by Joanne Fluke
The wind was blowing as she unlocked the door to the hotel. Hannah locked it behind her and began to climb up the stairs. The staircase was drafty and the wind howled, rattling the doors on the second floor. It was a bit eerie, being in this huge, empty hotel all by herself.
Hannah passed the two doors that led into Essie’s makeshift apartment. She stopped at the main door and said a little prayer that Essie would regain consciousness and recover from her injuries. She thought of the lovely hibiscus picture that Essie had hung on the doorframe to decorate her bedroom and gave a little sigh. Essie had done her utmost to make her surroundings cheerful and homey. She hadn’t been able to afford many extras, but she’d always had a smile and a fond greeting for any Lake Eden resident she’d met on the street. Essie was an inspiration to everyone in town.
The kitchen was at the rear of the ballroom and Hannah felt a pang of regret as she entered the empty ballroom. The decorations were still up, waiting for removal later today. Delores had assembled a work crew to take everything down, including the drapes, to be stored away just in case they held another Christmas Ball in the future.
Hannah flicked on the kitchen lights and walked through the spotless kitchen. The students that Michelle and Lisa had asked to help with the cleanup after the ball had done a wonderful job. She’d have to remember to bake something special for them during the upcoming holidays.
As she began to pull out drawers, looking for Essie’s beaded purse, she found herself hoping that no one had found it and given it to Andrea or Mayor Bascomb at the end of the evening. She worked her way around the perimeter of the kitchen, pulling out drawers, looking inside, and shutting them again. There were so many drawers, it reminded her of one of her great-grandmother’s favorite analogies, Like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Hannah was down to the last three drawers when she found it, the pretty beaded purse that she’d found in Essie’s rooms and taken to Essie in the hospital. Hannah put it inside her own saddlebag-size purse and turned to leave the kitchen.
As she walked across the ballroom floor, Hannah heard the windows begin to rattle. The wind was blowing even more forcibly and it was making what Hannah imagined was a keening sound. Had something happened to Essie at the hospital? Was the wind keening for her?
“Nonsense!” Hannah said aloud, hurrying to descend the staircase to the ground floor. Her imagination was running away with her, rushing past her sense of reality and making fanciful and rather frightening conclusions. But the wind kept howling in a high-pitched wail and Hannah felt the hair on the back of her neck bristle with an emotion very close to dread.
Hannah rushed down the remaining steps and pulled out the key Rose had given her. She unlocked the door and attempted to pull it open. But the door wouldn’t budge. The wind was too strong. She struggled for long moments and then the wind abated slightly and the door opened, almost blowing her off her feet as she stepped outside. It was a bad storm and there was no way she could walk home in gale winds like this.
Icy needles of snow stung her face as she rushed to the café. She struggled with that door, fighting against the gusts of wind, until she could rush into the warm haven of the interior and shut the door behind her.
“I was just coming to help you with the door,” Rose said. “Did you find what you needed, Hannah?”
“Yes, thanks, Rose.” Hannah handed the hotel key to Rose. “I’d better get back to The Cookie Jar.”
“You’re walking?”
Hannah nodded. “It seemed silly to drive when it’s only a couple of blocks.”
“I’ll give you a cup of hot coffee to go before you leave. It’s really blowing out there and you’re going to get cold on the way. They call it wind chill for a reason, you know.”
Rose was right and Hannah clutched the cup of coffee in her gloved hand all the way to The Cookie Jar. Even though the coffee was still warm, she was shivering as she unlocked the door and entered the warmth inside. Thank goodness the gas and the electricity were on! She didn’t even want to think about how cold it would be if the furnace wasn’t running.
She walked over to the industrial oven even before she’d taken off her parka and set the temperature dial to preheat it. She wanted to bake a batch of cookies before she went back to her mother’s house. She’d been thinking about a new cookie, a cookie that would be appropriate for Christmas, one that would be pretty and reflect the holiday season.
As Hannah mixed up her favorite sugar cookie dough, she began to smile. When Essie came out of her coma, they would celebrate by having some of these cookies with her. Annie had mentioned that Essie had served hot chocolate with candy cane sticks for stirrers when they’d arrived at the hotel after school to do their homework. Essie had told them that it was one of her favorite winter drinks, and the cookies that Hannah planned to bake would be perfect with hot chocolate and peppermint sticks.
Once she’d mixed up the dough, using peppermint extract instead of the vanilla extract she usually used, Hannah chilled the dough and rolled cookie balls with it. Instead of rolling them in white granulated sugar, she mixed green decorator’s sugar with white sugar and used it to roll half of the cookies. She used red decorator’s sugar for coloring in the second half of the batch so that some cookies would be red and white on top and others would be green and white. A Hershey’s Kiss would top every cookie and duplicate the flavor of the hot chocolate and peppermint that Essie loved.
* * *
The Suburban, which she now called her “cookie truck,” was toasty warm by the time Hannah reached her mother’s house. She’d started the engine and turned on the heater before she’d loaded up the cookies to take with her, and warm air was blowing out of the heater vents.
Hannah used the garage door opener that Delores had given her to open the garage door and pulled her cookie truck into the double garage. Her mother’s car was there in its spot. Delores was home and Hannah was glad that she’d put dinner up in the slow cooker before she’d left this morning.
“Oh, good! You’re home!” Delores greeted her as Hannah came in the door. “I just made coffee if you want some.”
“Thanks, Mother. I do,” Hannah told her, hanging up her parka and going to the cupboard to get a coffee mug. She poured herself a cup, carried it to the kitchen table, where her mother was sitting, and dashed back out to her cookie truck to retrieve the cookies she’d brought home with her.
“What do you have, Hannah?” Delores asked, as Hannah came in with the large, foil-lined box.
“Peppermint cookies with chocolate on top. I’m going to call them Minty Dream Cookies.”
“Oooh! Peppermint and chocolate are two of my favorite flavors. We can have one now, can’t we, dear?”
“Of course.” Hannah lifted off the foil and handed her mother a cookie. “Have two, a red one and a green one.”
“Thank you,” Delores took a bite of the red cookie and began to smile. “The red one is excellent!” she pronounced. “Now I’ll try the green one.”
“They’re the same, Mother. The only difference is that I used red sugar on one and green sugar on the other.”
“Perhaps, but I’d like to test it out for myself,” Delores said with a laugh, taking another bite.
Mother and daughter sipped coffee and crunched cookies for several minutes and then the kitchen phone rang.
“I’ll get it,” Hannah said, reaching up to grab the receiver of the wall phone next to her chair. “Hello?”
“Hannah!” Hannah recognized Andrea’s voice. “Is Mother there? I need to talk to her right away.”
“She’s right here,” Hannah said, handing the phone to her mother. “It’s Andrea.”
“Hello, dear,” Delores greeted her. Then there was silence for several minutes while Delores listened. “Oh, dear!” she said at last. “Is Bill very upset?”
There was another silence and then Delores spoke again. “All right, dear. I’ll tell Hannah. She’ll want to know.”
“Y
ou’ll tell me what?” Hannah asked the moment her mother had hung up the phone.
“The man they arrested is refusing to talk,” Delores said. “They don’t know who he is. He refuses to give them any information and he doesn’t have any identification on him.”
“Did they take his fingerprints?”
“Yes, but it’ll take a while to get that information back from the federal authorities. And that means they still don’t know if Essie was his intended target or if he was shooting at someone else.”
“I heard him say something about Sharon.”
Delores nodded. “So did Leroy Schmidt. He was standing right next to the man when he fired.”
“When will Sheriff Grant have news about the fingerprints?”
“Bill told Andrea that it’ll be at least a week or two before they hear anything and it could be even longer.”
“Another mystery,” Hannah said with a sigh.
“Another?” Delores asked, and it was clear she was intrigued. “What do you mean, dear?”
“Let me stir the chili in the crockpot and I’ll get you another cup of coffee. Then I’ll tell you all about it.”
MINTY DREAM COOKIES
DO NOT preheat oven—dough must chill before baking.
1 cup melted butter (2 sticks, 8 ounces, ½ pound)
1 cup powdered sugar (don’t sift unless it’s got big lumps and then you shouldn’t use it anyway) ½ cup white (granulated) sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon peppermint extract
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon cream of tartar (critical!)
½ teaspoon salt
2 cups plus 2 Tablespoons all-purpose flour (don’t sift—pack it down in the cup when you measure it)
¼ cup white sugar in a small bowl (for coating dough balls)
¼ cup white sugar in another small bowl
approximately 3 Tablespoons red decorator’s sugar
approximately 3 Tablespoons green decorator’s sugar
approximately 5 dozen Hershey’s Kisses
Melt the butter in a microwave-safe bowl or in a saucepan on the stovetop. Add the cup of powdered sugar and the half cup of granulated sugar and mix thoroughly. Let the mixture cool to room temperature.
Mix in the egg and the peppermint extract.
Add the baking soda, cream of tartar, and salt. Mix until everything is well combined.
Add the flour in one-cup increments, mixing after each addition. (You can add the 2 Tablespoons of flour to the last full cup.)
Cover your bowl with plastic wrap and chill the dough for at least one hour. (Overnight is fine, too.)
When you’re ready to bake, preheat oven to 325 degrees F. with the rack in the middle position.
While your oven is preheating, either spray your cookie sheet(s) with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray or line them with parchment paper.
Add the red decorator’s sugar to one bowl of white sugar and mix it in with a fork from your silverware drawer.
Add the green decorator’s sugar to the other bowl of white sugar and mix it in.
Use your impeccably clean hands to roll the dough into walnut-size balls.
Roll half of the dough balls in the bowl of red and white sugar.
Roll the second half of the dough balls in the bowl of green and white sugar.
Place the sugar-coated dough balls on a cookie sheet, 12 to a standard-size sheet.
Unwrap the Hershey’s Kisses and place one, point up, on top of each sugared dough ball. Press it down so that it will stay in place.
Bake your Minty Dream Cookies at 325 degrees F. for 10 to 15 minutes. (The cookies should have a tinge of gold on the top.) Cool the cookies on the cookie sheet for 2 minutes, then remove them to a wire rack to finish cooling.
Hannah’s Note: If you used parchment paper to line your cookie sheet, just pull the paper, cookies and all, over to a wire rack.
Yield: Approximately 5 dozen crunchy, buttery, sugary peppermint and chocolate cookies.
Chapter Nineteen
Lisa, Michelle, Hannah, and Delores were sitting in the living room munching on Minty Dream Cookies, Hannah’s new peppermint and chocolate Christmas cookie. They’d eaten the chili that Hannah had made, along with slices of homemade garlic bread and a crispy salad that Lisa had made out of shredded cabbage, shredded carrots, and pineapple chunks in a sweet vinaigrette dressing.
Once she’d finished her cookie, Hannah switched on the reading light she’d purchased and prepared to read from Essie’s last notebook.
“I can’t believe that this is the last notebook,” Lisa said, settling back in her seat.
“Me neither,” Michelle echoed her sentiments. “How about you, Mother?”
“I feel the same way,” Delores replied with a sigh. “If Essie would only wake up, we could ask her if she liked any of the ways we thought of to end her story.”
Hannah heard the concern in their voices. Lisa, Michelle, and Delores were every bit as worried about Essie as she was. She made an instant decision and pulled out the note that Doc Knight had given her.
“Essie left me a note,” she told them. “I read it to Doc Knight, but I didn’t know if I should let anyone else read it. I think you need to know what was going through Essie’s mind as she was getting ready to go to the Christmas Ball.”
Hannah unfolded the note and read it aloud. After she finished, there was shocked silence for a long moment and then Delores spoke. “But Essie didn’t have any children, did she?”
“I don’t know and neither did Doc Knight, but he let me go through all of Dr. Kalick’s records. There’s nothing in there about Essie giving birth to a baby.”
Lisa looked thoughtful. “Could it have been before she moved to Lake Eden?”
“Of course. But somehow, I don’t think so.”
“Then the story that Essie wrote in the notebooks was partially true?” Michelle asked.
“Maybe, but maybe not. All I know is, I have to find out.”
“How can we help?” Delores asked immediately.
“I don’t know. Let’s read what’s in Essie’s last notebook and maybe it’ll give us some clues.”
“And maybe it won’t,” Michelle pointed out.
“That’s true, too.” Hannah had to agree with her youngest sister. “But I think we all owe it to Essie to read it and find out.”
* * *
She looked out the window and realized that snow was falling. The man she now called her uncle Jim had given her his guest room and helped her to change into his wife’s nightgown. He’d told her that after his wife died, he’d kept all her clothes because he couldn’t bear to throw them out or give them away. He said the clothes were old now, and she was welcome to use anything that might fit her. Then he’d urged her to rest and left the room.
“Broth?” He reappeared in the doorway with a mug of what smelled like chicken soup.
“Oh! Yes, please,” she replied, welcoming the warmth as he handed the mug to her. “Thank you. You’re very kind.”
“Not at all,” he said. “You need to keep up your strength. Since this is your first baby, it could be a while before you can hold your baby in your arms.”
“No!” she said, shaking her head. “If I hold my baby, I won’t be able to do the right thing. And I have to do the right thing.”
“And you’ve decided on that?”
“Yes, I have to give up my baby. I don’t want to, but I promised my husband I’d keep our baby safe. And that’s the only way. No one can know where I am or that I had the baby.”
His eyes were sad as he looked into her face. “All right, my dear. If you’re sure about this.”
“I am,” she said firmly. “I’ve been thinking about this ever since I found out that my husband was killed. They may find me, and they may kill me. But if I give up our baby, the baby will have a chance to live.”
He closed his eyes for moment and then he sighed and gave a little nod. “All right then.
Try to get some rest. And call me if the contractions wake you. Please don’t worry, my dear. I promise you that I’ll keep your baby safe.”
* * *
“How awful!” Delores breathed. “What a horrible decision she had to make.”
Michelle looked as if she wanted to cry. “Please tell us that this isn’t the end of Essie’s book, Hannah.”
“It’s not. There’s a little more.”
“Read it,” Lisa begged her. “This is just too sad for words!”
* * *
When he’d left her alone, she got out of bed and went to the small desk that sat under the window. She pulled out a drawer and found the stationery and envelopes he’d placed there. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the handkerchief he’d given her, picked up the pen that was on the desk, and began to write.
She had to stop several times to dry her tears, but at last the notes she’d written were in separate envelopes. They were the same, except for the names. Right after the baby was born, she’d give him the envelopes—one if her baby was a girl and the other if her baby was a boy.
They had discussed names right after she’d gone to the doctor and learned that she was pregnant. She wanted to choose those names, but what if Tony had told someone about it? It would be easier for them to find the baby if they knew the baby’s first name. It was why she hadn’t chosen either of those names. Instead, she’d chosen two new names. She had to take precautions to safeguard their baby.
Despite her efforts, there were tears on the envelopes. She thought about opening them and putting the notes in fresh envelopes, even pulling out the drawer to do that. But before she could reach out to get the envelopes, the first contraction began.
She gasped and cried out. She wasn’t ready! But then he appeared in the doorway to help her back to bed.
“It’s all right. I’m here,” he told her.
“The notes,” she gasped. “One for a boy and . . . one for . . .”
The contractions were coming so hard and fast, she couldn’t finish what she’d started to tell him.