No Mallets Intended Page 2

  More recently the house was said to be haunted by the ghost of Mrs. Jane Dumpe, the last of that name to own it. She was said to disapprove of all that had happened to her beloved house in the last twenty years, since her death, but surely she wouldn’t haunt someone who was trying to help restore the place! Besides, Jaymie did not believe in ghosts.

  But she did believe in thieves, and she didn’t want to be in the house with one. She crept out of the kitchen, through the parlor and to the hallway, toward the front entrance, stopping and listening for footsteps so she wouldn’t run into someone. Hoppy was shaking with excitement or sensing her tension, she didn’t know which. She could feel his trembling all the way up the leash. Just as she got to the front hall, where the door stood closed, he began barking.

  “Hoppy!” Jaymie yelped, tugging him toward the front door.

  A rush of footsteps behind her made her jump and whirl. She got the impression of a dark-cloaked figure, then a blast of pain radiated from her forehead and everything went black.

  Two

  SHE 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 g
oing 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.

  • • •

  AFTER 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.

  It was just three weeks to Thanksgiving and three days before the next heritage society meeting. Jaymie needed to get back to Dumpe Manor to make some decisions regarding her recommendations to the committee. The thought of going there, the thought of being there alone, made her queasy, even though she would not have admitted that to Daniel or anyone else. She was sorely tempted to call Bernie back and take the offer of company—who better than a police officer, after all?—but she had to do it alone, and she had to walk. She was not going to change her habits, though she would practice better awareness of her surroundings and have her cell phone handy.

  It got dark early in November. Jaymie prepared to go, steadying her nerves with some common sense; now that it was well-known that the heritage society was refurbishing the house, vagrants would get the message. She’d be safe there, she really would. And she’d be more careful. Leaving Denver the crabby tabby snoozing in a basket by the stove, but with Hoppy on a leash and eager to go, she set out from the back door of her lovely old Queen Anne home, down the path to the gate and along the back lane that served both as access to the homes on her street and as a parking area. Trip Findley, her elderly backyard neighbor, waved to her as he raked leaves by the back porch light. Hoppy tugged at the leash, but she said, “No, Hoppy!” and he stopped.

  Her usual walk was toward the St. Clair River and Boardwalk Park, but the road to Dumpe Manor took her through the more modern section of town, where split-level ranch houses were punctuated by the occasional older home. Heidi Lockland’s midcentury modern ranch home was down a side street in the neighborhood. As Jaymie kept walking she passed through a section of town that was more commercial/light industrial, with a garage, the big doors open to reveal two men working on a car by a hanging light, and a small convenience store, brightly lit, with a few kids on bikes and skateboards hanging around the front. A dog barked and Hoppy quivered, on alert. But he trotted on without barking or tugging; her training regimen was beginning to work.

  They left the part of town with sidewalks, then the houses and buildings dwindled and the road turned to dirt. Autumn had done its work. The distant forests were bare of leaves, but the scent of them was everywhere, an earthy nutty smell Jaymie loved. She breathed deeply; someone had a brush fire going to burn debris, and the air held the fragrance of a campfire. That was one thing she had missed in the summer that had just passed. Every year she went camping with a group of girlfriends from college. They headed to the same family campground on Lake Huron and had a long weekend of fun and laughter. This
summer, one had been recovering from an operation, and another had been going out of state to a wedding, so they canceled and swore to do it the next summer for sure. She hoped they did. Jaymie adored the outdoor adventure.

  Hoppy trembled with excitement. He loved walking in the country, and this, though they were only a few minutes out of town, felt like the country, with the twilight closing them in, and the sound level significantly less. A few minutes more of walking, and she was there. She stopped and stared up at Dumpe Manor in the early evening gloom. It was once a beautiful home to one of the town’s founding fathers, passed down through generations; then it became a boardinghouse and finally was abandoned. Like Jaymie’s house it was Queen Anne style, but Dumpe Manor was bigger, with three stories counting the generous gabled attic, and instead of being yellow brick it was sheathed in clapboard and dripping with gingerbread, much of which was going to need repair or replacing.

  So far the heritage society had okayed an outside paint color scheme of gray and pale blue, and the work was done quickly, before cold weather made painting impractical. Windows were replaced, gutters installed and the roof fixed. With the new paint and the yard work done the house wasn’t such an eyesore. It looked better, though it would require a lot more work. Since her “little incident,” as Jaymie tried to think of it, more had been done. The sign in the yard, with unlit floodlights pointed toward it, now proclaimed QUEENSVILLE HISTORIC MANOR—QUEENSVILLE, MICHIGAN, painted expertly by Bill Waterman in the same paint colors as the house. The sign was surrounded by a garden filled with late-blooming chrysanthemums and evergreen shrubs.

  And she was delaying going in by staring up at the place as the moon rose.