A Deadly Grind

by Victoria Hamilton

  He eyed her, and his expression softened. “Momma wrote everything down. I’ll ask m’grandson. He’s the one looks after everything, since my daughter died of the cancer. Might have ’em. Might not. He tossed out a mess of papers and books when he emptied the house. No one has time for the old stuff anymore.” He was solemn for a long moment, staring out the window at the cheerful scene. Sighing, he turned back to her. “Everything changes,” he said.

  “Some of us still have time for the old stuff,” she said gently.

  He shifted in his seat, cleared his throat and continued. “Anyways, my momma worked like a dog, and my daddy never gave her so much as a kind word. He was a hard old sonuvabitch. Nowadays they’d say he had that ‘PTS’ or whatever y’call it.”

  “Post-traumatic stress from the war?”

  He nodded. “Back then they called it shell shock. And he oughtta’ve gotten over it. He treated Momma like she was his housekeeper. Then one day Marvin’s Cartage pulled up; Marvin, he had this big Morgan horse, size of a truck, and that horse pulled a heavy cart. He pulled up in the yard behind the house with somethin’ in a big old crate. Daddy tried to send him away, but Momma came out in the yard, arms crossed over her chest, and said it was for her. She was shakin’ when she said it, but still . . . even at the age o’ six, I could tell that she was determined to have her way, for once.

  “She’d ordered the Hoosier cabinet from some traveling sales guy a few months before, and now it showed up. Daddy went sky-high, face turned the color of a beet pickle, asked how much it cost. Momma said a dollar. A dollar, he said! She was a damned liar, he said, and I thought he was gonna hit her. But then she said a dollar a week for two years. That’s when Daddy clutched his chest, fell backward onto the ground, writhin’ and a’wrigglin’, and said Momma was trying to kill him.”

  Jaymie laughed at the picture. “Served him right,” she said. “It was about time she got something for herself.”

  “Daddy was right in one way, though. Dollar a week for two years was a lot! But Momma loved that Hoosier; said it cut out hours of work for her. She’d polish it and clean it, croon over it like it was a baby. I was damn near jealous of the thing . . . like a brother to me, it was.”

  Jaymie laughed out loud, and some of the other elderly guests looked over, as if surprised to hear laughter.

  Mr. Bourne grinned, but then continued. “Ladies came from miles around to see it too, and plagued their menfolk for one like it. Momma was likely damned in more than one home that day. She became the queen of Bourne County, and wasn’t lonely no more.” He leaned over, tapped her hand with his knobby finger, and said, “Glad you got it. You’ll ’preciate it. I can tell.”

  “Did your father ever come around? See its utility?”

  “Funny thing about that,” the old man said. “Think he respected Momma for standin’ up to him. Got to be a joke, in a way, between ’em. He used ta hide things in it, y’know?”

  “Really?” Jaymie asked, curiosity piqued. Finally, they were getting somewhere. “What kind of things?”

  He shrugged. “That was way back, honey. I don’t remember.”

  “Oh,” she said, deflated.

  “He went a little loopy toward the end. Lived with me an m’wife, y’see, at Bourne House, long after Momma died, right ’til he passed. One night he got to laughing, I remember . . . this was when he was starting to go, you know . . .” He circled his finger around his ear several times. “Cuckoo. And he said, ‘Let’s play “Button, button, who’s got the button?” ’”

  “What did he mean?” she asked, breathlessly, moving to the edge of her club chair. The button conversation! Was she finally going to learn what that was about?

  The old man shrugged. “It’s a kid’s game. You form a ring and one o’ you has the button; whoever is ‘it’ has to guess who.”

  “I know, but why did he say it?”

  “Don’t know.” He yawned widely.

  “Did it have a grinder with it when she bought it?”

  “It sure did. She used that thing to make sausage and hamburger, relish, lots o’ stuff.”

  So the grinder with it was likely original. “Mr. Bourne, I bought a bottle of old buttons at the same time as the Hoosier. Do you know if any of them are valuable? Is that what your father was talking about?”

  “Not likely. Them was from my wife; she liked to sew.”

  “But—”

  “Nap time. You can go now.” He hit a button on his chair’s control pad, and turned, using the joystick.

  Jaymie stood as he moved a ways away. “Mr. Bourne, did he ever say anything else about a button?”

  “Young lady, he said a lotta crazy things,” he said, over his shoulder. “Used to quote from some old Frost poem ’bout a witch. He was nutty as a pecan.”

  “Can I visit again sometime, Mr. Bourne?”

  He turned back toward her. “No one your age comes here, y’know.” He stared at her, his blue eyes watering. “No one. Or hardly no one; one feller, a writer, was here a while back. But I’ll tell ya, my grandson, he’s almost fifty, and I barely see him.”

  “I’ll come back,” she said, gently. “I promise.”

  It was all a jumble in Jaymie’s head, as she bid him good-bye. A button. The Hoosier. She watched as he rolled away, down a hall off the lounge. On the drive home she sorted out what she had learned. All the stuff about the Hoosier’s history was fascinating, but the “Button, button” comments had thrown her. The detective now had the jar of buttons; would he give it back to her, or should she tell him about Mr. Bourne?

  But it might not mean anything at all! She’d look like an idiot, phoning Detective Christian to tell him about a conversation with a ninety-year-old about his whackadoodle daddy and the kid’s game “Button, button, who’s got the button?” That was so many years ago, and how many other buttons could have been thrown out by the Bournes, given away, whatever? No button on earth was that valuable, to inspire murder!

  Maybe this valuable button really was in the Hoosier. She’d have to search it more thoroughly, really take it apart. She acknowledged, though, that even if there once was something in the Hoosier, it didn’t mean it was still there.

  She had to help Anna again, in preparation for the coming Memorial Day weekend, the real official test of her ability to run the Shady Rest Bed-and-Breakfast. Duty first, her grandmother had taught her. And if you promise something, follow through.

  When Jaymie got home from that, she checked her e-mail; there was a message from Becca with a bunch of photos from the auction and the tea. She then did a search for a witch poem and Robert Frost. She came up with “The Witch of Coos,” and read it; the poem had a line about the game of “Button, button, who’s got the button?”

  Strange and stranger. It all came back to a button somehow, but other than that she was no closer to solving the mystery. She’d definitely search the Hoosier again, but had a feeling she wouldn’t find any button in it. Even if it was once there, Mr. Bourne’s father had probably retrieved it and sold it decades ago. She fed the dog and let Denver and Hoppy both out into the yard. Dinner was a sandwich eaten while contemplating her empty garden. When she brought her plate in, the phone was ringing. It was Heidi. She still wasn’t sure how she felt about Heidi. On the one hand, the girl seemed harmless enough, but on the other, she was an unrelenting flirt, and Jaymie wondered if she could be trusted. Did Joel know what he was getting into? And why did Jaymie even care?

  But Heidi got to the point quickly. Her voice breathy with haste, she said, “Jaymie, the dead guy . . . the one who was murdered . . .”

  As if there was another dead guy, Jaymie reflected, and then decided she was just being mean.

  “. . . I think he was one of the guys who was fighting over the Hoosier you bought. Joel said to think about it, and I did. He’s the guy Joel had
to tell to shut up, and the one he decked, I’m sure of it! Is that important? Should I tell the police? Joel’s not home yet . . . should I tell the cops?”

  Trevor Standish was one of the men fighting over her Hoosier? “Why are you sure it’s the same guy?”

  “Well, first, Zell told me about his friend, the dead fellow, wearing a cable-knit cardigan, and I noticed that sweater on him at the auction. I knit. I thought maybe I’d try the design I saw on the sweater. When I thought about it . . . it has to be the same guy!”

  “Well, they do already know who he is, and that he was in town for a couple of weeks, but yeah, you should tell the police. It establishes that he was definitely at the auction, at least.” And bidding on the Hoosier. She needed to take the cabinet apart and examine it more closely. She moved out of the kitchen onto the summer porch and eyed the piece. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t done so already, but now it was urgent, and she was anxious to get Heidi off the phone.

  “Jaymie, I’m scared! Can I come over after? Can we talk about it? Do you really think I should call the cops?”

  “Yeah, sure, of course,” Jaymie said. Heidi should definitely tell the police about Trevor being at the Bourne auction. “Hang up and do that right away.”

  Heidi hung up.

  Trevor Standish had wanted to buy her Hoosier cabinet, and so had someone else with whom he’d fought. Coincidence? Could Trevor have just been one of those guys who hopped in to the bidding on anything that seemed to be heating up?

  But Jaymie didn’t think so, because that very same night he had broken in to her place, and then been murdered by someone else. The guy he’d fought with, maybe? Since he could not have thought that he could steal her Hoosier, he must have planned to search it. And that meant there was something valuable in it. It had to be that button. It was a great place to hide things. Mr. Bourne had said his father had hidden things in the Hoosier.

  It was definitely time to get to know her purchase a little better.

  Fourteen

  AS TWILIGHT GRAYED the sky and the neighborhood quieted around her, Jaymie dragged the looming cabinet away from the porch wall, the feet screeching on the wood porch floor and pulling up some of the gray paint. She had to be careful to not let the unsecured upper cabinet fall over in the move—it rocked a little and made her nervous, but stayed on—then she began at the top and worked down. Her hands were trembling, so she forced herself to calm down and pay attention to what she was doing. There may indeed have been a valuable button inside, but where?

  Now that it had occurred to her that the item of value in the cabinet could have been hidden there many years ago, it changed everything. A Hoosier cabinet, Jaymie discovered, truly was a dandy place in which to hide things. Lots of nooks and crannies!

  First, she got on a step stool and checked the top and back of the upper cabinet. Lots of dust, but nothing else. The top cupboard, with two square doors that latched in the center, held nothing, but it was interesting nonetheless. She had a book about Hoosier cabinets—she had lusted after one of the antique kitchen centers for a long time—and she knew that the smooth white paint in the interior surfaces of the cabinet was called “milk paint.” It was used because it was nontoxic for shelves or other surfaces where food was stored or prepared. That fact amazed her, considering the lead that makers had used in paint on children’s cribs and toys in the past.

  The long left cupboard still had, as she had discovered right away, the flour sifter, a long, large hopper made of tin. She had already searched it, forcing it to make it tilt out. It still stuck as she did it again, despite the obvious signs of wear, an arc on either side of the cabinet wall marking where it had been tilted out by two generations of Bourne housewives. Originally the hopper could be filled with flour, then the baker could just put her cup measure under the sifter and pull a lever to fill it. There really was nothing in that part, no mysterious button, no hidden valuables, nothing glued or taped behind it or in it.

  She knew that Trevor Standish having thought there was something of value in the Hoosier did not make it so. He could have died for nothing. She wasn’t sure what would be better, to find what he had been looking for, to discover that there never was anything in the Hoosier or to figure out that whomever had killed him had taken whatever it was he was looking for.

  Now to the cranky tambour door. This was the one she had been anticipating, because it would tell the tale of how original the piece was. This lowest cabinet in the upper section originally held all the glass spice jars, but much could have been lost or broken in almost ninety years. When they had lifted the upper cabinet onto the lower, she had thought she’d heard something clinking around inside, but she wouldn’t know until she opened it up.

  She pushed and pulled the tambour, but it wouldn’t budge. She tapped it, then got a butter knife from the kitchen and put it under the bottom and gently pried it up a fraction of an inch; from there it slid up with a whack that caused the butter knife to fly out of her hand, clattering down onto the porcelain top. Hoppy came to the back door and barked at her. Darn!

  “Sorry, buddy. Scared me, too.” She peered into the interior and, lo and behold, the original spice jars on a carousel mounted to the top of the interior were intact, as were two larger jars that would have held sugar and tea or coffee. “Wow,” she breathed, almost forgetting about the treasure she was hunting for in her rapture over the beauty of the Hoosier. She turned the carousel of spice jars and examined the other jars, but there was not another thing in that section.

  Hoppy limped over to the cabinet and sniffed, curious as always, nosing the lower drawer.

  “Something in there, m’boy?” she asked the intelligent little dog, and he looked up at her with a quizzical look. Wouldn’t that be a story to tell people, if the valuable button was in the drawer and her little Hoppy found it?

  She started searching the lower cabinet, the bottom tin drawer first; she pulled it right out and examined it. Tin had been used to make the bottom deepest drawer because it would have stored bread or other baking; metal kept the wee beasties out. Originally, it would have had a sliding tin lid, but that was gone. Contrary to Hoppy’s “pointing,” there was absolutely nothing in the drawer, so maybe he was just sniffing the ghost of long-dead mousies. The other drawers were almost empty, but one did hold some of the other discs for the grinder. The sliding breadboard was intact, and the largest bottom cabinet held only the memories of baking pans and pots from long ago.

  There was nothing else inside: zip, zero, zilch. No button of any kind. She sat back on her haunches and looked it over. So what was it about the Hoosier that made it such an object of interest that the murdered man had come to blows over it at the auction? She stood up, stretched and regarded it, mystified, then opened the flour sifter cabinet again.

  The cabinet still had what looked to be the original table of weights and measures stuck to the door, but one corner was loose. How had she missed that? Her heart thudded. Could there be something behind it? She gently peeled back the corner and tried to see, but it wouldn’t come far enough away. Darn it. She didn’t want to damage it with no cause. She pressed gently on the cardboard poster; there could not be a button behind it, nor anything else, because it was completely flat.

  There was nothing in the Hoosier.

  “I may as well clean it properly, then, Hoppy, before it goes into the kitchen, right? Who knows, if I take it apart, maybe something will pop out at me!” The little dog yapped happily in reply. “First things first; how to get this upper cabinet off the base without killing myself?” It was heavy and awkward and teetered perilously when she moved it. She pictured the heavy upper section falling on top of her and shuddered. Lifting it down would require some strength, but it was more the awkwardness of the piece. She tried to move it, and it rocked; maybe she shouldn’t try it alone.

  “Hey, let me give you a hand.”


  She jumped and whirled around at the voice behind her, her heart thudding against the wall of her chest. It was Daniel at the summer porch door.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t have spoken up like that!”

  “It’s okay, I was just startled. You have great timing,” she said. Thinking suddenly of Trevor, she watched his face. “How are you doing? You okay?”

  He shrugged, took his glasses off and looked down at the floor as he wiped the lenses on his shirttail. “I’ll be all right. It’s been a shock, and seeing his body . . . Zell met me there. At least he was some help. Then I had to talk to Trevor’s mom. She’s really upset.”

  “Oh, Daniel, that must have been so hard!”

  “Yeah. She hasn’t seen Trev for a few months. Said he had some project under way that he wouldn’t tell her about, but it was connected with his dad somehow.”

  “That’s too bad, that he never got to finish whatever it was. Unless he did. Maybe he did.” She considered mentioning her musings about Trevor Standish and her mysterious Hoosier cabinet, but hesitated.

  “I told her I’d help with his stuff back in Indiana, help his brother clear out his apartment. Maybe I’ll be able to figure out what the mysterious project was from that.”

  “That’s nice of you,” she said, putting one hand on Daniel’s shoulder. She squeezed and was surprised that, as slim as he looked, there was still some muscle in the guy. “Did you tell her in what circumstances he died?”

  He shook his head. “What would be the point? The poor woman has been through enough in the last few years. She had breast cancer, then Trev’s trouble . . . it’s not fair. I’m glad she has Trev’s little brother to stay with her. He was always the responsible one in the family.”