Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

It was just past five-thirty in the afternoon when Hannah and Michelle pulled into Hannah’s parking spot at the condo. Hannah led the way up the outside staircase to Hannah’s second-floor unit while Michelle carried a large bakery box with three dozen Triple Chocolate Cookies for them to test after dinner tonight.

They were cooking dinner together. Michelle had planned it all out. She would start the Smothered Chicken and Hannah would assemble one of her favorite side dishes, Oodles of Noodles. Once the chicken was in the pan and the heat had been turned down to low, Michelle would do her evening workout on Hannah’s new exercise machine while Hannah put a green salad together and got the coffee ready to go. Then Michelle would take her shower and Hannah would relax on the couch with a glass of something cold and wet.

“I’ll catch him this time,” Hannah said, setting her grocery bags on the landing and inserting her key in the lock. “You’ve got your hands full with those . . .”

“What is it?” Michelle asked when Hannah stopped speaking abruptly and stepped back without turning the key or opening the door.

“I don’t know,” Hannah said in a low voice. “I thought I heard something inside.”

“Moishe?”

“No. It sounded like a . . . a humming.”

“Humming as in music?”

“No. Humming as in noise. It sounded like something was running . . . a mixer, or a blender, or something like that.”

“Did you leave the television on for Moishe?”

“Yes. I always do.”

“Then maybe it’s a cooking show and it actually is a blender or a mixer. Let’s go in and check it out.”

Hannah hesitated for a moment. There were no signs of forced entry. The door was still locked, the living room window was open a bit, but she’d left it that way this morning. It was still broad daylight and would be until at least eight o’clock tonight, and she lived in a secure condo complex with a guard at the gate. It was extremely unlikely that a burglar had broken into her home and was blending drinks or mixing up a cake in her kitchen. “Okay,” she said, turning her key in the lock and opening the door.

The cat who hurtled out to meet her almost knocked her off her feet. Somehow Hannah managed to catch him and carry him back inside. Whatever she’d heard was no longer audible. Perhaps the humming noise hadn’t been coming from her unit at all. Since it was summer, most of her neighbors kept their windows open during the day and it was possible that Sue Plotnik, her downstairs neighbor, had been using her mixer or her blender.

“I don’t hear anything,” Michelle said, stepping in behind Hannah.