Due or Die (28 page)

Recipes

NANCY’S PEANUT BUTTER COOKIES

1 cup unsalted butter

1 cup crunchy peanut butter

1 cup white sugar

1 cup packed brown sugar

2 eggs

2 ½ cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 ½ teaspoons baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

Cream together butter, peanut butter and sugars. Beat in eggs.

In a separate bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Stir into batter. Put batter in refrigerator for 1 hour.

Roll into 1-inch balls and put on baking sheets. Flatten each ball with a fork, making a crisscross pattern. Bake in a preheated 375-degree oven for about 10 minutes or until cookies begin to brown. Do not overbake.

NANCY’S PEANUT BUTTER DOG BISCUITS

3 cups whole-wheat flour

1 cup quick-cooking rolled oats

1 ¼ cups warm water

½ cup natural peanut butter

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, whisk together flour and oats. Stir in water, peanut butter and oil. Knead dough on a lightly floured surface, mixing in more flour as needed until dough is smooth and no longer sticky. Roll out dough to ¼-inch thick. Cut into desired shapes with cookie cutters and place ¾ of an inch apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 20 minutes. Turn oven off, leaving biscuits in oven until completely cool.

“D
aisy Buchanan is an insipid, shallow, soulless woman,” Violet La Rue declared. “Jay should have found someone else.”

“But he loves her,” Nancy Peyton argued.

“Why?” Violet asked. She shuddered. “The woman is a horror.”

“She was charming and sophisticated. She was old money,” Lindsey Norris said. “She was everything that the new money, like Jay Gatsby, aspired to be.”

It was lunchtime on Thursday at the Briar Creek Public Library, where the crafternoon group met every week to work on a craft, eat yummy food and talk about their latest read. Per usual, Violet and Nancy were the first to arrive.

Lindsey was the director of the Briar Creek library, and
this group had been one of her ideas to boost the popularity of the library in town.

“Tom Buchanan was a bully. He thinks of Daisy as a possession not a wife,” Nancy said. “She should have run off with Jay Gatsby.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ve dated him; well, men just like him at any rate,” Beth Stanley said as she waddled into the room.

Beth was the children’s librarian, and today she was dressed as a giant green caterpillar, the puffy underbelly of which seriously impeded her ability to walk. Dangling from one arm, she held a large basket of plastic fruit and foodstuffs.

Lindsey lowered the sampler she was attempting to cross-stitch and studied Beth.

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” she said. “You read Eric Carle’s
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
.”

“What?” asked Mary Murphy as she stepped over the tail end of Beth’s costume to enter the room. “I thought we were reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
.”

“We are,” Nancy said. “Beth read the caterpillar book to her story time crowd.”

“Oh, phew, you had me worried there,” Mary said as she plopped into the chair beside Lindsey.

“Well, you might want to take a gander at some of the picture books,” Nancy said. Her look was sly. “You know, if you and Ian ever decide to have some babies.”

Mary tossed back her long dark curls and sent Nancy a grin. “My husband is all the baby I can handle at the moment, thank you very much. Although, things seem to
be progressing nicely between Lindsey and Sully, so perhaps you’ll have some luck there.”

“Ouch!” Lindsey jammed her thumb into her mouth before she bled all over her sampler.

“Interesting,” Nancy said, giving Lindsey a piercing look.

“Food’s here,” Charlene La Rue announced as she stepped into the room bearing a tray of mini bagel sandwiches and a carafe of lemonade.

Like her mother, Charlene was a tall, beautiful black woman with warm brown eyes and a smile that lit the room. But while Violet had been a stage actress, Charlene was a local news anchor. Lindsey always marveled that she was able to balance her public life, be an exemplary wife and mother and still make time for their crafternoon Thursdays.

Nancy turned her attention away from Lindsey and tucked her cross-stitch needle into the corner of her canvas cloth. She leaned forward to help herself to the mini bagel sandwiches Charlene was setting out on the table.

“How is Sully?” Violet asked. “I haven’t seen him in ages.”

Violet and Nancy were not only best friends, they were also tag-team buddies in the information-seeking game. Where one left off, the other stepped in.

“Did you know that
The Great Gatsby
is considered to be one of the great American novels?” Lindsey asked.

“There she goes, changing the subject,” Beth said.

She shimmied out of her caterpillar costume and hung it up on the coat rack. The static from the costume made her short spiky black hair stand up on end, and she ran her fingers through it in a futile attempt to tame it. She grabbed
her project bag from where she’d tucked it into her fruit basket and took the last remaining seat in the room.

“I am not,” Lindsey said. “I’m just keeping us on task. We’re supposed to work on a craft while we discuss our latest book, which is…”

“
The Great Gatsby
,” the rest of the ladies said together.

“We know,” Charlene said. “It’s just that you’ve been dating Sully for a few months now, so we’re curious. Can we assume it’s going well?”

Lindsey glanced at Mary for backup, thinking that since she was Sully’s sister, surely she wouldn’t want to hear about his love life, but no. She nodded at Lindsey encouragingly. Lindsey just shook her head. Her crafternoon buddies were incorrigible.

“Hey, that’s not your Granny’s cross-stitch,” Beth declared, looking at the cross-stitch hoop in Lindsey’s lap. “I love that.”

“Well, we did say we were doing ‘subversive’ cross-stitch,” Lindsey said. She glanced at her sampler, which when she was done would read
Books Are My Homies
, with a border of books on bookshelves going around it. She planned to hang it in her office, if she ever stopped stabbing herself in the thumb and bleeding on the darn thing.

“You need a thimble,” Violet said. “You’re a hazard with that needle.”

“I have an extra.” Mary reached into her bag and handed one to Lindsey.

“So, what do yours say?” Lindsey asked the group.

“Mine says, ‘Bake your own damn cookies!’” Nancy said.

Lindsey laughed. Nancy was not just her crafternoon
buddy, but also her landlord. After sixty-odd years of living in Briar Creek, Nancy had come to be known for her cookie-baking skills, which occasionally annoyed her as she had also become the go-to gal for cookie exchanges.

Violet held up her cross-stitch, and in her best stage voice, she read, “To be or not to be. That is not the question. The question is, what time is lunch?”

Nancy snorted and gave Violet a high-five.

“I went with an old restaurant standby,” Mary said. “Kiss my grits.”

Mary and her husband, Ian, owned the Blue Anchor Café, the only restaurant in town, which just happened to serve the best clam chowder in New England.

“Love it,” Beth said. “Hang it by the cash register.”

“Mine is going in our master bathroom,” Charlene said. She held up a pretty cross-stitch with a half-finished border of red swirls. It read,
Cap on. Seat down. Or else.

Mary cracked up and said, “If I pay you, will you make me one just like it?”

Lastly, Beth held up hers. It, too, had a pretty pink border and in the middle, it read,
#@&$!!

“Oh, no you didn’t!” Charlene said with a delighted giggle.

“Yes, I did,” Beth said. “I wanted to drop in some really rough language, but I thought this was pithier and more imaginative.”

“I think Fitzgerald would approve,” Nancy said. “I do love his way with words. My favorite line was when Nick Carraway meets Gatsby for the first time and thinks: ‘He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal
reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.’”

“That makes me want to date Jay Gatsby,” Beth joked.

“Which brings us to the biggest question in the book: Do you think Daisy was guilty of driving the car that struck Myrtle, and Jay took the blame or no?” Mary asked.

A knock on the door frame interrupted and prevented anyone from answering. Lindsey turned in her seat to see Charlie Peyton, her downstairs neighbor who was also Nancy’s nephew, standing in the doorway.

“Hello, ladies,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt.”

“Hi, Charlie,” they all greeted him.

“Is everything all right?” Nancy asked.

“Well.” He put a hand on the back of his neck. “It’s Heathcliff.”

“What’s wrong?” Lindsey asked as she rose from her seat.

“Oh, he’s fine but…” Charlie began but was interrupted when a black fur ball raced through his legs and launched himself at Lindsey.

Lindsey fell back into her chair with an
oomph
as her dog, Heathcliff, began to lick every part of her face he could reach.

“Hey, there fella.” She laughed and scratched his head. He wagged in delight and then jumped off her lap to greet the rest of the crafternooners.

“I’m sorry, Lindsey,” Charlie said. “But I got a call for a job interview, and I didn’t want to leave him alone in the house, you know, with his chewing issues and all.”

“No, it’s fine,” she said. She glanced at her watch. She used her lunch hour for crafternoons and her time wasn’t up yet. “I
have enough time to take him for a walk on the beach before I bring him home.”

“I can take him home,” Nancy said. “I have no plans for this afternoon. But, Charlie, what job interview do you have? Are you not working for Sully anymore?”

Charlie worked for Mike Sullivan, known to everyone as Sully, who owned a tour-boat company that gave tourists rides around the storied Thumb Islands off the shore of Briar Creek. He was the same Sully who Lindsey had been dating for the past several months.

“No, I’ll still help out Sully,” Charlie said. “But this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

“Sort of like that tour your band went on last winter?” Nancy asked. “You know the one that was supposed to make you famous but ended up breaking up the band?”

“Life on the road is tough,” Charlie said. “And, no, this is way more solid than that.”

His flipped back his long stringy hair, and Lindsey saw that he had increased the gauges in his earlobes to their next level, giving him even bigger holes. Charlie was very into body art.

“What’s the job, then?” Violet asked, looking as dubious as Nancy.

“Treasure hunting,” Charlie said. “I’ve been hired to help find Captain Kidd’s treasure.”