Candy Cane Murder (Hannah Swensen #9.5)(11)

Michelle’s puzzled expression smoothed out and she looked very impressed. “Wow. Andrea’s devious.”

“She gets it from Mother,” Hannah explained. “Mother can think of the most roundabout ways to get the latest gossip.”

“Thanks, Sally,” Andrea said, and snapped her cell phone shut. And then she looked over at them. “It’s murder. Vonnie left with the paramedics who transported Wayne to the hospital. Doc Knight must have been able to tell right away.”



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As usual, Andrea was the scribe. Not only did she have good organizational skills, she also had the neatest handwriting of the three sisters. Michelle’s had deteriorated when she’d gone off to college. After two years at Macalister, her notes were cryptic, filled with abbreviations that only she could decipher. Hannah, on the other hand, tended to print whenever she wrote something she hoped to read later.

“Here you go. A brand new steno notebook.” Hannah handed her sister one from the stash of notebooks she kept in every room. “Do you need a pen?”

“I have one.” Andrea reached in her purse and pulled out what Hannah termed a “dress pen,” since the barrel was gold and studded with sparkling white stones.

“Pretty fancy,” Michelle commented, leaning closer to gaze at the pen. “Are those rhinestones, or diamonds?”

“I’m pretty sure they’re rhinestones. It was a present from a client and the house he bought was a fixer-upper.” Andrea flipped to the first blank page and wrote Wayne Bergstrom’s name at the top. “We don’t know the time of death, or the method. What do you want me to write down?”

“We could list the time I found him,” Hannah suggested, “but I didn’t look at my watch.”

“I did.” Michelle said. “When you said Santa’s dead, I pressed the button to light the time and it said ten twentytwo.”

Andrea started to write it down, but Michelle grabbed her hand. “Put down tenseventeen,” she said.

“Wait a second,” Hannah was confused. “I thought you said you looked at your watch and it was ten twentytwo.”

“That’s right. But I always set my watch five minutes ahead. It keeps me from being late to class.”

“How does it keep you from being late if you know your watch is five minutes ahead?” Hannah asked her.

“It’s simple. If I start counting on that extra five minutes, I set my watch ten minutes ahead and psych myself out.”

36

Joanne Fluke

All was silent as Hannah digested that. It seemed her youngest sibling hadn’t inherited the logic gene.

“Okay. Tenseventeen.” Andrea jotted it down. “Do we know what time Wayne left for the parking lot?”

“Ten after eight,” Hannah responded.

“Are you sure your watch isn’t five or ten minutes fast?”

Andrea teased her.

“I didn’t look at my watch. I glanced at the clock in Sally’s kitchen as Wayne went out the back door. We can check it to make sure it’s accurate.”

Andrea flipped to another page and started a list of things they had to do. “Got it. We’ll run out to the inn and check Sally’s kitchen clock tomorrow.”

“That means Wayne was killed between eight-ten and tenseventeen,” Michelle pointed out. “That’s a window of just a little over two hours.”

“When we go out tomorrow, let’s see how long it takes to walk from Sally’s kitchen to that berm,” Hannah suggested.

“Even if you’re poking along taking your time, it can’t be more than five minutes.”

Andrea made another note. “Got it,” she said. “If you’re right, it means that Wayne was probably killed around eightfifteen, or eight-twenty.”

“Unless he stopped to talk to someone on the path,”

Michelle argued. “You know how people are when they meet each other at a party. They stop and talk for a while. He could have met up with his killer after he talked to somebody.”

“Good point,” Hannah said.

“We should get a guest list from Sally and check to see if anyone at the party met Wayne on the walkway.” Merrily winking rhinestones, or diamonds, or whatever they were, Andrea’s pen flew across the page. “It’s a couple of degrees above freezing tonight. If you were dressed for the weather, you could stand there and talk for five or ten minutes without getting cold.”

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Michelle nodded. “But Wayne wasn’t dressed for the weather. Hannah said he was wearing his Santa suit.” She turned to Hannah. “Do you think it was as heavy as a parka?”

“I don’t know. It looked heavy, especially with all that fur, but I didn’t actually feel the material.”

“They sell the same Santa suit at Bergstrom’s,” Michelle told them. “I saw a whole rack of them when I was shopping for boots with Mother.”

“We’ll go out there and check.” Andrea added another line to her To Do page, and then she let Moishe capture her pen and bat it around for a moment.

“Mother!” Hannah exclaimed.

“What about Mother?” her sisters chorused in perfect unison.