The Chocolate Mouse Trap by JoAnna Carl Page B

wood was lying beside Lindy, and apparently this was the club I had seen the attacker raising. It was the kind of thing that might be found in any Dumpster in the alley. The chief and the patrolman looked for footprints, but the alley had been plowed, so the snow wasn’t deep, and in the middle of a January night it was mostly ice anyway.
    “I guess the guy is agile,” I said. “I would have fallen down and broken my neck if I’d run off the way he did.”
    “We’ll check in the daylight,” Chief Jones said. “But I doubt we’ll find anything.”
    Joe came back about then. Tony had alerted Lindy’s mom and dad, and they’d arrived to watch over the sleeping kids. Tony had already called from the hospital with a preliminary report that Lindy was demanding to go home, so we were deducing that she was not seriously hurt.
    “It must have been a thief,” I said. “The guy ran off carrying something, and I don’t see her purse anyplace.”
    “We’ll have to ask Lindy just what she had on her,” the chief said. “Joe, you follow Lee home.”
    He’d alerted Aunt Nettie, of course, so she insisted that Joe come in so she could comfort us with coffee and bonbons—crème de menthe (“The formal afterdinner mint”) and Italian cherry (“Amarena cherry in syrup and white chocolate cream”). We sat around the dining room table, and I had to tell the whole story.
    After I finished, Aunt Nettie shook her head in disbelief. “It’s hard to imagine that a thief would attack Lindy,” she said. “It’s not likely she would be carrying the night’s take from Herrera’s.”
    “I’ll bet that ninety percent of Herrera’s customers use credit cards,” Joe said. “If you took the night’s take from Herrera’s, it probably would be less than fifty dollars in cash money and a whole lot of receipts. You’re right. It doesn’t sound like a thief.”
    “Then who was it?” I said. “A sex maniac? When the temperature is down in the teens? He would be a maniac. But it did appear that Lindy’s purse was missing. At least, it wasn’t in the car.”
    “Did she even have a purse?” Aunt Nettie said. “I’ve seen Lindy stuff her car keys in her pocket.”
    “I saw her pack her belongings up before I left,” I said. I closed my eyes and tried to remember. “I didn’t pay much attention. But you’re right. She did stick her keys in her coat pocket. She had a little, flat envelope purse. And she put it in the zipper pocket on the side of her laptop case.”
    I gasped. “Golly! That’s what was taken. Not her purse! Her laptop!”
    Joe called the chief and told him to look for the laptop in the car and inside the restaurant.
    After he hung up, he nodded at me. “I think you’re right. Lindy never goes anyplace without that laptop.”
    “She wouldn’t have left it at Herrera’s,” I said, “because she didn’t work there every day. She would have taken it home.”
    I was sure that was right. Lindy’s laptop—the computer she used to plan events for Herrera’s Catering, the machine that handled her schedule, the gadget she used for her e-mail—it had gone down the alley with the formless figure who had attacked her.
    And the computers of Jason, Carolyn Rose, and the Denhams had also been involved in weird events that day.
    “This is the fourth time.” I whispered the words.
    “The fourth time for what?” Joe asked.
    “It’s the Seventh Major Food Group,” I said. “Odd things are happening to all our computers.”
    He looked incredulous, and I realized I hadn’t seen Joe all day. I hadn’t had an opportunity to tell him about the damage to Jason’s computer, to the Denhams’ computer, to Carolyn Rose’s. So I told him.
    “But that’s crazy,” Joe said. “Everybody knows an expert can get that stuff back. All those political and Wall Street scandals have showed that to the public. Even if you try to erase everything on a computer, it’s still on the hard drive someplace.”
    But I