Bran New Death (A Merry Muffin Mystery) (14 page)

His face turned bright red, but he only sputtered and shook his head. I sat down in the uncomfortable, rickety chair across from him and crossed my legs. The chair wobbled precariously, and I quickly uncrossed my legs and sat straight. I did not want to end up on the floor, legs in the air;
so
undignified. “Look, I’m not here to talk about Tom Turner or his death,” I said. Mendacity suited me at that moment. “It’s none of my business. But I
am
here to find out some information about my property. I understand that Turner Wynter Construction had some kind of plan to build a subdivision, or neighborhood . . . or something, on the castle property. I’ve begun to look through my uncle’s papers, but they’re a mess, and it’s going to take me a while. Can you tell me anything about it?”

He stared at his computer screen for a long minute, then pasted a weak smile on his pale face. “I can try to help,” he said. “I’m just real torn up about Tom. We were kids together, you know?”

My bull-crap radar was beeping loudly, and I never ignore that. “I had heard you were best friends, but that things had changed between you lately.”

He sighed. “Yeah, we were friends, and rivals. We dated the same girls, played the same games, sometimes on the same side, sometimes against each other. It was never serious, you know, when we fought over women.”

“Like the last time?”

“The last time?”

“The last time, when you had a bar fight, reportedly over a girl named Emerald?” I watched his expression.

His face was lined beyond his years, and he had pouches under his weak eyes. He rubbed them and pinched over his nose. “Uh, that was just . . . a misunderstanding.”

“On whose part?”

“Mine. I . . . uh . . . I thought the girl was, uh . . . trying to tell him to get lost and he wasn’t listening. Look, what’s that got to do with anything?” He squinted across the desk at me and leaned over on his elbows. “Didn’t you say you wanted to talk about your uncle’s zoning problems?”

“Problems? I didn’t actually know there were problems.”

He picked up a pencil and began tapping it on the desktop. “Well, yeah, you know, Melvyn and Rusty . . . not the two sharpest tools in the shed. And always at cross purposes. One would file a paper and the other wouldn’t know a thing about it.” He shrugged. “They would have worked things out eventually, I guess.”

Helped by him? In a town as small as Autumn Vale, you wouldn’t think two partners could be working so determinedly at cross purposes. Something didn’t seem right. “But there were lawsuits in the works, then Rusty disappeared and Melvyn died.”

He nodded. “Yup.”

“Where does that leave me?” I asked, curious about what he’d say.

He colored pinkish. “What do you mean?”

“How can I clean up my zoning problems?”

“You mean, you intend to go ahead?”

I narrowed my eyes and watched him for a moment. He seemed panicked. What about? “I haven’t decided yet. But one thing I know for sure: the zoning still being up in the air is not good news for a potential buyer. I’d like to get everything sorted out and resolve the lawsuits that were in play at the time of my uncle’s death. Can I see the paperwork?”

“What paperwork?”

I was losing patience quickly. “The paperwork having to do with the zoning of my uncle’s—and now
my
—acreage.” I thought
way
back to my few months working in a zoning and planning permissions office in New York. “I’d like to see any plans that were filed, as well as the paperwork that went with it, any zoning change requests, building permits, lot subdivisions,
anything
.”

“I’ll . . . uh, well, geez, I’ll need a while to pull everything together,” he said, rising and walking over toward the door. “I’ll give you a call when I have it all ready, okay? I got work to do, now, so you run along and I’ll give you a call.”

I didn’t get up to leave, I just turned in my seat to watch him, standing there, the door open to the outside, where autumn sunshine was flooding the street. A breeze fluttered in the open doorway, clarifying the musty air. “You’re playing a computer game, Mr. Bradley. Surely you can pull away from that to get me some paperwork.”

“Uh, I don’t even know if I can show it to you, you know,” he said, and cleared his throat. He rocked onto the balls of his feet and back. “It’s, uh . . . well, I don’t know. You know, it was Rusty’s project, too, and with Tom gone, maybe Dinah is in charge.”

“Or maybe Binny is,” I said.

He was getting redder by the minute. “Binny doesn’t know a damned thing about her father’s business.”

“Is that why Tom is dead and Binny’s alive?” I asked. It just popped out. It was a dumb thing to say.

“I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about,” he said.

His mystification
seemed
genuine. I got up and strolled toward the door, stepping through and turning back. “When can I come to look over the paperwork?”

His expression hardened. “When you’ve got a court order.” He slammed the door in my face and I heard the lock
snick
.

Jerk.

I rounded up Shilo, who had been shopping in a couple of places, and we got groceries and headed back to the castle. About six, Binny Turner rolled up to the parking area in a white van that read Binny’s Bakery on the side. She strode up to the castle with her gaze resolutely turned away from the hole that was still cordoned off with police crime scene tape. I met her at the door and showed her around the place, then we sat in the kitchen and ate dinner. I’d made chicken spaghetti, which went nicely with the focaccia she had brought and the bottle of merlot I found tucked away in my uncle’s wine cellar. I was definitely going to have to explore the cellar a little more thoroughly, because the merlot was not half bad.

Over dinner, I told her and Shilo what had happened with Junior Bradley in the zoning office.

“What is his problem?” Shilo said, indignant on my behalf.

“He and Tom really were lifelong friends,” Binny said, doubt creeping into her voice. “He’s probably just reacting, you know, to Tom dying.”

Her voice broke on the last word, and I impulsively put out my hand, covering hers on the table. I shared a look with Shilo, who got up, collecting our plates.

“You’ve gone through so much,” I said softly, leaning toward her. “I want you to know, I understand. I
do
. I’ve lost a lot of people in my life, and grief changes you, at least for a while. And sometimes for always.” My voice caught on the last word, as I thought of Miguel.

“I just . . . I don’t want to wallow, you know? I called my mom last night. She’s going to come to Autumn Vale next week and spend a couple of weeks here to . . . to help plan the funeral. I mean . . . I don’t know when I can hold it because the police haven’t released the b-body yet. But I’m all Tom had left, with Dad who knows where, so I’m going to have to take care of it.”

She broke down and cried then, her head cradled in her arms on the table, and I was glad. She had been holding it all in, determined to be strong, but strength doesn’t come from suppressing emotion. I knew, because I had gone that route and all it led to was an emotional collapse. I went around to her side of the table and sat beside her, at first rubbing her back, but then talking about Tom, and her complicated relationship with her brother.

She seemed grateful to speak with someone who had no personal feelings in the matter. They had been apart for a significant portion of her childhood, so when she came back to Autumn Vale she had had to forge a new relationship with her brother. That had been complicated by her father’s disappearance just months after she opened the bakery. She and Tom had gotten along all right, but were not close, and she still felt like an outsider in Autumn Vale, even though she had been born here.

“I didn’t know what to think, at first, when Dad disappeared. I mean, Tom seemed certain Dad was murdered, and by Melvyn!” She sighed. “I just didn’t know what to believe. He knows everyone so much better than I do.”

I remembered what she said in the bakery when she asked if she could trust me. What had she been about to tell me when I made that ill-timed joke? A direct question would probably just scare her off. “But you see how ridiculous that is, right, to think that Melvyn could have killed and then buried your father?” I asked, as Shilo ran water and squirted detergent in the sink. When Binny nodded, I said, “
I
think Tom never actually believed that your dad was buried on the Wynter property, it was just an excuse to justify to you why he was digging.” I paused to let that sink in. “But if that’s so, then what was he looking for here? And who else knew he’d be here digging?”

She looked thoughtful, but shook her head. “I just don’t know. I wish I did.”

I wished she did, too. Shilo sat back down opposite me and we exchanged glances. “Did your brother have any enemies?” I asked. “Was he involved with anyone?”

“He didn’t have a girlfriend. I know people said stuff about some dancer, but I don’t think that was serious, just guy stuff, you know? Between him and Junior? He had a serious girlfriend a long time ago, but then she left town and that was it. He said he wasn’t the marrying kind.”

“What about work?”

“Work . . . you mean the company? Turner Construction? Him and Dinah have been trying to keep it afloat since Dad disappeared.”

“Is that why she asked for the key to the office?”

She had a blank look for a moment, then said, “Oh, the other day, in the bakery before . . .” Tears welled in her eyes. “Tom said she’d lost her key, but she hasn’t been working there for a while, as far as I know. There wasn’t much to do. Tom just wasn’t able to keep Turner Construction going like Dad did.” She sniffed, and Shilo handed her a paper napkin. “She probably just wanted in to collect some of her personal stuff.”

Or maybe Tom wanted the key himself for some reason. It was all a jumble in my head. But my mind kept returning to the zoning problems and Junior’s evasion. Was there something there? Did it all come back to that, something about the Wynter property?

“Binny, this is going to seem like an odd request,” I said. “But could you get me into the Turner Construction offices to look around sometime?”

“Well, sure.” She blew her nose. “How about tonight?”

A
N HOUR LATER,
Shilo and I, in her rattletrap vehicle, pulled into the yard by the makeshift offices of Turner Construction behind Binny’s van. It was starting to get dark, and the yard was a place of long shadows and murky corners. Before Shi turned off her headlights, I saw the Turner Construction sign looking the worse for wear, a random pattern of holes scattered over it as if it had suffered target practice.

Binny was already at the door of the trailer riffling through a ring of keys and trying them. “I don’t know what key works,” she lamented. “These are Tom’s keys; the cops gave them to me.”

“But you have a key to the office yourself, right?” I asked, remembering her refusal to give Tom the office key for Dinah.

“I did have one, but I’ve . . . uh . . . misplaced it,” she said.

Misplaced it?

“Let me try,” Shilo said. She took the ring and studied the keys by the yellow bug light over the trailer office door, then she bent over and stared into the lock. She took one key in hand, inserted it, and voilà, the door opened.

Binny gaped, mouth open. I shrugged and said, “Don’t ask, because I don’t know how she does it.”

“I’m a gypsy,” Shilo said, her grin wide. “We’re good with locks.”

We entered, and Binny flicked on a light switch; fluorescents shuddered and blinked into wavering brightness. The place was a mess; papers everywhere, trash bins overturned, surfaces heaped with junk. “Somebody has trashed the place,” I said, aghast.

Binny looked around. “No, this is pretty much how it always looks.”

Her voice sounded a little odd, and I shot a quick look over at her, but her face was blank. “Dinah Hooper worked here, right?”

Binny nodded. “She was the office manager; took care of day-to-day stuff.”

“And she was okay with this mess?”

“She had her hands full lately just trying to keep the company going. Dinah and Tom . . . since Dad has been gone, they didn’t work together too well, you know?”

There was an old sofa bed in one corner, and it looked like someone used it to sleep on. I hoped some bum wasn’t using the place to hide out, but there was no evidence of that. I suspected Tom had been using it as a crash pad. As far as that went, I didn’t even know where he lived, or if he used the office as his full-time apartment. “Had your brother been sleeping here, do you think?”

Binny seemed reluctant to answer, but she nodded. “I think he may have been. He was living at the house with Dad, but then Dinah kind of semi-moved in, and he started to bunk out here, sometimes.”

“I thought Dinah and your dad didn’t live together?”

“They didn’t officially live together, but she stayed there sometimes.”

“Do you live in your father’s house?”

“Nope. I live over the bakery. It’s more convenient. Dad’s house is in town, but it’s a ways away, at the other end. We own the building my bakery is in, so I took one of the apartments upstairs. Gordy and Zeke share the other one, a two-bedroom over the back.”

“So . . . no one is living in your dad’s house right now.”

She shook her head. Tears began welling in her eyes, and I knew I had to back off. Shilo, meanwhile, while Binny and I were talking and looking around, had sat down at one of the desks and turned on the computer. She was a card game addict, so she was probably taking the opportunity to play solitaire.

“What were they doing businesswise before Tom died?” I asked, scanning the junk, trying to make sense of the place.

“I
think
they were doing work for the Brotherhood of the Falcon. They needed the roof fixed on the hall and some other repairs.”

“Really?” I remembered Gordy’s wild theories about the Brotherhood; should I be dismissing out of hand what I didn’t know a thing about? Then I recalled a random comment made by someone or other. “Your dad was a member, right?”

She nodded, her eyes filling with tears. Again. She turned away and stood, clenching and unclenching her fists.

I hastily moved on. “They weren’t doing anything else? Did Tom work with anyone?”

“Not lately,” she said, turning back to me, having mastered her emotions. “Not as far as I know. I think they used to hire guys as they needed them. Neither he or Dad talk . . . talked . . . about the business with me.”

I looked around. The faux wood–paneled trailer itself was long and narrow, with two desks right near the door, and an area at the back that held a washroom, a kitchenette, and the ratty sofa bed. In between there was a drafting desk by the only window, and along one wall a large, wooden cabinet with shallow drawers that I knew would hold blueprints, maps, and plans. I worked in a planning office when I was a teenager, just as a gopher. For a while I even wanted to be an interior decorator, and thought getting the job at the planning office was a first step. Fetching coffee didn’t teach me a whole lot, but snooping did.

“I want to see the plans for the development of Wynter Acres. Do you know if Turner Wynter ran their business out of these same offices?”

“I suppose so,” Binny said, looking around dejectedly. “I mean, this is the only office that I know about. I wish I could help more.”

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “You’ve helped a lot just by letting me in here.” More than Junior Bradley had with his obstructionism, I thought.

“Well, if there was—or is, rather—a Turner Wynter Construction Company, then you and I might end up being co-owners of at least part of this mess. I’m going to need help to figure it out.”

That wasn’t a welcome prospect, because it tied me more firmly to a place I needed to leave, sooner rather than later. But if there really were lawsuits filed, maybe that could be resolved by the two of us more equitably than if Tom had still been involved. “Let me just riffle though the plans, see if I can come up with anything.” I pulled a stool over to the cabinet and read the labels, looking for anything that referenced Wynter property. None of the labels made any sense to me, so I just started at the top.

I soon figured out that most of the big jobs had been done years ago, and that lately—whether it was because of the economy or something else—the jobs had been getting smaller and smaller. The most recent big project appeared to be Binny’s bakeshop remodel. Turner Construction had redesigned and rebuilt the place to include room for the ovens and front shop area. The upstairs apartment had been renovated. Other than that, there were some sloppy-looking drawings for an addition proposed to the Brotherhood of the Falcon clubhouse, and a proposal for another addition to Gogi Grace’s Golden Acres.

I was vaguely aware that Binny was looking over Shilo’s shoulder, and I wondered what they were up to. I was about to ask when I suddenly came across charts and drawings that appeared to reference Wynter Acres. I pulled them out of the drawer and rolled my chair over to the drafting table, turning on the powerful light over the desk.

My first impression was that whoever had done the plan was a rank amateur.

First, the plat. A plat is a scale map showing the proposed subdivision of the land, and often includes vegetation and other considerations. This plat was crude; barely legible; and with few markers to show landmarks, elevations or even the lot sizes. It didn’t look like they had had a surveyor do the necessary work to mark out the proposed subdivision of the land. If this was the plat registered with Junior Bradley’s zoning office, it should have been rejected immediately. Would my uncle have understood enough to know that?

I sat and stared at it for a long time, trying to figure out what was going on. There was no way they could have intended to proceed in subdividing the Wynter land using this plat as a planning device. It was impossible. There wasn’t even a compass indication on it, or access roads marked. Why would Rusty’s office draw this shoddy plan up in the first place? And it was while Rusty was still in the mix; I could tell by the date, which indicated the plan was from the previous spring.
If
that date was legit. Careless work like this could have numerous mistakes or deliberate errors.

There were so many considerations if they planned on subdividing Wynter land into a community; what about water? Roads? Drainage? Electricity?

And what about buyers?

The town of Autumn Vale was barely viable as it was, with empty storefronts along Abenaki, and more houses for sale than anyone could ever want. Who did my uncle and Rusty Turner think was going to buy these condos at Wynter Acres? Silvio had claimed the idea was to attract aging boomers who wanted to live in the country but have the convenience of condo living, but the plans I saw were for sizable, single-family dwellings, not condos.

It was ridiculous. Maybe my uncle had been a pie-in-the-sky dreamer, but from all evidence Rusty Turner had been a pragmatic man with many years of experience in the building and development business. He had sent his daughter to culinary school. He had taken whatever small jobs were available in their town. Why have this shoddy plat drawn up? To fool Melvyn?

But . . .
why
?

I remembered something Andrew Silvio had said; Melvyn accused Rusty of cheating him. Based on the plat I had examined, that could well be, if Mel was paying to have the advance work done, and this pathetic piece of crud was what Turner had come up with.

I rolled back to the drawers and leafed through anything else I could find, and concluded that there was no way anyone had had serious plans to develop Wynter Acres. I had gone through a few of my uncle’s papers so far, and hadn’t come across anything to indicate some long-term strategy . . . unless . . . I cocked my head as I remembered the envelope I had found in my uncle’s desk to Turner Wynter Global Enterprises. Was that related to the real estate development? It had to be; it was the only thing the two men were involved in together, as far as I knew.

But had Virgil Grace taken stuff out of the castle when they searched it? He said he did, but I didn’t have the receipt yet, so I didn’t know what. That was going to be my first order of business the next day. Did items taken away by the police have anything to do with Wynter Acres?

My head hurt. I was confused, even worse than I had been before this little field trip. I stared at a map of Autumn Vale and followed the valley until I got to a road that rose up to a town on a ridge . . . ah, Ridley Ridge. There was a bar in that town where Tom and Junior Bradley had fought.

Maybe I would need to talk to Emerald and find out a little more about Tom Turner and Junior Bradley and the truth behind the fight. So far he was my star suspect for Tom Turner’s murder. Why? I didn’t have a clue at this point, except that I was following the violence.

I had one more thing to do. I looked up, but Shilo and Binny were still engrossed in something on the computer, so I went back to the drawers. I began searching through, and found that all of the old stuff was properly drawn up. When Golden Acres was redesigned, for example, it had been perfectly planned and executed, judging by the professional-looking drawings I came across, which included site elevations, blueprints, and drainage locations. Zoning permissions were all in place, as were building permits, with official seals and the zoning office stamp of approval, though the zoning commissioner at the time must have been Junior’s predecessor, since the signature was different.

That was the last indication I needed that Wynter Acres, no matter what Uncle Melvyn thought, was never a serious plan, at least as far as Rusty Turner was concerned. Was it possible that my uncle had found this out and turned nasty? I didn’t believe for a second that he had killed and buried Rusty on the property, but had he killed him and dumped him somewhere else?

“You done yet, Mer?” Shilo said, her eyes shining with excitement.

“Uh, yeah . . . what’s up with you two? What have you been doing?” Though Shilo looked excited, Binny appeared troubled.

“I think . . . I think my father and my brother were involved in something shady,” Binny said.

“I was just coming to the same conclusion,” I said. “Why do you think so?”

“The figures don’t add up,” Shilo said.

Oh, did I forget to mention that Shilo, among her other talents, can look at a list of figures and add them up in her head at warp speed? She can also see anomalies, little things that don’t make sense in the numbers. She’s an odd duck, to be sure.

“There is a heck of a lot of income coming in,” she continued, “but almost no work done to account for it. And there are, like, shadowy references to other accounts, but nothing to back it up. There might be something I’m missing, but I doubt it.”