Lemon Meringue Pie Murder (Hannah Swensen Mysteries)

by Joanne Fluke

  Doc Knight led them into Freddy’s room and Hannah felt the tears well up in her eyes. Freddy, who’d always seemed so full of life and enthusiasm, was perfectly still in his hospital bed. It was a shock seeing him immobile like that and Hannah realized that he looked much older, almost as old as he actually was without the boyish grin and the excited voice that had asked constant and sometimes childish questions.

  Freddy was connected by tubes and wires to monitors and other medical equipment, and Hannah was almost glad that he wasn’t awake. If Freddy had been conscious, she would have forced herself to be bright and cheerful for his sake and that would have been difficult.

  As Hannah moved closer, she noticed what she thought was a respirator and she turned to Doc Knight. “Freddy can’t breathe on his own?”

  “Not right now. Shortly after you brought him in, his throat began to swell and it compromised his airway. I gave him antibiotics to reduce the swelling, but they’ll take time to work.”

  Jed looked very concerned. “You mean Freddy could die without that machine?”

  “Yes, but it’s only a temporary condition. The antibiotics should improve matters by tomorrow morning. Then we can take him off the respirator.”

  “I’d better stay here tonight.” Jed sat down in the chair by Freddy’s bed. “If Freddy wakes up in the middle of the night, he’ll be scared and he might try to pull that tube out.”

  Doc Knight shook his head. “We’re keeping Freddy heavily sedated and he won’t wake up. There’s nothing you can do for him now. What you need to do is go home, get some sleep, and come back in the morning. I’ll call you if there’s any change in his condition.”

  “Are you sure? I could sleep in this chair and I wouldn’t be any trouble.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t be, but Freddy’s doing just fine and he’ll sleep through the night. I need you to be rested for tomorrow when we wake him up. That’s when we’ll need your help to reassure him.”

  Jed looked disappointed that he couldn’t stay with Freddy, but he nodded. “Whatever you say. You’re the doctor.”

  “If you don’t have any more questions, I have to get back to the emergency room. I’ve got some traffic injuries to treat.”

  “Sure,” Jed said. “Thanks for everything.”

  After Doc Knight left, Hannah motioned toward the door. “Come on, Jed. Let’s go out to the lobby and call my mother. Everybody’s waiting to hear about Freddy.”

  The corridor was quiet as Hannah and Jed walked back to the lobby. Most of the patients were sleeping, and only two nurses were manning the station that separated the two wings.

  “They only have two nurses for all these patients?” Jed sounded worried again.

  “Relax, Jed. Doc Knight runs a good hospital. Freddy will get the best of care here.”

  When they got to the lobby, Hannah placed a call to the cottage and filled Delores and Michelle in on Freddy’s condition. Then Jed got on the phone and thanked them again for finding him in the crowd.

  “You really should get home, Jed,” Hannah said when she’d hung up the phone. “You look tired.”

  “I am, but I don’t think I can sleep. I’m just too worried about Freddy. Do you have time for a cup of coffee in the cafeteria?”

  “Sure,” Hannah said, even though the last thing she wanted was hospital coffee. Jed obviously needed to talk.

  The hospital cafeteria was deserted and Hannah took a table near the window while Jed got them coffee from a vending machine. It was every bit as vile as Hannah had expected and she took small sips, hoping he wouldn’t notice that she was drinking very little of it.

  “I’ve been thinking about what Doc Knight said and I’m sure Freddy was in a fight.” Jed took a swallow of his coffee without seeming to notice how bad it was. “If I ever catch the guy that did this to him, I’ll…”

  “No, you won’t,” Hannah interrupted, reaching out to take Jed’s arm. “Believe me, Jed, I know exactly how you feel. I’m not a violent person, but I’d be tempted to hammer the person who did this to Freddy. What we both have to remember is that violence is never the answer.”

  “But I’ve got to do something! Just seeing him like that…it was awful!”

  “I know, but the authorities will take care of it. As soon as Freddy’s well enough, Doc Knight will call in a deputy to take his statement. If someone did attack Freddy, they’ll be caught and punished.”

  Jed sighed deeply. “I guess you’re right. I just feel so helpless, you know?”

  “I know. I’ve been trying to think of something I could do for Freddy, but there’s only one thing that comes to mind.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Freddy kept mumbling about the present he had for you and how he had to get it so that you wouldn’t be mad at him any longer.”

  “That sounds like Freddy.” Jed sighed again. “He doesn’t have much money, but he always wants to buy me things.”

  “Oh, he didn’t buy this. He said it was something you lost and he found in your garbage last week. He told me he had to shine it up for you before he gave it back to you for a present.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “I don’t have a clue.” Hannah shrugged. “Freddy had it in a shoebox, but it was tied up with twine and I didn’t look inside. I’m keeping it for him at The Cookie Jar. I’ll stop in to get it before I come to the hospital tomorrow morning. We can store it in his hospital room and once Freddy’s awake, he can give it to you.”

  Jed looked amused. “Freddy’s always giving me little things that he finds. It’s probably an old pair of shoes I got rid of.”

  “But you’re going to be delighted to get it back, whatever it is, aren’t you?”

  “Absolutely.” Jed gave her a grin. “Freddy’s a sweet guy and I wouldn’t spoil his surprise for anything in the world.”

  Chapter

  Twenty-Nine

  H annah glanced at the clock on the wall as she switched on the lights in her kitchen at The Cookie Jar. It was five minutes past ten—late at night to be mixing up cookie dough. She was closed tomorrow and Sunday so there were no cookies to bake for her customers, but she’d promised to donate some cookies to the Redeemer Lutheran bake sale and she wanted to take Freddy some Molasses Crackles. She’d mix up a batch, let them chill overnight, come in early to bake them, and split them between Reverend Knudson and Freddy.

  As Hannah assembled her ingredients, she thought about Freddy and who might have injured him. It was possible that Rhonda’s killer was the culprit, especially if Freddy had seen or overheard something that could lead to his arrest. Hannah freely admitted that such a theory was a little far-fetched, but she refused to believe that any of the local residents were to blame. Freddy was well liked around town and everyone knew that he had limitations. It was more likely that someone who wasn’t local had attacked Freddy. The fireworks had drawn a big crowd from outside the Lake Eden area and a stranger could be the culprit. In any event, standing at the workstation thinking about it wasn’t going give her the answer.

  On her way to fetch one of her stainless-steel mixing bowls, Hannah retrieved the crime-scene photos she’d taken through the basement windows and spread them out at the workstation. While she was mixing the cookie dough, she’d think about Rhonda’s murder. She gave the photos a glance as she waited for the butter to melt in the microwave, but she didn’t spot anything she hadn’t noticed before. The only thing unusual was the strawberry jam on the peach jam shelf. She was almost certain that the three jars of strawberry jam had been set there to replace the three jars of peach jam that had broken on the floor, but why would anyone go to that trouble and not sweep up the broken glass?

  Once the butter was melted, Hannah went to fetch the molasses from the pantry. As she took down the jar, she noticed what was stashed behind it and she groaned. It was a large bag of Hershey’s Kisses she’d bought for her almond cookies and it was staring her right in the face. She had to hide it quickly before she weake
ned and opened it. Hannah reached down to grab a sack of pecans and placed them in front of the bag. She kept all of her nuts on the shelf below, but this was just a temporary measure to hide the candy from view. Then she carried the molasses back to the kitchen, picked up her spoon, and set it right back down again as what she’d just done struck her with full force. She’d hidden her Hershey Kisses from view by placing a sack of pecans from a lower shelf in front of them. What if Rhonda’s killer had done the same thing? What if he’d hidden something by placing the jars of strawberry jam in front of it?

  That theory seemed reasonable and Hannah made a mental note to tell Mike and Bill about it in the morning. Perhaps the murder weapon was hidden there, or some other clue that might help them track down Rhonda’s killer. It was certainly worth a look.

  Hannah mixed in the molasses and then the sugar, stirring much longer than was necessary. The three jars of strawberry jam had been on the peach jam shelf and Mrs. Voelker’s letter had mentioned the peach jam. Hannah set down her spoon and went to retrieve it from her purse. Lisa was sure that the game Speedy had mentioned was the Treasure Hunt game. What if this whole letter was the first clue in a game he wanted Mrs. Voelker to play? Speedy had practically begged her to make peach jam and it was obvious he hadn’t known that she was in a wheelchair and her jam-making days were behind her. What if there really was a treasure behind Mrs. Voelker’s peach jam? Was it still there?

  She thought about that while she grated fresh nutmeg and added the rest of the spices to her bowl. She measured out the baking soda and salt, and stirred everything up. Giving a little shake of her head, Hannah turned back to the letter. One phrase stood out. The guy next to me is going to find someone to take this letter out and mail it to you. Take the letter out? Out where? What sort of hospital would refuse to mail a patient’s last letter?

  A prison hospital! The moment that answer occurred to Hannah, the whole thing made sense. If the dying man had been in prison, all correspondence in or out would have been examined by prison officials and it was obvious that this man hadn’t wanted his letter screened.

  Hannah thought about that as she beat the eggs and added them to her bowl. Who was Speedy? And why had he been in prison? Edna had remembered the summer he’d spent with Mrs. Voelker, but she hadn’t been able to remember his real name. She’d promised to tell Hannah if she remembered, but so far there’d been no word from Edna, unless…

  Delores had given her a message from Edna, but she hadn’t paid much attention to it. Edna had said to tell her that it was a tree. Speedy’s name was a type of tree?

  Hannah set down the flour canister so hard, a little puff of flour rose up into the air. She paged through her notes, came to the section about the bank robbery, and let out a whoop. One of the bank robbers was David Aspen and an aspen was a tree. This put a whole new spin on things!

  The pieces of the puzzle began to align themselves as Hannah measured out the flour. David “Speedy” Aspen had 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 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 café 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 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!

  Preoccupied with this theory, Hannah opened the walk-in cooler and stepped inside to find a convenient place for her bowl of cookie dough. She’d just moved some things around to make room when the door slammed shut and she was plunged into darkness. She grabbed the cord that hung down from the light, flicked it on, and whirled toward the door. It had never banged shut on its own before! She stepped forward to push the inside release, but it was jammed. What was going on!?

  As Hannah stood there, trapped inside her cooler, she heard someone rummaging around in her kitchen. It had to be Jed, and unless her theory was full of holes, he was the one who’d shut her in. “Let me out, Jed!” she shouted.

  “Sorry, no can do.” Jed’s voice was faint through the heavy metal door. “You’re gonna have to stay there.”

  Even though Jed’s voice was barely audible, Hannah could tell that he was slurring his words. He’d been drinking and that didn’t bode well for her. “Come on, Jed. This isn’t funny.”

  “’Course it’s not. There’s nothing funny about dying and that’s what this is all about. Maybe you figured it out and maybe you didn’t. I can’t take any chances.”

  A shiver went down Hannah’s spine and it had nothing to do with the temperature of the cooler. It would do no good to protest that she hadn’t figured anything out, because Jed was standing in her kitchen and he must have spotted the crime-scenes photo and Mrs. Voelker’s letter. Still, it was worth a shot and she took it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just let me out now and you won’t get into any trouble over this. I promise I won’t say a word about it.”