A Deadly Grind (16 page)

“We don’t even know what it is yet. And how would he know about this?”

She wasn’t about to go through all she had already established, the Bourne family history and the “button” chase she had been on. “
Is
it valuable? How are we going to know?”

“Well, I suppose a letter from 1776 could be; I think it really depends on who it’s from.”

“The ink is kind of faded. Let’s look at it in better light.” They moved into the kitchen, and Jaymie put on the overhead, an old pendant light still remaining from the 1920s remodel of the kitchen. She sat at the table, and Daniel looked over her shoulder as she flattened the paper. She was a quick reader and got to the bottom. “It’s about stuff going on after the Revolutionary War,” she said, with growing excitement. “How cool! But—” She stopped dead at the signature. “This signature . . . Button Gwinnett!” Button.
Button!
She gaped in astonishment; it was a name, a
person
, not a thing! The “button” was this letter!

“Button Gwinnett!” he said, his voice hollow.

Jaymie looked up; Daniel appeared stunned too, and put his trembling hand to his head, reflexively pushing back his floppy bangs.

“Do you realize what we have here?” he asked, his lenses glinting in the light. “It’s a Button Gwinnett letter.”

“Should that ring a bell?”

“Well,
yeah
!” he said, with heavy emphasis. He clutched his forehead with both hands and scrunched his sandy hair. “Button Gwinnett was the representative from Georgia to the Continental Congress,” he said, rapidly. “He . . . he became the governor of Georgia, and so he was one of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence!”

Jaymie’s eyes widened, and she stared at the letter, her hands truly shaking now. Anything connected to the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence was of historical value, but often monetary value, too.

“Not only that,” Daniel continued, sitting down heavily in the chair next to Jaymie, “but he is the rarest of all signers, because he died a year after the signing, from a wound he got in a duel with Lachlan McIntosh.”

They looked at each other, in stunned disbelief. “Lachlan McIntosh,” Jaymie whispered. “That was the name Trevor was staying at the Inn under.”

“How did I not recognize that name?” Daniel shook his head. “So this letter, this is the whole reason Trevor came here.”

“If it’s real—”

“—it could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe even a million.”

“Enough to murder someone for, if you’re that kind of guy.” Her mind was whirling, from fact to wild supposition. It made sense that Trevor would want the letter; he was, as she had learned from Daniel, a historical document dealer. But how did he know it was in the Hoosier? And who else knew about it and had killed him? And why
before
he had the letter? That, in particular, beyond all else, made not a bit of sense.

“I have to tell you something, Daniel. I think I overheard Trevor at the auction talking to someone else, a coconspirator, about the Button letter.” She explained, finally, about the “button” mystery. “And Heidi phoned earlier to tell me he was one of the ones fighting over the Hoosier,” she added.

“What did the person Trev was talking to sound like? Did you recognize the voice?”

“That’s just it, I can’t even tell you if it was a man or woman. The person was whispering.”

“Shoot. Whoever that was either killed Trevor or may know who did.”

They reread the letter together. It was from Button Gwinnett to his in-laws in England, the Bourne family. So that explained the connection to the Bourne estate. Jaymie remembered the conversation she’d had with Mr. Bourne, about his father’s “Button, button” game joke, and the packet of letters the Bournes had brought with them when they emigrated to Michigan. This might be the only surviving relic of that time, a single, solitary, valuable letter.

The tragedy of Trevor’s murder closed in on her. He had been so close, his hand stretched out to search the Hoosier, and then he had been struck down by someone. Why? Why, when the letter was still to be found? Or was that the point?

She asked those questions of Daniel—he didn’t have answers any more than she did—and then told him the rest of the backstory, all she had learned so far. It was late, and Jaymie was overwhelmed with weariness suddenly. She laid the letter down on the oak table. “This has all been too much. In the morning I’ll figure out what to do with the letter. It should go to Mr. Bourne, but first, I guess turning it in to the police is the best thing. Or at least telling them about it.” She was torn; which was the best thing to do? “I’ll do that first thing in the morning, when my mind is clear.”

Daniel appeared troubled and took off his glasses, wiping them again on his shirttail, which was looking increasingly rumpled. “This is an awfully valuable letter, Jaymie,” he said, tapping it with one long, bony finger.

“I know that.”

“I don’t want to tell you your business, but I really don’t feel comfortable with you having it here. Someone
killed
Trev for this thing.”

She was silent, watching his troubled expression. What was he getting at? She supposed she could call the police now, but why would it matter if she did that immediately or in the morning? There was not a thing they could do about it at this time of night.

“Look, why don’t I take it and put it in my safe overnight,” he said. “No one will know it’s there.”

“Then what’s the point, Daniel?” she said. “If no one
knows
it’s there and not here, then it makes no difference.”

“Except no one can steal it from you if it’s in my safe.”

She shrugged and tried to ignore the moment of suspicion that sent a trill down her back. Daniel was Trevor’s friend; could he have been involved, even somewhat innocently? No, she couldn’t believe that. He could not possibly be a good enough actor to have feigned ignorance when they’d found the letter and identified it.

“This explains the ‘venture’ Trevor wanted you to invest in,” she mused.

If he’d known about the existence of the Button letter, but not exactly where it was, it might have taken him that long to track it to the Bourne family estate. And if he was as perennially broke as Daniel said, then he needed money to live on while he searched.

“I didn’t hear from him again, so he must have found someone else to give him money,” Daniel said. “The sad thing is, he didn’t trust me enough to tell me exactly what the investment was.”

“He knew you wouldn’t fund him trying to steal a national treasure like that, or theft of any kind, for that matter. You guys are clearly different men.”

“True. I would have . . . I don’t know . . . told Mr. Bourne about it, I suppose.”

“So I must have overheard him talking to his investor. Maybe that’s who killed him?” If Trevor had been in Queensville for weeks, he had likely been tracking down the letter. What a panic he must have been in when he discovered that the entire contents of the house were going on the block, she thought, and how relieved when he figured out that the letter must be somewhere in the Hoosier! He
must
have been the “writer” who’d talked to old Mr. Bourne. If Mr. Bourne had spun the same tale of his father, the “Button, button” references and the old Hoosier, it all probably came together for Trevor. He’d figured out exactly where the letter was.

How much had he told his investor? She recalled the conversation she’d overheard. “He wasn’t willing to say exactly where the letter was,” she told Daniel. “But it would have become apparent that it was in the Hoosier as soon as he began bidding on it. That explains the opposing bid, and the fight. Maybe his coconspirator was trying to cut him out of the loot.” He had already told Zell that people were trying to cut him out.

“Heidi and Joel said the fighting at the auction was with a man, right?” Daniel said.

“Yeah. That narrows it down a little,” she said, with a half smile. “Though I wasn’t really thinking a woman bashed him over the head anyway.” She put her hand over her mouth, realizing how indelicate her phrasing was when she saw the look on Daniel’s face. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to put it that way.”

He shrugged. “I know. Please reconsider keeping the letter here, Jaymie. Someone killed Trevor to get their hands on this.”

“I know, but I can’t believe that the murderer would stick around Queensville with the police presence now. It was different before, when nobody else knew.” She was still stuck on why the killer had murdered Trevor
before
he had the letter. “Maybe the killer thought Trevor had found the letter, and searched him after hitting him on the head, but didn’t have time to look in the Hoosier because of the ruckus it was causing, Hoppy barking, and all that.”

“You can’t be sure they won’t try again.”

“We’ll leave the Hoosier out on the porch, but I’ll hide the letter.” She grabbed the book on Hoosier cabinets she had been perusing earlier, while eating dinner, and stuck the letter in the book, then put the book up on her cookbook shelf.

He was watching her when she turned back. “I didn’t mean that I was worried about the letter.”

“I know.” She stretched. “I’ll turn it over to the cops in the morning and tell them everything, I promise. Come on, help me put the Hoosier back together, and then I’m going to bed. To sleep.”

He took the hint and headed back to the summer porch. She slid the countertop back into place, then they put the top cabinet of the Hoosier back up on the base unit. He turned before he stepped down from the summer porch. He put his hands on her shoulders and she could feel the warmth through her T-shirt. “You be careful, though. I don’t like this, not a bit.”

She looked up into his worried eyes, and said, “It’s just one night, Daniel. It’ll be all right. I promise I won’t keep the letter here after tonight.”

“Okay. As long as you promise.”

He looked like he was undecided about something, and she half expected him to kiss her, but he firmed his lips, nodded and dropped his hands to his sides. “Talk to you tomorrow, then.” And he was gone.

“C’mon guys,” she said to Hoppy and Denver, who had been hiding under the Hoosier as long as Daniel had been in the house, but now slunk out to glare at Jaymie. “It’s time to hit the hay. I’m so tired I can’t think straight.”

She locked up thoroughly, then eyed the bookshelf for a moment. “It’ll be safe there. Won’t it?”

Hoppy watched her and gave a sharp yip.

“Right. I’m just tired and imagining things,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “I can’t help feeling like I’m being watched, but that’s just stupid. I need sleep.” In the clear, calm light of morning, she would look at the letter one more time, before turning it over to the police.

Fifteen

H
ER MARY BALOGH book couldn’t hold her interest—a rare moment indeed, when that happened—the bed felt lumpy, and her pillow wasn’t the right shape. She just couldn’t get comfortable, no matter how hard she tried. As cool night air puffed in the open window, ruffling the dotted Swiss vintage curtains, and Hoppy sighed and groaned in his sleep, turning around and around on his pillow under her night table, she thought about Daniel. Was he the good guy he seemed to be? She’d been wrong before, and it left her wondering about her radar where men were concerned. Daniel liked her, she could tell, but why?

Deliberately turning her mind away from her love life, or lack thereof, she shivered as she thought of the letter. The Button. Who had she heard talking about it at the auction? One of the speakers was Trevor, but who was the other person? Denver jumped onto the bed and curled up at her feet, one forepaw flung over her ankles. Hoppy groaned and whimpered, chasing Denver in his dreams, probably, something he didn’t dare do in real life.

She thought back to the auction; one of Lesley Mackenzie’s muscular grandsons had said he’d been hired as security because someone had broken into Bourne House and rifled through everything before the auction. Had that burglar been looking for the Button letter? Given its extraordinary value, that seemed logical. So was the burglar Trevor Standish? Probably, but not absolutely. It could have been his untrustworthy coconspirator.

She turned on her side, and Denver grumbled. “Sorry, fella,” she whispered and scratched his head.

When Trevor and whoever had bid against him lost out on the cabinet because of their fight, Standish had to go to “plan B”: break into her summer porch and search the Hoosier. But it still nagged at her; why had someone—his untrustworthy partner or someone else—killed him before he’d found the Button letter?

As she lay wide-awake, she remembered sweeping the porch and finding a corner of some kind of paper. She meant to have another look at it, but had forgotten completely. It hadn’t seemed relevant until now. Where had she put it? She sat up and turned on the light, found the torn corner of paper in her jeans pocket, then sat on the side of the bed and examined it.

It was old paper, yellowed and with faded courier print from a typewriter. Since it was just a corner, though, it was hard to tell what it was, or had been. She squinted and blurred her vision. Sometimes that helped. Hmmm. A receipt, maybe? Part of a line of an address? But what was it doing on the floor of her summer porch? It was probably just the product of her exhausted mind that she connected it in any way with the murder. It could easily have fluttered out of one of the cookbooks, since they had been spilled across the floor during the fracas.

She turned the light off and lay back down. Now she had an even longer list of questions, for which she had no answers. That was an uncomfortable state, and left her nowhere to go but finally, blissfully, to sleep. It was some time later when her bedside phone rang and she grabbed for it reflexively, her mind instantly going to her grandma or her parents, as middle-of-the-night phone calls are never good news.

“Jaymsie? Is Heidi there? Did you see her?”

“Wha—?” Jaymie put her legs over the edge of the bed and sat up in the pitch-blackness, scrubbing her eyes and holding the phone receiver to her ear. “Who is this?”

“It’s Joel! I woke you up?”

She squinted blearily and looked at her clock radio. Two-thirty-seven . . . and he had to ask if he’d woken her up? “Why are you calling me, Joel?”

“It’s Heidi. I just got back—I wasn’t supposed to be back until tomorrow—but she scribbled down your name and address on a notepad by the phone. I thought maybe . . . look, did she talk to you tonight?”

“Last evening?” Jaymie shook her head and sat up straight, clearer. She turned on her bedside lamp and flexed her shoulders. “Yes, I spoke to her.” She had a vague memory of the conversation, but hadn’t been paying complete attention because of the information the girl had just given her. Heidi had asked if she should call the police, and Jaymie had said yes. That was it, right?

Jaymie told Joel all that, then said, “I don’t know . . . she
may
have asked me if she could come over, and
may
have interpreted what I said as a yes. But she never arrived. She could have gotten sidetracked, or went over to another friend’s place instead.”

“She doesn’t
have
any friends in Queensville, Jaymie. I told you that. Folks have been standoffish.”

Jaymie winced. Loyalty will make people do strange things sometimes, even cut someone out of a social circle just so it won’t hurt someone else’s feelings. “She didn’t come here,” Jaymie repeated. “Call the cops if you’re worried.”

“I already did. They said to give it a while, that she’d be back. She’s an adult, they said.”

His tone implied that if they thought that, they clearly didn’t know Heidi, and Jaymie was reminded of some of Joel’s less admirable qualities, one of which was a sometimes unbearable condescension. When he hung up, Jaymie felt antsy and went downstairs to the kitchen. She turned on the back light and looked around the yard, letting Hoppy out to piddle, but trotting out and firmly grabbing him before he could hare off in the dark. “Oh no, m’boy,” she said. “I am not going to let you have another go at the skunk, like you did last month. I can still smell Pepé Le Pew on you.”

She sent him upstairs, looked around the kitchen thoughtfully, did a couple of little tasks, then went back up to bed and to sleep. When Hoppy started barking, Jaymie was once again hauled out of a deep sleep; she groaned and turned over. “Hoppy, go to sleep!” she yelled. “You are
not
going out after that skunk!”

The only response was a noise in the kitchen, and Hoppy kept barking.

“Hoppy, will you . . .” Jaymie hoisted herself out of bed and clattered down the stairs and through the dark house, intent on telling the little dog that a four a.m. wake-up call had
not
been ordered! But as she approached the kitchen, she heard the back door slam. It was too late to stop herself; she launched into the kitchen, terrified of what she would see, but there was just a flashlight on the floor and nothing else.

No dead body, but the kitchen door open, the summer porch door open, and her dog barking. From outside.

“Hoppy!” she shrieked, and pelted out of the back door without thinking, just in time to see the last of a hooded someone as the figure ducked through the gate and around the hedge. She raced barefoot into the yard, grabbed Hoppy, and stomped back in to the kitchen, slamming the door shut behind her, and picking up the phone. She dialed 911, breathlessly telling the operator that there had been a break-in and she needed police. No, the perpetrator was not still in the house, and yes, she was sure of that. Her dog would have chased down whoever it was in the house, if he or she were still there, she told the operator, and she thought she had seen the would-be thief leave.

The police arrived quickly, and she set Hoppy down to let them in the back door. The little dog tore outside as she let in the two uniformed officers, Deputy Ng and Officer Jenkins. The Yorkie-Poo started barking again almost immediately, but Jaymie still tried to answer the officers’ questions. Did she think anything had been taken? Her stomach clenched; she looked over at the bookshelf. The Hoosier book was gone.

Confused, shaken to the core, she couldn’t think in that moment, and just muttered, “I . . . I d-don’t think so. M-my dog must have scared them off before they got anything. Whoever it was dropped the flashlight and took off. I ran out back after my dog and saw someone just going around the hedge at the back gate.” Her mind whirled with questions and suppositions and fragments of thought. The only person in the world who knew what was in the Hoosier book was Daniel.

Daniel Collins. No! She needed to think about this.

They asked a few more questions and fingerprinted the door, photographing the broken window on the summer porch that had allowed the thief to unlock the door. They also photographed the damaged lock on the kitchen door, and bagged the flashlight as evidence to be processed at the police lab. There wasn’t a whole lot more they could do. All of that took some time, but Hoppy was still barking on and off. Finally, the dog trotted up the back steps as the cops were about to leave. The little Yorkie-Poo stared at Jaymie and barked again, his black button eyes snapping with intelligence, then raced outside.

“What is up with him?” she said out loud, and followed him down the path to the back gate, and when she opened the gate, he bolted through it and around behind the shed/garage that let onto the back lane. She followed, and by the yellowy illumination of the ancient light on the post near the garage, she saw a figure lying on the ground in the overgrown weeds. “There’s someone here!” she cried.

The police pushed her aside, and went toward the person, guns drawn. When they checked the form for signs of life, Jaymie squeezed between them.

“Heidi! It’s Heidi Lockland!” Jaymie knelt down beside her, and Heidi looked up, her beautiful eyes fogged with pain.

One tear squeezed out of the left eye, and she said, her voice muffled but audible, “I came to see you, and someone hit me!” Then her eyes rolled back, and she fainted.

They called for an ambulance, and as it pulled away Jaymie told the police she would call Heidi’s boyfriend to meet her at the hospital.

“No! Don’t do that, ma’am,” Deputy Ng said. “We’ll take care of everything, if you’ll just give us his name and address.”

She rattled it off, and said, crossing her arms over her chest and shivering with the night chill, “He called about an hour and a half ago, and said she was missing. He said he’d called the police, too.”

“We’ll take care of it,” the young cop said, sternly adding, “Please don’t call him! We appreciate your cooperation.”

She should go stay with someone, Deputy Ng advised her. If she was going to try to sleep more, she probably would have gone to Valetta’s or Dee’s, but the officer told her that, in any case, they would have a cruiser stationed in the back alley and circling past her front door the rest of the night. If she wanted to go somewhere, all she had to do was tell one of them.

“You know, none of this would have happened—not the break-in, nor the attack on Heidi—if one of you had still been in the back alley,” she said, a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“I wish it were that easy, ma’am,” he said, with a polite, regretful look. “Unfortunately, the resources of the Queensville Township Police Department are not unlimited.”

It only occurred to Jaymie a few minutes later, after he’d left and she was shoving a chair under the doorknob of her busted door, that they probably wanted to ask Joel “a few questions,” as the cop shows always had investigating officers say.

She thought of something else in that moment, too. Trevor Standish had broken into her summer porch, using something to bust the lock and break the door open. What had he used, and where was it? If the killer had used the grinder to murder him, whacking him from behind, then why did that person carry away the other thing? Whatever it was must be somewhere, and might have fingerprints on it.

The first glimmers of dawn were showing on the horizon.
Way
too much excitement for one night. She circled the kitchen restlessly, eyeing the bookshelf every time she passed it. She should have told the police about the missing book, but if she called them back now and explained about the letter, it would look weird. Someone, the murderer likely, had been in her home rooting through her belongings, and that someone had known to go for one book in particular, from all her cookbooks:
Hoosier Cabinets
by Philip D. Kennedy. She shivered and rubbed her arms. How had the thief known?

No one but she and Daniel Collins knew that she had put the Button letter in that book, and now the book was gone! He had arrived that night just
after
Heidi had called her and asked if she could come over. If Jaymie hadn’t been so darned preoccupied with what Heidi had just told her about the fight at the auction, she would have heard correctly!

She had to reason things out. If Daniel was involved with his buddy Trevor’s scheme, how would it have impacted last night? Say Daniel found Heidi snooping, or coming to see her, and bashed her on the head. But why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he just wait until she went away? Unless . . . could
Daniel
be the other guy who had been fighting with Trevor Standish over the Hoosier cabinet? Then he wouldn’t have been able to risk Heidi seeing him again.

Except, that didn’t make one bit of sense. Not a single one! Joel would have recognized Daniel at the auction if he had been the one fighting with Trevor. And Heidi saw Daniel at the Tea with the Queen. Still, even if he wasn’t the guy Trevor had been fighting with at the auction, Daniel
could
have been involved with Trevor’s scheme as his mysterious investor, and could have told her just enough to exonerate himself and get her to trust him.

Jaymie definitely needed to talk to Daniel, to ask him where he was and what he was doing. It didn’t seem possible that she could be so wrong about his character, but how well did she really know him? She climbed the stairs, Hoppy bouncing up ahead of her, and went to her room, sitting down on the side of her bed. She picked up
The Love Thief
, another historical romance, from her side table and opened it. She took out her plastic-covered “bookmark,” turning it over and over.

Whoever had stolen the Hoosier cabinet book would now have the old, mimeographed copy of the recipe for Queen Elizabeth cake, but they wouldn’t have the Button Gwinnett letter, she reflected, looking down at the valuable piece of American history in her hands.