by Joanne Fluke
“I wonder where it is.” Hannah began to frown. “Betty said she worked late Tuesday night, typing it up. She left it on her desk for Max, and it was gone when she came in to work on Wednesday morning.”
Andrea looked puzzled. “It’s not in Max’s briefcase?”
“No. Let’s check out the house.”
Andrea looked as if the last thing she wanted to do was go into Max’s house. “Do we have to?”
“I think we do. Max may have left something behind that’ll give us a clue to where he is.”
“Okay,” Andrea reluctantly agreed. “Do you think we should arm ourselves, just in case?”
“Good idea.” Hannah grabbed a claw hammer from the workbench by the door and handed Andrea a rubber mallet. A hammer and a mallet were no match for a killer with a gun, but she was almost positive that no one was inside. If arming themselves with carpenter’s tools made Andrea feel safer, that was fine with Hannah.
Hannah tried to turn the knob on the connecting door, but it wouldn’t budge. “Oh, great! Max did lock his door. See if his keys are in his Cadillac, will you? I think I noticed them in the ignition.”
Andrea hurried back to the Cadillac and came back with the keys. She handed them to Hannah and watched as her sister unlocked the door.
Hannah stepped into the kitchen, flicked on the light, and jumped slightly as the refrigerator kicked in. “Nice kitchen. I guess Max had a thing for cows.”
Every round handle on the row of kitchen cabinets was painted with black and white patches like a Holstein cow. There was a collection of china cows in various poses on the shelves of the greenhouse window over the sink, and a large painted plate with frolicking cows around the border hung over the stove. There were cow magnets on the refrigerator door, a cow creamer and sugar bowl on the table, and a cow cookie jar sitting on the counter. A farm dog would have gone crazy in Max’s kitchen, trying to round up all the cows.
“It’s a little much for my taste,” Andrea admitted, “but I guess Max had to do something with all the cow things that people gave him. That’s the trouble with collections. Once people know you’re collecting something, they give it to you for every occasion.”
There was a strange burning odor in the kitchen and Hannah noticed that the red light was glowing on the coffeemaker. She reached out to shut it off and realized that the pot was dry, just inky sludge that once had been coffee in the bottom. “Max left the coffee on.”
“Don’t run water in it,” Andrea warned. “I did that once and the carafe cracked.”
Hannah set the glass pot on one of Max’s burners to cool. Then she noticed a thermos on the counter, right next to a dishtowel with happy-looking bovines grazing across its green terrycloth surface. The thermos was empty and its cap was off. “Max must have planned to come back here. He made a pot of coffee so that he could fill his thermos. He probably wanted to take it with him for the drive.”
Andrea looked sick as she stared at the empty thermos, and Hannah knew she was thinking about what might have happened to Max. She grabbed her sister’s arm and propelled her past the cabinets with their cow-painted knobs and into the deserted living room.
Hannah flicked on the lights, but there was no sign that anyone had been here since Max had left early Wednesday morning. She glanced at her sister—that sick look was still on her face—and decided that she’d better do something fast. Andrea’s face was pale, her knees were shaking, and she looked as if she might faint.
“Andrea? I need you to help me out here,” Hannah ordered in the same tone of voice that Delores had used when she’d told them to clean their rooms. “Have you ever been in Max’s house before?”
Andrea blinked once, twice, and then she turned to Hannah. She looked disoriented and more than a little frightened. “What did you say?”
“Have you ever been in Max’s house before?”
Andrea nodded. A little color was beginning to come back to her cheeks, now that Hannah had given her something else to focus on. “Al sent me out with some papers last fall. Max bought some property over in Browerville and Al handled the paperwork for him.”
“Can you remember what the house looked like then?”
“Of course I can. I’m a real estate agent.” Andrea’s voice was less tentative. “Max even gave me a tour. It was right after he fixed it up and I wanted to see it. I thought he might want to put it up for sale later on and move to a bigger place in town.”
Hannah smiled and patted her on the shoulder. “I knew I could count on you. Just keep your eyes open for anything that looks out of place. How about this room? Does it look the same as it did then?”
Andrea looked around. “Everything’s the same, except for the couch. He used to have a black one with cow pillows on it. See that painting up there over the fireplace? He told me that his mother painted it from an old photograph. That’s Max’s grandfather standing in front of the original dairy.”
“I didn’t know that Max’s mother was an artist.” Hannah stared at the painting. It wasn’t very good.
“Obviously, she wasn’t.” Andrea recovered enough to smile. “It’s from one of those original paint-by-the-number sets. They were very big in the fifties. She mailed in the photograph and they sent back the canvas with little numbers in the spaces so she’d know what color to use. I had all I could do not to tell Max how bad it was.”
Now that Hannah had moved closer, she could see some of the numbers showing through the paint and she doubted that Max’s grandfather had sported a seventeen tattooed on his forehead. “Let’s go through the other rooms. Tell me if you see anything that you don’t remember.”
With Andrea following, Hannah stepped briskly out into the hallway and they proceeded to go through every room in the house. Andrea pointed out new curtains in the den, a slightly different furniture arrangement in Max’s home office, and new wallpaper in the dining room. Max’s bedroom had been painted since Andrea had seen it. He’d changed the color scheme from blue to green, and the guest bedroom had a new braided rug on the floor. Every room had at least one cow in some shape or form.
“How can you remember what everything looked like?” Hannah asked. She was amazed at the amount of information Andrea had remembered from a single tour of Max’s house.
Andrea shrugged modestly. “I’ve always had a good eye. That’s why I could tell when Mother had been in my room. If one tiny thing had been moved, I noticed it.”
“And there isn’t one tiny thing out of place in Max’s house?” Hannah kept talking as they made a full circle and approached the kitchen again. She didn’t want Andrea to think about what might have happened to Max.
“Not that I can see, except…” Andrea stopped by the connecting door that led to the garage and reached up to touch an empty hook by the side of the doorframe. “Wait a minute, Hannah. There’s supposed to be a key right here.”
“What kind of a key?”
Andrea closed her eyes for a moment and then they snapped open again. “A shiny blue metal key on a cow key chain. It was hanging right here when Max showed me his kitchen. The cow was really cute, brown and white with a little—”
“Do you know what the key was for?” Hannah interrupted her sister’s description.
“The dairy. Max said he used it when he walked to work and he didn’t want to carry his whole key ring. He told me he just grabbed that key and his garage-door opener and—” Andrea stopped speaking and turned to Hannah. “That must be what he did on Wednesday morning! When I went back to his car to get the keys, I noticed that his garage-door opener wasn’t clipped to the visor.”
“I think you’re right. Max started to pack his car Wednesday morning, but he didn’t have time to finish before his meeting. He left his briefcase open because he needed to pick up the speech that Betty typed up. When his meeting was over, he planned to come back here and leave for the convention. But Max didn’t come back. The last time anyone saw him he was in his office at Cozy Cow. His trail ends at the dair
y.”
Andrea winced. “I hope you’re not going to say what I think you’re going to say.”
“I am.” Hannah closed up the garage and ushered her sister out Max’s front door. “We don’t have a choice. We’ve got to check out the dairy.”
Chapter Nineteen
Hannah started her Suburban, reached for the bag of cookies she always carried in the back, and tossed them to Andrea. “Have a cookie. You need some chocolate. It’ll make you feel better.”
“I don’t need chocolate. What I need is a shrink! It would take a psychiatrist to figure out why I ever agreed to this harebrained, idiotic idea of yours to…to—” Andrea stopped speaking, too rattled to go on. Then she reached into the bag, pulled out a cookie, and bit into it savagely. She chewed, swallowed, and then she sighed. “These are really good, Hannah.”
“They’re called Chocolate-Covered Cherry Delights. Mother gave me the idea for the recipe when she told me how Dad used to always bring her chocolate-covered cherries whenever she was mad at him.”
Andrea reached into the bag for another and took a huge bite. “Are you absolutely sure we need to go inside the dairy?”
“I’m sure.” Hannah turned at end of Max’s access road and into the Cozy Cow parking lot.
“We can’t just try to call Bill first?”
“He’s got his hands full,” Hannah answered. She parked in the darkest corner of the lot and turned to her sister. Andrea looked a lot better and her hands weren’t shaking anymore. “Relax, Andrea. Max isn’t inside. He couldn’t be. Betty or one of the other employees would have found him by now. All we’re going to do is look for clues in his office.”
“That’s true.” Andrea managed a shaky smile.
“Then you’re coming in with me?”
“I’m certainly not going to sit in the parking lot alone, not with a killer on the loose! And it’s not like we’re actually breaking in or anything. You’ve got Max’s keys.”
“Right.” Hannah knew that this wasn’t the time to remind Andrea that they’d broken into Max’s garage to get those keys. “Grab the flashlights. I don’t want to turn on any lights inside. Someone might see them from the road.”
Andrea reached into the back for the flashlights. “You’re going to owe me a whole batch of cookies for this, Hannah. I’ll take the Chocolate-Covered Cherry Delights.”
“Deal.” Hannah grabbed her flashlight from Andrea’s hand and got out of the truck. The temperature had dropped in the past hour and she shivered as they walked across the parking lot to the rear door. She glanced down at the keys in the glare from the security lights and blessed Max for labeling them. She selected the one marked “Rear Door,” and was about to insert it in the lock when Andrea gasped.
“What?” Hannah turned to look at her sister.
“I just thought of something. What if the dairy has a security system? We could set it off.”
“Are you kidding? A security system for a place this big would cost a bundle. Do you really think that Max would spend that kind of money?”
“No, maybe not.” Andrea breathed an audible sigh of relief. “Go ahead, Hannah. It was just a thought, that’s all.”
Hannah didn’t mention that she’d thought of the same thing. She’d even glanced at Max’s birth date on his driver’s license. If there was a keypad by the inside of the rear door, she planned to enter the numbers two, three, and forty-nine. She’d read somewhere that most people used their birth dates as a code for their security systems. If bells started to clang and sirens began to wail, they’d hightail it back to her Suburban and leave as fast as they could.
The key turned, the door opened, and Hannah stepped in. No keypad, no flashing red lights, no buzzing or clanking or wailing. That was good. It would have been out of character for Max to fork out the extra money for an alarm system, but Hannah hadn’t been one hundred percent sure.
“Come on, Andrea.” Hannah motioned to her sister. “His office is down this hall and to the right.”
Andrea stepped inside rather gingerly. “How do you know that?”
“I took the grand tour when I was in sixth grade. We came out here on a field trip and Max showed us around.”
“We didn’t get to go when I was in grade school.” Andrea sounded a little miffed.
“I know. They stopped the tours right after my class went through. I think it had something to do with Dale Hoeschen. He tripped over a box and almost fell into a cream vat.”
Andrea grinned. She was clearly in better spirits now. “I knew there was something I didn’t like about Dale.”
Hannah led the way down the hall and into the main part of the dairy. It was large and cavernous, not a comfortable place to explore at night. Their flashlights were powerful, but the twin beams did nothing to dispel the looming shadows. Hannah was sure that the place would seem very ordinary if they could turn on the overhead lights, but several rows of glass-block windows peppered the face of the building and she didn’t want to take the chance that someone on the highway would notice the light.
“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Andrea’s voice sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness.
“I think so,” Hannah replied. “There should be another hallway—there it is.” Hannah trained the beam of her flashlight on the entrance to the second hallway. “Max’s office should be the second door on the left. Betty’s office is the first door.”
As they entered the second hallway, Hannah noticed that Betty had posted the delivery schedules on a corkboard right outside her door. The drivers’ names were listed and their routes were marked with the times of each delivery. Ron’s name was still on his route. Betty must be waiting for instructions from Max before she changed the name of the driver.
Max’s office was right where Hannah remembered and it was marked with a brass nameplate on the door. Hannah opened the door, stepped inside, and played the beam of her flashlight over the walls. There were no outside windows. If they closed the door behind them, they could turn on the lights.
“Come in and shut the door,” Hannah called out to her sister.
Andrea stepped in quickly and shut the door. “Good. It’s creepy out there.”
Hannah agreed. Her knees were still shaking slightly, but she decided to make light of it for her sister’s benefit. “That’s only because it’s so big and dark. You can turn on the lights. There’s probably a switch right by the door.”
“Are you sure?” Andrea sounded very nervous.
“I’m positive. I checked and there aren’t any windows. No one will notice the light if we keep the door closed.”
Andrea located the wall switch and a moment later, bright light flooded down from an overhead fixture. Both sisters breathed a sigh of relief as they gazed around the room. Max’s office was huge and it was tastefully decorated with dark gray wall-to-wall carpeting and pale yellow grass cloth on the walls. There were several framed prints of flowers hanging in strategic positions, and the upholstered furniture, done in a striped pattern of muted coral, dark green, and gold, picked up the colors from the flower prints.
“It’s a nice color combination,” Andrea commented. “The only thing that doesn’t match is Max’s desk chair.”
Hannah glanced at the old brown leather swivel chair that sat behind the modern, executive-style desk. “I guess Max was going for comfort, not style.”
Two smaller chairs faced the front of the desk for visitors and there was a small round table between them. A conversational grouping was arranged at the side of the room and there were three doors: the one they’d just entered, another that Hannah assumed connected to Betty’s office, and a rough-hewn antique door in the center of the back wall.
“What’s that door?” Andrea pointed to the only door that didn’t match the decor.
“That leads to the old dairy,” Hannah told her, “the one in the picture that Max’s mother painted. It’s the original door and Max told us about it when we took the tour. He said the ol
d dairy was a landmark and he decided to preserve it, even though it cost more money to incorporate it into his expansion plans. He called it his contribution to the history of this area.”
Andrea laughed. “And you bought it?”
“Bought what?”
“Max didn’t keep the old dairy intact out of the goodness of his heart. He got a huge tax break for preserving a historical landmark. All you have to do is connect one of the original walls to the new construction.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” Hannah just shook her head. “Everyone’s always said that Max is a shrewd businessman.”
Andrea reached down to touch the velvety carpet. “Max must have spent some of the money he saved to buy this carpet. It’s the deepest pile they make and it’s just like walking on pillows. I wanted it for our bedroom, but I decided that it would be too hard to keep up. It marks every time you step on it. It’s hideously expensive, too. For the price you’d think they could make something that’s easier to care for.”
Hannah spotted a leather-bound appointment book on the credenza near the door and she walked over to page through it. Wednesday’s date was marked: TSB Convention. She recognized Betty’s handwriting. There was another note at the top, scrawled in what she assumed was Max’s untidy hand. It said: Meet W.
“Look, Hannah.” Andrea sounded insistent. “See all the footprints on this carpet?”
Hannah looked down at the carpet and saw footprints in the deep pile. “You’re a genius, Andrea. If you hadn’t mentioned it, I might have trampled right over them. Follow me and keep to the sides of the room. Let’s see if we can find any footprints in front of Max’s desk.”
Hugging the wall, Hannah moved forward until she was even with the front of Max’s desk. Andrea was right behind her, and Hannah pointed to the tracks in front of one of the chairs. “There! That proves someone was in here with Max.”
“And we know Max was here. See those marks from the wheels of his chair?”
“I see them,” Hannah acknowledged, and then she pointed to another series of tracks. “But I’m more concerned about those.”
