“I know. I tasted it. I’m thinking about adding it to the menu. But enough about desserts. I’ve got some news for you,” Sally leaned across her desk. “You’re working to solve Ronni’s murder, aren’t you, Hannah?”

“Yes, Norman and I are working on it together.”

“Well, you might not know it, but Ronni came out here last week looking for a cocktail waitress job. I told her we really didn’t have cocktail waitresses, that if there was a big crowd in the bar, our regular wait staff filled in. She said that was fine, and she told me she’d worked as a cocktail waitress at The Moosehead Bar and Grill and that they served food in the bar. She said she quit that job last week because the tips weren’t good and it was too far to drive to Anoka and back every other night.”

“Did you hire her?” Norman asked.

“I never hire anyone without checking their job history. The last place she’d listed was The Moosehead, so I called the owner to ask about her. He wouldn’t tell me exactly what Ronni did, but he told me that she lied when she said she quit.”

“She was fired?” Hannah guessed.

“That’s right. He said he didn’t want to go into details, but they couldn’t afford to keep her on any longer.”

“I wonder what that means,” Norman said, looking puzzled.

“I’m not sure, but I thought maybe you might want to drive to Anoka to check it out.”

After everyone had a full cup of coffee and their waitress had left a carafe, Hannah pulled out her stenographer’s notebook, the one she’d come to think of as her murder book, and started their discussion. “Why don’t you go first, Mother? Tell us what you and Carrie found out.”

“You may already know this, but Hannah asked us to call around and see if we could find out who Ronni was involved with,” Delores prefaced her remarks.

“That’s romantically involved,” Carrie clarified.

“It turned out to be a much bigger job than we thought it would be.” Delores tapped her finger on the stapled sheets of paper on the table. “It would have been easier to find out who Ronni wasn’t involved with!”

“Let’s cut to the chase,” Carrie suggested. “We made sixty-seven calls, and we wrote down every name that came up.”

“We counted the number of times the names were mentioned by other people and arranged them according to…” Delores turned to Hannah. “What’s the word I want, dear?”

“Frequency?”