Yield: 4 generous bowls of Special Corn Chowder that everyone will enjoy. Almost everyone who tries it will never be satisfied with regular corn chowder again!
Hannah’s 2nd Note: Save the rest of the popcorn for later and give the bowl to the kids after they’ve done their homework.
Michelle’s Note: When I was little, Hannah used to make microwave popcorn for Andrea and me. She always poured it into a bowl, picked out the unpopped kernels so we wouldn’t bite down on one and hurt our teeth, and mixed the popcorn with M&Ms. It was a real treat to have the salted popcorn with the sweet, chocolate candy even though Andrea always made me eat the brown ones. She told me that the colored ones weren’t good for me because I was too young. Of course I didn’t believe that, but I never told her I didn’t mind because I counted a whole bag of M&Ms once when she was at cheerleading practice, and I discovered that there were a lot more brown M&Ms than colored ones!
Chapter Thirteen
Georgina was back in less than two minutes, carrying a tray with three tall glasses. She set it on the table, delivered theirs, and pulled up a chair to join them. “I decided to have a mango iced tea, too.”
Scores of questions had occurred to Hannah as they’d waited for Georgina to reappear, but somehow she managed to quell them until their waitress had taken a sip of her iced tea.
“Go ahead, Hannah,” Georgina told her. “I can see you’re just about bursting to ask me all those questions.”
“You’re right. I am.” Hannah decided to get to the most important question first. “I know that Mayor Bascomb was here with Stephanie on the night that Tori was murdered. And I know that he said he was going up to her condo to straighten her out on something important.”
“I figured you’d know all that. It’s one of the reasons I told my cousin, Irma. She’s the biggest gossip in town.”
“Maybe,” Hannah agreed, deliberately not glancing at Delores, the cofounder of the telephone tree Hannah always referred to as the Lake Eden Gossip Hotline. “Do you know what time Mayor Bascomb got back here to the lounge?”
“Not exactly, but I can give you a time frame. He left right before I went on my break at seven-thirty and he was back here, sitting with his wife when I got back at ten to eight. The night manager’s real strict about our breaks so I always watch the time.”
Hannah sighed heavily. The mayor was in the clear if Delores was right about the time she’d heard Tori scream. Right then and there, Hannah decided to go up to her mother’s condo after lunch to check the time on her office clock.
“Disappointing, isn’t it?” Georgina said, reading Hannah’s expression. “I call him the Teflon Mayor, you know. No matter what kind of trouble that man gets into, nothing ever sticks to him.”
“You’re right, Georgina,” Delores said. “Ricky-Ticky gets away with a lot in this town, but so far he hasn’t murdered anybody. It’s mostly just trouble with . . .” she paused, trying to think of an appropriate word.
“Trouble with remembering that he’s married,” Georgina finished the sentence for Delores. “There’s a lot of that going around lately. Kitty Levine was in for lunch a couple of weeks ago and she told me that Howie takes her to this big Winnetka County trial lawyers Christmas party every year. I guess those lawyers know how to get loose once they’ve had a couple of drinks. She snapped a picture with her phone at the party two years ago while everybody was dancing and not one single guy was dancing with his own wife. And when they went to the party this last Christmas, all those lawyers had gotten divorced and had remarried the women they were dancing with in Kitty’s picture. That photo predicted the whole thing.”
“That’s funny,” Hannah said, but once the words were out of her mouth, she amended it. “I mean, it’s funny that the picture predicted the future, but it probably wasn’t funny for the divorced wives.”
“That’s what I thought, but Kitty said that once she’d looked around, most of those former wives had new husbands, too.”
Hannah glanced at her watch as unobtrusively as she could, but Georgina saw her and laughed.
“Okay, Hannah. I’ll get to the point. We can talk after I tell you about the last time I saw Tori.”
Both Hannah and Delores leaned a bit closer to Georgina.
“Go ahead, Georgina,” Delores prompted her.
“It was exactly a week ago today and I was working the lunch shift. Stan Kramer came in and asked me for a nice, quiet booth. He said he was meeting Tori for lunch and they had some business to discuss. I gave him that booth over there.” Georgina pointed to a four-person booth in the corner. “I figured they might need to spread out papers and things.”
“That was nice of you, Georgina,” Delores said.
“I try to please.” Georgina gave a dry little laugh. “Besides, the tips are better when my customers are satisfied.”
“That booth looks fairly isolated,” Hannah commented as she concentrated on the booth in the corner. “The only one that’s close is that huge one on the wall.”
“I know, and we don’t have many big groups for lunch. Mostly, it’s just the people who work in the area, a few clerks from city hall, some of the condo residents who don’t feel like cooking, and locals who want something fancier than what they can get at Hal and Rose’s Café.”
“So how did you hear their conversation?” Delores asked her.
“I needed to clean the big booth so I sat there for my break and then I made sure it was spotless for the party of ten coming in for dinner that night. I put out a RESERVED sign and then I slid over into the corner and just sat there until my break was over.”
Hannah gave an amused smile. “You mean you just sat there and listened to Tori and Stan, don’t you?”