Victoria Hamilton - Vintage Kitchen 04 - No Mallets Intended (25 page)

“Thank goodness!” Jaymie cried. Jakob grabbed the telephone handset and tossed it to her. She dialed 911, as her host waited at the bottom of the stairs, listening to a thumping sound from upstairs.

“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?” came a calm female voice over the telephone.

“I need police! A man is threatening me. I’m trapped in a house, and he’s broken in upstairs.”

“Your location, please?”

“Uh… I’m not sure of the address!”

“Tell them Müller Christmas Tree Farm on Pine Ridge Road!” Jakob said.

Jaymie repeated what he said, unnerved by the sounds she was hearing, a commotion on the stairs. Dick Schuster, disheveled and panting, lunged down the stairs at Jakob, joined by Prentiss, who hopped down the last steps and dashed around the two tumbling men toward Jaymie.

“Why did you make this so complicated?” he grunted, grabbing her arm and tugging her toward the door. The telephone clattered out of her hands and onto the wood floor. “Now we’ll have to make this convoluted, a home invasion, and you, left for dead somewhere, probably by the same nasty criminals.”

That threat galvanized her; Prentiss Dumpe was not going to hurt this father and daughter. As he tried to pin her arms behind her back Jaymie twisted, her arm twisting, too, pain shooting through it. But it gave her room to make a fist and she punched Prentiss in the ear with her free hand. She could hear Dick Schuster struggling with Jakob. The fellow was smaller than Jakob, but desperate and shrieking with anger.

There was a sudden screech of pain, and Jaymie, still flailing at Prentiss, who was crying out at the blows being rained down on him, saw a wondrous sight: Jocie had a mop in her hand and she was whaling away at Dick Schuster with all the might in her little body. She was hitting her father, too, but Dick was so confused and terrorized that he covered his head with both hands, releasing Jakob, who knocked him out with a well-placed kick and came to Jaymie’s aid.

As he grabbed Prentiss from behind, pinioning both arms behind his back, Jaymie heard the welcome wail of sirens. Blinking light filled the cabin, flashing through the uncurtained kitchen window and across the log walls. A megaphone screamed to life, a loud voice commanding them all to come out with their hands up. Gladly Jaymie complied, as did Jakob, frog-marching Prentiss in front of him.

A half hour of confusion followed as the Michigan State Police took over the scene. Jaymie had a lot of explaining to do, and Jakob almost got himself into trouble when he protested at how his little girl was being spoken to. But in the end Prentiss and a still-unconscious Schuster were taken away. Courtesy of an MSP officer who let her use his phone, Jaymie spoke to Chief Ledbetter and found out the alarm company had alerted them to the “break-in” at the historic house. They then put that together with her panicked cell phone call as she drove away from the scene, traced Jaymie’s cell phone GPS to the cabin and alerted state troopers, who were just then getting her confused and garbled 911 call. It had all happened much more quickly than it seemed, the whole episode taking just a little over a half hour.

Finally Jaymie sat, drinking a cup of tea in a chair by the fireplace, as Jakob came back from putting his overexcited daughter to bed. He slumped down in the matching chair.

“Are you all right?” Jaymie asked, hands wrapped around the mug.

“That was awful,” he said, shoving his big hands into his unruly mass of dark hair. “I was so afraid for my little Jocie, and then she turns into the heroine of the day. She could have been hurt so easily.” His voice broke and he shuddered.

A Michigan trooper approached and cleared her throat. “Ma’am,” she said to Jaymie, “we need you to come with us to headquarters. Chief Ledbetter of the Queensville force is going to meet us there so we can sort things out and settle jurisdictional issues.”

Jaymie jumped up and Jakob rose, too. He walked them to the door. They had already settled that Jakob would go to the state police headquarters the next day to give a formal statement, since he had flatly refused to do more that night than give them his informal statement.

“I hope Jocelyn will be okay,” Jaymie said, turning and looking up into Jakob’s weary face. She wanted to touch his scruffy cheek, to thank him for his help, to say how grateful she was, but she wasn’t sure how. “I’m so sorry I intruded on you like that, but I was frightened and didn’t know where to go.”

“You came to the right place,” he said, squeezing her arm.

And then she had to go. She looked back over her shoulder and saw him standing in the doorway, scruffing his chin and watching, his gaze thoughtful. He waved, and she wished she could run back to the cabin and curl up in front of the fire again.

Twenty-five

A
FTER A CONFUSING
conversation that went long into the night at the Michigan State Police satellite station, Chief Ledbetter was actually the one who drove Jaymie home, telling her she was too tired and it was too late, and he’d make sure she got her van back the next day. She sat in her back lane in his car and stared at her home. It had been a horrendously long day. Home looked odd to her, as if she had been away on a long trip and come back to find everything altered.

“I’m not sure why I feel so… so strange.”

“You’ve been through a lot these last few months, Jaymie,” he said, moving slightly to rest his paunch more comfortably behind the steering wheel. “I always tell new recruits to expect to change more in the first few months of police work than they ever will. Nothing alters you like a firsthand view of crimes.”

Jaymie stared up at her house. “Chief, I have something I need to tell you, something important that I should have told you a while ago. I didn’t because it was someone else’s story, and I felt she should be telling you.”

“Does it have to do with Cynthia Turbridge and the bloody sweater?”

She looked over at him, his profile reminiscent of Hitchcock’s, the double chin, the plump cheeks. “Actually, yes. How did you know about it?”

“Mrs. Turbridge came to the station last evening and had me called in. Said she’d only talk to me. Told me everything about her little blackout evening, and told me you knew, but that she had sworn you to secrecy.” He looked over at her. “Would have helped if you’d told me.”

“But she didn’t kill Theo Carson,” she said, stubbornly, ignoring the little voice in her head that said he was right.

“I believe—and now that we have those two in custody we may be able to find out—that one of them met up with her when she was on that bender, and saw a chance to use her car.”

“Oh.” Jaymie thought it through. “I wonder if, instead of Dick or Prentiss, it was Iago. He’s the type who might be in a bar, right? I speculated that he was looking for a way to move his merchandise out of the house; maybe that was his intent, to use her car to finish up the last of the stuff in the attic.”

“Why not use his pa’s car?”

Jaymie thought for a moment, her tired mind going in circles before settling down. “Well, his father had the car,
that
we already know.”

“Might just have to put the thumbscrews to young Iago for the whole scoop. You know, we did a trace on the commenter who posted about Iago being seen climbing out of the Dumpe Manor window. Do you know who it was?”

Jaymie glanced over at him, waiting.

“Richard, aka Dick Schuster.”

Jaymie digested that information. “I’ll bet it was just a way to get the guy in trouble, and by extension, cause trouble for Prentiss. What a weird, sick relationship those two have.”

The chief nodded, sleepily. “Yup, that’s what we figure. Dick might have thought he could stop the whole merry-go-round he was on if Prentiss had other problems to take care of.”

“Why didn’t he just say no to Prentiss? If he had, Theo would still be alive.”

Chief Ledbetter slowly shook his head, his jowls wobbling. “Easy to say for you. We’ve been looking into those two gentlemen’s history. Dick Schuster has had a lifetime of troubles, and the rotten doctor took advantage. He knew how to place Schuster in a type of bondage every bit as strong as shackles.”

“Unfortunately, I think Theo brought some of this on himself,” Jaymie said, just then remembering to tell the chief about the stolen tablet, and what she had learned about it being a bribe for Theo to stay quiet. “I don’t think he knew who he was dealing with. He thought he could blackmail them and still do what he wanted, still sneak into the house and look for the Dumpe family manuscript.”

“You think that’s what Theo was after?”

She nodded. “I do; he was really ambitious, and desperate to match the success of his first book. Isolde believes that, too. Chief, if you knew some of this earlier, would it have helped put those two away?”

He shrugged, his big shoulders rolling. “Probably not. Couldn’t arrest them for murder before they did it, right? Might have gotten Iago on theft, but he’d be out on bail by now anyway.”

“I guess all you would have had on Prentiss would have been the suspected fraud with the will.” She sighed with some relief. “Nothing I knew would have helped you get them earlier.”

“That is not for you to think, young lady,” he admonished. “Could be true, but we might have gotten lucky if we’d known for sure that Prentiss’s alibi was a fake.”

“I just thought…” She trailed off and stared out into the darkness, longing to be already inside with her puppy and cat. But she still felt the need to explain herself. His opinion of her mattered. “I couldn’t turn Cynthia in, not when I promised not to. It didn’t seem right. But I told her to come to you.”

“I know. But we’d already spoken to Mrs. Turbridge. When I told her we knew she was not home that night, and that Dr. Dumpe said she was with him, she confirmed it. If I’d known what she’d told you earlier, it may have helped.”

“I’m sorry,” Jaymie said, feeling weepy all of a sudden. “I really am. I just… I knew in my gut Cynthia didn’t do it, but I was worried about her.”

“You try to help people too much. You have got to let them figure things out for themselves. Tell the truth and shame the devil, my mother always said.”

“She sounds like my grandmother.”

“If you had told us about her, we could have broken Prentiss’s alibi and brought him back in for questioning. I don’t think Mrs. Turbridge realized what it meant, that he needed an alibi. That fella had a way of controlling his patients. When she finally saw what was up with him, she couldn’t very well back out.” He paused and looked her over. “You, young lady, get out and go to bed, go to sleep. You look about done in.”

Tears flooded her eyes. “I’m
over
done, for sure. I’m so lucky I ended up at Jakob’s house, but I was afraid I’d put him and his daughter in danger.”

“You did what you had to do. Might have saved your own life, ’cause there’s no saying you would have made it all the way to the police station without being run off the road. They were getting desperate. I’d rather you had a fighting chance than be rolled over, trapped in your van or worse.” He paused, then said, gruffly, “I feel like I put you in danger myself, you know, coming over here and giving you the impression I was asking for help. I was just trying to figure out what you knew, see if you had any information you didn’t even know you had, if you get my meaning.”

“None of this is your fault. I got smug, figuring I could look after myself because I’ve done it before. I’m sorry about that. How many times do I have to learn the same lesson? It won’t happen again.” She said good night and felt some comfort that the chief waited in the lane until she had let Hoppy out to piddle. But when she finally went into the house, she saw the message light was blinking on her phone. The call display didn’t tell her anything; it wasn’t a number she recognized. She hit the message button, and Isolde’s voice filled the kitchen.

“Jaymie, I don’t know what to do! I’m out at Dumpe Manor looking for… wait… I think I may have—”

The message broke off there, but there was a muffled screech. What the heck? With shaking hands Jaymie called the Queensville police and in two minutes Chief Ledbetter was in her back alley again. She grabbed her coat and ran out to him. “Chief,” she said, out of breath, leaning over his car window. “Isolde may be in trouble, or… I don’t know!” She explained what she had heard, and he agreed that time was of the essence. He radioed for backup, but they took off to the historic house and were there in two minutes.

“Chief, that message came just about the time I was on my way out there. She wouldn’t be in the house, not with the security system armed. I don’t think it was any coincidence that Dick Schuster was there right when I was.” She thought for a moment as they pulled up the lane. “I hope she’s okay,” she said, her voice choked. “But I think we need to look for her… maybe even out at the root cellar.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” he grumbled, heaving himself out of the driver’s seat and grabbing a huge flashlight.

Jaymie dashed up to the garage, first, and looked in, but Isolde was not there, so to the root cellar they must go.

It was cold… so cold! Snowflakes fluttered down in the bobbing beam of the flashlight as the police chief and Jaymie hustled across the frozen field, with the chief sweeping the beam of light across the dark field in an arc, in case Isolde was somewhere out in the open. That was why he hadn’t driven, he told Jaymie; he was afraid she was out in the open and didn’t want to risk running her over.

But when they got to the root cellar, Jaymie stared at the door. “I guess we should look in there.”

“I’ll go,” he said.

She gave him a look. “I don’t mean to be impertinent, Chief, but that door isn’t… that is…” How to say tactfully that there was no way he could get into the root cellar.

“The door isn’t big enough for me,” he said, bluntly. “Okay. So we wait for backup.”

“No, I’m sorry but I
won’t
leave her there alone another minute.” She took the flashlight and ducked into the door, playing the beam into the dank interior. There, cowering in a corner, was a moaning and shivering Isolde Rasmussen. “She’s here, and she’s okay!” Jaymie shouted.

Jaymie helped her out of the root cellar and they both held her up as they walked back to the car. As she shivered in the chief’s car waiting for the ambulance, Isolde confirmed much of what they had speculated, and more they didn’t know. She said Theo Carson had had an inkling something was going on with the house, but he didn’t know what.

She told them that he’d started out looking for the legendary Dumpe manuscript, but in one of his perusals of the house must have come across some of the stolen goods, Isolde thought, because once when they were there, he went up to the attic but wouldn’t let her follow. He told her there was nothing of interest there but she had a feeling he was lying.

And that was why she had followed him the night of the murder. Theo did indeed take her cell phone, Isolde said. Why he texted Jaymie was a mystery, but Jaymie had a feeling it was his intention to get her out there to try to figure out what she knew, and what else there was in the house.

“Isolde, you told me that Theo got a phone call that night and seemed rushed. Who do you think called him?”

She shook her head. “It had to be one of them, right?”

Jaymie thought and met the police chief’s eyes. “I wonder if Dick or Prentiss called him to lure him out there, and told him to get me out there, too. He would not have known what they intended. He’d know that I’d be more likely to respond to a text from Isolde than from him.”

With a heavy sigh, the chief nodded. “We have Isolde’s phone, but we’ve never found Carson’s,” he said. “We might never be able to prove that. Could be important, so we’ll do our damnedest. Would prove premeditation right there.”

As the ambulance arrived, Isolde told them what little else she knew. Because at that point she thought Theo had found something important and was trying to exclude her from the fame, she followed him out there. When she pulled up to the house, she saw exactly what she told the police she saw. She hadn’t lied to them about any of that. She couldn’t tell if there was one man or two at the scene. She was hit from behind and knocked out; that seemed to indicate, to Jaymie at least, that Iago Dumpe probably was there that night and, as she had speculated, had Cynthia Turbridge’s car, maybe parked down the road or behind the garage.

Isolde was bundled into the trunk of a car, likely Cynthia’s, because the blood on Cynthia’s sweater must have rubbed off the clothes of the actual murderer, Dick Schuster. Forensics would eventually reveal what had happened. Isolde had been out cold and did not know anything until she was dropped off in town, coincidentally (or on purpose, who would ever know?) near Jaymie’s home. With the information they now had it would be a shortcut to the truth for the police, and to the prosecution of the unholy trio of Dick Schuster, Prentiss Dumpe and his son, Iago.