Bowled Over

by Victoria Hamilton

  “KATHY, KATHY!” SHE couldn’t believe it, wouldn’t believe it. Kathy had to be just dazed. Jaymie grabbed her shoulders and tried to lift her up. The metallic odor of blood mingled with the sour smell of old mayonnaise from the glass bowl, and she felt lightheaded. “Kathy, say something,” she sobbed.

  “Stop it!” the off-duty policewoman said. “Step away from her, now!” She spoke rapidly into the cell phone again, while she shoved her flashlight into her shorts pocket, then grabbed Jaymie’s T-shirt sleeve.

  Jaymie staggered to her feet, shivering uncontrollably, as the policewoman pulled her away from the scene.

  Officer Jenkins snapped her cell phone shut and took Jaymie by the shoulders. “There’s nothing you can do for her now,” she said, shaking Jaymie slightly. “She’s gone. You need to wait right here until the team arrives.”

  A sob caught in Jaymie’s throat. It couldn’t be what it looked like, it just couldn’t! She stumbled over to Becca, who stood several feet away.

  “What the heck is going on?” Becca muttered, holding Connor to her leg with one hand. “Where’s Kylie? And Kathy?”

  Kevin and Daniel walked toward them, a look of deep concern on Daniel’s face.

  When Jaymie didn’t answer, Becca peered at her in the shadowy gloom and asked, “Are you okay, sis?”

  “I…I don’t know.” From a distance Jaymie heard a woman’s frantic voice calling for Connor. She looked around, searching the grassy slope, where a few groups of people still lingered.

  “Connor! There he is; my baby!” Kylie Hofstadter surged up the rise near the washroom, knelt and gathered her little boy up in her arms. “I was so worried about you, baby boy. Why did you wander off?” She hugged him hard, as Andy Walker followed up the hill and touched the boy’s head, relief written on his tanned face.

  “Auntie Kaffy,” the boy said and began to cry, moaning sobs that cut through the misty stillness.

  “What about Auntie Kathy?” Kylie asked, searching his face, stroking his head. “Where is she? Were you trying to find her?”

  Jaymie watched the tableau, and then looked over at Bernice Jenkins, who stood guard near the corner of the washroom, her expression grim in the yellow light. In the distance the sound of a siren strengthened.

  “Jaymie, what the hell is going on?” Becca asked, her voice tight with fear.

  Jaymie realized that she was crying. Daniel put his arm around her shoulders and echoed Becca’s question. “What’s going on?” he asked, as a cop car screamed to a halt on the street below the park.

  “It’s Kathy Cooper,” Jaymie said, her words catching on a sob. “She’s…she’s dead!” She hadn’t meant to say it so loud.

  Kylie whirled. “What the frick are you talking about?” she asked. She handed Connor over to Andy Walker, who took the little boy a ways away, his face set and bleak. He had heard Jaymie too, probably.

  Jaymie blinked, and couldn’t find the words. She just shook her head. Kylie, appearing frightened, backed away, and retreated to Andy and Connor.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” Daniel said, eyeing Jaymie with concern on his face. “But I think we ought to wait until we find more out before we say another word.”

  Jaymie shook her head. There was nothing more to find out; the horrible truth was that Kathy Cooper was dead. The only question was, who killed her, and why with Jaymie’s glass bowl?

  More police cars screamed up, sirens wailing. Uniformed officers pushed everyone back to the bottom of the hill, onto the grass by the street, and set up a perimeter. Jaymie watched it all from Daniel’s protective embrace. But then a gray sedan arrived, and out of it stepped Detective Zachary Christian. He was the same detective who had been the investigator of the murder at the Leighton house in May. Even in the middle of the night, by the yellowish illumination of a bug light, he looked like he had stepped out of the pages of a romance novel; tall, dark haired, broad shouldered and good-looking.

  He approached Bernice Jenkins, and she talked to him for a few minutes, gesturing eloquently, and finally pointing in Jaymie’s direction. He straightened, swiveled and stared at her, a frown twisting his lips. She shrugged out of Daniel’s embrace, and stood free of him, waiting. It only took a moment. Christian headed toward her.

  “What the hell happened here?” he asked, as he strode toward her.

  “I wish I knew,” Jaymie said. The detective ordered the others to move away, and Jaymie repeated her story to him.

  He gazed down at her. “You found another body. What are the odds, in this fly-speck town, that one woman would find two bodies?”

  She shrugged, and the tears started again, even as she bit her lip, trying to quell them. “We used to be friends,” she said, but it came out garbled, mingled with a sob.

  “You and the dead woman?”

  Jaymie nodded.

  He looked off into the distance over her head for a long moment, then sighed. He called to some of the uniformed officers and made a twirling motion that took in all the people gathered on the rolling slope of grass. “Everyone here, to the station. Segregate as much as possible, especially these folks,” he said, indicating Jaymie, Becca, Daniel and the others in their group, as well as Kylie and Andy. When Bernice approached, he said to her, “Call in Wolverhampton PD. We may need a few officers for canvassing the area. I want someone on the highway on both sides of town, and radio the ferry operator; I want the names of everyone on the last ferry. We have a killer, and I don’t want to miss him or her. There were a thousand people or more in the park tonight, and every damned one of them needs to be interviewed.”

  A half hour later, in the familiar confines of an interview room at the Queensville police headquarters, Jaymie had a lot of time to think after the forensic team photographed then swabbed her hands and scraped her fingernails, with her permission. Her tears dried. Kathy Cooper was dead, and in a short while, Jaymie was going to have to tell Detective Christian that not only were she and the murdered woman enemies, her ex-friend had apparently been killed by a blow from one of Jaymie’s new finds, the antique Depression glass bowl with her fingerprints smeared all over it.

  The air-conditioning must have been working overtime, because she was getting cold. Think, Jaymie, think, she admonished herself. Who could have had access to the bowl? Who had killed Kathy Cooper? She closed her eyes, but all that came to her were the scene, and the figure. The first time she’d come around the corner, all she had seen had been a humped figure, and she’d thought maybe Kylie was sick. It was only when Bernice Jenkins, with her supersize flashlight, had accompanied her that she had seen more, had recognized Kathy, had seen…what? Besides her glass bowl cracked in two, what?

  The area had been trampled all day. There were footprints…lots of footprints: tiny ones, medium-size ones, huge ones that were more deeply indented into the mud near the water fountain. Were they deeper because the person had stood there awhile, waiting? Or because the person was heavy? She didn’t know. Something else had troubled her at the time, something…

  The door opened and she blinked, dazed by the bright lights as she opened her eyes. Detective Christian looked down at her quizzically. “Were you sleeping?”

  “No,” she said. “I was thinking.”

  He shut the door behind him. “That’s what my wife always said when she had her eyes closed.”

  Wife. So he was married? She looked down at his left hand, third finger. There was a groove where a ring might have once sat, but it wasn’t there now. He caught her glance and looked down. “Three years later, and the shadow of a ring still lingers, right? Does that ever go away?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, the inevitable blush rising to her cheek. “Detective, how did Kathy die?” she asked. “Was it the glass bowl that killed her?”

  His eyebrows rose, and he sat down opposite her, at the bare white table that was bolted to the floor. “You saw the bowl?”

  She nodded. “When Officer Jenkins played her flashlight around Kathy
, I saw it.” She had to do it, had to tell him now, or it would look like she was hiding something, which is what he had accused her of in the last case. “In fact, I recognized it; it is…was my bowl.” She shuddered.

  “Your bowl?”

  “I brought it to the picnic with my homemade potato salad in it.”

  He drummed his fingers on the table and watched her, his expression impassive. Sighing, he said, “Why don’t we start from the beginning.”

  “Good idea. Two days ago—”

  “I’m talking about today.”

  “So am I,” she said. “This all pertains, trust me. Two days ago—”

  “Look, I need to just find out about today, then you can tell me about a week ago, or last year or 1995.”

  Little did he know that she just might have needed to go back to 1995 to tell him the whole story, but she wouldn’t say that now. “I know you’re probably in a hurry, but…” She trailed off and shook her head. “Okay, fine. Today.” Taking a deep breath, she related packing the bowl full of potato salad in the cooler.

  “Why a glass bowl? Don’t people use plastic? Or…what’s that stuff called?…Tupperware?”

  “You’ve seen my place. The bowl is my newest vintage find, and I like…I liked it. I always use my latest find a few times, just to get the feel of it, you know?” Tears gathered in her eyes. “Poor Kathy!” She covered her face with her hands, and her next words sounded oddly muffled. “God, I wish we hadn’t fought. I wish I hadn’t waited to try to make up with her. I wish—”

  He leaned across the table, pulling her hands away from her face, and said, “Whoa, whoa! Wait a minute, you and the vic fought? When? Why?”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you,” she said. “Two days ago—”

  He put up one hand and sat back, watching her, his dark gray eyes brooding under thick brows and hooded lids. Finally he sighed, scrubbed his hand through his dark hair and shook his head. “Okay, go on. Tell me from the beginning…your beginning.”

  So she told him, briefly, about her and Kathy’s history, and then sped ahead to two days before and the confrontation at the Emporium. “So that’s why I went to Craig’s office to talk to him, and then to the feed store to catch up with her friend, Dani Brougham.” She then told him about their day, and how Kathy had behaved at the July Fourth festivities.

  “She was trying to egg me on into a fight, I could tell. And she got one. She said the most insane things…that I was chasing Daniel because he’s rich and I’m lazy.” Her indignation blossomed when she noted the smirk on his face. “I am not lazy. I work hard.”

  “Sorry, I’m not laughing. I have to say, though, the whole thing seems bizarre. She cut you off in high school and you still don’t know why? And you haven’t talked since, in a town this small?”

  Jaymie shook her head, trying to figure out how to explain. “It’s been awkward at times. But she made her feelings plain, and folks just didn’t invite us to the same places. I don’t know what happened back at Wolverhampton High, and now I probably never will.” That awful thought made the whole thing worse, somehow. Sadness choked her. “She’s gone. I was going to try to make up with her, but she’s gone, and I’ll never know why she hated me.”

  “You say she also had confrontations with other people today?”

  She told him as much as she could remember about Johnny Stanko, Matt Laskan and about the trouble between Kathy and Kylie. She felt like a snitch, talking about Kylie, who had surely suffered enough since the death of her fiancé, but anything could be important to the investigation. She had learned that last time, when the slightest clue had told her who the real murderer was, and almost too late!

  “Detective, was it…was it really my bowl that killed Kathy?” she asked again.

  His eyes held no emotion and gave her no clue. “We won’t know until the autopsy.”

  “Will you tell me when you find out? I just can’t bear the thought that I brought…” Her voice broke. She cleared her throat and tried again. “That I supplied a murderer with a weapon!”

  His expression softened. “I’ll tell you, if I can, whether the murder was committed with the bowl,” he said, his voice gentle. “It’ll be the most unusual weapon I’ve ever seen, I’ll tell you that, if it turns out to be what the killer used. I’m curious: Why didn’t you miss the bowl after dinner? And who had the opportunity to take it?”

  “Daniel and I went for a walk after we ate. I guess the bowl must have been taken then, before Becca and Valetta cleared all the stuff away, so they never noticed. You’ll have to ask them. Maybe they’ll remember something.”

  Detective Christian stood and tapped his notes together. “You can go home now. We’ll want you to review your statement and sign it. You know the drill. If you think of anything more, you can add it in then.” He opened the door for her, and said, “In the meantime, try not to worry about it. If someone is going to kill someone, they’ll find a weapon. If it turns out to have been the bowl, it was likely just chance.”

  She left the interview room but got lost and ended up down a dead-end hall, which held a string of interview rooms, each with a glass window facing onto the hall. As she turned to head back the way she came, she saw Kylie through the glass window sitting alone, head cradled in one hand. Jaymie stopped and stared. That poor girl. Kylie had already lost her fiancé, and now she’d lost her sister. Some families just seemed to have more than their share of tragedy.

  Jaymie headed back out to the main foyer and then out of the police station. Daniel, waiting beside his Jeep in the misty darkness, walked toward her, folding her into his embrace. “You okay?” he said, looking down at her face by the glow of the parking lot’s overhead lights.

  “Yeah. I just want to go home. Is Becca still here?”

  “No, the rest of them are gone. I told Becca I’d wait for you and sent her and Kevin back to your place. He was supposed to go back to Johnsonville on the last ferry, but he missed it, of course. They wouldn’t have let him go anyway, I don’t suppose. You’re the last one. I guess that detective saved the best for last.”

  Jaymie looked up at him. “What do you mean?”

  Daniel hugged her to him and walked her to the passenger side of the Jeep. “Nothing. Come on; I’m gonna drive you home. It’s way after midnight and you must be beat.”

  Six

  BECCA WAS WAITING up for her, and raced down the dim front hall, enfolding her in an embrace. “You okay?” she said, releasing her after a few moments.

  Jaymie nodded and petted Hoppy, who bounced around her feet. “I’m all right. But let’s not talk about Kathy tonight, okay?”

  “That’s all right. I do have something to talk to you about, though, sis,” Becca said.

  “First, I need tea,” Jaymie said. They headed down the long central hall to the back kitchen, a room that took up the whole width of the house. There, she filled the kettle, pulled out the box of Tetley, bought at a Canadian grocery store, from the cupboard and dropped two tea bags in the old Brown Betty teapot. Becca knew enough not to talk until they each had a steaming cup and were sitting opposite each other at the work-worn trestle table. “What’s up?”

  “I put Kevin in Mom and Dad’s old room,” Becca said.

  “Okay. Where else were you supposed to put him, a hammock strung from the rafters?”

  “And I’m sleeping there with him.”

  Jaymie said, “Well, yeah. If you guys are at that stage of your relationship, then, of course.”

  Becca slumped and wiped her brow with mock relief. “I thought you were going to give me no end of trouble about that,” she admitted.

  Jaymie shook her head. “Becca, really? For crying out loud, when did I become this…this fuddy duddy that everyone has to tiptoe around? I’m thirty-two, not eighty-two.”

  Grinning, her older sister said, “Actually, Grandma Leighton is probably more easygoing than you are. You were always more straitlaced than I would have expected.”

  I
rritated, Jaymie retorted, “Joel lived here, Becca, you know that. I’m assuming you know I’m not a virgin. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a virgin.”

  Becca made a face, wrinkling her nose. “I tried not to think about you and Joel.”

  Jaymie well knew how her sister felt about her former boyfriend, and it was mutual. He thought she was an interfering busybody. “I’m not ten anymore, and I don’t need my big sister worrying about me. And I’m not prim and proper, like some spinster aunt in a historical romance novel.”

  “Don’t take it the wrong way,” Becca said, reaching across the table and patting her hands. “I’ve always admired your aloofness. You’re a really smart girl.”

  “Despite Joel,” Jaymie said, with a sad smile, which faded immediately. The tragedy they’d experienced that night was too new, too raw, to be ignored, and Jaymie had questions. “Sis, when you and Valetta cleaned up the dinner dishes, did you notice my Depression glass bowl anywhere?”

  Becca’s mouth compressed. “That detective called me just before you came home and asked me the same thing.” She shook her head. “I can’t remember a thing about that bowl! Valetta and I were cleaning up, but there were a lot of people milling around. We were talking and laughing and…” Her eyes welled with tears and she put one hand to her cheek. “And to think…oh, Jaymie, was that what he killed her with?”

  Funny how a murderer was always a he. Jaymie nodded. “Someone killed Kathy Cooper with my bowl. I saw it, Becca, the bowl, I mean…broken in half right near her bloody head.” She shuddered, and a sob welled up in her throat.

  Becca jumped up and came around the table and pulled Jaymie to her, holding her and rocking her. Surrendering for just a moment, Jaymie let the tears flow, tears for Kathy and her lost life and the friend Jaymie remembered from middle school. Memories flashed into her brain, of the silly games, the sleepovers, the whispered confidences. They should have been friends for life. Jaymie pulled away, grabbed a tissue from the box on the table, dried her eyes and blew her nose. “I’m all right.”