Freezer I'll Shoot (A Vintage Kitchen Mystery) (4 page)

The old days of neighbors crossing back and forth with abandon was over, and most now obeyed the law. If they wanted to visit their backyard Canadian neighbor who was officially across the border, they had to go to one of the crossings, walk through, then go to their neighbor’s home. That was what folks did officially, anyway, in the light of day. But after dark . . . it was well-known that drunks wove back and forth to the Ice House, then to the Boat House, and back, hopefully ending up on their own side of the border at closing time. Cottagers on both sides of the border were having to fence their yards to keep people from sneaking through.

The island was actually bisected by a channel that had been cut early on to divert springwater and excess river flow. In places, that channel was an actual stream; in others, it was covered by dirt over a culvert. There was talk of sensors being put in the length of the border, along that channel, to ensure that no one crossed illegally, but it was hung up in debate on both sides because of property rights issues.

Tansy Woodrow’s shop, Tansy’s Tarts, was a bakeshop on the American side of the island. Tansy made the most exquisite tarts and pies for miles. Her specialty was butter tarts, the recipe a well-guarded secret that had been handed down from her Canadian grandmother. When you bit into a Tansy Woodrow butter tart the filling gushed like liquid heaven, sweet and buttery, golden perfection. There weren’t any like them in the whole rest of the United States and she was not sharing the recipe.

The shop took up much of the main floor of a white two-story frame structure with a big pink-and-white-striped awning over the front window and door with Tansy’s shop name in script; beyond the shop was the bakery at the back. Tansy and her hubby, Sherm, lived in the upstairs apartment and had a deck out back from which they could see much of the island. Jaymie suddenly realized it was probably not the best plan to go to the bakery just before closing, when their stock would be depleted, but she tied Hoppy up to the doggie post outside the door, near the big bucket of water kept out there for the pooches, and slipped in as a couple of skinny girls in cut-offs darted out, mouths full, crumbs falling and the gooshy inside of a butter tart dripping down.

Sherm Woodrow, Tansy’s husband, was staring out the window after the two girls, and turned to smile at Jaymie. “Hey, Jaymie, what can I do ya for?” he said.

She looked at the nearly empty glass case—the shop was lined with antique bakery cases, white porcelain and chrome, with huge glass expanses and wire shelves—and said, “I think I’m too late. I was going to buy a dozen pecan butter tarts to take back to the mainland tomorrow.”

“None but a couple left,” he said, as Tansy, her face red, came out through the swinging doors of the back bakery.

“Hey, Tans, how are you?”

“Good. You?”

“I’m good.”

Sherm repeated what Jaymie had said, and Tansy blew her bangs off her forehead with her lower lip thrust out. “No can do,” she said, “but I’m baking some more first thing tomorrow morning before it gets too warm, and I’ll save you a dozen, nice and fresh!”

“How about half pecan and half regular butter tarts? I’m taking some over to Daniel’s. His mother and father are in town and I don’t know their stand on nuts versus raisins, so I’ll buy both.”

“Ah, you mean the future in-laws?” Sherm teased, winking at her. “Can’t wait to ‘butter’ them up with Tansy’s tarts?” he said.

Both women groaned.

Just then the doorbell rang and Zack Christian strolled in, still in his relaxed island mode, in baggy swim trunks and a polo shirt. “Hey,” he said to Jaymie. “I thought I saw you go by, and then I saw Hoppy outside the shop.”

“Oh. Hi!” Jaymie still wasn’t sure what to make of the detective’s friendliness, but it was good.

“Hey, friend,” Sherm said, his greeting to anyone he didn’t know by name. “What can I do ya for?”

“I just discovered a Tansy Tart at the Ice House last night, and I’m hooked,” he said, with a wink at Jaymie.

Tansy was eyeing him and glanced over at Jaymie, raising her eyebrows.

“Sherm, Tansy, this is Zack Christian,” Jaymie said. “He rents a cottage on the island, but he works for . . . Uh, he’s a detective with the Queensville Police.”

He greeted the bakery owners, then asked Jaymie, “How is the article going?”

“Good, actually. I may even be able to use a picture from the Ice House for it.” She explained to Tansy and Sherm about the article on ice cream making for the
Wolverhampton Howler
. Then she said, “We had dinner there, and it was great until Urban Dobrinskie came in hollering about some illegal sail he claims the Redmonds are using in the race. You know anything about that?” She remembered what Dobrinskie said about Sherm having told him about the illegal sail.

Sherm had the grace to look embarrassed. “I might have accidently set him off,” he said. “I heard from someone that the Redmonds were ordering their sails from Switzerland these days, and I just mentioned it while I was down at the marina yesterday, and he stormed off muttering.”

“Sherm!” Tansy said, whacking him on the shoulder, “You should know better. Don’t say anything to Urb, ever!”

“He’s not such a bad guy,” Sherm said with a shrug, “but he’s got a couple of quirks.”

“I’d better get going,” Jaymie said. “I don’t like to leave Hoppy tied up too long.”

“Come by in the morning, Jaymie, and I’ll have those tarts boxed up for you to take home,” Tansy said, putting the two last ones in the case in individual boxes. “Here, both of you take one on the house for your dessert tonight.”

“Thanks, Tans! See you tomorrow morning.”

Zack said good-bye and dashed ahead, holding the door open for her, and when she went through, she glanced back to see Tansy, eyebrows raised and a speculative look on her face. Uh-oh. She may get on Sherm’s case about gossiping, but Tansy was known to like a good chinwag herself.

She would not let it bother her. Jaymie untied Hoppy and strolled back toward her cottage, accompanied by Zack, who seemed deep in thought. “Penny for your thoughts?” she said.

“I was just wondering, did Sherm Woodrow really just chat about the foreign sails accidentally, or did he intend to cause trouble between Dobrinskie and the Redmonds?”

“He wouldn’t do that!” Jaymie said. “Would he?”

“I’ve seen my share of folks who enjoy stirring up trouble. I just don’t know that guy well enough to know if he’s one of them.”

“Sherm and Tansy are gossips, but neither one of them is vicious.”

They walked along in silence, and of course Hoppy chose that moment to do his business, so she had to stoop and scoop, while she was holding her tart. Zack, trying not to laugh, took her tart box from her.

“I’ll carry this so you don’t have two such conflicting packages.”

“You could have offered to take the baggie,” she said, and they both laughed. After a pause, she said, “Zack, what did you mean last night when you told Urban that you could charge him with a hate crime for what he said?”

He shrugged uneasily. “It’s nothing.”

“No, I want to know.”

“I just blurted it out. I was in Canada a few weeks ago at a policing conference, and they were talking about hate speech and the law in Canada. If you say something cruel or libelous about someone’s race or sexual orientation in Canada, you could be charged with a hate crime.”

“Hmm. Really? Even though Canadians are supposed to be kinder and gentler than Americans, there still must be a lot of lawsuits. But how does that apply to Urban and Ruby?”

He looked uneasy.

“Be honest.”

“Well, you know, his calling her a she-male, because . . . because she’s gay. That’s hate speech. Maybe not here, but in Canada.”

“Why do you think she’s gay?”

He looked flustered. They reached Rose Tree Cottage and Jaymie deposited Hoppy’s little giftie in the trash can at the end of her sidewalk, then turned to regard Zack steadily.

“I guess I just assumed.”

“Why? Because she can sail better than most of the men on the island? Because she doesn’t wear a push-up bra?”

He shrugged.

“Or because she never married? Come on, you can do better than that!”

He took a deep breath and nodded. “You’re right. I made an assumption and that wasn’t fair.”

“You don’t know anyone’s life unless you’re in it,” Jaymie said. “If I’ve learned anything this summer, it’s that. Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t, but it’s not fair to speculate. Anyway, I’ve got to go.” Hoppy tugged on the leash, anxious for his dinner.

“Hey,” he said, as she walked toward the cottage.

She turned and waited.

“Do you want to go to the Ice House for dinner again?”

Dumbfounded, she paused, then said, “Uh, no, I don’t think so.” She was going to try to trot out some excuse, but decided it wasn’t necessary.

“Okay. Talk to you later,” he said, and walked away.

She watched him for a moment, wondering about the last-minute invitation. It must be boredom with his days off, she decided, and ascended the three steps to the cottage.

Four

S
HE WROTE FOR
a while, trying one more time to come up with a suitable introduction for herself. Nan wanted her to write a brief bio of herself to accompany the first “Vintage Eats” column, and it was proving to be more difficult than anything else she had tried to write in the last eight months. It also made her hyperaware of how little there was to actually say about her and her fledgling career as a food writer. Initially a respite from the heartbreak of Joel Anderson’s dumping her before Christmas the previous year, rummaging around in her grandmother’s old cookbooks had been her refuge and solace.

Over the weeks, she had become fascinated. In a way it was like the feminist social history class she had taken in college, a view of one woman’s life in the middle of the last century. One old binder in particular was full of handwritten recipes, and many more were snipped out of newspapers from the forties and fifties. She started to buy vintage cookbooks in thrift stores and at auctions, and her love affair with cooking from the recipes they contained blossomed. Though she had been collecting old cookware for years, now she was collecting cookbooks, too, and working out ways to explain old recipes to modern cooks.

But what was there to say about
herself
? She was just a woman, youngish, single, content in her small-town world. How could you make a bio out of that? She sat and tapped her pencil against the tabletop, then got up and went to the sink for a glass of water. The window over the sink overlooked the back deck and yard, a narrow strip that soon plunged down a decline to the ravine between their cottage and the Redmonds’ home. On either side of the ravine were wooded glades separating them from the other cottages on their streets.

Would she ever live out here? Would there come a day, in the far future, when even Queensville felt too big or bustling, when the island would seem a welcome retreat from the world? Well, it already was that. But she felt no desire to live here. The Queensville house was home, and always had been.

With a sigh, she sat back down to try again to frame some kind of biography. When she got no further, she went back to what she really wanted to do, and that was work on the column. Now that she had thought of using the Ice House to talk about ice harvesting and ice cream making in the past, she saw a pattern emerging. Vintage equipment and vintage recipes, with photos to match, would make a continuing column possible. Would she run out of ideas eventually? Gosh, she hoped not.

The words came fast and furious, and before long she had the article roughed out. It wasn’t bad, not bad at all. It moved from the fascination of the ice cutting procedure, through some background on how the homemaker of the past managed to keep and use the ice. She examined the photos she had taken, flipping through her digital camera and stopping at the green-handled ice pick. She’d thought she’d be able to use that as one of the illustrations for her article, but it was not the most interesting subject in the world, she supposed. The photo of the ice chests was cool, but the best one was ruined by Ruby’s hastily moving out of the frame. And Jaymie thought of herself as camera shy! Ruby beat her at that.

As twilight snuggled in around the cottage, she moved out to the front porch with Hoppy, clipboard in hand, tea mug beside her, but her thoughts wandered far afield from the article to Zack Christian. Why did he ask her to dinner? Was it intended as a date request? Friendly dinner offer? But she was “going” with Daniel Collins and he knew it. There was no way she and Zack were
quite
friends. Acquaintances, yes; friends, no.

Her instincts said Zack Christian—relatively new in town, attached now to a police force that was small and prosaic compared to the big-city police force he once was a part of—was just bored and lonely, and that the dinner invitation was a passing impulse. Had he made any friends in the months he had been working for the Queensville force? Officer Bernie Jenkins, a deputy on the same police force, had told Jaymie that the detective was rumored to have been fired from his last post after an incident involving a witness. If that was true, it must have left him angry, and maybe unsure of his future in his chosen career. As much as she liked Bernie—Bernice—gossip was unreliable at best, damaging and hurtful at worst. Until she knew the truth, she would not speculate.

She watched the shadows lengthen as Hoppy curled up next to her in the Adirondack chair with a sigh, falling into that profound doggie sleep that was the aftermath of contentedness. The line of pines across from her cottage darkened to a deep hunter green as shadows crept into their branches to nestle for the night. Darkness stole over the island and cottage lights came on; the sound of laughter from back patios and front porches waned, quieting as weary folks drifted off to their beds, but Jaymie still sat and thought.

How peaceful life was on the front porch, she reflected, ruffling Hoppy’s fur. She was not the kind of girl to look for excitement from life. Joy didn’t come at ninety miles per hour. Joy, which had little to do with pleasure, stole through you in moments of hope, feelings of tenderness for the good friends and loving family who surrounded you, and gratitude for life, she firmly believed. Pleasure was transitory; joy was lasting.

Her grandma Leighton had once said that Jaymie was an old soul in a new body. Maybe that was true. When Joel told her that living with her was like living with an old woman and a toddler all at once, she took umbrage. But he explained that he meant that she was sometimes wise, always patient, and yet at times she viewed the world as if it were all new to her, and took delight in the most unexpected things. It was the nicest thing he ever said to her, and yet for all that, he still preferred the company of Heidi Lockland. Heidi, while a truly sweet person despite cultivating a blond bimbo exterior, held a view of the world that was sometimes gratingly out of sync with reality, perhaps the result of being born wealthy and beautiful.

Her eyes drifted closed, but Jaymie awoke with a gasp, having fallen into a dream of tumult and fear, one of those half-waking, half-sleeping worlds of chase and capture that dotted one’s night life. “It’s time for bed, little dog,” she said, heaving herself up out of the chair and picking up her clipboard from the porch floor, where it had dropped when she fell asleep. “Tomorrow we have to go back to the mainland, no matter what. I need a shower.”

But of course, as sleepy as she had been just minutes before, when she locked up the cottage and headed to bed, she couldn’t sleep. So after a half hour of tossing and turning, she gave up, made a pot of tea, and sat at the kitchen table writing her article by the weak yellowish light of an incandescent bulb. She was writing longhand, since there was no computer at the cottage, and she had several sheets scribbled with wandering text by the time another two hours had passed. She had thought she had a handle on it, but now it seemed lacking: dull, flat and unoriginal. She was beginning to experience a bad case of midnight desperation, the certainty that not only was she not a writer; she never would be. She had no talent. Every opening line she tried came out sounding trite and overused.

Tapping her pencil on the clipboard, she felt that pressure in the lower regions that comes from too many cups of tea late at night and no bathroom facilities. She glanced up at the old clock, an electric rooster-shaped clock that had been in the cottage as long as she could remember. It was one o’clock in the morning, and sleep seemed an elusive chimera. If she could just go to the bathroom, she’d be fine.

She looked out the back window that topped the kitchen sink and stared through the gloom toward the Redmonds’ home. No lights. Darn! Ruby had said that the back door would be open, and to come on over whenever she needed to, but it would feel weirdly invasive to just walk in. Maybe she should just do what she had done as a kid on rare camping trips, and go in the bushes. That gave her the creeps, though, since she was so close to neighbors. It was definitely a last resort.

Hoppy trotted out to the kitchen, took a long slurp of water, and then scratched at the back door to go out. If only it was that easy for humans, she thought, as she stepped out on the back porch to wait for him to cock his leg and come back in. Not that he actually did cock his leg, exactly. He was three-legged, and wobbly, but he was still a boy dog and gamely tried. His late-night ventures were never long, just enough time to piddle, so it was a surprise when he suddenly bounded out into the lawn and began to bark.

“Hoppy!” she hissed, going to the edge of the deck and searching what was left of the grassy area behind the cottage. “Come back here!”

Barking again.

“Hoppy
!
”
Darn it! She did not want him wandering out onto the mucky leaching bed, because that would mean having to bathe him. She ducked back into the cottage and grabbed the flashlight that was attached to the wall by the back door. She turned it on and swept it around the mess of her backyard. Hoppy was on alert, his quivering nose pointed toward the small grove of crab apple trees that puddled around one small spot in the hollow between the Leighton yard and the Redmonds’.

Please don’t let it be a skunk,
Jaymie prayed! She tripped and skidded down the slope and across the mucky backyard, then pounced on her Yorkie-Poo, grabbing his collar. “Hoppy Leighton, you are
not
going be skunked tonight,” she whispered. She carried him back in, hoping he had done his business, and wishing it were so easy for her.

It took a good ten minutes to wash his paws and her own, and then she was left wanting a cup of tea but not daring to drink one more ounce of fluid, and sitting at the table drumming her pencil while Hoppy stared at the back door with wistful eyes. She
still
had to go! She paced and glanced out the back window again, hoping to see a light on in the Redmonds’ kitchen. She thought she saw a flash, but it was gone in an instant.

Okay, ignore the urgent need to relieve yourself
, she thought, as she settled down to work. An article on ice harvesting and ice cream making.
Ice, ice, baby,
she hummed; it caught in her brain, repeating like a manic refrain. She had to think of a way to start her article.

In the beginning, there was the ice age . . .

Or . . .

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream . . .

Rotten beginnings, both of them.

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy . . . but it wasn’t always so far as making that delicious summertime treat, ice cream. Today we head to the supermarket and buy a quart, but not so very long ago if you wanted ice cream to go with your cherry pie, you depended on a ready supply of ice and hours of hand churning. But where could you go to get ice in the age before mechanical refrigeration?

Not
too
terrible. Maybe she could do something with that. As she sat cudgeling her brain, noise erupted in the backyard, a loud shout and clang of metal. Then Jaymie clearly heard, through the open back window,
“Get off my property!”

The voice was loud and harsh, not one she recognized. Jaymie bolted up out of her chair and hustled out to the back deck, but couldn’t see anything. There was a light on in the Redmonds’ kitchen now, but there didn’t appear to be any movement. Hoppy started barking, and Jaymie was stunned into inaction for a moment. That voice had been clear as a bell, floating in her back window. If it was from the street in front of the cottage, she wouldn’t have heard a thing.

She reached back in, pushing Hoppy away with her foot as she grabbed the flashlight again, and played it across the yard. There was a dark hump down the slope, in the gully between her and the Redmonds’ backyard. She slipped flip-flops on her feet and trotted down the hill as her neighbors’ back porch light came on.

“Jaymie, is that you? Everything all right?” came Garnet’s voice floating down to her.

“I don’t know. There’s something down here. Did you just yell at someone to get off your property?”

“No! What’s going on?”

“Is everything okay?” That was Ruby’s voice, thick with sleep.