Victoria Hamilton - Vintage Kitchen 04 - No Mallets Intended (2 page)

Two

S
HE WAS COLD,
shivering and hurt. Something wet was being slapped against her cheek, and something smelled bad.
Real
bad. And what was with the headache? She never got a headache, except when her mother was in the house. “Mom… you home?” she moaned.

The wet slapping continued… what the heck
was
that, a dirty dishcloth? It smelled… it smelled exactly like the liver treats Hoppy adored. “Hoppy, stop it!” she whimpered, pushing him away. Her eyes flew open, and she groaned again. Not only was there no mother in sight, there was no home. It was cold. She was at Dumpe Manor. She sat up and looked around and spotted one of the heavy mallets from the kitchen, the wedge-shaped one she had just examined.

It was so dark… what had happened? She felt fuzzy and confused and put her hand to her head as a wave of dizziness swept over her. “Oooh!” she groaned, lying back down, cheek to the cold wood floor. As she tried to sort out what was going on, a frigid blast of air swept over her. The front door was now open. She raised herself on her elbows and tried to scuttle out of sight as someone charged in the door and turned on a light. The blaze of the overhead pendant glared in Jaymie’s eyes, and she cried out in fear.

“Jaymie, what happened?”

Jaymie slumped back down in relief. It was Isolde Rasmussen, girlfriend of Theo Carson, a historian the society had hired to document Dumpe Manor’s history. Isolde was also a docent at the Wolverhampton Historical Museum.

The tall blonde knelt by Jaymie, staring at her with a worried look. “What happened?” she repeated.

Jaymie didn’t really know. “I’m… I’m okay, I think.”

“Oh, honey, no, you’re not,” Isolde said. “You have a bruise and a cut on your forehead and there’s some blood. Did you fall? Did you hit your head?”

“I must have.” Jaymie shivered. “I’m cold.” Hoppy put one paw on her knee and gazed up at her, growling uncertainly.

“Let’s get you home,” Isolde said, taking her elbow to help her up.

Jaymie swayed on her feet and Hoppy ran around her in circles, then to the door and back. It made her dizzy. “Hoppy, stop! I can’t concentrate, I don’t know… oooh… I’m not feeling well.”

“I’m taking you to the hospital,” Isolde said suddenly, pushing Jaymie back down on the floor. “You stay right there. First I’m calling the hospital to tell them we’re coming”—she pulled a white cell phone out of her jacket pocket—“then I’ll pull my car up to the door.”

The next twenty-four hours passed in a flurry of busyness that left Jaymie exhausted. Hospital, Isolde, nurses, doctors, MRI. Daniel Collins, her kinda-sorta boyfriend, hovering over her hospital bed, a worried frown on his gaunt face. Valetta arranging everything, including who would look after Hoppy (herself) and calling Jaymie’s family, reassuring them that she was fine. Jaymie was then ordered to go home and get bed rest, though not to her own home just yet.

She was finally released late in the afternoon into Valetta’s care. Jaymie had to promise to stay with her friend overnight before they would release her, but she felt fine, except for a bandage on her forehead and a bit of a headache. Valetta picked her up at the hospital, drove her back to Queensville and parked in the lane beside her cottage-style home. She had painted the house a dull green with darker green trim; Jaymie didn’t like the dark colors but Becca agreed with Valetta that the color was “age appropriate” for the small home.

Jaymie was as comfortable there as she was anywhere that wasn’t her own home, and she knew exactly where to go. Hoppy, who had stayed at Valetta’s overnight, was overjoyed to see her and bounced around her all the way down the short hall. “So I get to stay in the room we painted,” Jaymie commented, slinging her overnight bag down on the antique single bed in Valetta’s spare room. They exchanged help in August when Jaymie had needed a hand getting the Leightons’ Rose Tree Cottage on Heartbreak Island ready for a memorable dinner with her parents and Daniel’s parents. So Jaymie was familiar with the spare room’s redecoration; she approved of the mellow gold Valetta had chosen for the walls, and the sparkling white trim.

She picked up Hoppy and nuzzled him. “I missed you, poochy-pooch! I hope Denver is doing all right at home.”

“Pam is feeding him,” Valetta said, referring to Pam Driscoll, who was looking after the bed-and-breakfast next door to Jaymie’s home for Anna Jones, Jaymie’s friend. “She doesn’t much like cats, but reluctantly agreed.”

She had done the right thing, Jaymie thought. Denver, her crabby tabby, did not take well to staying anywhere but home. She set Hoppy down on the bed and pulled her nightie out of her overnight bag.

At that very moment Daniel pulled up to the curb outside, the rumble of his Jeep engine too loud to miss, and came bounding into the house without knocking. He had visited Jaymie in the hospital but had asked to visit her at Valetta’s, too. He followed their voices to the bedroom and appeared in the doorway carrying a big bunch of multicolored roses, which he handed to Jaymie. Then he took her in his arms. “You okay? Are you sure you should be out already?”

“Daniel, it was a minor bump on the head, and I’m…” Her eyes widened and she sat down on the bed. Both Daniel and Valetta were watching her with concern. Even Hoppy had stopped bounding around the room and sat at her knee, staring up at her.

“Jaymie, what’s wrong?” Valetta asked.

“Are you okay? Should I take you back to the hospital? I
told
you it was too soon,” Daniel said.

“Stop fussing, Daniel! I just remembered what happened.” She looked up into her friend’s eyes. “Val, I didn’t fall, I was whacked over the head!” Hoppy jumped up on her lap and licked her chin. “And I think it was Hoppy’s barking that drove whoever it was away!”

Valetta called the police and an officer came out to interview her. They sat in Valetta’s cheerful retro kitchen. It honestly looked like something right out of the seventies, with an Arborite table and chair set in avocado green, burnt orange cupboards and funky, café-style patterned curtains drawn against the November evening.

The officer finished up the brief interview—Jaymie couldn’t remember much other than what she had already told her friends—and promised the police would be looking into it. They would interview Isolde and check the house out. But it was a day later, and unless there was some kind of evidence left behind or something taken, it was not that uncommon for someone to be in the house that shouldn’t. Before the heritage society had bought it, the police had had to go there quite often to check it for broken windows.

After the officer left, Daniel stood up from the dinette chair and tugged at the sleeves of his Ball State sweatshirt. “That’s it!” he said. “I’m going to have an alarm system put in that place.”

“The society doesn’t have that kind of money,” Jaymie protested, hand to her now-throbbing forehead.

“But
I
do, and I’m not going to have you at risk.” He sat back down next to her and pushed a tendril of hair out of her face. “Are you carrying the cell phone I gave you?”

“Sure,” Jaymie said, fishing in her purse and pulling it out. It was a nice little gadget and, given that she was not the best with technology, Jaymie had been surprised how well she’d taken to it.

He grabbed it and did some quick work, then handed it back to her. “Okay, now all you have to do to call 911 is hit star-9.”

“Wouldn’t it just be easier to dial 911?”

“No, because I know you too well: you’d have to get to a call screen past all the romance books you’ve already loaded on there to read.”

Valetta gave him a look. “Don’t badger her, Daniel.”

Daniel didn’t notice the look because he already had his own gadget out and was doing research, making notes and setting up an appointment for a security specialist to look over Dumpe Manor. Jaymie sighed. As much as she liked Daniel, there were some things she felt she shouldn’t have to explain. “You know, you can’t do
any
of that until you run it past the heritage society.”

He looked up and frowned, then pushed his glasses farther up onto the bridge of his beaky nose. “Why?”

“
Why?
Think about it a moment.” Honestly. How maddening could he be?

“Okay.” After a few moments of thought, he shook his head. “I still don’t get it.”

Jaymie exchanged an exasperated look with Valetta, who was snickering into her hand. “Daniel, you don’t own the property. You’re not even a member of the heritage committee.”

“Why wouldn’t they want free work? I’m not asking them to pay. I’ll
give
them the security system. For nothing. Kind of a donation. Who wouldn’t want that?”

He truly didn’t get it, and it reminded her of all the times she had to stop him from getting her something expensive that she didn’t want, just to try to please her. She had to accept some gifts, just to say no to others. He had wanted to buy her a new van, and she had been aghast. It had taken a month to explain why she couldn’t and wouldn’t accept it. It was all well-meant, but still… “I’m not saying they wouldn’t want it,” she explained. “But you have
got
to go through channels, Daniel. You can’t make a decision like that for them.”

“I’m just getting quotes! There’s no harm in that. We’ll go there tomorrow and—”

“No,” Jaymie said, her resolve hardening. “You’re not going to get quotes or anything until you ask the committee.”

“Then you’re not going back to work there until we do get a system put in.” He sat back and folded his arms over his chest, with a mulish look on his face.

“What gave you the idea that you could tell me what to do?” Jaymie asked, genuinely curious.

Valetta, her gaze slewing back and forth between them, held up one hand. “Children, enough. Daniel, go home. Jaymie’s had a rough couple of days and is going to bed.”

Jaymie bid Daniel good night, but her heart wasn’t in it. Her headache was pounding like a jackhammer. She had thought she had things figured out when she heard from her police officer friend, Bernie, that Detective Zack Christian had left the Queensville police force for a job with the beleaguered Detroit police. She was sure that her attraction to him was what was keeping her from fully committing to Daniel. Instead she found herself
more
impatient with Daniel’s increasingly possessive behavior, as the deadline for her decision about their relationship approached. She had said she’d tell him by Christmas whether she wanted to get more serious. If he’d pressed her that evening, she would have told him
no
.

•   •   •

A
FTER A COUPLE
of days passed and the results from her tests at the hospital came back, Jaymie was confident that she was fine. There was no concussion, her headache had all but gone away and it seemed like her memory had come back except for the fifteen minutes or so that she’d been out. Unfortunately, because she had not remembered about the intruder at Dumpe Manor until late the next day, a number of heritage committee members had been in and out, obliterating any evidence of someone who ought not to have been there.

There was nothing the police department could do, and no answers. The intruder was likely someone just hoping to bunk down for the night, startled when they heard her in the kitchen. Dee Stubbs, a good friend of Becca’s, told her that she and Mabel Bloombury, one of the other heritage society members, had gone there the next day to do some cleaning and found a heavy wooden mallet in the front hall. Not knowing how it got there, they had taken it back to the kitchen and tossed it in the box with all the others. Jaymie urged her to call the police and tell them that, but it wasn’t much good because Dee couldn’t even remember which mallet it was that they had found.

Bernie called to tell her that the police agreed with the general idea that it was just someone looking for a place to spend the night. Nothing, so far as they could tell, had been taken, and there was a minimum of disturbance. The theory was, someone walked in the unlocked door and went up the front stairs, but they heard her in the kitchen and got scared. When Jaymie moved to the front hall, they came down the back stairs, grabbed a handy weapon in the kitchen—one of the vintage mallets—and whacked her, then ran out the only working door. Bernie offered to go back to Dumpe Manor with Jaymie, if she needed support her first time reentering the scene of her attack, but it was something Jaymie wanted to do alone.