Raspberry Danish Murder (Hannah Swensen #22)(100)

This is almost like old times, Hannah thought as she climbed the covered staircase with Michelle. Dinner with Norman, and Mike is bound to show up with Lonnie. All we have to do is figure out what to make. She did a mental inventory of the supplies she had in the freezer and began to smile. “How does Chicken Paprikash sound to you?”

“It sounds great. I love your Chicken Paprikash and I can bake something easy for dessert.”





Chapter Thirty


As they climbed the covered staircase past her living room window, Hannah glanced into her living room. No Moishe. But perhaps he was waiting by the door to greet them by jumping up into her arms.

“You or me?” Michelle asked her when they reached the second-floor landing.

“I’ll catch him this time,” Hannah answered, bracing herself as Michelle unlocked the door and pushed it open.

The expected feline missile did not launch and land in Hannah’s arms. There was no sound of rushing feet and no orange and white blur as Moishe went airborne. Hannah sighed. Moishe was probably sleeping again, and as they went inside and shut the door behind them, she wished she knew why he was always so tired.

As they stepped into the living room, Hannah heard a whining noise. “What’s that?” she asked Michelle.

“I don’t know, but it sounds like it’s coming from my room.”

For a moment, Hannah was puzzled, but then she realized that they were home much earlier than they usually were and the RoboVac was still vacuuming the wall-to-wall carpeting. “It’s the RoboVac,” she told Michelle.

“I’ve never seen it operate,” Michelle replied. “Let’s go look.”

Hannah led the way as they walked down the hallway to watch her new vacuum do its job. They looked in the open guest room door and the sight they saw both amazed and amused them. The RoboVac was whirring away, twisting and turning around the furniture in the guest bedroom. And right behind the robotic vacuum was Moishe. The hair was bristled on his back, and his ears were flat against his head.

The vacuum turned and Moishe leaped back, startled. He gave the round case a swipe with his paw, but it didn’t stop moving. Instead, it turned again and Moishe reacted again. Then the RoboVac moved toward Moishe, and Moishe sprang out of the way as it headed toward the door. Hannah and Michelle stepped aside and left the room.

“So that’s why you’re so tired!” Hannah said, startling her feline roommate even more than the RoboVac had. “Come here, Moishe. I’ll pick you up and Michelle will go get the kitty treats.”

Contrary to his usual reaction to that invitation, Moishe walked past them as if they were invisible and followed the RoboVac down the hallway, stalking it as it made its way back to the living room. Only when the vacuum had gone back to its corner and shut itself off did Moishe rush back to them.

“Just wait until I tell Norman and Mike about this,” Hannah said as she picked Moishe up and carried him to his favorite spot on the back of the couch. “I’ll bet that Cuddles stalks Norman’s RoboVac, too.”

*

Dinner was tasty and, just as Hannah had expected, Mike and Lonnie arrived shortly before they were ready to sit down to eat. Hannah had already told Norman about watching Moishe stalk the RoboVac, and he’d laughed and promised to set both of their machines on a schedule that wouldn’t exhaust their pets.

“This is really good,” Mike said as he took a third helping from the slow cooker crock in the center of the table. “I’m glad we dropped by.”

“Michelle and I knew that you would if your food-dar was working,” Hannah told him. “By the way, we found out that Ross had a storage unit at the Superior Storage location in St. Paul.”

Mike dropped his fork with a clatter, even though he’d barely begun to eat his third helping. “But you gave me the key! How did you get in?”

“The rent was three months in arrears, so all we had to do was pay the back rent and the manager let us in,” Norman told him.

“They’re not supposed to do that unless . . . was the unit in Ross’s name?”

“Not exactly,” Michelle explained, “but the manager thought it was close enough. The name on the application was Russ Burton.”

“You lucked out,” Mike said. “The manager must have thought that someone got the name wrong.”

“That’s exactly what she thought,” Hannah said. “She said they’d hired a part-time worker to type the names of the tenants in the computer when they’d switched over to a new system and the worker must have misread the name on the application.”

“Amazing!” Mike said, shaking his head in disbelief. “She shouldn’t have done that, you know.”

“I know, but it turned out that the things stored inside did belong to Ross. I recognized a couple of the luggage tags that Ross’s fiancée made for him while we were in college.”

“And the unit was number three-twelve?” Mike asked Hannah.

“No. It was in the building marked five hundred and the unit was five-twenty. Everything inside was from our college years. Ross must have rented it after he graduated and moved out of the apartment building. The manager told us the unit was rented almost five years ago.”

“Did you leave the stuff there?” Mike asked.