Plum Pudding Murder Bundle with Candy Cane Murder & Sugar Cookie Murder

by Joanne Fluke

  “The coffee should be ready soon,” Hannah said, craning her neck to see if the carafe was full. It wasn’t, and she glanced at the plate of cookies that Andrea had baked. The cookies were pretty, a nice rich yellow with powdered sugar on the tops. They looked good, but looks didn’t count for everything when it came to baked goods.

  “I hope Bill isn’t late,” Andrea said, frowning slightly. “He told me he thought they’d be here by midnight to take our statements, but something could happen to delay him.”

  “If he’s really late, you can catch a nap on the couch,” Hannah told her.

  “Or share the guest room with me,” Michelle offered. “It’s a king-size bed.”

  Andrea shook her head. “I don’t think I could sleep, not after what I saw tonight!”

  “What who saw?” Hannah begged to differ. “You didn’t see anything.”

  “No, but you told me about it. And I have a very active imagination. There’s something really awful about Santa being dead.”

  “Wayne being dead,” Michelle corrected her. “Don’t think of him as Santa and it won’t seem so bad. Think of him as that old skinflint department store owner who wouldn’t approve you for a Bergstrom’s credit card so you could charge that luggage you wanted for your honeymoon.”

  Andrea blinked. “You’re right. And that does help. Not that he deserved to die, but I really didn’t like Wayne at all.” She turned to Hannah. “Do you think that’s really bad of me?”

  “Not really. As far as I know, there’s no rule of etiquette that says you have to like somebody just because they’re dead. If you didn’t like them alive, you probably won’t like them after they’re dead, either.” She paused to crane her neck again and gave a sigh of satisfaction. “The coffee’s ready. I’ll go get it and then let’s taste your cookies.”

  “Oh!” Andrea looked very nervous. “I really hope you like them. They’re the first cookies I’ve ever made by myself.”

  Hannah made quick work of gathering what they needed in the kitchen. The topic of Wayne’s death had come up earlier than she’d expected. When she came back with a tray containing three mugs of coffee and cream and sugar for Andrea, she set it down in the center of the table and reached for one of Andrea’s cookies before she could take the coward’s way out and claim that she was too full from Sally’s Christmas party buffet.

  Family love knows no bounds, she said to herself, but the words that came out of her mouth were different. “These look wonderful,” she said, taking a leap of faith and biting into one of her sister’s cookies.

  Hannah was well aware that both Andrea and Michelle were watching her like hawks as she chewed. And swallowed. And smiled.

  “Good!” she said, doing her best not to sound too surprised. “I like these, Andrea!”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” Hannah said and took another bite. “How about you, Michelle?”

  Michelle gave her the same look Hannah imagined a prisoner being led to the gallows would wear. But she managed to smile as she obediently took a cookie and bit into it. There was a moment of silence and then an expression of total surprise crossed her face. “These are good, Andrea!”

  “Well, don’t look so shocked.” Andrea gave a little giggle. “Carli told me that everybody in her family liked them.”

  “They’re wonderful,” Hannah said, finishing her first cookie and reaching for another. “And you actually made them all by yourself?”

  “Well…” Andrea faltered a bit and then she shook her head. “Not exactly.”

  “What does that mean?” Michelle wanted to know.

  “I didn’t do it entirely by myself. Grandma McCann showed me how to preheat the oven and put them on the cookie sheets. But that was only for the first couple of times. After that, I did it by myself.”

  Even though they weren’t an overly affectionate family, Hannah couldn’t help it. She reached out to give her sister a hug. “Good for you! Are you going to give me the recipe, or is it a big secret?”

  “It’s not a secret, and it’s really easy. They take only four ingredients.”

  “You’re kidding!” Hannah was amazed. The cookies had a light but complex lemon flavor. They were soft and a bit chewy inside, and the outside was almost crunchy.

  Andrea went on. “I think that’s why Carli sent me the recipe. She remembers the bake sales the cheerleaders used to have to raise money for uniforms.”

  Hannah remembered them too. When she discovered that Andrea and her friend, Janie Burkholtz, were buying Twinkies at the Lake Eden Red Owl to sell at the fund-raising bake sales, she started baking homemade cookies for them.

  “What are the four ingredients?” Michelle asked.

  “A package of lemon cake mix, two cups of Cool Whip, an egg, and powdered sugar.”

  Lemon cake mix! Of course! Hannah felt like rapping the side of her head with her knuckles for being so dense. Andrea had told them she hadn’t used zest or lemon juice, but the cookies were still lemony. The flavor had to come from somewhere and making cookies from lemon cake mix should have occurred to her.

  “That’s all there is,” Andrea continued. “Just the four ingredients. Any more and I probably couldn’t have done it.”

  “Well, you did it very well,” Hannah told her, pouring them all more coffee.

  “Thanks. I’m going to try chocolate next. Maybe I could even mix in a few of those tiny chocolate chips. That might be good.”

  Hannah just stared at her sister. This was a whole new side of Andrea she’d never seen before.

  “And then I was thinking of doing white cake mix with some kind of cut-up fruit like cherries or apricots. Why are you staring at me like that?”

  “Because that’s how great recipes are developed. You start with something basic and branch out. Sometimes it can be as simple as running out of one ingredient and substituting something else.” Hannah passed the plate of cookies to Michelle. “We’ve got three left, one for each of us. And then we’d better get down to business.”

  “You’re going to figure out who killed Wayne?” Andrea asked, taking her cookie and making short work of it.

  “I don’t even know if anyone did…yet,” Hannah reminded her. “It was night, he was at the bottom of the berm, and I was at least eight feet above him. I guess it’s possible he slipped and broke his neck.”

  “But why was he up there in the first place?” Michelle asked.

  “He could have climbed up to enjoy the view,” Andrea suggested. “What was it like up there?”

  “It wasn’t what I’d call a scenic vista. The only thing I could see from the top was the snow bank behind it and the cars in the parking lot.”

  “Okay.” Michelle gave a quick nod. “Then maybe he had to…you know. And he didn’t want to walk all the way back to the inn.”

  “So he climbed up a slippery eight-foot snow bank instead of just ducking behind a handy tree?” Hannah asked her.

  “Never mind. It was a dumb idea,” Michelle admitted.

  “Wait a second,” Andrea looked thoughtful. “Maybe he didn’t climb up there. Maybe somebody dragged him up there and pushed him down the other side to kill him.”

  “Why go to all that trouble when you could just shoot him, or stab him, or club him to death right there on the path?” Hannah asked the pertinent question.

  “Because the killer was afraid somebody might come along and catch him? Or…oh, I don’t know. Let me find out if it was an accident. Bill should know by now.”

  “You’re going to call Bill?” Michelle asked as Andrea took her cell phone out of her purse.

  “No, I’m calling Sally.”

  “Sally at the inn?” Michelle followed up with another question.

  “That’s right. She can tell me if Vonnie Blair’s still there at the party.”

  “Doc Knight’s secretary,” Hannah said, beginning to get an inkling of what her sister was doing. “And if Vonnie’s still there, it’s probably not murder. Is that right?”<
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  “You got it.”

  As Andrea punched in the number, Michelle turned to Hannah. “Maybe you got it, but I didn’t get it.”

  “It’s simple. If Doc Knight thinks it’s murder, Bill will ask him to rush the autopsy. Doc knows how important it is and he’ll do it right away. And since Doc has such awful handwriting, he’ll call Vonnie on her cell phone and ask her to come out to the hospital to type up the transcript of the autopsy tonight.”

  Michelle’s puzzled expression smoothed out and she looked very impressed. “Wow. Andrea’s devious.”

  “She gets it from Mother,” Hannah explained. “Mother can think of the most roundabout ways to get the latest gossip.”

  “Thanks, Sally,” Andrea said, and snapped her cell phone shut. And then she looked over at them. “It’s murder. Vonnie left with the paramedics who transported Wayne to the hospital. Doc Knight must have been able to tell right away.”

  As usual, Andrea was the scribe. Not only did she have good organizational skills, she also had the neatest handwriting of the three sisters. Michelle’s had deteriorated when she’d gone off to college. After two years at Macalister, her notes were cryptic, filled with abbreviations that only she could decipher. Hannah, on the other hand, tended to print whenever she wrote something she hoped to read later.

  “Here you go. A brand new steno notebook.” Hannah handed her sister one from the stash of notebooks she kept in every room. “Do you need a pen?”

  “I have one.” Andrea reached in her purse and pulled out what Hannah termed a “dress pen,” since the barrel was gold and studded with sparkling white stones.

  “Pretty fancy,” Michelle commented, leaning closer to gaze at the pen. “Are those rhinestones, or diamonds?”

  “I’m pretty sure they’re rhinestones. It was a present from a client and the house he bought was a fixer-upper.” Andrea flipped to the first blank page and wrote Wayne Bergstrom’s name at the top. “We don’t know the time of death, or the method. What do you want me to write down?”

  “We could list the time I found him,” Hannah suggested, “but I didn’t look at my watch.”

  “I did.” Michelle said. “When you said Santa’s dead, I pressed the button to light the time and it said ten twenty-two.”

  Andrea started to write it down, but Michelle grabbed her hand. “Put down ten-seventeen,” she said.

  “Wait a second,” Hannah was confused. “I thought you said you looked at your watch and it was ten twenty-two.”

  “That’s right. But I always set my watch five minutes ahead. It keeps me from being late to class.”

  “How does it keep you from being late if you know your watch is five minutes ahead?” Hannah asked her.

  “It’s simple. If I start counting on that extra five minutes, I set my watch ten minutes ahead and psych myself out.”

  All was silent as Hannah digested that. It seemed her youngest sibling hadn’t inherited the logic gene.

  “Okay. Ten-seventeen.” Andrea jotted it down. “Do we know what time Wayne left for the parking lot?”

  “Ten after eight,” Hannah responded.

  “Are you sure your watch isn’t five or ten minutes fast?” Andrea teased her.

  “I didn’t look at my watch. I glanced at the clock in Sally’s kitchen as Wayne went out the back door. We can check it to make sure it’s accurate.”

  Andrea flipped to another page and started a list of things they had to do. “Got it. We’ll run out to the inn and check Sally’s kitchen clock tomorrow.”

  “That means Wayne was killed between eight-ten and ten-seventeen,” Michelle pointed out. “That’s a window of just a little over two hours.”

  “When we go out tomorrow, let’s see how long it takes to walk from Sally’s kitchen to that berm,” Hannah suggested. “Even if you’re poking along taking your time, it can’t be more than five minutes.”

  Andrea made another note. “Got it,” she said. “If you’re right, it means that Wayne was probably killed around eight-fifteen, or eight-twenty.”

  “Unless he stopped to talk to someone on the path,” Michelle argued. “You know how people are when they meet each other at a party. They stop and talk for a while. He could have met up with his killer after he talked to somebody.”

  “Good point,” Hannah said.

  “We should get a guest list from Sally and check to see if anyone at the party met Wayne on the walkway.” Merrily winking rhinestones, or diamonds, or whatever they were, Andrea’s pen flew across the page. “It’s a couple of degrees above freezing tonight. If you were dressed for the weather, you could stand there and talk for five or ten minutes without getting cold.”

  Michelle nodded. “But Wayne wasn’t dressed for the weather. Hannah said he was wearing his Santa suit.” She turned to Hannah. “Do you think it was as heavy as a parka?”

  “I don’t know. It looked heavy, especially with all that fur, but I didn’t actually feel the material.”

  “They sell the same Santa suit at Bergstrom’s,” Michelle told them. “I saw a whole rack of them when I was shopping for boots with Mother.”

  “We’ll go out there and check.” Andrea added another line to her To Do page, and then she let Moishe capture her pen and bat it around for a moment.

  “Mother!” Hannah exclaimed.

  “What about Mother?” her sisters chorused in perfect unison.

  “When she calls to read me the riot act for finding another body, I’ll ask her to go shopping at Bergstrom’s and check out the Santa suits. It’s her favorite store at the mall.”

  “And she’ll be so pleased she’s helping us solve Wayne’s murder, she’ll forget all about criticizing you?” Michelle guessed.

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “It could work,” Andrea offered her opinion. “Mother’s hard to distract, but a trip to Bergstrom’s right before Christmas could do it.”

  LEMON WHIPPERSNAPPERS

  Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position.

  1 package (approximately 18 ounces) lemon cake mix, the size you can bake in a 9-inch by 13-inch cake pan (Andrea used Betty Crocker)

  2 cups Cool Whip (measure this—Andrea said her tub of Cool Whip contained a little over 3 cups.)

  1 large beaten egg (it’s okay to just whip it up in a glass with a fork)

  ½ cup powdered (confectioner’s) sugar in a separate small bowl (you don’t have to sift it unless it’s got big lumps)

  Combine dry cake mix, Cool Whip, and beaten egg in a large bowl. Stir until it’s well mixed.

  Drop by teaspoon into the bowl of powdered sugar and roll to coat the cookie dough.

  Place the coated cookie drops on a greased (Andrea used Pam, but any nonstick cooking spray is fine) cookie sheet, 12 cookies to each sheet.

  Bake the cookies at 350 degrees F., for 10 minutes. Let them cool on the cookie sheets for 2 minutes or so, and then move them to a wire rack to cool completely.

  Yield: approximately 4 dozen light and lovely cookies.

  Hannah’s Note: Andrea showed me the recipe. Carli wrote that this is an old church recipe and that you can use any flavor cake mix in these cookies. She especially likes Lemon Whippersnappers in the summer because they’re simple to make and very refreshing.

  Chapter Four

  “No!” Hannah groaned, categorically refusing to open her eyes. She reached for the snooze button on her alarm clock to shut off its infernal electronic beeping before it could fully wake her, but there was something wrong with her arm. It wouldn’t move! She could wiggle it slightly, but that was all. Had she suffered some type of debilitating injury while she slept? Or was she only dreaming that her arm was partially paralyzed?

  There was only one way to find out and that was to open her eyes. Hannah groaned again and forced her eyelids up and open. In the dim wattage cast by the nightlight she’d bought the last time she’d climbed out of bed in the dark and stubbed her toe, she could see her arm, under the blanket
, stretched out on the bed and perfectly immobile. But there was something different about it. Some time during the night it had swelled up to at least three times its normal size. That didn’t bode well!

  Hannah wiggled her fingers, feeling the tingles that accompanied a cut-off blood supply. It was clear her arm had gone to sleep. But why was it swollen? Had she suffered some kind of neurological damage without even waking up?

  As Hannah stared at the limb that had betrayed her while she slept, she saw two small peaks rise up from the vicinity of her armpit. The peaks were attached to a round fuzzy orb and for a moment Hannah was puzzled. Then she gave a startled laugh as she realized what had happened. The peaks and the fuzzy orb belonged to Moishe. The temperature must have dropped below freezing in the middle of the night, because he’d left his usual place at the bottom of her bed to seek warmer climes above. No wonder her arm had gone to sleep! It was buried beneath over twenty pounds of dozing cat.

  “Come on, Moishe…get off my arm!” Hannah rolled over with difficulty and reached across her own body to give him a push. This elicited a protesting yowl, but he climbed off, and Hannah’s arm was freed from its furry burden.

  The first thing Hannah did with her newly restored hand was shut off the alarm. She was awake now, and the urge to slumber for another five minutes was a wee bit easier to resist, especially when she reminded herself that today would be a busy day. Not only did she have cookie and dessert baking to do for her bakery and coffee shop, she’d agreed to cater luncheon at her mother’s regency romance club Christmas meeting.

  Michelle had gone home with Andrea last night and they planned to head out early this morning to take care of several items on the To Do list. They’d start off by driving to the Lake Eden Inn to check the clock in Sally’s kitchen, pick up a copy of the guest list for last night’s party, and time their walk from the kitchen door that Wayne Bergstrom had used to the base of the snow bank where Hannah had found his body. During the afternoon, they’d do a little reconnoitering with their male counterparts. Andrea would pump Bill for information about the investigation, and Michelle would find out what Lonnie knew. The three sisters would compare notes that evening when they met at Andrea’s house for dinner.