Freezer I'll Shoot (A Vintage Kitchen Mystery) (10 page)

But now they were putting in a system that would handle it all, something that Robin told her was a necessity if she wanted to keep renting out the cottage. The Redmonds had had to do it the summer before, she knew, and it was only the two of them. Now, that was odd. She glanced over at Garnet. She had never pondered that before, their lack of visitors. As far as Jaymie knew, the Redmonds never had family or friends bunking in with them. In general, once folks knew you lived in a tourist area they started dropping hints about coming to visit dear cousin so-and-so.

“I’m relieved we can go ahead and get this done, anyway,” Jaymie said. Once it was done, it was done, and it was good to go—other than an occasional pumping out of the solid waste from the septic tank—for thirty years or more.

“So what are you going to do with the property, once the leaching bed and septic system is done?” Garnet asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I just assumed that you’d do what we did, take the opportunity to reimagine the landscaping.”

He had a point, Jaymie thought, scanning the landscape. It had always been just a grassy slope, but if she looked at it as an opportunity, as the Redmonds had, it could be so much more. When the Redmonds did their septic system and leaching bed, they had built in some terraced gardens dotted over the slope, and now had a gazebo in the shade of the copse of pine trees on their side of the ravine.

“You guys did such a great job. I’d love your opinion. What do you think we should do?”

She walked around the muddy open pit with him, and he elaborated on the terrace idea, showing her where there could be a natural fieldstone patio, a kind of open-air living room, halfway down the slope. He mentioned patio furniture, and she tried to picture different kinds, natural rattan, or wicker, or synthetic versions. “And a swing,” she said, picturing soft summer nights and a swing set in the privacy of the grove of trees.

“Hello?” Zack Christian approached from the side of the cottage just then.

“Hey!” Jaymie said. She glanced over at Garnet, but he was looking down at the mud at the edge of the new leaching field, and didn’t acknowledge the detective.

“Chief Ledbetter told me you’d be here,” he said. He was dressed in his off-duty clothes, a towel slung over his neck.

“Yeah. He gave me the go-ahead to have the plumbers finish the septic system.”

Her neighbor knelt at the edge of the muck looking at something. Jaymie glanced over at him, and said, “Garnet, what are you looking at?”

He pointed. “There’s something wedged in the mud, something metal. What is it?”

Zack snapped into cop mode, the difference like that between a blazing hot day and a freezer. “Don’t touch it!” he said. He whipped his cell phone out of his pocket as he knelt down to look. But he didn’t make a call; he took a photo. “It’s a drill bit,” he said, finally, as he used the end of a key to dislodge it from the muck.

Jaymie squinted, and could see the blue steel and nodded. “You’re right! What’s it doing in the mud?”

The detective was noncommittal, but was on the phone calling for a forensic team. Jaymie groaned. Would this put her plumbing work on hold again? Garnet shrugged and grimaced, mouthing, “Sorry.” He climbed the hill to his cottage.

A half hour later the team had swarmed her property, after photographing and extricating the drill bit. It would be sent to forensic, Zack said, in case it was the murder weapon.

“But I thought the ice pick was the murder weapon?”

“It probably is, but we can’t be too careful. We are going to have to search again, just in case,” he said. “Better now than when you’ve laid sod. Have you thought of anything else regarding the ice pick yet? When you last saw it?”

“I told you in my statement; I last saw it when Garnet had it.”

“Okay, all right.”

The team cordoned off the area again. Darn! Just when she thought they’d make headway and get the plumbing job finished. There was no point in staying on the island that night, and Jaymie didn’t think she could face another lonely night with no toilet, so she went back to Queensville, after calling Robin and telling him that finishing the job had to be put off for another day or two. He was relieved, Jaymie could tell.

That evening she and Daniel went for a long walk, since both of their homes were off-limits, due to the parents being in residence. It felt like a high school date, and they shared a laugh over the annoyances attendant upon being thirtysomething and living, however briefly, with one’s parents. The evening ended with a very satisfying make-out session in the back alley of her home, interrupted at last by Trip Findley, her backyard neighbor, turning on his light and letting out his little dog, Skip. It started barking, setting off Hoppy in her own backyard.

“Good night,” she said to Daniel, softly. She took his glasses off, ran her fingers through his thick hair and kissed him. She felt him sigh, and smiled to herself, as she carefully placed his glasses back on his nose.

“Good night, sweetheart,” he said, kissing her forehead and ambling off.

Sweetheart? She felt like she had retreated to the 1950s. Kind of appropriate, given her fondness for all things vintage!

The next morning she helped Anna out at the bed-and-breakfast, giving her mom time to get ready for another day of golfing, and then updated her blog—she had three whole followers and no comments—and wrote for a while, clearing her mind of all the extraneous garbage that was plaguing her and concentrating on the words. The article on vintage picnics was coming together very well now, and she even found some recipes she was interested in trying. It was a subject, after all, that she had researched thoroughly for her thriving business.

Then she drove her van out to the police station to retrieve her camera. She now needed to photograph some of her vintage picnic baskets for the article on picnicking the old-fashioned way. There was a bit of a holdup, but she did get her digital camera back. She stood at the desk in the bustling office for a moment—phones rang and printers chattered to life, dispatchers talked and officers escorted the odd arrestee through the station—thumbing through the slide show of photos.

So, the ice pick photos had been removed. Interesting. Why remove them from her camera? Shuddering, she decided that was just fine; she didn’t really want to be reminded of Urban’s death anyway, and even though she had not actually seen the pick in the man’s chest, she could imagine it all too well. She frowned and stared at the other photos, one a blurry image of the ice chests at the back, with Ruby moving out of frame. The ice pick was likely the murder weapon, but now there was the complication of the drill bit. On the other hand, it was possible that the drill bit had nothing to do with anything, and had just been dropped, not stolen.

She turned away from the counter to leave, but just then Chief Ledbetter lumbered out from his office and yelped her name, then beckoned her back. Almost out. Oh, well. She threaded through cubicles and entered his office, a bland glass and metal box with a big picture window overlooking the back parking lot, and a desk facing away from it, with two hard chairs facing the desk. She sat down in one of them, as he circled to sit behind his desk.

He plunked down in his chair with a grunt of relief. “You’ve been a busy little bee the last few months, haven’t you, Miss Leighton? First that body on your back porch, then that girl dead at the park with your bowl as the murder weapon, and now this, out at your cottage. You don’t have any other properties I should be aware of, do you? Anywhere else you’re hiding dead bodies?”

As an example of gallows humor, it failed miserably, Jaymie thought, and she didn’t smile. Stiffening, she said, “A series of unfortunate coincidences.”

“Hmph,” he grunted. “Don’t really believe in coincidences. But Detective Christian seems to believe in ’em. Says you’re an innocent victim in all this.”

Her cheeks warmed, but she merely said, “Technically, Urban Dobrinskie’s body was not on my property, but on the Redmonds’. It was only chance that I happened to be out there that night and found Urban.”

“Yeah, we know that. Technically.” He sat and stared at Jaymie for a long few minutes.

“I have to go,” she said, standing. “Now that I have my camera back, I need to take photos of the subject of my newspaper article.”

“You’re not writing about the Ice House, right?”

“No. I decided to go with something else. Vintage picnics, actually.”

He squinted up at her. “Me and some buddies used to swim out to the island to hang around the rich girls, the ones whose families had cottages out there. We’d mooch a hot dog off someone, and go fishing off the dock. Guess that’s not the kind of vintage picnic you had in mind.”

“No,” she said, a little peeved. If he was trying to imply that she was a “rich girl” and a snob because her family owned a cottage on Heartbreak Island, then he was barking up the wrong tree. “You’ll have to read the
Howler
to see my article.”

“Sure. I’ll tell m’ wife about it. Don’t go finding any more dead bodies, right?”

She ignored him, merely asking, “I hope I can now have the plumbers finish my septic system?”

“Yup. Work away. That’s what I asked you back here to tell you. You are free to finish your plumbing adventure. Good luck.”

She returned home, parked the van and escaped, with Hoppy, back to the island. When she strode up the road toward Rose Tree Cottage, though, she saw that her sloping laneway was covered in muck, and some of the neighbors were standing around, examining it.

“What now?” she muttered, approaching.

Ten

T
HE “WHAT NOW”
turned out to be the wreckage left by an excavator brought in by the police to dig up what had already been done by Robin’s men, in search of any missed clues. They had blithely mowed down several saplings, part of a row of young poplar trees at the top of the Leighton cottage laneway. That row of saplings was the very reason Jaymie had had the plumbers access the joint backyard from the Redmonds’ property in the first place.

With Hoppy securely locked inside, Jaymie examined the mess and fumed.

Ruby descended their sloped, terraced backyard, surveying the damage from her side of the devastation. “I’m so sorry, Jaymie!” she called out. “What a mess!”

“I suppose I should just be thankful that Robin and the guys hadn’t laid all the pipe yet, so really, it’s just a little extra mud moving they’ll have to do.
If
I can get them away from Will, down at the marina.”

Ruby circled the muddy expanse and approached. Jaymie was shocked at how wan she looked, a ghostly gray, when usually she was healthy, if a little too tanned from hours on their sailboat, the
Heartbreak Kid
. “They’ve started work on the dredging, haven’t they?”

“Yeah, I saw them moving the equipment in,” Jaymie said. “How am I going to get them back for our piddly little job?”

“Garnet might be able to help,” she said. “I’ll have him call Will. I know they need to get moving with the harbor dredging and slip expansion, but you have to have this finished first. Especially if your future in-laws are going to come out here, eh?”

“Future in-laws?” Jaymie blurted. “Daniel and I don’t have any plans.”

Ruby smiled, a slightly sad expression. “Don’t let him get away. I’ve met him, and he seems like the real deal.”

Jaymie had the sense that there was a sad story behind Ruby’s eyes. She wondered whether there was a lost love in her past. But still, her life was her life, and no one else’s sad story could impact her. “I’m not rushing into anything. Not after Joel. I like Daniel a lot, but he’s not my future husband. Not yet, anyway.”

“I’ll get Garnet to call the marina,” Ruby said, squeezing her shoulder again. “And have Will send Robin and the guys back to finish up here.”

“That would be great, Ruby,” Jaymie said, at the same time wondering how the woman just
knew
that Garnet would have so much pull with Will. “I guess you guys are close?”

Ruby, who was heading back to her cottage, turned around and cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

“You must be close to Will Lindsay, if you figure Garnet can sway him.” Jaymie remembered what Valetta had said; she felt like there was something about Ruby, or Garnet, or both of them, something they weren’t revealing.

The other woman looked uneasy. “No, not particularly close. But we do keep our boat in the marina, and Will is the one we deal with most.”

“Understandable, with the way Urban behaved toward you, that you’d want to deal with Will more than that jerk. Was he always that hostile toward you and Garnet?”

She shrugged. “Urban was like that with everyone. We didn’t avoid him, but we didn’t seek him out. I had a feeling he was going to be moving on, anyway. The owner of the Boat House said Urban was in there talking to someone about buying the marina on the Canadian side of the island. That guy was always full of plans, though, and most of them didn’t go anywhere. I’ve got to go if I’m going to catch Garnet and get him to talk to Will and Robin.”

Ruby was as good as her word, and the plumbers were back that afternoon. They worked fiercely, with Robin shouting orders. One of the workers was a slim boy who looked to be working even harder than the older men. Jaymie was a little uncomfortable, knowing they were only working so hard to get done with her less profitable work and on to the big job, the marina. But darn it, she needed to have the leaching bed and septic system up and running. In another ten days or so they’d have more renters in the cottage; that was far more important a reason to hurry than her mother’s wish to have the family dinner at the cottage.

Robin came up to talk to her late in the day, to tell her they were working overtime, and would be done that evening.

“Thank you so much, Rob. I really appreciate it.”

“Hey, if we can get this off our schedule, I can get all of these guys working on the harbor and marina project.”

“That young fellow, the teenager, looks like he’s working harder than everyone else!”

“Yeah, he’s a good kid. You know who that is?”

She shook her head. “But he looks familiar. He’s one of your crew, right?”

“Yeah, but that’s Urban Dobrinskie’s son, Sammy.”

“Really?” She was shocked. “How long has he been working for you?”

“All summer. He’s going to college in September.”

“He wasn’t . . . Was he working here the day his dad . . . I mean, before his dad . . . ?” She let the question hang.

“Yup.”

“Does he know his dad was killed here?”

Robin grimaced. “I
think
he knows, vaguely, but he probably doesn’t know exactly where. And I’m not going to tell him.”

Jaymie appreciated Robin’s tact. “It must be hard on him right now, though, with his dad just murdered.”

Robin glanced over at her, with a wry grin on his lips. “Urban was an asshole, and no one suffered more at his hands than Sammy. I had it out with the jerk once, told him to leave the kid alone. Urb didn’t listen, of course. The kid is probably secretly doing the dance of joy.”

Jaymie was shocked to her core. Her father was so important to her, she couldn’t imagine being happy he was gone. Just the news that he’d had a cancer scare that he hadn’t told her about was frightening. But for all anyone knew, Sammy was deeply saddened. Abused kids still loved their parents, some of them right up to the day they snapped and committed patricide. She was shocked by her train of thought, but she couldn’t help it. Until the murder was solved, everyone was a potential suspect.

“Should he even be working today?”

“I told him to go home, but he didn’t want to.”

The boy was skinny, but wiry. After a summer of working for Robin, his bony arms were clothed in impressive biceps for one so slim. She remembered what Zack had said about having to tell Urban to back off from browbeating his son, and now Robin had added his independent testimony to the fact that Sammy and his dad had a troubled relationship. Had Sammy had enough that fateful night, and done his dad in? The police would certainly be looking into that.

The day wore on, the sun beginning to descend in the sky; the workers took a dinner break. Garnet had sent food over for all of them from the restaurant, one of his many kind and generous gestures. Jaymie sat out on the grassy border of the muddy area with them, and listened to Robin describe what was left to be done. It was taking longer because of the damage done by the police team. Sammy Dobrinskie sat near Robin, wolfing down his burger and onion rings, and draining a large bottle of water.

“I was thinking of doing some landscaping, since we have the opportunity now,” Jaymie said to Robin.

“As long as you don’t run over the septic area with excavators once we’re done, you’ll be okay,” Robin said. “The weight of the machine can crush pipes, even the new ones. Once the turf has packed in around them it’ll be okay, but at first the area will be a little fragile.”

“I have no clue what to do, but something like Garnet and Ruby’s maybe.” She gestured to their terraced lawn and seating area, gilded by the sun, which now hung low in the sky, casting a golden glow over everything.

“What do you think, Sammy?” Robin said, nudging the younger guy. “You’re the landscape guy.”

“You’re into landscaping?” Jaymie asked.

The boy flushed scarlet, tossed his flop of sandy hair off his forehead, and ducked his head. “I did our backyard. D-Dad said it looked like shit.”

“Your dad was wrong,” Robin said. “I’ve seen it, and you did a great job.” He turned to Jaymie. “His mom is into Asian influences, so he designed her a rock garden. Real Zen looking. It even has one of those areas where you rake patterns into the sand, you know?”

“Our property is k-kind of on a ravine, too,” Sammy said, sitting up straight, his thin face lighting up with enthusiasm. “The whole island is really a moraine left when the ice age receded, so there are these long grooves, and gravel deposits. I built a rock slope, with pockets of soil for plants, and we brought in all these mosses and alpines. I made her a waterfall to trickle through it, and found a kind of Chinese pagoda for the top.”

“It sounds awesome,” Jaymie said.

“Are you and your mom still thinking of leaving Heartbreak Island?” Robin asked, searching the boy’s face.

He sighed and looked down at his muddy boots, scraping one against the other. The setting sun lit up streaks of bleached-out blond in his hair. “I don’t know. If Mr. Redmond buys our share of the marina, like he wants, then Mom says she’ll move to Oakland so she can be near me while I go to school. I’m registered at Oakland Community College for the Landscape Tech course this fall. But if things don’t work out, I might not go for another year. I just can’t leave her alone right now.”

Jaymie was silent, but her mind was whirling. Garnet wanted to buy Dobrinskie’s part of the marina?

Robin asked the question Jaymie was thinking. “Since when did Garnet Redmond want to buy out the marina?”

The boy said, “I don’t know, but I heard him talking to Mr. Lindsay, and he said he was preparing an offer for Mom’s lawyer.”

“That’s happening awful fast, isn’t it?” Robin said.

Jaymie’s thoughts exactly.

“Well,
I
don’t want to run it, and Mom
can’t
. It would kill her.”

“I’d wait, if I was your mom,” Robin advised. “Garnet may push for it to be resolved quickly—he’s a good businessman, and sees an opportunity, I guess—but Will could get some help, and your mom could hold on to her share. Just my two cents.” He stood, and put two fingers to his mouth, whistling. “C’mon, guys. We gotta get this done tonight so we can get back to the marina in the morning.”

Some of the fellows groaned, as they stood, stretching out aching muscles, but they got back to work and two hours later, it was done. Jaymie had been working on her article on vintage picnics—and in fact she was pretty much done—but when she saw them packing up, she went outside and caught up with Sammy Dobrinskie.

“Hey, Sam,” she said. “I’d be really interested in any ideas you might have for my backyard, now that the plumbing is done. Can we talk about it some time?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, a smile wreathing his face. “I’ve been thinking about it all day. I’ll make a couple of sketches tonight, if you like.”

That was more than she had hoped for. “Great. If you’re going to be working at the marina tomorrow, can I come by there and bring you lunch, and you can show me your ideas?”

“S-sounds good.”

“I’ll pay you for your input,” she said, suddenly. If this was going to be his profession, she ought not to expect his help for free.

He flushed and ducked his head. “Naw, that’s okay.”

Robin, coming up behind them, overheard and clapped him on the shoulder. “Never turn down money, son. You can use the sketches for course work at Oakland. Even better, I’ll give you a little time free, if you want to work on it
with
Jaymie.”

This was all going too fast. Jaymie had just planned to sod the area and
think
about landscaping, at some future point in time.

“Naw. I’ll do some sketches, but she doesn’t have to pay me.”

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” Jaymie said. “Show me your ideas, and we’ll take it from there.”

They left it at that, but as darkness enfolded the cottage and Hoppy sniffed around the perimeter of the newly smoothed dirt along the slope of the yard, Jaymie sat on the back step and called her dad. He was all for giving the kid a shot at designing them a landscape scheme, and told her he trusted her judgment. He was adamant about one thing, and that was paying Sammy Dobrinskie for his work. No one should work for nothing, he said. She didn’t tell him she was probably doing just that for the
Wolverhampton Howler
.