As the Christmas Cookie Crumbles_Food Lovers' Village Mystery by Leslie Budewitz

Author:Leslie Budewitz [Budewitz, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: christmas cookie, s village, Mystery, food lovers, Christmas, food lover&#39, s mystery, as the cookie crumbles, trouble at jam fest, mystery fiction, mystery novel, mystery book, s mysteries, budewitz, CVR09112017, trouble at the jam fest
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2018-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Adam stood outside the courthouse sporting a big grin.

As we climbed the stairs to the clerk’s office, all thoughts of firewalls and murder and motherless girls slipped away, replaced by anticipation. By joy. Happiness. Nervousness. From the way Adam squeezed my hand, I knew he felt it, too.

Gratitude. Love. So much emotion swirling inside me, my skin could hardly contain it.

We’d filled out the application online and now presented our IDs, paid the fee, and signed in all the right places. Got the paperwork our officiant and witnesses would need. Sealed the deal with a kiss, accepted the deputy clerk’s best wishes, and headed out.

On the front steps, Adam kissed me again, a sweet, slow promise, before dashing off to his meeting.

As long as I was in Pondera, I decided to follow another line of thought. A wild hare, but those can be the most inspiring. I swung by the newspaper office and asked to see their archives. A twenty-something with a sapphire stud in one nostril set me up in front of a computer that provided access all the way back to 1980. That was decades more than the online archive, and plenty for my snoopful purposes.

The embezzlement from Beckman Timber and the charges against Merrily Thornton and Cliff Grimes had been big news for weeks. Some of the story I knew. Other details surprised me. Merrily had gotten the summer job as Cliff’s office assistant not through her father’s connections in the timber industry, as I’d assumed, but through Taya’s friendship with Sally. Still, the aftermath must have left them both feeling betrayed.

Taya was a good ten years older than Sally, and they weren’t neighbors. But unlikely friendships sometimes pop up in small towns.

Cliff Grimes had been away on a fishing trip when Sally opened the mail, found a tax lien, and called a CPA. Then she’d called the law. Cliff heard the news on the TV when he stopped at a favorite watering hole on his way home. He split for the border, but the bartender called the sheriff, and poor Cliff never saw Canada again.

Another article detailed the escape plan investigators pieced together. He’d been working on it for a while. It involved fast cars, fast boats, and secret accounts in banks on faraway islands.

It did not involve Merrily Thornton.

The whole business deflated my trial balloon theory that Walt and Taya thought she’d seduced Cliff and stolen from his wife. Discovering that their sweet-faced teenager was a manipulative gold-digger might have justified their anger and sense of betrayal.

What if he’d seduced her and planned to split? Talk about slimy.

It didn’t help me understand her parents’ reaction. But it might explain why Merrily had never spoken out against him.

I sipped the double latte I’d picked up on the way. It tasted thin, almost burned, unlike the espresso at Le Panier. At the time of Cliff’s trial, about 75 percent of the missing money had been located. He claimed Merrily had taken the rest, but investigators could never find a trail between her and any of the stolen funds.

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