Five

 

Jaymie was meeting Haskell at the heritage house to finalize plans for the nutmeg graters and the lessons they would be teaching with their aid. The Queensville Historic Manor, on the outskirts of Queensville, though the town was growing, and would someday encompass the property, was a large three-story Queen Anne, freshly painted and with a sign out front touting the heritage property and opening hours. It had been extensively renovated already, but there was more to be done.

The kitchen was Jaymie’s province and she had carefully chosen a vintage color scheme—soft green and cream—and found hundreds of vintage items to match. Utensils from the early part of the twentieth century often had painted handles in green or red, and cream. Even the stove was a vintage beauty painted green and cream that had originally come from The Junk Stops Here. It was her happy place; she volunteered as much as she could, acting as a historical interpreter in period costume and using the antique stove to cook and bake. Today, though, she was just meeting Haskell; the house was open, but visitors would pick up a self-guided tour pamphlet at the front door and wander through on their own.

Haskell was meeting with a builder in Wolverhampton who had offered to donate a structure on a property he owned rather than tear it down. The heritage society was studying whether it would work as the office and interpretation center they had always intended to build. As Jaymie found a spot in the newly paved parking lot behind the old garage, Haskell was returning across the open field with the builder.

She got out of her vehicle and waited. Haskell was a tall, nice-looking older man, calm and stately of demeanor. He was also some kind of cousin a few times removed to one of her best friends, Heidi. Thinking of Heidi, Jaymie reminded herself to call her later. Her friend had been struggling a bit over the summer, but Jaymie hadn’t kept up with her as much as she should have, given everything that was going on in her own life. However . . . that was no excuse. Heidi had been there for her, and she would be there for Heidi. It was an odd friendship in some ways, given that Heidi had “stolen” Joel, Jaymie’s former boyfriend, away from her two years before. Jaymie was grateful; if not for that theft she may have made the grave error of marrying Joel Anderson.

As they approached, Jaymie was startled when she recognized the builder. It was Fergus Baird! He was dressed as she had seen him before in colorful slacks—plaid this time—and a plain mauve shirt, with a pale green sweater over his shoulders.

“Mr. Baird,” she said after Haskell had introduced her. “I saw you down at the docks last week. You were a little hard on Miss Perry, weren’t you?”

Haskell gazed at her in horror. He was expecting help from Baird, after all. But the developer didn’t appear put out in the slightest.

“Someone needs to hold her accountable,” he said with a serious but mild expression, far removed from the anger of his confrontation of a week before. “Truly, do you think that rickety bait shop is the best impression for visitors to our village? I know you, young lady; I’ve seen you before. You are one of the most active servers at the annual Tea with the Queen event. As someone interested in the promotion of this lovely town, do you think those gentle ladies who come to sip tea on the lawn of elegant Stowe House are given a good first impression of Queensville as they wander down a decrepit board wharf past a feed store and bait shop?”

He had a point, and she admitted it. A couple of pretty shops would be a much more welcoming first impression from the water.

“Still,” she said, chin rising. “You were very rude to her. She’s an elderly lady, and frail.”

“So, pardon my bluntness, I should just wait until she dies of natural causes before we move this town forward?” He adjusted the sweater over his shoulders. “I’m well acquainted with the family history. Her mother was ninety-seven when she died. Miss Perry has a ways to go to reach that age. It makes better sense to press her to sell now, while I’m willing to do something, not fifteen years from now.”

“Jaymie, you are wasting Mr. Baird’s precious time,” the society president said, his thick brows drawn low over his eyes. He turned to the other gentleman. “Thanks for coming out, Fergus. I think the building will work for us, but I’ll need to take it to the expansion committee. We’d love to have it, but could use some financial help getting it here.”

“I said I’d underwrite some of the costs, Haskell.” The two men shook hands. “You know I’m good for it.”

Troubled, Jaymie watched him walk to his car. “I wouldn’t think you’d be on board with bullying an old woman, Haskell,” she said, turning to the heritage committee president. “This is still a free world.”

“He wasn’t bullying her. Isn’t anyone else entitled to a strong opinion? I think you underestimate Miss Perry.” Haskell talked about the building Baird was offering to donate. They needed a feasibility study to decide if it was a good fit for the property, he said. It was a thirties relic, a car dealership building from that time, and had a lot of vintage appeal in some ways, with art deco features: long curving windows that could be used as display areas and for good natural lighting.

“Can we go into the house so I can show you where I want to put the cases? I’ve got to go soon,” Jaymie said. They turned together and started walking, a fallish breeze chasing clouds across the blue sky above them. A couple of smaller birds were chasing away a large black crow, squabbling and shrieking in the country quiet. “I’m meeting Miss Perry this afternoon to get the graters so I can take them to Bill to get started on the design for the cases. Hey, did you see the news last night? The part showing Miss Perry chasing Estelle and the reporter away?”

“That woman . . . she’s impossible. I don’t know what she has against us all, but she’s becoming a problem, one we need to talk about and figure out how to deal with.”

Jaymie fought back a spurt of anger. She saw it all too often. Once folks reached a certain age they were expected to give up control of things important to them: their property, their homes, even the care they received from doctors and home health care workers. Getting old, as Mrs. Stubbs often said, was not for sissies. “She’s not a problem, Haskell, she’s a woman still in control of all of her faculties. If you truly want to make a deal with her, have you enlisted Mrs. Stubbs’s aid? They’re cousins, after all.”

“Mrs. Stubbs told me to do something physically impossible when I asked her to talk to Miss Perry,” he said haughtily.

Jaymie suppressed a snort of laughter. It clearly ran in the Perry family, that streak of irascibility.

“Can you talk to her?” he said. “You seem to have some kind of rapport with the old battle-ax.”

Her smile died. She didn’t appreciate the lady being spoken of so disrespectfully. “I’m not going to bully or cajole her. Jocie asked if she had a tummy ache. Maybe she’s got a point; perhaps Miss Perry isn’t well. That can make people tetchy.”

“Just try!”

“She’s your neighbor, Haskell. You know her better than I.”

“That does not mean I get along with her. We’ve had our differences, and still do. I don’t understand why she won’t let us do the cliff walk pamphlet.”

Exasperated, Jaymie said, “Maybe because her place was broken into while she was sleeping upstairs and she’s edgy about strangers wandering around her property, Haskell!”

“Okay, all right, I get it. Just do your best.”

“I’m not promising anything.” Jaymie preceded Haskell up the two steps of the side entrance and into the house; this door led directly to the kitchen. She sat down with him at the kitchen table and showed him the sketches Bill Waterman had drawn up of the locking cases for the spice graters—he had used approximate measurements—as well as the learning through objects material she had printed out from the internet. Bill had given a detailed cost projection. Haskell approved it all, while griping about the cost, the notion of the home being used to teach groups of kids, and the added expense it would incur. She reminded him that the whole purpose of the historic house was to be a teaching tool about the past, and that this, more than any program they had so far instituted, furthered that aim.

She would also bring that up at the next heritage meeting, if she had time to attend, to make sure society members were on board with their mission statement, which included a paragraph about teaching the next generation about Queensville’s past. With Haskell’s approval in hand, she departed to let him brood about money and history.

Two hours later, after doing some other tasks and getting groceries, heading back to the cabin, putting chili in the slow cooker for dinner, walking Hoppy and cleaning up, she was on the road again toward Winding Woods. She had tried calling Heidi while she was home, but there was no answer. She left a message, then tried Bernie Jenkins’s number, but Bernie, her and Heidi’s mutual best friend, was either working or didn’t have her phone on.

The clouds that had earlier appeared so fluffy and white had turned gray and gathered in gloomy groups, closing out the sky. A wind came up, and rain started tapping on the SUV roof. She glanced at her watch. She was already late. Miss Perry’s generation did not like lateness. She pulled over to the side and got out her phone.

All she got was the answering machine; that would have to do. “Miss Perry, I’m running a couple of minutes late but I am on my way. In fact, I’m almost there! I do apologize. See you in two minutes!”

She turned off River Road and started up Winding Woods Lane. She looked down, trying to adjust the windshield wiper frequency, as it was set too low to clear the increasing rain. When she looked up, a dark pickup was heading straight at her. “Dang, dude! Slow down!” she yelped, pulling as far as she could to the side of the road as he zoomed past.

She drove past Haskell’s stately home—he was there, it appeared; his car was in the drive—and pulled up to the Nutmeg Palace. By the time she pulled into the drive her heart rate had slowed to normal and the rain had become a steady, if light, drizzle. She jumped out and ran up the steps to the covered porch, knocked on the door, then waited. She knocked again more loudly after a few minutes. When there was no answer, she began to feel a light tug of unease. She tried the door and it easily opened.

She stepped into the big entry, pausing on the mat inside the door. “Miss Perry!” she called. “Yoo hoo!” She slipped her boots off and hiked her purse over her shoulder, trudging into the house, calling the woman’s name, becoming more and more uneasy. She was not in the parlor or dining room, nor was she in the kitchen or her TV room, though the TV was on, tuned to a game show but muted. Maybe she was sick in bed and had left the door unlocked for her niece, Morgan? But her niece had a key, Jaymie already knew that.

Jaymie returned through the kitchen and headed to the back door, but tripped on something . . . or someone! Loud, hoarse breathing alerted her and Jaymie found a light switch. There, at the bottom of the back stairs, was Miss Perry! “Oh, no!” Jaymie cried. She knelt by the woman, who was bloody but alive. “Miss Perry. Miss Perry, can you hear me?” A moan of pain was her only answer.

Jaymie fumbled in her purse and found her phone, plopping down on the floor beside the woman, then jabbed 911, babbling the problem and the Winding Woods Lane address. She answered the operator’s questions—Yes, Miss Perry was breathing; no, she didn’t seem to be conscious; yes, her breathing was regular, though labored and hoarse, and no, Jaymie would not attempt to move her—and left the line open, leaning over her new friend.

“Miss Perry, help is coming.” She pulled off her cardigan and laid it over the elderly woman, who only wore a faded housedress, her thin arms pitiably frail and wrinkled, threaded by blue veins and marred by arthritic joints. A housedress? She hadn’t had time to change before her appointment with Jaymie? That seemed odd. It was two in the afternoon.

Miss Perry and women of her generation and social strata—club ladies, as Mrs. Stubbs called the women she socialized with in the fifties and sixties—would never be caught by company in a faded, worn housedress. Hadn’t she an appointment with Estelle that morning? Maybe after that altercation in front of her house it was called off. But she said she had another appointment before lunch. Surely she would have been changed out of her housedress for that? Maybe the person had come, but when they got no answer had gone away again. Jaymie would have if she hadn’t known Miss Perry well enough.

The woman moaned and tried to move. Her head was bloody, the fluid drying in a crust in her tightly permed hair; Jaymie spotted a dark mark on the staircase newel post where the woman must have hit her head. She looked down to her feet; they were bare, but moccasin-style slippers that looked too large for her were lying near her at the bottom of the stairs, one upside down over the other. It suggested that she had tripped, but had she? The slippers looked brand-new, not like they had been worn.

Now she was imagining things! When Miss Perry recovered she’d tell them all that she slipped coming down the stairs. Jaymie had found too many bodies in her time. Sirens! Jaymie sighed and whispered a prayer of thanks for first responders. They would soon take over, knowing exactly what to do.

The sirens stopped, but she could hear the heavy throb of the motor of a fire truck and a noise in the front entrance. “Back here!” she yelled. “We’re at the very back of the house!”

A woman and man in firefighter uniforms came trudging through. Jaymie gladly relinquished her spot as they assessed the situation. They were swiftly replaced by paramedics from the ambulance, and Jaymie was pushed farther away until she was pacing in the front hall, as a police officer came through the door.

“Bernie!” Jaymie said, thankful it was her friend.

“Jaymie. What’s going on here?”

Jaymie sat on the second step of the front hall stairs and told her everything.

“So your understanding was that she was expecting two other people this morning?” Bernie checked her watch. “It’s two thirty-five. What time did you get here?”

“About half an hour ago now. I was a few minutes late, but not more. She said she had Estelle Arden—she’s a writer working on the Queensville walking tour pamphlet—coming this morning, but that may have been called off, given their altercation.”

Bernie knew all about that. She pulled a notebook out of a pocket and a pen from another. She flipped the small coil-bound notebook open. “Why was Ms. Arden coming here this morning?”

Jaymie shrugged. “About the pamphlet, maybe? They were trying to talk Miss Perry into letting walkers have access across her property along the river but she was dead set against allowing it. Why are you asking all these questions? Do you think there’s something fishy about her accident?”

“Given the woman’s trouble lately, I’m not taking chances,” Bernie said, her dark eyes riveted on her notebook. “What about the other appointment?”

“She said it was before lunch, but she didn’t say with whom.”

“What time would lunch be for her, do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll be checking with whoever she was supposed to see today, to try to get an idea what time she may have fallen.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Jaymie said. “She would not have been greeting anyone in that faded housedress.”

Bernie cocked an eyebrow. “Why not? My grandma wears hers twenty-four-seven.”

“Probably not a faded old one, though. And Miss Perry was starchy, like Mrs. Stubbs. She would have dressed for a meeting or company.”

“So you don’t know who else she was supposed to see?”

Jaymie shook her head. “She didn’t say, but the way she said it—appointment—probably means it wasn’t Morgan Wallace. Though I can’t say that for sure. Maybe she wrote it down somewhere? People usually mark things like that on a calendar.”

“Good point. Morgan Wallace,” Bernie said the name aloud as she wrote it down.

“Her niece. I think she visits often, maybe every day, and makes Miss Perry meals.” She thought for a minute. “I wonder if she drops in at lunch? Last time I was here she came in the middle of the afternoon. I don’t know much about their daily routine.”

“But the door was unlocked when you got here.”

“I didn’t know that at first and knocked for a while. Ten minutes or so at least. Then I tried the door and it opened.”

One of the paramedics strode through, out the front door, and came back a few moments later wheeling a gurney that was spattered with raindrops, shedding them on the shiny wood floor as he walked.

“Is she going to be okay?” Jaymie pleaded, tearing up. It had been a horrible shock, finding her like that. It had looked bad . . . very bad.

“I don’t know. They’ll do everything they can,” she replied, her tone no-nonsense but sympathetic. Bernie headed out the front door and to her police car pulled up to the curb; she slipped inside and used the police radio, then returned inside and said to Jaymie, “I’ve called it in. We’re having Mrs. Wallace called so she can come and lock up after her aunt is taken away. What are you doing here today, by the way?”

Jaymie explained, then said, “It’s a lucky thing; I don’t know when she would have been found otherwise. Not until Morgan came, I suppose.”

“Is everything okay? Is Lois all right?” Lan Zane came in the front door, his dog on a leash.

“Outside, please, sir,” Bernie said, ushering the man back out.

Jaymie followed, and they all stood on the covered front porch. Jaymie exchanged a glance with Bernie, introduced Lan Zane, Miss Perry’s neighbor to the north, then told him simply that Miss Perry had taken a tumble.

“Sir, did you see anyone visiting Miss Perry this morning?” Bernie asked him.

He glanced between Jaymie and Bernie. “What’s going on?”

“Please, sir, just answer the question.”

“No, I . . . I haven’t seen anything.”

They went through his full name, address—right next door—and where he was that morning, which, Jaymie overheard, was at work. He was a contract lawyer in Wolverhampton. He had lunch in town at his desk, which he did most days, though he worked alone so no one could verify that, then did a little more work. He had come home to walk Tiberius, which he did at least once a day when his wife was busy. “I didn’t see anything, but you can check with my wife, Phillipa; she was late leaving this morning. She volunteers at the hospital in Wolverhampton. And Haskell Lockland lives on the other side of Lois.”

“I was with Haskell out at the historic manor this morning,” Jaymie said. “He’d been there for a meeting with a local builder. But I think he must be home, because his car is in his drive now.”

For once Tiberius was behaving, lying alert and interested on the porch. “What’s going on?” Zane asked, his eyes narrowing. “Why all these questions?” Bernie ignored him and simply jotted down what she had learned.

As the front door opened, Jaymie, Lan and Bernie scattered down the steps and out into the rain, which had diminished to spatters coming down. The paramedics wheeled Miss Perry out on the gurney, then carefully down the steps, as Morgan Wallace drove up, screeching to a halt in her silver sedan with Wallace Motors emblazoned on the side. She jumped from the car and raced over to them. “Is she all right? What happened?”

One of the paramedics asked who she was, then told her that Miss Perry was unconscious. She was breathing on her own, but her blood pressure was low. Doctors at Wolverhampton General would be able to assess her more thoroughly. Morgan could follow them to the hospital.

She hung over her aunt, murmuring something, then turned and saw Lan Zane. “You! Did you do anything? Aunt Lois said you threatened her!”

He put one hand on his chest as his dog, awoken from his passivity by Morgan’s shrieking, began to snarl, bark, leap and snap. She jumped back, her face pale, her eyes wide.

“Me? I didn’t do anything!” He yanked on the dog’s leash, but Tiberius still tugged and growled as Morgan retreated further. “It’s your crazy aunt who threatened me . . . said she’d shoot my dog if she ever found him on her property again. What kind of person threatens to shoot a dog?”

“The kind who is upset when the dog has attacked her cats!” Morgan retorted.

“Her cats? You mean those feral vermin she feeds!” Zane shouted, his face growing red, the glow spreading up from his neck to his cheeks. His dog snarled and pulled at the lead, lunging at Morgan. “How can she blame my dog when those animals prowl all over my property all day and night?”

“Get that thing away from me!” she screamed.

“Sir, keep your animal under control,” Bernie said, stepping between Zane and Morgan Wallace.

The ambulance screamed away. Morgan whirled and stalked into the house, but bolted out a few moments later. “Hey, you! Miss Policewoman!” she shouted, snapping her fingers, her plump cheeks suffused with blotchy red. “Didn’t any of you morons notice the wire across the staircase? Someone tried to murder my aunt!”