A Deadly Grind (6 page)

“So you are sure there was no one in the kitchen?”

“Yep. As I passed the kitchen table I put down the plant, grabbed the broom, then opened the door from the kitchen to the summer porch—”

“Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Stupid thing to do, I guess, but I just wasn’t thinking. It was a false alarm, I thought, something falling over on the summer porch. I hadn’t processed hearing a scream and all that. I was woken up from a dead sleep, so I wasn’t really coherent.”

“How long did all of this take?”

“Not as long as it’s taking to describe,” Jaymie joked, but the officer remained stoic, staring at her. She sighed, and said, “Just a couple of minutes. As I opened the back door, I finally turned on the light, and that’s when I saw him; Hoppy was sniffing him. I said something to Becca, and she came up behind me.”

“Did you touch the deceased?”

“Well, of course! I didn’t know he was dead then.” She swallowed and took in a deep shuddering breath, battling the memory of that moment. “Look, officer, are we safe? What happened? Did someone kill him, or was it the box . . .” She trailed off and shook her head. “But it can’t have been the box.”

“The box?”

“Oh. I didn’t say that yet, did I? When I came out onto the summer porch the box that held the teacups—that’s the china that’s shattered all over him—was on him, on the dead guy. And the Hoosier cabinet doors were swung open. I closed the bottom door and pushed the box of teacups off him so I could get at him,” she continued, as the officer jotted swiftly. “I think I tossed a teacup and a couple of saucers aside and brushed china shards off his face. I saw the blood, and I felt sick. That’s when Clive came up to the back steps. I think that’s how it all happened.”

“Clive Jones? Your . . .” He consulted his notes. “Your neighbor?”

She nodded.

“Why was he there?”

She looked at him in surprise. “Well, he must have heard the commotion, I guess. There’s a wood fence between us, but if he had his bedroom window open . . . Hoppy had been barking like mad, remember. He had stopped by the time I got to the man on the floor. But Clive may even have heard the shouts and the crash that woke me up. You’ll have to ask him.” She realized Clive must have arrived at the bed-and-breakfast in the middle of the night, meaning he must have come by way of the bridge at Port Huron, and not the ferry, because he hadn’t been around when they unloaded the van the night before.

“And then?”

“Clive knelt down and checked the man for a pulse.”

“How did he do that?”

“He put his fingers about here,” Jaymie said, putting her fingers against her carotid artery, “and lightly pressed, then he looked at me and shook his head. I think I knew he was dead, but Clive confirmed it.”

“Where was your sister while you were doing this?”

“She was in the kitchen on the phone with the 911 operator.” Jaymie yawned, weariness settling in, and, still cradling Hoppy, rubbed her eyes. “I said, shouldn’t we try to revive him, and Clive started CPR, and I got a tea towel and applied pressure to the wound on his head. As best as I could, anyway.” Her breath caught in her throat, and she said, weakly, “He was pale, and there was so much blood!”

He asked a couple more questions, then let her go, asking her to send Clive Jones in, just as someone banged on the front door. Jaymie set Hoppy down, and he followed her to the front door, yapping crazily. She flicked on the dim hall light, an original Tiffany pendant that had been restored when the electrical had been updated, and opened the door to find Anna holding her daughter, Tabby, on her hip. The woman looked frightened, her red freckles standing out against the pale skin of her face.

“Where’s Clive?” she asked, shivering with terror, tears coursing down her cheeks, while her daughter sobbed and buried her head in her mother’s neck. “I can’t get anyone to tell me anything! He heard something, a crash and a shout, and rushed over to your place and then there were sirens and the police came banging on our door, my guests are all upset, and I haven’t seen Clive since he—”

“Anna, take it easy,” Jaymie said, putting one hand on Anna’s bare arm. Anna was dressed in a mauve shortie set and was shivering with fright or cold or both. For her daughter’s sake she needed to calm down. “Clive
is
here, and he’s fine. We . . . we had an incident, and Clive stayed while we sort things out.”

Just then Clive followed the officer into the library, but he leaned back out to the hall to say, “It’s okay, Anna. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

“What’s going on?” Anna shifted Tabby higher on her hip. The baby had calmed, and reached out, touching Jaymie’s cheek as Hoppy danced around their feet. “I should have brought Clive a T-shirt or something; I hope he’s not cold. What happened, Jaymie?”

Jaymie kissed the baby’s hand and shook it, and said, “Becca and I heard a noise and found someone on our summer porch.”

“Found someone? You mean . . . ?” She mouthed the word
dead
as Tabby reached down toward Hoppy, screeching with laughter at the dog hopping and dancing on his two hind legs.

Jaymie nodded.

“Oh no!”

In a hushed voice, Jaymie told her neighbor what happened, then Clive came out of the library and joined them, putting his arm around Anna’s shoulders.

“The police want us to go to the station and answer questions,” he said wearily, passing one long-fingered hand over his eyes.

“But we’ve already done that!” Jaymie said.

“I think that might be code for the fact that they wish us to be out of their way while they investigate thoroughly,” Clive said, his dark face splitting in a blinding white smile, his Jamaican accent marking his words with precise diction. He took Anna and Tabby into his arms, kissing the top of his wife’s head.

“Who is the guy, Jaymie?” Anna asked.

“I have no idea. I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

Four

“W
HOEVER HE IS, his passing is a terrible thing,” Clive said, hugging Anna and his baby daughter even closer. Anna buried her face in his shoulder.

Jaymie watched, not without envy. Anna and Clive were new to Queensville, and there had been whispering over the fact that she was white and he black, but that lasted only a couple of days. Clive and Anna were a splendid addition to their cosmopolitan little village. Queensville, with its blend of small-town charm, a marina serving both Canadian and American boats, and upscale shops selling everything from homemade jam to Piaget watches, was accustomed to an influx of newcomers—Americans, Japanese, Europeans from every nation—so Clive’s Jamaican roots, accent and cooking became interesting topics of conversation for all but the most reserved. He was one of the good guys, loving, hardworking, dependable . . . all the things Jaymie yearned for in a man, and had seen in Joel, at first. With the distance of a few months now, she wondered if she had just imagined in Joel what she wanted to find.

The police let Clive go home and dress as Jaymie provided a safe haven for her pets in her bedroom, with Denver’s litter box and bowls and Hoppy’s favorite blankie. She changed into jeans and a T-shirt—Becca did too—then an officer collected them and took them to the Queensville Township Police Department, a modern glass-and-steel building on the highway out of Queensville.

For a couple of hours Jaymie sat alone, in a dull beige box of a room. What was going on? Why couldn’t she sit with the others? A female police officer leaned her head in and asked if Jaymie would like coffee, and she said yes, but the brew was strong and bitter. She wasn’t willing to ask for tea instead; that would be too much to ask of a uniformed officer of the law. It wasn’t a tea shop, after all. She gulped some down, and the bitter taste remained on her palate.

Finally, a tired-looking man in a suit and tie came in, carrying a clipboard and sheaf of papers. “Ms. Leighton? I’m Detective Christian. How are you this morning?”

“Not so great since I found a dead body on my summer porch.”

He quirked a grin, and she examined him with interest. He was good-looking in the traditional tall, dark and handsome vein, about six foot, thick hair, a little mussed, and with a lean, hungry look to him. Excellent romance-novel hero material, if you liked contemporaries, which she didn’t. Give her a historical romance anytime. On the other hand . . . she cocked her head to one side as she listened to his lovely baritone voice. Put him in knee breeches and a cutaway coat, and give him a sword . . .

She shook her head to clear the cobwebs. “I’m sorry, what did you say?” she asked, realizing she had zoned out for a moment. A blush climbed her cheeks as she thought about how she had been viewing him. But anything was better than thinking of the body that lay on her summer porch floor that moment. She shuddered and met his eyes.

“I said I’d like you to go over what happened again for me, a step at a time. I know Sergeant MacAdams already went through this with you, but I’d like to hear your story myself.”

Over the next hour, Jaymie answered the same questions she had already answered and a few more regarding the boxes on the summer porch, her usual habits and the summer porch door. Did she recognize the victim? No, she’d never seen him before, she was pretty sure. Not positive, but close. He asked about any strange occurrences over the last while, and she found herself even talking about the auction, buying the Hoosier and the rude drivers on the highway and in Queensville the evening before.

What about the grinder that they suspected was the murder weapon, he asked; where was that?

She took him through finding the grinder in a drawer late the night before and screwing it loosely to the porcelain work top.

“So it wasn’t just lying on the work top, it was screwed down?”

“But loosely,” Jaymie replied. “I just wanted to see if it fit. I don’t know why I didn’t take it off and put it back in the drawer. I . . . I wish now that I had!”

He didn’t comment, just went back to questions. Why did she think the man broke into her house? She mused about the summer residents’ perennial problems with break-ins and the issues they’d had in past years with the family cottage on Heartbreak Island. She talked about the stuff she had bought at the sale, the Hoosier, china dishes and sewing paraphernalia, the linens and the valuable Royal Crown Derby. But she also noted that the guy on her porch was well dressed. He sure didn’t look like some transient thief, trying to find something he could pawn for a few quick bucks.

“Why our house?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

Detective Christian left the room, telling her he would be right back, but he was gone for quite a while. She had a lot of time to think, sitting alone on that ugly, uncomfortable cracked plastic chair in the drab, uninspiring room. Why
her
house, she wondered again, if the dead guy, and/or whoever had killed him, were thieves? Among all the summer houses of folks who weren’t even in Queensville yet, people who had stashes of jewelry and loads of other expensive treasures, why
her
house? Had other houses been broken into? Her neighbors on the other side, for example, hadn’t arrived for the summer yet. Their home was locked up tighter than Mrs. Bellwood’s Royal Doulton figurines. Locked, yes, but still, with no one home it would have been less risky than breaking into
her
house.

Was the dead guy a thief specifically targeting stuff they had bought at the auction? The cookbooks were everywhere, and the carton of sewing stuff and the box of vintage cookware were down on the floor. But that was all crap, worth only a little more than she had paid.

The only thing worth anything was Becca’s Crown Derby. He was a very well-dressed thief, and might have recognized the value of that box of china. Becca’s professional evaluation of it was eight thousand dollars—a lot of money.

The detective finally came back. “All right, Ms. Leighton, your story checks out.”

“Well, of course it does,” she blurted out, startled. “What, did you think I killed him?”

“Did you?” he said.

“Of course not!” She stared up at him, disconcerted by his blank expression.

“No problem, then, is there?”

“No, no problem at all,” she retorted. “Detective, assuming the killer used my grinder to kill the guy, why did he do that? If we assume the guy who was killed broke into our house, then he must have used something strong to pry our screen door off; why didn’t the murderer use that? And who
is
the victim?”

“First, you’re making a lot of assumptions that we haven’t established yet as to why and how the victim was in your house. And we don’t know the victim’s identity; he didn’t have any identification on him.”

“That’s unusual, isn’t it?”

“You’d be surprised how few crooks want us to ID them,” he said, with deadpan irony.

“He was really well dressed; that can’t be normal for a thief. He was wearing a cable-knit cardigan, for heaven’s sake.”

“Maybe he forgot his black cat burglar suit. Ms. Leighton, as I said, we can’t assume anything at this point. You can go home now. We’ll be in touch if we have more questions.”

He shook her hand and left, and an officer was assigned to drive them all home. Jaymie saw Clive folded into his wife’s arms, as Tabby toddled about near them on the sidewalk in front of the Shady Rest Bed-and-Breakfast. She unlocked the front door to their home, trailed by Rebecca, who looked gray with weariness. The body had been taken away, and the crime scene had been investigated thoroughly, she had been assured.

But what to do about the scene of the crime, her summer porch? The sun was high in the sky as she and Rebecca walked into their house and looked around with trepidation. But their beloved home was just as it always was, calm, quiet, bars of color from the stained glass sidelight slanting across the front hall’s hardwood floor.

“Guess it’ll be okay,” Becca said.

“It will be,” Jaymie said, linking her arm through her sister’s. “Life goes on. It was awful, but we’ll be all right. We still have the Tea with the Queen tomorrow to prepare for.”

“I’ll help later,” Becca said on a wide yawn. “Right now I’m so tired I could drop. I’m going to
try
to get a few more hours of sleep. You should, too.”

Jaymie nodded. “You go ahead. I’m too wired on bad coffee to sleep. I’ll get the summer porch cleaned up.”

Rebecca stopped at the foot of the stairs and touched Jaymie’s arm, watching her eyes. “Jaymie, no. Let’s call in a professional. I asked the cops, and they said there’s a company in Detroit that specializes in crime-scene cleanup. I got their card. Let’s call them; we can do that now, then get some sleep.”

Crime-scene cleanup! Jaymie hesitated and glanced toward the back of the house. She didn’t even know what to expect. “These crime-scene-cleanup people . . . could they come right away?”

“Probably not.”

“I don’t want that . . . that
awfulness
to sit there for days . . . or even for hours!”

“We could go stay somewhere else for a few days. Dee would take us in. Or we could get a room at the Inn.”

Jaymie shuddered. “It’s only going to get worse, Becca. Think about it sitting there for days and days. This is our home. I can’t stand the thought of that . . . I just can’t stand it.”

“I can’t let you handle that alone, but I will
not
go back there right now,” Becca said, her voice tight with nerves. She didn’t like blood; even a scratch on her arm made her queasy.

Jaymie took a deep breath and gritted her teeth. “I’ll clean it up. It’s just blood. I think. I hope.” She shuddered internally, but trying to rest while knowing blood was seeping into the boards of her beloved summer porch was an absolute no go. Surely cleaning it up quickly would be best all around.

“Are you sure? Look, rest now, and I’ll help you later, I promise.”

“No, Becca, it’s okay,” Jaymie said, reaching out and hugging her sister. It was a magnanimous offer, given how she felt about blood. “I
want
to do this. You know me; I like a little solitude and a boring task when things get crazy.” She pushed Rebecca toward the stairs and said, “Go! Come down when you’re good and ready.”

Without further protest, Rebecca went. But if Jaymie thought she’d have solitude, she was wrong. All she had time for was letting Denver and Hoppy out of her room, when the steady stream of gawkers and neighbors and concerned citizens began. She turned them all away as politely as she could until DeeDee Stubbs trotted toward her up the walk.

She carried a pail with a lid, gloves and a bottle of bleach. The very first things she said were, “Are you okay? How’s Becca?”

“I’m all right. I think,” Jaymie said. “Becca went up to bed. She’s exhausted.”

“Meaning she can’t deal with the blood. I’ve come to work, not just gawk,” she said, reaching down to pet Hoppy, who was begging for attention. “If even a fraction of what I heard is correct, you’ll need some help cleaning up your summer porch. That’s where it happened, right?”

“Yeah, that’s where . . . yeah.” She shuddered. “But Dee, you didn’t need to come over. I could never ask your help for something like this. You really don’t know what you’re signing up for.”

“I think I probably do,” she said. “Maybe more than you.”

On that cryptic comment, Jaymie looked up and down the street and ushered DeeDee into the house. “Okay, but
I
don’t even know yet what I’ll find,” she admitted. “I haven’t gone to the kitchen or the summer porch. All I’ve had time to do is let Denver and Hoppy out of my room. Now I have to go and look at the damage, and I’m kind of spooked.”

“We’ll face it together, kiddo,” DeeDee said. She linked arms with Jaymie and tugged her toward the back of the house. “Let’s go.”

The animals followed them down the hall toward the kitchen, Hoppy with the mindless happiness he always seemed to proceed through life exuding, and Denver slinking along with an attitude of surly suspicion,
his
customary outlook. Jaymie, with her older friend, held back one moment, then took a deep breath and stepped into the kitchen. The police had closed and locked the door between the kitchen and summer porch, so Jaymie walked slowly through her favorite room of the house, but quailed just as she got to the porch door. The memory of the dark and the body and her fear flooded her.

“Jaymie,” DeeDee said, gently, touching her arm, “it’s okay, hon, I’m here.”

“And I’m glad,” Jaymie said, covering DeeDee’s hand on her arm with her own. DeeDee had the motherly vibe that Rebecca occasionally emanated, but in a far different sense. Where Becca could be harrying, pushier toward Jaymie than their mom had ever been, Dee had kids, one just a few years younger than Jaymie, and knew how to be encouraging without being aggressive. Jaymie took heart and opened the door, staring aghast at the mess, which looked even worse in the light of day. For one thing, the summer porch door was still hanging from its hinges, though someone had put a piece of wood over it and nailed it on. For another, dark smudges covered so many surfaces: fingerprint powder, dusted over everything!

But worse than that was the stuff spilled everywhere: cookbooks, teacups, shattered china. The grinder, thank heavens, had been seized for examination; she didn’t know if she could ever even look at it again if it turned out it was the murder weapon. Worst of all, though, was the rucked-up, bloody rag mat and the pool of dark, congealing blood. A spray of blood spattered the door to the summer porch. Jaymie turned away from the sight.

DeeDee had already plunked down her bucket and had the water on in the kitchen sink. She fished around in the cupboard under the sink and got a roll of paper towels out. She returned to Jaymie’s side armed for a cleansing battle. “Honey, in case you don’t remember, when I married Johnny Stubbs, the best man in the world, I was a surgical nurse, and for a time before that a nurse in emerge over at Wolverhampton General. I can see you’re a little green around the gills at the blood, but to me it’s just so much red paint.”

She shook out a red garbage bag. “Blood and other body fluids need to be handled correctly. I’ll mop up the blood, you just concentrate on the china and books.” She pulled on the rubber gloves, squirted some detergent into the pail, poured in some bleach and filled it with steaming water.