Freezer I'll Shoot (A Vintage Kitchen Mystery) by Victoria Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page A

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