After hugs all around and wishes for sweet dreams and sound sleep they donned their coats and exited into the cold, crisp night air. It was a sparkling evening with icy crystalline snowflakes fluttering in the air. The slap of frigidity woke Jaymie up. They walked arm in arm back to her home and up to the front door. The cedar garland around the door and the fairy lights in the iron urn topiaries were aglow with silvery light. “Do you want to come in?” she asked, turning toward him.
“I wish I could, but Jocie is at my mother’s and tomorrow’s a school day. I want to get her home.”
“I understand,” she said, looking up at him in the faint illumination of the twinkle lights. She leaned against his chest and sighed deeply, the most relaxed she had been in over a week, since the awful murder that had started it all. “I’m so relieved Glenn was caught. Thank you,” she said, her voice muffled against his coat front.
He put one finger under her chin and turned her face up to his, then pulled her close and kissed her, softly at first, but with unmistakable passion. She shivered in pleasure; this was the missing ingredient, what had been lacking with Daniel. The rub of his whiskers, the cold of his cheeks, the smell of his soap, the soft warmth of his lips; it blended to become Jakob for her. There would be more to come, but for now, it was enough to have this.
“I have to go,” he said, regret in his husky voice.
“Good night, Jakob,” she whispered.
He thumbed her cheek and kissed her lightly again. “Good night, Jaymie.”
Twenty-five
NAN WAS ECSTATIC to have her son completely cleared in the murder. Jaymie was happy for her. Though she didn’t like Cody, he wasn’t a killer.
When she went to the police headquarters the next day with Valetta to give their statements, she was greeted with the news that they had found Natalie Roth. Their investigation of Glenn Brennan had uncovered a storage locker on the outskirts of Wolverhampton that he had rented just after her disappearance, and there was the poor young woman’s body stuffed into a large plastic tote.
Unexpectedly and against legal counsel, Glenn would not shut up, spewing forth his story in graphic and minute detail. Chief Ledbetter told Jaymie in confidence that it appeared that Natalie Roth, encouraged by Delaney Meadows, had indeed been working on a romance scam as Ashley Nash, and under another few names. After a carefully worded call in the newspaper for more information they had been contacted by a couple of men who told police that she had been dating them—under different names—and had asked for money. One gave her a thousand dollars so she wouldn’t go to his wife, but the other refused and never heard from her again. Neither had realized she was the girl in the copious “Missing” posters around the area because she wore a blond wig, which was found in the tote with her body. According to a confidante, Natalie had wanted the money to fund her burgeoning modeling career and pay for some plastic surgery.
But she had worked the scheme on the wrong guy when she tried Glenn Brennan. After a few dates and some intimacy, she pressured him for money, telling him she’d go to his boss at the drug manufacturer for whom he worked and reveal his violently kinky side. He killed her in a rage and stowed her body in the locker that he rented the next day. Shelby, suspicious of her boss’s dating website dealings, had gone through the dating and model files and come to the same conclusion Jaymie had come to about Delaney’s con, Natalie’s involvement and how she had met her end. Jaymie remembered what Shelby had said that day at the historic house, that she could investigate rings around Jaymie. It appeared she had made the fatal mistake of trying to emulate Jaymie’s recent investigative forays and pin Glenn Brennan down herself. That’s what she meant when she told her friend Lynnsey that she thought she knew who had done it and was going to the police.
It was a mystery how she knew where the key to Bill’s storeroom was until Cody admitted that in a brief phone conversation with Shelby he may have told her where to find it. She was probably seeking somewhere warm and private to confront Delaney about his scam and get more information from him on what she suspected about Glenn Brennan’s part in Natalie’s disappearance and presumed death.
But it was too late. Her increasingly pointed questions had tipped Glenn off, and he followed her to the storeroom. Shelby was confrontational; in Glenn’s confession he admitted that she told him she had proof he killed Natalie. He beat her, leaving her for dead, but he left a little shred of evidence behind; the bit of fabric caught on the bench was likely from the lining of one of Glenn’s overcoats. It would take time for the lab to confirm it, and that the splatter on the coat was Shelby’s blood, but it was apparently the right color according to Jaymie’s inside source, also known as the chief himself, and there was a tear, with material missing. Valetta’s information that she had seen Delaney hustling away from the area that evening made the chief wonder if he had found her and was frightened he’d be blamed. Unless Delaney gave them that information they might never know, but he’d come very close himself to being arrested on suspicion of killing Shelby.
Chief Ledbetter hoped he’d be able to charge Brennan with premeditated murder, and that was where the text to Cody came into play. Glenn had admitted that Shelby got tipsy one evening and told him all about her plot to avenge her family’s honor by screwing the son of the Wolverhampton Weekly Howler editor to the wall with a smear campaign. It hadn’t taken much to figure out who her target was, since Shelby had openly dated Cody, and rumors were rampant about the Fretter family’s run-ins with the newspaper. As Jaymie had suspected, the text to lure Cody to town, supposedly to see Shelby at the band shell, had come from a burner phone that Glenn set up to emulate one from Shelby, with a photo of her as the ID. Glenn was just smart enough to pull off the deception that had worked on Cody so well, texting him moments after he had beaten Shelby so severely she appeared dead. Ultimately the timing had not worked as Glenn had hoped, but it wasn’t for lack of effort on the killer’s part.
It was over, and the right guy had been apprehended. In the week before Christmas, Clutch buried his daughter. In her memory he and his buddies were arranging a fund-raiser for the New Year, the proceeds of which were going to a domestic abuse group in Wolverhampton. Lori, Travis and the rest of her family buried Shelby. One of the random facts that came to light during the investigation was that Travis’s lies about his timeline that night were simply because he was meeting with his pot dealer.
Delaney Meadows was apprehended and charged with fraud and tax evasion, but there would likely be more charges before it was all over. Lily told Mrs. Stubbs that her husband was cooperating in the Natalie Roth and Shelby Fretter murder cases, establishing how the two women ended up the victims of such heinous crimes. In return he was hoping for a more lenient sentence. She was standing by him, hoping he had learned his lesson.
Jaymie sped through the next days, busy with Dickens Days, the heritage house, work and a holiday party at Heidi and Joel’s with Bernie and a few others. Jakob attended and got along easily with her friends, but then, he was the kind of guy who never seemed at a loss among company. He could talk to anyone about anything. Joel, at first oddly protective toward Jaymie, ultimately backed off.
She saw Jakob a few more times with and without Jocie. The kiss wasn’t repeated, but still . . . it kept her warm and tingling whenever she thought of it. She talked to him every night, the intimate sound of his voice in her ear a promise of things to come. It was time to meet his family. Her hesitation came from her fear that his mom especially wouldn’t like her. In a late-night conversation she confessed all to Jakob, who chuckled warmly.
“Liebling, my mother is already half in love with you because of how Jocie speaks!”
Jaymie was silent for a long moment, stunned by any number of things: his pet name for her, that Jocie spoke of her to her oma, that Jakob’s mother was predisposed to like her.
“Jaymie?”
“What does liebling mean?”
<
br /> “Uh, it’s German for sweetheart. If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” she said softly.
“Does that mean you’re ready to meet my family?”
“I am,” she murmured.
“Good. Your family is coming down when?”
“Day after tomorrow,” she said. “The twenty-third. We’re planning dinner together, and then Christmas Eve day we’re driving to Canada.”
“Can you bring them to my place for a dinner on the twenty-third?”
She thought about it. Her mother and father, Becca, Kevin, Grandma Leighton, all of them, meeting at the same time his mother, father, brothers, sisters-in-law and nieces and nephews. And Jocie and him, most important of all. “Are you sure you’re ready for that?”
“I’ve been ready for weeks,” he said.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, petting Hoppy’s head gently. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
After that, her life was on fast-forward. She had three million things to do, including going out to Heartbreak Island to make sure the cottage was secure before the river froze up completely, doing laundry, shopping, cleaning and cooking. She remade the no-bake fruitcake with the ingredients she bought and put it in the fridge, hoping it turned out better than the trial one, since she had sent the recipe with her notes in to Nan. It would be in her December twenty-fourth column, a little late to make, but done, at any rate.
She talked to Becca, her mother and her grandmother on the phone half a dozen times, and Valetta was invited to join the family get-together at Jakob’s cabin home. On the morning of the twenty-third Becca and Kevin brought Grandma Leighton to Queensville, taking her directly to the Queensville Inn. There she settled in, and looked forward to lunch with her old friends Mrs. Stubbs, Mrs. Frump and Mrs. Bellwood, then a nap before dinner at Jakob’s. Becca and Kevin were staying at the inn as well. Alan and Joy, Jaymie and Becca’s parents, arrived about noon at the Queensville house in a drift of luggage, hailstorm of kisses, blizzard of gifts and a flurry of complaints from Joy about the long drive from Florida and her father’s insistence on keeping to a modest fifty miles per hour.
Jaymie, through it all, felt like she was going to jump out of her skin. What had she gotten herself into? What if it all went terribly wrong? And what if Jakob realized he’d made a mistake and decided he could never love her? That was her real fear beneath her worries, she acknowledged. This relationship had become frighteningly important to her.
Her father cast her questioning looks, but all she could do was smile so she wouldn’t cry. He hugged her. “Nervous about tonight, pet?”
She nodded into his chest.
He smoothed her hair and kissed her forehead. “We’ll all be with you.”
That was what she was worrying about.
But finally the time came and they drove through the dark of early twilight, Jaymie sitting in the backseat of her father’s car and directing him, with Becca, Kevin and Grandma following in Kevin’s luxurious sedan, his GPS guiding them. Valetta was going to be a half hour late, she said, as she had a pharmaceutical emergency, someone who had come down with the flu and needed meds delivered.
It was during the car ride that Jaymie caught on to how nervous her mother was, too. She had a gift for Jocie, even though Jaymie had assured her it was not necessary. She had three books, one a children’s cookbook, a second adventure story and also The Velveteen Rabbit. When Jaymie protested that the book might be a little young for Jocie, who was a very intelligent little girl, her mother just primmed her lips and shook her head. “Maybe someday she’ll have a little brother or sister to read the book to,” she said softly. Jaymie had no answer for that.
Joy clutched the prettily wrapped parcel on her lap all during the ride. When Jaymie ducked her head over the backrest to talk to her mom, she saw that the package was somewhat the worse for wear, clutched too tight against her mother’s narrow bosom. Jaymie put her hand on her mom’s shoulder. “Jakob is a lovely, amazing man. His parents have to be as wonderful as you two to have raised such a great guy.” She squeezed.
Joy Leighton put her hand over her daughter’s and caressed it. “I just hope they like me.” Her voice caught.
Jaymie’s heart squeezed in sympathy. Her mother was as nervous as she was. “Mom, they’re going to love you, just like I do.”
They pulled up to the log cabin. The curtains were drawn back and electric candles winked and glowed in the windows, a welcoming light. There was hustle and bustle, of course, as Becca and Kevin helped Grandma out of the car and up the three steps to the cabin, with Jaymie’s father anxiously watching every move. As they got to the door, it was thrown open and Jakob stood, the brilliant light framing him and throwing his features into darkness, chatter and music pouring out from beyond. And under his arm stood Jocie, her sturdy little body pressed against her daddy’s legs, his red plaid Christmas sweater clutched in her fists as she avidly examined the newcomers.
Grandma Leighton regarded her gravely. “Hello, child. What’s your name?”
She ducked out from under her father’s arm. “My name is Jocelyn Eleanor Müller, ma’am. What’s yours?”
Grandma Leighton bent over slightly and met Jocie eye to eye. “I’d like you to call me Gramee. Would that be okay?”
She nodded. “Would you like to come in?” she asked, taking the elderly woman’s hand.
“Lead the way.” Jaymie’s grandmother tottered forward, supported by her cane and Jocie.
Jakob gestured to the others. “Come, come in out of the cold, everyone. Introductions can wait until you’re inside.”
It was long and involved, of course, and done with much laughter and promises that there would be a quiz later. Jaymie’s father stood and held Jakob’s hand in a handshake, regarding him thoughtfully. He clapped him on the shoulder finally and nodded. Then Jakob took Jaymie’s hand and led her to a woman sitting in one of the wing chairs drawn close to the fireplace.
“Mama, this is Jaymie,” he said softly.
Mrs. Müller, a heavyset woman, struggled to her feet and pulled Jaymie into a warm, soft hug. “I’m so happy to meet you,” she said, her guttural voice full of feeling. She held Jaymie’s face between her hands and stared at her.
Jocie pelted over to them and grabbed Jaymie around the legs, looking up at her. “Oma, Jaymie likes to cook. And her mama brought me a present. Did you see? She got me a cookbook!”
Jaymie glanced over at her mother and smiled; the gift was a success. But she was caught by the expression on her mother’s face in the flickering candlelight. It held so much hope, but some worry. She beckoned her over, and Joy hesitantly approached. “Mrs. Müller, this is my mom, Joy Leighton. I know Jakob introduced everyone, but I hope you’ll have a moment to talk and get to know each other.”
Mrs. Müller’s round face creased in a big smile. “Come, Joy, sit by me and we will talk,” she said, taking Jaymie’s mom’s arm and pushing her to the chair beside her.
Valetta arrived and Jakob introduced her to everyone. The women began to take up dinner, but Jaymie stole away to stand in an alcove by the stairs for a moment, just to get a breather and look over the crowd. Jakob’s father was a calm, soft-spoken man, handsome and rough-hewn, plagued lately by a bout of heart trouble. He, Jaymie’s father and Jakob’s oldest brother stood by the fireplace talking golf.
Mrs. Müller had made sure to give Grandma Leighton a comfortable seat away from the worst of the noise but close to Joy and herself, so the three women were quietly chatting, letting the younger women and men take charge. Valetta and Becca were in the kitchen with Jakob. He showed them where everything was, then got dishes and glasses down from his cupboards. Jocie was sitting on her oma’s lap, looking at the cookbook while Joy pointed out recipes. The gift was a rousing success.
Sonya, Helmut’s live-in girlfriend, a pale Scandinavian-looking natural bl
onde, approached, sipping a glass of wine. “Overwhelmed?” she asked.
“Just taking a breather.”
“I know I was overwhelmed when I met his family for the first time. They’re kind of boisterous, being all boys. There’s more, too; we’re missing Franz, his wife and their four kids. Your sister’s fiancé is a great guy,” she said, nodding across the room to where Kevin had Sonya’s children on his lap, both at one time. “He’s telling them a story about a troll.”
“I was a little concerned about adding my whole family into the mix, but it seems to be working out.”
“The Müllers are wonderful people,” Sonya said, patting Jaymie’s arm. “And now, I suppose I should help with the food, though the extent of my cooking is opening takeout containers. Helmut does most of the cooking, and Oma Müller, too.”
Jaymie smiled. “Not everyone likes to cook, but I love it. I brought a baked pasta dish you might like to try for your family. Super easy. I never met a kid who didn’t like pasta.”
They joined Becca and Valetta in the kitchen, just off the big open living area, while the men carried in a long folding table and set it up for dinner, buffet style. With so many people, it just wasn’t practical any other way. Everyone ate, the mix of dishes everything from Jaymie’s pasta to Oma Müller’s traditional German potato salad, a huge ham, salami and salads, made and bought. After their big meal, desserts replaced dinner items on the table. Among the pies and cakes, Jaymie hesitantly brought out her platter of trial number two of the no-bake fruitcake. She made sure her grandmother tried a piece, and Grandma Leighton’s face lit up. “It’s delicious, Jaymie! I made this in 1963, for Alan and Joy’s first Christmas as newlyweds.”
After dinner Sonya and Kevin sat at the piano and played some Christmas songs. Some sang along, while the others talked or just sat in quiet contemplation. Jocie and her stepcousins were playing by the hearth with the train that had circled the big Christmas tree in the corner.
White Colander Crime Page 28
