Virginia Lowell - A Cookie Before Dying

After Maddie left, Olivia finished cleaning the kitchen and got out ingredients in preparation for their baking session that evening. She wished she were half as well organized as everyone seemed to think she was. She had managed, without forethought, to add Heather as a suspect in Geoffrey King’s death. She’d almost, but not really, found the mysterious dancer in the park, who may or may not have witnessed Geoffrey King’s murder. And if she had witnessed the murder, she might be incapable of testifying due to mental disturbance. The suspects she hadn’t tackled at all were the obvious ones: Charlene and Charlie Critch.

A subdued Maddie returned to The Gingerbread House kitchen in less than an hour. When she began to page through a decorated cookie cookbook that she knew by heart, Olivia couldn’t stand the tension another minute. She needed Maddie at her best, not distracted and mopey. “How’s Lucas these days?”

Maddie’s eyes flitted up to Olivia’s face and down again. “Fine.”

“ ‘Fine’ is not an acceptable answer,” Olivia said. She heard the impatience in her own voice and didn’t care. “Tell me what is going on between you and Lucas. One minute he is the love of your life and the next he’s just . . . fine.”

“Come on, Livie, it’s no big deal. These things cool down, that’s all.”

“Not that fast and not without a reason.” Olivia filled Mr. Coffee with water, threw in some ground coffee, and snapped the switch. “Madeline Briggs, you and I need to talk.”

“I thought you were worried about Jason. Your brother, remember? Suddenly my love life is more important than your own brother’s actual life?”

“Don’t change the subject. Sit.” Olivia grabbed a chair and pressed it against the back of Maddie’s legs until she had to sit down.

“Hey,” Maddie said. “When did you get so bossy?”

“I’m an elder child, I was born bossy.” Olivia poured two cups of coffee and put one in front of Maddie. After delivering the cream and sugar, she said, “Look, Maddie, I’ve been watching you pretend to be your usual super-perky, enthusiastic self, but you’re unhappy. When you’re unhappy, it isn’t much fun around here.”

Maddie’s freckled face took on a sullen look as she sipped her coffee.

“Okay,” Olivia said, “here’s what I know. I know that Lucas asked you to marry him.”

Maddie’s cup rattled on its saucer. “How did you—?”

“Because Lucas is beyond upset. He talked to me about it. He wants to understand. He’s afraid of losing you. Maddie, you’ve been nuts about Lucas for years. What happened?”

Maddie poured herself another cup of coffee and stirred in silence.

Olivia said, more gently, “Lucas is a great guy, and he loves you. You know that. You will never convince me that you’ve suddenly lost interest in him. That isn’t you. You’re loyal. It took you a long time to get over Bobby after he broke your engagement that summer after high school, and Lucas is a much better person. Wait, is that it? Are you afraid the Bobby thing will happen again?”

Maddie dismissed the idea with a wave of her hand and a shake of her head. Progress.

“Then what?”

“Look, Livie, I really, truly don’t want to talk about this.”

“I get that.” Olivia drained the last of the coffee in her cup. If her taste buds were accurate, she had tossed in about twice the correct amount of ground beans. Her heart had picked up about thirty beats per minute. She started a second pot, lower octane. “This has something to do with your parents, doesn’t it?”

“What? How did you . . . ? Of course not.”

“Nice try,” Olivia said, “but I know you too well. You never want to talk about your parents. Maddie, I know how traumatic it is to lose a parent, and you lost both of them at a very young age. But there was something else going on, wasn’t there?” When Maddie said nothing, Olivia added, “Mom mentioned that she saw your mother a few times in those months before the accident. She said your mom seemed unhappy, that she was distracted, losing weight.”

Maddie stared toward the kitchen floor, sniffled once, and tears began to dribble down her cheeks. Olivia went to her and put a hand on her shoulder. Maddie said, “I hate this.”

“Yeah, I know.” Olivia said. “You probably hate me right now, too.”

“Yep.” Maddie ripped off a paper towel and blew her nose. “The least you could have done was wait until we’d started making cookies.”

“You’re right. I’ll undoubtedly rot in hell for that.”

“Works for me.” Maddie blew her nose again on another paper towel. “Ouch. Put tissues on the grocery list.”

“Will do. How about telling me what happened with your parents? You’ll feel better, I’ll feel better, we can get to those cookies, maybe save my brother’s life. . . .”

Maddie half-laughed. “Okay, all right. Quick version. Mom was depressed, and I guess she started drinking. Anyway, looking back on her behavior, that’s what I suspect. On the day of the accident, she was driving. Why, I don’t know. Dad usually did all the driving. No one told me the part about Mom being at the wheel until I’d finished college. Aunt Sadie let it slip one day. That’s about it.”

“So . . . I guess I need a longer version because I’m not connecting the dots. Did you start worrying that marrying Lucas would turn you into a drunk?”

Maddie heaved a huge sigh. “If you’re going to force me to talk about this, I really, really need to be baking.”

“Okay by me. As you can see, I’ve lined up the ingredients. The butter is at room temperature. You only have to fire up the mixer.” Olivia waved toward the neat line of flour, sugar, and extracts.

Maddie was already mixing flour and salt in a bowl, which she set aside near the mixer. “Mom was depressed. I know that much because I remember hearing one of her friends use the word, and I asked Mom what it meant. She said she was just feeling a little sad and not to worry about it. Dad was traveling a lot for work. I don’t know, maybe she was lonely. Mom and Dad had always been so close, at least until those last few months. Dad seemed to be gone all the time, and Mom must have stopped eating because she lost a lot of weight.”

“Do you think she might have been seriously ill?” Olivia put the flour away and refilled their coffee cups.

“No, Aunt Sadie would have told me. I do have to wonder if my dad was having an affair. That’s something I would never be able to dredge out of Aunt Sadie. She thinks I’m still ten and terribly vulnerable.”

“She loves you.”

“Yeah, I know.” Maddie yanked another towel off the roll. Her nose had turned red from the roughness of the paper.

While Maddie washed her hands, Olivia took a roll of toilet paper from the kitchen storage cabinet. She tore off the paper cover and plunked the whole roll on the table next to Maddie.

“Here’s the irony, though,” Maddie said as she measured sugar into the mixer bowl. “Hand me the butter, will you?”

“Irony?”

Maddie opened the wrapper and scraped globs of soft butter into the bowl with the sugar. “Mom and Dad were going off for a weekend away together the day they died. They were driving to the mountains, planning to stay in the same place they went for their honeymoon.”

“Maybe they were trying to work things out?”

“What I remember so vividly was that when Mom leaned over to kiss me good-bye, I smelled her perfume. It was the first time I’d seen her smile in a long time. That was the last time I saw her.” Maddie switched on the mixer, indicating she was done talking about her parents, and lowered the spinning blades into the sugar and butter.