A Deadly Grind (21 page)

And if he had done that, how did she reconcile what Ted Abernathy had said, that Brett had sent him over to steal the letter from the Hoosier?

Brett was certainly one possible suspect, but wasn’t Ted more likely? When she thought about it, she only had Ted Abernathy’s word for it that he had just come to her garden shed the morning he’d grabbed her. He could have been there the night before, when Heidi got whacked and Jaymie’s house was broken into, and if that was true . . . she stopped in her tracks and thought, swiping her bangs out of her eyes and looking off toward the river without really seeing anything.

She remembered, the afternoon before, turning from regarding her cookbook shelf to look out the window at her backyard. What would the reverse view be? Anyone, Ted included, could have seen through her back window as she put the letter in the Hoosier book. She had thought Daniel was the only one who knew, but if someone else knew what was in the Hoosier, her actions that night, even observed from a distance, may have been as clear as if he were standing beside her.

If that was the case, and Abernathy was the one who had stolen the recipe from the book, then he could have lingered to remedy his mistake, intending to break into her home once he knew she was gone, and search her place for the real letter. Except he hadn’t even done it when he’d had the opportunity. She had been gone for an hour to the plant nursery, and presumably he had been in her shed the whole time.

Hoppy pulled at the leash and yipped. They walked down the steeply sloped path from the Boardwalk toward the marina, where a crowd was gathered waiting for the ferry to Heartbreak Island and Johnsonville, Ontario. If Abernathy
was
telling the truth, she mused, was it someone else, then, who’d bopped Heidi on the head and was looking in Jaymie’s back window while she put the letter in the Hoosier book? If so, who could it be?

As she descended toward the marina, she heard the wail of a siren, and a police car screamed to a stop at the top of the hill. Officer Jenkins threw herself out of the cruiser and scaled down the slope, not bothering with the path. Jaymie, alerted to something unusual going on, trotted the last few feet to where the officer had bolted, at the heart of the crowd that had gathered. What was going on?

She pushed through the crowd, but the officer, with a grim expression, said, “Back up, ma’am.”

“But what’s going on?” Jaymie said, picking Hoppy up as he squirmed with excitement.

“It’s a body!” someone next to her said.

She turned to find Valetta Nibley standing at her side, her eyes snapping with interest behind thick glasses. “A body?”

Valetta nodded and bent to whisper, “Someone came in to the Emporium and said something about a floater, so I took a break and came right down. It’s another dead person . . . two murders in a week!”

“Valetta, we’ve had tragic deaths before,” Jaymie reminded her. “Especially in summer. Doesn’t mean it’s murder. People are always falling out of boats after drinking too much, or in bad weather, or without life vests on. We get at least one or two every summer.” It was a sad fact of life. People didn’t take their “fun” seriously enough, and too often paid the ultimate price for not being water-safe while swimming, wave running, boating and rafting.

“True. But it’s more exciting if it’s a murder.”

Jaymie shivered. “It’s all fine if it’s in a book, but real life . . . not so much.”

“I’m here with you, Jaymie,” Valetta said with sympathy. “I’ll stay at your place again tonight, and every night until they catch the jerk.”

She squeezed her friend’s arm in silent thanks. A breeze came up from the river, whipping the poplars along the Boardwalk, the rustling sound of their silvery leaves carried on the wind. They stood side by side. Jaymie put Hoppy back down and he trotted to the end of his leash to sniff butts with Junk Junior, who was being walked by his daddy, Jewel’s current live-in boyfriend, Arnaldo. “Can you see anything?” Jaymie asked the taller Valetta.

“Not really. Not yet.”

A gasp rippled through the crowd as the EMTs valiantly lifted the dripping body from the river’s edge and hoisted it onto a backboard. As they made their way up the path, they came directly past Jaymie and she looked into the dead, dripping, lakeweed-festooned but too-familiar face.

Nineteen

I
T WAS HER erstwhile captor, Ted Abernathy! Jaymie began to shake, and pulled Hoppy’s leash, rewinding it in its retractable holder.

Valetta put her hand on Jaymie’s arm. “What’s wrong with you? You’re quivering like a Chihuahua in a draft.”

“I know who that is!” She raced off with Hoppy in tow and stumbled up the incline. She reached the EMT and tugged on his sleeve. “I know who that is!” she said gasping and panting.

The police officer had followed, and said, “Are you saying you can identify this homicide victim?”

“Homicide? Didn’t he just drown?” Jaymie, against her better judgment, focused on Ted Abernathy’s body. His neck had a gaping, flapping, bloodless wound that could only have been inflicted by something lethally sharp. She swallowed hard, and said numbly, “His name is . . .
was
. . . Ted Abernathy, and he was wanted for questioning in the murder of Trevor Standish.”

This time she did not need to be told that she had to go to the police station, she just took Hoppy home and went, driving as if on autopilot and parking in the visitor’s lot. She was put in a comfortable room alone, and a man in a suit came in and sat down across the table from her.

“I’m Detective Tewksbury, Ms. Leighton. Detective Christian is unavailable at the moment. Why don’t you tell me what you told the patrol officer?”

She spilled it all, though it was surprisingly little. The dead man was Ted Abernathy, who had snatched her the previous day and held her captive for a few minutes in her shed. Ted Abernathy, as she had told them the previous day, had been in Queensville at Brett Delgado’s behest, by his own admission, to forge a copy of the Button letter, which she had turned over to the police.

Even as she spoke, trying to tell them everything she knew or even surmised, she conned it over in her mind. This most recent event left her puzzled. She had been thinking that Abernathy was perhaps guilty of the murder of Trevor Standish, but now she wasn’t sure. Having been murdered himself didn’t absolve him, she supposed, but was it possible that there were two killers? It just didn’t seem likely.

One more time she toted up her cast of suspects in her head: Brett Delgado, Ted Abernathy, Daniel Collins, Zell McIntosh, and perhaps Nathan and Lynn Foster. The couple didn’t seem to have a lot to do with anything, but they kept popping up. In the words of Alice, curiouser and curiouser.

Was she leaving anyone out? There could be others that she just hadn’t encountered yet, but she rather doubted it. Whoever it was had been in and around Queensville for a week or more, and strangers were duly noted; even though they were a tourist town, people still saw stuff.

Detective Tewksbury’s expression was one of confusion by the time she was done talking, and he flipped through pages of notes. When he looked back up at her with an assessing gaze, he told her he’d be sure to share all her thoughts with Detective Christian. She could go home now, he said, and sent her on her way.

When she got home from the police station, she listened to her messages and decided to follow up on one harmless line of investigation. She let Hoppy out in the yard and sat down on the back step with the phone. Maybe she could shorten her list of suspects by two. Denver climbed into her lap in an unusual display of affection, and she petted him and scruffed his cheeks while she made a call. “Dee?” she said, as the woman answered. “It’s Jaymie.”

“Hey, how are you? Have you found anything more about how your Grandma Leighton is doing?”

Jaymie told her the gist of a phone message she had just gotten. Grandma Leighton was doing well and moving back to her retirement home already. Becca was relieved, and wanted to know what was going on in Queensville. “I’m going to have to call her and give her the long version, or she won’t be happy!” Jaymie said, explaining to her shocked friend some of what had gone on in the last couple of days. She then got down to the purpose of her call, a favor of sorts.

Dee readily agreed to her request, saying, “I’ll do you one better than letting you into the appropriate rooms. If you want, I’ll loan you my uniform, and you can go into the Queensville as a maid. No one even notices the cleaning crew, trust me! I only work for Lyle when he has someone phone in sick, but that happens a lot, and today happens to be one of those days. You can sub for me this afternoon.”

“I worked there when I was in high school, remember? I know the routine pretty well.”

“So what are you looking for?”

“Can I tell you later, Dee? I’m probably wrong, but I promise I’ll tell you.”

“Okay, but
please
don’t let Lyle know you’re snooping! He’d kill me.”

“Trust me, I’m going to be in and out of there in no time flat and do my . . . well,
your
job perfectly. I just want to nose around.” The benefit of a maid’s job was that some of it was identical to snooping, but what would mean nothing to a maid, might mean something to Jaymie.

Jaymie fed the animals and confined them to the house, promising Hoppy a long walk the next day, since today’s had been truncated by identifying a dead body. Then she set out to DeeDee’s place, changing into her uniform there as Dee called her brother and told him Jaymie was substituting for her that afternoon.

Jaymie walked over to the Inn, through the parking lot—as always, it was full of luxury vehicles: a black Cadillac, a cream Lincoln, a champagne Lexus—and let herself in the employee entrance with her borrowed passkey. She refamil-
iarized herself with the routine, pushed the cleaning cart to the service elevator, then slipped down the hall carrying a stack of towels to the room that was her main focus. The occupants were gone over to Canada for the day, DeeDee had assured her, after inquiring in the brief call to her brother-in-law, Lyle. Not that Dee could inquire directly, but a few pointed comments had been enough to elicit the necessary information.

She let herself into the Fosters’ suite.

It was the most elegant in the Inn, a double room with a sitting room and private bath furnished in gorgeous antiques authentic to the era of the original home. The bedroom was painted aqua, with one signature wall hung with Seabrook wallpaper. Once in the suite, Jaymie found that “searching” was easier imagined than undertaken. Yes, she was the maid, so she had a right to be there, but it felt like an invasion of the couple’s privacy to be looking through their baggage.

So she cleaned first, and as she cleaned she kept her eyes open. Vacuuming was a great excuse to investigate the closets and under the beds. There were a number of suits hanging in the closet and shoes on the floor, but nothing of interest. Making the bed allowed her to check the mattress for anything hidden, and wiping down the surfaces allowed her to search the books on the nightstand. His was a thick biography of President Andrew Jackson, while her reading material was a
Collector’s Quarterly
and an art magazine. Lynn Foster had a penchant for showy jewelry: a large art glass pendant, a black-and-white silk flower piece and some gaudy cocktail rings.

As she moved it to dust the side table, the black-and-white silk flower fluttered to the floor, falling apart as it did so. It seemed to be missing a piece in the center, something that would have kept it together and allowed it to be pinned to a piece of clothing. Like the black suit Lynn Foster had worn to the auction. With the black-and-white silk flower on the lapel. Jaymie paused and straightened. She picked up and examined the flower more closely; it did indeed have a pinhole in the center.

She sat down on the side of the bed and picked up the phone, hit nine for an outside line and called the pharmacy. “Valetta,” she hissed, trembling. “Do you remember yet where you’ve seen the pavé pin I showed you this morning?”

“Not yet. Why do you sound so odd? What happened about that dead body? Where are you, Jaymie?”

“Never mind,” she said. “The pin! Focus, Valetta; could it be that you last saw the pin in the middle of a black-and-white silk flower on the lapel of a black suit worn by Mrs. Lynn Foster?”

“That’s it!” Valetta said, her shriek piercing on the phone. “That’s it! How did you guess that?”

“I didn’t guess. I’m sitting here holding the flower, which is falling apart because it’s missing the pin. I’ve got to go.” She hung up, her hand trembling. There was no possible reason Lynn Foster’s diamond pin should have been in her garden, unless Lynn Foster had been in her yard.

But it didn’t prove that she was a cold-blooded killer. Jaymie would need more to believe that. She eyed their luggage, but the bags were locked, and staring at them was not going to elucidate the mystery. She moved on, leafing through the books on their nightstand and the drawers of the bureau. Nothing beyond some sleeping medication with Nathan’s name on the label. Her mind was churning with speculation.

Her final cleaning/searching foray was to the bathroom. It was tidy enough, but needed a thorough clean if she was going to do the Queensville Inn proud.
And
if she was going to search properly. She moved the Fosters’ personal items—his shaving kit, her nail polish and cosmetic kit, and a collector’s magazine—from the room, then removed the soiled towels and old soap, dumping them into the dirty linens bag and the garbage on the housekeeping cart, respectively. Then the tub, tile surround, vanity and mirrors needed a good scrub, on to the sink, and then the toilet.

Nothing. Time to return the Fosters’ items to their washroom. As Jaymie picked up the collector’s magazine and leafed through it, a piece of folded paper fell to the now-spotless floor. She retrieved it; it was yellowed in places, but the fold appeared new, and the paper, minus a corner torn off, flattened back to its original shape. It was a Sears and Roebuck receipt for a Hoosier brand kitchen cabinet. The date in the corner was March 31, 1927, and the buyer was listed as Mrs. Harold Bourne, Wolverhampton, Michigan.

Jaymie stared at it for a long minute. The full impact of the find soaked in, bit by bit. This sales receipt had been torn from the hands of the dying Trevor Standish. Shivering, she tucked the receipt back where it had come from and set the magazine on the edge of the vanity. Either Lynn or Nathan Foster, or the two of them together, must be the killer or killers. But something was wrong with the thought that Nathan could have been involved. He appeared to be so gentlemanly—but then she remembered his steely grip on her arm. He was stronger than he looked, and more determined.

Still, something nagged at her, some question in her mind. It wasn’t just that Nathan Foster didn’t seem the type to commit cold-blooded murder; there was something more that made her question his involvement. She glanced at her watch and was appalled at the time she had taken. If she was going to finish DeeDee’s rounds and get out of the Inn, she would have to hurry and clean while she thought. At least she knew the Fosters were gone for the day.

Just a few last-minute touches. As she swiped at the bathroom floor with a clean rag, erasing her own footprints on the damp tile, she noticed that a mascara had rolled under the vanity. How had she missed that? She picked it up, and wondered . . . did it belong to Lynn Foster, or was it from a previous occupant of the room? She couldn’t just leave it on the floor, and she couldn’t toss it in the garbage. It was an expensive department store brand. If she saw what brand of other cosmetics Lynn Foster used, it might help. Women tended to buy lipstick, foundation and other makeup from a single brand-name line.

She unzipped the cosmetic bag; it was indeed Lynn Foster’s brand of makeup, but among the jumbled pots of cosmetics and an empty pill bottle with her husband’s name on it she found a familiar-looking piece of paper crumpled up in it. Familiar, because she had put it in the Hoosier cabinet book with her own two hands. It was the old mimeographed copy of the recipe for Queen Elizabeth cake that she had put in the book as a replacement for the Button letter. That placed Lynn Foster in particular at the scene of the break-in and theft of her Hoosier book, and the attack on Heidi! It followed that she was also the one who’d killed Trevor Standish.

Lynn alone,
not
with Nathan! Jaymie sat down on the lid of the closed toilet.
Now
she remembered what it was that was tugging at her memory concerning Nathan Foster. She had been in the Emporium when he was at Valetta’s pharmacy window, complaining that he didn’t have enough sleeping pills. He was sure he had brought enough, but had run out. Which meant he was either lying and taking more than he should, or someone was taking some out of his bottle for some reason.

If Lynn Foster was sneaking out of their room at night to murder people, then she might drug her husband with extra sleeping medication to aid her in her deception. And thus, the empty bottle of his sleeping meds in her makeup bag. It made sense.

A noise from the bedroom made her jump up and she shoved the folded recipe back in the cosmetic bag, fingers trembling and clumsy. Hoping it wasn’t one of the other chambermaids—or worse, Lyle—Jaymie tucked the bag back on the shelf and hurriedly ended her cleaning by folding the end of the fresh toilet tissue roll into a V, like she had been taught years before as a fledgling chambermaid.

A voice behind her coldly demanded, “What the hell are you doing here?”

It was Lynn Foster.