They rushed from the coolness of the car to the coolness of Ambrosio, and followed the waitress through the murk to where the Collinses had reserved a table. Roger and Debbie Collins were younger than Alan and Joy Leighton by a few years, but still contemporaries. The men got along fine, and Roger and Jaymie’s dad greeted each other with firm handshakes and a comment on the possible matchups for the World Series. Joy and Debbie made polite noises while smiling on the surface, icy-cool expressions that did not reach their eyes. Daniel rose and took Jaymie aside, kissing her and giving her a very satisfying hug. Debbie watched from her seat with a neutral look on her plain, round face.
“I’ve been so worried about you,” he said. “For that to happen to you again, finding a body!”
It was much the same as he had said in their phone conversation earlier in the day. He had wanted to rush to her side, but she had reassured him that she was all right. Pretty much, anyway. He was comforting in every way, she thought, inhaling his soapy scent, fresh and vigorous. She looked up into his plain face, eyes set just the right distance on either side of a beaky nose, and a gaunt, rather lanternish jaw. “I’m fine,” she said, smiling up at him and squeezing his shoulders. “It was terrible, but it has nothing to do with me.”
He searched her face and nodded. “Good.”
“Let’s order soon. I’m starving!”
They sat down side by side and all chatted politely, until a waitress came and handed them each a menu. Jaymie glanced up at her, recognizing her immediately.
“Hey, Lisa,” she said, reading her name tag. “You also work at the Ice House, on the island, right?”
“I sure do. Oh! I recognize you; I saw you there the other night. You were sitting with a hot dude, that cop.”
Jaymie felt Daniel’s searching gaze fasten on her face as her cheeks reddened. “We weren’t really sitting together, at least not . . . It was just because it was crowded and there was nowhere else to sit,” Jaymie stuttered. She met Daniel’s gaze and said, “Zack Christian rents a cottage on the island. I didn’t know that until Ruby Redmond sat me at his table. There really was no other place.”
“It was hopping,” the waitress agreed.
Daniel smiled, crookedly, but his mother looked confused and concerned. For some, no explanation was necessary, and for others, no explanation would suffice; Jaymie repeated that to herself, and brightly looked up at the waitress. “So, do you work out there much?”
She shrugged. “Mostly in summer. I need the money for school, so I’ve got, like, four jobs in the summer.”
“Me, too,” Jaymie said.
“Oh, honey, that’s not quite true,” her mom said.
Jaymie closed her eyes and counted to five, then opened them and calmly said, “I work at the Emporium a couple of days a week, and substitute at Jewel’s Junk whenever she needs me. I cook breakfast for the B and B, and now I have the basket rental business, and in my spare time, such as it is, I’m working on that column for the Howler while writing a cookbook.”
“That’s not the same as a real job,” Daniel’s mother chimed in, agreeing with Joy Leighton. “You try being on your feet as much as this young girl is; you’ll soon see the difference.”
Daniel said, “Mom, you can’t—”
“It’s okay,” Jaymie said, touching his hand, keeping him from launching into a defense of her work ethic. “Let’s look at our menus.”
Lisa listed off the specials, and said she’d give them a few minutes. Jaymie stared at the menu, but didn’t really see it until she forced herself to relax. Ambrosio was a nice place, Jaymie thought, as she breathed deeply and looked out the huge picture window overlooking the river. Sparkling lights on the other side showed where a town was, and one slow-moving light was a mast top on a sailboat, slipping along the St. Clair.
She decided on her dinner choice, folded her menu and put it down. “I understand you have been looking at houses for sale in Queensville,” she said, brightly, taking both Roger and Debbie Collins in her glance.
Daniel glanced at her quickly. “Mom and Dad love looking at houses wherever they go,” he said. “Don’t you?”
His mother sniffed, her eyes still on the menu. “If you’re going to spend so much time here, Daniel, we may just have to buy a house. I haven’t seen hardly anything of you this summer.”
“Now, Deb, that isn’t true,” Roger said, heartily. “He came back for a couple o’ weeks in July, there.”
“Just to fix that trouble at Collins Inc.,” she replied. She looked over at Jaymie’s father. “He’s our only son, you see, and we miss him terribly.”
Alan Leighton, diplomat, said, “I can understand that, Debbie. He’s a fine young man.”
“And a good son,” she said. “It’s too bad that work and . . . other things, keep him busy so much, but you don’t get as wealthy and successful as he is without a great deal of hard work.”
There was a moment of silence, perhaps to mourn the death of any hope of subtlety behind Debbie Collin’s dislike for her son’s girlfriend, and Daniel sighed.
“I’m ready to order,” Jaymie’s mom said, slapping her menu closed. “Everyone else?”
Lisa came back and took everyone’s order, ending with Jaymie. “You had the perch at the Ice House, too, right?” she said.
“I did. Loved it.”
“It’s better there than here,” she said in a whisper, glancing around. “You didn’t hear it from me, but the fish at Ambrosio is not the best. You’re better off with pasta.”
That changed a couple of orders, including Jaymie’s, and Lisa gathered up the menus. But still she lingered for a long moment, and leaned over to talk to Jaymie. “Say, I need to know ahead of time . . . do you think Miss Redmond is going to be arrested? Or Mr. Redmond?”
Jaymie quickly said, “I really don’t believe so. Neither one of them killed Urban Dobrinskie. You know them better than that, don’t you?”
Lisa looked doubtful. “I don’t know. Mr. Redmond hit Mr. Dobrinskie pretty hard the other night. And the cops came back this afternoon to search the restaurant. Had to close down early. That’s why I’m doing a shift here.”
“Really?”
“Nonsense,” Jaymie’s dad said. “We’ve known them for years. Garnet Redmond is A-OK in my books, and so is his sister.”
“You never know what people are capable of,” Debbie Collins said, a dark expression on her face. “I thought Trish Brandon was a really nice girl until she dumped my Daniel.”
Jaymie glanced over at Daniel, who was turning red.
“Mom, not here, please.”
“Didn’t you tell Jaymie about Trish?”
“He did, Mrs. Collins,” Jaymie said, folding her hands on her lap. “He told me all about her. And that he now thinks it was for the best.” Some of the triumph left the woman’s face.
“So you don’t think they’ll be arrested, or the Ice House will close down?” Lisa asked, bringing the conversation back to the matter at hand. She glanced over her shoulder, at one of her other tables. “I really like my job there, better than this one. You know, I wouldn’t think anything of it—the Redmonds being guilty, you know—except for those phone calls that evening.”
“Phone calls?”
“Yeah. Garnet and Ruby both kept getting phone calls, and a couple of times they left the restaurant.”
“Really. Were they gone long?”
“Ruby was gone for a good half an hour or more, at one point. Maybe more like three-quarters of an hour.”
“So you don’t mean they were gone together?”
“No!” Lisa said. “No, I didn’t mean that. They were gone separately, at different times, and not to dart league, either, because I asked Marg about that. It was weird. Usually once they’re there, they’re there.”
Separately, at different times. You could get anywhere on Hea
rtbreak Island in twenty-five minutes or less. If you had a bicycle, which everyone did, even faster. If one of them wanted to kill Urban, and knew where he was, Jaymie supposed Garnet or Ruby could have done it.
But their absences from the restaurant didn’t matter a jot, since the killing had happened right behind the Redmonds’ and Leightons’ homes in the wee hours of the morning. “What did Ruby say when she came back?” Jaymie asked. “Anything?”
Lisa shrugged. “I was busy. Didn’t see Ruby again until a while later. It was nothing, I guess, but some bored kids prank calling. That’s what I heard Garnet telling Marg about the stupid phone calls, anyway.”
“What’s this all about?” Jaymie’s mom asked, her brow furrowed.
Jaymie had hoped the others were involved in their chatter and hadn’t been listening in on the conversation. She was silent, but Lisa was the original Chatty Cathy. “Jaymie found Urban’s body behind you guys’ cottage, right? Creepy! I’d be really weirded out by that, but she’s a trooper.”
Daniel’s mother had a look of horror on her face. “You found a body? Is this about that terrible murder out on the island? And it was behind the cottage where you all want to have dinner?”
Joy opened her mouth to reply, but Daniel and his father started to both talk at once, and Lisa, her face blanked into puzzlement, seemed to get that maybe—just maybe—she had put a foot wrong. The restaurant manager was looking over at them, frowning, so the waitress excused herself to see to her other customers and hustled off. Daniel’s mother had been soothed into calmness again, but Jaymie’s mother still looked ruffled.
Jaymie wondered whether she should raise the family dinner issue. As laden with emotion as it had been, it might just be a less fraught subject for conversation than the murder and her discovery of the body. Of course, even the dinner party at the cottage had violent overtones, now that it had been revealed where the body had been found. Fortunately, the men began talking golf, and proposed a foursome for the next day at the country club, at which the Collinses had a temporary membership while they were in Michigan, and the conversation wandered off in another direction.
As the others chatted, Jaymie began to wonder about something she hadn’t thought of before: there didn’t seem to be a lot of blood on the scene for someone who was stabbed, even though his shirt was soaked. She closed her eyes for a moment, the image of the body popping into her head. The bloodstain on his short-sleeved summer shirt had been an elongated oval, spreading down to his left side, even though he was flat on his back.
And Urban had been cold to the touch. Her eyes popped open, and she stared blindly down at the glossy wood surface of the table. Now she wondered not only who had killed him, but when? If Ruby was gone for a good while, that evening, could she have killed him earlier? It didn’t seem likely. Jaymie knew she would have noticed his body lying in the ravine when she looked out at some point, before the light was completely gone, or later, when she went looking for Hoppy. No, his body had not been there earlier; she was sure of it.
When Jaymie tuned back in, Daniel was observing her with a puzzled frown on his face, but the conversation among the parents had turned to the neutral ground of gardening. Debbie Collins was an enthusiastic gardener, it seemed, and had taken on the task of revamping the Stowe House gardens.
“I really miss gardening,” she said with a sigh. “It’s just not the same in Phoenix.”
“Bakersfield wasn’t much better,” Daniel said, with a grin, referring to his hometown of Bakersfield, California. “Dry and dusty, too.”
“It is different here,” Debbie Collins admitted. Her round face was alight with pleasure, for once, and she spoke enthusiastically of her trips to a local garden nursery, and her purchase of three new trees for the lawn of Stowe House.
Roger Collins grinned. “Yeah, and of course who gets to move them?” The others laughed as he raised his hand. “I had to get the wheelbarrow out. One of those things, with the root ball, is about two hundred pounds!”
“It is not that heavy,” Debbie demurred.
“I’ll help you out, Roger,” Jaymie’s dad said. “You and I can manhandle those babies into place. I’ve done that before.”
Joy Leighton, a look of alarm on her face, said, “Alan, you will do no such thing. I won’t have you straining something!”
Their dinners came just then, and they ate, agreeing that the food was not as good as the name Ambrosio promised. But the evening ended pleasantly enough, and Jaymie was relieved. The older couples made conversation in the parking lot while Daniel and Jaymie said their good-byes on the riverfront walkway. It reminded Jaymie of the Seven Minutes in Heaven game she played as a curious eleven-year-old, when she got her first kiss from Josh Burney; it was awkward, and yet oddly stimulating. They kissed for a couple of minutes; Daniel was a rather good kisser, not too hard, not too mushy.
“I’m sorry about my mom,” Daniel said, holding Jaymie close in the warm evening air.
“Are you kidding? My mom is no picnic either, Daniel. I was going to bring up the family thing out at Rose Tree Cottage, but there was already enough tension. I just wanted dinner to go okay. I think it did; don’t you?” She looked up at him.
“It went just fine,” he said. “You seemed a little distracted, though. Is everything okay? Despite finding a dead body in your backyard?”
She appreciated his delicacy. He never made her feel weak, or like he thought she couldn’t handle something difficult. “No, it’s okay. Troubling, and scary—I mean, there’s a murderer on the island somewhere, probably, unless he or she is already gone—but I’m all right.”
“C’mon, you two,” Roger Collins said from the parking lot. “Get done and let’s get going.”
“I don’t think your mom likes me,” Jaymie said, as they walked arm in arm back to their parents.
He shrugged, but she felt a thread of tension in his wiry body.
“She’s still holding a grudge against Trish,” he said. “She’ll come around. How could she not?” He gave her a quick kiss and the Collins family moved toward Roger Collins’s rented Beemer.
The Leightons returned home, and her parents turned in. She fed Hoppy the doggie bag she had brought home, then sat out on the back step while he took his piddle and Denver prowled the perimeter. She was going to do breakfast for Anna tomorrow morning, work four hours at the Emporium, then head back out to the island, hopefully, from her earlier conversation with the police liaison office, to supervise the plumbers as they finished their work.
Something that was said that evening should mean something to her, but what? She went over her conversation with Lisa. Was it about Ruby being gone from the restaurant? Or was it something someone else said? Finally, hopelessly confused, she called the animals in and retired, to dream of ice cream and Daniel’s kisses, not necessarily in that order.
Nine
JAYMIE BUZZED THROUGH her morning, taking care of Anna’s breakfast service for her, then spending a few hours working at the Emporium, filling in as cashier for the elderly but fairly spry Klausners, who both had medical appointments. The Emporium was a big, square clapboard building with a Victorian false front. The porch spanned the entire width, and had been a gathering place, of sorts, for over a hundred years, from a time when the newest shapes in bustles were available at the dry goods counter, to the present, when boxes of water weenies and boogie boards were lined up along the huge old windows. At one end of the wooden porch a newly reinforced wheelchair ramp gave access, but at the front, by the road, three wood steps ascended, and that was where Jaymie and Valetta took their midmorning tea, partially shaded from the glare of the sun that was traversing the cerulean sky.
“So they haven’t made an arrest yet,” Valetta said, sipping out of her mug emblazoned with the saying “Drug Dealer” in big red letters.
“No.”
“Do you think it could be Garnet or Ru
by who did it?”
“I really don’t, Valetta,” Jaymie said, sipping her cooling tea. “What idiot would kill someone on their own property?”
Her friend shrugged. “It happens all the time. I don’t think if you’re killing someone you think of that. At least, not at that moment.” She had shed her lab coat, and tugged at the neck of her T-shirt, which sported a design of playful kittens in neckerchiefs.
What she said was true, but Jaymie didn’t want it to be Ruby or Garnet. She liked them both. Valetta was someone whose opinion mattered to her, so she tried to give it a fair chance in her brain. “Do you think it was one of them? Have you heard anything?”
Valetta chuckled. “No, not at all. I just think we have to keep an open mind.”
“You must know them both, right?”
“And like them.” She frowned off into the distance, and screwed up her mouth, suddenly serious.
“What is it?” Jaymie asked, watching her.
“There’s just something there, and I can’t put my finger on it. I’ve always felt like they’re hiding something.”
“Do you mean about the murder?”
“Good Lord, no. I haven’t seen either of them since the murder. But I’ve always felt there was something there that just . . .” She shook her head and shrugged. “I don’t know. Just something not quite right.”
Jaymie pondered what different people had said about Ruby, in particular. A couple of people assumed she was gay, and then Valetta’s brother was convinced that she was having an affair with Urban Dobrinskie. In a town like Queensville, rumors and gossip bubbled up through most conversation like magma, and Jaymie had long ago learned to ignore 90 percent of what people said. But could it be true? Was Ruby having an affair with Urban? Even an idiot like Brock Nibley had to be right some of the time.
Freezer I'll Shoot (A Vintage Kitchen Mystery) Page 9