Murder Has a Sweet Tooth - By Miranda Bliss Page 0,76

what other kind of snooping I could do since I was already in the house, and wondered if perhaps Michael had a home office. The thought firmly in mind, I was just about to close the desk drawer when something under a pile of papers in it caught my eye. I reached for it, pulled it out, and found myself holding a small round coaster made of heavy card stock. The coaster featured a sepia-toned photograph of the sign that hung above the front door of the establishment it came from.

Swallows.

Fourteen

THE NEXT DAY, EVE AND I WERE AT THE GROCERY store. She was being a good sport and hanging out with me on her lunch hour simply because I asked her to. And me? I was multitasking. The wedding was just four days away, my investigation was getting nowhere, and I hadn’t had a spare moment to decide on a Scottish dish to serve at our wedding dinner. It all needed to be taken care of, so in my own perfectly logical way, I decided the best way to get it all done was to do it all at once.

I’d been so intrigued by the Swallows coaster I found in the kitchen desk at Beth’s, I’d forgotten to return the cooking magazine that I had every intention of putting back along with the Girl Scout cookie money. The way I saw it, that was a sign. Eventually, I’d make copies of all the Scottish recipes in the magazine, then pop the whole thing (anonymously, of course) in the mail. Until then, I figured some higher power somewhere intended me to use the magazine. I’d grabbed it from my kitchen counter that morning on my way out my door.

I’d stuck a sticky note on the page where the article about Scottish foods began. Now, standing in the middle of the dairy aisle, I flipped open the magazine, closed my eyes, and stabbed a finger on the page. “I’m going to make whatever recipe I’m pointing to,” I told Eve, and since it was something she would have done herself—say, to choose between two dresses she wanted in the newest issue of Vogue—she never questioned my decision process. I opened my eyes and read the heading above the recipe where my finger rested.

“Crappit heid.” I cringed, closed my eyes, and tried again. This time, at least I didn’t point to a recipe we’d already considered—and rejected. I read out loud, “Haggis, the most Scottish of dishes.”

It sounded promising, at least from the headline. I can only attribute my lack of reading comprehension to that and the fact that I was in a hurry, and feeling stressed. Jim and I were supposed to have our final, wrap-everything-up meeting with the florist that evening, and I had the final fitting for my wedding dress in just forty-five minutes, so I gave the recipe the most cursory of scans and pushed the grocery cart toward the back of the store, stopping along the way to load the proper ingredients into my cart.

“Cinnamon, nutmeg, coriander, pepper. Oh, salt, too,” I read and tossed, and because the next ingredient on the list was oatmeal and I knew I’d find it two aisles over, we zipped over in that direction.

“Beef or lamb. That’s what we need next. It says we can choose which we want to put in, beef or lamb.” We were on the move, and Eve was reading over my shoulder, so I didn’t question her. We rolled toward the meat department and while we were on our way there, I decided it was time to start killing those two birds with that one proverbial stone.

“Here’s the thing,” I said, getting back to what I’d wanted to talk about in the car on the way over, only Eve had been driving, and traffic was heavy. I was so busy hanging on for dear life, we hadn’t gotten any further than me finally owning up to accidentally purloining the Girl Scout cookie money and telling her what I found in the desk in Beth’s kitchen the night before. We simply hadn’t had enough time to draw any conclusions. “Why would Michael have a Swallows coaster?”

“He picked it up as a souvenir?” Leave it to Eve to be literal.

“Well, he did. He must have. Or Beth did.” This was a new thought, and while I considered it, we arrived at the meat department and I consulted the recipe again, carefully this time. I read out loud. “One sheep’s