“She does data entry, but works from home, so she only drops in to pick things up or drop them off. Why? Do you want to see her, or no?”
“I want to see Craig first, so I want to be sure she won’t be in the office.”
Valetta made a quick call and established that Kathy was out. She leaned back out the order desk window, and said, squinting behind her thick glasses, “That all you need to know? Do you want to know what I think of your plan to befriend Kathy?”
“Not really,” Jaymie said. It was her own battle, and she had been stung by her sister’s memory of her as a mean girl. She didn’t think she had been that bad, but still, she was an adult now, and would do better. Would be better.
Valetta shrugged. “Just thought I could help.”
“Who is Kathy friends with these days?”
“Dani Brougham,” Valetta answered swiftly. “Dani owns a horse farm not too far from here, and she comes into Queensville to the feed-and-tack shop. Today will be her day to pick up her feed, as a matter of fact. She’ll be there the moment they open.”
“Guess I’d better go see Craig, then hopefully Dani.” Jaymie was nervous suddenly and wished she hadn’t sloughed off Valetta’s offer of advice so nonchalantly.
“Be yourself,” Valetta said with a smile twisting her thin lips. “Be sincere. Be honest.”
“Should I apologize for coining Craig’s nickname in high school?”
Valetta laughed, a horsey haw-haw that made Mrs. Klausner frown over her knitting. “I don’t think telling him you were the one who thought up ‘Pooper Cooper’ is going to win you any points.”
“You remember that stupid name, too?”
“How could I forget?”
Jaymie left the store and retrieved her dog. With Hoppy by her side, she set out to the street along the river where the office of Laskan Cooper took up the five rooms of a modified cottage. Taking a deep breath, she entered, a buzzer announcing her arrival. Craig Cooper came out to the reception room from a back office and looked around. When he saw Jaymie and Hoppy, he frowned and adjusted his glasses on his nose. “Jaymie Leighton,” he said. “Surprised to see you here.”
“Can I come back and talk, Craig?”
Brows raised, he nodded, and said, “Sure.”
She followed him back and took a seat across from him as he settled behind his desk in a room that once would have been a bedroom. It now had no identity but grayness: dove gray walls, steel gray furnishings, charcoal gray blinds. Even Craig was dressed in gray.
“What can I do you for?” he said in a brisk, jaunty tone that no doubt made clients produce folders of tax forms or receipts. He grabbed a sheaf of papers and tapped them into alignment.
She examined his pale, serious face, glasses set high on a beaky nose over thin lips, then took another deep breath, and said, “Craig, I don’t know if Kathy said anything, but I had a bit of a run-in with her yesterday at the Emporium.”
He nodded. “Heard about it.”
She reached down to pet Hoppy and untangle his leash from the leg of the chair. He settled underneath her and curled up on the nubby, mottled gray carpet. “I didn’t want that to happen, especially in front of Connor. But it involved Ella Douglas—she was Eleanor Grimshaw back in the old days; do you remember her from school?—and she’s in a wheelchair.” Craig was about to start talking, and Jaymie put up one hand. “I’m not here to argue over who was right or wrong. It doesn’t matter. At least…it doesn’t matter now. It’s over.”
She paused, trying to find the right words. “I just want to…I really want to put this all…the old mess…behind us, Kathy and me. Do you think…” She sighed and shook her head, then continued: “Do you know how I can make amends to Kathy? Has she ever told you why she hates me so much?” It was awkward, and Jaymie struggled, but she was determined to move ahead.
He tapped a pencil and glanced at his computer monitor, which held an image of a spreadsheet of some sort. When he saw her glancing at it, he turned the monitor away. “I don’t know. You were kind of a snob, back in high school. I figured it was something to do with that. Kathy really has never talked about it, at least to me. If I were you, I would just leave it all alone.”
That was not unexpected, but she was not going to be so easily deflected. That was what had caused her to let the grievance stew for sixteen years. “Let it alone; she’ll forget about whatever it is,” well-meaning friends and even her mother had told Jaymie. But Kathy hadn’t forgotten about it. Most people would have, but she was cut from different cloth. So Jaymie poured out her reasons for making amends after such a long time, reminding Craig what he should already know, that being “enemies” in a small town made folks uneasy. Mutual friends felt that they needed to take sides. No one invited Kathy and Jaymie to the same events or parties. It was silly. She stopped and watched Craig’s gray eyes behind the glinting glass of horn-rimmed spectacles.
He sighed and shook his head. The front door chime sounded just then, and Matt Laskan poked his head into Craig’s office a moment later. “Just me,” he said. He glanced at Jaymie and smiled, then said to Craig, “I just got done at the insurance agent’s office. That little break-in we had last week is not going to be worth claiming, despite the scrambled hard drive and the broken window. We’ll have to just pay the costs and swallow it. But we’ll have to be more vigilant, my friend, about keeping the alarm on.”
“Thanks for taking care of it, Matt.”
The fellow glanced at Jaymie, then said, “I ran into Kathy. She seems to think that the move idea is still on. Haven’t you had the talk with her yet?”
“Can we get into this later, Matt?” Craig asked, glancing swiftly at Jaymie and then back to his partner with a significant look.
“Okay, all righty. Just sayin’. You gotta keep the old lady in line.” He disappeared, whistling, presumably to his own office.
Hoppy, alerted by the whistle, whined a little and stood up, wobbling toward the door to the end of his leash. Jaymie tugged him back, and asked, “What did Matt mean about a move idea?”
“Nothing!” Craig said. “Jaymie, just leave Kathy alone. She’s got enough on her mind without you screwing things up more.” His tone was irritable, where it had been calm and equable.
What had happened? She stood up. She was not going to leave it alone, but she didn’t have to tell him that she was going to go talk to Kathy’s best girlfriend now. Maybe Kathy told her girlfriend things she didn’t tell her husband. “I’ll let you get back to work, Craig. Sorry to bother you.”
He nodded.
But Jaymie just had to ask again, as her brain processed the remark Craig’s partner had made. “So…are you moving? You guys leaving town?”
“No, of course not. It’s nothing important.” He didn’t meet her eyes and was already tapping away on the number pad of his keyboard, clearly signaling he was too busy to talk.
She glanced at her watch as she left the accounting office. Time for a brisk walk through Boardwalk Park, then to the feed-and-tack store down by the dock.
Queensville, situated as it was on the St. Clair River across from Johnsonville, Ontario, overlooked Heartbreak Island, shared by both Ontarians and Michiganders. The Leighton family owned Rose Tree Cottage on the island, and Jaymie oversaw its cleaning and rental through the spring, summer and autumn months, a task that most cottage owners assigned to a property management company. She stood on the walkway and leaned on the railing, watching a Norwegian tanker navigate the shipping channel, the narrow waterway in the middle of the river that was deep enough to accommodate such vessels. The tanker moved north majestically past Heartbreak Island, and back into the deeper blue of the safer passage in the middle of the St. Clair. The day was warming up. Canada was clear right now, the tiny town of Johnsonville just a green blob on the far shore, but on some mornings in summer there would be a haze near the river, a profound fog so white and dense nothing could be seen. A foghorn would sound to remind ships to navigate carefully.
Recently they had gotten much closer, and she liked Daniel a lot. He was the kind of man you could depend on, a good friend to have in a crisis. She supposed that what they were doing could be called dating, but she hated to pin a label on what was really just a friendship at this point, at least in her mind.
Daniel had dropped a medium-sized bomb on her a few days before. His parents, who lived near Phoenix, were coming up to see Stowe House. They were anxious to meet her, Daniel had told her. That meant he had been talking to them about her.
Also, he wanted to go with her the next time she went over to Canada to meet her Grandma Leighton, the family matriarch. That, along with his consulting her about changes to Stowe House, had her wondering if he was becoming a little too attached much too quickly. She was just seven months out of a serious relationship and wasn’t ready for anything more than casual dating. Joel Anderson had broken her heart into a million tiny pieces in December of the previous year, walking out on their serious relationship a couple of weeks before Christmas. She was just beginning to glue those shards back into something that resembled her heart.
Shaking herself out of her gloom, she walked on, keeping pace with the tanker ship as it majestically slipped upriver toward an oil refinery on the Canadian side. One thing at a time, and no point in worrying about things that might or might not happen between her and Daniel. His parents probably just wanted to see his lovely historic house.
At the end of the park, the walkway descended to the municipal docks and from there to an area of small, old shops, leaning against each other for support like rest home residents. Among them was a bait-and-tackle shop for the fishers who trolled the waters of the St. Clair, and beside it was the Queensville Feed and Tack. She checked her watch. The feed-and-tack shop opened at eleven, and Dani Brougham reportedly was regular as clockwork, their first customer of the day.
As Jaymie strolled toward the feed shop, an old green GMC pickup skidded into the parking lot, throwing up a spray of gravel, and a woman in jeans leaped out and headed toward the door. Jaymie followed, curious to see if this was her quarry.
Her guess was confirmed as she followed the woman in, and a guy in overalls looked up, and said, “Hey, Dani, what’s shakin’?” then glanced at Jaymie with curiosity. Jaymie smiled, but kept right on, following Dani Brougham to the back of the shop, where stacks of paper sacks were piled on skids in neat rows. She hadn’t thought of an approach, and everything she considered sounded weird and faintly menacing. So, you’re Kathy Cooper’s only friend, right? Or, Say, Dani, can we talk for a minute about why Kathy Cooper hates me so much? As it turned out, Hoppy provided the icebreaker by launching himself at Dani Brougham and dancing excitedly round the woman.
“Hey, little guy! Aren’t you a cutie-patootie?” Dani Brougham had a pleasantly gruff voice, and she continued to talk as she hunched down to scruff Hoppy’s neck until the little dog was wriggling with ecstatic joy. She finally looked up, and said, “He’s a cute li’l tripod, isn’t he? What kind of dog is he? How’d he lose his leg?”
“He’s a Yorkie-Poo, a rescue dog,” Jaymie said, smiling down at them. “He was found at a puppy mill, just eight weeks old, his leg caught in the chicken-wire cage. It was so badly infected, they had to amputate. I was just supposed to foster him past the surgery and recovery, but…” She shrugged. “That was three years ago.”
Dani laughed as she stood. “Who could resist, right? I normally like bigger dogs, but this little guy has loads of personality.”
She had never thought she would find herself liking Kathy’s best friend so much from the very first moment of meeting her. Every circuitous approach seemed dishonest and sneaky. “You’re Dani Brougham, right?” she blurted out.
The woman’s smile died. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“You’re a friend of Kathy Cooper’s.”
Her smile was reborn and lit up her blue eyes. She swiped sandy bangs out of her eyes and said, “Yeah, sure. You a friend of Kathy’s?”
“I was, once upon a time. Something happened, though, and there was some kind of misunderstanding, and she…we don’t speak now. Maybe she’s said something about it to you. I’m Jaymie Leighton.”
The woman’s expression was blank. “Nope, sorry. She’s never mentioned your name.”
“Not once?”
“Not once.” The woman paused for a moment and looked into the middle distance, her eyes unfocused. Then she looked back into Jaymie’s eyes. “Hey, did you and she have some kind of run-in yesterday?”
“Um, yes. Yes we did.”
Dani sighed and shook her head, then bent down and hefted a heavy bag of feed onto her shoulder, standing with the assurance of a weightlifter. “Look, I’d just let Kathy cool down. You must have really ticked her off,” she said, her head tilted sideways to accommodate the heavy bag of feed on her shoulder. “She came out yesterday to the farm, going on and on about how she was going to get back at all her ‘enemies.’ I told her to cool her jets, but she just said I didn’t understand, that some things were unforgivable, and that she’d make sure somebody suffered.”
“Who?” Jaymie asked, following as Dani headed to the front of the store. “Make sure who suffered?”
Dani passed the clerk, told him what she was taking and said she’d settle up next week, then sailed out the door with Jaymie and Hoppy trotting after her. She tossed the feed into the back of the pickup, then jumped into the cab of the truck and revved the motor, backing out of the parking lot while she said, out the open window, “I don’t know who. Her enemies, plural, she said, whoever they are. Let it blow over. I’m sure it will be fine. Kathy’s really a good egg. Gotta go; I’m on a tight schedule today. Bye!” She tore out of the parking lot in another hail of gravel and tooted her horn, before blasting off toward the highway out of town.
* * *
COMFORT FOR JAYMIE’S perturbed spirits was as close as her stack of vintage cookbooks, her fenced backyard and a cup of tea. It was after lunch. She had already taken care of the next day’s rental baskets and organized the food pickup for them, so now she had some free time for herself. Denver lay in the shade provided by her Adirondack chair, while Hoppy sniffed the fence line. Her next-door neighbors, Mimi and Grant Watson, were back in town, and their purebred toy poodle, Dipsy, was the bane of Hoppy’s existence, but he just couldn’t leave her alone. She snapped at him, growled, barked through the fence, and then ignored him when they were in company together. Hoppy was neutered, but Jaymie wondered if his obsession was a kind of hopeless crush on Dipsy.
The Watsons lived in their Queensville home in summer but wintered in Boca Raton, near Alan and Joy, Jaymie and Becca’s parents, so they had brought with them a few things for Jaymie and Becca, including a vintage book on Floridian cookery that had a recipe for Key lime pie she just had to try. Her mom had been listening to her during their phone calls this past winter after all, Jaymie realized.
Becca and her best friend, Dee, pulled in beside Jaymie’s ancient van in the lane behind the house. The Leighton home was one of the old ones in the center of the village, with no laneway in front but a carriage lane and stable behind. The stable was now a garage, of course, weighed down with trumpet vines, orange flowers draped elegantly, disguising the elderly structure. When Becca was staying, she used it for her much nicer and newer car, while Jaymie’s rust bucket van baked or shivered in the elements.
“Hey, you two,” Jaymie called out,
smiling as she noticed how Dee had quite a few boxes of junk to transfer to her car, which sat in the guest parking in the lane. “Did you leave anything untouched?”
“No, so you can come help me carry boxes,” Becca said, unlatching the gate and opening it. “I found a few things you’ll like, too.”
Oh no, Jaymie thought, getting up and strolling down the stone walkway that bisected the backyard. While she loved shopping for vintage kitchenware, she hated others doing it for her. She knew what she wanted, but others tended to think that anything old and kitcheny was right up her alley. Valetta was particularly bad at this; she enjoyed thrift-store shopping almost as much as Jaymie, but bought more for her friends and relatives than she did for herself. Jaymie had finally had to say that while she appreciated the thought, an avocado green plastic ice bucket from the seventies was not going to find a home in her kitchen.
But she obediently helped her sister unload and carry stuff up to the house. Three boxes contained serving pieces for Becca’s thriving business. Rebecca’s RLB China Matching could help anyone—for a price—find a replacement for their grandmother’s broken Spode platter, or a tea set to go with their Minton dinner service.
Becca’s miracle find for Jaymie was a big box of vintage cookbooks, and just a quick look through, as she set it on the trestle table, convinced Jaymie that Becca too had finally figured her out. Some of the titles were kitschy: The Book of Can Cookery, The Photo Method for Bread Baking and Anty Drudge’s Cook Book. She couldn’t wait to dig in!
Of course Becca had to spoil her anticipation. “But you had better really go through and get rid of some. I couldn’t just take a few because the whole box was up for bids, but we just don’t have room for it all.”
Jaymie stuck her tongue out at her sister behind Becca’s back, and Dee, as she stood watching in the door of the summer porch, smothered a laugh.
“I saw that,” Becca said, then chuckled.
It was a girls’ evening. Valetta came over after work, and Dee had stayed. They were hanging out with Jaymie and Becca to make the food for the next day’s picnic. The plan was to make enough for all their families, so the kitchen, by the time the sun started down, was unbearably warm, and the four women sat out in the backyard with glasses of lemonade, fanning themselves against the heat wave that had just begun to make itself felt across the Great Lakes Basin.
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