Virginia Lowell - A Cookie Before Dying

After a couple hours of dealing with numbers, Olivia was ready to call it quits for the day. Their sales had been good for a Tuesday, but not as impressive as most previous events, especially when she factored in the cost of all those cookies the customers had consumed.

“I’m beat,” Olivia said. “I’m going to bed early tonight.”

Spunky trotted over to her, but Maddie gave her a puzzled look and pulled her iPod buds from her ears. “You spoke?”

“I said I’m heading for bed. Are you planning to work all night?”

Maddie shook her head. “I’m actually tired, for once. I’ll clean up in here and turn out the lights.”

Olivia nestled her sleepy dog in one arm and closed the kitchen door behind her. With the store lights dimmed and the air conditioner on low, the light clink and dull shine of the cookie cutter mobiles reminded her of outdoor chimes. The store still smelled faintly of lime zest. At that moment, Olivia could not imagine leaving Chatterley Heights and moving back to Baltimore. The Gingerbread House had sneaked into her heart the way Spunky had as a puppy, the first time she’d held him.

Feeling expansive, Olivia decided to give her brother the Duesenberg cookie cutter he so coveted. Without turning up the lights, she wound through densely packed displays to the transportation mobile from which she’d hung the cutter. It wasn’t there. Unable to comprehend what she was seeing, Olivia reached toward the spot where it had hung, on the right side of the mobile. It had to be there. Gwen had chosen the tin baby rattle cutter as her prize. And Jason wouldn’t have taken the cutter on his own. Would he?

Maybe Maddie had given the Duesenberg to Jason. It would be like her to take pity on him because he hadn’t won the contest, even with her hints. Olivia poked her head into the kitchen and waved to get Maddie’s attention.

“Maddie, did you by any chance take that Duesenberg cookie cutter out of the transportation mobile?”

“Nope,” Maddie said. “Not my job.”

“It’s gone.”

“It can’t be.”

“Well, it is. Gone, absent, disappeared.”

“Livie, you don’t think Jason would . . . ?”

With a slow shake of her head, Olivia said, “I can’t believe that he would. It’s a valuable cutter, but Jason knows I’d let him have it free, or at least for next to nothing. Anyway, he seemed awfully focused on Charlene and her problems. It’s hard to imagine he’d even have thought about it. Well, I won’t worry about it tonight, and don’t you, either. It’ll turn up. Maybe it fell off and someone put it somewhere in the store. I’m sure we’ll find it in the light of day. You look baked to a crisp. How many days has it been since you slept?”

Maddie yawned and stretched. “I’m fine. I went to bed early Sunday night.”

“This is Tuesday evening. I’ll clean up. You go home and get some rest.”

For once, Maddie didn’t argue.

Olivia lay awake and listed her midsummer resolutions. First, buy a new bedroom air conditioner. Second, never read the Cookie Cutter Collectors Club’s latest Cookie Crumbs newsletter right before bed. Way too stimulating. She could read a thriller and still drift off, but looking at photos of vintage cutters made her want to run out and find an all-night flea market.

It didn’t help Olivia’s sleep problem that the temperature in her second-floor bedroom was in the mid-eighties with a dew point she could take a bath in. The Weather Channel had mentioned a storm nearby, possibly heading in their direction. It couldn’t arrive soon enough.

Olivia lay spread-eagle on her bed wearing only panties and a loose cotton T-shirt that reached to her mid-thighs. When she’d first moved into her apartment, she had talked herself out of replacing the old window air conditioner in her bedroom. After all, it might be noisy and slow but it still worked. Frugality was her lifetime habit, inheritance or no inheritance. But with the distractions of Maddie’s impromptu cookie event and Charlene’s dramatic appearance, she hadn’t remembered to turn the useless thing on until bedtime. The day’s heat had snaked through the myriad, inevitable cracks in the old house and slithered up the staircase, gaining strength as it curled into her bedroom.

“I’ve been lying here for hours,” Olivia muttered. She switched on the bedside lamp and checked her cell phone for the time. It was one a.m. “Okay, thirty-five minutes.”

Spunky’s tiny body stretched out flat at the foot of the bed, as far as possible from Olivia. When she spoke, he lifted his eyelids and dropped them shut in one smooth movement.

Olivia considered going to her kitchen and pouring herself a glass of wine. No, she had to open the store in the morning; she couldn’t afford to feel groggy. She’d finished her last library book. Music never helped her to sleep, and the only television was in her living room, where the air conditioner was even older and louder.

Olivia shifted sideways to a cooler place on the sheet. Forcing her eyes shut, she tried deep breathing, which her yoga-addicted mother insisted would relax her. It made her crabby. As if mirroring her mood, Spunky raised his head and growled. But he was looking toward the bedroom windows, not at Olivia. She sat up, listened, but heard only the racket made by the air conditioner.

“What is it, Spunks?”

Spunky fixed his limpid brown eyes on Olivia and whimpered. His head snapped back toward the window, ears perked. The air conditioner consumed one of two bedroom windows. Spunky leaped off the bed and trotted to the second, moonlight-filled pane, where he fidgeted and whined. When he gave Olivia his most heartrending look, the one with the pleading eyes and tilted head, Olivia turned off the bedside lamp and joined him at the window.

“I don’t see anything,” she said. Spunky stood on his hind legs and leaned his front paws on her shin. Olivia picked him up so he could look outside. “See? Dark of night, not a creature is stirring.” Spunky’s ears fell, then shot up again. This time Olivia heard it, too, even with the air conditioner whining in her right ear. She turned it off. The sound came through clearly, a howl that would have sent a chill down her spine if the room temperature hadn’t already risen by at least a degree.

“Hang on a sec, kiddo,” Olivia said, depositing Spunky at her feet. At once he began to hop on his back feet and paw at the wall. Olivia unlocked the window and lifted the crank, but the humidity-swollen frame stuck. She hit the wood with her fist and felt it shift. She hit it again, and the window cracked open, allowing heavy, wet air to penetrate the only slightly drier room. She cranked the pane wide.

Spunky yapped until Olivia picked him up. Together they peered out through the screen at what looked like black nothing until Olivia’s eyes adjusted and the clouds parted to reveal streaks of moonlight. She began to distinguish large shapes: other buildings on either side of The Gingerbread House, trees in the town square, the lamplight near the late-nineteenth-century band shell. Spunky wriggled his front paws free of Olivia’s grasp and reached out to touch the screen. He yapped three times and went silent. A faint howl answered his call.

“Oh no, don’t tell me.” Olivia pressed her forehead against the screen. “Is Buddy out there, Spunks? Is that Buddy howling?” Spunky yapped and wagged his tail. “I’ll take that as a yes.” Deputy Sheriff Cody Furlow’s dog, Buddy, was huge, even for a black Labrador. However, the part about having black fur would explain why Olivia couldn’t see him. Buddy and Spunky had forged a special bond and sometimes led one another into trouble, or out of it.