Bran New Death (A Merry Muffin Mystery) (15 page)

“What could that mean?” I wondered out loud.

Binny spoke up. “The logical explanation, I guess—the
legitimate
explanation—is that if Dad and your uncle were going into business together to develop your uncle’s land, maybe they had started up accounts to use for equipment purchases and rentals.”

That actually made a lot of sense, and if it was true, then the accounts could have to do with that, and there would be no mystery. “Who did the bookkeeping for your dad’s company?”

“Lately? Dinah Hooper.”

“Then I think we’ll have to ask some questions of Ms. Hooper tomorrow,” I said. “I have some of my own for Mr. Silvio and Sheriff Grace, too.”

*

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS FOR ME.
The next day was going to be full, and the anxiety of unanswered questions, financial worries, and a plethora of other problems had me awake at three a.m. I brewed tea made in my new Brown Betty teapot and filled a mug. As I stood in the pantry doorway, a cool breeze wafted in, the smell of night-scented phlox drifting toward me from the weedy yard, as well as the comforting chirp of crickets. Disregarding the
necessity
of selling this property—I honestly did not see anything changing that—if I could, would I stay here at Wynter Castle? If it were financially feasible, would it be my choice?

Though I had been a city girl most of my life, settling in at the castle had come surprisingly easy. I loved the place; it suited me somehow. Oh, it was
way
too big, and in winter it was going to be hell to heat, and if Shilo hadn’t happened to stalk me all the way to upstate New York I would be hideously lonely. But right now, leaning in the doorway of the back door and drinking tea, I was weirdly content for someone who had found a dead body just a couple of nights before.

I had my notebook in the kitchen and I returned to the table and began doodling, which soon enough became a list of ideas that would let me keep the castle. It could become a rest home, a retirement home, an inn, or an event venue, if I chose to run it as one of those things. I could sell off some of the land—if anyone would buy it—or I could . . . I ran out of ideas, and my wayward mind began roaming over random thoughts.

Those random thoughts began to settle around the enigma that was Sheriff Virgil Grace; what did I make of him? He was good-looking in a surly way. Kind of scruffy, but a manly man, to be sure. I do like a manly man. When you’re a big girl, being held by a big guy makes you feel fragile and feminine. Dumb, right? But I can’t help it! I’m a modern woman with retro hormones.

I recalled a little tidbit that McGill had let slip; Sheriff Grace had other siblings, but when his mom was sick, he was the one who looked after her. Tears welled and one dripped onto the notebook page, smearing my ink; I thumbed the droplet away, which smudged the page even worse. That was my Miguel, all over. When his mom came down with a virulent form of influenza in the first year of our marriage, he flew back to Spain to be with her for six weeks. It had been our only source of contention, but looking back, I was being petty and selfish. If I could only turn back the clock, I would have behaved much differently. If only. I wished with all my heart I could tell him now, that what I had complained of then made him a very good man, and I wouldn’t have wanted him to do anything different. Miguel’s selflessness and nurturing ability was some of what made me love him so much.

Was Virgil Grace another very good man? I had not been in love, or had a crush, nor had I even kissed another man in seven years. Erotically charged dreams of the past had been my only outlet. Would I ever love again? Would the part of me that died the night Miguel crashed his car ever come back to life?

I sniffed back tears and abandoned that morose nighttime melancholy. I couldn’t undo the past, and I couldn’t live in it. Picking up and petting Magic—he had somehow, as his name suggested, escaped Shilo’s closed room—I reflected on the changes Wynter Castle had worked in me. I felt, like the night-scented phlox that bloomed in wild profusion among the weeds, that I was opening up, blooming to new possibilities in my life. Leatrice’s betrayal of me and the friendship I had thought we had was a closed book. Her treachery had poisoned the well of the New York fashion world in a way that hurt to my core, but it had shown me who my real friends were.

When I thought of real friends, Pish Lincoln’s name popped into my head. Pish was a brilliant, witty, intensely alive older gentleman who had been a money manager for many a lucky model of my acquaintance. If I had trusted him with my investments I would not now be broke, but I had stubbornly thought that the insurance money from Miguel’s death was like funny money to be played with. I tossed it willy-nilly like confetti, drifting toward stocks in companies that sounded good to me, or whose products I liked. Pish had tried to steer me, but I hadn’t, to my current chagrin, listened.

When I figured out more of what Turner Construction was involved in, maybe he was someone who could answer a few money questions for me. I trusted him implicitly, and missed his daily dose of calm, good sense. In fact, a need for information or not, I was going to call him. When I left New York, I hadn’t been sure I could handle all the fond and teary farewells my friends would have foisted on me, and I had slipped out of the city like a thief in the night. He was going to be angry, but he never stayed angry for long. Not with me, anyway.

I set Magic down on the table and wrote a list of things to do on the morrow. Lists are my thing. I love lists, so making one felt like I was returning to some semblance of my former self, the self before Leatrice stabbed me in the back and twisted the knife.

The list:

1. Call Pish Lincoln and throw myself on his mercy.

2. Go to the police station and demand to know what they took from the castle.

3. Question Dinah Hooper about the financial dealings of Turner and Turner Wynter Construction.

4. Find someone to mow the freaking field that’s growing up around the castle.

Seriously, Wynter Castle was beginning to look like an abbey abandoned during the Reformation, only not as neat and tidy.

Oh yeah . . . I jotted one more thing down on my list.

5. Go for a long walk in the woods with Lizzie, and get her to show me the abandoned encampment.

I wanted that torn down, removed, cleansed. Picking up Magic again, I went back upstairs and actually slept for three hours, waking up feeling more like myself than I had in years.

T
HE LIST WOULD
need to be tweaked, I discovered. I got a call first thing in the morning from Sheriff Grace asking me to come in and sign a statement. If I was going to be out and about, then I may as well do the things on my list that required a trip to town.

Shilo and I, following directions—turn left off Abenaki at the Autumn Vale Community Bank—found the tiny police station. Located at the end of obscure and brief Valley View Avenue, the sheriff’s department was a small, modern building with a barracks-like look, narrow, slit windows, and overall gray, drab appearance. I left Shilo in the car, went in past the big, glass, double doors, and was guided to Sheriff Grace’s office by a young female deputy. I sat down in an uncomfortable chair across the desk from his leather swivel chair. He joined me moments later, but not before I examined his walls, the “artwork,” such as it was, included local citations for his coaching of the town’s Little League baseball team and an honorary membership in the Brotherhood of the Falcon. They had made him an “Eyas,” which I guess was a fledgling falcon. Other than that there was a pleasant if nondescript watercolor of an autumn forest.

As he took a seat across the desk, I remembered my late-night thoughts and blushed. I don’t blush. Ever! But he was very good looking: dark, wavy hair, thick enough to catch your fingers in, and just that bit of shadow along the jaw, very much like Miguel always had five minutes after shaving.
I have been alone a long time,
I thought. Nothing wrong with a little late-night fantasizing if it was left to late at night. I took a deep breath as he slid some paperwork across the desk to me, regarding me with that steady, unsmiling look he had perfected.

“This is the list of what we took from the castle,” he said. “It’s mostly paperwork, anything with Tom Turner’s name on it.”

“Was there a lot with his name on it? Why would there be?” I squinted and examined the paper. Pretty soon I was going to have to admit that I needed close-up glasses—cheaters, my mother had called them. Oh, joy. Anyway, it was a simple list, though from it I could not tell what each document pertained to.

The sheriff shrugged. “Old Melvyn and the Turners were involved in some real estate deal that went bad, and there were lawsuits, so there was a fair bit of paperwork and we just wanted to look it over more closely, see if we can find anything that has to do with Tom. It’s a mess of bank loans, defaults, zoning problems, and missed deadlines.”

Bank loans?
Oh, lord
, I thought,
I hope that the estate is not saddled with a mountain of debt, undiscovered until now.
I was going to have to take this seriously and untangle the mess before the property was actually salable. I felt like I had been wearing blinders, and they had just fallen off. Lawyer Silvio, among others, had some ’splainin’ to do.

“Your uncle also wrote nasty notes to the Turners, and vice versa,” the sheriff went on. “I know about a lot of this because I was occasionally involved, called in by both parties at different times. I know very well what those two old men were like.”

“But they’re all dead now,” I said, glossing over the fact that no one truly knew what had happened to Rusty. Despite Binny’s and Dinah’s hopes, I figured the old guy had probably died, and his body just hadn’t been discovered yet. Maybe he went for a walk and fell off a cliff. Who knew? “What does this have to do with Tom’s murder?”

“We don’t know. But there were things mentioned in the letters . . .” He stopped abruptly.

I was intrigued. “What kind of things?”

He regarded me calmly. “Tom was well-enough liked by many, but he had his peccadilloes.”

Peccadilloes; is that what they called them in a small town? I smiled inwardly. “Such as?”

“Girlfriends he had cheated on. Friends he had betrayed in some way or another. Don’t we all have those dark spots in our past?”

I stiffened. It felt like his comments were aimed at me. It would only take a phone call or two to come across Leatrice’s accusations of thievery against me. Maybe he already knew about it. But that had nothing to do with this. “What’s your point, Sheriff?”

He leaned across the desk. “Now, locally, folks are kind of looking at you oddly because you threatened Tom Turner, and then he winds up dead in your yard.”

“That’s ridiculous. I’m not the kind of woman who goes around bashing people over the head!”

“Maybe so, but folks around here don’t know you, right? And you must admit—”

“I don’t have to ‘admit’ anything,” I snapped. “I didn’t kill him, but I sure would like to know who did so I can sleep better at night.”

He thrust his fingers through his hair, and it stood straight up. Combined with his dorky uniform, a dark-blue shirt done right up to his neck and adorned with a clip-on tie, it made him just
too
cute in a way my perfect, suave, dignified Miguel never was. Come to think of it, that was Miguel’s only fault, his lack of a sense of the ridiculous, especially about himself.

“Look, I’m not accusing you, all right? I’m worried. There have been break-ins all over the county lately, and you and your friend are alone out there at that castle. If I thought you’d do it, I’d say find someplace in town to stay.” He paused, eying me and narrowing his eyes. “You wouldn’t, would you?”

“No. Mostly because that doesn’t make a bit of sense to me.” I shifted my purse on my lap. “Sheriff, I don’t mean to be difficult, but you’re not going to find evidence of whomever killed Tom in my uncle’s papers. Surely you have leads? Personal issues?” His stony expression told me that if he did, he was not going to share them with me. There was more I should ask, more I wanted to know, but he wasn’t going to tell me anything. I took the receipt and stood. “If that’s all . . . ?”

“We’d like to take your statement now,” he said, his tone expressionless. He pushed a button, and the female officer came in and sat in the spare chair. “We’ll be taping the interview, and you can sign the transcript once it’s done.”

“I did give a statement that night,” I said, keeping my tone carefully neutral. I really wasn’t trying to be difficult, but he grated on my nerves.

He met my eyes. “That was preliminary in nature. Miss Wynter, please . . . I’d appreciate your cooperation.”

I nodded, and he took me through the evening one more time. It was like reliving it, especially looking down into the hole and seeing Tom at the bottom. I made sure to be clear about the crowbar, which I had found at the lip and tossed aside. By the time I was done, I was shaking, emotions rising within me that I thought I had tamped down and conquered. Death is wicked, and a purposeful death—robbing someone of all the potential life he had left to live—was evil.

I had one last thing to say on the record. “I want whoever did this found and prosecuted. I want them to spend the rest of their life in jail. It’s horrible to think that there is a killer out there, and he or she could be watching me, or have some reason to want to hurt me.” My voice was trembling. I steadied it, as I finished. “It was on my property, and I won’t rest until the killer is out of circulation.”

That was the end of my statement, but not the end of my visit with the sheriff. I had been ready to walk out before, but calmer now, my flare of anger gone, I remembered that I had questions, too, and a promise to fulfill. As the female officer left the room, I stayed in my seat. “Sheriff, I would like to learn more about my uncle’s death, the car accident. Do you have a moment?”

He hesitated. “Not really, but shoot.”

“What happened? All I know is he slid off the road on an icy, November morning.”

“That’s pretty much all we know, too. Old Mel was in his eighties, and his eyesight was not the best. Regardless, he seemed to have taken it in his head to drive the highway at six or so in the morning.”

“It would have been dark at that time.”

Virgil nodded. “We were having a cold snap. The road was practically frozen over.”

“Do you know where he was going?”

“Silvio mentioned that Mel told him he was heading to Rochester for some reason. That’s all I know.”

“So it was just an accident?” I thought of Gogi’s suspicions, and wondered what was behind them. It seemed simple enough to me; an elderly man with poor sight on an icy highway in the dark. It sounded like a recipe for trouble.

“I have no reason to think it was anything else.”

“Where’s the car?”

“Our impound lot. It’s damaged beyond recovery.”

“How did the call come in? What time of day was it?” I asked.

“Early. It was about six a.m. when we got the call from a citizen who was passing by and saw a car off the road. They were concerned, and told us where to find the car.”

“Who was it who called?”

“Not my place to tell you, Miss Wynter. The caller wished to remain anonymous unless called to give evidence at an inquest.”

“And? When is the inquest?”

“We haven’t scheduled it yet. I haven’t gathered all the information I need.”

“Why not?”

No answer from the stone-faced cop. He was being deliberately difficult, and I eyed him with suspicion. Something else clicked in at that moment. I didn’t recall any mention of an insurance settlement in the accident case, so it was not closed, not by any means. “You’re not convinced it was an accident,” I said, suddenly sure of my conclusion. “And you don’t want an inquest until you know the truth. Why? Was there any damage not accounted for by the accident?” I saw by his expression that I had nailed it.

“We’re investigating. I haven’t closed the books on it yet.”

“So there is something about the car-accident theory that doesn’t ring true to you.”

He sighed and closed his eyes. “Miss Wynter,” he said, his tone frosty, “I
said
, I’m still investigating. I have no concrete proof that it was anything more than an accident, but there are a couple of minor scrapes of black paint on the back bumper that trouble me. Mel was not a great driver, however. For all I know they could be from a fender bender in the parking lot of a Wegmans in Buffalo!” He stood and walked to his office door, holding it open for me. “And that is all I have to say.”

But as I passed, he grabbed my elbow.

“Merry . . . Miss Wynter, please be careful,” he said, his gaze intense, his voice a growl that sent shivers down to my toes. “I don’t like the idea of you out there at the castle with a killer on the loose. Please reconsider staying in town.”

I pulled away from him, tugged down my jacket—I was dressed for professionalism in a skirt suit—and headed out to the car, where Shilo, out of the car now, sat on a curb, waiting. We got back in and I let Shilo off at Jack McGill’s office—she and the lanky Lothario were getting along like a house afire, it seemed to me—and found a parking spot outside of Binny’s Bakery.

Okay,
I thought, gripping the steering wheel a little too tightly,
so I had gone to the police station and demanded to know what they took from the castle.
Check that off on the list, and note a big, fat nothing beside what I had learned, other than the fact that Virgil Grace was cute, in uniform or out, and had a sexy voice. Oh, and that my uncle may have been murdered in a hit-and-run accident. Maybe Gogi was right after all, to be concerned.

I stopped at the bakery and told Binny I would be back later to bake—I was going to try some chocolate-walnut and prune Danish muffins—but right then I was going to track down Dinah and find out what, if anything, she could tell me about the financial troubles between my uncle and Rusty Turner. Binny gave me Dinah’s address.

She lived in a little apartment over Crazy Lady Antiques and Collectibles, one of the shops on Abenaki, Binny had told me. I walked down the street toward it, not even sure of what I needed to know, or what to ask Dinah. I guess I was trying to figure out where everyone fit in the scheme of things in Autumn Vale, New York. It was as if three jigsaw puzzles had been tossed into a box together, and none of the pieces I was collecting came from the same one.

As I remembered from my first morning in Autumn Vale, Crazy Lady Antiques and Collectibles was the last shop in a line of conjoined downtown building faces, all brick, some painted, some left natural, and most windows boarded up this far down the block. I had never stopped to look in the window. Wow. I stared in openmouthed awe. There was a jumble of stuff packed into the store window, from petit point dining chairs to a gigantic plant stand in the shape of a dragon. There was new junk, old crap, antiques, and kitsch all sharing space, jammed cheek to jowl as my grandmother used to say.