A Deadly Grind by Victoria Hamilton

thought there must be a reason why Heidi was at one of the only meetings of the year you weren’t at, but the others said no, it was just chance. Then I said, we’ve never done anything like that before, let someone pay their way onto the committee or the tea. Bad precedent.”
    “I didn’t ask why you all
let
her, I asked why no one told me.”
    DeeDee began scrubbing again. She carefully disposed of the cleaning cloths and soiled paper towels in the garbage bag. She had already explained that they would be taken to the hospital; it was vital that they be disposed of correctly by someone experienced in handling bio-waste.
    “No one would volunteer to hurt your feelings, hon,” DeeDee said. “We were going to get Becca to do it—God knows she doesn’t have trouble hurting anyone’s feelings—but she never came to town, and it wasn’t the kind of thing we wanted to do over the phone.”
    She had to stop mooning around Queensville, Jaymie decided, because if people thought she still carried a torch for Joel six months after he’d dumped her, she was risking looking like an idiot. She swept the shards of china up and disposed of them, then knelt down by the cookbooks. As she stacked them back in the box, one in particular stood out; it was a small vintage book, grease-stained, with a line drawing on it of a church. “The Johnsonville United Church Ladies’ Auxiliary—1953. That’s interesting,” she said. She plunked her butt down on the wide board floor of the summer porch, trying to ignore what DeeDee was doing, and leafed through it. One recipe jumped out at her. Queen Elizabeth cake. Hmmm. She held it up to show DeeDee, and said, “This must have been made to honor Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953.”
    DeeDee bent forward and stared at the recipe. “Maybe, but my grandmother swears that recipe was around during World War II; says it was a favorite of the Queen Mum, and that’s why it was called Queen Elizabeth cake.”
    “Oh, right! I forgot her name was Queen Elizabeth, too. I’m going to try this recipe for the tea tomorrow,” Jaymie said, beginning to feel better just focusing on something other than the dead body. “If I ever get this stuff cleared up, that is.”
    “Who do you think he is . . . was, the dead man, I mean?” DeeDee asked. “Hoosier dead guy?” she said, laughing. She wrung red water into the pail from her cloth.
    Jaymie looked away, queasy, but tried to smile at DeeDee’s joke. “I don’t have a clue. Why did he break into our house, of all places, with all the houses that are empty and loaded with expensive stuff? I don’t get it.”
    “Maybe he wasn’t the robber,” DeeDee said. “Maybe he saw or heard something, came up to investigate, caught someone
else
in the act and got whacked.”
    “At our back door?” Jaymie considered it, but shook her head. “He’d have to come through the gate and down the path and up to the house, and he’d have had to be walking down the back lane to see anything going on. Unlikely at three or four a.m.”
    The whole thing was unlikely, though. Who was he, and what had he wanted? And why had he lifted all the boxes off the Hoosier? She glanced over, and her eye was caught by the box of sewing stuff; she remembered the random conversation she’d overheard at the auction about the valuable button. When she bid on the sewing stuff, it was really to see who else would be bidding on the box, hoping she’d see who was after a valuable button, but she’d gotten the whole box for fifteen bucks.
    Surely someone wouldn’t have followed her home for
that
? She’d never been broken into until the night she brought stuff home from the auction, though. It was something to consider. She packed the cookbooks into the box, piled the sewing box on top of it, and piled them on the Hoosier. She was going to take it all up to her room to sort, at some point, but not until after the tea.
    Even as she made plans and tried to forget the awfulness