Hot Dish Heaven: A Murder Mystery With Recipes (3 page)

Handing me the card, she uttered in a voice absent any emotion, “This here’s the recipe for the bars ya seem to like so much. Ya better write it down.”

Before I could inquire about Samantha Berg’s murder, two old-timers came in, and Margie excused herself to wait on them. Despite the August heat, both men wore long-sleeve shirts and bib-overalls. Each also sported a baseball cap, one advertising John Deere tractors, the other, chemical fertilizer.

Sitting down at the counter, the chemical-fertilizer guy asked Margie if it was hot enough for her, while the other tipped his head in my direction. Ignoring the weather-related question, she told them who I was and what I was doing there. They seemed impressed.

Margie served them carrot bars and coffee, all the while chatting about the upcoming beet harvest. Even though sugar beets, used to create the alternative to cane sugar, were sometimes grown in the southern part of the state, they were king of all crops in the Red River Valley. According to my research, they’d made wealthy people out of many of the Norwegian and Swedish farmers who called this sparsely populated area home.

The two guys and Margie talked, but I paid little attention. I wanted the men to leave so Margie and I could return to murder. Or, at least, our discussion of it.

I finished copying the mint-bar recipe about the same time Margie began regaling them with a story about an apparatus Ole had rigged up years before to “rotate the filler wheels on his beet lifter.”

The men chuckled. “Oh, that Ole,” the guy with the John Deere cap said in a Scandinavian accent so strong it put Margie’s to shame, “he was a thinker.” Although it sounded more like, “he was a tinker.”

He swiveled on his stool to face me. “Ya know, he also was the first guy in these parts to try modern organic farmin’, and—”

His friend cut him off. “That there’s nothin’ to brag about.”

John Deere twirled his seat back around. “For cryin’ out loud, now why would ya go and say somethin’ like that?”

“‘Cause I don’t think much of organic farmin’, that’s why.”

Without making any eye contact whatsoever, John Deere argued, “For your information, Ole got prit near ‘tirdy’ a bushel for his soybeans one year.”

“Ya ain’t tellin’ me nothin’ I don’t already know. But he had to work a lot harder.”

“There’s nothin’ wrong with hard work.”

“He was always pullin’ weeds.”

“So?”

“So sprayin’ weeds is easier.”

“Well, easier ain’t always better.” That last remark was spoken brusquely and was obviously meant to end any further debate.

“Say, Margie,” John Deere then said, shifting both his focus and his tone, “I remembered that Ole and Lena joke I wanted to tell ya after Ole’s funeral there. Care to hear it now?”

“Do I have a choice?”

A grin inched across his face. “No, not really.”

She slouched against the stainless-steel prep table and crossed her legs at her ankles, “In that case, go ahead and get it over with.”

John Deere shoved his cap back from his sunburnt face and scratched his pale forehead. “Well, ya see,” he began, looking quite pleased with himself, “like most Norwegians, Ole, a professional fisherman, was pretty dang frugal. But when his wife, Lena, passed away, he reckoned he better put an obituary in the paper. So after fishin’ one day, he went on down there to the newspaper office and told the editor to write that Lena had died. Well, the editor said, ‘For land sake, Ole, ya gotta say more than that. You were married to the woman for dang near fifty years, and she was your partner in the fishin’ business.’ Still, Ole kept quiet, so the editor told ’em, ‘Now, if it’s the money you’re worried about, Ole, don’t forget the first five words of any obituary are free.’ Of course, that got old, tightwad Ole tinkin’, and soon he said, ‘Well, in that case, write, “Lena died; walleye on sale.”’”

John Deere’s friend belly-laughed, while Margie groaned, and I couldn’t help but smile. These guys weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, but I found them charming in a “Beverly Hillbillies” sort of way.

“Heard that one before?” John Deere asked.

“No, don’t think so.” Margie ambled back to our booth. She winked at me, picked up her recipe box, and returned to the prep table.

“Now I better get cookin’,” she said to no one in particular before calling out, “Hey, Emerald, why don’t ya come on over here and keep me company. Or better yet, give me a hand. You can cook, can’t ya?”

“Nothing you’d want to charge money for.”

Margie snorted. “How on earth did ya get to be a food writer if ya can’t cook?”

I slid from my booth and strolled to the kitchen, a pen and several blank note cards in hand. “My aunt has connections, and I’m a pretty good eater.”

“Ya don’t look it.” Margie’s gaze traveled from my head to my toes. “You’re kind of skinny.”

“High metabolism,” I muttered self-consciously.

“Just like me.” John Deere rose from his stool and patted his Santa-like paunch. “I have a high metabolism too. I just don’t know where I put it.” His sidekick laughed some more as John Deere wiped crumbs from the bib of his overalls.

When the laughter died, John Deere added in the direction of his friend, “Say, now, we better be goin’.” He shoved the last of his carrot bar into his mouth and washed it down with coffee.

Returning his cup to the counter, he tossed a few dollars alongside it. “Tanks, Margie.” He then tipped the bill of his cap in my direction. “And Miss Malloy, it was a pleasure to meet ya.”

He lumbered toward the door on the heels of his companion, Margie calling out after him. “Ya comin’ back later?”

He answered across his shoulder, “That all depends. Ya servin’ Wild Rice Hot Dish?”

Margie huffed, “Of course I am.” Her tone implied she could hardly believe he’d ask such a question.

“Then, ya betcha, we’ll be back.”

The two men stepped outside, though John Deere peeked right back in again, his red face backlit by the afternoon sun. “Eh, Margie, that there was a humdinger of a joke, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, get out of here!” she teasingly ordered, causing the sidekick to snicker as the door banged shut.

With a shake of her head, Margie returned to her recipes. “Those two old coots stop in every afternoon. They went to high school with Ole. The three of them were best of friends.”

“They seem nice enough.”

“Oh, yah, and they’re as common as snow in January. You’d never guess that once upon a time, the guy with the John Deere cap was a big-time engineer at Boeing.”

“Really? An engineer at Boeing?”

“Yah, but when his pa got sick, he had to come home and take over the farm.”

I must have been in shock about the whole engineering thing because all I could utter was, “Well, that’s too bad.”

Margie handed me the recipe for carrot bars. “Oh, don’t go and feel too sorry for him. He may be the valley’s worst joke teller, but he’s one of its biggest farmers. He works more’n fifteen hundred acres of beets, and I don’t know how much wheat and soybeans. On top of that, he’s president of the beet growers’ association. The growers own the beet plants, which means they decide how many tons get processed each year. In other words, they regulate the price of sugar.” She shook her head. “Yep, like a lot of farmers up here, he’s worth millions.”

I jerked my head so fast I almost broke my neck. “Millions?”

Margie looked embarrassed. “Oh, yah, but I suppose I shouldn’t of said that. It wasn’t my place.”

I plopped down on the stool next to the prep table and took stock of everything Margie had shared with me. Her sister, Vivian, was married to a one-arm man named Vern, and together they had a daughter known as Little Val. Her recently deceased brother, Ole, was married to an Hispanic woman named Lena, who died of a broken heart after he dumped her for a tramp who wound up murdered. And the goofy-sounding farmer who frequented the café was really a brainy millionaire. “Hmm.” I could hardly wait to meet the fire eater and the bearded lady. But in the meantime, I’d have to settle for watching Margie chop onions with the speed and accuracy of the guy who did the Ginsu commercials.

Awestruck, I asked without thinking, “What are you making?”

She smiled, as if I were oddly amusing. “Hot dish. What else? I’ve got the ground beef and turkey brownin’ and the noodles and rice boilin’. I made the buns and bars yesterday and the salads this mornin’.”

Margie had informed me on the phone that she was co-hosting a fund-raiser with the VFW on the night of my visit. It was to benefit a local woman who had breast cancer. The woman needed help paying her bills because her treatment made her too sick to work.

According to Margie, medical fund-raisers were fairly common in the valley. “If ya ask me,” she’d said, “the cancer’s from all the chemicals sprayed on the fields. But don’t quote me on that, or I’ll get tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.”

With a dangerous-looking knife, Margie sliced and diced onions right next to me, my eyes watering as my thoughts returned to Samantha Berg. I assured myself that as a reporter, it was only natural to be interested in her. Only natural to ask more questions.

“Margie,” I said, wiping away my tears, “tell me more about Samantha Berg.”

She set the knife down. “There’s not much to tell, and she sure wasn’t worth cryin’ over!” She chuckled at the remark.

“Seriously, how was she killed?”

As if doing a dance she’d done a million times before, Margie stepped from the prep table to the stove and on to the sink. There, she dumped a frying pan full of cooked ground turkey into a colander and rinsed it with water. “She disappeared three years ago this past March, exactly one year to the day from Lena’s death. It was the spring the Red River flooded so bad that folks got stranded on their roofs and had to be rescued by helicopter.” She squeezed her eyes closed in an apparent attempt to shut out the images. “Anyways, when the flood waters receded, Samantha’s body was found washed up on shore. She’d been stabbed in the heart … or in the place her heart would have been if she had one.”

I shuddered. “That must have been a gruesome discovery.”

Margie dumped the ground turkey back in the pan, carried it to the prep table, and spooned the meat into an industrial-size baking dish. “Little Val’s husband, Wally, found her.” She emptied the pan. “Of course he wasn’t her husband back then. He was just some guy travelin’ from Fargo to Winnipeg on business. He got sick and stopped in Drayton. That’s the town ya went through just before crossin’ the Red. It’s where the beet plant’s located.”

She aimed her wooden spoon at the cutting board full of chopped onions. “Would ya mind addin’ those in here?”

I commandeered her knife and scraped the onion pieces into the casserole dish. At the same time, she retrieved a metal bowl of whole-kernel corn and another of sliced green beans from a massive, stainless-steel refrigerator that stood alongside the upright freezer.

“Fresh from my garden,” she reported, tossing the vegetables into the ground-meat mixture.

She handed me one of the bowls. A few uncooked beans remained at the bottom, and I popped them in my mouth. “Oh, these are good,” I said as I crunched.

Margie’s cheeks flushed slightly before she hurried back to the subject of murder, evidently something far easier for a humble Scandinavian to deal with than a compliment. “Anyways, Wally’s aunt lives just north of the beet plant. He wanted to rest at her house until he felt better, but she wasn’t home. So he went for a walk along the river there. And lo and behold, he came upon Samantha Berg. She was dead and nearly naked.” She pivoted toward the stove before wheeling back around. “Naturally, he didn’t know it was Samantha at the time.” She arched her pale eyebrows. “Had he been from ’round here, he probably would of. Like I told ya, most men in the county could of identified that big, bare ass.” She shuffled to the stove.

“What did he do?”

“He called the police, who called the FBI. They told him to stick around while they investigated, so he ended up stayin’ with his aunt for darn near a month, if you can imagine that.”

She removed a kettle of rice from a burner and poured its contents into the baking dish. “While he was there, his cousin had a barbecue. That’s where he met Little Val.” She trudged to the sink and dropped the empty pot into one of the deep basins. The thud made me jump, and she chuckled again.

Once back at the table, she stirred the hot dish a final time before nodding at the double wall oven. “Grab the top oven door, will ya?”

I did, and she slid the dish onto the upper rack. “They hit it off right away,” she said. “They’re musicians, don’t ya know. Little Val plays the piano, and Wally, the guitar, and both sing.”

She wiped her hands on the soiled towel that draped her shoulder and headed back to the steel work station. “When they got engaged, he quit his job in Fargo and got another at the crop insurance office in Hallock. Now they’re married and expectin’ a baby. They’re nice folks.”

“Did the FBI ever solve the murder?”

“No,” Margie replied, handing me the recipe for Uncle Ben’s Hot Dish. “They never did, which is just fine by me.”

Uff-da, it’s hard to believe Little Val and Wally have been married goin’ on two years. Time sure does fly.”