Overdue for Murder

“Betsy?”
My Aunt Maggie was at the back door. She opened the squeaking screen and walked in pulling a sheer scarf off of her freshly teased and sprayed hair.
“Ruby Green says hello.” Maggie had just left her weekly haunt, “The Best Little Hair House in Texas.” There was more breaking news going on down there than Rocky could ever hope for. If he had any brains he’d plant a reporter at the salon who could cut hair. Maggie heard it all, and thankfully, she brought it back to me. “Anything going on?” I asked.
“Well, heard about one affair, and Ms. Gibbs has been dressing with the blinds up again.”
“Something to that,” I said as reached for a dusty cookbook, turning the pages to the cake section. I leafed through sumptuous pictures of the kind of birthday cakes you could only dream of on an empty stomach.
“Aunt Maggie, have you ever made one of these fancy cakes?”
“Like what? Like what you see at the grocery?” Maggie’s voice rose at the end, exaggerating her Texas accent.
I propped up the book for her to see a cake titled “Undersea Fantasy,” which featured crabs, turtles and dolphins all crafted out of what looked like marshmallows and licorice strings. She peered at it, adjusting her bifocals on her nose as I explained to her what Rocky had asked me to do for Creative Cooks Day.
“Gee, Betsy. I’m thinkin’ you’re in over your head this time. I remember when you tried to make Danny that smiley face cake. The black icing you used on the grin ran down the side and it about scared him to death. Surprised he made it to his next birthday without counselin’.”
I scratched my head. “Oh, yeah. I forgot about that, no wonder on the video all the kids were screaming.”
“Sure, and then there was the time you tried to make Judd that cake and forgot to put the eggs in.”
“I should have caught that.”
“Yeah, we had to put candles on a box of honey buns that day. You got a track record for bad baking, baby girl.”
Zach and Danny ran into the kitchen. “Mama,” Danny said. “We’re going to break the world record.”
“What world record?” Maggie asked.
“All of them!” Danny answered.
“We’re still figuring out what incredible thing we’re going to do, Aunt Maggie, so I’m glad you got your hair done.” Zach stretched out his arms, imagining his future paparazzi. “There will probably be hundreds of reporters out on the lawn after we do it.”
“Thanks for the warning,” she smiled.
I paged through the glossy photos in the cookbook. There were cakes that looked like circuses, swimming pools, insects, hats, cartoon characters. I started having a case of baking terror. “You know, Aunt Maggie. I could always drive into Houston and buy something and bring it back. They’ll never know.”
“You’ll know.”
I sighed.
“You could make a cake out of rubber bands,” suggested Zach.
I nodded. “That’s original, but not too tasty.” I turned the page and spotted the cake labeled “Beginner’s Crocodile Cake.” How kind of them to have a cake that was supposed to be easy enough for people like me. I grabbed a pen and started writing down the ingredients I would need. Surely I could stir up some green frosting and turn it into something.
That evening as I checked my email, I had a message from “weatherguy,” Leo Fitzpatrick. We had met last October while I had been helping my aunt do her paranormal ghost hunt out at the abandoned tuberculosis hospital on the edge of town. For a while I wasn’t sure if I could trust him, especially when he became a suspect in the murder of my ex-husband’s partner, Oliver Canfield. He seemed to keep showing up in the wrong place at the wrong time, but in the end he turned out to be a pretty decent guy. It also didn’t hurt he was six feet tall and the handsomest man I had met since my husband.
Now I was embarking on the rest of my life, and that included beginning to date. Leo Fitzpatrick was a part of this. Since our finding each other in a pretty dark and scary place, we had spoken on the telephone and emailed, and he had come back to Pecan Bayou a couple of times, staying at the Sinclair Arms, our local hotel. Returning the favor, Zach and I visited him and his nephew, Tyler, in Dallas, and we also stayed at a hotel. Each time we went out it was either with the boys or for a few hours while the boys stayed with a babysitter. Having a long-distance relationship worked for me because even though I really wanted to date again, something kept holding me back.
My time with Barry and the trust he betrayed changed my attitude toward love and marriage. Why couldn’t men wear white and black hats to make it easier to tell the good guys from the bad? It would make it so much simpler for all of us in the trenches. I read Fitzpatrick’s email.
Dear Betsy,
There is a jazz festival in Dallas next month, and I would love to have you come and visit. Could your dad babysit? Tyler will be at a weekend grief support camp for children who have lost a parent. I miss her too, but they don’t have one of those for brothers.
Fitz
I was touched by his honesty. Tyler was a sperm-donor baby, so when his sister took her own life, Leo stepped up to be a combination uncle and father to her son. Reading through his message, I could surmise that he wanted to spend the weekend with me and that he wanted our get-together to be without either his son or mine. Up until this time, the physical side of our relationship had been pretty close to platonic. Taking the boys out of the equation changed things. As long as it felt like we were on a “playdate,” I felt perfectly safe. If Fitzpatrick even tried to come near me, Zach would squeeze in between us with some sort of need. Without my fifty-pound protector there, things would be different, and I felt a mixture of terror and delight over the thought of it.
Maybe I could just drive over for the day and make my exit before nightfall. I could make something up, like I have to teach Sunday School or help with a science project that was due on Monday. I tapped my fingers on the keyboard for a moment and then hit reply.
Dear Leo,
Sounds great, but let me check my schedule.
Betsy
That was easy. I didn’t say no, but I didn’t exactly rush into his arms – and oh how nice that would be. I just needed a little more time to think this out. According to his email, I had several weeks. I had to admit it was time to make some changes in my life, but I also needed to make sure they were changes that would be good for me and Zach. After Barry, I wasn’t sure about my own judgment of men, but also having a man like my father in my life, I knew they weren’t all bad. Some of them were downright pleasant to be around.
On Sunday afternoon I decided to tackle my first attempt at the crocodile cake. I propped the cookbook open on the counter and looked at an adorable picture of a little bitty crocodile in a bed of raffia straw. It would be so simple. I would bake a couple of cakes in Bundt cake pans. From there I would cut the Bundt cake in three equal pieces and then take one of those pieces and cut it in half sideways. Then I would arrange the three equal pieces to look kind of like a snake. Then take one of the cut halves and make the tail and take the other and cut it into four pieces to make the feet. So easy. It was kind of like sewing with food.
I measured, stirred and poured a box of chocolate cake mix into my Bundt pan and put it into the oven. I needed malted milk balls, a large marshmallow, gummy spearmint leaves, green gumdrops and white yogurt-covered pretzels. The marshmallow, cut in half, would be the eyes, with malted milk balls for the pupils. The spearmint leaves went on his feet for claws, and green gumdrops went on his back for whatever those bump things are on dragons. The yogurt-covered pretzels would be stuck in the head section along where the mouth would be, to look like teeth. For his slimy scaly skin, I would tint some white icing green. I had some multicolored fruit snacks that I could substitute for gumdrops and some real pretzels to make the teeth on my practice crocodile.
As I scoured the cabinets for malted milk balls, Zach came running in with his book of world records. His small frame was swallowed up by a Houston Astros T-shirt he got when my dad took him to an Astros game last year. Zach had been struggling with Little League, and my dad thought it would be a good idea for him to see what baseball was like on a professional level. Zach took it all in, including the overpriced souvenir stand.
“Hey Mom, how long would you say I could go without sleeping?”
“Well, when you were a baby I think you might have been working on that world record.” I closed one cupboard door and opened another, still in search. He stood still, waiting for my attention. “Okay, what’s the record?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s not in here anywhere. Why is that?” he asked.
“Maybe because if you go without sleep, you die. It’s not healthy.” I took down the baking powder, now looking to see if the malted milk balls were in the back of the cabinet.
“How do you know that?” he said, looking at me as if I might be making this stuff up.
“I just do. You’re a growing boy, and you need all the sleep you can get. What’s another record you could break?”
He sat down at the kitchen table and leafed through the pages. “Uh, I could stack the most Legos. Umm, it looks like this guy stacked twenty-one Legos in fifteen seconds.”
My hand landed on a crunchy cellophane bag. I had found them at last. The malted milk balls had probably been up there since last Christmas, but they would work for a practice cake. If I hadn’t found them I was going to have to use salad olives instead. This would be much more pleasing to the palate.
“That sounds pretty good, Zach. Why don’t you go practice?”
He slammed the book shut with a loud pop and ran out of the room again. Life is pretty exciting when you go from adventure to adventure, I thought. The buzzer on the stove went off, and I busied myself preparing the cake to transform into a crocodile. I carefully cut each piece as per the instructions and then angled them just so to make the little crocodile’s body. I felt pretty good as I put the frosting over the S-shaped cake. I started sticking the gummy fruit snacks on the back when all of a sudden the cake split. There was a noticeable crack where the sections should have met. Chocolate brown came gaping up between the green icing, making it look like some sort of ghastly roadkill. This would never do. I tried sticking a little icing in between, but still the cracks appeared. How could I make it look like a cute little crocodile when it was starting to look like it had been run over by a pickup truck? I tried attaching toothpicks to it, but by the end of my handling, the delicate cake looked like a sad pile of sod. I had finally made something worse than the smiley face cake. An exploding brown worm.
I looked at my now icing-spattered cake cookbook. There were cakes in there that would bring Rachael Ray to tears. There had to be cake design tips that the Happy Hinter needed to add to her portfolio. I knew just who to ask about this, and that was my friend Pattie at PattieCake’s Bakery. If anyone could make a crocodile cake, it was Pattie. If anyone could make a cake stick together, it was also Pattie.