Bowled Over (27 page)

“Yes?” Ella Douglas said, weakly, peering out at her.

“Hi, Ella. It’s Jaymie Leighton. How are you this evening?”

“I’m all right.”

“Can I come in? I’d like to talk to you.”

There was silence for a long minute. “Okay. For a few minutes.”

“I won’t keep you long,” Jaymie said, slipping through the open door. She heard a
beep beep
and saw Ella motoring down the hallway. She followed her to the living room, a cramped space with just enough room for the wheelchair to wend its way to a spot cleared for it. By her wheelchair there was a floor lamp, a low shelf filled with books pushed in haphazardly and a small table with a plate of uneaten toast and jam on it. A book was overturned in the jumbled mess.

“Bob’s at a Rotary club meeting,” she said. “He usually does the dishes after supper, but he was in a hurry tonight.”

“Can I help? Would you like a cup of tea?”

Ella eyed her warily. “Tea would be okay, but please don’t
disturb anything in the kitchen; Bob likes things just as they are.”

“No problem.” She made her way to the kitchen, past a multitude of bookcases stuffed with books on holistic medicine, herbal remedies and the philosophy of medicine.

The kitchen was a bit of a mess—toast crumbs, an open jar of homemade jam, a dirty plate in the sink—but Jaymie had said she wouldn’t touch anything. She looked for the kettle, found some tea bags—there were dozens of boxes of different types of herbal teas as well as some orange pekoe—and a teapot. She dropped the teapot lid, but luckily it didn’t break.

“What’s going on in there?” Ella called. “Did you break something? What are you doing?”

Jaymie came to the living room door and said, keeping her tone cheerful, “Just being clumsy. I dropped the lid of the teapot, but it’s fine. No damage.”

“Try to be more careful,” the woman said, flexing her fingers on the armrests of her wheelchair.

Jaymie didn’t reply, opting to go back and finish making the tea, using the orange pekoe bags instead of the more risky herbal teas, because she didn’t know how they tasted. She found a tray, and put the teapot, two mugs and the bowl of raw sugar and a pitcher of soy milk on it, and carried it into the living room.

“Where would you like me to put this?” Jaymie said.

Ella blinked and looked around. “I don’t know. Wherever you can find room, I guess.”

Setting the tray temporarily on the floor, Jaymie moved a stack of books that were on the coffee table to a spot on the floor, and put the tray up on the table.

“You’ll put that back, won’t you? The books? Before you leave?”

“Yes, of course. How do you like your tea?”

“I don’t really like black tea. Wasn’t there some chamomile, or mint?”

Jaymie stifled a sigh of exasperation. She reminded herself of how difficult it would be to be confined to a wheelchair. The Eleanor Grimshaw she remembered had been a strapping, energetic girl. She took one of the cups back to the kitchen, made a mug of chamomile and brought it back in, removing the uneaten toast and setting the tea in the pool of yellow light from the floor lamp. She made up her own mug and sat back in one of the overstuffed armchairs.

Eyeing her with suspicion, Ella said, “If you want to know if I know anything about poor Kathy’s tragedy, then you’ve come to the wrong place.”

Okay, so no subterfuge, no sneaky way of interrogating Ella. “I just wondered, I guess, if you’ve had any dealings with her other than that confrontation in the Emporium.” Jaymie watched the woman’s face, noting sallow cheeks, ashen skin and wary, sunken eyes. A nerve jumped in Ella’s temple, but other than that, her expression didn’t change. “Someone told me that she intended to drop in on you the morning of the Fourth,” Jaymie pressed. “Did she?”

“Who told you that?” Ella said, sharply. Her gaze was dubious, her eyes narrowed.

“A friend,” Jaymie said, slowly, wondering why Ella was so suspicious.

“Whose friend? Yours or Kathy’s?”

“Kathy’s. Why does it matter?”

“What were you doing talking to a friend of Kathy’s about me?”

Jaymie sighed. She now remembered more about Eleanor Grimshaw’s years at Wolverhampton High. Eleanor—now Ella—didn’t have many friends. She seemed to exist on the
fringes of school activities and rarely mixed with others. Maybe her current sparkling personality was just an extension of her teenage self and not the result of her illness at all.

“I wasn’t specifically talking about you at all. It just came out. Did she drop in here on the morning of the Fourth?”

“Well, yes.”

“What did she want?”

“Why are you asking?”

Jaymie let that question lie and just sipped her tea, watching Ella, trying to figure her out. Finally, she asked, “Why did you move to Queensville, Ella? Is your family still here?”

“I don’t have a lot of family left. Bob and I just wanted a fresh start. I don’t know how much of a fresh start you can have when you’re as sick as I am, but…” She shrugged. “Queensville is the only place I was ever happy.”

“It must be so tough. I’m sorry.”

“Bob has been amazing. I don’t know what I’d do without him. The sicker I get, the more he loves me!”

“What an odd thing to say!” Jaymie blurted, then reddened. “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, you shouldn’t.” Ella shrugged and put her cup down. “Sometimes I think that Bob’s too good for me, but he’s a nurturer, you know? Someone desperate to help others.”

“There are men like that,” Jaymie said, reflecting on an acquaintance, a fellow who had married a party girl. They had three kids together, and he looked after every need of the babies they had while she went out barhopping most nights of the week. He seemed content with the arrangement, and the children adored him. Maybe Bob was that kind of guy. “It’s good that you found one.”

“No point in not telling you, I guess. Kathy did come here the morning of the Fourth,” Ella said, picking at the fluffy
gray afghan that covered her knees. “She said she was sorry about yelling at me in the Emporium. At least it gave me the chance to say I was sorry too, and make sure little Connor was okay. I told her that my eyesight isn’t very good.”

“I think she was distracted that morning, and maybe upset. Did you two talk about old times at Wolverhampton High?”

Ella’s cheeks took on a faint pink tinge. “No, not really. What’s to talk about? The fact that we were both outcasts?” she said, bitterly, then she looked ashamed. “I don’t know if she remembered, but I was kind of hard on her in high school. I bullied her a bit. I keep trying to be a better person, but…” She shrugged. “We sat and talked, mostly about my health.”

“She planned on being a nurse, back when we were kids,” Jaymie murmured. This was proving to be a dead end.

“So she said. She wanted to make sure I was getting the right foods and taking the right supplements. I got the feeling she was interested in natural remedies.” She chuckled, but it was a mirthless sound. “I told her I’ve tried everything known to man! And a few things that aren’t.”

“Was there anything odd about Kathy that morning? Did she mention that something was bothering her?”

Ella shrugged. “Not really. My eyesight is bad, though, so I don’t notice a lot about expressions and such. Some days I just can’t even stand light in my eyes, it’s so bad.”

“I’m so sorry,” Jaymie murmured.

“Could you get me a glass of water? I’m so thirsty. It’s dry in here.”

Jaymie retrieved a glass of cold water for her, and the woman drank it down. Jaymie watched, then asked, “What did Kathy do while she was here? Did she stay long?”

“Not really. We talked for a while. Kathy made some tea,
got the mail for me, went to the washroom. Bob came home, and Kathy said she had to go, that she and some friends were getting together in the park. I said I wished I could go, and Bob said maybe we would. That’s why we went for a walk there.”

“And then you came home?”

“Why are you asking questions like that? Where else would I go?”

“I’m just trying to figure out what happened to Kathy, if anyone saw anything.”

“Well, we sure wouldn’t have!” Ella snapped. “We came home and stayed home for the rest of the day.”

It seemed that there was nothing here. Ella certainly had no reason to wish Kathy harm, nor did her husband. “I’ll leave you be, then,” Jaymie said.

“Make sure you leave everything the way it should be,” Ella fretted. “Except, can you take that toast and throw it out? I’m just not hungry tonight.”

“I will.” She took the plate and their mugs to the kitchen, tidied everything back to how it was and rinsed out the teapot, then took her leave, feeling deeply sorry for someone whose health was so compromised. Ella was peevish and demanding, but who wouldn’t be in that situation?

As she left, Jaymie took a look at the wheelchair lift attached to the vine-covered porch. It was certainly likely, looking at the thing, that Ella could work it herself. It was intended for the wheelchair-bound person to use alone, in fact. It was barely possible, then, that Ella could have left the house without Bob knowing, and gone to the park to confront Kathy. But why? The theory didn’t make much sense.

The phone was ringing as she got home, and it was Wendi, her university friend in Port Huron, the one she had called about Matt Laskan.

“Girl, you caught yourself a humdinger,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Jaymie said, walking to the back door and sitting down on the step to watch Hoppy take his last piddle of the evening, then scratch grass over the spot.

“This Matt Laskan fellow? He was arrested on charges of assault and, get this, attempted kidnapping in January. Charges were dropped, but still! That is serious stuff.”

“Assault? Attempted kidnapping? Matt Laskan?” Jaymie sat, mouth open, thinking of the buoyant yet calm fellow she had only met a few times. “Was he drunk?”

“No record of any blood alcohol level.”

“Who was the victim?”

“I wondered if you’d ask that. Thirty-nine-year-old female by the name of Janet Broadhouse.”

“I wonder why she dropped the charges.”

“Maybe the girl’s got more important things to worry about.”

“Like what? What do you mean?”

“Oh, maybe like the drug and prostitution charges she’s facing in court next month?”

*   *   *

J
AYMIE HAD A
difficult time getting to sleep and kept waking up. It was a restless night. She was trying to reconcile the calm accountant that Matt Laskan seemed to be, with someone who would get himself into such a spot that he would be arrested on assault and attempted kidnapping charges with a druggie prostitute.

The next morning, as she drank her first cup of coffee and got ready to go over to the bed-and-breakfast, she still pondered it all. He was
really
lucky the charges were dropped, because attempted kidnapping could be hard time. Was this what Kathy had over his head? And would he kill to keep
secret that he associated with a prostitute? His girlfriend would surely not be too happy about that, Jaymie imagined, on
any
level. The possible health consequences and the damage to their relationship aside, if she was thinking of a senate run, Matt’s legal problems could kill that for her. But how would Kathy have found out about the arrest?

Valetta called just as she was on her way out. “I’m off again today. Have you figured anything out, Jaymie?”

“We should talk. I’m trying to work things out, but I
have
found some interesting information, and I want to see what you think. I’m taking a run to the thrift store in Wolverhampton when I get done at the B&B. I desperately need more vintage melamine and wicker baskets for the rental business, if I can find any. Can we get together after that?”

“Why don’t you pick me up and we’ll go to town together, if you don’t mind.”

“Works for me.” Jaymie got done quickly at Anna’s and took Becca’s car to pick up Valetta. It was going to be hot, and her van didn’t have air-conditioning, unless you counted an open window. She didn’t mind, but she didn’t want to subject Valetta to the heat.

“So what’s new?” her friend said, slamming the door shut. “Sounded on the phone like you found out something juicy.”

Jaymie retraced her steps from the day before, ending with the shocking call she’d gotten from her friend in Port Huron.

“Kidnapping? Assault? How did Matt hide that?”

“The charges have been dropped,” Jaymie said.

“Dropped. Hmm.”

“Wendi speculated that the woman has so much on her plate—other legal problems of her own—that she doesn’t want to go to court to follow up on the charges.”

“Or the charges are baloney, and she doesn’t want to get caught lying.”

“Possible. Matt Laskan does not seem the type to get physical. But then he doesn’t seem the type to use prostitutes, either.”

“You can never tell,” Valetta said, her mouth setting in a grim line.

They parked on the main street in Wolverhampton and went into Dollar Dan’s Thrift Store and More. As usual, Valetta tried to get Jaymie to buy every kitchen utensil or bowl that looked to be more than ten years old, and Jaymie resisted. She did her best to keep her mind off the vintage bowl used to kill Kathy, but the murder was like a dark blotch in her brain, a spot that she couldn’t ignore, one that filled her with horror.

Instead, she haunted the kitchenware aisle, gathering some vintage melamine, and even found a couple of nice willow baskets that she could transform into picnic baskets with vintage gingham linens and the right accompaniments. Acrylic wineglasses and a couple of straw wine-bottle holders attracted her attention, and she snatched them up to use in the Lover’s Lane basket. In no time, her cart was full, and she took a deep breath. Retail therapy for her was a trip to a junk or antique store.

She moved on to the furniture, examining a nice wood bookcase. Jaymie’s romance novel collection was almost as large as her cookbook collection and needed its own home. As Valetta approached with a full cart herself, she said to her friend, “I think I need this for my collection of Mary Baloghs and Jo Beverleys.”

“Then you should get it.”