Carrot Cake Murder (Hannah Swensen, #10)(4)

Drop by teaspoons onto a greased (or sprayed with nonstick cooking spray) standard-sized cookie sheet, 12 cookies to a sheet.

Flatten the cookies on the sheet with a greased metal spatula (or with the palm of your impeccably clean hand.) You don’t have to smush them all the way down so they look like pancakes—just one squish will do it.

Bake at 350 degrees F. for 11 to 13 minutes or until they’re an attractive golden brown. (Mine took the full 13 minutes.)

Cool the cookies for 1 to 2 minutes on the cookie sheets and then remove them to a wire rack to cool completely.

Yield: 10 to 12 dozen delicious cookies, depending on cookie size.

These freeze well if you roll them in foil and put them in a freezer bag.

Hannah’s Note: These cookies will go fast, even frozen. If you want to throw the midnight freezer raiders off the track, wrap the cookie rolls in a double thickness of foil and then stick them in a freezer bag. Label the bag with a food your family doesn’t like, (something like BEEF TONGUE, or PORK KIDNEYS, or even LUTEFISK—it works every time.)





Chapter Two


Hannah stopped just inside her condo door and stared around her in shock. There had been a blizzard in her living room! Her wall-to-wall carpeting, normally a dark green color that she’d chosen because it reminded her of a lush green lawn, was covered with fluffy white snowflakes. Except it wasn’t snow, and it wasn’t flakes. And there was the empty couch pillow cover to prove it. Hannah picked up the cover and read the tag listing the contents. What she’d thought was snow was really the “unidentified fibers” CostMart used as stuffing in their decorator sofa pillows.

“Moishe?” she called out, realizing that her orange-and-white feline roommate was nowhere in sight. He hadn’t hurtled himself into her arms as he usually did when she came in the door, and that meant he was probably responsible. The pillow was a bit wet on the corner, from kitty saliva no doubt, and at least two paws’ worth of claws had shredded the fabric to pull out the faux snow. The male companion who shared her home and her bed knew he’d done wrong and he was hiding somewhere, waiting for her to get over her initial shock and anger before he showed himself.

At least the pillow stuffing was easy to collect. Hannah got a garbage bag from the broom closet and began to fill it with the fluffy white balls. As she bent, retrieved, and stuffed, she thought about the very few times that Moishe had misbehaved.

A month or two after he’d decided to set up residence with her, Hannah had forgotten to empty his litter box when she cleaned the condo. Moishe had given her a one-day grace period, but the following night, when she’d come home from work at her bakery and coffee shop, she discovered that he’d accomplished the task himself and the litter was scattered all over the floor. At that late stage, it had been impossible for Hannah to tell whether her fastidious feline had gotten in to scratch it out, or whether he’d tipped the pan to dump it out and then righted it again. It didn’t really matter in the giant scheme of things. She’d never needed another reminder to empty Moishe’s litter box.

A more serious infraction had taken place a month or two after the litter box incident. Moishe had taken an immediate dislike to Hannah’s mother, and he’d snagged several pairs of her real silk and really expensive pantyhose before Delores had decided that Hannah should visit her, rather than the other way around. Hannah liked to think that her kitty’s dislike of Delores came from an effort to protect her from her mother’s not-so-gentle reminders that she was over thirty, her biological clock was ticking, and she was still single. Perhaps that was true. Or perhaps Moishe simply didn’t like the perfume Delores wore, or the pitch of her voice, or any of a hundred other things.

Hannah glanced at the deflated pillow casing. The litter box message and her mother’s shredded stockings had been easy to interpret. This message was not so obvious. Did it mean that Moishe had suddenly developed an aversion to pillows? Although she’d never been to veterinary school, she didn’t think it was common for cats to develop pillowphobia. Had Moishe objected to her color scheme for couch accessories and decided to let his preferences be known? The wine-colored pillow was intact, but he’d quite literally beaten the stuffing out of the light green pillow. Perhaps the light green color had reminded him of some traumatic incident in his kittenhood?

“Ridiculous!” she murmured under her breath. If there was a message in Moishe’s pillow bashing, it probably had something to do with what was inside the pillow. Hannah let her imagination run wild. It was possible that a colony of bugs originating from the country that exported CostMart’s unidentified pillow fibers had hatched.

Hannah glanced down at the fibers she’d tossed in the garbage bag. She didn’t see any bugs. Could they be tiny, almost microscopic insects that would flutter around harmlessly for a day or two and then disappear? Or were they some type of science fiction worm that would invade her body, take over her mind, and…

A small pathetic sound brought Hannah out of her late-night horror movie scenario. Moishe was inching across the rug toward her, clearly unsure of her reaction but unable to stay away any longer from the mistress he loved. His expression was wide-eyed innocent, and it seemed to say, What happened to that pillow? You don’t think I did that, do you? He reminded Hannah of her niece, Tracey, who’d come out of the kitchen at The Cookie Jar with chocolate smears on her face, insisting that she’d given a half-dozen chocolate chip cookies to a poor starving man who’d knocked at the back door.