They were Bonnie’s boots. She recognized them. There were uneven patches of darker-colored brown on both of the boots from the sides of the soles all the way up to the ankles. There was no duct tape in sight, but it had probably lost its adhesive grip on the leather when the leather had gotten wet. But was the leather wet? Or was it simply discolored? Hannah had to know for certain. She moved close enough to the boots to touch the area that looked wet. It was wet, very wet, so soaked that it had not yet dried out. The night that she’d seen Bonnie at the bar, the same night that Phyllis had been murdered, Bonnie had worn her soaked boots inside the Corner Tavern and then she’d changed to the only dry footwear she’d had in her car, her red tennis shoes and a pair of Gil’s argyle socks. But the pair of wet boots didn’t necessarily mean that Bonnie had anything to do with Phyllis’s murder. Bonnie might have walked through some deep snow before she got to the Corner Tavern, realized that her boots were wet when she arrived, and carried her tennis shoes inside to put them on in the cloakroom.
