A Deadly Grind

by Victoria Hamilton

  “What’s in this box?” he asked, as he pulled out one covered in a tea towel.

  “Um . . . I don’t know. Let me see.” Jaymie looked under the tea towel. “Oh, that’s the box of sewing oddments.”

  “What the heck did you buy that stuff for?” Rebecca asked, returning to their side and peering into the box. “We already have enough junk like that to sink the Titanic!”

  Jaymie was about to explain the conversation she’d overheard about the valuable button, but something made her shut her mouth. She shrugged, and said, “I just felt like it. There were some interesting vintage trims.”

  Brett and Jaymie conferred over the Hoosier.

  “Where do you plan on taking it?” he said. “I don’t think I’d want to carry it up too many stairs.”

  “Well, no, it’s going in the kitchen.”

  “And that is . . . where?”

  “Right in the back of the house.”

  He hoisted himself into the back of the van and pushed the bottom portion of the Hoosier as she grabbed the end and pulled; it groaned and screeched along the metal floor the whole way, as befit anything almost a hundred years old. When it was at the edge, he hopped down and helped her lift it out, down to the ground, while Hopalong danced around, wiggling and pleading for Brett’s attention.

  “He’s a cute little guy,” Brett said, bending down and scruffing Hoppy’s neck while he caught his breath. In the dim spill of light from the lane lamps, the little dog did the insane eye-rolling/butt-wiggling “I never get this kind of attention” thing dogs do, and flopped on the ground, rolling around like a Pentecostal adherent seized by the spirit. “Is he your only dog?”

  “Yeah, he’s it. Don’t mind him,” Jaymie said. “He’s sooo neglected.”

  “I can tell,” Brett said, straightening. “So, ready to go with this thing? It’s heavier than it looks. You don’t have an alarm system on that back door, do you?”

  “Nope. No alarm, and we’ve already got it open, anyway.”

  She and Brett carried it along the path, stopping once to put it down and huff and puff a little. Something was sliding around inside one of the drawers, something heavy that made a heck of a lot of noise. They awkwardly manhandled the lower cabinet up the three steps to the summer porch, an airy room the width of the house that was used for sleeping during hot summers gone by, before air conditioning. It was lined with enormous screened windows that were still covered in storms—storm windows—this early in the spring, and the solid wood door was still in place. Taking down the storms and removing the solid door was a task Bill Waterman, their handyman, would undertake before Memorial Day. They set the Hoosier down.

  “Do you really want to take it into the kitchen right now?” he asked, panting. “It’s dusty. Why don’t you store it out here until you get a chance to clean it up?”

  Jaymie nodded. “Good idea. Let’s just line it up along the wall between the door and the kitchen window so we can still get to the couch and chairs beyond.”

  They returned to the van and retrieved the top section, carried the much lighter part in one trip, and set it gently on its metal brackets over the porcelain work top. “I won’t bother screwing it down, because I’ll just need to unscrew it again when I take it apart to clean it.”

  “This is such a lovely house,” Brett said, looking around the screened summer porch while he dusted his hands off. He swung the door back and forth on its hinges idly, and said, “Ted and I admired it when we checked in to the Shady Rest. Do you own it?”

  Rebecca joined them from the kitchen, and said, “We both do. Our parents deeded it to us equally when they moved down to Florida.”

  “Oh, do you live here, too? Just the two of you?”

  “Not exactly; Jaymie’s the only one who lives here full-time. I come down some weekends from London . . . that’s London, Ontario, not England.”

  “Becca, can you grab one of those boxes I toted into the kitchen?” Jaymie said of the boxes of cookbooks, vintage cookware and sewing oddments. “I’ll get the others. I don’t want to trip over them in the morning, so I think I’ll leave them on the Hoosier until I get a chance to look at what I bought.”

  “Can you come in for a cup of coffee? Or tea? Or maybe a glass of wine?” Becca said, eyeing their new acquaintance.

  “I’d better be getting back to the room. You two must be tired. Early to bed, I’ll bet!”

  “Not that early,” Becca said, with a laugh. “We don’t mind the company.”

  “I’d better get back,” he repeated. “I didn’t expect to be gone more than ten minutes.”

  “I’m so sorry to have kept you!” Jaymie said, at the same time as Becca said, “Oh, come on, a few more minutes and a glass of wine won’t kill you.”

  “Becca!” Jaymie said.

  “Jaymie,” Becca replied, giving her a wide-eyed look that meant “Don’t interfere.”

  Brett glanced back and forth between them, and said, “No, I really do have to go. Ted gets wound up if he starts worrying.”

  “Your friend will be fine for another couple minutes,” Becca said.

  Jaymie bit her tongue and clamped her mouth shut, as she set the box of teacups on the porcelain work top of the Hoosier, pushing it back, tempted almost beyond standing to tell Becca to leave the poor guy alone. Just because he was good-looking, nice, well dressed, well spoken . . . didn’t mean he should be mooned over by every single woman he came across. Besides, she knew something Becca didn’t.

  When he firmly but politely said no and bowed out of the invitation, then left, Jaymie got the dog and cat inside and locked up the screen door and the inside panel door, turning the lights out on the summer porch. She looked out the window for a moment, as Brett walked down the lawn to the back gate and pulled it closed behind him, then paused and looked back. He was dimly lit by the faint alley light. She waved, and he waved, then turned away. She returned to the kitchen and put on the kettle for tea. “Becca, you didn’t have to plague the poor guy to stay.”

  “I didn’t plague him; I just repeated an invitation.” She washed her hands at the old porcelain sink and dried them on the tea towel that hung beneath it.

  “Three times! Couldn’t you tell he was just being polite?”

  “He’s a really good-looking guy. And nice. And not wearing a wedding ring. No harm in trying,” Rebecca said with a smile, waggling her eyebrows.

  Jaymie laughed, pouring boiling water over a Tetley tea bag in her Brown Betty teapot, then carrying it to the long trestle-style table. “No, except you were barking up the wrong tree. Anna told me that Brett Delgado and Ted Abernathy are up here from New York to get married. They’re going over by ferry to Johnsonville next weekend to see a justice of the peace about the ceremony. Canada doesn’t require residency to marry there,” she added, helpfully, “even for a gay couple.”

  “Are you sure that he’s the guy? I do not think that man is gay.”

  “I know it’s him. Can’t you just admit for once that you are occasionally wrong?” That was her sister’s one problem: she always thought she was right.

  “I didn’t get that vibe at all, and I usually pick up on it. Not to stereotype or anything, but in my business, I meet my share of gay men.” Becca shrugged. “Oh well. I can admit I’m wrong, despite what you think, little sister,” she said, leaning across the table and tapping Jaymie on the shoulder.

  “I didn’t mean that crack to sound harsh. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. That’s a long way, though, just to get married. Couldn’t they have married in New York, or just go to Connecticut? It’s been legal there for a while, I think.”

  Jaymie shrugged. “I don’t know . . . marriage and honeymoon all at once? Maybe they’re doing an antiques tour. He was at the auction.”

  Rebecca yawned. “I am so tired. I was up a
t dawn doing stuff, then drove here and went to the auction. I’m going to look over my Crown Derby and go to bed.”

  “I’m not far behind you.”

  Once Becca was gone, Jaymie went back out to the summer porch and stood looking at her new acquisition. Despite her confidence to Becca, it was going to be a tight squeeze putting it in the kitchen. She’d manage, though. She pulled open the drawers one by one, wondering what had made such a racket as they moved it. Something was in the bottom drawer, and she reached in, lifting it out. Heavy little devil, whatever it was. Aha! She knew exactly what she held the moment she looked at it, and it gave her hope that the piece would have other original pieces with it.

  The complicated piece of machinery was a grinder, used to grind meat and vegetables and made with a screw clamp on the bottom. In the dim spill of light from the kitchen, she knelt by the Hoosier and affixed the grinder to the porcelain work top, screwing the clamp on at the side where there were notches in the wood slides under the work top. The grinder was made of steel and had a hopper at the top, a handle to turn to make the auger move and various round disc plates that would attach to the auger output with a wing nut; the auger chopped and pushed food through the discs, which determined the size of the chunks of meat or veggies that came out.

  She sat down on the summer porch floor and sighed, gazing at the grinder attached to the Hoosier. The piece was even more perfect now; nothing could spoil this love affair with her new Hoosier.

  She returned to the kitchen and closed the door to the summer porch. The house gradually fell silent as Hoppy curled up in his basket near the stove, and Denver slunk away to whatever hidey-hole he brooded in. Jaymie drank her tea, then cleaned up the table and counter from their hasty lunch/supper earlier, before the auction, washing the dishes in the long, deep porcelain sink, and putting them on the drain board to air dry. The kitchen, newly renovated in 1927, was her favorite room in the house. She sat down at the long, well-worn trestle table that centered the room and took a moment to let the busyness of the day drain away, to be replaced by the peace that the kitchen brought her.

  It was the center of her home enterprise, for one thing, this kitchen. Here she tested vintage recipes, pored over old cookbooks, experimented and perfected. She was no gourmet chef, but someday, maybe, she’d have her own cookbook to add to her shelf. She gazed affectionately around at the room in the butter-yellow light from the single fixture over the sink. She loved the house so much that coming back to it after university had been an experience she had never forgotten; she felt like it had welcomed her with loving arms, folding her to its bosom and whispering that she was home again, at last. She had never left again for any length of time.

  It was old, a big, two-story yellow-brick built in the 1860s to replace a log home. A long central hall was flanked first, at the front of the house, by the living room and parlor—the parlor smaller by quite a few feet because the staircase to the second floor took up some of the left side of the house—then, beyond that, by the library and a guest bedroom, and beyond that were the expansive kitchen and summer porch that were both the width of the house. The kitchen was the home’s heart, and her haven, lined with that ultramodern invention—in 1927—built-in cupboards; it still had ample room for a pie safe, a big gas stove and modern side-by-side fridge/freezer, as well as a worktable and long, beat-up trestle-style table with benches along both sides and armchairs on both ends. The items lined up on the top of the cupboards reflected Jaymie’s love of all things antique or vintage—junk, as her mother and Becca called it—with old biscuit, honey, cocoa and mustard tins competing for limited space.

  The deep porcelain sink, a molded piece complete with porcelain backsplash, was topped by a window that opened onto the summer porch and overlooked the lawn through the big windows that lined the porch. She always left the dim light on over the sink. She finished her tea, rinsed the mug out and put it on the drain board with the other dishes, then drew the curtains, a tatty lace café-style set that was out of keeping with the vintage kitchen. She intended to replace them this summer, so maybe the vintage trims in the box of sewing oddments would come in handy after all.

  Time for bed. She climbed the stairs, followed by Hoppy and the silently reappearing Denver, and stopped at Becca’s bedroom door, still the same room she had inhabited as a girl, though the décor had changed. It was now clean and simple, Becca’s preference. She disliked fuss and had a modern sensibility, so the room was decorated in white and ice blue, her childhood furniture painted with a stark white melamine. It was the opposite of Jaymie’s room, which was painted in warm butter-yellow and with an antique iron-frame bed covered with a quilt handmade by Mrs. Bellwood. Jaymie had won it in a church raffle and treasured it as a piece of local history.

  Becca looked up from the box of Royal Crown Derby Old Imari dishes. “Aren’t these gorgeous?” she crooned, her voice hushed with reverence.

  Jaymie joined her, sitting cross-legged on the bare wood floor and taking a dinner plate in her hands. Old Imari is gaudy, rich reds and blues ornamented by gold trim in an elaborate formal design; surprising that Becca liked it so much. Jaymie turned it over.

  “Careful, careful!” Becca cried. “That plate is worth a few hundred dollars.”

  “Wow. Not my taste, but it’s nice stuff.”

  Becca shook her head and took the plate back. “Nice? Nice? I just can’t understand why you get so enthused about a box of old Pyrex and melamine dishes and a cocoa tin from 1938, but aren’t crazy about something as fabulous as this!”

  Jaymie shrugged and struggled up off the floor. “To each his own, I guess. I love all the stuff that housewives used, and the cookbooks. It feels like real life to me. I imagine the hands of the woman who used them, how she pored over the cookbooks, carefully washed her Pyrex, handed out quick meals to her kids on melamine plates.” She hesitated, but then plunged ahead, saying, “Becca, I’ve written a cookbook.”

  “You’ve what?”

  Now she had her sister’s undivided attention. Becca’s eyes were round with wonder. “Grandma Leighton’s old cookbooks were up in the attic, and I brought a bunch of them down last winter. I started looking through them and just loved the recipes. I asked her about them, and she said they were family recipes passed down. So . . . I started compiling them, altering them for the modern kitchen, and some worked really well. Remember her buttermilk biscuits? And her sage and sausage stuffing?”

  Becca regarded her with interest, staring up at her younger sister in the dim light. “How did I not know this? Why the secrecy?”

  Jaymie shook her head. How could she remind Becca of the number of times she had ridiculed “little sister’s” ideas? Jaymie had learned to flesh things out and have a solid plan before telling Becca anything. In a way that had been a valuable tool, forcing her to become more critical of her own, sometimes impulsive, ideas and intentions. “Grandma Leighton and I talked about it. When I came up at Christmas and was so blue—about Joel and Heidi, and everything—she and I got to talking about the recipes. I had just found the box of cookbooks up in the attic at that point.”

  “I didn’t even know they were there. I thought they were long gone.”

  “I got fired up after talking to Grandma, and in January started working on them. Some of them had no real instructions, and for some, the instructions were so outdated, I had to rewrite them for a modern kitchen. I did that all winter, along with some research, then wrote some intros to the recipes. When I was up last month, Grandma looked at my final copy and loved it. So . . .” She took a deep breath. “An editor is looking at the proposal for Recipes from the Vintage Kitchen right now.”

  Becca stared, her mouth open, and shook her head. “I had no idea!”

  Warming up to her topic, letting her enthusiasm build, as it always did, Jaymie said, “And now I’m researching other recipes from vintage cookbooks, looking for ways to upd
ate them. If it works out, I’ll have enough for a second cookbook. I like using the real thing when I’m cooking, vintage Pyrex or Depression glass mixing bowls, old eggbeaters and wooden spoons. I want to use them for photographs to accompany the recipes, too.”

  “That’s a really good idea!” Becca exclaimed. “When will you hear back from the publisher?”

  Jaymie grimaced, rocking back and forth on the wood floor, listening to the hardwood creak. “I don’t know. I started out so green, but since then I’ve done a lot of re-search; it’s a long process. I’m just going to keep working on the new cookbook and not wait. So that’s why I want to set up the Hoosier and use it as a woman in the twenties and thirties and so on would use it. I want to experience how the kitchen of those days worked. I think it will help me get in touch with the recipes, understand them better. I’ll update them, but I still want them to have the feel of the old days and old ways.”

  “I get you,” Becca said, nodding. “Wow, my sister, the cookbook author!”

  “I hope,” Jaymie said, crossing her fingers.

  “I’ll be visiting Grandma Leighton on Friday, probably.” Their grandmother had returned to Canada, the country of her birth, after their grandfather died thirty years ago, and lived near Becca in London, in a comfortable retirement home. “Can I talk to her about the cookbook?”

  “Sure. Cat’s out of the bag now,” Jaymie said, with a half smile. She had been so nervous about telling Becca, but this had seemed like the right time, and she was glad she’d done it.

  “But I still say you won’t find a spot in that overcrowded kitchen for the Hoosier.”

  “Just watch me,” Jaymie said, as she exited and padded down the hall to her own room. “I know exactly where I’m putting it,” she said aloud, as she stripped off her clothes and pulled on her night attire, a T-shirt and shorts, tossing the clothes into the hamper by her wardrobe.

  Sleep came quickly. Much later she began to dream, the auction replaying in her sleep. Someone kept whispering in her ear that her button was undone. Then she drifted into a dream of her Hoosier; it kept falling over, hitting the floor with a loud bang. She awoke with a start, her heart pounding. It was the dark and silent hours of the middle of the night. The loud bang had not been a dream, she thought, but something falling over downstairs.