Combustible (A Boone Childress Novel) by CC Abbott

when Cedar texted him firs t thing with the message: OMG, he didn’t mind texting: DITTO in return.
    He finished the household chores in time to eat a late lunch. In the kitchen he fried four slices of bologna in a skillet and toasted four pieces of Mom's oatmeal bread.
    When the bologna gave off a smell like undercooked bacon, he knew it was done. He slapped together the meat and toast and then headed out the back door toward the deck. He ate as he walked. By the time he had come through the gate, he had devoured both sandwiches.
    But they didn't hit the spot. Boone really did have a sweet tooth. It was just a specialized form of sweet. It was only satiated by snickerdoodles. Mom’s snickerdoodles, which given the circumstances, Boone knew he had little chance of getting. Only one solution. He would have to make his own. Cooking was like chemistry, right? You get a list of ingredients, follow the procedure, and eureka! You’ve got cookies.
    “Cookbook, cookbook,” he said aloud as he scanned the line of books on the shelf above the stovetop. “Nothing for making desserts?”
    Who knew there were so many books on preparing fish? That made sense, now that he thought about it. Cookies were naturally appealing. Making fish edible probably took a higher level of skill. Fish. He snapped his fingers. That’s one species had not included in his science experiment. All of his subjects were mammalian. Which made sense because humans were mammals. But wouldn’t it be interesting to see if insects responded the same way to non-mammalian samples?
    “No dessert cookbooks at all? Barbaric.”
    Instead, he settled on the Fanny Farmer cookbook because the name Fanny made him smirk and because it looked like a generalized text. He found cookies in the table of contents and was delighted to discover the recipe for snickerdoodles.
    “The mystery is solved.”
    The recipe was simple: Butter, sugar, cream of tartar, eggs, vanilla, flour, and cinnamon. The instructions were straightforward like a science lab. What was the big deal here? With directions like these, anyone could cook.
    An hour and twenty minutes later, he pulled a pan of cookies out of the oven and set it on the stove top next to the three glass bowls he had used for mixing, which were stacked next to a metal dish he had used for working the butter, as well as the decanter of sugar he had spilled on the counter when he burned himself putting the raw cookies in the oven.
    The kitchen was sort of a mess, he had to admit, but he would clean it up while he enjoyed his snickerdoodles. He poured himself a tall glass of milk. He set it on the table. He used a spatula to gently lift the cookies from the pan and arranged them on a clean white plate. He sprinkled them with cinnamon twice because there’s no such thing as too much cinnamon. Then he put the plate on the table next to the milk.
    “Now for the taste test,” he whispered and took the first bite.
    He waited for the rich, buttery flavor to fill his mouth, the w armth to spread over his tongue and the cold of the milk to harden the cookie so that it crunched satisfyingly between his teeth.
    “ What the hell!” he said and ejected the cookie. “Bleh! Bleck!”
    He grabbed the milk and emptied the glass. He refilled it and emptied it again.
    The cookies tasted like paste. He picked one up from the pan. He held in the light, turning it over and over. It made no sense. He had followed the recipe precisely. The shape was right, the consistency was right, but the texture was all wrong. It was lumpy and grainy, like congealed cream of wheat. And the flavor. Damn. It was nothing like Mom used to make.
    The recipe was defective. That was the only explanation.
    He picked up the pan and carried it to the gallery. “Bon appetite, birds,” he said and flung the cookies into the yard. The crows would eat them for sure.
    As he put the bowls and the pan into the sink, his pager went off. The readout indicated a house fire in