A Deadly Grind

by Victoria Hamilton

  “No. His dad used to tell the story about the phone call . . . cocktail party chitchat among the town-and-gown set. But the old guy either didn’t say exactly where it was, or Trevor’s father never mentioned it. If Standish had known where it was, he would have just marched up here, broken into the house and stolen it!”

  “But he couldn’t very well sell a stolen letter, could he?”

  Lynn gave her a withering look and waved the gun, saying, “Oh, come on! Surely you’re not that naïve. Collectors only care that it’s authentic, not how it was obtained.”

  How nice that she was able to speak for all collectors like that, Jaymie mused.

  “He didn’t have a clue,” the woman continued, “other than it was somewhere near Queensville. I don’t think his dad ever even got the man’s full name, just Horace or Harvey or Harold; something like that. Do you know how many men had those names? So Trevor needed money to come to the area to look around. It took him forever.”

  It started to make sense. “So that’s why you and your husband paid for his room, and why you came yourself.” Trevor had gone to them for money when his good buddy Daniel had turned him down.

  “It was taking so long that Nathan and I started to think he was going to cheat us. Nathan wanted to keep the letter; he’s a ‘Declaration signer’ collector. But I told him it was going to be too valuable, and he agreed to think about selling it. Our split was going to be fifty-fifty on the auction proceeds, but I suspected if Trevor got that letter without us around to protect our investment, he’d disappear and we’d never find him.” She glanced at her watch again.

  Time was for some reason important. Was she expecting someone? Did she have an appointment? Keep her talking! “But he hadn’t given you any reason not to believe he would keep up his end of the bargain.”

  “He was always shady. I did my background work; Trevor Standish was fired from Ball State for plagiarizing an undergrad’s paper on Paul Revere. Anyway, enough talk! Just shut up for a minute!” The woman turned away and murmured, “I need to figure out what to do.”

  Lynn Foster’s voice, muffled like that as she turned away, was familiar. Where had she heard it before? “You’re the one I overheard at the auction!” Jaymie blurted. “You were talking to Trevor Standish about the Button!”

  Lynn whirled and glared at Jaymie, narrowing her eyes. “You overheard us? Is that when you decided to buy the Hoosier from under us? Did you intend to sell the letter to the highest bidder?”

  “I overheard your conversation, but I didn’t know what it was about, and I didn’t know about the letter when I bought the cabinet,” Jaymie explained again, trying not to show her exasperation. “Look, can we move out of the bathroom? The echo in here is giving me a headache.”

  “Okay, but don’t try anything funny,” she said, waving the gun.

  Jaymie preceded the other woman out to the bedroom and glanced around, looking for a way out of her dilemma. She moved toward the window, but the street outside was deserted. “I really didn’t know anything about the letter,” she said again, as she feverishly tried to work out how to get out of this predicament.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “It’s true! No one else knew about it, not even the owner of the Hoosier!” She paused, then said, turning to face Lynn Foster, “It sounds like neither you nor Trevor trusted each other. You wanted to know where the letter was hidden in the Hoosier, and he said he didn’t know.”

  “He was going to get the letter, then cut and run.”

  Lynn Foster, like most who were willing to cheat others, expected to be cheated every step of the way, too. She didn’t trust anyone because she knew what she would do in a similar situation, and in this case, she could have been right. There were so many people involved, it seemed, and the connections were baffling. “Where does Brett Delgado figure in to this?” Jaymie asked, trying to untangle the twisted knot of mystery.

  Just at that moment the door to the suite opened, and Jaymie muttered a quick prayer that it would be salvation. What would she do? How could she take advantage of the distraction?

  Nathan Foster entered and started back at the sight of his wife with a gun trained on the maid. “What is going on here?” he demanded. “Lynn, what are you doing with a gun?”

  Twenty-one

  “I THOUGHT YOU were staying in the coffee shop!” the woman said to her husband.

  “I needed the facilities, and you know I don’t like public washrooms,” he said fretfully, picking at a scab on his wrist. He swept his gray hair back and peered at Jaymie. “This is the girl who was playing a maid at the tea, the one who bought the Hoosier cabinet at auction.”

  “Yes, yes! The one who has the Button letter. And she won’t give it up.”

  “But surely a gun is taking things too far, Lynn, dear.”

  “Nathan, you know how much money we’ve invested in this,” Lynn said, her voice changing subtly, to a softer, almost pleading tone.

  Jaymie watched her in horror, thinking it was like watching a snake go from hissing and threatening, reared back in attack mode, to sly and slithery.

  “We’ve been plagued by idiots, my darling! Trevor double-crossed us, and now this . . . this country bumpkin wants to deny us our right to that letter! We’ve paid and paid; we deserve it!”

  Unbelievable, how she had the nerve to cite murder and treachery—oh, and a little money—as somehow earning the right to the Button Gwinnett letter, a piece of valuable American history that belonged to an old man in a nursing home. But Nathan Foster was eating it up with a spoon, smiling fatuously at his wife.

  “I want you to have the letter,” she cooed, her tone caressing and wheedling. “It was going to be your birthday gift, the crowning glory to our signer collection. You can keep it, the one piece you need for a full collection; I would never deprive you of so much pleasure. I have so little I can give you, dearest, but this was going to be the most magnificent present.”

  A foolish grin twisted his mouth. “Lynny, my dear!” He crossed the floor and took his wife in his arms. “And I thought lately you had seemed so distant!”

  “I’ve been so focused on this. You know how I get, darling.”

  “Mr. Foster,” Jaymie blurted, “your wife has been feeding you sleeping pills while she sneaks out to . . . to . . .” She trailed off at the vicious look Lynn gave her over her husband’s shoulder, the pistol still trained on her. She did not want to give the woman any excuse for an “accidental” discharge of the weapon.

  “I beg your pardon?” Nathan said, turning toward Jaymie.

  “Don’t listen to her,” Lynn said. “She’s raving. She has the letter and she will give it to me. We paid Trevor to find it, and it rightfully belongs to us.”

  Jaymie quickly toted up her options while she tried to look inoffensive and helpless, wrapping her arms around herself. She could throw herself on Nathan’s mercy and hope he let her go, but that didn’t seem likely, given his infatuation with his wife. He appeared firmly under his wife’s thumb. She could let it all play out and see where it took her. That was a risky tack to take, doubly so since she really didn’t have the letter, and thus had no bargaining chip. But Lynn hadn’t believed her when she told her she didn’t have it. She could say she had hidden it, and then, while stalling, plan her escape.

  The situation seemed more volatile, somehow, with Nathan there. Jaymie hadn’t lost sight of the fact that Lynn was, she knew now, a killer, but it was imperative not to make her desperate. Desperation was what would drive her to use the gun. Jaymie could imagine the court case, with husband and wife standing united: “I was just showing the maid our little gun, and it accidentally went off! A tragic mistake.”

  “I think she’s going to be sensible, my dearest,” Lynn said, watching Jaymie. “Aren’t you?”

  “I’m always sensible,”
Jaymie replied, proud of how steady her voice was.

  “She won’t even admit she knew the Button letter was in the Hoosier when she bought it!” Lynn declared.

  Her husband shook his head and made a tsk, tsk sound between his teeth. As she suspected, Nathan Foster would be no help to her at all. But she couldn’t let it go without one more try. “Look, Mr. Foster, this is not how you want to get the letter,” she said, clasping her hands together in front of her in a pleading way. “I’ll gladly give it to you, if you just let me go!”

  He shook his head sadly. “Lynn, my dear, you were precipitous in pulling out your little gun, it seems.”

  The woman threaded one arm through her husband’s and around his back. “I did what I had to do for us . . . for you! I swear, before the end of the day the letter will be with the one person who can appreciate it above all the others.”

  He smiled and rubbed her shoulder. “Thank you, my dear. You are truly one woman in a million.”

  Jaymie squinted and thought, trying to take advantage of the tender moment to answer some of the questions she still had. It also kept her calm to force her mind to think logically. “So . . .” she said, slowly, “you both were in it with Brett Delgado and his forger friend, Ted?”

  Nathan Foster opened his mouth, but Lynn hurriedly interrupted him, saying, “Let me take care of this, darling,” grabbing his sport coat sleeve and tugging him toward the door. “She’s just trying to stall, now, but you won’t leave here without that Button Gwinnett letter, I promise, and you know I always keep my promises! Go back down to the café and make sure we’re not interrupted. If you see anyone headed up here—especially those pesky hick cops—stall them somehow!”

  He bumbled out, muttering something under his breath. Jaymie started to second-guess herself immediately. Should she have thrown herself at Nathan and begged his aid? It didn’t seem likely that it would have helped. Neither of the murder victims had been shot, but Jaymie didn’t want to be the first.

  “Idiot,” Lynn said, as the door closed. “God, I need a smoke!” She paced around the room, looked up at the clock and feverishly added, “If he thinks I want this letter for him, then he deserves whatever he gets.”

  She fished a cell phone out of her purse, tossing a set of keys down on the table near her as she did so. When Jaymie glanced down, she saw the Cadillac logo on the keychain. As Lynn Foster flipped open her cell phone, Jaymie felt a thread of unease wind through her. Jaymie now knew how Brett Delgado had found out about the Button Gwinnett letter. She had seen Brett talking to Lynn just the day before, when she had seen him leaning in the window of the black Cadillac, the same car that was in the Inn parking lot. “You’re having an affair with Brett Delgado,” she suddenly said.

  “Brett’s a very attractive fellow,” Lynn said with a wry grin. “And about as gay as Bill Clinton, despite what he’s told the locals. For a while he was entertaining. Especially since we both share a love of money; more, I thought, than any interest in antiques and documents.”

  “If you and Brett are in this together, what about Nathan?” Stalling was working so far, but it was only a plan if she actually had something in mind, some way of getting out of the room without a bullet buried in her. If she could just get closer to the door . . .

  “Don’t be so naïve!” Lynn Foster’s patrician face looked hard in the light streaming in from the window, the lines around her mouth showing her true age. “Eight years ago Nathan was my insurance policy against old age, but I’ve paid my premium in years spent cosseting his ego, and he’s not shown to be a good return on my investment. I thought with his health issues that he’d be dead in a year, but he got better. Who knew a man could recover completely from a serious heart attack and quintuple bypass surgery?” She shrugged and shook her head. “I’m over forty, now, but I’m not dead.”

  Jaymie wondered, given what Lynn had done to Trevor and Ted, why hadn’t she just murdered her husband? A little overdose of the sleeping meds and she’s a widow with a life insurance payoff.

  Lynn Foster paced back and forth. “Now, how to get the Button and get out of here?”

  “So, you and Brett,” Jaymie hurriedly said, trying to scramble for a way out of her predicament. She edged toward the door. “Did you plan to take the letter and leave together?”

  “That was the original plan. Stop moving toward the door and sit down, right there.” She indicated the sofa, while she sat down in a chair near the window.

  Jaymie obeyed, not liking that gun barrel pointed in her direction.

  “I met Brett in the same collector’s group as we met Trevor. Brett wanted me to knock Nathan off and marry him. I think he was under the same misapprehension I was, that Nathan had millions stashed somewhere, but my elderly hubby has been keeping something from me. He’s not worth what he used to be.”

  Jaymie felt a chill at the casual talk of contemplating hubbycide. So there was not enough money left to risk murdering him for, apparently. What, no high-value insurance policy? No double indemnity? That was shortsighted of Lynn Foster.

  What to do, what to do? How was Jaymie going to turn this awful scenario around? This was decidedly not one of her better ideas, to stay in the room. She should have run, or used poor, misled Nathan Foster as a shield and walked out before him. Above all else, Jaymie knew one thing . . . she needed to keep Lynn talking. “You honestly don’t sound overly committed to Brett,” she said.

  Lynn Foster gazed at her in bemusement. “So you’re one of those idiots who believe in romance, and that love is forever.”

  “If you had an affair, you must feel something for him!”

  “Why would I want to share the money from the letter? Besides, Brett has shown a distressing tendency toward greed,” she said, with a huffy twitch to her narrow shoulders. “The minute he brought that miserable weakling Ted Abernathy into the plan, I knew it would be trouble. My plan was to snatch the letter from Trevor and take off, but Brett wanted to keep the original and make a copy to sell.”

  Or copies, Abernathy had said to Jaymie. Brett may have been intending to run a little scam on his ladylove, keeping a couple of copies to sell for his own profit.

  “That’s dicey business,” Lynn continued, rifling through her purse, the pistol sagging and bobbing. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes, jerked one out and lit it, inhaling deeply with a sigh of satisfaction. “It was always going to be difficult to sell the Button Gwinnett letter,” she said, her tone calmer and more contemplative and the pistol now steady on Jaymie. “I didn’t want a buyer who would ask any questions. Even so, though, I felt fairly comfortable selling the original. I mean, who owns something that’s been hidden for fifty years? Finders keepers, right?”

  “Not really. It’s not as if it was found on the sidewalk. You all knew the letter was in that Hoosier, so you should have told Mr. Bourne. He’s still alive, after all, and even if he wasn’t, his heirs would own it.”

  “Oh, so you say you didn’t even know it was there, but when you found it, you were planning on handing it over to this Bourne fellow?”

  The scorn in the woman’s voice didn’t shake Jaymie’s opinion. “I would have, without a doubt. And yet you were worried about Brett wanting to make and sell a forged copy?” It didn’t make any sense to her.

  “Rich people can be ruthless. If we sold the copy to the wrong rich person, and they found out it was a forgery . . .” Lynn Foster trailed off and shook her head, a grim expression on her face. “It’s not worth the risk.”

  So, it was not a moral issue, but purely self-preservation. Jaymie had heard it said that every person had their own definition of “acceptable risk”; in Lynn’s mind, knocking off two people was apparently an acceptable risk, but selling a forged copy of the Button letter wasn’t. “Is that why you turned against Brett at the auction, because he wanted to bring Ted Abernathy in to forge the letter and
sell copies? You were conspiring with Trevor Standish again, right?”

  “Of course! One must be adaptable.” She took a long drag on the cigarette, and then stabbed it out in an ormolu dish on a side table as she blew out a thick stream of smoke. “It would have all gone perfectly too, because Brett was clueless. Still is, I hope. But his little copycat, Ted Abernathy, must have seen Standish and I together, and suspected something was up. He didn’t trust Standish or me, and when he saw Trevor bid on the Hoosier, he realized where the letter was and jumped into the bidding. That idiot, Trevor, lost his cool and the two started to fight. Men! Idiot jerks, all of them. Then some asshole stepped in, interfering and confusing the issue, and you got the Hoosier.”

  Jaymie didn’t think it would be politic to say she knew the “asshole,” Joel Anderson. “And Trevor ended up dead.” She trembled as she said it, wondering if the woman would excuse her violent solution.

  “Served him right!” she said.

  “So did Ted Abernathy. End up dead.”

  “I know,” Lynn said with a frown, but then shrugged. “Things happen.”

  Murder just happens? She was a cold customer! “So, after the auction, didn’t Brett figure out that you were going to take the letter and ditch him?”

  “Ah, but he didn’t see me with Trevor; Ted did! He was suspicious, but I don’t think Ted shared his info with Brett.” She paused and looked thoughtful. “Or maybe he did. Maybe that’s why Brett sent Abernathy over to try to steal the damned letter from under Trevor’s nose.”

  But Abernathy had shown up a fraction too late. Lynn had merrily snatched what she thought was the Button Gwinnett letter out of Trevor’s hand as he lay dying. “So, what now?” Jaymie asked, her voice quavering with tension.

  Lynn’s expression hardened, and her gun didn’t waver. “Brett and I have reconciled and made kissy face; that kept him quiet and compliant, anyways. Poor dove; he has a weak stomach and needs a stronger soul to do his dirty work for him. He still thinks we are in some mad love affair, with me in the role of cougar to his man-kitten, I guess. He’s been badly frightened by Ted’s death. Such an awful thing,” she said reflectively.