Changes to the Recipe

by K. J. Emrick

  “Anything,” she said. “Anything I can do to help. Um. Well, the call was just before noon. I remember because I was there to take Mom to lunch.”

  Jerry wrote it all down as she said it. Cookie watched him work, processing each bit of information herself, based on what she thought she knew about her friend as well as all the new things she was learning since Sheila’s death. Cream, for his part, padded around the room on his little paws, making a full tour of each room until he got back to them.

  Then he faced the door, and he growled.

  “You know,” Amanda was saying, “there was something funny about the voice.”

  “Funny?” Jerry asked. “Funny how? Like an accent or a lisp, you mean?”

  “No, not like that. It was almost as if—”

  Several loud noises were followed by the sound of the front window shattering. Glass fell across the carpet. The loud noises came again.

  Gunshots, Cookie realized. Someone was shooting at the house.

  Cream was barking loudly, and Jerry’s weight was suddenly on her, throwing Cookie to the floor and covering her protectively. She saw him grab Amanda’s arm and yank her down with them.

  Cookie tried to count as the shots echoed outside. Seven? Eight, maybe. She lost track.

  How many bullets could a gun hold, anyway?

  After several long minutes Jerry got up, telling her to stay where she was until he got back. Then he opened the front door and headed outside. His gun was clear of his holster, held tightly in his hand.

  She wanted to tell him to stop. She wanted to shout at him that he wasn’t a police officer anymore, that he had retired and this wasn’t his responsibility now. Only, she knew Jerry too well. He would always be the man who tried to protect everyone. It wasn’t just a job for him. It was in his nature.

  The silence stretched, and in its own way it was impossibly loud in the absence of the gunshots. Cream came over and licked at her fingers to get her attention. Cookie pulled him in close, and hugged him tight. “I think it’s over now. We’re okay, Cream. Jerry will be back any moment and we’ll be okay. Isn’t that right, Amanda?”

  Still, the silence continued.

  “Amanda?”

  Cookie lifted her head up, looking around the room. The broken pieces of the window had scattered halfway across the rug. The curtains flapped in a breeze from outside. She found Amanda not that far away, laying on the floor on the other side of a coffee table. At first it looked like she was still trying to take cover, just like Cookie had.

  Then she saw the blood on Amanda’s face, and more on the corner of the table. She must have hit her head on the way down…

  Or had she been shot?

  Cookie rushed over, checking for a pulse, several decades’ worth of CPR courses kicking in. Amanda was breathing, and she was alive, but she wouldn’t answer Cookie, and even after being shaken by the shoulder her only response was a fluttering of her eyelids.

  There was a portable phone on the coffee table. Cookie picked it up and dialed 911. As she waited for the call to be answered she had time to think about what Amanda had told them earlier. She was hiding from someone who killed her mother. She’d been sure that person would come for her as well.

  It looked like she’d been right to be worried.

  Her police protection should have taken care of that. Only, where had they gone? They should have been here. Not that Chief Rosen had seemed overly concerned with Amanda’s safety, either.

  That little nagging feeling at the back of her mind was there again. Rosen had been acting strangely during this whole sad affair. Yelling at Jerry for finding Grayson, and then yelling at him again for finding Amanda. Sending Amanda here, to her house, instead of bringing her to the police station to be interviewed. Then his two lackeys leaving Amanda alone like this.

  Even for someone like Rosen, a man who Cookie had zero respect for, that seemed like shoddy police work at best.

  At worst, it was criminally negligent.

  The nagging feeling began to form a very disturbing picture. Maybe there was a reason for Rosen’s behavior, after all.

  A reason that involved a large amount of cash.

  “911,” the woman said when she answered Cookie’s call on the third ring, “what is the nature of your emergency.”

  “There’s been a shooting,” Cookie informed the operator. “My friend has been hurt.”

  Chapter 5

  Widow’s Rest wasn’t large enough to have a hospital of its own. There were two doctor’s offices, and they were both run by competent physicians, but Amanda’s injuries were severe enough that the paramedics went straight to the hospital with her. It was a twenty-minute ride in the ambulance to the hospital in Bridgefield. They didn’t exactly obey the speed limits. Or stop signs, either.

  It was a few hours before the doctors came out to the waiting room to talk to Jerry. They’d been waiting there for word, Jerry holding her hand, and Cream curled up at her feet. He was allowed this far into the hospital through the good graces of head nurse who loved dogs, but he wouldn’t be allowed any further in.

  When the doctor came out, Cookie noticed the young doctor’s gaze flicking to the spot on Jerry’s uniform shirt where the badge should have been, but he didn’t say anything about that, thankfully.

  The good news was that the bullets had missed Amanda. The not-so-good news was that she was in a coma, he said. Although she hadn’t been shot she had suffered a major blow to the head from that table and she wasn’t likely to regain consciousness anytime soon. They were monitoring her vitals and watching her closely, and they were optimistic for a full recovery, and the brain was a funny thing, and so on.

  Then he asked if there was any family that they should be contacting for Amanda.

  “No,” Cookie explained with a heavy heart. “Her father has been dead for years. She has no children or family of her own. And, her mother was murdered yesterday.”

  The doctor’s eyes went wide. Jerry understood his concern.

  “I’m going to be contacting the State Police,” he said. “We’ll get a protection detail for her. Don’t worry, doctor, we don’t want any trouble here in the hospital, either.”

  That seemed to calm the doctor’s fears. At least, he smiled at them as he walked away, already headed off to the next crisis. Cookie watched him leave with a heavy heart, knowing there wasn’t anything else she could do here.

  “Are you sure the State Police will help?” she asked Jerry.

  “I’ve got friends over there.” He leaned forward in his seat, resting his elbows on his knees. “These days, seems like I have a lot more friends there than I have in the Widow’s Rest PD. Rosen’s managed to fill that place with his own people. It’s not like it used to be.”

  Cream padded over to him and laid down with his head over the arch of Jerry’s boot. Cookie was glad to see the way it made Jerry smile.

  “Anyway,” he said, sitting up straight again and taking out his cellphone from its clip on his belt. “I’m going to call the State guys now. I wish we’d caught whoever was shooting at Amanda’s house. That would have made this all a lot easier. As it is, I don’t think we should leave until we know Amanda is safely guarded. Until she wakes up we’ve lost our only witness.”

  Cookie nodded in agreement. “So you aren’t buying Grayson as the killer, either?”

  “I was on the fence before. Now I’m convinced that it wasn’t him. Someone tried to kill Amanda. I know Grayson couldn’t have done that from his cell at the station, and I doubt he would have sent someone else to kill his own girlfriend.”

  “What about one of his buddies from the card game?”

  “I doubt it.” He pursed his lips. “If Grayson was constantly asking Sheila for money, he probably wouldn’t have the resources to hire someone to kill his girlfriend.”

  “From what I saw on that bank statement,” Cookie pointed out, “there was a lot of money involved here.”

  “Sure, but it’s still missing.
I don’t know too many killers who are willing to work on the promise of payment alone.”

  Cookie supposed that made sense. Who would take that kind of risk without getting their money up front? “Well, the man who Amanda heard calling her mother must have been looking for that money as well and for whatever reason, Sheila didn’t want to give it up to him.”

  “Yes. That’s what I was thinking. I was thinking something else, too.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, although she was pretty sure she already knew.

  “I hate to even say it.” Standing up, he dialed the number for his contact in the State Police, and then he met Cookie’s gaze directly. “I think our dear Chief Ed Rosen is way too interested in this case being closed, and closed quickly. He doesn’t want me looking into it, that’s for sure. And what happened to Mason and Cassandra? It’s like they wanted Amanda left alone. Know what that makes me think?”

  “I do. You’re asking the same questions I’ve been asking. So do we think…?”

  Putting the phone to his ear, Jerry frowned. “Yes. I think Chief Ed Rosen might be our killer.”

  When the call connected he made short work of explaining the situation and asking for help. From what Cookie could gather he was transferred to another person with a higher rank, and then again, before the request was finally granted. With a sigh of relief, he hung up and put the phone away. “Now, we wait, I guess.”

  “Jerry, how are we going to prove Grayson isn’t the killer? I mean, proving Rosen is involved would be hard enough but all the evidence still points to Grayson.” She got up to join Jerry in the middle of the waiting room floor, and Cream came to sit at her feet. “What can we do without Amanda?”

  “I’d love to track down that phone call Amanda overheard at her mother’s. That’s going to take getting a subpoena for the phone company records, though.” He rubbed thoughtfully at his chin. “Which could take a week or better. If we could figure out where that money went, that would probably solve the entire case for us. I think that’s the way to go.”

  Cookie shook her head in wonder. “I still can’t believe that my friend had that much money to her name and never said anything about it. I sure wouldn’t mind accumulating that much cash to pass on to my children.”

  Jerry’s eyebrows went up. “Huh.”

  “Excuse me?” she said, trying to read his expression. “Now, what exactly is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, you’re the smartest woman who ever lived.” He took her by the shoulders, and kissed her on the forehead. “And I’m not just saying that because you’ve agreed to marry me.”

  “Mm-hmm,” she hummed. “Which is a discussion for another time, to be sure. Now. Exactly why do you think I’m so smart at the moment?”

  “Because, if you had a small fortune to your name, you’d make sure that it went to your daughter, right?”

  Cookie nodded. Her daughter Madison was her only direct heir. For a time, Madison’s first husband had been in the will but after the divorce she had him taken out. For a while after Madison had remarried, the family had been stretched to the breaking point as everyone tried to adjust to the new dynamic. That was when her granddaughter Clarissa had first come to live with her. Then just as Clarissa had started to get along with Madison’s second husband, the man had been murdered. That had been hard enough on everyone. It had been worse—and better in some ways—when they learned Madison was pregnant. Her second husband had left a piece of himself behind that had become a beautiful baby boy to carry on his name.

  They were all much closer now for everything they had been through, and so now Cookie’s will included both her daughter, Madison, and her granddaughter, Clarissa. There was even a little something in there for Clarissa’s new baby brother, too. She wanted to make sure that whatever she had to her name on her last day went to help her family when she was gone.

  Oh!

  “I see what you mean,” Cookie told him as the lightbulb went off in her head. “Sheila must have had a last will and testament that would say where her money was supposed to go in the event of her death. So if we find that will, then we’ll find where she wanted her money to go.”

  “Right. Or, at the very least, we’ll find out who had a reason to expect a large sum of money when Sheila died, and who wouldn’t expect a dime. That might point us at a list of suspects right there.”

  Cookie chuckled. “Wouldn’t it be ironic if Chief Ed Rosen was in that will?”

  “It would certainly make things clearer. Did Sheila ever talk about knowing Rosen?”

  “No, not that I recall.” Cookie thought back as hard as she could but any discussion between Sheila and her that had concerned the chief of police had basically been about how much they didn’t like the man. “Sheila did know quite a few men, however, after her husband died. She didn’t want to be alone. I was just thinking about her last steady boyfriend earlier today, actually. He’s long out of the picture, as were all of her boyfriends. It’s possible that Rosen was in that group somewhere, I suppose. So who do we talk to about seeing her will?”

  “Her attorney.” Jerry nodded firmly. “I’m sure it was someone local, and I know all the attorneys in Widow’s Rest. It won’t take long to figure out which one she used.”

  “I can save you some time,” Cookie told him with a smile. “Her attorney is Zane Gillman. I use him for any business affairs at the bakery. Will he let us see Sheila’s will just because we ask?”

  “With our luck? Maybe, but probably not.” Then he pointed. “There’s more of our luck now.”

  From where they were sitting, they could see the front doors of the hospital. Out in the parking lot a black and white patrol car pulled into a spot marked reserved for ambulances. They watched as Ed Rosen got out of the driver’s seat, straightening the lines of his uniform shirt. He stared straight into the hospital, through the glass doors, and Cookie had the distinct impression that he was looking straight at them.

  Cream stood up on his paws, and whuffed at the man as he got closer. Cookie felt the same way, but she knew she couldn’t let Rosen know what she was thinking. If she tipped him off then he would have time to create alibis and excuses for himself. No. For now, she had to smile and be nice to the man, even if what she really wanted to do was dunk him in cooking grease until he was fried up good and proper.

  When he threw the doors open, and walked over to them, Rosen’s face turned an instant shade of red. His hands fisted on his hips as he stepped up just inches from Jerry’s face. “I should’ve known you’d be here. That was quite a mess you left for us back in Widow’s Rest. Any chance I can get you to quit now and save us any more re-enactments of the shootout at the OK Corral?”

  Jerry didn’t back down from the tirade. “You know that wasn’t our fault, Chief. In fact, if we hadn’t been there then Amanda might be dead right now instead of in a coma from a blow to her head. Someone tried to shoot her. Where was her protection?”

  Rosen threw his hands in the air. “Things were just fine until you stuck your nose into them. We had it covered.”

  “I don’t think you did. What happened to Mason and Cassandra? They weren’t there when Cookie and I arrived. Where’d they go, Chief?”

  “That’s not your concern. They only went around the corner to get coffee. I’ve put them both on a two-day suspension for deserting their post, to be served at my discretion. It’s handled.”

  “Uh-huh. Served at your discretion, huh? Like on days they’re already scheduled to be off?”

  The chief’s smirk was aggravating. “Department manpower is tight, Jerry. Even more so now that you’re abandoning us.”

  Cookie cleared her throat before this escalated any further. “The point is that your two officers were gone. I’m not sure that Amanda would agree with you that she was well protected. Not from where she’s lying right now, anyway.”

  “You just never mind,” Rosen snapped at her. “I’m here now, and I’m going to take over. You and this boyfriend
of yours can just go home. Besides, if I remember correctly, you quit on me today, Jerry.”

  “I’m retiring, Chief.” Now Jerry did back away a step, like the reality of his turning in his badge had taken the wind out of his sails. “I didn’t quit, and I didn’t abandon you. I’m retiring.”

  “Well, unless you want to be fired, I suggest you leave. Now. I’ll be staying to protect Amanda personally from this point on.”

  In the parking lot, Cookie could see other patrol cars pulling in. These were a dark blue color, with gold striping. The State Police. There were two cars and their drivers made sure to park in spaces that weren’t reserved for medical vehicles. The officers who stepped out of the cars were tall and confident, with flat-brimmed hats on their heads that were set at a downward angle over their eyes. They meant business.

  Cookie smiled sweetly. “We’ve already made arrangements for Amanda’s protection. Here they are now.”

  “It’s the State Police,” Jerry explained. “They’ve agreed to help us. They’ve got more people to use and like you said, the Widow’s Rest PD is a little strained for manpower right now. Besides, Chief. We’re out of our jurisdiction here. Neither of us has any authority to do anything here but watch.”

  Rosen glared at the both of them, but he knew Jerry was right. Whatever argument he might have come up with was forgotten as the State Troopers came in and started talking to him about the arrangements for protecting Amanda. Jerry caught Cookie’s eye and nodded toward the doors. They should slip out now while the getting was good.

  They were halfway to Jerry’s car when one of the Troopers came back out and called over to them. Cookie wondered what that might be about, until he put his hand out for Jerry to take, and the two of them smiled like old friends.

  “How’ve you been, Jerry?” the Trooper asked.

  “I’ve seen better days, Tony. Thanks for getting here so quick.”

  “No worries.” Tony tipped the brim of his hat to Cookie. “Nice to finally meet the woman who’s making an honest man out of Jerry Stansted. He talks about you all the time.”