“Hey, Edith,” Jaymie said as she entered the main lobby and found the woman manning the check-in desk.
Edith looked over the tops of her bifocals. “Oh, hello, Jaymie.”
Jaymie explained her quest, and Edith said she could just leave the backrest with her, but Jaymie replied that if Mrs. Stubbs was in her room, she’d like to visit for a moment. It was only five thirty, so though the senior had eaten dinner, she was likely still up and about. Jaymie headed down the hallway.
It was Mrs. Stubbs’s crankiness that had saved Jaymie’s life during the spring incident, when a would-be killer was coming after her in an upstairs suite of the inn. Jaymie made enough noise that Mrs. Stubbs’s complaints sent her son, Lyle, up to the room at just the right moment. She had a profound regard for the old lady and had managed to enrich her new friend’s life by arranging for the wheelchair-bound woman to get over to Johnsonville on the Canadian side for a day trip that summer. She hadn’t forgotten her resolution to find out about getting a ramp installed at the new Queensville Historic Manor for Mrs. Stubbs and other wheelchair-bound townies, too.
“Mrs. Stubbs?” Jaymie said, knocking and entering.
“Who is it? What do you want?” the woman said, looking up from her book. She was an avid mystery reader and held a large-print copy of the latest M. C. Beaton on her lap, where she sat in her wheelchair in the pool of light shed by her bedside lamp. “Jaymie!” she cried, when she saw who it was. She put one long, arthritic finger in her book to hold her place and sat back, wincing a little.
Jaymie brought the bag over with the back support and explained it was something Dee had bought for her to try. She offered to put it in place, and the woman agreed. It was a simple thing, just a support with Velcro straps around the backrest. Jaymie securely attached it and the woman sat back, sighing with a smile on her face.
“That feels better. She’s a nice girl, my daughter-in-law,” Mrs. Stubbs said about DeeDee. “But she’s afraid of me. Needs to grow a backbone.”
Oh, she has plenty of backbone, Jaymie thought, recalling how Dee, a former ER nurse, had helped her mop up a terrible pool of blood on her back summer porch in the spring. “I think she can’t figure out how to stand up for herself with you and yet be respectful at the same time.”
“She should take lessons from you.”
“It’s easier for me, though, because you’re not my mother-in-law!”
“Sit, young lady; stop towering over me. Makes me feel like an invalid.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jaymie said with a laugh, sitting down on the edge of the adjustable bed.
“Now, I want to hear all about the goings-on with the society and that darned house! And I mean all the gossip, the more mean-spirited the better.”
Jaymie brought her up to speed with it all, but noticed the woman eyeing her through narrowed slits.
“You’re not going to talk about the murder?” she griped. “I’m disappointed in you, Jaymie. Thought you’d be front and center, ’specially since you found that crumb.”
“Crumb?”
“Crumb . . . a bum, what you kids call a jerk. I was at the meeting, don’t you remember? I heard that feller, Theo Carson. Dreadful man; not surprised someone bumped him off. Talked a bunch of baloney ’bout himself. At the same time, got everyone’s goat that had a goat to get! And he talked down to me. Despise that. I’m old, not stupid.”
Jaymie grinned. No one said things like Mrs. Stubbs. “How could I ever forget you were at the meeting? You did something I wanted to do, and told Prentiss Dumpe off! I loved it. Okay, shall I tell you all the gruesome details?” She told the older woman what she had seen, what she suspected, and what she had heard, as much as she could.
Mrs. Stubbs nodded, squinting into her bedside light as she listened. When Jaymie finished, the senior said, “Interesting. You keep me up to date, you hear?”
Jaymie agreed, then thought of something she wanted to talk to the woman about. “At the meeting you said you knew the old Mrs. Dumpe and her helper, Hazel Grinley Frump.”
“I did. Jane Dumpe was one of the town’s leading matrons when I was a young bride. She was head of the Methodist Church Ladies’ Guild and we had a separate ladies’ group for gatherings not related to the church. That’s what women did in those days instead of working, you know, or at least those of us who could afford to stay home. Lots of women still worked. Your grandmother, Lucy Leighton, was one of the younger ladies we invited to join, along with Imogene Frump—she’s Hazel’s niece, you know, by marriage—and Tree Bellwood,” she said, referring to Mrs. Bellwood by her seldom-used nickname, “Tree,” short for Trelawney.
“At the heritage meeting you said Mrs. Dumpe was not one to suffer fools gladly. What did you mean by that?”
She snickered, then set her book aside, reached for a tissue and blew her nose. Eyeing Jaymie, she said, “You got time for a story? Younger days in Queensville?”
“I do!” Jaymie said, popping up from the bed and dragging a chair over to sit more comfortably in easy view of the older woman. “As long as I’m not keeping you from anything.”
“Hmph . . . what would you be keeping me from, the grave? Saw a young man on Halloween night dressed up as the Grim Reaper and nearly had a heart attack; thought he’d finally come for me.”
Jaymie laughed, as she knew she was meant to. Mrs. Stubbs was cranky and had alienated many, but if you stood up to her, she was a pussycat. “Tell me the story,” she prompted.
The woman settled in. “Jane, as I said, did not suffer fools gladly. And Hazel . . . poor Hazel.” She shook her head, her eyes misty with remembrance. “She was what you’d now call naïve, but we called empty-headed. She was a good soul, but not bright at all.”
“I know the kind,” Jaymie said.
“Hazel believed everything anyone told her and everything she read in the trashy magazines she loved. You young folks get your lies from the Internet; well, she got hers from dime magazines. She believed that communists were listening to her through the ductwork. She was convinced that aliens had abducted her uncle Seth and taken out his heart, replacing it with a pig heart.” She snorted with laughter. “Jane had just about enough with the foolishness, and one day she decided to do something about it.”
Mrs. Stubbs looked like she was getting sleepy, but Jaymie did want to hear the story, so she stayed quiet, not offering to listen some other time, as was her instinct when she saw an older person tiring. She had learned just to let Mrs. Stubbs take her time and catch her breath.
After a moment, the woman went on. “Jane enlisted my help to trick Hazel, and I didn’t dare say no. This was a few years after the war, you know, World War Two. It was the early fifties. We were all young mothers or newlyweds. I had Lyle then, but Johnny wasn’t born yet,” she said. Johnny was DeeDee’s husband. “I drove; not all the ladies did, so most relied on their husbands to shop at the bigger grocery stores in other towns. I sometimes took friends with me, and at Jane’s urging, I offered to take Hazel shopping in Wolverhampton. On the way we stopped at a little roadside market where the produce was fresh and local.”
She paused and picked up her glass of water, taking a long drink. Jaymie patiently waited.
“Well, Jane had enlisted a couple of her nephews, young hooligans who thought it was a lark, and made them costumes—just long robes, really—out of this shiny sateen fabric she had for lining some dress. We went to the market, Hazel and I, and I told the proprietors we wanted some pumpkins for pies, not the big old ones for jack-o’-lanterns they had piled up by the cash desk. Well, they sent us out back to the field, like I knew they would, where I insisted to Hazel I would find the smallest, sweetest of the pie pumpkins. She followed, just as I knew she would. It was one of those gloomy raw days in late October.”
“I can picture it.”
“I was very smart in those days, with a woolen coat, stylish ha
t, gloves, handbag, everything. Hazel did her best, but there was always something not quite right, her hat askew, her gloves stained.” Mrs. Stubbs looked melancholy for a moment. “I wish I could go back and be kinder to that poor woman. Anyway . . . they had a corn maze set up for the youngsters, you know, and I led Hazel out toward it, when all of a sudden these fellas erupted out of the maze in their silvery suits and googly eyes, silver-painted helmets, the whole thing,” she said, laughing, sketching the commotion in the air with her arthritic hands. “They came toward us, me trying not to burst out laughing, and poor Hazel, she took one look and started screaming!”
“Oh, no!” Jaymie murmured, watching Mrs. Stubbs’s face, lit with a sparkle in her cataract-dimmed eyes, her mouth stretched in a devilish grin.
“She screamed, ‘The martians are coming! The martians are coming!’ and ran all the way past the vegetable stand, past my car and down the highway, dropping her purse and leaving a trail of tissues and lipstick and keys and whatnot after her on the way.”
She laughed and Jaymie joined her, at the vivid picture the old woman had created. After the laughter, though, Mrs. Stubbs soberly said, “Afterward, when Hazel learned it was all a joke on her, she said to me, ‘I expect that kind of abuse from Jane, but I never expected it from you, Martha,’ and she walked away.” She compressed her lips and sighed. “I didn’t know whether to be ashamed or unrepentant. Hazel didn’t talk to me so much after that.”
She closed her eyes and put her head back. Jaymie knew she was tired. It was well after six, and for Mrs. Stubbs that was getting close to bedtime. She had intended to talk to the woman about the will supposedly penned by Jane Dumpe, leaving everything to her grandson, Prentiss, but it was going to have to wait. She wanted to think about it some more, anyway. Jaymie moved her chair back into place, then hugged the elderly woman. “I’m sure she forgave you, ma’am,” Jaymie said. “You have a good night, Mrs. Stubbs, and sleep well. I’ll send Edith down to you, shall I?”
Jaymie walked home and was greeted by Hoppy, who went a little insane, wiggling and leaping, hopping and wobbling around the kitchen when she let herself in. “I know, sweet boy, you’ve been on your own all day.” She let him out into the yard, after checking for skunks, and made herself a cup of tea and warmed up some of the previous day’s dinner in the microwave. She was tired, and yet she didn’t feel she’d gotten anywhere all day. She had been just pedaling madly to keep up.
She had put her cell phone on the charger the night before, after the chief gave it to her, so now she sat down with her dinner at the kitchen table as Denver jumped up on the chair next to her to watch. Since he had had most of his bad teeth removed he was eating more and starting to look like a butterball. “I keep saying I’m going to call Daniel, Denver, and yet I don’t. What do you think that means?” He looked at her and licked his chops.
She ate some, then clicked on her phone. It chimed, meaning she had a text message. She touched the screen and a longish message popped up. It was from Zack Christian, and the first line was, Been thinking of u a lot lately . . .
Fifteen
. . . SO WHEN CHIEF L. gave me your cell #, I figured I’d text u. How’s everything in Q’ville? —Zack
Jaymie stared, her stomach turning over and scrunching. She put the phone down, ate some more, then picked it up again and read on, grateful that though Zack did abbreviate his text, he didn’t make it unrecognizable.
Left in a hurry; sorry I didn’t say g’bye.
He had texted again, continuing his conversation . . . Do you want to talk sometime? Call me.
She had always brushed off her attraction to Zack Christian as a one-sided crush, just a physical reaction to his good looks and intense personality. But she had learned that he was a truly nice guy, as well as hot, and discovered that she liked him a lot as a person. The lusty dreams of him had stopped, though, as she got to know him better, and since he’d left Queensville she’d rarely thought of him at all. However . . . her heart still beat a little faster when she thought what this reaching out by text might mean. Did he like her as more than a friend?
But Daniel was her boyfriend. He was the one who had pursued her. She liked him because he was smart, easygoing, energetic and not clingy. Or so she had thought. Lately, though, she had been pushing him away, and it had nothing to do with Zack. Daniel just seemed to want more than she was prepared to give; he was anxious to get serious more quickly than she was comfortable with. She had begun to resent the deadline of Christmas for figuring out if she wanted to take their relationship to a new level, and that wasn’t fair because the deadline was a mutual decision, not just his. Her state of confusion was not a good indicator of being ready to settle down to serious dating.
She was left wondering . . . why did Zack want to talk to her? Was it just that he was lonely in his new job? Was she a friend? Or . . . was it more?
She picked up the cell phone and looked further. There were several texts from Daniel, starting with a response to hers, but then more along the lines of Where r u? and Why haven’t u answered? Is everything all right?
Daniel was still the same good guy: solid, dependable, good-natured, fair . . . most of the time. But there were quirks, things she just wasn’t sure about. Over the past five years he had apparently become addicted to buying houses in random cities across the country, staying there for a few months each time. It made no sense, when his business was in Phoenix. What was up with that? He would never say, just shrugged his shoulders. It made her uncomfortable and left her wondering if he would just abandon Stowe House and Queensville at any minute with no explanation. She had begun to wonder if her initial assessment of him as a straightforward, no-nonsense, uncomplicated nice guy was truly who he was, or just the aura he gave off.
She needed to think.
It was only seven thirty, but she was so tired. She brought Hoppy in, locked up and headed upstairs, took a hot bath, then retreated to her bedroom. It was an oasis of calm in a frazzled world. Butter yellow and warm, it was furnished with an antique iron bedstead, a 1940s dressing table, an Eastlake chest of drawers and a modern bookshelf crammed with Mary Balogh, Mary Jo Putney, Eloisa James and Jo Beverley books and a hundred other romance novels, all historical. She lived in the past, some (including her mother and sister) said, but that wasn’t true. She very much lived in the present.
She sat cross-legged on the homemade quilt on her bed with Hoppy curled up next to her. Denver entered and leaped up to the bed, settling himself on her other side. It was eight o’clock, six in Phoenix. Daniel should be home. She picked up the cordless phone from her bedside charging unit and dialed.
“Hello!” came his hearty greeting.
“Daniel! It’s so good to hear your voice.”
“Uh . . . hi! How are you?”
“I’m good.” His voice sounded odd. It had started out hearty and happy, but changed to guarded the moment he knew who had called.
“Is everything all right, Daniel? I have so much to tell you. To start with, I’m sorry I didn’t respond to your texts, but—”
“Can you hold the line a second? I’ll be right with you.”
The sound went muffled, but she could hear him say something in the background. Maybe he had company, or an employee, over; he often worked from home. There was a rustling sound, a door closing, it sounded like, and then he came back.
“Hi, Jaymie. How are you?”
“I’m good.” She paused, feeling awkward. “Daniel, if I’m interrupting something you can call me back later. I’ll be reading for a couple of hours.”
“No, no, it’s okay. Now, you said something about the texts I sent?”
She launched into her story, telling him all about the text from Isolde and finding Theo Carson’s body. He sympathized and added an “I told you so” about staying away from the house.
“That’s why I went with Valetta,” she said, to avoid nagg
ing. “I just can’t figure out the text message from Isolde’s phone, though; I mean, why? And we still don’t know where the cell phone is.”
“Are you sure she’s telling the truth?”
“Not really. I’m not sure of anything to do with this mess.” She related her discovery of the root cellar and the stolen goods stored there. “But then the most extraordinary thing happened!” She told him about the chief and Bernie paying her a visit.
“I don’t like that,” he said, his tone wary. “What does he think he’s doing? The police chief has no right to draw you into it! Stay out of it, Jaymie. Stay well out of it.”
That was not the reaction she expected. She understood his concern, but she was an adult, and could handle herself. Stiffly, she said, “I don’t intend to go investigating, or snooping, Daniel.” She crossed her fingers, a juvenile response, she supposed (especially since she had just been thinking that she was an adult and wanted to be treated like one), but it was true; she didn’t intend to snoop, but she did have questions. “I’m mostly concerned about other things now.” She told him about finding the will leaving the house to Prentiss.
“That’s a problem,” he said.
“I know! It would mean we did a bunch of work for nothing, but that would really be our own fault. Prentiss kept saying that his grandmother would never leave the estate away from direct family, but not a single one of us thought he had a leg to stand on.” She paused, staring off into the distance and ruffling Hoppy’s fur. “I still think there’s something fishy going on.”
“Fish . . . uh, what did you say about fish?” Daniel asked.
He seemed distracted again, and she could hear a voice in the background.
“Just a minute,” he said and muffled the receiver.
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