Sourdough Suspect

The shed on the mill lot held forty-one boxes of Willow Hollow's paper, and on the eleventh of January it burned to the ground with a man inside it.  Grover Ainsley was seventy-eight. He slept in that shed because the county wanted a watchman on the ground, and he had drag marks on the bottom of two boxes and a third one half out of the door when the smoke got him. The county says arson. The fire started inside, in the corner, in the paper, and there was a five-gallon drum of denatured alcohol standing eight feet away with a ring on the floor where it had been moved.  And in the ashes, at twenty to seven on a Monday morning, a firefighter hands Yue Lin a key. Brass. Burned at the teeth. A short piece of red string tied around the bow, two turns and a knot.  It opens the back door of her bakery. She is holding her own key in her other hand. It has two turns and a knot on it too, because she tied it that way herself.  There are only two keys in the world for that door. One is in her pocket. The other belongs to the boy who works for her, and the boy cannot find his, and the boy does not know where it went, and the whole town has already decided what that means.  The jar on her kitchen bench is the other thing she cannot get past. A sourdough starter that has been alive since 1996, fed twice a day by her mother for twenty-nine years and by her for two, and on the night of the fire somebody lifted the cloth off the mouth of that jar, fed it by hand with no scale, and put the cloth back. Yue Lin knows the difference the way a baker knows a hand. The person who fed that jar knew what it was.  The person who fed that jar was in her kitchen at two in the morning, with a key that nobody had cut on any record.  To find him she has to go to the man who cuts every key in Willow Hollow, who has never once asked a question in twenty-six years, who offers her his ledger before she asks for it, and who tells her, in his own shop, with the book open, that he did not ask.  The Sourdough Suspect is the sixth book in the Willow Hollow Bakery Mysteries -- a small-town cozy with a fair-play puzzle, a slow-burn romance that is still refusing to say anything out loud, one orange cat who has never once helped, and three recipes from The Butter & Crumb.