Victoria Hamilton - Vintage Kitchen 04 - No Mallets Intended (19 page)

Eighteen

J
AYMIE
BROUGHT
V
ALETTA
up to speed on everything else that had been happening. She was suitably interested.

“I was wondering about something else,” Jaymie said, glancing over at her friend.

“Shoot.”

“You said that Dick Schuster’s wife works with Brock, right?”

“Wife in name only… almost ex-wife. They’re both real estate agents, yes. Independent, but working for the same company.”

“What is she like? Have you met her?”

Valetta appeared torn how to answer. She took a long time, and said, “I’ve met her. She’s… okay.” She glanced over at Jaymie. “Look, I’ll tell you something, but it has to stay here.”

“Does it have anything to do with the murder?”

“Of course not! I wouldn’t ask you to keep something a secret if it did.”

“You’ve got it; I promise.”

“Brock and Dick’s almost-ex are dating, if you want to call it that.”

Jaymie remembered Heidi telling her about the gossip, that Brock was seeing a married woman. That must be the source of it. “I think people are already whispering about that. So you’ve met her; what’s she like?”

“I can’t say I blame her for breaking up with Dick Schuster. The man is a pill, says the pharmacist. But she’s…” She shook her head. “She makes all kinds of snarky remarks around me, about the pharmaceutical industry, and me being a ‘pill pusher.’”

“I guess she wasn’t happy with the services of Dr. Dumpe, right?” That wasn’t the kind of information that helped, but since she didn’t really know what she was looking for, Jaymie couldn’t blame Valetta. “Anyway, I guess that’s neither here nor there. If they’re divorcing, then Brock can date her all he wants.”

Valetta stayed silent, but her mouth twitched in distaste.

“Hear me out on something; Dick Schuster hated Theo Carson, but I couldn’t imagine a reason strong enough for him to kill the guy, right?”

Valetta shrugged. “Professional jealousy can get pretty strong, I imagine, since Theo is the one who got the writing contract over a local boy.”

“It seemed far-fetched to imagine that Dick would kill Theo, though. However… Dick also hates Prentiss Dumpe, after the fiasco of the marriage counseling that backfired.”

“Okay, all true, but I’m not following you.”

“This is where it gets complicated. Could Dick Schuster be responsible for planting the fake will
and
killing Theo, trying to make it look like Prentiss did it, thus getting rid of two evils in his life?”

Valetta snorted with laughter. “You really have been reading too much. That is a plot worthy of… well, worthy of I don’t know who.”

“So it was a shot in the dark,” Jaymie said with a smile. “Someone killed the guy, and it wasn’t me or you!”

They talked a little more, moving to personal topics. Jaymie fretted over her doubts about Daniel, Zack Christian and dating at all at this point in her life. She just wasn’t feeling it, for whatever reason.

“You need a breather from romance,” Valetta said. “Maybe it just isn’t the right time in your life for it.”

“That’s pretty much what I’ve been thinking. Daniel and I have been talking at odds for months, and neither one of us is happy now. Zach contacting me sent me for a loop, I guess. I dreamed about him and fantasized… even read a few contemporaries with a sexy cop as the hero!” She chuckled. “He really is a nice guy, but maybe not for me.”

Valetta helped her do the dishes, then headed home. After letting Hoppy out to do his business, writing down some notes about the turkey roulettes for her Vintage Eats column and checking her blog, Jaymie took a notebook to bed and tried to figure out what all was going on and why. She scribbled a list of interesting facts and questions.

1. Theo Carson claimed that under no circumstances would he go to Dumpe Manor alone, and yet he was apparently there alone when he was murdered. So… either he lied, or he was not alone, or something persuaded him to break his oath.

Jaymie stared at what she had written and added:

He would not technically have been going there alone if he thought he was meeting someone at the house.

2. Cynthia Turbridge had blood on her sweater the night Carson was murdered. However, she claimed to have no memory of the evening after leaving the Cozy Inn. Where was she after the fight at the next bar? She says she awoke on a side road near Algonac, but is that true? No proof.

Jaymie added a note to try to find out if Theo’s number was on Cynthia’s cell phone.

3. Isolde Rasmussen claimed that she was hit on the head by someone as she witnessed Theo’s murder. Who hit her on the head? Was she really locked in her trunk that night? Where is her cell phone?

4. Was the attack on me and the murder done by the same person? It was a similar weapon, so it’s possible.

5. Why was Theo killed?

She sat back and thought about that for a while. Not just who killed Theo, but
why
. Of course, she didn’t know every facet of his life. For all she knew—and given his
charming
personality—he could have had a dozen people out to get him. She could only formulate theories based on what she did know, and based on not just his murder, but where it took place. She tapped the bed with her pen and Hoppy looked up, a question in his little black eyes. “Go back to sleep, Hoppy. If I need help, I’ll let you know.”

Prentiss Dumpe, for one, had a fractious relationship with the writer. Carson was claiming that the family started out as slavers and were Nazi sympathizers during the Second World War. For someone as sensitive as the disgraced psychiatrist, those could be fighting words. For the same reason, Iago Dumpe could be a suspect. He was, after all, the person fingered as having been seen climbing from an upstairs window of Dumpe Manor. She made a note to find out more about Iago. Where was he the night of the murder?

Thinking of Iago reminded her that the alarm system was going in, and she was going to be one of the few to have the codes to it. She’d have to coordinate with Haskell Lockland as to who would have access and how.

Then there was Dick Schuster. The logic that made him a suspect was tortured, at the very least. But he had, in truth, leveled a pretty serious charge against the writer, that he had stolen his work and published it as his own. In the literary world plagiarism could ruin a career. So Jaymie had to consider that perhaps it wasn’t a case of Schuster wanting to get rid of Theo for that reason, but had Carson reacted badly to the accusations, and had they then fought? There was a marginal possibility there, but then, why would it all go down out at the historic home?

She turned it over in her mind. Dick Schuster was the kind of man who was willing to use any tools, legal or illegal, to get what he wanted. He had used the mere threat of publication as blackmail in the past, apparently successfully. That line of musing took her nowhere. Had he arranged to meet Carson out at the house to talk in private or something like that? But then… why a meat mallet from the house as a weapon? In fact that question went for the murder, period: who had taken the mallet out of the house with the intent to use it to kill Theo? Maybe the theory she had presented to Valetta, that Schuster had done it but had tried to implicate Prentiss, had some merit.

It was all such a mess in her mind!

There was one person she couldn’t ignore, as unlikely as it seemed to her personally. Cynthia Turbridge. Cynthia was livid, crushed,
heartbroken
about Carson dumping her for a younger woman. Given her dark history with alcohol, and her claims of a blackout, who knew what she had done? Jaymie squirmed out of bed and grabbed her tablet computer from the office—another techie gift from Daniel, one she kept simply because it had been for her birthday—and jumped back into bed, getting a dirty look from Denver and an inquisitive one from Hoppy. She brought up a browser (Daniel had insisted on installing Wi-Fi in the house as well, which Becca was pleased about) and did a little research on alcoholism and blackouts.

What she learned was fascinating, as well as frightening. Memory loss was a significant side effect of a blackout, but there were different types of memory loss.
En bloc
memory loss was characterized by a complete loss of memory during the blackout period, but the more common type was
fragmentary
memory loss, which was characterized by some complete areas of loss, and some fragments of memory that remained or came back. Interestingly enough, the drinker might not even be aware that there were periods missing from his or her memory.

Alcoholic blackout, as a matter of fact, had been used as a defense in numerous murder cases. People had driven for hours, shot and killed someone, then drove home, all while in an alcoholic fog. This was most common among long-time alcohol abusers; did Cynthia qualify, since she claimed she had been sober for years? Could one binge result in that kind of blackout?

She felt sorry for the woman. Relapse after a long period of sobriety must be disheartening. But it was important to find out… did this blackout of Cynthia’s have any stray memories that had popped up, or had she remembered some portion of the night, but didn’t want to talk about it? Had she
truly
been sober for years, as she said, or was she lying to save face?

One other important thought came to her on that topic: for Cynthia to kill Theo that night, she would have had to know where he was. Had she followed him, perhaps?

She set the tablet aside and snuggled down under the covers, as Hoppy turned and groaned and Denver grumbled.

And then there was Isolde Rasmussen. Jaymie went back to what she had been thinking of earlier. Everyone claimed she was a calculating and ambitious woman, but how did that square with murder? It didn’t make any sense, but still… Jaymie had a feeling she was hiding something. It could be involvement, or it could be something she knew that she didn’t want to talk about. That was the problem with an imaginative mind; Jaymie could think of too many possibilities. Had Isolde witnessed or overheard something, and intended to approach the person in question?

Jaymie sure hoped that wasn’t it. That was a dangerous course of action, and one she would never take. Over the last few months she had become wiser and more careful after a couple of close calls.

But there was another possibility with Isolde. Why had the woman just
happened
to be driving past Dumpe Manor the night Jaymie was attacked? Her stomach turned. Was it not possible that Isolde was
both
Jaymie’s attacker and Theo’s killer? After all, it was
her
cell phone that had summoned Jaymie to Theo’s murder scene. If she hadn’t had Valetta with her, she might have been murdered. Isolde’s possible culpability was one avenue she had to follow, for her own peace of mind… but not late at night, or she’d never sleep! Her brain was tied up in knots at the thought of all these suspects.

Enough murder and suspicion. She picked up her Regency anthology off the nightstand, huddling down in the bed to read. When she finally turned off the light a couple of hours later, she drifted to sleep dreaming of an old English manor house and a handsome viscount who wanted nothing more than to hold her in his arms and dance the night away.

Nineteen

T
HE
DAY
WAS
going to be a long one. Jaymie headed to the Emporium early to do some catching up on the vintage picnic business. Jaymie and Valetta then opened the store and pharmacy counter right on time, at nine a.m. It wasn’t exactly bustling, but there was a steady stream of local customers coming in for prescriptions and groceries of the milk, bread and butter sort.

After their midmorning tea break and gossip, Valetta and Jaymie were both back to work. At about eleven thirty Dick Schuster came in for a prescription, then picked up some things and started toward the cash desk, basket of foodstuffs and random items in hand. This was an opportunity Jaymie hadn’t expected, to talk to someone who was intimately involved in the whole Debacle at Dumpe Manor, as she had begun to think of the controversies swirling around the history, who was going to write it and what was going to be in it.

She made a mental note to drop in to the bed-and-breakfast to talk to Theo Carson’s mother, because she was curious whether anything had been found in his papers, though the police would certainly have gone through everything with a fine-tooth comb. Jaymie was looking for something different, though, something not necessarily related to the murder but that could provide an oblique motive that only a historian or writer would see.

Schuster plunked his stuff down on the worn wooden counter, looked up and, seeing who was in front of him as cashier, dropped some items. He picked them up, then nervously shuffled them around, knocking down some candy bars that were in a display in front of the counter. He picked them up, too, and tossed them into a bin willy-nilly. She wondered why he seemed so nervous, but decided to capitalize on it to get him to talk. Nervous people often talked more than they should, in her experience.

After greeting him by name, she said, “So, you must be glad Theo Carson is out of the picture. Are you going to apply again for the job of writing the Dumpe family history?” She gathered his items together and started to sort them—slowly—then leisurely typed in a bar code number from a package of disposable razors. The Klausners had barely entered the twenty-first century by having a computerized cash register, but they hadn’t plunked down good money for a bar code scanner system yet. Nobody in Queensville was in that much of a hurry.

“Why would I do that?” He pushed the things together and something else fell off the counter. He bent to pick it up, his face red.

Jaymie tried to keep from smiling, and tried even harder not to show how interested she was in his nervousness. Was she facing Theo Carson’s murderer? He seemed too nervous and clumsy to kill someone in such a cold-blooded manner, but she had been fooled before.

She again sorted the items, then checked to see which ones she had already typed in. “Well, we’re going to need
someone
to write the family and house history, and we didn’t have that much luck last time. We only had you and Theo Carson. Now that he’s out of the picture, it would be more likely you’d get the job. Don’t you think?”

“I… uh… I hadn’t thought of that.”

There was a pause. Jaymie wasted some time, examining the items, typing in codes, finding a bag. “I wasn’t a big fan of Theo Carson, you know,” she said, turning a can of tomatoes over, typing in the code, knowing that it wouldn’t work because she was typing it in wrong on purpose. The machine beeped, and she rolled her eyes and typed it in again. It beeped again; wrong! She looked up. “He was kind of a jerk.”

Anger burned in Schuster’s eyes. He shifted from foot to foot. “He sure was. I
know
what people are saying, you know. I
know
no one believes me that he stole my research for that book of his. But it’s true, every word. He stole it from me!”

“How did he steal it?” she asked, truly curious. She had thought he was just trashing the other man at the meeting, but he appeared genuinely irate.

“I don’t know, that’s just the thing.” He looked around, then leaned over the counter and whispered, his dark eyes wide and staring, perspiration breaking out in beads on his high forehead, “I think he hacked into my computer. We’d been to the same writing conferences, you see, and talked about the same subject. He must have guessed my passwords, stalked me online, then hacked me!”

She paused, examining him, the wild eyes, the trembling lips. “Did you do anything about it?”

“I tried, but no one would listen.” He wiped his mouth with one trembling hand. “Even the police wouldn’t do anything about it!”

“Well, you won’t have
that
problem again, will you?” She rang up a few more items from his basket. Though she didn’t know a lot about computers, she was virtually certain Theo Carson had not hacked into Schuster’s computer and stolen his work, but she was equally certain Schuster really believed he had. How had such conviction affected him? Enough to commit murder? Where did his paranoia come from?

She watched him as she typed in another bar code. He definitely seemed a bubble off level, as Bill Waterman would say. Did that make it more or less likely that he had killed Theo Carson? “Have you ever heard of a manuscript at Dumpe Manor, Mr. Schuster? I heard that there was some kind of secret family manuscript hidden somewhere.”

“Maybe. Why? Did you find it?”

He seemed casual, and it looked like he was making an effort to suppress his various nervous tics… in fact, he seemed to be trying to be
too
casual for someone who would definitely be interested in that information. She would bet that either he knew there was no such manuscript or he had already searched for it unsuccessfully.

“No, I didn’t find it,” she said and watched him. Would he be interested to know that she had, however, found a hidden will?

That had nothing to do with him, since Prentiss Dumpe was the only one who benefited. However, given his ongoing trouble with Prentiss, he would not want the man to benefit, no doubt. “I was curious, Mr. Schuster, what were you and Prentiss arguing about at the meeting?” she suddenly asked, as she continued to ring up the rest of his things, looking each item over as if it was the first time she had seen a package of razors, a bottle of cleaning solution or a toothbrush.

“Arguing? Uh… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You and Prentiss Dumpe. You were arguing at the meeting. I saw you; you had hold of his sleeve.”

“You’re wrong. Completely wrong. We weren’t arguing at all.” He spoke quickly, then added, “But I don’t like Prentiss much; never have.”

“Have you known each other long?”

He paused, then asked, “Why?”

“No reason,” she said and sighed. It was like talking to a suspicious teenager. But she couldn’t actually confront him about being in the doctor’s care. That was just too personal. “Anyway, now you can—” She stopped abruptly when she looked up and saw the throbbing vein in his forehead and the wild, bulging eyes. “Mr. Schuster, what’s wrong?”

“You think I killed Theo Carson!” he shouted.

“I
what
? How the heck did you get that idea?”

He backed away, bumping into a table of toys and knocking it over. “You
do
! You’re accusing me!” Tears gathered in his eyes. “I can’t believe it. I would never do anything like that! I have to go.”

“Mr. Schuster, I didn’t say that!” she called after him, as he headed toward the door. “Mr. Schuster, what about your groceries?”

He waved his hand back in a dismissive gesture and headed outside, stumbling as he went, slamming the door behind him, the bells jingling overhead. She was genuinely worried and dashed after him, threading her way around tables and displays, as did Valetta, having heard the commotion as she was locking up her pharmacy counter for a lunch break.

“What’s wrong with him?” Valetta called.

“I don’t know,” Jaymie said over her shoulder.

By the time she got to the veranda of the store, though, Schuster was already down the street, his head hunched, his shoulders rounded, his hands in his coat pockets. Valetta joined her and watched. Jaymie explained what had happened.

“Holy mackerel!” she said. “I wonder what that’s all about?”

“I wish I knew.”

It was lunchtime and the sky was clear. Even on a November day it was not bad out if you sat in the sun. There were a couple of sturdy weatherproof rocking chairs on the store veranda, so Jaymie and Valetta opted to have their lunch and tea there, to watch the goings-on in town. That way Jaymie could hustle into the store if she had a customer.

The Queensville Emporium, a century-old building—creaky floorboards, false front, and big picture windows on the veranda—was on a slight rise in the town. From the veranda, Jaymie could see all the way down Main Street, past Jewel’s Junk, Bill’s workshop and junk store in the shed behind, and on to Cynthia’s store, the Cottage Shoppe, which was a converted cottage-type home. She could see the corner of the Knit Knack Shack, a little yarn store in another converted cottage. You could even see past to the old houses, mostly Queen Anne interspersed with Colonial, and a few “one-and-a-half” cottages, which had a small second story, and so weren’t traditional cottages. Because the leaves were all off the trees, Jaymie could see the upper story of the Queensville Inn, a couple of streets over. The Emporium faced
away
from the river, so you couldn’t see Boardwalk Park, the docks, the marina or the humbler homes that descended to the riverfront.

But on a cold November day they were faced the right way to be protected from the wind and catch some sunshine. Jaymie had a thermos of leftover chicken noodle soup and a couple of turkey roulettes from the previous evening’s meal, which she had warmed up in the store microwave and shared with Valetta, who also had a thermos of soup. Both had tea made fresh and poured into a carafe to keep it hot.

They discussed Dick Schuster’s weird breakdown, but since neither knew what to make of the fellow’s accusations, they went on to chat desultorily about the murder and the historical society’s plans for the house and the will. Jaymie shared what she had written the night before.

“After work I think I’ll drop in at the bed-and-breakfast to see if Mrs. Carson needs anything. I want to find out if she has managed to get a hold of your brother to see Theo’s apartment yet.”

“Mmm, oh, yeah. She has,” Valetta said, after swallowing a mouthful of roulette. “In fact she’s probably there right now, or will be going there soon.”

Jaymie glared at her. “You didn’t tell me that!”

Valetta shrugged. “Forgot. You can’t do anything about it right now anyway.”

“You’re right.” Jaymie took another sip of soup and watched with a frown as Isolde Rasmussen walked down the street toward them. A car followed her, then screeched to a halt. Out of it came Theo Carson’s mother like an angry wasp out of a nest.

“Speak of the devil,” Valetta said.

“You! You did it,” Mrs. Carson shrieked at the younger woman. “I
know
you did!”

Isolde stepped back and the two women came to a halt face-to-face. “Look, lady, I don’t know who you are or what you think I did,” she said, her voice carrying in the crisp autumn air.

“Who I
am
? You most certainly do know who I am, or you should, given that you’re sleeping with my son. Or… or you were! When he was a-a-alive!” Mrs. Carson burst into tears.

Isolde, appalled, stepped back. “I’m, uh, so sorry for your loss,” she said.

A couple of women who had been walking by pushing strollers stopped to watch.

“Sorry for my loss?” Mrs. Carson screeched. “You’re the one to blame. You did it; I know you did it!”

Jaymie stood, worried about a situation that was going from bad to worse. She could see from her vantage point that Cynthia Turbridge was outside of her shop watching. She wouldn’t be able to hear what was going on, but she could certainly
see
the confrontation.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Isolde said, clutching her jacket around herself like it would shield her from crazy motherly grief.

“You killed my Theo!” It was a guttural wail from the depths of the woman’s soul.

A senior couple walking arm in arm stopped, identical concern on their faces. Jaymie wondered if she should intervene. More people joined the onlookers.