Pancakes & Pandemonium - Culinary Competition Mystery #6

Chapter 12

(Amy)

It was after dark when Amy heard the rumble of the Breakfast All Day truck's motor as it pulled into the driveway. She shrugged on her coat, grabbed a battery-powered lantern, and ran out the door to greet them. Her mother silently stalked past Amy on the walkway.

"Hey," Amy called as she waved at whoever was sitting in the passenger seat in the truck cab.

"Hello," Kim said as she rolled down the window. "We didn't get a chance to thank your mom before she headed into the house."

"I'll tell her you said that." Amy leaned sideways to look around Kim and waved at Teresa. The women were softly illuminated in a green glow from the lit gauges on the dash. "Do you have a few minutes to come in? I made too much peach cobbler for the three of us to eat. You deserve a treat after working all day."

"That sounds lovely," Teresa replied. "Thank you for thinking of us."

Sophie's fireplace cooking experiment had inspired Amy to try making the dessert with some canned peaches in a cast-iron Dutch oven. Piling hot coals on the lid of the pot, which was designed to be used on a campfire, had browned the sweet biscuit topping to perfection. She was even considering adding the recipe to her cookbook.

The three of them walked single file up the path to the kitchen door with Amy and her lantern leading the way. The usually mundane trek took on an adventurous vibe in the inky darkness. There were a few solar lights positioned along the path, but they didn't do much to light up the darkness like the porch light normally would. Every bush looked like a rabid animal getting ready to attack. Or at least that's what Amy thought they looked like.

Inside the house, the kitchen was tolerably warm, but the living room was downright toasty thanks to the roaring fire. Pogo danced a greeting to the guests as Amy dished up bowls full of the warm dessert and poured mugs of cinnamon-laced cider. It took a few minutes before her usually-vigilant pup realized that the person sitting in the chair that was pulled away from everybody, cloaked in shadows, was her mother. He halted the Happy Wiggle Dance to bark fiercely at her for several seconds. Her mother flipped him off.

"Hush. Come here, and settle down," Amy said as she patted the end of the mattress that was still in the middle of the floor. With the hideaway bed folded up, there was enough room to navigate around it so that everybody could sit on the couch or in easy chairs. Pogo barked one last time at her mother, wagged his tail exuberantly at Kim and Teresa, then curled up in a ball at the end of the mattress. Once he settled down, Amy moved to a chair.

The fireplace, about a dozen votive candles, and two battery-powered lanterns lit up the room as everybody began eating.

"This is wonderful," Kim said in between bites. Her bright auburn hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail that snaked down the front of her white chef's jacket.

"Thank you. It was an experiment that worked out even better than I had hoped." Amy licked the syrupy peach juice from the back of her spoon. "You guys have been gone a long time. Did you have enough soup?"

"I made a big pot of lentil chili last night, so we had plenty," Teresa said.

"That was so nice of you to do. I'm sure everybody appreciated it. Hopefully, the electricity will come back on soon, so people can start getting back to normal," Amy said as she tucked her feet underneath her. She was sitting in the chair farthest away from the fireplace. The cold was creeping across the floor from the rest of the house and assaulting her toes.

Teresa nodded at Amy's comment. "Talking about things that aren't normal, your mom told us today that Catherine Engelbert was murdered at the bazaar. We had no idea something had happened to her!"