Cherry Cheesecake Murder

This book is dedicated to my best friend, Shiva.

It’s not the same without you, girl.

In Memory Of:

Ikuko, a lady I wish I had been fortunate enough to meet.

Bob Rogers, talented friend.

And Little Al and Betty.

For Ruel, who’s always there when I need him.

And for the kids, even when they ask, “Are we eating another experiment?

Or can we have a real dessert?”

Thank you to our friends and neighbors:

Mel & Kurt, Lyn & Bill, Gina & the kids, Adrienne, Jay, Bob M., Amanda, John B., Trudi, Dale C., Dr. Bob & Sue, Laura Levine & Mark, Richard & Krista, Nina, the princess of cheesecake, and Mark Baker, who’s been hoping for this title.

Thank you to my editor’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Scognamiglio.

Without you, John wouldn’t be here.

And without John, Hannah Swensen wouldn’t be here!

Thank you to Hiro Kimura, my cover artist, who truly out-did himself with those scrumptious cherries on the cover, and thanks to Lou Malcanji for putting it all together in such a delectable dust jacket.

Thanks also to all the other talented folks at Kensington who keep Hannah sleuthing and baking up a storm.

Thank you to Dr. Rahaal & Trina for all you do.

Many hugs to Terry Sommers for proving that you can bake every single cookie and dessert recipe in this book and go on to live a normal life.

The Mini Cherry Cheesecake recipe is from Jane at Mysteries To Die For in Thousand Oaks, CA—Thanks,

Jane!

Thanks to Marcy for suggesting the All-Nighter Cookies,

and to Betty for the Double Flake Cookies.

Thank you to Jamie Wallace for her superb work on my

Web site

MurderSheBaked

Thanks to Lois Hirt, who knows almost everything about dentists, and a hug for Kamary, who came all the way from Michigan to meet me.

A big thank you to everyone who e-mailed or snail-mailed. In a perfect world, The Cookie Jar would be just around the corner and we could all meet for coffee and cookies.

(I’ve got dibs on the Mock Turtles!)

“Cut!”

Dean Lawrence had directed at plenty of locations, but Lake Eden was the worst. These yokels raised boredom to a whole new level. The chubby broad who ran the bakery made a great cherry cheesecake, and that was the only good thing he could say about Podunk Central.

Nothing was working today. They were never going to get this scene. The local lethargy must be catching, and it was time to kick some butt.

“What’s with you, Burke? You’re supposed to make people weep for you! Get up. I’ll show you what I want here.” Dean pushed Burke out of camera range and got ready to play the scene himself.

Midway through the scene, he noticed that the redhead who baked his cheesecakes was staring at him with new respect. Maybe she’d be a little more receptive, now that he’d impressed her with his talent. He opened the center desk drawer, pulled out the prop gun, and stared at it while he waited for Lynne’s line.

“I love you, Jody! Don’t do this to me!”

It was a perfect reading of the line and Dean was glad he’d decided to use her in his next movie. He put on a tortured expression as the camera came in for his close-up, and gazed at Lynne with tears welling in his eyes. “I’m not doing it to you, Li’l Sis. I’m doing it for me.”

He raised the gun to his temple. Lynne looked horrified, exactly as she should, and he gave her a last, sad smile. Then he squeezed the trigger. The gun went off and Lynne screamed for real. Their director was dead.

Two Weeks Earlier

Hannah Swensen did her best to convince her sleep-logged mind that the insistent electronic beeping she heard was in the soundtrack of her dream. A huge semi tractor-trailer was backing up to the kitchen door of her bakery, The Cookie Jar, to deliver the mountain of chocolate chips she’d ordered for the gazillion Chocolate Chip Crunch Cookies she’d promised to bake for her biggest fan, Porky Pig, who’d finally overcome his stutter with the help of a voice coach and was now being sworn in as president of the United States…

The dream slipped away like the veils of Salome, and Hannah groaned as she clicked on the light. No doubt her dream was the result of watching Cartoon Network until two in the morning and eating two dishes of chocolate ice cream with a whole bag of microwave popcorn. She silenced the alarm and threw back the covers, sitting up in bed in an effort to fight her urge to burrow back into her warm blankets and pull them up, over her head.

“Come on, Moishe,” she said, nudging the orange-and-white lump that nestled at the foot of her bed. “Daylight in the swamps, dawn in the desert, and sunrise in Lake Eden, Minnesota.”

Moishe’s yellow eyes popped open. He looked out the window into the darkness beyond, then swiveled his head to stare at her accusingly. While most people didn’t think cats could understand “human-speak,” Hannah wasn’t most people. This was primarily because Moishe wasn’t most cats. “Sorry,” Hannah apologized, backpedaling under his unblinking yellow gaze. “It’s not really daylight in Lake Eden, but it will be soon and I have to get up for work.”

Moishe seemed to accept her explanation. He opened his mouth in a wide yawn and gave the little squeak in the middle that Hannah found endearing. Then he began to stretch.

Hannah never tired of watching her previously homeless tomcat go through his morning calisthenics. Moishe rolled onto his back and gazed up at the bedroom ceiling. His right front leg came up in a fascist salute and after a slight pause, his left front leg shot up to join it. Then his back legs pushed toward the foot of the bed and spread out in a tensely inverted “Y,” like the handholds of a witching rod. Once his whole body was stretched taut, he began to quiver like the proverbial bowlful of Jell-O.

The kitty quiver lasted for several seconds and then Moishe flipped from back to stomach. This was the position Hannah called “shoveled,” because it was about as flat as a cat could get without the aid of a steamroller. All four legs were stretched out to the max and Moishe’s chin was perfectly parallel to the worn nap on the chenille bedspread Hannah had rescued from Helping Hands, Lake Eden’s only thrift store.

The part that came next was Hannah’s favorite. Moishe’s back legs moved forward, first the left and then the right, in what her first grade friends had called “giant steps” in their games of Captain, May I. This continued by awkward measure until Moishe’s rear was up in the air, his hips so high it turned him into a kitty teepee. Once the apex had been reached, he gave a little sigh, a little shake, a little flick of both ears simultaneously, and then he made a big leap to the floor to follow Hannah down the hallway.

“Hold on,” Hannah said, hopping from foot to foot as she pulled on her fleece-lined moccasin slippers. “You know you can’t open the Kibble Keeper by yourself.”

After a short trip down the hall spent dodging Moishe’s efforts to catch the laces on her slipper, Hannah reached the kitchen. She flicked on the bank of fluorescent lights and winced as the walls shimmered dazzling white to her sleep-deprived eyes. Perhaps it was time to paint her walls a darker color, a color like black, especially if she kept operating on three hours of sleep. Last night had been another night in a long string of nights spent in her living room, stretched out on the sofa with a twenty-three pound cat perched on her chest, watching television until the wee small hours of the morning and wrestling with a decision that would have stymied even Solomon.

An indignant yowl brought Hannah back to matters at hand and she opened the broom closet to lift out the Kibble Keeper. It was a round, gray, bucket-type container with a screw-on lid that was guaranteed to keep out even the most persistent pet. Hannah had found it at the Tri-County Mall after Moishe had defeated every other means she’d tried to keep him from helping himself to his own breakfast. It wasn’t that she begrudged him food. It was the cleanup that made feline self-service dining unfeasible. Hannah had swept up and dumped out the last kitty crunchy she was about to sweep and dump, and the salesclerk at the pet store had assured her that no living being that lacked opposable thumbs could open the Kibble Keeper. It was made of a resin that was impervious to biting and scratching, knocking it over and batting it around had no effect at all on its sturdy exterior, and it had been tested on a tiger at the Minnesota Zoo and come through with flying colors.

Even though Hannah knew that Moishe was physically incapable of unscrewing the lid, she still concealed her actions from him. It wasn’t wise to underestimate the cat who was capable of so much more than the ordinary tabby.

“Here you go,” she said, scooping out a generous helping and dumping it into his bowl. “Finish that and I’ll give you some more.”

While her feline roommate crunched, Hannah poured herself a cup of steaming coffee and sent a silent message of thanks to whoever had invented the automatic timer. She took one sip, swallowed painfully, and added a coffee ice cube from the bag she always kept in the freezer. A regular ice cube would dilute what her grandmother had called “Swedish Plasma,” and that was why Hannah kept one ice cube tray filled with frozen coffee. She needed her caffeine full-strength in the morning.

Several big gulps and Hannah felt herself beginning to approach a wakeful state. That meant it was time to shower and dress. The lure of a second cup of coffee would make her hurry, and she was awake enough not to doze off and turn as red as a lobster under the steaming spray.

Hannah reentered the kitchen eleven minutes later, her red hair a damp mass of towel-dried curls, and clad in jeans and a dark green sweatshirt that proclaimed CHOCOLATE IS A VEGETABLE—IT COMES FROM BEANS in bright yellow script. She’d just poured herself that second cup of coffee when the phone rang.

Hannah reached for the bright red wall phone that hung over the kitchen table, but she stopped in midstretch. “What if it’s Mike? Or Norman?”

“Rrowww!” Moishe responded, looking up at the phone as it rang again. “Yowwwww!”

“You’re right. So what if they both proposed? And so what if they’re waiting for me to choose between them? I’m thirty years old, I run my own business, and I’m a sensible adult. Nobody’s going to rush me into a decision I might regret later…including Mother.”

As Hannah uttered the final word, Moishe’s ears flattened against his head and he bristled like a Halloween cat. He despised Delores Swensen and Hannah’s mother had a drawer full of shredded pantyhose to prove it.

“Don’t worry. If it’s Mother, you don’t have to speak to her.”

Hannah took a deep breath and grabbed the phone, sinking down in a chair to answer. If it was her mother, the conversation would take a while and there were bound to be unveiled references to her unmarried state. If it was her younger sister, Andrea, the conversation would include the latest about Hannah’s two nieces, Tracey and Bethany, and it would also take a while. If it was Michelle, Hannah’s youngest sister, they were bound to have a discussion about college life at Macalester College and that would also eat up the minutes Hannah had left before she had to go to work.

“Hello?” Hannah greeted her caller, hoping mightily that it wasn’t either of the two men in her life.

“What took you so long? I was almost ready to give up, but I knew you wouldn’t leave for work this early.”

It was a man, but it wasn’t either of the two in question and Hannah breathed a sigh of relief. It was Andrea’s husband, Bill, the only other early riser in the Swensen family. “Hi, Bill. What’s up?”

“I am. I’m out here at the sheriff’s station and we’ve got a problem.”

Hannah glanced at the clock. It was only five-fifteen. Bill kept regular hours now that he was the Winnetka County Sheriff. He never went to the office until eight unless there was an emergency. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“You bet there is. And you’re the only one who can fix this mess!”

“What mess?” Hannah had visions of homes burglarized, motorists carjacked, public buildings vandalized, and murder victims stacked up like cordwood. But if crime was running rampant in Lake Eden, she certainly hadn’t heard about it. And how could she possible be the only one who could fix it?

“It’s Mike. You really did a number on him, Hannah. One minute he’s on top of the world, telling everybody that you’re bound to choose him. The next minute he’s all down in the mouth, absolutely sure that you’re going to ditch him and marry Norman.”

Hannah did her best to think of something to say. It wasn’t her fault that Mike couldn’t handle the stress of waiting while she made up her mind which proposal to accept. It had been only a week. A girl, even one whose mother thought her old enough to qualify as an old maid, was entitled to all the time she needed for such an important decision.

“Look, Hannah. I know it’s not totally your fault, but I’ve got a dangerous situation here.”

“Dangerous?”

“That’s right. Mike’s supposed to be my head detective, my right hand when it comes to solving crime. The way he’s acting right now, he couldn’t catch a perp even if the guy stood in front of his desk holding a sign that said, I DID IT. I mean, what if we have a real murder, or something like that? What’ll happen then?”