A Deadly Grind Read Free Page B

she’d stick around until its lot number came up.
    But who, Jaymie idly wondered, were the two people talking about the mysterious and valuable button? She scanned the crowd. Was it someone she knew? Hard to tell just from a whisper. There were lots of folks she recognized; with DeeDee was her son, Arnie, and her brother Lyle’s latest girlfriend, Edith. Jewel Dandridge, owner of Jewel’s Junk, a funky little shop in Queensville, was scouting the auction, too. She had just bid on a lot of five boxes kindly described by Lesley as “unique, undervalued treasures”; in other words, broken junk. In her hands they would become weird and wonderful works of art. Bill Waterman, a local handyman, had bid and won a lot of obscure tools, to add to the collection he kept in his barn, on display. He was in the process, he’d told her the summer before, of writing a history of the handyman, and the vintage tools were to be photographed to illustrate his book. As a collector herself, Jaymie knew most of the other people in the village who were fellow collectors.
    But there were many more at the auction she didn’t recognize. One fellow was notable because he did nothing but wander aimlessly through the crowd. The second time he squeezed past the same people a couple of them gave him that irritated look one does when impatient with someone, but not ready to confront them. He, however, appeared oblivious and kept wandering.
    A middle-aged couple, wealthy-looking and faintly bored, stood watching the action. Jaymie had spotted them outside the Queensville Inn just that morning while she was shopping across the road at the Queensville Emporium in advance of Becca’s arrival. The dark-haired woman, elegantly dressed in a black suit with a black-and-white silk flower pin on the lapel and diamond earrings, was the one Jaymie had walked beside back toward the auction site when she’d left the porch. The couple whispered to each other but didn’t engage with anyone else in the crowd, keeping themselves separate in some miracle of aloofness. There was an actual personless circle around them, as if they had a commoner-shunning force field. The husband, a distinguished-looking silver-haired gentleman, bought a small painting, but if they bid on anything else, she didn’t catch it.
    There was another fellow in the crowd she recognized by sight; he was staying next door to her, at Anna and Clive Jones’s bed-and-breakfast. He was handsome in an overly clean-cut way, perfectly groomed, almost beautiful, with dark collar-length hair and a chiseled jaw. He turned as she eyed him, caught her look and smiled. Jaymie, mortified that he had caught her staring, turned her gaze to the front, feeling the blush rise in her cheeks.
    “Lot number one-sixty-eight,” Lesley intoned, looking down at his pad as his grandson held up the cardboard box, “is a mixed batch of sewing paraphernalia: rickrack, needles, bobbins, thread, a large jar of buttons, assorted other sewing oddments. Who numbered this junk lot to come up so late?” He gave his grandson a mock-severe look, then turned his gaze back to the crowd. “Who’ll give me five dollars?”
    Buttons! Jaymie slewed her glance around. No one looked interested, but that didn’t indicate anything at an auction, where a poker face was an asset. “One,” she said, shooting her hand up, wondering if this was the lot that held the potentially valuable button. Someone else in the crowd bid two, she bid three, then several others joined the bidding. She tried to see her competition, but she was placed badly and could only see hands. She was curious enough, though, that she went to fifteen dollars, at which point she won the box and glanced around for disappointed faces. Nobody appeared disappointed or upset; most looked bored. If it was what Lesley said it was, she had overpaid. She added it to her notebook.
    The sun was sinking, the shadows lengthening, and it was getting colder. A stiff, earth-scented