Pecan Chews

Preheat oven to 350° F, rack in the middle position.

1 cup butter (2 sticks, ½ pound)

3 cups brown sugar ***

4 eggs, beaten (with a fork is fine)

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

3 teaspoons vanilla

2 cups finely chopped pecans

4 cups flour

Melt butter and add brown sugar. Mix well and let cool. Add beaten eggs and mix. Add salt, baking soda, vanilla, and nuts. Mix well. Add flour and mix until flour is thoroughly distributed.

Form dough into balls with your fingers. (Make them the size of a walnut with shell.) Place them on a greased cookie sheet, 12 to a standard sheet. Press them down with a spatula. (Spray it with Pam first, or grease it.)

Bake at 350 degrees F. for 10 to 12 minutes. Let cookies set up on sheet for one minute, then remove them to a wire rack to finish cooling.

(There’s no problem if your recipe calls for dark brown sugar, or light brown sugar—just mix in molasses until it’s the right color.)

(Norman Rhodes adores these, and so does Bill.)

Yield: 8 to 10 dozen, depending on cookie size.

Chapter Eleven

Hannah couldn’t say a word. Her tongue seemed glued to the roof of her mouth. She stared down at the stack of Polaroids and blinked hard. No, she wasn’t imagining things. The images were still there. There were no faces, just pictures of women’s torsos, and every one was nude to the waist.

“Hannah?” Andrea reached out to grab her arm. “Are you all right?”

Hannah took a deep breath and nodded. “Who are they?”

“Dental patients. You can tell where they were taken from the background.” Andrea jabbed her finger at the top print. “See that picture on the wall? It’s in the room that Norman uses for cleaning teeth. I checked.”

“This woman posed for Norman in his dental chair?”

“Make that these women.” Andrea fanned out the pictures so that Hannah could see. “And I don’t think they exactly posed. See the two canisters next to the chair? One is oxygen and the other is nitrous oxide.”

“Laughing gas?”

“I studied it in chemistry class. If you mix it right, it’s an anesthetic. A lot of dentists use it. But if you cut down on the oxygen, it can make you lose consciousness. A couple of whiffs of the increased mixture and these women would have passed out cold.”

“He knocked them out and took nude photos of them?”

“That’s what it looks like to me. When they came to, they wouldn’t remember a thing.”

Hannah shook her head. “I can’t believe that Norman would do something like this. He seems so…normal.”

“That’s what they always say about perverts. You’ve heard those interviews on the news. All the neighbors say that they can’t believe it, that he seemed like such a normal guy.”

Hannah blinked and stared down at the photographs again. She still couldn’t believe that Norman could have taken these pictures.