Hot Dish Heaven: A Murder Mystery With Recipes Read Online Free Page A

yah, but I suppose I shouldn’t of said that. It wasn’t my place.”

Chapter 4
    I plopped down on the stool next to the prep table and took stock of everything Margie had shared with me. Her sister, Vivian, was married to a one-arm man named Vern, and together they had a daughter known as Little Val. Her recently deceased brother, Ole, was married to an Hispanic woman named Lena, who died of a broken heart after he dumped her for a tramp who wound up murdered. And the goofy-sounding farmer who frequented the café was really a brainy millionaire. “Hmm.” I could hardly wait to meet the fire eater and the bearded lady. But in the meantime, I’d have to settle for watching Margie chop onions with the speed and accuracy of the guy who did the Ginsu commercials.
    Awestruck, I asked without thinking, “What are you making?”
    She smiled, as if I were oddly amusing. “Hot dish. What else? I’ve got the ground beef and turkey brownin’ and the noodles and rice boilin’. I made the buns and bars yesterday and the salads this mornin’.”
    Margie had informed me on the phone that she was co-hosting a fund-raiser with the VFW on the night of my visit. It was to benefit a local woman who had breast cancer. The woman needed help paying her bills because her treatment made her too sick to work.
    According to Margie, medical fund-raisers were fairly common in the valley. “If ya ask me,” she’d said, “the cancer’s from all the chemicals sprayed on the fields. But don’t quote me on that, or I’ll get tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.”
    With a dangerous-looking knife, Margie sliced and diced onions right next to me, my eyes watering as my thoughts returned to Samantha Berg. I assured myself that as a reporter, it was only natural to be interested in her. Only natural to ask more questions.
    “Margie,” I said, wiping away my tears, “tell me more about Samantha Berg.”
    She set the knife down. “There’s not much to tell, and she sure wasn’t worth cryin’ over!” She chuckled at the remark.
    “Seriously, how was she killed?”
    As if doing a dance she’d done a million times before, Margie stepped from the prep table to the stove and on to the sink. There, she dumped a frying pan full of cooked ground turkey into a colander and rinsed it with water. “She disappeared three years ago this past March, exactly one year to the day from Lena’s death. It was the spring the Red River flooded so bad that folks got stranded on their roofs and had to be rescued by helicopter.” She squeezed her eyes closed in an apparent attempt to shut out the images. “Anyways, when the flood waters receded, Samantha’s body was found washed up on shore. She’d been stabbed in the heart … or in the place her heart would have been if she had one.”
    I shuddered. “That must have been a gruesome discovery.”
    Margie dumped the ground turkey back in the pan, carried it to the prep table, and spooned the meat into an industrial-size baking dish. “Little Val’s husband, Wally, found her.” She emptied the pan. “Of course he wasn’t her husband back then. He was just some guy travelin’ from Fargo to Winnipeg on business. He got sick and stopped in Drayton. That’s the town ya went through just before crossin’ the Red. It’s where the beet plant’s located.”
    She aimed her wooden spoon at the cutting board full of chopped onions. “Would ya mind addin’ those in here?”
    I commandeered her knife and scraped the onion pieces into the casserole dish. At the same time, she retrieved a metal bowl of whole-kernel corn and another of sliced green beans from a massive, stainless-steel refrigerator that stood alongside the upright freezer.
    “Fresh from my garden,” she reported, tossing the vegetables into the ground-meat mixture.
    She handed me one of the bowls. A few uncooked beans remained at the bottom, and I popped them in my mouth. “Oh, these are good,” I said as I