A Deadly Grind

by Victoria Hamilton

  Was she leaving anyone out? There could be others that she just hadn’t encountered yet, but she rather doubted it. Whoever it was had been in and around Queensville for a week or more, and strangers were duly noted; even though they were a tourist town, people still saw stuff.

  Detective Tewksbury’s expression was one of confusion by the time she was done talking, and he flipped through pages of notes. When he looked back up at her with an assessing gaze, he told her he’d be sure to share all her thoughts with Detective Christian. She could go home now, he said, and sent her on her way.

  When she got home from the police station, she listened to her messages and decided to follow up on one harmless line of investigation. She let Hoppy out in the yard and sat down on the back step with the phone. Maybe she could shorten her list of suspects by two. Denver climbed into her lap in an unusual display of affection, and she petted him and scruffed his cheeks while she made a call. “Dee?” she said, as the woman answered. “It’s Jaymie.”

  “Hey, how are you? Have you found anything more about how your Grandma Leighton is doing?”

  Jaymie told her the gist of a phone message she had just gotten. Grandma Leighton was doing well and moving back to her retirement home already. Becca was relieved, and wanted to know what was going on in Queensville. “I’m going to have to call her and give her the long version, or she won’t be happy!” Jaymie said, explaining to her shocked friend some of what had gone on in the last couple of days. She then got down to the purpose of her call, a favor of sorts.

  Dee readily agreed to her request, saying, “I’ll do you one better than letting you into the appropriate rooms. If you want, I’ll loan you my uniform, and you can go into the Queensville as a maid. No one even notices the cleaning crew, trust me! I only work for Lyle when he has someone phone in sick, but that happens a lot, and today happens to be one of those days. You can sub for me this afternoon.”

  “I worked there when I was in high school, remember? I know the routine pretty well.”

  “So what are you looking for?”

  “Can I tell you later, Dee? I’m probably wrong, but I promise I’ll tell you.”

  “Okay, but please don’t let Lyle know you’re snooping! He’d kill me.”

  “Trust me, I’m going to be in and out of there in no time flat and do my . . . well, your job perfectly. I just want to nose around.” The benefit of a maid’s job was that some of it was identical to snooping, but what would mean nothing to a maid, might mean something to Jaymie.

  Jaymie fed the animals and confined them to the house, promising Hoppy a long walk the next day, since today’s had been truncated by identifying a dead body. Then she set out to DeeDee’s place, changing into her uniform there as Dee called her brother and told him Jaymie was substituting for her that afternoon.

  Jaymie walked over to the Inn, through the parking lot—as always, it was full of luxury vehicles: a black Cadillac, a cream Lincoln, a champagne Lexus—and let herself in the employee entrance with her borrowed passkey. She refamil-

  iarized herself with the routine, pushed the cleaning cart to the service elevator, then slipped down the hall carrying a stack of towels to the room that was her main focus. The occupants were gone over to Canada for the day, DeeDee had assured her, after inquiring in the brief call to her brother-in-law, Lyle. Not that Dee could inquire directly, but a few pointed comments had been enough to elicit the necessary information.

  She let herself into the Fosters’ suite.

  It was the most elegant in the Inn, a double room with a sitting room and private bath furnished in gorgeous antiques authentic to the era of the original home. The bedroom was painted aqua, with one signature wall hung with Seabrook wallpaper. Once in the suite, Jaymie found that “searching” was easier imagined than undertaken. Yes, she was the maid, so she had a right to be there, but it felt like an invasion of the couple’s privacy to be looking through their baggage.

  So she cleaned first, and as she cleaned she kept her eyes open. Vacuuming was a great excuse to investigate the closets and under the beds. There were a number of suits hanging in the closet and shoes on the floor, but nothing of interest. Making the bed allowed her to check the mattress for anything hidden, and wiping down the surfaces allowed her to search the books on the nightstand. His was a thick biography of President Andrew Jackson, while her reading material was a Collector’s Quarterly and an art magazine. Lynn Foster had a penchant for showy jewelry: a large art glass pendant, a black-and-white silk flower piece and some gaudy cocktail rings.

  As she moved it to dust the side table, the black-and-white silk flower fluttered to the floor, falling apart as it did so. It seemed to be missing a piece in the center, something that would have kept it together and allowed it to be pinned to a piece of clothing. Like the black suit Lynn Foster had worn to the auction. With the black-and-white silk flower on the lapel. Jaymie paused and straightened. She picked up and examined the flower more closely; it did indeed have a pinhole in the center.

  She sat down on the side of the bed and picked up the phone, hit nine for an outside line and called the pharmacy. “Valetta,” she hissed, trembling. “Do you remember yet where you’ve seen the pavé pin I showed you this morning?”

  “Not yet. Why do you sound so odd? What happened about that dead body? Where are you, Jaymie?”

  “Never mind,” she said. “The pin! Focus, Valetta; could it be that you last saw the pin in the middle of a black-and-white silk flower on the lapel of a black suit worn by Mrs. Lynn Foster?”

  “That’s it!” Valetta said, her shriek piercing on the phone. “That’s it! How did you guess that?”

  “I didn’t guess. I’m sitting here holding the flower, which is falling apart because it’s missing the pin. I’ve got to go.” She hung up, her hand trembling. There was no possible reason Lynn Foster’s diamond pin should have been in her garden, unless Lynn Foster had been in her yard.

  But it didn’t prove that she was a cold-blooded killer. Jaymie would need more to believe that. She eyed their luggage, but the bags were locked, and staring at them was not going to elucidate the mystery. She moved on, leafing through the books on their nightstand and the drawers of the bureau. Nothing beyond some sleeping medication with Nathan’s name on the label. Her mind was churning with speculation.

  Her final cleaning/searching foray was to the bathroom. It was tidy enough, but needed a thorough clean if she was going to do the Queensville Inn proud. And if she was going to search properly. She moved the Fosters’ personal items—his shaving kit, her nail polish and cosmetic kit, and a collector’s magazine—from the room, then removed the soiled towels and old soap, dumping them into the dirty linens bag and the garbage on the housekeeping cart, respectively. Then the tub, tile surround, vanity and mirrors needed a good scrub, on to the sink, and then the toilet.

  Nothing. Time to return the Fosters’ items to their washroom. As Jaymie picked up the collector’s magazine and leafed through it, a piece of folded paper fell to the now-spotless floor. She retrieved it; it was yellowed in places, but the fold appeared new, and the paper, minus a corner torn off, flattened back to its original shape. It was a Sears and Roebuck receipt for a Hoosier brand kitchen cabinet. The date in the corner was March 31, 1927, and the buyer was listed as Mrs. Harold Bourne, Wolverhampton, Michigan.

  Jaymie stared at it for a long minute. The full impact of the find soaked in, bit by bit. This sales receipt had been torn from the hands of the dying Trevor Standish. Shivering, she tucked the receipt back where it had come from and set the magazine on the edge of the vanity. Either Lynn or Nathan Foster, or the two of them together, must be the killer or killers. But something was wrong with the thought that Nathan could have been involved. He appeared to be so gentlemanly—but then she remembered his steely grip on her arm. He was stronger than he looked, and more determined.

  Still,
something nagged at her, some question in her mind. It wasn’t just that Nathan Foster didn’t seem the type to commit cold-blooded murder; there was something more that made her question his involvement. She glanced at her watch and was appalled at the time she had taken. If she was going to finish DeeDee’s rounds and get out of the Inn, she would have to hurry and clean while she thought. At least she knew the Fosters were gone for the day.

  Just a few last-minute touches. As she swiped at the bathroom floor with a clean rag, erasing her own footprints on the damp tile, she noticed that a mascara had rolled under the vanity. How had she missed that? She picked it up, and wondered . . . did it belong to Lynn Foster, or was it from a previous occupant of the room? She couldn’t just leave it on the floor, and she couldn’t toss it in the garbage. It was an expensive department store brand. If she saw what brand of other cosmetics Lynn Foster used, it might help. Women tended to buy lipstick, foundation and other makeup from a single brand-name line.

  She unzipped the cosmetic bag; it was indeed Lynn Foster’s brand of makeup, but among the jumbled pots of cosmetics and an empty pill bottle with her husband’s name on it she found a familiar-looking piece of paper crumpled up in it. Familiar, because she had put it in the Hoosier cabinet book with her own two hands. It was the old mimeographed copy of the recipe for Queen Elizabeth cake that she had put in the book as a replacement for the Button letter. That placed Lynn Foster in particular at the scene of the break-in and theft of her Hoosier book, and the attack on Heidi! It followed that she was also the one who’d killed Trevor Standish.

  Lynn alone, not with Nathan! Jaymie sat down on the lid of the closed toilet. Now she remembered what it was that was tugging at her memory concerning Nathan Foster. She had been in the Emporium when he was at Valetta’s pharmacy window, complaining that he didn’t have enough sleeping pills. He was sure he had brought enough, but had run out. Which meant he was either lying and taking more than he should, or someone was taking some out of his bottle for some reason.

  If Lynn Foster was sneaking out of their room at night to murder people, then she might drug her husband with extra sleeping medication to aid her in her deception. And thus, the empty bottle of his sleeping meds in her makeup bag. It made sense.

  A noise from the bedroom made her jump up and she shoved the folded recipe back in the cosmetic bag, fingers trembling and clumsy. Hoping it wasn’t one of the other chambermaids—or worse, Lyle—Jaymie tucked the bag back on the shelf and hurriedly ended her cleaning by folding the end of the fresh toilet tissue roll into a V, like she had been taught years before as a fledgling chambermaid.

  A voice behind her coldly demanded, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  It was Lynn Foster.

  Twenty

  JAYMIE TURNED AWAY, hoping the woman hadn’t seen her face clearly, and said, “I’m cleaning the bathroom.”

  “Really?” The woman stared at her for a long moment. Her gaze flicked over the room and then settled back on Jaymie; she tilted her head, looking at her profile. “Do you think I don’t recognize you? You’re the girl who bought the Hoosier, and you’ve been snooping,” she said, pulling something out of her handbag. “I don’t appreciate that. It means you’re suspicious, and I don’t like suspicious people.”

  Jaymie looked down at the woman’s rock-steady hands to find herself staring at a very small, but lethal-looking pistol. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, summoning all her nerve to steady her voice.

  Her expression cold, her voice tight with suppressed fury, Lynn Foster said, “Are you going to tell me this is a coincidence, you being in my room, snooping?”

  “I work part-time for Lyle, the owner. Look, I’m sorry if I’ve upset you. I’m not suspicious, and I haven’t been snooping, honest.”

  “I don’t have time for this. Sit!” she commanded.

  Jaymie sat down on the toilet again.

  “I suppose you’ve figured it out,” she said, her coldly handsome face set in an expression like granite. The cold fluorescent light harshened the effect of the mauve lipstick she wore. “I know for a fact that you still have the Button Gwinnett letter, and I want it.”

  Well, of course she knew—or thought she knew—that Jaymie still had the letter, since she had tried to steal it, and had gotten a vintage recipe instead!

  “You will give it to me,” the woman said with a menacing tone, “but I have to figure out a way of getting it that allows me to get away from here. Those damned cops were sniffing around here too much, asking all kinds of questions.”

  Jaymie was silent for a moment. This was a woman who would kill without remorse, and Jaymie had to be as careful now as she could be. “All right, I won’t pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She paused, working through it in her mind. If she could convince the woman she didn’t have the letter anymore, then it would eliminate all reason to keep her there. It might make her expendable too, but either way she went into this, she was taking a risk. “Look, I gave the Button letter to the police after the break-in at my home.”

  The woman snorted, the sound echoing off the hard surfaces in the bathroom. “As if I would believe that! You clearly know how valuable it is, and bought the Hoosier for the same reason we wanted it. I don’t know which of those undesirables is your partner, but I suspect it’s the late Ted Abernathy.”

  So she knew about Abernathy, and probably Brett, as well. Jaymie’s stomach turned over. Her mind churning, she wondered, did she really want to convince the woman that she no longer had the letter? As she’d already realized, not having it would make her expendable. Lynn Foster was cavalier about dispatching human life, so maybe it was better if she thought she had something to gain by keeping Jaymie alive.

  Okay, so Jaymie was not going to go out of her way to convince the woman she no longer had the letter. She stared at Lynn Foster, who was pacing in the narrow confines of the space between the bathroom vanity and the door. Had this elegant woman really killed two men? Was it possible? “You might think I know more than I do,” she said, slowly. “I stumbled across the Button letter. Really, I did!” she emphasized, as the woman snorted again in derision.

  Lynn Foster stopped and stared down at Jaymie. “You didn’t know what was in the Hoosier when you bought it?”

  Jaymie shook her head. “I fell in love with the cabinet. I collect early and mid-century kitchen stuff.”

  Lynn Foster chuckled, then began to laugh, guffawing until tears ran down her cheeks. “Good God, I’ll give you some money and you can buy me a lotto ticket!”

  A momentary urge to lunge for the gun seized Jaymie, but the impulse disappeared as the other woman sobered and maintained her iron grip on the pistol. The bathroom was not a good place to tackle Lynn; too many places to hit one’s head and be knocked out. She was going to have to be smart about this. She had stumbled into it on her own, and she’d have to get herself out of it the same way. “Yes, I’m a very lucky person,” she said, staring at the gun.

  Lynn Foster’s expression darkened. “If people would just stay out of my business, I wouldn’t end up having to be so nasty!”

  “So . . . you knew Trevor Standish, already, right?” That was something she had just figured out; there had been no mistake about the hotel bill for “Lachlan McIntosh,” nor had he been swindling them. That was just a tale told to Lyle Stubbs to separate themselves from the murdered man. They must have had some kind of agreement for him to find the Button letter. “You knew him from before. Standish was a historical expert—I know that from his buddy, Daniel Collins—but was his specialty signers of the Declaration?”

  Lynn Foster nodded. “And he was as crooked as a pawn-shop owner,” she said, with a twisted smile.

  So, finding and stealing the Button letter was the venture Trevor had wanted his frat brother, Daniel, to invest in. But he couldn’t tell his honest buddy the
truth. She knew Daniel wasn’t involved in anything underhanded! And it looked like Zell was absolved, too. Ted Abernathy and Brett Delgado were still involved somehow, though how, she had no clue. Jaymie’s thoughts returned to her perilous situation. “How did he find out about it in the first place?” she asked. Keep her talking, she thought, until she figured a way out of her dilemma.

  “He was looking for either a customer or a partner when he joined the collector’s group Nathan and I belong to. It wasn’t long before he approached us with his wild tale of an undiscovered Button Gwinnett letter floating around out there somewhere in some little podunk town in Michigan.”

  “There actually is a Podunk, Michigan,” Jaymie said, helpfully, then bit her lip as she saw how the woman’s face tightened in fury. Her insides quivered with nerves, but she needed to focus on getting out of this situation alive. A gun poked in her direction was distracting. Focus, Jaymie! she admonished herself. “How did he find out about the letter?” she asked again, genuinely curious, but also hoping to distract Lynn Foster, getting her to let her attention stray long enough for Jaymie to do something about it.

  “Trevor’s father—he was a professor of history at Ball State—got a call back in the early sixties from the old man who owned it; it was some kind of family heirloom. He acted like he wanted to sell it, but he was probably fishing, to see if it was worth anything.” She looked at her watch, then back to Jaymie. “Nowadays he could find out in five minutes on the Internet, but back then it wasn’t so easy.”

  Mr. Bourne’s eccentric father! Even in the sixties a Button Gwinnett letter would have been considered valuable, but he must have decided to squirrel it away. Then, as he went senile, he kept making jokes about it, the “Button, button” suggestions and “The Witch of Coos” poem mention. Strange that he never told his son or wife about the letter, but then he sounded like he’d been an odd kind of guy, secretive and off-kilter, enjoying taunting his family and laughing at them. “But Trevor Standish didn’t know exactly where it was,” Jaymie said. Old Mr. Bourne had died without ever telling the truth.