A Cookie Before Dying

by Lowell, Virginia

  Olivia met her mother halfway and said, “Let’s talk in private.” Olivia led the way out the front door and into the foyer, where she unlocked the door leading to her apartment. At the top of the stairs, she unlocked her apartment. A ball of fur catapulted through the door the instant it opened. Olivia grabbed Spunky’s middle as he flew past. “I banished him to the apartment this morning before racing off to visit Jason.” Holding the whimpering, squirming dog, she led her mother to the living room.

  “Let me,” Ellie said, taking Spunky from Olivia’s grasp. The Yorkie calmed down at once. Olivia was impressed. Even in her agitated state, her mother could calm a beast driven to escape.

  “I’m sorry it’s been so frantic,” Olivia said, “and it’s about to get more so. Mom, I’m really sorry, but I have to get right back down to help Maddie in the kitchen. We’ve got a crisis with Gwen and Herbie’s shower. Could you possibly help Bertha mind the store this afternoon? Maddie will be in the kitchen working like a madwoman until—”

  “Yes, of course I will, but what about Jason?”

  “Jason . . .” Olivia threw up her hands and flopped down on the sofa. “Jason is an idiot.”

  “At the moment, I’d have to agree with you,” Ellie said as she sat next to Olivia. Spunky settled in her lap and curled into a ball. “So I assume he won’t recant his ridiculous confession?”

  “Nope. And he still won’t talk to you or Allan.”

  “Oh Livie, what are we going to do? How can we get Jason out of this horrible mess?” Tears filled Ellie’s eyes and spilled down her cheeks. Spunky sat up in her lap and whimpered.

  Fighting her own tears, Olivia put an arm around her mother’s shoulders. “I don’t know. I’ll find a way.” It was a rash promise, but failure was unthinkable.

  “How are we going to spring your brother from jail?” Maddie asked as she piped a pink yawn onto a round baby-face cookie.

  “Cute,” Olivia said, glancing at the cookie. She was relieved that Maddie, after her bout of panic and guilt, had thrown herself into the task of decorating nearly eight dozen cookies in less than three hours. Together, they’d been able to finish almost two dozen already, and it was only two forty-five. “I’m afraid Jason will have to experience incarceration for some time, since he refuses to help himself. It’ll take time to dig up anything that might be useful.”

  “But you have a plan, right?” Maddie looked up from the sparse blue hair she was piping onto another round baby-face cookie.

  “Nope.”

  “You have no plan? That’s worrisome,” Maddie said. “What did Del have to say?”

  “That his hands are tied.” Olivia hated to keep secrets, especially since Maddie could be very helpful with problem solving. However, a promise was a promise. Del would stop trusting her if she revealed anything that might affect his investigation. On the other hand, there was no law against being sneaky. “Until I think of something, maybe we should work on our own mystery—what happened to Clarisse’s Duesenberg cookie cutter?”

  “I looked everywhere I could think of,” Maddie said. “Unfortunately, I’ve run out of places to search. I mentioned it to Bertha—casually, so she wouldn’t get upset. She hadn’t seen it, didn’t even know it had disappeared.” Maddie picked up a cookie she had just finished. “You’ll love this one.”

  “Hm?” Olivia was piping red and navy dots on a baby carriage.

  “Who does this remind you of?” Maddie held the cookie under Olivia’s gaze. It looked like a baby face with blue dots for eyes, messy clumps of yellow hair, and a jagged red mouth.

  “Now that’s just mean,” Olivia said.

  “Yet cathartic. I’d eat it, but we need every cookie.” Maddie placed baby Charlene next to a pink-and-red teddy bear.

  Olivia added her baby carriage to the row. “How sure are you that Charlene won’t be at the baby shower this evening?”

  “Positive. Gwen gave me the invitation list, in case I was inspired to match any cookies to guests or their kids.”

  “Can I see that list?”

  “Sure, as long as you read and decorate simultaneously and with equal efficiency.” Maddie opened a kitchen drawer and drew out a folded sheet of paper, which she unfolded and placed next to Olivia. “We are on this list, in case you were worried.”

  Olivia selected a baby bootie for her next project and gathered pastry bags of baby blue and navy icing. Since Gwen and Herbie had declined to learn their baby’s sex, Olivia and Maddie had decided to use a variety of icing colors. Before removing the covers from the metal tips, she put aside her pastry bags to look through the names on Gwen’s list. Charlene Critch wasn’t there, as Maddie had promised, and neither were Charlie Critch and Olivia’s brother, Jason. Her mother and stepfather were listed with “regrets” next to their names. They would be too upset to feel like socializing. Otherwise, at least half the people on the list had been in The Gingerbread House during the infamous “harvest” event on Tuesday.

  “Excellent,” Olivia said, picking up her bag of baby blue icing. “I feel the onset of a plan.”

  “Oh goodie,” said Maddie. “Do I get to help?”

  “Check in with me when you bring the rest of the cookies to Gwen and Herbie’s house. By then I should know if it’s a dud.”

  Olivia parked her silver PT Cruiser in the alley outside the kitchen of The Gingerbread House. She had bought it used, in excellent condition, and she loved its roominess. She’d splurged and had The Gingerbread House logo painted on both sides. Whenever she opened the car door, she smelled a faint spiciness left over from the dozens of decorated cookies she and Maddie had delivered to private events.

  By three thirty, Olivia and Maddie had managed to finish decorating four dozen of the eight dozen cookies for the Tuckers’ baby shower. Olivia had packed them in single layers inside sheet cake pans to allow the icing to continue to harden. She wedged the pans in the back seat so they wouldn’t shift around during transport.

  Before starting the car, she took a small flashlight from her pocket and wedged it into the glove compartment. Having learned her lesson the night before, she’d called Lucas at the hardware and asked him to drop off half a dozen flashlights of various sizes.

  Gwen and Herbie Tucker owned a small farm west of town, about a fifteen-minute drive from The Gingerbread House. Olivia checked her watch. It was already ten minutes to four, but she couldn’t afford to speed, in case she hit a bump and sent the cookies flying. Before starting the PT’s engine, she called the Tuckers’ number from her cell and left a message that she was on her way.

  Olivia barely noticed the scenery. The part of her brain not engaged in avoiding bumps in the road was busy trying out questions to ask the baby shower guests. She wished she could have gotten some information from Jason. Drat that boy. Didn’t he care how much trouble he was in? Or what he was doing to his mother and stepfather? How could he have gotten so hung up on Charlene that he’d even consider sacrificing his life on the off chance she’d killed her ex-husband?

  Or did Jason know for certain that Charlene killed Geoffrey King?

  As Olivia turned onto the long driveway to the Tucker farm, she asked herself one last question: Might Jason have killed Geoffrey King in an attempt to protect the woman he loved? Could he have been so stupid and misguided? As much as she loved her brother, her answer to her own question was a firm yes.

  Chapter Eleven

  Gwen Tucker opened the front door of her nineteenth-century farmhouse, took a pan of cookies from Olivia’s hands, and said, “If it’s a girl, I’ll name her Olivia.”

  Following Gwen through a foyer crammed with muddy boots, Olivia said, “My brother calls me Olive Oyl. Just information you might want to consider.”

  Gwen’s laugh had a frantic edge. “Maybe it will be a boy. I could name him Oliver.” She slid the pan onto an already crowded kitchen counter. “Although one of our dogs is named Oliver, so that might be confusing. Anyway, I want you to know how incredibly grateful we are to
you and Maddie for pinch-hitting today. Poor Heather, she sounded awful on the phone. Here it is, hotter than jalapeno, and she manages to get the flu.”

  Olivia flashed back to their store event on Tuesday and Heather’s rosy cheeks. Maybe she hadn’t been wearing makeup after all. “I fervently hope no one caught Heather’s virus yesterday,” she said. “That was quite a crowd we had.”

  “I’m drinking orange juice and hoping my flu shot still works.” Gwen began to arrange cookies on large plates. “These look irresistible, as always. However, I shall resist, at least for now. I don’t think my skin will stretch any farther.” She was about five feet tall, and her current width looked a close second to her height.

  “How can I help?” Olivia asked.

  “I’m afraid the house needs some straightening. We’ve been so busy lately, what with preparing for the baby and moving Paws to our big barn.” Both Gwen and Herbie were vet techs with a dream. They had opened the Chatterley Paws no-kill animal shelter about three years earlier and quickly found they needed more space. “That’s the thing about a no-kill policy,” Gwen said. “We spay and neuter our animals, but that only slows down the inevitable. Lately we’ve been getting pets from families who can’t afford them anymore. It’s so sad. I don’t suppose you’d like a kitten? Or two?”

  “Um . . . Bertha Binkman is allergic to cats, so no, but I’ll spread the word.”

  “Maybe Maddie—?”

  “Did you mention something about a bathroom that needs cleaning? Point me to the noxious chemicals and I’ll get to it. Can’t have you breathing that stuff.”

  By five thirty p.m., Olivia had cleaned two bathrooms, decorated the living room, and made a bowl of punch. While arranging chairs, she realized there were only enough for ten guests. She found Gwen in the kitchen, cutting sandwiches into animal shapes.

  “Oh gosh,” Gwen said, “Heather was going to bring a bunch along with her. She keeps a huge supply of folding chairs for family picnics, and she carts them around in her truck. What can we do? Guests are arriving in less than two hours.”

  “I hate to bother Heather when she’s not well,” Olivia said, “but maybe I could drive to her place and pick up the chairs myself?”

  “Oh, would you? That would be perfect. And you wouldn’t have to bother her because I know where she stores the chairs—in the small barn way at the back of her property. Not the big barn behind her house; that’s where she keeps her horse. She adores horses, you know. And cats, thank goodness. Just follow the gravel drive past the big barn to the beginning of a grove of trees, and you’ll see the small barn. Heather never locks that barn because there’s nothing of value in it. I mean, I guess the chairs are valuable, but they aren’t books or horses. That’s all Heather cares about, books and horses.”

  “You’re sure I shouldn’t call and warn her?”

  “Totally sure. Even if she hears your car, she’ll see the painting of The Gingerbread House on the side, and she’ll know you’re helping me. You’re an angel to do this, Olivia. I will never, ever buy a cookie cutter from anyone but you and Maddie. I’d hug you, but . . .” She pointed to her rotund middle and laughed.

  Heather Irwin’s farm was several miles down the road from Gwen and Herbie’s, in an isolated area of the countryside. Whereas the Tuckers had neighbors across the street, Heather was able to look out any window in her old farmhouse and see nothing but fields and trees. It was an ideal setting for a shy woman who loved books and horses.

  Olivia turned onto the gravel drive that wound past Heather’s place. She braked for a moment and rolled down her window, still wondering if she should let Heather know what she was doing. The quiet, dark house convinced her to drive on. If Heather had managed to fall asleep, it was better to leave her alone.

  The drive curved in back of Heather’s house to skirt around a large maroon barn. Like the farmhouse, the barn looked recently painted and in good repair. Olivia heard a horse whinny as she drove past. The gravel thinned and mixed with hard dirt as Olivia traveled through the middle of a fallow field toward the copse of trees where the small barn nestled. She wondered if the trees might once have marked a boundary between properties. The building’s orientation seemed odd, facing into the trees rather than back toward Heather’s house. The fields behind the barn had all gone fallow in a wild way, as if no one cared.

  The little barn had seen better days, though maybe not much better. It looked like it was hand built by an amateur. Only a few remnants of brown paint dotted a door barely large enough to allow more than one animal at a time to enter. The door was unlatched. Olivia carefully wedged it open—she didn’t trust the rusty hinges to hold it upright.

  Little daylight penetrated the small, dirty windows, and the air smelled of rotting hay. Olivia heard the unmistakable rustling of little rodent feet scurrying to escape the human intruder. She decided it was best not to dawdle. The folding chairs were easy to locate. They leaned against the wall in neat stacks of four, close to the door. Ten stacks added up to forty chairs. The baby shower invitation list had contained about fifty guests, and most had accepted. The PT Cruiser could hold a lot, but it didn’t have the capacity of a truck. Olivia decided to pack in as many as possible, and that would have to do.

  Carrying four chairs at a time proved painful. On her first try, one chair slid from the middle of the stack and directly onto Olivia’s big toe. She held on to the other three and limped to her car. Transporting two chairs at a time, she filled her trunk, then packed the back seat so high she wouldn’t be able to see out her rear window. She thought she’d wedge a few more on the floor of the passenger’s side of the front seat and then call it quits.

  Olivia reentered the barn and picked up three chairs at a time, hoping to make this her last trip. Burning pain seared through the shoulder she had injured some months earlier in a car accident. She lowered her burden to the floor and closed her eyes, willing the pain to subside. As it eased, she became aware of an odor in the stale air, besides the natural ones she’d already learned to ignore. She smelled coffee.

  Opening her eyes, Olivia slowly swiveled her head, trying to locate the direction of the odor. This is silly, I don’t have time for this. But coffee? In a virtually empty, unused barn? Heather must have visited recently and dumped the remains of a cup of coffee on the dirt floor. Not today, though, if she was as ill as Gwen said she was. How long would the smell of coffee linger in the air, given the competition from ranker odors? An hour or two? Surely not an entire day. It wouldn’t hurt to go fetch that new flashlight she’d put in her glove compartment and check out the source. She was probably making a big deal out of nothing, but given the unsolved murder hanging over the town, she’d feel better if she had a quick look around that barn.

  The bright, hot daylight steadied her. Feeling silly, she dug out her little red flashlight and wedged it into the back pocket of her khaki pants. Back inside the barn, Olivia switched on the flashlight and began to explore. The rodents, she hoped, would be in hiding.

  At first Olivia saw nothing in the barn that aroused her curiosity, only an abandoned pile of hay in one corner and a couple of tractor attachments she couldn’t put names to; she wouldn’t know a combine if it ran over her. Otherwise, the barn looked empty, with the exception of two stalls along the opposite wall. The door to one stall hung open, and the other was latched shut.

  Olivia checked her watch, which she should have done earlier. She’d already spent nearly forty minutes on her errand. Gwen would be getting anxious for her to return. Okay, a quick check of the stalls, and if she found nothing, she would leave the coffee puzzle unsolved. Olivia crossed the barn and ran her flashlight around the insides of the open stall. The coffee smell was stronger, but she saw no evidence of any in the stall.

  Olivia moved to the closed door of the second stall. She lifted the latch, then dropped it and jumped sideways as two rats ran past her feet to escape into the barn. Through the thudding in her head, Olivia listened for more scuttling sounds.
After some moments of silence, she clutched the latch and rattled it. Three more rats ran out under the door. Olivia figured that any rodents left in the stall were either dead or armed. She knew she had to look inside, if only to convince herself there was nothing of importance to see.

  The hinges creaked as Olivia swung the stall door open. Geez, could this get more melodramatic? She poked her head inside far enough to see one back corner, which she illuminated with her flashlight. What she saw explained the stale coffee smell—a landslide of paper coffee cups, some scrunched, others tossed with coffee still in them. Next to the pile stood one lone ceramic cup with its own brewing attachment. A pile of coffee grounds had been dumped next to it. Since the barn had no obvious source of electricity, the cup must have been brought from somewhere nearby. Heather’s house, perhaps? Or there might be another farmhouse through the trees, if the barn had once belonged with another property.

  Olivia stepped inside the stall and aimed her flashlight at the other back corner of the stall, where a blanket was spread over a lumpy pile. Olivia felt more curious than leery; she’d read enough police procedurals to know that her nose would probably have told her by now if the blanket hid a body. She’d already left her fingerprints all over the place, so she lifted a corner of the blanket and took a peek. Her flashlight revealed what looked like a collection of belongings. By now, she’d forgotten about the time. She gently peeled the blanket back.

  “My, my, my,” Olivia whispered. “What have we here?” She’d expected to see personal items, such as worn, used clothing, shoes, maybe a backpack. What she found was not what one would expect a homeless person to carry . . . unless that person was also a thief.