As Long As There's Cake Read online

  So what was keeping her here now?

  Cookie thought about it another way: If Mara had been the accomplice to a bank robbery all those years back, wouldn’t she have had the cash she needed to make her escape, no matter what else was happening in her life? Didn’t that mean that it wasn’t her?

  Then again, her traitorous mind suggested, maybe having that money was why she could dream about going to all those exotic lands. Maybe everything else had gotten in her way. Her mother had only died a few years ago. She could have been waiting for her chance to leave. That could be why she was so upset now. Jerry and Cookie were ruining that chance.

  Either way, she couldn’t accuse Mara of anything without proof. She sat down on the bed, trying to think of something she could say that would be reassuring. “This will all be over soon, I’m sure. Jerry is a good man. He’s just going to look through your house and then when he doesn’t find anything we’ll be gone. That will be the last you’ll have to hear about it.”

  Mara hooked a leg over her knee. “I shouldn’t have to hear about it at all. I haven’t done anything. My mother didn’t do anything. You have no proof.”

  Hmm. Funny that she would put it that way. Cookie had to swallow back the first comment that came to her mind because there was a big difference between Mara not doing anything, and not having any proof that she did anything. It was like Mara was being even more defensive now that a police officer was searching her house.

  Which made Cookie very nervous.

  She put a hand on Mara’s wrist. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to intrude on you like this.”

  “Oh, you didn’t?” Mara answered sarcastically. With a sudden push she jumped up off the bed. “Why not? Everyone else is. My house is becoming like Grand Central Station. Everyone comes through here. So why not you and your husband the cop? Huh? Why not. Sure. Well, I suppose you’re going to want to search in here, too. I mean, it’s just my bedroom. So. Look around, Cookie. Just take a look!”

  She walked to her dresser and yanked open the top drawer. “Here’s my socks and underwear. Here’s some shirts.”

  Clothes went flying around the room as Mara tossed them aside.

  With a sharp turn she went to her shelves. “Look through the books, too. You never know what you might find in these pages, right? Ooh, look. Might even be a bookmark in this one!”

  Cookie had to duck as a paperback novel went sailing over her head.

  The closet door got thrown open and now more clothes got flung to the floor. “Pants. Blouses. Oh, here’s my favorite dress. Better check that one closely!”

  Cookie stood up, and came over to Mara, taking hold of her by the wrists. “You don’t have to do this, Mara. Honestly, just stop.”

  “Why, isn’t this what you want?” Mara asked sharply. “You want to believe I’m guilty, then let me act like I’m guilty!”

  “Mara, please.”

  “No! I’m being accused of helping someone rob a bank. You already think I’m guilty. Well, maybe this pair of shoes is the evidence. Maybe my bowling ball? Huh? That looks very suspicious, now doesn’t it?”

  Cookie definitely did not want to dodge a bowling ball. She tried to calm Mara down, but everything she said only seemed to make things worse. “Mara, it will be all right. We don’t actually think you did anything.”

  “Yes you do! You and Jerry both think I’m guilty. You think I’m a master thief, and that I was stupid enough to keep money from a robbery in my house for, what, twenty years was it? Longer?” She laughed hysterically and pulled her hands away from Cookie. “Well, you find it. Go ahead, you look! You see if there’s any money here anywhere!”

  Things were crashing off the shelves to the floor, one after the other, and Cookie had to step back out of the way before something landed on her foot and broke her toes. Mara was out of control. She was obviously upset, and although Cookie could understand why, this was getting out of control. If Jerry didn’t hurry, she was beginning to worry that Mara might hurt herself.

  She turned away from Mara as the woman continued to make a mess of her own things, meaning to go find Jerry and bring him here to stop this. He’d asked her to stay with Mara and distract her, keep an eye on her, but this was getting out of hand. She didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t a police officer and she didn’t know how to handle a situation like this. She needed Jerry.

  And there he was.

  He was standing in the doorway to the bedroom. His eyes were narrowed as he watched Mara. Half of his body was still in the hallway, and Cookie had the distinct impression he had been about to storm in until he caught sight of the chaos Mara was creating. His gaze slipped over to Cookie, and with just his eyes he told her to step aside.

  She was only too happy to do exactly that.

  “Mara,” Jerry said to her, “you need to stop.”

  “Why!” She spun around from her closet, tossing an empty suitcase aside. It bounced off the mattress and knocked over a lamp on the side table that went crashing to the floor. “I don’t have to do anything! You want to arrest me right now? Huh? There’s nothing in this house worth arresting me for. Are you done looking? Are you? There is nothing here for you to find, Jerry, so you can just go!”

  He took a single step sideways, until he was fully framed in the doorway. In his hand he held a large black fabric bag. It was faded, and rumpled, but Cookie could tell the bag was full of something.

  No, she realized. It wasn’t just a bag.

  It was a backpack.

  “I found this,” Jerry said. “This isn’t nothing. I found it in your shop. This backpack has a bunch of money in it and none of it looks newer than thirty years ago. A backpack full of old-style paper money. All the dates are from before the Northern Adirondack bank robbery. There’s been some security changes since then that aren’t on any of these bills. I mean, it isn’t all the money from the robbery, but I’ll bet my last year’s salary that it’s whatever is left.”

  Mara glared at him, not saying a thing, but if looks could kill…

  Jerry didn’t seem to notice the murder written in her eyes. “Oh, and guess what? I found it in the only locked cabinet out there in your shop. Seems to me like you had something to hide. Or, you did, until I found this.”

  It took a minute for Cookie to realize she had her mouth hanging open. The backpack from the robbery. The one that Jonathan Graham said was in the possession of the accomplice. Here it was, in Mara’s beauty shop. In a locked cabinet.

  The one that Cream had been sniffing at when they were here before.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered. “Oh, Mara… no…”

  Mara ignored her and shouted at Jerry instead. “You broke into my cabinet? You had no right!”

  “Uh, yes I did, actually.” He pointed to the paper Mara had tossed aside, lying among the mess of clothes and other stuff. “I had a search warrant, remember? I searched, and I found. Now comes the next part. Mara Kelsey, you’re under arrest.”

  Those words finally took the steam out of Mara’s tirade. She slumped against the wall, and hung her head, and let the tears fall.

  The Widow’s Rest Police Department was getting pretty crowded.

  Jonathan Graham was still in the holding cell at the back. It looked like he’d held up his end of the bargain, giving them the information they needed to solve at least part of a decades’ old robbery. They might not have the actual robber in custody, but they had his accomplice. With some more digging, they might discover the identity of the robber as well.

  For now, Graham was going to stay in that cell. They still needed to square away his original arrest for breaking into people’s houses. They needed the Feds to sign off on his release. Just because he’d helped the police did not make him a good guy.

  The other officers had come back to the station after searching Ed and Pauline’s houses. Loretta informed Jerry that at both places, they didn’t find anything. That made sense. They’d already found what they were looking for in Mara’s house.
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  Mara was at the station, too. Since Graham was in the holding cell, Jerry put Mara in the interview room. She wasn’t handcuffed to the ring in the room’s metal table like they usually did with people in custody. There was no need. Mara hadn’t said a single word the whole way here. She’d just sat there, listless and crestfallen, like she’d spent all of her energy in the tantrum she had thrown at her house. Like she had completely given up.

  Cookie wished she could understand how this could have happened. How could a woman like Mara do something like this to the community where she lived, and where she worked, and keep it quiet all these years? Although, as Cookie recalled, Mara did say that she hated it here. What were her exact words? ‘Postage stamp cesspit?’ Yes, that was it. She truly had no love for this town.

  When she looked at it that way, Cookie thought maybe she could understand Mara doing this. Some people were never happy, even if they had all the money in the world. Or at least, all the stolen cash from the local bank.

  Cookie was sitting at Jerry’s desk in his office, trying to stay out of everyone’s way while they scurried about, putting together forms and paperwork and doing whatever else police officers did to get suspects properly charged and arraigned before a judge. Jerry had told her once that police work was only one-third excitement and action, but seventy-five percent paperwork. When she’d pointed out to him that those numbers didn’t make any sense, he’d told her that was because paperwork didn’t make much sense.

  She really loved that man. She was proud of him for pushing this mystery to its conclusion, no matter how it had turned out.

  With another long sigh, Cookie checked her watch. Almost noon. She really should be getting back to the bakery. She had complete faith in her granddaughter to run the business for a day, but it wouldn’t be fair to ask that of her. Especially with the troubles she was already having with Rick. They might have partially solved a robbery from long ago, but there were still problems right now in the present that needed to be taken care of. She gave herself a few seconds to wonder where that boy had run off to this morning. He wasn’t from Widow’s Rest. She doubted he knew many of the people here anymore, now that he and Clarissa had both been gone for so long. So where did he go? Was he back yet?

  Well, that would be a problem for when she got back to the bakery. Tonight most likely, after she and Clarissa had closed up for the day. Oh, and no doubt Clarissa hadn’t had time to call her mother yet. Or more likely, she was just putting it off. Cookie would have to sit down with her tonight, so they could make the call together.

  Cookie sighed again. Why couldn’t things just be simple for a while?

  Maybe because when they were simple, you get bored, she told herself. Sit still for too long, and you just might wake up dead one day.

  She was beginning to feel old again. Now, that was quite enough of that.

  Standing up from the desk, Cookie looked for a pad of paper and a pen, so she could write Jerry a note. Then she was just going to leave. He was busier than anyone else here. She didn’t want to interrupt him while he was working so hard. Part of it also was that she didn’t want to step back into an investigation that had gotten someone she knew arrested, and on their way to jail.

  Hard to feel sorry for Mara, she told herself, with what Jerry had found in her hair salon.

  She pushed several folders and papers around the desk. How could Jerry conduct business without a notepad somewhere nearby? She couldn’t go ten minutes at the bakery without writing herself a note. Buy more eggs, try less cinnamon in this recipe and more sugar in that one. She always had a pocketful of notes on little scrap pieces of paper. Sometimes she wrote them so quickly that she couldn’t remember later on what she’d been writing to herself…

  That train of thought crumbled away as her eyes fell on one folder in particular among all the things on Jerry’s desk. It was labelled with his strong, not-so-neat handwriting as simply “Background checks—Robbery.”

  Cookie scrunched her eyebrows together. Those would be the investigations on the bank employees, Ed and Pauline and possibly even Rosalyn even though she had passed on. And Mara, she reminded herself. Mara must be in there, after the search warrant had turned up the very thing Jonathan Graham said it would.

  Her hand moved toward the folder.

  Then she pulled it back again. She shouldn’t look. It was sensitive police information. Not for civilian eyes. She shouldn’t look.

  Should she?

  Her internal debate continued as she opened the folder and took out her reading glasses. She turned a few pages, ignoring the information on Ed, ignoring anything about Pauline. She wasn’t doing this to snoop. Well, not exactly. What she was curious to see was what Jerry had found out about Mara. If Cookie had been so wrong about her, what else had a police check discovered?

  She shouldn’t look…

  …but she couldn’t stop herself.

  The next page was Mara’s report. All of this would have been included with the search warrant request that Loretta faxed to the judge, of course, which meant that Jerry had seen this already. He hadn’t said anything about any of it to her, so didn’t that mean there would be nothing to see?

  Cookie closed her eyes for a moment, letting the debate between looking and not looking play out in her mind. Then she pressed her lips tight and just decided to look no matter what her mind was telling her. In her heart, she felt she needed to know. Sometimes you just had to look under the rocks where things were hidden in your town. This week, she had experienced firsthand how people hid behind masks of perfection. Well. Nobody was perfect. Herself included.

  The question, at the moment, was just how imperfect was her friend Mara Kelsey?

  She read through the two pages on Mara. Then she read them again. There was nothing criminal here. There was an application for her license as a hairdresser… Cookie didn’t even realize the state required hairdressers to be licensed. There were a couple of speeding tickets listed, but that was the worst thing in here as far as she could see. Her biographical data was here, including the name of her ex-husband.

  This certainly didn’t read like the life story of a crafty criminal who had lived off the cash from a bank robbery and kept it hidden from the world all these years. It read more like the normal life of a normal person. In fact, it turned out that Mara had been the victim of a crime just last week, according to this. Someone had broken into her house.

  Oh, my. That was the string of home invasions that Patrick Flanagan had been taking care of while she and Jerry were on their honeymoon out of state. The break ins that had been committed by Mister Jonathan Graham, the man in the holding cell at the back of the station.

  Well, well, well. Cookie thought that was just the oddest coincidence. Graham had broken into several houses when the owners were away in order to sleep there for a night or two, as Cookie understood it. What were the chances that he would end up sleeping in the very house that held the money from the Northern Adirondack bank robbery?

  Then a thought occurred to her. That must be how Graham knew about the money being there. He must have seen it when he broke into Mara’s place and spent the night there. Then, when he got arrested, he had information to trade for his freedom.

  She had to wonder, though, why he wouldn’t have taken the money for himself. What was the point to leaving it behind? Just to have a bargaining chip later on?

  Also, didn’t Jerry say the money had been in that locked cabinet? Yes, he did. That was the one she’d seen during her hair appointment with a padlock. Cream had known there was something in there. She should have listened to him. That lock had been a sturdy one. She knew how Jerry got into it. He was an expert at picking locks, although it wasn’t something he wanted to advertise. The search warrant would have included everywhere in the house, locked or not.

  Then again, Jonathan Graham had been picking locks to get in people’s houses, hadn’t he? He had most likely undone the padlock for that cabinet the same way. This was why C
ookie liked deadbolts on all of her doors. There was no way to get through those. Unless someone broke the door. Or a window. Nothing was a hundred percent safe, but padlocks were no trouble for people like Jonathan Graham who could use a simple lockpick set to open them up.

  She would have to talk to Jerry about all of this when she had the time, and when he wasn’t so busy. Perhaps tonight at dinner. They had a lot to talk about, including getting things ready for her big move to his place. With everything else that had sort of fallen by the wayside. Perhaps now that this mystery was wrapped up, they would have time for the other big things happening in their life. The move, Clarissa and Rick, and whatever else the world planned on throwing at them.

  The mystery was over. Well, not completely. They had Mara in custody, with some of the bank money, but she knew Jerry would have a lot of work ahead of him still to put all of the pieces together. Her part was done though. All she had to do now was sit back and watch the oncoming frenzy once the media got ahold of the story. She definitely was not looking forward to that. Reporters could be so pushy about getting their front-page stories. Jerry and the rest of the officers here could worry about that. She was happy to just be a small-town baker. She certainly wasn’t hiding behind any sort of mask or curtain, that was for sure! She was exactly who she wanted to be.

  Chapter 8

  Cookie didn’t remember that she’d missed lunch until she got back to the bakery and all of the wonderful smells of the pastries and the warm breads and goodies made her stomach growl. She went in through the back door, as usual, and when she saw the lineup at the counter her first thought was that maybe Clarissa was in over her head after all and she couldn’t keep up with the sales. Leaving her alone all day might have been a mistake.

  But just before she would have jumped in and taken over, she stopped herself. She saw Clarissa, smiling and chatting with each customer as she quickly bagged up the items they requested and gave them their total and made change for them or worked the EFT card machine. Whenever a customer needed a moment to decide what they really wanted, she quickly raced out to the nearly full tables in the dining area, making sure everyone was doing all right and asking if anyone needed anything.