Deadly delights, p.1
Deadly Delights, page 1
Deadly Delights
A BOOKISH BAKER MYSTERY
Laura Jensen Walker
In loving memory of my parents, David and Bettie Jensen, and the bookish, bakery childhood upbringing they gave me in Racine, Wisconsin, unofficial kringle capital of the world and home to the best Danish bakeries in America.
My fond growing-up memories include going into the West Racine bakeries with my mom, dad, siblings Lisa, Todd, and Tim to pick up a kringle or Seven Sisters—seven Danish pastry rolls baked together to form a round coffee cake with luscious custard filling and almond paste. (My sister and I always fought over the center piece.) On special occasions we would enjoy Danish layer cake with its ribbons of raspberry and custard filling and thick buttercream frosting. Yum.
The daughter of a book-loving father, I devoured books more than I did Danish pastry. My love of words began when Dad drilled us at the dinner table on the Reader’s Digest “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” section. This word love continued once I started school and received a constellation of gold stars for reading the most books in Miss Vopelensky’s first-grade class—a hundred and three. That’s when I determined to someday become a writer. A favorite Racine childhood pastime was our biweekly visits to the bookmobile where my sister, Lisa, and I would each check out the maximum number of books allowed (six or eight, as I recall). We would race through our books and then swap stacks. Another favorite childhood memory was receiving the latest Trixie Belden mystery hot off the press from the Western Printing factory in town where my aunts worked. My love of mysteries was born thanks to Trixie Belden.
It wasn’t until we moved from Wisconsin when I was a teen that I discovered that the delectable Danish pastries and mouthwatering baked goods I had grown up with as a normal part of everyday life did not exist anywhere else in America. Definitely not in dry, dusty Arizona.
What? No more kringle or Seven Sisters as a special treat on weekend mornings? No more napoleon kringle with its rich custard filling at wedding showers and baby showers? And, worst of all, no more delicious Danish layer cake with the fat buttercream roses the grown-ups gave me at every birthday party and wedding? Sacrilege.
These Bookish Baker mysteries are my love letter to my Racine childhood.
Acknowledgments
Writing during the initial time of COVID-19 was … challenging. As all of us responded to and tried to cope with a crazy, frightening, once-in-a-lifetime deadly pandemic that no one understood or knew enough about, it was difficult to focus or concentrate. I’ve never struggled with anxiety before, but suddenly my anxiety level went off the charts. I couldn’t write or even read any books (my favorite pastime) during those first six to eight weeks. Thankfully, after those first anxiety-filled months, I found my footing again and developed a new, safe rhythm of how to live and work during the coronavirus. Returning to Lake Potawatomi was a joy and a safe and delightful haven during this stressful time.
Thank you to my agent, Chip MacGregor, for your continued support and for putting me together with Crooked Lane. I am grateful to my fabulous and clever editor, Faith Black Ross, the hardworking and intrepid Melissa Rechter, Madeline Rathle, Rachel Keith, and the great Crooked Lane team. (Thanks again, Rob Fiore, for another killer cover!)
I’m also grateful to my friends and early readers Marian Hitchings and Cheryl Harris for their feedback on an initial draft, with a special thanks to Cheryl for vetting the pole-fitness dancing parts for accuracy. Any mistakes are my own. Additional thanks to Cathy Elliott, Dave Meurer, Annette Smith, and (“Team Laura”) Kujubu. Deep gratitude to my first reader, longtime journalism friend, and editor-pal Kim Orendor for her speed and willingness to read chapters, answer questions, and provide encouragement. I owe you, Kimmie. (And I can’t wait to read your first book!)
Heartfelt gratitude to dear friends Dave and Dale Meurer for once again opening up their lovely home (pre-COVID) to me for a desperately needed writing getaway and for thoroughly spoiling me the entire time I was there with delicious food, cups of steaming-hot PG Tips, and yummy shortbread and other goodies. Every writer needs a Dave and Dale Meurer in their life.
A special shout-out to the kind and generous Zoe Quinton for allowing me to nervously bounce off a new-ending idea at the eleventh hour and confirming that yes, it works. (One of these days, I’ll make it to Santa Cruz to buy you that drink.) Finally, thanks to Michael for being the head baker of the Cozy Bakery and to our friends who sampled the Cozy Bakery’s delicious treats (and failures), with special thanks to Connie Weichert and Michael Johnson for allowing me to use their family recipes.
Chapter One
I bent over to pick up my embossed rosemaling rolling pin that had rolled off the table onto the ground, and as I did, someone whistled and pinched my butt. Instinctively I whirled around and smacked the pincher with the rolling pin, which sent him staggering.
“Ow! What’d you do that for?” said Lester Morris, rubbing his polyester-suited arm.
“Keep your hands to yourself, Les.” You disgusting pig and sorry excuse for a human being.
The aging lothario was the town lech—Lester-the-molester we’d nicknamed him years ago in high school—who fancied himself quite the ladies’ man. A fancy none of the women in Lake Potawatomi returned.
Unfortunately, Les Morris, CPA and the president of the chamber of commerce, also happened to be the head judge of our annual baking contest. Every August our small southern Wisconsin town holds its version of The Great British Bake Off, with local bakers—including, this year, yours truly—gathering in a large white vinyl tent in the park competing to win the title of Best Baker of Lake Potawatomi.
“I thought you’d be flattered,” Les whined. “I mean, since you don’t have breasts anymore, I figured you’d be happy to know you still have some womanly assets men find appealing.” He gave me a flirtatious wink beneath his bushy white brows and licked his ancient lips.
Is this guy for real? What century is this Neanderthal from?
Remember? They dug him out of that time capsule from the sixties, along with copies of Playboy and pictures of Barbara Eden in her harem costume from I Dream of Jeannie.
Pushing my flyaway dark-brown curls behind my ears, I raised my distinctive Norwegian rolling pin and took a step toward the scrawny senior with the ill-fitting silver hairpiece. “Lester,” I said in an even, measured tone, “you need to shut up and move away before I knock that bad rug off your miserable bald head. Right here. Right now.”
A couple women outside the end of the open baking tent tittered, and Lester flushed.
“Attagirl, Teddie,” said white-haired Fred Matson, one of my cookie fans, punching the air with his cane. “You tell ’im!”
More titters and chuckles came from the crowd gathered in the park for the first day of the annual competition.
Unbelievable this guy can still get away with this crap. There had been complaints to the chamber and City Hall over the years, but Lester’s influence—he owns several commercial properties in town—and wealth always made them disappear.
“Les, honey,” his long-suffering wife Patsy called from her table in the center of the tent, “can you come here, please? I need your help.”
“Sure, sweetie. I’ll be right there.” He hurried away from my baked-goods display table, glowering at me as he left.
“Way to put Lester in his place,” said my best friend and bookstore owner Char Jorgensen as she high-fived me, “but you can kiss that first-place baking trophy good-bye.”
“Not necessarily,” said Sharon Hansen, co-owner with her husband Jim of the Lake House Bed and Breakfast and the third member of our fortysomething girlfriends-since-grade-school group. Our teacher had dubbed us The Three Musketeers, and it had stuck. “Lester’s not the only judge in this competition.”
“True,” Char said, tossing her red ponytail. “But didn’t you have to sign something about being an impartial judge, Blondie”—she used Sharon’s high school nickname—“and not letting personal relationships with the contestants influence your decision-making?”
“Yes.” Sharon lifted her chin. “And I will be impartial. My judging will be based solely on taste and presentation.”
“Too bad Lester’s won’t,” said white-haired Bea Andersen, the third and final Bake-Off judge and longtime owner of Andersen’s Bakery, as she joined our conversation. “Patsy Morris has won the competition every year for the past nine years.”
“That’s what happens when you sleep with the head judge.” Char waggled her eyebrows at me in Groucho Marx fashion. “Maybe you should reconsider your Lester aversion.”
I shuddered. “Not in this lifetime.” Adjusting the boho-cotton scarf around my neck, I straightened my three-tiered dessert stand of peanut-butter blossoms. “My cookies can stand on their own.”
“Yes, they can,” my fellow Musketeer Sharon said. “And they will, if I’ve got anything to say about it.”
“Teddie, how come you haven’t entered the contest before now?” Bea asked.
“I was too busy with my job, and then the cancer and treatments took me out of commission for a while.”
Five plus years earlier, I’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, requiring a mastectomy and chemotherapy followed by a second mastectomy less than a year later. The cancer was a wake-up call—it made me realize life is short, too short for me to be stuck in a boring government job rather than pursuing my passion. I took early retirement, did some traveling, and followed my lifelong dream of becoming a writer. Since then I’ve had four Kate and Kallie mystery novels published, including the recently released A Dash of Death—my first USA Today and Amazon best seller.
“I’ve finished the first draft of my book and am letting it rest a while before I come back to it with fresh eyes to slash, burn, and rewrite,” I said, “so this was the perfect time to enter the contest.”
Char filched a cookie from the bottom tier and took a big bite. “Yum. You’ve definitely got my vote.”
“You don’t get to vote, Charlotte Jorgensen,” said Sharon. “Only the judges.” In a gesture well honed from being the mom of college-age twins, she placed her hands on her hips and shook her head at our freckled friend. “I can’t believe you just did that.”
“Yeah,” I said, adjusting the cookies to cover the empty spot left from Char’s cookie theft. “Hands off the goods, Cookie Monster, until after the judging.”
“Sorry. My bad.”
Brady Wells arrived and snaked his arm around Char’s waist. “What’s my girl gone and done now?”
“You need to arrest her, Sheriff,” said Sharon, only half joking. “She stole one of Teddie’s cookies before the judges even had a chance to sample each contestant’s entry.”
“Is that true?” Brady asked, giving Char a mock-stern look.
She held up her hands. “Guilty as charged. I’ve been a bad girl. Guess you better handcuff me and take me away,” she said playfully.
Brady blushed above his uniform collar.
“Get a room, you two,” I said. “Although it would be nice if you could wait until after the judging.”
That judging commenced half an hour later. Sharon, Bea, and Lester stopped by each of the top-ten contestants’ tables inside the spacious tent to taste-test the first entry of the competition: cookies. Contestants had been instructed to bake their favorite cookie using an original recipe of their own or one handed down through family generations.
I’d had a hard time deciding which cookie to enter, so a couple weeks ago I had enlisted Char, Brady, and (reluctantly) my mother to do some taste-testing in advance. Char wasn’t much help. She’d never met a cookie she didn’t like.
“You definitely need to make your peanut-butter blossoms,” she said, after inhaling three. “I mean, peanut butter and chocolate? What could be better?”
“Fattigman bakkels,” said Brady, brushing the powdered sugar from one of the fried-dough cookies (they’re pronounced futtymon buckles) off his uniform shirt. “You know I love your fattigman.”
“My grandma’s fattigman,” I corrected him. “She got the recipe from her grandmother, who brought it over from Norway. The name translates to poor man’s cookies, because back in the day, after buying all the ingredients, it left the baker poor. Happily, that’s no longer the case.”
Brady popped another one of the airy confections into his mouth. “I don’t care what they’re called or what they cost. I like them because the inside reminds me of doughnuts.”
“Careful,” I teased, “or you’ll turn into the pudgy doughnut-loving-cop stereotype.”
Char patted her boyfriend’s flat stomach. “No worries there. My guy is lean and mean.” She bit into a chippy chunk cookie—my version of chocolate-chip cookies with extra chocolate—and moaned with pleasure. “I changed my mind. These are my favorite.”
“You said that about the oatmeal-raisin too,” I reminded her. “I need a consensus here.”
“I vote for the lemon-sugar cookies,” interjected my mother (the mother who doesn’t have an ounce of fat anywhere on her slender seventy-three-year-old frame). “They’re lighter and less fattening.”
In the end, I decided on classic peanut-butter blossoms topped with a Hershey’s kiss—Char was right; the combination of peanut butter and chocolate is hard to beat. The judges apparently agreed, because I’d wound up in the final top five.
The remaining winning entries also included Sophie Miller’s granola clusters, Jeffrey Hollenbeck’s gluten-free chewy chocolate-chip cookies, Barbara Christensen’s snickerdoodles, and Patsy Morris’s coconut macaroons. (Wilma Sorensen’s sugar cookies had made it to the top ten, but Wilma, the town gossip, had been disqualified when it was discovered she’d used store-bought refrigerated cookie dough.)
“Congratulations to our finalists,” squawked Lester Morris into the microphone at the gazebo bandstand, where all the contestants had assembled. “The judges and I had a hard time picking the final five—and almost came to blows doing so,” he said with a fake laugh, sending a pointed glance in Bea and Sharon’s direction, “but it all worked out in the end.” He motioned for the finalists to step forward. “As you can see, this year we’ve got a man in the Bake-Off, our newest resident and latest member of the chamber of commerce, Jeff Hollenbeck. Jeff here is an artist. He moved to town a few months ago and set up our new local arts collective.”
The head judge grinned at the good-looking gray-ponytailed male finalist wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt, cargo pants, and Birkenstocks. “Never thought I’d say this, Jeff, but those healthy cookies of yours are mighty tasty—nice and chewy. Can you tell us why you made them gluten-free?”
Jeffrey took the mike from Lester’s outstretched hand. “My daughter Willow was diagnosed with celiac disease when she was six, so I learned to make gluten-free meals and desserts for her. Over time, I realized that going gluten-free was healthy for me too, and since I love chocolate-chip cookies”—he chuckled—“I determined to make the best gluten-free chocolate-chip cookies possible.”
“And you succeeded,” piped fellow judge Bea, giving Jeffrey a thumbs-up.
“Yep,” Sharon agreed, sending him a congratulatory smile. “You sure did.”
Lester, who fancied himself the American Paul Hollywood—although he had a good twenty-five years on the Great British Bake Off judge—scowled at the other two judges for stealing his thunder and plucked the microphone back. “Thanks, Jeff. Let’s hear from the other contestants now.” He cast an appreciative glance at Barbara Christensen, an attractive silver-haired widow in crisp white linen slacks and a red top. “Ah, the lovely Barbara … would you like to tell us about your snickerdoodles, pretty lady?” He sidled up to her.
Barbara, distinctly uncomfortable, took a small step back from Les. “They were my husband’s favorite, and my grandchildren love them,” she said. “Simple as that.”
The head judge then moved on to Sophie Miller, the granddaughter of my older neighbor, Margaret, who has Parkinson’s. Sophie, who is five feet tall and maybe a hundred pounds, sported a turquoise streak in her long blonde hair, courtesy of her BFF and stylist Lauren. Sophie moved back home last year after losing her job and now lives with her grandma as her caregiver.
“Let’s have a round of applause for our youngest contestant,” Les said.
While the crowd clapped, the lecherous judge leaned down, apparently forgetting about his mike, and whispered something inappropriate into shy twenty-year-old Sophie’s ear.
Sophie blushed furiously and slapped him in the face.
* * *
“Well, that was an exciting first day of competition,” Sharon said as we gathered around the island in the Lake House kitchen later that afternoon.
“I’ll say.” Char scarfed down one of my leftover cookies. “I can’t wait to see what happens tomorrow. Maybe one of the contestants will smash a pie into Lester’s face.” She sent me a hopeful look.
“I’m not wasting my grandma’s classic cherry pie on that jerk,” I said, thinking of the intricate lattice-and-leaf design I still had to painstakingly create when I got home. “Besides, custard-cream pies are the usual pie-in-the-face fare.”
“That’s right,” Jim said. “Cream pies are what we used during our fraternity food fights.” Sharon’s forty-five-year-old husband and co-owner of the Lake House smirked at the memory. “I’d be happy to resurrect my college pie-smashing skills on Les. That guy is a piece of work.”
“Tell me about it,” Brady said. “I still can’t believe he wanted to file assault charges against Sophie.”
Char gave her boyfriend a quick hug. “I’m glad you set him straight, babe.”
“How exactly did you manage that?” I asked. “I was busy packing up and missed it.”
