Fudge Cupcake Murder (22 page)

"Hi, Hannah!" Jon Walker stepped into the coffee shop and took a seat at the counter. "Here's your prescription. Doc says you should take two right away and one more tonight before bed. From then on it'll be one pill, three times a day."

"Thanks, Jon." Hannah took the white bag, stashed it behind the counter, and grabbed three of Jon's favorite Oatmeal Raisin Crisps. She placed them on a napkin and served them with a mug of hot, black coffee. "It's on the house. And thanks for the personal service."

"No problem. The antibiotic Doc prescribed is expensive, but it should do the trick. I gave you a discount because I know your health insurance doesn't cover drugs."

"How expensive was it?" Hannah asked, holding her breath. "She wasn't exactly broke this month, but there wasn't all that much left over in the budget, either. Moishe's shots and vet visit hadn't come cheap and his vitamins had been much more expensive than the human equivalent.

"I put the invoice in the bag."

Hannah took it out and gulped as she read the total. The little bottle of pills that Jon just delivered cost over eighty dollars! "

"Sticker shock," Jon commented, looking sympathetic. "Ted Koester had that same look on his face."

"Ted is taking these, too?"

"That's right. And when he picked up the prescription he told everybody in the drugstore about it so I'm not breaking any confidences. He gashed his arm on a piece of metal at work last week. It probably would have been okay if he'd washed it out right after it happened, but he didn't and it got infected."

"Poor Ted. Hold on a second, Jon. I'll get my purse and write you a check."

A minute or two later, their business finished, Hannah perched on her stool while Jon sipped his coffee. "Are you decorating the drugstore for Halloween again?" she asked.

"I've got the girls working on it right now. If I don't pop up behind the counter as the mad chemist stirring something that looks like slime in a beaker, the kids will be really disappointed."

"They really get a kick out of seeing the business owners in costume. Lisa's carving pumpkins to put in our window."

"What are you wearing for a costume?"

"Lisa's going to be a black cat. She showed me the costume last week."

"She's bound to look cute in something like that, but I asked about you."

Hannah shook her head. "I'll stick to the kitchen. That way I won't have to come up with a costume. And if I have to come up front for any reason, I'll put on the same old sheet I used last year and be the Ghost of Cookies Past."

"You're going to the community center for the party, aren't you?"

"I wouldn't miss it. I'm going to take Tracey since Andrea has to stay home with her feet up."

"The baby?"

"Doc Knight's orders."

"Are you bringing cookies for the party?"

"Of course. Twenty dozen, just like always. The only problem is, I haven't decided which cookies to bring. I'd like to do something special for Halloween."

"How about corn cookies? My mother made those for Halloween when we lived on the reservation."

"Corn cookies?" Hannah was puzzled. She'd never heard of corn cookies, but she knew that corn was a basic ingredient in Native American cooking. Perhaps it was a tribal custom to bake cookies with corn in them for Halloween, but that seemed odd. Hannah was fairly sure that Halloween had no celebratory significance in American Indian culture.

"What's the matter, Hannah? Haven't you ever heard of corn cookies?"

"No, I haven't," Hannah said, wondering how to word the second half of her response. "Are they… uh… an old Indian recipe?"

Jon threw back his head and laughed long and hard. Several people seated at the tables turned to stare at him, but he just laughed harder. When he had calmed down enough to speak again, he asked, "An old Indian recipe? I guess you're right, in a way. My mother's an old Indian."

"I didn't mean that!" Hannah retorted, chuckling along with Jon. "But I really would like to know more about them. Are corn cookies ethnic, or tribal, or whatever's politically correct to say now?"

Jon shrugged. "I really doubt it. As far as I know, my mother was the only woman on the reservation who baked them."

"Did she use corn meal? Or canned corn?" Hannah asked. She was about to add cornflakes to her list of possibilities, but Jon was laughing so hard he wouldn't have heard her anyway.

"None of the above. I'm not talking about real corn, Hannah. My mother made pumpkin cookies and decorated the tops with candy corn."

Hannah climbed the stairs to her condo with resolve. She was determined to give Moishe his vitamin supplement. Several of her patrons had offered advice on medicating cats and a couple of techniques sounded as if they might work. First of all, she had to put on a heavy, long-sleeved shirt. Everyone agreed that this was important. She also had to wear gloves to guard against scratches and bites. Trudi Schmann thought that Hannah should tie Moishe up so that she could use both hands to medicate him. She'd even suggested duct-taping his feet together. That unhelpful hint had gone in one of Hannah's ears and out the other. Everyone knew that Trudi didn't like cats.

Vern Kleinschmidt suggested tranquilizing Moishe so that giving him the vitamins would be easier. But the moment the suggestion left his mouth, he realized that there was no way to tranquilize Moishe without giving him a pill. And if Hannah had to hold him and give him a pill, she might as well give him the vitamins.

Lisa came up with the best feline offensive, the one Hannah intended to use. She was going to wrap Moishe tightly in a large bath towel so he couldn't scratch, set him on her lap facing her, and hold him in place with her legs. Then she'd have both hands free and could use one to block his nose. Moishe would be forced to breathe through his mouth, and when he opened it, she'd squirt in the vitamins.

"I'm home," Hannah called out as she unlocked the door to her condo, but no orange and white blur hurtled itself into her arms. Moishe must be keeping a low profile, perhaps because he felt guilty for scratching her this morning. "Moishe? Where are you, boy?"

Hannah tossed her shoulder bag purse and her jacket on the chair by the door and started the search for her missing cat. With the exception of tipping the couch on end so that she could see beneath it, she explored every feline hiding place in the living room and came up with nothing.

Hannah flicked on the kitchen light and checked the narrow space by the side of the refrigerator, the seats of the chairs that were pushed under the formica table, and the area behind the kitchen wastebasket. She even looked on top of the refrigerator, although he hadn't jumped up there in a while. Moishe wasn't in the kitchen.

He wasn't in the laundry room, either. Or the guest bedroom. Hannah stepped into her bedroom and called out again. Moishe had to be here. There was no way he could have gotten out.

She was about to go through the rooms again when she heard a pathetic mew. Then Moishe appeared, pulling himself out from under the bed. Hannah's heart plummeted to her toes when she saw him. Something was terribly wrong. Her poor kitty was trembling so hard he could barely move and he was crawling along on his belly.

"Come here, sweetheart," Hannah crooned, reaching out to carefully gather him into her arms. She held him gingerly, fearing he might be injured, and set him on his favorite goose down pillow.

Moishe looked up at her as she sat down on the bed beside him and Hannah could swear he blinked away a tear. Then he pulled himself closer to her and licked her hand.

"Poor baby," Hannah murmured, leaning down to nuzzle him on the top of his head. "Did something scare you?"

Moishe mewed again and pushed his head up against her hand, soliciting more gentle pets from his mistress. Hannah obliged and felt for injury. Nothing seemed to be broken, and there were no wounds that she could see or feel.

After several long minutes of scratching and soothing, Moishe was calm again. Hannah made sure that he was bribed into complacency by a handful of his favorite salmon-flavored kitty treats, and then she headed off to see if she could spot what had disturbed him.

The windows were secure and the door had been locked when she came in. Finding nothing amiss in any of the other rooms, Hannah headed into the bathroom. And that was when she found the telltale piece of evidence that told her exactly what had happened. The liquid vitamin supplement she'd left on the kitchen counter was now in the bottom of her toilet bowl.

"Uh-oh," Hannah groaned. No wonder Moishe had been trembling when he'd come out from under the bed! He knew he'd done wrong.

Should she punish him? Hannah considered it for a split second and quickly discarded that notion. Moishe had been kicked around and abused during his former life on the streets. This was a safe haven for him and there was no way Hannah was going to jeopardize the trust they'd built up in one another. Everyone said that unless you caught your pets in the act, punishment after the fact would only confuse them. And the way that Moishe had trembled, mewed pitifully, and crawled to her on his belly when she'd come home certainly indicated contrition.

Hannah fished out the bottle of vitamin supplement and put it in the cabinet under the sink. She couldn't bear to throw away something that had been that expensive, but she didn't intend to use it again. It was simply too traumatic for both of them. There had to be something else she could do that wouldn't upset either one of them. Tonight she'd feed Moishe his regular kitty crunchies. They'd both been through enough for one day. And tomorrow morning she'd stop by the vet's office and ask Doctor Bob's advice.

"Is that a new cookie recipe?" Lisa asked the next morning, bringing Hannah a fresh cup of coffee from the urn. They'd finished the baking and now they were relaxing at their favorite table in the back until it was time to open.

"It's a new recipe, but it's not for cookies. I stopped by the vet's office this morning and Sue gave me a recipe for making Moishe's senior cat food from scratch."

"Uh-oh," Lisa said with a frown. "My brilliant plan to give Moishe his vitamins wasn't so brilliant after all?"

"It could have been brilliant, I just don't know. I never got the chance to test it out. When I got home last night, Moishe was hiding under the bed and his vitamin bottle was at the bottom of the toilet bowl."

"I guess that tells you what he thinks of food supplements."

"It certainly does," Hannah said with a grin. "Anyway, I decided to try something that both of us could live with. Cooking his food doesn't seem to be that difficult."

"Let me see." Lisa peered over Hannah's shoulder at the typewritten recipe. "You're going to boil liver for him every morning and every evening?"

"It's worth it as long as I don't have to give him those vitamins."

"How about the rest of this stuff? You have to cook that, too." Lisa read the list of additional ingredients and shuddered. "This sounds really horrible, especially for breakfast."

"It's not that bad, Lisa. It's almost like an omelet, if you think about it."

"I don't want to think about it, especially first thing in the morning. What is this last ingredient, calcium carbonate?"

"It's what's in eggshells. Sue said I could just crush the shells really fine and add the powder to Moishe's food. The whole thing'll be like a crunchy liver omelet with a side of rice."

"Yuck. Just thinking about it is making me sick. I don't know what's worse, the liver or the eggshells. Do you think he'll eat it?"

"I think so, especially when I finish seasoning it. I can't bear the thought of making an omelet without salt and pepper and maybe a little dash of garlic powder."

"But animals aren't supposed to have seasoning."

"Says who? I bet that comes from people who never had to taste pet food. If I were a cat or a dog, I'd want my dinner spiced up with a little seasoning. I might even douse it with ketchup if I could figure out how to get the cap off the bottle."

When Lisa came back from lunch, she handed Hannah a bag from the Red Owl. "Here, Hannah. I picked up a sack of candy corn. Where do you want it?"

"In the kitchen, on the counter by the sink."

Hannah made the rounds with the coffee carafe while Lisa took the bag to the kitchen and washed her hands. When she came back out, she was wearing her hair net and one of the pretty serving aprons that a local seamstress had made for them.

"You should see the community center," Lisa said. "The seniors are helping to decorate it for Halloween and it looks really good."

"How's the Haunted Basement coming along?"

"It's almost done. They were just moving in the furniture while I was there. Edna was in the kitchen, filling the bags of treats for the kids, and she had an idea for Alma's cupcakes."

"What's that?" Hannah asked. Edna had been baking for almost half a century and she knew what she was doing.

"She said she thought it had to be some kind of thickened liquid."

"I agree," Hannah said. "Did she have any suggestions?"

"Only one, but she said it couldn't be right."

"What was it?" Hannah wanted to know. Even if Edna's suggestion wouldn't work for the secret ingredient, it might give them some ideas.

"Sweetened condensed milk."

"But that could be it! The recipe could use more sugar and it's just about the right consistency. Why didn't Edna think it would work?"

"Because Alma was known for pinching her pennies."

"You mean sweetened condensed milk would be too expensive for her to use in a recipe?"

"Not exactly. Edna said Alma would use it, but she sure wouldn't throw any away."

"I get it," Hannah began to smile. "The recipe calls for half a cup and there's more than that in the can. But maybe Alma doubled the recipe."

Lisa shook her head. "Edna thought of that. Even if she doubled the recipe, she'd still have a quarter cup left in the can. Edna said Alma never would have stood still for that."

"Edna's probably right," Hannah said, refilling her coffee cup. "When you get a second, Mayor Bascomb needs another Molasses Crackle and Mrs. Jessup wants a dozen Peanut Butter Melts to take home with her. Call me if it gets really busy. I'm going to mix up a batch of Corn Cookies for us to test."