Devil's Food Cake Murder (Hannah Swensen, #14)(8)

“Do you have a list of stolen goods?” Andrea asked her husband. And then she pulled a notebook and pen from her purse and wrote down what her husband told her.

While Andrea was writing what appeared to be a lengthy list, Hannah stirred eggs and vanilla into the sugar and butter mixture and took out another bowl for the dry ingredients. She mixed the flour with the baking powder and the salt and made sure they were well blended. She added them to the bowl with the brown sugar, butter, and eggs, and mixed everything up with a wooden spoon. Then she added chopped walnuts and gave the batter a final stir.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Andrea said, giving a little laugh. “It’s called rose cut because it looks like a flower. It was a popular cut way back when. And it’s almost three carats?”

Hannah divided the contents of her bowl into three batches. She added the butterscotch chips to Bertie’s batch and spread the batter in the bottom of a nine-inch by thirteen-inch pan she’d lined with heavy duty foil. Since she’d tripled the recipe, Hannah mixed semi-sweet chocolate chips into the second batch and white chocolate chips into the third. Personally, she preferred these yummy cookie bars plain. The butterscotch flavor from the ingredients was absolutely delicious all by itself. But several of their customers were crazy about white chocolate chips, and she knew they’d be delighted with the combination of white chocolate and butterscotch. There were also those who wouldn’t dream of ordering anything without dark chocolate, and the third batch she’d made was bound to please them.

“How many diamonds did you say were around it?” Andrea asked. And then, as Hannah watched, her sister’s eyes widened. “Sixteen! It’s just loaded with diamonds! Did they tell you what it’s worth?”

Hannah carried the three pans she’d filled to the oven and slipped them in. She turned just in time to see her sister gulp a little air.

“That’s incredible, all right!” Andrea said. “But if the diamonds add up to almost four carats, it sounds reasonable.”

Andrea listened for a moment and then she laughed. “You’re right, honey. It doesn’t sound reasonable. No ring should be worth that much money. How did they get it?”

Hannah poured herself another cup of coffee and sat down on a stool across from her sister. Some people might not be able to read upside down, but Hannah was well schooled in the art. When she was growing up, she’d helped her sisters with their reading lessons. The three sisters, Hannah, the oldest, Andrea, the next in line, and Michelle, the youngest, had gathered in Hannah’s room to go over their assignments for the next day. At that time, Hannah had found that reading upside down made their homework sessions shorter and increased her sleep time.

What Hannah read was a list of jewelry. There were necklaces, brooches, tiaras, bracelets, and rings. But the item at the end of the list, the item that Andrea had been discussing with Bill, was an antique ring worth more than Hannah could fathom.

“While they were sleeping,” Andrea repeated, shivering slightly. “I hate to think of what might have happened if they’d woken up.”

Awakened, not woken up, Hannah’s mind corrected. Andrea always had trouble with that one, but this wasn’t the time to point it out to her.

“No!” Andrea sounded shocked at the next piece of information she learned from her husband. “If they hit the neighbor with their getaway car and he died, is that murder?”

That’s the felony murder rule, Hannah answered the question, but not out loud. Any unlawful homicide that occurs in the commission or attempted commission of a felony is felony murder.

“Felony murder,” Andrea echoed the answer that Hannah hadn’t spoken. “What I don’t get is why she had all that expensive jewelry spread out in her dressing room.”

Several scenarios flashed through Hannah’s mind, but what Andrea confirmed next wasn’t one of them.

“A charity event at the Walker? And she couldn’t decide which gown she wanted to wear so she took all of the jewelry out of the safe?” Andrea frowned slightly. “I guess I can understand that, but why didn’t she lock up what she didn’t wear before they left the house? Or at least lock everything up when she got home?”

Hannah reached out to feel Andrea’s coffee cup. It was stone cold. She picked it up, carried it to the sink to dump it out, and refilled it with fresh hot coffee.

“She thought he put it back in the safe, and he thought she did,” Andrea said with a snort. “That’s a pretty lame excuse, but I know it happens. Remember when I thought you put on the coffee, and you thought I put on the coffee, and when we came downstairs in the morning there wasn’t any? And since we were late, there wasn’t time to make it and we had to leave for work without coffee?”

Hannah shuddered at the thought. No coffee in the morning was about the worst thing she could imagine. There was no way she could get along in the morning without coffee. If she didn’t have a minimum of one cup before she stepped into the shower, she’d probably fall asleep and drown!

“You want me to keep my eye out for the missing jewelry here in Lake Eden?” Andrea said incredulously. “Bill…honey…that’s ridiculous! Why would it wind up here? We don’t have any pawnshops, and even if we did, they wouldn’t buy expensive jewelry like that. And I can practically guarantee that the burglars aren’t going to stand on the corner in front of Hal and Rose’s Cafe and try to sell an antique diamond ring for thousands and thousands of dollars. People don’t have that kind of money.”