Fudging the Books (A Cookbook Nook Mystery 4)

by Daryl Wood Gerber

  Dang.

  Aunt Vera ran after her. Bailey, too. Cinnamon didn’t budge, which surprised me. I lasered her with a glare.

  “What?” Cinnamon brushed her hands as if ridding herself of guilt. “Don’t kill the messenger.”

  I sneered. “You couldn’t have told me about the new contract earlier?”

  “I just learned about it myself.” Cinnamon held up her cell phone to show me the recently received text message. It spelled out the contract issue.

  In the parking lot, Coco had stopped running and was slumped against the driver’s door of her Sweet Sensations–logoed SUV. Her face was buried in her hands. My aunt stood next to her, mouth moving. No doubt she was trying to reason with Coco to return inside.

  I rapped Cinnamon on the arm and gestured to Coco. “Does she look like a guilty woman?”

  “I don’t know what she is, but she has more explaining to do.” Cinnamon’s cell phone rang. She answered and moved toward the exit. I followed. Her forehead drew down, forming a deeply etched number eleven between her eyebrows. “Where? When?” She ground her teeth together as she listened. “Aw, heck. On my way.” She glanced at Coco and back at me. “Two pirates are going at it on The Pier. Blood has been drawn. I’ve got to go.”

  “What about Coco?”

  “Do that voodoo you do. Talk to her. Get her to come to the precinct and spill her guts out of her own free will. Things will go much more smoothly. Promise.”

  “She didn’t kill Alison.”

  “I need the name of her lover.” Cinnamon hurried out of the shop and sped off in her cruiser.

  Coco looked up as the cruiser hightailed it past her. She gazed at me. I beckoned her inside. She tucked her chin and nodded. Bailey and my aunt flanked her and guided her to the vintage kitchen table.

  Aunt Vera released her and said, “Talk to the girls, dear. It will help much more than a tarot card reading right now.” Aunt Vera pecked Coco’s cheek, then said she had to pop into the café for a bowl of soup. She would return shortly.

  Coco nestled into the chair Cinnamon had vacated. Bailey sat beside her. I took the chair opposite them. Tigger, wanting in on the action, scrambled beneath the table and nuzzled my ankles. I chucked his chin with my fingers. He turned in circles and finally settled on the floor.

  Coco, like so many others, picked up a piece of the jigsaw puzzle. She twisted it to the right and left, then discarded it. “It’s hopeless.”

  “Let me help,” I said.

  “Not the puzzle, you goon,” Bailey hissed.

  “The whole affair,” Coco said. “Alison.” Tears welled in her eyes. “I didn’t kill her. You have to believe me.”

  “Of course we do,” Bailey said.

  Did I? I just told Cinnamon that I did, but Coco’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon. Alison was killed at Coco’s house. Stop it, Jenna. She’s innocent.

  “Nature’s Retreat,” I said, encouraging her to elaborate. “You met a man.”

  She nodded once.

  “A married man,” I stated.

  “Jenna, I can’t—”

  “He has to come forward.”

  “He . . . we . . .” She gulped in air. “He promised we . . .” More air.

  I patted her back. “Breathe. Slowly.”

  “Did Jenna get it right?” Bailey asked. “Is he married?”

  “He’s going to divorce her,” Coco whispered.

  I knew it. “And he promised to marry you. Have I got that much right?”

  Coco moved her head up and down. Tiny jerky movements.

  “She doesn’t get him like you do,” Bailey said.

  “Yes. Yes.” Coco gazed at Bailey with appreciation and relief. Someone was finally understanding. “She bullies him.”

  I gasped. “Are you saying she beats him?”

  “No. Not physically. But verbally. She’s a shrew.”

  In addition to Bailey, whose relationship with a married man had ended badly, I had known a number of women who had engaged in affairs. Only one had worked out. But it wasn’t my place to counsel Coco about matters of the heart.

  “Yoo-hoo. Hello, ladies.” Faith Fairchild, the twin of the woman who ran Home Sweet Home, one of my favorite homemade collectibles stores, hurried into the shop. Unlike her sister, who wore her long hair in a braid Faith wore her hair in spiky abandon, like she had run her fingers through it because that was all she had time for, and yet she’d had plenty of time to apply makeup. A heaping amount. “Help! I need a cookbook gift, pronto.” Faith raced to the counter.

  Bailey glanced at me. I hitched my chin for her to tend to Faith. I was the boss, after all, and she was the assistant. Bailey scowled and mimed: Fill me in. I blinked that I would.

  After she left us, I said, “Coco, you’ve got to talk to your lover. Tell him to go to the precinct. The police will keep his testimony confidential. He has to give you a verifiable alibi.”

  Coco dug into her purse and pulled out a tissue. She dabbed her teary eyes. “I must look a fright.”

  “You look fine,” I assured her.

  “Oh.” Coco hiccupped. “Poor Alison.” She covered her mouth with the tissue, took a deep breath, and blew her nose. She wadded the tissue into her fist. “She didn’t deserve to die, Jenna. Alison was a good lady. Smart. Independent. And a good publisher.”

  “You were ending your contract.”

  “That’s not true. Not yet. My other publisher and I . . . we’re discussing options. You know how it goes. Nothing is final until there’s ink on the page. And Alison, well, I told her. She understood.”

  “She did?” I said. Coco was one of Alison’s biggest sellers. She wouldn’t have relished letting her go. “You two fought the night she died. At the book club event.”

  Coco tilted her head up, her gaze toward the ceiling as if she was trying to remember when they had battled. The memory dawned on her. “Oh, that. It was staged. We told you so.”

  “But the words you used. You argued about Alison taking too much creative control. Was there truth in that?”

  Coco heaved a sigh. “Alison . . . what can I say? She could be dastardly when it came to editing, so, yes, there was some truth, but she was not cruel, and she wasn’t indiscriminate. She was excellent. In the end, I trusted her choices.”

  I shifted in my chair. “Tell me about the new contract.”

  “I have so many more cookbooks in me. Alison”—Coco crammed the used tissue into her purse and pulled out a new one—“could only publish so many. She was a one-woman operation.”

  “She had Ingrid.”

  Coco sniffed. “Ingrid. Pfft.”

  Okay. That summed up her opinion of the copyeditor’s worth. “You told Alison about the contract. How did she react?”

  “She wasn’t thrilled, but she knew that I had to spread my wings. I have high hopes of becoming the next Ina Garten or Martha Stewart.” Coco sighed. “Alison had dreams of growing her business. She wanted to expand. But—” Coco jammed her lips together.

  “What?”

  “Alison could be controlling. To the point of martyrdom. She could do it faster, better. Why hire someone else? She had the best eye for editing. She had the best eye for art. Honestly, that slows things down.”

  I thumped the tabletop. “Back to Ingrid. She said she was Alison’s second-in-command. Is that true?”

  “No, but if Alison was thinking about taking on a partner, then Ingrid, as much as I don’t like her, would be a wise choice. She’s very smart. Very detailed. But she and Alison were oil and water.” Coco sat taller. “Hey, did I tell you I saw the two of them exchanging words after the cookbook club meeting?”

  “No. Why didn’t you bring that up when we went to Vines?” Better yet, why hadn’t she mentioned it to the police? “What were they arguing about?”

  “I only
caught a snippet. They were standing near Alison’s car. Ingrid was shaking a finger. She hissed—” Coco sniggered. “You’ve noticed she hisses, right? Those teeth of hers! Anyway, she said. ‘You promised—’ but Alison cut her off with, ‘I did not . . .’ I didn’t listen to the rest. It wasn’t my business. And I was in a hurry to catch up to you and Bailey.” Coco glanced toward the parking lot. “You know, Pepper Pritchett might have overheard them. I saw her lingering about.”

  According to Cinnamon, her mother was under the weather. Would Pepper remember what she had heard?

  “Alison and Ingrid argued on numerous other occasions,” Coco went on. “One time, I heard Ingrid claim she could run the business better than Alison. Of course, Alison took umbrage. Ingrid said Alison should expand not only the number of cookbook authors she handled, but also the number of nonfiction authors, too. Like I said, Alison was against too much expansion. Taking on too many authors or titles could lessen the impact of the imprint and cripple a small independent publisher.”

  We’d had the same problem at Taylor & Squibb. If we took on too many new clients, other accounts might suffer. Employees would be overloaded. Creativity could flounder.

  “On the other hand,” Coco continued, “I know Alison has a number of books lined up for publication, so maybe she had taken Ingrid’s suggestion to heart. Dash has a book on Alison’s desk. Bailey’s mother, too.”

  Not to mention Simon Butler and so many others, I mused. All of them would have wanted Alison alive to fulfill their dreams. Who had wanted her dead?

  “Poor Alison,” Coco repeated. “She had so much life ahead of her. If only . . .” She sighed.

  “If only what?”

  “If only she and the guy she was dating had gotten together.”

  “I thought you said she didn’t have a boyfriend.”

  “She doesn’t . . . didn’t. Not currently, but she did. He died of a stroke about a month ago.”

  “Wow. That stinks.”

  Coco nodded in empathy. “He wasn’t forty yet. Tragic. She was heartsick.”

  “Who was he?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me. Whenever she talked about him, she sounded dreamy. I think he lived in San Francisco. He might have been an investment banker. Or an entrepreneur.”

  “Was he married?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That seems to be the reason of the day to keep a man’s identity secret.”

  Coco glowered at me. “He had money, I know that much. Alison had hoped he might invest in her company and help her grow. But he didn’t. You know, it’s possible”—Coco gripped my wrist—“that Alison was pregnant.”

  I gawped at Coco and then glanced at Bailey, who was at the sales counter ringing up Faith Fairchild. Bailey must have sensed me looking her way. She mouthed, What? I wagged my head and said to Coco, “Why would you think that?”

  “I’m not positive, but Alison mentioned wanting a child, and well, when her boyfriend died, she lost all control. She either cried or she slept. Nonstop.”

  “I lost it when my husband died.” Actually I was a wreck, screaming, kicking, and yelling at nothing and nobody, just to get through the anger, but I didn’t need to tell Coco all that. “Losing control is not unusual.”

  “Lately—I’m just saying friends notice these things—Alison has . . . had . . . been feeling out of sorts. Morning sickness is my guess. And the night before the cookbook club dinner, when she and I went out, she didn’t have a lick of wine. Alison loved a glass or two of wine.”

  Someone knocked on the front door of the shop, even though it was propped open. I twisted in my chair. Simon Butler entered with his hard-bodied, horsey-faced wife, Gloria, who had dressed in a riot of color: tight yellow gym pants and tank, aqua blue purse, purple lace flats, turquoise fingernails. Her burgundy hair added to the full-color-spectrum effect.

  Coco stiffened.

  I whispered, “Don’t worry. I don’t think they overheard us talking about Alison being, you know . . .” I twirled a hand.

  “Hey, Jenna.” Simon nudged his glasses higher on his nose. “My wife was asking about your Chocolate Cookbook Club. She wants to join. She’s sort of shy about these things.”

  Gloria was anything but shy. She was an in-demand personal trainer who could command anyone into shape. Why on earth would she want to join the club?

  “Do I have to fill out a form?” Gloria asked in an assertive, definitely-not-shy voice.

  “There isn’t a form,” I said, “but let me get some particulars.” I gestured for her to follow me to the checkout counter.

  Simon moved toward Coco. “I’m sorry about Alison.”

  “Thanks,” she mumbled.

  Simon uttered something else, but I couldn’t make it out because his wife said, “I know you think I’m nuts to join the club, Jenna. I can see it in your eyes, but I adore chocolate. Ultra-dark chocolate. As little sugar as possible, of course.”

  “Of course.” I tilted my head, trying to figure out her angle. Perhaps she was hoping to score more clients from the group. Many of our book club members could use an exercise regimen. At the hundred-dollars-an-hour fee Gloria charged, she wouldn’t need more than a few appointments a week to make well in excess of fifty thousand a year.

  “What do you need from me?” Gloria asked. “Phone number, e-mail? Here’s my business card, which has everything you should need.” The card was as colorful as Gloria. Her name and telephone number were printed in a bold font. The full-body picture of her in the upper right corner looked just like her. “By the way, I simply have to own Coco Chastain’s last cookbook.” Gloria eyed Coco. “Simon is buying it for me as a Valentine’s gift.”

  So much for giving her a surprise. Maybe he planned to cook her a romantic meal using the recipes.

  “Where is it?” Gloria asked.

  I pointed to the pile of books attractively displayed to her left. How had she missed seeing them? Coco’s face figured prominently on the front cover.

  Gloria grabbed one, hurried back to Coco, and thrust it at her. “Would you autograph it for me? It’s spelled G-L-O-R-I-A, just like Van Morrison wrote it in the song.”

  Was there any other way to spell it? I wondered. Perhaps with a y.

  Coco took the book, fetched a pen from her purse, and signed the title page. She finished her signature by drawing a heart with an arrow through it, and handed the book back to Gloria, who opened it and immediately scanned the inscription.

  “Aww,” she whispered. “Sweet.”

  Simon tapped Coco’s arm. “How is Alison’s family doing? I mean, her brother seems to be coping.”

  Coping? I nearly laughed. Neil had taken no time off to mourn, which made him colder than an icicle, in my humble opinion, or in desperate need of a paycheck.

  I said, “By the way, Coco, have you touched base with her mother?”

  She shook her head. “Ingrid called me. She said a doctor stopped by to see Wanda.”

  “Ingrid.” Gloria screwed up her mouth. “That’s the copyeditor, isn’t it? The one with the long torso, short legs. She asked for my card yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?” Simon raised an eyebrow. “You were on a plane to Vegas.”

  “At eight in the evening. She caught me right before I hopped in the car to head to the airport.” Gloria addressed Coco and me. “I’m like a speeding bullet lately. In and out of town on a moment’s notice. I attended a crack-of-dawn seminar for gym equipment and was back on a plane by nine this morning. Thanks to my darling husband. He registered me for the event. Gym equipment. Can you imagine? I’ll tell you, testosterone was teeming.” She snorted out a laugh. “Want to know what the latest is? An abdomen roller wheel. It really works. See, you get on your knees—” She started to crouch, as if she were going to show us on the floor.

  Simon tapped her shoulder. “Hon, you’re
doing it again.”

  Gloria rose to her full height. “Am I? Forgive me. I have a tendency to proselytize. But the core matters.” She outlined her firm torso. “My husband doesn’t work on the core.”

  Simon rubbed his knuckles along her arm. “Or the neck, or the spine.”

  “He watches birds.” Gloria sniffed her disapproval. “What a frivolous waste of time.”

  Simon’s mouth turned down. “Not to me.”

  “There’s no exercise value in it.”

  “But there’s aesthetic value. Moving on.” Simon twirled a finger to end the discussion.

  Faith sidled up to us, a Cookbook Nook bag looped over her arm. “Excuse me. I couldn’t help overhearing. Were you talking about that woman with the tight teeth? Ingrid, is that her name?” She drew back her lips, which made her look, other than the hairstyle, strikingly similar to Ingrid Lake. “I saw her in Vines last night.”

  “I didn’t see her,” I said. “Or you.”

  Faith bobbed her head. “I came in around ten forty-five. I’m a night owl.”

  Hmm. If asked, I would have sworn Faith was a morning person. On the other hand, she was single, and according to Bailey, forever on the hunt for a mate.

  Simon frowned. “I didn’t see you, either.”

  “That’s because you weren’t around, silly.” Faith batted Simon’s arm. “The waitress with the wavy hair said you’d gone to the store to pick up more peanuts.”

  Was Faith flirting with Simon? In front of his wife? Gloria grumbled; her teeth looked as tightly gritted as Ingrid’s. Coco cleared her throat, I’m pretty sure to catch my attention. We exchanged a bemused glance.

  Simon must have realized what was going on. He moved a half pace away from Faith. “Right. We ran out of nuts around ten.”

  Oblivious to her gaffe, Faith stepped toward him like a supersonic train, in fast-forward with no inclination to slow down. “I’ve got to say, something seemed odd about Ingrid. She wasn’t with anyone, yet she ordered a bottle of wine for herself. Indulgent, if you ask me, but”—she tittered—“you didn’t.”