One Spoonful of Trouble (Felicity Bell Book 1)

by Nic Saint

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  When Felicity Bell expresses the wish there were more to life than working in the family bakery, she didn’t know her wish would come true so soon. Suddenly the small town of Happy Bays is confronted with a crime wave the likes of which she’s never seen. The main culprit seems to be big shot reporter Rick Dawson, and soon the two are at daggers drawn.

  Rick actually came down to Happy Bays to work on a tell-all article exposing villainous billionaire Chazz Falcone. Rick just lost his job because of the exposé, and he’s determined to nail the real estate tycoon to the wall. He soon discovers that trouble has followed him from New York City. Though she pretends to be a baker, he has a sneaking suspicion Felicity Bell is really working for Falcone, trying to get her hands on his article.

  Before long, Felicity and Rick find themselves in a reluctant partnership fighting the crime wave that has hit Happy Bays, and the shady billionaire who seems to be behind all the trouble.

  ONE SPOONFUL OF TROUBLE

  A Felicity Bell Mystery - Book 1

  Nic Saint

  CHAPTER 1

  “A storm is brewing off the East Coast. It is predicted to hit land within the next forty-eight hours…”

  Felicity was barely paying attention to the news broadcast, her mind occupied with other, more important matters such as the right consistency of Bundt cake batter, when the next topic came on.

  “And in other news, the snow monkey that was caught roaming Central Park late last night is now safely back where it belongs: in the Central Park Zoo. The Japanese macaque, affectionately called Zebra by its keepers because of its distinctive stripes, managed to escape the confines of the so-called Temperate Zone and was found crashing a wedding party at The Loeb Boathouse. Unlike Zebra, who devoured the entire wedding cake, the newlyweds were not amused. Representatives of the Central Park Zoo promised this would never happen again.”

  She chuckled quietly as she returned her attention to the menus she was writing for next week. Even though she’d lived all her life in New York, or rather on Long Island, she could safely say she’d never heard of a monkey feasting on wedding cake in Central Park.

  “Perhaps he was hungry, the poor dear,” her mother remarked as she dumped a box with pristine menu cards on the kitchen table.

  “I should think they feed the ‘poor dear’ well enough,” Felicity said as she expertly glued another sheet of paper inside a menu. “Absolutely no need to binge on cake of all things.”

  Mom shook her head sadly. It was obvious her heart bled for the poor little creature. “How would you feel if you had to spend all your life cooped up in a tiny cage?”

  “Well, I do know what it feels like to spend all my life cooped up in a tiny cage. I’ve been a fixture at Bell’s Bakery & Tea Room since the day I was born, remember?” When no answer came, she immediately regretted her glib response. “Just kidding, Mom.” She winked. “At least Bell’s has plenty of cake. No need for me to escape, huh?”

  This time Mom’s lip curled up into the tiniest of smiles. “Don’t tell me you finished those already,” she said, before clasping a hand to her mouth. “Oh, dear Lord! What have you done?” With trembling hand she lifted a menu card from the stack and stared at her daughter’s handiwork, visibly aghast.

  Felicity gave her a winning smile. “The power of the personal computer, Mom. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

  “But—but…you—you printed them!”

  “Of course I did. Can you imagine writing that whole litany by hand? One hundred times? My school days are over, you know.” She grinned, recollecting that one time Miss Ellis had her scribble ‘I will not bring stink bombs to school’ five hundred times. In all fairness, it hadn’t been a stink bomb, exactly. Merely a baking experiment gone wrong, but she’d rather the teacher think it was a stink bomb than spread the word that Felicity Bell, daughter of Happy Bays’s most celebrated baker Peter Bell, couldn’t bake.

  Mom’s eyes were wide with shock. “But we always write them by hand. It’s part of the charm of Bell’s.”

  She seemed genuinely perturbed but Felicity merely shrugged. She really didn’t feel like writing the same menu a hundred times just because of that nasty beast called inflation, or because Dad liked to change the menu on a whim.

  “Mom, Marcel prints its menus. They’ve been doing it for ages.” Like Bell’s, Marcel offered all manner of delicious pastry in its bakery slash tea room.

  “Oh, you can’t possibly be serious,” Mom snapped. “Just because Marcel prints their menus doesn’t mean we should. They’re a horrible little place. Tacky and selling the worst junk you can possibly imagine.”

  That was perhaps a slight exaggeration. After all, Marcel had opened shop on Lake Street around the same time Felicity’s great-grandpapa had, in 1938 to be exact. That Felicity’s forefather and Marcel Le Corbusier hadn’t been the greatest of friends was inconsequential, as was the fact that Dad and the current owner of Marcel, Lucien Le Corbusier, weren’t the best of pals either. These family feuds were pretty silly, Felicity felt, and if she ever took over the business she would have none of this nonsense.

  “I think we need to maintain our competitive edge,” she said with a tentative eye on her mother. From experience she knew that when all else failed, referring to buzzwords usually did the trick. She’d taken a course in marketing, and for some reason Mom and Dad had a layman’s reverence to the stuff, though she could have told them most of it was pure rubbish.

  “You think so?” Mom asked uncertainly.

  “It’s good for the bottom line.”

  “Mh…” She wavered, and Felicity could sense she had her right where she wanted her.

  “Millennials like print,” she continued airily. “All the thought leaders indicate this. It’s all about localization and a responsive menu design. It’s called native advertising and viewability, Mom.” She tapped the table sharply. “Customer-centricity is key. As is omnichannel retailing and immersive design.”

  “Really?” Mom was staring at her, confusion clear in her powder blue eyes. “Well, then.” She managed a brave smile. “I guess that settles it.” She picked up one of the old menus, written in Felicity’s slanting hand. “Pity, though. You write so beautifully.”

  “Thanks, Mom. I’ll write you a birthday card.”

  Mom sighed. Like her daughter, she was a big and busty woman with a mass of red curls that consistently escaped the scrunchie to which she tried to confine them.

  “All right then. If you say so, dear. After all, you are the marketing expert.” She sighed once more. “Besides, it’s not as if we’ll be changing the menus any time soon.”

  Felicity raised an eyebrow. “I thought Dad liked to experiment now and again?”

  Mom eyed her sadly. “Your father seems to have run out of ideas. He used to put new items on the menu every season. Now he says he’s tired of trying to come up with different ways to do the same thing. Any way you slice it, a waffle is a waffle, he says.” She shook her head. “How we will keep our…competitive edge, I don’t know.”

  “I think it’s a wonderful idea. Dad is right. A waffle is a waffle. And a crepe is a crepe and a scone is a scone and a muffin is a muffin. Slathered in butter, served with sugar, maple syrup, whipped cream, Marshmallow Fluff, strawberries, banana or Nutella…it’s still the same dish.”

  Though she had to admit Mom’s concern for Dad’s reluctance to keep innovating struck a chord. It was clear that after spending thirty years
at the helm of Bell’s, Dad was yearning for new horizons, preferably far from Happy Bays and the bakery that carried his name. Dad had been dreaming of retiring to Florida for years now, wistfully thumbing brochures of idyllic retirement communities where the sun always shone, sandy beaches were golden, the water cerulean and he and Mom could spend their twilight years undisturbed by the demands of customers, relatives or the taxman.

  In fact what Dad—and perhaps even Mom—was secretly hoping for was that Felicity would finally settle down ‘with a nice boy’ and take over the bakery. The pressure was mounting, and even though her parents had yet to say the first thing about this, they’d made plenty of veiled suggestions over the years.

  Refusing to allow herself to be drawn into a discussion of Dad’s faults as an innovative baker, Felicity leaned back in her chair. “So! Then I guess we’re done.”

  “I guess so,” Mom said dubiously, settling down on the chair opposite from her daughter. She eyed her narrowly. “Don’t you ever get tired of working in this place, Fe?”

  Felicity looked up. Her mother was surprisingly maudlin today. Whether it was the snow monkey that had affected her or the incoming storm she didn’t know, but she still felt compelled to answer a question with a question. “Why would I ever get tired? I work with the people I love doing what I love.”

  “Which is?”

  “Well…you know…baking stuff,” she replied a little lamely.

  “I don’t know. I just thought perhaps you wanted to pursue your second career.”

  This ‘second career’ Mom was referring to was the baking column Felicity had started to write for the Happy Bays Gazette not so long ago. Called Flour Girl, it didn’t amount to much, but apparently for Mom it was enough to suspect her daughter of wanting to jump ship. In her mind she already saw Felicity traveling the globe writing Pulitzer Prize-winning articles about warlords, deforestation and other calamities.

  “Mom, my column is hardly a career. Besides, I thought you liked the idea of some free publicity for Bell’s.”

  “Oh, I do,” Mom said vaguely. “It’s just that I don’t want you to do anything you might regret later, honey.”

  “I’m writing a baking column Mom, not joining the Foreign Legion.”

  “Well, you never know. You start writing for the Gazette and before you know it you’re getting sucked into this whole…” She gestured ineffectually. “…newspaper business.”

  Felicity had to laugh. The way Mom went on, she seemed to feel that newspapers were only one step removed from the Cosa Nostra. “I can promise you,” she stated emphatically, “that I’m not turning this into a full-time job.” She covered her mother’s hand with her own and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “I like it here at Bell’s. I’m not going anywhere, Mom.”

  Her mother offered a weak smile. “That’s very nice, dear. As long as you don’t run off with some reporter type, I’m happy.”

  “I won’t,” she promised fervently. Reporter types were the furthest thing from her mind. As were men in general, to be honest, but she bit her tongue before she let that bit of information slip out. No need to add to her mother’s worries.

  CHAPTER 2

  Half an hour later Felicity was splashing through the puddles as she walked along Lake Street, an umbrella held aloft. The perpetual rain didn’t depress her in the least. She was of Belgian descent, and Belgians are known for cherishing their wet climate. She’d always found there was something utterly relaxing about the pitter-patter of rain drops splashing down from the skies above and echoing on roof tops, pavements and umbrellas.

  On days like these she liked to roam around town and run her errands, mainly because the streets were quieter—sometimes even deserted—and stores practically devoid of shoppers.

  There were a number of items she needed most urgently. They were all part of the ‘second career’ her mother wasn’t all that keen on. There was a recipe she was dying to publish in the weekend edition of the Happy Bays Gazette but first she needed to prepare the treat herself. She’d tasted it countless times, and watched her grandmother make it, but had never actually tried her hand at it.

  That morning when she rose she’d decided that tonight was the night she was going to put her food processor to work and finally prepare that strawberry shortcake she loved so much. Stephen Fossick, the Gazette’s editor, had given her carte blanche when it came to her column, so each week she needed to come up with something fresh. That sounded a lot harder than it was. As a fourth generation baker there was a treasure trove of recipes to dig into, and if she wanted to—and Stephen allowed her to—she could keep this column going for years to come.

  As she’d always kept a diary, writing came easy to her and it fulfilled a childhood dream of wanting to be a reporter. As a kid she’d loved the adventures of Tintin, that intrepid Belgian reporter, always on the go with his little doggie Snowy, and she’d dreamed one day of following in his footsteps. Well, writing about strawberry shortcake wasn’t perhaps the same thing as toppling South-American dictators or fighting pirates but it still satisfied an itch she’d been yearning to scratch.

  Humming a cheerful tune, she entered Rafi’s Deli & Grocery, where she was sure to find the ingredients she needed. She pushed her cart in the direction of the fresh produce section and took her time to select the finest strawberries. Taste was important, but looks even more so. At her best friend and flatmate Alice’s suggestion, all the baking experiments were carried out in front of a camera, taped and uploaded to the YouTube channel they’d created.

  This way people could actually see the recipe being prepared if they wanted to. Stephen Fossick had loved the idea, and so had, apparently, ninety-six of her readers, for that was how many subscribers they’d collected so far.

  It wasn’t that she imagined herself the second coming of Julia Child or Paula Deen, but she enjoyed the process, and so did her videographer, the perpetually enthusiastic Alice. It could even further cement Bell’s reputation as Happy Bays’s premier patisserie. Talk about whipping up two eggs with one whisk.

  And she was just picking up a quart of heavy cream from the dairy section and lifting the lid to have a whiff when a powerful voice arrested her attention. Whirling around, she found herself staring at a dark-haired stranger. His bedraggled appearance was unfamiliar to her, and she eyed his shaggy clothes, his bushy beard, and his red-rimmed eyes with distaste. At the center of his forehead he sported a purple wart sprouting three black hairs. The man could have been a vagrant eager to convince her to bear the burden of his livelihood, if it hadn’t been for the large gun he was holding in his hand, the business end pointing in her direction.

  “Your wallet, lady,” he repeated, “and be quick about it!”

  Felicity thought about the big wad of cash tucked away in that wallet. As she did every day, she’d picked it up from the cash register at Bell’s, intending to deposit it into the account at the bank as soon as she’d loaded up on strawberry shortcake necessities. Now every fiber of her being revolted against the notion of handing over her family’s hard-earned money.

  “I—I don’t have a wallet,” she blurted out, the first thing that came to mind.

  If her brain had been firing on all cylinders she probably would have found something less inane to say. But then it’s very hard to think straight when there’s a huge gun pointed at your face. As it was, the grubby stranger merely lifted an upper lip that seemed made for snarling, and produced a low, growling sound that reminded Felicity of an unfriendly species of canine.

  He gestured with the gun and grunted, “Your money or your life!”

  In spite of the situation Felicity had to stifle a giggle. The peculiarity of hearing those words uttered outside of a movie theater strongly affected her funny bone.

  “You think this is funny?” the man growled. He didn’t seem to share her sense of the comedic, for he was waving that gun again.

  “No. No, of course not,” she said, flustered now. As this was the first time s
he’d ever been in a situation like this, she was unprepared for what happened next. For some reason she would later find impossible to explain, instead of digging into her purse for her wallet, she found her fingers tightening around the quart of heavy cream she was still holding in her hand.

  She’d removed the lid, and without thinking things through and measuring the consequences as any sane person would, she simply swung her arm up and decanted the contents of the container into the man’s face.

  To prove that she wasn’t completely crazy, she simultaneously dropped to the floor in an attempt to avoid the bullet she was sure would now be fired off, then scurried over to the yogurt section. And so it was that she found herself flat on the floor while her attacker yowled in agony as the cream stung his eyes.

  In her defense she’d actually aimed for the wart decorating his brow.

  Felicity felt for the guy. Judging from his howls of agony it wasn’t a pleasant experience. And to make matters worse, he even dropped the gun he’d been holding, needing both hands to clutch at his face.

  It fell to the floor and skittered to where Felicity had taken cover.

  She stared at the thing, and blinked. She’d never handled a gun before.

  Tentatively, she picked it up and weighed it in her hand. It felt nice and heavy, and was a perfect fit. Then she pointed it at the stickup man, who was now dancing around like a hip-hop artist, clearly not in the best frame of mind.

  Felicity cleared her throat. She felt that now was a good time to let this fellow experience something of the Happy Bays spirit. Happy Baysians are not all that keen on strangers, especially when they come bearing arms and issuing threats.

  “Stick em up!” she yelled.