Carrot Cake Murder (18 page)

Duh! Hannah thought, but of course she didn’t say it. “What makes you say that?” she asked instead, unwrapping the chocolate, which was beginning to melt in her hand, dumping it into a half-pint measuring cup, and popping it into the microwave.

“It’s just that I pride myself on my interviewing techniques, and I can’t believe I didn’t pick up on something like that and pursue it.”

Hannah glanced at him as she set the timer on the microwave. “Maybe it’s a girl thing,” she said.

“And maybe I’m losing my touch and you’re just really good at this.”

“Fat chance,” Hannah told him, melting the chocolate squares and salvaging his ego simultaneously. “I’m just lucky, that’s all. And people talk to me because I was raised here. I’ve got the hometown advantage.”

Mike considered it for a moment and then he said, “You’re right. That probably counts for a lot. I like these Party Cookies, Hannah. They remind me of something, but I don’t know what.”

“Old-Fashioned Sugar Cookies.”

“That’s right!”

“It’s close to the same recipe, but with different flavoring and pretty colors.”

“Right. So let’s get back to the identity of the victim. Why did Mrs. Beeseman and Mrs. Diehl have doubts about it?”

Hannah was stymied for a moment and then she realized that Mike was talking about Marge and Patsy. “It’s just that they hadn’t seen him for so many years,” she tried to explain. “And both of them thought that his personality had changed since he left Lake Eden.”

“It probably did. He was pretty young then, wasn’t he?”

Hannah did some mental arithmetic and came up with a figure. “He was in his twenties, I think.”

“Point taken. You’re not the same person you were when you were twenty, are you?”

“I hope not!” Hannah said, without thinking. And then she was a bit embarrassed over the vehemence of her answer. She’d been horribly naïve at twenty, and she preferred to think that she was wiser and more sophisticated now.

“I bet you were cute!”

Hannah felt her heartbeat speed up as Mike flashed his knee-weakening grin. How could one man affect her autonomic nervous system so drastically? Then she remembered that he’d used the past tense. She was about to call him on it, when he spoke again.

“They had enough time to get a good look at him,” Mike continued. “Did they think his physical characteristics matched their brother’s?”

“Yes, but they pointed out that any guy about the right age and height with blondish hair might have fooled them. Marge told me that Gus didn’t have any distinguishing physical characteristics or marks.” Hannah stopped speaking, but she quickly convinced herself that telling Mike about the tattoo couldn’t hurt. “But he did,” she said.

Mike’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”

“You don’t need to know that. Let’s just say that four different people told me about one special physical characteristic that Gus had.”

“And that characteristic would be…?”

“A tattoo. It was two crossed bats with a ball between them and it was on his left buttock.”

“And you know this for a fact?”

“Not me!” Hannah glared at him. “The people who told me about it said that he got it in high school and it was still there unless he had it removed in the intervening years.”

“Hold on,” Mike said, pulling out his cell phone. “I’ll call Doc Knight and find out. Thanks for telling me, Hannah. This could be important.”

While Mike was waiting to be put through to Doc Knight at the hospital, Hannah began to assemble her cookie dough. She mixed the softened butter with the sugars and beat them together until they were light and fluffy. Then she mixed in the baking soda and salt, and added the egg. Once that was incorporated, she mixed the sour cream with the red food coloring and added them to her mixing bowl. As she mixed them in, she half listened to Mike’s conversation with Doc Knight while she debated whether or not she should tell him about how Jack Herman and Gus had fought on the night that Gus left Lake Eden.

“Okay, then. Thanks, Doc.” Mike clicked off his phone and looked over at Hannah. “The victim has an identical tattoo to the one you described.”

“No,” Hannah said, nodding her head.

“What does that mean? You said no, but you’re nodding yes.”

“That means I came to a decision about something else, and I was acknowledging the information you gave me about the tattoo at the same time.

“Then the no you said was for the decision.”

“Yes,” Hannah said, shaking her head.

“Hold on. This time you said yes, but you shook your head no.”

“That’s right. Yes, I came to a decision. And no, I won’t tell you what it’s about.”

Mike drained the last of his coffee and stood up. “Thanks for the cookies. And thanks for telling me about the tattoo. I’ll let the family know we have positive I.D. I’d better go now. I’ve got a meeting with my team in twenty minutes.”

“Take these with you.” Hannah reached for the box of cookies she’d packed up for him to take back to the sheriff’s station. “And share them with your team. There’s nothing like chocolate to perk you right up.”

PARTY COOKIES

DO NOT preheat the oven yet. This dough must chill before baking.

2 cups melted butter (4 sticks)

2 cups powdered sugar (not sifted)

1 cup white sugar

2 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla (or any other flavoring you wish)

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon cream of tartar (critical!)

1 teaspoon salt

4¼ cups flour (not sifted)

Food coloring (at least 3 different colors)

¼ cup white sugar (for later)

Melt the butter. Add the sugars and mix. Let the mixture cool to room temperature and mix in the eggs, one at a time. Then add the vanilla, baking soda, cream of tartar and salt. Mix well. Add the flour in half-cup increments, mixing after each addition.

Divide the cookie dough into fourths and place each fourth on a piece of waxed paper. (You’ll work with one fourth at a time.) Place one fourth in a bowl and stir in drops of food coloring until the dough is slightly darker than the color you want. (The cookies will be a shade lighter after they’re baked.) Place the colored dough back on the waxed paper and color the other three parts. (You can leave one part uncolored, if you like.)

Let the dough firm up for a few moments. Then divide each different COLOR into four parts so you have sixteen lumps of dough in all. Place a sheet of plastic wrap on your counter and roll each lump into a dough rope with your hands (just as if you were making bread sticks.) The sixteen dough ropes should each be about 12 inches long.

To assemble, stack the dough ropes, two on the bottom, two on the top, near the edge of the plastic wrap. Squeeze them together a bit and push in the ends so they’re even. Flip the edge of the plastic wrap over the top and roll them up together tightly in one multi-colored roll. Twist the ends of the plastic wrap, fold them over on top of the roll, and refrigerate the rolls as you make them. When you’re all finished, you’ll have four rolls of multi-colored cookie dough chilling in your refrigerator.

Let the dough chill for at least an hour (overnight is fine, too.) When you’re ready to bake, pre-heat the oven to 325 degrees F., rack in the middle position.

Put ¼ cup white sugar (granulated) in a small bowl and have it ready next to your greased cookie sheets.

Take out one dough roll, unwrap it, and slice it into ½ inch thick rounds. (Each dough roll should make about 24 cookies.) Place each round into the bowl of sugar and flip it over so it coats both sides. Position the sugarcoated rounds on a greased baking sheet, 12 to a standard sheet. Return the unused dough to the refrigerator until you’re ready to slice more cookies.

Bake the cookies at 325 degrees F. for 12 to 15 minutes, just until they begin to turn slightly golden around the edges. Cool them on the cookie sheet for a minute or two, and then transfer them to a wire rack to complete cooling.

These cookies freeze very well if you stack them in a roll, wrap them in foil, and place the foil rolls in a freezer bag. You can also freeze the multi-colored unbaked dough rolls by leaving them in the plastic wrap and placing them in a freezer bag.

Yield: Approximately 8 dozen pretty party cookies.

By the time the hands on the kitchen clock met and pointed straight up at the ceiling, Hannah had finished baking and frosting the Red Velvet Cookies. She was about to call Norman to see if he was free to taste one, when Luanne pushed though the swinging door between the kitchen and the coffee shop.

“Norman just called,” she told Hannah. “He’s got an emergency patient in the chair, and he can’t make it in to taste those cookies you told him about.”

“Okay. Thanks for telling me. How are you holding out on cookies?”

“Just fine. It’s been only the regulars so far. As far as takeout goes, Mrs. Surma came in for two dozen Orange Snaps for the Brownies, Reverend Knudson picked up some Viking Cookies for his grandmother since she liked them so much after church, and Mr. Purvis came in for five dozen Oatmeal Raisin Crisps for his teachers.”

“But school’s not in session yet.”

“That’s what I said, and he told me it’s teachers’ prep week. They come in a week early to get things done that they don’t have time to do when they’ve got classes to teach.”

A mental picture of her second grade teacher flashed through Hannah’s mind. Miss Gladke was dressed in a pair of white overalls with a white painter’s cap pulled over her curls. And she was up on a ladder with a brush in her hand, painting the walls of her classroom.

Hannah took a step back from the ridiculous image. She knew that painting wasn’t the type of work done during teachers’ prep week. Miss Gladke would be making up lesson plans, choosing textbooks, and other academic tasks.

“You can leave for the reunion now,” Luanne told her. “I can take care of everything here. I’ll lock up when it’s time and be in tomorrow morning at nine to help you open.”

Hannah was grateful for the extra work Luanne was putting in, especially because Delores and Carrie were spending the week at the lake and she was sure Luanne would much rather spend the time with her four-year-old daughter.

“You probably won’t have many customers this afternoon. Why don’t you call your mother and Nettie, and have them bring Suzie down here for cookies? It’s a hot day, and I’ve got some Pecan Crisps made into ice cream sandwiches in the freezer.”

Luanne looked absolutely delighted at the suggestion. “Thanks, Hannah. I’ll do that. Suzie just loves to come down here with her grandmas and see all the different kinds of cookies. She says she wants to be a cookie baker when she grows up.”

“Great! She can take over for me when I retire…unless she changes her mind and decides to be a nuclear physicist or a brain surgeon, of course.”

Less than five minutes later, Hannah was zipping down the alley in back of her shop in her cookie truck. She turned west on Third and then made a right onto Main Street. Luck was with her and there was a parking spot directly in front of the Rhodes Dental Clinic. Hannah wasted no time pulling into the spot and shutting off her engine. She grabbed the pink box of cookies she’d packed as a care package for Norman, got out of the truck, and headed straight for the front door that nestled under the green-and-white metal awning that protected dental patients from the sun and rain in the summer and the snow in the winter.

A buzzer sounded somewhere in the interior of the building as Hannah opened the front door and stepped in. The sliding frosted glass windows at the reception desk were closed, but that didn’t surprise Hannah. Norman usually hired a student from the Jordan High senior class work-study program to man the desk during the school year, and he took care of things himself during summer vacation.

“Please make yourself comfortable in the waiting room. I’m with a patient, but I’ll be with you in just a minute or two.”

Hannah smiled as Norman called out to whoever had come in the door. He had no idea who it was, and she decided to surprise him. Since he was expecting a reply, she settled for a one-word response that was unlikely to give away her identity.

“Okay,” she replied, keeping her voice deliberately low. Then she walked over to the magazine rack and chose a current issue to read while she was waiting. Norman ordered magazines specifically for his waiting room, and they were delivered directly to the clinic. His patients weren’t stuck perusing three-year-old news stories, or movie magazines that featured celebrity weddings that had already ended in divorce.

As Hannah flipped through a gourmet food magazine, she heard voices coming from the examining room just inside the inner door. She didn’t consciously intend to eavesdrop, but there were no other patients that she could engage in conversation. That meant the waiting room was perfectly silent, except for the soothing music that was playing at low volume. She could hear every word that was spoken in the examining room.

“I waszh eating an apple and it juszht pulled out.”

“That happens sometimes. How old it is?”

“Doc Bennett put it in sheventeen yearszh ago.”

“He did a fine job. Most bridges need to be replaced long before that, especially if they’re not made of modern amalgams. Just let me clean it up for you and I’ll reattach it. It’ll only take a couple of minutes.”

“Good! I’ve got shurgery at two, and I need to get back to the hoshpital.”

Hannah drew in her breath sharply. She thought she’d recognized that voice! It was Doc Knight, the very man she needed to see!

The sliding glass doors opened and Norman peered out. He seemed surprised but pleased to see her. “Hi, Hannah. I didn’t know it was you out here. This isn’t a dental emergency, is it?”