A Deadly Grind

by Victoria Hamilton

  The police—Detective Tewksbury again, not Detective Christian—and a police deputy took her statement, which she kept as minimal as possible. If they searched Lynn Foster’s room, they would find both the old receipt from her Hoosier cabinet, she told them, and the mimeographed Queen Elizabeth cake recipe stolen from her bookshelf. She hoped that proved Lynn was a determined thief and would not stop there to get what she wanted.

  So the next question surprised her.

  “Is that why you were in her room?” the detective asked, leaning forward and peering directly into her eyes. “Did you put those items there? Were you trying to incriminate her?”

  Twenty-three

  “IS THAT WHAT Lynn Foster’s saying?” Jaymie asked. She saw how it could look, that she’d snuck in to plant the items to make it look like Lynn was guilty. Was she in trouble?

  “Do you think she would say that?”

  Jaymie watched his eyes, but the detective was expressionless and simply waited with a calmness that was frightening. She sat forward on the padded purple chair. “I’m the one who turned the Button Gwinnett letter over to the police. Why on earth would I do something to incriminate Lynn Foster?”

  “I don’t know; why don’t you tell us?”

  Her stomach ached, and she was suddenly nervous. She had never been on the wrong side of the law before, not even for a traffic ticket! She paid her taxes on time, didn’t litter, and never parked in the disabled zone. But from their aspect, she could see why they’d be suspicious. She had thrust herself into the middle of a murder investigation, dressing up in a maid’s outfit to get into a suspect’s hotel room. She flattened her palms on her thighs. “I didn’t plant the papers. I would never do something like that.”

  “So if we find your fingerprints on the items what should we think?”

  “Well, of course my fingerprints will be on things. I handled the Hoosier receipt when I found it in Lynn Foster’s room, and the recipe came from my place originally, but I did not put them there. As I have already said, the Hoosier receipt must have been taken from the dead man’s hand. I found a corner of it, I think, when I was sweeping up the mess. I can give that to you, if you like. I still have it at home.” She met the detective’s gaze steadily.

  “I still find it curious that you were dressed in a maid’s uniform and in Lynn Foster’s room. It’s all very . . . convenient. If you were investigating on your own, Ms. Leighton, please be aware of what a dangerous thing you have done, and that, potentially, you may have ruined any case against Mrs. Foster, if it does turn out that she is the perpetrator.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make more trouble for you.” She was silent for a moment, thinking, but then said, “Would you give Detective Christian a message? I showed him a black-stone-and-diamond pavé pin that I found in my garden. I know how it got there now. It came from the middle of a silk flower that Lynn Foster was wearing on the lapel of a black suit; you can ask Valetta Nibley about that, because she saw it there. If Detective Christian or you can think of any other way it got in my garden except dropping from her lapel, I’d be interested to know!”

  The detective’s expression was neutral. He wrote a note, then looked up. “You can go home for now, Ms. Leighton, but please don’t leave the area.”

  She left, avoiding everyone else, just too tired to talk, even to Daniel. Once home, Jaymie let the animals out, filled their bowls and sat on the back step of her summer porch watching Hoppy chase squirrels as the sun sank lower in the sky. It had been a confusing, frightening day. She was overwhelmed with weariness, and yet her nerves were twitching like Mexican jumping beans. Closing her eyes, she went through the crimes committed in the last week, one by one. By Lynn’s own admission, she and Trevor had been conspiring to grab the Button letter for themselves and leave Nathan, Brett and Ted out of it.

  She pictured the Bourne house, remembering her spot on the trumpet vine–shaded porch, and knowing now that Trevor and Lynn were along the side wall just feet from her; in retrospect, if Lynn hadn’t wanted to be seen with Trevor Standish, that side of the house was a bad spot for the schemers to meet. It was within view of some of the auction-goers, certainly, and apparently they were seen at least by Ted Abernathy. Heck, her husband and Brett may have seen her, too! That revelation, that she was scheming with Trevor, had led to the fight at the auction between Trevor and Ted, both of whom were vying to purchase the Hoosier. If it hadn’t been for that fight and the distraction it had caused, the bidding on the cabinet would have gone too high, and Jaymie would have been out of it. One of them would have gotten the Button letter.

  The phone, beside her on the porch step, rang. It was her mother. They had a vague conversation that meandered uncertainly, mostly about Grandma Leighton and the Leightons’ plans to come up from Florida in August to stay at Rose Tree Cottage for a week. Jaymie was exhausted after her stressful encounter, but she certainly did not want to worry her mother with her near-death experience.

  Her mom finally said, “Well, I can tell you have things on your mind, so I’ll let you go. Your father has put me in a terrible spot! I have to face the bridge club this evening and tell them that Alan didn’t really mean it when he said they were a bunch of interfering old biddies with too much time on their hands. I swear, once a man reaches sixty he changes, and not for the better. I don’t even know him sometimes.”

  She hung up, and Jaymie stared at the phone in her hand. Didn’t know him, after forty-some-odd years of marriage? Did anyone really know anyone else, even the ones closest to them?

  Jaymie picked at the flaws and assumptions she had made in her reasoning along the way. She had assumed that it was Lynn who’d come along that night, just as Trevor found the receipt that he thought was the Button letter. Jaymie could imagine her whacking him over the head, but is that really what had happened? Did she think that based solely on the evidence of the receipt and the recipe being in the Fosters’ suite?

  Why had she dismissed Nathan Foster so readily as a suspect? Well, Lynn’s pin in the holly hedge meant that Lynn had been in her backyard when she’d had no just cause to be there. Or was that necessarily so?

  Jaymie got up and strolled the length of her lawn toward the back lane, eyeing the holly bushes. It was an odd place for the pin to have dropped. Even if someone had snuck up along the line of bushes toward the house, the pin would likely have dropped in the grass. As she had searched the Fosters’ suite at the Inn, she had turned toward the theory that Lynn Foster was the murderer, in part because of the pin that had come from Lynn Foster’s suit lapel. Maybe that was even what Lynn Foster had been wondering about the other day as they came into the Inn; she had said something to her husband about not knowing where she’d lost something. It could have been the valuable diamond pin.

  But why else had Jaymie dismissed Nathan Foster as a suspect? The older gentleman’s aura of dignity and gentility seemed to preclude any nefarious activity on his part. And there were the missing sleeping pills. She now knew that Lynn had been drugging her husband so he would sleep through her meetings with her boyfriend, Brett, but she had assumed that Lynn had dosed him while she was out killing Trevor Standish, too.

  She stopped at the back gate and stared down the quiet road. It was a silent, early evening in the middle of the week; everyone would be inside eating dinner or in front of the TV. A rustling in the nearby bushes was likely a raccoon ambling out to forage for food to feed her babies. She yawned. Queensville would come alive again tomorrow, the official start of summer, the beginning of the Memorial Day long weekend.

  Her mind returned to the enigma of Nathan Foster. What if all along he’d known about his wife’s affair and her plan to take the Button letter and leave him? What if he’d only pretended to take the sleeping pills and pass out? Going to the drug store for more and seeming bewildered about missing so many pills would lend verisimilitude to h
is obliviousness. But if he secretly had known she was doing all that, wouldn’t he have wanted to get rid of her? How better than to have her accused and jailed for a murder or murders that she hadn’t committed, all while he was actually the one benefiting by stealing the valuable letter? Lynn was tired of him; well, maybe he was tired of her too and figured if she were in prison he would be rid of her and her scheming.

  She could see how it would give him satisfaction to see her marched off to prison, when she had been cuckolding and drugging him. And he was the only other one of their scheming bunch who had access to her silk flower pin. She turned, leaned back against the fence and gazed at the line of holly bushes. If he took the pin out of the silk flower and tossed it into the bushes, he may have expected the cops to find it and trace it to her. Had he even planted the other evidence in their suite? She thought it over; the Hoosier receipt, the empty pill bottle . . . it was possible.

  The more she thought of it, the more certain she became. It all added up! “It was Nathan Foster all along!” she muttered.

  A strong arm snaked around her neck; she screamed and struggled, but the barrel of a gun was pressed to her temple. With her peripheral vision, she could see that it was not the cute little toy Lynn had trained on her, but a lethal-looking blue-steel number.

  “That’s right, my dear,” Nathan Foster said, holding the gun against her head with a steady, gloved hand. “It was me, and right now my sweet little wife—who has not been charged, and so has been encouraged by the high-priced attorney I retained for her, like a good and devoted husband, to walk out of the police station—is on her way here, thinking she is to meet me by the back gate.”

  Jaymie looked around wildly, as much as she could while holding her breath. The various backyards were still deserted; no helpful, nosy neighbor to see her plight.

  “Now, you are going to turn around and open the gate, and you are not going to scream, or you’ll be dead before you’re done.”

  He released her, and she turned around slowly, trembling with terror. Gone was the vague expression of befuddlement; instead, Nathan Foster’s lined face was twisted with sour triumph. He pushed her, and she staggered away from the fence as he opened the wrought-iron gate. He grabbed her again, and said, “She knows I’m on my way here. She thinks that we’ll get the letter after all and sail off into the sunset. Though I’m sure her plans are more along the lines of getting the letter and sailing off into the sunset alone.” He grinned. “Instead, she’ll find your dead body and the gun, which she will likely pick up, knowing her. If I’m fortunate, it will be just in time for your horrified neighbors to discover her.”

  “That’s never going to work!” Jaymie said, shivering, afraid to move. She had thought Lynn lethal, but all along it was Nathan she should have watched out for.

  The melodic twilight song of a robin taunted her with its peaceful sound. She stared longingly up her yard to the porch, where her cordless phone sat on the top step. Hoppy had gone back into the house through the open back door, no doubt to munch kibble and curl up in his basket, and who knew where Denver was? Anna, her closest neighbor, might hear her scream, but might not. And if Jaymie did scream, it would likely be the last thing she did on earth.

  “It’ll work,” he muttered. “I know my sweet Lynn. She’s as predictable as most women.”

  “You killed Trevor,” she said, shaking. “And you used the grinder off my Hoosier to do it!”

  “Is that what that was? The damned idiot wrenched it off as he went down. I lost my grip on the crowbar and picked that thing up to finish the terrible deed. I did not enjoy it, you know, doing that,” he said, with a huffy tone. “I’m not a killer. I thought he had the letter in his hand, but the dolt had merely found a receipt. If only I had not been so precipitous!”

  She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. “And Ted Abernathy. Why him?” She twisted, trying to see someone, anyone. But no one was in their backyards, not even Mr. Findley!

  “Fool. He tried to blackmail me!” He looked around. “Where should we stage this little drama, I wonder? Here, or closer to the house? Hmm.” The evening shadows were long and concealing, and he appeared in no hurry. Yet. Even if someone saw them from a distance, they wouldn’t know what they were looking at. “You asked about Ted Abernathy; what a fool that man was! He left a note at the Inn for me to meet him at the marina. Luckily, boathouses have fishing gear and fillet knives, for gutting fish. Knifing is much quieter than a gun, and that particular fillet knife is at the bottom of the river now. Your death, on the other hand . . . I want people to hear it.”

  He grabbed her shoulder with one steely hand and squeezed. Pain shot down her arm. Fear was clouding Jaymie’s mind. She needed to clear it, to still the trembling and think. She was not going to die.

  Nathan checked his watch. Motioning with the gun to the back porch, he said, “March!” and pushed her up the path, maintaining his unyielding grip on her neck. “This little tragedy will act out on your summer porch, near your beloved Hoosier. There is a certain poetic justice in that. Once my dear wife is found over your body—or running away from the crime—those idiot cops will be able to connect the dots, and Lynn will be up a creek. I won’t need to worry about Trevor and Ted’s unfortunate demises being laid at my doorstep. I’ll be the sadly horrified and misled husband.”

  If Jaymie had learned anything in the last few hours, it was not to dillydally when faced with a murderer. There was not a moment to waste. She twisted suddenly and managed to get her teeth on his wrist, biting hard while ducking from the direct aim of the gun. He released her and yelped in pain, and she kicked back, connecting with his leg, then tore away from him, zigzagging toward the house, yelling and screaming, hoping her back was not a target. She made it to the porch, and could hear him grunting as he ran after her.

  She didn’t dare stop to pick up her phone handset, but instead raced through the kitchen. Hoppy, startled, began to bark and ran after her, enchanted by this new game. She could hear Nathan Foster’s heavy footsteps behind her on the creaky, wide floorboards, but his unfamiliarity with her house gave her the advantage, and she wove through the shadowy interior, then opened the front door. Instead of exiting, though, she left it open and ducked back into the hall behind the laden coat tree. Hoppy raced outside and began to bark frantically. Bless his excitable nature!

  The man lumbered through the house, then paused briefly in the open doorway. Jaymie didn’t hesitate, but pushed the coat tree over on him, thinking it might disable him. He thrashed about, flailing through woolen coats. Jaymie grabbed an umbrella from the stand on the other side of the door and began whaling away at him in the doorway, all the while shrieking for help.

  Her arms felt like they’d fall off. Nathan Foster grunted, rolled away from her and lumbered to his feet, steadying the gun on her once more. “You little bitch,” he said lunging toward her. “I’ve gotta kill you before Lynn shows up . . . and . . .” He clutched at his heart and turned gray, falling to his knees in her doorway just as Mr. Trip Findley, Prince Albert himself, trotted through her house toward them, cricket bat in hand.

  “What’s going on here?” he shouted. “Saw him chasin’ you up your back lawn from my porch and came to help. Jaymie, you okay?”

  Moments later the cops arrived and, since the gun was still in Nathan Foster’s hand, even though she had tried to dislodge it, there was no question who the dangerous assailant was. He was cuffed and arrested just as Lynn Foster drove her Cadillac down the block. She screeched to a halt and jumped from the car, staring openmouthed and pale at the sight of her battered husband being led away by two sturdy police officers. He sagged in the officer’s hands, though, looking lifeless.

  “I think he’s having a heart attack!” Jaymie cried.

  “That’s what it looks like, all right,” Mr. Findley said.

  “What’s going on?” Lynn Foster shrieked.
She swatted at one of the cops who held Nathan. “You let my husband go!”

  “He was setting you up, Lynn,” Jaymie said, loudly.

  The police, now aware that something was wrong with their prisoner, gently lowered the man to the sidewalk and started CPR.

  “He was going to kill me and make it look like you had done it,” Jaymie continued. “You were going down for murder, even though he was the one who killed Trevor Standish and Ted Abernathy.”

  Lynn ignored Jaymie, trotting down the walk and falling to her knees at her husband’s side, hanging over him. “I love you, Nathan!” she cried, stroking his face, interfering with the female deputy, who was doing her best to administer lifesaving actions. “We’ll get through this. I believe in you!”

  Jaymie sighed and shook her head. She had tried, and that was all she could do.

  Nathan Foster had been about to be charged with murder for killing Trevor Standish and Ted Abernathy, the local news radio chirped the next morning, but he’d died of a massive heart attack, despite all efforts to revive him at the Wolverhampton hospital. He’d admitted the killings in a deathbed confession, so no one else was being charged.

  Jaymie had called Becca and filled her in on all the excitement. Her sister was aghast at the danger Jaymie had been in, but claimed to be proud of her courage and resourcefulness. Grandma Leighton was doing so well that Becca was now worry-free. She would be driving down for the weekend, and they could go over every minute of the events of the last week.

  For the rest of the day, she didn’t do much but answer the phone to calm concerned friends, especially Daniel, who had phoned three times and was on his way over. She ached; whether it was a reaction to the tension and fear she had suffered, or the death grip Nathan Foster had had on her, she wasn’t sure. Later in the day, Anna came over to check in on Jaymie. Everyone had the same idea, it seemed, and there were quite a few people already there, and more coming. “Just to drop in,” each person had said on the phone.