“Thanks for telling me, Loretta. I won’t take her anything with chocolate or peanut butter. When you talk to her, tell her I’ll be there at four. That’ll give us time to talk.”

“Talk about what?”

There was a wary tone in Loretta’s voice and Hannah thought fast. She seized the most plausible explanation she could devise on such short notice and answered, “I want to ask Jennifer about a job, but I need to talk to her for a while first. I’m thinking about hiring someone to help out here at The Cookie Jar and it just occurred to me that Jennifer might like to ride in with you a couple of mornings a week and work here.”

“Oh. Well . . . I don’t really know if she’s looking for work right now.”

“If she says no, that’s okay. At least I’ll get a chance to say hello and welcome her back to Lake Eden. Actually, she may be overqualified for a little part-time job like mine. What kind of work did she do before she came back home?”

“Oh. Uh . . . Jennifer was a . . . a shop girl, a clerk in a department store. You know. That type of thing.”

“That’s nice. Where did she work?”

“A couple of places. I don’t remember the names. They were big stores, though, and she made a good wage.”

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s got to be a duck, Hannah thought, repeating one of her great-grandmother’s favorite sayings in her mind. Loretta was acting like someone who was lying by hesitating before she answered Hannah’s questions, and then refusing to meet Hannah’s eyes when she did. As far as Hannah was concerned, that meant Loretta was a liar and she wasn’t very good at it.

After Hannah had walked Loretta to the door, she came back to sit on her stool again. She had to think of a good cookie to bake for Jennifer, one that would serve as a test of her real identity. She wouldn’t use chocolate and she wouldn’t use peanut butter. If Jennifer was really Jennifer, giving her an allergic reaction could be dangerous. Perhaps she’d make a sweet potato cookie. According to Carly, Jennifer had always hated sweet potatoes. Jennifer might take one to be polite, but she certainly wouldn’t eat more than one.

Once that was decided, Hannah got up to flip through her file of recipes. She didn’t have a sweet potato cookie recipe, but she could adapt one of her existing recipes to incorporate them. As she gathered ingredients and began to mix up cookie dough, Hannah was even more determined to find out why Loretta was lying to her and what she was trying so desperately to hide.

BLUE APPLE MUFFINS

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F., rack in the middle position.

The Muffin Batter: