Murder of a Chocolate-Covered Cherry Read Free Page B

a thought that had been nagging at her subconscious finally surfaced. She stopped and turned toface her mother. “You said there were four categories, right?”
    May nodded.
    “The cake would be in the Special-Occasion Baking and the casserole in the One-Dish Meals, right?”
    May nodded again, this time more slowly.
    “So, whose names did you use for the Healthy and Snack divisions?”
    “What makes you think I entered those?” May studied her nails intently.
    “Let’s not do this dance. Just tell me the whole truth. No equivocations.”
    “What does equivocation mean?” May turned away from Skye and opened the dryer door, taking sheets and towels from its drum.
    “Mother!” Skye pulled a towel out of May’s hands. “You have three seconds to tell me or I’ll drop out of the contest.”
    May shook out a sheet, remaining silent.
    “One.”
    May picked up two pillowcases and paired them.
    “Two.”
    May closed the dryer door with her knee, her arms full of folded cotton.
    “Thr—”
    “Uncle Charlie for Snacks and Vince for Healthy.”
    “Well.” Skye had to bite her lip to keep from giggling as she tried to imagine her godfather cooking. “I guess it’s a good thing they didn’t final.”
    “Mmm.”
    “They didn’t final, did they?” Skye followed her mother as May walked to the linen closet.
    “Yes.” May put the clean laundry on the shelf. “Charlie knew I had used his name, and he called just a few minutes ago to say we’re in.”
    “And Vince?” Skye asked. When her brother had become a hairstylist, he’d had a hard time convincing the more narrow-minded townspeople, which included their father, that he was straight. Entering a cooking contest would cause all that talk to flare up again.
    “He said it would be a hoot, and he likes the idea of being surrounded by women.” May beamed fondly. “He’s such a good boy.” Vince was thirty-eight, but would forever be a boy to May.
    Skye shook her head, hoping neither her mother nor her brother would repeat his statement to Vince’s girlfriend, Loretta. Loretta was Skye’s sorority sister and sometime attorney. She would not be amused to learn that her boyfriend was one of the only males under seventy among two dozen women.
    “It seems wrong for you to have four chances to win, and the others to have only one.” Skye wondered how the organizers felt about three finalists coming from the same family— four if you counted Charlie. On the other hand, since the contest had an entry area of only about a forty-five-mile radius, there was bound to be some duplication.
    “It’s not like I’ll be doing the cooking. I just provided the recipes. Sort of like sponsoring a car in a race.” May closed the linen closet door. “I checked the rules and there’s nothing that says the recipes have to be your own; they just have to be original.”
    Skye gave up. It wasn’t her problem. Her problem was learning how to make Chicken Supreme Casserole without burning down the kitchen. Why did the expanding-bread episode of the old TV show
I Love Lucy
keep running through her mind?
    It was the first Thursday in April, April Fools’ Day, which was apropos, since Skye had just gotten out of a meeting with the school’s attorney regarding the threatened lawsuit against the student newspaper. Due to spring break, there were only one or two people in the school building. Most of the staff was off on vacation, including Trixie, the student newspaper’s cosponsor.
    The lawyer was confident they’d win the case if it ever went to court, but the stakes were so high Skye was still worried. The superintendent was threatening to do away with the activity if they lost, which would devastate the kids who had worked so hard to make their paper one of the beststudent-produced newspapers in the state. They had even won a prize for last year’s efforts.
    Skye cheered herself briefly with the thought that the de-fault mode of school administrators was always no, but