If Bread Could Rise to the Occasion

  Praise for

  If Fried Chicken Could Fly

  “Take a puzzler of a mystery, season with a dashing ghost, add a pinch of romance, and you have a blue ribbon–winning recipe for a tasty read.”

  —Jenn McKinlay, New York Times bestselling author of

  the Cupcake Bakery Mysteries “I guarantee your spirits—pardon the pun—will be lifted . . . Paige Shelton has created a vivid setting, fun, friendly characters.”

  —E. J. Copperman, author of Ghost of a Chance

  “If Fried Chicken Could Fly simply warms your spirit with delicious homespun goodness.”

  —Blogcritics

  “If Fried Chicken Could Fly has terrific characters, including a wonderful ghost, and a perfect setting.”

  —Lesa’s Book Critiques

  “All good fun and a nice twist on a cozy—a little bit of the supernatural added in.”

  —Book Reviews and English News

  “A charming cast makes this a delightful read in this wonderful and appealing debut series.”

  —Dru’s Book Musings

  Praise for Paige Shelton’s

  Farmers’ Market Mysteries “[A] puzzling and satisfying whodunit.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “[An] absolute delight . . . A feast of a mystery.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Each page leads to more intrigue and surprise.”

  —The Romance Readers Connection

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Paige Shelton

  Farmers’ Market Mysteries

  FARM FRESH MURDER

  FRUIT OF ALL EVIL

  CROPS AND ROBBERS

  A KILLER MAIZE

  Country Cooking School Mysteries

  IF FRIED CHICKEN COULD FLY

  IF MASHED POTATOES COULD DANCE

  IF BREAD COULD RISE TO THE OCCASION

  Specials

  RED HOT DEADLY PEPPERS

  If Bread Could Rise

  to the Occasion

  PAIGE SHELTON

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England For more information about the Penguin Group, visit penguin.com.

  IF BREAD COULD RISE TO THE OCCASION

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author Copyright © 2013 by Paige Shelton-Ferrell

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-10162471-5

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / August 2013

  Cover illustration by Phil Parks.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

  For Lisa and Paiger, and an ankle tackle that has given us hours of laughter.

  Acknowledgments

  When I first started writing this story, the bakery was a shoe factory. It turned out that a shoe factory didn’t work so well with a cooking school mystery, so the bakery was born. However, I kept the building the same as the one that inspired the ghostly location in the book. It’s located in Rolla, Missouri. When I was a little girl, my parents and grandparents drove me past it lots of times, always commenting on how many of their friends had worked there. Back then I was pretty certain I saw a ghost or two peering out one of the big windows. The building no longer looks the same as it did when I was a child; time and building codes have modernized it. But I still enjoy driving past it.

  A special thanks to everyone who does whatever they can do to see that old buildings are saved and preserved in their finest forms. After all, it is these sorts of places that inspire stories.

  Contents

  Praise for If Fried Chicken Could Fly

  Also by Paige Shelton

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Recipes

  Chapter 1

  “I wanna talk about me, I wanna talk about I,” Gram sang.

  “Hmm,” I said to myself as I stood up from my office chair and hurried next door to the infrequently used classroom. “Gram?”

  But whatever she was looking at in the file cabinet drawer was firmly holding her attention.

  “Gram!” I said a little louder.

  It wasn’t until she peered up that I could see the earbud cords trail over her Texas A&M T-shirt and into her jeans’ pocket. She pulled the buds out of her ears and smiled. “What’s up, Betts?”

  “You wanted to talk about you?”

  Gram laughed. “It’s a Toby Keith song. I was just singing along. That man’s got a voice that makes me . . . mmmhmm.”

  I smiled. “I didn’t think any of the students were here yet. I just wanted to make sure you were okay and weren’t already greeting someone.”

  Gram looked at her watch. “They’ll be here in about an hour, huh? How exciting. What a great group we’ve got this year.”

  “I’m excited, too,” I said.

  This was always the most thrilling moment, the time right before the new crop of students arrived for our nine-month course in down-home country cooking. We’d looked at applications, we’d pondered who would fit the best, we’d thought about both the chemistry of the food we’d be using and the chemistry of the students’ backgrounds and past experiences, and then chose fifteen we thought would be brilliant and amazing.

  We’d had to turn away more applications, more people, this year than any year before. Gram’s Country Cooking School was only gaining in popularity. Her simple and delicious ways with food had always been popular and sought after, but her reputation was growing, and more and more people wanted to venture to Broken R
ope, Missouri, for our nine-month course.

  The few hours before the students arrived for the first time were always filled with the most anticipation. This was the time when we could still envision that everyone would get along, that everyone would be willing and cooperative, that there would be only friendly competition among the group of daytimers—our nickname for the full-time students.

  We never spent much time worrying about the nighters—the locals who took our night community education classes. Those classes would begin again in a month or so, and were just small bites, designed more for fun than bona fide Gram-cooking-ability certification.

  Of course, reality would set in soon. When the students arrived they’d be cheery and excited and somewhat scared, but once they mellowed into a routine, we’d find that not everyone is, by nature, cooperative, not everyone gets along with everyone else, and despite our deep consideration about each and every person’s potential skill level, not everyone could handle themselves in a kitchen.

  We’d never had one failure, though. Even if it took extra hours with a student or students, we were bound and determined to make sure that all issues got the attention they needed so that they were no longer issues, but, instead, challenges well met and defeated.

  Still, that didn’t stop us from wallowing in a few hours of pre-arrival hope that the upcoming school year would be magically perfect.

  “Hellooo!” someone called from the kitchen a moment after the front door buzzer sounded.

  “Someone’s early?” Gram said as she pulled the iPod out of her pocket and set it and the earbuds on the desk.

  “Guess so.”

  Gram led the way out of the classroom and into the long well-furnished kitchen. Someone was, in fact, early or lost, or something. A young man, who couldn’t have been much older than twenty, stood at the far end. He’d placed himself halfway through the swinging doorway, but he’d set a large suitcase on the floor in front of him. He had a head full of brown curls, and even though he was at one end of the room and we were at the other, I could clearly discern the bright, mint green of his eyes.

  It didn’t register at first that we hadn’t accepted anyone under the age of thirty this year, not because of their age, but that’s just how it seemed to have worked out. Both Gram and I were clued in that something was wrong, though, when the grinning young man said, “Hi, I’m Freddie, am I at the right place?”

  I was sure that Gram’s mind was working through the same gymnastics as mine. Freddie? I don’t remember a Freddie or Fred or Frederick.

  “Freddie who?” Gram said as we stayed on our end of the row of butcher blocks that ran down the center of the room.

  “Freddie O’Bannon,” he said as he came all the way through the door, stepped around his suitcase, marched down the side aisle toward us, and extended his hand to Gram. “You must be the legendary Missouri Anna Winston.”

  Again, my mind worked silently. Freddie O’Bannon, Freddie O’Bannon. Who is this guy and why does he have a suitcase?

  “I am Miz,” Gram said cautiously as she extended her own hand. “Can we help you?”

  Freddie laughed. “I hope so. I’m ready for nine months of intense training, Miz. I’m ready to learn how you fry chicken, mash potatoes, and bake amazing cakes. But mostly, I’m here to learn all about your bread—the doughy kind that is. I don’t need to know how much money you make.” Freddie winked. “Need—K-N-E-A-D—get it?” He laughed again. “My plans are to open the best bakery in all of the state of Maine, and I know you’re the one to teach me the ways.”

  One of those uh-oh silent pauses hung in the air for a moment. Gram and I both memorized the names of our daytime students before they arrived, and there was not one Freddie O’Bannon on the list. There wasn’t anyone with an O-apostrophe, either, so I didn’t think we’d mixed up a name.

  Gram opened her mouth to speak, but I put my hand on her arm.

  “Freddie, I’m Betts Winston, could you excuse us for a minute? Please have a seat in the front reception area. We’ll be right back.”

  “Sure. Happy to,” he said a beat later, his smile dimming only slightly. He retrieved the suitcase and backed through the door. “So good to finally be here,” he muttered, and then the door swung back and forth a couple times.

  “Who in tarnation is that?” Gram said to me.

  “Come on,” I said as I signaled her to follow me.

  We traipsed back the way we’d come and I pulled the stack of student files from off the file cabinet in my office.

  “I thought we should take a minute and make sure. Double, triple-check that this guy’s not supposed to be here. I’d really hate to insult a student if he is one.”

  “Good point, but . . .” Gram said. “There’s nothing about him that fits. Even his age. He’s pretty young. I don’t think we had many applications from people his age this year.”

  “I think you’re correct, but let’s just see. Some people look a lot younger than they really are.”

  I thumbed through the stack of fifteen. We had students coming from all over the country; one from Portland, Oregon, one from Alabama, one from Arizona, and a bunch from many different Midwestern states. There was only one from the East Coast, and he was from Massachusetts, not Maine. There were, in fact, no students who were named some version of Frederick. There was someone with the last name of Riley, but that was the closest thing to O’Bannon I could find, and that was a pretty big stretch.

  I closed the last file. “Why would he be here? Why would he even think he was supposed to be here?”

  “Let me see the other applications, the ones we had to deny,” Gram said.

  There were many more applications than there were accepted folders, but the applicants’ names were right at the top of each page so they were easy to thumb through. We thought we might have solved the mystery when we found a Frederick Stallion, but a closer look at his application showed that he was from Florida and had graduated from MIT in 1977. Freddie O’Bannon wasn’t even a glimmer in his father’s eyes in 1977 if he was truly as young as we thought he was.

  “I don’t understand who he is or what he wants, but this is silly. We just need to talk to him.” Gram sighed.

  I sighed, too. “You’re right. I guess the only way to find out is . . . Oh, wait! Gram, you don’t suppose he’s a ghost?” I asked.

  She looked at me with drawn-together eyebrows. “No, of course not. They’re different and they all have a scent. He wouldn’t be able to carry real luggage, either. We’d . . . I’d know.”

  “But things are . . . changing a little,” I said as gently as I could. Things on the Broken Rope ghost front were changing, transforming. From all indications, those changes were mostly because of me; somehow my onset of ghost communication ability had triggered nuances to the specter visits that we were still trying to understand. Our most recent ghost, Sally Swarthmore, had disappeared back to wherever they disappear back to only a couple weeks earlier. We’d helped her by finding the truth about her past, and she helped us solve a murder and kidnapping. But we’d also been able to release her from a terrible burden—this was something Gram hadn’t ever been able to do, but apparently I had a talent for it.

  One day, a couple weeks after the crimes were solved, she was just chatting with us and told us she probably should bid us farewell. She was gone in the next instant, leaving behind a quiet we hadn’t known since she’d arrived.

  “Well, there she goes,” Gram had said before she turned her attention back to the knife she was sharpening.

  “Yes, there she goes,” I had said. I was working on not getting attached to the ghosts, but I wasn’t quite there yet. When Sally left I’d swallowed a lump of sadness, and I still missed her a little.

  “Things might have changed, Betts, but a ghost is still a ghost. Freddie isn’t a ghost. It looks like whatever the mistake is, it’s not our mistake. Let’s go talk to him and see if we can just send him on his way.” She turned and left my office.

 
; When she was gone I patted my front pocket. I still carried the coin that reminded me of the first ghost I’d gotten to know. I didn’t pine away for Jerome Cowbender as much as I used to, but I still missed him sometimes. I smiled to myself.

  “Quit being so goofy, Isabelle Winston,” I said.

  Gram was quick enough to have made it to the reception area by the time I got to the kitchen. I picked up speed and hurried to join her.

  But the lobby was empty except for Gram standing with her hands on her hips as she bit at her bottom lip.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  “Gone? As in, maybe he really was a ghost?”

  Gram looked truly perplexed. This didn’t happen often.

  Only a moment later, though, Freddie O’Bannon came back through the school’s front door, this time his scent was strong and awful. He and it were pushed inside by a small breeze.

  “Whoa,” Gram said.

  “What’s the smell?” I said.

  “Oh, sorry about that,” Freddie said. “It looks like my cologne bottle broke in my suitcase. I heard a snap, a crack when I set it down out here. I got it outside before it could stink the place up inside, but when I took the bottle out of the case, I’m afraid I got it all over my hands. And shirt. And of course on everything that’s in the case. Any chance I could wash up?” He stood with his hands up and out. His smile was much less confident now and he looked even younger.

  Out of the side of my mouth, I said to Gram, “I guess he’s not a ghost.”

  “I’m beginning to wish he was,” Gram mumbled, but then she turned to Freddie and said, “Come on, young man. This way, and then it looks like we’re going to need to have a chat.”

  She led him through the swinging door and to the bathrooms at the back of the building, a sandalwood incense-like fog moving with him.

  I followed a second later, but not before glancing briefly out at the cemetery next to the school. It was still too early for the leaves on the trees to have begun changing, so the graves and tombstones were still under a full green canopy. I looked at the two markers I was most familiar with—Jerome Cowbender’s and Sally Swarthmore’s—and smiled. There were lots of other graves out there, many more chances for ghostly visitors, but at the moment all was quiet and undisturbed.