Raiders of the Lost Corset by Ellen Byerrum

“I hear there’s a hot market in Latvian diaries.”
    “I only know what Magda told me. She wouldn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.”
    “Yeah, I’ll put it on the list. Missing ugly broach, missing Latvian diary. Anything else missing?”
    My sense of humor. “There’s a French translation of it too, in Magda’s own handwriting in one of those school composition notebooks.”
    “Oooh la la, a French diary! Now that’s really hot.”
    “You’re a scream, Lamont. You got anything on the poison or the dagger or the cause of death yet?”
    “Gimme a break, Smithsonian, it only happened a couple hours ago. Takes longer than that for the morgue to type up a toe tag.”
    The detective hung up and Lacey breathed a sigh of relief. Now she couldn’t be accused of not telling the police what she knew, or at least some of what she knew. She returned Magda’s papers to her file drawer and locked it. Nobody paid any attention. She started to gather her things to go home.
    Other reporters around her were still involved with their own stories, and a few were hanging around after hours. Lacey could see one determined reporter heading for the LifeStyles section of the paper right now. It was Harlan Wiedemeyer, The Eye ’s reporter on the “death and dismemberment beat.” He was headed her way, and it was too late for her to run.
    “Exploding toads! Can you believe it, Lacey? In a pond in Germany. A thousand toads just exploded.” Wiedemeyer’s eyes gleamed with pleasure, not so much at the fate of the toads, but at the joy of a new and strange phenomenon to report, the weirder the better.
    Lacey rubbed her head. She felt a headache coming on. Her head suddenly felt like an exploding toad. Wiedemeyer thrilled to impart news of the strange, the grotesque, and the gut-churningly disturbing. He filled his round cheeks with air, then expelled it quickly in the manner of an exploding toad, or at least his cheerful impression of one. “Kaboom! Ribbit!”
    “Oh, Harlan, that’s terrible,” food editor Felicity Pickles cooed at him, with a love offering of freshly baked goodies. Felicity was a large woman with a face that looked innocent at first glance, big round blue eyes, porcelain skin, long auburn hair. She looked rather like a deranged china doll. Wiedemeyer, her love-struck suitor, was a round little gnome of a man with a receding hairline and a wide mouth. “Those poor little toads. Have a gingerbread man. Aren’t they cute? ”
    “Poor little bastards,” Harlan agreed. “Kaboom!” He took today’s fresh baked carbohydrate bomb from his indulgent angel of the food beat. “Kaboom! Ribbit! Kaboom! Ribbit!”
    Felicity had few social skills, but she knew how to cook. At The Eye Street Observer , that was enough to make her Miss Conge-niality. Reporters of all stripes found a reason to hover around her desk across the aisle from Lacey’s whenever Felicity was trying out a new recipe. This week she was testing desserts for an up-coming Thanksgiving section. Her fattening food of the day was spicy gingerbread men slathered in cream cheese icing with eyes and noses and buttons of crystallized ginger. More evidence to feed Lacey’s theory that Felicity lived a secret life as a Gingerbread Witch, lurking deep in the forest in a gingerbread house with a fluffy cream cheese roof, tempting all who entered to eat a tasty shutter or two so she could fatten them up for her larder.
    The zaftig food editor never liked the svelte fashion writer, and the feeling was mutual. But Felicity now found herself happily dating exploding-toad reporter Harlan Wiedemeyer, and it was all thanks to Smithsonian. Lacey had recognized telltale signs of in-fatuation in the chubby would-be lovebirds hovering incessantly near her desk, admiring each other in love-struck awe, and she had found it unbearable. Wiedemeyer was also known to be the office jinx, but he made Felicity blush all the way down to her round little toes. And Felicity