Flourless to Stop Him (15 page)

“Does she remember anyone else local checking in?” I asked the question casually as if I were talking to the cookie dough.

“She said she hasn’t seen anyone from town check in. She has regulars that come for the fishing or the prairie chicken hunting, but that’s it.”

I finished creaming the butter and sugar and added the dry ingredients to my oatmeal raisin cookies. I reached up and switched radio stations to the one that played continuous Christmas music from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Eve. I loved Christmas, but I had no idea why anyone would want to listen to nothing but Christmas songs for so long.

“Don’t you just love Christmas songs?” Grandma said, her long fingers flying in the air as if she were conducting. “I could listen to them all year long.”

“That’s a lot of Christmas,” I stated as I scraped dough onto waxed paper. I shaped the dough into logs, wrapped them in waxed paper, and froze them. Later I would pull out the frozen logs, cut out discs of cookies, and bake them. That way I always had warm cookies in the bakery.

“I bet Tim’s not getting any Christmas in that cold jail cell he’s stuck in.” Grandma pouted. “All because his sister is too busy with cookies to help him.”

“Tim is a grown man,” I said, pulled out a clean bowl, and started creating more dough. This time it would be chocolate chip. “His time in jail is his business, not mine.”

“He’s being framed, and you’re going to stand there and make cookies?”

I rolled my eyes, turned, and waved my hand to the door. “If you haven’t noticed, there’s a blizzard out there. It’s hard to investigate anything in that kind of weather.”

As if on cue, the radio stopped playing music and the disc jockey came on. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It’s Christmastime in Kansas, which means the winter wheat is in and the cattle are hunkered down because the wind is
howling and the snow is falling. Let’s hope you have nowhere to go today, because portions of I-35 are shut down. I-70 is a parking lot. Stay home, stay in bed, and let visions of sugarplums dance in your heads.”

“This is the best time to investigate,” Grandma declared and whipped out her smartphone. “People are going to be hanging around with nothing to do.”

S
he dialed a number and handed me the phone. I scowled but took it.

“Hey, this is The Hamilton Inn. I’m Terry, how can I help you?”

“Hi, Terry, it’s Toni Holmes. My brother is Tim Keene. I think you were in his class in high school.”

“Oh, sure, I remember you. You were skinny as a beanstalk and had the awful flyaway hair.”

“Yes.” I shook my head. “That’s me.”

“Hi, sugar, how’ve you been? Weren’t you living in Chicago?”

“I moved back when my mom died last summer.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

There was a pause where I wondered briefly if she was sorry to hear I was back or that my mother had died. I chose to believe it was the fact that my mom had died. “Thanks,” I said. Grandma motioned with her hands for me to get on
with things. I gave her the evil eye and turned my back on her. “Hey, Terry, are you real busy?”

“Not right now, why?”

“I don’t know if you heard that my brother Tim was arrested last night.”

“Oh, sure, I heard,” she said. “Terrible news, him killing that man and all—and right there at the Red Tile, where you and your friend Tasha were.”

“You know, I don’t think Tim killed anyone.”

“Well, of course he did,” she chided me. “The police wouldn’t have arrested him unless they were pretty sure he did it.”

Whatever. “Listen, I was wondering, did you have any registrations that belonged to Tim?”

“Excuse me?”

“No worries. I thought I’d help him pay his bills, so I’m calling around asking if he had run up any bills at the local hotels.” I glanced at Grandma, who grinned and put both thumbs up.

“Oh, let me take a look in my computer.” Terry did some fast typing and then some clicking. “It looks like your brother stayed here five times in the last two months. That’s kind of weird since you have that big house and all. Were you having company?”

“No, no company.”

“Huh, well, in any case he’s all paid up. It looks like he paid in cash every time. He must be doing some work on the side. Nobody pays in cash anymore. What’s he doing? Do you know? Because, if he’s plowing, have him call me later. It’s always good to have a backup plow guy. For instance Bill Western’s our regular guy and he’s on vacation this week. It would have been nice to have a backup snowplow. Of course, with your brother in jail and all it wouldn’t have helped much. But still . . . You know Bill saved up and
took his whole family to Disney World. I always wanted to go to Disney World.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes,” she sighed. “I bet it’s warmer in Florida, too. I mean if they had this kind of blizzard it’d ruin the orange crop or something, wouldn’t it? I won’t wish that on Florida, then, because I like my orange juice and I don’t need it to get any more expensive.”

“No, we don’t,” I said and widened my eyes at Grandma. She made the
wrap it up
signal with her index finger.

“Say, Terry, do you know if anyone else local has been staying at your hotel?”

“I don’t know. . . . I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘local.’”

“Well, you know anyone from Oiltop having a fight with their spouse or getting their place renovated? I mean, surely Tim can’t be the only local guy renting a hotel room.”

“Oh, honey, do I have the stories I could tell you. Why, just yesterday Junior Riley—you remember him, right? He was in your class, I’m thinking. Anyway, Junior came in and asked if we had any vacancies—which, of course, we didn’t because it’s the holiday season and people are visiting their families and all. Well, it turns out Allie May kicked Junior out of the house. She found out he wasn’t going to those AA meetings like he said he was. Instead he was down at the Grey Goose playing pool every Monday. Boy, I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Allie May found out. That gal might be small, but she’s feisty. I wouldn’t be surprised if she waited for him with a shotgun in her lap.”

“Right?” I agreed in an effort to keep Terry talking. “So really no one else local comes in every week?”

“Not to rent a room,” Terry said. “We have a few regulars come into the restaurant and have supper or sit at the bar for a drink.”

“Oh, I imagine you do see regulars; I hear the food there is good—especially Sunday-morning brunch.”

“It is good.”

“Too bad I can’t eat there.” I acted casual. “My needing to eat gluten-free and all.”

“Well, you know, we don’t get much call for people with allergies to eat here. I imagine if we ever did we’d be calling you to find out what all we had to do.”

“I appreciate that, and Terry, always remember: if you need anything gluten-free, from donuts to rolls to sandwich bread and dessert, you can always call me. I give a discounted rate for small businesses.”

“Now, that’s good to know.” Terry’s voice sounded chipper. “I’m going to write that down on a big old notepad and stick it near the kitchen phone.”

“Thank you. I appreciate all your help.” I hung up after Terry said good-bye and frowned at Grandma. “The Hamilton Inn is like the Motel 7. They rarely see anyone from town except to eat at the restaurant or stop in at the bar.” I worried my bottom lip. “How many of the places where Tim supposedly rented a room have restaurants or bars in them?”

“Give me my phone and I’ll tell you.” Grandma held out her hand. I studied her. It could be a ploy. She might dial someone else or she might have the list in her phone.

I suppose I could always refuse to talk to the next person she dialed. Yeah, like that was going to happen. I handed her the phone. She flipped through the icons like a pro. It made me sigh. Even my grandmother was better versed in smartphones than I was. I was still doing all my online ordering through e-mail, and that I checked from my desktop computer in my office. And here I was so proud to be modern and have a flat-screen television.

“A quick glance tells me half of them have restaurants and another third have bars.”

“So they don’t all have bars or restaurants?”

“Well, the Bait and Buckle is right next door to the Two-Hand Saloon.” Grandma shrugged. “They don’t need a restaurant or a bar. It’s not like you get families staying at a place like Bait and Buckle.”

“What other hotels are left?” I drew my eyebrows together. For goodness’ sake, Oiltop only had twenty thousand residents. How many hotels did it need? No wonder Tasha had had a problem keeping her bed-and-breakfast going. I knew they were working on the new lake project and hoping to bring in race boats and sportfishing, but that meant there was a lot of summer campground business and such. Winter months were left to truckers and stranded motorists trying to get home.

“There’s Paulette’s Cabins on the other side of town.”

“She’s not even open. Why would she be on the list?”

“She’s not. You asked me what other hotels were in town. Paulette’s is down closer to the lake. It’s a bit shady. The police blotter says they send someone down to break up the rowdies at least once a week.”

“You read the police blotter?”

“It’s an old habit. When I first started out I wrote the police report column. It was a completely boring exercise,” Grandma said. “The dispatch writes down all the calls and the police blotter is a shortened version of dispatch notes. Sometimes the editor of the
Times
would tell me to keep something or someone out. But most of the time it was simply an address, a time, and a title—say, for instance, ‘domestic dispute,’ or ‘disturbing the peace.’”

“Is that when you got the crime beat?” I always loved to hear Grandma’s stories. I figured sooner or later she was going to pass on and then I’d share her stories with the family. That was if I didn’t die first. Knowing Grandma, she just might live to be 120 years old.

“Yes, one night I picked up a blotter notice of a Peeping Tom on Locust Street. They sent a squad car down there
three nights in a row and never saw anything. So I decided to go undercover. Now remember it was during WWII and things were rationed, so I was a bit thinner in those days.”

“How old were you?”

“I was in my twenties. Just finished my college degree and was working at the paper so the men could be drafted. Anywho, I decided to go undercover and spend a night on Locust Street to see if I could catch the perpetrator of this crime. I dressed all in black and smeared mud on my face like I saw in the war movies. Then I took my flashlight with me and patrolled the street in a three-block radius of the calls.”

“You patrolled the area?” After the usual early morning flurry of activity, the bread was rising and the cakes had come out of the freezer to thaw. I had set the mixer to low mixing powdered sugar and butter for buttercream frosting. I liked it to mix a while for a creamy result so I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table to hear Grandma’s story. The wind howled outside, and I still had half an hour before I needed to open. “Yes, I did.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I did all right up until three
A.M
. Then I sat down under Mrs. Rawlings’s maple tree—you know, the one in her side yard—because I was tired. I dozed for a bit when something woke me up.”

I leaned in closer. The scent of coffee filled the air and the steam swirled above my cup. “What was it?”

“The oddest thing I’ve ever seen. Two beady eyes staring at me. Gave me such a fright I jumped up and bit my tongue to keep from screaming. I turned my flashlight on the intruder.” Grandma stopped to sip her coffee.

“And . . .”

“And the flashlight revealed . . .”

Grandma gave this dramatic pause until I was forced to say, “What? What did it reveal?”

“The Peeping Tom was no other than Mr. Maddox’s
Great Dane. That was the biggest darn dog I’ve ever seen. When he stood on two legs he could grab whatever he wanted off the top of the refrigerator. It seems he’d jump the fence and go sniffing around, patrolling the neighborhood. Then before dawn, he’d jump back into his yard and lie down by the door as if he’d been there all night.”

I laughed out loud at the story and got up to stop the mixer and test the frosting. “Only in a small town.”

“Hand me one of those day-old donuts, would you?” Grandma asked.

The frosting was ready. I removed the bowl from the mixer, setting it down near the cakes. I took a small white plate from the stack on the counter and placed a spice donut with caramel frosting on the plate. “Aren’t you supposed to be watching what you eat?” I asked as I brought Grandma the donuts. It was a conversation we had almost daily. I swear she ate just so that I would notice.

“I am,” Grandma’s blue eyes twinkled. “I watch it all the way into my mouth.”

I shook my head and frowned at her. “Gluten-free is not calorie-free.”

“Trust me, kiddo, at my age health is the last thing on your mind.” She snagged one of the donuts and took a huge bite, washed it down with coffee. “There’s a law,” she said with her mouth full. “Once you hit ninety, all bets are off on trying to make a hundred.”

“I want you here and well.” I went back to the cakes. I knew the argument was more out of habit than real concern. Grandma was nowhere near dying, even if she smoked like a chimney and ate her way toward the three-hundred-pound range.

“Being alive
is
well.” She cackled. “Now, where were we? I know there was a point to my story. What was I talking about?”

I grabbed a frosting knife and scooped up buttercream,
plopping it on top of a cake and making quick work of the crumb-coat. After that I covered half with marshmallow fondant and half with more buttercream. “I believe you were talking about Mr. Maddox’s Great Dane.”

“Oh, right.” Grandma slurped her coffee and then reached for the pink packets to sweeten it further. “The point of the tale was that I broke the story wide-open simply by paying attention to the police blotter and then being in the right place at the right time.”

“So you think I should go out to Paulette’s Cabins at two in the morning to see what the police blotter is really talking about?” I whipped through the crumb-coats of the six cakes.

“Use your noggin, kiddo,” Grandma said as she stuffed the second donut in her mouth. “What does Paulette’s Cabins have in common with all the other hotels in the area?”

“The police blotter?” I raised my right eyebrow and made a flat line of my mouth.

“Close.” Grandma lifted the plate and held it out to me. We both knew she wasn’t giving it to me to put in the dishwasher.

I took the plate and, for a second, thought about pretending to mistake her motion as she was done.

“Chocolate chip ones . . . please.”

I sighed long and loud as I put one chocolate chip donut on the plate. I could say no and not enable her, but she’d only run me over with her scooter and pile her plate with six donuts. “I don’t understand,” I said as I handed her the single donut. She gave me the evil eye for the lonely single donut. I answered back by raising my eyebrows innocently. “How is the police blotter close to the answer?”

“Think.”

“Police? Blotter?”

“Yes.” Grandma slurped the remainder of her coffee and held out her mug for more.

Now I was really confused. I filled her mug with hot
coffee. The scent filled the air as I thought over the conversation. The answer hit me the moment I handed her back her mug. “The police!”