Cream Puff Murder (Hannah Swensen, #11)(5)

She didn’t believe it for a second. No good would come of what she was about to do. She’d much rather sit here all day debating the pros and cons of her decision, but she had to get going or she’d be late.

“Okay,” she said, standing up and addressing Moishe again. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be, so here goes nothing.” And then she shrugged out of the robe she was wearing and turned to face the mirror.

There was dead silence in the room. It was the same silence that followed a terrible disaster, the same eerie stillness that motorists talked about after a multicar pileup on the interstate. It was the total absence of sound that occurred after every catastrophe, and it was even more of a catastrophe than Hannah had thought it would be.

A generous sprinkling of silvering in the center of her reflection could have spared her this moment. Spidery cracks splitting the glass into irregular shapes and turning her image into a Dali painting would have done the trick as well. Even better, the entire mirror could have fallen forward onto the floor, leaving nothing but an ornamental frame around the paper Delores had chosen for the walls of her eldest daughter’s boudoir.

“Good grief!” Hannah moaned, echoing Charlie Brown’s famous utterance. She’d known it would be bad, but not this bad. The screaming yellow accents on her black exercise outfit called blaring attention to the extra padding around her middle. Her legs, encased in black tights, looked like stout tree trunks, fully capable of supporting the oh-so-much larger torso than she’d realized she had. She’d chosen to wear black because it was slimming, but there was no escaping the truth. She was stout, like her Grandma Swensen. And although she’d loved her grandmother with every fiber of her being, she’d never aspired to actually look like her.

“At least no one will see me except a bunch of other women trying to lose weight,” Hannah told the cat, who was bristling slightly as he regarded her with round, unblinking eyes. “I know I don’t look good, but I wish you wouldn’t bristle that way.”

Moishe made no sound, but Hannah thought the hair on his back smoothed out a bit. It was time for a fish-flavored reward, and then she had to leave. She’d promised to meet Andrea at the Tri-County Mall to go over her exercise routine before class started. Hannah’s plan was to learn the exercises, attend the thirty-minute class, and then drive to The Cookie Jar to help her partner finish the baking for the day.

It took only a few moments to get ready to go. Hannah turned on the television for Moishe, made sure his food bowl was full to the brim, and checked to make sure he had plenty of water. Then she slipped into her longest jacket, one her grandmother would have called a car coat, grabbed her purse and her car keys, tossed several treats to the cat who was waiting patiently on the back of the couch, and hurried out the door.

A chill wind whipped her red curls into an even more unruly state than usual. This second week in November was cold, and it smelled like snow was on the way. But something was wrong, and Hannah stopped midway down the outside stairs from her second floor condo to figure out what it was.

There were no strange noises coming from any of the condos, and the smooth expanse of snow that had fallen during the night was unbroken by human footprints. All the doors and windows in her line of sight were intact, and she didn’t see any evidence of burglary or vandalism. Everything seemed to be perfectly normal, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

There was a faint cyan cast to the landscape, and the wood siding on the condos stood out in sharp relief. The scene reminded Hannah of an old sepia photograph she’d seen of her grandparents’ farm. The color was different. The shadows in the photograph were brown, but the shadows she saw now were bluish-black. They were different than anything she’d ever seen before.

Blue light. She thought about that for a moment. Was this some kind of natural phenomenon like a meteor shower, or a blue moon? Hannah hurried down the covered staircase and looked up at the sky. She didn’t see anything unusual in the heavens. The only difference between this morning and any other morning was the light. The sky was brighter in the east than it had ever been before.

A delighted laugh escaped Hannah’s lips. Her mirth took a visible form in the icy air, and the little cloud of vapor that formed reminded Hannah of the balloon above a cartoon character’s head. To carry the analogy even further, the balloon should be filled with a lightbulb to show that she’d figured out what was amiss. Of course things looked different this morning. She was accustomed to leaving her condo at five AM when it was pitch black. On this particular morning she was a full hour later than usual.

Hannah stepped carefully on the sidewalk between the buildings and took the stairs down to the garage. It was underground, stretching the length of her four-condo building and extending across to serve the four units in the building next door. Hannah hurried down the steps. She had to rush to meet Andrea on time, and as she reached the bottom step, she came very close to running into her downstairs neighbor, Phil Plotnik, who worked nights at DelRay Manufacturing.

“Whoa!” Phil said, reaching out to grab her arms. “What are you doing here this time of morning? Did you sleep late?”

“Not really. Lisa’s handling the baking this morning, and I’m meeting Andrea at the mall.”

“I thought the mall didn’t open until ten.”

“It doesn’t, but Andrea’s a member at Heavenly Bodies and she’s got a key to their outside door. We’re going to work out before anyone else gets there.”