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

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Leave It to Cleaver (A Vintage Kitchen Mystery Book 6) Page 23

by Victoria Hamilton

Jaymie was not about to promise anything, so she kept silent.

  Maybe he took that for agreement, because he launched back into speech, staring down at a pothole in the parking lot pavement. “I saw Rhonda that day. She . . . uh . . . she told me she was going . . . going to pick Delores up at that farmhouse where she lived.”

  She watched him, her bull-crap meter was pinging loudly. “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Why was she picking Delores up?”

  “I don’t know. Why does anyone do anything? All I’m saying is, it was probably that whacko Clifford Paget who killed them both. But he’s gone now, so . . . no one will ever know for sure.”

  Why was he lying? Didn’t he realize that by saying he saw Rhonda he was making himself a suspect? Though in truth, she already suspected him. “How did she get hold of you?” she asked, thinking of what Sybil had said about Rhonda’s phone calls. It’s not like anyone had cell phones back then.

  “She . . . called the school, I guess. I don’t remember.”

  “Where did you two meet?”

  “At school. In the parking lot.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the police that at the time?”

  “I don’t know. I was scared, I guess.”

  “But no one knew she was dead at that point. They just thought she had taken off. You thought she left because she was pregnant.” But the whole reason she wanted to see him that day was to tell him she wasn’t pregnant. If they had actually met, wouldn’t Rhonda have said that? Maybe there was more to this story. She opened her mouth to ask him more questions, but he waved one hand and turned away. “Gus, can I ask—”

  “No! Just drop it. Phone’s ringing; gotta go.” He slumped back into the store, shoving the empty dolly cart ahead of him.

  She could go after him but he’d told his story now; he would no doubt stick to it. Jaymie got in the van and called Bernice. They were storing all the stuff in her garage until the wedding, so she may as well swing by there to drop it off. Bernie was home, so Jaymie headed there, mulling over Gus’s foul mood, trying to decipher why he was so mad at his sister and trying to figure out why he was lying about seeing Rhonda. If he was lying about seeing Rhonda.

  Maybe it was a lie, but not exactly a lie. Maybe he did meet up with her—not how and when he said, but somewhere else—killed her, and was now saying what he said to get it out there that when she left him, she was alive and well. It didn’t make much sense, but trying to make sense of what people lied about was highly overrated. Sometimes people lied to get themselves out of one spot of trouble, not seeing traps they were walking right into, or how their lies were illogical or even couldn’t be true. Some people lied reflexively, without even considering what they had already said. She hadn’t noticed that about Gus in the past, but then, she didn’t know him very well.

  Her head was swimming with possibilities that she needed to sort out.

  Bernie, in bare feet and exercise pants, came out to unlock the garage, and together they lugged the stuff into the rapidly filling space. Jaymie stared at the furniture and boxes and glanced over at Bernie. “You don’t even have room in here for your car anymore. You’re such a good sport about this,” she said. “As if you don’t have enough on your plate, with all of this wedding planning that Heidi is involving you in.”

  “Hey, it’s fun! I was raised with brothers, and I didn’t get to do a lot of girly stuff.” She pushed the sleeves up on her long-sleeved baseball shirt, her dark skin a lovely contrast to the pale blue of the shirt. “Heidi has been good for me.”

  “You’ve been good for her, too,” Jaymie said, reaching out and hugging her. She inhaled deeply her friend’s scent, a lovely combination of soap and some product she used to keep her natural hair lustrous. It smelled deliciously of coconut and hibiscus. “You’re like the sister she never had.”

  “You’re the one who befriended her to get the whole town to accept her, and don’t think she’ll ever forget that.”

  Jaymie felt heat rush to her face as she released her friend from the hug. The May breeze cooled her skin. “Did Heidi say that? She wasn’t supposed to figure that out.”

  “She’s sharper than people think,” Bernie said with a wide grin.

  “You’re right about that. She’s a lot nicer than I ever expected, too.” They closed the garage and Jaymie paced back to the van, slamming the back doors shut and locking it up. She turned back to Bernie. “You have to work tonight?”

  Bernie nodded. “At least on the night shift I get to be more than the chief’s chauffeur.”

  “He likes you, Bernie. I think he sees himself as your mentor.”

  “Yeah, well, I appreciate that, but he’s not good at sharing his thought processes. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what’s going on in that giant head.”

  “You’ll have a new police chief soon enough, and then you’ll have someone new to try to figure out.”

  “We all think it’s going to be the assistant chief, Deborah Connolly. I’ll be okay with that, she’s cool.” Bernie leaned back against Jaymie’s van. “Has the chief been keeping you up to speed?”

  “Kind of.” Knowing it would go no further, she shared what the chief had told her about Clifford Paget. Bernie already knew most of the information anyway. “What’s your take on that? The chief doesn’t think he killed Delores, but it seems like the most likely solution.” And maybe Rhonda, too, if what Gus had said was actually true; if so, that placed her at the farmhouse with Delores. “Clifford creeped my sister out. She thought he was a lech. And now we know he wasn’t even related to Delores, and knew that the whole time. Maybe he was . . . I don’t know, abusing her, and killed her to shut her up.”

  “Could be. But if he’s willing to cop to helping kill his own mother, why wouldn’t he admit to killing Delores?”

  “And Rhonda.”

  “Right. Though we still don’t know if she was killed by the same killer or if there were two murderers.”

  “True,” Jaymie mused. “So you think I should trust the chief’s feeling that Clifford isn’t the killer?”

  “I’d say that what seems like intuition is, in a highly trained and intelligent person, a lot more than just a gut instinct.”

  Jaymie nodded. “You know, I think you’re right about that.”

  “I’ve learned at least as much from Chief Ledbetter as I have from all my textbooks.”

  “Though that won’t stop you from hitting the textbooks,” Jaymie said with a smile.

  “You bet. Next stop, I make detective.”

  “You will, Bernie. We know you will. And when you do we will have one giant party.” She gave her friend another hug. “I’d better get going. I promised to order the pamphlets from the printer for the Tea with the Queen event. I’ve pulled back this year on helping organize the whole thing with everything else I’ve got going on, but it’s the least I can do.”

  • • •

  JAYMIE RETURNED HOME and let Hoppy out, let Denver in, then set to work on organizing myriad details she had to take care of. First things first; she called in the order for the pamphlets, and sent over the graphic files via email. She then made a list of what else she had to do before the wedding. Now that the shower was over, the countdown to the day had truly begun.

  The day dwindled. Should she call Jakob, see if he wanted her to come out and make dinner? Life was more complicated now than it used to be, but it was a good complicated, the kind of messy, busy, chaotic life she should hate, given her personality, but that she loved. Somehow, chaos was different when it was the busyness that came with love. She was secure in her trio of love: herself, Jakob and Jocie.

  But the tangled mess of the murder investigation would not leave her alone. It was a hum of sad distraction in an otherwise happy time. She hauled out all the information she had and began to make notes. If she could construct a timeline of the day Rhonda and Delores disappeared and were murdered it might help pinpoint who could have done it. Maybe not why, or how, but who
.

  So . . .

  Both girls were apparently at their schools in the morning. Both apparently left school at some point during the day. Rhonda was at her boarding school until lunch, Sybil helped her make phone calls on study break, and then she left. One brief call to Sybil set the time Rhonda left Chance Houghton, thirty miles from Wolverhampton, at about one thirty. So Rhonda took off, maybe to meet Gus at Wolverhampton High, maybe not. Jaymie was not sure when Delores left WH, nor where she went.

  Hoppy started barking and almost immediately after there was a tapping at the back door. Jaymie jumped and looked up. Brock! Her heart thudding, she hurriedly covered up all the stuff she was looking through and crossed the room, unlocking the door. “Hey. Did Valetta tell you to come talk to me?”

  He nodded. Brock was tall, with a full head of dark lank hair that looked greasy from some product he used. He was always neatly dressed, as befit a real estate salesman, but today, though he wore a sport coat and dress slacks, he looked rumpled and tired.

  “Come on in,” Jaymie said and let the door swing open. Hoppy darted out to the lawn. “Can I make you coffee?”

  He nodded and slumped down in a chair at the table, passing one long-fingered hand over his face. She busied herself with making coffee and set a mug in front of him with the sugar bowl, milk pitcher and spoon close by. He ladled sugar into his cup and stirred.

  “So you called the other day and wanted to talk to me but you never showed up. Why?”

  He looked up with resentment etched in the deep lines on his face. “You know why.”

  “No, I honestly don’t,” she said, searching Brock’s face for clues. He had bags under his eyes, which were bloodshot. Something was troubling him deeply.

  “The moment you got off the phone with me, you must have called your buddy the police chief,” he said, his tone deeply resentful. “What did I ever do to you, Jaymie? Why don’t you like me?”

  Deciding to ignore the whining, Jaymie hit to the heart of his complaint. “If you had come in you would have discovered that the police chief actually called me wanting to come over, and I said sure. It was pure coincidence.”

  Brock snorted and glared down at his cup.

  “I don’t care if you believe me; it doesn’t stop it from being true. Why did you call and want to come over? You said you had something to tell me.”

  He sighed and wiggled his shoulders. “Okay. All right.” But still, he didn’t say anything for a long time, gulping down his coffee and moodily glaring at the table.

  She decided to wait it out. There was something on his mind, something important. She was curious as heck, but she wasn’t going to badger him.

  “It was all so long ago. I feel like I was someone else, you know? I can’t get into my head, the mind of that teenage guy who was so hard up and miserable.”

  He was casting himself as a victim; this was not good. Jaymie was braced to hear anything and not react.

  He was silent again for a while. “You know, I saw her that day.”

  “Delores. Yes, so you said.”

  “I wasn’t exactly . . . truthful about what happened.”

  He lied; no surprise. But if he was about to tell Jaymie that he killed Delores, she was going to run out that back door and not stop.

  “I took her for a ride.”

  Six words, so sinister. I took her for a ride. She could picture it, him taking her to a back road to neck, getting over-amorous, she begging him to stop . . . anxiety choked her. She wished he would just spit it out. But no, that picture in her mind was all wrong. She knew how Delores died, in her own kitchen with a cleaver in her head. So . . . he took her home and tried something, then . . . she shook her head and cleared her mind. She needed to listen instead of speculating. “Brock, why don’t you tell me what happened?”

  “I’m going to, from the beginning.”

  Twenty-two

  “I SKIPPED SCHOOL at lunch that day and hitched home,” Brock said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Bunch of guys were bugging me. Anyway, I was hanging around the Emporium when I saw Delores coming down the street toward the store. I talked to her. She was looking for a pay phone because she had to make a phone call. I think she was supposed to meet someone, but they weren’t there.”

  “But you didn’t ask her who she needed to call, or who she was meeting?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t remember.”

  “Okay.” That was typical Brock, Jaymie thought; so self-involved he wouldn’t even think to ask who she was calling.

  “I told her she could use our phone at home for free instead of using a pay phone. Mom was at Mrs. Stubbs’s. Val was at school.”

  He figured if he got her alone at his house he could make out with her. He didn’t need to say it; the truth lingered in the air like a bad odor.

  “So she came back home and used our phone.” He wasn’t looking up.

  “How many calls? More than one? Did she actually talk to someone?”

  “She got someone, yes. I heard her talking to someone. I think she made two calls, but I’m not sure.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged. “She got off the phone and said she had to go home.”

  “Home? Why?”

  “To meet someone, I guess.”

  “Hmm.” She frowned and lifted the edge of one of the papers she had been reading. Did this revelation support Gus’s assertion that Rhonda was going to the farmhouse to pick up Delores? “What did you say to her after that?”

  “I asked how she was going to get there and she said she was hitching. So I offered her a ride.”

  “You drove her all the way out to the Paget house?”

  He nodded.

  “So you took her home. Was there anyone else there?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I never got out of the car.”

  “Really? Why?”

  He shrugged again and his cheeks turned red. “She told me to take off, to . . . to get lost.”

  She watched him for a minute. Jaymie slowly said, “There’s more to it than that. What is it, Brock? I know there’s more.”

  He hung his head and mumbled, “She told me I was a loser. A jerk. I had used her and then switched to Rhonda, she said, but Rhonda was too smart and too good for me. She let me have it, both barrels.” He took in a deep breath and straightened, looking Jaymie directly in the eye for the first time. “And I deserved it. I was mad then, but looking back . . . if any guy ever uses Eva like that,” he said about his daughter, “. . . just trying to cop a feel, I’ll kill him. Having a daughter who’s almost a teenager . . . it changes your perspective.”

  He seemed genuine, but most people try to show themselves as the good guy even after doing something despicable. “So you dropped her off and left?” she said, with heavy emphasis.

  He nodded. “I peeled out of there so fast gravel flew.”

  “What time was that?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe . . . two o’clock, two thirty? Not sure.”

  “And that was the last time you saw her?”

  He nodded again.

  “Where’d you go?” Would he lie, say he went home? He’d already lied to his sister and told her he went back to school. He likely didn’t know how much Valetta had documented in her diary.

  “Wolverhampton. I ended up in a filthy pool hall with some old dudes. They fed me a bottle of cheap wine. I got stinking drunk and threw up in the back alley.”

  “And then?”

  He shrugged. “I slept it off on a bench in the back of the pool hall, sobered up and then drove home. I crawled into the house, sick as a dog.”

  “What time?”

  He shrugged. “Hell if I know. Ten, maybe? Mom was already in bed. Val was mad. I was such a jerk; worried my mother to death.” He took a heavy breath. “I’d love to say I straightened my life up and became a better son, but I didn’t.”

  “And that was it?”

  “That was it.”

&
nbsp; “So why didn’t you tell the police you had given her a ride home when they asked if anyone knew anything?”

  “I was scared. I’d been drinking the night before, and driving. And I didn’t think it mattered. I wasn’t lying, exactly; she did tell me once she was going to take off, just disappear. That’s what I thought she was doing, arranging a ride to get out of town.”

  It made sense, but it had misled police for decades. “So, Brock . . . why did you lie to the chief now? You’re not a kid anymore.”

  He shrugged. “It dredged it all back up and . . . I panicked. It doesn’t exactly show me in a good light.”

  And that was Brock all over; he had never cared about his actual character, just how he appeared to others. But it seemed like he was having a crisis of conscience, so maybe there was hope for him yet. “You know what you have to do now, Brock. You have to tell the police the truth.”

  He swallowed. “Maybe you can tell Ledbetter for me. He’ll believe you.”

  “It’s not my story, Brock.” There was no way she was going to put herself on the line for him, especially since she wasn’t positive she believed him.

  After Brock left she doodled on a pad of paper. Some half-formed thoughts were bouncing around in her head. She did mindless chores: dishes, a load of laundry, some pre-cooking for the next meal she’d take out to Jakob’s. She called him and they chatted, but Jocie had come home early from school. She wasn’t feeling very well so he was going to tuck her in and have an early night himself.

  “I miss you,” he said. “I wish you were here.”

  “Me too,” she confessed. She was tempted to tell him about her conversation with Gus but there was no point in upsetting him, not when he was worried about Jocie. “Call me later if she’s feeling worse. And I’ll call you in the morning to check in. I can come out and look after Jocie if she isn’t well enough for school tomorrow.”

  “That’s a relief; thanks, liebchen. Night.”

  She checked her email. The photographer had sent the photos. It was evident, and the photos confirmed, that Gus was there all afternoon as they practiced and then took to the field playing another local high school football team. It didn’t seem possible that he was out at Delores’s killing her and Rhonda and then taking Rhonda’s body out to the island that evening to dispose of.

 

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