A Deadly Grind

by Victoria Hamilton

  “What about Zell? Has he seen Trevor lately? Does he know what your friend’s project was?”

  He shook his head. “Zell’s been working in Kuwait for the last year or so, until his employer’s company went bust. That’s what made this get-together so great; we hadn’t all seen each other since our fifteen-year college reunion two years ago.”

  “But you’ve talked to them both, right? On the phone?”

  “Yeah. But Trev’s been distracted lately. I’ve been thinking a lot about him the last coupla days, and some things keep nagging at me.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, about six months ago or so, he called me up out of the blue. We talked for a minute, but then he asked me to invest in a venture.” Daniel grimaced. “Last time I invested in anything of my friend’s I lost a bundle. Zell may run Trevor down for his get-rich-quick schemes, but he’s had his share of them himself.”

  “It may have been legit, though,” she said.

  “I hate to say it, but that was unlikely. Trev’s moral center was always a touch off. He was fired because of an incident at Ball State. Plagiarism.”

  “You call plagiarism being a touch off, morally?”

  “No, no, that’s not what I meant. I know that’s real bad, especially for a professor.”

  “Yeah, that’s for sure. He’s supposed to be teaching his students that plagiarism is wrong.”

  “Anyway, after that I gave him some money. He was dead broke and in trouble. He had borrowed money from the wrong people, and they wanted it back. He called it a loan, but he was in such bad shape financially, I didn’t expect it back. And I didn’t get it.” He shrugged. “No big deal, but I wasn’t going to give him more. It had already affected our friendship.”

  “What kind of a venture was it that Trevor wanted you to invest in this time?”

  “That’s the thing, he wouldn’t tell me.” Daniel shrugged and looked away. “I thought he was just looking for another handout, and I told him all my money was tied up in stock. I think . . . I’m sure he knew I was lying. He didn’t call me for a few months after that. I feel so bad that that’s how we left it.”

  “Don’t feel bad. You didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, putting her hand on his arm. “He organized this reunion; that shows he wanted to see you again. That should be your last real memory of him.”

  He nodded, but looked thoughtful, his brow furrowed. He swept his lank hair off his forehead. “That’s a little weird too, now that we know he was in Queensville for a while. What was he doing here? Zell says when they last talked, a few weeks ago, Trev told him he was going to be rich. Said he had some scheme that was going to pay off big, he just had to finesse the details. People were trying to cut him out of the big money, he said, but they couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t?”

  “I guess Trev said he was going to ‘get to it first’ and leave them in the dust.”

  That didn’t make a whole lot of sense, unless . . . the valuable button was still a possibility. “Do you think it’s associated with why he was on my summer porch?” she said, still not willing to talk about the valuable and elusive button.

  “Maybe, but if it was someone who was after Trevor for some other reason—I loved the guy, but he did have a knack for getting himself in trouble—that could be just incidental. Somebody could have followed him here, if they wanted to knock him off.”

  “I guess,” she said. Trevor was involved with some folks he thought were shady, people he didn’t trust, so why go looking for some motive apart from that? “I hope they catch whoever did it soon.”

  “So do I, for your sake, and for Trevor’s family. But it’s up to the police now.”

  “What if they never figure it out?”

  “They will, Jaymie. They know what they’re doing. That detective has been talking to everyone in town, and sooner or later they’ll figure it out.”

  Meanwhile, there was a murderer wandering around out there, and she was angry that he—or she—was still on the loose.

  “Anyway, can I help you?” he said.

  “Sure. I’d appreciate it.” She told him what she wanted to do: take the upper cabinet off the bottom so she could take the porcelain work top into the kitchen to clean it properly.

  “Can you do that?” he asked, bending over and examining the side brackets. “Isn’t it all attached?”

  “No, the upper cabinet sits in these metal brackets; they hold it in place,” she said, pointing out the rusted brackets. “The tabletop slides out from under it a foot or more so the cook can have more workspace. It’s completely removable. Normally the brackets would be screwed to the upper cabinet, but the top part was taken off to move and hasn’t been screwed back into place. I don’t have to take the top cupboard off to remove the work top—I could lift and pull it out—but the whole thing is a little unstable because the screws aren’t in place, so I want to lift that off first.”

  “Okay, let’s do it.”

  They grunted a little and got the upper cupboard down onto the floor and shoved it to the free space on the other side of the summer porch. Then he helped her lift the porcelain work top; it was more awkward than anything. When she turned it over, something fluttered and flapped.

  “What’s that?” Daniel asked, pushing his glasses up and peering more closely in the yellow light that spilled out to the porch from the kitchen.

  There was a paper package taped to the underside with decades-old cellophane tape, yellowed with age and crumbling. She pulled it off and turned it over in her trembling hands. The outside of the package just looked like lined foolscap of the kind used many years before in schools. She unwrapped it in the dim light of the porch and saw that the paper was only a blank wrapper for something much older.

  Much, much older.

  She swallowed hard. This had to be the valuable treasure that was hidden in the Hoosier. It was high-quality rag paper, probably the only reason the letter had survived. Remnants of red sealing wax were stuck to the edge, and she opened it carefully so it wouldn’t flake off. It was from, if the date at the top could be believed, 1776. “Wow,” she said, holding it up so Daniel could read it, too. “Do you think it’s real?”

  “I don’t know. I’m no document expert. Now is when we need Trevor; he’d be able to tell us in an instant.”

  Jaymie felt a shiver pass through her, and she met her companion’s serious gaze. “Daniel, you do realize that this is what Trevor was after, don’t you? This is why he broke into my house. This is why someone killed him.”

  “We don’t even know what it is yet. And how would he know about this?”

  She wasn’t about to go through all she had already established, the Bourne family history and the “button” chase she had been on. “Is it valuable? How are we going to know?”

  “Well, I suppose a letter from 1776 could be; I think it really depends on who it’s from.”

  “The ink is kind of faded. Let’s look at it in better light.” They moved into the kitchen, and Jaymie put on the overhead, an old pendant light still remaining from the 1920s remodel of the kitchen. She sat at the table, and Daniel looked over her shoulder as she flattened the paper. She was a quick reader and got to the bottom. “It’s about stuff going on after the Revolutionary War,” she said, with growing excitement. “How cool! But—” She stopped dead at the signature. “This signature . . . Button Gwinnett!” Button. Button! She gaped in astonishment; it was a name, a person, not a thing! The “button” was this letter!

  “Button Gwinnett!” he said, his voice hollow.

  Jaymie looked up; Daniel appeared stunned too, and put his trembling hand to his head, reflexively pushing back his floppy bangs.

  “Do you realize what we have here?” he asked, his lenses glinting in the light. “It’s a Button Gwinnett letter.”

 
“Should that ring a bell?”

  “Well, yeah!” he said, with heavy emphasis. He clutched his forehead with both hands and scrunched his sandy hair. “Button Gwinnett was the representative from Georgia to the Continental Congress,” he said, rapidly. “He . . . he became the governor of Georgia, and so he was one of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence!”

  Jaymie’s eyes widened, and she stared at the letter, her hands truly shaking now. Anything connected to the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence was of historical value, but often monetary value, too.

  “Not only that,” Daniel continued, sitting down heavily in the chair next to Jaymie, “but he is the rarest of all signers, because he died a year after the signing, from a wound he got in a duel with Lachlan McIntosh.”

  They looked at each other, in stunned disbelief. “Lachlan McIntosh,” Jaymie whispered. “That was the name Trevor was staying at the Inn under.”

  “How did I not recognize that name?” Daniel shook his head. “So this letter, this is the whole reason Trevor came here.”

  “If it’s real—”

  “—it could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe even a million.”

  “Enough to murder someone for, if you’re that kind of guy.” Her mind was whirling, from fact to wild supposition. It made sense that Trevor would want the letter; he was, as she had learned from Daniel, a historical document dealer. But how did he know it was in the Hoosier? And who else knew about it and had killed him? And why before he had the letter? That, in particular, beyond all else, made not a bit of sense.

  “I have to tell you something, Daniel. I think I overheard Trevor at the auction talking to someone else, a coconspirator, about the Button letter.” She explained, finally, about the “button” mystery. “And Heidi phoned earlier to tell me he was one of the ones fighting over the Hoosier,” she added.

  “What did the person Trev was talking to sound like? Did you recognize the voice?”

  “That’s just it, I can’t even tell you if it was a man or woman. The person was whispering.”

  “Shoot. Whoever that was either killed Trevor or may know who did.”

  They reread the letter together. It was from Button Gwinnett to his in-laws in England, the Bourne family. So that explained the connection to the Bourne estate. Jaymie remembered the conversation she’d had with Mr. Bourne, about his father’s “Button, button” game joke, and the packet of letters the Bournes had brought with them when they emigrated to Michigan. This might be the only surviving relic of that time, a single, solitary, valuable letter.

  The tragedy of Trevor’s murder closed in on her. He had been so close, his hand stretched out to search the Hoosier, and then he had been struck down by someone. Why? Why, when the letter was still to be found? Or was that the point?

  She asked those questions of Daniel—he didn’t have answers any more than she did—and then told him the rest of the backstory, all she had learned so far. It was late, and Jaymie was overwhelmed with weariness suddenly. She laid the letter down on the oak table. “This has all been too much. In the morning I’ll figure out what to do with the letter. It should go to Mr. Bourne, but first, I guess turning it in to the police is the best thing. Or at least telling them about it.” She was torn; which was the best thing to do? “I’ll do that first thing in the morning, when my mind is clear.”

  Daniel appeared troubled and took off his glasses, wiping them again on his shirttail, which was looking increasingly rumpled. “This is an awfully valuable letter, Jaymie,” he said, tapping it with one long, bony finger.

  “I know that.”

  “I don’t want to tell you your business, but I really don’t feel comfortable with you having it here. Someone killed Trev for this thing.”

  She was silent, watching his troubled expression. What was he getting at? She supposed she could call the police now, but why would it matter if she did that immediately or in the morning? There was not a thing they could do about it at this time of night.

  “Look, why don’t I take it and put it in my safe overnight,” he said. “No one will know it’s there.”

  “Then what’s the point, Daniel?” she said. “If no one knows it’s there and not here, then it makes no difference.”

  “Except no one can steal it from you if it’s in my safe.”

  She shrugged and tried to ignore the moment of suspicion that sent a trill down her back. Daniel was Trevor’s friend; could he have been involved, even somewhat innocently? No, she couldn’t believe that. He could not possibly be a good enough actor to have feigned ignorance when they’d found the letter and identified it.

  “This explains the ‘venture’ Trevor wanted you to invest in,” she mused.

  If he’d known about the existence of the Button letter, but not exactly where it was, it might have taken him that long to track it to the Bourne family estate. And if he was as perennially broke as Daniel said, then he needed money to live on while he searched.

  “I didn’t hear from him again, so he must have found someone else to give him money,” Daniel said. “The sad thing is, he didn’t trust me enough to tell me exactly what the investment was.”

  “He knew you wouldn’t fund him trying to steal a national treasure like that, or theft of any kind, for that matter. You guys are clearly different men.”

  “True. I would have . . . I don’t know . . . told Mr. Bourne about it, I suppose.”

  “So I must have overheard him talking to his investor. Maybe that’s who killed him?” If Trevor had been in Queensville for weeks, he had likely been tracking down the letter. What a panic he must have been in when he discovered that the entire contents of the house were going on the block, she thought, and how relieved when he figured out that the letter must be somewhere in the Hoosier! He must have been the “writer” who’d talked to old Mr. Bourne. If Mr. Bourne had spun the same tale of his father, the “Button, button” references and the old Hoosier, it all probably came together for Trevor. He’d figured out exactly where the letter was.

  How much had he told his investor? She recalled the conversation she’d overheard. “He wasn’t willing to say exactly where the letter was,” she told Daniel. “But it would have become apparent that it was in the Hoosier as soon as he began bidding on it. That explains the opposing bid, and the fight. Maybe his coconspirator was trying to cut him out of the loot.” He had already told Zell that people were trying to cut him out.

  “Heidi and Joel said the fighting at the auction was with a man, right?” Daniel said.

  “Yeah. That narrows it down a little,” she said, with a half smile. “Though I wasn’t really thinking a woman bashed him over the head anyway.” She put her hand over her mouth, realizing how indelicate her phrasing was when she saw the look on Daniel’s face. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to put it that way.”

  He shrugged. “I know. Please reconsider keeping the letter here, Jaymie. Someone killed Trevor to get their hands on this.”

  “I know, but I can’t believe that the murderer would stick around Queensville with the police presence now. It was different before, when nobody else knew.” She was still stuck on why the killer had murdered Trevor before he had the letter. “Maybe the killer thought Trevor had found the letter, and searched him after hitting him on the head, but didn’t have time to look in the Hoosier because of the ruckus it was causing, Hoppy barking, and all that.”

  “You can’t be sure they won’t try again.”

  “We’ll leave the Hoosier out on the porch, but I’ll hide the letter.” She grabbed the book on Hoosier cabinets she had been perusing earlier, while eating dinner, and stuck the letter in the book, then put the book up on her cookbook shelf.

  He was watching her when she turned back. “I didn’t mean that I was worried about the letter.”

  “I kn
ow.” She stretched. “I’ll turn it over to the cops in the morning and tell them everything, I promise. Come on, help me put the Hoosier back together, and then I’m going to bed. To sleep.”

  He took the hint and headed back to the summer porch. She slid the countertop back into place, then they put the top cabinet of the Hoosier back up on the base unit. He turned before he stepped down from the summer porch. He put his hands on her shoulders and she could feel the warmth through her T-shirt. “You be careful, though. I don’t like this, not a bit.”

  She looked up into his worried eyes, and said, “It’s just one night, Daniel. It’ll be all right. I promise I won’t keep the letter here after tonight.”

  “Okay. As long as you promise.”

  He looked like he was undecided about something, and she half expected him to kiss her, but he firmed his lips, nodded and dropped his hands to his sides. “Talk to you tomorrow, then.” And he was gone.

  “C’mon guys,” she said to Hoppy and Denver, who had been hiding under the Hoosier as long as Daniel had been in the house, but now slunk out to glare at Jaymie. “It’s time to hit the hay. I’m so tired I can’t think straight.”

  She locked up thoroughly, then eyed the bookshelf for a moment. “It’ll be safe there. Won’t it?”

  Hoppy watched her and gave a sharp yip.

  “Right. I’m just tired and imagining things,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “I can’t help feeling like I’m being watched, but that’s just stupid. I need sleep.” In the clear, calm light of morning, she would look at the letter one more time, before turning it over to the police.

  Fifteen

  HER MARY BALOGH book couldn’t hold her interest—a rare moment indeed, when that happened—the bed felt lumpy, and her pillow wasn’t the right shape. She just couldn’t get comfortable, no matter how hard she tried. As cool night air puffed in the open window, ruffling the dotted Swiss vintage curtains, and Hoppy sighed and groaned in his sleep, turning around and around on his pillow under her night table, she thought about Daniel. Was he the good guy he seemed to be? She’d been wrong before, and it left her wondering about her radar where men were concerned. Daniel liked her, she could tell, but why?