Five

 

It was a gloomy November morning in downtown Queensville, suiting Jaymie’s mood. She hugged her arms around her purse and yawned. Suspicion and anger had kept her awake all night, tossing and turning, Jakob snoring serenely at her side. As annoying as this was, she was still determined to somehow make Dickens Days a success, and so had filled her SUV that morning with all the stuff for her Dickens diorama and had parked close by so she didn’t have to tote it too far.

But right now Jaymie stood with Bill Waterman watching the township fire inspector surveying the damage to the cider house.

“Who do you think did it?” Bill asked. He had not been on the scene the night before as he lived out of town, and didn’t hear about it until the Wolverhampton Weekly Howler broke the news with Jaymie’s pictures in the online edition.

“It could have been an accident,” Jaymie said, but her tone was half-hearted and unconvincing.

The inspector, a broad-shouldered middle-aged man wearing a navy blue uniform, red and gold Queensville Township Fire Department patch on his shoulder, was crouched down, clipboard in hand, examining the electricity post and shaking his head. Bill strode over to speak with him. “Dale, there wasn’t even anything plugged into the electricity last night and there wouldn’t be until we were actually up and running,” he said, his voice loud enough that it easily carried back to Jaymie standing twenty feet away. “No matter what you think about the electrical outlet, it is not the source of the fire.”

“Bill, don’t get your unders in a knot. I’m just checking.” The man stood and finished making notations on his clipboard, which he then tucked under his arm. He was a smidge taller than the older handyman.

“What do you think caused it?” Bill asked, craning his neck at the booth, trying to see all the details.

“You know I can’t hazard a guess at this point, and I wouldn’t even if I could. I’ve got a few more things to do, then I’ll be making my report to the police.”

“So it’s arson?”

“I didn’t say that,” the fire inspector said patiently, his lined face weary. “I would be making a report either way. You’ll have to wait like everyone else.”

Bill paced back to Jaymie. “I know Nezer had something to do with it.”

“We don’t know that, Bill,” Jaymie said, thinking of Sarah Nezer and her expression as she watched the fire.

“I’m gonna make sure they consider it.” He strode off to follow the fire inspector, who stopped and turned, listening to the handyman.

Valetta brought Jaymie a hot cup of tea in a thermal mug and stood with her across from the village green, staring at the burned wreck of the cider booth. It had been so cute, a simple square structure, about six by eight feet, with a marquee over the counter on which Bill had painted some sheet music. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” was picked out in black notes, with the words in gold script, holly sprigs painted in the corners. Now it was a blackened shell, debris and burnt chunks littering the grass around it, the paint that was left curled and cracked, just one O showing. There was still an acrid smell coming from the wrecked husk whenever the wind wafted through it.

What were they going to do now? Their annual Dickens Days festival featured free hot cider for tourists who had come for the beginning of Dickens Days. It was heavily advertised on their website, in their brochure and in all Dickens Days print and radio ads. The cider booth being destroyed changed everything, and was devastating to one of the heritage society’s two moneymaking events of the year.

“What are we going to do?” Jaymie fretted, giving voice to her worries. “There’s no time to build another one.”

Valetta, in deep thought, didn’t answer for a long moment. Finally, though, she leaned in to Jaymie and murmured, “You know, we do have a security camera mounted up on the top of the Emporium now. I don’t think it looks over this far, but it may have some footage of value on it.”

Jaymie looked up in surprise but quickly looked back to the burnt-out booth, her heart and mind racing. “I did not know that.” She glanced up quickly and spotted a very small addition to the roof of the Emporium. “How did I not know that?”

“It’s recent, and we didn’t exactly make it public.”

“I hate to ask, Val, but would you . . . could I—”

“Have a look at it before I tell the police? You know it, my friend in investigation. If you hadn’t asked, I would have suggested it. Let’s go.”

They headed up the slight rise to the Queensville Emporium. As they entered and passed by the cash register, Jaymie waved to Gracey Klausner, granddaughter of the owners and soon-to-be manager, but followed Valetta to the back. There was a lunch room behind her pharmacy that doubled as an office that was rarely used in this digital age. The Klausners now had another one of their granddaughters, who was an accountant, looking after the books, but with everything available digitally now, she did that off-site. Mostly the room held boxes of overflow goods for the shelves. They lined the walls, piled high, cartons of baked beans, soup, juice boxes and pop.

Valetta used it more than anyone as a lunch room when the weather was too foul to eat her meal outside, either on the porch or at the picnic table under the oak tree by the store. She pushed a chair over for Jaymie and sat down behind the desk, accessing an elderly computer. She tapped the mouse and brought up a split screen of wavery images that appeared to be a live view of all sides of the Emporium. “We’ve got four cameras set up and they digitally record everything, one month’s worth of video, before it begins overwriting old footage.”

Jaymie squinted and stared at the screen. “So that’s the view we want, right?” she said, pointing to one of the four boxes. “Can we get that full screen?”

Valetta adjusted her bifocals and tapped away at the computer keyboard, then moved the mouse pointer, accessing the correct video camera. “Look, you can see to the cider booth, just barely,” she said, pointing out the view of the village green. “I didn’t think you’d be able to. Maybe we hit the jackpot.” She wound back through the hours, the timer spinning backward. “When should I go to?”

“Uh . . . maybe eight or nine last night?”

“That early?”

“We can scan quickly until we see movement, right?”

“True.”

“You never know what will be useful.”

She found eight p.m. Jaymie leaned forward as Val scanned through quickly. It was weird, seeing the town’s activity in such a way. She caught a glimpse of her own SUV as she headed through town to Val’s place. Mrs. Bellwood scurried past in quick time with Roary, her pug, which stopped to pee on one post holding up the Emporium porch; Petty Welch speed-walked through town, then ten minutes later returned, her routine fitness walk now that she had moved into Queensville; cars came and went.

A thin figure with a bulging shopping bag bustled across the street and disappeared behind the Emporium, then reappeared, the bag empty.

“Who was that, I wonder?” Jaymie asked.

Val stopped the film and glanced over at her. “You know, I noticed a while back a lot of gin and wine bottles in our recycling bin. I wasn’t worried about it, but . . . I noticed. Now, seeing this, I have a feeling I know who puts them there.”

“Who?”

“Really, Jaymie, you don’t know?” She backed up the video footage and restarted it at normal speed. “Look at the angle the person took as they crossed the road.”

Jaymie watched. Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. “That’s Georgina, my brother-in-law’s sister!” And manager of Kevin and Becca’s store, Queensville Fine Antiques. “She’s a secret drinker!”

“And she hides it by bringing her empties and disposing of them in the Emporium’s recycling.”

“I wonder if Kevin knows?”

“Probably. How could he not? Maybe as long as she does her job well he doesn’t care.”

“Does her job well? She’s rude, even to customers sometimes!”

“Part of the shop’s charm, from what I’ve heard,” Val said dryly. “You would not believe how many tourists come in here chattering about the British manager over at QFA, and how she was so hoity-toity. Americans love being abused by a Brit.”

Jaymie rolled her eyes. “Not me. But she does give excellent customer service. I’ve watched her. She’s knowledgeable and can source something in minutes. She’ll go out of her way to help a customer find something, and she can spot a fake and give a value within, as she says, a farthing.”

“She’s never drunk on the job, right?”

“Not that I know of,” Jaymie admitted. “I’ve never seen it, at any rate, and I’ve spent hours with her. It’s none of my business what she does in her off hours.” But was Georgina happy in her new job and new town? Did she miss home? She vowed to take more time to get to know her brother-in-law’s sister. In the past she had been so determined to stay out of other people’s business that sometimes she missed a cry for help, or an extended hand of friendship. Georgina was standoffish, but maybe that masked a friend waiting to be made.

They kept watching and saw a shuffling fellow push a shopping cart along the street. He left it on the curb and took the same rout Georgina had, disappearing behind the Emporium, then reappearing with a bulging bag, which he put in the cart. He then continued on.

“And that, my friend, is why I leave the gin and wine bottles in the recycling bin at the back,” Val said. “That’s Amos.”

“Amos? I know him,” Jaymie said. “He was homeless, but now he rents a room from Johnny Stanko in his house down near the river.”

“When I was a kid he was the school custodian, but he’s fallen on hard times, I think.”

“He was the designated town drunk for a while,” Jaymie said. “Maybe staying with Johnny is helping his sobriety.”

“I hope so, for his sake. He’s such a nice old dude.”

As Amos trundled away with his cart, Jacklyn Marley could be seen circling the Emporium from the direction of the stairs that led to her apartment above. She jammed her hands in her coat pockets and disappeared off camera. Nine forty-five, and no smoke yet. A large male figure lumbered into sight, moving from the river side of town down the main street. Jaymie squinted. “I think that may be Johnny,” she said suddenly.

“Good call!” Val said. “It is.” It was Johnny Stanko, who galumphed by with his recognizable gait. “He’s probably on his way to Cynthia’s.” Cynthia Turbridge, who owned the Cottage Shoppe, was Johnny’s sober buddy.

It was fascinating to see the village life in such a form, folks coming and going, driving, strolling, jogging and walking their pets. Amos headed back, passing by the Emporium once again, pushing his cart off in another direction, past the line of pine trees, disappearing into shadows and then beyond the camera’s range.

There was a period of inactivity, and then movement. “Who’s that?” Jaymie asked.

A figure approached the cider booth from the Nezer house side, pushing through the pine trees. With the distance, the grainy black and white of the video and the booth obscuring the person, it was impossible to even figure if it was a male or female. He or she appeared to be clad in a long coat, but it was hard to tell.

“I don’t know,” Valetta admitted, squinting at the screen. “But look!”

There were some odd motions of an arm, something glinted in the glow from the light standard, and then a flare. There was an arcing flash and then, as the figure retreated between the pines, a flame flickered and built on the cider booth.

“That’s it. That’s it!”

Jaymie and Val watched as the cider booth erupted into flames, the flare blinding the camera at times. They witnessed the arrival of the fire trucks, and the firefighters’ swift action, then the moment that Jaymie rushed to the scene and shot out of the SUV.

“It’s like a grainy black-and-white action movie,” Jaymie said. “Well, you have proved positively that it was arson. The firebug looked like they came from the Nezer property. Do you think it was one of them?”

“I don’t know. It could be. Or it could be someone wanting to hide. Those pine trees provide good cover.”

“You mean you think they knew about the camera on the Emporium?”

“Not necessarily,” Valetta said, pushing her glasses up on her nose and squinting at the screen, where she had backed up the video and paused it, with the person throwing some flammable liquid, presumably, at the cider booth before torching it. “It could have been a convenient way to hide his or her actions from anyone passing by.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“I’m going to call the police. Can you see if the fire inspector is out there still?”

As Jaymie had hoped, the fire inspector had already determined that it was arson and called the police. The destroyed booth was cordoned off with police tape, and Officer Ng was standing by it, arms crossed, legs splayed. She looked around but Bill had retreated. Haskell Lockland and Mabel Bloombury, representatives of the Queensville Heritage Society, stood speaking with the fire inspector and Detective Macadams, who had been promoted and replaced a departed detective a year before. Drifting over to join the heritage society members and eavesdrop, she heard the fire inspector reassure them that everything was being done as it should be.

The mayor, Eddie Fletcher, an infrequent sight in Queensville lately as he sought a wider political arena, stood and talked to the detective. The fire chief joined them. Evan Nezer strode around the pines from his home and headed straight for the fire inspector and detective. He berated them for a moment, shaking one finger at them both.

The mayor put out one hand, touching his shoulder, trying to reassure him, it appeared. Nezer shook him off, then stomped over to Jaymie, Haskell and Mabel, his expression malice-filled. “I hope you bunch of plaguey do-gooders are happy now. I told everyone this whole thing is a fire hazard. And on my property!”

“I don’t remember you telling anyone it was a fire hazard, Evan,” Haskell said.

“It is not on your property, Mr. Nezer,” Mabel said, her tone steely. A plump little partridge of a woman in sober colors and perfectly permed curls, she was nonetheless doughty and fearless. “The booth is on public property. And it wasn’t a fire hazard any more than your house is.”

Jaymie stifled a smile. Atta girl, Mabel!

“Madam, you display your ignorance by opening your big, fat mouth.”

Gasping aloud, Jaymie stared at the man, appalled.

“I beg your pardon?” Mabel said, eyes wide.

“Beg all you want,” he sneered. “I’m sure you’re accustomed to it.”

“Sir, you go too far,” Haskell, who had stiffened into rigid dislike, said. “I will not tolerate rudeness to a lady.”

Nezer examined him up and down. “Gasbag,” he muttered.

Bella Nezer paced toward them from beyond the fringe of pines. She was in an elegant white wool wrap coat, her glossy dark hair pulled up into a chignon, revealing her glorious cheekbones and creamy complexion. “Evan, dear, behave yourself,” she said, taking his arm. She turned to the two members of the heritage society. “He doesn’t mean to be rude.”

Yes, he does, Jaymie thought. He appeared to enjoy being rude.

Her ungracious husband motioned to the burnt, soggy wreckage and grumbled, “Look at this ruin! It could have burnt down my trees, destroyed my house. Look at that . . . they hacked off branches!”

“To save your house. Would you rather they let the trees catch fire and spread to your home?” Mabel said.

Nezer ignored her. “Haskell, why don’t you take this whole damn circus and put it out at that house you all paid a fortune to renovate?”

Interesting, Jaymie thought. If Nezer was the one to set the fire, as Bill suspected, perhaps that was his goal, to induce the heritage society to relocate Dickens Days. “Mr. Nezer, the whole point of the Dickens Days festival is to get publicity for the Queensville Historic Manor,” Jaymie said. “Which, as you appear to know, is on the outskirts of town away from the tourism district. The holiday festival attracts people who have never been there; we hand out treats and flyers and free visit coupons to the house. We promote Queensville as a tourist destination, thereby fattening the town’s business coffers, and making some money for the society. It’s a win-win situation.”

“Ah, yes, there you are, old Sobersides’ sad-sack sidekick,” Nezer sneered, eyeing her up and down.

“Sobersides?”

“Waterman, old fart that he is. And you . . . you’re one of those plain hausfraus who throw yourselves into good works to force people to notice you.”

Bella stared off toward the Emporium, either appalled or uncaring about her husband’s rudeness. It was impossible to tell which by her deliberately neutral expression.

Nezer’s intent was to needle and offend Jaymie. Instead she felt nothing but minor irritation. He was a blind pimple of a person. “And you’re one of those sour sad little bullies who have a mean nickname for everyone, right?”

Mabel clapped her hands together in delight.

“I suppose that’s your only shot,” he said dismissively, stroking his beard and adjusting his glasses. “Too bad it is pathetically weak.” He turned away. “Come along, Bella,” he said, yanking her by the arm so she stumbled. “Let these bumbling ninnies try to recover from this.”

Jaymie was tempted to tell Haskell and Mabel what she had seen on the Emporium CCTV footage, but that was a recipe for disaster. In minutes it would be all over town that Nezer or someone from his house had set the fire, and as Valetta had pointed out, that was not certain . . . it wasn’t even probable. Instead she excused herself and walked away. Her phone pinged; it was a text from Nan thanking her for the scoop and asking what else she had. The editor appended a list of questions: What exactly had she seen? Who did she suspect? Was it arson? What was the heritage society going to do now? What was the fate of the Dickens Days festival?

Jaymie would respond later. Her mind turned to the heritage society’s problems; what would they do now that the cider booth was gone? She took shelter from the chill breeze by the Emporium porch; she had an idea forming and texted Jakob to ask a question. She also needed to talk to Bill. He was the only one who could answer if there was any hope for the shell of the booth. She slipped her phone in her coat pocket and trotted along the street, then up and across the grassy area between the Emporium and Jewel’s Junk, heading to Bill Waterman’s workshop. He was a handyman, yes, but he was also a talented woodworker who restored antiques, rebuilt pieces for Jewel and Cynthia, and made cabinets from scratch in his spare time. His volunteer work with the heritage society saved it thousands of dollars every year, and it was done solely to help preserve the town in which he had grown up.

She approached the big barn and slid one of the huge doors open slightly. That it was unlocked was a good sign. It meant Bill was somewhere on the premises.

“Yoo-hoo, Bill!” she called out, her voice echoing within.

“In here!”

She followed his voice, inhaling the aroma of wood, damp earth, and something else. He was in the dark depths with a task light on over his sawhorses, staining a lovely old set of drawers he had stripped. The pungent smell of shellac assailed her nostrils, and she breathed in deep. “I love the smell of fumes. Weird, right?”

He chuckled, his good humor returned. “My daughter says whenever she smells paint, stripper, shellac or vanish she thinks of me.”

“So what are we going to do, Bill? I don’t imagine the shell of the cider booth can be saved.”

“Nope. That ship has sailed out of the harbor and wrecked on jagged rocks.”

She laughed. “You sound more at peace now, Bill. You don’t like Nezer, do you?” Understatement of the year.

He shook his head. “Classic bully: mean, rude and unfit for human company.”

“Or animals.”

He smiled. “How that lovely woman, Bella, can stand him I do not know. He has names for everyone, did you know that?”

“I was getting that idea.”

“He calls his ex-wife Old Graytop.”

“What is wrong with him?”

Bill dipped his brush, spread a thin coat of shellac along the final raw strip and stood back, nodding. “He’s like the Grinch. Has a heart two sizes too small.”

“Or Scrooge. He actually said ‘humbug’ the other day!” Her phone pinged, and she took it out of her pocket. Aha! She looked up from her phone. “So, Bill, the cider booth can’t be saved and it’s too late to build one from scratch, but . . . what about repainting something already built?”

“What do you have in mind?”

She brought up the photo her husband had sent her in reply to her text, positioning the phone under Bill’s task light so he could see it. “Look at this. Jakob rescued a bunch of buildings from the old fairgrounds near Wolverhampton. Now they’re sitting in his warehouse taking up space. I laughed at him and asked him what he was going to do with them. He said he might be able to use them on the farm someday, you know, make one over into a roadside vegetable booth or something. But today I thought . . . could you repaint this one to be the new cider booth? It’s about the right size.”

He wiped his hands then took it from her, squinting at the screen. The booth in question was about the right size, and though it had been a hot dog stand, the marquee on top could be repainted. A big smile lit up Bill’s homely, lined face. “Jaymie Leighton Müller, you are one smart cookie. This will be perfect, and the best part about it is, it’s going to drive Nezer bonkers when we tote that over and put it in place. How soon can we get it here so I can paint it?”