber’s car. It wasn’t there. “So where did the Taurus go?” she asked Libby.

  “Maybe she came back and got it,” Libby said, feeling an uncharacteristic surge of optimism.

  “I wish, but it was probably towed,” Bernie replied as she put the van in park and exited the vehicle.

  Libby sighed. She hoped not, but she suspected that Bernie was correct.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said to Bernie as she flipped up the hood on her parka to protect her face from the wind.

  “What?” Bernie asked from the depths of her collar. Her eyes started to tear from the cold.

  “This weather isn’t helping.”

  “Helping what?”

  “Helping our business.”

  “No, it certainly isn’t,” Bernie agreed as she picked up her pace. “Anyone’s business. I know I wouldn’t be out if I didn’t have to be, that’s for sure.”

  The sisters started with the yoga studio and worked their way down the strip, going from right to left. The conversation at the yoga studio yielded some promising information, but things went downhill from there. Besides the yoga instructor, no one else had seen Amber last night. And absolutely no one had seen her this morning.

  “If she was here this morning, I didn’t see her,” the yoga teacher said as she arranged a sprig of greenery and a stem of pink carnations in a vase. She had, Bernie decided, the look of someone who had done one too many juice fasts and cleansings. “In fact,” the yoga teacher continued, “now that I think about it, I’m not even sure she’s the person I saw last night.”

  “Why don’t you just tell us what you did see?” Bernie urged.

  The yoga teacher stepped back to study her arrangement and shook her head. “No harm in that, I suppose,” she told the sisters as she started redoing the arrangement, even though it looked perfectly fine to Bernie. “Around nine o’clock last night I glanced out the window and saw someone parking the Taurus. The person driving it didn’t get out, but I didn’t think much about it. I figured whoever it was had pulled over to text or something like that, so I went back to reconciling my accounts.” She made a face. “New York State is such a pain. But when I looked up again, I saw a car pull up beside the Taurus. Then a girl with really bright orange and pink dyed hair got out of the Taurus and got into the other car, and it drove off.”

  “That’s definitely Amber,” Bernie commented.

  The yoga teacher moved the sprig of greenery a quarter of an inch to the left. “If you say so.”

  “Did Amber get in the car willingly?” Libby asked the yoga teacher.

  “As far as I could see she did,” she replied. “Anyway, when I came in this morning and saw that the car was still there I became concerned and called the police.”

  “What did they say?”

  The yoga studio owner shrugged. “Nothing. They didn’t care. They asked me if it was posing a public safety hazard, and when I said it wasn’t, they said the vehicle was my problem.”

  “So where is the car now?” Libby asked her.

  “Over on Dell Street. I called Frank’s auto and asked them to tow it. Just like the sign outside says. We have such a small lot I can’t have it taking up valuable space.”

  “Naturally,” Libby murmured, although she couldn’t see this place ever being so busy that it would matter.

  “We’re not a parking lot,” the yoga teacher said sharply. “The rule is posted in a prominent place for everyone to see.”

  “I’m not saying you’re wrong,” Libby agreed, thinking once again that she had to practice her poker face.

  “Could you identify the car that Amber got into?” Bernie asked, changing the subject to one she hoped would be more productive.

  The yoga teacher shook her head. “Not really. I don’t do cars. They’re an emanation of a destructive world.”

  “Really?” Bernie said, barely managing to stop herself from rolling her eyes.

  “Yes, really,” the yoga teacher answered. “If it weren’t for cars we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today. Our search for oil has destabilized the world, and now we’re going to pay for it.”

  “If you say so,” Libby said, moving the conversation along. “But on a less intense note, do you remember the color of the car?”

  “It was light,” the yoga teacher said. “That’s really the best I can do.”

  �
��Was it a Subaru, by any chance?” Bernie asked.

  “Sorry,” the yoga teacher said. “But I wouldn’t know a Subaru from a Honda. They’re really not my thing. I’m better with the natural world.”

  Not flower arranging, Libby thought as she watched the yoga teacher redo the flowers for the third time.

  “Did you happen to get a look at the person who was driving?” she asked. So far they were batting zero for three.

  The yoga teacher shook her head.

  Libby persisted. “Was it a he or a she? Old? Young?”

  “I told you I didn’t see anything,” the yoga teacher replied, her voice rising in annoyance.

  “You didn’t notice anything? Anything at all?” Bernie asked.

  “No,” the yoga teacher snapped. “If I had, I would have told you.” She took a deep breath and let it out. Then she took another one and smiled. The smile traveled as far as her mouth and died. “I hope you don’t think I’m being rude, but you two look as if you could use my services. You’d be surprised what yoga can do for your chakras.” She handed Bernie and Libby a card.

  “I think my chakras are just fine,” Libby said to Bernie as they entered the Chinese takeout place.

  “Actually, I’ve been meaning to speak to you about that. I think your fourth one could use some polishing,” Bernie told her.

  Libby giggled. “Which one is that?”

  “I don’t have the foggiest,” Bernie said as they reached the counter and asked the woman manning the register if they could speak to the establishment’s owner.

  A moment later, a tired-looking man with a stained apron tied around his waist joined them, and Bernie asked her question.

  “When I left, the Taurus was still here,” the owner said. “I figured it was broken down or something and that whoever owned it would come back and get it, you know? I guess not.”

  “Didn’t see anything,” the owner of the pizza shop told them. “I was too busy filling orders to be looking at the parking lot.”

  The owner of the nail salon informed them that they closed at seven and if the Taurus had been there she hadn’t been aware of it.