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

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.
    A dog barked in the distance, then yelped; it sounded like someone had thrown something at it. Jaymie stumbled down the slope and across the muddy ravine, over the ruts of dirt, to the clear space that the plumbers were working in. She stepped over PVC piping, and played her flashlight over the grass as Hoppy barked at the back door. Other lights were beginning to flicker on through the woods that separated their cottages from others.
    Where was that dark spot she had noticed, the one that hadn’t been there earlier? There! She approached and the flashlight pinned on the dark spot, which quickly became a human form. “Garnet, call 911!” she cried.
    “Jaymie, are you okay?” Ruby shouted, as Garnet said, “What’s going on?”
    “Someone’s hurt,” Jaymie yelled, and, gasping for breath, approached the figure. She played the flashlight over the man, beginning at the feet, shod in sand-clogged, deep-treaded work boots. As the light moved up the paunchy body, she wondered at the stillness. “Mister, are you okay? Can I get some he . . .” She stopped talking. The glassy eyes, wide-open and staring, as well as the bloodred stain drenching his golf shirt left no doubt that help would be too late. She sobbed, her voice clogged and unnatural sounding. “It’s Urban Dobrinskie,” she yelled. “And he’s . . .” She paused as her stomach heaved. She reached out and touched him; he was cold! She retched, then cried, “He’s dead!”
    Not again, not again, not again; the refrain thrummed through her brain. Another body?
    “What? Impossible,” Garnet said, his voice coming closer as he spoke, echoing her own thoughts.
    It
was
impossible. And yet . . . there was