Allan picked up the last piece of bacon on his plate, folded it in half, and devoured it in one bite. “Now,” he said, wiping the grease off his fingers with his napkin, “how else can I help? Can I sell you a used car?”
Ellie began clearing the table.
Allan grinned at his wife’s back. “I’ve been told more than once that I sound like a used-car huckster on TV. No one has meant it as a compliment. Ellie hates hearing it. Not me, though. I don’t mind one bit if people see me that way. It makes them underestimate me.”
Olivia remembered thinking used-car salesman when she’d first met Allan. And she had, indeed, underestimated him.
“You see, Livie,” Allan said, “when folks underestimate you, they tend to let down their guard. And when they let down their guard, you can get a good look at their strengths and their weaknesses.”
“Was Clarisse ever fooled?”
“Nope, not when it came to business. Martin, neither.”
“And when it came to her family?”
“Parents see their kids through a filter,” he said. “For better or for worse.”
“What is your take on the Chamberlain brothers?”
“Edward and Hugh?” Allan threw back his head and laughed. “Opposites. Hugh has the charm without the drive. Edward, he’s got the drive without the charm. Put ’em in a blender, you’d have a damn fine businessman.”
Ellie passed by close enough for Allan to reach around her waist and pull her to him. Ellie’s cheeks pinked up. Olivia tried to hide the fact that she still felt a vague discomfort at witnessing the affection between her mother and Allan. Maybe by the time she turned forty, the feeling would disappear, but she wasn’t holding her breath.
“Frankly,” Allan said, “I think it would have been better for Edward and Hugh if they’d gone off on their own, developed their own style. Martin, though, he wanted a family dynasty, and Clarisse, well, I suspect she wanted her sons nearby.”
“Jason should be here soon,” Ellie said. “We decimated the pancakes. I’d better start more bacon cooking.” Ellie squeezed Allan’s hand, removed it from her waist, and headed toward the stove.
“Oops, sorry I forgot the eggs, Mom. Jason will be hungry.”
“Jason won’t starve. He can have bacon and toast sandwiches.”
“One last question, Allan,” Olivia said. “Only this one is about Lucas Ashford.”
Ellie and Allan exchanged a quick glance. “Are you concerned for Maddie?” Ellie asked as she put bacon into a frying pan. “They must be getting serious.”
“No, it’s not about Lucas and Maddie, although if there’s anything I should know, I order you to tell me instantly.”
With her light laugh, Ellie said, “If I ever find out that Lucas is an ax murderer, I’ll be sure to let you know. As far as I’ve observed, he is a perfectly nice man, if a bit quiet for my taste.”
“Maddie can supply the noise,” Olivia said. “I was wondering, though. . . . Allan, maybe you know, is the hardware store doing all right?”
“As far as I know,” Allan said. “There’s no swelling demand for hammers and nails, but Heights Hardware seems to float along modestly. Why? Have you heard something?” His tone was casual, but Olivia sensed the businessman in him leap to attention.
“No, not in so many words.” Olivia wished she hadn’t brought up the topic.
Allan shrugged, but Ellie turned sideways so she could see the table and keep an eye on the spitting bacon at the same time. “I can answer that one, Livie. The hardware may be doing fine, but the Ashford family went through a rough patch.”
“I’ll be in my office, paying bills,” Allan said. “Give me a holler when Jason gets here.”
“Allan gets bored by too much talk about other families’ troubles,” Ellie said, without a hint of criticism. “Anyway, about the Ashfords, all this happened while you were busy in Baltimore, no reason you’d have heard about it. Although, I suppose a better mother would have emailed you regularly with all the Chatterley Heights news.”
“Thank you for not being a better mother.”
“You’re welcome, dear.” Ellie paused to move several strips of bacon from the pan to a length of paper towel she’d placed on the kitchen counter. She added raw strips to the pan, each landing with a sizzle.
“It all started about four years ago,” Ellie said. “Lucas’s father was diagnosed with colon cancer. He had surgery and chemo, and it looked hopeful, but the shock of his illness was too much for Lucas’s mother. She had a stroke, a bad one.”
“Poor Lucas,” Olivia said.
“Poor Lucas, indeed. He was trying to care for both parents and keep the hardware store running. His dad needed to be transported back and forth for the chemo, and then he’d be sick from it. His mom was . . . well, you probably remember her.”
“Do I,” Olivia said. “She terrified me when I was a kid. I’d wait outside the hardware store when Dad took me on errands with him.”
“Yes, well, the stroke seemed to make her even more of a tyrant. All of us tried to help out by staying with her while Lucas carted his father to and from treatments. But nobody lasted very long. I have to admit, Shirley tried my patience.”
Olivia began to scrape the dirty plates and arrange them in the dishwasher. “As I remember, not only did Shirley have a demanding personality, but she must have weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds. If you were trying to help her to bed, she could have squashed you.”
“Illness did whittle her down considerably,” Ellie said. “Though she still possessed nearly two hundred of those pounds.”
“And you a wraithlike ninety-nine pounds,” Olivia said.
“Sadly, with the arrival of middle age, I’ve packed it on. I’m up to one hundred and four. Three digits.”
Olivia snickered. “I wonder how you can show yourself in public.”
“Loose clothing helps.” Ellie had finished frying the bacon and was pouring the grease into a Maxwell House coffee tin. From the rust, Olivia assumed it was the same tin her mother had used since she and Jason were kids. The thought comforted her.
“As to your question,” Ellie said, “Lucas had to hire caregivers almost around the clock, so he could keep the hardware store going. From what I heard, he had to mortgage the house, which they’d paid off years earlier, and also take out a hefty loan, using his business as collateral. Both his parents passed on shortly before you came back home, but the loan remains to haunt poor Lucas. That’s why I was surprised to hear he and Maddie are spending so much time together—for years he’s done nothing but work.”
“Is his loan with the bank here in town?” Olivia asked.
“Not a bank, dear. The loan came from Clarisse Chamberlain.”
“Hey, where is everybody?” Jason’s voice came from the living room. “Does he always walk in without knocking?” Olivia asked.
“Look who I found loitering outside our front door,” Allan boomed. He appeared in the kitchen a moment later, Jason following behind.
“Hi, Olive Oyl.” Jason gave Olivia a light tap on the shoulder and raked his fingers up the back of her head, causing unruly curls to poke out from her carefully smoothed hair.
“Hey!” Olivia grabbed Jason’s hand before he could strike again. Looking at his long, oil-stained fingers, she said, “Here’s a suggestion: why don’t you scrub your hands instead of cleaning them in my hair?”
“I could scrub this stain for hours and it wouldn’t come out.”
Jason had spoken with pride, and Olivia swallowed her next retort. She knew what that job at the garage meant to him. He’d stuck with it for two years already, and he was earning a reputation for quality work. After quitting college and a string of other jobs, he needed to feel good about this one. However, he also needed to stop messing with her hair—and calling her Olive Oyl, a nickname given her as a young teen, after a dramatic growth spurt left her with long, skinny legs.
“This looks great, Mom,” Jason said. He piled s
everal strips of bacon on a piece of buttered toast, folded it in half, and finished it off in three bites. “I smell pancakes and maple syrup,” he said.
“All gone,” Ellie said. “There’s plenty more toast and bacon.”
Jason’s forlorn expression reminded Olivia of Spunky when he hoped she’d forgotten that he’d already had his dinner.
Ellie sighed. “No, I can’t make more,” she said. “No more pancake mix, no eggs, no time to get any before you go back to work.” She pushed the bacon and toast closer.
Jason accepted defeat and rolled another half sandwich. “S’okay,” he said between bites. “The boss has been ordering pizzas every afternoon, ’cause we all get so hungry we start to slow down.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t gotten fat,” Olivia said.
“I’m surprised you’re not in jail,” Jason said just before forcing another half a sandwich into his mouth. He closed his eyes in ecstasy while he chewed, which left him unaware of the reason for the sudden silence. Only when he opened his eyes and reached for the last of the food did he notice the confused stares from his nearest and dearest. “Wassup? Do I have a piece of bacon up my nose?”
Ellie frowned at him, a rare occurrence. “That was an unusual statement you made about your sister,” she said.
“What? About her being in jail?” Jason looked from his mother to his stepfather and finally to Olivia. “You really haven’t heard, have you?”
“Heard what?” Allan’s tone was clipped, no-nonsense.
Jason wiped his mouth with his napkin and scraped back his chair. “We found out soon after it happened because a customer came in to get his car right after watching the ambulance arrive. Sam Parnell was rushed to the hospital, unconscious. I guess he finally got too snoopy for his own good and somebody tried to kill him.”
Olivia was first to break the stunned silence. “How do they know it was a murder attempt?” she asked. “And even if it was, what could it possibly have to do with me?”
Jason started to laugh, but the dangerous look on Olivia’s face sobered him quickly. “I don’t have the inside scoop or anything, only what’s going around town.”
“Which is?”
“Well . . . Look, Livie, don’t kill the messenger, okay? What’s going around is, Sam was eating a cookie when he collapsed, and he didn’t choke or have a heart attack or anything. He had a bag from your store, and there were still cookie crumbs and icing bits inside.”
“That doesn’t mean the cookies were ours. What do we sell in our store, for heaven’s sakes? Cookie cutters, that’s what. There are scads of people who’ve bought them from us and could have made that cookie.”
Jason said, “What about the bag?”
Ellie said, “Jason, I have a stack of bags from The Gingerbread House.” At a look from her husband, she said, “What? I like them.”
“I gave Sam a few cookies this morning but none ‘to go’ in one of our bags. Who found him?” Olivia asked.
“Ida, that ancient waitress at Pete’s Diner. I guess she’s off on Mondays. Anyway, she opened her front door and reached around to empty her mailbox and there was Sam, out cold on her porch. She called an ambulance.”
“None of which means that—”
“Sis, all I’m saying is, it doesn’t look good.”
Chapter Twelve
“What the heck is going on in this town?” Olivia paced around The Gingerbread House kitchen, moving objects from one place to another for no apparent reason.
“Don’t ask me.” Maddie sounded exasperated. “I’m as confused as you are, not to mention irate. It seems as though somebody went to a lot of trouble to make us look like bad guys. At least Sheriff Del hasn’t arrested us.”
“He hasn’t eliminated us as suspects—or me anyway. I don’t think he believed I didn’t know about Sam being diabetic. He sure packed away the cookies this morning.”
“You don’t get out much,” Maddie said. “Sam is funny about the diabetes. He’s so proud of being fit, I think he sees diabetes as something he shouldn’t have. It’s hard to believe he’d blow off his insulin after eating so many cookies, though.”
“If something was wrong with his insulin, I guess it’ll show up when they test his supply,” Olivia said. “Meanwhile, we need to get organized.” She removed a container of confectioners’ sugar from a cupboard and put it on a shelf.
“That’s the third time you’ve moved that sugar,” Maddie said. “That isn’t the type of organization we need right now. Stop moving, you’re making me nervous.”
“Right. You’re the one who can’t sit still, I’m the calm one. And if I ever find out that someone tried to set us up, I will calmly break their nose.”
“Good, that’ll leave a few appendages for me.”
They had returned twenty minutes earlier from the Chatterley Heights Police Station, where Sheriff Del had questioned them without any of his normal friendly teasing. He had confirmed Sam’s condition as serious and being treated as a diabetic coma. He hadn’t regained consciousness. The cookie crumbs, Del had said, were undergoing analysis, along with Sam’s stomach contents. Otherwise, all Olivia and Maddie had received was a warning to stay quiet and in town.
“I’ve known Delroy Jenkins since I was ten years old,” Maddie said. “As long as I’ve known you. He treated us like suspects!”
“That’s what sheriffs do. It’s pretty much their job. Although he didn’t have to be so officious about it.”
“You sort of like him, don’t you, Livie?”
“Yeah. I hate when that happens.”
They looked at each other and burst into laughter, with a tinge of hysteria. Minutes later, when they’d quieted down, Olivia said, “I feel better. Let’s get to work.”
“What can we do?”
“We can put our heads together. The attack on Sam, if it was an attack, must be connected with Clarisse’s death.” Olivia fetched her laptop computer from the kitchen desk and settled at the table. “I’m setting up a file to record everything we know about Clarisse’s death and everything we need to find out,” she said, her hands flying across the keys. “Give me a password only you and I will know.”
“Teal42,” Maddie said.
“Good,” Olivia said. “Now we need suspects and alibis. Edward and Hugh, of course. Presumably they will inherit almost everything, and I happen to know that Clarisse was worth at least a million dollars.”
Maddie whistled. “She told you that?”
“She wanted to show me what was possible. She and Martin started from nothing, made careful decisions, invested, saved. . . . They took calculated risks and admitted when it was time to cut their losses. Clarisse was trying to teach me.” Olivia felt herself slip into grief and yanked herself back to the present. “Hugh and Edward supposedly have alibis for the night of their mother’s death. Do they hold up? And what about the attack on Sam today?” She set up a table with suspect names down the left side.
“This is awfully linear,” Maddie said. “It hurts my brain, but here goes. Didn’t Del say Hugh and Edward were at a conference when Clarisse died?”
“In Baltimore. But he didn’t say whether he talked to them in person or left a message. We can probably check that. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out what conference they attended.”
Olivia typed “Alibi” at the top of the first column in her table. “Martin and Clarisse used to visit all their businesses every Monday, and I know Hugh and Edward have carried on that tradition.”
“Do they travel alone or together?”
“Alone. Either of them could have slipped in a stop at Sam’s house. Everyone knows he arranges his route so he can stop at home for lunch.”
“What about Bertha?” Maddie asked. “Does she inherit anything from Clarisse? Although I’d hate to think that anyone who bakes such luscious pies could be a murderer.”
“Would you rather everyone believe that two women who make luscious cookies might be poisoners?”
; “Point taken,” Maddie said. “We include everyone.”
Typing as she spoke, Olivia said, “Clarisse told me that Bertha was well provided for. I’m not sure it would be enough to kill over, especially since Bertha already had a secure situation.” Her fingers paused over the keyboard.
“May I suggest Tammy Deacons as our next suspect?” Maddie asked. “From what we overheard, she and Hugh did something they don’t want anyone to know about—something that involved Clarisse. We need to find out where Tammy was the night Clarisse died.”
Olivia added a row for Tammy Deacons.
“Tammy had lots of cookies at her house,” Maddie said, “left over from her engagement shindig. Although, if she was teaching that day, I suppose she wouldn’t have been home to hand Snoopy Sam a bag of cookies when he delivered her mail.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed. I’m sure we can find out if she was at school today . . .”
“I’ll bet you a dozen cookies Tammy doesn’t have an alibi for either time period.” Maddie’s cell phone sang a muddy phrase of Gregorian chant. “That’ll be Lucas,” she said, reaching into the pocket of her jeans. “He’s calling about when we’ll meet for dinner. He’s taking me to Pete’s for scallops night.”
While Maddie paced the kitchen and spoke to Lucas, Olivia shook her shoulders to loosen them. Hunching over a computer had begun to leave its mark on her once-flexible limbs. She had one more suspect to list, and she wasn’t looking forward to it.
“Okay, it’s scallops at six,” Maddie said as she snapped her cell shut. “What time is your will-reading dinner at the Chamberlain mansion?”
“Sherry and will reading at six-thirty, dinner at seven.”
“Sherry? La-de-da. Sounds like the setting for a British murder mystery. Wish I could pose as a serving wench and watch the show.”
Maddie rinsed out her coffee cup and reached for her jacket. “Gotta roll if I want a shower before dinner.”
“Maddie,” Olivia said, “there’s one more person we ought to discuss.”
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