Free Murder by the Slice by Livia J. Washburn

think for a minute that I’m not going to beat you.”
    Phyllis returned her friend’s smile and said, “We’ll see about that.”

Chapter 8

    Phyllis spent the weekend experimenting with the healthy cookie recipe. Now that Carolyn had made peace with her, she was able to throw herself wholeheartedly into getting ready for the upcoming competition without feeling guilty about it. She tried to make the cookie into a giant pizza using coconut and a thin layer of jam for the topping, but the cookie was too soft for this to work, and the jam was overpowering. Phyllis decided it would work better to just make regular-sized cookies. The taste was the most important thing.
    While the last batch of cookies was cooling, Phyllis decided she’d better find out if Carolyn was right about young children and peanut butter. On the Internet, she found out that Carolyn was indeed right: Bobby would have to wait until he was older before he could have anything with peanut butter. It would still make a nice recipe for the carnival. She’d just need to make sure any smaller kids were allowed to eat food with peanuts before letting them sample.
    On Monday Phyllis drove over to Fort Worth, twenty miles to the east, for a doctor’s appointment. Her regular physician, Dr. Walt Lee, practiced in Weatherford, but she also saw an allergist several times a year for help with her hay fever. This was a particularly bad season for it. The pollen levels wouldn’t drop significantly until after the first freeze, and Phyllis’s eyes had begun watering and itching too much for her to wait that long for relief.
    After getting a shot and a prescription for some eyedrops, Phyllis returned to her car and got ready to leave the doctor’s office in southwest Fort Worth. Since she was already over there, she decided she would shop a little, since it was a nice area with a multitude of stores. She didn’t go there very often because the traffic was bad.
    She stopped at the exit of the doctor’s office parking lot to wait for traffic to clear on the busy boulevard. While she was sitting there, she spotted a familiar face in a car that slowed down right in front of her to turn into the next parking lot, which happened to belong to an Applebee’s.
    At first Phyllis wasn’t sure she had seen whom she thought she saw. But then the car slid into a parking space in front of the restaurant and stopped. Sure enough, it was Shannon Dunston who got out, and she was accompanied by a tall, dark-haired man who possessively took her arm as they went inside. The man definitely wasn’t Shannon’s exhusband, Dr. Joel Dunston. Shannon must have started dating again.
    Phyllis couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy for the poor guy.
    Then she told herself she ought to be ashamed for thinking that. Shannon’s social life was none of her business.
    And besides, maybe enjoying a little male companionship would mean that Shannon wouldn’t be quite so cranky in the future.
    Phyllis scolded herself for thinking that , too.

    By the day before the carnival, Phyllis had received all the recipes that would be in the cookbook. Since most of the recipes came through e-mail, all Phyllis had to do with most of them was copy and paste them into her newsletter program. Once she had all the recipes laid out, she needed a cover. She had a digital camera that she bought when Bobby was born. She thought about just taking a picture of the plate of cookies after she made them, but Carolyn would probably be upset if she used her entry for the cover. She could go to the school and take pictures, but then it occurred to her that there might be a picture of Loving Elementary on the school Web site. Sure enough, after she’d connected to the Internet it was short work to go to the Web site, copy the picture of the school, and paste it onto the cover page. Once she was satisfied, she set it up to collate and print one hundred copies. She had a booklet stapler that she had bought when she