A Deadly Grind

by Victoria Hamilton

  “Now, Ms. Leighton, you told the deputy you had some things to tell us. Is there more than this?” His expression was neutral, but his words were laden with suspicion.

  “I haven’t been holding anything back deliberately, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said with some alarm. She gazed into his gray, dark-lashed eyes. She hadn’t told them everything, but she would now.

  “Why don’t you just tell me whatever it is that you haven’t been deliberately holding back?”

  “Okay. Well. I’m going to try to be completely honest,” she said, tapping her fingernails on the table surface. “That’s more difficult than you would think, because sometimes you don’t tell everything because you only figure it out later, or you only suspect something and aren’t sure, or . . . well, lots of reasons.”

  “And that is the difficulty of police work, Ms. Leighton.”

  She ordered her thoughts while he waited. She was not going to let anyone rush her. “First, I think I know now what the thief was after when he broke into my house, but whether that thief was the dead man, or someone else, I still don’t know.”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  She held up one hand. “Just wait one moment. I have something to show you.” She raced out to the van, retrieved the Button letter, and came back to the kitchen. Her hands trembled as she opened the sandwich bag and carefully extracted the priceless artifact. She explained what it was, and where and how she’d found it as his eyes widened and his thick eyebrows rose.

  “Why didn’t you tell us this last night, when we responded to the call about the break-in and found Miss Lockland?”

  “I don’t know,” she said wearily, not willing to meet his eyes. “Ultimately, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference anyway, but I really don’t know. It was the middle of the night, and I was confused, and scared, and it all just . . . overwhelmed me.”

  He was silent for a moment, but then said, “You weren’t trying to cover up for your ex-boyfriend, Joel Anderson, were you?”

  “What?” Of all the things she expected him to say, that was not one of the possibilities. “I don’t understand!”

  “Please just go on, Ms. Leighton.”

  But her mind was working on what he had asked, and she realized a couple of things. “Oh!” She met his inquisitive gaze. “The man Joel popped at the auction was Trevor Standish. That’s why the dead guy had a bloody nose! So you think he knew something, or . . . or was involved somehow with Standish?”

  Detective Christian’s gray eyes were cool, but a smile lingered at the corners of his nicely shaped mouth. “It’s something I’ve been considering. In any normal murder case, if I find out the victim had an altercation with someone just hours before he died, I’ve got my lead suspect.”

  “You haven’t lived here long, have you?” she asked.

  “What has that got to do with anything?”

  “But you haven’t, am I right?”

  “I just got this job a month or so ago. Moved here from Chicago at the same time.”

  She was tempted to ask, but didn’t, why a man his age would mire himself in a small-town police department after working in Chicago. He seemed cut out for bigger things, but it was none of her business and would just distract from her point. “Queensville is a small town, Detective. Everybody is entangled in everyone else’s lives. There are no separate spheres; it’s a big Venn diagram of interconnected circles.”

  “I’ve never heard small-town life described quite like that,” he said, a smile finally breaking his somber demeanor. “Now please, Ms. Leighton, tell me about this letter and why you’ve connected it with Ted Abernathy.”

  “Okay. All right.” She started at the beginning, but when she got to the part about Daniel Collins coming to her house the night before and how he’d helped her find the letter, which she hid temporarily in the Hoosier cabinet book that was later stolen in the late-night break-in, he stopped writing and looked up at her. She shrugged. “I don’t know if they’re connected. I really don’t. Daniel is a multimillionaire. If he wanted something like the Button letter, wouldn’t he just buy it?”

  “Some things aren’t for sale,” he said.

  “I think it’s more likely he’s an innocent party,” she said stubbornly. “I think, if anyone is involved, it might be his friend, Zell McIntosh. That guy showed up the very night the murder happened, and he was friends with Trevor Standish, too.”

  He was silent for a moment, then said, “Excuse me.” He got up, paced out to the lawn and called someone.

  Jaymie heard Daniel Collins’s name mentioned, as well as Zell McIntosh’s, and she had an awful feeling they were picking both men up for questioning. But it was not her fault; she had to tell the police everything.

  When the detective came back in to sit down, he said, “Anything more, Ms. Leighton?”

  “Yes.”

  He sighed and raised his brows. “Go on, then.”

  “Ted Abernathy—the guy in my shed—said that he and Brett Delgado, who is staying next door at the bed-and-breakfast, were here to find this letter and forge a copy,” she said, tapping her finger next to the Button. “To sell. In fact, he was planning to make multiple copies to sell. Brett had a partner, Ted said, but it can’t have been Trevor Standish.” She explained why. It seemed to her that there were far too many people involved in the whole caper. It was like an English bedroom farce, with folks popping in and out of the deal.

  Abernathy had said he hadn’t killed Standish, but a killer wouldn’t necessarily tell the truth, would he? Everything he said may have been a lie.

  “I don’t think Abernathy killed Trevor, I really don’t,” she said, even though she could not be sure. “He just didn’t seem like a killer. He was too scared. If he had killed Trevor, then he’d know there was no murderer to be scared of, right?”

  “Doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be scared of someone else, or paranoid.”

  The police had finished searching the shed by the time she was done telling Detective Christian everything, but there was no evidence taken away that Jaymie could see. Another deputy, again the young African-American woman, came to the back door and softly said, “Detective? Could I speak with you?”

  She and Christian hunched together and murmured, but Jaymie pricked up her ears and heard the woman say something about Brett Delgado not being at the bed-and-breakfast. Had he fled? Was that an admission of guilt? It was all so confusing, and Jaymie just wished it were over. She had flowers to plant and life to live, and as bad as she felt for poor Trevor Standish, and however much she wanted the killer brought to justice, she wanted it done sooner, not later.

  Abernathy seemed to have disappeared without a trace, from what she could gather from the police, but Jaymie felt sure they’d find him. How far could he have gotten on foot? She tried to make sense of what Abernathy had said, about making some money off the deal even without the letter—she had told Christian about that, too—but couldn’t figure it out. When Detective Christian came back to her, she slid the plastic bag across the table to him. “I’d feel a whole lot safer if you would take this away and lock it up somewhere. It’s a piece of American history, and belongs to Mr. Bourne, anyway.”

  “Strictly speaking, it’s not evidence, since it was never in anyone’s hands but yours,” he said. “But I think that’s a wise choice, Ms. Leighton.”

  “Jaymie,” she said, and smiled.

  He stilled for a moment, then smiled back. “I think that’s a wise choice, Jaymie. I’ll write a receipt for this, and have someone drop it off. I don’t think you should stay here tonight, at least not alone. We’re going to have police here, but still . . . would you consider staying somewhere else?”

  “I will,” she said. “I’ve got a couple of friends I can crash with.”

  He left, taking the valuable letter
with him, and after her heart stopped pounding so hard—he had a killer smile—she worried about all she had told him. Was it fair to tell the detective about Daniel Collins’s part in her discovery of the letter? How could she have avoided it? She had not said a word that wasn’t true. It was still far more likely that the killer was Abernathy—he admitted having been there, after all—or his partner-in-crime, Brett Delgado. Brett taking off was surely some admission of guilt? Or had he taken off?

  Too many questions and not enough answers!

  It was getting late, almost dinnertime, and time she decided what she was going to do that night.

  “Valetta, I need a favor,” she said, when her friend answered the phone at the pharmacy.

  “Shoot.”

  She explained what had happened that afternoon, interrupted by many exclamations from Valetta, and then said, “So, it looks like I’m going to need somewhere to stay. I wouldn’t admit it to anyone else, but I’m a little freaked. Can I stay at your place?”

  “You could.” After a pause, Valetta said, “Or I could come and stay at your place tonight.”

  Jaymie replied, thunderstruck, “You’d do that? Really?”

  “Done deal. That way you don’t have to admit to anyone that you got chased out of your house, and you don’t need to try to take Denver anywhere. I know you’d never leave him there alone, and he doesn’t travel well.”

  Jaymie grimaced. That was the truth. Even his yearly checkup at the vet’s was a trial for her independent and suspicious cat. “You are a lifesaver.”

  “I am indeed a Life Saver, and the flavor is Butter Rum. Have a cup of tea ready at 8:09, because that’s how long it’ll take me to walk over after I close up at eight.”

  The cops were still snooping around the shed out back, and the phone rang repeatedly. Finally, after a couple of hours of ignoring it, she dashed to grab the handset off the kitchen table and shouted, “Hello!”

  There was silence, but then Daniel said, “Jaymie? Are you okay?”

  She plunked down in a chair and put her head in her hand, thinking she might need a good cry. “I’m sorry for yelling, Daniel. It’s been a rough day.”

  “I heard about what happened last night, and then today. I wanted to come over, but then the cops asked Zell and me to come to the station, and we were there for quite a while answering all kinds of questions, and . . . look, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, really,” she said, sniffling. “Daniel, did you tell anyone about us finding the Button Gwinnett letter? I don’t mean the cops, I mean last night?” She stared at the line of cookbooks on her shelf; the books were still askew from the late-night theft, and there was now some fingerprint dust on the shelf, though the cops didn’t find any “latents,” as they called fingerprints other than her own.

  “No, I would never do that. It was just between us.”

  “Not Zell, even?” Sometimes one didn’t consider telling a friend as telling anyone.

  “No, of course not. I didn’t say a word to anyone. What are you getting at, Jaymie?”

  She kind of wished he’d said he’d blabbed it all over the place. What could she say? She turned in her chair and stared out the back window to the yard. Hoppy begged to come up as Denver slunk in from the summer porch. She picked up her dog and cuddled him on her lap.

  The silence had stretched to an uncomfortable length. “You don’t think I broke in and tried to get the letter? Jaymie! Did someone actually steal the letter, then? And you think I have it?”

  So he didn’t know that the actual letter wasn’t stolen? She was about to say that of course she didn’t suspect him, but her tangled mind rounded on itself and pondered if he was being clever by implying he didn’t know if the letter had been stolen or not. “I don’t know, Daniel, I just don’t know!”

  “Jaymie, can I come over?”

  “No. Daniel, I just . . . I’m confused right now.”

  He was silent, but then said, “I understand. Really, Jaymie, I do. But please, if you still have that damned letter, get rid of it! Give it to the cops or something. Okay? And don’t stay there tonight, please!”

  “I’ll talk to you soon, I promise,” she said, without telling him that she had already turned the letter over to the detective, and without saying that Valetta was coming to stay over. “Really, I’m okay.”

  She said it, even though she wasn’t. Not really. She definitely needed to figure things out, because her head hurt with the confusion. Ted Abernathy, from having been an unknown, had leaped to the top of her list of suspects. She knew from occasionally reading mysteries to consider motive, means and opportunity, and he had all three. Motive: He clearly wanted the letter. Means: Well, the weapon was right there, attached to her Hoosier. Anyone could hit someone over the head, right? And opportunity: Abernathy had already admitted to being at the scene of the crime. If everything he’d said was true and he was completely innocent, wouldn’t he have turned himself in, rather than run, despite his lame excuses?

  But she still had a hinky feeling in her spine about Brett Delgado. His motive was the same as Abernathy’s—he wanted the letter, and if Standish was in his way, maybe murder had seemed like the only solution—and he had been lying ever since he got to Queensville. She remembered, with a shiver, the night she’d brought the Hoosier cabinet home. He had helped her, even suggesting the placement of the cabinet, and all while he’d asked questions that had seemed innocent at the time, but now, in retrospect, could be ascribed to sinister motives. When did they all go to bed? he had asked. Did she have an alarm system? Was Hoppy the only dog? He could have done the deed and used Abernathy as a shield, implicating him to cover up his own misdeed.

  She could not ignore the other player in this game, Daniel Collins. And with him came an even likelier suspect, Zell McIntosh. Both guys knew Trevor Standish, and both had contact with him in the last few weeks. One or both of them could be lying about not knowing where Trevor was in the days before his death. A valuable letter was motive enough. Daniel sure seemed to know a lot about Button Gwinnett for a tech geek. And Zell McIntosh . . . why had he shown up so early, when he wasn’t expected until the next day? She had a feeling one of them might be guilty, but not both, because their stories didn’t mesh well enough. If they were in it together, their stories would be more cohesive. Neither could truly vouch for his whereabouts during the murder, because Daniel had said he was on the road, driving toward Queensville, but that was only his own word; and Zell . . . well, who knew if he truly was in his car, sleeping, all night?

  And then there was the suspect she had not yet identified. Who had been speaking to Trevor Standish at the auction, having what she now thought of as the “Button” conversation? She tried to recall exactly what had been said; if she remembered right, the dominant voice of the two had said he would bid, but he didn’t exactly know where the Button was in what she now knew was the Hoosier. They’d figure that out after the auction. But the secondary voice, which Jaymie couldn’t identify as male or female, hadn’t trusted the first speaker.

  As far as she could tell, every single person involved was out to cheat every other person. Apparently the saying was wrong: there was no honor among thieves.

  Eighteen

  SHE MADE A late dinner for herself and treats for Denver and Hoppy, chicken pulled off the bone for both animals. After eating, and while waiting for Valetta, she went up to look through the photos that Becca had sent her. Before the ones of the tea, there were a few of the auction, and Jaymie scanned through them, noting all the folks she knew. But she was stopped dead by one. She got closer to the screen and peered at a picture Becca had shot of the Minton she was after, but did not get; in the background, a little out of focus, but recognizable, was a figure that she was almost sure was Zell McIntosh.

  She enlarged it and leaned toward the monitor screen, looking more closely. It wa
s Zell! What was he doing at the auction? He hadn’t said he was there, but she supposed he hadn’t said he wasn’t either. It could be totally innocent, or sinister. It felt weird, given that Trevor was there, too. Were the two in cahoots? That was a question for Daniel, but it was going to have to wait until she saw him next. One thing she was going to do, though, was send the photo to the Queensville police. She found their site and e-mail address, and attached the photo to an e-mail that explained it.

  Valetta arrived, toothbrush and nightie in a little bag, and Jaymie made her tea and some chicken salad. After she ate, they sat at the kitchen table, and Jaymie explained a lot of what had gone on, including the Button Gwinnett letter. She owed it to so good a friend, she thought, and it helped her think it through.

  “But Valetta, I’d appreciate it if you could keep this under your hat.” She watched her friend with trepidation. She was a gossip, and surely asking a gossip to keep something quiet was an invitation to spread it wider?

  “Not a problem,” she said, inviting Denver up onto her lap and sharing the last of her chicken salad with him.

  To Jaymie’s amazement, he ate it right off the end of her finger. She had never tried that before with her own cat. “Really, Valetta, this is serious. I’m not comfortable letting others know about the letter and everything just yet, until this is all out of the way and solved.”

  “Jaymie, I know you all think I’m a gossip,” Valetta said, on a sigh, “but I am also a pharmacist. I know a whole lot that I cannot and will not divulge. If you knew some of the stuff people order via catalogue? And don’t get me started on the meds.” She winked and smiled. “I only spread what I know is all right to talk about. And I mix in a liberal helping of manure, so folks never know if they can trust what I’m saying. Makes it more interesting.”

  “I knew it!” Jaymie crowed. “I just knew you were having me on, sometimes. So, if you know so much, what’s the scoop on Detective Zachary Christian?”