Cut the candy rolls into half-inch slices with a sharp knife.

Yield: Makes about 48 slices of delicious candy.

Chapter Seven

“Good-bye, Aunt Hannah. See you later!” Tracey gave her a kiss that landed on her chin, and then she ran over to hug Lisa. Once that was done, she gave a little wave in Candy’s direction. “’Bye, Candy. It was nice meeting you.”

“Nice meeting you, too,” Candy said, giving Tracey a friendly smile. “Sorry about that fraction thing.”

“That’s okay. You didn’t know. And I didn’t know either!”

Both Candy and Tracey laughed at that, and Hannah watched her niece as she went out the back door with Janice Cox, her preschool teacher. Janice had come in to pick up some cookies she’d ordered, and she’d offered to give Tracey a ride to Kiddie Korner.

“Come on, Candy. You can help me set up the tables,” Lisa said, herding the young teenager, who claimed to be twenty, into the coffee shop. “Once that’s done, we’ll open and I’ll teach you how to go around with the coffee.”

Once they’d left, Hannah reached for the steno pad that contained the information she’d gathered about Candy, and took out her pen to make another entry. Only child? she wrote. It was clear that Candy hadn’t had much experience with preschoolers. When Tracey had offered to help Candy mix up the dough for the Chocolate Mint Softies they were serving for the Lake Eden Quilting Club’s Christmas party, Candy had handed her the recipe and asked her to measure the brown sugar.

If Hannah had heard the exchange, she would have told Tracey how much was called for in the recipe and given her the correct measuring cup. Her niece knew how to measure brown sugar. She’d helped Hannah and Lisa bake before. She could even identify the line that called for brown sugar in the list of ingredients because she could read the words brown and sugar. But the Chocolate Mint Softies called for two-thirds of a cup of brown sugar. And while Tracey knew her whole numbers up to twenty, she didn’t know her fractions yet. If Candy’d had a little sister or brother, or if she’d spent time with kids Tracey’s age, she would have known that most five-year-olds couldn’t even read yet, and it would be several more years before they understood fractions.

Once she’d stuffed the list of clues to Candy’s identity back in the bottom of her purse, Hannah began to fill the display jars. She’d just finished helping Lisa and Candy carry them out into the coffee shop when Andrea came in the back door.

“Well?” Andrea asked, breezing in without knocking. She shut the door, took several steps forward, and turned around smoothly like a model. “What do you think?”

“Gorgeous,” Hannah replied. Her comment referred to her sister’s hairstyle, an elaborate twist with feathered curls softly framing her face, and also to her outfit. Andrea was wearing a bright coral wool suit with fur around the collar. It was a color that Hannah would wear only if she wanted to help Jon Walker, the owner of the Lake Eden Neighborhood Pharmacy, sell his entire stock of sunglasses. Redheads couldn’t wear coral. It was a law. Or if it wasn’t a law, it should be.