The Sweet Baked Mystery Series - Books 1-6

by Katherine Hayton

  Holly ran to her car, not even bothering to hold a hand up to protect her from the rain. The worry over getting everything ready and perfect in time eclipsed any concerns about the weather. Not only had she lost a gulp of time by going the wrong way, but Holly also bet that Crystal had lost more fretting about where she might be.

  If only her cell phone worked this far out of town!

  Aidan caught her urgency like a virus and jumped into action. Within a few minutes, and a three-point turn that clenched Holly’s jaw to witness, he had cleared a path.

  Now, she just needed to maneuver her way out through the oncoming traffic, and she’d be set.

  Half torn between concern for the cakes in the back and fear she’d run into somebody coming her way, Holly’s speed never increased above jogging. When she turned out onto the main road and could drive at the speed limit, she breathed a sigh of relief. Foot down, eyes scouring the countryside for the correct turn-off, Holly tried to make up for lost time.

  When she saw the bold signage at the exit, Holly felt a bit silly for her mistake. Instead of the simple post that had read Inglewood Manor on the turn to the church, an archway crossed the road with a sign half the height of a billboard proclaiming that she’d found the right place.

  Crystal was waiting at the front doors, an umbrella in one hand while she stared at her watch on the opposite wrist. When Holly pulled alongside her, she saw her sister’s expression change from relief into frustration.

  “Where on earth have you been?”

  Holly stepped out of the car, ignoring Crystal for a moment as she checked on the load of cupcakes in the back. “I lost you back in the township,” she admitted. “When the other cars all seemed to be going to the wedding, I thought that following them would lead me here. Instead, it led me to the church.”

  Crystal shook her head and gave an exasperated sigh. Still, she folded up the umbrella and set it by the door then gave Holly a hand by taking the first tray out of the back.

  “I’ll lead the way through to the servant’s quarters,” Crystal said. She cast a brief glance over her shoulder, eyes sparkling as she added, “Please try not to lose me this time!”

  Relief at being where she was needed swamped Holly as she picked up a tray and balanced it. Although not heavy, the delicacy of its contents had her take mincing steps along the hallway. Thankfully, just as Holly remembered that her shoes were muddy from the cemetery, she saw the floor was polished wooden boards.

  A childhood memory of being shouted at for tracking dirt onto the carpet bubbled up into her mind, then was subsumed by a task list a mile long.

  It took another four trips to empty the car of its goods. Holly didn’t like to think of whether Crystal had help with her van once she arrived.

  After moving her sedan around the back, Holly returned to their designated room. It wasn’t a kitchen, at least, not initially. Bells were mounted on the side of the wall, each one with a white plaque beneath.

  Leaning over, Holly read out the first one, “Ballroom South.”

  Crystal glanced over. “They have them for every room.”

  “Do they still work?” Holly turned back to her sister with raised eyebrows.

  Crystal shrugged. “I don’t know. Given the number of people who’ll soon be arriving and the rooms Wendy has booked out, I’m sure we’ll soon find out.”

  Holly laughed and nodded. No matter what the occasion, if there were a rope to be pulled somewhere in the house, some young man or woman would be bold enough to do the job.

  “Oh, dear,” Holly said, raising her hand to her mouth to cover a fit of giggles. “Can you imagine once the toasts have been had? A few glasses and we’ll be running all over the show!”

  At that, Crystal burst into laughter, too. “You don’t have to answer them, silly.” She slapped at Holly’s shoulder. “You’re not a servant, you goose.”

  “I don’t know.” Holly strutted up the length of the room, eyes downcast, curtseying as she reached the far wall. “I think it would suit me.”

  “If it didn’t suit great-granny Celia then I hardly think it would suit you!”

  Settling down beside her sister to work, Holly asked, “When was Celia, a servant?”

  Crystal shook her head, tongue between teeth as she positioned a chocolate lattice on the top of a cupcake. Once it was in position, she answered, “She wasn’t. That’s the point. Instead, she fought to set up a business in town at a time when ladies just didn’t do that sort of thing.”

  “I wish I knew more about her,” Holly said. “It seems everywhere I go, somebody is telling me part of a tale about her.”

  Crystal nodded. “It seems she was quite a character. It’s a pity that we never knew her.”

  The Waterstons weren’t known for their longevity. Holly’s father had died not long ago, just edging into his seventies. Her life cut even shorter, their mom hadn’t lasted to see the sisters in their teens.

  “Did you know that Dale had some old records on her, down at the police station?”

  Crystal stopped moving, her eyes widening. Holly was puzzled for a moment, then realized that she never mentioned him. At least, not since finding out the policeman had been part of a conspiracy that almost cost her life.

  Holly pushed the thoughts away. Today should be a day of good wishes and kind thoughts. Then she shook her head. What of it? Just because Dale turned out to be a traitor to his community didn’t mean that the story wasn’t right.

  “He said that she got into trouble frequently, though I doubt it was anything too troubling, or we wouldn’t be here.” Holly flicked a glance at her sister, then concentrated again on the delicate work in front of her.

  “We should go down there and request them someday.” Crystal finished up with the chocolate and moved onto slicing strawberries. “It’d be interesting to know what they counted as arrest-worthy back in the day.”

  “Crossing the road at the wrong time?”

  “Wearing a red kerchief when it was blue kerchief day?”

  Holly giggled and added, “Baking without a permit?”

  “Accepting money when women weren’t allowed a bank account.”

  Holly shook her head. “There’re so many things to choose from, I’m sure we’ll be disappointed when we get to the real stuff.”

  “Maybe not.”

  Holly looked over at her sister, but Crystal just gave an enigmatic shrug. “Just a few overheard rumors I’ve picked up over the years. I don’t have any details, but I’m sure people wouldn’t still be talking about her if she hadn’t been a big deal.”

  The two sisters settled back down to their work, each frowning in concentration. The delicate business wasn’t improved with knowing that there was a very firm deadline before all of the decorations needed to get done.

  Just as Holly finished up with the cut-strawberry cupcakes and moved onto the lemon cheesecakes with a satisfied sigh, a young man ran into the room.

  “Come quickly,” he shouted, pointing out toward the entrance. “There’s a terrible problem. The wedding might well be called off!”

  Chapter Three

  Holly and Crystal raced for the entrance hall, skidding on the polished wood. Outside the front doors was a deluge that pounded down like rocks hitting the ceiling. In the servants’ quarters with no direct line to the outside walls or roof, they’d been insulated from the increasing noise.

  Near to the entrance, a puddle of water was spreading over the floor.

  “Get some towels and find a shovel if you can,” the doorman called to the waiters and caterers gathered around him.

  At the curt instructions, Holly ran back to their assigned room and picked up the stack of tea towels from the bench. She opened the cupboards quickly and cried out with delight when she located a plastic dustpan and broom. While Crystal searched for more towels, Holly took the stash back to the doorman.

  “Here,” she called out, thrusting the towels at a young man already kneeling on the floor and moppin
g up the water. When the doorman raised an eyebrow at the pan, Holly separated the brush from it and walked outside. In an instant, she was drenched from head to toe. The hair she’d taken care to fix up on top of her head soon became limp strands, framing her face on either side.

  She squatted, and pushed the dustpan into the shingle by the marble step, tossing it out to her left-hand side once Holly ascertained there was no one standing there. Once the surface gravel was gone, she dug the plastic handle of the broom into the hardened clumps and worked more free. When the level was a good few inches below the marble step, she stood with a groan and stretched her back.

  Now that the water was no longer running off the side of the piled-up gravel and hardened mud onto the entrance step, the progress of the water inside the building had slowed. Sodden towels were replaced with fresh ones, while dampened men walked outside to squeeze the excess moisture out. With disappointment, Holly looked down at her wet clothes, sticking to her body like a cold and clinging second skin.

  “Thanks for the quick thinking,” the doorman said as Holly stepped inside.

  She nodded and crossed over to Crystal, who handed her a tea towel to dry with. Holly looked at the small rectangle then at the length of her dripping frame.

  “Let’s go back to the cupcake room,” Crystal suggested. “You can wring your clothes out in the sink. Hopefully, they’ll be dry before the wedding party gets here.”

  “What wedding party,” the young man who’d fetched them said disconsolately. “The radio news said a tree’s down on the main highway. No one who wasn’t at the church already is turning up to the reception. What’s that going to be? Fifty people, tops?”

  “Oh, no!” Holly took a step back in shock. “Poor Wendy.” She looked at Crystal whose own eyes were wide at the news. “I can’t believe that this is happening when she spent so much time and money planning the big day.”

  “That’s what you get for this flagrant display of wealth,” the doorman said, sniffing.

  The heat of Holly’s sudden anger was almost enough to dry her off without a towel. “You take that back,” she said. “Wendy doesn’t have a lot of money. She poured everything she had into making this the best day for her daughter that they could afford, and she worked hard to do it.”

  “They might not have a lot…” The doorman raised his eyebrows as he let his sentence trail off into an implied meaning.

  “No one else but Wendy is paying anything for this reception,” Crystal said, leaping in when indignation left Holly momentarily tongue-tied. “Derek’s father contributed nothing.” In a lower voice, perhaps meant only for herself, she muttered, “Much like he did to the rest of Derek’s life.”

  “I didn’t mean any offense.” The doorman had taken a step back, his face furrowing into confusion at their apparent anger. “Perhaps I made an assumption I shouldn’t have.”

  “Perhaps you did,” Holly agreed. As a rivulet of water trickled down her back, triggering a shiver, she held the tea towel to the back of her neck.

  “My name’s Arnold,” the doorman said, extending his hand to shake. “If you follow me, I’ll show you into an en suite upstairs where you can swap those wet clothes out for a robe and have a shower to warm yourself up.”

  “I’m Holly, and this is my sister Crystal.” Holly shook his hand after wiping hers dry on the towel.

  “And no prizes for guessing that you’re here on the bride’s side.”

  “We’re mainly on the cupcakes’ side,” Crystal said with a giggle. Then she groaned. “Oh, dear. What are we going to do with all those cakes? The mission doesn’t have the freezer capacity to take on more than a few dozen, and even the pigs on the Henderson farm will call it quits before they get through all of those.”

  “Why don’t we just leave that for the moment?” Holly suggested, following Arnold through into a bedroom suite that took her breath away. She spun in place for a second, looking at the grandiose furniture and fittings decorating the room. Then Holly scurried for the bathroom as she realized she was dripping all over the carpet.

  “I’ll leave you here then. Take as long as you need.” From the bathroom, Arnold’s voice was faint, but Holly still heard every word. She wondered if that was what a lifetime of issuing orders got you.

  “I doubt the couple designated to take this suite will be making it here through the storm.”

  Holly’s heart sank as she thought about all of Wendy’s efforts being wasted. Yes, the day was far more ostentatious than it needed to be, but Holly had learned in the few weeks since meeting Wendy that the woman had a well-placed chip on her shoulder.

  The bathroom suite could easily have swallowed up half of the house that Holly shared with Crystal. After closing the door, she wrung her clothing out as best she could in the enormous claw-footed tub that took a place of pride on the gleaming expanse of white tiles.

  A warm shower refreshed her, although it meant that Holly’s hair probably couldn’t be resurrected. Still, it would dry into its usual loose curls soon enough and from what Arnold had said, there wouldn’t be many people to see it, anyhow.

  Her clothes wouldn’t dry for hours. That was a far more pressing issue than the loss of her hairstyle. Holly pulled on the large, loose robe that Arnold had referred to earlier and stuck her head out of the bathroom to see who was in the vicinity.

  “Crystal! Have you been seated there all this time?”

  Holly’s sister was perched on the edge of the king-size bed, resting so lightly that she barely dimpled the covers.

  “Where else would I go? It’s not like we need a thousand cupcakes any longer, is it?”

  “I suppose not.” Holly crossed the room and took a seat beside her sister. “The whole day looks like it’s turning into a bit of a mess.”

  Crystal snorted. “A bit? I’d say that’s ‘a bit’ of an understatement. Poor Wendy must be frantic, and I can’t imagine that Sheila and Derek are happy, either.”

  “If they got to the venue at all,” Holly said. As the words came out of her mouth, her eyes widened. Although she spoke them, the horror of that thought hadn’t hit home before. “Can you imagine if there’s no wedding and no reception. Bad enough for one, but the other?”

  Crystal placed a reassuring hand on Holly’s knee. “I’m sure they’ll make it okay. They only have to travel up from Hanmer Springs the same way we did. It’s not like they were in Christchurch and needed to come via the highway.”

  “They weren’t.” At Crystal’s confused frown, Holly elaborated, “Meggie was saying about it yesterday because she couldn’t manage as many appointments. Sheila and Derek were staying with his uncle who lives about half an hour out of town. It freed up the house for Wendy to have her mother and grandmother stay with her. Otherwise, she would have had to put them up in a hotel, and they definitely weren’t having that!”

  “And it was beyond the blockage?”

  Holly shrugged. “I don’t know. It could easily be, though. We should go and track down that young man who was listening to the radio.”

  Holly stood up and crossed the room, her hand resting on the door handle before she realized that Crystal hadn’t followed her. She turned to see her sister with one eyebrow raised in wry amusement.

  “Planning on heading downstairs in that attire, were you?”

  Crystal nodded at the robe, and Holly burst out with a noise partway between laughter and frustration.

  “This is ridiculous! I need to either find a way to dry my clothes or find something else to wear. I’m not skulking around up here for hours, waiting for them to dry.”

  Crystal moved over and rested her hands on Holly’s shoulders. She guided her back to the bed and pressed down until Holly sat.

  “You stay here. I’ll go and see if there’s anything around the place that would be suitable. I’m sure that with all the waitstaff hanging around, somebody must have a change of clothes or a spare uniform.”

  She left, and Holly moved over to the window, looking
out at the storm. The rain showed no sign of abating. Whereas the weather usually blew itself out in a couple of minutes, maybe an hour, the torrential downpour seemed to have settled in for the day.

  “What miserable luck,” Holly muttered. She tried to see if the entrance looked any drier than before, but couldn’t tell without sticking her head out the window. Unless she wanted to get another soaking, that wasn’t going to happen.

  As she paced the length of the room, Holly wished that she’d at least taken her bag with her to access her smartphone. She could have played a few games of Candy Crush to pass the time, or spied on what her soon-to-be-ex-husband was getting up to on Facebook.

  No, she amended. I couldn’t.

  With no mobile phone connection that took the internet off the menu, as well.

  Crossing to the bedside tables, Holly pulled out a drawer to see if there was at least a bible she could read to pass the time. It looked like the Gideon’s hadn’t made it this far out in the boondocks, though. The drawer was empty, except for a brochure advertising the great things to do in Hanmer Springs. When it wasn’t pouring down with rain, that was.

  The opposite cabinet was empty, too. Holly dropped to her knees and looked under the bed. She no longer expected to find a bible, but there might be something under there of interest. A pair of shoes whose absence was only noted when the visitors returned home, perhaps. An interesting button that popped off a jacket and disappeared. Maybe even an old fortune in small bills shoved between the mattress and the box-spring.

  No luck.

  Holly sat back on her feet and looked around the room for something, anything of interest. She wasn’t used to having nothing to do, and the possibilities frightened her. What if she started to think about something she didn’t want to and couldn’t distract herself long enough to turn the thoughts off?

  The wastepaper basket caught her eye. There was something in there, possibly more interesting than just a bit of crumpled paper.

  With a groan that betrayed her entry into middle-age, Holly stood and walked over to the small bin. It had been painted the same color as the walls in an attempt to blend it in. Instead, the pale gold paint made it stand out more, the wicker strands eschewing the gaudy decoration.