Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder (Hannah Swensen #1)(13)

“Don’t ask. I’m going in to take a quick shower.”

“But Bill’s here and he needs to talk to you.”

Hannah ducked into the bathroom and poked her head out the door. “Where is he?”

“Out in front. He’s minding the counter while I pack up this order for Mrs. Jessup.”

“Give him a mug of coffee and send him back here. I’ll be out just as soon as I’m decent.”

The moment she’d closed the bathroom door behind her, Hannah peeled off her filthy clothes and stuffed them into a laundry bag. Then she climbed into the minuscule metal enclosure that Al Percy had called an “added bonus” when he’d shown her the building, and cranked on the water. She’d used the shower once before, when a fifty-pound bag of flour had burst as she’d muscled it up to the surface of the work island. Her shower might be tiny and cramped, but it worked. Once she was as clean as she could get within the tight confines, she shut off the water and stepped out, toweling off in record time.

She put on the extra set of clothes she kept for emergencies: a pair of worn jeans with a threadbare rear and an old Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt that had faded from royal purple to a dull shade of pewter. The gold block letters had deteriorated into a peeling smudge, but at least she didn’t smell like decaying food. After running a wide-toothed comb through her frizzy red hair, she slipped her feet into the pair of cross-country trainers she hadn’t worn since the last time she’d fallen for the old “jogging is good for you” routine, and opened the door.

Bill was sitting on a stool at the work island. There were cookie crumbs on the otherwise sparkling surface and Hannah assumed that Lisa must have plied him with cookies to keep him from becoming too impatient.

“About time,” Bill commented. “Lisa said you smelled worse than the panhandler that hangs around the Red Owl. What happened?”

“I was just helping you. Edna Ferguson told me that Max hired a woman assistant for Ron. I was collecting the coffee cups they used this morning.”

Bill looked confused. “But Ron didn’t have an assistant. I asked Betty about that. If there was a woman with Ron this morning, she wasn’t hired by the dairy. Didn’t Edna recognize her?”

“Edna didn’t see her. Ron and this woman left before she came in to work.”

“Wait a minute.” Bill held up his hands. “If Edna didn’t see this woman, how did she know about her?”

“From the cups. Edna always leaves a jar of instant coffee out for Ron and there were two cups on the counter this morning. One of them had a smear of lipstick on the rim and that’s how she knew that Ron was with a woman. I collected them and they’re right over there by the dishwasher in that bread wrapper.”

“Why did Edna save them?” Bill looked puzzled as he got up to retrieve the cups.

“She didn’t. I dug them out of the cafeteria Dumpster. They were all the way in the bottom and I had to climb in to get them.”

“That’s why you smelled like a panhandler?”

“You got it.” Hannah gasped as Bill started to reach inside the bread wrapper. “Don’t touch them, Bill! I went to a lot of trouble to preserve any fingerprints.”

Bill’s eyebrows shot up and he froze for a second. He took one look at her earnest face and then he began to laugh. “The lab can’t lift prints from this kind of cup. The surface is too rough.”

“I knew I never should have climbed in that Dumpster!” Hannah groaned. “How about the lipstick? Can you do something with that?”

“It’s possible, unless it’s such a popular color that half the women in Lake Eden wear it.”

“It’s not.” Hannah was very sure of herself. “Most women look awful in bright pink.”

“How would you know? I’ve never seen you wear lipstick.”

“That’s true, but Andrea bought a color like that once and it looked horrible on her. She’s got every other shade there is, so I figure that this one can’t be very popular.”

“You’ve got a point.” Bill started to smile. “Good work, Hannah.”

Hannah was pleased at the compliment, but then she started thinking about the logistics of finding the Lake Eden woman who owned that color of lipstick. “What are you going to do, Bill? Inspect every powder room in town?”

“I hope it won’t come to that. I’ll start with the cosmetic counters and see if they carry this color. Whoever she is, she had to buy it somewhere. That’s called legwork, Hannah, and I’ll need your help. You may not know much about lipstick, but you’ve got to know more than I do.”

Hannah sighed. Watching paint dry held more interest for her than cosmetic counters, and legwork didn’t sound like very much fun.

“You are going to help me, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am. I’m sorry I’m not more enthusiastic, but rooting around in all that garbage got me down.”

“Next time just call me and I’ll do it. I’ve got coveralls in the cruiser and I’m used to stuff like that.”

“I did call you. I even left a message, but you didn’t get back to me in time. And since Edna told me that the trash company was coming to empty the Dumpster at five, I figured that I’d better do it.”