Hannah nodded. Andrea looked terribly upset. “Okay. Go tell Lisa to come up here and I’ll join you back in the bakery.”

The switch was accomplished quickly, and once she’d slipped back to the bakery, Hannah found her sister perched on a stool at the work island in the center of the room. Andrea was staring at the ovens as if she’d just encountered a hibernating grizzly, and Hannah was alarmed. “Is there something wrong with the ovens?”

“Not exactly. Lisa said that the timer’s about to go off and the cookies have to come out. You know I don’t bake, Hannah.”

“I’ll do it.” Hannah grinned as she handed her sister an individual carton of orange juice. Her sister would be more at home in a foreign country than she was in a kitchen. Andrea’s culinary efforts were always disasters. Until she’d gone back to work and hired someone to come in to cook the meals, the Todd family had eaten nothing but microwave dinners.

Hannah grabbed a pair of oven mitts and removed the trays from the ovens. She replaced them with the unbaked Oatmeal Raisin Crisps that Lisa had prepared and then she pulled up a second stool and joined her sister at the work island. “What’s wrong, Andrea?”

“It’s Tracey. Janice Cox just paged me from Kiddie Korner. She said Tracey’s telling all of her classmates that she saw Ron’s body.”

“That’s true—she did.”

“How could you, Hannah?” Andrea looked positively betrayed. “Tracey’s impressionable, just like me. It’s liable to scar her psyche for life!”

Hannah reached out and opened the carton of orange juice, slipping the little plastic straw inside. “Take a sip, Andrea. You look faint. And try to relax.”

“How can I relax when you exposed my daughter to a murder victim?”

“I didn’t expose her. Bill did. And all Tracey saw was the body bag. They were loading it into the coroner’s van when he took her over to the preschool.”

“Then she didn’t actually see Ron.”

“Not unless she has X-ray vision. You can ask Bill about it. He’s still out in the alley securing the crime scene.”

“I’ll talk to him later.” Andrea took a sip of her orange juice and a little color came back into her cheeks. “I’m sorry, Hannah. I should have known that you wouldn’t do anything to hurt Tracey. Sometimes I think that you’re a better mother to her than I am.”

Hannah bit her tongue. This wasn’t the time to give Andrea a lecture about how to raise her daughter. “Tracey loves you, Andrea.”

“I know, but motherhood doesn’t come naturally to me. That’s why I hired the best baby-sitters I could find and went to work. I thought that if I had a real career, it would make Bill and Tracey proud of me, but it’s just not working out the way I hoped it would.”

Hannah nodded, recognizing the real reason behind her sister’s unusual candor. “Your sale fell through?”

“Yes. He decided the property wasn’t right for him. And when I offered to show him some of my other listings, he wouldn’t even look. I really wanted that carpet, Hannah. It was gorgeous and it would have given my bedroom a whole new look.”