Devil's Food Cake Murder (Hannah Swensen, #14)(27)

Hannah gave another heartfelt sigh. Whatever Norman was planning to tell her had to be important. She just hoped that he wasn’t going to say that he couldn’t date her anymore because he was going to marry his former fiancée!

She was awake now, and being awake meant that she was beginning to feel stressed. There were too many tasks to accomplish, too many problems to attempt to solve. Somehow she had to slog through it all step by step, hour by hour, and day by day. It was a fallacy that things would be better in the morning. This was morning, and things were just as bad as they’d been when she’d gone to bed five hours ago.

Today was not going to be a good day. Hannah knew that the moment she walked into her kitchen and saw that the red ready light on her coffeemaker was out. No coffee. She’d forgotten to set it last night. How could she start the morning without coffee? She should go back to bed, take a little snooze, and start her day over.

But duty called and no Swensen daughter had ever shrugged off her duty. There was the German work ethic on her mother’s side and the Scandinavian work ethic on her father’s side. A fifty-hour week was nothing to gripe about, and a sixty-hour week was not impossible. You worked until your job was finished, even if you were tired.

Two minutes later, the coffeemaker was activated and Hannah was opening the refrigerator to have a glass of juice. She poured some spicy tomato juice in a glass, returned the bottle to the top shelf of the refrigerator, and was about to close the door when she realized that there was a round white sock ball on top of the refrigerator again.

“Moishe?” She turned to look at her feline roommate, who was sitting on the kitchen floor by his food bowl, waiting patiently. “How did these socks get up here?”

Had ever a cat looked more innocent? For a moment, Hannah had doubts. Perhaps she’d taken her socks from the drawer, carried them to the kitchen, and absent-mindedly placed them on top of the refrigerator when she opened it to pour her juice.

“No, I didn’t!” Hannah said aloud. She knew she hadn’t carried her socks into the kitchen this morning, and the sock ball hadn’t been there last night. Moishe must have done it, but how? He couldn’t pull out her sock drawer, and she hadn’t done a load of laundry since Saturday.

Hannah grabbed the sock ball and turned to look at her cat again. He still looked innocent. She tossed it in the air, and Moishe followed it with his eyes, but he made no move to intercept it. Then she bent down and rolled it across the floor so that it landed right next to him, hoping he might do something to incriminate himself, like grabbing it in his mouth, jumping up to the counter and then to the top of the refrigerator, and dropping it there.

Of course it didn’t work. Moishe ignored the sock ball. He ignored her also and concentrated on an area of the wall immediately behind her head. His fur bristled slightly and his eyes widened, causing her to swivel around to see what he was reacting to, but there was absolutely nothing there.

Trying to establish a cat’s guilt or innocence was a time waster. There was no way she’d solve the mystery of the sock balls this morning. Hannah tabled it for another time and filled Moishe’s bowl with his favorite kitty crunchies. Once she’d given him fresh water, she poured her coffee and sipped it on her way to the bathroom to take her shower and get ready to go to work.

“Hi, Norman,” Hannah greeted him as he pushed through the swinging door at The Cookie Jar and joined her in the kitchen. “I’ve got a great new cookie. How about trying one of Mother’s Orange Creams?”

Norman stared at her for a moment, an expression of complete astonishment on his face. “Your mother bakes Orange Creams?”

“Not Mother.” Hannah gave a little laugh at the concept. Delores did not bake and never had. “Mother got the recipe from an Irish woman who lives in England. You can make them in lemon or orange, and I’ll give you one of each. We’re going to serve both kinds at her launch party.”

Norman looked at the cookies with interest as Hannah delivered them to the workstation, along with his cup of coffee. “They’re pretty,” he said.

“That’s what Mother thinks. She said the burst of citrus flavor would have been a huge hit in Regency England, where only the wealthy had orangeries.” Hannah noticed Norman’s puzzled look and went on to explain. “Orangeries are interior greenhouse gardens with fruit trees and exotic flowers.”

“Like Wayne Bergstrom’s penthouse garden?”

“Exactly right.” Hannah remembered the garden well. She’d been back several times since Jenny had moved into the penthouse with Anna, and the only change they’d made to the garden was to add several fruit trees. One had been a mandarin orange tree so Norman was doubly right. Not only did it look like an orangery, it was an orangery.

As Norman picked up an Orange Cream and tasted it, Hannah tried not to think about the department store mogul and how he’d died.

“Very tasty,” Norman said, pulling Hannah out of her contemplative mood. “The orange flavor is really intense.”

“Lots of orange zest. Try the lemon.”

Norman put down the rest of his orange cookie and picked up the lemon. He took a bite, and made a little sound of enjoyment. “Very good. I think I like the lemon best, but I’d better give the orange another try in the interest of fairness.”

Hannah began to smile. “Just in the interest of fairness.”