Fudge Cupcake Murder

asked me if I knew where Lonnie was and when I said I didn't, she hung up.'

    'Sorry, Michelle.' Hannah began to feel guilty that she'd left her baby sister out of the loop. 'I should have called you, but I figured you must know. I can't believe you didn't hear anything about it. You'd think the murder of a county sheriff would make the news.'

    'Um… it might have made the news. It's just that I've been out of touch for a while. I've been really busy… uh… studying.'

    'Right,' Hannah said, not believing a word of it. Michelle was hiding something and Hannah was pretty sure the thing she was hiding was a who. 'Let's cut to the chase, Michelle. Go get Lonnie and put him on the phone. I need to know more about that incident report.'

    'Lonnie? Um… what makes you think that Lonnie is here? When Mother called last night, I told her I hadn't seen him.'

    Hannah sighed. 'That was Mother. This is me. Let me talk to him, Michelle. And stop hedging. I won't tell anybody he was with you.'

    'He's not exactly with me, Hannah. It's a big house and there's plenty of room.'

    'Right,' Hannah said, grinning a little.

    'Well, there is. It's not like we're staying in the same room, or anything. I just didn't want Andrea or Mother to know. They'd never understand.'

    'How about Raj?' Hannah used Roger Allen Jensen's nickname. He was the college boy Michelle had been dating when she came home last July. 'Does he understand?'

    'Raj is history. We broke up the day after I got back to school. I got really tired of his superior attitude.'

    'That would do it, all right,' Hannah said, remembering how Raj had referred to Michelle's Lake Eden background as colorful and quaint.

    'Hold on. I'll get Lonnie. Be careful how you break it to him, Hannah. He's been with me the whole time and he doesn't know anything about Sheriff Grant's murder, either.'

Chapter Twenty-Eight

    'Hi, Hannah,' Lonnie greeted her. He sounded a bit guilty and Hannah hoped it was the result of going off without telling anyone where he was going, rather than for any other reason. 'Shelly says you've got something important to tell me.'

    Shelly? Hannah's brows headed skyward. Michelle didn't like to be called Shelly. She'd told Hannah that it made her feel like a turtle.

    'Um… yes, I do have something important to tell you,' Hannah said, wondering why Lonnie was permitted to use the nickname Michelle disliked. 'I've got some bad news, Lonnie.'

    'My folks are okay, aren't they?' Lonnie asked, before Hannah could follow up her initial statement.

    'They're fine,' Hannah reassured him. 'Your whole family's fine. Everybody in Lake Eden is fine, except for Sheriff Grant.'

    The minute the words were out of Hannah's mouth she wished she'd thought of another way to phrase it. She'd never been a master at tact.

    'What's wrong with Sheriff Grant?' Lonnie asked, exactly as Hannah had expected he would.

    'He's dead,' Hannah said, deciding to spit it out now and deal with the fallout later. 'Somebody murdered him last Monday night.'

    There was a long silence, so long that Hannah wondered if Lonnie had passed out from shock. But then she heard a sigh and Lonnie cleared his throat.

    'That's really awful,' he said, his voice shaking slightly. 'Do Mike and Bill need me to come back home?'

    'I don't know, but you can call them if you think you should. Mike's the acting sheriff now. You could say that you were out of touch and you just heard about it.'

    'Good idea.' Lonnie sounded more in control when he spoke again. 'Do they have any suspects?'

    'I don't know. If they do, they're not telling me.'

    'I guess they wouldn't. So are you mad?'

    'I'm not exactly dancing up and down the streets in delight,' Hannah said with a shrug, even though she knew Lonnie couldn't see it. 'Sure, I wish they'd include me in their investigation, but that's about as likely as snow in August.'

    'I didn't mean are you mad at Mike and Bill. I meant, are you mad at me.'

    'Oh.' Hannah took a second to regroup. 'You mean, because you're spending your vacation with Michelle?'

    Lonnie gulped again. 'Um… yeah. That's exactly what I mean.'

    'No, I'm not mad.' Hannah smiled, remembering her own college days. It had been a time of testing her wings and it was fairly obvious that Michelle was doing the same. 'I just hope you didn't keep her from her classes. Good grades are very important to Michelle.'

    'I didn't keep her from anything. I went along to every class and sat in the back. Nobody seemed to mind and I even took notes in case Shelly missed something.'

    Hannah gave it up. It certainly didn't sound as if Lonnie had hurt Michelle in any way. 'I need to talk to you about that stolen car report you wrote right before you left on vacation. Did you know that Sheriff Grant took it home with him?'

    'I didn't know that, but it doesn't surprise me. He was really interested in that car thief. He told me he was going to handle the case personally and that was when he gave me two weeks of comp time for all the extra hours I'd put in working on it, effective anytime I wanted.'

    'And that was unusual?' Hannah asked.

    'I don't know, for sure. But Sheriff Grant isn't…' Lonnie stopped and Hannah heard him swallow. 'Sheriff Grant wasn't known for being really generous about time off, and vacations, and things like that. I figured I'd better grab it before he changed his mind, so I said I'd take the comp time right away and I left.'

    'That was probably smart. Let's get back to the car thief. What can you tell me about him?'

    'I put everything I knew into the report. The guy wouldn't give me his name and he didn't have any I.D. on him. He just clammed up and I figured he was bound to lawyer up when I got him to the station, but he didn't. Sheriff Grant told me not to worry about it. He said he'd interrogate the guy himself and find out who he was. I'm assuming that's what he did. The guy was still in the holding tank when I left the station.'

    Hannah asked several other questions, but when it became clear that Lonnie couldn't give her any more information, she asked to talk to her sister again. After assuring Michelle that she wasn't about to tell anyone the identity of her house-guest, Hannah hung up and flipped through her notebook.

    Car parts in Sheriff Grant's home office that belonged to him, not Jamie. A car thief Lonnie had apprehended. Sheriff Grant's interest in pulling Lonnie off the case so that he could interview the suspect himself. The fact that Sheriff Grant took Lonnie's report home in his special briefcase. Hannah was beginning to see how all these things might fit together. Could they be part of the big case that Sheriff Grant had needed to win the election? And did something he discovered while he was working on this big case result in his murder?

    Just when Hannah thought her head would burst with churning ideas, the phone rang. She reached out to answer it without thinking, and only then did she realize that she should have locked up the shop ten minutes ago.

    'Hannah?' It was Andrea's voice and she sounded excited. 'I'm so glad I caught you!'

    'Why's that?' Hannah asked, pulling out the cash drawer and starting to count the money for their nightly deposit.

    'I wanted to tell you that I'm almost done with the recipes.'