“Yeah. We still have some time though. I think if we leave by eleven that will be plenty of time to find the kitchen, take stock of things, and buy any supplies or ingredients that we need tonight.”
“I was hoping you would say that,” Sam confessed as we made the way into the kitchen.
“Why’s that?” I asked curiously.
“Because I’m starving and I still haven’t packed; I accidentally fell asleep,” she admitted. “I was hoping you would make your amazing Spinach and Artichoke Grilled Cheese? Please?” She blinked up at me like a kid with puppy dog eyes.
“Fine.” I laughed, swatting at her. “Go pack and I’ll make us an early lunch.”
“That is why you’re my best friend.” Sam smiled.
I shook my head as she nearly skipped, or at least the closest I’ve seen for a grown woman skipping. My stomach growled. Okay, okay. I agree the sandwich sounds good, geez, I thought to my rumbling insides.
“Griff must still be out of town,” I commented as we took our plates out onto the back verandah of the duplex, overlooking blinding sands and gorgeous blue water. Sleek, blue-gray fish shot like torpedoes into the air from the cresting waves. Sam cringed as a seagull succeeded in snatching one from midair. She hated seeing animals get hurt, any kind.
“Did you limit yourself to only three or four pantsuits for our two-day trip?” I teased to distract her. “Oomph!” I rubbed my temple where she threw a piece of crust at me. That earned us the attention of a few nearby seagulls.
“Now look what you’ve done, Piper.” Sam gave an exaggerated eye roll.
“Me? You’re going to blame this on me?” A particularly bold seagull winged between our deck chairs. I leaned out of the way.
“Of course, it is absolutely your fault, and for the record, I packed regular clothes.”
“What do you mean regular clothes? You wear slacks all the time.”
“I packed jeans and t-shirts.”
“T-shirts?” I narrowed my eyes.
Sam finally ducked my gaze. “Fine. Maybe they are cute t-shirts, but they still count as t-shirts.”
“Ha!”
We finished our sandwiches, delicious and creamy spinach dip oozing from between buttered and crisp-toasted bread. I tossed the paper plates in the trash and cleaned the counter while Sam did the dishes.
“You ready?” she asked a few minutes later.
“Yep, let’s get out of here.” I gave her a thumbs-up.
“Road trip!” She clapped and danced in place, making me laugh.
“Get in the truck,” I told her, shaking my head. “We still have to stop for gas.”
Piling Sam’s belongings in the back seat beside my own, I backed out and waited for her to close the garage before taking off down the coastal road. We wound our way along Beachside Drive for several miles before I turned back inland. I pulled into the first gas station I saw and hopped out to fill the tank.
“I’m going to the restroom,” Sam called as she exited the passenger side.
I spent a few minutes people watching while gas chugged into the 26-gallon tank of my truck. Yikes. I cringed as I caught sight of the dollars and cents rolling higher and higher. Definitely better to people watch; paying for gas is painful, I decided to myself.
My eyes roamed the parking lot, watching as a toddler dropped her Skittles and commenced screaming at the top of her lungs, the teenagers at the next pump made out in the car even though their gas pump had stopped long ago, and a young boy helped his grandmother sit down in the car, showing her patience and care. Having run out of people at the gas station to view, my eyes landed in the parking lot next door. It was a seafood and burger joint, and the parking lot contained only a handful of vehicles.
“I got you a Snickers.” Sam appeared out of nowhere at my elbow, making me jump.
“You nearly gave me a heart attack,” I griped at her but took the candy anyway.
“Yeah, you were pretty zoned out. What are you staring at?”
“I’m not staring; I’m people watching. You see that girl in the parking lot, over at the seafood place?” I waited for Sam to nod before I continued, “She nearly broke her ankle in a pothole with those heels. She looked like a baby giraffe learning to walk!”
“You’re so mean.”
“Then there was a guy whose hat blew away before that. Look, someone else is coming out of the restaurant.”
Sam leaned forward a bit. “Is that…?”
“Griff?” I asked her. “Maybe this town is where he came for his business trip. Wait, are we even out of Seashell Bay yet?” Seashell Bay was the picturesque little town we lived in; I knew we had been driving a while but wasn’t sure where the city limits technically ended.
“Nope. I’m going to call him.” She pulled her phone from her pocket.
“No! Don’t.” I grabbed her arm and pointed back to the neighboring parking lot. Griff now held the door open for a tall woman wearing a tight yellow dress. She grabbed his arm, and I watched as Griff escorted her toward his silver truck. How did I miss that truck? I chastised myself. Suddenly Griff stopped and reached to his side, unclipping his phone.
“Crap,” Sam mumbled beside me. She had hit send after all. I listened to her side of the conversation. “Hey. Yeah. No, I didn’t need anything. Where are you? Oh, still at work—I see. Okay. Okay, love you too. Bye.”
Sam put the phone back in her pocket and shook her head. We watched as Griff helped the woman into his passenger seat, got in, and drove away.
“Working out of town? He said he was still at work?” I asked Sam. I didn’t know how to process what I had seen.
Click.
Sam and I both startled as the gas pump shut off with a last shudder.
“Piper, I’m sorry. I…I don’t know. I’ll find out more from him, maybe she’s a client.”
“Whom he took to dinner,” I said as I placed the nozzle back on the pump with a bang.
“Yeah…”
“And who was very dressed up.”
“Well…” Sam shrugged. “We will get to the bottom of this. I know Griff wouldn’t have said he had feelings for you if he were seeing someone.”
“Then why did he lie to you about work?”
“He…I don’t know,” she admitted, “but I’m sure there’s a reason.”
“Let’s just go,” I told her. We climbed into the truck. I tossed the Snickers bar into the console. As if by magic, my appetite had vanished.
Merging back onto the highway, I tried to shake the unsettling feelings that snaked their way through me similar to how the road snaked along the coast, back and forth, back and forth. It really didn’t matter that Griff took a woman, a beautiful woman, out to lunch. It hurt like hell, but it didn’t matter.
And it shouldn’t hurt either, for that matter. I hadn’t even begun to unravel the tangled emotions and raw nerves that sparked against each other after my ordeal with first Abigail and then Griff’s unexpected revelation. Throw Landon and his unexpected appearance and unknown intentions into the mix, and I was just plain finished with drama and intrigue in my life. I’m much better suited to cookies, I thought. Cookies make sense, ingredients can be measured, the desired outcome achieved, no problem. Usually.
“Piper!”
Sam’s screech at last penetrated the fog of confusion clouding my brain. I glanced over and was shocked to see she was white-knuckling the armrest on the door.
“Piper, the road!” she yelled, pointing.
I whipped my gaze forward and saw through the windshield a large eighteen-wheeler bearing down on me. Directly on me. Alarm bells sounded in my head. I’m in the wrong lane! I tapped the brakes and wrenched the steering wheel right. Angry bursts of a horn sounded from the truck as, seconds later, it roared past. Sam sat silently, staring at me from the passenger seat. I slowed and eased over to the shoulder of the road.
I closed my eyes and released a shuddering breath. My best friend squeezed my hand.
“I’m so, so sorry.” I l
ooked at Sam. “I don’t even know what to say. I was in my own head and didn’t even realize I stopped paying attention. I’m sorry.” It wasn’t adequate, not nearly enough. I could have gotten us both killed, and I knew it.
“I think I should drive,” Sam spoke firmly, but with kindness. She squeezed my hand again, and her eyes were filled with compassion where I deserved to see anger. She held out her hand. I nodded and dropped the keys into it.
Chapter 10
“Wow!” I said as I spun in another circle. “This kitchen is huge.”
“Not at all what I expected in a remote cabin,” Sam agreed.
I looked at my watch. Four fifteen p.m. We had arrived in Lion’s Cove only half an hour ago. The trip had taken much longer than planned, first because a wreck shut down traffic for over forty minutes. After that, Sam ended up stopping to ask directions to The Cove’s Cabins because the navigation we were using on my phone kept sending us in circles. Her phone died, and the charger sat tucked away in a suitcase somewhere. It turned out this cabin resort area was less than six months old. No surprise that the directions hadn’t been perfect considering that I don’t run my phone updates every time it prompts me to.
“I’ll leave you ladies to it,” said Roy, the maintenance man who had been tasked with our grand tour and handing over the keys to the cabin we would bunk in as well as keys to the cabin designated for dining.
“Thank you, Roy.” I smiled. He nodded and left. I heard the soft sound of his golf cart as he puttered off, on to his next chore, I was sure.
“Okay, let’s check the list,” Sam said, all business.
No further discussion of the incident on the road had come up. Sam had simply parked the truck, handed me my keys back, and given me a big hug when we arrived at the main office. The liaison for Breaking Chains hadn’t arrived yet, which is how Roy ended up being our tour guide. A good sport about it, Roy had handed us up into his golf cart as if we were royalty and driven us through the dunes to see the many colorful cabins. He loved his job here, he told us, and took great pride in maintaining the cabins and keeping the beach sprawled before them clean as could be.
I unfolded the small sheets of paper from my pocket and flattened them onto the counter.
“Flour,” I read off first.
“Flour,” Sam said as she swung each cabinet door wide open and left them that way. “Got it, ten pounds of flour,” she said at last.
“Sugar.”
“Sugar…yep, there’s a three-pound bag of that.”
“Eggs?”
“Eggs, yes, but only a dozen.” Sam frowned from the refrigerator.
“We will definitely need more than that.” I peeled a clean piece of paper from the back of the small stack and wrote out a new list. TO BUY, I wrote in large letters at the top. Eggs. I thought about our many recipes. Probably at least three more dozen.
After another forty-five minutes, going from list to list and cabinet to cabinet, we had a fairly long grocery list compiled.
“Do we buy groceries now or make some test cookies first?” Sam asked.
“Let’s go ahead and make at least two batches. We need to see if the oven works, check the microwave for melting, see what the measuring cup and mixing bowl situation looks like; basically, let’s cook something so we know if we have everything to cook with. I’d hate to drive all the way to town to get ingredients then come back and find out we need four other things to bake efficiently.”
~
“Phew!” I wiped droplets of sweat from my forehead. “What time is it, Sam?” I asked as I scrubbed the last dish and placed it in the rack to dry.
“Almost seven,” she answered with a glance at her watch as she paused mid-sweep and then continued to tidy up the floors.
“No wonder I’m hungry. I didn’t plan on waiting this long before we went back to town for ingredients and supplies.” We had ended up getting the dough ready for the scones along with baking more cookies than planned.
“Let’s go. We have enough done for tonight. Pancakes won’t take long in the morning, and we don’t need to prep for them tonight.”
I nodded, wiping down the last drops of water from the counter and drying my hands. A scan of the large kitchen showed Sam to be right—there was nothing left for us to do tonight.
“Maybe we can find a good place for supper in Lion’s Cove,” I said. “Those test cookies were good, but I need something with a little more sustenance.” Like a whole bushel of fried shrimp. I imagined the crisp, golden, buttery shrimp and licked my lips. “Seafood?”
“Sure, that sounds fantastic.” Sam nodded.
It took us half an hour to maneuver all of the tiny blacktop roads back into Lion’s Cove.
“I don’t know why they are even called ‘The Cove’s Cabins.’” Sam rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t feel like they are near the city of Lion’s Cove itself.”
“True, but it is the closest town around,” I pointed out.
Our supper at The Shrimper, a small, weathered building with wood siding and shrimp crates lining the porch rails, was delicious. I ordered the Big Shrimp Basket; Sam enjoyed the Crab-Stuffed Ravioli. The portions were enormous and the food absolute perfection. Or maybe those grilled cheese sandwiches were just a long time ago; either way, we both cleaned our plates with gusto. Even though we skipped dessert at the restaurant, opting for the bag of cookies in the truck, by the time we left, it was dark out.
“I guess Lion’s Cove isn’t as big as I thought it was,” I said after getting in the truck and scrolling through my phone.
“Why do you say that?” Sam asked as she buckled her seatbelt.
“Google says there isn’t a Walmart within an hour of here.”
“I think I saw a Grocer Giant a few blocks down the road. I don’t know if they have more than food, but we can check it out.”
The Grocer Giant had only groceries. We were able to find all of the ingredients but none of the supplies.
“We still need a large whisk and a second set of measuring cups, plus a powdered sugar shaker and a glass measuring cup for melting things in,” I read the items off the list before tossing it back into the console.
“It looks like,” Sam leaned closer to her glowing phone screen, “there’s a Dollar Store that is still open for the next thirty minutes. It’s about a ten-minute drive on the other side of town, I think.”
Sam passed me her phone, and I glanced at the directions. Neither of us saw any promising stores closer to us; evidently, Lion’s Cove rolled up the sidewalks early.
“Dollar Store it is,” I said, throwing the gearshift into drive. “You can tell me how to get there.” So, with Sam reading the directions, off we went.
Streets deteriorated as we drove. I watched out the window as old but clean buildings gave way to graffiti-covered walls and garbage littered alleys. Women with long legs and short skirts smoked on a corner. Soon, only every other street light remained lit. The others sported busted or missing bulbs. Darkness edged closer, making the already smaller side-streets seem narrower.
We made it to the other side of town in about eight minutes. I found myself hoping we would make it out even more quickly than that.
“I think we might be in a bad neighborhood,” Sam said as she studied the dimly lit parking lot, the beer bottles littering the empty grass lot to the left and the large graffiti drawing of a middle finger decorated the side of the Dollar Store building. Sam had been focused on the phone and directions and hadn’t seen just how rough this part of town had gotten.
“Well, we’re here now. Let’s just go in, grab the stuff, and get out.” I felt for the pocket knife clipped to my pants, making sure it was within reach. For what, I don’t know and hoped I didn’t have to find out; still, it made me feel better as I got out of the truck and walked with Sam through the dimly lit parking lot.
“No splitting up,” Sam warned as we entered the store.
The store was old. I mean wood floors old. Not nice ones, but splinter
ed and stained wood that rolled up and down through the store, warped from age and nowhere near level anymore. I wondered if it ever had been. Most of the aisles were labeled with signs hung from the ceiling, though several hung by only one end and you had to tilt your head sideways to read the words.
The kitchen aisle, miraculously beneath a sign that still gripped the ceiling by cables on both ends, was located at the front of the store. Sam picked out a whisk, doing her best to find the sturdiest option, while I gathered up plastic and glass measuring cups.
“They don’t have the powdered sugar shaker,” Sam said as we made a third pass down the aisle, checking into the recesses of the shelves.
“It’s fine. We can make do,” I said. Punch a few holes in a paper plate – voila – homemade sugar shaker. We carried our purchases to the counter where a redhead reclined against the large case holding cigarettes, chomping on a piece of gum like a cow on cud. It was not attractive, but I wasn’t about to tell her. A nose ring glinted in the fluorescent light and I blinked, was that a puppy she wore on her nose?
“Hey!” she barked. Sam took a step back and I pulled my eyes away from the metal dog decorating her left nostril.
“Hi,” I said. “Just these, please” I sat all of the measuring cups down and grabbed the whisk from Sam to add to the pile.
“What are you two doing in this neighborhood? You lost?” she asked, not even looking down as she scanned the purchases but narrowing her eyes and staring at us.
“Nope, not lost,” Sam said.
“We didn’t find any other open stores in Lion’s Cove,” I admitted.
“You should’ve gone far away then,” she said. “Don’t you know pretty girls get grabbed out here?”
“You’re out here,” I replied, not sure what to make of her. Was the woman issuing a threat or a warning? The scowl on her face in between bubble gum chews hadn’t changed.
“But I’ve always been here,” she said as if that should clear it up for me. “Twelve dollars,” she said before I could think of anything else. The second I handed over the money she tipped her head at the door. “Get back where you came from before you get hurt.”
Ooey Gooey Bakery Mystery Box Set Page 20