No Grater Danger

by Victoria Hamilton

  Twelve

  “TIBERIUS! DOWN, TIBERIUS. What’s going on?” Lan Zane, huffing and puffing, raced across the grass.

  Jaymie backed out of the brush, turned, and put her hand up. “Take your dog out of the yard.” When he stood, staring at her, she grabbed the dog’s collar and thrust the pooch at his owner. “Go! Now!” Because of her varied experiences over the last two years, she knew what needed to be done, and none of it was for the body that was once Fergus Baird, poor fellow. The only thing anyone could do for him at this point was to find out who killed him.

  Jaymie followed, as the neighbor hustled his dog past the house and along the walk between, but diverged from Zane’s path to approach the back door of the house. Morgan, her face white, her body trembling, stared out at her through the open door. It was odd that the woman hadn’t come out to see if everything was okay. And why, if she was just going to stand there, was she not with her aunt, making sure she was all right?

  Unless she had known all along what Jaymie would find out there under the shrubbery. Maybe that was why she so absolutely resisted being the one to go out and take care of the problem. Jaymie’s suspicions crept down her backbone in a nervous shudder. Nothing about this made sense, especially why Fergus Baird’s body had been shoved in the bushes along the back of Miss Perry’s property. “Get me my phone, please. It’s on the table by Miss Perry.” She had been about to show the woman the pictures of the cases Bill had made.

  Morgan obeyed without even asking why, retreating and returning, handing Jaymie the phone out the back door.

  “Go back to Miss Perry,” Jaymie said. “There’s been an incident and I have to . . . take care of something, but tell Miss Perry that the cat is fine. Cats are the drama queens of nature. They always sound like they’re dying when they’re just angry. Tiberius didn’t harm it, he scared it.” When the young woman disappeared back into the house, Jaymie sheltered under the eaves from the rain, which had plastered her bangs down over her forehead and dripped into her eyes, and made the call to 911.

  • • •

  IT WAS A CRIME SCENE, of course, with all the attendant confusion and neighborly interest, Winding Woods Lane lined with police vehicles. Jaymie—wet, cold and shivering—sat by Miss Perry. She had been forced to tell the lady that she had found a body, but she hadn’t elaborated. She did not tell Morgan who it was. Miss Perry assumed it was “one of those foolish walkers” who had fallen down the cliff, and there was no point in clarifying. The police would do that soon enough.

  Detective Angela Vestry had arrived on the scene. Chief Ledbetter, Jaymie’s friend, had lauded the woman as one of the best detectives he’d worked with in his long law enforcement career, but she certainly lacked his personal charm. However, since when did a detective require charm? She was an effective investigator, one the new chief of police, Deborah Connolly, relied on.

  Officer Ng summoned Jaymie. She followed him out the back door and he pointed her toward Detective Vestry, who stood inside the taped perimeter that cordoned off the back half of the lawn. At least the rain had stopped, though it still dripped from trees overhead and clung to bushes that had not yet shed their leaves. Jaymie, damp and shivering, approached with trepidation. The detective had once expressed skepticism about Jaymie’s habit of finding dead bodies, and this was one more example.

  Faced with that skepticism and doubt from the detective and others, Jaymie had pondered the pattern. It seemed to her that it was mostly because she was involved in so many of her community’s events, societies and groups. Combined with her innate curiosity—nosiness, Valetta called it—it meant she was more apt than most to discovery. Like today; if she had hauled the dog away without looking to see if the cat was all right, who knew how long Baird would have lain there? Someone else would have found him, but not so soon.

  Armed with this argument, she was therefore surprised by Vestry’s bland expression when she said, “Tell me what happened, Ms. Leighton.”

  “Leighton Müller,” Jaymie corrected automatically, before launching into a description of her day. She finished by saying, “I went looking for the cat to make sure he was okay. That’s when I saw the body stuffed into the hedge. I recognized the pants and shoes right away. Mr. Baird had a habit of dressing in pastels, and I knew the white loafers from seeing them on him the other day. I parted the bushes and saw his face.” She paused, but then went ahead, determined to tell all she knew. “I recognized that silver thing in his mouth; it’s an antique nutmeg grater. Like . . . like the ones in Miss Perry’s collection.”

  If Vestry was startled by the revelation, she didn’t show it. It was plaguing Jaymie, though, because she was trying to remember if it was one Miss Perry had shown her on her first visit. Was it even the missing one Morgan had been complaining about? When she mentioned that, and the detective asked why that mattered, she replied, “It matters because Miss Perry suffered a break-in and theft some time ago. If the grater hadn’t been seen since, then it could have been stolen at the same time as the other silver. But if I saw it, it means the grater was stolen between that day and the moment it was shoved into Mr. Baird’s mouth.”

  The wind was coming up and blowing brisk and cold. Standing outside in damp clothes and sodden shoes, without a warm dry sweater or coat, she shivered, frigid to the core of her being. Or maybe it was a belated reaction to finding another body. Her stomach roiled and she swallowed back a rising sick feeling.

  Vestry eyed Jaymie. “You have lately been accusing Mrs. Beverly Hastings of playing a part in that theft, isn’t that true?”

  “No, not exactly.” Jaymie told the detective everything about the silver, and how unlikely it seemed that another local would have a complete set of Savoy by Buccellati. “It’s my sister and brother-in-law’s shop. I was concerned. It seems odd to me, you know? One coincidence too many.” She made a swift decision and added, “There’s more, Detective. I don’t know if they’re in it together or not, but I wonder if Bev Hastings, at least—maybe not Jon, I don’t know—was trying to help Fergus Baird buy the dockside property from Miss Perry.”

  The detective gazed steadily at her, pale brows raised in skepticism. “Are you seriously suggesting Miss Perry herself killed Baird and planted him in the shrubbery with one of her silver grater thingies shoved down his throat because he was trying to buy her land?”

  “Of course not!” Jaymie’s cheeks burned with embarrassment, and her back went up, irritation that she was being treated like a flake flooding through her. “I’m telling you what I think.”

  “Stick to solid information, Ms. Leighton, not conjecture.”

  Leighton Müller, Jaymie thought, but this time did not say. Her respect for the detective’s acuity went down a notch. At least Chief Ledbetter had listened to her, no matter how far-fetched her thoughts had seemed at the time. She was not a trained professional, true, but she did have some insight and it didn’t cost anything to listen.

  Morgan came to the back door and stared down the lawn at them. So . . . after that warning from the detective, tell about the affair she suspected between Morgan Perry Wallace and Fergus Baird or not? After all, it might not even be an affair, she couldn’t know for sure. Jaymie decided only to tell if she was asked directly.

  Vestry dismissed her with a casual, “We’ll be in touch, Ms. Leighton.”

  Jaymie returned to the house, slipping through the back door to find Morgan standing in the kitchen waiting, one hand resting on the worn kitchen counter, her index finger following a scar in the work surface, stroking it over and over.

  “What did you say to her?” Morgan asked, her eyes clouded and a tense, expectant expression on her round face. She blinked and squinted, looking anxious.

  Jaymie paused. If Morgan knew it was Fergus Baird lying dead out there then any feelings of heartbreak or sadness were overlaid with something more worrying. Fear, perhaps, or guilt? Without knowing her better she could not guess.

  “How much do you know about what’s going o
n out there?” Jaymie asked.

  “I know it’s Fergus. I saw the . . . the shoes. Even from a distance I could tell. What happened?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I know that, but I mean . . . how?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Surely you know something?” Her nail caught that scratch in the countertop, picking away at the laminated surface, chipping at it until there was a little pile of arborite scraps.

  Jaymie shook her head.

  “What . . . what did you tell that woman, the detective?”

  “You mean about you and Fergus?”

  Morgan’s breath caught, but she nodded.

  “I didn’t tell her anything, but if I were you, I’d fill her in completely on your . . . relationship.”

  The young woman whirled and grabbed the kettle from the stove, filling it with water and slamming it down, turning on the jet. “That’s none of your business.”

  “True,” Jaymie said. “I’m going to check on your aunt.”

  Miss Perry, white with exhaustion and trembling with pain—she was past time for her pain medication, but it made her sleepy and confused, she said, not how she wanted to be when she spoke to the police—was more worried about the safety of her colony of feral cats than her own suffering, or even the dead body in her yard. “Those police won’t shoot them, will they?”

  “Of course not. I’m sure the cats will be hiding anyway, Miss Perry.”

  “Call me Lois, dear,” the woman said with a confiding look, her eyes watery. “My cousin is right about you, you know. You’re . . . solid.”

  Jaymie smiled briefly.

  “Oh, I don’t mean physically,” she said, waving her blue-veined hand. “Plump girls worry too much about that anyway. I mean solid like . . .” Her voice drifted off, and she winced, some stab of pain giving her trouble. “You’re reliable. So few people are anymore. Or maybe that’s just me getting old.”

  The kettle whistled. “I’ll make some more tea,” Jaymie said, squeezing the woman’s hand.

  “I don’t know what’s happened to Morgan,” she said fretfully as the teakettle whistle shrilled.

  Jaymie retreated to the kitchen, but Morgan had disappeared. She refilled the teapot, got out her phone, texting Jakob that she might be late, then called her mother-in-law to see if Jocie was okay to stay with them for dinner. Mrs. Müller said it was perfectly all right. Jocie could stay over; her cousins were, and they would all be ecstatic if Jocie could, too. When Jaymie fretted about Hoppy and Lilibet, she was assured that Helmut would take Jocie over to the cabin and bring both animals back to the Müller farm, where there was a fenced yard and people who loved them both.

  Jaymie gave her a message to relay to Jakob, in case he didn’t get her text. She was fine. She would be home the moment she could, but she was not going to leave Miss Perry alone if she could help it. Sighing in relief to have such a brilliant support system, she rinsed out their cups, then made the tea and took it to Miss Perry.

  “Miss Perry . . . uh, Lois . . .” She shook her head. It didn’t feel right to call her by her first name. “I understood that you were to be released from the hospital with nursing care. Are you sure Morgan’s capable of taking care of everything you need?”

  “Nursing care?” the woman said with a quizzical frown. “I don’t know anything about that. I let Morgan take care of it and she said I could go home, and that she’d stay with me.” She picked up the remote and turned the TV up, tuned to another game show, all noise and bright color, then closed her eyes, softly snoring after a few minutes.

  Sleep would be a relief from pain; she’d let her slumber. Jaymie picked up the remote and turned down the racket. Worry gnawed and ached in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t think she could even handle tea at this point. Who was responsible for trying to kill Miss Perry? Morgan had every motive. On multiple levels her aunt’s death would materially benefit her, and she had just tried to get the woman to sign over control of her life and assets with a POA. And now Fergus Baird was dead, his body in Miss Perry’s backyard. There were weird happenings afoot. Jaymie could not, in good conscience, leave Miss Perry alone with just Morgan.

  Decision made, and knowing Morgan—if she was the murderous niece Jaymie hoped she wasn’t—wouldn’t try anything with the current police presence, Jaymie slipped out to her SUV. No one stopped her, no one questioned her, so she drove away to the Queensville Inn. Afternoon was waning. Weak sunlight was trying to burn off the clouds, but unsuccessfully so far. Dull shadows were lengthening over the still-green grass as she went directly to the sliding glass doors on the terrace by Mrs. Stubbs’s room.

  Her friend had been dozing in her mobility chair, an open large-print book on her lap, the sun streaming in on her, warming her arthritic hands, but waved Jaymie in when she tapped on the sliding glass doors. After Jaymie’s long relation of what had happened that afternoon, Mrs. Stubbs was lost in thought.

  “Well, what do you think?” Jaymie said, fidgeting anxiously. She paced to the glass door, worrying over the dwindling light and her sureness that the police would be wrapping up the investigation for the night very soon. “Am I being paranoid?” she asked, turning to her friend. “Tell me I’m nuts.”

  “I wish I could. Get me my phone and my address book on the shelf above the counter.”

  Jaymie did as she was told, and Mrs. Stubbs took the phone. She kept the coil-bound book open on her lap and followed a number with one crooked finger as she punched it in. She gave her name; it was clear by the ensuing conversation that they knew her. They put her through to someone, as she covered the mouthpiece.

  “There are few benefits to being my age,” she said to Jaymie, “but one is, I know exactly how to get proper care.” Her gaze shifted, and she answered yes to someone on the other end of the line. It swiftly became clear what she had decided as she ordered twenty-four-hour-a-day nursing for her cousin, who had come home from the hospital and was doing poorly. The nurse would arrive within the hour at the address on Winding Woods Lane and would work a twelve-hour shift, before being replaced by another. He—Mrs. Stubbs asked for a certain nurse named Skip Buchanon—was registered and adept with geriatric patients, and would provide his identification when he arrived. Mrs. Stubbs made it very clear that she was worried about her cousin’s safety, as there had been a murder near the house and the perpetrator might be lurking anywhere.

  “Now, go back there. I’ll call Morgan and tell her what I’ve done. I’ll say it was my idea because Lois is so fragile. You did the right thing.”

  Relief flooded through Jaymie and she even teared up. “Thank you, Mrs. Stubbs. I wouldn’t have been able to leave Miss Perry alone but for your excellent idea.”

  “Now, go pick up soup or something and take it back, and tell Morgan you had errands to do. Remember . . . it’s not necessarily a bad thing if she thinks you had anything to do with what I’ve done. If she’s guilty, then she’ll know multiple eyes are on her. And if she’s not, then she has nothing to fear, right?”

  Thirteen

  BECAUSE SHE STOPPED AT THE EMPORIUM to get some things for Miss Perry—soup, pudding, Jell-O and ice cream—she arrived at the Winding Woods Lane residence about the same time as the nurse, a young African-American fellow, Skip Buchanan, who was driving a smartcar with the name of the nursing service on the side. She pulled up to the curb, waited while he got out his bag, and noticed him looking at the police cars. Round-faced, with a fringe of close-cropped beard rimming his chin, about the same length as his close-cropped hair, he was dressed in green scrubs and around his neck had a lanyard with his identification tag and affiliation.

  She strode over to him, her grocery bag dangling from one hand, and introduced herself, shaking his hand and telling him she was acquainted with both his patient and her cousin, who had called the service to arrange his help.

  “I know Mrs. Stubbs; love her!” he said with a broad, toothy smile. His voice was light, pleasant, with a soothing quality.
“Whenever I’ve looked after her we play euchre and she beats me every time. So what’s going on here?” he asked, following her up the steps to the porch, hoisting his duffel bag on his muscular shoulder.

  “They didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  She stayed him with one hand on his arm as he grabbed the doorknob, and quickly filled him in. He held her gaze, his dark brown eyes thoughtful as he nodded and interjected occasional sharp questions. When she was done, he paused, then said, “There’s something you’re not telling me. Is Miss Perry in danger?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, relieved at not having to raise the idea herself. “But obviously I don’t want her life at risk.”

  “And so, twenty-four-hour care. You’re not even sure of the people closest to her, am I right?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Jaymie said, shying from the notion of accusing Morgan, or anyone else. “I . . . I don’t know anything for certain,” she said, feeling tears well up. “But I didn’t want to take any chances. She’s a cranky, difficult, dear old lady, and she’s important to Mrs. Stubbs.”

  “Don’t worry,” Skip said, turning the knob. “I got this.”

  Morgan was furious, Jaymie could see that right away as Skip Buchanon introduced himself, told her he was sent by Miss Perry’s cousin, Mrs. Stubbs, who was concerned for the well-being of her relative. He took her hand, shook it briefly, and said he’d see his patient now, so they could get acquainted.

  “I don’t want you here,” Morgan said, facing the nurse, her whole body stiff with outrage. Her fierce whisper echoed in the dim hallway.

  This was a delicate and difficult spot, and as much as Jaymie wanted to tell the woman this was how it was going to be, she hesitated. If Morgan talked Miss Perry into telling Skip to go home, there wasn’t much he could do but comply. No one could force nursing on her if she didn’t want it. Jaymie slipped away from the confrontation in the hall and headed to Miss Perry’s temporary bedroom.