With the evidence secured, Hannah slid down from the hood of her Suburban and climbed into the driver’s seat. As she started her engine and drove out of the school parking lot, she felt a little foolish about the elaborate precautions she’d taken. Modeling herself after a television detective was crazy unless she was dumb enough to believe that the prefix of every telephone number in the entire country was five-five-five.

Chapter Four

Lisa was filling a bag with Peanut Butter Melts and her eyes grew as round as saucers as Hannah blew in the back door. “Hannah! What…?”

“Don’t ask. I’m going in to take a quick shower.”

“But Bill’s here and he needs to talk to you.”

Hannah ducked into the bathroom and poked her head out the door. “Where is he?”

“Out in front. He’s minding the counter while I pack up this order for Mrs. Jessup.”

“Give him a mug of coffee and send him back here. I’ll be out just as soon as I’m decent.”

The moment she’d closed the bathroom door behind her, Hannah peeled off her filthy clothes and stuffed them into a laundry bag. Then she climbed into the minuscule metal enclosure that Al Percy had called an “added bonus” when he’d shown her the building, and cranked on the water. She’d used the shower once before, when a fifty-pound bag of flour had burst as she’d muscled it up to the surface of the work island. Her shower might be tiny and cramped, but it worked. Once she was as clean as she could get within the tight confines, she shut off the water and stepped out, toweling off in record time.

She put on the extra set of clothes she kept for emergencies: a pair of worn jeans with a threadbare rear and an old Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt that had faded from royal purple to a dull shade of pewter. The gold block letters had deteriorated into a peeling smudge, but at least she didn’t smell like decaying food. After running a wide-toothed comb through her frizzy red hair, she slipped her feet into the pair of cross-country trainers she hadn’t worn since the last time she’d fallen for the old “jogging is good for you” routine, and opened the door.

Bill was sitting on a stool at the work island. There were cookie crumbs on the otherwise sparkling surface and Hannah assumed that Lisa must have plied him with cookies to keep him from becoming too impatient.

“About time,” Bill commented. “Lisa said you smelled worse than the panhandler that hangs around the Red Owl. What happened?”

“I was just helping you. Edna Ferguson told me that Max hired a woman assistant for Ron. I was collecting the coffee cups they used this morning.”

Bill looked confused. “But Ron didn’t have an assistant. I asked Betty about that. If there was a woman with Ron this morning, she wasn’t hired by the dairy. Didn’t Edna recognize her?”

“Edna didn’t see her. Ron and this woman left before she came in to work.”