Chocolate Cake Nobody Cut

The letter said the church would be inventoried, packed, and dispersed. It did not say by whom.  Grace Hollow has stood at the top of Main Street since 1892, and on the first Sunday in December it merges into a church two towns over. Attendance. The cost of heating. The roof. Before the building changes hands, somebody has to open every box in the back hall and write down what is in it. Forty-one boxes of things people did not want in their own houses.  Yue Lin takes the job. Her mother's order books are in the third box, tied in bundles with the same thin brown twine, in the same small upright hand. And in November of 1996 there is a slip that says:  CHOCOLATE - 2 layer - no writing.  A name. A day. A time. And four months later, in the same hand and a different ink, two words: not picked up.  The name is Clyde Bidwell. He was fifty-four, he was the church sexton, and on the afternoon of the twenty-third of November, 1996, he fell off that church's roof. The county called it an accident. The report noted frost at the time of the fall, but did not establish the roof conditions or the exact time. Willow Hollow has been repeating the official account for thirty years.  Here is what Yue cannot get past. The cake was ordered for the afternoon of the day he died, and he never came for it. And in her mother's bakery in 1996 there was exactly one chocolate cake with no writing on it. It was the one Eleanor Martin made for every funeral in that town, and she never once wrote a name on it. You do not write a name on a cake that is going to be eaten by people who are already saying the name.  A man does not order his own funeral cake by accident.  Now she has a bakery to run, a church to empty by the middle of December, and a town that would rather keep the story it already has. There is a ladder on the north wall of that church that has not been moved in thirty years. There is a page out of a 1987 ledger in her drawer with the right half torn away. And there is a man in this town who has told the same story for three decades, and nobody has ever had a reason to doubt him.  The Chocolate Cake Nobody Cut is the fifth 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.