A Deadly Grind

by Victoria Hamilton

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Jaymie looked up from the list to find Mrs. Bellwood, the annual Tea’s short, stout Queen Victoria, staring at her, thick dark brows drawn down over beady eyes. “Sorry, Mrs. Bellwood, I was thinking aloud.”

  “Bad habit. I do it all the time.”

  Jaymie was about to move on, but the silver-haired woman grabbed ahold of her sleeve with a firm grasp.

  “Is that outsider in Queensville yet?” she said.

  Jaymie effortlessly translated the woman’s reference. “I don’t know if Daniel Collins is here yet, but I sure hope he is. We need to get into the attic to get down the tables for the tea.” The tables for the Tea with the Queen had been stored in Stowe House attic for thirty-five years, ever since the first event.

  “Weather channel says rain for tomorrow,” she replied, obliquely.

  “I hope not,” Jaymie said. “We can’t get nearly as many people in the house as we can when we hold the event on the lawn. And Canadian tourists won’t come over on the ferry if it’s raining.” Jaymie suspected that Mrs. Bellwood would love the chance to lord it over a tea table in the parlor, which Daniel had not changed since he bought the house with the furniture three years before.

  In those three years he had spent, probably, less than a month total in Queensville, and many of the locals resented an “outsider’s” grasp on the oldest and most prominent house in the village. Lazarus Stowe, builder of Stowe House, was an important local figure, the man who had brokered the agreement to split Heartbreak Island between the neighboring countries of Canada and the US, avoiding an international incident in the 1840s, when feelings were still running high in Canada after a rebellion in 1837. It was rumored that Sir John A. MacDonald, the first prime minister of Canada, had spent a few days there once as Lazarus Stowe’s guest, before Canadian confederation, that momentous uniting of various parts of the northern nation into one dominion on July 1, 1867.

  “Trip Findley told me that there was a car outside that house all night long!” Mrs. Bellwood said, her voice low. “Probably another outsider!”

  “How did Mr. Findley know the car was there all night?” Jaymie asked, vaguely moved to defend Daniel Collins, whose only discernible flaw was that he had bought Stowe House from underneath the nose of the heritage committee.

  “Trip walks every morning at five a.m., and he goes past Stowe House. He feels that since Collins is so seldom there,” she said, her chins wobbling with indignation, “it behooves those of us with a stake in Queensville to keep an eye on the place.”

  Jaymie resisted the urge to retort. When the place had gone up for sale three years before, Mrs. Bellwood and Trip Findley had spearheaded a movement to buy Stowe House and convert it into a Queensville historical museum, but the plan had fallen through, the victim of not enough cash and a lack of local enthusiasm. As good an idea as it was, local people felt it would be a money drain, and probably foresaw decades of pleas for more money to repair and maintain the building as a museum. The local economy was not that strong and folks’ pockets not that deep.

  Even after the plan died for lack of interest, when the irascible pair of oldsters learned that an outsider had bought that precious piece of village history, they became incensed and never forgave the buyer. Daniel Collins seemed happily oblivious to Mrs. Bellwood’s frosty stares and cutting remarks. In truth, Daniel, whom Jaymie had befriended, had perfectly good caretakers who checked daily on the house. He had installed an expensive alarm system and fire protection, and even though he was seldom there, was an excellent guardian of that bit of village history.

  “So, what did Mr. Findley see?” Jaymie said, urging the woman (who was staring down her mortal enemy, Imogene Frump, in the pet food aisle) to continue. Anything about a stranger in town was interesting, given what had happened at Jaymie’s house.

  Mrs. Bellwood looked to the left and to the right, then leaned toward Jaymie. “There was a car with out-of-state plates sitting outside Stowe House.” She flashed a look at Imogene Frump, then leaned over even closer and whispered to Jaymie, “And there was a man asleep in the backseat!” Mrs. Frump was edging closer down the crowded grocery aisle, and Mrs. Bellwood straightened, and said, in a ringing, carrying tone, “And that’s all I know about that!”

  The two old enemies nodded and drifted past each other, like great sailing ships signaling their presence in murky fog and thus avoiding a catastrophic collision.

  “I’ll see you at the tea tomorrow, Jaymie dear,” Mrs. Bellwood cried. Her position playing Queen Victoria in the annual tea had been her victory decades ago over Imogene Frump, and the root of their enmity, since she took every opportunity to remind the other woman of her triumph.

  “Jaymie, parcel pickup,” Valetta called just then.

  Jaymie, musing about the new information Mrs. Bellwood had given her, finished up her shopping, got Anna’s birth control from the pharmacy and left the store with much to think of, not the least of which was how was she going to handle four bags of groceries and a prancing little dog all the way back home. She released Hoppy from puppy prison—Junk Junior was already gone, so Hoppy was the only little dog in the pen—and put her bags down on the creaking stoop while she snapped on his leash.

  “Hey, Jaymie!” a voice called out, fighting to be heard over the roar of an energetic engine.

  She looked up as Daniel Collins himself cruised up in front of the store in his battered Jeep Wrangler. “Hi, Daniel! I was just talking about you. Were your ears burning?”

  He grinned and unfolded himself from the driver’s seat, hopping out and strolling around to greet her. “I was talking about you, too. I met your new neighbor, Anna Jones, when I went looking for you. I figure everyone is probably freaking out that I haven’t gotten here yet.”

  “A little,” Jaymie admitted. “Hey, can you give me, Hoppy and this mountain of groceries a lift back home?”

  “That’s what I came here for! Anna said she hadn’t realized you were walking and had given you her whole shopping list.” He slung her bags in the back, as Jaymie climbed in the passenger side and belted herself in, holding Hoppy securely on her lap.

  The ride back to her home took less than three minutes, but it saved her a lot of time and trouble, and Jaymie told Daniel so. There was something different about him this time, she thought, glancing over at his beaky profile, tousled sandy hair dancing in the wind and flopping over his high forehead. He was smiling more and seemed unusually animated.

  As they pulled up in front of the B&B, Jaymie said, reaching behind for Anna’s grocery bags, “I heard there was someone sleeping outside of your house all night. What’s up with that?”

  Daniel reached over to help her retrieve a runaway apple as Hoppy leaped into the back of the Jeep and chased it. “Bad timing is what’s up with that. That’s Zell McIntosh, an old college buddy of mine. We’re having a reunion of sorts this weekend through to Memorial Day weekend next week. Just the three of us: me, Zell and Trev Standish. Frat buddies.”

  Jaymie tried, and failed, to imagine Daniel Collins—serious, (generally) bespectacled and levelheaded—as a frat brat. “Were you supposed to be here earlier, or was he the one who got the timing wrong?”

  Collins nodded. “Perspicacious: that’s what my mom would call you. He’s the one who got it wrong, because I texted him three days ago that I’d be here Saturday morning. I was early, got here at seven a.m., so I don’t know why he arrived last night.” He paused one beat, then said, “Hey, I heard there was a fracas at your house last night, but nobody would tell me what happened. What’s up?”

  “Hold on, and I’ll get rid of these bags and tell you,” Jaymie said. After she unloaded Anna’s groceries and helped her harassed neighbor get them into the house, Daniel and Jaymie went into the Leightons’ front door, just as Becca came down the stairs yawning and stretching.

 
Between them they told their village neighbor what had happened as Jaymie unloaded the groceries. He exclaimed at the awful event and regarded Jaymie with great seriousness for a few moments over his glasses. “Are you all right? Really?”

  “Yeah, I am. I’m just fine,” she said, wondering at his expression. Becca was watching him with raised eyebrows.

  “And I’m okay too, in case you’re concerned,” she said, after a moment’s silence.

  “Right. Good. Hey, can I see the Hoosier cabinet?”

  Jaymie led him back to the summer porch and pointed it out, and watched while he looked it over.

  “A real Hoosier, right?” he said. “What are you going to do with it? You putting it in the kitchen?”

  “Eventually,” she said, “but not until it’s cleaned up some.” She shuddered and turned away, not able to look at it without thinking of the man dead beside it, or the grinder that had been the murder weapon.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” Daniel said. “It was . . . it was right here that it happened, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded and went back to the kitchen table; the police hadn’t warned her against it, but she was not about to reveal to anyone else what they suspected about the grinder.

  Daniel then told them his plans for the next while. He and Zell—and his friend Trevor, if he showed up in the next few hours—could handle getting the tables down from the attic. His lawn service was mowing that very moment, pruning the forsythia that lined the south side of the house and trimming the spirea on the other side. Tables would be set out the next morning, and he and Zell and Trevor would be available to move them into place. Becca, naturally bossy, said she would be there to organize them.

  There was silence for a moment, and then Daniel slapped his open palms on the trestle table and stood. “I guess I’d better get going. Zell wants to see the sights, and I said we’d go across the river into Canada for dinner.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket as it buzzed. “Damn!” he said, reading the tiny screen with a frown. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Looks like Trev’s going to be late.”

  “Your other friend?”

  “Yeah, Trevor Standish. He’s the one who organized me and Zell and him getting together, and now he’s going to be late.” Collins swiftly texted an answer and slid the device back into his pocket. “How late, he didn’t say. Typical Trevor. I’ll let you both get back to . . . to whatever you were doing,” he said, with a shy look at Becca.

  And he was gone.

  Jaymie and Becca had some lunch and then, to relax a bit from the horrors of the night, Jaymie began her Queen Elizabeth cake, turning the sticky dates into a newer glass bowl, boiling the kettle and pouring one cup over the dates and baking soda, which fizzed up. She would never pour boiling water into a vintage bowl; an unseen hairline crack could cause it to shatter. Nor did she ever use her vintage bowls in the microwave. That would be like putting her grandmother in a rocket ship to the moon.

  “What is that all about, boiling water and baking soda?” Becca asked, looking over her shoulder.

  “I think you do this to soften the dates, so they blend well with the moist cake batter,” Jaymie said, lifting down her favorite Pyrex bowls, a vintage “Primary Colors” set, from the open shelf over the sink. She set the oven to preheat while Becca sat down at the kitchen table to make a list of things to do before the next day.

  There was silence for a moment, other than the sounds of Jaymie mixing and Becca scratching items on her list.

  “I can’t stop thinking about that poor guy . . . the dead man,” Becca said, tapping her pen against her pad of paper.

  “I know,” Jaymie said. She worked the moist ingredients together in the red bowl, the second smallest in the graduated nesting set, while her sister watched.

  “Who can he be? Do you think the cops know and just aren’t saying?”

  Jaymie shrugged. “The detective told me that they didn’t know yet. That was hours ago, though.”

  “I should have stayed up to help you clean, Jaymie,” Rebecca said, looking toward the sunporch. “You did a great job. I was almost afraid to come down, but . . . it’s like it never happened.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “I’m not sure about sleeping here tonight, though. There’s a murderer running around out there.”

  Jaymie had been trying not to think about that all day. “I have Bill Waterman coming to fix that back door later,” she said, in an oblique answer. “I want him to take the storms off the summer porch, too. I was going to call him this week about that anyway. The police did say they’re going to cruise by often for the next while, and even have someone sitting out back, until they figure out who did it. Bill’s going to put in motion detector alarms.”

  “I know. Still . . . it freaks me out.”

  Jaymie set the bowl aside for a moment, pushing thoughts of the blood and violence out of her mind. It wasn’t easy because, as tired as she was, it was looming, like an awful weight on her shoulders. “Anyway,” she said, brusquely, “about the cleaning . . . DeeDee showed up to help just after you went upstairs. She dug right in and did the stuff I couldn’t face—you know her; blood doesn’t faze an ER nurse—so don’t worry about it, sis.”

  Becca smiled and put one hand over Jaymie’s and squeezed. “Old friends are the best kind. Anyway, to change the subject to something lighter . . . I bought a gross of white polyester napkins that look a lot like damask. You know how every year some idiots steal the vintage ones, and we can’t replace them. Polyester’ll make it a lot easier to wash out the jam stains.”

  “Let me see them.” While Becca was gone, Jaymie finished the cake batter, poured it into a round pan and popped it in the preheated oven.

  Becca plunked a shopping bag with plastic sleeves of the white polyester napkins on the table, and Jaymie slipped a set out of the plastic and shook one loose. She handled it, the cheap fabric catching on a ragged fingernail and the rough skin along her thumb. “Becca, these are awful! They don’t feel anything like real damask!”

  “Good enough for the masses, Jaymie. They’ll steal them anyway, and I won’t care because they’re only fifty cents apiece and replaceable, instead of real damask or linen at five bucks.”

  “But . . .” Jaymie stopped, dismayed but unable to fight her sister on it. Becca was right in one respect; folks did keep filching the vintage linens, as petty as it seemed, as a souvenir of the tea. But polyester! She looked down at the textured striping meant to simulate damask. “We use real china and real linen tablecloths because we’re trying to create a Victorian ambience. This doesn’t really go along with that.”

  “I know,” Becca said. “But it’s like trying to feed foie gras to a five-year-old. They don’t appreciate the real thing anyway, and when they steal one of these, the last laugh is on them, not us. You know I’m right.”

  As uneasy as Jaymie was with Becca’s sweeping statement, she was right about the polyester napkins. This was a fundraiser for the Heritage Society, and losing vintage damask or linen didn’t help the bottom line. “Counterfeit damask. What’ll they think of next?” Jaymie said, and rose to pull the cake out of the oven. She had already boiled the odd “icing”—it was made of brown sugar, coconut, butter and one other ingredient she had had to guess at; she hoped “top milk” meant cream—and poured it over the cake. It pooled, so she got a nutpick out of the drawer and poked holes in the top, letting the brown sugar mixture ooze into the cake. She then stuck the pan back in the oven, watching it carefully so she could tell when the coconut had browned slightly.

  “People will counterfeit anything!” Becca said, bundling up the bag.

  When she pulled the cake out of the oven, she stared at it, unsure what it would taste like. It was a lovely golden brown, and smelled divine. “Yeah, but counterfeit damask napkins? Sheesh!”

  Six

  BECCA HAD A
million things to do, she said, not the least of which was a visit to the Queensville Methodist Church to see how preparations for the next day’s affair were going. She bustled off, happy to have someone to boss around, Jaymie thought with a smile. Maybe her sister needed that activity to get her mind off what had happened in the night. No matter what Jaymie did, the questions continued to hum in the back of her mind: Who was the dead guy, and who’d murdered him? And why? And why in their home with that darned grinder? She had a headache that probably wouldn’t go away until she got some sleep.

  After washing and pairing up the china teacups and saucers that hadn’t been smashed in the murderous melee, and setting aside the strays—cups or saucers that didn’t have mates—Jaymie packed the sets in a box to be taken along with the ones they had already chosen for the tea, as well as the boxes of serving pieces, and set them in the hall near the front door. The Queensville Methodist Church Lady’s Guild, in support of the Queensville Heritage Society, would be using their own giant urns to hold boiling hot water from which they would make pots of tea fresh, as needed. Tea was a delicate thing, and one could not make an urn of tea and expect it to be palatable, not on the ladies of the Guild’s watch, anyway! Coffee would also be available for confirmed tea haters, and the ladies themselves, most of them in their seventies or eighties, would be up on the wide wood porch manning the urns, teapots and serving tables while the nimbler women, like Jaymie, DeeDee and others would be doing the table-to-table serving.

  In costume. Ugh, Jaymie thought. She had a black dress made a few years back for her first time serving at the Tea, and it was authentic in most details, sewn of “stuff,” that ubiquitous scratchy cloth considered adequate for the serving class in Victorian England. Black didn’t suit her, magically draining all the color from her pink cheeks and making her look like a superannuated spinster. In the historical romance novels she read, the servant girls (usually earls’ daughters who felt compelled to escape evil guardians, or who wanted to earn their way with honest labor, rather than living in the luxury to which they had been born) always managed to look fetching and piquant in black maids’ outfits and white lace mobcaps. But Jaymie knew she looked frumpy, especially when compared to Heidi, who would be decked out in a gown fit for a princess. And Joel would certainly be there if Heidi was. She sighed, resigned to her fate of looking like Heidi’s dowdy older sister.