Ash got up to walk me out and I asked, “New question. I would have asked Hal, but I don’t think we’re on speaking terms right now. How’s Tabitha? I haven’t seen her around lately.”

“No,” he said. “And you won’t for two or three more weeks.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Not with her.” Ash shook his head. “She’s downstate, taking care of her sister, who fractured her wrist snowboarding. Needed surgery, lots of pins and screws, sounded like.”

“Um, a younger sister?” Like her husband, Tabitha was in her early sixties.

“Vanessa is seventy-one.” He left me at the front door and headed back to his office.

I smiled. Not that I was happy about Tabitha’s sister having such a bad accident, of course, but that she had a sister who was snowboarding in her seventies. Yet another positive role model for me.

Then my smile faded. A few months ago, Tabitha had been a huge help on a different murder investigation. Unless I got Rafe more involved, this time I was on my own.

Chapter 6

As I left the sheriff’s office and started my walk up to the library, I thought about Ryan. Hoping that he was okay, afraid that he wasn’t, and laying plans for proving that he had nothing to do with the downstate robbery and murder, and certainly not Pug’s murder.

When I was halfway through downtown, I had a brilliant idea: If I could help find whoever killed Pug, that would go a long way toward establishing Ryan’s innocence. Maybe not in a court of law, but at least in the court of public opinion. Not that I had any genius ideas on how to do that, but surely something would come to me. Rafe would help with the brainstorming (especially if I agreed to eat at Hoppe’s Brewing that night), and if I kept my ears, eyes, and mind open, all sorts of ideas would pop up and some of them might even be good ones, and—

“Hey, Minnie!”

I jumped. To my right, Tom Abenaw, owner and proprietor of Cookie Tom’s, who had to be the skinniest baker in the history of bakers, was laughing.

“You were going to walk right past me without saying hello, weren’t you?”

Of course I was, because I was so busy thinking about keeping my ears and eyes open that I hadn’t been keeping my eyes and mind open, which might be the definition of irony. “Would I do that to my favorite cookie maker?”

“Sure. You do it all the time.”

One of these days the habit of being completely lost in my thoughts was going to get me into serious trouble. “But never intentionally. You know that, right?”

“No worries. Everybody knows what you’re like.” He laughed again, nodded, and headed back inside his shop.