“Johnny sure didn’t help himself, did he?” Jaymie said. “I thought he was probably guilty, you know. But Valetta was so sure he wasn’t, and I thought I’d sniff around. He’s really lucky to have a friend like her.”
“She’s the kind of friend you’d want on your side.”
“One question I had was, how did Johnny Stanko know about my bowl being the murder weapon?”
“Ah yes, you found out about that—him knowing the bowl was the murder weapon—on your visit to him, which you never told me about.”
She flushed and wisely remained silent.
“He apparently got an anonymous call about it—we think that was from Bob Douglas, but we’re not sure—its purpose to incriminate Stanko by making him too knowledgeable or making him run. We think Bob is the one too who called us and told us about Stanko being in his house, resulting in the arrest. He was seen skulking around the neighborhood.” He gazed at her steadily, his gray eyes warm. “Jaymie, you need to keep your nose out of investigations, though, and I’m serious. It could be really dangerous. It was really dangerous. Bob Douglas intended to kill you.”
“I know. But I was just poking around,” she said. “There were things I wanted to know, but most of them had nothing to do with Kathy’s murder.”
“You didn’t know that at the time,” he pointed out. “That turned out not to be the case!”
“But I didn’t go to Ella’s because I was investigating. She hasn’t been well, and I was worried about her when she didn’t answer the phone. I didn’t figure out about Bob until I found her half-dead and saw that berry jam smeared on the toast. That’s when it all came together.”
He finally let her go. Valetta took her home, made sure she was all right and left her with Hoppy and Denver guarding her well-being.
The next couple of days were busy, and the town was buzzing with the news. The memorial service for Kathy was postponed, and a funeral was planned for Monday, after the arrest of Bob Douglas, first on charges of attempted murder of his wife, then finally—as the news came to Jaymie through the Queensville telegraph, i.e., Valetta—with Kathy Cooper’s murder.
Jaymie attended Kathy’s funeral with Becca—she had returned without Kevin—and Dee and Valetta. Dani Brougham and Emma Spangler were there, Dani weeping softly, leaning on Emma’s shoulder. Craig Cooper sat with his sister and Lily Fogarty. Matt Laskan sat alone, eyeing Lily with a heartbroken expression. Kylie, Connor and Andy Walker were there, as was Mrs. Hofstadter, also weeping inconsolably. Kylie, Jaymie heard, had prevailed upon her mother to stay at the Walker home for a few days. She would try to talk to Kylie and tell her that her mother wanted to help Mrs. Hofstadter, but she wasn’t sure how Kylie would receive what could possibly be viewed as interference.
The Methodist church was crowded, and the hymns chosen appropriate. Matt Laskan glowered over at Craig and Lily as the choir sang, from “Depth of Mercy”: “Now incline me to repent, / Let me now my sins lament, / Now my foul revolt deplore, / Weep, believe, and sin no more.”
“I found something out,” Valetta murmured to Jaymie after a prayer. “About Matt Laskan and his arrest. Remember I told you I might have a contact? I know a girl who does booking and admin at the jail. We can’t say a word about this to anyone, but the kerfuffle with Matt Laskan? It was a big mistake. Word is, he goes to Port Huron once a week to visit his sister!”
“His sister? Okay…but—”
“Shush. Just listen. She’s on the street,” Valetta said, casting the fellow a glance. Matt was still focused on Lily, but with a softened look and a trembling lip. “She’s an addict, and she hooks to support her habit. He goes to the city once a week to make sure she has been eating, and to try to talk her into going into rehab. Her pimp interrupted them, and Matt took a swing at him, then tried to take off with his sister in the car. The cops were called, and in front of her pimp she had to say Matt tried to kidnap her. But the charges were dropped when it was all sorted out.”
“Wow. In a million years I would never have guessed that explanation. So that’s why he was so puzzled, and asked why Lily would care? It’s no one’s business, really; he’s just a nice guy trying to save his sister from herself.” She felt awful for him. His sister was an addict, and his fiancée had dumped him for his business partner; all in all, not a great week for Matt Laskan.
The service was finally over, and everyone adjourned for coffee and cake in the rectory hall. Matt Laskan disappeared, though Craig and Lily were conspicuous by their solidarity in the face of disapproval. One generally did not attend one’s wife’s funeral with one’s girlfriend, but if they had a future together, maybe it was the best strategy to move forward.
The next afternoon, Jaymie picked some roses from her garden and took them to Wolverhampton General Hospital. Becca offered to go with her, but Jaymie really wanted to talk to Ella alone. When she entered the invalid’s room, Jaymie paused a moment, watching her. She was lying in bed staring out the window to the blue sky, streaks of sunshine blazing through the horizontal blinds, laying bars of shadow across her blankets. Her color was so much better than it had been that it was startling. She was hooked up to an IV, probably fluids, since the solanine poisoning had taken so much out of her.
“Hi,” Jaymie said, coming in, flowers thrust forward.
“Hi! My savior. I’m so glad to see you!” Tears gathered in her pale eyes and trickled down her cheeks, soaking into the neck of her blue-patterned hospital gown. She took the roses and buried her nose in the bouquet.
Jaymie pulled a chair up to the bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Better than I was. I’m back to being just a cripple!”
Not knowing how to answer, Jaymie was silent.
“So…I understand Kathy has been buried,” Ella said, a catch in her voice.
“Yes, just yesterday. It was a lovely service. Everyone talked about how much she’ll be missed.”
There was silence between them for a while. Then Ella said, her tone pensive, “You know, I’m the one who told the guy that Kathy liked, back in high school, that you said she and her whole family stank.”
Jaymie felt the gut punch, but in the last few days she had begun to wonder. “Why did you do that, Ella?” She searched the other woman’s face.
“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you the whole stupid, sad story.” Eleanor Grimshaw was new in school that year, and she wasn’t cool, the way some kids were, nor pretty, nor popular, nor smart or athletic. She was just “the new kid.” Her family’s farm was down the road from the Hofstadter farm, and Eleanor began to fantasize how nice it would be to have Kathy as a friend, to be able to hang out at each other’s places and ride the school bus together, to go to school dances as buddies. “But she had you. The last thing she wanted was another farm girl as a friend, because Kathy never wanted to be a farm girl, she wanted to be a townie.” Her voice faltered; Ella was clearly weary.
“You don’t have to do this right now, you know,” Jaymie said. “You can tell me this another day.”
“No, I need to do this today. I almost died, Jaymie. I was almost murdered! I married a murderer. I’m never not saying anything again. I’m never leaving anything to tomorrow.” She stopped and caught her breath, the roses lying on her legs, the buds starting to droop. “Anyway, I figured if I broke up your friendship with Kathy, then she’d want to be my friend. So I started the rumor that you said she and her family and her home stank like pigs. I knew telling that guy was the way to go, because he’d spread it to all his buddies. It worked! It got back to her that you had said it, just like I planned. I was there to console her when she needed a friend.”
“So you did become real friends?”
“For a while. But Kathy was obsessed. All she talked about was you, and your friends, and your family. She was so intense! And she wanted to get back at you. It’s all she talked about! I got sick of it. Sometimes when you get what you want, it turns out to be not what you want at all.”
Ella must hav
e been really lonely to have played such a mean trick.
“I wish I’d known,” Jaymie said. “I wish I’d known how lonely you were and had reached out. But I was in my own little bubble back then.”
“Don’t be sorry for me. I was not a healthy kid, not in any way. There was a lot going on at home, and I couldn’t know then that I was just…” She sighed, her eyelids drooping. “I was so unhappy. Anyway, when I couldn’t get her to lay off talking about you, I just turned around and became the meanest bully! I was so angry and miserable, and saying nasty things was all I could do. It felt better while I was doing it, but afterward it was awful.”
“I wish my mom had let Mrs. Hofstadter say something, like she wanted to,” Jaymie said. “Some adult intervention might have helped us all. Please don’t feel bad. You were a kid too, just like Kathy and me, and it sounds like you had enough going on in your life that we weren’t aware of. I wish we’d all been friends.”
“I came back to Queensville hoping that it was all over, that I hadn’t done irreparable damage, but there you were, years later, you and Kathy, still enemies. When I found out it wasn’t over, I didn’t know how to fix it. I was trying to summon up the courage to tell Kathy the truth, hoping that would fix things. I was going to that morning when she came over, but I was getting so sick. And then she apologized for being mean in the Emporium. I thought, if she can apologize to me, maybe she would to you, too.”
“But that wasn’t all she talked to you about, that morning, was it?”
“No. She went into the kitchen and was gone for a few minutes.” Ella closed her eyes, and sighed. When she opened them again, there was a profound sadness in the depths. “Kathy came back to the living room and asked me about the homemade jam in the fridge. I was surprised that she was in my fridge. In fact, I was a little put off—I don’t like people rummaging through my things—and maybe I snapped at her. I told her Bob made it, and that he was experimenting with local berries. Now I know what that was about. If she’d just told me…but I guess she only had suspicions at that point.”
Jaymie remembered how Ella acted about her belongings, her insistence that things be put back exactly as they were. Maybe that prickliness had made Kathy hesitant to confide her worries or suspicions to her old nemesis, which perhaps went back to overhearing Ella’s complaints in the Emporium about her vision problems, dry mouth, et cetera. Kathy, interested in all things medical, probably did some research on those symptoms, and discovered the correlation with atropine poisoning, Her hypothesis would have been confirmed by finding the deadly nightshade–laden jam. Kathy had had lots of time between the visit to Ella and the afternoon’s events in the park to do more research, and even to phone the Payne Institute.
But still…“You’d think she would have said something, like, don’t eat the jam!”
“Maybe she didn’t want to alarm me. I told her flat out I wasn’t planning on eating any more of it because I didn’t like the taste. She asked if Bob was due home, said she wanted to talk to him, that maybe she’d catch him that day, if we were going to be at the park.”
“Perhaps she wasn’t sure until she saw how he reacted to her questions about the jam.” Jaymie didn’t elaborate on that, though she knew from Bob what went down that evening when Kathy confronted him. “Why did you eat more of it, if you didn’t like the taste?”
“Bob begged me…said he’d made it better. I ate it to please him. He’d been so helpful. I wish Kathy had just said something. Now she’s gone forever.” Ella lay back, weakened by talking so long. Tears trickled from her closed eyes. “I wish I’d told her the truth, apologized for the past. I’m such a coward.”
“Ella, we’re adults now. If Kathy had just told me what was said about me back in high school, I could have told her that I’d never said it. We could have solved it. Once we grew up, it was our responsibility, not yours.” Jaymie thought back through the years. While they were friends, Kathy had rarely invited her to come out to the farm; she always wanted to spend time at Jaymie’s house or the cottage. “You know, I think she was hanging out with me, trying to become the ‘townie’ she wanted to be. And so her pride was hurt when she thought I dissed her. Injured feelings can be mended, but pride…”
Pride. When Joel left her, Jaymie’s pride had taken a big hit. She had figured out a lot since he’d left, though, and she was better now. It was his weakness—his inability to deal with a smart, independent woman—not hers, that had led him to leave her. She turned the conversation to other things, Ella’s plans now that Bob was incarcerated with no bail set.
“Glynnis, a cousin of mine, is coming to stay here for a while,” Ella said. Her cousin was a few years her senior and had just lost her job as a loans manager at a savings and loan. She needed someplace to live for a while. “She can help me, at least until she gets back on her feet.”
“I’m happy you won’t be alone,” Jaymie said. Ella was still heartbroken over Bob’s awful betrayal, but she almost seemed stronger without him, more decisive and with a better outlook on life. “I hope you feel better soon.”
“I hope so, too. They’re still doing tests to see if there has been any permanent organ damage.”
“Good luck. I’ll see you soon.” Ella’s eyes were drooping, and they closed as Jaymie left the room. She returned home, had lunch with Becca, then walked over to Stowe House. Daniel had just gotten in late the night before, and she wanted to talk to him. He greeted her at the door with a big hug and a kiss.
“I missed you!” he said, holding her close. “I can’t believe what happened while I was away.”
“Let’s go for a walk.”
It was a beautiful summer day, and they walked hand in hand toward the river, as if by common consent, not talking much. She told him her side of what had happened. It was only a few days ago, but it felt like quite a while.
“Daniel, I don’t think I’ve been very fair to you,” she said, stopping and indicating a shaded bench along the boardwalk path.
They sat. “What do you mean?”
She thought about what she wanted to say. “First, I want to tell you about my feelings for Joel.”
He tensed.
She glanced at him, saying, “I loved him; I really did. But that’s over.”
He relaxed.
“He was the wrong guy for me. He tried to make me feel inferior. He interrupted me all the time, corrected whatever I said.”
“He’s a jerk,” Daniel said sharply.
“You’re right; he’s a bit of a jerk, and I’m so over it. But, that said, I’m just not ready to get serious again. I don’t get there easily, Daniel. Joel and I dated for almost a year before…before anything happened. And he was only my second real boyfriend. I’m kind of a stick-in-the-mud.”
He was pensive and stared out over the river.
“Really, Daniel, it’s not y—”
“Please don’t say, it’s not you, it’s me,” he said tightly.
“Okay.” She paused. He was still tense, like he was waiting for the other shoe to fall. “I’m not saying I don’t want to go out with you, I’m just…” She shrugged, unable to form the thought into words. She watched his face. “Why did you move to Queensville, Daniel? You’ve never really told me.”
“Why does that matter?”
She watched him for a long moment and cocked her head to one side. “When was the last real relationship you had?”
He shrugged and was silent, staring still toward the river. She turned toward him, putting her knee up on the bench and her arm along the back. “Tell me,” she said, gently, squeezing his shoulder. “Did someone hurt you?”
“Has anyone gotten away unscathed?” he asked. “We’ve all been brokenhearted at some point.”
“Then tell me about your broken heart.”
He glanced over at her, and something he saw in her expression seemed to relax him. He talked. It was a long conversation, one that delved back five years before to a woman who’d worked with him and in wh
om he had placed a lot of trust. But she’d left him, breaking their engagement, telling him she didn’t want what he wanted: a home, a family…kids. “You want children, don’t you, Jaymie?” He turned toward her, and the longing on his face, the absolute yearning, was heartbreaking.
Her heart sank. “You came to Queensville looking for something, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I was just…driving. And when I came through Queensville, it was the weekend of the Queen’s Tea three years ago. Stowe House was up for sale, but the Realtor had allowed the event to go on. I stopped and had tea. You served me; do you remember?”
She shook her head.
“I asked you about the house, and even though you were busy, you talked to me. I called the Realtor that day and bought Stowe House.”
Oh crap. Jaymie felt her heart drop. He bought Stowe House because of her? How had she never known this? Was that creepy or sweet? She considered the implications. “You thought because I was a small-town girl with no career that I was just waiting for Mr. Right to marry me and give me children, didn’t you?”
“Is there anything wrong with getting married and having kids?” he asked, his tone exasperated.
“Of course not. But if that’s what I am to you, then I’m not the right girl.” She searched his eyes. “I might want kids, but not yet. I can’t even promise in the next five years.”
He held her gaze. “I get it,” he said, taking her hand. “I do. But since then, since I fell in love with Stowe House and bought it, it’s been three years. I found out you were going out with Joel, and I just got on with my life. Stowe House has become a project of sorts, I guess. I like Queensville, and I’m good, now. I’ve gotten to know you, Jaymie. I really like you. Honestly. Down to my heart.”
“And I like you, too.”
“So can we still go out?”
“No expectations, at least not for…oh, six months?”
He smiled. “Six months; let’s see, that takes us up to Joel and Heidi’s wedding, doesn’t it?”
She laughed out loud. “It does! I had completely forgotten about it.”
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