Virginia Lowell - A Cookie Before Dying

“How come you get to have all the excitement?” Maddie said. She opened the box of cookies Olivia had taken with her to Heather Irwin’s farmhouse. “We might as well eat these. Good thing you stashed them in your car before Heather could run over them. What a waste that would have been.”

“Thanks for your concern about my person,” Olivia said, reaching into the box. She pulled out a pink book-shaped cookie dusted with darker pink sugar sprinkles. “They say reading is broadening,” she said.

“Try not to think about it,” Maddie said before biting the roof off a library-shaped cookie. While she chewed, she retrieved her laptop from the kitchen desk. “We weren’t too busy today, which was bad for our bottom line but good for research.” Depositing her cookie on a plate, Maddie opened the lid of her computer. “I bookmarked the good stuff.” When her bookmark list appeared on the screen, Maddie hooked her ankle around a chair and dragged it next to Olivia’s at the kitchen table. She set the computer between them. “I had to do a lot of digging to get to this point, for which I want adequate appreciation.”

Olivia reached back to the kitchen counter, grabbed Maddie’s half-eaten library, and handed it to her. “Have a cookie. Hey, your cookies are the best on earth. What appreciation could be more adequate?”

Maddie slid the box out of Olivia’s reach. “Brat. No more cookies for you. Now concentrate.” She clicked on a bookmark and up popped the website for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, based in Manitoba.

“Manitoba, wow,” Olivia said. “How do they stay warm in those skimpy costumes?”

“Oh, the ignorance. Ballet is hard work. Sit up front at a ballet sometime; you can watch the dancers sweat.”

“Sounds like fun, but I’ll pass. What have you found?”

“Wait’ll you see, Livie, you will beam with pride. At first I thought it was a mistake on the Internet—and really, how could that be? But then I figured it out. Don’t fidget, I’m getting there. Presentation is everything. Okay, first we have to go back some years. For that I had to find an obsessive-compulsive ballet blogger, which wasn’t hard. Ballet is easy to obsess about.”

While Maddie squinted at her bookmark list, Olivia inched closer and closer until she could reach around and grab the cookie box. “Brain food,” Olivia said in response to Maddie’s glare.

“Here we are,” Maddie said. “I found this blogger who has collected the names of principal dancers and soloists for every year going back more than fifty years, almost to the troupe’s beginning. I skimmed through all of them. Just when I felt blindness begin to descend, I found this.” Maddie scrolled back to 1980 and tapped her fingernail against one name on the screen, listed under the category “Principal Players.”

Olivia leaned close to make out the tiny print. “Lara Larssen. You don’t think . . . ? The last name is spelled the same as Raoul’s, but couldn’t that be a coincidence?”

“I found a short bio on another website that mentioned Lara was married to a Latin dancer. How many Latin dancers named Larssen can there be on the earth at one time? Lara would have been twenty or so at that time, and I’d guess Raoul to be in his mid-fifties right now, so it fits.”

Thinking back to her conversation with Constance Overton, Olivia said, “Raoul told Constance his wife was dead, but we have only his word for that. Maybe she’s in hiding for reasons relating to the scar on her cheek.” She did some quick math. “But would our ballerina in the park really be so old? Lara Larssen would be pushing fifty. Could she do all those leaps?”

“Maybe,” Maddie said, “if she’d kept dancing and hadn’t suffered a major injury. The question is, why? Who dances outdoors in the middle of the night?”

Olivia selected a rectangular cookie decorated as a library card. “Someone who still longs to express herself? Not that I know anything about this artistic expression stuff.”

“However, you could be on to something, in your own fuzzy way.”

“Or she could be mentally unbalanced,” Olivia said.

“Also not unheard of in the artistic world. It would explain why she stays hidden during the day.” Maddie scrolled up to 1982 and pointed to the screen. “I have a suspicion that the young Lara Larssen’s ballet career was cut short. First, read this list.”

Olivia scooted her chair next to Maddie’s and scanned another list of dancers. “Okay, so Lara Larssen was still a principal player in 1982.”

“This is two years after she was hired by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.” Maddie switched to another screen. “And here it lists Lara Larssen as the dancer chosen to play the role of Clara in The Nutcracker . That’s pretty heady stuff for a young ballerina. I found a review of her performance that called her the next Margot Fonteyn.”

“Margot Fonteyn . . . wasn’t she a soap opera star?” Olivia asked.

Maddie was too excited by her Internet discoveries to react. “Now it gets even more interesting,” she said, pointing to the screen. “This is the list for the following year, 1983.”

“I don’t see Lara’s name,” Olivia said.

“Exactly. She has disappeared, never to dance again, at least in public. I haven’t been able to track down another mention of her. You’d think there’d be something on the Internet, given what a splash she made and how mysteriously she disappeared.”

“I suppose you searched for death notices?”

“Of course,” Maddie said. “No luck. However, I left a question for the blogger who put together this fantastic history-of-the-ballet website. Maybe she’ll know something. In fact, let me check again and see if she’s had time to respond.”

Maddie’s fingers bounced around the computer keys, reminding Olivia of little ballet feet. While she waited, Olivia got up to fill the dishwasher and wondered if Del had found Heather Irwin and her speeding green truck. She doubted Heather would disappear forever. She loved her horse too much to leave him without care. She even loved the barn cats and had given each one a name.

“Eureka!” Maddie paused a few moments to read the blogger’s response to her question. “Okay, Livie, here’s the scoop. Lara was a gifted dancer, but she was of a delicate constitution complicated by feelings of inadequacy, or that’s what the blogger tells me. This is, after all, the Internet, so the information might be anything from total truth to romantic hogwash. Anyway, she says Lara developed a serious problem with anorexia. In those days, ballerinas had to be tiny. They got weighed all the time. Lots of ballerinas had problems with anorexia and bulimia. It’s still a problem. Sad.”

“Any information about Lara’s ultimate fate?” Olivia asked.

“Let me finish. Nope, my blogger says she fell off the edge of the earth. I guess we struck out on this one.”

“Not to worry, we’ll keep searching.” The Gingerbread House cookie box held two more cookies. Olivia handed the gold lion with blue dragée eyes to Maddie. Olivia bit into the other cookie, a library building decorated with pale green ivy leaves.

“I need to do some cutting and baking this evening,” Maddie said. “We’ve managed to run through most of the supply in the freezer. Want to help?”

“I do,” said Olivia. “Should we grab a pizza?”

Staring at her computer screen, Maddie said, “I agreed to have dinner with Lucas tonight.” She didn’t sound happy. “I should be back in an hour.”

“Maddie? Is there something you want to talk about?” Olivia sat down next to her.

Maddie shook her head at the computer screen.

“Maybe later?”

Maddie shrugged her shoulders and stood up. “Back in an hour. Then you can lay out your plan. Because I know you have one, and it better be good. We have about thirty-six hours to save your brother.”