“My mother’s mother gave me these recipes and I want to share them with you,” Emelina tells me. “They were her mother’s recipes from the old country. Over time, I’ve added some of my own.”
Emelina knows every recipe by memory, and she is patient with me as I write down ingredients and baking instructions. She has already figured out what order we will follow and which ovens we will use. Over the next two days, we are going to make three dozen each of twenty-four specialty cookies. On top of that, every attendee with get a take-home box of the assortment, which will include her prized chocolate chip cookies.
It is as if the last couple of weeks working on Antoinette and Andrew’s murders never happened. My new gig is starting today, and it takes all my concentration. Em is patient with my mistakes and makes gentle corrections before things go into the oven. She makes a batch. I watch. Then she watches me make a batch and we taste the two. She is the wine connoisseur of cookies, and in the side-by-side comparisons, I begin to tease out the subtle differences. We find out we need extra pans and trays, and we need them rather quickly. I take photos of them. I bribe Ken to go to the store to buy them. My guy flies into the kitchen in record time with the merchandise. We fawn over him as he goes from spicy ginger molasses to applesauce raisin chews to lemon pecan. The man is higher than a kite on sugar by the time we send him home. Make, bake, wash, repeat. Next are peanut butter oatmeal treats, apple cider cookies, drop sugar cookies. They all have her little signatures and variations that make the favor pop in my mouth. Time, temperature, and handling all are explained by Emelina, and I take copious notes. We are learning the ovens as well. Viennese hazel butter thins, date pinwheel cookies, and a variation on chocolate and peanut butter are next. The time flies.
We finish the day with vanilla butter crescents, chocolate almond buttons, and honey carrot cookies. Emelina is a stickler about cleaning everything and wiping the surfaces down. All the bowls, pans, cookie cutters, and utensils are hung up. Everything is spotless. Except for the smells permeating the air, you wouldn’t know that we baked eighteen dozen cookies today. I learn more in eight hours than I could from a lifetime of watching the baking shows.
We close up the studio just before dark and walk our separate ways home. There was no idle chit-chat today between rounds and certainly no talk of the murders which have consumed our attention since the day after Ken literally stumbled upon Antoinette’s remains.
In the fading twilight, my thoughts settle on my future. If I had a choice between baking with Emelina all the time or sleuthing with Erin, which would it be? I question why it has to be an either-or scenario. For now, it must be. Emelina Bidwell is my baking partner in the real sense of the word, and she no longer requires my other non-teaching skills. Will there be a void until the next case comes along? There, I said it to myself. There will be a next case, but as soon as I think it, clarity after stepping away for two days from the forest that was the speculation about the twin killing from fifty years ago allows me to see the trees.
Working with sugar and spice and everything nice today and giving it my fullest concentration allows me space to rethink some of our previous operating assumptions. Again, clues surface on the periphery of my consciousness, dancing like the twinkling stars over the river on this moonless night. They feel close enough to touch, but as my granddaughter Jesse would tell me, they are millions of miles away. I am not comforted that the clues are much closer, but as elusive to touch. C’mon, Captain Obvious, throw me a bone.
My little guy greets me with his whole body wagging before my big guy gives me a hug and peck.
Ken looks perplexed. “No extras?”
“Sorry, honey. They are all accounted for.”
“How many did you make?”
“Eighteen dozen. We have the same amount to make tomorrow.”
“How did it go?”
“Emelina is a great teacher, but we already knew that. She was patient with me. I watched her make a batch and then she watched me. She’s a perfectionist but without dinging me for mistakes. Now, if I make the same mistakes tomorrow, it might be a different story.”
He surprises me by saying, “I was thinking more about your case.”
“Not a single word was said. We had some downtime between bakes while we were cleaning pots and pans, but she didn’t bring it up.”
“Strange,” he says.
“Why do you say that?”
“You are working side by side all day and don’t talk about all the things you did together for the last couple of weeks. I don’t get it, especially because it involved the biggest news to hit Milford since, well, your last two cases.”
“She knows more than she’s telling us, hon,” I say. We move into the kitchen. He helps by setting the table, while I stir the crock pot. Beef stew. “Erin and I think that we unwittingly gave her the last pieces of the puzzle. She can see the whole picture, but we can’t.”
“How does that make you feel?”
“She’s entitled to her privacy. We will turn everything over to Detective Shafer after the party and let him run with it. She can’t stop him from investigating two murders, even if they happened over fifty years ago.”
He smiles at me. “What is it you always say to me? Thank you for your response but can you answer the question?”
“Ken, you are asking me about those squishy things? You know, what do you call them?”
“Feelings?”
“Yeah, those things. You know how good I am at burying them deep down inside.”
“Are any bubbling to the surface?”
“Nope. At first, I was shocked by how she just walked out on us, but then I came to understand that she got what she needed.”
“Which was?”
“A reasonable explanation to what happened. Johnny Murphy killed Antoinette to keep her quiet about a possible rape and ensuing pregnancy with his child and then killing Andrew, who might have figured it out.”
“But you don’t think that is the case, do you?”
“I don’t see how a coal delivery guy can hide both bodies by building a partition wall.”
Ken thinks about that as he feeds Billy. I start to ladle out the stew into our bowls.
I say, “My friend of over thirty-five years discovers what happened to her niece and nephew, and it was not from her receiving a couple of postcards from Hawaii. They were found murdered and stuffed in a trunk and a coal furnace shortly after they went missing. Her world gets turned upside down. Then we figure out what might have happened, and it fits with what she already thinks but wasn’t telling us. I can’t beat her up for wanting to halt my snooping. I guess I feel compassion for her. I can’t let my need to solve the mystery get in the way of that.” We move to the kitchen table. Neither of us reaches for our soup spoons. Ken is waiting for me to finish rummaging around for those squishy things, just as much as I am trying to verbalize them.
“Do you remember that time when we were dating,” I say to him, “and we were in my parent’s basement, and we heard the upstairs door open?” Ken and I had been going out together for a while at that time, and this wasn’t our first time to the rodeo. “We were very much in the moment and then everything came to an immediate halt.”
He grins at me. “It feels like that?”
“Worse.”