Olivia refreshed her computer screen and stared at Clarisse’s cookie cutters. “The autopsy revealed Jasmine had given birth. I’m willing to bet she had a daughter.” She pointed to the gingerbread woman and girl. “There’s no mother and son here, only a mother and daughter. Can your friend check with hospitals?”
“That would take a long time. We don’t know when Jasmine gave birth. She might have used another name or given birth at home. A name would help.”
“What about Faith, the name on the note to Clarisse that I gave you?”
“Still a long, long shot. If this Faith was a friend of hers, then maybe Jasmine used her ID at a hospital, but we need a last name.” With his hand on the doorknob, Del said, “Cody and I will be here tomorrow morning at eleven. Get some sleep.”
“I’ll probably still be decorating cookies at eleven,” Maddie said.
Olivia didn’t answer. She was staring at her computer screen, trying to tease out a thought. She heard the alley door shut behind Del, but it barely registered.
“Maddie, come look at this.” Olivia pointed toward the left corner of the photo on her screen, then over to the right side.
“What?” Maddie pulled over a chair.
“Clarisse spoke some French, you know. A little, anyway. You see this tree shape, right above the gingerbread mother and daughter? What if Clarisse was trying to find a cutter that represented a forest?”
“You’ve totally lost me.” With an air of boredom, Maddie began poking loose curls back under her bandanna.
“Dubois. The name Dubois loosely translates as ‘of the wood’ or ‘of the forest.’”
Maddie dragged over a chair. “You think ‘tree’ is as close to ‘forest’ as Clarisse could get? That would imply the gingerbread woman is Jasmine Dubois, and the girl is her daughter, whose first name we don’t know.”
“Except . . .” Olivia pointed at the far left side of the screen. “What does that look like to you?”
Maddie twisted her head in several directions, trying to find an angle that made sense of the partial image. “It looks sort of familiar. Not a flower shape, at least I don’t think so. Can you zoom in a bit?” She touched the screen and traced the outline as best she could. “For some reason it reminds me of my first high school boyfriend, Matt.”
“You mean Matt the do-gooder? The one who left you on the curb while he helped any woman over thirty across the street?”
“That’s the one.”
“Hang on.” Olivia jumped up and rushed over to the desk, moving far too fast for someone who’d recently wrecked her car. She’d pay for it, but she didn’t care. She grabbed her list of Clarisse’s entire cookie cutter collection and flipped through it. “Yep, there it is,” she said, poking a triumphant finger at one name.
“Hold still, will you?” Maddie followed Olivia’s finger and read, “‘Boy Scout insignia.’ There’s a Boy Scout cookie cutter?”
“Clarisse had this handmade when Hugh was a Boy Scout, so she could bake cookies for his troop. Well, so Bertha could bake them. Clarisse showed me a photo of a plate piled with cookies, all shaped and decorated like the Boy Scout insignia.”
“Okay,” Maddie said, “but what startling revelation does this lead to?”
Olivia quickly found a website that showed the Boy Scout insignia in its entirety. “What is that shape called?”
“Oh. It’s another French thing, isn’t it?”
“It’s a fleur-de-lis.”
“Livie, don’t you dare ask me to guess what that means, or I swear—”
“Fleur means ‘flower,’” Olivia said. “And ‘lis’ means ‘lily.’”
A broad smile plumped Maddie’s cheeks as she stared at the screen. “I knew I’d seen that somewhere before.”
“I just told you—”
“No, not the fleur whatever, I mean that one.” Maddie poked her finger at the six-sided flower to the right of the fleur-de-lis. She snatched the laptop off the table and put it on her lap. Her fingers flew until she pulled up the website of an online cookie-cutter vendor. “Look at that.” She turned the screen toward Olivia.
And there it was, a six-sided copper cutter with pointed petals, labeled “lily flower.” On Clarisse’s list, the cutter was labeled simply “six-sided flower.” Olivia wondered if Clarisse had obscured the name to protect her grandchild.
“I need your cell,” Olivia said. When Maddie dug it out of her coat pocket and handed it to her, Olivia punched in a number. “Del? I may have something for you. Lily.”
“The flower?” Del sounded groggy.
“Also a name. A flower name, like Jasmine. I think the child’s name is Lily.”
“What makes you think so?”
“It’s complicated, I’ll explain later, but I’m pretty sure I’m right.”
“Okay, I’ll . . .” Del yawned. “I’ll call Roberta. Maybe it’ll help. Bye.” The telephone clunked and went silent.
Olivia handed the phone back to Maddie. “I hope our Lily doesn’t show up in an obituary.”
Chapter Twenty-four
The next morning as Olivia and Maddie finished readying The Gingerbread House for Clarisse Chamberlain’s memorial, storm clouds began rolling in. Sheriff Del and Deputy Cody had already arrived. Cody had taken his position in the store kitchen, with the door slightly ajar. He would be the only one armed.
“Perfect,” Maddie said, shutting the windows against the first spatter of raindrops. “It’s a dark and stormy afternoon.”
Olivia was so keyed up, she giggled.
Ellie and Jason Greyson arrived, shaking off raindrops. Ellie peeled her raincoat off an outfit that was unique yet appropriate—a tunic and loose pants of black silk with glistening silver thread work. A silver silk scarf draped loosely around her neck and over a shoulder. A single braid hung down her back, secured with a thin black ribbon.
Jason wore his best black jeans.
“Fill me in on my role, dear,” Ellie said with a gentle tug at Olivia’s arm.
“For this experiment to work, “Olivia said, “the guests need to understand what the cookie shapes are. You could drop a subtle hint here and there.”
“I am the soul of subtlety.”
Olivia led her mother to the cookbook nook, where Maddie had cleared space on a table by moving a display of pie-baking equipment to the main sales room. In its place was a large metal tray holding one each of the identifiable cookie shapes found in the photo of Clarisse’s desk. They’d given up on two shapes.
“Never mind the icing colors,” Olivia said. “First, tell me what you think the shapes represent.”
Ellie pointed a silvery polished nail. “That is an angel in the upper-left corner. Then a baby carriage, a coffin, a bird of some sort?”
“A dove.”
“Of course.” Ellie hesitated at the next shape. “Oh, a nutcracker. And that must be a tree, despite the bright red trunk. Oh, a gingerbread woman and little girl. I grew up with a set like that. I wonder what happened to it.”
“Time marches on, Mother.”
“Yes, dear. Over here we have a witch’s hat, that darling Dancing Snoopy with purple fur, a flower of some type. . . .”
“That’s an important one,” Olivia said. “It’s meant to be a lily.”
“Oh yes, I see it now. And the flower next to it?”
“A jasmine flower.”
“Ah. So Lily is . . . ?”
“We think Lily is Jasmine Dubois’s daughter. You mustn’t say that to anyone, but do observe reactions.”
“Of course.” With a troubled glance, Ellie asked, “Are these two lovely flowers still blooming, do you know?”
“We have hope for little Lily.”
“I see,” Ellie said softly. “So perhaps dear Clarisse was not the only victim. How sad.” Ellie straightened to her full four foot eleven. “This makes me angry, which is bad for my karma. I shall do my subtle best to help.”
Olivia put her arm around her diminutive mother’s shoulders. “Don’t tell anyone else. Del and Cody know all, of course, but you are the only other person we are trusting with our suspicions.”
“I am the soul of discretion.”
“All those souls in one tiny body,” Olivia said. “It must get crowded in there.”