Victoria Hamilton - Vintage Kitchen 04 - No Mallets Intended

by Victoria Hamilton

  “Now he’s got nothing to lose,” she murmured, thinking of his license suspension. “And he’ll need money, if he loses his license to practice psychiatry permanently. So what do we do next?”

  Haskell took a deep breath and sighed, as he slipped the will back in the envelope. “Now I take this and present it to the court. The previous will was probated so long ago! The property has been through two owners since then, and the court could decide to dismiss it. Probably not, though, since the inheritor by this will is still alive. It’s going to get complicated.” He slumped, his broad shoulders rounded. “Very complicated. And just between you and me, complicated, in the legal system, is not good except for the lawyers involved.”

  Jaymie shook her head. “I feel awful! I wish I’d never found the will.”

  “Don’t worry yourself, my dear. We wouldn’t even have had the wherewithal to buy this place if it had not been for you and the Button Gwinnett letter!”

  She brightened. Well, that was true; it was her investigation into the dead man on her back doorstep that had led her to find a letter written by a signatory to the Declaration of Independence. When she returned the letter to its rightful owner, that generous man had donated it to the heritage society. At auction it had brought seven figures, allowing them to buy the manor house and invest in refurbishing it.

  “Anyway, better now than a few years down the road when we’ve put a lot more money into restoration!” Haskell said, bucking up slightly. “And who knows… maybe the will isn’t valid at all!”

  “I really hope Prentiss Dumpe doesn’t get a dime.” Jaymie sighed and put her hands on her hips. On to other things. “By the way, did you get my email this morning?”

  “About Iago Dumpe? Yes. I don’t know what to make of it, though. Was it just an ill-mannered joke? Or someone trying to make trouble for Iago? He doesn’t have many friends in the community.”

  “There was something not quite right about the letter, the way words were misspelled,” Jaymie mused. “I suppose it will all be a moot point if the property isn’t ours. Should we still take Daniel up on his offer and have the security system put in?”

  “Absolutely. We won’t know for some time how this is all going to go, and I hope we’ll still be able to go ahead with our Dickens Days opening. The fellow is coming out soon to install the alarm. We’ll have to work out a system with each society member as to security codes and such.”

  Haskell left, and with him went Heidi, whom he offered to take out to lunch at Ambrosio, a restaurant down the river. He told her he wanted to discuss their family history, but Jaymie was sure it was more that he wanted to take a pretty girl out to lunch and be seen with her. Yes, they were cousins, and he was quite a bit older than she, but they were distant cousins, and she was very pretty and very wealthy.

  And very sweet. Jaymie sighed. How hard would it be to have to suspect people’s motives all the time? Remembering Heidi’s mistrust of Joel’s intentions, Jaymie reflected that it must not be easy to be rich. Like I’ll ever have that problem, she thought.

  Hoppy, who had been gaily running free in the house, came to Jaymie when she called, and she snapped his leash on and headed outside. She circled to the back and had a look at the murder site, the splashed blood now a dark stain on the wood steps and painted clapboard. The death of Theo Carson, though she had done her best to push it to the back of her mind, weighed heavily on her. Her almost sleepless night had been full of images, specifically of the poor man’s dead face, startled eyes open, shattered skull crushed and bloody.

  With the meat mallet. How had it gotten from the kitchen into the hands of the murderer unless he or she had been inside? That certainly limited the field of suspects to those who had been in the house, but unfortunately that included dozens of people, certainly everyone she knew of who hated Theo.

  Shuddering, she turned away and stared over at the garage. The police had gone through it, but hadn’t found anything to indicate who’d killed Theo or if anyone suspicious had even been in the garage, as far as she knew. Bill was keeping some of his tools and materials inside, and she wondered if he had bought the molding to repair the ceiling. Some of the tin panels were sagging and needed to be pushed up and fixed in place.

  Tugging Hoppy to come with her, she pushed open the single door and flicked on the light switch. The big double doors were locked securely, so nobody could park in the garage at this point, and Bill had all his tools locked up in a tool chest in the corner. She let Hoppy have a long leash and he snuffled around in the corners, but he didn’t find anything but some mouse poop, candy wrappers and an empty Rolaids container.

  “Come on, fella… let’s get out of here. I sure hope they fix that back window, because the wind is whistling through it something awful. Once the snow flies we’ll have drifts in here.” She exited and stopped to look around. She was not ready to return home just yet.

  Moody November, mercurial in its sudden weather changes, had gone gloomy again, a grim gray sky foretelling a few snowflakes before long. Bare trees swayed as a wind tossed them, tearing the last few leaves from fragile branches. It sometimes seemed that autumn was a sudden season: one day there were red and gold leaves on the trees, and the next every tree was bare, stripped by the wind, a litter of brown crunchy leaves on the ground around them.

  She gazed out over the landscape and wondered how far the Dumpe property actually went. It had been surveyed recently, and the survey stakes were still in place. She needed to clear her head. Skirting the crime scene and avoiding looking at it, she headed out, hiking across the weed-clogged field, her feet sinking into the ground in some low-lying boggy spots. So far, no survey stakes. But she saw a mound ahead within a grove of scrubby trees and walked toward it, letting Hoppy off the leash to have a good run. He always came back when she asked.

  What an odd mound, she thought, circling it to find a structure buried in a hillside. It was half concealed with brush and overgrown, withered trees, but there was a wall set into the hill, with a battered wooden door half hanging off it. “I know what this is!” she exclaimed excitedly. “This is a root cellar, Hoppy!”

  Her little dog bounced around, barking. This place was spooky, she thought, the hair on the back of her neck standing up. Somewhere nearby, perhaps in the woods, a crow cawed, harshly warning her to beware! But it was daylight, no reason to be alarmed, and she was not going to be frightened away because of a gloomy sky and noisy birds.

  She pushed away brambly branches by the root cellar’s doorway; the brambles looked for all the world as if they had been stacked there on purpose. Why would someone do that? The door was just pieces of rotting wood held together by another couple of strips of rotting wood. But when she grabbed the rusty handle, it actually moved reasonably smoothly. She stopped and stared at the door for a long minute, then looked down. She could see the fan shape in the dirt; the door had been opened recently. Why?

  “What are you doing, Jaymie?”

  She shrieked and jumped a foot in the air. Hoppy began to bark as she whirled. “Bernie!” she said, hand over her pounding heart, staring wide-eyed at her police officer friend. “What are you doing here?”

  “So, I’m just driving up the lane and I see you and your little dog head out across the field. Where the heck is she going? I wonder. If I’m smart, and I want to solve this crime, then—given your track record—I follow you! I would have caught up with you, but those two ladies, Mrs. Frump and Mrs. Bellwood, came clumping out of the house right then and pinned me down, asking me all kinds of questions about the murder.”

  Jaymie bit her lip but couldn’t refrain from chuckling.

  “Lord save me from old folks when it comes to gruesome detail!” Bernie said. “My aunts are like that… have to know every detail of the death, even down to the bloodshed. Anyway, those two wanted to know everything. I told them to ask you. What’s going on?”

  Jaymie’s hear
t began to return to a normal rhythm, and she turned back to the door. “Look at this: you can tell it’s been opened recently.”

  “What is this place?” Bernie asked, moving forward and crouching, peering into the darkness. “Okay, this is seriously creepy. It reminds me of that awful underground den in The Lovely Bones, the one the killer built.”

  “I loved that book… cried like a baby at the end. I didn’t know you liked to read!” Jaymie exclaimed. Few of her friends did, and it got lonely when you couldn’t talk about how exciting a particular book was.

  “Anything but murder mysteries,” Bernie said with a laugh. “Can’t stand the nosy villager who always stumbles across the identity of the killer. No offense, Jaymie. Now seriously, what is this place? Do you know?”

  “It’s a root cellar,” Jaymie said, as she turned back to the wooden door. “Back in the day, folks didn’t have refrigerators, so they had a root cellar to store vegetables over the winter. You know: potatoes, carrots, onions, turnips, cabbages. Enough to get the whole family through.”

  “Why is it so far from the house?” Bernie asked, twisting to look back at the heritage home, a good couple of football fields away.

  Jaymie straightened. “Good question.” She peered back at the house, now ominous looking as the gathering clouds piled up, darker charcoal against the gray sky. “Maybe the original house was out here, nearby,” she said. “I’ll bet if you looked around you’d find the foundation of the original Dumpe home.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “And when they built the big house nearer to the road, they didn’t need the root cellar anymore because they dug a cellar right in the house,” Jaymie said, developing her theory as she spoke. “The house cellar has since been finished and a floor put in, but originally I’d bet it was just dirt.”

  “You really are into all this, aren’t you?” Bernie examined her like she was crazy. “Hey, I love old, too, but old to me is my dad’s childhood. He’s told me stories about when he was a kid, what he remembers about his family’s first TV, Howdy Doody, his bicycle and Radio Flyer wagon.”

  That explained the police officer’s fondness for midcentury modern. “Old for me is my grandmother’s childhood,” Jaymie explained. She suddenly looked around. “Where did Hoppy go? Hoppy!” They heard a muffled bark. “Darn dog!” she exclaimed. “He’s gone into the root cellar. I guess that means I’m going in, too.” She pulled the creaky door open across the fan-shaped scrape in the dirt and ducked her head. “I can’t see much,” she said.

  “Let me,” Bernie offered, and she shone a pencil flashlight into the space.

  Jaymie glanced around and what she saw made one thing clear: someone had very recently been staying in the root cellar.

  Eleven

  THE PLACE WAS astoundingly dry and completely walled, with rocks and plaster set between thick, squared wooden beams. Makeshift shelves lined the walls and were stocked with cans of beans and stew. In the corner was a kind of pallet with blankets piled in a heap. It was dark, but whoever had been staying there had an oil lantern that hung from one of the wooden beams that held the ceiling in place.

  But there was a lot more in the root cellar than just food and blankets: boxes were lined up against the shelves on pallets, new boxes of what appeared to be electronic stuff. There was a big wooden crate with clothes spilling out of it, all still with price tags.

  “I want to know who’s staying here,” Bernie muttered. “We’d better go back to the house. I need to radio headquarters. The boss has to see this.”

  Jaymie caught hold of Hoppy and leashed him, and together they walked back to the house. What did this mean? Jaymie wondered, her mind spinning with conjecture. Was it connected to the murder? It was quite possible that it wasn’t, since squatters had once considered the house fair game to stay in, and they must have moved somewhere once locked out. But then, what were the boxes of electronics and clothes doing out there in the root cellar? It didn’t take much imagination to figure out that the cache had to be stolen goods.

  When they got back to the drive, Bernie went directly to her car and radioed in. She rejoined Jaymie, who stood staring off into the distance.

  “You don’t look too good, Jaymie. You okay?” Bernie crouched down, as Hoppy danced around and then tried to crawl up on her lap as she scruffed behind his ears. “No, little guy. Not on the uniform,” she said and stood back up.

  “I’m okay. Just a little trauma left over from last night. I don’t think you ever get used to seeing a dead body.” She looked over at her friend. “How do you deal with it as a police officer?”

  Her expression sober and her tone determined, Bernie said, “Honestly, I go to a different part of my mind. I never want to become desensitized to the point that I can’t understand and respond to another human’s tragedy, but as an officer I have to take that natural fear and turn it into the energy to do something about it. People have to be able to trust that I will both know what to do and have the ability to do it.”

  What would sound stiff and formal coming from some was a warm expression of humanity coming from Bernie; she was a good cop. It was the best explanation Jaymie had ever heard for a police officer’s need to respond appropriately in the face of violence. She looked at the stoop, trying to get over her sick feeling at the splattered blood still evident on the freshly painted wall and door. Softly, she said, “I’ve been trying to figure out how the murderer got the meat mallet that was in the kitchen, last time I saw it.”

  “Was that before or after you were attacked?”

  Good question, and one that had not been covered in the lengthy interview Detective Vestry had done with her the night before. The police seemed to be treating the attack on her in the house as a separate incident, as it probably was. Jaymie frowned and thought. “It was after, I think. But I can’t be sure.”

  Bernie whipped out her notebook and started writing. “So it couldn’t have been taken the night you were attacked, is that correct?”

  “I can’t be sure, but I don’t think so.” That meant it was lifted after the incident by someone with access to the house.

  Just then a car pulled up the drive and an older woman got out, clutching her purse to her chest and looking up at the house with loathing.

  “Who could that be?” Jaymie asked.

  “Mrs. Carson, Theo’s mother. She wanted to see the place her son died. That’s why I’m here, actually; they sent me to meet her and show her around.”

  Wind whipped up the driveway as Mrs. Carson hesitantly approached, examining the house. She was a woman of about seventy, with tightly curled iron gray hair and wearing all black, a skirt suit and long coat, with a black handbag and matching low-heeled pumps. Bernie walked toward her, introduced herself and asked how she could help.

  “You can tell me who killed my son, and why!” The woman’s voice trembled with intensity.

  “We’re working on that, ma’am.”

  “Who are you?” she asked with some hostility, glaring at Jaymie.

  Jaymie stepped forward and said, “I’m one of the heritage society members, working on the house. Jaymie Leighton.” She put out her hand, but it was ignored. “I found your son, Mrs. Carson. I’m so sorry. He was a great writer and we were all looking forward to his booklet on the family and house history.”

  The woman stared past Jaymie, at the stoop. “Is that where it happened? Those back steps? That’s what the paper said, that he was found on the back steps of the house.”

  “Yes, that’s where it happened,” Jaymie said.

  She started forward, picking up speed as she went. Bernie and Jaymie exchanged a look and followed. Mrs. Carson stood, shivering in the brisk wind and staring at the blood splatter. Jaymie’s stomach turned. With the information she had, thanks to the gabby medical examiner, Jaymie thought she could detect how Theo had been standing at first, when hit; there
was a light spray of blood that was beginning to fade from the clapboard wall. But then the poor guy had fallen or been beaten down on the stoop when the final blow was dealt. That was where most of the blood was concentrated, on the stoop and the wall immediately above it. What had the murderer wanted that Theo wasn’t giving up? Was it simply a brutal theft?

  And why murder by mallet?

  “Have you spoken to your son lately?” Jaymie asked, as Bernie hung back at a respectful distance.

  “Just the day before he died,” she said, her voice clogged with tears. “He had a girl he wanted me to meet. I was so happy he’d broken up with his last girlfriend.”

  “His last girlfriend?”

  “Some older woman.” She stiffened in anger. “Far too old for him; she was apparently in her midfifties. What was she doing with my Theo?”

  “Was that Cynthia Turbridge?”

  “You know her?”

  “I do,” Jaymie said.

  “Some yoga instructor antique shop retiree.” Her tone was filled with bitter disgust. “Theo said she was crazy, in the end, when he broke it off with her. She told him he had better know what he was doing or he’d be sorry. What kind of woman badgers a man like that?”

  That was certainly dramatic. Cynthia had been upset about Theo, but Jaymie had figured she was just hurt, and that she’d get over it. But how well did she really know Cynthia? And one thing was true: Cynthia had access to the house and could have taken the mallet anytime she wanted.

  But there were so many other avenues. She glanced over at Bernie, but the police officer did not seem inclined to interrupt. “Theo has been a controversial writer for a while, though. I know his book From War to War stirred up a lot of feeling, and he said he was writing a new one, Nazi in America. Was he professionally in trouble with anyone?”