An Unthymely Death (9 page)

“You can’t. Eric is in Europe on a buying trip. He left two weeks ago and won’t be back for another month.” Jane picked up the tray and put it in the refrigerator. “Somehow I don’t believe that anybody would steal the
Cookery Book
for the money. If you ask me, the thief wanted it for its own sake.”

“Do you have any guesses?” I asked.

Jane pursed her lips. “You might talk to Delia Murphy. Her mother was Myra Merryweather’s niece. Delia has always claimed that the cookbook belongs to her. Nobody believes her, of course, but I wouldn’t put it past her to—” She shrugged, leaving the sentence dangling tantalizingly in the air. It was obvious that Delia was not one of Jane’s friends.

“Cora says Jerry Weber might be involved,” Ruby said. “What’s your take on that?”

“Jerry?” Jane laughed scornfully. “He’d steal anything if he thought he could turn it into a dollar. But he wouldn’t know how to sell that book for enough to make it worth stealing. And Cora herself is a possibility. She told me that she’s thinking of running for Guild president in the next election. She might have taken the book just to make Pansy look bad.”

After we left, Ruby and I compared notes. Jane had been very ready to accuse other people. But even though her brother was in Europe, she certainly could have taken the book and sent it to him. Pansy was still on the list. Jerry, too, in spite of what Jane had said. And Cora, who suddenly had extra money to spend—and a reason to put Pansy in a bad light. I’m always astonished at the ease with which even the most petty motive can become irresistibly compelling.

It was time to talk to Delia Murphy. Maybe she could throw some light on this mystery.

 

 

Delia, a heavyset woman with gray hair and snappy blue eyes, has a bead shop in the Emporium, the craft and boutique mall that occupies the big Victorian house next door to Thyme and Seasons. She shook her head sadly when Ruby said that we’d come to talk about the cookbook.

“I really don’t have anything to tell you,” she said. “There’s already been enough unhappiness about that dreadful old book. Frankly, I’m glad it’s gone.”

“What sort of unhappiness?” Ruby asked.

Delia opened a box, took out a plastic bag, and opened it. “Have you ever smelled anything so sweet?” she asked with a smile, taking out a string of large black beads. “They’re rose beads. They’d make a lovely family heirloom.”

Normally, I’d be interested in those beads, since I make my own to sell in my shop. But not today. “What kind of unhappiness, Delia?”

She put the beads back in the bag and tucked the bag into the box. “It’s an old story. It doesn’t mean anything to anybody but me.”

“I understand that your mother was Myra Merryweather’s niece,” Ruby remarked. “How did that valuable book get out of the family? You’d think it would be the kind of thing that Myra would want her relatives to have.”

Delia turned away to put the box on a shelf. “Well, I hate to disillusion you, but Aunt Myra just wasn’t a very nice person. She and Mother didn’t get along. Mother tried very hard to satisfy her, but—” She turned with a shrug. “Aunt Myra always insisted on having her own way. She fancied herself a matriarch, as her mother had been.” Her smile was slightly askew. “To tell the truth, she was something of a bully, at least in the family.”

“Still,” I said, “it must have been a disappointment when she gave the cookbook to the Herb Guild.”

Delia’s chin was quivering and she looked as if she might be about to cry. “I don’t mean to be rude, China, but I don’t see that my family’s history is any of your business. Anyway, all that unpleasantness is over and done with. I don’t want to think about it.”

“Do you have any idea who might have taken the book from the Guild library?” I persisted. I felt sorry for Delia and didn’t want to cause her more pain, but the question needed an answer.

“Of course not,” she said. Another customer came in at that moment, and she turned away with a bright “How may I help you?”

“Well, we certainly didn’t learn anything from Delia,” Ruby said as we walked back to our shops. “Except that Myra Merryweather’s family thought she was a bully. That’s interesting, although it doesn’t take us any closer to finding out what happened to the cookbook.”

“When you come right down to it, we haven’t learned anything from anybody,” I replied. “All our suspects just point their fingers at one another. Cora accuses Pansy and Jane. Jane accuses Delia and Cora. And everybody denies knowing anything.”

“What about Jerry Weber? We haven’t talked to him yet.”

“We can try,” I said.

 

 

Jerry is a charming man, a retired widower in his early sixties, trim and athletic. But our talk with him produced nothing more than a firm denial, a few shakes of the head, and the tart remark that if the Guild paid him a little more money, he’d be glad to fix that dang kitchen door so nobody would have to worry about folks walking in off the street and stealing valuable books. Jerry did, however, point out that he had been in Houston visiting his daughter when the theft occurred. According to him, he couldn’t have stolen the book.

“Anyways,” he said with a frown, “what would I want with a cookbook? If I get to hankerin’ for serious home cookin’, I go over to the Diner. Otherwise, I open me a can o’ beans and cut up a weenie in it. Some onions and catsup, too, maybe a little chile powder.” He grinned. “You can’t get much better than that, no matter how many cookbooks you got.”

Ruby and I had gone through the complete suspect list and had gotten exactly nowhere. It was time for a different strategy. If we couldn’t pry the information out of somebody, maybe we could
buy
it.

 

 

“A reward?” Pansy asked dubiously. “You want the Herb Guild to offer a five-hundred-dollar reward?”

Ruby and I were sitting in the swing on Pansy’s front porch when I made my suggestion. Pansy has planted a lovely silver garden beside the steps. The sharp, clean scent of lavender filled the soft evening air, with the spicy undertone of clove pinks. Bees were gorging themselves with happy abandon among the blue catmint flower spikes.

“For information leading to the identification of the thief or the return of the book,” Ruby explained. “No questions asked.”

“But the book is worth a lot more than five hundred dollars,” Pansy objected. “If somebody intends to sell it, that’s not much of an incentive.”

“That’s true,” I replied, pushing the swing with my toe. “However, the thief has probably found out how hard it is to sell. He—or she—may be happy to get five hundred out of it. It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?”

Pansy shook her head. “But the book may have been sold already. You said that Cora just bought some expensive furniture. If she’s the thief—”

I threw up my hands. Why was Pansy being so stubborn? Didn’t she want Myra’s book to be found? “We have to try
something,
Pansy,” I persisted. “We’ve interviewed every one of the suspects and we still don’t have a clue.”

“The problem,” Pansy said quietly, “is that we can’t have any publicity, for the same reason that we couldn’t involve the police in the first place. Since we don’t want anybody but the Library Committee to know that the book has been stolen, I don’t see how we can offer a reward without letting on that there’s been a theft.”

“Rats,” Ruby said, and I echoed her. Both of us had forgotten about that. I sat for a moment, swinging back and forth, feeling frustrated.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that book,” I said after a while. “What kind of recipes are in it?”

Pansy got up from her chair. “I’ll show you,” she replied. She was back in a few minutes, with a manila folder. “This is a photocopy of the book.” She laid a few pages on the table so we could see them. “I copied it so I could study Myra’s revisions and see if the Herb Guild might publish a second edition.”

“That’s a good idea,” Ruby said approvingly. She turned a few pages. “These are interesting recipes, China. Here’s one for lavender butter—I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that before.”

“For her day, Myra was an amazingly inventive cook,” Pansy said. “She particularly loved rosemary. She grew lots of it—in fact, a few of her original plants still survive, in the herb garden behind the Guild House. She had all sorts of novel ideas for using it in foods.”

I picked up a few pages, thinking with relief that we could scratch Pansy off our suspect list. I doubted that she would have bothered to photocopy a book that she intended to steal. I began to study Myra’s handwritten notes in the margins of the pages. Many were changes in existing recipes—an ingredient added here, another subtracted there. Others were entirely new recipes, written in a tiny but legible script. A couple of unusual ones caught my eye, and I blinked. If the stolen book hadn’t been valuable because of Myra’s handwritten notes, it should be valuable because of these new recipes. Some were quite unique. I looked up. “Do you know if anybody else copied Myra’s notes?”

“I don’t think so,” Pansy said. “The book has been in the vault since her death, so no one has had access to it. Why?”

“Because,” I said, “I have an idea.” I grinned. “A brilliant idea, if I do say so myself.”

“An idea for publishing a second edition from Myra’s notes?” Pansy asked.

“An idea about how to offer a reward without letting anybody know?” Ruby guessed.

“You’re both wrong,” I replied. “I have an idea about how to trap a thief—in a trap baited with rosemary.”

Pansy looked confused. Ruby looked dubious. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

“I’m thinking that it’s time for a cooking contest,” I said. “The prize goes to the person who comes up with the most creative use of rosemary.” When they still looked puzzled, I added, a little impatiently, “Don’t you see? The person who took the book won’t be able to resist submitting one of Myra’s unique rosemary recipes. She’ll give herself away!”

“Well, maybe,” Pansy said slowly.

“What if she’s too smart to fall for the trick?” Ruby asked.

I shrugged. “Then we’ve gone to a lot of trouble for nothing. But let’s face it. We’ve come to a dead end. We have no eye-witnesses, no clues, and nothing but accusations from the suspects. Do you guys have any other suggestions?”

“You’re right,” Pansy said. “I’ll get the word out. People can bring their entries to the next meeting.”

“They need to bring their recipes, too,” I said. “If we find one that exactly matches one of Myra’s handwritten entries, we’ll know we’ve got our thief.”

“And then what?” Ruby wanted to know.

“We try to get it back,” I said with a shrug.

 

 

It was a suspenseful week. I thought back over the conversations we’d had with the suspects, wondering if we had overlooked a clue. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t think of anything we’d missed. If our trap didn’t work, Myra Merryweather’s original
Cookery Book
was probably gone forever.

Judgment day finally arrived. Everybody was excited about the contest, and the downstairs meeting room at the Guild House was full. The contest entries were arranged on a long table, each dish accompanied by the recipe written on a white index card, the contestant’s name on the back. While Mrs. Gates gave a talk on herbal liqueurs and everybody got to taste her famous Rosemary Orange Honey Liqueur, Ruby and I snooped among the entries, checking the recipes against the list I had made of the handwritten rosemary recipes in the margins of Myra’s
Cookery Book.

“Mabel Gordon has entered something called Kidney-and-Leek Pie with Rosemary Radishes,” Ruby said, shuddering. “What was she
thinking
?”