A Cookie Before Dying accsm-2

by Virginia Lowell

  “I doubt it,” Olivia said. “The Witness Protection Program would never have allowed Raoul to continue dancing. He’d be too recognizable, too easy to track down.”

  “He’d have to give up dancing?” Maddie held a pirouetting ballerina cookie cutter in the palm of her hand. “How sad. Remind me never to witness a mob hit.”

  “Duly noted.” Olivia slid a pan of cookies into the oven. “I have a theory about Raoul,” she said. “The trouble is, I don’t have a bit of evidence.”

  “What? Tell me!”

  “It doesn’t really qualify as a theory,” Olivia said. “I keep thinking about Ida’s story of the dancing ghost.”

  The oven timer dinged. Maddie wedged open the oven door to take a look, releasing the sweet-spicy fragrance of orange and nutmeg. “Perfect,” she said. “One more batch and we’re done with the baking. Ida’s brain is a little on the buttery side, you know.”

  “I got that impression,” Olivia said, “but maybe we shouldn’t ignore every detail of her story.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like her account of a man threatening the dancer. Ida described that incident in some detail, and I did find a dress with a rip in the front. She said the ballerina kicked him and got away. Ida seemed so pleased by the dancer’s feisti-ness that I dismissed the story as fantasy, especially when I found out she didn’t report the incident to the police. But what if it was true? We’ve been thinking of the dancer as an older woman reliving her lost days as a prima ballerina . . . as someone damaged, in need of protection from any human contact.”

  While the batches of cookies were baking, Maddie had managed to whip up a batch of royal icing and divide it into covered containers for coloring. She added three drops of medium pink gel food coloring to one container and stirred the icing. “If Ida wasn’t hallucinating,” Maddie said, “then it seems to me our ballerina is one strong chick. A fighter.”

  “And young,” Olivia said. “The way Ida described the incident, it didn’t sound like a typical mugging. Think about it, the man grabbed the dancer and lifted her off her feet.”

  “So you think this woman might not be Raoul’s wife? But Livie, all those costumes you described to me, they must have been Lara’s from the roles she danced with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.”

  “I’m sure they are,” Olivia said, “but . . . like mother, like daughter?”

  “Raoul and Lara’s daughter.... I wonder. Pregnancy would certainly explain Lara’s interrupted career.” Maddie twisted a lid on the icing container she’d been working on and sat at her laptop. “There are a lot of ballet fanatics out there. It’s hard to believe one of them wouldn’t have uncovered the fact that Lara had a daughter. And said daughter must have trained as a ballerina. Let me check her bio again.” She typed in Lara Larssen and selected Wikipedia. Skimming the brief biography, Maddie said, “Sketchy. I’m surprised her ardent fans haven’t filled in more details, but it happens all the time.”

  “Exactly,” Olivia said. “Internet information can be wrong and full of holes. Someone would have to hunt down official and private documents to locate birth certificates and medical records. If there was no public notice, like a newspaper obituary, even finding a death could take a lot of effort. Lara only danced professionally for two years. Maybe those ardent ballet fans didn’t think she was all that interesting.”

  “Point taken,” Maddie said. “The Internet is less than godlike. Maybe the dancer is Lara and Raoul’s daughter, but where does that get us? If Raoul is drugging her whenever he leaves the studio, we won’t be able to talk to her. It seems like an awful risk for not much gain.”

  Olivia felt suddenly lightheaded and realized she had been hyperventilating. She’d already gotten away with sneaking into Raoul’s living quarters, but she’d had all day to do it, and no one had been home. Now there was a good chance someone would be there, and their time would be short. She’d be dragging Maddie into danger, too. They might be caught, even arrested. Del would never forgive her. Then Olivia thought of Jason, her baby brother, being carted off in shackles, standing trial for murder. She wished she hadn’t mentioned anything to Maddie. Luckily, she hadn’t yet revealed her real reason for wanting to get into the dance studio again—Raoul’s little private office upstairs. She was willing to bet he had records in there somewhere.

  “You’re right,” Olivia said. “We’d be taking a big risk for little or no gain. I’ll give Constance her key back tomorrow. Meanwhile, let’s finish these cookies and get a good night’s sleep for once.”

  They finished by two thirty Friday morning. Olivia sent Maddie home, left the kitchen a mess, and checked the store locks. A sleepy Yorkie snuggled against her chest as she lumbered up the stairs to her apartment. She told herself that leaving Maddie out was the best decision. She wouldn’t have much time to search through Raoul’s papers, if indeed she could find any helpful documents, but she’d do what she could. If she got caught, so be it. Her baby brother was worth the risk.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Promptly at five forty-five Friday morning, after less than three hours of fitful sleep, Olivia gave Spunky extra food and a hug. She locked her apartment door, leaving behind her whining pet. Halfway down the stairs, she realized something was amiss in the foyer. She could see light streaming from the entrance to The Gingerbread House. She was already keyed up. A break-in at the store was the last thing she needed. She eased down the steps, mentally preparing herself for whatever disaster awaited. A light thump-rattle sound came from inside the store, like someone bumping into a display table. Olivia froze five steps from the bottom of the stairs and reached into her jeans pocket for her cell.

  “I thought those stealthy steps might be you.” Maddie’s face peeked around the doorjamb. “Cutting it a little close, aren’t we?” She wore black jeans and a black T-shirt. Her bright red hair hid underneath a large beret. Black, of course. “What, you thought you could sneak off on an adventure without me? Please. I’ve known you too long to fall for your feeble effort to pretend you’d changed your mind. I could tell the moment you decided to go it alone. So come on, we need to be hiding outside the dance studio in time to see Raoul leave for Mass. Otherwise, we can’t be sure he’s gone.”

  Olivia heaved a dramatic sigh. “Oh, Maddie, Maddie, Maddie. You’re my best friend, and you are totally nuts.”

  “If that’s your way of admitting you can’t outsmart me, then apology accepted. Now, let’s get a move on.”

  Maddie turned off the store light while Olivia poked her head out the front door. Except for one car, the town square looked deserted. That wouldn’t last long. Business owners would begin arriving anytime after six a.m., especially for the two restaurants, which opened at seven. “Let’s go out the back,” Olivia said. “I wish I’d thought this out better, but I was dead tired last night.”

  “Not to worry,” Maddie said. “I’m at my best when I’m winging it. You did remember the key, right?”

  Olivia felt the shape of it in her pocket. “Present and accounted for. That much I planned.”

  They slipped into the empty alley behind The Gingerbread House. “Good thing it isn’t garbage day,” Olivia whispered. “Let’s go behind the stores instead of down Willow Road, then we can cut through that little park across the street from the dance studio.”

  “Good idea,” Maddie said. “No one uses that park much, and it’s got lots of trees. Try to look like we’re out for an early morning walk, in case some obsessive store owner decided to arrive early to do inventory or something. You never know.”

  Olivia and Maddie walked with brisk casualness down the alley behind the stores on the east side of the town square. They’d encountered no one by the time they reached the park that stretched for a block from Hickory Road to Willow Road. The wooded area wasn’t really a park, simply a large lot that had gone wild after two small houses burned down decades earlier.

  Once they’d decided on a spot to hide and watch for Raoul to leave for Mass, Maddie a
sked, “What if he takes the back door?”

  “No reason he would,” Olivia said. “Constance said he goes to St. Francis, which is on south Park Street. The greater danger is he might cut through these woods.”

  “That’s so comforting.”

  “That’s why we’re staying on the north edge.” Across the dance floor, Olivia saw a light flick on in the office at the rear of the studio. Instinctively, she drew back behind a tree, yanking Maddie with her.

  “Ow,” Maddie whispered. “I think you dislocated my shoulder.”

  “Sorry. Look, there’s Raoul in that little room at the back.” Within seconds, the light went out. For several moments, the dance floor looked deserted. Olivia moved out of cover of the tree to see better. “I think he did go out the back,” she said, cursing herself for overconfidence.

  “No, I can see him,” Maddie said. “The front door is opening.” This time it was she who strong-armed Olivia out of sight.

  Dressed in a light gray suit, Raoul looked exotically handsome. He glanced up and down the street before he crossed the lawn and walked to the north side of the studio. Maddie groaned. “Oh geez, what now? He’s supposed to go south.”

  Olivia shifted several trees over to get a better view of the studio’s north side. She saw Raoul pause and look up at the top floor. “I think he’s checking at our ballerina’s window. Maybe he wants to be sure she’s asleep, not watching for him to leave.”

  “Do you think he left her room unlocked?” Maddie asked. “We might be able to talk to her.”

  “He’s leaving. I wonder if he was worried she hadn’t swallowed those pills I saw next to her bed. Okay, he’s out of sight, time to rumba.” Olivia glanced up and down Willow Road. “No cars,” she said. “This is a quiet area, thank goodness. Let’s double back to the end of the block and go up the alley in back of the studio.”

  “Okay, but we’d better step on it.” Maddie’s strong legs took her quickly through the trees. Olivia had to rush to keep her in sight. Once in the open, they tried to look casual, especially when several cars drove past. By the time they reached the rear door, Olivia felt so wound up she fumbled as she tried to fit the key in the lock.

  “Livie? Are you okay? Your hand is shaking.”

  “Just excited,” Olivia said. “I felt a lot calmer yesterday when I had more time. Okay, we’re in.” She took a deep breath, which slowed her heartbeat. She couldn’t afford a case of nerves, not with Jason’s life on the line. She locked the door behind them and put her finger to her lips as she pointed to the staircase. “Our dancer is probably upstairs,” she whispered, “asleep or awake.”

  Maddie nodded. “I’ll go check on the bedroom, if you want to get going in the study.”

  “Thanks.” Olivia led the way upstairs. At the top, she pointed Maddie toward the bedroom. “I’ll be there,” she whispered, nodding toward the study. “Be careful.” Maddie grinned like a kid playing a game of international espionage, which triggered one of Olivia’s bad feelings. She told herself Maddie was reliable . . . for the most part. When it was important. Too late now, anyway.

  In the small, littered study, Olivia realized at once that Raoul, though precise and meticulous as a dancer, had no organizational impulse when it came to paper. She headed for a wooden desk with two drawers. It looked old, battered rather than antique. Papers covered the top of the desk, the chair seat, and the bookshelves. There were papers on the floor and she didn’t see evidence of any attempt to sort them into piles. Olivia felt overwhelmed. She wondered if Raoul experienced the same emotion, having to deal with all this paper. She scanned the top of the desk and saw numerous invoices, apparently for medical treatments, many of them stamped PAST DUE. Would an itinerant dance teacher be able to afford health insurance, let alone such an array of medical bills?

  Olivia checked dates and found a pattern. The oldest papers were on the floor, more recent ones on the bookshelves, and the newest papers covered the desk. She extricated a letter from the chaotic desktop. It was a brief description of a patient’s treatment progress, signed by a psychiatrist at The Psychiatric Institute of Washington in DC. Olivia was skimming through it, feeling guilty, when she heard a creaking sound behind her. She spun around to face the door.

  “Hey, it’s just me,” Maddie whispered. “Wait’ll you hear what I found out. What’s wrong? You look like you’re about to faint.”

  “This is me being excited. Read this.” Olivia handed the letter to Maddie.

  “Wow,” Maddie said. “Patient has regressed . . . down from ninety to eighty-five pounds . . . appears to be hallucinating about being attacked again . . . reliving trauma. . . . The letter is dated yesterday. This must be where Raoul goes every Thursday.”

  “I’d bet on it,” Olivia said. “I suspect that attack was no hallucination.”

  “So Ida wasn’t imagining things.” Maddie took stock of the room. “Kind of messy, isn’t he?”

  “Probably overwhelmed.”

  “This patient,” Maddie said, peering at the papers on the desk, “is she named anywhere? She’s right down the hall, by the way. Sound asleep.”

  “The bedroom door was open? She might hear us.”

  “Not a chance,” Maddie said. “The door is bolted shut on the outside. But here’s what I wanted to tell you. There’s a covered peephole in the door, aimed right at the bed. I saw our ballerina. At first, she was facing away, all curled up like a little girl. Then she turned over, which just about stopped my heart. But I got a good look at her, and you were right. Being so thin makes her face look older at first glance, but she is young. I’m betting she’s Raoul’s daughter. If we could only find a name on one of these reports.... Do these guys ever say anything but ‘the patient this’ or the ‘the patient that’?”

  “What you’re holding might be a copy of the doctor’s notes,” Olivia said. “There should be some identifying information on the bills, at least.” She shifted a few papers on the desk. “Here’s one. And there it is! Her name is Valentina. Valentina Larssen.”

  “Yay!” Maddie clapped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry,” she whispered. “I am subject to glee attacks. What do we do now?”

  Olivia glanced at her watch. “We’re running out of time. I really want to know if Valentina talked to the psychiatrist about her dancing in town square, what she might have seen. Even if he thought she was hallucinating, maybe he recorded the details.”

  “Where would we even start?”

  “On the desk. That’s the most recent stuff.” Olivia was already riffling through the papers. In the midst of such disorganization, she told herself, surely Raoul would never notice anything had been moved.

  Maddie peered out the window, which faced Willow Road. “The world is waking up out there. We’d better make it snappy.”

  Precious minutes passed as they pawed through papers, looking for anything that mentioned Valentina’s night dancing. Olivia had become a woman obsessed, desperate to find evidence that might clear her brother. It was Maddie’s turn to exhibit frayed nerves. She briefly helped the search but soon gave up to check the window and the hallway. She disappeared once to make sure Valentina was still asleep in her room.

  Olivia could feel her concentration flag, dragged down by despair. The psychiatrist seemed to dismiss whatever Valentina said as the imaginings of a damaged psyche. “I think I hate psychiatrists,” she muttered. Maddie did not comment. She was gone again, probably checking the shower to make sure Raoul wasn’t hiding in it. Olivia knew her time was nearly up, that she was tempting disaster by staying longer. Only a few papers left, she told herself. What if the evidence was right there, in those last unexamined reports?

  Olivia heard Maddie arrive at the study door, but she didn’t look up. Her hand shaking, Olivia picked up a sheet of paper and skimmed the first paragraph. “This is it.”

  “What was that?” Maddie asked.

  “The evidence,” Olivia said as her eyes skimmed the page. “I think I’ve found it.”

/>   “No, listen,” Maddie hissed. “What was that sound?”

  Olivia’s body tightened.

  “It’s a door opening downstairs,” Maddie said, staring at her with huge eyes in an ashen face. “We’re too late.”

  Olivia raced to the window in time to see Raoul walk away from the front door, pick a newspaper off the lawn, and head back toward the studio. Her mind took off at a gallop. She and Maddie needed to be out the back entrance before Raoul could get upstairs to check on his daughter. Not even Maddie’s legs could move that fast without making a racket. It couldn’t be done.

  The faint sound of whistling drifted upstairs. Raoul was inside now. The whistling grew louder; he must have been coming up the stairs. Maddie unfroze herself from the study doorway and stumbled into the room. Olivia zipped through a series of escape ideas, all of which led to their discovery and ultimate disgrace. Yet staying put would be equally disastrous. Raoul was likely to glance into or enter any upstairs room. There was no predicting which one or when.

  “What are we going to do?” Maddie breathed in Olivia’s ear.

  “We have to stay in this room,” Olivia whispered back. “No choice.” The door had been slightly ajar when they arrived. Maybe they could flatten themselves against the wall beside it, so they’d be hidden if Raoul entered the study. No, if he stayed to do some work, he’d eventually hear them. Olivia scoured the room for other ideas. She saw another door, also ajar, which she eased open. A storage closet, big enough to hold a small wardrobe . . . or two grown women.

  They heard whistling nearby. Raoul was in the upstairs hallway. Olivia grasped Maddie by the upper arm and pulled her into the closet, leaving the door ajar.

  The whistling stopped. Olivia sensed Raoul standing in the study doorway. She imagined him taking in the condition of the room. He might be noticing that his papers were not as he had left them.