Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder (Hannah Swensen #1)(108)

Baking at The Cookie Jar was a dream come true. Hannah was nice and she said funny things that made Lisa and Candy giggle. Candy hadn’t felt this good since she’d grabbed her things and hit the road, and she found herself smiling as she shaped a pan of Candy Cane Cookies the way Lisa had taught her. It was easy. All you had to do was roll out a spoonful of white dough and another of pink dough, twist the two rolls together, and shape it into a cane with a crook on top.

“We bake these only nine minutes,” Hannah told her. “Any longer and the white part will turn brown.”

“Wouldn’t that be golden instead of brown?” Candy quipped, remembering how her mother had described the cake they’d left in the oven too long.

Hannah laughed and turned to Lisa. “She’s a natural. She’s already read the baker’s excuse book.”

Candy finished the last sheet of cookies and slipped them into the oven. They were flavored with almond and her mother would have loved them. There was a bakery only three blocks from their house and she used to walk down there every Saturday morning and buy Mom a chocolate-covered stick of marzipan.

Tears sprang to Candy’s eyes. She really missed her mother. To keep from thinking about her too much, she concentrated on the cookies baking in the oven.

“You don’t have to watch them every second,” Lisa told her. “You set the timer, didn’t you?”

“Sure, I did. For nine minutes. And I wasn’t really watching the cookies.” Candy blinked the moisture from her eyes and turned to face Lisa. “Do you want another candy recipe? I just remembered one.”

“You memorized recipes?”

Candy nodded. “I’ve got one of those weird memories. I can see the recipe in my mind and all I have to do is read it out loud. I forget what it’s called.”

“Photographic memory,” Hannah supplied the term. She was standing at the counter, her back to Candy and Lisa, crushing peppermint candy for the topping on the Candy Cane Cookies. “It’s like your mind takes a picture with a camera. There are times I wish that I had a photographic memory, but I understand there’s a drawback.”

“What’s that?” Candy asked.

“Photographic memories aren’t very selective. Memorizing recipes is a skill that could come in really handy, but I’ll bet you find yourself memorizing a lot of useless things, too.”

“You’re right!” Candy said with a giggle. “I still remember the license plate on our old van. It was personalized and it said, critters. Mom got it for Dad when he opened the clinic.”

Lisa laughed. “That’s cute. How about your driver’s license number? Did you memorize that?”

“I don’t have…” Candy stopped in mid-sentence. She’d told Hannah that she was twenty and that meant she should have a driver’s license. “I don’t have that one memorized. I can name all the books of the Bible in order, though. I memorized them right before we went to visit Grandpa Samuel. He’s a Methodist minister.”

“I’ll bet he was impressed,” Hannah said, turning to smile at her.

Candy nodded. “So was Mom. And after that, she used to ask me to memorize things for her.”

“What things?”

“The grocery list when we went to the store. That was just in case she forgot it. And Dad’s number at the clinic. She could never remember it. I tried to teach her, you know? I told her it was all ones, fours, and eights. I mean, how hard is eight-one-four, eight-four-four-one? But she kept getting it mixed up.”

Candy stopped speaking and frowned slightly. It was time to change the subject. She was talking too much about herself and she didn’t want Hannah or Lisa to guess where she came from. “When we’re through with the cookies, do you want me to make you a chocolate pecan roll? You could sell it in slices.”

“That sounds fabulous,” Lisa said. “How about it, Hannah?”

“Absolutely. If there’s anything you need that we don’t have, I’ll give you some money and you can run down to the Red Owl.”

Candy thought about that for a minute and then she shook her head. She’d taken a good look at the contents of Hannah’s pantry the first night she’d stayed in The Cookie Jar, and she’d spotted almost everything she needed. “Do you have butter?”

“We’ve always got butter,” Hannah told her. “My Grandma Ingrid used to always say that there’s nothing that doesn’t taste better with more cream, more sugar, and more butter.”

Candy laughed. It was a funny line and she had to remember it so she could use it on Mom. But she wouldn’t see Mom again, at least not for a very long time.

“Anything else?” Lisa prompted her, and Candy was glad. She was getting sad again, thinking about Mom and home.

“Chocolate in squares, the kind that’s wrapped in white paper. I need two of them.”

“Unsweetened, semi-sweet, or German’s?” Hannah gave her three choices.

For a second, Candy was stymied. She hadn’t known there was more than one kind of chocolate that was wrapped in white paper. The one she needed smelled good and tasted awful, but they might not know that. “Just a second, and I’ll tell you what the package says,” she said.

Candy shut her eyes and thought about the package they kept in the cupboard at home. “It comes in an orange and brown box and it says Baker’s in big yellow letters. And there’s a picture of a lady in an apron right before the name. That’s at the top on the brown part. And then on the orange part it says, Unsweetened Baking Chocolate Squares.” Candy opened her eyes and blinked.