by Joanne Fluke
“Tracey has her dance class Christmas party tomorrow and I promised Danielle I’d make enough for everybody. Most of the other mothers are bringing refreshments, too.”
There was total silence while Hannah and Michelle digested that information. Refreshments meant food, and both of them knew that Andrea’s only culinary skill was heating water in the microwave for instant coffee or Jell-O.
“What’s the matter?” Andrea asked, realizing at last that her sisters were perfectly silent.
“We’re wondering what…uh…Whippersnappers are,” Michelle explained.
“They’re cookies.”
“You baked cookies?!” both Michelle and Hannah exclaimed in unison.
“Yes, I did. And they were so easy! Carli Spurr e-mailed me with the recipe. You remember Carli, don’t you? She coached the cheerleading squad.”
“I remember,” Hannah said, her mind flying through dire possibilities. Perhaps, through some miracle, Andrea had managed to mix up and bake several batches of cookies, but they couldn’t possibly be good. Of course she couldn’t say that without hurting her sister’s feelings, and Andrea looked very proud of her accomplishment. It would be kinder to pretend that everything was fine, at least until she found out more.
“I’ve never heard of Whippersnappers before,” she commented, fishing for information. “What kind of cookie are they?”
“I made lemon. Carli said you could make any flavor, and Tracey really likes lemon.”
“Lemon’s good.” Hannah gave a quick smile, but she felt more like groaning. Lemon cookies usually called for lemon zest and she was almost positive Andrea had never heard of it.
“Did you have to go out and buy a zester?”
Michelle asked the question, and Hannah turned to give her a quick nod. She was willing to bet that they were on the same page.
“What’s a zester?”
That answered that question! Hannah gave a little groan before she responded. “A zester is like a grater for lemon peel,” she explained.
“Why would I need that? There’s no lemon peel in Carli’s recipe.”
“No lemon zest, either?” Hannah quizzed her, trying to cover all the bases.
“No. What does lemon zest do?”
“It makes things taste really lemony,” Michelle answered her.
“Well, I didn’t need any zest, because my Whippersnappers taste nice and lemony without it. Is that a word?”
“Yes. Zest is the yellow part of the lemon peel,” Hannah told her.
“Not that. I was talking about lemony. Is lemony a word?”
“If it’s not, it should be,” Hannah settled that query and moved on toward her objective. “If Michelle and I drop in at Tracey’s party, can we taste your cookies?”
“Sure, but you don’t have to wait until then. Just give me a ride home and we’ll have some. Bethie caught a little cold and I want to check in on her.”
“Good idea,” Hannah said, giving her sister an approving nod. Andrea had been a nervous first-time mom with Tracey, reading every baby care book she could get her hands on, and trying to follow everyone’s advice. Of course that was impossible, but Andrea still felt like a failure as a mother whenever Tracey cried. Finally, in desperation, she’d gone back to work as a real estate agent and hired the best nanny in Lake Eden, “Grandma” McCann, to take care of Tracey.
“Won’t Bill mind if you leave?” Michelle asked her.
“No. He’s already danced with me twice, and that’s all the time he has for me tonight. He’s got fifteen ladies to go.”
“Fifteen ladies?” Hannah asked, glancing at Michelle, who looked every bit as puzzled as she felt.
“I asked Sally for an advance copy of the guest list and Bill and I made up our game plan last night. A sheriff has certain obligations, you know, especially if he wants to serve more than one term. Bill has to play politics and dance with all the important women here.”
“Are you talking about women who are married to important men?” Michelle asked, frowning a bit.
“Not necessarily. Rose McDermott is on Bill’s list. You might not think she’s important, but a lot of local people go into the café. If Rose likes Bill and thinks he’s doing a good job, she’ll mention it and that can influence a lot of people when they go to the polls.”
“You’re right.” Michelle looked thoughtful.
“And then there’s Bertie Straub. She’s not shy about telling her customers down at the Cut ’n Curl who they should vote for.”
Hannah was amused. The next election for county sheriff was over three years away. “So you’re already launching Bill’s campaign?”
“It’s never too early to play politics.” Andrea glanced around the room and spotted her husband, deep in conversation with Mayor Bascomb. “Just let me tell Bill I’m leaving and we can go.”
“Can I go with you?” Michelle asked, when Andrea had left.
“Sure. But I thought Lonnie was bringing you back to my place.”
“He was. But he’s pulling a late shift and it’ll save him a trip.”
“If you go with us, you’re going to have to taste Andrea’s cookies,” Hannah warned.
“I know. But my nose is all stuffed up and I won’t be able to taste much. I’ll just chew and swallow. And then I’ll tell her how delicious they are.”
Hannah wished that she had a similar ailment, hoping she’d be able to lie convincingly. Praising Andrea’s cookies would constitute a lot more than a little white lie, but it would make her sister very happy.
“It smells like Christmas trees out here!” Andrea said, taking a deep breath and expelling it in a cloud of white vapor.
“That’s because we’re walking past a whole grove of blue spruce,” Hannah told her.
They walked in silence for a moment, and then Andrea held out her gloved hand. “It’s snowing again. I just love knowing that every snowflake is different. We learned it in school. They called it one of nature’s miracles because no two are alike.”
“That’s what they thought back then,” Hannah said. “But then Jon Nelson, a cloud physicist from Kyoto, Japan, found that it’s probably not true for the smaller crystals, the ones that barely develop beyond the prism stage.”
There was another long silence. Hannah was about to tell them more about the physicist from Japan when Michelle almost stumbled over a drift of snow on the walkway.
“Careful,” Hannah warned, and Michelle stopped walking.
“Let’s just stand here for a minute and look at the stars. It feels like you can reach out and touch them, they’re so huge tonight! They weren’t like this last night when Mother had us over for dinner.”
“That’s because it’s darker out here,” Hannah explained. “Lake Eden has streetlights on every corner, and there are lights in all the houses. If you combine the lumens from the old-fashioned globe streetlights Dick and Sally put in on this walkway and add the lights they have at the inn, it doesn’t add up to a fraction of the output of a single arc light in the parking lot at Jordan High.”
Both Michelle and Andrea turned to look at her and Hannah immediately realized her mistake. She was offering science textbooks when what they wanted was poetry.
“Of course maybe it’s not true,” she said, trying to ameliorate the damage.
“Maybe what’s not true?” Andrea asked, and Hannah could tell she was still upset about the snowflakes.
“All of it. But let’s take the snow crystals first. That same cloud scientist compared the number of possible snowflake shapes with the number of atoms in the universe. It would be impossible for scientists to examine them all.”
“So he really doesn’t know.” Andrea looked very relieved. “It’s just a theory, right?”
“That’s right.”
“How about the stars?” Michelle asked.
Hannah stuffed her gloved hands in her pockets. “They could be bigger tonight,” she said, crossing her fingers. “It’s not an absolute certainty. I li
ke to think the stars and the moon react to us when we watch them. That makes the night magical.”
This drew smiles from both of her sisters and Hannah relaxed a bit. She had to remember to curb her impulse to be realistic and practical when her sisters wanted whimsy and romance.
“Uh-oh!” Michelle stumbled again. “I just stepped on something slippery,” she said.
“What?” Hannah asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Hold on a second.” Hannah drew a tiny flashlight from her pocket. “Norman gave this to me the last time I dropped my keys in the snow.” She switched on the light and trained the beam on the walkway. “You were right here and you slipped on…this!”
“What is it?” Michelle asked.
“A miniature candy cane wrapped in plastic.” Hannah held it up so both of them could see it. “It’s one of Wayne Bergstrom’s and he must have dropped it on his way to the parking lot.”
“You seem pretty happy about finding it,” Michelle commented, reacting to the smile on her older sister’s face.
“I am. I know it’s mean of me, but I’m glad he lost it. I wanted to keep the leftover candy canes to try out a new cookie recipe, but he told me he wanted them all back for his next Santa appearance.”
Andrea just shook her head. “Wayne’s such a tightwad. It’s not like he doesn’t have more. And they probably cost him practically nothing. What were you going to use them for?”
“Chocolate Candy Cane Cookies. And now I can’t make them until I buy some candy canes.”
Both Andrea and Michelle gave little groans of dismay and Hannah was gratified. “If Wayne dropped one, he probably dropped more, especially if he’s got a hole in his pocket. Let’s keep looking. I don’t think it’s snowed enough to completely cover them.”
“Are you going to use them for the cookies?” Michelle wanted to know.
“No, I’ll buy my own. I just think it would be really funny if we collected them all and gave them back to Wayne at the store tomorrow.”
“Here’s one!” Michelle called out, spotting another cellophane-wrapped candy at the side of the pathway. “It looks like he’s dropping one every ten feet or so.”
“This is fun,” Andrea commented, rushing ahead to pick up a candy cane. “It’s like in Hansel and Gretel, except there aren’t any birds or breadcrumbs.”
The walk to the parking lot had turned into a game, each sister trying to find the next candy cane. They had about a dozen when the trail of candy canes abruptly stopped.
“What happened?” Andrea, the current holder of Hannah’s miniature flashlight, spread the light around in a circle. “We haven’t found anything for over ten yards.”
“How do you know it’s over ten yards?” Michelle asked.
“Believe me, I know how far you have to go for a first down. Bill used to play football, remember?”
Neither Hannah nor Michelle voiced any argument to that. Not only had Bill been the best quarterback in the whole county, Andrea had been the head cheerleader at Jordan High.
“Do you think Wayne ran out of candy canes?” Michelle asked Hannah.
“I don’t think so. The basket was big and it was over half full when Wayne told me to stuff the candy canes in his Santa suit pocket.”
“The hole in his pocket didn’t mend itself,” Andrea pointed out.
“Right. Wayne must have left the walkway for some reason. Let’s check the sides of the path. If we can find the point where Wayne veered off, we’ll start finding candy canes again.”
Michelle led them back to the point where she’d found the last candy cane. “This is the place,” she said, pointing down to the snowy walkway. “Where do we look now?”
“You and Andrea check your side of the path. If you don’t find anything, come back and give me the flashlight so I can check my side. If Wayne is still leaking candy canes, we’ll find them.”
“Why wouldn’t he be leaking candy canes?” Andrea wanted to know.
“I could be wrong about how many are left. Or maybe he noticed that they were falling out and he put them in another pocket.”
Hannah waited while Andrea and Michelle checked their side of the walkway and came back.
“Your turn,” Andrea said, handing her the flashlight. “We’ll wait right here while you check.”
Hannah moved forward with the flashlight, sweeping the beam over the snow. She was about to give up and admit defeat when she spotted four candy canes near the edge of the path.
“I’ve got some,” she called out and her sisters hurried over.
“Why are there so many here?” Michelle asked, bending down to pick them up. “It looks like they all fell out at once.”
“Maybe he slipped,” Hannah theorized.
“Or maybe he got tired of holding his hand over the hole and decided it wasn’t worth it,” Andrea added her take on it. “I don’t think he’d do that, though.”
“Why not?” Michelle asked her.
“Because he’s too cheap. Every time he dropped one, he’d be adding up how much it cost him. Mother used to say that Wayne had the first nickel he ever made.”
“I remember that,” Michelle said with a laugh. “She told me Wayne pinched it so hard, the buffalo squealed and ran away.”
“Look at this.” Hannah pointed to another candy cane a foot or so away. “The trail picks up again here and keeps going.”
The three sisters followed the candy cane trail to a bank of hard-packed snow the plow had left when Dick had cleared the inn’s parking lot after the last snowfall. Behind it and a few feet back was another bank of snow and ice, rising even higher than the first. By the end of a snowy winter there could be several banks lining the perimeter of the lot. When one berm got too high for the snowplow blade to reach and dump, Dick started another snow bank in front of it.
“I see candy canes going all the way up that snow bank,” Michelle said, illuminating them with Hannah’s flashlight. “I wonder why Wayne climbed way up there.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Hannah told her.
“Not me.” Andrea pointed down at her high-heeled boots. “That’s hard-packed snow and these boots were expensive. I could break off a heel.”
“I can go with you,” Michelle offered.
“No way. Mother just bought you those suede boots and they’re going to get ruined.”
“It’s okay. I really don’t mind.”
“No, but Mother will. And if Mother minds, I’ll never hear the end of it. Just stay here with Andrea and I’ll take a quick peek.”
Hannah dug in with her heels and her hands, and started to climb up the bank of snow. It was a good eight feet tall with fairly steep and slick sides, and the ascent wasn’t easy. She slipped a couple of times, but she kept going until she’d pulled herself up on the top. She opened her mouth to make a joke about being King of the Hill, a reference to the children’s game they’d played in the winter every recess in grade school, but then she saw what was on the other side and the joke died a quick death on her lips. There was a figure spread-eagled on the snow at the base of the berm. It was Wayne Bergstrom and he’d obviously been pushed. Making snow angels wasn’t in his repertoire.
“Anything there?”
Michelle’s voice floated up to her, and Hannah swallowed with difficulty. She took a deep breath, expelled it in a cloud of white, and croaked out one shaky word. “Yes.”
“You sound really funny,” Andrea commented. “Are you all out of breath?”
Hannah knew she wasn’t the one who was out of breath. Wayne Bergstrom was, but she couldn’t quite manage to say anything that sarcastic.
“Hannah?” Michelle sounded worried. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Hannah choked out the words and took another deep breath. Andrea was right. The air did smell like Christmas trees. The stars and the moon seemed bigger too, illuminating the figure at the bottom of the far side of the snow bank in an intensely cold blue light. Everyone said
you couldn’t see color at night, but Hannah’s mind filled in the colors. He was wearing red velvet and white fur, and there were candy canes scattered all over around him.
“Hannah?” Andrea asked again, and Hannah knew she had to say more. She didn’t want her sisters to be so worried about her they’d try to climb the berm and see what she was seeing.
“Santa’s dead,” she said, seemingly capable of only two-word responses.
“You mean Wayne?” Andrea asked.
“Right.” Hannah brushed the snowflakes, no two alike, from her sleeve. And that seemed to do the trick because the dam broke and the words rushed out. “Go back to the inn and get Bill and Lonnie. I’ll stay and guard the crime scene until they get here.”
Chapter Three
“He is just the sweetest kitty in the world!” Andrea-crooned, scratching Moishe under the chin. The moment they’d entered Hannah’s living room, the twenty-something-pound, orange-and-white cat that Hannah had found shivering on her doorstep over two years ago, had made a beeline for Andrea and climbed up in her lap.
Hannah just smiled, deciding not to burst her sister’s bubble and mention the fact that she was holding a canister of salmon-flavored treats that Moishe adored, and doling them out to him every time he nudged her with his head.
By tacit agreement, they hadn’t discussed Wayne Bergstrom’s death. It didn’t seem to be an appropriate topic of conversation when they stopped by to check on Bethie and Tracey, and pick up the plate of cookies Andrea wanted them to try. Hannah had pulled Grandma McCann aside to fill her in, but the three sisters hadn’t mentioned Wayne’s name on the trip to Hannah’s condo complex, either. Perhaps it was simply an attempt at avoidance. If they didn’t mention it, it might go away. Or perhaps it was a delaying tactic and all three of them wanted to enjoy their time together for a little while longer before discussing such a gruesome topic. Hannah figured they’d have coffee first, a little fortification with a mug of Swedish Plasma was in order while they tasted Andrea’s cookies, and then they’d talk about Wayne Bergstrom and the distressing sight she’d seen from the top of the snow bank.
