Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) by Shelley Singer Page A

kitchen table. A nice homey scene. The night before she had been wrapped in plastic against the weather, and about all I’d noticed about her was that she was a big woman with a fretful face. I got a better look at her now. She was tall and broad, but not fat, with wide shoulders. A square face with prominent cheekbones, her brown hair hanging straight to just below her shoulders. Her brown eyes had heavy lids smudged with brown eye shadow. Her hands, wrapped tightly around the roller handles, were big enough to go with the rest of her, with square-tipped fingers and chipped polish on the short nails. She was one of those women who should wear men’s shirts— the cheap, frilly blue blouse was too tight across the shoulders. Her old faded big-bottom bells nearly covered the blue sneakers worn thin over the big toes. Her face still looked fretful.
    She invited us to sit down at the table and talk while she worked. It was a nice old table, scrubbed pine, but the chairs were plastic and chrome and ugly. There were two sheets of baked cookies on top of the refrigerator and a big pile of plastic freezer bags on the counter nearby. I started to say something, but she peered at her watch and turned away, taking down the two cookie sheets, grabbing a handful of plastic bags, dumping cookies into the bags. She put the bags on a large metal tray, carried the tray to the upright freezer, and stashed the cookies inside, where there must have been a thousand cookies in plastic bags already stored.
    She finished making cutouts in the dough she’d just rolled, put the cutouts on the two liberated cookie sheets, opened the oven, took out two sheets of baked cookies, put those on the refrigerator, and loaded the oven with the new batch. Then she looked at her watch again, pulled another large dough ball out of an immense mixing bowl, and plopped it down on the wooden board.
    “I bet you think that’s a lot of cookies for one woman and one little girl,” she said slyly, pointing at the freezer. I said yes, it certainly seemed to be. “It’s my business. I sell them to the grocery, the restaurants. Especially in summer, when more business comes through. This year I’m expanding. Got a customer up in Rosewood, north of here. Fredda’s sugar cookies. All natural.”
    We told her we thought that was terrific, which pleased her.
    “Now,” she said, whacking the doughball with her rolling pin, “what can I help you with?”
    “Wait a second,” I said, scribbling in my notebook. “Fredda’s all natural cookies. That’s Fredda with two D’s?”
    “Yes. Two.” She began mashing the dough flat. I finished writing with a flourish.
    “They smell very good,” Rosie said politely.
    “Oh, gee. I bet you’d like some. And some coffee.” She scraped a half dozen off the sheets on the refrigerator and onto a plastic plate, set the plate and two cups down in front of us, turned on the flame under a percolator, checked her watch again, and went back to rolling dough.
    “About the town,” Rosie began. “Have you lived here all your life?” Fredda nodded. The dough was nearly subjugated. “And your cousin?”
    She sighed, set down her rolling pin, and went to the stove for the percolator of warmed-over coffee. She poured some into our cups and seemed to assume we both drank it black.
    “She lived here all her life too.”
    “I guess most of the people in town are people you grew up with?” I asked.
    “A lot of them, anyway.”
    “Like Wolf, over at the tavern?”
    She nodded, picked one of the cookies off the plate, took a bite, then another, then one more and it was gone. Back to the dough. Another forearm-bulging roll and it was a quarter inch thick. “And Nora, at the sperm bank?”
    “That’s right. Of course, Nora was a little older than me, so we weren’t close as kids or anything. Wolf’s more like my age. Poor Wolf.” She shook her head. “I guess he’s all broken up about this.”
    “You guess?” Rosie