Fortune Cookie (Culinary Mystery) by Josi S. Kilpack Page B

weren’t sugar, but salt, amplifying the flavor even more. She swallowed the bite with a satisfied sigh before remembering that she wasn’t alone. She looked up at Pete and Ji, both of whom were looking at her with smiles on their faces, though Ji’s was more guarded.
    Pete glanced at Ji. “Told ya,” he said softly. Ji’s smile widened slightly.
    “Told him what?” Sadie demanded.
    “That these cookies were going to make you cry.”
    “I didn’t cry.” Her attention was captured by the rest of the cookie in her hand. She took another bite, managing to keep from making any more appreciative sounds out loud, but just barely. By the time she finished her first cookie, she was eyeing the milk and trying to ignore Pete’s knowing smirk. She wouldn’t cave and drink from the carton. She would be strong!
    She picked up her second cookie, even though the first one was rich enough that she was satisfied. What if the cookies didn’t keep well? It was her duty as a food connoisseur to ensure that none of this deliciousness went to waste.
    After the first bite, however, she needed milk. The cookie was so rich. Pete laughed when he caught her trying to sneak some milk without him noticing, but he turned his attention back to Ji. That she didn’t care how trashy it was to drink right out of the carton said more about the quality of the cookie than anything else could. She wondered if she could find the recipe online. It was one she’d definitely put in her Little Black Recipe Book if she could recreate such magnificence!
    “That was amazing,” Sadie said after she finished the second cookie and drank from the carton again. It took another moment before she realized she’d interrupted their conversation. “Sorry, what were we talking about?”
    “Ji was telling me about Wendy’s ex-husbands—I was asking him about one of them.”
    “She had more than one ex-husband?”
    “She had four,” Ji said.
    Sadie lifted her eyebrows. “Four?”
    Ji explained that Wendy had technically been married when she met Ji’s father, Kai, though she hadn’t seen her husband in a couple of years—Ji called it a “hippie thing.” Her divorce was final in time for Kai and Wendy to get married a month before Ji was born, but before Ji was even two, Wendy left Kai for someone named Dan or Darin or Darryl. Ji barely remembered Husband Number Three; they divorced when Ji was four.
    “She had a few boyfriends over the next several years, but she left me with my dad in order to marry her fourth husband, Rodger.”
    She left me, Sadie repeated in her mind. She didn’t ask him to elaborate and simply nodded her understanding. Woven within his account were the other things Ji had told her about his childhood: living with friends, panhandling at the beach. What a sad childhood.
    “The police talked to Rodger Penrose, the last husband, and cleared him as a suspect. They said that he and Wendy had remained on good terms, and that he had an alibi,” Pete said. “They haven’t located the other husbands yet.”
    “My dad was sent back to Hong Kong a few years ago. His papers were fake, so when immigration laws started being more heavily enforced, he was found out,” Ji said without much emotion. “I think the first husband’s dead, and the guy whose name starts with a D could be anywhere. I told all this to the police.”
    Pete nodded. “They said as much.”
    “So, where are things with the investigation now that the forensics are back?” Sadie asked, worried that without solid leads to follow—which they didn’t seem to have—the police wouldn’t keep working the case.
    “Well,” Pete began, “they did give it a solid week of investigation—interviews, timelines, crime scene, that kind of thing. Nothing led anywhere concrete, though, and they’re discouraged by the forensics report. I think the reason they’re willing to give me so much information is in hopes that we’ll find some new leads for them to follow. It’s