CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In spite of their husband’s pleading, the women insisted on continuing with the gingerbread competition. Whispers and stares permeated every person in the room, each one under suspicion by someone.
“Why are we not seeing anything on the cameras?” frowned Luke. AJ and Hiro had come out to the event to inspect the cameras and ensure that all was good, no interruptions to the feed.
“We’re not sure. Everything is clear on videos and even while we’re filming during the competition. No one is touching anything that they shouldn’t. I mean, the judges have to touch things but we’re not seeing anything suspicious at all.”
“Someone is getting to the ingredients,” said Luke.
“They could be getting to their lunches,” said Rett. “Everyone takes a lunch break at the same time. Sometimes people have pre-made meals due to allergies or dietary requirements. Their names are on the boxes and everyone would know that it’s their food.”
“That’s true,” frowned Luke. “Damn, I just don’t know what’s happening here. All for a fucking blue ribbon or a few grand? I don’t get it.”
“Well, they’re working on the gingerbread final touches so let’s go walk around and see what we see,” said Rett. “Tailor and Alec are allegedly ‘helping’ at our station, although I seriously think it’s more taste-testing.”
“Then we should all go see,” smirked Luke.
The ballroom had been dressed for Christmas even though it was scorching hot outside. But no amount of ribbon, pine garland, or polished brass could soften the strain that hung over the gingerbread village competition like a storm cloud.
Every table glittered beneath the chandeliers, every workstation smelled of cinnamon, cloves, browned butter, and hot sugar, and every contestant seemed to understand that one careless move could ruin more than royal icing or spun sugar.
After the recent deaths, laughter had become thin and nervous, offered only in quick bursts before vanishing into the scrape of spatulas, the brittle snap of cooling candy, and the uneasy awareness that someone in the room might know more than they were saying.
Taylor stood at the head of Crescent City Bakery’s table, her hands steady even though her shoulders carried the same tension everyone else was trying to hide.
Beside her, Dylan leaned over a parchment sketch marked with measurements and color notes, while Casey kept watch over the drying pieces as if they were evidence in a criminal trial.
Sara, sleeves pushed to her elbows, moved between trays of edible moss, candied leaves, and delicate gum-paste wildlife with the quiet focus of someone who knew exactly how much depended on the next hour.
Their village was not the frosted fairy-tale sort that usually won over crowds with peppermint roofs and cheerful little chimneys.
It was Louisiana rendered in gingerbread, sugar glass, praline, marzipan, isomalt, and patience—a bayou settlement so realistic that the shallow canals appeared to hold dark, slow-moving water.
Brown-sugar banks curved around the buildings, shaded by cypress trees made from piped chocolate trunks, toasted coconut bark, and clouds of finely shredded pistachio moss tinted with matcha and a breath of silver dust.
At the center of it all rose the antebellum home, stately and pale against the darker landscape, its columns molded from white chocolate rolled smooth as porcelain and its porches lined with impossibly small railings piped from stiff royal icing.
Taylor had cut each railing twice, rejecting the first set because the spacing was uneven by less than a fingernail.
Now the house stood with disciplined grace, every shutter made from scored gingerbread, every sugar-glass window catching chandelier light, every roof seam hidden beneath a dusting of powdered sugar that suggested winter without betraying the humid soul of the bayou.
Around the house, Sara had created gardens that looked both cultivated and wild, planted with edible versions of native flowers, herbs, and greens. They were perfect miniatures of Belle Fleur, although only their team knew that.
There were tiny magnolia blossoms shaped from wafer paper, sugared violets tucked beneath mint leaves, and delicate strands of candied mayhaw, a small red or yellow fruit grown on hawthorn trees. Muscadine vine was winding along paths paved with crushed vanilla wafer and pecan praline gravel.
Even the vegetable beds looked real enough to harvest, with miniature okra pods of tinted fondant, pepper leaves cut from spinach pasta dough, and feathery carrot tops placed in careful, natural disorder.
Dylan lowered a pair of tweezers toward a sugar heron standing at the marshy edge of the canal.
The bird’s neck curved in an elegant question mark, its beak tapered from a sliver of pale almond, and its legs were no thicker than threads of pulled candy tinted the faintest reed-brown.
Casey had brushed the wings with diluted gray cocoa so the feathers seemed layered and damp, as if the little creature had just lifted itself from the mist. For one dangerous second, the heron tipped, and all four women held their breath as if the entire room had narrowed to that single fragile point.
“Don’t touch the base,” Casey whispered, not because she mistrusted Dylan, but because whispers felt safer than normal voices.
Dylan adjusted the bird by a fraction, then withdrew the tweezers with a surgeon’s care.
The heron stayed upright, silent and perfect among reeds made from slivered almonds and strands of green apple peel, with tiny sugar snails clinging to the marsh grass and a line of pearlized isomalt bubbles caught beside its feet.
Across the aisle, a baker slammed a piping bag onto the table hard enough to make everyone flinch.
“I told you the roof pitch was wrong,” someone snapped, the words cutting across the room.
A second voice answered, sharper and louder, and a few nearby contestants turned their heads despite themselves, as if the quarrel might reveal whether ordinary pressure—or something more deliberate—was pushing everyone toward the edge.
Taylor did not look up.
“Eyes here,” she said softly.
It was not a command so much as a lifeline.
Dylan nodded, Casey exhaled through her nose, and Sara returned to painting a faint brown stripe down the back of a sugar alligator half-submerged near the dock, adding shadow between each armored ridge so the creature seemed to rise out of the dark water by inches.
The alligator was one of Casey’s triumphs.
She thought that even Alvin would have been proud of the likeness.
Its ridged tail disappeared into glossy molasses water lacquered with clear isomalt, while its eyes, made from dots of black sesame sealed beneath clear sugar, seemed to watch the village with ancient patience.
Around it, turtles basked on praline logs with shells scored like old river stones, pelicans balanced on pretzel pilings with almond beaks tucked toward their wafer-paper chests, a nutria crouched near a dock post shaped from cinnamon stick with whiskers of spun sugar, and a cluster of tiny egrets lifted their feathered wings as though startled by some unseen ripple moving beneath the surface.
The details were magnificent, but magnificence only raised the danger. A perfect village invited judgment from every angle, and in a room already unsettled by death, every flaw looked like a clue waiting to be discovered.
One leaning fence, one cracked window, one smudge in the sugar glass could pull the judges’ attention away from artistry and toward error, and none of the women could afford that—not after everything that had happened, not with the competition already feeling like a room full of lit matches.
Casey checked the clock, then checked it again as if the second glance might reveal more mercy than the first.
“Twenty-eight minutes,” she said. No one groaned. No one panicked out loud. They had done too much work together to waste breath on fear.
Sara slid a tray closer to Taylor. On it lay the last pieces of the garden. Edible yaupon berries glazed to a red shine, rosemary hedges trimmed into scale, candied pecan shells meant to suggest broken mulch, and tiny palmetto fans cut from green-tinted modeling chocolate.
Taylor selected each piece with reverence, placing them along the curving path to the antebellum home until the garden seemed to breathe with life, as though one whisper too loud might disturb it.
Another argument erupted two tables down, this one worse than the first. Metal clattered. Someone accused someone else of moving a support beam.
A man laughed bitterly, and the sound carried through the ballroom with the wrong kind of cheer, the kind that made Taylor think of locked pantry doors, missing tools, and the whispered question no one had dared ask plainly.
Dylan’s hand paused over the canal bridge.
The bridge was lacework gingerbread brushed with coffee glaze, arched over the black-sugar water and strong only because they had reinforced it with amber caramel hidden beneath decorative scrolls of royal icing.
If she set it crooked, they would have to choose between damaging the bank or leaving the mistake for the judges to find, and with so many eyes pretending not to watch them, either choice felt dangerous.
“I’ve got the left side,” Casey murmured.
Sara moved in without being asked, steadying the opposite bank with two fingers wrapped in parchment. Taylor watched the angle, her eyes flicking from sketch to village and back again. Together, they lowered the bridge into place, and for a moment their four separate breaths seemed to become one.
The bridge held. No crack traveled through the arch. No caramel seam buckled. Sara smiled first, just barely, and the others answered with expressions too small to invite bad luck.
That was the difference at Crescent City Bakery’s table. Fear was present, but it did not turn them against one another. It sharpened them.