The last of the confirmations for the next book club meeting rolled in by Sunday night while Ellie was busy in the kitchen. Despite what had happened at their last meeting, every woman in the club appeared to be intent on coming to the next meeting. Many had offered condolences in their replies, some had mentioned that they thought the club should go on in Abbie’s memory, and a couple added notes about not letting some murderer get the better of them.
For Ellie’s part, she was working at making the treats for Wednesday night. She was going to make up three kinds of cookies to serve and plain bottled water to drink. It would be a lot easier to see who grabbed what, and definitely easier to see if anything extra was added. She’d need to keep her observation skills sharp, but it was worth the small risk if they could catch the killer.
For now, that task meant a lot of prep work. She was the first to admit she hadn’t been very good at helping out at the bookstore lately. Things were slowly starting to quiet down, but that didn’t give her any right to slack off when it came to her share of the duties. Despite how active and youthful her grandmother could be, Ellie had to remind herself that Ma’May was still seventy years old and could probably use more assistance than she was willing to ask for.
For her recipes, Ellie was planning on mixing up three batches of cookies. The first, which was already wrapped in plastic and in the fridge to wait until it was time to bake, were a classic favorite – snickerdoodles. She had to adjust the recipe a bit, but doing so had become second nature when she was baking. A little flax here, and some mashed banana there, and she had perfectly delicious, and slightly healthier, treats ready to go.
The second batch, the one she was working on now, were plain chocolate chip. With no egg in the recipe, she happily munched on raw dough and fed a little bit to Beau before she added the chocolate. She was about to pop her third bite into her mouth when she remembered her too tight suit and stopped. Eating raw cookie dough was no way to get back down to her pre-divorce size and she regretfully dropped the bit of dough on the floor.
“That’s your last bite,” she told Beau. “You’re getting a little chunky, too.”
It was a lot harder to tell if Beau had gained weight. For all his golden floof, it was impossible to tell if he was skinny or chunky underneath it with just a glance.
Beau gobbled up the glob of dough and instantly whimpered for more. Ellie was tempted to give in, and did the one thing that would stop her from doing so. She dumped a bag of chocolate chips into the dough and began to mix it up with her hands. Now there was no way that Beau could have any more.
Once that mix was complete, Ellie dropped the dough onto a prepared sheet of plastic wrap and rolled it into a tube. Come Wednesday nice she would be able to slice off quarter inch sections of dough and put them on a cookie sheet to make perfect, uniform cookies.
The last batch she had to make up were chocolate macaroons. After prepping two batches of cookies already, Ellie’s arms were getting tired by time she moved on to the last recipe, but she knew if she didn’t get them done now, she never would.
On top of still needing to sit down and read the book for their next meeting, Ellie had also volunteered to work open to close all week as a thank you to Ma’May for managing the place almost entirely on her own over the last few days. Ma’May had insisted she was fine with it and that Ellie was doing a good thing by trying to discover Abbie’s killer, but Ellie wouldn’t hear anything of it. She was a firm believer in fairness and making her grandmother work extra just so she could run around town wasn’t fair at all.
“All done making a mess of my kitchen?” Ma’May teased as she joined Ellie.
“Just about,” Ellie said. She was placing the macaroon mix in the fridge and only had the cleanup left to do. Sadly, there was a lot of clean up.
“And why did you go overboard on the cookies this time?” her grandmother asked as she started to load things into the dishwasher.
“Stop that, Ma’May” Ellie scolded her. “I made the mess, I’ll clean it up.”
Ma’May just laughed and kept on tidying. “You know I hate sitting still,” she told her granddaughter. “It’s never been my style. Now, tell me why you’ve filled my fridge with cookie dough.”
“It’ll be easier to keep track of,” Ellie told her. She moved to the sink and began to fill it with warm water and a touch of dish soap. “If everyone eats the same thing, it will be harder to track three dozen of an identical thing and whose hands were on what. Make them all different colors and it should be a little easier to follow the bread trail. Or in this case, the cookie trail.”
“Not bad,” Ma’May said as she wiped some spilled flour from the counter tops and into a damp cloth. “But what if someone does something to a cookie? What if someone gets sick?”
Ellie had to admit that was a bit of a risk. “I know,” she said with a heavy sigh. “I’m going to be watching everyone like a hawk and if I see anything fishy, I’m putting the brakes on it. You have to, too. If anyone even looks suspicious, we have to move. No one is getting sick.”
“If anyone asks, I don’t like it,” Ma’May said, but the devil was back in her bright, clear eyes. “But if there is even a little doubt that Lilith White is our man, we have to do what we can to make sure everyone knows it.”
“Exactly,” Ellie said. Her fingers were starting to turn pink from the warm water, but she still had a lot more scrubbing to do. Not everything was going to fit in the dishwasher, which meant a lot needed to be done by hand. The other choice was leaving it out all night, but that wasn’t her style.
“And how are you going to explain this plan to Detective Murphy?” Ma’May asked. Ellie suddenly realized why her grandmother looked so sneaky. She was more interested in how Ellie was going to approach the subject of the plan than the plan itself.
“I haven’t thought of that yet,” Ellie said, which wasn’t exactly a lie. Mostly because she hadn’t even considered it at all yet.
“Well, you should,” Ma’May told her. “And not just because I think you secretly harbor a desire to speak to him. If something goes belly up with this plan of yours and word gets back to him you thought that someone might try this nonsense again, well, I don’t think he’ll be too pleased with you.”
Ellie hated to admit it, but her grandmother did have a point. Ellie was dead certain that she would be able to keep an eye on everything, now that she knew she needed to. Despite Ma’May’s warning, Ellie had already decided it would be easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask permission and she wasn’t going to change her mind now.
She just had to keep her mind made up for three days.
“It will be okay,” Ellie assured her. “I honestly don’t think anyone will try anything. You and I will both be watching, and probably the rest of the girls will as well. If anyone is stupid enough to try anything, they deserve to get caught.”
Ma’May nodded. “You have a point. The only woman I think who’d be that brazen would be Lilith, but from what you told me, she might not be our prime suspect.”
“But we can’t rule her out,” Ellie reminded her. “Just because she told me a good story doesn’t mean it was anything more than just that, a story. For all we know, she was acting her heart out. I’ll be watching her very closely, don’t you worry.”
“I’m not worried,” Ma’May said. “I know you won’t let me down, or yourself. I just hope we can clear this mess up quickly.”
“Me too,” Ellie said. It had already been almost two weeks. Despite knowing that crimes weren’t solved as quickly as they were on TV, Ellie wanted this wrapped up as soon as possible. To let things go on any longer was only going to let the trail get even colder than it already was.
Once the two women had the kitchen cleaned up, Ellie decided it was time for a nice, long, hot bath to relax. Thankfully, the apartment she shared with her grandmother had just the ticket in a large claw foot tub that had probably been in the building since the day it was built.
Beau happily trotted beside her as she moved into the bathroom. Even though it was an apartment, the bathroom, just like the rest of the rooms, was quite large. Despite being a little old fashioned in her decorating, Ma’May had made the bathroom cozy and inviting, even if there was a carpeted cover on the toilet lid. It made for a great place to go and relax when her mind was being just a bit too busy.
Ellie turned the old knobs above the tub and held her hand under the water as it flowed out of the faucet. The building was old and it took a minute or two before the water began to run hot under her fingers. Once it reached the scalding mark, she added a bit of cold and let the tub begin to fill.
Being so large, the tub took quite a while to get to full. Ellie had time to prepare a cup of her favorite relaxation tea as well as pull her curly hair up on top of her head. She grabbed the next book for the book club meeting, a paranormal romance called Harvest Moon by an author named Helena Shaw, and then stripped off her flour and sugar coated clothes and tossed them in the laundry bin.
With Beau settled down on the rug beside the tub, Ellie dipped her toes in the hot water. It was a bit much to get used to at first, but her body adjusted to the temperature as she slowly sunk into the water and she let her muscles relax.
Her fingers were still damp, but Ellie picked up the book she’d left beside the tub and flipped to the first page. She wasn’t sure what to expect with the book since it was Lilith’s recommendation and she knew the kinds of books Lilith read, but she was going to give it a chance. That was, after all, what book club was all about.
After the first chapter, Ellie quickly found herself hooked. The main character with her secret double life had her flipping pages nearly faster than she could read them. The small town reminded her so much of Dundurn which warmed her heart, and then things got even better when the heroine, Dawn, began investigating the mystery going on in her small town. With the help of an FBI agent, she needed to discover who – or what – had kidnapped her best friend.
“Oh what?” Ellie yelped when she hit the reveal of the truth behind the sexy FBI agent. Just like the heroine, the FBI hero wasn’t exactly who he was making himself out to be. Ellie had to keep flipping the pages to find out more and it wasn’t until her bathwater was getting uncomfortably cool that she stuck her bookmark between the pages.
“Okay, okay,” Ellie said to Beau as he wagged his tail at her. He still needed one more walk before bed and she regretted not being able to just slip into her pajamas and call it a night.
Instead of her fluffy flannel pjs, Ellie grabbed a set of clothes she’d left draped over the end of her bed and pulled them on. They weren’t the cleanest things she owned, nor the most stylish, but the faded pair of jeans and out of season Christmas sweater were warm enough. With her jacket overtop, no one would notice what she was wearing anyway.
With his harness on, Ellie led Beau down the back stairs and into the alley behind the bookstore. Maybe it was the book she’d been reading, or maybe it was the fact that there was still a murderer on the loose in Dundurn, but Ellie couldn’t help but look over her shoulder as Beau sniffed around. She knew she needed to exercise more and took that as a great excuse to make Beau jog out of the alley and into the glow of the street lights on the main road.
Thankfully, a few other people were mulling around outside while Beau led her up and down the street. A few people nodded hello, but most kept to themselves in a manner very unusual for their town. Ellie noticed several people checking over their own shoulders and realized there was another very good reason to catch Abbie’s killer.
Until that person was caught, no one in Dundurn would truly feel safe.