Kate sat the pitcher of lemonade in the refrigerator as Maxi and Peter came through the front door.
“Peter helped me string up the balloons, and they look fantastic!” Maxi said proudly.
“Not bad, if I do say so myself,” he agreed. “This place looks a lot like it did for the reopening. Minus the hordes of people.”
“We wanted something small and classy,” Maxi said. “Sam’s not a big fan of crowds. Some cookies and lemonade in the kitchen, then a nice, hot home-cooked meal.”
“From whose home?” Peter teased.
“Bridget’s place—and she’s going to be cooking your dinner, if you’re not careful,” Maxi warned, giving him a playful swat on the shoulder.
“Apparently, her Irish stew sandwiches are Sam’s new favorite,” Kate explained. “Although I wouldn’t repeat that to Esperanza. Bridget said she’d bring over dinner as soon as she saw Ben’s car.”
“We left the front door open but flipped the ‘closed’ sign,” Peter said. “So no more customers today.”
Kate shook her head. “I don’t know how Sam will feel about closing two hours early.”
“It’s our last official act as managers of the Cookie House,” Maxi said. “I say we go for it. But I still can’t believe it took a whole week to get him out. Even after we knew the who and the how.”
“Hey, only TV detectives can solve a crime in an hour,” Peter said, shaking his head. “Real-world forensic tests take real time. And if Kyle Hardy hadn’t literally stumbled onto that rum bottle at the recycling center, we wouldn’t even have been able to do that.”
“Yeah, I guess I’m gonna have to stop calling the bobo a bobo,” Maxi said.
“I’m just glad the bottle was still there,” Kate said. “Especially after all this time.”
“I never doubted it,” Maxi said. “I was a chaperone when Michael’s class went to the center last year. I always thought recycling meant it went into some big machine and boom! New stuff. Uh-uh. First they stash it for a while, like squirrels. Then they process it.”
“Well, that delay turned out to be a win for the good guys,” Peter said. “Not only did the bottle contain a residue of rum and that drug, but it also had a big juicy thumbprint from one Mr. Paul Larde, aka Stewart Lord.”
“Carl dug through his scrap metal drawer and found the hardware he’d removed from the back door of the bakery after the robbery,” Kate said. “Ben’s team lifted a couple of Lord’s fingerprints from that, too.”
“Which the bobo would have found weeks ago, if he’d bothered to look,” Maxi fumed.
“Hey, it’s a new day,” Peter said, pulling Maxi to him and kissing the tip of her nose. “Time to let bobos be bygones.”