A Cookie Before Dying

by Lowell, Virginia

  “So . . . you two are meeting here for a cookie before lunch?”

  “Guess again,” Jason said. “I mean, think about it, Sis. These aren’t just cookies; they are fruit and vegetable cookies, something we hardworking guys need lots and lots of, right?”

  Olivia glanced around at the dwindling supply of cookies and the many hands reaching for more. Maybe they really might run out of cookies early, before Charlene had a chance to show up.

  “By the way, great contest idea,” Jason said. “I already picked out the cookie cutter I want when I win.”

  Olivia arched her eyebrows at him. “You? A cookie cutter?”

  Jason lowered his voice and leaned toward her ear. “Not just any cookie cutter, Liv. It’s probably the closest I’ll get to a Duesenberg. I don’t expect you to know what—”

  “Of course I know what a Dues—” More quietly, Olivia said, “I know what it is. Clarisse had it specially made for her husband, Martin, because he was restoring a 1930 Due—car he’d gotten cheaply. He loved that car.”

  “Cool,” Jason said. “Which model? Never mind. See, I want that cutter thing to hang in the 1957 Ford Fairlane I’ve been working on. I found it rusting in a farmer’s field and told Struts. She made an offer on it; got it for practically nothing. But the best part is, she said if I find the parts and restore it on my own time, she’ll let me have it. Hey, here comes lunch.” Jason pointed toward the kitchen door, through which Maddie emerged, chewing on a piece of hay and carrying a large plate stacked high with decorated fruit and vegetable cookies. Charlie Critch stood nearby. He smiled at Maddie and said something. Maddie handed him the tray and waved her hand as if to say, “Put it anywhere.” When she disappeared back into the kitchen, Charlie flashed a broad grin across the room at Jason and lifted the cookie-laden plate above his head. Jason waved and slid off his perch. “Gotta get a picture of this,” he said, holding his cell phone above customers’ heads. “Later, Liv. Can’t wait till you hand over my prize.”

  “What makes you think you’ll win the contest?”

  Jason winked at her. “Maddie gave me a few little hints.”

  Olivia decided that she and Maddie were due for another talk. Not that it would do any good. Maddie was Maddie, impulsive in her generosity, impulsive in . . . just about everything. Olivia began to wonder if moving back to Baltimore to work with Ryan wasn’t such a bad idea after all. However, her mood brightened as she watched her brother and Charlie Critch laugh together and stuff decorated cookies into their mouths. They both cared about Charlene. If it hadn’t occurred to either of them that Maddie’s cookies might be interpreted as a slap at Charlene, maybe no one would make the connection.

  An eruption of laughter distracted Olivia from visions of Charlene on the warpath. A group of women had clustered near a large mobile, which hung in front of the picture window looking out on the Chatterley Heights town square. Maddie had designed the mobile using a baby theme, and Olivia had added a copper cookie cutter shaped like an infant’s rattle. Clarisse had bought the cutter to celebrate the birth of her elder son. Heather Irwin, the young librarian at the Chatterley Heights Library, was touching the copper rattle as she spoke to her good friend, Gwen Tucker. Heather, normally shy, looked happy. Olivia had heard she had a new boyfriend, which might explain the color in her cheeks.

  Gwen Tucker, along with her husband, Herbie, ran the Chatterley Paws no-kill animal shelter. At the moment, Gwen was pregnant, and she looked it. Fine-boned and about five feet tall, she was lugging eight months of healthy baby. Which reminded Olivia that she and Maddie had promised eight dozen decorated cookies for the baby shower Heather was organizing for Gwen on Wednesday evening. Maddie would have to pull off one of her frenzied baking miracles.

  Olivia started at a light touch on the back of her shoulder, and a deep male voice said, “Livie? Could I talk to you for a minute?” She spun around and looked up several inches to Lucas Ashford’s handsome and worried face. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” Lucas said. “I just . . . I know this is a really bad time, but . . .” He ran strong fingers through his dark hair and heaved a sigh that should have sounded manly, but the poor guy looked more like a tot who’d lost his puppy.

  Over Lucas’s shoulder, Olivia saw Maddie push backward through the kitchen door, holding a large tray of cookies. She turned around and handed the tray off to Bertha. Maddie glanced around the crowded store with a pleased expression until her gaze landed on the back of Lucas’s head. Her smile melted into sadness, or so it seemed to Olivia. As Maddie spun around and vanished into the kitchen, Olivia said, “Yes, Lucas, let’s talk. Now is fine. Let’s see if we can find a spot in the cookbook nook.”

  The relief on Lucas’s face was palpable. He followed Olivia closely through the sales floor, around groups of customers who seemed more interested in eating cookies and trading guesses about cookie cutter shapes than in purchasing anything. In forlorn silence, he stood at Olivia’s elbow as customers stopped her and tried to wheedle hints about which cutter was the special one or whether they’d guessed the shape correctly.

  Olivia had hung all her mobiles in the main sales area, so the cookbook nook was relatively quiet. The stack of cookies she had deposited in the nook before the store opened was now reduced to a few colorful crumbs. She led Lucas over to the two leather easy chairs arranged in a corner.

  “It’s . . . it’s about Maddie,” Lucas said. He sighed, then sighed again.

  Olivia nodded her encouragement. Lucas wasn’t much of a talker, and Maddie tended to interpret for him. Olivia wanted to give him the chance to say, in his own words, what was going on between the two of them. She might not be able to fix the situation, but at least she would know what it was.

  Lucas bent his long torso forward and leaned on his forearms. Staring down at his intertwined fingers, he said, “Maddie is a real special woman. She’s beautiful, she’s smart and funny and . . .”

  Uh-oh, he’s breaking up with her. Olivia wished she had a cookie to cram into her mouth; she wanted so much to intervene.

  “I don’t know, maybe I’m not interesting enough. I don’t talk a lot. Maybe she’s tired of me being quiet, but I think I’m a pretty good listener, and . . . and I love her with all my heart.”

  And she adores you. What’s the problem? “Lucas, could you fill me in a bit? Have you two had a fight or . . . ?”

  Lucas’s startled eyes lifted to Olivia’s face. Despite his chiseled features, his confusion gave him a boyish look. “Oh, I . . . I guess I assumed Maddie had confided in you. Sunday evening I asked her to marry me. She said no, and she won’t talk about it.”

  By eleven forty-five, Olivia allowed herself to be hopeful that the store event would finish without incident. She was less hopeful about her ability to rescue Maddie and Lucas’s romance. Friendly, exuberant Maddie could close up like Chatterley Heights on a Sunday evening. When she did, it was serious. Olivia had lived in Baltimore for twelve years, through college and her marriage. She and Maddie had chatted often by phone, emailed, visited now and then. To be honest, though, living in separate locations had allowed each of them to limit how much to share with the other. Olivia had to admit she’d been tight-lipped about the problems she and Ryan were having, at least until she’d made the decision to leave her marriage. Had Maddie hidden a painful experience or two, as well?

  Olivia had scheduled the announcement of the cookie cutter contest winner for twelve forty-five, so customers who couldn’t get away from work until their lunch hours would have at least some chance to participate. With luck, the crowd would clear out by one o’clock or shortly thereafter. Charlene must have heard about Maddie’s vegetable and fruit cookies by now and thought nothing of it.

  Bertha waved to Olivia from behind the counter, where a line of customers waited to make purchases. Finally. Olivia had begun to wonder if her contest idea was so successful it had distracted folks from their new collection of hand-embroidered tea towels and their recently acquired vintage Wilto
n cookie cutter sets. Maddie had brought out the last of the cookies and was working the sales floor, so Olivia waved back to Bertha and headed toward the sales counter to help at the cash register. By the time she got there, the line had expanded to ten customers.

  Fifteen minutes later, Olivia and Bertha had reduced the line to two customers. Olivia had a chance to survey the sales floor, which had grown denser with the arrival of the lunch crowd. The front door opened to admit a young couple she’d never seen before and, right behind them, Sam Parnell. She remembered he’d delivered their mail at about nine a.m., as usual. He was dressed in full uniform, complete with the hat that rarely left his head, but he wasn’t carrying his mailbag. Olivia assumed he’d decided to stop by on his lunch hour. Since the very first day The Gingerbread House opened its doors, Olivia could not remember Sam ever giving up his precious lunch hour to drop by. This could mean only one thing: Sam thought there was juicy gossip to be had, or perhaps helped along. Sam’s nickname—Snoopy—was well earned. Olivia’s hope for a confrontation-free event began to fade.

  Olivia’s peace of mind took another hit when the front door again opened and in walked Binnie Sloan, the barrel-shaped editor of the Weekly Chatter, followed by her skinny young niece, Nedra. As Olivia knew from personal experience, the Weekly Chatter was not known for its adherence to journalistic standards.

  Maybe, Olivia told herself, Binnie and Ned had come to cover the cookie cutter contest. Right. And Sam was there only to snag a cookie or three, despite his diabetes. Olivia noticed he did seem to be examining a half-full tray of decorated cookies with great interest. Finally, he selected one and took a bite. Binnie came up behind him, grabbed two cookies, and bit through both at the same time, as if they were a ham sandwich. Ned took a photo of the tray but did not indulge.

  Another flurry of customers distracted Olivia for a time. When she was once again free to glance around, she saw Sam Parnell and Binnie Sloan in conversation, apparently about a sheet of paper that each of them held. Olivia told herself that they were simply comparing notes about the contest, but she didn’t find herself convincing. Her apprehension spiked higher. Turning to Bertha, she asked, “Will you be all right handling the register for a while? I’d like to check with Maddie to see how close we are to announcing a contest winner.”

  “The pace seems to be settling down,” Bertha said. “You go right on ahead now.”

  Olivia spotted Maddie standing in the opening to the cookbook nook, where she could see and be seen. In the crook of her right arm, she held a mixing bowl into which folks were depositing half-sized sheets of peach-colored paper. Maddie’s attention, however, was focused on the full-sized sheet of white paper in her left hand. As Olivia approached, she noticed red splotches on Maddie’s pale, freckled cheeks.

  “Something tells me,” Olivia said when she reached Maddie, “that you aren’t reading the contest results.”

  Without comment, Maddie handed the sheet of paper to Olivia, who recognized it at once as a copy of Charlene Critch’s anti-sugar manifesto that she and Maddie had spent Sunday afternoon cleaning off The Gingerbread House lawn.

  “So Charlene printed more of these things?”

  “Take another look,” Maddie said. “Then check out those folks who are just arriving.”

  Obeying the last order first, Olivia watched as three women—customers who made regular trips from Clarksville in search of vintage cookie cutters—closed the store door behind them. Instead of plunging eagerly toward the ever-changing cookie cutter display as they usually did, the women paused to skim the papers they held. Their expressions appeared to range from bemused to concerned.

  With chilled anticipation, Olivia turned her attention to the latest edition of Charlene’s diatribe against the demon sugar. The opening warning that “Sugar Kills” hadn’t changed, though Charlene had added an additional exclamation point. It was followed, as before, with a list of pseudo facts about how sugar accomplishes its dastardly effects. In this version, the claims were even more outrageous and, Olivia realized, more personal:• WARNING: Don’t be fooled by a little lime zest. Cookies shaped like fruits and vegetables are still just clumps of sugar, and sugar is a weapon of human destruction.

  • Sugar causes obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and dementia. If you are eating an iced cookie while reading this, you have shortened your life by several months.

  • If you are pregnant and consuming sugar at this moment, you are condemning your baby to a life of illness and early death.

  • No amount of exercise can undo the damage those cookies are doing to your bodies right this minute.

  • Ask yourselves this question: What kind of person provides daily mega-doses of sweet poison to an entire town?

  If you are worried about your health and your loved ones, come to The Vegetable Plate this evening at seven o’clock. We will plan how to take back our lives from the destructive effects of sugar in our own town.

  “Wow,” Olivia said. “It seems we are a public menace. I’m wondering if we should call the police and have ourselves arrested.”

  Maddie glowered. “I don’t find it amusing. Charlene is trying to destroy our business. I think we should sue her. I mean, this is illegal, right? You still have Mr. Willard on retainer, don’t you? So call him and ask if this is legal or not.”

  “I don’t really see the need to keep an attorney on retainer, though I could certainly talk to him if it would make you feel better. But Maddie, nobody could possibly take this stuff seriously. It’s completely over-the-top. I’m more concerned about Charlene’s state of mind. She seems . . .”

  “Insane? Bonkers? Several cookies short of a mass poisoning?”

  Olivia heard a gentle laugh as her mother joined them, also holding the offending paper. “Maddie, dear,” Ellie said, “I must agree with Livie, and not only because she is my daughter. On numerous occasions, I have not agreed with her in the least, such as—”

  “Mom, could we focus on the part where you think I’m right?”

  “Certainly, Livie.” With a motherly squeeze to Maddie’s shoulders, Ellie said, “I do understand your feelings, Maddie. Those outlandish claims are more than lies; they are a profound insult, not only to your integrity but also to the intelligence of your customers. No, I don’t believe Charlene is clinically insane. I do sense that something is deeply amiss in her life, though, and this is her way of . . . I don’t know, assuming control?”

  “Are you taking a class in Jungian analysis, Mom?”

  Ellie patted her daughter’s arm. “No, dear, it wouldn’t provide nearly enough exercise for me. All I’m suggesting is that we turn our attention to Charlene’s current situation. For instance, who tore apart her store, and why hasn’t this person picked on other stores in Chatterley Heights? I have to wonder if Charlene is being tortured by a personal enemy, and maybe she feels alone. Perhaps we should talk to her, try to—”

  “Uh oh,” Olivia said.

  “Now hear me out,” Ellie said.

  “No, I mean ‘uh oh,’ as in, look who is coming through the front door.”

  Olivia noticed that the decibel level of customer chatter dropped a notch and several hands pulled back from the cookie trays as Charlene Critch closed the front door behind her. She was dressed to perfection in a figure-skimming, pink-and-white striped sundress. The stripes were vertical, of course, to emphasize Charlene’s slight figure. Her blond hair was gathered into a ponytail, with tendrils framing her face. From a distance, she could pass for a teenager.

  Olivia accepted the inevitable: if there was to be a confrontation, she should be the one to handle it. For the long, complex process of creating decorated cookies, Maddie had infinite patience. For people, not so much. Forming her lips into a smile, Olivia wove through her customers and around display tables toward the front of the store.

  Charlene watched Olivia’s approach with a cold stare. She didn’t speak until they were face-to-face. “How could you?” she said, loud enough to b
e heard by everyone in the store.

  “How could I? All I did was—”

  “Do you think I’m so dense I wouldn’t understand what you and Maddie are trying to do? I knew she was mean enough to try a stunt like this, but I can’t believe you played along. I ought to sue both of you.”

  “Sue us? Look, all we did was host a celebration of the harvest. I really don’t think that is grounds for a lawsuit. If anything, you’re the one that—”

  “This is just so . . .” Charlene’s brown eyes began to glisten with tears. “So mean. You were only pretending to be kind to me after my store got broken into. And now you’re trying to destroy my business.” Her thin chest heaved as she tried to catch her breath.

  “Charlene, let’s talk somewhere else.”

  “Don’t even bother to deny it. The evidence it right there.” Charlene pointed toward a nearby table, where a tray held three uneaten cookies: a magenta apple with a grinning pink worm, a cornflower blue carrot, and something that looked like a turnip with the icing licked off. “You and Maddie are trying to trick everybody into believing that healthy eating doesn’t matter, so they won’t come to my Healthy Eating Club, or maybe even my store. You’re trying to ruin me, and . . . and you’re willing to poison everyone in Chatterley Heights to do it.” Tears spilled down her cheeks, dragging her mascara and foundation with them.

  In a flash, Olivia reached two understandings. First, Charlene probably believed everything she had written in her announcement. And second, her thickly applied makeup was an attempt to hide a black eye.

  Charlene sniffled and swiped the tears off her cheeks. She seemed unaware that the bruised skin around her left eye had begun to show. “Anyway,” she said, “I didn’t come to talk to you. I need to talk to your brother.”

  “Charlie? I think I saw him over by the coffee table, near the window facing the square.” Olivia waved her hand in the general direction of the window. “But Charlene, are you sure you’re all right? I couldn’t help but notice—”