Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder

by Joanne Fluke

  Hannah was chuckling as she drove off. Judging from the surprised expression on Herb’s face, he hadn’t guessed that her mother had previously considered him for the position of son-in-law.

  The wide gate that separated the teachers’ parking lot from the school grounds was open and Hannah drove through. As she traveled down the lane between the rows of parked cars, she noticed a conspicuous absence of new or expensive vehicles. Teaching didn’t pay well enough for any luxuries, and Hannah thought that was a shame. There was something really wrong with the system when a teacher could make more money flipping burgers at a fast-food chain.

  The strip of blacktop by the back door of the cafeteria was peppered with warning signs. Hannah pulled up by one that read: “NO PARKING AT ANY TIME BY ORDER OF THE LAKE EDEN PARKING AUTHORITY.” In smaller letters, it warned that violators would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, but Herb was the sole employee of the Lake Eden Parking Authority and he was out watching the front entrance. Hannah didn’t feel guilty about violating a city parking statute. She was running late and she had to unload her supplies. In less than ten minutes a horde of hungry Boy Scouts would be clamoring for her cookies and lemonade.

  The minute that Hannah pulled up, Edna Ferguson opened the kitchen door. She was a bird-thin woman in her fifties and she wore a welcoming smile. “Hi, Hannah. I was wondering when you’d get here. Do you want some help unloading?”

  “Thanks, Edna.” Hannah handed her a box of supplies to carry. “The Scouts aren’t here yet, are they?”

  Edna shook her hair-netted head. “Mr. Purvis called an all-school assembly and they’re still in the auditorium. If their parents aren’t here to pick them up, he wants them to walk home in groups.”

  Hannah nodded, hefting the large box of cookies that Lisa had packed, and followed Edna into the school kitchen. As she entered the large room with its wall-long counters and massive appliances, Hannah wondered what it would be like to be the last child in the group. You’d start off together, feeling safe by virtue of sheer numbers, but one by one your friends would peel off to go into their own homes. When the last one had left, you’d have to go the rest of the way by yourself, hoping and praying that the killer wasn’t lurking in the bushes.

  “There was no suffering, was there, Hannah?”

  Hannah set the box down and turned to Edna. “What?”

  “With Ron. I’ve been thinking about it all day. He was such a nice boy. If it was his time to die, I hope it was quick and painless.”

  Hannah didn’t believe that everyone had a prearranged time to die. Thinking like that was too much like buying a lottery ticket and figuring that it was your turn to win the jackpot. “Bill told me he thought it was instantaneous.”

  “I guess we should be grateful for that. And to think that he was right here, only minutes before he was murdered! It’s enough to give a body chills!”

  Hannah placed her lemons on one of Edna’s chopping blocks and began to cut them into paper-thin slices. “Then Ron made his delivery this morning?”

  “Of course. That boy never missed a day. He was real conscientious and he took pride in his work.”

  Hannah added this tidbit to the small stockpile of facts she’d gathered. Ron had stocked Jordan High’s cooler this morning, for whatever that was worth. “Did you see him this morning?”

  “No. I never do. I don’t come in until eight and he was long gone by then. But the cooler had been stocked.”

  Hannah unpacked her heavy-duty plastic punchbowl and handed it to Edna. She only used the glass one for formal functions like weddings and the senior prom. Then she picked up the huge thermos of lemonade and the bowl of lemon slices she’d cut, and led the way into the main part of the cafeteria. A table had already been set up for refreshments, covered with a blue paper tablecloth, and there was a cardboard file box at the head of another similarly covered table.

  “Gil came down on his free period to set up,” Edna told her. “He said to tell you that he’s bringing a balloon centerpiece.”

  “Okay, I’ll leave room for it.” Hannah motioned for Edna to put the punchbowl down. Then she opened the thermos and started to pour the lemonade into the bowl. “You didn’t notice anything unusual about the way Ron left the kitchen?”

  “Can’t say as I did. What’s in those ice cubes, Hannah? They look cloudy.”

  “They’re made out of lemonade so they won’t dilute it when they melt. I do the same thing with any punch I make.” Hannah finished transferring the lemonade and floated the slices of lemon on the top. As she stepped back to admire the effect, she noticed that Edna was frowning. “Do you think it needs more lemon slices?”

  “No. It looks real professional. I was just thinking about Ron.”

  “You and everybody else. Come on, Edna. I’ve got to unpack the cookies.”

  Edna followed her back to the kitchen and she gasped when Hannah lifted the lid on the box. “Just look at that! Those are real pretty, Hannah.”

  “I think so, too.” Hannah smiled as she arranged the cookies on a tray. Lisa had piped on yellow and blue frosting in the shape of the Boy Scout logo. “Lisa Herman did the decorations. She’s getting to be an expert with the pastry bag.”

  “Lisa’s real talented. I swear that girl could do anything she put her mind to. It’s just a pity she had to give up college to take care of her father.”

  “I know. Her older brothers and sisters wanted to put him in a nursing home, but Lisa didn’t think that was right.” Hannah handed Edna a box with small blue paper plates, gold napkins, and blue plastic cups. “You take this. I’ll bring the cookies.”

  It didn’t take long to arrange the plates, cups, and napkins on the table. Once everything was done, they went back into the kitchen for a cup of coffee. They were sitting at the square wooden table in the corner of the kitchen, waiting for the Scouts to arrive, when Edna gave another long sigh. “It’s just such a pity, that’s all.”

  “You mean about Ron?”

  “Yes. That poor boy was running himself ragged with those routes of his. He was putting in a sixty-hour week and Max doesn’t pay overtime. It was getting to him.”

  “Did Ron tell you that?”

  Edna shook her head. “Betty Jackson did. She was there when Ron asked Max for an assistant. That was over six months ago, but Max was too cheap to put anyone else on the payroll.”

  Hannah knew. Max Turner had the reputation for pinching a penny until it screamed in pain. For someone who was rumored to have money to burn, he certainly didn’t live the part. Max drove a new car, but that was his only luxury. He still lived in his parents’ old house in back of the Cozy Cow Dairy. He’d fixed it up some, but that had been necessary. It would have fallen down around his ears if he hadn’t.

  “I just think it’s a shame that Ron had to die on the day that he finally got his assistant.”

  “Ron had an assistant?” Hannah turned to look at Edna in surprise. “How do you know that?”

  “I keep out a jar of instant coffee for Ron. He always liked something to warm him up after he came out of the cooler. There were two coffee cups on the counter when I came in this morning so I figured he finally got his assistant. But I never thought that Max would hire a woman!”

  Hannah felt her adrenaline start to pump. Ron’s new assistant might have witnessed his murder. “You’re sure that Ron’s assistant was a woman?”

  “There was lipstick on the cup. She must have been young because it was bright pink and that color looks terrible on someone our age.”

  Hannah bristled at being lumped in a category with a woman who was at least twenty years older than she was. She had half a notion to remind Edna of that, but it might be counterproductive. “Did you wash the cups, Edna?”

  “Nope. I threw them in the trash.”

  “You threw them in the trash?”

  Edna laughed at Hannah’s astonished expression. “They were the disposable kind.”

  “They could be evidence,�
�� Hannah informed her, and Edna’s laugh died a quick death. “Bill’s in charge of the investigation and he’ll need to see them.”

  Hannah turned and headed for the wastebasket by the sink, but before she could start to rummage inside, Edna stopped her. “Mr. Hodges emptied my trash right after lunch. I’m really sorry, Hannah. I never would have thrown them away if I’d known that they were important.”

  Hannah realized she’d been abrupt. “That’s okay. Just tell me what Mr. Hodges does with the trash.”

  “He throws it all in that big orange Dumpster in the parking lot. Somebody’s going to have to dig through it before it gets hauled away.”

  “What time does that happen?”

  “Around five.”

  Hannah muttered a curse under her breath. She couldn’t stand by and let the trash truck haul away important evidence. She’d try to reach Bill, but if he wasn’t here by the time the awards banquet was over, she’d have to go through the trash bags herself.

  “Great job, Hannah!” Gil Surma, the Lake Eden scoutmaster and Jordan High counselor, gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder. “It’s a good thing you brought extra cookies. I never thought that eighteen boys could eat seven dozen.”

  “That’s less than five apiece and they’re growing boys. I just figured that since I was catering a Boy Scout banquet, I’d better live up to the Boy Scout motto.”

  It took Gil a minute. As Hannah watched, the corners of Gil’s eyes began to crinkle and he chuckled. “You mean, ‘Be Prepared’? That’s very clever.”

  Hannah smiled and carried the punchbowl out to the kitchen. When she came back, Gil was still there. “You don’t have to stay, Gil. I can clean up.”

  “No, I’ll help you.” Gil began to gather up the plastic cups and plates and toss them into the trash. “Hannah?”

  “Yes, Gil.” Hannah paused to stare at him. Gil looked very earnest.

  “You found Ron, didn’t you?”

  Hannah sighed. Everyone she met wanted to know something about Ron. She was becoming a local celebrity, but being catapulted to instant fame by virtue of Ron’s murder made her feel rotten. “Yes, Gil. I found him.”

  “That must have been very upsetting for you.”

  “It wasn’t exactly my idea of fun.”

  “I was just thinking…that’s a terrible thing you had to go through and you might want to talk to someone about it. My office door is always open, Hannah. And I’ll do my best to help you through this.”

  Hannah wanted to tell him that she didn’t need a shrink. Even if she did, a Jordan High counselor who dealt with the heartbreak of acne and dateless Saturday nights wouldn’t be the shrink she’d choose. But then she reminded herself that she’d vowed to be tactful, and she took a deep breath, preparing to lie through her teeth. “Thanks for the offer, Gil. If I need to talk to somebody about it, you’ll be my first choice.”

  Edna had left by the time Hannah had packed up her supplies and carted them out to her Suburban. She’d tried to call Bill several times, but she’d been told that Bill was out in the field and couldn’t be reached. Hannah glanced at her watch. She’d promised Lisa that she’d be back by four, and she had only five minutes to make it. But finding the cup with lipstick was more important than getting back to The Cookie Jar on time.

  Hannah glanced down at her best dress slacks and sweater set. She was catering the mayor’s party tonight and she’d planned to wear it.

  The knit outfit was light beige, but it was washable. Giving a little groan for the load of laundry she’d have to do the moment she got home, Hannah pushed up her sweater sleeves and marched to the Dumpster, girding her loins to do battle with the cafeteria leftovers that awaited her.

  The Dumpster was huge. Hannah wrinkled her nose at the stench that rolled out of the metal bin and muttered a curse. The lip of the container came up above her armpits and there was no way that she could lift all the bags out to examine them. Muttering another curse, a more colorful one this time, Hannah walked back to her Suburban and drove it up nose-to-nose with the front of the trash bin. Then she clambered up on the candy-apple red hood and reached into the Dumpster to pull up the first trash bag.

  Her first attempt yielded wadded napkins, globs of butterscotch pudding, and clumps of something brown that looked like beef stew. At least she knew what the students had eaten for lunch. Hannah was about to haul up the second bag when she remembered that the kitchen wastebasket had been lined with a smaller green plastic bag. She stretched out over the hood and lifted the black bags one by one, dragging them over to one side. Near the bottom—she should have known that it would be on the bottom—she saw one lone green bag.

  Even though she scrunched forward until her entire upper body was hanging over the edge of the Dumpster, the tips of her fingers were still a good three inches from the top of the green bag. Hannah sighed and then she did what any good sister-in-law and dedicated amateur detective would do. She turned around to dangle her legs over the lip of the metal bin, took a deep steadying breath, and slid down into the bowels of the Dumpster.

  Now that she was on the inside, grabbing the green trash bag was simple. Climbing back out of the Dumpster wasn’t. Hannah had to stack the big black bags in a pile so that she could scramble up on top of them, using them like a slippery and squishy staircase. One bag broke under her weight and she groaned as her shoes sank down into a morass of stew. By the time she emerged from the malodorous depths and pulled herself back up on the hood of her Suburban again, Hannah knew that she smelled every bit as bad as she looked.

  “Bill’s going to owe me big time for this,” Hannah grumbled as she loosened the tie on the green plastic bag and began to search through the contents. Several crumpled bread wrappers and a slew of illicit cigarette butts later, she encountered two Styrofoam cups.

  “Gottcha!” Hannah crowed. She was about to grab the cups when she remembered that movie and television detectives always used protective gloves and evidence bags. If there were fingerprints on the cup with the lipstick, she certainly didn’t want to smudge them. Since Hannah didn’t happen to carry gloves or evidence bags on her catering jobs, she settled for slipping a bread wrapper over her hand, plucking out the two cups, one by one, and depositing them inside a second empty bread wrapper.

  With the evidence secured, Hannah slid down from the hood of her Suburban and climbed into the driver’s seat. As she started her engine and drove out of the school parking lot, she felt a little foolish about the elaborate precautions she’d taken. Modeling herself after a television detective was crazy unless she was dumb enough to believe that the prefix of every telephone number in the entire country was five-five-five.

  Chapter Four

  Lisa was filling a bag with Peanut Butter Melts and her eyes grew as round as saucers as Hannah blew in the back door. “Hannah! What…?”

  “Don’t ask. I’m going in to take a quick shower.”

  “But Bill’s here and he needs to talk to you.”

  Hannah ducked into the bathroom and poked her head out the door. “Where is he?”

  “Out in front. He’s minding the counter while I pack up this order for Mrs. Jessup.”

  “Give him a mug of coffee and send him back here. I’ll be out just as soon as I’m decent.”

  The moment she’d closed the bathroom door behind her, Hannah peeled off her filthy clothes and stuffed them into a laundry bag. Then she climbed into the minuscule metal enclosure that Al Percy had called an “added bonus” when he’d shown her the building, and cranked on the water. She’d used the shower once before, when a fifty-pound bag of flour had burst as she’d muscled it up to the surface of the work island. Her shower might be tiny and cramped, but it worked. Once she was as clean as she could get within the tight confines, she shut off the water and stepped out, toweling off in record time.

  She put on the extra set of clothes she kept for emergencies: a pair of worn jeans with a threadbare rear and an old Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt that had fade
d from royal purple to a dull shade of pewter. The gold block letters had deteriorated into a peeling smudge, but at least she didn’t smell like decaying food. After running a wide-toothed comb through her frizzy red hair, she slipped her feet into the pair of cross-country trainers she hadn’t worn since the last time she’d fallen for the old “jogging is good for you” routine, and opened the door.

  Bill was sitting on a stool at the work island. There were cookie crumbs on the otherwise sparkling surface and Hannah assumed that Lisa must have plied him with cookies to keep him from becoming too impatient.

  “About time,” Bill commented. “Lisa said you smelled worse than the panhandler that hangs around the Red Owl. What happened?”

  “I was just helping you. Edna Ferguson told me that Max hired a woman assistant for Ron. I was collecting the coffee cups they used this morning.”

  Bill looked confused. “But Ron didn’t have an assistant. I asked Betty about that. If there was a woman with Ron this morning, she wasn’t hired by the dairy. Didn’t Edna recognize her?”

  “Edna didn’t see her. Ron and this woman left before she came in to work.”

  “Wait a minute.” Bill held up his hands. “If Edna didn’t see this woman, how did she know about her?”

  “From the cups. Edna always leaves a jar of instant coffee out for Ron and there were two cups on the counter this morning. One of them had a smear of lipstick on the rim and that’s how she knew that Ron was with a woman. I collected them and they’re right over there by the dishwasher in that bread wrapper.”

  “Why did Edna save them?” Bill looked puzzled as he got up to retrieve the cups.

  “She didn’t. I dug them out of the cafeteria Dumpster. They were all the way in the bottom and I had to climb in to get them.”

  “That’s why you smelled like a panhandler?”

  “You got it.” Hannah gasped as Bill started to reach inside the bread wrapper. “Don’t touch them, Bill! I went to a lot of trouble to preserve any fingerprints.”