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around town.
    â€œYeah?” Ruth dug her car keys out of jacket pocket.
    â€œWhat can you tell me about the body? About the death?”
    â€œNot much at this point,” Ruth said. “It looks like she bled to death. But I need to run some tests, of course, to be certain.”
    â€œHow would someone get trapped in a freezer long enough to bleed or freeze to death?” Annie asked.
    Ruth walked out of the Pie Palace holding a big bulky bag and a pie box, and Annie followed her outside into the fall morning. The sun was just beginning to rise, giving the sky a slate-blue tinge. The waning moon was still visible.
    â€œWhy didn’t she just open the door?” Annie said. “If she was in there struggling with someone who slit her throat?”
    â€œNo, she wasn’t inside with someone. I don’t think so, anyway. Not like what you’re suggesting. There was about five hundred pounds of sugar blocking the door. “She couldn’t have possibly moved it. I’m sure she’s less than a hundred pounds.”
    â€œBut that means someone else placed the sugar in front of the door while she was in there.”
    â€œShe was probably already dead when they did. But restaurants get deliveries all times of the day and night. Check with Pamela on that,” Ruth said, opening her car door. “Call me later. I may have some answers for you then.”
    â€œOkay,” Annie said and stepped back from the car.
    She had enough to file her first story on the case. But she’d need more for the complete story. A lot more.
    Annie mentally sorted through the evidence and possibilities. She didn’t know which was worse—the idea that the young woman could have met her death in the freezer, crawling inside to get away from someone, or that someone could have killed her and then stored her dead body inside.

Photo by Christy Majors
    Mollie Cox Bryan , author of the Cumberland Creek mystery series, is also the regional bestselling author of Mrs. Rowe’s Little Book of Southern Pies and Mrs. Rowe’s Restaurant Cookbook: A Lifetime of Recipes from the Shenandoah Valley . An award-winning journalist and poet, she currently blogs, cooks, and scrapbooks in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with her husband and two daughters. Her first Cumberland Creek mystery, Scrapbook of Secrets, was nominated for an Agatha Award for best first novel. Please visit her at molliecoxbryan.com.

Having traded in her career as a successful
investigative journalist for the life of a
stay-at-home mom in picturesque
Cumberland Creek, Virginia,
Annie can’t help but feel that something’s missing.
But she finds solace in a local “crop circle” of
scrapbookers united by chore-shy husbands,
demanding children, and occasional fantasies
of their former single lives.
And when the quiet idyll of their small town
is shattered by a young mother’s suicide,
they band together to find out what went wrong . . .
    Â 
    Annie resurrects her reporting skills and discovers
that Maggie Rae was a closet scrapbooker
who left behind more than a few secrets—and
perhaps a few enemies. As they sift through
Maggie Rae’s mysteriously discarded scrapbooks,
Annie and her “crop” sisters begin to suspect that
her suicide may have been murder.
It seems that something sinister is lurking beneath
the town’s beguilingly calm façade—like a killer
with unfinished business . . .

The ladies of the Cumberland Scrapbook Crop are
welcoming an eccentric newbie into their fold. A
self-proclaimed witch, Cookie Crandall can whip
up a sumptuous vegan meal and rhapsodize about
runes and moon phases with equal aplomb. She
becomes fast friends with her fellow scrapbookers,
including freelance reporter Annie, with whom she
shares shallow roots in a community of established
family trees. So when Cookie becomes the prime
suspect in a series of bizarre murders, the croppers
get scrappy and set out to