Leave It to Cleaver (A Vintage Kitchen Mystery Book 6)

by Victoria Hamilton

  “Yeah. Let’s ride.” Delores led the way around the house and back to the barn, the crickets silencing as they walked past, down a beaten and scorched dirt path through the dusty yellowing grass. Behind them the crickets again began to chirp.

  The hobby barn, a tin-roofed board structure, was cooler inside than out but not by much, and the horses seemed reluctant to move. They got them saddled—Delores’s favorite, a bay gelding named Strider, and Becca’s mount, Sally, a gray dapple mare with a black mane—and rode down the lane, across the gravel road and through a gate to a trail that led to the cool copse of trees through which there was a winding path.

  “So did Dee ask you where you were going today?” Delores asked Becca.

  “I don’t tell her everything,” Becca indignantly stated. They were speaking of Becca’s lifelong best friend, DeeDee Hubbard.

  “What about Valetta?” Delores pressed.

  This was one of the things Becca didn’t appreciate about Delores, the constant badgering about her friends, their reactions, what they thought, what they said about Delores. She couldn’t be honest because neither of her two friends liked Delores. It had been a rocky summer so far, trying to satisfy both sides without feeling like a complete fraud. She wished she could take back some of the things she had told her friends about Delores: that Becca had only made friends with her so she could ride; that the Paget home was not clean and not comfortable; that Clifford Paget seriously creeped her out and bragged about all his crimes, like robbing toolsheds for money for pot. As she had gotten to like Delores it felt more and more disloyal.

  But it was done and she couldn’t unsay stuff. “So, you looking forward to school?” Becca said instead of answering with another lie.

  “I guess,” Delores said with a shrug. They walked the horses side by side along the path, entering the shady woods. “I’d look forward to it more if I knew I could take driver’s ed.”

  “Why can’t you?” Becca shifted the reins to one hand and adjusted her sneaker-clad foot in the stirrup. “My dad said it might be the last year they’re offering it because of budget cutbacks or something—I wasn’t really listening—so I’m taking it for sure.”

  “Aunt Olga says we can’t afford it. I don’t see what the big deal is. I could get a job if I could get my freaking license. I could drive to Wolverhampton in the winter and work at the coffee shop. I’d pay her back, but she won’t even hand over my birth certificate so I can get my learner’s!”

  “Why not?”

  Delores shrugged. “Who knows. They’re both getting weird. I wish I had parents, like you do.”

  Becca knew from past conversations this was a dangerous path for their exchange to take. Delores’s parents had died in a car crash when she was just a year old, so her aunt and uncle had taken her in, as well as their nephew, Clifford, who had lost his parents some other way. It was all a bit hazy to Becca. They couldn’t have kids themselves but they did have a family, Delores’s aunt had said once, when she was acting normal. Other times she and her husband sniped at each other or at Delores, making it uncomfortable all around. Becca preferred visiting when they were out.

  Delores glorified the Leightons’ home life. She had only been over once but it had clearly made a lasting impression, because she was always asking to come into Queensville and sleep over. Becca wasn’t letting anyone come home with her right now. She loved her baby sister, but it was no fun having an infant around twenty-four seven, especially not with Mom sick and depressed all the time and Dad working overtime. With any luck her Grandma Leighton would come back from Canada, where she was staying with her sister, and live with them. Then things would get better.

  “At least you don’t have to change diapers,” Becca said, keeping it light, determined to have fun. “Come on, last one to the stream is a rotten egg.” She set Sally to a trot and took off past Delores.

  Two

  Late April—The Present

  WHEN THE CLEAVER CAME AT HER, Jaymie Leighton didn’t know what to do except scream and dive to the left, falling off the stepladder, tumbling and rolling sideways as the blade hit the floor and stuck into the old linoleum.

  “What the heck was that?” Becca yelled from the living room.

  Jaymie lay on the floor, Hoppy, her little tripod Yorkie-Poo, licking her face as her heart thudded, making her feel sick to her stomach. She took a deep breath, sat up, dusted herself off and said, “Oh, nothing much. I just got attacked by a box of meat cleavers placed dangerously on the top of a set of cupboards!”

  “You okay?” her older sister asked, poking her head around the doorway.

  “I said I just got attacked by a meat cleaver! What part of that sounds okay?”

  “Actually you said a box of meat cleavers.” Becca adjusted her glasses, pushed back her silver-threaded dark curls and stared pointedly at the cleaver, still stuck in the stained linoleum floor. “I only see one.”

  “Ha-ha,” Jaymie said and cautiously got to her feet. Hitting the floor that way had hurt her hip; she rubbed it, wincing. She kicked the box. “I was reaching up to get this box from the top of the cupboard, wondering what it was, when it tipped and the cleaver fell out.” She shivered, a belated thrill of fear shooting up her spine. “Thank goodness the box landed upright instead of spilling the rest of the cleavers. That could have been nasty.”

  Becca frowned. “Be careful, ya nutbar! This is a foraging expedition, not a death trap.”

  Jaymie took another deep breath and lifted the box up onto the counter. “I’m lucky only one fell out!” It was indeed a whole box of cleavers, all different shapes and sizes. “How much meat cutting did this family do?”

  Becca joined her at the counter and sorted through the box with her. They laid some out on the scarred butcher-block counter; there were long-handled and short-handled blades, and a couple that didn’t have wood handles at all but rather a hook, to hang on a rail. A couple had serrated edges opposite the blades, and one had a wolf atop the blade, stamped from the metal in one piece. There were two other animal ones, a horse and a duck shape atop the blade. “These are plain weird. I don’t remember any cleavers from this house way back when. I knew this family pretty well when I was a kid,” Becca said. “I even stayed out here a time or two. It’s sad they’re all gone now.”

  “How did that happen?” Jaymie asked. “I know that Lesley Mackenzie was hired to liquidate the assets of the estate, but why?”

  The Mackenzie auction house was a family-run business that handled most of the estate sales and auctions in and around Queensville and Wolverhampton. Lesley, a much older, very dapper gentleman, was the patriarch, and a good friend of the Leightons’ backyard neighbor, Trip Findley, another gentleman of a certain age. Jaymie wasn’t asking why the Mackenzie auction house, but rather why the house and estate were being liquidated.

  “Nobody can trace their family. It’s sad, but no one has come forward, even after a year of advertising and searching. As far as I ever knew there were just the four of them.” Becca pensively stared at the cleavers. She explained that the proceeds of the auction would go to the state unless they could find a relative, any relative. Michigan law said even someone distant—a cousin, say—could inherit, but so far they had found no one and it had been over a year since the last known Paget, elderly Olga, had died in a hospital without gaining consciousness after a fall at home.

  The estate would soon pass to the attorney general if no living relative could be found. Every paper in the house had been gone through, but not a single one indicated any family before 1968, when they had moved into the house. So far most of the furniture that was worth anything had been moved to the auction house. Jaymie and Becca were boxing up the rest of the contents and doing a quick clean so the house could be put up for sale. In exchange for their help, they would get first pick of whatever they wanted.

  “The family seemed bound for tragedy,” Becca said, helping Jaymie put the cleavers back in the box and setting it by the door. She took one
back out and examined its wide blade and polished wood handle. “Some of these are antiques. Maybe the historic house would display them?”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Jaymie said. Acquisitions for the kitchen of the Queensville Historic Manor, where she volunteered, were in her control and she was gradually gathering a collection of kitchen utensils that would celebrate the most important room of the house, to her thinking. She already had vintage pestles and many other tools, but no cleaver. “I’ll go through the box later and pick out the best.” She’d have to have them mounted in a locked frame, where they would be safely out of the way of curious guests.

  Her sister’s words about the family intrigued Jaymie, so she went back to them. “What did you mean when you said the Pagets were bound for tragedy?”

  Becca shrugged and adjusted her glasses, glancing around the kitchen. She tugged her spring blouse, now smudged with dust, down over her generous bosom. “There was never a lot of happiness here. The summer before I turned sixteen I made friends with Delores Paget. Her parents were killed in a car crash when she was a year or so old, so her aunt and uncle took her in. What was his name?” She frowned down at her loafers, polishing the toe of one on her pant leg. “Ah, yes! Uncle Jimbo. Aunt Olga and Uncle Jimbo Delores called them. There was a cousin too; he was older, and I didn’t like him. Clifford, if I remember right.” She shuddered. “Yeah, Creepy Clifford. Del and I were friends for a while, but Valetta couldn’t stand her and neither could Dee,” she said about her two best friends from the time, still her friends and Jaymie’s too. “I felt sorry for Delores. She was so eager to hang out. I came out here a few times a week that summer. They had horses and I loved to ride.”

  “I must have been a baby,” Jaymie said. She was fifteen years younger than Becca.

  “That’s why I spent so much time out here,” Becca said with a sly grin and sideways look. She rinsed her hands in the kitchen sink under the cold-water tap and dried them on a paper towel from a roll they had brought with them. “Mom had just had you and she wasn’t well. Coming out here was a way to escape when I wasn’t looking after you.”

  “So what happened to Delores? I’ve never met her. Did she move away?”

  Becca frowned and balled up the paper into a wad, tossing it into an open green garbage bag. Hoppy yapped once, so Jaymie retrieved it and threw it into the living room. The Yorkie-Poo barked merrily and wobbled after it.

  “So . . . what happened?” Jaymie repeated. Hoppy brought back the ball of paper, but when Jaymie threw it again he had lost interest and went to sniff around the other room.

  Becca stroked the worn butcher-block counter, nicked and cut from years of chopping. “She took off the fall after we both turned sixteen. I’d gotten busy with school and was hanging out more with Dee and Valetta again, so I hadn’t seen her.” She paused. “Well, that’s not quite true, I guess. She came to my sweet sixteen birthday party in September, and I saw her at school sometimes. She left town in October or November, but no one knew where she went. Just away, I guess. Like I said, she wasn’t happy at home.” She paused and sighed. “I’ve since wondered if her cousin . . . if Clifford was the problem.”

  “Did her aunt and uncle call the police when she took off?”

  Hands on her hips, Becca glared up at her “little” sister, who was taller by a couple of inches. “It’s nothing weird, don’t get that in your head. She took off. Brock knows,” she said, naming Valetta Nibley’s brother. “He saw her the day she left, if I remember right. She told him she didn’t want to live with her aunt and uncle anymore because they were so strict, so she was taking off.”

  “Brock saw her before she left?” Jaymie narrowed her eyes, then bent over the box of cleavers, choosing four and setting them aside. They’d be for the historic home, the wolf one and three others. “What exactly did she say to him?”

  Becca made an exasperated noise. “Good heavens, Jaymie, that was forever ago. I don’t even remember!”

  Jaymie straightened. “But you do remember Brock saying he saw her in Queensville and that she was leaving town.”

  “I can’t remember where he saw her, he just said he saw her.” Becca stared at her younger sister and squinted behind her glasses. “Jaymie Leighton-soon-to-be-Müller, not everything is a mystery! She wasn’t happy, and she left. She wasn’t the first, and she won’t be the last. There was another girl who took off from Wolverhampton about the same time, drove west and kept going. Kids leave. It happens. We had another friend who took off a year or so later.”

  “But shouldn’t Delores inherit then? She’d be your age.”

  “The state has been looking for her for over a year,” Becca admitted. “They searched, advertised . . . even employed a private detective. Nothing. If they can’t find her and she doesn’t come forward, they have to wrap the estate up sooner or later. They’ll keep trying for a while, but what more can they do? Let’s get back to work so you can stop imagining things.”

  They parted ways for another hour, sorting, gathering, stacking, sweeping and vacuuming. It was an old farmhouse and nothing had been done to it for years, so they couldn’t make it sparkling clean, but it would be sold “as is” anyway. They then took a break, carrying mugs of thermos tea out to the rickety porch that overlooked a dusty back road, followed by Hoppy, who sat on the top step, content just to be with them. It was only late April, but it was dry enough and warm enough that it felt like late May.

  “This must have been a nice place back then,” Jaymie said, swinging her legs on the porch swing, hoping it wouldn’t shake loose from the rafters and tumble her down. She held her tea in both hands so it wouldn’t slosh from the gentle swaying. “I like the view of the fields and the trees.”

  A car roared down the road, kicking up a cloud of dust that settled, gradually, to reveal the newly planted soybean field across the road, and in the distance, following a creek bed, a narrow band of trees that tossed on the spring breeze. Becca, sitting on the top step of the porch, cradled her mug in her hands and took a sip. “It was okay, but it was always kind of ramshackle. And it was never clean. I didn’t spend much time inside the house because Clifford was always hanging around, smoking dope and watching TV. Del and I used to ride the two horses across the road and down that narrow lane to the woods.” She pointed toward a wide gate and path beyond it. “There’s a big hilly open area on the other side, and she taught me to canter.”

  “I didn’t even know you could ride,” Jaymie said, staring at her sister. Becca was a tightly wound prissy perfectionist who didn’t like sports and who often dressed like a seventy-year-old woman, though she wasn’t quite fifty.

  “I had my adventurous side,” she replied, then drained her tea mug. She stood, dusted her bottom and said, “Let’s get this done. We have to finish this job because we have wedding planning to take care of.”

  Hoppy jumped up, ready to follow. Jaymie felt a tickle of excitement; wedding planning! She would not have thought that possible a year ago, but now it was positively entrancing. She and Becca had consulted with their fiancés and all came to the conclusion that a double wedding would be best, because to gather the aging family together once was hard enough. Twice would be cruel. Jakob got along great with Becca and Jocie had taken to Kevin, Becca’s older fiancé, as if he were another grandpa.

  “That reminds me,” Jaymie said as they stepped back into the dim coolness of the house. She pushed Hoppy in with one foot, since he had stopped to sniff the doorway threshold. “I was thinking of that beat-up dresser in the garage out back, the one nobody wants. I took a picture and sent it to Heidi, and she said it would be perfect. She wants to distress it. I said it’s plenty distressed as it is!” They were planning, of course, a vintage-themed wedding, and Heidi Lockland had absolutely insisted, as her gift to the sisters, on planning the details. “C’mon, Hoppy. I’ll get you some water and a snack.”

  “What does she want to use it for?” Becca asked, following Jaymie and setting her mug in the
kitchen sink. She grabbed another roll of paper towels from the tote of cleaning supplies they had come armed with.

  “The cakes. Tami needs something wide enough and sturdy,” Jaymie said, speaking of their wedding cake designer, Tami Majewski, Jakob’s partner Gus’s older sister, who worked as the cake decorator for the Wolverhampton Bakery. She filled the animals’ water bowl and set it down on the floor next to a saucer of kibble. “And it has a mirror attached, so it might look cool, you know . . . reflect the back of the cakes.” They were going to have two cakes, completely different to reflect the differences in the two sisters. “I think it will need to be sanded a bit, and cleaned up, but other than that we want it to look old, so it won’t need much work.”

  “I’m sure it will be okay. Heidi seems to know exactly what she wants,” Becca said, pushing her fluffy bangs off her forehead. “I hope it’s what we want.”

  “I’ll call Mackenzie’s and have them pick it up and deliver it for us. Heidi said to drop it off at Bernie’s because they’d be fixing it up together.”

  “Which means that Bernie is going to do the work,” Becca said with a snort. She was not Heidi Lockland’s biggest fan and thought the girl was childish.

  “Maybe. Bernie has more experience refinishing and fixing up her auction finds anyway, so that’s probably best. But you know as well as I do that Heidi is doing a whole lot of free work that a wedding planner would charge thousands of dollars for.”

  Jaymie felt compelled to defend Heidi. Raised rich and spoiled, blonde and lovely Heidi, in her twenties, was doing her level best to grow up. But if that happened in fits and starts, who could blame her when she had been indulged her whole life? She was sweet-natured, didn’t have a mean bone in her body, and was trying.

  It would have been churlish to say no to Heidi’s pleas to do the planning, Jaymie and Becca agreed before they realized how far the girl, who was now engaged to Jaymie’s ex-boyfriend Joel, would be taking it. Neither bride-to-be had even considered a theme as such, but vintage made perfect sense since both collected and dealt in vintage and antiques in one way or another. Heidi had done sketches, sent emails, started Pinterest pages, designed invitations and generally run amok in the most tasteful and vintage-gorgeous way. She had also enlisted Officer Bernice “Bernie” Jenkins, their mutual friend on the township police force, to provide vintage barware, and design some vintage-inspired cocktails reflecting the joining of the Leighton, Müller, and Brevard families.