One Dead Cookie

by Virginia Lowell

“Sure,” Maddie said. “I always love a party. I get to wear a fantastic dress, be surrounded by friends and total strangers…what’s not to get excited about? I hope you’re all planning to be at Bon Vivant Saturday afternoon. There will be wine, cookies, and little sandwiches with the crusts cut off.”

  Olivia noticed that Trevor hadn’t passed the cookie plate on to Howie. She also observed Howie’s stiff posture and wooden expression. Maddie must have noticed, too, because she snatched the cookie plate from Trevor’s lap. After claiming a deep pink wedding gown for herself, Maddie offered the plate to Howie. His shoulders relaxed as he reached for a cookie shaped like a gift box wrapped in pink-striped icing.

  “Be careful of your weight, Howie,” Trevor said. “You worked so hard to lose it.”

  Trevor’s warning, delivered so casually, silenced everyone. Olivia froze, her own cookie halfway to her lips. Maddie recovered first, and said lightly, “You’re too skinny, Howie. And I’m not just saying that because I myself have quite generous proportions.” Howie glanced up at Maddie with an expression that reminded Olivia of Spunky when she gave him an extra treat.

  “You both look great,” Dougie said. He chomped on his cookie and nodded in approval. Before taking a second bite, Dougie lifted up his cookie heart, now minus one lobe, to offer a toast. “To Maddie and Lucas,” he said, “and a long and happy life together.”

  All but Trevor echoed the toast. Olivia noticed his tight jaw and narrowed eyelids. Trevor Lane was very angry, which startled Olivia. Why? Just because Maddie and Dougie tried to soften his nasty comment to Howie?

  With a jerky movement, Trevor raised one of his cookies, as Dougie had done, and said, “I wish you the very best of luck, Maddie, as you enter that challenging condition known as married life. And may you be spared the fate suffered by Anna Adair, my good friend Dougie’s former wife.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Wow, talk about drama,” Maddie said as she scooped up an assortment of gel food colors and arranged the bottles on the kitchen counter. “Trevor’s mysterious line about Anna Adair is such a great ending for a scene in a play. I was impressed. Trevor would be totally convincing as Rhett Butler. I might have to start watching the soaps.”

  “Trevor Lane doesn’t like to be crossed, that’s for sure.” Olivia noticed the sugar supply was running low and started a shopping list. “Dougie told me he was still in love with his former wife. I would love to know what terrible fate befell her. I wonder if Lenora knows.”

  “I’m not sure we could trust Lenora’s version of anything, but I bet I can find the information online.” Maddie fired up Olivia’s laptop, which doubled as the store computer. “Although Trevor might have been ad-libbing to punish Dougie for contradicting him when he told Howie to watch his weight. Honestly, I feel like we’ve been in the middle of a joie de vivre or something.”

  After puzzling for a moment, Olivia said, “Well, this evening was intriguing in a tense sort of way, but ‘enjoyment of life’ isn’t the description I’d have chosen.”

  Maddie lifted her fingers from the computer keyboard. “Déjà vu?”

  “Not unless you’d heard Trevor’s showstopping toast before this evening.”

  “Ménage à trois?”

  “Please stop.”

  Olivia sat at her little kitchen desk, where she’d left a notebook in which she’d been scribbling ideas for cookie recipes. The lavender cookie recipe was close, thanks to her mom’s input, but she was ready to scratch the lemon verbena idea altogether. Olivia felt as if the time pressure had frozen her brain. Maddie created recipe variations all the time, but she never wrote them down. Too boring, she always said. Olivia enjoyed recording her ideas. She liked to watch an idea develop into a project, even if the goal was as mundane as reorganizing a shelf. Her current project, creating two new recipes for Maddie’s engagement party, was far more intriguing than reorganizing a shelf, but also a whole lot tougher. Olivia thought back to her business-school training, specifically her class on entrepreneurship. I’m supposed to think of this as a challenge, right? So why do I feel tempted to clean the bathroom instead?

  “Livie, do you know you’re mumbling to yourself?”

  Olivia tossed her pen on the nearly blank page. “Let’s face it, I’m no good at making up recipes.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Maddie’s hands paused over the computer keys. “Here’s your problem: you’re going at this like it’s a school assignment that requires icky things like logical thinking. Making up cookie recipes is really more like playing in a sandbox. Sometimes numbers are involved, but once you get the hang of it, you can estimate. I’ll show you what I mean in a minute. Give me a little more time to sate my curiosity about Trevor, Dougie, and Howie, okay? I mean, it’s sort of your fault I’m doing this search.”

  “Your rampant curiosity is my fault?”

  “Well, not when I’m wondering, for example, what beets taste like in sugar cookies, but you are the one who got me hooked on mysteries. Books aren’t enough for me anymore. Now I need regular doses of mystery delivered right to my door. So go organize the fridge or something while I get my sleuthing fix.” Maddie’s fingers hopped around the keyboard. “And stop all that muttering about addictive personalities.”

  Suddenly, cleaning out the freezer did sound like a good idea. Olivia began by extracting an unlabeled container made of clear plastic. She pried off the lid and found two cookies: a purple tree and a pink bell. The Gingerbread House had hosted a holiday event in early December, nearly five months earlier. Way too long to keep fully decorated cookies. She dumped the cookies and tossed the empty container into the sink. Next she found a small, rusting tin so filled with ice crystals she’d need carbon dating to identify the age of the contents.

  “Eureka!” Maddie said.

  Olivia tossed the tin and its contents into the wastebasket and abandoned her task. “I remember now why I never clean the freezer,” she said. “It reminds me of digging through layers of sedimentary rock. What did you find?”

  “First, about Dougie Adair. I’ve been piecing together bits of his past from several sites. The most recent stuff is from Hollywood gossip blogs. The bloggers write mostly about Trevor Lane, of course, but Dougie’s name pops up from time to time. There was no mention of a wife, which made me really curious. I tried searching his full name, Douglas Ray Adair, and I found some older records. It looks like he moved to New York City in 1995 to try his luck at playwriting.”

  “Dougie mentioned living in New York City. How was his luck?” Olivia lifted a clean mixing bowl from the dishwasher and used a kitchen towel to wipe off any moisture that hadn’t evaporated during the energy-save dry cycle.

  “Really bad,” Maddie said. “In the late nineties, a couple of Dougie’s plays got produced way, way off Broadway. I found some scathing reviews.”

  “How far off Broadway?”

  “One of them was in New Jersey.” Maddie peered at the screen. “Listen to this: ‘Mr. Adair may have intended to tell a tale of unrelenting darkness and despair, and I must admit that he succeeded, in as much as the audience longed for the lights to go on and despaired of ever seeing the final curtain.’”

  “Ouch.”

  “No kidding,” Maddie said. “I suspect the reviewer stole those words from someone else, but still…I’m sticking to decorated cookies. Everybody likes decorated…Whoa.”

  “What did you find?” Olivia dropped her towel in the dishwasher and scooted a chair next to Maddie.

  “This looks like a 1999 obituary list of people in the arts.” Maddie pointed at a short entry in a series of death notices. “It says here that ‘Anna Adair, twenty-three, died unexpectedly at her home in New York. Cause of death unknown. Anna was a poet, married to writer Douglas R. Adair, who was out of town at the time of her death.’ Evidently, Dougie found her when he returned home. Golly. What Trevor said about Dougie’s wife sort of implied that she might have killed herself, didn’t it?”

  “I wonder if…” Ol
ivia shook her head to clear it. “My friend, your engagement bash is in two days, and we have a lot of work to do before then. Our curiosity can wait.”

  “Point taken.” Maddie put the computer to sleep by lowering the lid. “This is unsettling and wildly fascinating, but we have fabulous cookies to invent and produce in practically no time. Fire up the trusty Artisan, and let’s get to work!”

  * * *

  By midnight, Olivia felt more hopeful that her promised wedding gift to Maddie and Lucas might materialize in time, even though Maddie had contributed a good portion of the creativity. In the Gingerbread House kitchen, the luscious aromas of lemon and lavender competed for dominance. Olivia’s legs felt wobbly, and even Maddie’s pace had slowed down to that of an average human, but they had accomplished a miracle. They’d created at least one promising original cookie recipe.

  “Your idea for speeding up the experimentation process was pure genius,” Olivia said. “I was afraid it would take weeks to come up with an edible recipe. I would never have thought of mixing quarter batches until we got the texture and flavor right.”

  “Aw shucks. I couldn’t have done it without your superior math skills.” Maddie sampled a barely cooled cookie. “I do believe we’ve done it,” she announced. “Here, taste this and tell me what you think.”

  Olivia bit into a heavenly melding of lemon and lavender flavors. “The texture came out just right this time, and the lavender flavor is pretty good. Maybe we could lighten it a bit. And I’m fine with ditching the lemon verbena idea and sticking with good old lemon cookies. I’ll save the lemon verbena for green beans or something.”

  “Yeah, like you ever cook vegetables,” Maddie said.

  “Hey, I have a can opener, and I know how to use it.” Olivia sat at her desk with pen and paper. “Do you have an estimate of how many guests might attend your engagement party?”

  “Livie, that would be math. How many people live in Chatterley Heights and the surrounding countryside?”

  “Too many. Hand me the laptop, would you?” Olivia woke up her computer, looked up the population of Chatterley Heights, and added in what information she could find about the areas nearby. “Several thousand,” she concluded, “not including nearby towns like Clarksville, where I know you have some friends. I do recall suggesting that you use the invitation-only approach.”

  “I get it, Livie; you told me so. Only it wouldn’t have worked because Binnie took it upon herself to advertise the event in both The Weekly Chatter and her infernal blog. All I can hope is that most people would rather die than do anything Binnie Sloan tells them to do.”

  “I doubt Binnie’s following goes much beyond Chatterley Heights, anyway,” Olivia said. “I guess we’ll just have to bake as many cookies as humanly possible, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.”

  “We’ll limit the wine, too,” Maddie said. “Lucas and I are footing the bill for drinks. Poor Lucas is still paying off the loan he took out to pay for his parents’ care before they died. This recession has really slowed down business, even for Heights Hardware, the best hardware store in the entire country. Luckily, my income has been more or less steady, thanks to The Gingerbread House.”

  While the last batch of experimental lavender-lemon cookies cooled on racks, Olivia began filling the dishwasher. “Tomorrow evening we’ll need to start baking the cookies for Saturday,” she said. “I’ll check and make sure we have enough supplies.”

  Maddie bounced up from her chair with altogether too much energy. “Livie, it’s already tomorrow, and there aren’t many tomorrows left before the party. I’m wound up anyway, so I intend to keep baking. You get some sleep. You are two months older than me, after all; you could get a heart attack or something.”

  “I’ll remind you about that comment two months from now, when you’ve reached my advanced age,” Olivia said. “I was planning to stay up a while, too. I brought home several boxes from Clarisse’s cookie cutter collection. We’re only using a few of them, so I thought it would be fun to put together a new display for the store. I mentioned the idea to Bertha, and she loved it. She still misses Clarisse. So do I.”

  “Aren’t you worried they might be stolen?” Maddie asked. “Del hasn’t caught whoever broke into Lady Chatterley’s and/or attacked the head teller at the bank.”

  “I’ll lock the cutters in a case and put it in the safe at night,” Olivia said. “Del keeps telling me to install an alarm system, but it’s so expensive. Knowing me, I’d probably trip the alarm on a daily basis.”

  “I see your point. Hang on a sec, let me check something.” Maddie turned toward the computer screen. “I hate reading Binnie’s blog, but if there’s any new information about the break-ins, she’ll hear it first.”

  “Or she’ll make it up.” Olivia cleared her desk and began to lay out the cookie cutters she’d selected from Clarisse’s collection.

  “Nothing from Binnie,” Maddie reported, “except that your ongoing feud with the love of your life, Sheriff Del Jenkins, is heating up again. Apparently, you are in desperate denial and won’t let go. Oh my…”

  “What? No wait, do I really want to know?”

  “Binnie has redefined nasty. She dug up information about Del’s divorce,” Maddie said. “According to Binnie’s blatant innuendo, Del was such a difficult husband he drove his wife back into the arms of her ex-husband. Del will kill Binnie.”

  “No, he won’t, but I will.” Olivia slapped a dishtowel on the counter. It felt good. “Del told me his wife left him to return to her ex-husband. It hurt him deeply. Binnie finally says something partly true, and it’s more vicious than any lie she’s ever printed.”

  Maddie stared at the screen in silence for a moment. “You know,” she said, “that’s not the sort of insider information I usually find easily on the Internet. Not impossible, of course, but…” Her hands bounced around the keyboard for a few minutes. “Nothing so far. Del’s ex-wife was named Lisa, right? Okay, here’s a notice about his wife’s remarriage, but it doesn’t mention Del, or that she is remarrying her ex-husband. I’m sure I could find more, but only because I know what I’d be looking for. Binnie must really hate Del to go to such lengths to trash him.” Maddie clicked away for several more minutes. “Okay, I can find references to Del as the arresting officer in various places other than Chatterley Heights, probably in previous jobs. A couple quotes about more recent cases. Lisa doesn’t appear to be a tell-all sort of person. Del never posts anything online himself.”

  “Of course not,” Olivia said. “He isn’t the celebrity cop type. He’s very private.”

  “I hate to break it to you, Livie, but that wouldn’t stop someone who really wants to find out about him. Private investigators manage to dig up all sorts of information the rest of us wouldn’t know how to find. Even an average citizen can use sites that find personal information for a fee. I don’t, of course. My curiosity wanes when I have to shell out money.”

  “I need sustenance,” Olivia said as she selected an undecorated lavender-lemon cookie. “Herbs are good for the brain, right?”

  “I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere,” Maddie said. “While you’re at it, hand me one of those babies. I could use a few more IQ points.”

  Olivia relaxed on a kitchen chair and propped her feet up on the seat of another one. “Binnie Sloan can be a bulldog when it comes to hunting down information, especially when she’s miffed at someone. She doesn’t like you and me. She’s still angry with Del for all the times he has interfered with her so-called investigative reporting. If she could find damaging or humiliating information about any of our pasts, she’d gladly use it, but I can’t see her hating us enough to pay anyone to find the information for her. Can you?”

  “Not a chance,” Maddie said. “The Weekly Chatter isn’t exactly the Baltimore Sun. Binnie operates on a frayed shoestring. Plus she’s been paying for her niece’s journalism training. Ned’s been burning through lots of online classes, plus she’s taken a couple cour
ses at American University.”

  Olivia nibbled her cookie and felt herself relax. Her mother always told her that lavender potpourri would calm her, if only she’d give it a chance. She concluded that cookies worked much better. “And don’t forget,” Olivia said, “Binnie has her pride. She’d have to be desperate to pay someone else to dig up dirt for her.”

  “So do you think Binnie might be really desperate to embarrass Del?”

  “Can’t imagine why.” Olivia finished her cookie and brushed the crumbs off her lap. “No, I have a feeling Binnie came by the information about Del’s divorce without much effort. I suspect someone else fed it to her.”

  “I don’t get it,” Maddie said. “Who would do that? Maybe somebody Del arrested?”

  Olivia stood and stretched her arms above her head. “I don’t know. But I can’t help thinking maybe there’s—”

  Fierce barking penetrated into the kitchen from the store’s sales area. Maddie’s chair toppled to the floor as she leaped to her feet. Olivia scrambled toward the door with one worry in her mind: Spunky’s safety. She’d left him to snooze in the dark store while she and Maddie baked the night away. She hadn’t wanted him to wake up alone in the apartment. He might fear he’d been abandoned.

  With Maddie close behind, Olivia threw open the kitchen door and flipped on the lights. “Spunky? What’s wrong, boy?”

  Spunky yapped as he skittered back and forth in front of the large window that faced onto the Chatterley Heights town square. Olivia didn’t try to stop him. Instead, she doused the sales floor lights and stood at the window. Maddie joined her.

  The outside porch lights revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Olivia saw no movement in the store’s dimly lit front yard. Clouds hid the moon, while streetlamps dropped glowing circles along the sidewalk surrounding the park. Nothing suspicious there, as far as Olivia could tell. The park itself was dark, except for the single lamp by the band shell.

  When Spunky quieted down, Olivia scooped him into her arms. “What did you see, my fierce protector?” The tired little guy snuggled against her shoulder, ready to call it a night.