Antiques Fruitcake by Barbara Allan Page B

Mother had been kind enough to allow me to help her put on the annual Christmas play at the Playhouse.
    Better?
    But before we go merrily Christmas-ing into our murder mystery, let’s introduce our cast, or anyway, the two leads. Brandy Borne (me), thirty-two, divorced, bottle-blonde, blue-eyed, and Prozac-popping since coming back to live with her mother. Think Kristen Bell. Mother (her), Vivian Borne, seventies, bipolar, widowed, Danish stock, local thespian, and amateur sleuth. Think Meryl Streep (if Mother herself isn’t available).
    Of course, actors are cattle, as Hitchcock said. It’s the play that’s the thing, and the thing in this case was The Fruitcake That Saved Christmas.
    The play (written by Mother) is based on a true slice of Serenity history dating to the early 1930s during the worst winter of the Great Depression. Most local men had been thrown out of work as business after businesses went bust. One firm that did manage to keep head at least temporarily above water was the Serenity Fruitcake Factory. It, too, seemed about to go down for the third time, when a Christmas miracle occurred.
    Franklin Delano Roosevelt, newly elected but not yet in office, took a whistle-stop tour across the country in early December to calm a jittery nation—a tour that included a brief no-speech stop at the train station at the riverfront in Serenity. The president-elect was standing at the railing of the caboose, waving to the crowd of well-wishers, when the owner of the fruitcake factory, Mrs. Hattie Ann Babcock, took the opportunity to rush forward and present him with one of her signature fruitcakes. Roosevelt sampled the cake on the spot and declared it to be the best he’d ever tasted—“Simple with integrity!” —and promptly ordered several hundred as holiday gifts for cronies and constituents.
    After the story in the Serenity Journal was picked up by the Associated Press, thousands of orders began pouring in from all across the country. Soon the factory began churning out fruitcakes day and night, the expanded shifts putting darn near every able-bodied man in Serenity back to work just in time for Christmas.
    Mother—not just the playwright but the director—insisted on using the original factory recipe for her play, and went to some trouble getting it. After all, the Serenity Fruitcake Factory had devolved into a bakery in the 1940s and by the ’60s was just a fondly remembered wisp of our community’s collective memory.
    But after locating a descendant of Mrs. Babcock’s on an Internet ancestry site, Mother hounded the poor elderly man by phone till he finally coughed the recipe up. Coughing it up is, coincidentally, what I want to do every time I have a bite of any fruitcake.
    Thursday morning, for the evening’s dress rehearsal, Mother baked two prop fruitcakes: one for Hattie Ann Babcock (Act One), and the other for President Roosevelt (Act Two). Ever thoughtful, Mother wanted fresh fruitcakes for the actors who’d be sampling them onstage.
    After supper, Mother—looking take-charge in her navy wool Breckenridge slacks and jacket—and I—loaded for bear in DKNY jeans and Juicy Couture black sweater—gathered our things to leave for the eight o’clock rehearsal at the Playhouse. My brown-and-white diabetic shih tzu, Sushi, could read all the signs and did her take-me-along dance.
    The little darling had been blind for several years but now she could see again, thanks to a recent operation. I’d been taking her with me from the first read-through—she just loved being around all that excitement. But as tonight was dress rehearsal, I figured she might get underfoot.
    As we bundled up to brave the cold, Sushi spied the fruitcakes in my arms, where by all rights she should be, and threw a hissy fit, barking, growling, circling Mother and me like a tree she was considering.
    Sushi had been neglected most of the day, what with