Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder (Hannah Swensen #1)(12)

Hannah smiled and carried the punchbowl out to the kitchen. When she came back, Gil was still there. “You don’t have to stay, Gil. I can clean up.”

“No, I’ll help you.” Gil began to gather up the plastic cups and plates and toss them into the trash. “Hannah?”

“Yes, Gil.” Hannah paused to stare at him. Gil looked very earnest.

“You found Ron, didn’t you?”

Hannah sighed. Everyone she met wanted to know something about Ron. She was becoming a local celebrity, but being catapulted to instant fame by virtue of Ron’s murder made her feel rotten. “Yes, Gil. I found him.”

“That must have been very upsetting for you.”

“It wasn’t exactly my idea of fun.”

“I was just thinking…that’s a terrible thing you had to go through and you might want to talk to someone about it. My office door is always open, Hannah. And I’ll do my best to help you through this.”

Hannah wanted to tell him that she didn’t need a shrink. Even if she did, a Jordan High counselor who dealt with the heartbreak of acne and dateless Saturday nights wouldn’t be the shrink she’d choose. But then she reminded herself that she’d vowed to be tactful, and she took a deep breath, preparing to lie through her teeth. “Thanks for the offer, Gil. If I need to talk to somebody about it, you’ll be my first choice.”



Edna had left by the time Hannah had packed up her supplies and carted them out to her Suburban. She’d tried to call Bill several times, but she’d been told that Bill was out in the field and couldn’t be reached. Hannah glanced at her watch. She’d promised Lisa that she’d be back by four, and she had only five minutes to make it. But finding the cup with lipstick was more important than getting back to The Cookie Jar on time.

Hannah glanced down at her best dress slacks and sweater set. She was catering the mayor’s party tonight and she’d planned to wear it.

The knit outfit was light beige, but it was washable. Giving a little groan for the load of laundry she’d have to do the moment she got home, Hannah pushed up her sweater sleeves and marched to the Dumpster, girding her loins to do battle with the cafeteria leftovers that awaited her.

The Dumpster was huge. Hannah wrinkled her nose at the stench that rolled out of the metal bin and muttered a curse. The lip of the container came up above her armpits and there was no way that she could lift all the bags out to examine them. Muttering another curse, a more colorful one this time, Hannah walked back to her Suburban and drove it up nose-to-nose with the front of the trash bin. Then she clambered up on the candy-apple red hood and reached into the Dumpster to pull up the first trash bag.

Her first attempt yielded wadded napkins, globs of butterscotch pudding, and clumps of something brown that looked like beef stew. At least she knew what the students had eaten for lunch. Hannah was about to haul up the second bag when she remembered that the kitchen wastebasket had been lined with a smaller green plastic bag. She stretched out over the hood and lifted the black bags one by one, dragging them over to one side. Near the bottom—she should have known that it would be on the bottom—she saw one lone green bag.

Even though she scrunched forward until her entire upper body was hanging over the edge of the Dumpster, the tips of her fingers were still a good three inches from the top of the green bag. Hannah sighed and then she did what any good sister-in-law and dedicated amateur detective would do. She turned around to dangle her legs over the lip of the metal bin, took a deep steadying breath, and slid down into the bowels of the Dumpster.

Now that she was on the inside, grabbing the green trash bag was simple. Climbing back out of the Dumpster wasn’t. Hannah had to stack the big black bags in a pile so that she could scramble up on top of them, using them like a slippery and squishy staircase. One bag broke under her weight and she groaned as her shoes sank down into a morass of stew. By the time she emerged from the malodorous depths and pulled herself back up on the hood of her Suburban again, Hannah knew that she smelled every bit as bad as she looked.

“Bill’s going to owe me big time for this,” Hannah grumbled as she loosened the tie on the green plastic bag and began to search through the contents. Several crumpled bread wrappers and a slew of illicit cigarette butts later, she encountered two Styrofoam cups.

“Gottcha!” Hannah crowed. She was about to grab the cups when she remembered that movie and television detectives always used protective gloves and evidence bags. If there were fingerprints on the cup with the lipstick, she certainly didn’t want to smudge them. Since Hannah didn’t happen to carry gloves or evidence bags on her catering jobs, she settled for slipping a bread wrapper over her hand, plucking out the two cups, one by one, and depositing them inside a second empty bread wrapper.

With the evidence secured, Hannah slid down from the hood of her Suburban and climbed into the driver’s seat. As she started her engine and drove out of the school parking lot, she felt a little foolish about the elaborate precautions she’d taken. Modeling herself after a television detective was crazy unless she was dumb enough to believe that the prefix of every telephone number in the entire country was five-five-five.





Chapter Four




Lisa was filling a bag with Peanut Butter Melts and her eyes grew as round as saucers as Hannah blew in the back door. “Hannah! What…?”