A Deadly Grind

by Victoria Hamilton

  Deliberately turning her mind away from her love life, or lack thereof, she shivered as she thought of the letter. The Button. Who had she heard talking about it at the auction? One of the speakers was Trevor, but who was the other person? Denver jumped onto the bed and curled up at her feet, one forepaw flung over her ankles. Hoppy groaned and whimpered, chasing Denver in his dreams, probably, something he didn’t dare do in real life.

  She thought back to the auction; one of Lesley Mackenzie’s muscular grandsons had said he’d been hired as security because someone had broken into Bourne House and rifled through everything before the auction. Had that burglar been looking for the Button letter? Given its extraordinary value, that seemed logical. So was the burglar Trevor Standish? Probably, but not absolutely. It could have been his untrustworthy coconspirator.

  She turned on her side, and Denver grumbled. “Sorry, fella,” she whispered and scratched his head.

  When Trevor and whoever had bid against him lost out on the cabinet because of their fight, Standish had to go to “plan B”: break into her summer porch and search the Hoosier. But it still nagged at her; why had someone—his untrustworthy partner or someone else—killed him before he’d found the Button letter?

  As she lay wide-awake, she remembered sweeping the porch and finding a corner of some kind of paper. She meant to have another look at it, but had forgotten completely. It hadn’t seemed relevant until now. Where had she put it? She sat up and turned on the light, found the torn corner of paper in her jeans pocket, then sat on the side of the bed and examined it.

  It was old paper, yellowed and with faded courier print from a typewriter. Since it was just a corner, though, it was hard to tell what it was, or had been. She squinted and blurred her vision. Sometimes that helped. Hmmm. A receipt, maybe? Part of a line of an address? But what was it doing on the floor of her summer porch? It was probably just the product of her exhausted mind that she connected it in any way with the murder. It could easily have fluttered out of one of the cookbooks, since they had been spilled across the floor during the fracas.

  She turned the light off and lay back down. Now she had an even longer list of questions, for which she had no answers. That was an uncomfortable state, and left her nowhere to go but finally, blissfully, to sleep. It was some time later when her bedside phone rang and she grabbed for it reflexively, her mind instantly going to her grandma or her parents, as middle-of-the-night phone calls are never good news.

  “Jaymsie? Is Heidi there? Did you see her?”

  “Wha—?” Jaymie put her legs over the edge of the bed and sat up in the pitch-blackness, scrubbing her eyes and holding the phone receiver to her ear. “Who is this?”

  “It’s Joel! I woke you up?”

  She squinted blearily and looked at her clock radio. Two-thirty-seven . . . and he had to ask if he’d woken her up? “Why are you calling me, Joel?”

  “It’s Heidi. I just got back—I wasn’t supposed to be back until tomorrow—but she scribbled down your name and address on a notepad by the phone. I thought maybe . . . look, did she talk to you tonight?”

  “Last evening?” Jaymie shook her head and sat up straight, clearer. She turned on her bedside lamp and flexed her shoulders. “Yes, I spoke to her.” She had a vague memory of the conversation, but hadn’t been paying complete attention because of the information the girl had just given her. Heidi had asked if she should call the police, and Jaymie had said yes. That was it, right?

  Jaymie told Joel all that, then said, “I don’t know . . . she may have asked me if she could come over, and may have interpreted what I said as a yes. But she never arrived. She could have gotten sidetracked, or went over to another friend’s place instead.”

  “She doesn’t have any friends in Queensville, Jaymie. I told you that. Folks have been standoffish.”

  Jaymie winced. Loyalty will make people do strange things sometimes, even cut someone out of a social circle just so it won’t hurt someone else’s feelings. “She didn’t come here,” Jaymie repeated. “Call the cops if you’re worried.”

  “I already did. They said to give it a while, that she’d be back. She’s an adult, they said.”

  His tone implied that if they thought that, they clearly didn’t know Heidi, and Jaymie was reminded of some of Joel’s less admirable qualities, one of which was a sometimes unbearable condescension. When he hung up, Jaymie felt antsy and went downstairs to the kitchen. She turned on the back light and looked around the yard, letting Hoppy out to piddle, but trotting out and firmly grabbing him before he could hare off in the dark. “Oh no, m’boy,” she said. “I am not going to let you have another go at the skunk, like you did last month. I can still smell Pepé Le Pew on you.”

  She sent him upstairs, looked around the kitchen thoughtfully, did a couple of little tasks, then went back up to bed and to sleep. When Hoppy started barking, Jaymie was once again hauled out of a deep sleep; she groaned and turned over. “Hoppy, go to sleep!” she yelled. “You are not going out after that skunk!”

  The only response was a noise in the kitchen, and Hoppy kept barking.

  “Hoppy, will you . . .” Jaymie hoisted herself out of bed and clattered down the stairs and through the dark house, intent on telling the little dog that a four a.m. wake-up call had not been ordered! But as she approached the kitchen, she heard the back door slam. It was too late to stop herself; she launched into the kitchen, terrified of what she would see, but there was just a flashlight on the floor and nothing else.

  No dead body, but the kitchen door open, the summer porch door open, and her dog barking. From outside.

  “Hoppy!” she shrieked, and pelted out of the back door without thinking, just in time to see the last of a hooded someone as the figure ducked through the gate and around the hedge. She raced barefoot into the yard, grabbed Hoppy, and stomped back in to the kitchen, slamming the door shut behind her, and picking up the phone. She dialed 911, breathlessly telling the operator that there had been a break-in and she needed police. No, the perpetrator was not still in the house, and yes, she was sure of that. Her dog would have chased down whoever it was in the house, if he or she were still there, she told the operator, and she thought she had seen the would-be thief leave.

  The police arrived quickly, and she set Hoppy down to let them in the back door. The little dog tore outside as she let in the two uniformed officers, Deputy Ng and Officer Jenkins. The Yorkie-Poo started barking again almost immediately, but Jaymie still tried to answer the officers’ questions. Did she think anything had been taken? Her stomach clenched; she looked over at the bookshelf. The Hoosier book was gone.

  Confused, shaken to the core, she couldn’t think in that moment, and just muttered, “I . . . I d-don’t think so. M-my dog must have scared them off before they got anything. Whoever it was dropped the flashlight and took off. I ran out back after my dog and saw someone just going around the hedge at the back gate.” Her mind whirled with questions and suppositions and fragments of thought. The only person in the world who knew what was in the Hoosier book was Daniel.

  Daniel Collins. No! She needed to think about this.

  They asked a few more questions and fingerprinted the door, photographing the broken window on the summer porch that had allowed the thief to unlock the door. They also photographed the damaged lock on the kitchen door, and bagged the flashlight as evidence to be processed at the police lab. There wasn’t a whole lot more they could do. All of that took some time, but Hoppy was still barking on and off. Finally, the dog trotted up the back steps as the cops were about to leave. The little Yorkie-Poo stared at Jaymie and barked again, his black button eyes snapping with intelligence, then raced outside.

  “What is up with him?” she said out loud, and followed him down the path to the back gate, and when she opened the gate, he bolted through it and around behind the shed/garage that let onto the back l
ane. She followed, and by the yellowy illumination of the ancient light on the post near the garage, she saw a figure lying on the ground in the overgrown weeds. “There’s someone here!” she cried.

  The police pushed her aside, and went toward the person, guns drawn. When they checked the form for signs of life, Jaymie squeezed between them.

  “Heidi! It’s Heidi Lockland!” Jaymie knelt down beside her, and Heidi looked up, her beautiful eyes fogged with pain.

  One tear squeezed out of the left eye, and she said, her voice muffled but audible, “I came to see you, and someone hit me!” Then her eyes rolled back, and she fainted.

  They called for an ambulance, and as it pulled away Jaymie told the police she would call Heidi’s boyfriend to meet her at the hospital.

  “No! Don’t do that, ma’am,” Deputy Ng said. “We’ll take care of everything, if you’ll just give us his name and address.”

  She rattled it off, and said, crossing her arms over her chest and shivering with the night chill, “He called about an hour and a half ago, and said she was missing. He said he’d called the police, too.”

  “We’ll take care of it,” the young cop said, sternly adding, “Please don’t call him! We appreciate your cooperation.”

  She should go stay with someone, Deputy Ng advised her. If she was going to try to sleep more, she probably would have gone to Valetta’s or Dee’s, but the officer told her that, in any case, they would have a cruiser stationed in the back alley and circling past her front door the rest of the night. If she wanted to go somewhere, all she had to do was tell one of them.

  “You know, none of this would have happened—not the break-in, nor the attack on Heidi—if one of you had still been in the back alley,” she said, a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  “I wish it were that easy, ma’am,” he said, with a polite, regretful look. “Unfortunately, the resources of the Queensville Township Police Department are not unlimited.”

  It only occurred to Jaymie a few minutes later, after he’d left and she was shoving a chair under the doorknob of her busted door, that they probably wanted to ask Joel “a few questions,” as the cop shows always had investigating officers say.

  She thought of something else in that moment, too. Trevor Standish had broken into her summer porch, using something to bust the lock and break the door open. What had he used, and where was it? If the killer had used the grinder to murder him, whacking him from behind, then why did that person carry away the other thing? Whatever it was must be somewhere, and might have fingerprints on it.

  The first glimmers of dawn were showing on the horizon. Way too much excitement for one night. She circled the kitchen restlessly, eyeing the bookshelf every time she passed it. She should have told the police about the missing book, but if she called them back now and explained about the letter, it would look weird. Someone, the murderer likely, had been in her home rooting through her belongings, and that someone had known to go for one book in particular, from all her cookbooks: Hoosier Cabinets by Philip D. Kennedy. She shivered and rubbed her arms. How had the thief known?

  No one but she and Daniel Collins knew that she had put the Button letter in that book, and now the book was gone! He had arrived that night just after Heidi had called her and asked if she could come over. If Jaymie hadn’t been so darned preoccupied with what Heidi had just told her about the fight at the auction, she would have heard correctly!

  She had to reason things out. If Daniel was involved with his buddy Trevor’s scheme, how would it have impacted last night? Say Daniel found Heidi snooping, or coming to see her, and bashed her on the head. But why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he just wait until she went away? Unless . . . could Daniel be the other guy who had been fighting with Trevor Standish over the Hoosier cabinet? Then he wouldn’t have been able to risk Heidi seeing him again.

  Except, that didn’t make one bit of sense. Not a single one! Joel would have recognized Daniel at the auction if he had been the one fighting with Trevor. And Heidi saw Daniel at the Tea with the Queen. Still, even if he wasn’t the guy Trevor had been fighting with at the auction, Daniel could have been involved with Trevor’s scheme as his mysterious investor, and could have told her just enough to exonerate himself and get her to trust him.

  Jaymie definitely needed to talk to Daniel, to ask him where he was and what he was doing. It didn’t seem possible that she could be so wrong about his character, but how well did she really know him? She climbed the stairs, Hoppy bouncing up ahead of her, and went to her room, sitting down on the side of her bed. She picked up The Love Thief, another historical romance, from her side table and opened it. She took out her plastic-covered “bookmark,” turning it over and over.

  Whoever had stolen the Hoosier cabinet book would now have the old, mimeographed copy of the recipe for Queen Elizabeth cake, but they wouldn’t have the Button Gwinnett letter, she reflected, looking down at the valuable piece of American history in her hands.

  Sixteen

  SHE HAD TAKEN the Button Gwinnett letter out of the Hoosier cabinet book in the middle of the restless night, put it in a Baggie and brought it upstairs with her, sticking it in her romance novel. The thief would be the only one who knew that she had removed the letter from Hoosier Cabinets, though. She’d have to decide what to do: confront Daniel, or not. Was he involved somehow in the attempted theft of the letter? She couldn’t condemn him until she knew for sure, because he could have told Zell McIntosh, or someone else, for all she knew, about the letter and Jaymie having put it in the book.

  Zell McIntosh: who was more likely to have been in on something with Trevor Standish? And his arrival was so precisely timed, the very night Trevor had died. Who was to say Zell hadn’t been lingering somewhere, in another village, waiting for the word from his partner, Trevor? It was more than possible, given the connection between the two men. And if that was the case, and he killed Trevor and took his cell phone, who more likely to know what to text Daniel?

  She needed to talk to Daniel, but not yet. And before sundown the Button Gwinnett letter had to be out of her home, and it had to be known that it was out of her home for the sake of whoever was trying to steal it. How she was going to manage that, when she didn’t know who had broken in, was going to be a challenge. It was too dangerous to keep, that was for sure.

  The morning got busy really early, once villagers learned of the break-in and the attack on Heidi. As Jaymie cleaned fingerprint dust off her back door for the second time in a few days, she received half a dozen phone calls, all before eight a.m., and most expressed concern and sympathy for Heidi, as they should have. Being bashed on the head and left for dead was an easier way to the villagers’ hearts than just being a nice—if vacuous—young woman, because the universal response seemed to be “poor little thing.”

  The second response among callers was to make sure Jaymie hadn’t taken out her “rival” with a baseball bat. It was not mindless wondering, in that case, apparently; there was a rumor going around Queensville that she had beaten Heidi unconscious, then gone inside and had tea. Folks didn’t really believe it, each person claimed, but they still called, “just to check.”

  “Who would say something like that, Valetta?” Jaymie asked her friend, who had dropped in to check on her before she had to be at work at the Emporium.

  The woman gazed at her quizzically, then said, “Kathy Cooper?”

  Jaymie sighed. It had to be Kathy Cooper, her one and only enemy in Queensville.

  “What has she got against you, anyhow?” Valetta asked, wrapping her bony hands around a blue mug. “I have never seen anyone so bound and determined to destroy someone’s reputation. Good thing we all know you well, ’cause she paints you as a catty, jealous, spiteful old maid.” She paused a beat and cocked her head. “Kinda like me.”

  Jaymie laughed, knowing it was a joke, but then said, “I
wish I knew what went wrong. We were friends as kids.” That soured somehow, and now Kathy persisted in regarding her as an enemy and badmouthed her whenever she had the chance. It was puzzling. Jaymie had tried to discover what was behind it, and had attempted to make amends for whatever had come between them, but there didn’t appear to be a rational explanation, so she had just learned to live with it.

  “You know, you’d better call Becca and tell her everything, or she’ll hear it from someone else,” Valetta advised. She had gone to school with both Becca and DeeDee, but had never become close friends with either. Instead, she and Jaymie had become close pals over the years. “She’s gonna want to know why you didn’t go stay at Dee’s place after the break-in last night. Why didn’t you, anyway?”

  The easy answer was that she didn’t intend to go back to bed, and hadn’t. But there was more to it. “Ever since I turned twenty or so, it seems like as much as I see myself as a competent, intelligent adult, I’ve got ten people telling me I’m just a kid, and not a very bright one at that. I’m thirty-two; when is that going to stop? If I ran over to Dee’s every time something bad happened, it would just confirm that impression that I can’t look after myself. It’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s the ‘woman alone’ syndrome,” Valetta said sympathetically. “My brother still figures he needs to step in and run my life for me, and I’m forty-two.” She was really forty-seven, but shaving five years off her age was a long-ingrained habit. “It’s only gotten worse since his wife died. Brock figures I should move in with him and his kids, but that,” she said with a shudder, “is a fate worse than death. I don’t mind helping out sometimes with them, but to live there? I’d rather be steeped in boiling tea.”