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the offending noise on the desk in the kitchen.
    After fifteen rings Carrie gave up and went to get the plates.
    CHAPTER III
    The committee ate Carrie’s brunch as eagerly as if she’d spent all morning in the kitchen preparing it.
    There, she thought, that proves it. It doesn’t take a zillion-ingredient recipe and stacks of dirty pans. All it takes is friends getting together—then no one cares whether your kitchen helper was Julia Child or the Pillsbury Doughboy!
    Carrie’s helper was much more likely to be the Pillsbury Doughboy. By the time she married Amos, she had established a casual approach toward culinary efforts in her nearly-spinster life. Frozen dinners and simple, one-dish meals suited her just fine, though sometimes she did enjoy creating specialty edibles from unique and often bizarre combinations of basic ingredients. She had frequently surprised guests with dishes whose origins were long lost in “Carrie’s kitchen fiddling,” as Amos called it. Since he preferred to work late and eat alone at the Tulsa Legal Club, it hadn’t mattered to him whether she cooked fancy or didn’t cook at all.
    And, as far as their son Rob was concerned... well, he’d been used to ready-prepared food from the time she opened the first Gerber jar. When she’d tried to apologize to him recently for what she had begun to suspect was a warm-fuzzy-home-cooked-meal-deprived childhood (was it something she’d read in a magazine?), Rob only laughed and asked how she thought he’d manage alone today if he hadn’t learned her cooking methods early on.
    Perhaps it was no surprise that, over the years, Carrie’s friends had given her cookbooks. She always thanked each giver with the same burst of enthusiasm that inspired her special kitchen creations, and every one of them went away feeling that all Carrie McCrite had lacked was the right cookbook. She shelved each book in a special maple bookcase Amos brought home from his office, dusted them all twice a year, and sold them all—in mint condition—right before her move to the Ozarks. She kept only a small file box with a few favorite recipes and a hand-written notebook that preserved the details of her more successful kitchen experiments.
    Now she felt a warm satisfaction as she watched Jason, whose wife was a dedicated cook-from-scratch woman, pick a last scrap of caramel topping off his plate, lift it to his mouth, then lick his fingers carefully. After a short pause for appreciation, he looked around at the group and said, “We can’t wait any longer for JoAnne, so we might as well adjourn the meeting. It’s important to find out what she learned from the Environmental Commission before we plan our next move.”
    Roger and Shirley looked just as placid as they had when the meeting opened, but it was easy to tell that everyone else was annoyed by JoAnne’s absence.
    Mag said sourly, “It’s just like her to plan a meeting and then run off after some will-o’-the-wisp at the last minute, not caring a bit if it bothers any of us.”
    The group agreed on the necessity for taking some kind of action as soon as possible, so Jason suggested they meet again the following Saturday, making sure JoAnne would be there. Mag invited them to get together at her house.
    “Jack’ll be busy around the farm,” she said, “so we’ll have the place to ourselves.”
    Carrie had met Jack Bruner on one of her rare visits to Mag, and she saw him in Guilford occasionally, but that was all. Mag was certainly opinionated and outspoken, but at least she was friendly enough. Friendly was the last word Carrie would have chosen to describe Mag’s husband. He was dark and moody, taciturn to the point of hostility. Carrie thought of him as one of those people you’d never want to be alone with in a dark alley—or anywhere else.
    Whenever Mag’s sharp tongue tried Carrie’s patience, she’d remember Jack and pray for the Lord to help her be kind and loving toward his wife, and to love