Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder (Hannah Swensen #1)(42)

She reached for the notepad she kept by the couch and scrawled a list of names: Coach Watson, Norman, Blaze, and Alfred Redbird. Then she sighed and drew a line through each of them. As an afterthought, Hannah added Danielle to the list, but she really didn’t think that Danielle had shot Ron. All the same, she decided to check to see if she had an alibi.

Hannah picked up the phone book and paged through to find Danielle’s number. If Coach Watson answered, she’d just hang up.

Danielle picked up on the second ring and Hannah breathed a sigh of relief. “Hi, Danielle. It’s Hannah Swensen. Can you talk?”

“Just a minute, Hannah.” Hannah heard Danielle say something to Boyd about ordering cookies and then she came back on the line. “We’ll need five dozen for my art class Halloween party, Hannah. I was thinking of something with orange frosting.”

“No problem,” Hannah answered quickly. “If I ask you yes or no questions, will that be all right?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Did you see anyone or make any calls after Ron dropped you off on Wednesday morning?”

“Yes. I’d love to see a sample, Hannah, but I can’t come in that early on Wednesday morning. The Sparklettes man delivers our water between eight and nine and I have to be here to let him in.”

“Can you figure out any way to tell me exactly what time he was there?”

“I hate those morning deliveries, too. Last Wednesday he was here at eight and I almost overslept.”

“Thanks, Danielle.” Hannah hung up and jotted down a note by Danielle’s name. She’d check with the Sparklettes driver and if he’d delivered water to Danielle at eight, she could cross Danielle’s name off the list.

It was another dead end. Hannah sighed and tried to think of something positive. Positive thoughts were supposed to lead to pleasant dreams and she didn’t want a repeat of last night’s nightmares. At least she was getting along with Andrea much better lately. Perhaps all the old resentments were fading with the years and they could actually become friends.

Hannah had to admit that she’d been a pretty hard act to follow in school. Andrea had taken a lot of criticism from her teachers about the fact that Hannah had been a straight-A student. Instead of competing with Hannah’s academic record, Andrea had thrown herself into extracurricular activities. She’d starred in school plays, sung solos at concerts, and edited the school paper and yearbook. And Andrea had certainly been more popular with the boys than Hannah had been. Andrea’s Friday and Saturday nights had been booked from her freshman year through her senior year.

Hannah sighed. She could boast of only two dates during her entire time in high school. One had been a study date at her house with a classmate who was about to flunk chemistry and it had taken some very broad hints from Delores before he’d agreed to take Hannah out for pizza to thank her for his passing grade. The other had been her senior prom date. Hannah had found out later that it had entailed a promise of a part-time summer job in her father’s shop for Cliff Schuman to show up at her door with a corsage in his hand.

College had been different. There she hadn’t been treated as a pariah because she read the classics and knew who Wittgenstein and Sartre were. In college, the ability to do an algebraic equation in her head wasn’t considered a personality defect, and no one thought less of her if she knew the atomic number of einsteinium. Of course, there had been a group of incredibly gorgeous, bubbleheaded girls who’d turned male heads, but most of them had either flunked out or left to get their MRS degrees.

Hannah had finally started to date as a sophomore in college. She’d gone out with a too-tall, too-thin history major for several months. After that, there had been an intense art major who’d confided that he was celibate right after she’d begun to think they’d had something going, and a master’s candidate who’d wanted her input on his thesis. True love, or perhaps it was true lust, hadn’t found her until November in her second year of postgraduate work. That was when Hannah had met the man she’d thought would be her soul mate.

Bradford Ramsey had been the assistant professor in Hannah’s poetry seminar, and the first time he’d given a lecture, she’d been spellbound. It hadn’t been his manner of speaking or the way he’d read stanzas from Byron and Keats. It had been his marvelous, soul-searching dark blue eyes.

Social meetings after class with the professor had been frowned upon by the administration unless several students were in attendance, but Brad had found ways around the rules. Hannah had gone to his office for several student-professor conferences. After he’d told her that he thought he was in love with her, she’d wound up at his apartment, sneaking through the lobby at eleven at night with the hood of her parka obscuring her face. That night, and the nights that followed, had been memorable. Hannah had discovered that sex was a lot more fun than she’d thought it would be. But the last night she’d spent with her handsome professor had been memorable in a way she’d never anticipated. His fiancée had driven in for a surprise visit, Brad had panicked, and Hannah had been forced to vacate his bed by way of an icy fire escape.

Hannah had broken it off and told herself that she was wiser for the experience, but that hadn’t made it any easier. Seeing her former lover stride across campus with a gaggle of young, impressionable girls in his wake had been almost too painful to bear. It had come as a relief when Andrea had asked her to leave college and come back to Lake Eden to help settle her father’s affairs. That didn’t mean that Hannah had given up on men. She was just taking a breather, waiting for one she could love and trust to come along. In the meantime, she had her family, her work and her loyal cat. And if her bed was lonely and she sometimes wished that she had someone without furry paws to cuddle, she could deal with it.