Blackberry Pie Murder (A Hannah Swensen Mystery)

by Fluke, Joanne

  Loretta looked nonplussed for a moment and then she nodded. “Of course. I’m sure she’d like to meet you, too.”

  “I’ll take her some cookies as a welcome home present. Does she like chocolate?”

  “She likes it, but it doesn’t like her. She’s the same with peanut butter. I baked peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies when she was a toddler. Jennifer ate one and the poor darling broke out in hives all over.”

  “Oh, dear! Did you stop baking cookies for her?”

  “No. I just tried my mother’s oatmeal-raisin cookie recipe and Jennifer adored those. I made a batch the night before she came home and they were gone in less than a day.”

  “Thanks for telling me, Loretta. I won’t take her anything with chocolate or peanut butter. When you talk to her, tell her I’ll be there at four. That’ll give us time to talk.”

  “Talk about what?”

  There was a wary tone in Loretta’s voice and Hannah thought fast. She seized the most plausible explanation she could devise on such short notice and answered, “I want to ask Jennifer about a job, but I need to talk to her for a while first. I’m thinking about hiring someone to help out here at The Cookie Jar and it just occurred to me that Jennifer might like to ride in with you a couple of mornings a week and work here.”

  “Oh. Well . . . I don’t really know if she’s looking for work right now.”

  “If she says no, that’s okay. At least I’ll get a chance to say hello and welcome her back to Lake Eden. Actually, she may be overqualified for a little part-time job like mine. What kind of work did she do before she came back home?”

  “Oh. Uh . . . Jennifer was a . . . a shop girl, a clerk in a department store. You know. That type of thing.”

  “That’s nice. Where did she work?”

  “A couple of places. I don’t remember the names. They were big stores, though, and she made a good wage.”

  If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s got to be a duck, Hannah thought, repeating one of her great-grandmother’s favorite sayings in her mind. Loretta was acting like someone who was lying by hesitating before she answered Hannah’s questions, and then refusing to meet Hannah’s eyes when she did. As far as Hannah was concerned, that meant Loretta was a liar and she wasn’t very good at it.

  After Hannah had walked Loretta to the door, she came back to sit on her stool again. She had to think of a good cookie to bake for Jennifer, one that would serve as a test of her real identity. She wouldn’t use chocolate and she wouldn’t use peanut butter. If Jennifer was really Jennifer, giving her an allergic reaction could be dangerous. Perhaps she’d make a sweet potato cookie. According to Carly, Jennifer had always hated sweet potatoes. Jennifer might take one to be polite, but she certainly wouldn’t eat more than one.

  Once that was decided, Hannah got up to flip through her file of recipes. She didn’t have a sweet potato cookie recipe, but she could adapt one of her existing recipes to incorporate them. As she gathered ingredients and began to mix up cookie dough, Hannah was even more determined to find out why Loretta was lying to her and what she was trying so desperately to hide.

  BLUE APPLE MUFFINS

  Preheat oven to 375 degrees F., rack in the middle position.

  The Muffin Batter:

  ¾ cup melted butter (1 and ½ sticks, 6 ounces)

  1 cup white (granulated) sugar

  2 beaten eggs (just whip them up in a glass with a fork)

  2 teaspoons baking powder

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries (no need to thaw if they’re frozen)

  2 cups plus one Tablespoon flour (no need to sift—pack it down in the cup when you measure it)

  ½ cup whole milk

  ½ cup apple pie filling (I used Comstock)

  The Crumb Topping:

  ½ cup sugar

  cup flour

  ¼ cup softened butter (½ stick)

  Grease the bottoms only of a 12-cup muffin pan (or line the cups with double cupcake papers—that’s what I do at The Cookie Jar.) Melt the butter. Mix in the sugar. Add the beaten eggs, baking powder, and salt. Mix it all up thoroughly.

  Put one Tablespoon of flour in a plastic food storage bag with your cup of fresh or frozen blueberries. Shake it gently to coat the blueberries and leave them in the bag on the counter for now.

  Add half of the remaining two cups of flour to your bowl and mix it in with half of the milk. Then add the rest of the flour and the rest of the milk. Mix thoroughly.

  Put the contents of the can of apple pie filling in a bowl and chop up the apples with a sharp knife. (You will want some apple pieces in each muffin so the pieces have to be fairly small.) Measure out ½ cup of pie filling and add it to your muffin batter. Stir it in thoroughly.

  Hannah’s Note: You will have approximately ½ cup of apple pie filling left over. Put it in a small freezer bag, label the bag, and stick it in the freezer with the rest of the frozen blueberries that you didn’t use. Then you’ll have the fruits together the next time you want to make Blue Apple Muffins.

  Fold the frozen or fresh blueberries into your muffin batter. Mix gently so that the blueberries will stay intact.

  Fill the muffin tins three-quarters full and set them aside. If you have any batter left over, grease the bottom of a small tea-bread loaf pan and fill it with your remaining batter.

  To make the Crumb Topping, mix the sugar and the flour in a small bowl. Add the softened butter and use a fork or a knife to “cut” it into the dry ingredients until the resulting mixture is crumbly. (You can also do this in a food processor. Just layer the dry ingredients with chilled butter that you’ve cut into chunks, and then process it in an on-and-off motion with the steel blade until it looks like coarse cornmeal.)

  Fill the remaining space in the muffin cups with the crumb topping. Then bake the muffins in a 375 F. degree oven for 25 to 30 minutes. (If you had muffin batter left over and put it in a tea-bread pan, it should bake about 10 minutes longer than the muffins.)

  When your muffins are baked, set the muffin pan on a wire rack to cool for at least 30 minutes. (The muffins need to cool in the pan for easy removal.) Then just tip them out of the cups and enjoy.

  These are wonderful when they’re slightly warm, but the apple and blueberry flavors will intensify if you store them in a covered container overnight.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The Minnesota Twins were playing a doubleheader and Hannah had the game on in the kitchen of The Cookie Jar. The Twins and Detroit were battling it out at Target Field. The Twins were winning, four to three, but the bases were loaded with Tigers. It was the ninth inning and the new relief pitcher for the Twins, who had been recently brought up from the minors, was struggling.

  “Strike him out!” Hannah instructed the pitcher, just as if he could hear her instruction through the tiny screen of her kitchen television set. “You can do it! Come on!”

  It was a full count. It had been a full count for the past four pitches. The Tiger at bat, their second baseman, kept hanging in there by hitting foul balls. As she watched, the batter fouled off another three pitches. Would this inning ever be over? How long could a pitcher pitch? And how long could a batter hit foul balls that were uncatchable?

  The inning seemed endless as another three pitches were delivered and fouled off. Hannah was surprised that the announcer wasn’t giving statistics about the record for the number of pitches fouled off by a single batter.

  Two more pitches, two more uncatchable foul balls, and Hannah turned away to take a peek at the timer to see how many minutes her cookies still had to bake. And that was when the crowd roared. Something had happened!

  Hannah’s head immediately swiveled toward the television set. Instant replay. Normally she hated instant replays, but this time she was grateful for the technology that generated the replay footage.

  “Wow!” Hannah gasped as the pitcher threw a wild pitch, and the Tiger on third base sprinted all-out for home pl
ate. The catcher got out of his crouch much faster than Hannah had thought was humanly possible, retrieved the ball that had ricocheted off the wall between home plate and first base, and threw a missile to the pitcher who had correctly dashed off the mound to cover home plate. The Tiger approaching home slid in feet first, the pitcher reached down to tag him before his foot reached the plate and that was it. Game over, and the Twins had won! Mike had once commented that he thought baseball was as boring as watching paint dry, but he’d obviously never seen a game like this one!

  Hannah was smiling as her timer dinged and she opened the oven door to take out her cookies. They looked good and she was eager to taste one.

  “Oh, good!” Michelle said as she came into the kitchen and saw that the bakers rack was full. “We’re almost out in the coffee shop. Lisa’s story is really pulling in the customers today.”

  “Let’s just hope it doesn’t pull in Mother. I don’t think she’d appreciate the people in Lake Eden knowing she pretended to interview Starlet for one of her books.”

  “You’re right. She wouldn’t. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that she doesn’t come in.”

  “Thanks for letting me sleep,” Hannah said, smiling at her youngest sister. “But I think you should be the one to sleep in tomorrow.”

  “I’m all right. Really, I am. I get more sleep here than I do when I’m at school.”

  “Then you’d better get some more sleep at school. I know you didn’t get enough sleep last night.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You were so tired this morning that you left my new exercise machine on after you used it.”

  Michelle looked at her blankly. “But I didn’t exercise this morning. I was afraid I’d wake you if I did.”

  “You didn’t use the treadmill?”

  “Not this morning. Why?”

  “Because it was running when I got up this morning. Moishe was walking on the treadmill and I woke up to the humming of the machine.”

  Both of them were silent for a moment, not willing to accept the only plausible explanation, and then Michelle shook her head from side to side.

  “Uh-uh. There’s no way. I just don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t either. Maybe it was a poltergeist.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts, either.”

  “Neither do I, but that exercise machine didn’t turn itself on.”

  “That’s true. It has to be Moishe. There’s no other explanation.”

  “Okay, it was Moishe. But how did he learn how to turn on the machine?”

  “By watching me do it. He stared at me every time I turned it on. I thought he was just curious, but he must have been figuring out how to do it by himself. You’ve got a really smart cat, Hannah.”

  “I know. Sometimes he’s too smart for his own good. I just hope he never learns to bake. He’ll put me out of business.”

  Michelle laughed. “I think you’re safe on that score. And that reminds me, how did you like the muffins this morning?”

  “They were phenomenal! I meant to tell you when I came in the door, but you were busy and I forgot. And then I got busy back here and I forgot I hadn’t told you. Did you write down the recipe?”

  “I did. I’m going to call them Blue Apple Muffins because they’ve got apples and blueberries in them. They’re really simple to make in a hurry. All you have to do is keep a can of apple pie filling in the cupboard and a bag of frozen blueberries in the freezer. If you’ve got those, you can make them anytime you want to.”

  “Can you make them again tomorrow?”

  “Sure if you want me to. I’ve got half a bag of frozen blueberries left and there’s some leftover apple pie filling. But are you sure you want the same breakfast you had today?”

  “I’m positive. Your Blue Apple Muffins were some of the best breakfast treats I’ve ever had.”

  Michelle had just finished filling two display jars to take back to the coffee shop when the phone rang. “I’ll get it,” she said, setting the cookie jars down on the counter and reaching for the phone on the wall. “The Cookie Jar. Michelle . . . oh, hi Mother. Hannah told us what a wonderful job you did in Minneapolis yesterday.”

  Hannah rolled her eyes and Michelle winked to acknowledge it. Both of them knew it paid to keep their mother happy.

  “What’s that, Mother?” Michelle asked, and then she turned to give Hannah a shocked glance. “You’re going to change your mind about the bridesmaid dresses?”

  Hannah sat down on a stool and put her head in her hands. Delores was at it again despite the promise she’d made to choose something and stick with it.

  “The menu, too?” Michelle asked, sounding even more shocked. She listened for a moment and then she started to frown. “But I thought you didn’t want salmon.”

  As Hannah watched, Michelle pulled up a stool and sat down. Then she reached for the shorthand notebook that Hannah always kept by the phone. “Just a minute, Mother. I have to find a pen.”

  As Hannah watched, Michelle grabbed a pen from the coffee mug with the broken handle that Hannah kept handy by the phone. Then she began to write. She wrote line after line until Hannah couldn’t stand the suspense any longer. Delores was obviously giving Michelle instructions and Hannah had to see what her sister was writing. She got up, walked over to the counter, and glanced at the long, narrow, spiral-bound page.

  The first line was blank except for one word with an exclamation mark after it. Buttercups it read in Michelle’s perfect script. And below it, on the next line, were the words, Where the Sam Hill are we supposed to get buttercups this time of year, followed by three question marks. On the third line, Michelle had written two words, burgundy dresses, and she’d underlined the first word, burgundy. And under it was the following inscription, Oh, yeah. Hannah will be sooo happy about this, followed by an exclamation point.

  Hannah’s eyes widened as she read the fifth line. Lobster Bisque, Salmon in Phyllo Dough, White Asparagus with Caviar, Heart-Shaped Rolls with Our Initials. This was followed by a sixth line that read, Don’t want much, do you, Mother, followed by another three question marks.

  Michelle was still writing and Hannah leaned closer to read the next line. Butterscotch Champagne it read. She grabbed the pen out of Michelle’s hand and wrote She expects us to invent it, followed by three question marks on the following line.

  “Got to go, Mother,” Michelle said in a voice choked with laughter. “They need me in the coffee shop. Call me later, okay?” and then she hung up the phone and turned to Hannah.

  The two sisters faced each other for a moment, both of them too stunned to speak. Then Hannah slowly shook her head. “No way,” she said. “This has gone on long enough. I’m calling Doc. If anyone can talk some sense into Mother, it’s him.”

  The words had no sooner left her mouth when the phone rang again. “I’ll get it,” she said, plucking the instrument of Michelle’s previous torture from the holder on the wall. “The Cookie Jar, Hannah speaking.”

  She listened for a second and then she gave Michelle the high sign. “Oh! Hi, Doc! I was just about to call you.” She listened for another couple of seconds and then she responded. “Well . . . sure. I’d love to and I’m sure Michelle, Andrea, and Lisa would too. And we agree with you wholeheartedly. See you at six, then.”

  That said, Hannah hung up the phone and turned to Michelle, who was having trouble containing her curiosity. “I didn’t have to tell Doc about it. He walked in when Mother was talking to you and walked back out to call me from the front desk. We’re meeting him tonight at the Lake Eden Inn for dinner at six. Mother won’t be joining us until seven, so we’ll have an hour to discuss the problem. Doc says he has a solution in mind if we all agree.”

  “Sounds great to me,” Michelle said. “I’ll agree with anything at this point. I’m so frustrated by the whole thing that I don’t know what to do.”

  “Matricide is not an option,” Hannah told her, and she felt a lot better when Michell
e laughed. At least they hadn’t lost their senses of humor quite yet.

  “I’m surprised that Mother didn’t insist on joining us right away,” Michelle said. “What excuse did Doc use for getting away early?”

  “He didn’t need an excuse. The Rainbow Ladies are hosting a wedding shower for Mother at the hospital. It starts at five-thirty and she’ll be tied up until seven or maybe a little later. Doc’s going to ask her to meet him for dinner at the Lake Eden Inn as soon as her shower’s over. He already told her that we’re coming, too.”

  “This all sounds good to me,” Michelle said. “Anything Doc can suggest to help will be great. Mother just doesn’t seem to understand that we can’t plan her wedding and reception dinner if she changes her mind every time the wind blows.”

  “Right. Let’s hope Doc’s got something good in mind because I’m fresh out of ideas. Go tell Lisa about it, will you please? Doc wants her to come to the dinner, too. And ask if you can ride out to the Lake Eden Inn with her. I’ll call Andrea and tell her to meet you and Lisa in the dining room. Doc wants the whole wedding planning committee to be there.”

  “You’re coming too, aren’t you?”

  “Of course. I wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

  “But you asked me to ride with Lisa. Where will you be?”

  “I have to run home to feed Moishe. And then I need to drive out to Loretta’s farm to meet Jennifer at four.”

  “Jennifer asked to talk to you?” Michelle sounded surprised.