The Appleton Case (A Markham Sisters Cozy Mystery Novella Book 1) (5 page)

“I suppose our
first job tomorrow should be to take the letters to Mr. Appleton, then,” Joan
said.

“I suppose,”
Janet
agreed, hating to have to spend the time doing that
when they could be doing so many more interesting things.

With the
kitchen tidied, they both found books in the library to curl up with for a few
hours and then headed to bed.

“I hope I can
sleep,” Joan said as Janet headed up the stairs.
 
“It’s always difficult in a strange
place.”

“I’m sure
you’ll be fine,” Janet replied.
 
“Just pretend you’re on holiday.”

Janet washed
her face and brushed her teeth and then changed into her
favourite
nightgown.
 
She crawled into bed and
was asleep in minutes.
 

Some time
after midnight, she came awake suddenly.
 
She sat up in bed and listened.
 
The loud scream that had woken her was repeated as her heart pounded in
her chest.

Chapter
Five

With her
senses on full alert, Janet slowly slid out of bed and found her slippers and
her bathrobe.
 
She tiptoed across
the bedroom and then stopped at her door.
 
After the second scream, she’d heard nothing but silence.
 
She turned the doorknob, wincing as it
squeaked under her hand.
 
Holding
her breath, she slowly pulled the door open.
 

The moon,
shining through a small window at the top of the landing, was providing the
only illumination in the short hallway.
 
Janet looked up and down the hall, but it was empty.
 
After a moment of indecision, she headed
for the stairs.
 
Better to get Joan
to join her before checking the other bedrooms.
 
As she descended the stairs, she started
to worry about her sister.
 
Where
was she?
 
Surely the screams had
woken her as well.
 

Janet expected
to run into to Joan at any second, but she reached the ground floor without
hearing another sound or seeing her sister.
 
She walked down the corridor to the
owner’s suite and tapped gently on the door.
 
After a moment, she knocked again, with
more force.
 
Getting no reply, she
gave up on knocking and opened the door.

“Joan?” she
called out quietly.
 
“Are you
awake?”

The sound of
snoring coming from the bedroom answered that question for her.
 
Janet shook her head and then stomped across
the floor.
 

“Joan?
 
Didn’t you hear the screaming?” she
asked loudly, right next to her sister’s ear.

Joan sat up in
bed, nearly bashing heads with Janet.
 
“Janet?
 
What are you doing
here?
 
What time is it?”

Janet glanced
at the clock.
 
“It’s two-fifteen,”
she told her sister.
 
“And I was
woken up by screaming, so I came down to get you so we could check the house
over together.”

“Screaming?”
Joan echoed.
 
“I didn’t hear
anything.”

“You were
snoring too loudly,” Janet replied.

“I don’t
snore,” Joan told her stoutly.
 
“I
suppose you won’t be able to sleep until we check the house, though, will you?”

Janet thought
about it.
 
“Not really,” she
said.
 
“I definitely heard someone
screaming.
 
Maybe we should ring the
police, now that I think about it.”

“Let’s look
out the front window, first of all,” Joan suggested.
 
“Maybe something has happened across the
street or something.”

Joan put on
her own slippers and robe and the two sisters headed towards the front of the
house.
 
The more awake she became,
the more Janet began to doubt what she’d heard.
 
Outside, the street was dark and nothing
seemed to be moving.
 

“Are you sure
you weren’t dreaming?” Joan asked as they began to walk through the downstairs,
switching lights on and off in each room.

“I’m sure,” Janet
replied, even though she was feeling less certain every second.
 
She peeked into the small cloakroom, but
it was as empty as every other room on the ground floor had been.

“Just the
first floor to check,” Joan said.
 

The two guest
bedrooms and bathrooms were quickly inspected and found to be empty.
 
Janet switched on her own lights and
walked through her bedroom and bathroom.
 

“Nothing,” she
said quietly as she sat down on her bed.

“Perhaps you
had a bad dream,” Joan suggested.
 
“You sometimes do in strange places.”

“Yes, but I’ve
never dreamed that I’ve heard screaming before,” Janet argued.
 
“It’s very strange.”

“I think we
should both get back to sleep,” Joan told her.
 
“Would you like a cup of tea before you
go back to bed?”

Janet shook
her head.
 
She’d caused enough fuss
and bother for one night.
 
“I’m sure
some more sleep will do me a lot of good,” she told her sister.
 
“Sorry about waking you.”

“That’s no
problem,” Joan assured her.
 

Joan gave her
a warm hug.
 
Janet sat on the bed,
listening to her sister’s footsteps getting further away.
 
After several minutes, she switched off
the lights and curled back under the covers.
 
Sleep was elusive and erratic and
morning seemed to arrive far too quickly.

When she got
downstairs for breakfast after a shower that did little to wake her up, Janet
was pleased to find that Joan had made coffee.
 
Both sisters preferred tea, but this
morning coffee was definitely called for, at least as far as Janet was
concerned.
 
Joan didn’t look the
slightest bit tired.

“Did you
manage to get back to sleep?” Joan asked as Janet filled the largest mug she
could find to the very brim with hot coffee.

“Not really,”
Janet told her.
 
She took a small
sip and sighed.
 
Although logic told
her that the caffeine couldn’t possibly have done anything yet, even that
single sip seemed to make her feel more alert.
 
By the time she’d emptied the mug, she
felt almost like her usual self.

“I made
oatmeal,” Joan told her, filling a bowl for Janet.

Janet felt her
emerging good mood vanish.
 
She
hated oatmeal and Joan knew it.
 
Joan, on the other hand, not only loved it, but also seemed to feel that
it had its own restorative qualities.
 
Every time Janet was tired or poorly, Joan made her oatmeal for
breakfast.
 

The sisters
sat at the table together and ate their breakfast.
 
Joan ate with enthusiasm, while Janet
worked her way through her bowl resignedly.
 

“So, I suppose
we should go and see Gavin Appleton this morning and give him the letters,”
Joan said as Janet did the washing up.

“Should we
read them first?” Janet asked, hoping her sister would say yes, but fairly sure
she wouldn’t.

“That would be
wrong,” Joan said primly.
 
“They
aren’t ours to read.”

“They came
with the house,” Janet reminded her.

Joan shook her
head.
 
“We know that Gavin wants the
letters back,” she said.
 
“Perhaps
he’s embarrassed by things he said in them.
 
It isn’t our place to read them.”

“I’ll go get
them,” Janet said, swallowing a sigh.
 
It wasn’t that she was especially nosy, she just had a healthy sense of
curiosity, she told herself as she headed into the library.
 
The folders were exactly where she’d
left them and she flipped through them, pulling the bottom one out and
returning to the kitchen with it.

“I’ll just
glance through the pile and make sure that they’re all from Gavin,” she told
her sister, sitting down at the table.
 
“We definitely shouldn’t give him anything that isn’t his.”

Joan didn’t
object, so Janet quickly went through the small stack.
 
It only took a moment to check that all
of the letters were indeed signed “Gavin.”
 
There were only about a dozen letters in the pile and, as Janet closed
the folder, she began to regret that she hadn’t taken the time to read her way
through them the previous evening, before she’d told Joan about them.

They agreed to
stop at the man’s garage on their way to the grocery store.
 
Now that Joan was feeling more settled
in the house, she wanted to start doing a great deal more baking.
 
Janet grinned as she climbed into the
car.
 
Joan’s mood had all the
hallmarks of a baking frenzy, something that happened once or twice a year to
her big sister, usually after some small upset.

The frenzy
always started with Joan pulling out a number of cookbooks, looking for new and
interesting recipes to try.
 
Janet
had spotted several of Joan’s old
favourites
on the
kitchen counter, along with a new American one that she’d purchased only a few
weeks earlier.
 

If Janet was
correct, the trip to the grocery store would be an expensive one, but once they
were home again Joan would start baking everything from bread to pies to
biscuits and cakes.
 

We’d better
invite the
neighbours
around for tea soon, Janet
thought, otherwise we’ll never eat it all.
 
Joan usually baked for three or four days before she ran out of
ingredients or recipes she wanted to try or both.
 
Then she’d go back to her normal pattern
of baking just a little something every day.

Joan drove
today and Janet enjoyed the scenery that she hadn’t really noticed on their
last trip when she’d been driving.
  
When they arrived at the garage, one of the large overhead doors was
open.

“Oh, good,
someone is here,”
Joan
said as she turned into the car
park.

“I hope
it’s
Gavin,” Janet said.
 
“I don’t want to leave these papers with
a stranger.”

Joan parked
and turned off the engine.
 
“I suppose
we should both go in,” she said in a reluctant voice.

“Unless you’d
rather go alone,” Janet said, suddenly wishing they’d just turned the papers
over to the police to return to Gavin.

“Let’s go,”
Joan said.

“Okay,” Janet
replied with forced enthusiasm.

“Hello?” Joan
called as they approached the door.
 
There was no reply.
 
The
sisters reached the door and peeked into the garage.
 
A large black car was parked in the
space, but no one was around.

“I think the
office is over there,” Janet whispered, pointing towards the back corner of the
garage.

“Why are we
whispering?” Joan hissed at her.

“I don’t
know,” Janet replied in a hushed tone.

Janet took a
deep breath and then strode purposefully towards the door.
 
As she got closer she noticed that a small,
hand-lettered sign that read “office” was stuck to the door.
 
Stopping when she reached it, she
knocked hard.
 
The sound seemed to
echo through the large space.

“It’s open,” a
voice shouted from behind the door.

Janet glanced
at Joan and then turned the knob, frowning as her hand encountered something
sticky on its surface.
 
She pushed
the door open and forced herself to smile at the four men who were looking at
her in surprise.

“I’m so sorry
to interrupt,” Janet said.
 
“Only we
found some letters in the house and we wanted to give them to you.”
 

She addressed
her remarks to Gavin, who was sitting facing the door at the large round table
that took up most of the office space.
 
The other three men, who looked considerably younger, had glanced at the
two women and then turned away.
 

“Oh, great,”
Gavin muttered, jumping up from the table.
 
“We can talk about that outside,” he said, crossing to the sisters and
ushering them out of the room.

“There isn’t
really anything to discuss,” Joan said.
 
She stopped in the middle of the garage and reached into her large handbag
and pulled out the folder.
 
“These
are the letters we found.
 
They’re
all from you to your mother.”

Gavin
frowned.
 
“You didn’t read them?” he
demanded.

“No, of course
not,” Janet said indignantly.
 
“I
just flipped through them to make sure they were all from you. We didn’t want
to give you the wrong letters, now did we?”

“No, right,
well, thanks then,” Gavin said, opening the folder and flipping through
it.
 
“Is this all the letters you
found?” he asked after a moment.

“So far, at
least,” Janet replied.
 
“Why?
 
Were you expecting there to be more?”

“Well, yeah,”
Gavin said.
 
“I mean, I wrote to mum
a lot.
 
I thought there’d be a lot
more.”

“If we find
anything else, we’ll be sure to drop it off to you,” Joan said.
 

“Yeah, or just
ring me and I’ll come get whatever it is,” Gavin told them.
 
“I don’t want you to have to keep coming
by here.”

“It’s no
problem,” Janet said.
 
“You’re on
our way to the grocery store, anyway.”

“Yeah, well,
thanks, then,”
Gavin
said.
 
He took them each by an arm and led them
out of the garage.

“Those young
men looked very young,”
Joan
remarked as she dug in
her handbag for her keys.

“I run a sort
of apprentice-like scheme,” Gavin muttered.
 
“There aren’t a lot of good jobs around
here, but people always need someone to fix their cars, you know?”