“Okay. What is it?”

“It’s about Shawna Lee Quinn!”

“What about her?” Hannah took a deep breath and held it, hoping that her sister’s gossip didn’t include Mike.

“She’s leaving town tonight.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Would I kid about something that important? Bill called me from the station to tell me. there was a death in the family and Shawna Lee’s going back home to Georgia.”

Hannah curbed her impulse to cheer at Shawna Lee’s impending absence and did her best to react to the gravity of the situation. “I’m sorry for her loss. Who died?”

“Vanessa’s husband. And from what Shawna Lee told Bill, it wasn’t unexpected.”

“Who’s Vanessa?”

“Shawna Lee’s younger sister. They’re less than a year apart and they were really close growing up. Vanessa’s husband was an octogenarian.”

Hannah’s eyebrows shot up. Shawna Lee was in her middle twenties, and it seemed unlikely that her younger sister would marry a man who was sixty years her senior. “Her husband was in his eighties?”

“That’s what octogenarian means. Shawna Lee told Bill that they’d been married for a little over a year before he died.”

Hannah didn’t comment. It could have been a love match, but the term gold digger came to mind. She was trying to figure out a polite way to pose the question, when Andrea nodded.

“I know what you’re thinking and you’re right. He was a rich octogenarian and he owned a whole string of home improvement stores. Vanessa inherited everything and from what Shawna Lee told Bill, it amount to a lot of money!”

“How long is Shawna Lee staying?”

“I don’t know, for sure, but Bill asked her when he gave her the standard form to fill out.”

“Yes?” Hannah asked, holding her breath. She hoped it was a good long time.

“She said she wasn’t sure, that she’d been homesick for her sister and her family and she could hardly wait to go home for Christmas, even under these sad circumstances. She also promised to call him in two weeks to let him know whether she’d be coming back to her job … or not.”

“You mean there’s a chance she won’t come back?” Hannah could hardly believe her good fortune.

“That’s what it sounds like to me. Bill has to hold her job for a month. That’s a union regulation. But after that, the job can be posted at the sheriff’s discretion.”

“And Bill’s discretion will be right away?”

“It will be if I have anything to say about it! I feel the same way about Shawna Lee as you do, and her sister sounds like more of the same. I mean … I suppose it’s unfair of me to judge her when I’ve never even met her, but think back to when you were twenty-three.”

“Okay.” Hannah thought back to her college days and she remembered the efficiency apartment she’d rented in a crumbling stucco building six blocks from campus. She’d fixed it all up with low-cost decorations, and it hadn’t seemed to matter that if she took longer than a three-minute shower, she’d run out of hot water.