Carrot Cake Murder (Hannah Swensen, #10)(13)

Chapter Four


When Hannah’s alarm clock went off in her darkened bedroom, she rolled over on her stomach, clamped the pillow over her head, held it in place with her arms, and tried to block out the noise. She wasn’t ready to get up yet, certainly not now, and maybe not ever. She’d just closed her eyes, she was very sure of that, and it couldn’t possibly be time to get up, get dressed, and drive to work. Perhaps the power had gone off in the middle of the night, causing her alarm clock to malfunction. Or perhaps she’d goofed when she’d set it last night. Whatever the reason, she was absolutely certain it couldn’t possibly be four-thirty in the morning.

She really should check on the time, but that meant she’d have to open her eyes. If she kept them closed, she might be able to drift off to sleep again. Quite clearly it wasn’t time to get up. She wouldn’t be this tired if it were. She assessed her level of exhaustion and decided it had to be two-thirty or three in the morning. If she’d gotten another hour or two of sleep, her eyelids wouldn’t feel as if they’d been weighted down with hockey pucks.

Hannah gave a little smile under her protective pillow. How much did hockey pucks weigh, anyway? She seemed to remember that she’d looked it up once, and the regulation weight was between five and a half and six ounces. That was the NHL standard. Then there were the blue four-ounce training puck, and the two-pound steel puck that was used to increase wrist strength. There were also hollow, lightweight, orange fluorescent pucks that were used for road hockey and floor hockey. Roller hockey pucks were made of plastic in light, visible colors. They were available in yellow, orange, pink, and green, but red was the most popular color.

Hannah gave a little groan. Now that she’d recalled almost everything she’d read or heard about hockey pucks, she was wide-awake. And her alarm clock was still ringing. She had to reach out and shut it off. It would wake the neighbors if it continued to ring.

Her eyes popped open, and Hannah sat bolt upright in bed. Her alarm clock couldn’t be ringing. It didn’t ring. It beeped. Her phone was ringing, and that meant something was horribly wrong. Not even her mother called her before six in the morning!

Two-thirty. Hannah glanced at the lighted display on her clock as she reached for the phone by her bed. She snatched it from the cradle, her heart beating hard, hoping against hope that it was a wrong number and nothing awful had happened to her family. “Hello?” she croaked, quickly clearing her throat so that she could talk.

“Hannah?” a young female voice asked.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“It’s Sue Plotnik from downstairs. Is everything all right up there?”

Hannah glanced around. Everything looked fine, and she was fine, too, if she didn’t count the fact that her pulse was racing. “I’m fine, and everything looks okay. What’s the matter?”

“We’re not sure. The noise woke us up. Don’t you hear it?”

Hannah started to ask what noise Sue was talking about when she heard it, a low rumbling and thumping like an unbalanced load of clothing in a washing machine. “I hear it now. What is it?”

“Phil thought there must be something wrong in your master bathroom. The thumping is loudest when we stand in our bathroom and that’s right below your bathroom.”

“Hold on and I’ll go check.”

“Wait!” Sue sounded panicked. “Phil says not to go in there alone. He thinks maybe a burglar tried to get in your bathroom window and got stuck.”

“That couldn’t be it. Right after I moved in, Bill put locks on all my windows. They only open far enough to let the air in.”

“Okay, then. I’ll hang on while you go check, and if you’re not back on the line in two minutes, I’ll send Phil up with the extra key.”

Hannah’s heart was beating hard as she placed the receiver on the nightstand and headed for her bathroom. The door was open an inch or two, and the rumbling noise was loud. She really didn’t know how she’d slept through it, but she supposed that if a person was tired enough, that person could sleep through anything. After a long night of studying when she was in college, she’d slept through a tornado siren. She hadn’t learned about the tornado until the next morning, when she emerged from her apartment to find several large trees uprooted near the entrance to her building.

Hannah inched the door open and stepped cautiously into the bathroom. The noise was coming from her tub, and it sounded like thunder in the space that was enclosed by tile walls and glass doors that turned the tub into a shower stall.

Something was in there! By the dim nightlight she had plugged in by the sink, Hannah could see a dark blur racing around the enclosure. The glass door was open a few inches, but the dark blur passed by too quickly to identify. It was short and there was a scrabbling noise as it fought for purchase against the slippery sides of the tub. It had to be some kind of animal, smaller than a dog and about the size of…

“Moishe!” Hannah gasped, sliding the glass door open in time to see her feline rounding the back of the tub and heading for the faucets. He skidded to a stop, gave her a Whatcha-want? look, decided it wasn’t something he needed to pursue, and began speeding around the bathtub racetrack again.

There was only one thing to do, and Hannah did it. She stepped into the tub and cornered him as he passed by the faucets again. “That’s quite enough, Moishe!” she told him in no uncertain terms.