Victoria Hamilton - Vintage Kitchen 04 - No Mallets Intended

by Victoria Hamilton

  There were teacups turned into chandeliers, keys as wind chimes and drawer fronts made over into wall plaques, with doorknobs as coat hooks. As creative as it all was, Jaymie still preferred to see the items in their original form; so, as much as she admired Jewel’s work, she had no desire to do the same in her own home.

  Much later, as the sun hung low in the sky and purple clouds foretold a storm on the horizon, or even snow if it got colder, the two women came back with a trailer full of finds from their little road trip. Jaymie pulled on her coat, a wool parka, and met them outside, on the road halfway between their two shops. “Hey, how did you do?”

  Jewel bounded out of the truck, her flame red hair flying around her, then settling on her shoulders, vividly standing out against her milk chocolate shawl-collar sweater coat. “It was fabulous!” she cried. “We had lunch at a darling little tearoom near Marine City, then Cynthia had to mail something or other, so I went to an antique store and got the most stunning estate ruby!” She flashed a gorgeous ring. “Then we went on to the junk store and I found a piece for the parlor of the Dumpe and we bought a ton of junk that Cynthia and I are going to make over into shabby chic for her Cottage Shoppe.”

  Cynthia got out of the passenger’s side, but she was low-key and did not seem as invigorated as her friend.

  Jaymie eyed her, but asked Jewel, “Where all did you go?”

  She named some places, then said, as she lowered the tailgate on the trailer, “Have you heard of a new junk store on the highway called the Junk Stops Here?” When Jaymie admitted she hadn’t, Jewel said, “You have got to go! Amazing. Right, Cynthia?”

  “Sure,” her friend said, with no enthusiasm.

  “And the owner is the cutest young fellow,” Jewel raved. “If I were forty instead of fifty I’d go for him!”

  Jaymie smiled, but glanced over at Cynthia, worried. A chill wind gusted down the road, sending a shower of leaves whirling up into the air. “Let me help you two unload your stuff.”

  “Okay,” Jewel said. “Some of this is going back to Bill’s place for me to work on,” she said. Bill Waterman had a workshop/store/museum of ancient tools in the big shed behind Jewel’s Junk. Jewel used his space and tools to do the rough work and paint or strip. Jaymie helped her carry back a couple of old dressers and a dressing table, then helped with boxes.

  Cynthia worked, too, quietly, but Jaymie insisted, after saying good-bye to Jewel, on helping with Cynthia’s last two boxes. She carried a heavy one up to the Cottage Shoppe’s back door and waited while Cynthia unlocked the door and turned the lights on, then carried the box of enamelware and Pyrex into the kitchen.

  When she set down the box, she said, “Cynthia, I wanted to tell you how sorry I was. I know you dated Theo for a time, and that you felt deeply about him. It didn’t end well but still… it’s hard.”

  Cynthia nodded, her dark hair like a curtain concealing her face as she stared down at the vintage Arborite table, with silver and gold starbursts on a turquoise background. She traced the pattern of one of the starbursts with a long, manicured fingernail, cracked, it appeared, but expertly repaired.

  “Did he ever ask you anything about Dumpe Manor? Or… anything like that?”

  “He kept wanting to go there and look around, I don’t know why. He had been researching and said that the last Mrs. Dumpe’s husband was a Nazi sympathizer. I asked what that had to do with anything.”

  “Anything else you remember?”

  She sighed and shook her head. “Oh… he asked me about some manuscript he’d heard about, something about the Dumpe family.”

  “Did he ever talk to Prentiss Dumpe, do you know?”

  “Sure. He said Prentiss was a jerk, and that he wasn’t going to fare well in the booklet. I guess Prentiss and he didn’t get along.”

  Maybe that was some of what he had told his mother was going to shock Queensville about the Dumpe family. “But you seem to be friends with Prentiss,” Jaymie said, remembering the doctor comforting Cynthia at the meeting, after her snub from Theo.

  “I don’t want to talk about it!” Cynthia exclaimed, turning away and moving things around, agitated. “I have to close up the shop.”

  Jaymie, startled by Cynthia’s outburst, decided not to pursue that subject. Maybe Cynthia had been seeing the doctor for some reason, or maybe they were just friends. She framed her next words carefully, still thinking that Cynthia could have information that would be valuable. “I keep thinking, if Daniel hadn’t bought me a cell phone, I would not have gotten a text, and if I hadn’t had a text, I wouldn’t have gotten that weird message, and I would have just gone to bed like any other night in November. What about you? What were you up to that evening?”

  Cynthia suddenly got very busy, taking the box and pulling out the contents, willy-nilly. There was a pretty lot of vintage enamel bowls that caught Jaymie’s interest, and a green enameled soap dish that would be perfect hanging over the sink in the Dumpe kitchen. Jaymie picked it up, examined it and realized it was a reproduction of an antique, not the real deal. Cynthia didn’t really care about the distinction, but Jaymie did.

  She glanced up to talk, but the other woman had gone white, her complexion a pasty chalk color. “Are you okay?” Jaymie asked, as her friend swayed on her feet. She pulled a chair over and forced Cynthia to sit. Kneeling by her, she repeated the question.

  Cynthia shook her head, then appeared dizzy, and put it down in her arms for a second, on the Arborite table. Finally she said, her voice muffled, “I’m not all right at all. You want to know where I was that night Theo was killed?”

  “Yes,” Jaymie said, afraid of what she was about to hear.

  Cynthia took a deep breath and sat up straight, staring out the back window at the darkening sky. “I wasn’t home, I can tell you that.”

  “Then where were you?” Her question hung between them, and Jaymie knew the answer was important. Cynthia’s fury over Theo’s defection had been weighing heavily on the older woman, and there was clearly still something wrong, even though Carson was now dead.

  “I was over at some bar on the highway getting stinking drunk,” Cynthia said, her voice guttural with suppressed emotion. “Like a fool, I then got in my car and drove.”

  “No!” This was not at all what she had expected and, even though Jaymie was shocked, it wasn’t as bad as she feared. Or was it? “Cynthia, what were you thinking?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking! I don’t even remember it clearly, but I knew I needed to go somewhere.” She broke down sobbing, and Jaymie knelt by her, patting her shoulder, not quite knowing what else to do.

  “I haven’t done that in a long, long time. Not since the DUI about… oh, God… fifteen years ago? But I did it… I drove. And now I can’t remember where all I was, where I went. All I know is…” She raised her head and looked at Jaymie, tears streaming down her face. “When I woke up in the morning in my car on a side road, there was blood on my sweater and I don’t know how it got there!”

  Fourteen

  JAYMIE’S HEART THUDDED, and then beat faster; she felt sick, but she was not going to get hysterical. “How much blood? Are we talking a scratch, or…” She shook her head and caught her breath. She thought of what the police chief had said about the killer being splattered with blood. “Was your sweater splattered or dripping or… or what?”

  The older woman swayed in her chair and moaned.

  “Cynthia, relax.” Jaymie hopped over to the sink and filled a tumbler with cold water. “Have a drink and take a deep breath,” she said, pulling out a chair and sitting opposite her. “What exactly are you saying? What do you think happened that you had blood on you? And where were you?”

  Cynthia shivered, her teeth chattering with cold or shock. Jaymie turned up the thermostat, then retrieved a vintage granny square afghan from the living room section of the shop and draped it around C
ynthia’s shoulders, tucking her in, trying to help her get warm.

  The woman’s eyes held a bleak expression. “I don’t know what to say,” she whispered. “I just don’t know!”

  Okay, first things first. Perhaps Jaymie should be advising a trip to the police station, but there was time for that, if it was necessary. “Where is the sweater now?”

  “Do you want to see it?”

  Jaymie hesitated, but then her resolve crystallized and she nodded. “Yes, I do. Where is it?”

  “Here, in the shop. I didn’t want to leave it at home, but I didn’t know how to get rid of it. I hadn’t… I hadn’t thought anything until I heard about Theo. That’s when I brought it here… I just couldn’t leave it in my house!” Her voice rose to a hysterical note, and Jaymie touched her arm to reassure her. She instantly calmed. “I’ll get it.” She disappeared from the kitchen and returned carrying a pale pink cashmere polo-neck sweater.

  Jaymie took it from her, trying to quell the shaking of her own hands. This was a lot to take in; cool, calm, collected, yoga-teaching Cynthia Turbridge, whom she had always admired for her poise and serenity, had some darkness in her past, it appeared, from the casual mention of drinking binges and DUIs. Her grandmother had always said still waters run deep, and it appeared in this case the aphorism was true.

  But if the last year had taught her anything, it was that people were not always who you thought they were. Joel’s defection and her climb back from the depths of heartbreak had begun her transformation into a more realistic woman. Finding a few dead bodies along the way had toughened her, too. A little blood was not going to shock her. As long as it was a little blood. She laid the soft, luxurious sweater on the table and looked it over.

  There was what appeared to be blood on it, true, but it was limited to one sleeve at the ribbed wrist and some along the ribbed waistband. There was a hint of the blood on the cable-knit pattern across the breast, but it wasn’t splattered, by any means; it appeared as if Cynthia had rubbed against something—or someone—bloody. Whoever killed Theo Carson would have been splattered, unless they were wearing protection of some sort. In fact, this blood would seem to argue that Cynthia could not have been his murderer; if she had killed him, there would be much more blood or none at all.

  But still… it was blood. Now, what to do about it? She was uneasy, after her talk with the chief the previous night. It seemed as though he wanted her help, and he definitely considered her an aid in his quest to nab the killer. But she would only pass along what she considered to be truly related. It was like the will she had found… it had nothing to do with the killing, so it was not a piece of the puzzle and would only cloud the case. This blood could not be from the murder, so it was unrelated and unimportant. Or at least she sure hoped that was so, because she wasn’t turning Cynthia over to Chief Ledbetter. Not yet, anyway. The woman was fragile and already a suspect in the chief’s mind.

  “Are you sure you don’t remember anything?” Jaymie prodded. “Did you see anything? Talk to anyone?” The shop owner had turned away from the sweater and was swallowing convulsively. “Cynthia, you have got to face this.”

  “I know, I know,” she said, her tone low. “It’s just like a part of my past has come back to haunt me.”

  “What do you mean?” Jaymie asked.

  “I came to Queensville for a lot of reasons that you know about… my mother, and wanting to start fresh, retiring from business. I messed up in my life but good, Jaymie. I don’t talk about it, but it’s true. There was a time when I drank heavily. I was… I am . . . an alcoholic, and I fell off the wagon that night. I haven’t driven drunk or blacked out for years.”

  Jaymie grabbed her hand. “Cynthia, I’m sorry for your troubles, but right now you need to focus and tell me what you remember of that night.”

  “That’s the problem, I don’t remember anything!” She shook her head and closed her eyes.

  “That can’t be true. Think, Cynthia!” Silence. That approach—bleating at her to think—wasn’t working. Instead Jaymie went back to the beginning and took the other woman over her evening, how she’d closed up the shop, gone home, had something to eat, then got restless.

  “I was feeling lonely, and that’s dangerous for me.” She picked at her manicured fingernail, pulling at a tiny ragged flap of skin. “I tried to call Jewel, but she was out and not picking up her cell phone. So I thought I’d go out for just one drink.” She laughed, but it was a bitter sound, dark with self-loathing. “One drink. When did I ever stop at one drink? I really thought I had it licked.” She shook her head. “I guess that was my mistake.”

  “But you must remember where you went. You were sober when you started out.”

  “Oh, sure. I went to the Cozy Inn Bar and Grill, out on the highway on the way to Wolverhampton.”

  “Okay, that’s good. What happened there?”

  She frowned. “I had a few drinks. But the bartender was watching me too closely, so I left.”

  Jaymie frowned; watching her too closely? It almost sounded like Cynthia had regressed to her alcoholic ways even at that early point, paranoia making her skittish. “Okay, you left the Cozy Inn… and went where?”

  “Some other place. I just drove for a while. I don’t remember where it was.” Her tone was dull, defeated, her head down.

  Jaymie pushed the glass of water toward her, worried that she hadn’t been looking after herself and might be dehydrated. “Drink up. Look, there aren’t that many bars around this part of the township. How long did you drive? How far?”

  She shrugged, hopelessly. “Fifteen minutes? Twenty? I just don’t know.”

  “Where were you when you woke up in the morning?”

  She shivered and looked embarrassed. “I was on a side road down near Algonac,” she said. That was a town at the junction where the St. Clair River entered Lake St. Clair.

  That was the opposite direction and quite a ways away from Dumpe Manor. Jaymie looked down at the sweater. Carefully, she said, “It doesn’t look, to me, like you were anywhere near the murder.”

  Cynthia turned to Jaymie with hope in her eyes. “Really?”

  “Really. I was there; I saw poor Theo. If you had done anything, there would be more blood.” Jaymie blinked and shoved the memory back in the closet of her mind, where it belonged. “Still… Cynthia, if you could just think what happened in those hours, it would help. This is blood, or looks like it, anyway,” she said, indicating the crusty, stiff dark spots.

  “I don’t know, I tell you!” she cried, threading her fingers through her hair and scrunching it, leaving it unusually mussed. “Everything from the Cozy to waking up in the morning is a blur!”

  “Has this happened to you before? Blackouts, I mean?”

  “When I was drinking,” she said, nodding, her voice breaking. “It happened all the time. People would tell me stuff the next day that I did the night before, and I wouldn’t remember.”

  That sounded awful… and dangerous. “Cynthia, you have to—”

  “No! Don’t push me. Can’t you see I’ve had enough?” She got up and took her glass of water to the sink, then gripped the edge. She stared out the back window and said, “I don’t remember a thing, and that’s it.”

  No amount of coaxing or prodding helped, after that, and in fact she became almost hysterical. Jaymie got her calmed down and left without subjecting her to any more questions, but she was still wondering, where did the blood come from? And whose was it?

  It was getting dark quickly, the sky purple and streaked with gray clouds. Jewel caught her as she was walking away from the Cottage Shoppe.

  “Hey, Jaymie! Can you do me a favor?”

  “What’s up?” She was tempted to tell Jewel that Cynthia needed a friend right at that moment, but she wasn’t sure if the woman would appreciate it. She swiftly decided that if Cynthia needed Jewel she’d call her
.

  “In Wolverhampton I picked up a back support that Dee ordered for her mother-in-law. You know Mrs. Stubbs in the wheelchair? I guess her back has been bothering her and Dee sourced this one designed for people with osteoporosis and paid for it online. I told her I’d pick it up for her since I was going to be out and about today. If you’re going that way, could you take it over to the Queensville Inn?”

  Though it wasn’t on her way home, Jaymie agreed and took the clunky bag; it was only a few blocks out of her way. She headed there, walking quickly. The Queensville Inn looked a little spooky in the gloom of autumn twilight, with purplish clouds gathering in mounds on the horizon and wet leaves gusting along the streets. It was a grand Queen Anne manse, much bigger even than Dumpe Manor, and had newer additions to make several modern suites for guests. Lyle Stubbs, the proprietor, and his girlfriend, Edith, lived on the main floor in a suite, as did Lyle’s mother, Mrs. Stubbs. Jaymie knew the woman well, and they’d struck up an odd friendship based on two things: Mrs. Stubbs’s grudging liking for Jaymie, who, though a modern girl, still appreciated the past, and Jaymie’s love for the elderly woman’s stories of Queensville’s days gone by.

  “Hey, Edith,” Jaymie said as she entered the main lobby and found the woman manning the check-in desk.