Lemon Meringue Pie Murder (Hannah Swensen Mysteries) (18 page)

“Do you want me to start on them now?”

“Not quite yet. I have someone I need to see. Could you man the counter for an hour?”

“Sure. Does it have anything to do with—” Lisa stopped and glanced around her, but the customers at the tables were busy with their own conversations “—with Rhonda’s murder?”

“Yes. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Take as long as you need. I told you I’d run the shop while you investigated. Is there anything I can do while I’m waiting on our customers?”

Hannah thought about that for a moment. “Nothing specific, but keep your eyes open and be the invisible coffee mug filler.”

“That actually works,” Lisa said with a laugh. “They just go right on talking like I’m not even there.”

“I know. That’s one great advantage we have. Just listen for anything that has to do with Rhonda and tell me about it when I get back.”

“Can you tell me who you’re going to see?”

It took Hannah no more than a split second before she decided. Lisa never blabbed what she shouldn’t. “Kenneth Purvis.”

“Mr. Purvis?” Lisa’s eyes widened. “Do you think
he
killed Rhonda?”

The concerned look on Lisa’s face made Hannah decide to hedge a bit. “I just think he might have some information that could help me. I’ll give him a call and see if he’s at home.”

“He’s probably at the school.”

“How do you know that?”

“Mrs. Purvis was in last Wednesday and I heard her tell Gail Hanson that she was driving to Rochester for a family reunion and she wasn’t coming back until the third. She said Mr. Purvis had a lot of work to do on the fall schedule and he’d practically be living at the school until she got back.”

Hannah smiled. “The invisible coffee mug filler trick worked.”

“Actually, it was the invisible cookie boxer trick. She came in to get three dozen Old-Fashioned Sugar Cookies to take to her mother.”

A
fter promising to stop and pick up some vanilla and chocolate ice cream, Hannah went out through the kitchen. Once she reached her cookie truck, she unlocked the doors and lowered the windows to let out the stifling air. On a day like today, when the mercury was flirting with the ninety-degree mark, she’d give her kingdom for air-conditioning that worked.

It didn’t take long to drive to the school. Hannah pulled into the Jordan High faculty lot and parked next to Ken Purvis’s car. The only other car in the lot belonged to the music teacher and she could hear the marching band practicing on the football field. Hannah walked across the steaming concrete, grimacing at the strains of music she heard. It was good they were practicing. They needed it.

The interior of the school was slightly cooler than the blazing heat outside. Hannah walked down the deserted hallway, smelling the same unique combination of sweeping compound and chalk dust that had welcomed her as a child. She still felt a pang on the first day of school, when freshly washed school busses carried spiffed-up students to the Lake Eden school complex. The first day of the school year had always been her favorite. Dressed in her new school clothes with summer freckles still dancing a line across her nose, she had carried her new book bag into a classroom that had sported completely clean blackboards, long pieces of perfectly formed chalk, and bigger desks.

Hannah stopped at the end of the hall and peeked around the corner at Ken Purvis’s office. The door was open and the secretary’s desk was unoccupied. She breathed a sigh of relief as she stepped into the outer office, glad that she didn’t have to make up an excuse to see Ken privately.

There was the sound of rustling papers from the inner office, Ken’s domain. Hannah approached the open door and stopped in her tracks as she smelled a familiar scent. Old Spice. There could be no mistake about it. Her father had used Old Spice aftershave and the scent was as familiar to her as chocolate. Ken Purvis had been Rhonda’s boyfriend. Hannah was certain.

Ken glanced up as Hannah knocked on the open door. He looked startled at the interruption, but the moment he saw that it was Hannah, he smiled. “Come in.”

Hannah entered the inner sanctum that caused most high school students to tremble in their sneakers and took a chair in front of Ken’s desk. She was trying to think of something polite to say to warm Ken up for the ensuing conversation when he beat her to it.

“It’s always good to see you, Hannah. You’re not planning to enroll for the fall semester, are you?”

Hannah laughed at the standard principal’s joke. “No, I’ve got something else on my mind.”

“What can I do for you?” Ken removed his reading glasses and placed them upside down, bows crossed, on the pile of papers he’d been reading.

Hannah hesitated. She wanted to handle this tactfully, but she couldn’t think of a way to do it. “Why did you bring two takeout dinners to Rhonda Scharf at the Voelker place on Friday night?”

All the color in Ken’s face fled and so did his smile. “How do you know
that?”

“I know.”

“Does anybody else know?”

“Not yet. Maybe they won’t have to if you’re honest with me.”

Ken sighed and it was like letting all the air out of a basketball. Hannah could almost see him deflate before her eyes. “What you’re thinking is right, Hannah. I’m not proud of it, but I was involved with Rhonda.”

“Does that
involved
mean what I think it means?”

“Yes. It’s entirely my fault that it went this far and I take full responsibility. I just hope that Kathy won’t have to find out about it.”

Hannah could understand his concern. Ken’s wife had a fiery temper and she wouldn’t take the news of her husband’s infidelity lightly. “This is just between you and me right now. Tell me how it started.”

“I was having troubles at home with Kathy.” Ken sighed deeply. “You don’t need to know about that, do you?”

“No.”

“Well…I wanted to ease the situation a bit and I went to the drugstore to buy a bottle of perfume as a peace offering.”

Hannah decided to cut to the chase. She knew about Rhonda’s bag of tricks. “And Rhonda came on to you?”

“That’s exactly what happened. It was right after she inherited her great-aunt’s place. She said she really wanted to go out and look at it, but she needed the help of a big strong man. And…”

“Never mind, I get the picture,” Hannah cut him off. “And you went out there for another…uh…rendezvous with Rhonda on Friday night?”

Ken shook his head. “Not exactly. Kathy and I worked out our problems. When she left on Wednesday to go to her family reunion, I decided the time was right to break it off with Rhonda.”

“Because Rhonda would have two weeks to get over being mad at you before she came back from her vacation?”

“That was a factor,” Ken admitted. “I was trying to make it easier on everybody involved.”

“Including you?”

“Including me.”

Hannah gave Ken a long hard look, but he appeared completely sincere. “And you decided to bring Rhonda dinner before you broke the bad news to her?”

“It sounds a little strange now, but that’s exactly right. I called and asked to see her, but she said she had to go out to her great-aunt’s place to pick up some things. I told her that was fine, that I’d take her out there and then I’d go get us some dinner. She thought that was fine and she offered to bring dessert.”

Hannah was sure that Ken was telling the truth, but that didn’t mean that he hadn’t killed Rhonda. She felt slightly uncomfortable for a moment, wondering if she should have brought some kind of weapon, but she quickly dismissed that concern. Ken wasn’t a large man and Mike had taught her some good self-defense moves. “Tell me exactly what happened that night and don’t leave anything out.”

“All right,” Ken agreed, but he looked very uncomfortable. “Just let me take a pill first.”

Hannah watched as he pulled out his center desk drawer and took out a prescription pill bottle. “What are you taking?”

“Something Doc Knight prescribed for my bursitis. He said it would work, but it hasn’t had much effect so far.” Ken shook out a pill and downed it with a sip of water from the glass that was sitting on his desk. “You want to hear everything?”

“Yes.”

“I had an appointment with Doc Knight at five on Friday afternoon. After that, I went straight over to Rhonda’s apartment and drove her out to her great-aunt’s place.”

“What time was that?”

“About six.”

Hannah jotted down the time in her notebook. “What happened when you got there?”

“I dropped her off and then I went to pick up our dinners. I figured I’d tell her after we ate.”

“The takeout was from Alfredo’s Ristorante?”

“Yes. I ordered in advance. They have osso buco on Friday nights and Rhonda said she liked it.”

“Where was Rhonda when you got back?”

“In the kitchen. She was taking a break, waiting for me to get back. We sat down at the table and I opened the wine. I brought a really good bottle of Chianti, because I thought it might ease the situation.”

“Right.” Hannah tried not to sound too sarcastic. Ken was a fool if he thought a bad situation would improve with alcohol.

“I sat down to dinner but I was so nervous, I couldn’t eat much. I just had the garnish off the osso buco and that was it. Rhonda noticed that I wasn’t eating and she asked me if something was wrong. That’s when I told her.”

“And was her reaction as bad as you thought it would be?”

“It was worse. She got angry and accused me of treating her like a…” Ken stopped speaking and cleared his throat. “Do you really need to know what she said?”

“No. What happened next?”

Ken reached for his glass of water and took a sip. “She started screaming at me and calling me names. They were really ugly names, if you get my drift.”

“I do. Go on.”

“By this time I’d taken just about all I could take. I knew there was nothing I could say to calm Rhonda down, so…I left.”

Hannah pulled out her notebook. “What time was that?”

“Around seven-thirty.”

“Where did you go?”

“I drove home and called Kathy at her mother’s house.”

Hannah groaned. “Did you tell Kathy what had happened with Rhonda?”

“Of course not. I realize I was irresponsible and stupid when I started this whole thing with Rhonda, but I’ve never harbored a death wish.”

Hannah had to grin at that. “What
did
you tell Kathy?”

“Just that I’d had a rough day and I needed to hear her voice. We talked for quite a while about the reunion and the cousins she hadn’t seen since she was little. When I finally hung up, I felt a lot better. I also felt hungry, because I skipped lunch and all I’d eaten were the sliced olives on top of my dinner. There wasn’t much to eat in the house, so I decided to go out and get a hamburger or something. I went back out to my car and that’s when I realized that I’d left Rhonda at the Voelker place with no way back to town.”

“I was wondering when you’d get to that. So you drove back out?”

“Yes. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t just leave her there. It was too far to walk back to town.”

“What time did you get back there?” Hannah held her pen at the ready. The time frame would be crucial.

“At nine-thirty or so. The lights were on so I figured that Rhonda was still there. I sat there in the car for a minute or two. I really didn’t want to go in and start fighting with her again. But I’d driven out there to give her a ride and I figured I might as well do it.”

Hannah flipped back to the page where she’d listed Rhonda’s time of death. If Doc Knight was right, and he usually was, Rhonda had been dead and cooling off in the basement when Ken had knocked on the door. “Were there any other cars in the driveway when you drove up?”

“No. I wouldn’t have stopped if there’d been another car. Whoever it was could have given Rhonda a ride.”

“What happened when you went in?”

“I didn’t go in, not right away. I knocked on the door and waited for her to answer. And when she didn’t, I knocked again. Then I opened the door and went inside.”

“What’s the first thing you did when you stepped inside?”

“I called out for Rhonda. It’s not a big place and I knew she could hear me. When she still didn’t answer, I got nervous. I thought maybe she’d had an accident, or something like that. I went from room to room, looking for her, but she wasn’t anywhere in the house. I even went out in the backyard to search for her.”

“What made you think that Rhonda might have been out there?”

“The takeout boxes were gone and the back door was standing open. I figured she’d gone out with the garbage and…” Ken stopped talking and swallowed hard. “Do you think Rhonda’s killer went out that way?”

“It’s possible.”

Ken shivered. “I guess I could have scared him away. I never thought about that. If he was still in the basement when I drove up, he could have run out the back way.”

Hannah nodded as another piece of the puzzle clicked into place. She’d discussed the grave with Mike. Both of them thought that the killer had intended to fully bury Rhonda, but someone or something had frightened him away before he could finish his grisly task. Ken Purvis could be that someone. If Rhonda’s killer had been in the basement when Ken’s car drove up, he would have had plenty of time to flee out the back door.

“Maybe the killer was still there when I went to the backyard,” Ken speculated, his voice shaking slightly. “I didn’t hear anything, but it was dark and he could have been hiding anywhere.”

Hannah figured she’d better reassure Ken. His face had turned a sickly shade of gray and drops of nervous perspiration were beading on his forehead. “My guess is that he was long gone. Let’s get back to what happened. After you checked the backyard, you…?”

“I came back in and shut the back door. I figured she could come back in after I left.”

“Think back to how the kitchen looked. Was the basement door open?”

Ken frowned in an attempt to remember. “It must have been closed. If it had been open, I would have gone down there.”

“So you never considered that Rhonda might be in the basement?”

“It never even occurred to me,” Ken said, sighing deeply. “I really wish I’d thought to check. If I’d found her, I could have gone for help, or taken her to the hospital myself.”

“Forget it, Ken. Doc Knight said Rhonda died instantly. Even if you’d found her, you couldn’t have saved her life.”

“Thanks for telling me, Hannah.” Ken reached for his glass and took another sip of water. “That makes me feel a little better. It’s still awful, but at least I know there was nothing I could have done to help her.”

“What did you think when you searched the house and you couldn’t find Rhonda?” Hannah asked.

“I figured one of her friends had seen the lights, dropped by to see her, and given her a lift home. Or maybe she’d walked out to the road and flagged someone down. Those were the only explanations I could think of.”