“It happens to be an established family here in town, Beverly Hastings. Very embarrassing all ’round,” Georgina said frostily, slapping antique magazines together and shoving them under the counter. “The police spoke to her, and I understand she produced her copy of the will in which the set of silver was listed. I have been doing this for some time, you know, Jaymie, and I do know what I’m doing.”
“I didn’t mean to give offense, Georgina. Have a good rest of the day!”
On her way out she ran into Petty Welch, who had started working with Cynthia Turbridge, the owner of the Cottage Shoppe, and Jewel Dandridge, the owner of Jewel’s Junk, which was where Petty was headed that day.
A petite gray-haired dynamo, Petty had swiftly become fast friends with her two new employers. She grabbed Jaymie’s arm as she enthusiastically extolled the virtues of her new life. “Guess what? I’m selling my cottage and moving to Queensville. I’ve already found a buyer for my cottage and I’m putting in an offer for the house next door to Cynthia’s!” The gray clouds were breaking up and retreating. A ray of fall sunshine shone through. “Brock Nibley has been good to me, very helpful.”
“I’m so happy for you, Petty. I think Brock is trying to make up for the past.” In which he had lied repeatedly, leading to a decades-long confusion over two girls who had been missing, before their bodies were recovered and it was learned they were murder victims. Petty was the aunt of one of the two, Rhonda Welch, who had been found submerged in her car in the river off Heartbreak Island. Just before her spring wedding, Jaymie had helped solve the murders of Rhonda and Dolores Paget, a teen friend of Becca’s. Petty now seemed to be emerging from the dark cloud under which she had once lived, forever wondering where her beloved niece had gone.
“Hey, guess what?” Petty said, her fast-moving mind already changing to a new subject. “I’m dating again! I think you know him, Haskell Lockland?”
“Haskell? Wow!” Jaymie said. Haskell and Petty? She was surprised that his choice was so age-appropriate; he had a habit of flirting with younger women. “He’s . . . a good guy.” If a bit of a stuffed shirt. “I’ve known him for years.”
“Anyway, enough about me, how are you doing, dear?” she asked, still clutching Jaymie’s arm.
Jaymie told her the latest but then glanced at her watch. “I have to get going. I’m going to visit a friend in the hospital, and then I have a lunch date!” They hugged, then set off in opposite directions.
Jaymie found a parking spot about midway between Wolverhampton General Hospital and Wellington’s Retreat, the tearoom where she was having lunch with Heidi. In the hospital Jaymie went directly to Miss Perry’s room. When she entered she was overjoyed to find Mrs. Stubbs, in her mobility wheelchair, sitting by the bed of her cousin.
“I get a two-for-one visiting deal!” she said, seeing that Miss Perry was now conscious. She still looked terrible; she had a black eye and magenta bruises all down her face and neck, as well as along her arm, and her head sported a large bandage on the bruised side, her gray hair matted and sticking up over the top and under it. She looked frail in the sickly blue patterned hospital gown, hooked up to a monitor on a pole with a saline bag almost empty, the monitor with a steady beep beep beep measuring her pulse, oxygen saturation level and respiratory rate.
Miss Perry wearily waved her to the visitor’s chair. Jaymie gave Mrs. Stubbs a hug, then sat down, setting her purse under her chair.
“I bullied Edith into giving me a ride into town,” Mrs. Stubbs said about her son’s live-in girlfriend.
“I’m sure she was happy to do it,” Jaymie said.
“Darn tootin’ . . . it gives her an excuse to go shopping,” grumbled Mrs. Stubbs.
“Stop your moaning, Martha,” Miss Perry murmured, her whiskey voice fainter than before and lacking vigor. She looked over at Jaymie. “I hear you’re the one who found me.” She reached out her free hand, the one untethered by an oximeter and saline drip. “I’m old, but I’m not done living, so I’m grateful.”
Jaymie took her hand, her eyes misting. “I’m happy I tried the door. What happened? Do you remember?”
She exchanged a look with her cousin. “We were discussing that.” She tried to sit up but it was too much of a struggle.
Jaymie released her hand and helped her get the pillow lower under her back, and pressed the button to make the bed head higher so the woman could look into their eyes. She then brought the bedside table closer and moved the sipping cup of ice water within easy reach. Miss Perry took a drink of the water and sighed, giving Jaymie a nod of thanks.
“Lois doesn’t remember everything,” Mrs. Stubbs said. “She thinks Estelle came to the door for their appointment at about nine, but Lois ignored her.”
“I know that much. That’s not where my memory is foggy,” the woman said adamantly, contradicting Mrs. Stubbs. “I was not going to talk to that woman again. We’ve said all we need to say and I’m not changing my mind.” She clutched her hands together over her little round belly. “I saw her at the door from my bedroom window, which overlooks the circle. She kept knocking.”
“So you didn’t cancel your appointment with her after your run-in?”
“If she had a grain of common sense she would have known our appointment was canceled, for heaven’s sake.”
Estelle Arden was persistent, and no assumption would be made if she was trying to get something done.
“Who was your other appointment with?”
“The police asked me the same thing,” Miss Perry said, squinting and shifting uneasily. “But I don’t remember any other appointment.”
“When we spoke on the phone to arrange me coming out to pick up the graters, you told me you had another appointment that morning after Estelle, presumably there, at your place. You said I should come after lunch.”
Miss Perry shook her head slowly. “Are you sure I said that?”
“I’m sure,” Jaymie said, and glanced over at Mrs. Stubbs, who raised her brows and shook her head. “I suppose a blow to the head could hurt one’s memory. One detail that surprised me was that when I found you, you were still in your housedress. You hadn’t dressed for your appointment, whatever it was. Do you always dress at the same time of day? It may help the police nail down the time of the . . . the accident, if they knew that.”
“Not particularly,” she said wearily.
“Have the police already asked you about the housedress?” Miss Perry shook her head. “Do you always dress before lunch, say?” Jaymie pressed.
“Usually, but not always.”
“But you certainly would if you were expecting someone else before lunch.” The woman nodded. “Is there anywhere you would have written an appointment down?” Jaymie asked.
Miss Perry’s eyes were blank for a moment, and she raised one trembling hand to her bandaged forehead. “I . . . I’m not sure. I don’t think . . .”
“Lois, you’ve always been organized,” her cousin said. “And you always kept an appointment calendar. Think!”
“Stop bullying me, Martha! I don’t remember.”
She appeared confused. Pain and medications do that to even the most coherent person. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it,” Jaymie said, putting her hand over the frail lady’s. “It’s not important.”
“Except someone tried to do her in,” Mrs. Stubbs said. “Oh, yes, I heard about the string across the stairs,” she said to Jaymie. “Morgan went on and on about it. How she found it. How the idiot police didn’t do their job.”
“That’s unfair! Bernie couldn’t exactly charge in and check things out while the paramedics were looking after Miss Perry!”
“I know, dear, you needn’t defend your friend. Morgan is like that, very high-handed.” She glanced over at Miss Perry. “I wonder where she gets it from.”
“Miss Perry, what kind of slippers do you wear?” Jaymie asked, noticing a pair of fluffy blue ones on the shelf of the side table. “Do you have a pair of moccasin-type slipp
ers that are too big for you?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I don’t like moccasins, and I’d never wear slippers too big for me. Why?”
A nurse came in and charted her signs, then efficiently changed the depleted saline bag. They were silent, but Jaymie’s mind was working double-time. Morgan was seeing Fergus Baird on the side, while married. Fergus desperately wanted the shops by the dock, likely not for new shops but to raze them and construct luxury riverside condos. Should she raise the topic of Morgan and Baird?
Just then the young woman herself bustled in and greeted her aunt affectionately. Jaymie was swiftly ashamed of suspecting her of anything. She was clearly devoted to her aunt. Morgan cast a narrow-eyed look at Jaymie, then ignored her.
As the nurse left, Jaymie retrieved her purse from under the chair and stood. “I can’t stay; I’m meeting a friend for lunch. You can take my chair, Morgan.” She gave Miss Perry an affectionate goodbye, and said she’d visit when she returned home. Mrs. Stubbs followed her out of the room and into the hall, manipulating the joystick of her mobility wheelchair expertly to get through the door and around a laundry cart.
“What do you make of it all, Jaymie?” Mrs. Stubbs said as they slowly headed toward the elevator past a cluster of nurses and residents comparing notes. “Who would want to kill Lois? I’m trying not to alarm her too much, but I’m extremely upset and angry about the whole thing.”
“I have some theories, but nothing solid.”
“I want you to look into it, Jaymie; you’re the only one I trust to figure things out.”
“Mrs. Stubbs, the police are more capable than I am. I’ve just been lucky.”
“I’ll take lucky over good every time. And I object to that characterization anyway. You’ve been shrewd, you know all the players, and you have access to gossip and inside information that the police won’t pay attention to.”
They stopped at the elevator near the nurses’ station, a circular desk with banks of computers for nursing staff. Attendants milled about, and a porter stopped with a patient in a wheelchair next to where a man in a suit and carrying a briefcase spoke to a nurse. The gentleman nodded, turned, and headed down the hall and directly into Miss Perry’s private room.
“I know who that is,” Jaymie said. “That’s Parker Bastion, a lawyer. He’s the Müllers’ contract and will lawyer. I wonder why Miss Perry needs to see him?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” Mrs. Stubbs said, waving a hurried goodbye and heading back to her cousin’s hospital room.
Jaymie descended to the main floor and slipped into the gift shop. Heidi needed something to cheer her up, so a friendship gift was the order of the day. The gift shop was run by hospital volunteers and stocked locally handmade items, from artisanal chocolate to beaded gifts. As usual, there were at least three volunteers, all women of a certain age, as Valetta called herself and other ladies in the forty-to-sixty-year-old range.
“May I help you?” one said.
She was an attractive woman with a smart wedge-shaped bob hairstyle dyed dark brown, wearing a dark suit and a WGH tag with the name Phillipa Zane engraved on it.
“Mrs. Zane. You’re Miss Lois Perry’s neighbor, Lan Zane’s wife!”
“I am. How do you know Miss Perry?”
Jaymie explained as she moved around the gift shop, past the displays of gum, chips, coolers of water and pop, and hospital necessities: tiny shampoo bottles, tubes of toothpaste and travel toothbrushes, flimsy slippers and thin robes. “I was up to visit her. She’s conscious now and seems a little better.”
“Good to hear. She’s a crusty old bird, but I kind of like that. I hope that’s me at her age!”
In the front window there was a hanging display that caught the sunlight flooding in; a sign advertised locally made handcrafted stained glass suncatchers, each with a prismatic bead that showered a rainbow of light all around the shop. One was a butterfly with the prismatic crystal as its body and stripes of colored glass for the wings. That was Heidi. She took it to the cash register.
“So you’re the one who found her, I hear!” Phillipa exclaimed, ringing up the purchase and dipping under the cash desk, taking out a white box and folding it into shape, lining it with silver tissue and nestling the butterfly within.
“I was, fortunately.”
“I was here that day, so I missed all the excitement.”
“You were here? When did you leave home?”
The woman frowned, wrinkles bunching on her forehead. “I don’t know . . . tennish? I left, got into Queensville, then realized I’d forgotten my cell phone, so I came back.”
“What time was that?”
She stared at Jaymie but answered. “I don’t know . . . maybe ten after ten, a quarter after? It made me late to work, anyway, but who can go a whole day without their phone? Langlow told me all about it later. He has to walk that brutish dog of his—darn thing barks at me like I’m a stranger every time I come in—several times a day or he poops in the house.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust.
Several times a day? He had said he was only there in the afternoon. Interesting. “I suppose it was lucky, but I’m sure Morgan would have discovered her soon after. She’s such a good niece to take care of her aunt that way!”
The woman sniffed. “Don’t be fooled by the prissy butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth behavior. Morgan Perry Wallace is in it for the inheritance. That’s the only reason she takes care of Lois. She knows what she’s getting and she knows she has to keep her nose clean until she gets it.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’d divorce her husband in a second if she didn’t think Miss Perry would disapprove. The old lady is from the marriage is forever and that’s why I didn’t marry school of thought.”
Maybe that explained the affair with Fergus Baird and the odd look Morgan’s husband had when she dissolved on his chest weeping. “How do you know this?”
“I’ve heard things,” Phillipa said, tying a turquoise bow on the box with a flourish.
Gossip: sometimes spot-on, sometimes unreliable. However . . . there was still the cheating. Would that be enough to disinherit Morgan? Jaymie didn’t know Miss Perry well enough to understand. Maybe she should ask Mrs. Stubbs, even though she had sworn just minutes before that the police were perfectly capable of finding out who had tried to kill Miss Perry.
“I’ve spoken to your husband a couple of times,” Jaymie said. “You’ve both agreed to let tourists follow a historic walking trail across your property?” She nodded. “It’s Miss Perry who’s holding things up. But you must understand her hesitation when someone broke into her house through the back utility room. She’s worried about strangers in her backyard.”
“We offered to share the expense of a fence across the back all the way along. Haskell said he’d help with the cost, too, but she said no way.”
Fences don’t stop resolute robbers, Jaymie thought but did not say. “I’d better get going,” she said. “I’ve got a friend who will love this!” She held up the box. “Thank you for making it such a pretty package.”
Nine
WELLINGTON’S RETREAT WAS A NARROW TEA SHOP along Wolverhampton’s main street. They served tea and desserts, but also did lunches: soups, sandwiches, and salads. Jaymie hustled in the door and Heidi jumped up from her chair, flinging her arms around her and hugging hard.
Jaymie hugged her back, then held her away from her and examined her friend. Heidi Lockland was a slim woman, with long silky blonde hair and impeccable taste in clothing, beautiful in every way, including her heart. They sat down across from each other at the tiny table by the window. Heidi was paler than usual and had lost a few pounds, her cheekbones more prominent, the shadows under her lovely blue eyes not helped by the mustard-colored blouse she was wearing.
Clasping her hands across the table and squeezing, Jaymie said, “Sweetie, I’m so sorry you’re going through this. Joel is an idiot. You were the best thing that ever happ
ened to him.”
“After you, maybe. But he let go of you, so he’s got to be a real jerk, right?” She offered a ghost of a trembling smile.
“Let’s agree that he doesn’t know when he’s got it good. So you know who he’s seeing.”
“I do,” she said, withdrawing her hands and folding them in front of her, no longer wearing the engagement ring Joel gave her. “Like I said, she called me because she found my number and name in his contacts and saw how often he’d called me.”
“Why was she going through his phone?”
Heidi shrugged. “She was suspicious. Like I’ve been, though I’ve kept it to myself. I started to think something was up a few weeks before you got married.”
“This has been going on that long?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t know for sure. I was trying to ignore my doubts. We went away in the summer to Italy, and everything seemed fine. But when we got back his business trips were lasting longer than normal by a few days.” Joel was a representative for a pharmaceutical supply company and often traveled for work in the Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio area. “And he was spending that time in Ohio.”
“The other woman isn’t his ex-wife, is it?” Jaymie asked. His ex, from whom he had only recently gotten a legal divorce, lived in Ohio.
“Nope, this is a new one. She met him in a bar and took him home. That was in April. They’ve been seeing each other ever since. He stays at her place a few nights a week.”
“Since April?” Jaymie hadn’t thought that badly of Joel, even though he broke her heart. She had thought that he’d finally found his true love in Heidi. What an idiot. What more could a man want than someone who was kind, good-natured, forgiving, beautiful, and, to top it all off, the cherry on a delicious sundae, was born wealthy? “He doesn’t deserve you,” she said, using the favorite phrase of supportive female friends since the dawn of time.
No Grater Danger Page 10