“No problem,” Hannah answered quickly. “If I ask you yes or no questions, will that be all right?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Did you see anyone or make any calls after Ron dropped you off on Wednesday morning?”

“Yes. I’d love to see a sample, Hannah, but I can’t come in that early on Wednesday morning. The Sparklettes man delivers our water between eight and nine and I have to be here to let him in.”

“Can you figure out any way to tell me exactly what time he was there?”

“I hate those morning deliveries, too. Last Wednesday he was here at eight and I almost overslept.”

“Thanks, Danielle.” Hannah hung up and jotted down a note by Danielle’s name. She’d check with the Sparklettes driver and if he’d delivered water to Danielle at eight, she could cross Danielle’s name off the list.

It was another dead end. Hannah sighed and tried to think of something positive. Positive thoughts were supposed to lead to pleasant dreams and she didn’t want a repeat of last night’s nightmares. At least she was getting along with Andrea much better lately. Perhaps all the old resentments were fading with the years and they could actually become friends.

Hannah had to admit that she’d been a pretty hard act to follow in school. Andrea had taken a lot of criticism from her teachers about the fact that Hannah had been a straight-A student. Instead of competing with Hannah’s academic record, Andrea had thrown herself into extracurricular activities. She’d starred in school plays, sung solos at concerts, and edited the school paper and yearbook. And Andrea had certainly been more popular with the boys than Hannah had been. Andrea’s Friday and Saturday nights had been booked from her freshman year through her senior year.

Hannah sighed. She could boast of only two dates during her entire time in high school. One had been a study date at her house with a classmate who was about to flunk chemistry and it had taken some very broad hints from Delores before he’d agreed to take Hannah out for pizza to thank her for his passing grade. The other had been her senior prom date. Hannah had found out later that it had entailed a promise of a part-time summer job in her father’s shop for Cliff Schuman to show up at her door with a corsage in his hand.

College had been different. There she hadn’t been treated as a pariah because she read the classics and knew who Wittgenstein and Sartre were. In college, the ability to do an algebraic equation in her head wasn’t considered a personality defect, and no one thought less of her if she knew the atomic number of einsteinium. Of course, there had been a group of incredibly gorgeous, bubbleheaded girls who’d turned male heads, but most of them had either flunked out or left to get their MRS degrees.

Hannah had finally started to date as a sophomore in college. She’d gone out with a too-tall, too-thin history major for several months. After that, there had been an intense art major who’d confided that he was celibate right after she’d begun to think they’d had something going, and a master’s candidate who’d wanted her input on his thesis. True love, or perhaps it was true lust, hadn’t found her until November in her second year of postgraduate work. That was when Hannah had met the man she’d thought would be her soul mate.