“I guess there’s a reason you’re the writer in the family instead of me,” Tricia said.
Principal Randall continued to look at them with what could only be described as boredom. No doubt she had better things to do than to watch them snoop around. As if to prove it, she looked at the big clock near one of the cabinets. “Have you seen enough?”
Angelica sighed. “Yes, thank you for taking the time to see us and let us have a peek at our workspaces.”
Mrs. Randall’s smile was anything but authentic. “It was no trouble at all.”
They followed the principal back to the first floor, where Mrs. Randall paused at the school’s main entrance. She gestured toward the door. “Ladies.”
“Whom should I contact about establishing the scholarship?” Angelica asked.
“Then you were actually serious about it?”
“Of course.”
“If you’ll leave me your card, I’ll set something up and then call you.”
Angelica withdrew a business card from her purse and handed it to the woman. They said their good-byes and the sisters left the building and headed south down Main Street.
“Well?” Tricia asked.
“I didn’t like that woman. I have a mind to double my scholarship—just to show her how authentic my offer is.”
“You go, girl!”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.” They looked both ways at the corner and crossed the side street.
“What are you going to do now?” Angelica asked.
Tricia shrugged. “Go home and make another practice batch of cupcakes.”
“I wish I could, but I have to get back to the day spa. Then again, I really don’t need the practice. After all, I’ve been making cupcakes for almost as long as you’ve been alive.”
Tricia ignored the dig.
She’d show Angelica.
Now, if she just could find the perfect recipe.
TWELVE
Tricia arrived at Haven’t Got a Clue just as Pixie was about to unlock the door. “Another beautiful day in Stoneham,” Pixie called. She had to be the happiest woman alive. And why not? She had a job she loved, a new home, and a husband who cooked for her. Tricia had no reason to feel anything but happiness for her friend and co-worker, but instead, she felt depressed. But then, with Vera Olson’s death and the Bake-Off hanging over her, maybe she was just feeling a little overwhelmed.
“It is,” Tricia agreed.
“Any plans for the day?” Pixie asked as she stowed her purse behind the cash desk.
“Just trying out another recipe for the Bake-Off. I hope you won’t mind taste testing yet again.”
“Not a chance.” Pixie looked over at the beverage station. “I’ll get the coffee going. You get up those stairs and start making those cupcakes.”
“Will do,” Tricia said, and headed to the back of the store for the stairs to her apartment above.
An hour later, Tricia looked at the finished cupcakes before her. She’d gone for a plain yellow sponge with an almond-flavored frosting, garnished with toasted sliced almonds. They smelled pretty good but looked . . . boring. Despite the dozen or so decorating videos she’d watched, Tricia’s efforts at embellishment were not inspiring. Just swirling frosting on the top of a cupcake wasn’t going to win the Bake-Off prize money for Tricia’s charity, not with cutthroat competition like Angelica. What Tricia needed was a ringer. Maybe that wasn’t quite right; what she needed was to be a ringer.
Angelica wasn’t the only woman on earth who knew how to make a rose out of frosting or fondant, but where could Tricia find someone to teach her? There was only so much you could learn from a book or watching YouTube videos. What she needed was some hands-on experience.
The only professional bakers in town were Nikki Brimfield-Smith, Alexa Kozlov from the Coffee Bean, Tommy, the short-order cook at Booked for Lunch, and of course the pastry chef at the Brookview Inn, Joann Gibson. All of them had entered the competition in the professional category; they weren’t about to help Tricia learn to decorate so she could win in her division. But there had to be other people who were skilled in that capacity. She just had to find one of them.
But before she even faced that hurdle, she needed to hit the grocery store and stock up on cake flour, eggs, and butter—lots of butter. So, after dropping off the cupcakes in her store for her employees and customers, off to Milford she went.
It was only a ten-minute drive, and Tricia soon arrived at the parking lot of the biggest supermarket in the area. As she approached the store, she saw a woman who looked vaguely familiar exiting. She stood in the middle of the aisle just staring until a car horn blasted her from her reverie, jostling her memory. She scooted out of the way of the offensive driver and called, “Officer Pearson?”
The blonde woman looked up. Without the bulky navy uniform and cap, Officer Pearson looked a lot more feminine in jeans, a pink tank top, and sandals than she did when on the job. She carried two plastic grocery bags but no sign of a purse.
“Can I help you?” she called.
Tricia hurried over to intercept the officer. “It’s Tricia Miles. I was in Joyce Widman’s store when Vera Olson arrived and tried to start an argument on Monday.”
“Oh, yeah,” Officer Pearson said, and seemed distinctly uncomfortable at the reminder. “You found the body at Ms. Widman’s home, too.”
“Joyce and I found it. I was wondering if there were any new developments in the case.”
“I’m not authorized to talk about such things outside of the department.”
Probably true, but something about her tone and body language made it seem like no matter what Tricia asked, her answers would be evasive.
“I’m worried about my friend. I don’t think she’s capable of committing a murder—and especially over such a petty argument.”
“That’s been her reputation,” Pearson said succinctly. “I’m sorry. I really need to get going. I’m working second shift tonight and have other errands to run this morning.”
“I’m sorry. It was nice speaking with you.”
Pearson nodded and headed for her car once again. Tricia crossed the tarmac and paused to watch the officer steer her late-model white Kia toward the lot’s exit; then she shrugged and entered the store.
Grabbing a small cart, Tricia headed straight for the produce section, where she selected several lemons and limes and a pint of strawberries, figuring any of them would make a great-tasting cupcake or frosting. She considered stopping at the deli but decided against it and instead figured she’d just get a loaf of bread in the bakery department.
Bakery?
Good grief! Why hadn’t she thought of that before? She pushed her cart with greater speed and practically skidded to a stop in front of one of the glass display cases. Beyond it, a gum-cracking woman of about fifty, with bleached blonde hair, dressed in baker’s whites, wielded a large pastry bag filled with pink icing and was piping a scroll design on the edge of half a white-frosted sheet cake.
Tricia stood there, mesmerized, just staring at the woman’s hands as she worked, the evident ease she possessed, and her speed.
When she’d finished with the scrolls, the woman looked up. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so. I’d like—”
“The book of designs is over there.” She pointed. “Pick out what you want and let me know.”
“I was hoping I could convince you to teach me to do what you do.”
The woman grabbed another pastry bag, this one filled with icing a pale lilac in color. She began to make roses, filling the first corner. “Teach you to do what?”
“Make roses and scrolls with frosting.”
“What for?”
Tricia bit her bottom lip. Should she admit it? “Well, I’m participating in the Great Booktown Bake-Off and—”<
br />
“Oh, yeah, I heard about that.”
“Have you entered?”
The woman shook her head. “Nah, I can’t bake for sh—” She didn’t finish the sentence. “Cake and cupcakes just aren’t my thing.”
“But you work in the bakery?”
“Yeah, and before that, I was a waitress. They trained me to do this. The cakes come already baked. We just do the personalization. This one is for a kid’s eighth birthday party. The pink and purple together look sucky, if you ask me, but it’s going to make some little girl pretty darn happy.”
It probably would, and for a moment Tricia remembered her fifth birthday cake and the slice she’d never gotten to eat. She shook herself back to the present.
“Could you teach me?”
“When? And what’s it pay?”
“Double what you make here an hour.”
The woman looked thoughtful. “This competition is in a few days, isn’t it?”
Tricia nodded. “Next week.”
“I work here from noon to four every day.”
“Could you come to my home in Stoneham in the morning and give me some pointers?”
“I’ve got to drop my granddaughter off at daycare, but I could be there around nine. It should only take a few hours to teach you the basics.”
“That’s all I need.”
“Okay. By the way, I’m Donna.”
“And I’m Tricia. Glad to meet you.”
Tricia gave Donna her business card and scribbled her cell phone number on the back. “See you tomorrow, then.”
“I’ll be there.” And with a sigh, Donna went back to the little girl’s dream cake.
She might have felt resigned, but Tricia felt energized.
Maybe she’d have a chance to win the Bake-Off after all.
* * *
* * *
Since Tricia was already in Milford, she decided to swing by the Pets-A-Plenty animal shelter. As she entered the building, she heard a lot of barking—much more than usual, but there was a distinct lack of humans to be seen at the usually busy rescue.
Tricia strode up to the reception desk, where a harried volunteer clasped a phone in one hand and held the index finger of her other hand in her other ear.
“I’m sorry, but you have to sign paperwork and come to the shelter in person. We don’t just drive pets to your house to see if you’d like to adopt them. Yes, yes, I understand, but those are our rules. Yes. Yes. Good-bye.” She hung up the phone. “Some people,” she muttered, then seemed to realize Tricia stood on the other side of the counter. “I’m sorry,” she said, sounding embarrassed. “Can I help you?”
Tricia had to raise her voice to be heard over the din. “Are any of the Pets-A-Plenty board members in today?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Not even Toby Kingston?”
“He has meetings off-site all day.”
“Oh.” Did the man ever show up for work? Again Tricia noted the loud barking from the kennels behind the door beyond the desk. “Is everything all right?”
“No. We’re seriously short-handed today. Most of the animals haven’t eaten or had their cages cleaned.”
Miss Marple had been fed at her usual time. The strays and abandoned cats and dogs were probably confused and apprehensive, in addition to being hungry.
“Can I do anything to help?”
“Uh, no.”
“For what it’s worth, I’ve been nominated as a possible replacement on the Pets-A-Plenty Board of Directors. If someone will give me some direction, I’d be glad to step in and do whatever I can to help out.”
The woman eyed Tricia’s attire. “You might get dirty.”
“As a longtime pet owner, I’m well acquainted with cleaning up after cats and dogs.” Okay, she’d never owned a dog, but she had been walking Sarge on a regular basis—and that meant picking up after him, too.
The woman scrutinized Tricia once again. “Well, I guess so. Come on.” She lifted the counter and beckoned Tricia to follow her to the kennels beyond.
The barking was almost deafening inside the kennels where anxious dogs jumped up against the chain link as though to garner even more attention from the humans who walked along the aisle.
“Cori?” the woman called.
An older, gray-haired woman popped her head out of a doorway at the far end of the corridor.
“What?”
“I’ve got a warm body who wants to give you a hand.”
“I’ll take whatever I can get.”
The receptionist waved a hand in the direction of her colleague and then abandoned Tricia to return to the shelter’s lobby.
“Hi, I’m Tricia Miles.”
“Cori Haskell,” the beleaguered woman said. In front of her were at least twenty bowls filled with kibble and another set with water. “Those poor puppies haven’t eaten since last night. We had two volunteer cancellations this morning. I wasn’t supposed to come in until four, but they called me half an hour ago.”
“Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it,” Tricia said.
Half an hour later, all the dogs and cats had been fed and watered. It was then that the cage cleaning began.
Nobody wants to clean up cat and doggy doo, but Tricia didn’t mind, and she got to make friends with so many of the shelter’s residents, which was heartening and heartbreaking at the same time.
“Thanks for stopping by,” Cori said after Tricia had told the woman about her own cat and her sister’s dog. “It’s really hard to keep the place staffed. Volunteers come when they can—and we try to schedule them—but . . . life happens. If your kid is suddenly sick, your volunteer job goes out the window. It seems like it’s harder to staff the place in the summer when kids are home from school and vacations happen.”
Tricia could understand that.
“How long have you been volunteering for the shelter?”
“Two months.”
“Really?” Cori seemed so well versed in the tasks that needed to be accomplished, Tricia would have guessed she’d been a volunteer a lot longer.
“Yeah. I got pissed off when Monterey Bioresources came to New Hampshire, and I felt I needed to do something to promote animal welfare. They’ve got a compound just outside of Concord.”
“Monterey Bioresources?” Tricia asked.
“They’re a company that works for Big Pharma and the cosmetics industry. They test products on dogs, cats, and bunnies. Terrible experiments like squirting hairspray in their eyes and injecting them with drugs to see how they react—which is sometimes lethal.”
“I never heard of them before.”
“And it’s not likely you ever would—except for me telling you. The whole operation is low-key. You can’t even see the buildings from the road. They’ve got a long driveway and very little in the way of signage. They don’t want you to know they’re there or what they do because any person who gives a damn about animals would be appalled.”
Tricia was already appalled. Of course, she knew that the medical and pharmaceutical industries heavily relied on animal experimentation, but she also knew that a lot of their supposed research could now be done by computer modeling based on past results. Was it really necessary to subject innocent animals to that kind of torture? And yet she had heard that some agencies that professed to be animal activists were just as cruel, saying they wanted to help protect animals when their agenda was just as detrimental to the lesser species they pretended to advocate for.
Tricia decided right then and there that when she got back to her computer she would do some research on Monterey Bioresources to find out just what their reach was in her adopted state.
“I get all that, and I’m in your court,” Tricia said. “But I’m not sure what that has to do with Pets-A-Plenty.”
Cori seemed to shrink
into herself and lowered her voice. “Because there’re rumors that some of the animals that are supposedly adopted from here are being sold to Monterey Bioresources.”
Tricia’s mouth dropped in horror. “Surely you’re wrong.”
Cori shook her head. “I wouldn’t have told you what I suspect—know—if you hadn’t said you might become part of the board. I’m not sure everyone who currently serves on it is really out to protect the animals.”
“How do you know?”
Again, Cori looked almost frightened. “The volunteers talk among ourselves. There have been some funny adoptions. Sometimes we’ll have six or seven guinea pigs and ferrets, and then they’ll all go at once. Same with some dogs. Somebody in charge might know what’s going on and is trying to cover it up—but you didn’t hear that from me.”
Which meant that if push came to shove, Cori might not be willing to testify about it. And who could blame her?
Tricia looked down the aisle, catching sight of so many dogs that sat before the chain link looking pathetic and longing to be loved like she and Angelica loved Sarge. The sadness that enveloped her was like a ten-ton weight on her soul. Pets-A-Plenty was a no-kill shelter. But did they do enough due diligence when it came to vetting the people who adopted the animals?
She really didn’t know.
THIRTEEN
After her troubling conversation with Cori, Tricia decided she needed a bit of a pick-me-up and stopped at Granny’s Garden, a nursery just outside the Stoneham village line. As she got out of her car, she saw a large outdoor display of birdbaths, concrete and resin statuary, metal and white-plastic arbors, flower-filled urns, and clay planters.
She took the time to go through the entire display before turning to the greenhouses, which were filled with a vast variety of annual flowers and vegetables ranging from tomatoes to peppers, zucchini, broccoli, summer squash, and Brussels sprouts. Tempted as she was, Tricia pushed her cart and stopped to collect two varieties of bite-sized tomatoes in plastic planters (as the clay ones were far too heavy for her to maneuver on her own), a pot of thyme, and another of cilantro, and again lamented the fact that she hadn’t better thought out the design of her far-too-small balcony on the east side of her home. Maybe she’d repurpose it in a year or two, but for now, she was stuck with what she had. She also bought two flower boxes and the metal hangers to fit over her balcony rail, along with several six-packs of pansies and begonias. One of the nursery employees suggested she buy a couple of spikes to give her arrangement a little height, which seemed like a good idea.
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