Joanne Fluke Christmas Bundle: Sugar Cookie Murder, Candy Cane Murder, Plum Pudding Murder, & Gingerbread Cookie Murder (78 page)

“Uh-oh.”

“Exactly. I looked it over, and I thought you should read
it, too. I’m crazy about Tracey, but that girl is too smart for her own good!”

Hannah took the letter Janice handed her and sat down in one of the little chairs by the blackboard. The chair was so low that her knees almost touched her chin, but she barely noticed how uncomfortable she was once she started to read.

“S
orry about that,” Hannah said, hurrying to the group-of chairs where her sisters were sitting. “I got hung up at Kiddie Korner borrowing this steno pad.”

“Did you see Tracey?” Andrea asked.

“No, she was at the library watching a Disney movie with her friends.” Hannah opened her mouth to tell Andrea about the Santa letter, but she thought better of it and clamped her lips shut again. Andrea would only worry if she knew that Tracey had guessed about the murder. “Did you find anyone who knew Mary Kay Hinklemeyer?”

“Not a single person,” Andrea said, sounding very frustrated. “The closest I came was Joe Dietz. He said he served with a guy named Sam Hinkelmeyer when he was in the army, but he was pretty sure Sam came from Idaho.”

“Same here, except I didn’t find anybody who knew any Hinklemeyers at all,” Michelle reported.

“Okay. Since we’re not going to get anywhere with that, let’s regroup.” Hannah reached into both of her sweater pockets and drew out the stacks of folded napkins. “The first thing to do is transfer these notes to the steno pad Janice gave me.”

Andrea picked up one of the napkins and attempted to read it. “Is this a blot from your pen, or food?”

“I don’t know. You take notes and I’ll read the napkins,”
Hannah delegated, handing the pink notebook to Andrea. “You listen, Michelle, and if you think of something I missed, sing out.”

“Right.” Michelle got up to fetch the wastebasket that stood near the front door, pausing to give Lonnie a little pat on the arm before she returned. “Here, Hannah. After you read them, toss them in here.”

Hannah picked up the first napkin and squinted at it. Andrea was right. The ink had run, and the area where it had met a grease spot looked a lot like the first Rorschach card. “It looks like…” Hannah resisted the urge to say
a vase,
or
a mirror image of a person in profile.
Instead she concentrated on making out the letters. “Kirby. It’s Kirby Welles. As far as I know, he was the last person to talk to Brandi before she was killed. Kirby told me he met Brandi in the cloakroom shortly after seven-thirty.”

“That was right after she went to the ladies’ room with me,” Michelle pointed out. “Better write that down, too.”

Andrea looked a bit exasperated. “I’ve got it. Actually, I’ve got it in two places. I’m making a timeline here. What time did you go to the ladies’ room, Michelle?”

“A quarter after seven. I looked at my watch.”

“Okay, Brandi was at the table with Martin until seven-fifteen. Then she went to the ladies’ room with Michelle. You talked to her until seven-thirty, Michelle?”

“That’s right. I was asking her questions about her life in Vegas.”

“And you learned what?”

“Hold on!” Hannah complained, “I’m looking for a toy soldier here.”

“You’re
what?”
both younger sisters asked in perfect unison.

“A toy soldier. I used a napkin with a toy soldier on it to write down what Michelle told me. Here it is!” Hannah held her disreputable prize aloft and waved it like a flag.

“It’s falling apart,” Andrea commented.

Michelle agreed. “And somebody spilled frosting on it and it’s all stuck together in one corner.”

“I can still read it,” Hannah insisted, spreading it out with the care of someone who was performing open-heart surgery on an ant. “It says,
ring, green stone, diamond surround, M. afraid plus coat show-off.”

“You saw the ring,” Michelle said to Andrea, “so you can give a better description than mine. And that other part is Hannah’s shorthand telling us that Martin didn’t want Brandi to wear the ring. He told her it was because she had the fur coat and he thought two expensive items like that might make people resentful.”

“People like Shirley,” Hannah pointed out, “who admitted that she told Martin she’d do anything she could to help him get rid of Brandi so that they could get remarried.”

“Motive!” Michelle cried out.

“Alibi,” Hannah countered. “Shirley was with Martin in that little room under the stairs at the time that Brandi was killed. The fact that they were together means that both of them are in the clear.”

“I’ve got all that,” Andrea said, putting down her pen and massaging her fingers. “Let’s get back to the timeline. Do you know what time Brandi was killed?”

“I found her at eight-fifteen, and Doc Knight didn’t think she’d been out there for more than thirty minutes. That puts the time of death anywhere from a quarter to eight to when I found her.”

“Seven forty-five to eight-fifteen,” Andrea repeated, her pen racing across the page, whose color had certainly been modeled after the inside of a Pepto-Bismol bottle. “That really narrows it down. How about Kirby? Why did he talk to Brandi in the cloakroom?”

“She asked him to meet her there.”

“So
that’s
why she kept looking at her watch!” Michelle
spoke up, and Hannah couldn’t help thinking that if her youngest sister were a cartoon character, a light bulb would have gone off in the little balloon over her head. “I thought she was worried about getting back to Martin, but she must have told Kirby what time to meet her.”

“Makes sense,” Hannah said.

“What did they talk about?” Andrea asked, her pen at the ready.

“Old friends they knew in high school and…”

“Kirby went to high school with Brandi?” Andrea asked, coming very close to dropping her pen.

“Yes, with Mary Kay Hinklemeyer. She was Kirby’s first girlfriend.”

“I’ll be!” Michelle breathed. “Do you think he killed her because she married Martin instead of him?”

Hannah shook her head. “It’s not feasible. For one thing, I’m almost sure that the jazz ensemble was playing the entire time, and I already know that they wouldn’t have sounded good without Kirby. And for another thing, Kirby wasn’t jealous.”

“Are you sure?” Andrea asked.

“I’m positive. You see, Brandi told Kirby she was leaving Martin. She was going to take his car out of the parking lot and drive it to the Minneapolis airport. From there she was going to fly to the Bahamas, and she asked Kirby to go with her.”

“That’s…romantic,” Michelle breathed.

“It’s also money-grubbing, illegal, and immoral,” Hannah reminded her. “Brandi told Kirby they could live like kings if she sold her ring and mink coat. And…her antique knife.”

“What antique…” Andrea started to ask, but she stopped, and this time the light bulb could have gone on over
her
head. “You mean Mother’s antique cake knife?”

“One and the same.”

“So Brandi stole it?” Michelle asked, frowning slightly.

“That’s a likely scenario.”

“And the killer managed to take it away from Brandi and stab her?” Andrea asked, paling slightly at the thought.

“That’s part of the same scenario. Hold on a second and let me find the caroling penguins. That’s where I wrote the list of suspects.”

Hannah paged through the remaining paper napkins, reading off several notes to Andrea. There was their conversation with Shirley, her meeting with Martin, and their mother’s grilling of Mayor Bascomb and how he admitted that he’d seen Brandi’s strip show and hired her for a “date” he was too drunk to keep.

“And I really thought she was a showgirl,” Michelle said with a sigh. “I feel really awful about all those questions I asked her.”

Hannah slipped a comforting arm around her youngest sister’s shoulder. “I’m sorry she disappointed you, Michelle.”

“Oh, she didn’t disappoint me, not exactly. But if she’d admitted that she was a stripper who partied on the side, I would have asked her a whole different set of questions and tried out for an entirely different part in the play!”

Ten minutes later, they had reached an impasse. Hannah had found the caroling penguins, but every single suspect except the unknown suspect with an unknown motive had been eliminated.

“What now?” Hannah asked, throwing out the question and hoping that one of her sisters would have an answer.

“I don’t know,” Michelle said, shaking her head. “It beats me.”

“Me, too,” Andrea sighed. “It just makes me wish we had some outtakes to watch this time around.”

“Outtakes?” Hannah asked, thoroughly puzzled.

“You know, like we did when we were investigating Boyd
Watson’s murder. We went through all those tapes of the Hartland Flour Bakeoff.”

“But we didn’t find anything,” Hannah reminded her.

“I know, but we could have. I’m just sorry somebody wasn’t videotaping tonight. There might have been something in the footage we could use.”

“Hold on,” Michelle said, an excited expression crossing her face. “Norman’s been taking photos of everyone all night long. What if he caught someone following Brandi when she filched the knife and ran off to the parking lot with it?”

Andrea shook her head. “If Norman saw something like that, he would have raised the alarm.”

“But maybe he doesn’t know he saw it. Just imagine this for a second…Norman’s concentrating on taking a picture of someone getting a second helping of something or other and the dessert table is in the background. He snaps pictures of his main subject, but he also gets a picture of Brandi in the background stealing the knife. Norman might have something we could use, and not even know he’s got it.”

“That makes sense,” Hannah said, catching some of her sister’s enthusiasm. “We’d better find Norman right away and ask him to develop his photos. Even if he goes straight home to the darkroom, that’ll take him a couple of hours.”

“I don’t think so, Hannah. We might just get instant results.”

“How?”

“I saw Norman’s camera earlier, and it looked like a digital to me.”

Finding Norman was no easy trick, but Hannah managed to locate him in the kitchen, where Edna had set him up with a platter of leftovers that would have fed the Lake Eden Gulls football squad. “Hi, Norman,” Hannah said, sliding into the kitchen booth to face him.

“Hi, Hannah. The Christmas party’s a huge success. I heard a lot of people saying that the food was the best ever.”

“Good to hear.” Hannah berated herself for not telling Norman about Brandi’s murder sooner. She should have found him right away, but circumstances had intervened. She took a deep breath and prepared to give him the shocking news. “I need you, Norman.”

“I figured you would.”

That took Hannah back a pace or two. “But…you don’t know
why
I need you.”

“Does it matter?”

“I don’t know,” Hannah said, thinking about that for a moment. “I guess it doesn’t, not really.”

“I didn’t think so. It’s enough that you do. Well, who do you like?”

“Like?”

“For Brandi’s murder. That’s cop talk. Mike told me that’s what they say in the squad room.”

“You know about the murder?”

“Of course I do. The police photographer couldn’t get here, and Mike had me take the crime scene photos. It’s definitely an art. I couldn’t have done it without his instructions.”

Hannah had a sobering thought as she looked into Norman’s face. What if Mike had already gone over all of Norman’s photos? What if there was nothing that Norman had captured on film, or disk, or whatever it was called in digital photography? But was it digital photography? That should be her first question. “Are you using a digital camera tonight?”

“Yes. The technology’s great, and I’ve got to say the results are as good or better than the traditional method. It’s amazing, Hannah.”

“Instant gratification?”

“Precisely. You shoot it and you view it. Then you keep it, or you ditch it, all in one fell swoop. And it’s not at all ex
pensive, considering all the money a photographer’s got to put into a darkroom.”

Hannah felt herself getting impatient. “Okay. Wonderful. Come with me. Andrea, Michelle, and I need you upstairs with your camera and whatever it is that holds those photos you took tonight.”

“Not quite yet,” Norman said, shoving his coffee cup across the table. “Drink this. And eat this chocolate-dipped pear. You’re getting cranky.”

“I am not!” Hannah said, and then she had the grace to laugh at the crabby tone in her voice.

“That’s better.” Norman looked amused as she took a sip of coffee and a bite of the pear. “Do you want to take some chocolate upstairs? Your sisters might need a pick-me-up too.”

“Good idea,” Hannah said sweetly and it wasn’t an act. She really was feeling much better, but she wasn’t sure if it was due to the chocolate, or Norman. “I have a feeling we could have a long night ahead of us.”