It was overwhelming at times, all of the preparation needed for even a modest affair. And Jaymie didn’t have a wedding dress yet! The wedding was a couple of months away, in June. She needed to get a dress but she had no clue what kind, though she didn’t dare say so to Becca, who had a tendency to take over her younger sister’s life if she let her.
The wedding planning was bewildering to Jaymie, though as an inveterate list maker she was generally well organized. As they went back to work rather than dwell on all that had yet to be done for the wedding, Jaymie found it simpler to let her mind wander and think about the family who had lived in this old house. How sad that they were all gone! But what happened if Delores was out there somewhere with no idea she should be inheriting the farm? And what about the cousin, the repellent (to Rebecca) Clifford? Where was he? Jaymie stored those questions away to ask her sister later.
They worked for another couple of hours but finally were ready to call it quits. Hoppy had long ago given up shadowing Jaymie and was curled up on her sweater in the corner of the kitchen, where she had spent hours cleaning out the cupboards and washing windows.
“We’re going to have to come back out tomorrow to finish,” Becca said, pushing back her dark bangs again to reveal a sweaty brow as she joined Jaymie in the kitchen. Her hair was curling into damp ringlets. “I want to have a look down in the cellar to see how much work we have left to do.”
“We have to do the basement too?” Jaymie asked, her voice squeaking in dismay.
“Of course. And the attic. When we agreed to do the house, we agreed to do the whole house.”
“You go ahead, then,” Jaymie said, eyeing the cellar door that led off the kitchen.
“Whatsa matter, fraidycat,” Becca said, “you scared of the dark?”
“Of course not, I’m not fond of basements. But the electricity is on, so we’ll have light, right?”
She followed Becca down a rickety set of almost vertical steps into the dim basement. Hoppy, alerted that something was going on and unwilling to be left out of it, tried to follow her, but she shooed him away and closed the door, afraid he’d fall down the steps. Poor little guy; with just three legs he was not steady enough for the steep descent. The chilly basement smelled musty and damp, like earthworks. There were lights, but they were just hanging bulbs at ten-foot intervals. “Bunch of cheapskates,” she mumbled. “I swear these bulbs are fifteen watts at most.”
A series of rooms stretched out before them, the smell of decay heavy in the damp air. Jaymie groaned as she saw all the piled junk: old lawn furniture, splitting boxes with mildewed National Geographic magazines spilling out, more boxes labeled “Old China” and “Junk,” and lining the walls, sagging wood shelves. Those shelves were laden with dozens of Mason jars filled with murky, mysterious foodstuffs. Jaymie slipped past some of the boxes and picked up one of the jars, tilting it sideways and squinting. “It looks for all the world like a pickled lab specimen. What the heck is that?”
Becca took it from her and turned it over and over. “Preserved peaches, I think. Grandma Leighton used to make them. We’d have peaches all winter because of her.”
“A peach! That’s why it looks like a wee beastie’s bum,” Jaymie joked, taking the bottle from her sister and setting it back on the shelf, then dusting her fingers off. “Did you ever come down here when you were a kid?”
“No way. Like I said, Delores and I would usually take off and go riding, or walk or bike into Queensville, or catch a lift to Wolverhampton.”
“What was she like?”
Becca turned and stared at her through the gloom. “Why are you so fixated on Delores?”
“Just curious. I know most of your friends but I’ve never even heard of her. And riding horses? That’s a side of you I’ve never seen. It’s interesting, I guess. I don’t know that much about what you were like as a kid, before I came along.”
Becca’s glasses glinted palely in the dim light. “I suppose that’s right. I never thought of it that way. I know your whole life, but you don’t know mine.”
“Exactly.”
“I liked her, but she was . . . troubled. Let’s say I wasn’t that surprised when she took off. I knew things weren’t all sunshine and lollipops here with her family.”
“What about the cousin, Clifford?”
Becca shuddered. “He was an odd duck. Gave me the creeps. Let’s keep moving and get all the way back to the front, if you know what I mean.”
Jaymie did and clambered back toward her sister over the boxes of magazines. Since the cellar stairs were off the kitchen, and the kitchen was at the back of the house, they were moving through the rooms toward the front of the house. “I wish I’d brought a flashlight,” she muttered.
“Like this?” Becca asked as a blade of light cut the gloom.
“Sheesh. You had that the whole time?”
They moved together, following the light, and got to the last room, a low-ceilinged, dank, cobwebby, earth-floored room where the furnace squatted, glowering in the corner, and the rusty water heater sat on a brick pad. The smell was indescribable, a mingling of dead animal—probably a raccoon or possum had crept in through the crawl space and died—and damp dirt, with a soupçon of vegetation rot. Weeds had grown in through gaps in the cracked windows and rotting window frames.
“It is spooky! There’s nothing here; let’s go back.” Jaymie shivered, though it was warm and airless in the room.
“Wait, there is one thing: a trunk.”
Jaymie laughed, but it came out shaky. “Right, it had to be a big old trunk. With my luck it probably has a body in it. You haven’t killed anyone lately, have you?”
Becca sighed and trained the flashlight on it. “Well, now we have to open it,” she said. “Just to show you that it’s nothing but old clothes. I don’t want my wittle sister to have nightmares.”
Jaymie groaned at her mocking tone. “All right, okay, let’s do it. You know me better than that. I’m not afraid, just creeped out.”
It was a very old, rather large trunk, with patches of blue-painted metal still showing through rust. The clasp was rusted, too, but there was no lock on it, so with some effort Jaymie got the hasp open. The lid was stuck. It took both of them tugging to get it to begin to lift. It smelled wretched, like ancient body odor, once they cracked it, but the lid finally came up with a creak.
“Darn it!” Becca screeched.
Jaymie jumped. “What? What’s wrong?”
“I broke a nail.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Becca! You scared the life out of me.”
Becca shone the light into the trunk, where some vivid red knitted cloth was visible. “See, I told you; just a wig and some old clothes, probably a tickle trunk.”
“What’s a tickle trunk?” Jaymie asked.
“Good heavens, you are younger than me. A tickle trunk is a costume trunk. It’s from an old Canadian show; we got a CBC station from across the border. It was . . . what the heck was it? Mr. Dress Up! Yeah, that was the show. I remember Grandma’s tickle trunk with all the old clothes from the forties, but maybe you don’t. You were too young.”
“I think I may have seen some episodes.” Jaymie stared, perplexed, into the trunk. “Why would anyone store it full of a wig and clothes in the damp depths of the basement?” There was some other stuff, like a wooden handle of something tangled in with the wig. “So weird,” she mumbled. “Maybe it’s a Halloween costume?”
Jaymie stared down at the sweater under the blondish wig, a stained hand-knit piece of a weirdly vibrant red synthetic. She reached out to touch the wooden handle, but when she did it felt stuck, and the hair shifted. A low moan erupted from her throat and she bolted to her feet, followed by Becca. They stared at each other and clutched their hands as the flashlight, which Becca had dropped, stopped whirling on the dirt floor.
“Is that . . . is it . . . ?” Becca cried.
“I think s-so, I think . . . no, I know . . . that’s a cleaver in a sk-s
kull. It’s a b-bo—”
“Jaymie, shut up!” Becca said, her tone strangled. She squeezed Jaymie’s hands and stared into her eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“I recognize that sweater,” Becca said, her tone agonized. “Delores wore it. Valetta’s mom knitted it for her when she was g-going out with Brock! And the hair . . . it’s the s-same color, the exact shade of light brownish-reddish-blonde with dark roots.” Her tone was feverish, the words rapid-fire. “She used . . . she used Sun-In to color it that summer and it was growing out! Ooooh,” she moaned, swaying. “Jaymie, I think that’s Delores in the t-trunk!”
Three
THEIR PLANS FOR THE REST OF THE DAY, admittedly just dinner and nothing much else, went out the window. Jaymie called the police department. There was no need for 911; there was no assailant hiding in the basement to endanger them. Chief Ledbetter, in his last few months of service to the department, came out, with Bernie Jenkins, as well as Detective Angela Vestry, a frosty but competent woman. The chief was a proponent of women in policing and it was widely expected that when he retired in a few months he would be replaced by Assistant Police Chief Deborah Connolly.
The chief and detective interviewed Jaymie and Becca separately. Becca’s interview was considerably longer, given that she knew the girl they suspected was the victim of a heinous crime. Jaymie sat on the porch shivering even in the warmth of an unusually mild late April; Hoppy leaned on her lap, snuffling and snoring in a doggie nap, as she stroked him and ruffled his ears. It upset Jaymie that they had been in the house all day, never knowing that below them was the body of a teenager who never had a chance to grow up. All the years that Becca had assumed she was living it up in California or somewhere else warm and far away, her body had been moldering in that trunk.
Jaymie’s mind teemed with questions. Had Brock actually spoken to Delores and had she told him she was running away? He had a tendency to exaggerate and embellish, so she didn’t trust much that he said. Had Delores returned home first, where something heinous was done to her? Or had she started out hitchhiking, only to be dragged home? Did Delores’s aunt and uncle know she was in that trunk all those years? Or was she in that trunk all those years? She had disappeared in October or November, Becca said. She was apparently wearing the sweater Valetta’s mom had knit for her, which fit with the autumn. Was Creepy Clifford to blame?
So many, many questions and no answers.
Chief Ledbetter lumbered out the front door and heaved his bulk into a creaky Adirondack chair on the porch. “Come talk to me, Jaymie.”
She obeyed, taking the other Adirondack, a little loosey-goosey—it could use some screws and glue—but holding up, and picking Hoppy up to sit on her lap.
He eyed her, then squinted off in the distance, across the road and over the plowed rows of dirt in the rolling fields. “We’re ’bout ready to pack it in, once the team moves the body. Not much to see here after all these years.”
“We’ve cleaned and sorted every corner of this place except for the basement and the attic. Too bad we didn’t find it—the body . . . poor Delores—earlier.”
“Wouldn’t have made much difference. We figured out with your sister that the last time anyone saw Delores Paget was fall of 1984, early November, she says now, far as she remembers. We’ll narrow it down. That is going back some time for people’s memories, but we have resources.”
“So you’re proceeding based on the idea that it is Delores.”
“Becca seems pretty sure about the sweater and the hair. It’s going to be touch-and-go since there appears to be no surviving family.”
“What about that cousin of Delores’s, Clifford? Becca mentioned him but I don’t know what happened to him.”
“It appears that he was killed in a boating accident in the nineties. The uncle, Jimbo Paget, died in two thousand of a heart attack, then Olga Paget last year. We’ll start with blood typing to narrow it down, and do DNA too, of course.”
“What about dental records?”
“That’s our best hope,” he admitted. “She must have had dental work done, but it’s going to take some time to go back that far and construct a timeline.”
Jaymie pondered the problem as the chief reached out to rub Hoppy’s ears. He took the pup from her and rested him on his paunch, letting the little dog curl up there and snooze.
“Becca’s friends, Dee Stubbs and Valetta Nibley, both knew Delores. And Brock . . . I guess my sister told you that Brock and Delores dated? And what Brock said, that he’d talked to Delores the last day she was ever seen, and she said she was taking off?”
He nodded. “I’ve got Jenkins on it right now,” he said, referring to Bernice Jenkins, who had been promoted and served as a kind of assistant and driver for the chief. “Your sister didn’t know Delores’s parents’ names, or even if Paget was her legal last name.”
“The lawyer handling the estate should know though, right? They would have researched the family to try to find an heir.”
“Good point. We’re kinda scrambling to find our feet here. I’ve investigated cold cases before, but this one is in the deep freeze because she was never officially listed as missing, just as a runaway.” He got out a notebook and laboriously made a note, huffing and puffing through it. He stuck the notebook in his pocket. “Jenkins wants me to get some kinda digital device to make notes. I said a notebook doesn’t run out of battery power.”
Jaymie smiled. When she had first met the chief a year ago she had been unnerved and unsure how to take him. Now she knew him better, through a few investigations; he was smarter than he let on, and nicer, too. Becca, looking wan and unsettled, joined them on the porch.
“Detective Vestry said we could go now,” she told her sister.
“Chief?” Jaymie said, turning to Ledbetter.
“Sure,” he replied, handing a sleepy Hoppy to her. “I’ll be in touch.”
• • •
September 1984
THE WEATHER WAS SO WEIRD, Becca thought, disgruntled. One day it was blazing hot and you had to wear short sleeves to school or suffer, and the next you were shivering. She was shivering today; she had left the house in a skirt and short-sleeved blouse, even when her mom told her to wear a sweater. It didn’t help that she and her mom had a huge argument that morning about Becca coming straight home from school. She had finally made up her summer-long quarrel with Dee and had promised to go to her place to study, but instead she’d have to go straight home to babysit Jaymie.
Oops, there was Delores coming down the hall. Becca flung open her metal locker door and hid behind it, waiting for the other girl to pass, but instead she felt a tap on her shoulder. “Oh, hey, Del, I didn’t see you there,” she said, ducking her head around the metal door.
“Yeah, you did. Then you hid.” Del’s acne-riddled face was red with emotion. Her blondish-reddish hair, dark roots growing out from the summer attempt at dyeing it blonde, was newly but badly layered, so Del had tried to curl it away from her face. It was half successful. “You coming out to my place this weekend?”
“I can’t,” Becca said. She saw Dee coming down the hall arm in arm with her boyfriend, Johnny Stubbs, and felt a moment of panic. She had to tell DeeDee that she couldn’t come over after school, but she didn’t want Dee to think she was ditching her for Delores. “I gotta go.” She slammed her locker shut, hurriedly snapped the combination lock in place and trotted away toward Dee and Johnny. When she looked over her shoulder, Delores was still standing, watching them.
It was a moment of indecision, but the look on Delores’s face decided it. She told Dee to wait a minute, and went back to her summer friend. “Hey, I forgot to ask . . . we’re having a pizza party for my birthday this Saturday night. Can you come over and hang out?”
Delores’s face lit up, but then she shook her head. “I don’t know how. I don’t have a ride.”
“Maybe my dad can pick you up. He offered to pick up a couple of kids, and I don’t think he’d
mind swinging by your place.”
“Really?” Del’s cheeks were rosy. “That would be so cool! Your dad is the greatest.”
“I know,” Becca said with a smile. “See you in class.” She dashed off to join Dee and Johnny, who were in her first-period English.
• • •
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY WAS OKAY, Becca thought, but they were kind of cramped into the front parlor of their old house, and they couldn’t be too loud because her mom wasn’t feeling well and Jaymie was still colicky. There were seven of them: Becca, Valetta and her brother Brock, Dee and Johnny, and a couple of others, all crowded onto two finicky antique sofas that faced each other across a low coffee table full of cans of pop and boxes of pizza from the only pizza place in Wolverhampton. There were three separate conversations going, none of which she was part of.
Her mom and dad had given her a boom box, and Dee’s gift to her was a Eurythmics tape, but she couldn’t play it above a whisper. “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” was playing for the fourth time. She wished it was Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” instead. They should have gone bowling in Wolverhampton. At least they’d be able to laugh out loud without Dad coming in and shushing them with that worried look on his face. This was getting ultra lame.
Delores sure was enjoying herself, Becca thought, eyeing her summer friend, who was glowing with happiness, sitting and talking to Brock Nibley, Valetta’s older brother. Becca didn’t like Brock much, but he was one of her best friends’ brothers, so she had to put up with him. If he wasn’t invited to every party he got in a snit, and that left Valetta in an awkward position.
Leave It to Cleaver (A Vintage Kitchen Mystery Book 6) Page 3