A Case of Cat and Mouse

by Sofie Kelly

  Like my mother, Richard also had the reputation for having chemistry with just about everyone he worked with—at least the women. He was also reputed to have a bit of a short temper, although I hadn’t seen or heard any evidence of that so far. However, the chemistry between him and Kassie Tremayne seemed to be lacking. The two of them got along well enough on camera to make the show work, but I had noticed that they ignored each other the rest of the time. There was none of the easy rapport Richard had shared with his co-host on another cooking show, a chef named Camilla Flores.

  Camilla, who owned two restaurants, was quiet and elegant, but quick with a smile and a word of encouragement for the contestants on her show. Richard could sometimes be a bit cutting with his criticism but somehow she had brought out his gentler side.

  Kassie seemed . . . pricklier.

  Eugenie had confided that Elias had wanted Camilla as a judge for the Baking Showdown but she’d just had a baby and had turned down his offer.

  Kassie was a popular food blogger and social media influencer, but Rebecca had confided that none of the crew liked working with her. “She would do a lot better if she remembered how to say please and thank you,” Rebecca had commented. I had also heard that several crew members were quietly pushing for someone, anyone, to replace Kassie.

  There was always a sharp barb, it seemed, under any of her words of praise. For instance, she had told Ray Nightingale that she had expected him to fail spectacularly at the patisserie challenge and she was surprised to see he hadn’t. When Kate Westin, who was the youngest of the contestants, had paired banana and bacon in her open-faced sandwich, Richard had expressed his admiration for the way the sweetness of the banana cut through the fatty saltiness of the thick-cut bacon. Kassie had nodded her agreement while at the same time making a bit of a face as she took a bite. My father would have said she gave backhanded compliments.

  Eugenie scanned the last page of the notes I had given to her and then looked up at me and smiled. “The information is on point and well organized,” she said. “Not that I had expected anything less from you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I got to my feet. “I’ll see you later tonight with the calendar.”

  “I’m not putting you out, now, am I?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Not at all. As I said, it’ll be sometime after eight.”

  “I’ll see you then,” Eugenie said.

  As I headed back down the hallway I could hear voices arguing. They were coming from one of the offices that I thought was being used by an associate producer. As I got closer I realized that the voices were those of Richard and Kassie, but I couldn’t make out their actual words until I was just about level with the half-open door. Richard had his back to it. I didn’t see Kassie but I did hear her.

  “Don’t play games with me, Dickie,” she said in a voice laced with equal parts honey and venom. “Or I promise, I will end you and your career!”

  chapter 3

  I thought about what I had overheard Kassie saying to Richard as I drove over to Fern’s Diner. Her words just seemed to confirm what I’d observed and the rumors I had heard about her. Whatever Kassie’s issues were with Richard, whether they were justified or not, people liked him, and when it came to taking sides they were all going to be lined up on his.

  I was going to Fern’s to pick up an order of cupcakes—devil’s food chocolate with mint-chocolate-chip buttercream. Usage numbers were up again at the library and I thought we should celebrate. Georgia Tepper, who owned Sweet Thing bakery, had made them for me. She had been doing all of her baking for the last two days in the diner’s kitchen after a small fire on top of a power pole on her street had caused more damage than anyone had realized.

  “Hi, Kathleen,” Peggy Sue said when I walked in. She was wearing hot-pink pedal pushers and a pink-and-white short-sleeved polka-dot blouse with the collar turned up, along with her retro cat’s-eye glasses. With her bouffant hair and a hot-pink scarf tied at her neck she looked like everyone’s idea of a 1950s diner waitress. She even had a pair of roller skates that she would put on for special occasions. Peggy was co-owner of the diner and a very savvy businesswoman.

  She reached down behind the counter. “I have your cupcakes,” she said. “They smell terrific.”

  “Thanks,” I said, taking the cardboard box with the Sweet Thing logo on the top from her. “Is Georgia here?”

  Peggy shook her head. “The power is back on in her kitchen. She left about an hour ago.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “Thanks for hanging on to these for me.”

  “Anytime,” she said with a smile.

  * * *

  It was a quiet Friday afternoon and evening at the library. I put the box of cupcakes in our staff room—minus the one I took for myself. I knew they would be gone by the end of the day. I set our newest student employee to work cleaning gum from under the table and chairs in the children’s department. It was a tedious, neck-knotting job but Levi had actually offered to take it on.

  Levi Ericson had worked part-time as a waiter at the St. James Hotel before I’d hired him. He was a voracious reader, at the library at least once and often twice a week. When he had applied for the part-time job I’d had a good feeling that he might be the person we had been looking for.

  We all missed our former student staff member, Mia Janes, who had left to attend college. We’d had a couple of students since then but neither of them had the rapport with the rest of the staff or our patrons that Mia had had. It was looking like Levi was going to be a good fit. The quilters and the members of the seniors’ book club were already trying to fatten up the lanky teenager. The little ones crawled all over him at story time and he didn’t seem to mind. And he read everything from graphic novels to War and Peace, which meant he could suggest a book for pretty much any reader who came in. I was hoping he would stay with us for a while.

  Marcus called during my supper break. “How’s the paperwork coming?” I asked. The Mayville Heights Police Department along with the police in Red Wing had broken up a group smuggling counterfeit blood-sugar-monitoring devices.

  “I swear someone is rearranging it all whenever I get up for a cup of coffee.” He raised his voice and I knew the words were being directed at someone besides me.

  I pictured him standing at his desk, his tie loosened, his dark hair mussed because he’d been running his hands back through it.

  “I have to drop something off to Eugenie after the library closes but it shouldn’t take long.” I broke a bite off my biscuit. “Any chance you’ll be done by then? We could go to Eric’s for chocolate pudding cake or just sit in the truck and make out like a couple of teenagers.”

  “I thought you loved me for my sharp intellect,” he teased.

  “Nope,” I said. “Turns out I’m way more shallow than that.”

  Marcus laughed. “You’re many things, Kathleen, but shallow is not one of them.”

  We agreed I’d call him when I finished with Eugenie and we said good-bye.

  * * *

  I was just bringing one of the book carts back to the front desk after my supper break when Kate Westin and another contestant from the show came in through the front doors. They both looked around in surprise. We often got that reaction from first-time visitors. The building, a Carnegie library, was more than a hundred years old. It had been restored to its original glory in time for its centennial, and I still took pride in showing off the mosaic tile floor, the refinished trim, the huge windows and the beautiful carved sun with the inscription Let There Be Light over the main doors, reminiscent of the original Carnegie library in Dunfermline, Scotland.

  I walked over to say hello. “Kathleen, this is a beautiful place,” Kate said with a shy smile.

  “Thank you,” I said. “A lot of people put in a lot of work to restore the building.”

  “That railing outside on
the steps, is it original?”

  I shook my head. “No. It’s actually a reproduction. The original had deteriorated so much it had been replaced with a wooden railing about ten years before we started the restoration of the building.” It had been one of the things that had struck me as “wrong” the first time that I saw the building

  Oren Kenyon had installed the new railings and had done a lot of other work inside including making several pieces of trim to match the original woodwork. The metalwork had been done by a blacksmith in Red Wing with a lot of help from Oren on the design. Wrought-iron spindles supported the flat handrail. The center spindle on each side split apart into a perfect oval and then reformed again. The letters M, H, F, P and L for Mayville Heights Free Public Library were intertwined and seemed suspended in the middle of the iron circles.

  “It’s beautiful work,” Kate said, glancing back over her shoulder at the front doors.

  Kate made me think of a princess from a child’s picture book. She was tall and slight and her dark blond curls were loose around her shoulders instead of pulled back in the tight braid she wore on the show. She had pale blue eyes, very fair skin and a perfect oval face. And she was smart as well. The former model was working on a graduate degree in psychology I’d learned. We had started talking after a production meeting when she had noticed I had Ernest Jones’s biography of Sigmund Freud poking out of my bag.

  “I’ve always been fascinated by what makes people behave the way they do,” she’d explained in her soft voice. “When my modeling career ended I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I had already taken a couple of psychology courses in high school and I’d done well in both of them. So I enrolled in university. I did think about cooking school, but I had only really ever cooked for myself—just for fun. But now, if I could just make it into the top three, maybe . . .” She hadn’t finished the sentence. She hadn’t had to. It had been written all over her face how desperately she wanted to do well.

  Kate had gone on to very matter-of-factly explain that her promising modeling career, along with a lucrative contract with an exclusive line of makeup, had disappeared when five years ago—at twenty-one—she’d had an allergic reaction to a facial mask that had been marketed as being “natural.”

  “I didn’t know the word was meaningless when it comes to skincare,” she explained, her voice laced with bitterness. “Anyone can just use one or two natural ingredients in a product and call it natural. I wasn’t the only person who had a reaction, but by the time we all connected with each other and thought about hiring a lawyer the owner of the company, Monique Le Clair, had left the country. Some people think she might be in Asia somewhere or maybe Mexico. No one has been able to find her.”

  After the allergic reaction Kate had developed a skin infection that had left her with scars on her face that both the modeling and cosmetics industries couldn’t seem to see past. I looked at her now and all I could see was how beautiful she was.

  Caroline Peters was with Kate. Caroline was old enough to be Kate’s mother but the two of them had connected the same way Rebecca and I had. Caroline was a stay-at-home mother, I knew. She was short and round with a head full of black curls and deep blue eyes. She was wearing a blue flowered wrap dress with a jean jacket and white Adidas Superstars with black stripes. She turned in a slow circle to take in the main floor of the building. “What an incredible building,” she said. She gestured to the words over the front door. “This is a Carnegie library, then?”

  I nodded.

  “So is my library at home. These are great pieces of history. I’m glad this one was restored.”

  “A lot of the buildings aren’t libraries anymore,” I said. “I’m glad this one still is.”

  Caroline smiled at me. The mom of five was a perpetually happy person. “Right now, we’re looking for a place to hide out for a little while,” she said. “It seemed like a perfect evening for a walk but sadly that means we might possibly be missing a quick get-together for the contestants.”

  I laid a hand on my chest. “Your secret is safe with me,” I said. “Librarian’s honor.”

  “Is that a real thing?” Caroline asked with a teasing smile.

  “As real as wishing on a star,” I said. “How’s the baking going for this week?”

  “We’re just baked out,” Caroline confided. “I don’t think I ever want to see another loaf of bread, and believe me, that’s close to blasphemy coming out of my mouth.” She patted one hip. “I have never met a carbohydrate that didn’t make me say, ‘Come to Mama.’”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” I said. I gestured at the stacks. “You can see that we’re not exactly busy tonight. I can tell you that the chairs in the reading area are a lot more comfortable than they look. And there are a couple of big, almost leather chairs in the back corner by the windows that are good for curling up in. You can look out over the water from there.”

  “That sounds perfect,” Kate said. She was wearing ankle-length jeans and a long cream-colored cardigan over a striped long-sleeved T-shirt in shades of brown and orange. A chocolate-colored scarf was wrapped around her neck. Kate always seemed cold. Her shoulders were hunched, her hands jammed in her pockets. Both of her sleeves were pushed back and I noticed the left one was damp, probably from her last cooking session. She looked frazzled, much more than Caroline did. The pressure was on now that there were only six of the original twelve contestants left. I’d seen with Rebecca how finicky sourdough bread could be and I wondered if the stress was getting to Kate now that the semifinals were so close. Patisserie Week had not gone well for her.

  I pointed the two of them toward the quiet back corner. “If you need anything, please come find me or you can ask Susan at the desk.”

  They both thanked me and headed across the floor.

  I walked over to join Susan at the front desk. She and Mary had switched some shifts and we hadn’t worked together very much in the last couple of weeks. I missed her sense of humor and seeing what she had stuck in her perpetual updo to keep it in place. Tonight it looked like a tiny green plastic trellis.

  “They’re contestants on the Baking Showdown aren’t they?” she asked.

  I nodded. “They are. They’re just looking to take a break from everything.”

  “I don’t blame them.” She checked the number on the spine of the book on the top of a pile in front of her and then leaned back to place it on the top shelf of a cart. “I used to watch the original version of the show and I know I would never be able to handle baking under those high-pressure conditions. First of all, I would be way, way too slow and, second, the cameras there all the time would freak me out. How could I pick up a cake layer after I’d dropped it on the floor and get way with it?”

  I gave her a pointed look.

  “Not that I’m saying I’ve ever done that,” she added with a mischievous expression on her face.

  “I feel exactly the same way,” I said. “Although, if I dropped a cake layer on the floor, it would have two cats all over it before I could even bend down to try to pick it up.”

  “Trying to make dinner with the twins on either side of me both talking at the same time about two completely different things is hard enough. And I’d only be able to pick up a dropped cake if the boys weren’t home.”

  “Not that you’re saying you’ve ever done that,” I added.

  Susan grinned. “Of course.” She picked up another book and turned it over to check the cover for damage. “So do you have a favorite baker? I mean other than Rebecca or Ray. I won’t tell.”

  “Honestly, it’s hard to choose,” I said. I did have a soft spot for Kate. She had such a flair for decorating. I’d loved the ginger cookies she’d made, decorated with kitty faces. “What about you? Are you Team Rebecca or Team Ray?”

  “I’ll be cheering for both of them, but I think my favorite is Charles. He’s been into the café a co
uple of times.”

  Charles Bacchus was a former boxer in his midfifties. He had been the episode “Hot Shot” the previous week. Stocky and balding with a barrel chest and a deep laugh, Charles’s massive hands had a deceptively light touch when it came to baking.

  “Just talking to him has blown all of my stereotypes out of the water and I love his laugh,” Susan said. She nudged her black cat’s-eye glasses up her nose. “What are the other contestants like?”

  “I’ve only talked to Stacey once,” I said, “and that was when we were introduced. I know Rebecca says Stacey seemed to be the one handling the pressure the best, which makes sense since she’s an elementary school teacher.”

  Susan gave me a knowing grin as she put another book on the cart. “No wonder she’s so good at keeping her cool.”

  “Caroline is very much the mother of the group,” I continued. I reached over and pulled a book out of the pile in front of Susan. Its dust jacket was torn. I’d leave it in the workroom for Abigail to repair. “She’s always trying to make her bakes healthy, which sometimes doesn’t work out so well.”

  Three preteens came in the front door then. Two of them looked a little lost and the third looked petulant.

  “Okay, someone assigned a paper that requires reading an actual physical book,” Susan whispered. “Where’s Mary when we need her?”

  Mary Lowe looked like everyone’s idea of a sweet grandmother—and she was. She had soft white hair, she wore a themed sweater for every holiday and she made the best cinnamon rolls I had ever eaten. She was also a champion kickboxer and a big proponent of both reading and getting an education. The kids who came into the library looking for her help were partly in awe of her and partly a bit terrified. According to the middle school rumor mill, Mary had once dropkicked two foulmouthed boys out the front doors of the building. It was supposed to have happened before my time but I knew Mary well enough to know she wouldn’t raise a hand or a foot to a child. She would, however, give you a talking-to you wouldn’t soon forget.