Bowled Over (30 page)

“W
HAT IS IT
?” Jaymie asked. She knew already, but she wondered what Joel knew and how.

“That’s just it, he won’t tell me. He says it has nothing to do with anything.”

Darn. No new info, then, unless…“Heidi, do you call or text Joel while he’s away?”

“Sure, all the time.”

“Can you text him now?”

Heidi whipped out her cell phone and was ready, the dipping sun glinting off the screen. “What shall I say?”

Jaymie thought about it for a moment. “Ask him if he knows about ML’s legal trouble in PH.”

Heidi tapped away and hit send. “What does that mean? I get that ML is Matt Laskan, but what is PH?”

“Tell you in a minute.” They talked for a while longer with a few pleasant silences as the air cooled to comfortable and the animals came out of the shade to roll around at their
feet. Heidi’s phone rang, a funky little popular tune. She picked it up, looked at the display and answered.

“Hey, baby, what’s up? What do you mean, how did I find out about Matt? That was a message from Jaymie. How does
she
know? I don’t have a single clue. Do you want to talk to her? Sure, she’s right here.
Why
is she right here? I’m at her place; she invited me over for dinner. Okay, wait a minute.” Heidi covered the phone with one hand and made a face. “Joel’s kind of angry. He wants to talk to you.”

She took the phone. “Hi, Joel.”

“How’d you find out about Matt’s trouble in Port Huron?” he said.

“Nice to talk to you, too! We’re just sitting here outside with some wine. How’s it going in Hotlanta?”

“Very funny. I’m serious, Jaymie. Leave the poor guy alone!”

Jaymie sighed. “I’m kind of tired of being warned to leave things alone. First Craig and now you, on Matt’s behalf.”

“What do you mean, ‘first Craig’?” he said.

“Nothing.” She was not about to blow Craig and Lily’s little secret; that was up to them. “Look, I just found out that Matt had some legal trouble in Port Huron. I know what the charges were going to be. Until they were dropped.”

“I mean it, Jaymie; you should really keep your nose out of other people’s business. It’s not what it sounds like.”

She thought about it for a moment. “If it’s not what it sounds like, why don’t you tell me what it
is
, then?”

There was silence on the other end. “Let me think about it,” he said. “I’ll be home tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, and I’ll decide before then what I should tell you.”

“Fine,” she said tightly. “You decide. I’m handing you back to Heidi.” She thrust the phone back to Heidi and took
their wineglasses back to the kitchen to refill. It wasn’t fair, she supposed, to be angry, because Joel was clearly torn between telling her and keeping a secret for a friend. But it was frustrating to be so close to an answer and yet not to get it. He said it wasn’t what it sounded like. What else could attempted kidnapping be but what it sounded like?

When she came back out, Heidi was staring down at the phone in her hand with a perplexed frown. “You really got him mad!” she said. “Joel told me to get away from you, that you’re a bad influence.”

“Really? Me, a bad influence?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool. Are you going?”

“No way!” Heidi said, accepting the refilled wineglass from Jaymie. She grinned, her eyes glittering. “This is too much fun, getting him riled.”

“Good for you!” So there was some spirit in pretty little Heidi after all. “Okay, now about Lily Fogarty…What do you know about her? Do you like her?”

“Not really. She’s too…oh, she’s too darn smart!”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“It is when she makes me feel like a dumb bunny.”

Jaymie watched her expression, halfway between a pout and a grimace. Denver hopped up onto her lap and settled. “I can’t imagine you feeling threatened,” Jaymie said, petting her cat and watching Heidi’s face. “But are you?”

She shrugged. “Joel really admires her. They sit and talk about politics, and I don’t know anything about politics.”

“Neither does Joel,” Jaymie said, sitting back, the magic of a purring cat on her lap calming her down. “He just talks a good line. Half of what he says is crap.”

“Really?”

“Sure, and I’ll bet Lily knows it. Joel doesn’t care about
any of it; he just pretends if it’s something he thinks he
should
care about. In reality, he’s as shallow as any of us.”

“But you’re not shallow, Jaymie,” Heidi said, reaching across and putting her hand on Jaymie’s wrist. “You’re smart. Maybe that’s why Joel left you for me. You don’t think Joel likes Lily in that way?”

Jaymie needed to pick her words carefully so she didn’t hurt Heidi’s feelings. In truth, Joel always wanted to feel intellectually superior to his girlfriend. Heidi was right; Jaymie’s intelligence and willingness to challenge him were why Joel had left her, at least in part. She had begun to catch on to the fact that he pretended to know a lot more than he really did. Heidi hadn’t—so far anyway—caught on to that. Of course, now that Jaymie had outed him as a fraud, it might only be a matter of time. Heidi was smarter than she realized. “You suit him. Lily doesn’t.”

Heidi seemed content with that. Their conversation wandered off to other topics. The Heritage Society had been given an extremely valuable item, a genuine letter belonging to Button Gwinnett (he was a “first signer,” one of those founding fathers who’d signed the Declaration of Independence), and it was due to be auctioned off at Christie’s in New York in September. Talk had moved to what could be done with the possible one million dollars it would bring. “Mrs. Bellwood thinks the Heritage Society should buy Dumpe Manor,” Jaymie said about a Queen Anne manor house on the edge of town.

“Dumpe Manor?” Heidi chirped. “You’re kidding me, right? Dump, as in, ‘take a’?”

Jaymie giggled and wondered if the wine was getting to her. “Dumpe with an
e
on the end. Can you imagine? We get a million dollars and buy the Dumpe?”

“But then you could open up the Dumpe to the public,” Heidi said, choking on laughter.

“How do you furnish a Dumpe?” Jaymie laughed so hard that Denver jumped off her lap and glared up at her. “Would you come to the grand opening of a Dumpe?”

Heidi was laughing so hard, she spilled her wine down her chambray blouse. “The slogan…it could be, Come to the Dumpe and Find History!”

“Genius! We could have a world-famous Dumpe!” Jaymie exclaimed. “And Tea with the Queen could be moved to the Dumpe!”

Heidi held her stomach and roared, her hysterical laughter echoing in the growing darkness. “All dressed up to go to the Dumpe!”

“Hey, rumor has it there’s a ghost of the last family member to own it!” Jaymie said. “We’d have the world’s first haunted Dumpe!”

That was it for them; both laughed until tears streamed down their faces. When they parted a half hour later, Heidi was still giggling. She phoned to tell Jaymie she’d gotten home all right, and Jaymie changed into a nightgown and headed to bed a while later to relax with a book and try to keep the good feeling she had going.

She woke up the next morning with a headache; not exactly a hangover, but close. A mild feeling of depression settled over her as she wondered if they would ever know for sure who killed Kathy Cooper. She did her job at Anna’s, then learned she wouldn’t need to come over for a while because Clive was taking a few vacation days and coming to Queensville to give his wife a hand in the breakfast department. It would be good to have a break from that responsibility. Her pseudo-investigation into Kathy’s murder
was weighing her down. Kathy’s memorial service was going to take place Friday afternoon, she’d learned, and it was one more hurdle to get past, one emotional trial she was not looking forward to. How would she manage, after harassing Craig and suspecting Matt? She called Becca and left her the message that the memorial service was set to be held at the Methodist church. She, Becca, Valetta and Dee would go together.

Her mind teemed with questions, most of them with no easy answers. They ranged from the unanswerable—Why had she put off making it up with Kathy?—to the impossible—Why did such rotten things happen in life?

She had to concentrate on questions to which there may be answers. She sat in her office, trying to work on her recipes, but that seemed as confusing as anything at the moment. Did she have a clear grasp on what she was doing? Was she rewriting vintage recipes or merely decoding them for the modern cook? It was a fine line she was walking. And what if no one wanted yet another cookbook? She shut down her computer, grabbed a notebook and went outside to sit in the shade of the backyard to try to clear her mind of the turmoil that was troubling her.

She wrote down a series of questions having to do with her suspects and others with whom Kathy had contact.

One: Why had Matt Laskan not been formally charged on the serious counts of attempted kidnapping and assault? If Kathy threatened him with revealing all about the charges, would Matt have snapped? Did anyone have evidence of where Matt actually was during the evening fireworks in Boardwalk Park?

Two: Why did Kathy go to Ella and Bob’s the morning of July Fourth? Did she really apologize to Ella? Was that the only reason she went?

Three: Why did Andy and Kylie lose track of where Connor was during the fireworks? Were they together during that time, or was one of them busy elsewhere?

Four: Did anyone see Stanko give the bowl to an Uncle Sam impersonator? What did the Uncle Sam do with the bowl if that was the case? Could the impersonator have been one of the other suspects in Kathy’s death?

Craig seemed to be off the hook as far as Kathy’s murder was concerned, as were other peripheral folks Jaymie had never really suspected anyway: Lily Fogarty and Chloe Cooper, who both had unshakable alibis. But she would take the other questions one by one and try to figure them out.

She looked up Matt Laskan’s number in the phone book, but when she called, the receptionist at Laskan Cooper said he was out. The girl mumbled something about him being over at Heartbreak Island seeing a client, and when Jaymie asked when he’d be back, she said about noon. That meant he must be coming back on one of the half-hour ferry jaunts before lunchtime.

“Come on, Hoppy. We’re going for a walk,” she said. It was early yet. The day was sparkling with sunshine and there was no sign of the humidity that would build by afternoon. Hoppy greeted the opportunity to check his pee-mail with boundless enthusiasm, but his social networking made the walk a longer one than strictly necessary. Jaymie hoped she hadn’t missed Matt’s ferry return to Queensville.

She descended the long, sloping pathway to the marina north of the ferry dock and sat down on one of the benches, lifting Hoppy up to sit by her. A sturdy man in dirty jeans and a torn, grease-smeared T-shirt was working on one of the boats. It was Andy Walker! Well, she had a few questions for him, so maybe she would take the time to somehow befriend him. But just as she was about to get up and saunter
over, she saw Kylie and Connor walking from the other direction, hand in hand, down the path to Andy.

He was happy to be interrupted, it was clear, and he swung Connor up on his shoulder and pretended to lose hold of him once, which sent the little boy into shrieks of laughter. The two adults moved to a shady spot by a marina shed, and Kylie handed over a paper bag and a take-out cup. He looked in the bag and seemed pleased, because he leaned over and kissed Kylie Hofstadter…full on the mouth. Even from a distance it was clear that it was not the kiss of a father-in-law to a woman he thought of as a daughter; it was the kiss of a man in love.

Nineteen

J
AYMIE WAS ROCKED
back on her bench, the breath gone from her as if she had suffered a blow to the stomach. She must have made some noise, because Kylie looked over and saw her. Even from a distance, it was clear the young mother’s face was red. She said something to Andy, and he looked sharply over at Jaymie and said something back to Kylie.

She got up and approached Jaymie, holding her gaze over the hundred feet or so she had to walk. “Hey, didn’t see you there. You look, uh…shocked,” Kylie said.