Chapter Fourteen

When Hannah woke up the next morning, she was in a foul mood. She was used to getting along without the recommended eight hours of sleep, but she’d spent a very restless night and some of her dreams had been disturbing. Ron’s killer had chased her in a yellow Cadillac bearing a striking resemblance to the one Bernice drove. Her final nightmare hadn’t been so bad. She’d dreamed that she was being held down and tickled by a furry monster. By now, Hannah knew what that dream meant. Moishe had crawled onto her pillow. She’d managed to rouse herself enough to shove him over, and the rest of the night had been relatively peaceful.

There was a list on the pad of notepaper she kept on her night table and Hannah switched on the light to read it. The words Fluffy Dreams were written at the top and they were in her handwriting. She must have been dreaming about cookies again.

Oh, yes. Hannah began to smile. She remembered the dream now. She’d been catering a reception at the White House and the president, a young Abe Lincoln, had raved about her cookies. His wife, Barbara Bush, had asked for the recipe and she’d written it out right there in the Oval Office.

Hannah laughed out loud. Abe Lincoln and Barbara Bush. She guessed she shouldn’t be surprised. It had been a dream, after all. But she had written down the recipe. Perhaps her unconscious had come up with something delicious.

The words were written in an untidy scrawl. Obviously, she hadn’t bothered to turn on the light. Hannah made out the word butter and a bit farther down sugar. Between the two words was a scrawl that looked like pooches. It must be peaches, and peach cookies were an intriguing concept. She also made out marshes for marshmallows, and cuckoo, which could be either cocoa or coconut. Perhaps she’d experiment a bit with the ingredients and see what she could make.

Hannah carried the notebook out to the kitchen and poured herself a fragrant cup of coffee. After several bracing sips, she noticed that there was another line scrawled at the bottom of the recipe. It said: D—ask not with.

There was a plaintive yowl from the direction of the food bowl, and Hannah got up to dump in the kitty crunchies. As she filled Moishe’s water bowl with filtered water, she thought about that last cryptic note. The “D” was Danielle. Hannah was almost certain of that. But what was “ask not with?”

It came to her in a flash of brilliant insight. Her mind had been working overtime last night. She’d wanted to remind herself to ask Danielle if there had been any time, during their night and early morning together, that Ron had gone somewhere without Danielle.

Hannah set Moishe’s water bowl down on his Garfield rubber mat and went back to the table to finish her coffee. If yesterday and the day before were any indication, today would be hectic. She reached for the notepad, turned to a fresh page, and wrote down a list of things to do.