Hannah stood there in the cloakroom of the Corner Tavern, staring at the pair of light-brown boots at the end of the rack. They were Bonnie’s boots. She recognized them. There were uneven patches of darker-colored brown on both of the boots from the sides of the soles all the way up to the ankles. There was no duct tape in sight, but it had probably lost its adhesive grip on the leather when the leather had gotten wet. But was the leather wet? Or was it simply discolored? Hannah had to know for certain.

She moved close enough to the boots to touch the area that looked wet. It was wet, very wet, so soaked that it had not yet dried out. The night that she’d seen Bonnie at the bar, the same night that Phyllis had been murdered, Bonnie had worn her soaked boots inside the Corner Tavern and then she’d changed to the only dry footwear she’d had in her car, her red tennis shoes and a pair of Gil’s argyle socks. But the pair of wet boots didn’t necessarily mean that Bonnie had anything to do with Phyllis’s murder. Bonnie might have walked through some deep snow before she got to the Corner Tavern, realized that her boots were wet when she arrived, and carried her tennis shoes inside to put them on in the cloakroom.

A warning bell in Hannah’s mind clanged insistently. Mike needed to know about Bonnie’s boots. She really should take a photo and send it to Mike. She’d promised to keep him informed of anything she’d found that could relate to the murder. And even though she didn’t believe that Bonnie had anything to do with it, she had an obligation to share this information with Mike.

Hannah pulled out her phone, took a photo of the boots, and tried to remember what her niece Tracey had taught her about attaching a photo to a text message. She titled the photo Bonnie’s Boots and hit the proper series of buttons to send the photo to Mike.

“Yes!” Hannah said out loud when the attachment worked. And then she frowned. She’d sent the photo, but she hadn’t typed a text message explaining anything about it. Hannah knew that she should send another text to explain, but it was getting late and she still had to stop to take the soup and candy to Bonnie before she would be free to join Michelle and Lonnie for lunch. She could always text Mike later.

For a long moment, Hannah debated whether she should take the boots with her and give them to Bonnie. But Bonnie had left them here and she probably didn’t want them back. Bonnie’s fix with duct tape had probably worked just fine on shoveled sidewalks and plowed streets, but it was quite obvious that deep snow had rendered the repair useless.