Killer Maple Cookies: Book 3 in Killer Cookie Cozy Mysteries

by Benning, Patti

  “When are you free?” she asked, eager for anything that would distract her from the disastrous dinner with her parents.

  “I could do tomorrow morning,” he said. “Are you working the morning shift at the diner?”

  “Hold on…” She hurried into the kitchen to double-check the schedule on her fridge. “Nope, evening. Tomorrow morning’s perfect. What’s the address? I’ll meet you there.”

  He gave her the address and then bid her goodnight. Lilah realized that it was getting late, and decided that she ought to head to bed as well. First, she pulled out her laptop and searched for the address that Reid had given her. It belonged to a small concrete laying business. The building was cute, with a red awning out front, but she wasn’t sure it screamed “cookie shop.” Still, it wouldn’t hurt to check it out. At the very least, it would take her mind off of everything that had happened this evening.

  The next morning, she left early and got to the little shop before he did. She waited in the car, gazing at the building. It was small, but so was the sandwich shop. This building stood alone on its own lot, instead of sharing space with its neighbors, which she supposed should have been a plus, but she had liked the way Pete’s place had been nestled between the two other stores.

  “But this place is available,” she told herself. “And no one knows what’s happening to Pete’s. I’ve got to start being more realistic.” Her father’s comments had stung, but she knew that they had at least a kernel of truth. If she wanted to have any chance of success in starting her own business, she had to be realistic.

  There were some things that she liked about the building. The red awning, for one, and the flower bed in front. It had its own parking lot, which she was sure would come in handy. She resolved to reserve her final judgment until after she had seen the interior.

  When Reid finally got there, she got out of her car and met him at the building’s front door. “So why is the guy who owns this building selling it?” she asked.

  “He’s expanding, and doesn’t use this location as much anymore,” he told her. “He called me while I was driving. He had to run out to pick something up for his daughter, but he told me he left the door unlocked, and we’re welcome to go in and take a look around before he gets back.”

  Lilah pulled open the door and walked into the empty building ahead of Reid. The first thing she noticed was that it was dark; there weren’t many windows, and the ones that were there were small. It didn’t have anything like the nice, big display window that she had loved so much at Pete’s sandwich shop.

  She flicked on the lights, and wasn’t impressed with what she saw. The building looked comfortable enough, but it didn’t look like the sort of place where one would sell cookies. The floors were carpeted, and the layout was cramped. There were a few small rooms, and one tiny kitchen in the back. If she owned it, she could knock down some of the walls, but that would be a lot of work and expense on top of the cost of the building.

  The truth was, the sandwich shop had been perfect. Even though she tried not to, it was impossible not to compare the two. She knew her dad would tell her to be realistic—she couldn’t expect to have a wide variety of storefronts to choose from in such a small town, after all—but she couldn’t ignore her gut, which was telling her very clearly that this was not the place for her.

  “I hope he gets here soon,” Reid said, glancing at his watch.

  “If you have to go somewhere, I can just call him about the building,” Lilah told him. She appreciated him taking the time out of his day to meet her out here, and didn’t know how to tell him that she had already decided that this wasn’t the place for her.

  “I’m supposed to stop in at the police station before noon,” he told her. “Detective Eldridge wanted to talk to me.”

  “About Pete’s suicide?” she asked, knowing that she was probably being nosy.

  “That’s just it,” Reid said with a frown. “I’m not so sure it was suicide.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, looking up at him sharply.

  “Well, you saw that other man that was there when we met him at the sandwich shop,” Reid said. “It turns out that Pete owed him a lot of money. A lot of money. He had some sort of gambling problem. One of our mutual friends, a guy named Jackson, stopped in to see me at my office to talk about business, and the subject of Pete came up. He’d heard about Pete’s death, but didn’t know it was suicide. He asked me if I knew who had killed him. When I told him that Pete had taken his own life, he acted surprised. Apparently, Pete had called him only hours before his death and they had made plans for another big-stakes poker game.”

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t kill himself,” Lilah said. “Maybe he realized that he was about to lose even more money by gambling on the poker game. He could have gotten overwhelmed and decided to end it.”

  “According to Jackson, Pete regularly won a lot of money at poker. Between the game and selling the store, he should have been able to pay off most of his debts.”

  Lilah frowned. If Reid was right, then maybe Pete hadn’t killed himself. Did that mean there had been another murder in Vista?

  “Do you think that guy, Andrew, we saw when we got to the store could have done it?” she asked.

  “I’ve got no idea, but I’ll mention him to Eldridge. I’m going to tell him what Jackson told me. If this was a murder, then Pete deserves some justice.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  * * *

  After Reid left for the police station, Lilah called the person that owned the building and told him thanks for letting her look at it, but that she didn’t think it would suit her needs. She was a bit disappointed, but mostly she couldn’t stop thinking about what Reid had said. What if Pete had been murdered? It wouldn’t change anything about the availability of his store, of course, but somehow it made a world of difference to how she felt. When she’d heard of his suicide, her predominant emotion, after shock, had been sorrow. The thought of murder, however, made her angry. Even though he’d had his issues, Pete had seemed like a nice guy. He definitely hadn’t deserved to have his life brutally ended by some drunk that he owed money to.

  Lilah drove back home, distracted by thoughts about Pete and the unfairness of the world. She stopped to get gasoline on the way, taking her time picking out a bottled iced tea inside before filling up at the pump. It wasn’t until she was nearly to her house that she glanced at the clock and realized that she had fifteen minutes until her shift at the diner was supposed to begin.

  She left her car running and dashed into her house to let Winnie outside and change into a different set of clothes for work. After letting the dog back in, she swiped the list for the last set of cookie ingredients that she needed from the counter and ran out the door. She got to work just as the second hand on the clock in the diner swept past the twelve.

  “Lilah?” Kate said, sounding surprised when she pushed her way into the kitchen. “What are you doing here?”

  “Sorry I’m late,” Lilah gasped. “I had a busy morning… saw Reid… talked about murder…”

  Kate blinked. “You aren’t late. Didn’t Randall call you? He changed the schedule yesterday because I needed to switch around some of my hours. You didn’t need to come in until two.”

  “Oh. Which number did he call? I didn’t get anything on my cell…”

  They both looked around to Randall, who was just dumping a new batch of potatoes into the fryer.

  “He probably called your home phone,” Kate said apologetically. “You know how he is about cellphones.”

  “It’s all right,” Lilah told her. “I can just head back home for the next two hours. It’s not like I live far away. Or maybe I’ll stick around and get lunch here. I’m in the mood for something chock full of flavor and calories.”

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place,” Kate said with a smile.

  Lilah fetched herself a cup of soda and put an order for a double cheeseburger with the works with Randall, then sett
led into a corner booth and pulled out her phone. She wanted to talk about Pete’s death with someone, but she didn’t know who she could reach out to. Reid, of course, was busy, and besides, he had known the man personally. It didn’t seem right to try to talk about it with him. Margie had her family over, and the last thing that she wanted was for Eliza to hear her gossiping about a dead man. Suddenly it hit her. Of course: Val. She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of her best friend sooner. Granted, the two of them hadn’t been seeing each other as much lately due to the fact that Val’s fiancé had recently returned from a business trip overseas. Lilah decided to send her a text to see if she was free to swing by the diner—her boutique wasn’t far—and have lunch with her.

  “I got your message just in time,” Val said as she slid into the seat across from Lilah. “I was just about to go out and get Chinese for lunch, but of course this is nicer. Sorry I haven’t been stopping by as much lately.”

  “It’s fine,” Lilah assured her. “How’s Joel?”

  “He’s glad to be back,” Val said. “And it’s good to have him back.”

  “I bet. He was gone a while this time.”

  “It should be his last big trip before the wedding.”

  Val and Joel had been engaged for almost six years, and had been dating each other for much longer than that. Somehow the date for their wedding kept getting pushed back. Lilah was relatively sure that it would happen this time, but then she’d thought the same thing the year before when it got canceled due to Val’s father ending up in the hospital after a heart attack. The two had met in high school, and as far as Lilah knew had been together ever since.

  “You two are lucky to have each other,” she said, thinking of her own dismal love life.

  “You’ll find someone like Joel too, one day,” her friend told her. “I’m sure of it. Besides, maybe it’s good that you don’t have any romantic distractions right now. You’ve got more important things to focus on.”

  Lilah knew Val was talking about her cookie shop. She sighed and picked at the huge pile of fried beside her burger. “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”

  “Are you having second thoughts?” Val asked.

  “Well, my parents came to town last night…”

  “Oh, don’t listen to them,” her friend said, stealing one of her fries. “Your dad’s still sore about you leaving the company. He wouldn’t be happy even if you became the president of the United States.”

  “I just don’t understand why he cares so much,” Lilah said, all of the old bitterness coming back. “I’m his daughter. Isn’t he supposed to want me to be happy? If I had children, I’d tell them to follow their hearts. I wouldn’t be angry at them if they did something differently than what I had planned out for them.”

  “He’s, what, seventy?” Val asked.

  “Almost.”

  “My guess is, he’s getting worried about what’s going to happen to his company when he’s gone. He probably wants to keep it in the family.”

  Lilah couldn’t help but think of Talbot’s Sandwiches. From what Margie and Randall had said, the sandwich shop had been handed down for generations, always staying in the same family. Was that what her father wanted? Was she being selfish by following her own dreams?

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly, thinking back over their conversation the evening before. “He doesn’t seem to think I’m responsible or realistic enough to run my own business. I don’t see why he’d want me in charge of his.”

  “I’ve been telling you since you moved here, the two of you need to sit down and talk without arguing sometime. Neither of you are very good at communicating in emotional situations like that.”

  “Well, next time I see him, I’ll invite you along to mediate,” Lilah promised. “I don’t know, I guess one of the reasons that dinner last night upset me so much was because I know that a lot of what he said was right. I keep messing things up. I haven’t kept a job, other than working here, since I left the company. What makes me think that I can run my own business? The thought of failing at this terrifies me. So much is at stake, and it feels so different than all of the other jobs I’ve tried.”

  “Well, there you go,” Val said. “With everything else you’ve started, you always seemed to jump in feet first, without a care in the world. I can tell already; you’re acting differently with this whole cookie shop thing. You’re being more careful, taking your time. You’re going to be fine, Lilah.”

  “But what if I’m not? Even if I do everything perfectly, the store could still fail. I should never have accepted Margie’s loan. It’s not fair of me to put her savings on the line too. I—”

  “Whoa,” Val said, putting a hand on her arm. “Calm down. Margie’s a grown woman. She knows what she’s doing, okay? If she wasn’t prepared to take risks, she wouldn’t have offered you the money. I don’t like hearing you doubt yourself like this. You’re usually so confident. What’s gotten into you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because of what Eliza said,” she said with a sigh. Seeing Val’s blank look, she added, “Margie’s daughter-in-law,” and proceeded to tell her friend about her interactions with the other woman over the past week.

  When she was done, her friend snorted and said, “Well, it sounds to me like this Eliza is more worried about how much money she’s going to inherit from Margie than anything else. Some people get ugly when it comes to money.”

  Val’s comment brought Lilah full circle to the reason why she had wanted to talk to someone in the first place; Pete’s death. A thought popped into her mind, but she quickly dismissed it. Eliza might not be the most pleasant person in the world, but there was no way she would have committed murder just to keep Lilah from getting the storefront that she wanted. Instead, she told Val about Reid’s theory that Pete had been killed by the drunk man he owed money to.

  She and her friend spent the next twenty minutes discussing reasons that people might have had to kill Pete, and by the time they were done, Lilah was convinced that his death had indeed been a murder and not a suicide. It just didn’t make sense to think that someone on the verge of pulling himself out of debt would choose to end it all just weeks before he could finally pay off the money he owed.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  * * *

  Lilah woke up the next morning with a twisting stomach and sweaty palms. It was the day before Reid’s party, and she still had dozens of cookies to make. That fact alone wasn’t what was making her so nervous that she felt sick, though. This event would be her first real test as a professional baker. If people liked the cookies and nothing went dreadfully wrong, then it would be great publicity for her cookie shop, but if the cookies weren’t a hit or she somehow messed up the order, her new career could be over before it began. She was grateful toward Reid for taking this chance on her, but right now a part of her was wishing that she had never even heard of his company party.

  After work the evening before she had stopped at the little grocery store in town for some last-minute shopping. She had saved today’s cookies for last for two reasons: one, they would be the most difficult, and she hadn’t wanted to risk getting discouraged before completing the two simpler recipes; and two, she didn’t think they would store as well in the freezer as the maple brown sugar and white chocolate toffee cookies had.

  Lilah dragged herself out of bed and walked into the kitchen to see the pile of apples waiting for her just where she had left them on the counter the night before. She stared at them for a long moment, wondering what she had gotten herself into. There was no way she could make all of the caramel apple pie cookies she needed to in time for the party tomorrow. What was she thinking, choosing such complicated cookies? She should have played it safe and done something simple, but it was too late now. She had all of the ingredients, and the recipe was printed. She would just have to do the best she could.

  The recipe was in four parts, and she started with the dough first. It was different than regular
cookie dough, more like pie crust, but luckily it was pretty straightforward; in no time at all, she had four balls of dough wrapped in plastic wrap in the fridge to chill.

  Beginning to feel more confident—that part had gone easily enough, after all—she turned her attention to the next section; the caramel. As she read through the instructions, she realized that the process was similar to how she had made the toffee a few days ago, with a few differences such as the addition of heavy cream. She managed to melt the sugar and stir in the other ingredients without burning anything, which she considered to be a great success.

  The caramel made, she turned her attention to peeling and slicing the apples, which was boring, but not difficult, and didn’t have much potential for error, then mixed the apple pieces with sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and a dash of lemon juice to keep the apples from turning brown.

  Her anxiety from that morning had all but faded by the time she had finished with the apples and put them in the fridge. With ample time while the dough chilled, she decided to take a shower and get cleaned up. The messy part of baking, mixing all of the ingredients together, was done. Actually assembling all of the cookies would be much more time consuming, but at least she wouldn’t come out of it covered in flour.

  After she was dressed, she felt more like herself. She called Reid and confirmed the details for the party the next evening. She was supposed to arrive at six to drop off and arrange the cookies. He had asked her if she would be able to stay for the event, but she had politely declined. Even though she had seen a lot more of Reid lately, and was slowly beginning to realize that maybe he wasn’t quite the work-obsessed clone of her father that she had originally thought, she was still reluctant to do anything that might mislead him about her interest in a relationship. Like Val had said, she had more important things to worry about right now.