Devil's Food Cake Murder (32 page)

Thirty minutes later, Hannah was ready to give up her search altogether. She’d checked every hiding place at the front of the church, including the pulpit and the statues. She’d gone through every pew, looking for anything that might be taped under the seats or inside the hymnal and Bible racks. She’d searched the little storage room where the communion supplies and the vestments were kept, and she’d even explored the choir loft. The only place she hadn’t gone was the belfry and that was because she wasn’t sure how to get there. Grandma Knudson would know. She’d mentioned that she used to ring the church bell when her husband was the minister.

The moment she thought of it, Hannah raced back to the church office and picked up the phone. She dialed the parsonage and was greatly relieved when Grandma Knudson answered. “I need to know how to get up in the belfry,” she said.

“The belfry?” Grandma Knudson sounded surprised. “Why do you want to go up there?”

“Because Reverend Matthew could have hidden something up there to keep Paul from finding it. It seems unlikely, but I’ve checked everywhere else.”

“All right. Whatever you think best, Hannah. To get to the belfry, all you have to do is go through the door in back of the choir loft. There’s a circular staircase that leads up to the bell-ringer’s platform.”

“And that’s the belfry?”

“Only part of it, dear. You’ll see the rope for the bell and if you look to the right, you’ll notice another staircase that looks like a ladder next to the wall. There’s a trap door above that staircase and the bell tower’s up there.”

“Uh-oh,” Hannah breathed, not liking the sound of that. She wasn’t exactly afraid of heights, but she certainly wasn’t comfortable with them. And although she didn’t think she was claustrophobic, she asked her next question anyway. “Is the bell tower large?”

“It’s good-sized, but you can only stand up in the center. The rest is filled with rafters that support the steeple. And of course the bell and the bellframe are in the middle. Since you’re tall, you’ll have to duck a little to walk around that.”

Hannah sighed. The belfry didn’t sound like a pleasant place to visit. And then she remembered the phrase her grandmother Ingrid had used to describe someone with only part of their faculties. “Are there bats in the belfry?” she asked.

“I don’t know, dear. I’ve never been all the way up there, but I imagine there could be bats. You should be very quiet when you’re up there and they’ll probably stay asleep. Bats are nocturnal animals, you know.”

“I know,” Hannah said, not terribly relieved by that piece of knowledge. Nocturnal did not mean nonfunctional in daylight. She’d watched part of a program about bats on the animal channel. They’d debunked the old wives’ tale that bats were blind in the daylight and could get tangled in your hair, but she was glad she had tightly curled hair all the same.

“At least there’s no such thing as a vampire bat,” Hannah said, trying for humor.

“Oh, yes there is. They’re from Mexico, I believe. Of course they’re not like Count Dracula or any other foolishness like that, but I understand that they bite.”

Lovely! Hannah’s mind interjected. Bats that bite. That’s all I need!

“Good luck, Hannah,” Grandma Knudson said. And then she hung up the phone.

There’s nothing to it but to do it, Hannah’s mind echoed her great-grandmother Elsa’s favorite sentiment, the one she’d uttered every Monday when she got out the big galvanized wash tubs and wheeled the old washing machine and wringer into the kitchen from its storage place on the back porch.

Time was ticking away, and Hannah knew she’d better get at it before Paul, or Matthew, or whoever he was got back from visiting the sick at the hospital. Her great-grandma was right. Sitting here thinking about what she had to do would not get it done.

On her way to the choir loft, Hannah passed the cloak room and stopped at the lost and found box. It was half-full of items that had been left behind in the church. There was a woolen head scarf on top, and Hannah reached down to grab it. She folded it into a triangle and tied it over her head, knotting the ends under her chin babushka-style. Old wives’ tale or not, she felt much better about facing the bats.

She found the door behind the choir loft with no problem, and for a moment, she wondered why she’d never noticed it before. Then she realized it was probably because she’d never sung in the choir. Hannah opened the door and went up the narrow, winding staircase to arrive at a part of the Lake Eden Holy Redeemer Church that she’d never seen before, the platform for the bell-ringer.

Light filtered in through the vented windows on all four walls. The wooden slats were canted so that very little rain or snow could get in, but it didn’t stop the cold air from whistling through. Hannah knew she wouldn’t like the job as bell-ringer. This part of the wooden steeple was freezing cold in the winter, and she was sure it would be miserably hot in the summer. Grandma Knudson was a saint for ringing the bell to gather the flock for Sunday services when her husband was the minister.

The rope hung down from an aperture above, and Hannah looked up to see the church bell high above her. It was a huge bell and very old. Reverend Bob had once mentioned that the bell had been made in the eighteen hundreds, and it was cast bronze. The bell rope was made of thick hemp with a sleeve of cotton so the bell-ringer’s hands wouldn’t touch the fibers of the rope. She’d once heard someone mention that the sleeve was called a “sally,” although she had no idea why.

Hannah stared at the rope for a moment and fought the insane urge to grab the rope and pull. Of course she didn’t. If she rang the bell, Grandma Knudson would think there was something wrong, the parishioners would start calling the church office and the parsonage to find out why the bell was ringing, and if Paul, or Matthew, or whoever he was, caught wind of it, he’d rush right up here to see who was responsible and catch her searching the belfry.

She stepped around the rope and headed for the ladder-type staircase on the wall. At least it didn’t have round rungs. She didn’t like to climb ladders with round rungs. In place of rungs, this built-in ladder had regular steps like a stepladder. They were much narrower and shallower than ordinary steps, but she could handle that.

The steps went straight up at a ninety-degree angle from the floor, but there were handrails to grip. When Hannah came to the point where the top of her head was about to hit the trap door, she held on with her left hand and pushed the trapdoor open with her right. The trapdoor was big enough to accommodate a large man, but it opened smoothly on its hinges and fell back against a wooden brace that held it open and in place.

It was a bit eerie stepping into the hushed and quiet belfry. There were no sounds at all except the occasional honk of a horn in the distance, the faraway bark of a dog, or the tinny growl of a snow blower clearing a sidewalk. There was no rustling, and Hannah was relieved. If there were bats, they were sound asleep.

The space, itself, was a geometric figure that Hannah couldn’t begin to identify. It began as a square with five-foot walls, but the walls began to narrow and tilt in beyond that point to form the ascending steeple. The four large open windows, covered only with fine mesh, displayed the bell to passersby on the streets below. From her bird’s eye vantage point in the belfry, Hannah’s view of Lake Eden was spectacular. If she looked out each of the four windows in turn, the vista was only a few degrees short of a full circle.

“Incredible!” Hannah said, spotting her mother’s car traveling down Main Street and heading out of town toward the highway. Michelle must be going out to the mall to return the costume their mother had rented.

The interior of the space was cluttered and crisscrossed with wooden rafters, metal braces, and heavy blocks of wood to support the structure. Just as Grandma Knudson had told her, the bell sat directly in the center, suspended between two heavy wooden wheels. There was a groove for the rope, and Hannah surmised that was how the bell was operated. A pull on the rope from below would turn the wheel, and gravity would cause the clapper to hit the side of the bell.

A cabinet hung below one of the windows. The door was open and tools were scattered across the floor as if they’d been carelessly tossed there. No workman would leave his tools in such a state. Someone had looked for something in the cabinet and tossed the tools aside.

The walk space around the church bell and its housing was minimal. In order to get to the walls, she’d have to bob, and duck, and weave her way around structural supports. And it seemed that someone else had done exactly that not long ago, because there were footprints in the thick dust on the floor!

Hannah followed the footprints, careful not to bump into rafters, or braces, or blocks on the way. As she neared the wall, she was forced to stoop lower and lower until she was in a crouching position. When she reached the wall, she saw that the boards had been pried off, exposing the space between the inner and outer walls. Someone had searched here. And she was convinced that someone was Paul.

“What are you doing up here?”

Hannah, startled by the loud voice, swiveled her head to see who was there. “Paul!” she gasped.

The word hung between them like a scimitar swinging lower and lower over her head. Hannah desperately wished there were some way to call the name back, but of course there wasn’t. Perhaps he wouldn’t notice?

“That’s right. I’m Paul. You’re smarter than you look, Hannah. You figured it out!” He stared at her with narrowed eyes. “Too bad someone didn’t teach you to keep your nose out of other people’s business.”

Hannah gave an involuntary shudder. His voice had changed from that of a warm and friendly minister into one that was as cold as ice. The transformation shocked her so much, she stood there and stared at him like a possum caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. And then, as she watched, he pulled out a gun and aimed it directly at her head.

It was a twenty-two semiautomatic. Hannah knew that because Lisa and Herb had one just like it, and Hannah had shot it at target practice. And she was almost positive that this twenty-two semiautomatic was the missing murder weapon.

“What are you looking for up here?” Paul confronted her.

“The same thing you’re looking for. Grandma Knudson saw you standing on a pile of books, searching for something on the top of the bookcase in the church office. I figured you were trying to find something that the real Reverend Matthew hid.”

“Give the lady an A,” Paul said with a sarcastic laugh. “Let me get this straight. You were searching for something, trying to find it before I did, and hoping that you’d recognize it when you found it?”

“Exactly right.” Hannah inched her way forward slightly, causing Paul to back away.

“Come one step closer and you’re dead!” he threatened.

“Sorry,” Hannah apologized quickly and switched gears. “You must have hated Matthew a lot.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You killed him.” Hannah managed to inch just a slight bit closer.

“I know I did, but I didn’t hate him. It was…self defense. That’s exactly what it was. I was saving my own skin. I had to shoot Matthew to keep him from calling the police. He said he wanted me to do the right thing, to turn in the jewels so they could be returned to their rightful owner.”

“Jewels?”

“From the heist. I had to get them back. I’ve got a partner.”

“The jewels from the house in Minneapolis,” Hannah said, her mind whirling with this new information. “But how did Matthew get them?”

“We had to stash them in a safe place so I used part of the cash we got to fly to St. Louis. I was going to visit Matthew at the seminary and stash them somewhere at his place. I mean, who’d think to look for stolen jewels in a seminary?”

“That’s a good point,” Hannah said.

“But before I could even ask where he lived, I saw him carrying suitcases and stuff out to his car.”

“But he didn’t see you,” Hannah guessed. If Matthew had seen his cousin, he would have told Grandma Knudson that first afternoon.

“No, he didn’t see me. He was saying goodbye to some guy and they talked about how long he was going to be away and how he was going to visit somebody in Wisconsin and then come here. The guy was going to teach Matthew’s classes and live at his place while he was gone. I knew I didn’t dare stash the jewels there, the other guy might have found them, so I waited until Matthew went back inside, and then I hid them in a box of books in his trunk, way down in the bottom.”

“And you planned to pick them up when he got here,” Hannah concluded.

“Right. I never thought he’d find them and hide them from me! That was like…blackmail!”

Hannah nodded, even though Paul’s definitions of self-defense and blackmail left a lot to be desired. “And Matthew refused to tell you where the jewels were and said he was going to turn you over to the police?”

“Yeah. That’s it. He told me I needed to pay for the crime I committed. Isn’t that a laugh? He promised me that God would forgive me if I was truly sorry for my sins, and he would always love me like a brother. And then he did a really stupid thing. He picked up the phone and started to punch in the number. So I shot him. What else could I do? It wasn’t like I wanted to shoot him. He just didn’t give me any choice.”

“I understand,” Hannah said.

“You do?” Paul was obviously surprised at her comment. “Why do you believe me?”

“Partly because of that hole you dug in high school when the whole football team went camping.” Hannah could hear the far-off ringing of a phone, probably in the church office. If it was Grandma Knudson and Hannah didn’t answer, would she call the police? Hannah wasn’t sure, but she knew she had to keep Paul talking and buy herself more time. “You filled that hole in with leaves so that Hugh Kohler would break his leg, and your cousin Matthew could take Hugh’s place as the quarterback. That proves you liked Matthew.”

Paul laughed, and it was not a nice laugh. “You got it all wrong, sister! I didn’t dig the hole. I found the hole. And I didn’t try to trap Hugh Kohler for Matthew. I did for me. Hugh was a bully, and he picked on everybody in junior varsity. According to Hugh, nobody could do anything right, and the coach let him get away with taunting us and talking the rest of the senior squad into being vicious whenever we played practice games. That’s why I was after Hugh. He deserved that and more! I just lucked out when he broke his leg in that hole and everybody thought Matthew did it. But we’re wasting time here.”