A Deadly Grind

by Victoria Hamilton

  “I guess. So you’ll be back?”

  “In a while.” He walked away, down the path, with Heidi.

  “I’ll see you, Jaymie,” she threw over her shoulder.

  Wiggling her aching toes in their black-leather prison, Jaymie watched them walk away. McIntosh scooped Heidi up and carried her down the path while she laughed and playfully struggled. Joel had told her to look out for Heidi. Did that include protecting her from wolves?

  “Will you stick around for a while?” Daniel asked. “I’ve got to help tear down, but I’d like to talk to you.”

  “Sure,” she said. She joined Dee and Becca up on the porch where the last dishes were being dumped into plastic bins. Her sister was on her cell phone, and Jaymie could tell by the set of her shoulders that something was wrong. “What’s wrong, Becca?” she asked, as her sister closed her phone.

  “That was the retirement home. Grandma Leighton fell in the bathroom,” Becca said.

  “Oh no!” Jaymie cried.

  “She’s at the hospital in Emergency; they think she’s broken her kneecap. I have to go!” Distracted, she looked around, her gaze unfocused. “What am I going to do with all the teacups and stuff?”

  Jaymie grabbed her arm. “Becca, is she okay?”

  Her older sister nodded. “I just talked to a nurse. They said she’s fine, cracking jokes and telling stories. But still . . . I’ve got to go.” Grandma Leighton was special to Jaymie, but it was Becca, as the closest family member and living in the same city, who took most of the responsibility for her finances, her living arrangements and any needs the elderly woman had.

  “Poor Grandma! You’re not going to worry about any of this,” Jaymie said, waving her hand at the tubs of dirty dishes. Her heart thumped and she felt ill. It flashed on her that she had underestimated, perhaps, how much thought and care her big sister put into her responsibility for their grandmother. Jaymie visited once a month or so, but Becca looked after everything so well, there was little for Jaymie to do. “I’ll look after everything here. Unless you want me to go with you? I can be ready to leave in twenty minutes; I’d just have to go home, change and arrange for someone to take Hoppy for a few days and come in for Denver.”

  “No, Jaymie, stay here,” Becca said, one hand on her sister’s arm. “There’s no head injury or other more serious damage. She’ll be all right. It’ll be faster if I go alone. But I do have to go right away.”

  “Yes, of course. If you go now, you won’t catch much traffic on the Blue Water. You can be in London in an hour and a half.” Grandma Leighton, in her mid-eighties, was fragile but feisty, and Jaymie couldn’t bear the thought of her in pain. It was good to hear she was well, but she would still need her essentials brought to the hospital, and other details taken care of. “Call me when you get a phone in her room so I can talk to her.”

  “I should not have left London this weekend,” Becca fretted, putting her cell phone back in her shoulder bag. “I had a feeling—”

  “Stop it! You can’t be there all the time,” DeeDee said, grabbing her elbow and shaking her best friend. “Jaymie’s right. Just go, and don’t worry about any of this. You know we’ll be fine. Just take care of that precious woman.”

  “But the murder . . . and who did it, and . . .” Becca, normally unflappable, looked teary-eyed.

  “Jaymie can stay with me, if that’s what’s got you worried,” Dee said.

  “Just go!” Jaymie gave her sister a shove. “Everything will be fine. Call me when you see Grandma!”

  Becca trotted away, down the walk and back toward the Leighton house, where she’d pick up her car. More folks filtered away, and Jaymie sent a weary-looking Dee home, despite her protests. Finally there was just Daniel and Jaymie left at Stowe House.

  He stood on the porch staring at the stack of tables, scratching his head. “I guess I’ll wait until Zell comes back to help me get these tables back to the attic.”

  “How about you keep them in the cellar instead?” Jaymie suggested, thinking it would be easier to take them down there than up the winding stairs and then up a ladder into the attic.

  He shook his head. “Basement leaks.”

  “Really? You ought to do something about that.”

  “I’ve already talked to Bill Waterman about it. I plan on spending a lot more time here this summer, and that’s on my list.” He gave her a significant look and smiled.

  He had a pleasant face, she thought; not spectacularly good-looking, but he had kind eyes and a mobile, interesting mouth. Could she picture kissing that mouth? Her thoughts made her blush. “It won’t do them any good to sit outside, not with how damp it gets overnight, this early in the spring,” she said, briskly looking away. “I can help you get them into the house, anyway, then when—or rather if, considering he’s captivated by Princess Heidi—Zell comes back, he can help you get them up into the attic.”

  They carried the tables into the front hall, leaning them against the wall. It took a while, since there were fifteen or so, and one long one used for the royal family. When they got them all in and lined up, he looked over at her in the dim hall and said, “You know, for what it’s worth, I think Joel Anderson is an idiot for letting you go. He traded down, if you ask me.”

  She looked away, embarrassed, and said, “I didn’t mean anything by that crack about Princess Heidi. She seems like a nice girl, but . . .” She shook her head.

  “But holy catfish, is she needy!”

  “Yeah, I know. She is kinda clingy.” And flirtatious and pretty and sweet natured. A person could have worse attributes, Jaymie thought. But did she want to be Heidi? She was stronger and more independent, a tiger to Heidi’s kitten. Or at least, that’s how she saw herself. She’d better start acting like it, though, instead of letting everyone think she was still going all drama queen over Joel’s dumping her. “Hey, I haven’t seen the inside of Stowe House for a couple of years,” she said. “Have you done anything to it?”

  “Have a look around, if you want,” Daniel said. “I haven’t been here much, as you know.”

  Jaymie walked from the front hall, with the stained-glass sidelights surrounding the door casting colorful bars of light across the dark wood floors, to the central hall, from which the stairs ascended, and were adjacent to the parlor and dining room. The rounded turret room, which had been a library in the Stowe family days, was directly off of the parlor, so she walked through the parlor to the unusually shaped room, windowed on four sides of an octagon. It looked exactly as it had a few years before, since Daniel had bought it intact, with the books and furniture in place. The walls that didn’t have windows had bookshelves that stretched to the fourteen-foot ceiling, with a sliding library ladder attached to a brass bar, to reach the upper shelves.

  “Do you read these books?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not much of a reader, except technical manuals and stuff like that.”

  She noticed that he had added a few of his own items, including a table of photos in ornate frames. “These your family?” she said, looking them over.

  Daniel approached and stood just behind her, looking over her shoulder at the photos. “Most of them,” he said. “That’s my mom and dad,” he said, pointing to a picture of an older couple by a pool, surrounded by palm trees.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever known where you’re from, really,” Jaymie said, her heart beating a little erratically. It seemed a kind of intimate moment in the dim library, no one else around, looking at his family photos. But what was she feeling? Did she really like Daniel, or was she just flattered that he so clearly liked her? Was it attraction or gratitude that she felt?

  “Cali,” he said. “I was born in California, near Bakersfield. My parents live in New Mexico now, though; that photo was taken in their backyard.”

  “Any brothers or sisters?” She idly pi
cked up another photo of a younger Daniel with a couple of other guys in front of a big, dilapidated house. Daniel, yes, and the tall geeky one was surely Zell McIntosh. But then her eyes riveted on the remaining one of the three. She didn’t hear his reply to her question, as her heart thudded sickly in her chest. “Who . . . who is that?” she asked, pointing to the shortest fellow in the photo.

  “That is the guy who is holding up the party,” Daniel said, with a laugh. “‘The late Trevor Standish,’ Zell and I always call him.”

  “Late . . . why? Why do you call him that?” she asked, turning swiftly and gazing up at him, searching his smiling face.

  “Because he’s always late for everything.” His smile died. “Jaymie, what’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Um, well,” she said. “I think I just may have.”

  Twelve

  “WHAT DO YOU mean?” Daniel asked. “Jaymie, are you okay? Tell me!”

  She swayed. So now she knew who the mysterious Lachlan McIntosh was. But how could she tell Daniel that his buddy, his friend, was the murder victim found in her home? Hey, Hoosier dead guy? DeeDee’s joke replayed in her mind, but this was neither the time nor the place. It never would be, now that she truly knew who the dead man was. “Daniel,” she said, and put her hand on his arm, looking up at his perplexed expression in the dim library light. “I think that Trevor Standish might be Lachlan McIntosh, the guy who was murdered on my summer porch.”

  “What do you mean?” He stared at her for a long moment, then, his half smile dying, he said, “Okay, so I said ‘the late Trevor Standish’. I get it, haw haw! Joke’s over.”

  “No, Daniel, I mean it,” she said, touching his arm.

  “Look, Jaymie, you’re way off base with this one. I just got a text message from Trev not more than an hour ago.”

  “Then someone is playing games, Daniel. I wouldn’t joke about something like that; you have to believe me. The fellow they identified as Lachlan McIntosh is really Trevor Standish. I saw his body; I ought to know. Do you have a more recent photo than that?”

  “Of Trev? Sure.”

  He dashed over to the desk, grabbed his iPad and brought up class reunion photos from the year before. One showed him and Zell McIntosh and Trevor Standish at a bar, toasting. It was him, the fellow she had seen, all right, down to the same slacks and shirt.

  Daniel watched her face anxiously, and when she looked up at him her certainty must have showed, because his face twisted, and he whispered, “No! Not Trev!”

  “I’m so sorry! We’ve got to call the police.” She did so while Daniel sat down in a leather desk chair and stared into space, tears gathering in his eyes. He squinted, took off his glasses and knuckled one of his eyes, then cleared his throat. The police said they’d send someone right away. Jaymie hung up, returned to Daniel and took his arm. “C’mon, let’s go into the kitchen and sit. I’ll make some coffee.”

  The kitchen was expansive but old fashioned, and not in a good way. But she found coffee in the freezer and put the pot on as she looked out the back window at the well-kept gardens. When the victim was a stranger it had been hard enough to figure out the mystery, but it seemed even weirder now that she knew it was a friend of Daniel’s. Why had Trevor Standish broken into her home? It didn’t make any sense that this stranger, who was only coming to have a reunion with his frat buddies, would wind up murdered on her summer porch.

  “What was he like?” she said, returning to Daniel’s side.

  He had recovered some, and he talked, telling her about his buddy’s college days, how they met as fraternity pledges, how they got along, even though they were as different as two guys could be. She made him a cup of coffee as he told her how Zell McIntosh was the third musketeer in their oddball gang; they’d gone through all four years together as the best of friends. Trevor Standish was the son of a tenured history professor at Ball State, and so naturally fell into history, but Daniel said he’d had a genuine passion for it, too.

  “What kind of history?”

  “American. Trev loved the Revolutionary War. He even had a bit part in John Adams, that HBO series a few years back.” He brought up a picture on the iPad of his pal in knee breeches and a periwig. “He was one of the rabble-rousers at the Boston Tea Party!”

  “What did he do after college?”

  “The year after his dad retired, Trev became an associate professor of American history at Ball State.”

  It occurred to Jaymie at that moment that “Hoosier dead guy?”—her silly joke with DeeDee—had a double meaning neither of them could have foreseen; the dead man truly was a Hoosier. “He must have been in his glory: loving history, the college you all graduated from, his dad’s old job, practically!”

  Daniel’s expression darkened, as if a storm cloud was passing, and he turned away to look out the back window. “He lost his position a few years ago and started working as a historical document dealer.”

  “Lost his position! That’s too bad.” She frowned down at her hands, thinking things through. “How can you have received two texts after Trevor died? Could they have been sent before he died, and just got through now?”

  “I don’t know, that’s weird,” he said. “Maybe some time delay in the messaging? Or maybe he set it to send later?”

  Jaymie shrugged. She wasn’t big on technology. She had a cell phone, but hadn’t used it in weeks. It was buried in her purse somewhere, the battery probably dead. “Do you still have the message?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t keep stuff like that. I delete ’em as soon as I read ’em.”

  Silence fell between them; what could she say? She considered what she had learned about Trevor Standish. Jaymie had thought academic jobs were pretty secure, but with the uneven economy, who knew? Did colleges have cutbacks like normal jobs? She guessed it depended on whether the fellow had tenure, a concept she didn’t exactly understand, but knew equated with some measure of job security. “Why did Trevor lose his position at Ball State?” she suddenly asked.

  Daniel was about to answer, but just then someone knocked on the door. It was the police, Sergeant MacAdams and a compact deputy of Asian heritage, introduced as Deputy Ng. Jaymie explained why she thought the dead man was Trevor Standish, and Daniel showed MacAdams the photos. The officers didn’t commit themselves, but Jaymie could see that they were as certain as she was.

  “Would you come with us to identify the body, Mr. Collins?” MacAdams asked.

  Daniel nodded curtly.

  “Detective Christian will want to speak with you,” the sergeant added. “And we’d like a copy of the most recent clear photo you have, too. You can bring your device with you, and our tech staff can grab the pictures. We’ll need to find out about his latest movements. Also, if you know his family, we’d like those names and any addresses or phone numbers you may have.”

  “It’s all on here,” Daniel said, patting the gadget. “He’s not married, no kids, no girlfriend that I know of. His dad is dead, but his mom . . . she’s going to be devastated.” His voice broke on the last word.

  Jaymie waited for Daniel to say something about the after-death text messages, but he didn’t. She knew enough now to know that it was bound to come out in questioning.

  He went with the police, and Jaymie went home. She approached by the back lane, as she usually did when she walked.

  “Jaymie, Jaymie!”

  She turned, as Trip Findley opened his wood gate and beckoned her over.

  “Yes, Mr. Findley?”

  “I got to thinking about what you asked yesterday, about seeing anything.”

  “Yes?” she said, eagerly.

  “Well, I still didn’t see anything.” His wizened face was pinched in thought, his beaky nose hovering over his pursed lips. “But there is something odd.”

  �
�Yes,” she said, trying not to hop around in her eagerness.

  “There were lights on at that bed-and-breakfast next door to you. I saw ’em when I looked out, before the commotion.”

  “When was that, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. Didn’t look at the clock. But before. My motion detector light was already on, though.”

  Well, that probably didn’t mean a thing, Jaymie thought. “Which window?” she asked.

  “That one right above the back deck.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Findley,” she said.

  She went through her wrought-iron gate and up the stone path to her back door. Keys in hand, she paused and looked at the new lock. Were those fresh scratches on it? She got down to examine more closely and realized the scratches were not into the chroming, they were just surface scratches from the use she had already put the lock to. She was letting herself get freaked over nothing.

  She unlocked the door, let Hoppy out and gratefully shed her ugly maid’s outfit for another year. She called Becca and left a message to call her the moment she found out anything about Grandma Leighton, and told her that she thought she knew who the murder victim was. Then she phoned her parents, but there was no one home there, either. She felt alone and walked through her beloved old house like a ghost. Her faithful little dog, who had come back in after his necessary business, followed, looking up at her as they ambled.

  Every squeaky floorboard of the dear old place was familiar, every creaky stair. Sometimes she felt like the stable center of a whirlwind: her parents moved among their condo in Florida, a rental in London and the cottage on Heartbreak Island; Becca split her time among her house in London, the cottage and the Queensville home and traveled extensively for her china-matching company to conventions and sale events.

  She moved, on automatic, toward the kitchen. Jaymie, unlike her sister and mother, was a dedicated homebody, a putterer, a grateful small-town girl. She moved through the kitchen and to the summer porch, then stood and looked out at the backyard; the roses were just now bursting into bud. A hundred years ago no one would have thought twice about a young woman who didn’t “have a career,” but looked after the family home. A modest inheritance and income from the cottage rental and her management of it, along with her own thrifty ways and numerous temporary and part-time jobs, made it easy for her not to have a career, so she could, as some said, “waste” her life doing what she wanted.