place at the baked goods competition tonight.”
“It sounds marvelous! I’ll have some when I take my next break. And that reminds me…you don’t have anyone staying in your guest room, do you?”
“No.” Hannah readied herself for a major imposition. Her mother had mentioned something about a cousin three times removed who’d wanted to visit Lake Eden.
“Oh, good. Would you mind terribly if Michelle stayed with you?”
“You mean…our Michelle?”
“Yes. It’s just that I’m so busy right now. I really don’t have much time to spend with her, and poor Michelle must be lonely with only the television for company. I thought it might be more fun for her if she…”
“That’s fine, Mother,” Hannah agreed, before Delores could continue. “I’d love to have Michelle stay with me.”
“Wonderful! Go out there right now and have her pack up her things. Tell her she can use my car for the week. Then she’ll have her own transportation, and you won’t have to drive her around.”
“But won’t you need your car?”
“No. The only place I’m going is out to the fair, and I can ride with Carrie. We signed up for the same hours at the booth.”
“All right, Mother.”
“Tell her to come in and say goodbye before she leaves. I’d come out, but I still have several more pages to write before I’m through, and then I need to get some sleep. I’m burning the candle at both ends to get everything done.”
“Okay. I’ll tell her.” Hannah stood up, but before she could take a step, her mother stopped her.
“It’s not that I don’t want her, dear. Make that clear, will you? It’s just that with working at Granny’s Attic and supervising the booth at the fair, I don’t have time to get things done around here. And that reminds me…you are going to be at the Historical Society booth from eight to closing on Saturday night, aren’t you?”
Hannah took a deep breath and stifled the complaints she wanted to make. She’d agreed to help out in the Lake Eden Historical Society booth when her mother had asked, assuming she’d be passing out literature and taking contributions. But Delores had tricked her. What Hannah had really agreed to do was sit on a stool in a frilly dress while contributors threw balls at a target that would open a trapdoor and dunk her into a vat of cold water.
“Hannah?” Delores prodded.
“Yes, Mother. I said I would and I’ll be there.”
“Thank you, dear. And thank you for the coffeecake. I’ll have a piece when I take my next break. Chocolate and cherries are my favorite combination.”
“I know,” Hannah said. And then she headed out the door to tell Michelle that she was being transplanted from her mother’s guest room to Hannah’s guest room in the condo, and she didn’t have the slightest idea what their mother was writing.
Hannah woke up with a cat on her head. Moishe had climbed up in an attempt to wake her so she’d shut off the alarm. When she didn’t sit up quickly enough, he batted at several unruly curls that were sticking out over her ear. And when that didn’t work, he gave an ear-splitting yowl that made his wishes abundantly clear.
“Okay, okay,” Hannah groaned, reaching out with one sleep-leaden arm to depress the alarm button on the clock. But the clock wasn’t where it was supposed to be, on the table right next to her bed. The bedside lamp wasn’t there either, and Hannah encountered a perfectly smooth surface. What was going on?
Moishe yowled again, and Hannah realized that what she’d heard wasn’t her alarm clock at all. It was coming from the television, and the clock belonged to a starlet whose face she didn’t recognize. Hannah watched for a moment through partially closed eyes. She’d fallen asleep on the couch last night during Casablanca. Since this wasn’t a young Ingrid Bergman, Hannah figured she was at least one, probably two features past her bedtime.
The starlet reached out to turn off the alarm clock and climbed out of bed with the sheet wrapped around her like a toga. As she walked across the bedroom set and disappeared through a door, Hannah wondered if anyone had ever pulled the sheet off the bed for modesty’s sake while they were alone in their bedroom. It seemed silly. You’d just have to re-make the bed from scratch.
After one glance at the time, which was subtly displayed at the lower right-hand corner of the screen, Hannah clicked off the television with the remote control. It was almost four-thirty in the morning. Since she always set her alarm clock, the one in her bedroom, to go off at a quarter to five, it seemed silly to go to bed for fifteen minutes and count the seconds she had left before it was really time to get up.
A compelling scent wafted in from the kitchen to help Hannah make up her mind. The timer on her coffee pot had activated, and her morning brew was ready.
“Coffee,” she pronounced in a voice that was midway between a groan and a prayer. She needed caffeine, and she needed it fast, before the specter of another hot, muggy day would drive her to turn on the window air conditioner the former owners had installed in the bedroom and sleep until the unseasonable June heat wave headed east, or west, or anywhere far away from Lake Eden, Minnesota.
Hannah stood up and shivered slightly. She’d fallen asleep in her favorite summer sleep outfit, an extra-long, extra-large tank top in such an eye-popping shade of magenta that she hoped Moishe’s vet, Dr. Hagaman, was right and cats truly were color-blind. Not only was her sleepwear the wrong color choice for anyone with red hair, it was plastered to her skin in a manner her mother might call decidedly unladylike.
“Okay, I’m up,” Hannah declared to the orange and white tomcat who still wore the scars of his former life on the streets. She tugged her tank top back into place, got to her feet with what she thought was a minimum of groaning, and headed off to the kitchen. “Just let me pour a mug of Swedish Plasma and then I’ll get your breakfast.”
But Moishe didn’t follow her into the kitchen as he usually did. He didn’t even move from the back of the couch where he’d perched. And then everything came back in a rush of memory, and Hannah recalled why she’d been sleeping on the couch. She was worried about Moishe. He wasn’t eating. And she’d wanted to wake up and take note if she heard him crunching his food in the middle of the night.
Hannah had just poured her first, life-giving mug of coffee when she heard a voice that seemed to be coming from inside her condo.
“Is Moishe okay?” the voice asked.
Even in her sleep-deprived state, Hannah recognized that voice. It was Michelle, and she was staying in the guest room.
“Don’t know yet. Want coffee?” she managed to say, anything other than Pidgin English eluding her.
“I’ll get it. Just sit there and drink yours. Do you know your eyes aren’t open all the way?”
“No.”
“What
