A Deadly Grind

by Victoria Hamilton

  She heard a shout from below and, groggily, not quite sure what was going on, she yelled, “Denver, get down off of the counter!” Darn cat; he’d broken a nice teapot once, in one of his nightly rambles on the kitchen counter. She swung her feet over the edge of the bed, and put her foot down on Denver. Hoppy stood half-in and half-out of his basket, head cocked, listening to something.

  So it was not the cat who was responsible for the noise, nor was it Hoppy, who took off and trotted out the door toward the staircase. Cats and dogs did not shout anyway, she realized as her mind cleared of its sleep fog.

  “Jaymie, what was that?” Becca called out from her room, her voice thick with sleep.

  At that same moment Jaymie heard another scream and a crash. She bolted to the head of the stairs, grabbing a potted ivy off the plant stand on the landing as she went, and was joined by Becca. Hoppy staggered down the stairs ahead of them, barking his little head off.

  “What was that?” Becca repeated.

  “If I knew, would I be standing here whispering to you, holding a potted plant as a weapon? I’m going down,” she said, and began down the stairs. “I don’t want Hoppy getting in trouble if it’s a burglar.”

  “You and that damned dog!” Rebecca whispered, following.

  Three

  THE HOUSE WAS dead silent again, but there was another muted tinkle as Jaymie tiptoed through the hall, checking the den and guest bedroom as she crept toward the kitchen. Becca was behind her.

  “Where’s Hoppy?” Jaymie whispered. “Why did he stop barking?” Panic surged through her and she hastened her pace.

  “Turn a light on!” Becca whispered.

  “No way. Not ’til I know what’s going on.” Jaymie threaded her way through the kitchen and around the trestle table, setting the potted plant down as she passed. She heard a noise and a muffled expletive from her older sister—and a scratching noise from the other side of the kitchen.

  “Dammit, I stubbed my toe,” Becca muttered. “If you’d just turn a light on . . .”

  Jaymie ignored her, cautiously approaching the door to the summer porch. Hoppy scratched and pawed at the door, so that answered where he was, but the door was still closed and locked. The dim light over the sink didn’t reveal anyone moving. When she unlocked and opened the door to the summer porch, Hoppy darted past her and a cool night breeze wafted through the kitchen. That wasn’t right. The solid back door of the summer porch had been shut and locked before she went to bed.

  Pausing, she listened, grabbing Becca’s arm to keep her from going farther. Absolute silence, except for a wheezing, snuffling sound. She released her sister and moved stealthily forward, grabbing a broom as she passed the corner by the kitchen cupboard.

  Reaching out with her free hand as she moved to the door, she finally flicked on the overhead light. What she saw made her cry, “Becca, come here! Someone’s hurt.”

  Hoppy was snuffling at a man who lay on the floor of the summer porch by the Hoosier cabinet. The upper and lower cabinet doors were all wide open, and Jaymie swiftly shut the bottom one so she could get at the fellow. A cardboard box rested partly on his bleeding head, broken china on and all around him. Jaymie tossed the broom away and knelt by him, pushing the cardboard box away.

  “Becca, can you take Hoppy? There’s broken china all over the floor,” she said, pushing the little dog aside and brushing the shattered china and whole teacups and saucers from the injured man, a tinkle of china echoing in the quiet night. Was he breathing?

  Rebecca cried out, picked up Hoppy, and then grabbed the cordless phone from the wall mount in the kitchen as Jaymie reached out and tried to help the man roll over. He didn’t budge, despite her efforts: a dead weight.

  “Hey, mister?” she said, staring at the still man; he was a well-dressed fellow, wearing khaki slacks and a polo shirt under a cable-knit cardigan. Besides the bloody gash on his head and the blood that oozed in a messy stream from it, his nose was also crusted with old blood. Jaymie, dizzy and a little nauseous, wondered what the heck he had been doing on their summer porch. She glanced up and saw that the door was wide open and hung drunkenly from its hinges, which explained the night air drifting in. In the distance, someone’s dog was barking, which started a chorus of howls from the other dogs in town.

  “C’mon, guy, please . . . wake up!” she said again, beginning to shake, and feeling weirdly unreal. Becca was babbling in the background, giving their address and details over the phone.

  Jaymie looked up and out toward the backyard again, breathing deeply to quell a rising tide of dizziness; someone had pried the screen door off the hinges and popped the lock on the inside door to break in, and this guy was either the one who’d done it, or had tried to stop someone who did. She didn’t see any tool around that could have been used to do such damage to the door frame. Jaymie settled back on her heels, wondering what to do; was this guy friend or foe? Should she even be trying to revive him? Becca had set Hoppy down, and he came back and sniffed at the man’s loafer-covered feet, then nudged Jaymie’s hand as Denver slunk out to the summer porch and approached them.

  “Jaymie, they want to know, is he conscious?” Becca asked, the receiver to her ear.

  “No,” Jaymie said, her voice strange and hollow. “He’s . . .” She bent over to look at the man’s face. He was pale, too pale for life, and still, no movement of his chest. “I . . . I think he’s dead,” she said, her heart thudding and her stomach roiling.

  “Jaymie, are you okay? Jaymie!” Becca cried, standing at the door with the phone to her ear. “My sister doesn’t look well,” she said to the 911 operator.

  Jaymie felt herself sway, and sat down with a thump on the floor, staring at the still figure. “Becca, I’m okay, I just . . .” She retched and coughed.

  In another moment Clive Jones, wearing just boxers, strode up the three steps to the summer porch. “Jaymie!” he yelped. “You okay?”

  Jaymie looked up, as Becca babbled in the background to the 911 operator. She gazed steadily at Clive’s face, his dark eyes wide, the contrast between his white striped boxers and dark skin stark in the spill of light from the kitchen. “I think so.” She took a deep breath, calmed by his presence, and said, “Yes, I’m fine. But this poor guy isn’t. Clive, is he . . . is he dead? Can you tell?”

  Composed as always, Clive immediately knelt down by the fellow, holding one long finger to the carotid artery and compressing lightly. He stilled for a long moment, then looked over at Jaymie. “He’s dead,” he said, his expression somber.

  “Should we . . . should we try CPR?” Jaymie asked.

  “Let’s try,” he said. “I don’t think there’s much hope, but . . .” He turned the guy over onto his back and began chest compressions, counting out loud. Then he bent over and tried to breathe into the guy’s lungs. When he looked up again, his cheek smeared in blood, he asked, “What happened here? Was this a break-in?”

  “I wish I knew,” Jaymie said. She dashed back into the kitchen and got a tea towel, saying, “He was like this when we found him.” Apply pressure to the wound, first aid advertisements always said. She knelt at his side and put her tea towel to his head wound, looking away, trying not to notice the red sopping into the towel.

  It seemed obvious. The busted door, the box of broken and spilled teacups and saucers that used to be atop the Hoosier: this guy, or someone else, had broken in to rob them, and the falling box had killed him. Or . . . she sharpened her gaze and stared at the dead man. He had been facedown with his head turned to one side. Shattered china was everywhere, but the blood dripping from his head wound indicated that something much heavier than a box full of teacups had hit him. It couldn’t have been that! But what?

  Clive kept working, and put his finger to the man’s throat. He shook his head and stood. “He’s long gone, Jaymie. There’s no bringing him back,”
he said, stepping in to the kitchen to the sink and washing his hands of the blood that had stained them from his efforts at lifesaving.

  Sirens wailed in the distance. Jaymie stared and stared, unable to form complete thoughts. The guy was dead, but how? There was nothing but shattered teacups scattered around. Death by Doulton? Murder by Minton?

  The police and paramedics arrived at about the same time, sirens and lights creating a chaotic barrage of sight and sound in the narrow back alley. Two uniformed cops, a man and a woman, were first on the scene, then the paramedics. Paramedics went to work on the fellow, nodding as Clive told them what he had done to try to revive the man. More cops arrived, and Jaymie heard a female voice give orders for them to fan out in the neighborhood looking for an assailant and the weapon. So Becca must have gotten the full message through to the 911 operator. It was as obvious, then, to the police as it was to Jaymie, that the dead man had been hit by something heavier than a box of teacups.

  When it became obvious to the paramedics that there was no helping the fellow, the police took over, sending Jaymie into the kitchen to stand with Rebecca and Clive. The three stood for a while in a huddle, silent at first, and Jaymie held Hoppy in her arms to keep him out of trouble. He was quivering with excitement. Denver had disappeared back into the house, unnerved by the commotion.

  “Who do you think he is?” Rebecca asked. “Have you ever seen him before, Jaymie?”

  She shook her head and shuddered. “He’s so pale, and the blood . . .” She could smell it, the metallic tang, the organic scent of death, filling her nostrils.

  “Why would someone break into your place?” Clive asked, his arms over his bare chest. He lifted one bare foot and pulled a sliver of china out of it. Frowning at it, he set it on the kitchen counter. “And what is that all over the floor of the summer porch?”

  “That is the remains of a box of teacups Rebecca bought yesterday,” Jaymie said quietly, flicking a glance at the clock. It was almost four in the morning. “They were supposed to be for the Tea with the Queen fundraiser tomorrow afternoon. She brought enough, but when she saw the box at the Bourne auction it seemed like a good idea.”

  “If not for this year, for next year. I can always use more teacups and saucers,” Becca said.

  “This is your first year in Queensville for the Tea with the Queen,” Jaymie said to Clive. He and Anna had just bought the bed-and-breakfast next door, the Shady Rest, in January, to run as a family business. “Customers can actually buy the teacup and saucer set that they use, if they like. We get a few every year who do, as a souvenir.”

  “Are they valuable?”

  Becca snorted. “No, they’re mostly Royal Albert or Royal Vale . . . junk, in the china world.”

  “But pretty,” Jaymie said, defending the shattered pottery. She thought for a moment and glanced toward the door where officers examined the summer porch and the backyard beyond, the wide arc of flashlights cutting through the night blackness. She could hear an officer upstairs searching; she and Becca had, of course, given the police permission to investigate the entire house, though it seemed obvious to her that the burglar had not made it past the kitchen door, which had still been locked when she’d come down. With the banality of their conversation, her mind was beginning to work again.

  Something wasn’t right about the scene, other than the obvious: a dead guy and smashed teacups. The other boxes she had purchased were off the Hoosier as well, the cookbooks scattered across the floor and the box of sewing oddments on the top step. Why? Who had moved the boxes from the Hoosier, and for what purpose? And why were the Hoosier’s cupboard doors open?

  “Sir, look here!” a female officer shouted. She played her flashlight around the shadowy corners of the summer porch. “Could be the murder weapon!”

  Jaymie bolted forward with another uniformed officer and followed the beam of light. On the board floor of the porch, in the shadows between windows, lay the heavy steel meat grinder she had loosely attached to the Hoosier work top. As the beam of light settled on it, Jaymie could see that it was smeared with dark fluid . . . the victim’s blood.

  “No!” she whispered, and turned away.

  “Jaymie come back,” Becca said, grabbing her T-shirt sleeve and pulling her away as the police crowded around.

  Her sister made her sit down in one of the kitchen chairs, an old wood farm chair that had one wobbly leg. That is where a police officer found them. He was a tall fellow with a grave expression on his clean-shaven face. “Sergeant MacAdams,” he said. “May I ask you folks a few questions? Who lives here?”

  Jaymie and Rebecca both put up their hands. The officer established their co-ownership, then asked to speak with them all separately, Rebecca first; he led her to the library and, after ten minutes or so, he came back to get Jaymie. She followed him through the kitchen door to the hall and into the library, still furnished for its original purpose, with tall built-in bookcases lining the walls and a cushioned seat set into the window. She put Hoppy down and wearily sank into a chair by the fireplace. Hoppy demanded to come up on her lap, so she cradled him again as he curled up in her arms, trembling.

  “Do you know the deceased?”

  “No. Who is he?” Jaymie asked, sitting back in the chair and petting the Yorkie-Poo’s head.

  “Could you just take me through what happened?”

  Jaymie thought a moment. “Well, Becca and I went to bed about eleven or eleven-thirty, I guess.”

  He jotted down notes in a coil-bound notebook. “That’s your sister?”

  “Yes. We had come back from the Bourne estate auction near Wolverhampton, and we were both tired. I woke up to Hoppy barking and a shout and a crash—”

  “Hoppy is your dog?”

  She nodded.

  “In what order?”

  “Huh?”

  “Was it in that order, the dog barking, then a shout, then a crash?”

  Jaymie stopped and stared into the fireplace, the original coal fire grate from when the house was built. “No, that’s not quite how it happened.” She was silent for a moment, organizing her thoughts. “I was sound asleep but heard something that woke me up. A shout, maybe?” She mused. “Or maybe the sound of the back door being pried off its hinges? I don’t know. I think it was something banging, like falling down. Anyway, I thought the noise was Hoppy at first, but Hoppy and Denver—Denver’s my cat—were both in my room. Then I heard a shout, and then the crash.”

  “And then?”

  “We met in the upstairs hall, Becca and I. She asked me what the noise was, and I said I didn’t know. I grabbed a potted plant as we came down the stairs. Hoppy had bolted ahead of us and started barking. We followed Hoppy’s noise into the kitchen. I went toward the back door.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? The noise I’d heard came from the summer porch.”

  “Everything was dark?” he asked, pencil poised over his notepad.

  Jaymie nodded, but got what he meant. He wondered why she hadn’t turned any lights on as she went through the house. “I never turn lights on when I come down at night. I’ve lived here my whole life, and I could find my way through it blindfolded, but Becca stubbed her toe on the table leg, I think. Anyway, I was worried about my dog, but if there was a prowler, I didn’t want them to see me.”

  “So you went toward the back door?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know what I was thinking. I should have headed out the front door, but, like I said, Hoppy had darted into the kitchen, and I was worried about him. Anyway, when I got into the kitchen I could kind of see, by the light over the sink—I leave that on all night, but it’s only, like, fifteen watts—that there was no one in the kitchen. In fact, the door between the kitchen and the summer porch was still locked.”

  “So you are sure there was no one in the kitchen?”

 
“Yep. As I passed the kitchen table I put down the plant, grabbed the broom, then opened the door from the kitchen to the summer porch—”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Stupid thing to do, I guess, but I just wasn’t thinking. It was a false alarm, I thought, something falling over on the summer porch. I hadn’t processed hearing a scream and all that. I was woken up from a dead sleep, so I wasn’t really coherent.”

  “How long did all of this take?”

  “Not as long as it’s taking to describe,” Jaymie joked, but the officer remained stoic, staring at her. She sighed, and said, “Just a couple of minutes. As I opened the back door, I finally turned on the light, and that’s when I saw him; Hoppy was sniffing him. I said something to Becca, and she came up behind me.”

  “Did you touch the deceased?”

  “Well, of course! I didn’t know he was dead then.” She swallowed and took in a deep shuddering breath, battling the memory of that moment. “Look, officer, are we safe? What happened? Did someone kill him, or was it the box . . .” She trailed off and shook her head. “But it can’t have been the box.”

  “The box?”

  “Oh. I didn’t say that yet, did I? When I came out onto the summer porch the box that held the teacups—that’s the china that’s shattered all over him—was on him, on the dead guy. And the Hoosier cabinet doors were swung open. I closed the bottom door and pushed the box of teacups off him so I could get at him,” she continued, as the officer jotted swiftly. “I think I tossed a teacup and a couple of saucers aside and brushed china shards off his face. I saw the blood, and I felt sick. That’s when Clive came up to the back steps. I think that’s how it all happened.”