Cherry Cheesecake Murder (34 page)

Finally the rubble stopped falling, and some brave soul ran out onto the ice to pick up a piece that had fallen. Hannah watched as Doc Knight, who’d been watching the taping from the side of the rink, grabbed the piece from the man who’d fetched it from the ice.

“What is it, Doc?” Lynne asked, skating back to Lake Eden’s local physician after having delivered the girls into the capable hands of Sophie, Honey, and Andrea.

Doc Knight shrugged. “Looks like a fibula.”

“You mean a leg bone?”

“That’s right.”

“From some animal?”

Doc Knight took his time about answering, and the crowd waited. They were so quiet Hannah thought she could hear them breathe.

“No,” Doc finally said. “It sure looks human to me.”

“Winnie? Are you here?” Hannah knocked on the door of the farmhouse. When there was no answer, she turned around to face Mike and Norman. “I think she’s here, but she’s afraid to answer.”

“You’re probably right,” Mike said.

“Try again,” Norman suggested. “And tell her who you are this time.”

“Winnie? It’s Hannah.” Hannah knocked on the door again. “Open up. You know we need to talk to you.”

“I’m coming,” came a faint voice from within, followed by a shuffling of feet. “All right, all right. Hold on while I get this lock off.”

It seemed to take awhile, but at last Winnie unlocked the door. She stood there in the fading light of the day, looking very small and very alone. “So did you come to arrest me?”

“No,” Mike answered for all three of them. “Should I?”

“Maybe. Come in and have some coffee. I’ve got a pot going in the kitchen.”

She always was a good hostess, Hannah thought as she followed Winnie into the large farmhouse kitchen and took a chair at the round oak table that dominated the room. “Why did you run off like that, Winnie?”

“You know why. Doc must’ve figured out those bones are human by now.”

“That’s right, he did,” Mike confirmed it. And then he turned to give Hannah a warning glance. His message was loud and clear. She should let him handle this. It was his job.

“Well, let’s have coffee before you haul me off to jail,” Winnie said, pouring four cups from the blue-and-white speckled pot that sat on the old wood stove. “Anybody take cream and sugar?”

“Just black, thanks Winnie,” Hannah responded.

“Me, too,” Norman added.

“Black’s fine with me,” Mike said, watching as Hannah and Norman picked up their cups and sipped.

Hannah held in a chuckle. Like a king with an official food taster, Mike wasn’t about to sip the coffee until they’d tried theirs. She figured he’d wait at least a minute to make sure Winnie hadn’t put anything lethal into the brew. What he didn’t know was that Winnie’s brew was lethal all by itself. It was strong Norwegian coffee made the old-fashioned way. Winnie washed the pot on Saturday night and made it fresh on Sunday morning. Then it sat warming on the old wood stove until the whole pot had been consumed. When there were only used grounds in the bottom, Winnie added more water and several tablespoons of new ground coffee, and brewed another pot. By the time Saturday night rolled around and it was time to wash the pot, it was at least half-filled with spent coffee grounds, some of them pressed into service at least a dozen times.

Hannah took another sip of her coffee. Thank goodness it was only Friday! She’d once had Winnie’s coffee on Saturday afternoon and it was strong enough to knock out a mule!

At last Mike raised his cup and took a sip. Hannah watched closely and she gave him points for not choking. His eyes watered a bit, but that was to be expected from a first-timer tasting Winnie’s coffee. Then he did something Hannah hadn’t expected from someone not born and raised in Lake Eden. He cleared his throat, gave Winnie a smile, and said, “This coffee’ll peel the paint right off the walls!”

Winnie gave a little smile and Hannah could tell she felt slightly better. Everybody in town said that Winnie’s coffee could peel the paint off the walls, and that was a compliment. Hannah held her breath, waiting for Mike to put down his cup and start asking questions. He’d once told her that he had two favorite techniques he used to interrogate suspects. One technique was intimidation, and the other was to use a sympathetic approach.

“Why don’t you tell me about those human bones and maybe we can work something out,” Mike said, and Hannah gave him a grateful look. She was glad he’d decided to be sympathetic rather than intimidating.

“Guess I’d better do that,” Winnie said, taking the chair across from Mike. From the way she was sitting, stiff and poised on the edge of the wooden seat, Hannah knew the story they were about to hear would be painful for her to tell. She took a sip of her own coffee and then she sighed.

“It’s like this,” she said. “My second husband used to beat on me every time he got a snootful. I was smart enough not to keep any liquor in the house, but he went down to the Municipal on Saturday nights. There was nothin’ I could do to keep him here on the farm. Lord knows I tried.”

Hannah frowned slightly, but she didn’t interrupt to ask the question that had occurred to her the moment that Winnie mentioned her second husband. If she had the chronology of succession correct, his name was Red and he’d left one morning to buy a pack of cigarettes and never come back.

“Anyways, the night my first boy was born it was a Saturday and Red was down at the Municipal. I knew I had some time, but I called my brother Arnie, he lived in town, and asked him to go fetch Red so he’d be home to take me to Doc Knight’s.”

“Go on,” Mike encouraged her.

“Well Red didn’t want to come home that early, but Arnie got tough with him and brought him out here. Red wouldn’t let Arnie in. He told him to go home and slammed the door in his face. But Arnie was afraid to leave me alone with Red when he was drunk, so he walked around the house and looked in the window. By the time Arnie got to the kitchen window, Red was already slapping me around pretty good.”

Hannah felt sick just hearing about it and one glance at Norman told her he felt the same. She glanced at Mike. He was managing to keep his emotions in check, but she saw him swallow hard.

“What did you do when your husband slapped you?” Mike asked.

“I took it for a couple of minutes, but then I fought back. I thought he might hurt the baby. Hitting with my hands didn’t do any good, so I looked around for something else I could use. I always kept a coffeepot on the stove, a big one about twice the size of the blue-and-white one I got now. It had two handles like this one, see? And it was full of coffee.”

Winnie pointed to the handle on the back of her current coffee pot, and the wire bail that was attached to both sides near the top. “You need two handles when you got a big pot. You hold the top one in one hand and tip the pot up with the handle on the back, just like I did when I poured your coffee.”

“Which handle did you grab that night?” Mike asked her.

“The one on top. And I swung it around and hit him right in the face. The coffeepot went flying and he went down hard on the kitchen floor. When he made to get up again, I knew he was probably gonna kill me, so I grabbed the spider that was setting on the stove and hit him again.”

“Spider?” Mike asked, looking very confused.

“It was just like this one,” Winnie said, getting up to fetch a large, black, cast-iron skillet, the kind you could use to fry two chickens at once. “It’s heavy, see?”

Mike lifted the skillet. “You’re right. It’s got to be ten pounds at least, maybe more.”

“Well I wasn’t sure that would keep him down for good, so I hit him again on top of the head. And by the time Arnie had bashed in the glass and come right in through the window to help me, I’d hit him another couple of times for good measure.”

“What did your brother do?”

“He checked to see if Red was a gonner, and he must have been because he just left him there. And then he scooped me up in his arms and drove me straight to Doc Knight’s office.”

“Not the hospital?”

“We didn’t have one then. Doc’s office was like a clinic. He had a couple of beds and he lived in the back, so he was always there.”

“And you had the baby?”

“I did, but not until Doc got me all stitched up. I was cut pretty bad from the ring Red wore when he went to the Municipal. It had these sharp edges, just in case he got in any fights.”

Hannah took another sip of her coffee to quell the sick feeling in her stomach. What kind of man would attack his pregnant wife? The coffee didn’t help, she still felt sick, and she swallowed hard.

“Anyways, right before Doc knocked me out, Arnie got me alone for a minute. He told me not to worry, and he’d take care of everything. And that’s what he did. I didn’t find out until I came home with the baby, but Arnie went back and rolled Red’s body in this big rug we had in the kitchen. He cleaned up the whole place so nobody would know what happened, and then he dragged Red out to his car and drove him over to the garage he used for a studio. I guess he must’ve chopped him up or something. Arnie never would tell me that part. But when he was dying, he told me he hid Red’s body in the base of that statue he made for the park.”

Hannah and Norman gulped in tandem even though they’d already figured out the end of the story. It was still horrifying. But Mike seemed unfazed. Perhaps he’d heard even worse tales than this when he’d been a detective on the police force in Minneapolis.

“So what did you tell everybody about where Red was?” Mike asked.

“I said he went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Nobody ever asked me any more about it. They all figured he left me because he didn’t want to take care of a wife and a baby. So are you gonna arrest me now? Or what?”

“What,” Mike said, earning a smile from Hannah. “There’s no reason to arrest you, Mrs. Henderson. It sounds to me like it was self-defense.”

“But I killed him, all the same!”

“What do you think?” Mike turned to Norman, and Hannah came close to gasping out loud. For a cop who always went by the book, this was quite a divergence.

“Justifiable homicide,” Norman said, jumping in quickly with his vote. “How about you, Hannah.”

“It’s certainly not murder. You killed him, but you were protecting your baby’s life.”

“Okay,” Mike said, smiling at Winnie. “As long as Doc Knight substantiates the injuries you described, this matter is concluded.”

“You mean…you’re not taking me to jail?”

“That’s right. Now here’s a hard question and I want you to answer it honestly. Did you switch those revolvers so that Dean Lawrence would die and keep his hands off that statue?”

Winnie’s mouth fell open and she looked as if a little puff of air from one of Bertie’s handheld hairdryers could knock her over. When she recovered, she shook her head vigorously from side to side. “I was already planning out what to do to keep him from moving that statue, and murder had nothing to do with it!”

“What were you planning to do?”

I was gonna chain myself to that statue, lock it with a padlock, and throw away the key. I figured by the time somebody got bolt cutters, it would be too dark to shoot it anyway.”

“Then you never thought about switching the revolvers?”

“’Course not! It could’ve been that young surfer in those commercials that got himself killed, and I got nothing against him. Or it could’ve been anybody that picked up that gun and was fooling around with it.”

“Okay,” Mike said, snapping his notebook closed and putting it in his pocket. “That’s what I thought, but I had to ask. It’s part of my job.”

“A person’s got to do their job.” Winnie looked very relieved once she saw that Mike believed her. “Are you gonna tell everybody that I killed Red?”

“I can’t see any reason to do that. It was over years ago.”

“But…how about those bones? Everybody knows they’re human by now.” Winnie’s expression was a curious blend of elation and worry.

“I’m open to suggestions,” Mike said, and turned to look at Hannah. “What do you think I should say?”

“That they’re really old? Like fossils, or something like that?” Hannah grasped at straws.

“It won’t work,” Norman said. “They look too new. But why don’t you say that Winnie’s brother was leveling the ground to landscape the park and he found some Indian bones in the pile of rocks and debris he was hauling away. He knew he should put them back, but he didn’t know exactly where they came from.”

Hannah began to smile as she took over the fabrication. “That’s a great idea! Arnie didn’t want to go to the authorities with the bones. He was afraid they’d stop him from working on the park and donating the land to the city. So he bundled up the bones and gave them a decent burial in the base of the statue he sculpted for the park.”

“And he didn’t tell anybody about it until he was dying and that’s when he confessed it all to me,” Winnie added.

“Sounds good,” Mike agreed, pushing back his chair. “You folks can stick around and drink more coffee with Mrs. Henderson, but I’ve got Mr. Lawrence’s killer to catch.”

Winnie showed Mike out and when she came back into the kitchen, she was smiling. “Well, doesn’t that make a body feel good? All these years I’ve been worrying about being a criminal, and I’m not.”

“Maybe not quite yet,” Hannah said, grinning right back, “but if you don’t wash out that coffeepot soon, Mike could lock you up for making paint thinner without a license.”

It was Saturday afternoon and Hannah was standing at the back of a classroom in Jordan High, waiting for Burke Anson to play a much younger version of himself. Disaster had struck without warning when the young actor who’d been hired to play Jody at fifteen came down with laryngitis and could do no more than squeak. Burke had offered to play the teenage Jody as long as Honey could age him down. Hannah had known the term from college and the time she’d spent hanging out in the green room, another showbiz term for the backstage room that actors used to relax and wait for their cues. Aging down meant applying makeup so that an actor would look younger, and aging up was making an actor look older.