Freezer I'll Shoot (A Vintage Kitchen Mystery) (17 page)

“Me? Nothing, really. I just said there was something off about them.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I can’t explain it. Just . . . off.”

“Is it more one than the other? And what kind of ‘off’ do you mean?”

Valetta was silent for a long minute, and Jaymie could hear her slurping tea.

“I
just
don’t know. Let me think on it. You coming back to Queensville?”

“I have to come back sometime today. My article for the
Howler
is due, and I just have to email it over to Nan. I hope it’s good enough. I’m so nervous about it!”

“You’ll be just fine. Talk to you later. Let me know when you need help with cleaning up the cottage, and I’ll take a day off.”

The phone rang as soon as she hung up; it was Daniel. He and his dad were ready to go, with trees already ordered for Sammy’s reimagining of the cottage back lawn, and the pair willing to help.

“My mom wants to talk to you,” he said, with an odd tone in his voice.

“Uh, okay,” she said.

Debbie Collins came on the line. “I must admit, Jaymie, I’m curious about Heartbreak Island after the boys came back talking about it last night. Let’s set a date for the family dinner right now.”

With a sigh of relief at the woman’s conciliatory attitude, Jaymie set the next Saturday for the dinner.

“And do any of you have food allergies? Our Daniel can’t eat shellfish, did you know?”

“No, none of us have food allergies. Uh . . . I hope this isn’t putting you out too much, Mrs. Collins?”

“It’s fine. See you next Saturday.”

And, dial tone.

After that, everything kicked into high gear. She fed Hoppy, made some sandwich fillings, stuck them in the fridge and did dishes, and then the men arrived. Roger, Jaymie’s dad and Daniel all worked to Sammy’s direction. It was kind of funny to see an eighteen-year-old bossing around two retired businessmen and a multimillionaire software company owner, but to their credit, the guys were all good-humored about it. Late in the morning, Jaymie saw Garnet sitting on his back porch watching the work. She made a quick decision, and climbed the hill to his house to talk to him. She needed answers.

“How are you doing, Garnet?” she asked.

He waved to a chair. “Sit down, Jaymie. Ruby says you all were at the restaurant for dinner yesterday.”

“We were,” she said, sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs that lined the back patio of the Redmonds’ home. “What were you up to?”

“I was down talking to Will at the marina. Seems that the Dobrinskies have decided not to sell after all.”

She watched him in profile, the tightening of his jaw, and didn’t mention seeing him storm from the office. “I was surprised you were even interested. I didn’t know you wanted to buy into the marina.”

“I tried to buy half of it seven years ago, when Ruby and I first settled here. Urban sold a half share to Will instead.”

That was interesting. She hadn’t known that Urban once owned the whole thing. “Really? You must have been angry.”

He shrugged. “At first, but we found the Ice House and built a great restaurant out of it. I always did want to own a marina. With Urban gone, and Evelyn Dobrinskie wanting to sell, it seemed like the right time.”

“I’m surprised you and Ruby didn’t settle down in Florida. I mean, you’re practically professional sailors, and that’s where sailing is at its best, right? On the ocean?”

His jaw flexed and his brown eyes held a faraway look. “We like the north better. I like to ski in winter. It’s a compromise, really. I would have been happy with Florida, but Ruby wanted to be close to family in Canada.”

“I didn’t know you had family in Canada. Whereabouts?”

“Uh, up near Montreal.” He shifted and looked over his shoulder, through the kitchen window of the cottage, then back to Jaymie. “Look, I don’t want you to misinterpret anything you may have . . . uh . . . heard the morning after the murder.”

She watched him. “You mean what Ruby said? About not meaning to do it?”

“Yeah. There’s, uh, a very simple explanation for that.”

Garnet had never been the kind to stammer, so the repetition of “uh” in his speech pattern was suspicious in and of itself. “And the explanation is . . . ?”

He looked down at his feet. “She said after we had that confrontation outside of the restaurant that she wished he was dead. That’s it.”

She eyed him with a frown. “But why did she say, ‘I didn’t mean to do it’? That doesn’t make sense.”

“She’s superstitious, like, the wish becomes the reality, you know?”

“What?” It felt like he was making it up as he went along.

“You know . . . if you wish someone harm, and it comes true,” he said impatiently, looking over his shoulder again, “wouldn’t you feel bad if that happened to you?”

She looked down, and noticed that his hands were clenched on the seat of his chair so hard, his knuckles were white. Did that much tension really go with telling the truth? She wanted to ask him about how angry he was the evening before, storming out of Will’s office, when he found out he wasn’t getting the marina after all. She wanted to ask him why both he and Ruby were telling different tales, and about what Ruby had said about him the evening before, that she was afraid he had killed Urban. Where did he go that evening, she wanted to ask.

But she needed to think about it first. If she was talking to a killer, she didn’t want to tip her hand, as had happened in the past. She couldn’t keep blundering around into murder cases, not looking where she was going, so she was going to be more cautious this time around.

“You and Ruby have always been great neighbors, Garnet, and we’ve always been friends. I never believed for a second that either one of you could kill someone.” That much was true; it was impossible to conceive of either sibling as a murderer. But
someone
had killed Urban Dobrinskie. Was it going to be her task to believe something impossible that day? “I’ve got to go back and pitch in,” she said, standing. “The guys are working hard, and I’d better make some lunch for them.”

“Jaymie,” he said, grabbing her wrist and staring up at her. “I hope you believe what you just said, that neither of us killed Urban. I know it looks bad, but we didn’t do it.”

She looked into his eyes, noting the dark circles under them, and that they were bloodshot. It didn’t look like he was sleeping well. “Can you think of anyone with a grudge against you? Someone who also knew about your tiff with Urban? Maybe someone was trying to make you look guilty.”

His steely grip relaxed and he let her go as his expression changed, becoming thoughtful. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open.

“Did you think of something?”

But his open expression shuttered, like a blind going down. “No. I just never thought of that . . . someone setting us up. I’ll think about it. I’d better get going, too,” he said, shoving himself up out of his chair. Jaymie stood, too. “Supplies coming in to the Ice House today.”

He trotted into the house, and through the window she saw him grab the phone in the kitchen and call someone. When he saw her still standing there, he waved good-bye, and she had to leave. But he thought of someone, she was sure of it. Unless . . . unless what he suddenly thought of was a way to deflect police suspicion from them by throwing it on someone else?

She started down the hill, pausing partway to overlook the work so far. The sod was down, and some trees were planted, with another load still sitting, root balls in burlap, to one side. This was getting expensive, but her dad considered it an investment. She didn’t know what she thought of his suggestion to modernize the cottage, though. Becca had been talking about that for years. Jaymie was kind of a traditionalist, and liked the cottagey feel of their cottage.

She was just an old-fashioned girl, stuck in the past. She loved vintage anything, but it seemed that the rest of the world wanted shiny and new, convenient, modern. Boring. Sighing, she put that broody thought to one side, and focused on the new look of the backyard. Daniel was helping Sammy with the hard work of laying out the stone patio in the shade of the alders, while Roger and Jaymie’s dad planted yet another tree. The scene of the crime was now just a sod covered grassy valley. Or . . . not really the scene of any crime, but the dumping of a body, as sad and horrible as that was.

She still thought the body placement was an attempt to implicate Garnet or Ruby by someone who knew about the tension between them and Urban. It appeared to be working, and she worried that gossip would condemn them as guilty, even if they weren’t. Would their reputations suffer? If the murder was never solved, would they be ostracized, or had they made enough friends in the last seven years that they could weather it out? Jaymie didn’t know.

As she slowly descended the slope to the gully, she turned her mind to the murder, and wondered, instead of trying to think of who benefited from Urban’s death, maybe she should turn it around. Who suffered?

Sammy had lost a father and, no doubt, some financial stability.

Will Lindsay had lost a competent, if difficult, partner.

Evelyn had lost a husband and therefore some stability in her world. Heck, she may even have loved the jerk, for all Jaymie knew.

So that little exercise got her exactly nowhere. Confused by her conversation with Garnet and his evasiveness, Jaymie decided that lunch was what she needed.

Seventeen

S
HE WAVED AT
the guys as she passed, then climbed the steps up to the sliding back door. Hoppy was at the door, begging to go out, but there was no way she was going to let the little Yorkie-Poo out when there were holes being dug. It might give him the wrong idea, or he might fall in one and get planted under a birch.

“You, my friend, are going to have to wait,” she said, throwing him a crunchie from the treat bag on the counter. “I’ll let you out while we eat lunch, and not a moment before.” The phone chimed just then, and she grabbed it.

“Jaymie! Oh, thank God I got you.” It was her mother. “Anna is not well, and Clive came and picked her up this morning to take her back to Toronto, and Pam is doing the best she can, but she doesn’t know how to work the computer and I don’t, either, so I don’t know what people are coming in this afternoon, and Pam is freaking out, but I don’t want to call and worry Anna and Clive.”

Jaymie glommed onto the one thing that worried her most in the stream of chatter. “Anna’s not well?”

“Her blood pressure has been a little high. Could be preeclampsia. It was important that she get to her specialist in Toronto to have it checked out.”

“But is she okay?”

“She’s going to be fine. But, Jaymie . . . did you hear me? Pam and I can’t figure out this computer thingie and I don’t know what to do.”

“Mom, you’ve worked with computers before.” Her mother emailed regularly, had a Facebook page and had even figured out things like attaching photos and downloading movies.

“But she’s on some kind of bed-and-breakfast network, and I have her password—or at least I think I do—but . . . I’m lost!”

“You sound harried. Isn’t there some kind of support phone number for the software?”

“I tried that. They won’t help me, since I don’t know Anna’s PIN. Can you come?”

“Let me make lunch for the guys, and I’ll come. Sit tight, and I’ll be there in an hour or so.” Well, she had said to Valetta that she needed to go home to email the article, so she’d do that at the same time.

A half hour later, after making a speedy lunch of sandwich wraps, salad and cold drinks for her eclectic work crew, she and Hoppy were heading down to the marina. Robin and his guys were taking a lunch break, sitting and lying in the shade along the river’s edge with lunch boxes open and a radio blaring FM rock radio. “Born to Be Wild” was playing, and one guy was playing air guitar while lying on his back.

Zack was at the marina talking to Will, who held a cleaning cloth and a bucket, which he set down at his feet. The detective seemed distracted, and just sketched a wave to Jaymie before heading off up the road toward the cottager’s section of the island. While she waited for the ferry, she headed toward Will, who was scrubbing down a sailboat, a “For Sail” sign, misspelling intended, lying on the wooden deck.

Hoppy went to the end of his lead and barked at some seagulls floating on the waves. “Another sailboat up for grabs?” Jaymie said. “That’s the third one this week. Is everyone leaving Heartbreak Island?”

He shrugged and went back to work, using a stiff brush to scrub the greenish line off the hull. “Pretty normal this time of year. Now that we’re dredging the harbor and fixing up the slips, we won’t lose any more. I’m pretty sure I can add another ten slips, actually, and we can move ahead, instead of backward.”

“What did the detective want?”

Will frowned and paused in his work, wiping sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. “He wanted to know how long I’d known Garnet and Ruby. I don’t understand it. It was like . . . he seemed suspicious.”

“Of you?”

“No. Of Garnet and Ruby.”

“Why?”

Will’s gaze shuttered. “I . . . I don’t know. Look, Garnet is a friend, and I won’t gossip about him.”

He was the only one of the Redmonds’ friends who seemed so reserved, and she appreciated that. “They’re lucky to have you as a friend, Will.” She hesitated, but then said, “But I have to say . . . the other night, when you told him finally that you were advising Evelyn and Sammy not to sell, he stormed out of your office kind of angry, right?”

“Yeah, but at least he apologized this morning. Called me right up and said he was sorry about getting bent out of shape. That’s a true friend.” He swiped at his eyes, then scruffed Hoppy under the chin, while the little dog panted and danced, trying to get more attention. “I will never believe that either one of those people had anything to do with Urban’s death. Couldn’t it have been an . . . I don’t know, an accident or something?”

“No one ends up stabbed though the heart with an ice pick accidentally,” she said.

“Stabbed? Oh my gosh! I . . . I didn’t know. Poor Evelyn!”

He really
didn’t
listen to gossip, she guessed, because Urban’s manner of death was common knowledge. The ferry chugged into the marina, pulled up to the dock, lowered the gangplank and disembarked passengers. Jaymie tugged at Hoppy’s lead, picked him up and then walked onto the ferry, settling on a bench near the railing with her little pooch in her arms. As she gazed back at the marina, she saw Will sitting on the overturned bucket, head in hands, looking for all the world as if he’d lost his only friend.

When she got home, her mother was in a dither. As Jaymie let Hoppy off his leash in the yard and walked up to the back door, Joy Leighton charged out onto the summer porch, saying, “Oh, Jaymie, thank goodness you’re here. Let’s go over to the bed-and-breakfast right now and see if you can help poor Pam.”

“Give me a minute, will you?” Jaymie said, squeezing past her mom and into the kitchen. “I just need to go online and . . . and check my email.”

Her mother followed her and folded her arms across her chest, looking put out. “I thought you were only coming back to help poor Pam. But if your email is more important . . .”

Her mother had a habit of saying something irritating, and letting it trail off. In the past it had elicited instant obedience from Jaymie, because guilt would overwhelm her. This time was going to be different; she’d react as an adult. “Mom, it won’t take long, I promise. This is important to me. I have to email my article to Nan Goodenough, the editor at the
Howler
.”

Her stomach growled. She was nervous about the editor’s reaction. She had been assailed by doubts in the middle of the night, sure that her wording was trite, her subject matter boring, and her grammar horrendous. After all, she was no writer. She had even woken up in a cold sweat thinking that she had forgotten to list a key ingredient in her recipe. That was another thing: she wanted to check her article over before sending it out, just to make sure she hadn’t left out a key ingredient in the recipe.

“All right,” her mom said. “But hurry up!”

First, she typed and checked the article, reading it through and checking the vintage sandwich loaf recipe. It was exactly right, but she adjusted it a little, having now made the loaf, with some tips to make spreading the cream cheese “icing” easier. With a sigh of relief she realized she had not forgotten a thing, and the article sounded okay. Not great, but okay, except she had misspelled “picnicking.” Darn. Why hadn’t spellcheck caught that? She made the correction. She got the memory card out of her camera and uploaded the sandwich loaf photos, choosing the two best, as well as the vintage picnic settings she had photographed. Then she logged on to her email, attached the document and the photographs, and held her breath, pushing “send.”

Done. No going back. It was in Nan’s in-box.

Now she would handle her mother and Anna’s cousin’s crisis. She was interested to meet Anna’s cousin Pam, who would be taking over the running of the bed-and-breakfast for the winter months, while Anna spent at least six months in Canada making sure her baby would be healthy and safe. All Anna had said about Pam was that she needed the job, and she would be happy to live in a small town after living in Rochester.

Jaymie and her mom went next door, where a harried-looking blond woman with her straggly hair pulled back in a ponytail stood on the sidewalk peering at the door, a frown on her thin face. “Oh, Joy, I’m so glad you came back!” she said, throwing her arms around Jaymie’s mom.

Jaymie’s brows inched up. Really? Pam had just met Jaymie’s mom and was acting like the long-lost best friend?

“You must be Jaymie,” she said, turning with a nervous smile. She touched her hair and tucked a stray wisp behind her ear. “I’m sorry to be so much bother already; I’m such a dunce! Anna ran me through the computer program, but I’m such a dolt I can’t remember stuff like that. It just goes in one ear and out the other.”

“Pam, don’t talk about yourself like that,” Jaymie’s mom said. “I didn’t have any more luck than you did with the software.”

“But I’m the one Anna is depending on! I
knew
I couldn’t do this. I just knew it, but Anna said she had faith in me. I’m going to let her down and ruin her business.” A tear welled up in one eye and slid down her cheek.

“Let me see the trouble,” Jaymie said, to stem the tide of self-abuse.

They went upstairs to the office, and Jaymie noted, on the way, that the house was cleaner than it was even when Anna was present. It gave her pause, because she wondered whether her mom had been helping Anna out more than she was supposed to. Her mom seemed to like cleaning other people’s homes, even though she hired a woman to clean the Leighton condo in Florida.

Jaymie sat down at the computer and familiarized herself with Anna’s setup, while Pam chattered nervously to Joy, babbling about her son, Noah, who was going to go to school at Wolverhampton High, and how she hoped the kid would fit in, and how sorry she was to cause so much trouble.

“It’s no trouble, Pam,” Joy said, touching the other woman’s arm. “Jaymie has time. She helps Anna all the time, you know, so it’s no imposition at all.”

Jaymie gritted her teeth. Oh no, her time wasn’t worth anything at all . . . She was
only
pulled away from landscaping the cottage yard that she was slaving over because her mother insisted that they have the dinner at the cottage, and so Mrs. Collins wouldn’t look down her nose at them for having a mud yard, as if they were a bunch of poor relations. Jaymie took a deep, cleansing breath and tuned out the chatter.

Anna used a software called InnKeeper. It tracked bookings, and held a wealth of information about past, present and future guests of the Shady Rest Bed and Breakfast. Anna had slowly been adding to her InnKeeper database, entering information on all of the clients the former three landlords had compiled on paper. That way Anna could send out email and paper invitations to visit the Joneses, the new landlords of the Shady Rest. They had a website, with Clive and Anna’s smiling faces, cradling Tabitha between them, in their arms.

There was a log-in button in the corner, and Jaymie clicked on it, but it came up with a window for a PIN. How was she supposed to magically guess Anna’s PIN? It appeared that the software required both the password they already had, and a PIN, something that had been missed in the hurry of Anna’s leaving. Of course, she could always phone or email Anna to ask, but they were trying not to upset her friend, and there would, no doubt, be more pressing concerns in the days ahead, if this first day was any indication.

As she thought about it, she listened in on Pam’s stream of self-deprecating chatter.

“I’m so lucky Anna had this idea, for me to work here. I was at my wit’s end, you know, because with Jack after me, and running out of money, I had to get out of town but I just didn’t know what I was going to do.” She touched her cheekbone.

When Jaymie glanced up, she could see a faint purpling of the area.

“I just hope he doesn’t find me. I don’t know what I’ll do if he does! I can’t leave now, not with Anna depending on me.”

Yikes, there was a lot of drama in this woman’s life. Had Anna made the right decision for her business, or had she let her heart and family loyalty sway her? Would Pam prove to be the B and B’s undoing? Jaymie sat and stared at the screen for a minute. Anna must have her password and PIN information stored somewhere. She rummaged around on the messy desk and found a little booklet that Jaymie had seen Anna consult before. Flipping through it, she came upon a list of words. Aha! Such a random list could only mean one thing. She methodically started entering words, one after another, but nothing worked. She sat back and thought about it.