When the Cookie Crumbles

by Virginia Lowell

  Startled by Spunky, Quill shifted sideways. In that split second, Matthew shoved his wet mop between Quill’s and Olivia’s feet, separating them. Olivia yanked her arm away from him and succeeded in breaking Quill’s hold on her. As Quill let go, another strong arm grabbed her wrist and spun her out of Quill’s reach. It was Lucas, who’d stepped from between the gingerbread mansion and the church. Lucas hurried her to a safer distance and ran back to the gingerbread village.

  Olivia turned back to see Matthew flip the heavy mop straight up in the air, knocking the gun out of Quill’s hand. Instead of letting the mop drop to the floor, Matthew whipped it over Quill’s head and down behind him. Before the soaking fibers reached the floor, Matthew whacked them against the backs of Quill’s knees. With a yelp, Quill lost his balance and crashed into the combined church of St. Francis and St. Alban’s. Lucas kicked the gun aside, grabbed Quill under his arms, and dragged him away from the gingerbread village. Quill didn’t resist.

  Once Quill had been subdued, Maddie opened the staff door, and Spunky shot through. As he skidded on the linoleum floor, Olivia ran to help him. When Spunky spotted Olivia, he yapped his joyful yap and leaped into her arms. As she held her panting pup close, Olivia had a thought that made her giggle. In a sense, Chatterley Heights Catholics and Episcopalians had joined forces to defeat evil. Quill Latimer had been defeated by one grand ecumenical event.

  The community center’s front door flew open, and Del rushed inside, his gun drawn. He took in the scene and slid his weapon into his holster. Behind Del, a tall, skinny, boyish figure wandered through the open door. His dark eyebrows lifted high as he took in the smashed gingerbread church. “Wow,” he said. “You guys sure know how to party.”

  “Jason! You’re home!” Ellie ran to greet her son, Olivia’s younger brother. “I thought you’d be arriving earlier.”

  “Me, too,” Jason said, “but the bus had a leaking fuel line. The driver wanted to call for help, but I patched up the leak with duct tape. Otherwise, we’d still be out there by the side of the road. You okay, Olive Oyl?” Assured that his sister was fine, Jason inspected the remains of St. Francis and St. Alban’s. “I’m starving,” he said. “Would it be sacrilegious of me to eat this?”

  Chapter Twenty

  Olivia awakened at dawn on Monday morning. She had fully intended to sleep in, but Spunky had other ideas. He trotted back and forth across her stomach like a pooch who needed to go out. Now. Olivia hoisted herself up on one elbow. “Young man,” she said, “I distinctly recall that we went on a late walk last night to calm our nerves. Go back to sleep.”

  Spunky jumped off the bed, ran to the open doorway, and looked back at Olivia. “You had too much sleep yesterday,” she said. “That’s your problem.” Spunky whimpered.

  Olivia curled in a ball underneath her covers and took a deep, relaxing breath. Spunky jumped on top of her. Olivia whipped the covers off and said, “What the…Oh.” She heard the faint whir of a mixer. A moment later she smelled the sharp sweetness of orange oil. Maddie was baking cookies.

  “For cookies, I’ll get up.” Olivia rolled out of bed and into her favorite slippers, a pair of worn tennis shoes without laces. She was looking forward to wearing jeans and a sweatshirt while the store remained closed for the day. Maybe she’d dress up for dinner, which she had promised to cook for Del. After the previous evening’s adventure, their dinner plans had fallen through.

  Olivia took Spunky on a brief, chilly run around The Gingerbread House yard before she let both of them into the store. Locking the front door behind her, she said, “You guard the place, Spunks, while I confer with Maddie.” Spunky knew the drill. He set out to sniff every corner of the store, while Olivia entered the kitchen.

  It always amazed Olivia that Maddie could dance and roll out cookie dough at the same time. Maddie was listening to music, so it took a few seconds for her to notice Olivia. “Well, hello, sleepyhead,” Maddie said, taking out her earbuds. “I realized we had no cookies left for the store’s cookie tray. I put orange zest in the dough.”

  “I know. I could smell it upstairs.” Olivia began to fill the dishwasher.

  “Is it too much of a good thing? The orange zest?” Maddie smoothed her rolling pin over a high corner of dough to even it out. “Too bad. It’s going into the icing, too. I’m in an orange mood.”

  “Maddie, what’s this?” Olivia was emptying the canvas bags Maddie had left in the kitchen. Their wench costumes and fete decorations filled several of the bags, but one bag held only a single fold of cloth.

  Glancing over at the cloth in Olivia’s hand, Maddie said, “I think it’s a rag that accidentally slipped into the bag when Aunt Sadie was packing our embroidered shawls.”

  “It looks too good to be a rag.” Olivia unfolded the cloth and held it up. “There’s embroidery on it, all in one color. Maddie, are these what I think they are?”

  “Bring it here,” Maddie said. “Hold it under the light.” She washed the dough off her hands before taking the fabric. “Wow,” she said, “Aunt Sadie is good. Those are cookie cutters. She put in all sorts of detail using only shades of gray.”

  “That’s what I thought they were,” Olivia said. While Maddie selected cutters to work with, Olivia spread the cloth on the kitchen counter, under a new full-spectrum light. Aunt Sadie had managed to show dents, scratches, soldering marks.… Olivia traced a shape with her finger. “Maddie, tell me again about the two antique cookie cutters Paine brought to show Aunt Sadie when he was a boy. Wasn’t one a horse?”

  Maddie paused, her cookie cutter poised above the rolled dough. “Yeah, a rearing horse with a rider, and there was something on the rider’s back. The other was a cat with its tail in the air. Pretty common, but Aunt Sadie was sure it was antique, maybe Moravian or something like that. Why?”

  “Because Aunt Sadie embroidered those two shapes, along with six others. Do you know if Paine brought more cutters to show her?”

  Maddie pressed her cutter into the dough and left it there to join Olivia. “I remember her saying that Paine kept bringing cutters until she ordered him to stop. She was afraid he’d get in trouble with his parents.” Leaning closer to the embroidered shapes, Maddie said, “Unfortunately, she didn’t mention any of the others, but these all look like they were antiques. Aunt Sadie has a stellar visual memory. Maybe she embroidered these shortly after seeing the cutters, while the imperfections were clear in her mind.”

  As Maddie returned to her cutting, Olivia said, “This might be the only memento we’ll ever have of the Chatterley cookie-cutter collection. I should have it framed and hung in the town hall.” She had trouble taking her eyes off the embroidered piece, but…“Time’s a-wasting,” she said. “I need to start cooking.”

  “You? Cook? Whatever for?”

  Olivia traced another shape with her finger, a bird of some sort. “I promised Del I could cook something besides frozen pizza.”

  “But you can’t,” Maddie said. “Listen, I was hoping you and Del could have dinner with Lucas and me this evening. How about I do the cooking? Then I could give you cooking lessons for, say, six months before you make another rash promise to Del.”

  Olivia didn’t answer. She had traced two more shapes. They’d begun to trigger a memory.

  “Earth to Livie.”

  “Hm?”

  “Dinner this evening? I’ll make a big pot roast with carrots and potatoes and onions, the works. Plus a salad. Cookies for dessert. You provide the wine.”

  “Sounds great,” Olivia said. “We can eat here. In fact, could you call my family and ask them to come? And Rosemarie? I guess we should invite Karen, too. Oh, and if you bring Aunt Sadie, that would be terrific. We can eat downstairs in the cookbook nook, so she won’t have to negotiate stairs. That used to be a dining room, anyway.” Olivia grabbed her phone and car keys. “Gotta run an errand. I might be a while.”

  “Uh…” Maddie’s eyes had widened in confusion.

  “Thanks, Maddie. Yo
u’re the best. I’ll take Spunky with me. This is going to be so fun.”

  As the kitchen door swung shut behind her, Olivia heard Maddie say, “You’re channeling me, you know that, right?”

  Olivia did not return home until four p.m. She opened The Gingerbread House door to find the cookbook nook filled with folding tables already set with tablecloths and dinnerware. Instead of orange zest, she smelled garlic and onions. Spunky raced around the store at top speed, excited by the possibility of meat in his immediate future.

  A note taped to the kitchen door read

  Gone home to shower and pick up Aunt Sadie. Lucas, too. Everyone coming except Matthew, who is working late for Constance the Tyrant, and Karen, who’s staying in the hospital with Hermione. Arriving 5:30. Baste the pot roast.

  Maddie

  p.s. Del said Hermione is doing well after surgery.

  p.p.s. If you don’t know what “baste” means, look it up on the Internet.

  Olivia entered the kitchen, holding Spunky under one arm so he wouldn’t lunge for the roast when she opened the oven door. She did know what “baste” meant, and she did it quickly. “Now for your real food,” she said to Spunky. “Upstairs we go.”

  By the time Olivia fed Spunky, showered, and dressed in new burgundy wool pants and a matching sweater, it was five twenty. She found two unopened bottles of merlot and headed for her apartment door. Spunky whined and whimpered until Olivia changed her mind about leaving him upstairs. “Okay, Spunks, you deserve to come, too. But if you beg food from the table and end up sick, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.” Spunky yapped his agreement.

  As Olivia unlocked the inner door leading to the store, she heard a key in the outer door. Maddie held the door open while Lucas escorted Aunt Sadie and her walker into the foyer. Maddie wore her serving wench costume without the mop cap, and Lucas looked uncomfortable, yet handsome, in a suit. Aunt Sadie, Olivia noted with approval, wore a periwinkle blue sweater over navy pants. Del followed behind, bearing a case of wine.

  Within ten minutes, all of Olivia’s guests had arrived. Olivia felt her cheeks flush with excitement, but she intended to wait until dessert to share her news. The atmosphere felt perfect. The tables were arranged in a large, loose circle, so everyone could see everyone else. As Maddie settled Aunt Sadie near Olivia and Del, her promise-to-think-about-it engagement ring flashed in the light.

  “Maddie,” Olivia said, “show me your ring. It’s suspiciously sparkly this evening.”

  Maddie held up her ring finger for everyone to see. The emerald was no longer alone. It had been joined by two rows of tiny diamonds, one row along each side of the emerald. “I decided I’d thought about it long enough,” Maddie said. “After all, Lucas saved my best friend’s life. So I let him buy me some diamonds to go with the emerald.”

  “And?” Olivia prompted.

  “And we’re getting married in the spring. Now let me sit down and eat.”

  With Maddie soaking up the attention, Olivia asked Del, “So is Hermione going to be all right?”

  “It looks good so far. I suspect that finding her daughter has given her a strong will to live.”

  “But wasn’t she involved in Paine’s death? If she recovers, will she be prosecuted?”

  “Hermione might luck out,” Del said, twirling his wineglass. “Quill claimed she masterminded the whole thing, but that’s doubtful. Hermione did keep tabs on Chatterley Heights over the years, hoping to find a way to return and look for her daughter. According to Quill, Hermione contacted him and promised he could search for the Chatterley cookie-cutter collection if he would tell her when the mansion was ready to be lived in again.”

  “That doesn’t make sense to me,” Olivia said. “Quill lived here; he could have searched the mansion any time he wanted.”

  “Exactly. Quill needed Paine to identify secret hiding places in the mansion. Thanks to you, we know that Quill made numerous trips to England over the past ten years to research the Chatterley family, and during one trip he saw Paine and followed him.”

  “But the cookie-cutter collection was long gone,” Olivia said.

  “Apparently.” Del refilled their wineglasses.

  “And I was so sure Quill had found something important in the front parlor while Maddie and I were in the root cellar. All that for nothing.” The room was growing warm, so Olivia pushed up the sleeves of her sweater.

  “You should have worn your tavern wench costume, Livie. You’d be nice and cool right now.”

  “Dream on,” Olivia said. “Hermione and Paine were in hiding, weren’t they? They were using assumed names to stay under the radar.”

  “We still aren’t sure why, but yes. Paine probably killed the man who was identified as him. It might have been a crime of convenience: Paine was in Switzerland, met a man who looked like him, invited him skiing, and pushed him off the mountain.”

  “It’s all very sad,” Olivia said. “I mean, I adore cookie cutters, but Quill went off the deep end.”

  “That collection was his life’s passion,” Del said. “You should hear him talk about it, even in jail. A Chatterley ruined his life, and the Chatterley cookie-cutter collection was going to restore it. It probably didn’t help Hermione’s heart condition to watch those two lunatics go at each other. When she got out of surgery, she told us that while Quill searched the house for cookie cutters, Paine would drink and taunt him. Paine followed Quill from room to room, breaking anything he seemed to admire. Hermione tried to clean up the shards, but it was a hopeless job.”

  Olivia remembered the small cuts she’d noticed on Hermione’s fingers after Paine’s death. Poor woman.

  Del said, “Hermione said she even tried to sedate Paine, so he’d go to bed and shut up. She tried to bake his crumbled sleeping pills into cookies, even a steak, but she couldn’t figure out how to do it right.” Del smiled toward Spunky, who had worn himself out and fallen asleep on one of the stuffed armchairs in a corner of the cookbook nook. “By the way, Hermione begged me to assure you that the meat she fed Spunky had no sleeping pills in it.”

  “Thank goodness,” Olivia said. “What will happen to Hermione? She did steal from a number of businesses.”

  “All the owners said they didn’t want to prosecute a Chatterley, though they do want their merchandise back. Hermione apologized. She said she’d grown up in a well-to-do family, and Paine had squandered everything. She was stressed beyond endurance by Paine’s behavior. It isn’t an excuse, but she’s returning what she stole, and we’re inclined to release her to her daughter’s custody. Karen is dropping all plans to run for office so she can care for her mother. And as Karen pointed out, she was born of British parents, so her citizenship is questionable.” Del drained his wineglass and said, “On the night Paine died, he’d drunk enough whiskey that Hermione was able to fool him into thinking he hadn’t taken his pills. In fact, she managed to get him to take at least three doses.”

  “The sleeping pills didn’t kill him?”

  “No, but they gave Quill the opportunity to do so.” Del glanced around the table; the guests had clustered nearer Maddie to admire her ring and discuss her upcoming wedding. “Quill did confess to the murder,” Del said quietly. “He told us that Hermione was afraid she had given Paine too many sleeping pills and killed him, rather than simply sedating him. She began to feel faint. Quill told her to stay downstairs while he checked on Paine. He wasn’t aware of Hermione’s heart problems.”

  “I can believe that. Maddie and I noticed how hard she worked to hide her condition.” Questions whirled around in Olivia’s head, but she kept them to herself. She was aware Del was sharing information that he would normally keep under wraps. He trusted her. Olivia wanted more than anything to keep that trust. Rather than ask another question, Olivia said, “While Quill was using me as a human shield, he told me he’d pressured Hermione into throwing suspicion on Matthew by claiming she really had killed Paine with her pathetic attempt to sedate him. He said she’d
go to prison and never see her daughter again.”

  “I remember that from your statement,” Del said, nodding. “No wonder the poor woman had a heart attack. In fact, Quill had determined that Paine was alive, though the sleeping pills plus alcohol had induced such a deep sleep that he couldn’t be shaken awake. Quill believed Paine had already found the Chatterley collection and hidden it just to torture him. So while Paine was out cold, Quill searched his room for antique cookie cutters. When he found nothing, all those years of rage overcame him. He suffocated Paine with a pillow, then filled the tub and slid him underwater. Quill isn’t a mystery fan, so it never occurred to him that the body should have been faceup or that forensics could tell a drowning from suffocation.”

  “So in the end,” Olivia said, “Paine outsmarted him again.”

  Olivia’s mother and stepfather had brought cognac to round out the evening. While they served the drinks and Maddie passed the cookie tray, Olivia made a quick trip to the small safe in the store kitchen. She extracted a box and brought it back to the gathering.

  “Before everyone heads for home,” Olivia said, “I want to share something with you.” As a murmur went through the group, Olivia said, “Let me quickly add that Maddie is the only one currently engaged to be married. What I have to share really comes from someone we all knew and loved: Clarisse Chamberlain. As you know, Clarisse was my dear friend. I wish she were with us tonight. Something of her spirit is here, though.” Olivia opened the box she’d set on the table. “Clarisse left me her wonderful cookie-cutter collection, in honor of our shared passion for cutters. I still haven’t gone through the entire collection, it’s so extensive. She left me a list, which highlighted the most valuable pieces, and I’ve put those in locked storage. The shapes in this box were on the list, labeled as ‘possibly valuable, no information.’ I hadn’t gotten around to examining the contents until today, after I realized Paine had shown some of them to Aunt Sadie.” Olivia smiled at Aunt Sadie.