Lemon Meringue Pie Murder (Hannah Swensen #4)(93)

The pieces of the puzzle began to align themselves as Hannah measured out the flour. David "Speedy" Aspen had

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robbed a bank and hidden the money somewhere, perhaps in Mrs. Voelker's basement. Since she'd known him as a child, she would have welcomed him if he'd come to visit. The stolen money couldn't be behind the jam jars. The shelf was shallow and stacks of bills would have taken up more space than that. But the furnace room was old and the walls and floor were dirt. Speedy could have cut a hole in the back of the shelf, dug a cave right into the dirt wall, hidden the money there, and stuck the board back in place. With peach jam on the shelves blocking the cut board from view, no one would ever have found it.

But someone had found it The money was beginning to surface in the Lake Eden area. Hannah remembered Rhonda's one-way ticket to Zurich as she added flour to her bowl and another piece of the puzzle clicked into place. She'd wondered how Rhonda could afford to stay in Europe and now she knew the answer. Swiss banks had numbered accounts and they were a perfect place to hide the stolen money.

The puzzle was starting to take form now that she had some key pieces. The letter had been in Rhonda's apartment. That meant she'd found it before the night of her death. And if Mrs. Voelker had played the Treasure Hunt game with Speedy, she'd probably played it with Rhonda, too. Rhonda might even have known about the robbery, since the robber was a shirttail relation of hers. Rhonda could have found the letter with her great-aunt's effects, gone down to the basement to check the jam shelf, and realized that the stolen money was stashed in the furnace room wall.

As Hannah added more flour to her bowl, she asked herself another question. If Rhonda had found the letter shortly before she'd bought that one-way ticket, why hadn't she removed the money and taken it back to her apartment? Hannah thought about that as she stirred, and then she remembered what Beatrice Koester had told her about Rhonda's apartment. They'd replaced the carpet and repainted it in June. That meant workmen had been going in and out while Rhonda

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had been at work. Rhonda must have decided that the money would be safer in her great-aunt's basement where it had been hidden, undiscovered, for years. It was the reason Rhonda had hesitated about signing the deed. She'd wanted to make absolutely sure that she could go out to the house over the weekend to pick up a few mementos.

"A few mementos," Hannah muttered, stirring for all she was worth. "A fortune in stolen money is more like it!"

Suddenly another piece of the puzzle fell into place. When Ken Purvis had left Rhonda on Friday night, she must have decided that it was a perfect time to retrieve the money. Although Ken had believed that Rhonda was stuck without a way back to town, Hannah knew that Rhonda had been a resourceful woman. She could have walked to the neighboring farm to call a taxi, gone out to the road to flag down a passing resident, or stayed overnight and dealt with the problem in the morning. Rhonda had packed up that money. Hannah was sure of that. And the killer had caught her in the act of retrieving it and murdered her for the stolen cash.

Hannah had the motive. It was greed, and greed could be powerful. Hannah added the rest of the flour to her bowl and stirred it in, thinking about the money that had surfaced. Rhonda's killer had it now and he was spending it. One ten-dollar bill from Lake Eden Neighborhood Drugs had surfaced in her own shop on Wednesday. Someone had shopped in the drugstore that morning and passed a ten-dollar bill from the old bank robbery.

"Oh-oh," Hannah groaned, remembering the theory she'd discarded when she'd discovered that the bank robbers had never been prisoners at Stillwater. She might have crossed Jed off her suspect list too soon. He'd been spending a lot of money lately and he couldn't be making that much doing handyman work. There was the late-model pickup truck, the lunches at the cafe every day, and the expensive hand-embroidered vest that he'd been wearing at the celebration today.

Hannah tore off a strip of plastic wrap and covered her

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mixing bowl, smoothing down the edges to make a tight seal. Was Jed Rhonda's killer? Mike had told her that they'd found Jed's cap in the basement. What if he hadn't left it there when he'd replaced the glass in the window? What if he'd dropped it when he'd killed Rhonda?

A likely scenario began to take shape in Hannah's mind. Ken Purvis hadn't seen a car in the driveway when he'd driven up on the night that Rhonda was killed, but that was before Jed had bought the pickup, and he would have been driving Freddy's mother's old car. He'd told Hannah that the starter was defective and he had to park it at the top of the hill. What if Jed had left the car on the shoulder of the road and walked in?

Hannah's mind went into overdrive. If Jed had knocked on the door and gotten no answer, he might have looked in the windows to see if Rhonda was there. And if he'd seen Rhonda in the basement packing up the money, he could have gone inside, killed her, and taken the cash. Jed was strong. He could have dug her grave in the hard-packed dirt floor before Ken Purvis drove up and frightened him away. And in Jed's haste to hide the board that covered the hole in the wall, he could have dropped three peach jam jars and replaced them with the strawberry jam.

Another part of the scenario occurred to Hannah and she gulped. Was Jed the one who'd attacked Freddy and left him for dead under their dock? If Freddy had somehow discovered that Jed had killed Rhonda, he would have told someone. Mrs. Sawyer had taught her son to be a good citizen and Freddy knew that murder was wrong. Had Jed's concern at the hospital tonight been because Freddy was injured? Or had he been concerned that Freddy would recover enough to tell someone that Jed had attacked him and killed Rhonda? Just as soon as she put her cookie dough in the cooler she'd call Mike and tell him her suspicions. If she was right and Jed was the killer, he'd been duping everyone in town, including her!