Bowled Over

by Victoria Hamilton

  It sounded like Lily was going to drop a bomb on him, either telling him about her and Craig or just breaking up with him. Jaymie walked to the Emporium, hoping to catch Valetta on her lunch break. She was in luck, and she sat on the front step as Valetta brought out a cup of tea.

  “So, did you make any headway in finding out who was dressed up like Uncle Sam at the picnic?” she asked her inquisitive friend.

  Valetta sighed and said, “Well, yes and no. I have seven names, but everyone agrees there were more like a dozen Uncle Sams and four or five Betsy Rosses.” She named everyone she had so far found out about, but not one of them was on the list of suspects. “The trouble is, we’ll never know if we got them all. One of our suspects could have been dressed up at some point, and we’d never know.”

  “Hmm. There’s got to be a way to figure this out! Did Johnny notice anything in particular about the Uncle Sam? Was the person short or tall, man or woman, pale complected, anything at all?”

  Valetta shook her head in regret. “He said the person was a man, for sure, but he couldn’t say anything else.”

  “That leaves us pretty much where we started, with Johnny’s uncorroborated story of handing the bowl to Uncle Sam. It would have been better if he hadn’t lied first and told us he’d put the bowl back on our table.”

  “I know, but Johnny lies by instinct.”

  That didn’t bode well for his court case, Jaymie thought, even if he was innocent. Lots of people lied, even when they didn’t do anything wrong, she guessed, but mature people didn’t. In the next moment she realized that, in all fairness, wasn’t true at all. Everybody lied, and one only had to look at the mess among Craig, Kathy, Lily and Matt to see dishonesty in action.

  “I feel like I’m wandering around in circles,” Jaymie said. She told Valetta what she had written down and what she had seen that morning and what Kylie had said about her and Andy falling in love and just realizing it. “My problem is, I have no official reason to ask people these questions, and so I have to try to talk around it, and I never get the information I need. How did Andy and Kylie lose track of Connor during the fireworks? How does a three-year-old boy wander off in the dark and you don’t notice? That’s a sticking point for me, especially now that I know that Kylie is getting that huge insurance payout.”

  “Can you see Kylie killing Kathy, though?”

  Jaymie thought about it for a minute. “I just don’t know. I keep wondering if Connor followed his mom, Kylie, when she went to meet Kathy. It’s one of the few explanations that makes sense.”

  “But how would Kylie have gotten the bowl?”

  “I don’t know. Could Andy Walker have been one of those dressed up as Uncle Sam later? You know, it would be pretty easy to go somewhere, slip on a tailcoat, wig, beard, hat and gloves, and wander around. What do you know about him?”

  “Andy Walker? Let’s see…single dad, wife passed away about twenty years ago, when Drew was just seven or eight. He lived on a farm, then, but sold it and moved into town. I can’t say that I know a whole lot more about him, other than that he’s worked as a mechanic at the marina for years. Our paths haven’t crossed much.”

  “Can you see him killing Kathy?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” Valetta said. “But I can’t see anyone killing anyone!”

  “I know what you mean. It seems so barbaric.” She pondered the problem. “But there is one person we know who has been involved in a violent confrontation recently. I’m still puzzled as to why Matt Laskan wasn’t charged with the assault and attempted kidnapping he was arrested for. And why does he seem so relaxed about it? Do you know anyone who can find out anything about the charges and why they were dropped?”

  Valetta thought about it. “Maybe. I’ll have to call in a favor.”

  Jaymie stood and dusted off her butt as Hoppy pranced around in circles, waiting to continue their walk. “Okay. Are there any new picnic basket rentals today?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’ll call you later and see if you found anything out.”

  She headed home and did some cleaning and some garden upkeep and then mowed the lawn. She confirmed the next reservation for Rose Tree Cottage—the last one before her parents’ two-week stay—and arranged for a plumber to check out the cottage drainage while the Leightons were there to oversee the work, then called Dee to confirm that she was going with them to the memorial service for Kathy Cooper. She spent an hour cleaning and organizing all the items she’d just bought at the thrift store in Wolverhampton. Valetta didn’t have any new information, Jaymie discovered, when she called her friend to check in.

  And then another early, solitary dinner. She made herself some of her grandmother’s mac and cheese, sharing it with Hoppy. She kept thinking about Kathy, how she had so many loose ends in her life. Would she ever have become the nurse she wanted to be? And why had nursing appealed to her so much? Would she have finally made it all up with her sister, as it seemed she might have been on her way to doing? How would it have gone down between her and Craig?

  Something was sticking in Jaymie’s mind, something she had overlooked. Or something she had taken for granted. Was it something about Kathy? Or…wait. It was something about the murder scene. Something not quite right. But what?

  Restless, not ready for bed but with no desire to do anything else, she slipped her flip-flops on and went for a walk. She threaded her way through the village and up to the boardwalk, then stood for a while, watching the lights on Heartbreak Island. The occasional sounds of folks having a drink on the decks of their boats in the marina, laughter and even the occasional splash, drifted to her on the light breeze.

  A splash. As she had approached the figure she thought was Kylie behind the ladies’ washroom, she had heard a faint splash. The river was about ten feet below the railing. What could it have been? A fish? Fish didn’t generally jump at night. Could have been a duck, she supposed. The fireworks upset the ducks and sent them scurrying. But this was several minutes after the fireworks had ended.

  Had someone jumped in? Not a big enough splash for that. Someone could have thrown something in, but from where? She might never know, and it more than likely had nothing to do with the murder.

  * * *

  SHE WORKED AT the Emporium again the next day and made up the rental baskets for the next few days. The winery idea had taken off, and after an ad on an online classifieds website, she had three Lover’s Lane rentals booked, so she called the Queensville Inn to order the food hampers.

  During their tea break, Valetta told her that she still hadn’t found anything out about Matt Laskan’s trouble in Port Huron. After lunch with Valetta at the front counter, Jaymie was perched on a high stool by the cash register doing a crossword puzzle. A long-legged blonde walked in the front door, her handbag under one arm and a rattan basket swinging from the other. “I’m returning this rental basket,” she said, her voice clear and melodious. She plunked the basket on the counter and turned to walk away.

  Jaymie recognized the woman right away from the tea shop in Wolverhampton, but she grabbed the book from the display, and said, “Please wait a moment while I find the entry. Now, what was your name?”

  She turned back toward Jaymie. “Lily Fogarty,” she said, toying nervously with her gold necklace. “But the basket is probably checked out under a different name.”

  “And that would be?” Jaymie said, looking up into her smooth face.

  She sighed. “Craig Cooper.”

  Was there any point in delaying Lily, or in trying to find out about her and Craig? She already knew that neither Lily nor Craig was guilty of killing Kathy, but it occurred to her for the first time that though they hadn’t done it themselves, they could have had someone else kill Kathy. In fact, wasn’t it mighty suspicious that they had photo proof of the fact that both of them had an alibi? “Oh, so this is Craig’s basket. I was at the picnic here in Queensville, and he didn’t stay.” She examined the other woman’s face. “I w
onder why?”

  “I don’t know,” Lily said, impatiently. “He was busy, I suppose.”

  “Busy in Wolverhampton at your local evening parade, I understand,” Jaymie said, calmly watching the woman’s eyes.

  “How do you know that?”

  “His photo was in the paper, and he was in the crowd looking up at you.”

  “I don’t have to stand for this. At least all you snoopy Queensvillians know Craig didn’t do it, right?” she retorted crisply, and picked her purse up off the counter.

  “Didn’t kill his wife? Well, not directly. But there are other ways. You know, the husband is always the first suspect, especially if he had motive.”

  “This is not a topic I know anything about, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t get involved in local crime stories.” She started toward the door.

  Jaymie took a deep breath, and said, “But you’re already involved, Ms. Fogarty, since you and Craig have been seen spending a lot of time together.”

  Lily whirled, her face red, and pointed at Jaymie with her handbag. “You’re the one who was lurking at the tea shop, you and your snoopy old-maid friend,” she snarled. “If you so much as breathe a word of this, I’ll…I’ll sue you for defamation of character!” She spun and headed out the door, the bells overhead jingling at her frantic departure.

  “I guess I’m your snoopy old-maid friend,” Valetta said, joining Jaymie at the cash desk and watching through the big front window as Lily got into a sedan and skidded out of the gravel parking space. “She was really mad.”

  “I know. I got to thinking, isn’t it a real coincidence that the photo with both of them in it happened to make the front page? Did they know they’d both need an alibi? Did they know Kathy would be dead?”

  “Oooh, I never thought of that,” Valetta said, her eyes big and round behind her thick glasses.

  “Neither did I, until now.” Jaymie didn’t add that it was still possible that Johnny Stanko was guilty, and that he’d been hired by Craig Cooper.

  Twenty

  THE REST OF the day trickled by minute by minute, with a flurry of customers at the last moment buying things for their dinners. There was only one minor addition to Jaymie’s collection of information. Valetta made a call to an editor at the Wolverhampton Howler, and found out, to both Jaymie’s and her interest, that Lily Fogarty had been proactive in making sure there was a photo of her in the paper, specifically the one from the Fourth of July events in Wolverhampton. It begged the question: Had she wanted to make sure both she and Craig had a good and verifiable alibi for the time of Kathy’s murder? There were still too many unanswered questions to know for sure.

  Jaymie walked home alone and let Hoppy out. She sat on the back step and watched as Hoppy snooped and sniffed. She and Valetta had talked it over, thoroughly exhausting the topic of the possibility of Lily and Craig hiring someone to kill Kathy. Jaymie had even brought up Johnny’s name, and Valetta honestly examined the possibility. Nothing indicated it, they decided. Craig and Johnny’s past relationship as bullied and bullier probably precluded Craig going to him for such a big job.

  But it was still something Jaymie couldn’t just dismiss.

  The village was abuzz with the gossip about the police questioning. Spending the day at the Emporium, she had heard the tale a dozen times from different folks, how one police officer or another had asked them questions about the picnic in Boardwalk Park: if they had noticed anything, who was sitting near Kathy Cooper, et cetera. Trouble was, from what Jaymie could tell, no one had seen anything of importance, except for her and Kathy’s argument.

  She sat on the back step, enjoying the moment as a gentle evening breeze wafted over her. She too often took such a simple pleasure for granted, she thought, looking down at her strong legs, sticking out from her denim cutoffs. She was so lucky, especially compared to Ella Douglas; it was terribly sad how sickly Ella had become. It was as if she were fading away, the mystery illness attacking her from every angle and leaving her weak. Jaymie had speculated that Ella might be faking her illness and could be stronger than she looked, but visiting her had dispelled that notion.

  It was just too bad that Kathy hadn’t lived. Jaymie clung to the belief that she could have resolved things with her former friend, because Kathy sure seemed willing to forgive and forget, as far as Ella was concerned anyway. Maybe it was sympathy for Ella’s illness that made it possible for Kathy to apologize for the incident in the Emporium and also forgive the bullying Ella had inflicted on her back in high school, when she had never been able to forgive one rumored nasty comment, something that Jaymie had never even said. No one wants to be mean to someone so desperately ill, Jaymie supposed, not even Kathy Cooper, the queen of holding grudges. It occurred to Jaymie then that Ella was one person who might know who had spread the nasty rumor.

  Jaymie called her house, but there was no answer. She made a sandwich for dinner and went up to her office for a while. The “office” was really the spare bedroom, a tiny little closet of space about eight by ten, with her desk, computer and bookshelves. All through the long Michigan winter she had kept herself sane—and from fixating too much on Joel and Heidi—by going through her grandmother’s old cookbooks from the second World War and beyond. She was now trying to organize the recipes into categories and collections. There were stacks of loose pages, many of them in her grandmother’s spidery, elegant handwriting, the India ink fading but still legible on the sixty-year-old paper.

  Among the papers was a list of herbal remedies for everything from premenstrual cramps to headaches. Another sheet listed a lot of poisonous plants in the garden to stay away from. Who knew that rhubarb leaves were so deadly? She’d have to remember that. Her grandmother had written that one of her friends from childhood had a relative in England who died from eating the rhubarb leaves they were turning to as a source of nutrition during the Great War, a time of deprivation. She read the long list of other poisonous plants and the horrible symptoms they brought on. One in particular stopped her dead. It was awful to think that a plant that was so hardy and prevalent—and so common locally—could be so dangerous.

  She tried Ella’s number again, anxious now to talk to her, but there was still no answer. She remembered suddenly what she had heard at the Emporium earlier: there was another Rotary club meeting that evening, an emergency one called to deal with the fallout from a recent fund-raising effort that had gone terribly wrong and had actually lost money. Bob, who was the secretary-treasurer for the local chapter, would be at that meeting, and it would go on for hours. So why was Ella not answering?

  Jaymie remembered the last time she’d seen Ella, the pallid skin, the sunken eyes, the aura of desperate illness that clung to Ella. Uneasy, she tried calling again. There could be a thousand reasons why someone wouldn’t answer the phone. She could be sleeping. She could be watching TV. She could have the ringer turned off. It was stupid to feel so worried.

  But it wouldn’t hurt to walk over there. If she saw Ella inside, or if she tapped on the door and Ella came to answer it, she would make some excuse, or say she was just passing by. All the way over she tried to allay her fears; it was silly to get so worked up over nothing. Becca had done that before when their grandma had not answered the phone, only to find that the woman was over at a friend’s apartment watching an old movie or in bed sleeping soundly. Maybe Ella was over at someone else’s house or…there were a million other possibilities.

  She walked through the rapidly darkening streets, her palms sweating, the darkness increased by gathering clouds. A low rumble of thunder rolled across the heavens. It was going to rain, and she hadn’t brought an umbrella. If she found out Ella was fine, it would be worth a soaking.

  As she walked she thought back: Was Kathy’s apology to Ella for overreacting to the incident at the Emporium just an excuse to check in on her? Kathy had always wanted to be a nurse, her lifelong passion. Jaymie remembered Kathy’s request for an herbal products catalog at the Emporum. She was in
terested in natural remedies. She probably knew all the information Jaymie had just discovered among her grandmother’s papers.

  Her thoughts began tumbling over one another like competitors at a gymnastics meet: natural remedies, symptoms of poisoning, Mrs. Bellwood saying that nightshade was terribly dangerous. And from her own reading: symptoms of nightshade poisoning included vision problems, rapid pulse and lots more. Ella, her vision affected to the point that she’d run over little Connor’s foot…

  “I don’t eat potatoes or tomatoes,” Ella had said at the Fourth of July picnic. Why not tomatoes or potatoes? Grandma had said never to eat green potatoes, because they’re poisonous. Solanine poisoning. A phrase from her earlier reading, about tomatoes and potatoes belonging to the nightshade family, leaped out.

  Her thoughts teemed. Nightshade; where all had she seen it recently? At Mrs. Bellwood’s. In her own backyard. At Johnny Stanko’s and…winding up the porch near the lift at Ella and Bob’s home!

  She increased her pace, her heart pounding. This was ridiculous; she was getting worked up over nothing. But still, she couldn’t stop worrying. She saw Bob and Ella’s home and broke into a sprint. A dog nearby barked. She trotted up to the porch and knocked. And knocked. No answer, no car in the drive. Bob wasn’t home. If Ella was in trouble, there was no one to help her, because Bob was at the Rotary club meeting!

  She pounded on the door, then went to the window and cupped her hands around her eyes, looking through the glass. It was hard to see; a curtain was in the way, almost closed, but through a sliver Jaymie could see Ella, slumped sideways in her wheelchair in her favorite spot, a book on the floor near her. Crap! She didn’t look well.

  Jaymie tried the door, but it was locked securely. She raced up the laneway toward the garage, let herself through a gate and climbed the stoop to the back door. She rattled the knob, but it too was locked. But there was an open window with a screen. If she was wrong—please God let her be—then she would pay to have it repaired, but she took her keys and slit the screen, reaching in and around to the door and finding the lock on the knob engaged. She twisted it and tried the door. It was still locked. She twisted it again and rattled the knob, and the door finally swung open and banged against the wall.