Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke Read Free Book Online

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
    L isa 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…?”
    “Don’t ask. I’m going in to take a quick shower.”
    “But Bill’s here and he needs to talk to you.”
    Hannah ducked into the bathroom and poked her head out the door. “Where is he?”
    “Out in front. He’s minding the counter while I pack up this order for Mrs. Jessup.”
    “Give him a mug of coffee and send him back here. I’ll be out just as soon as I’m decent.”
    The moment she’d closed the bathroom door behind her, Hannah peeled off her filthy clothes and stuffed them into a laundry bag. Then she climbed into the minuscule metal enclosure that Al Percy had called an “added bonus” when he’d shown her the building, and cranked on the water. She’d used the shower once before, when a fifty-pound bag of flour had burst as she’d muscled it up to the surface of the work island. Her shower might be tiny and cramped, but it worked. Once she was as clean as she could get within the tight confines, she shut off the water and stepped out, toweling off in record time.
    She put on the extra set of clothes she kept for emergencies: a pair of worn jeans with a threadbare rear and an old Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt that had faded from royal purple to a dull shade of pewter. The gold block letters had deteriorated into a peeling smudge, but at least she didn’t smell like decaying food. After running a wide-toothed comb through her frizzy red hair, she slipped her feet into the pair of cross-country trainers she hadn’t worn since the last time she’d fallen for the old “jogging is good for you” routine, and opened the door.
    Bill was sitting on a stool at the work island. There were cookie crumbs on the otherwise sparkling surface and Hannah assumed that Lisa must have plied him with