Carrot Cake Murder (Hannah Swensen, #10)(54)

“It’s Tracey. I just taught her the planets that way! And now she’s going to get them wrong when she goes in to be tested for her Girl Scout badge.”

“She’s smart enough to remember to leave Pluto out,” Hannah comforted her sister. “Just remind her before she goes to the meeting, or wherever they go to be tested.”

“It’s the school. The scouts are using the auditorium since school hasn’t started yet. And Tracey’s the youngest one going for a badge, and she really wants to get it right.”

“She will,” Michelle said with a smile. “But I thought Tracey was a Brownie Scout, not a Girl Scout.”

“She is, but Bonnie Surma got a special exception for Tracey to study for her badges early. And it’s a really big deal this year because one of the ladies from national is coming to award the badges.”

“Tracey will be fine. Don’t worry,” Hannah reassured her sister again, and then she picked up the envelope and removed a file that was inside. “Let’s go over the crime scene photos together.”

“Don’t look,” Andrea instructed Michelle.

“What do you mean, don’t look? It’s not like I’m a child, you know. You don’t have to protect me from the ugly side of life.”

“You’re too young to know anything about the ugly side of life. The ugliest thing you ever saw was the stuffed boar’s head that hung over Grandpa and Grandma Swensen’s couch!”

“I thought that boar’s head was cute! All that bristly hair sticking up. He looked like a character in a cartoon. But getting back to the ugly side, I bet I’ve seen more ugly things than…”

“That’s enough, girls!” Hannah interrupted, stepping in with her best big-sister-in-charge voice. “If you don’t stop squabbling, I won’t let you taste the new cookies I brought.”

There was complete silence for a moment, a phenomenon that deeply gratified Hannah. She hadn’t lost her big sister touch.

“New cookies?” Michelle was the first to speak.

“Yes. I made them for Jack Herman’s birthday party tonight. Lisa’s mom used to make a similar cookie years ago.”

“Do they have chocolate?” Andrea wanted to know. “I’m going to need chocolate if I’m going to look at anything the least bit gory.”

“They’ve got plenty of chocolate. There’s chocolate in the cookie dough and more chocolate chips inside. And there’s cream cheese frosting, too.”

Michelle gave a little whimper of anticipation. “Cream cheese frosting is my very favorite. Sometimes I make up a batch and spread it on soda crackers.”

“Is that good?” Andrea asked her.

“Yes, but make sure you buy salted soda crackers. Then you lay them out with the salt side down and frost the other side. You can spread it between two graham crackers, too. Or two chocolate cookie wafers. That tastes almost like Oreos.”

With peace restored and cookie hunger kindled, Hannah wasted no time opening her box of Red Velvet Cookies and giving each of her sisters a sample. While they were tasting her newest creation, she paged through the crime scene photos. Since nothing was really gory, she left them all in the pile.

When she was finished censoring the stack of photos, Hannah almost called out, You can look now, the phrase her father had used on Christmas morning when they sat by the Christmas tree, eyes tightly shut, until he brought in the presents that had been too large to wrap. But the photos she held in her hand weren’t presents. They were grim reminders of what could happen when the sanctity of human life was violated.

“I’m ready with the photos,” she said instead.

“These are great cookies, Hannah!” Andrea complimented her, wiping her fingers on a napkin. She picked up the stack of photos, examined the one on top, and then she handed it to Michelle.

“Yuck!” Michelle commented.

“My cookies are yuck?” Hannah, who hadn’t noticed the photo pass from hand to hand, was clearly astounded by Michelle’s remark.

“Not your cookies. They’re absolutely fantastic, and they remind me of red velvet cake. I meant this photograph. He was stabbed, right?”

Hannah nodded. “Keep your eye out for something unusual that I might have missed, or anything that doesn’t fit with the way you remember the pavilion from the night of the dance.”

“But you were right there,” Michelle pointed out. “You found him. You saw everything with your own two eyes. How could you have missed something?”

“Hannah was probably in shock,” Andrea reminded her. “Finding a dead body isn’t fun.”

“Okay. You’re right,” Michelle said, taking the next photo from Andrea and examining it.

Nobody said anything for at least five minutes, an unusual occurrence when the three Swensen sisters got together. But Hannah was busy watching her younger sisters, and Michelle and Andrea were absorbed in examining the photos. Finally the last one was placed facedown on the counter.

Andrea gave a big sigh. “I didn’t see anything unusual,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure that everything looked just the way it did when I left the dance.”

Michelle gave a little nod. “I agree. I’m sorry we didn’t learn anything new, Hannah.”