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  A Deadly Grind

  VICTORIA HAMILTON

  Dead man on the porch

  Hoppy was snuffling at a man who lay on the floor of the summer porch by the Hoosier cabinet. The upper and lower cabinet doors were wide open, and Jaymie swiftly shut the bottom one so she could get at the fellow. A cardboard box rested partly on his bleeding head, broken china on and all around him. Jaymie tossed the broom away and knelt by him, pushing the cardboard box away.

  “Becca, can you take Hoppy? There’s broken china all over the floor,” she said, pushing the little dog aside and brushing the shattered pieces and whole teacups and saucers from the injured man, a tinkle of porcelain echoing in the quiet night. Was he breathing?

  Rebecca cried out, picked up Hoppy, then grabbed the cordless phone from the wall mount in the kitchen as Jaymie reached out and tried to help the man roll over. He didn’t budge, despite her efforts; he was dead weight.

  “Hey, mister?” she said, staring at the still man. He was a well-dressed fellow, wearing khaki slacks and a polo shirt under a cable-knit cardigan. Besides the gash on his head and the blood that oozed in a messy stream from it, his nose was also crusted with old blood. Jaymie, dizzy and a little nauseous, wondered what the heck he had been doing on their summer porch. She glanced up and saw that the door was wide open and hanging drunkenly from its hinges, which explained the night air drifting in. In the distance someone’s dog was barking, which started a chorus of howls from the other dogs in town . . .

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written.

  The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require

  medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the

  recipes contained in this book.

  A DEADLY GRIND

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / May 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Donna Lea Simpson.

  Cover illustration by Tim O’Brian.

  Cover design by Lesley Worrell.

  Interior text design by Tiffany Estreicher.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or

  electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of

  copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58069-1

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is

  stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the

  author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  To Jessica Faust, my “literary soulmate”:

  thank you, Jessica, for being the best at what you

  do and for your hard work, dedication and creativity.

  It was your guidance that led to the creation of the

  Vintage Kitchen Mysteries. There are no

  words to express my gratitude.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The road is long, with many a winding turn . . .

  Once upon a time there was a little girl who read her mother’s Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries and dreamed of growing up to become a mystery author. She took a few side roads and detours along the way, but today, she fulfilled her childhood dream.

  So many people to thank, so little time!

  Thanks to the Berkley Prime Crime team, among them Andy Ball, Lesley Worrell, and cover artist Tim O’Brian. Special thanks to Michelle, for loving the Vintage Kitchen Mysteries!

  Thanks to my mom, who loves mysteries, and let her kid borrow them all.

  And to all of you out there who dream of writing your own mystery . . . my wish for you is that you have someone who believes in you every step of the way, because that—and the willingness to work and learn—is what it takes.

  Contents

  Copyrights

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  About the Author

  One

  NO ONE WOULD expect to find a new love at an estate auction, but Jaymie Leighton just had; her heart skipped a beat when she first saw the Indiana housewife’s dream. She wasn’t in Indiana and she wasn’t a housewife, but those were just details. Tall, stately and handsome, if a little the worse for wear, the Hoosier stood alone on the long porch of the deserted yellow-brick farmhouse. The hubbub of the crowd melted away as Jaymie mounted the steps, strode down the creaky wooden porch floor and approached, reverently.

  “You are so beautiful!” she crooned, stroking the dusty porcelain work top and gently fiddling with the chromed latch of the Hoosier cabinet cupboard, handled by so many generations of housewives before her eager, yet inexperienced, hands touched it. It was a genuine Hoosier, if the metal plate
affixed above the top cupboards of the cabinet was to be believed, and she had no cause to doubt it. The latch of the long cupboard popped and the door swung open to reveal an intact flour sifter, mounted on a tilt-out pin.

  “Wow,” Rebecca, Jaymie’s older sister, said, as she approached from the lawn below the porch railing.

  “I know,” Jaymie said, standing back and tilting her head to one side, gazing at the piece with admiring eyes. “The latches work, at least the ones I’ve tried, even if some of them are rusty. And the darn thing still has the flour sifter intact! Do you know how rare that is? Most times someone has stripped it out to make more storage space. And it’s never been painted! Original oak. Someone really treasured this piece.”

  She stepped back up to the cabinet and fiddled with the tambour door, a section that looked like the rolltop on a rolltop desk; it was near the porcelain work top and should have rolled up to reveal a storage area where glass spice jars, as well as baking tools and other cooking necessities, were kept. But the tambour would not budge. It was either jammed or broken, or moisture had caused the slats to swell, making them stick. That could be fixed, but it would temporarily keep her from finding out if it had more original parts hidden. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Jaymie said, glancing at her sister and stepping back so Becca could get a good look.

  “That’s not what I was going to say, but . . . okay.”

  “I’m going to bid on it,” Jaymie said, jotting down the lot number on her pad.

  “What? Why?”

  “Why?” Jaymie stuck the pad back in her purse and stared down at her older sister in disbelief. “Becca, look at it!”

  “I am,” she said, eyeing it, a dubious expression on her round face. “It’s dirty and damaged. The side panels are chipped, the porcelain work top is scarred and the legs have water staining. It looks like crap. As far as vintage pieces go, I’d give this one a two out of ten.”

  Jaymie marveled at how differently she and Becca could see things. Her sister was fifteen when Jaymie was born and almost seemed like a second mother at times; the message was always the same: I am so much older than you, she implied time and again, that I know more and my ideas are better!

  Becca was logical and pragmatic and had a numerical grading system for everything in life; two out of ten did not cut it. Anything worthwhile, from food to men to antiques, had to be a seven or better. Jaymie preferred to look beneath the surface to the heart of a piece, and this one had a heart of solid, twenty-four carat gold. “It just needs a little cleaning up. I love it, and I’m going to bid on it.”

  “And put it where?” her older sister said, crossing her arms over her ample bosom, sensibly covered by a burgundy sweater to ward off the chill of approaching evening.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Jaymie said, rubbing her bare arms. May in Michigan is changeable and moody, sun shining one moment and dark clouds scudding across the sky the next. Seduced by the heat of the late-afternoon sun, Jaymie had optimistically pulled her canvas sneakers out of the closet and had neglected to slip a sweatshirt or sweater over her pink T-shirt. The auction didn’t start until five p.m., and would likely run for hours; it would be dark and cold by the time they left, and she would be freezing. She shrugged, both at the cold and her sister’s gloomy assessment of the Hoosier. “I’ll find a place for it.”

  “Jaymie, get real,” Becca said, still staring over the porch railing at her from the lawn. “The kitchen is packed enough as it is with all your crap. Vintage tins, old pots and pans, Pyrex bowls, bowls, bowls and more bowls everywhere! How many bowls can one cook use? The last thing we need is another big piece of furniture.”

  “Do I call all your china and teacups ‘crap’?” Jaymie shot back.

  “My china and teacups are not cluttering the kitchen. I’m just saying there is no more room for another scrap of furniture or cooking junk!”

  “You only live at the house every other weekend, so you don’t have to worry about it,” Jaymie said, going back to examining the Hoosier. Though they jointly owned the family’s nineteenth-century two-story yellow-brick home in Queensville, she was the only one who lived there full-time. It was truly a family heirloom, and had been deeded to Jaymie and Rebecca by their parents, Joy and Alan Leighton, who preferred the Florida heat and humidity to Michigan’s variable temperatures: too hot in summer, too cold and snowy in winter, and iffy in between.

  “What do you think Mom would say about all that stuff crowding her kitchen?” Becca pointed out.

  Jaymie sighed. Becca could be so controlling, a trait she had inherited from their mother. She thought—again, because she was so much older than Jaymie—she had a right to tell her sister what to do, but Jaymie was thirty-two, not ten, so the fifteen-year age gap was not such a big deal anymore. “Okay, first, it isn’t her kitchen. She always hated it anyway. Thank heavens she didn’t modernize it in the eighties when she wanted to.” She shuddered, and continued. “But I know exactly what she’d say: ‘Jaymie, you can’t possibly like all this clutter!’ She would mutter something about ‘hoarders’, then Dad would tell her to butt out. It isn’t their house anymore, and they shouldn’t care one bit what I do to it.” She gave her older sister a defiant look.

  Becca couldn’t deny that; though Joy Leighton had come to the home in Queensville as a young bride in the sixties, she had never been fond of the old, yellow-brick house. In fact, when the Leightons did come back north, in the sultry heat of midsummer, they were more likely to stay at the family’s cottage on Heartbreak Island, the heart-shaped island in the middle of the St. Clair River between Queensville, Michigan, and Johnsonville, Ontario, the Canadian town named in honor of President Andrew Johnson, back in the eighteen hundreds.

  Heartbreak Island, split in two by a navigable channel, was shared by American and Canadian cottagers, a compromise reached in the early eighteen hundreds to settle ongoing land disputes that lingered after the War of 1812. To Jaymie, that compromise was symbolic of the ongoing friendship between two sovereign nations that shared the world’s longest undefended border. In honor of that unique friendship, Queensville and Johnsonville shared holidays. This late-May Friday ushered in the first Canadian holiday weekend of summer, the Victoria Day weekend. On Sunday and Monday Canadian visitors would flock across the St. Clair River to Jaymie’s hometown—Queensville, Michigan, was named in honor of Queen Victoria—to attend the longstanding traditional “Tea with the Queen.”

  But still, while Jaymie lived in Queensville year-round and adored her touristy little village home, Rebecca Leighton Burke ran her own company, RLB China Matching, out of her home in the nearby southwestern Ontario city of London, halfway along the highway between Detroit and Toronto and perfectly situated for business. She had settled there when she married a Canadian, and now, even after the divorce, stayed to look after their grandmother, who lived in London, too.

  Becca bought and sold old bone china and made a good deal of money doing it. If someone had broken an antique Spode platter or Minton teacup, Becca could sell them a replacement . . . for a premium price. Perhaps it was unfair, as they shared ownership of the family home, but Jaymie felt that, since she was the one who cared for it most, she should be able to do what she wanted, as long as she consulted Becca on any substantial changes.

  “Look, Jaymie, I can’t discuss this right now,” Becca said, her glance returning to the back lawn of the old house, where the flatbed stage was set; the nattily dressed gentleman auctioneer was mounting the steps as they spoke, so the auction must be starting in minutes. She glanced down at her notebook and said, “I only came to tell you that I’ll be bidding on an assorted box of teacups and saucers—that’ll be for the Tea with the Queen fundraiser Sunday and Monday, in case we run out—the complete set of Crown Derby, the Minton tea set, and the box of Spode completer pieces.” She checked each one off as she named it. She looked up at her sister with a worried frown. “Oh, a
nd, uh, Joel and his new squeeze are here. I just thought I’d better warn you.” She began to walk away, but over her shoulder she threw, “And don’t you dare bid on that Hoosier!”

  Jaymie stood frozen, her hand on the dusty porcelain work top of the cabinet, as she overlooked the green lawn, dotted with buyers and gawkers threading back through the tables of auction lots toward the stage. Joel was at the auction? And he was there with Heidi? Crap! As she stood there, silent, undecided on whether to flee or stay, she listened idly to a murmured conversation taking place around the corner of the old brick farmhouse, one of many, no doubt, as couples and groups decided on their bidding strategy.

  “Look, I’ll bid on it,” a man said, “you just stay in the back and make sure no one else bids.”

  “How am I going to do that?” a second voice asked.

  “I don’t know! Be creative.”

  “But where exactly is the button?” The second voice was a mere whisper, too soft to tell if it was a man or woman, but the tone was urgent.

  “Never you mind,” the first speaker said. “Do you think I’m gonna tell you?” There was a moment of hesitation, then, “Look, if I knew, I’d already freaking have it. It’s in there somewhere; we’ll figure that out once we get out of here. Just do as I say.”

  The second person said something, but too quietly to catch.

  “Yeah, well, too bad if you don’t trust me, you’re just gonna have to. We’re in this together, I told you, just you and me. Don’t attract attention. I don’t wanna tip anyone off that we know where the button is.” The voices faded.

  Jaymie shook herself and focused. The little snippet of conversation, weird and out of place—the voices were silent now, so the speakers must have moved off toward the auction stage—brought her back to the reason she was there, the auction. She had driven her van over for Becca, who was acquiring stock for the business, but also to look around for herself and her own collection, vintage cookware and old cookbooks. She was bidding on a couple of lots of both, so she had better get going.