A Deadly Grind

by Victoria Hamilton

  In the hour or so she was gone to the nursery, Bill Waterman had come back and removed the storm windows off the summer porch, including the one smashed the night before; they were lined up along the side of the shed, waiting to be put away. Bill, a lifelong resident of Queensville, was like that, fitting in small tasks for steady clients between larger jobs. The summer people paid a premium for his help, but he never forgot his town people, like Jaymie, Mrs. Bellwood and Trip Findley.

  Her lips tightened as she surveyed her backyard. She loved her home so much, but the murder and the attack on Heidi left her feeling uneasy. Just at that moment, though, a Queensville Township Police cruiser edged down the narrow back lane. The driver was a deputy she didn’t recognize, but she waved, relieved by the visible police presence. He waved back and chased away a guy with a digital camera, then went back to his observation, slowly driving along, his gaze traveling over each backyard.

  She took a deep breath, her anxiety eased. Time to garden. If she worked nonstop, she could have most of it planted before sundown, then she’d bathe, change, and take the letter to the police station and explain.

  But right now, gardening. Grandma Leighton always said there was nothing like getting your hands dirty to settle your mind. She had quite a few plants, lots of work ahead. There were also a few boxes for the front windows and two black urns that graced either side of the front door. Those would be planted out in annuals, a few petunias, some ivy and a spike to give height and drama. The first step, she supposed, other than standing and staring at the empty gardens, was to get the gardening tools, window boxes and urn planters out of the shed.

  She pulled the creaky door open, and peered into the dark. Once, she had just bolted into the dark, and had stepped on a little mouse. She’d had a shock, but the poor mouse suffered worse, shrieking in terror as her foot almost ended his life prematurely. She was about to step in to the twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot space, but hesitated. Did she really want to start the gardening now? She was tired, and she wasn’t sure why. Life had seemed full of upheavals lately. What she really wanted to do was make a cup of tea and sit in the garden with the stack of vintage cookbooks.

  But that wasn’t going to happen. She was beginning to wish she had gone to the police with the Button letter as soon as she’d found it. Until the murder was solved, life could not return to the ease it once had. Oddly enough, she had started out being calm about it all, but as the days progressed, she was getting more and more agitated, uneasy even in her own comfortable home, especially now that she’d discovered what the murdered man and his assailant were after. It would all get better after she turned the letter in, she reassured herself, but maybe she would go and stay with Dee or Valetta for a few days.

  She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and stepped into the dim interior, reaching for the light chain that hung from the fixture in the ceiling of the shed. She found the chain, but nothing happened when she pulled it. “Darn!” she said. What a time for the bulb to blow out.

  The shed was as familiar as the house, though, after almost thirty years of living there. The spade was on the left, with the other long-handled implements. If she just felt around . . . she moved cautiously, one hand out, and felt for the long handles of the rake, shovel, spade and hoe. No wood handles, but cloth. What the heck? She batted at it, and felt fleshy firmness under the cloth.

  “Don’t move, or I’ll blow your head off!”

  Seventeen

  A STEELY HAND GRIPPED her arm, and Jaymie screamed loudly.

  “Shut up, willya?” he said, his tone plaintive.

  She thrashed about, barked her shin on the potting bench and knocked over the garden tools; they clattered to the cement floor. She tensed to scream again, but he put one rough, smelly hand over her mouth, muffling her effectively; all her struggling accomplished was that he pinned her arms behind her with one strong arm while keeping her silent.

  “Stop it!” he grunted. “Stop struggling!”

  Had she made enough noise to attract attention? Oh, how she hoped now for one of those sick, murder-obsessed thrill seekers to be lingering. Even Kathy Cooper’s husband could be her savior! She seriously considered biting the man’s hand, but couldn’t bear to put her mouth around his smelly digits. “I’ll stop if you promise not to shoot me,” she mumbled, her voice stifled and shaking so much it was unrecognizable, even to herself.

  “I don’t have a gun,” he said, holding her arms still in a rough grasp. But at least he took his hand off her mouth.

  “You said you’d blow my head off if I moved.” Her heart was pounding like a machine gun, rat-a-tat-tat against her rib cage, and she took in deep, heavy breaths of dusty air to try to calm herself.

  “That was just to scare you.”

  “Mission accomplished,” she snapped. Trying to ignore the nauseating sense of her heart pounding in her throat, she let her eyes adjust to the dust-scented dimness and twisted around to look at her captor. “What do you want?” she asked, afraid of the answer.

  “Got a spare hundred thou?” he asked, his voice laced with desperation.

  “What?”

  “I need money. Why else would I be in this hick town, for my health?”

  “So why are you in my shed?”

  “I need to see Brett. The asshole isn’t answering his cell.”

  “Brett Delgado!” She twisted more and peered through the gloom at the disheveled man. “Are you Ted Abernathy?”

  “You got it in one,” he said, his tone glum.

  A chill raced down her back, chased by a trickle of sweat. In the close confines of the dusty shed it was starting to feel warm, and the other man’s body odor was leaving her faint. She tensed to bolt, but sensing it, he grabbed her arm again, and growled, “Stop it, willya? Why won’t you just let me think?”

  She could scream, but she didn’t relish that smelly hand over her mouth and nose again. Her mind was going a mile a minute: she hoped the police cruiser passed by again and noticed something wrong; she urgently needed to pee; she wished she had let Hoppy stay outside, because he would be going crazy right that moment, like he had when poor Heidi was lying behind the shed.

  “Did you kill Trevor Standish?” she blurted, twisting to try to see him.

  He plopped down on a stool by the potting bench, and since he had a tight grip on her arm, she was yanked down, too. Her legs folded under her, and her knees scraped on the dirty shed floor. He didn’t even pretend not to understand her. “No way! He was dead when I got there.”

  “To my summer porch. But you knew who he was?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Did Brett kill him?”

  He was silent for a long moment, then shook his head. “Nah. He didn’t do it. Why would he?”

  Now that her heart rate was calming—the guy didn’t seem terribly dangerous, despite the death grip he had on her arm—she could again reason and figure a way out of this. She needed to keep him talking so he wouldn’t have time to plan anything heinous and, in the meantime, plot her escape. “I heard noise and came downstairs and found Trevor dead. Did you see the killer?” she asked.

  He groaned. “I saw something. Someone.”

  “But it wasn’t Brett?”

  “Brett wanted the . . . the thing we came here for.”

  An oblique answer. Was he or Brett the other guy who’d fought at the auction with Trevor Standish over the Hoosier and the treasure it contained? If he knew who Trevor Standish was, and if it was Brett who had pointed the guy out to him, then Ted was deeply involved somehow in the Button search. “I know what you’re looking for. Did you get into a tussle with someone at the auction?”

  “Aha, so you musta found it!” he exclaimed, tightening his grip.

  She squirmed. “So you are the guy who wrestled with Trevor over bidding on the cabinet!”


  “Did you find it, the . . . item we wanted?” He paused and narrowed his eyes. “Wait a minute, you’re fishing, aren’t you? Do you even know what I’m talking about?”

  She twisted and watched his shadowy eyes, barely visible in the dim light that leaked through the tattered curtains from the slanting sun. How much should she say, now that she had spilled the pintos? “How else would I know about the fight at the auction? It’s a letter. Really old.”

  He scratched his scruffy chin. “Okay. For argument’s sake, say it’s a letter.” He was trembling, the tremors vibrating through her body too, where he held her tightly. “Who has it now?”

  “I’m not telling you! I don’t have it anymore. I gave it away. Let go of me,” she said, jerking her arm out of his grasp. To her dismay, one fat tear leaked out of his eye and ran down his dirty face, leaving a clean(ish) trail through the grime. “Hey, don’t cry!”

  “I’m not,” he said, swiping the back of his hand across his cheek. “I’m just real tired. And hungry. And I’m sorry for scaring you. I’m not that kind of guy, really.” He released her and covered his face with his hands.

  Jaymie got to her feet with difficulty and stretched out her cramped legs. “Just tell me what’s going on?”

  “I wish I knew! I could kill the sonuvabitch who killed Trevor, just for giving me such a scare.”

  “What about Heidi?” she asked.

  “Heidi?”

  “She’s the girl who was found out here last night, knocked out. Are you saying you didn’t have anything to do with that?”

  “Look,” he said, with pleading in his voice. “I’ve been hiding out in a boathouse down at the marina for days.”

  So that explained the car parked in the marina parking lot. The police had searched the marina, but if someone was determined to hide, she guessed he could evade notice. He was dirty enough to have been in the oily water, even, at some point.

  “I didn’t do any of it, not Standish’s murder and not that girl being hurt . . . none of it! Why would I? I don’t even know who that is. Heidi? What is she, a frickin’ escapee from a kid’s book? Look, all I know is, I need to talk to Brett. I’ve tried to call him but he doesn’t answer, and now my cell phone is dead. I can’t go back to the bed-and-breakfast. Look at what happened with you! First thing you thought was I killed Trevor.”

  “I might not have thought that if you hadn’t run away!”

  “I was scared. Finding a dead body will do that to a guy!” He hung his head and was silent for a long moment. “Look, will you give Brett a message for me if I let you go?”

  Jaymie thought for a few seconds. If she said yes, he’d probably let her go, but she might never know any more than he was about to tell her in his message. If she said no . . . well, she still had only his word for it that he didn’t have a gun. “Why were you sneaking up to my summer porch? And if you didn’t kill Trevor Standish, why did you run?”

  He sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “I’m not exactly . . .” He paused and shook his head. “Look, I’ve been in some trouble. First off, I’m Canadian and I’m not supposed to be down here. I was scared, so shoot me. I’d have left, but I need money!”

  “Okay, let’s just figure this out,” Jaymie said. “You and Brett are clearly not gay lovers intending to marry.”

  “No.”

  Jaymie should have listened to Becca about that. Not that it would have made any difference. “You’re in a scheme to steal something and get money, am I right so far?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t think of it as stealing.”

  “If you didn’t think of it as stealing, you wouldn’t all have been sneaking around about it,” she retorted. “So you were here to get the letter.”

  “I gotta get out of here,” he said, ducking down to try to peer out the crack between the curtains. “You’re gonna call the cops the minute I let you go, and they’re gonna think I killed Trevor.”

  “Not if they solve the murder! I just want to find out who killed Trevor Standish, and I believe that you didn’t do it. But I also know it has something to do with that letter. You were in this with Brett. What’s your part?”

  “My only job was supposed to be to copy the letter.”

  “Copy it; you mean, forge it!”

  He nodded. “I’m the best. Brett was supposed to get the letter, and I was going to make a copy. Or maybe two. Or three. He said I could make one for myself, and sell it! I need money.”

  “What for?”

  “I have a sick mother who needs an operation—”

  Jaymie made a rude noise. “Don’t give me that. You have paid health care in Canada. What did you really need the money for?”

  “I took something that doesn’t belong to me, and I lost it.”

  “What?”

  He growled and grimaced. “Okay, all right! I got messed up with some people, and I took the wrong briefcase and it had money in it, and then I lost it. In Vegas. Now I hafta pay them back, or . . .” He shook his head. “Sounds like the plot of a frickin’ caper movie, but it’s true. I don’t even want to think about that.”

  “So you hooked up with Brett and agreed to forge the letter?”

  He nodded. “That’s all I was supposed to do! No risks, Brett said, nothing but a little forgery!”

  “But Brett was supposed to steal it? So why were you the one who came to the summer porch that night? You must have been going to steal it.”

  “I didn’t want to,” he whined, wringing his hands. “Brett made me!”

  “Made you? How?”

  “Said I had to earn my share.”

  “But you were going to forge the letter; that was your share of the work, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, yeah. But we didn’t have the damn letter,” he said, in a tone you use when talking to a slow-witted three-year-old. “Brett was supposed to get it from someone else, but he said we could make a whole lot more money if we did it together, just us. ‘Cut out the middle man,’ he said, then laughed with this weird look on his face.”

  “You were going to forge it, then, and Brett would sell the copy?”

  The man nodded. “His copy. He said I could make an extra for myself, and sell it. I need a hundred thou.” He was trembling again. “I can’t go back to Canada without it, and I’m not supposed to be in the States.”

  “So you were at the auction; did you know where the letter was?”

  “I didn’t, and Brett said he didn’t, but I don’t know about that now. Damn double-crosser.”

  “Double-crosser? What do you mean?” Jaymie asked.

  “He was in on this with someone else, but I didn’t know that at first, and he didn’t tell me who. I figured that out on my own.”

  “Who was he in on it with?”

  “Never you mind,” Ted said. “Look, I gotta get out of here. In case you hadn’t noticed, someone out there is willing to kill for that letter.”

  “Ted, if you truly didn’t kill Trevor Standish, you really need to go to the police. You could give them valuable information! After all, you did see someone, you said. Tell them that!”

  Abernathy got an odd look on his face. “Tell the police I was there and saw someone, but have no proof who it is?” He shook his head, then frowned. “No way. Look, do you still have the Button letter?”

  “No. I . . . I turned it in to the police.”

  “Then I gotta get out of here. I have things to do.”

  “Find Brett, you mean?”

  “Screw Brett,” he said vehemently. “I just thought of a way to make some money off of this deal even without the darned letter!” Abernathy pushed past her, opened the shed door, looked both ways, and was gone before Jaymie could remonstrate.

  She called the police right away, of course, and was sitting on a kitchen chair cle
aning the scrapes on her knees with alcohol when the cops arrived, sirens screeching, for the third time in four days. Hoppy barked and danced around the kitchen as the deputy she had seen cruise by earlier came up to the house, gun drawn.

  “Abernathy left,” she called out, through the door. “I told the dispatcher that!”

  The young man holstered his gun and came into the kitchen from the summer porch, Denver hissing and glaring at him from under the Hoosier. “Sorry, ma’am. We thought y’may have been held at gunpoint, y’know, even on the phone.”

  “Well, I’m not. He’s gone.” She shook her head and capped the alcohol bottle, tossing the dirty cotton swabs in the garbage. This whole mess was getting old. She wanted to get on with her life instead of worrying about assailants now every time she was alone. It gave her a new, steely determination to get to the bottom of the mess. She was still scared, but now she was scared and angry. She looked up at the deputy, and said, “I need to talk to Detective Christian, because this has to do with the murder that happened here. He’s going to want to hear it, and I don’t want to repeat myself.”

  Five minutes later Detective Christian strolled into Jaymie’s kitchen. He was just as good-looking as Jaymie remembered, but she did her best not to get flustered, despite the inevitable blushing, which thankfully was minor this time. She had a lot to tell him, and she didn’t want to get sidetracked. He sat down at the table and took out a notepad. Hoppy danced around and put his one front paw on the detective’s thigh, but the detective gently pushed the little dog away. With a disappointed whine, Hoppy wobbled out the back door to watch the police as they searched the shed, dusting for fingerprints yet again.

  Jaymie told him what had happened, that Ted Abernathy had grabbed her in the shed. He was not responsible for Trevor Standish’s murder, according to him—she believed him, Jaymie admitted—but Brett Delgado might be in-volved. She related Abernathy’s cryptic comment, when he’d called Brett a double-crosser. Christian immediately sent Deputy Trewent, a Welsh immigrant, out to broaden the search already underway for Ted Abernathy, and to look next door for Brett Delgado.