Authors: Victoria Hamilton
Jaymie helped Anna out, then came home and washed all the Pyrex and other items she’d bought and carefully put them away. She stood staring at the old wood kitchen cupboards for a long moment; they were getting overfull, as Becca had pointed out. The tops of the cupboards were crowded too, and sooner or later she would have to thin out the herd of bowls, tins, utensils and bric-a-brac.
The extra storage in the Hoosier cabinet sure would be welcome. She could display some of her vintage kitchenware on it, but it was meant to be a useful piece, too. Cookbook number two,
More Recipes from the
Vintage Kitchen
, would be another collection of forgotten vintage recipes, like the Queen Elizabeth cake, reimagined for the modern kitchen. People longed for the past and were nostalgic for simpler times, but it didn’t mean they wanted to use all the old methods. There was nothing wrong with modern when it meant better or faster or more efficient. Or tastier!
It might be a while before she heard back about her first cookbook, she had learned from her online perusal of publishing websites, and until then, she had to keep busy.
Every year the Heritage Committee sent the extra goodies from the Tea with the Queen fundraiser to a different retirement home, and this year the selected home was Maple Hills, near Wolverhampton. When the ladies were looking for someone to deliver the tubs of frozen treats, Jaymie had volunteered. She had remembered something she had overheard from one of the auctioneer’s grandsons. He’d said that Mr. Bourne, the owner of the Bourne estate, was now living at Maple Hills. Maybe the elderly Mr. Bourne would be able to tell her if there was anything especially valuable about her Hoosier that would inspire someone to break into her home the very night she bought it.
She fired up her rattletrap van and headed over to the Queensville Emporium. They had commercial grade freezers, and so had volunteered to freeze and store the treats until they were delivered to the home. Valetta, who virtually ran the store for the elderly owners, met her at the back-alley entrance and helped her load the goods.
“How are you? I heard about your grandma; how is she doing?” Valetta asked once they were done loading the big plastic tubs of treats in the back. She searched Jaymie’s eyes.
“I’m fine,” Jaymie said, slamming the back door of the van. “Things are a little better. Grandma Leighton is going to be okay, the murdered guy has been identified—”
“Yeah, how weird is that?” Valetta said. She had heard all about it, of course, via the Queensville telegraph, also known as the Emporium front cashier, more efficient still than texting or Facebooking. “He’s been in Queensville this whole time, and under an assumed name. I wonder why? I heard he’s a friend of Daniel’s. You don’t suppose . . .” She eyed Jaymie. “Daniel Collins couldn’t be involved, could he?”
Jaymie thought back to her conversations with him. The text message he brought up with Zell McIntosh still nagged at her. “I don’t think so. Daniel’s too good a guy, and this was an awful shock to him. Whatever Trevor Standish was doing in Queensville might be the reason he was killed, and I sure would like to know who did it.” She shuddered. “I get the creeps every time I think about it. Someone killed, on my doorstep, and now knowing it’s a friend of Daniel’s . . . it’s just awful.” She paused. “I’m hoping the murderer is long gone by now. Why would he hang around, with all the fuss? He’d be taking an awful risk.”
Valetta nodded as she opened the door to the Emporium stockroom, ready to go back to her post. “He’s probably in Canada by now.” She waved and went back in to her pharmacy/catalogue counter.
Jaymie left Queensville and followed the highway south along the river, turning inland near where she and Becca had gone to the Bourne estate auction and then turning again down a road to Wolverhampton, a larger town a few miles from Queensville. She passed a Walgreens and a Kroger while she thought about Trevor Standish and why he might have been in Queensville and who may have wanted him dead.
From reading murder mysteries and watching TV, she knew that the identity of the murderer was most easily found if you knew what the victim was up to, and who was in his life. She had a few questions already that she wanted to know the answers to. Was he driving a rental car? And the name Lachlan McIntosh; had he just subconsciously—or consciously—taken the last name of his friend, Zell McIntosh? What was he doing in the time he was in Queensville? Had anyone noticed him in all those weeks?
She saw the sign and stone pillars that indicated the lane to Maple Hills, pulled into the lane and drove around back to the service entrance and unloaded the plastic tubs, hoping the treats, mostly cookies and squares, were still frozen. Once she had signed in and delivered them to a fellow in kitchen whites, she asked directions from him and made her way to the lounge area of the retirement home. Her original hypothesis about the victim’s death had been that it had something to do with the stuff she bought at the auction. Maybe Mr. Bourne himself could shed a light on what made something—either the Hoosier or something else—in all that stuff she’d bought at his family’s estate auction special.
Maple Hills was not posh, but was above standard. The guest lounge was comfortable, albeit worn, with faded blue carpeting and an electric fireplace, framed paintings and a courtesy table loaded with a coffee urn, tea carafe and foam cups. Jaymie glanced around and found herself being regarded with some curiosity by a young African-American woman in a cheerful outfit of scrubs with playful kittens cavorting across it as a pattern. “Do you know Mr. Bourne? He just moved here a few months ago.”
The nurse nodded. “He’s in 22C North, here on the main floor. You going to visit him? He loves having visitors.”
“I bought some things from his estate auction last week, and I’d love to know more about the stuff.”
“Oh, he’ll tell you. He’ll tell you
all
about it. Be prepared,” the young woman said with a laugh, pushing her medication cart toward the elevator.
Mr. Bourne was not in his room, but Jaymie was guided to where he sat in a motorized wheelchair at a sunny window in the library/lounge, literally twiddling his thumbs and looking out over the green lawns. Jaymie introduced herself and asked if she could sit down in the patterned wing chair opposite him.
“Mr. Bourne, I went to your estate auction last week and bought the old Hoosier kitchen cabinet. Do you remember it?”
“’Course I do. ’Member every detail o’ that cabinet. I’m old, but I’m not senile.”
Jaymie bit her lip to keep from smiling. It seemed to be her week for cranky oldsters. She could imagine being touchy about one’s mental faculties, though, because far too many people assumed anyone over seventy was lacking. She had the example of her grandmother to guide her and would never make that mistake. “Of course not, sir. I was interested in finding out more about the cabinet, when it was bought, if it was bought new, that kind of thing.”
“I remember the day the damn thing was delivered, clear as a bell, as if it was yesterday. That’s the day my father said Momma was trying to kill him.”
Thirteen
“T
RYING TO KILL him? What do you mean?” Jaymie asked.
The old man chuckled, which led to a coughing fit; he dragged a tissue out of his cardigan pocket and held it over his mouth. A nurse came over, gave Jaymie a sour look and got some apple juice for Mr. Bourne. Through all the nurse’s ministrations, the old man had a sly smile on his face, as if he was enjoying making Jaymie wait for the story. When he was better and the nurse had left, with an admonition not to “get him worked up,” he winked at her.
“Nurses. Not a sense o’ humor among ’em.”
“Mr. Bourne, what did you mean, your mom was trying to kill your dad?”
“Now, I didn’t say that. I said that’s what Daddy
said
. I’ll tell you the story of the day the Hoosier arrived, but you gotta promise not to interrupt me.”
Jaymie recognized defeat; there was no quick way out of this story. He had a visitor and a story to tell, and he was in no hurry to be done with either. Even though she also wanted to ask him about some other things, she nodded, recognizing a strong-willed personality when she met one. She’d have to let him do this his way.
“Okeydokey. It was 1927. Depression time.” He swiveled his gaze and glared at Jaymie. “You know about the Great Depression?”
She nodded. Grandma Leighton was a Depression baby, born when times were at their toughest.
“Momma was a nurse in the great war . . . the first one, you mind. That’s where she met Daddy; he got hisself gassed in France, and she nursed him back to health at a convalescent hospital in D.C. He was a fair bit older than her, but they got married and he brought her back here.” He paused, his eyes misty with remembrance. “She was from Indiana originally, you know.”
“A Hoosier,” Jaymie said. Lately, she had been inundated by Hoosiers, it seemed.
“Yup. She missed home, I think.” He gazed off out the window at a sparrow hopping from branch to branch on a flowering crab.
Jaymie glanced at her watch; it was getting on. She still had a lot to do. “Mr. Bourne—”
“She’d get this look in her eyes,” he continued. “And then she’d say something like, ‘They’d be doing this, that or the other thing in Indiana right then’.”
“What about the Hoosier cabinet and your mom trying to kill your dad?” Jaymie put in, trying to get to the meat of the story.
“Slow down, or go away,” he said grumpily, slewing his gaze over to her, his rheumy eyes watering.
She took a deep breath and sat back. He’d warned her. “Of course, sir. I’m sorry.”
While he spoke about his family, she forced herself to relax and listen and wait, thinking about her grandma, sending her healing thoughts and wishing she was with her right then. Maybe she should have gone with Becca, but at the moment, it had seemed best to send her sister on alone, since she could speed there while Jaymie took care of things in Queensville. As soon as she was free, Jaymie would go and visit, check in on the sweetest lady in the world.
She brought her mind back to Mr. Bourne and his tale of the good old, bad old days. He was an interesting-looking fellow, almost bald, with wisps of gray hair sticking out from his liver-spotted dome, deep pouches bagging under his eyes, making him look like a hound dog. He had gone back further, now, back to his father’s family, the Bournes. He told her about how they had originally emigrated from England to America after the Revolution, and how they had kin in Georgia somewhere. “Came over with a bundle o’ letters talkin’ ’bout how pretty Georgia was. Coulda gone to live there, but my daddy’s folks didn’t like slavery. Immoral, they said. Said it would cause trouble later, you see, and weren’t they right?”
Jaymie nodded, and said, “The Civil War.” She was anxious to get back to the story of his mother wanting to kill his father, but now knew better than to rush him.
“Anyways, 1927,” he finally said. “I was six. My momma’s only surviving child. Momma worked like a dog: kept chickens, sold butter from the Jerseys, did anything and everything to keep us goin’, while Daddy sat in the corner by the fire and carved pipes out of meerschaum. You know what that is, meerschaum?”
She didn’t, but she nodded, not willing to ask. The last thing he needed was an excuse to go off on a tangent.
“You’re lying, but I don’t care,” he said with a wink. “Meerschaum is some kinda seafoamy stuff found floating on lakes in Germany. I guess it’s some kinda mineral. Anyways, don’t know how much you know ’bout the old days, but in those days houses didn’t have kitchen cupboards.”
“I live in a family home, Mr. Bourne, in Queensville. My great-grandmother was one of the few who had cupboards installed when they remodeled the kitchen in the twenties, but I’ve always been fascinated by Hoosier and other brand cupboards. That’s why I bought yours.”
“Well, then you know money was scarce. Work was hard. Any bread we ’et, Momma made. Jam, the same. Butter, too. She had an acre garden and canned the vegetables. Kept chickens. She did everything she could to keep us afloat while my daddy sat in the corner and carved his pipes outta that stuff he ordered from Germany. Strange, him ordering that crap from Germany, when it was the Krauts that gassed him, but he was hard to figger out. Secretive bugger. Anyways, he said when the economy was back on its feet, those pipes would sell for a fortune.”
Jaymie was lost for a moment, imagining the loneliness and hardship his mother had suffered. Unlike the Leighton home, Bourne House was in the middle of nowhere even now, and in the twenties they probably didn’t have phone lines out that far, and likely didn’t even have a car. Vintage cookbook two tugged at her mind. “Did you keep her recipes? I’d be interested in seeing them.”
He eyed her, and his expression softened. “Momma wrote everything down. I’ll ask m’grandson. He’s the one looks after everything, since my daughter died of the cancer. Might have ’em. Might not. He tossed out a mess of papers and books when he emptied the house. No one has time for the old stuff anymore.” He was solemn for a long moment, staring out the window at the cheerful scene. Sighing, he turned back to her. “Everything changes,” he said.
“Some of us still have time for the old stuff,” she said gently.
He shifted in his seat, cleared his throat and continued. “Anyways, my momma worked like a dog, and my daddy never gave her so much as a kind word. He was a hard old sonuvabitch. Nowadays they’d say he had that ‘PTS’ or whatever y’call it.”
“Post-traumatic stress from the war?”
He nodded. “Back then they called it shell shock. And he oughtta’ve gotten over it. He treated Momma like she was his housekeeper. Then one day Marvin’s Cartage pulled up; Marvin, he had this big Morgan horse, size of a truck, and that horse pulled a heavy cart. He pulled up in the yard behind the house with somethin’ in a big old crate. Daddy tried to send him away, but Momma came out in the yard, arms crossed over her chest, and said it was for her. She was shakin’ when she said it, but still . . . even at the age o’ six, I could tell that she was determined to have her way, for once.
“She’d ordered the Hoosier cabinet from some traveling sales guy a few months before, and now it showed up. Daddy went sky-high, face turned the color of a beet pickle, asked how much it cost. Momma said a dollar. A dollar, he said! She was a damned liar, he said, and I thought he was gonna hit her. But then she said a dollar a week for two years. That’s when Daddy clutched his chest, fell backward onto the ground, writhin’ and a’wrigglin’, and said Momma was trying to kill him.”
Jaymie laughed at the picture. “Served him right,” she said. “It was about time she got something for herself.”
“Daddy was right in one way, though. Dollar a week for two years was a lot! But Momma loved that Hoosier; said it cut out hours of work for her. She’d polish it and clean it, croon over it like it was a baby. I was damn near jealous of the thing . . . like a brother to me, it was.”
Jaymie laughed out loud, and some of the other elderly guests looked over, as if surprised to hear laughter.
Mr. Bourne grinned, but then continued. “Ladies came from miles around to see it too, and plagued their menfolk for one like it. Momma was likely damned in more than one home that day. She became the queen of Bourne County, and wasn’t lonely no more.” He leaned over, tapped her hand with his knobby finger, and said, “Glad you got it. You’ll ’preciate it. I can tell.”
“Did your father ever come around? See its utility?”
“Funny thing about that,” the old man said. “Think he respected Momma for standin’ up to him. Got to be a joke, in a way, between ’em. He used ta hide things in it, y’know?”
“Really?” Jaymie asked, curiosity piqued. Finally, they were getting somewhere. “What kind of things?”
He shrugged. “That was way back, honey. I don’t remember.”
“Oh,” she said, deflated.
“He went a little loopy toward the end. Lived with me an m’wife, y’see, at Bourne House, long after Momma died, right ’til he passed. One night he got to laughing, I remember . . . this was when he was starting to go, you know . . .” He circled his finger around his ear several times. “Cuckoo. And he said, ‘Let’s play “Button, button, who’s got the button?” ’”
“What did he mean?” she asked, breathlessly, moving to the edge of her club chair. The button conversation! Was she finally going to learn what that was about?
The old man shrugged. “It’s a kid’s game. You form a ring and one o’ you has the button; whoever is ‘it’ has to guess who.”
“I know, but why did he say it?”
“Don’t know.” He yawned widely.
“Did it have a grinder with it when she bought it?”
“It sure did. She used that thing to make sausage and hamburger, relish, lots o’ stuff.”
So the grinder with it was likely original. “Mr. Bourne, I bought a bottle of old buttons at the same time as the Hoosier. Do you know if any of them are valuable? Is that what your father was talking about?”
“Not likely. Them was from my wife; she liked to sew.”
“But—”
“Nap time. You can go now.” He hit a button on his chair’s control pad, and turned, using the joystick.
Jaymie stood as he moved a ways away. “Mr. Bourne, did he ever say anything
else
about a button?”
“Young lady, he said a lotta crazy things,” he said, over his shoulder. “Used to quote from some old Frost poem ’bout a witch. He was nutty as a pecan.”
“Can I visit again sometime, Mr. Bourne?”
He turned back toward her. “No one your age comes here, y’know.” He stared at her, his blue eyes watering. “No one. Or hardly no one; one feller, a writer, was here a while back. But I’ll tell ya, my grandson, he’s almost fifty, and I barely see
him
.”
“I’ll come back,” she said, gently. “I promise.”
It was all a jumble in Jaymie’s head, as she bid him good-bye. A button. The Hoosier. She watched as he rolled away, down a hall off the lounge. On the drive home she sorted out what she had learned. All the stuff about the Hoosier’s history was fascinating, but the “Button, button” comments had thrown her. The detective now had the jar of buttons; would he give it back to her, or should she tell him about Mr. Bourne?
But it might not mean anything at all! She’d look like an idiot, phoning Detective Christian to tell him about a conversation with a ninety-year-old about his whackadoodle daddy and the kid’s game “Button, button, who’s got the button?” That was so many years ago, and how many other buttons could have been thrown out by the Bournes, given away, whatever? No button on earth was
that
valuable, to inspire murder!
Maybe this valuable button really was in the Hoosier. She’d have to search it more thoroughly, really take it apart. She acknowledged, though, that even if there once was something in the Hoosier, it didn’t mean it was still there.
She had to help Anna again, in preparation for the coming Memorial Day weekend, the real official test of her ability to run the Shady Rest Bed-and-Breakfast. Duty first, her grandmother had taught her. And if you promise something, follow through.
When Jaymie got home from that, she checked her e-mail; there was a message from Becca with a bunch of photos from the auction and the tea. She then did a search for a witch poem and Robert Frost. She came up with “The Witch of Coos,” and read it; the poem had a line about the game of “Button, button, who’s got the button?”
Strange and stranger. It all came back to a button somehow, but other than that she was no closer to solving the mystery. She’d definitely search the Hoosier again, but had a feeling she wouldn’t find any button in it. Even if it was once there, Mr. Bourne’s father had probably retrieved it and sold it decades ago. She fed the dog and let Denver and Hoppy both out into the yard. Dinner was a sandwich eaten while contemplating her empty garden. When she brought her plate in, the phone was ringing. It was Heidi. She still wasn’t sure how she felt about Heidi. On the one hand, the girl seemed harmless enough, but on the other, she was an unrelenting flirt, and Jaymie wondered if she could be trusted. Did Joel know what he was getting into? And why did Jaymie even care?
But Heidi got to the point quickly. Her voice breathy with haste, she said, “Jaymie, the dead guy . . . the one who was murdered . . .”
As if there was another dead guy, Jaymie reflected, and then decided she was just being mean.
“. . . I think he was one of the guys who was fighting over the Hoosier you bought. Joel said to think about it, and I did. He’s the guy Joel had to tell to shut up, and the one he decked, I’m sure of it! Is that important? Should I tell the police? Joel’s not home yet . . . should I tell the cops?”
Trevor Standish was one of the men fighting over her Hoosier? “Why are you sure it’s the same guy?”
“Well, first, Zell told me about his friend, the dead fellow, wearing a cable-knit cardigan, and I noticed that sweater on him at the auction. I knit. I thought maybe I’d try the design I saw on the sweater. When I thought about it . . . it has to be the same guy!”
“Well, they do already know who he is, and that he was in town for a couple of weeks, but yeah, you should tell the police. It establishes that he was definitely at the auction, at least.”
And
bidding on the Hoosier. She needed to take the cabinet apart and examine it more closely. She moved out of the kitchen onto the summer porch and eyed the piece. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t done so already, but now it was urgent, and she was anxious to get Heidi off the phone.