Cold River - Carla Neggers [100]
She nodded. “It’s a slightly cracked old blue willow jar. It’s pretty distinctive. Beth, Dominique and I found it in a cabinet we moved out when we were fixing up the place for the café. The mouth was narrow—it was easier to fit money in than get it out.”
“Where did you find it?”
She stood up and pointed behind her at the shelves of canning jars. “Third shelf from the bottom. I started pulling out jars to check the wall behind the shelves for rot. I didn’t want any more surprises, and it was something to do to help me think.”
She raised the lid of the trunk and smiled, as if she had nothing else on her mind but a stash of what appeared to be old fabric. “Look, Sean. It must be swatches someone collected for a quilt. Or several quilts, maybe. It looks like men’s shirts, mostly, that were cut up and stored in here.”
“Are they moth-eaten?” Sean asked, reining in his impatience. He didn’t care about the contents of the trunk. He wanted to know about the cash jar.
“The ones I can see look to be in good shape. Of course, I might find a mouse nest in here any second.” Hannah shut the lid and latched it, her face flushed as she glanced around at the dark, dusty cellar. “Imagine what all’s gone on in this house since 1835.”
He didn’t want to imagine anything of the sort. “Hannah, do you have any idea how the money jar got down here?”
“Yes, yes, I do.” She focused now, her hands clenched at her sides. “Kyle Rigby or Melanie Kendall, or some unnamed associate, walked into the café kitchen, grabbed it, ducked down here—possibly when I had the bulkhead open—and dumped out the money and hid the jar.”
“Whoever was responsible could explain having the cash but not the jar.”
“As I said, it’s not that easy to dip your hand into the jar. Dominique can, and I can with some effort—but Beth can’t. A man or a woman with a larger hand would have had to break the jar or dump it out to get the cash. I can imagine standing in the kitchen, thinking I was just going to snatch a handful of twenties and run and discovering the damn jar was too small—” She gulped in a breath. “Or hearing someone coming. Toby or Devin or me. Dominique. Beth. Any of us.”
“Hannah.”
She raised her gaze to him. The bruise on her cheek was faint now, just a trace of yellow against her pale skin. “We called the police. Scott Thorne came. The town police. Wes Harper showed up. It was all very fast.”
“I’m sure they were thorough.”
“With all the activity—with you and Bowie and Devin and me all down here in recent days, not to mention the furnace man and the plumber just since the money turned up missing in November, and the work and the dust and commotion…” She raked a hand through her hair. “There’s really no hope of learning much of anything.”
Sean took her hand and saw that the bruising on her wrist hadn’t yet faded entirely. “Let’s go upstairs.”
“The thought of one of those killers hiding down here makes me sick to my stomach.” She pulled away and sucked in a breath, or maybe it was a sob. “Bastards,” she said, and ran up the stairs.
Twenty-Five
Hannah burst into O’Rourke’s and pushed her way down the rough-wood bar to the stool where Bowie sat nursing a soda. She stayed on her feet. He didn’t so much as glance at her. “It’s Diet Coke. No booze for me until I’m off probation, and even then…” He sighed. “What are you all cranked up about, Hannah?”
She grabbed him by one shoulder, her fingers digging into his hard muscle as she tried to turn him to her. “Look at me.”
He turned to her, voluntarily, his dark eyes narrowed into slits. “Say what you have to say.”
“Did you do it? Did you steal the petty-cash jar out of the café kitchen?”
Bowie didn’t respond.
“Did you grab the jar because you couldn’t just grab the money?”
“Keep going,” he said.
“You grabbed the jar and ducked out the back with it, thinking you could get to your van in time, but you saw someone coming. It was November. You’d have been wearing your sweatshirt or your sweatshirt and your vest. The jar wouldn