Bran New Death (A Merry Muffin Mystery) (25 page)

“I’m coming, Mom. Yes, I’m getting off the phone now. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Merry,” she said, and hung up.

I hope she had heeded my warning. I headed to bed, making sure Becket was comfortable first. He seemed to be okay, though he was still standoffish with me. He watched me, and it was unnerving, especially as I undressed and did my nightly ritual of shower, face cream, and hair. It seemed as if he was not used to being in the presence of a woman.

Sleep came fairly quickly, and I was happy about that. I thought about Shilo as I nodded off. I hoped she had found love. Would I ever? “Miguel,” I whispered, “will I ever find anyone like you?”

I
HAD A
strange dream. I saw Miguel, but he was just leaving for work. I clung to him at the door, like I often did, but he told me he had to go, and I was upset. Then something woke me up—something sharp and painful—before I had a chance to ask him why he had to leave in such a hurry.

The “something sharp and painful” was a full set of cat claws. Becket’s method of waking me up was by smacking my face. He looked better, a lot better. Even his coat had regained some gloss. Being a naturally bright person, I figured that he was hungry. Yawning, I wandered downstairs, with him following me, and opened a can of tuna. I plopped it into the saucer of one of the cups that came in the box of mugs I had bought from Janice Grover. I then remembered I had a case of cat food, but it was too late. He ignored the tuna anyway, prowling back and forth near the door. Lightbulb moment—my brain is slow to work before my first coffee of the morning—he had to go to the bathroom, and didn’t like the litter box I had bought. After almost a year of living in the wild, he had developed certain habits, I supposed.

I looked down at him as he paced back and forth, scratching at the door in the butler’s pantry. “You won’t go far, right? You’ll just go out, do your business, and come right back?”

He looked up at me and meowed loudly. Sounded like a “Sure, just let me ooooout!” to me. “Okay, all right. I’m losing my mind, talking to a cat. I’m trusting you here, so go out, do your business, and come back in. You’re still on the mend, fella.” I opened the door, expecting Becket to saunter out, but he suddenly became an orange streak and headed directly for the woods. I hopped outside, my slippers hitting the cold stone, but he was already gone.

“Darn cat!” I said, only it wasn’t “darn.” I had a million things to do, but how was I going to do any of it when I was worried about the cat? The vet had cautioned me that he might seem fine, but was still recuperating; she wanted to see him again in two days. That would be hard to do if he was roaming the woods. I futzed around for a few minutes, but there was nothing to do but go looking for him. I hopped from foot to foot in the cold morning air, considering dashing after him then and there, slippers and all, but then the castle phone rang. I ran back into the kitchen.

“Hello?” I gasped.

“Merry, darling, are you okay? Did I catch you at a bad time?”

It was Pish, of all people! This early? I looked at the clock. “Why are you calling me at six a.m.? I didn’t think you even knew the early hours existed.”

“Sweetie, I was a financial planner and investment counselor for
how
many years? I used to get up at the crack of dawn to read the financial news before hauling myself downtown. I don’t look at dawn’s crack anymore, but I still
do
know it exists. Enough of that; I have
news
!”

“What kind of news?”

“The kind of news I can
only
deliver in person.”

I stood there, phone in hand, perplexed. I held the receiver away from me and glared at it for a moment. Was he kidding? “In person? I can’t come back to the city right now.”

“That’s why I thought I’d come to
you
!”

“You would come all the way here, to Autumn Vale, the backwater of upstate New York? To tell me what?” My stomach twisted. “Pish, is it dreadful news?”

“No, darling, it’s
not
dreadful,” he reassured me. “Not for you, anyway. But it
is
fascinating!”

“Hint! Please, Pish, a hint! I have to go search for a cat—long story—but I’ll die without a hint.”

“It has to do with Autumn Vale Community Bank. And that’s
all
I’m saying! I’m heading out this minute to catch a flight, but I
need
you to meet me at the airport in Rochester. You’re only an hour away from Rochester, right?”

“If that. More like forty-five minutes, depending on the driver.”

“Well, my flight leaves in an hour, and it’s
only
an hour long, so best get moving.”

“Darling, I can’t . . . but maybe . . . okay, all right.” I sat down in a chair and thought quickly. “Look, some way or another I will make sure that someone meets you at the airport.” I took down the flight details, then hung up, since his cab was waiting at the door and his ancient mother was yammering at him in the background.

I raced upstairs, woke Shilo up—she had gotten in very late the previous night—and told her about Becket and Pish and the whole shemozzle. She drowsily agreed that she could go fetch Pish at the airport in Rochester.

I stood over her watching her drift back to sleep. “Maybe I ought to go,” I fussed, glancing at my watch. “I’ll just run out, see if I can get the cat, then . . . if Becket won’t come to me, to heck with him,” I said. “I have too much to do to be ruled by that feline conniver.”

Shilo chuckled sleepily. “Don’t you worry about it. I’ll go and fetch darling Pish. If I can’t figure out how to get to the Rochester airport, I’ll rope McGill in to help.”

I sat down on the side of her bed. “What’s going on between you and McGill, Shi? I’ve never seen you spend this much time with a guy.” I knew his secret, but supposed that he hadn’t actually proposed to her yet.

She sat up and hugged her knees, yawning and rubbing her eyes. Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders in waves. “Do you remember way back, when Julia Roberts married Lyle Lovett and everyone thought it was so weird?”

I nodded.

“I always thought her biggest mistake was divorcing him,” Shilo said dreamily, and yawned again. “That guy had character, you know? I mean, they got married real quick, and that was because the connection was immediate, intense . . . but she let it get away from her. Dumb girl. You find that kind of guy, you hold onto him.”

I didn’t say another word. She was an adult, and it wasn’t up to me to caution her against moving too fast. Shilo had been beaten up by the world when she was young, I figured, and deserved to find happiness however she could. She didn’t have contact with her family, as I had told McGill—
that
I knew—so her friends were the only family she had. I remembered how serious McGill seemed about my darling friend. I kissed her forehead, and said, “I’m going to get dressed, see you on your way, then go out to find that little monster.”

A half hour later, after running Shilo through what she had to do, calling McGill, and telling him she’d pick him up in my rental car—I just could not subject Pish to both Shilo’s driving
and
her car; it would be inhumane—and making sure she knew what flight he was arriving on, I was out the door to look for the cat. Okay, so I had stalled, not really
wanting
to go search for the wee beastie in the woods alone, hoping he’d come back on his own, but knowing I didn’t have a choice since he hadn’t.

He was probably all the way to Canada by now, I figured, but armed with sliced chicken breast from my dinner the night before in a plastic baggie, I waded through the weeds across the field toward the forest. I paused at the edge, peering into the shadowy depths, as a crow cawed raucously, and a wind came up, tossing the tops of the trees. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty,” I called, hopeful that I could tempt him out with just the magical sound of my voice.

No kitty.

“Becket, come on, boy! I have chicken!” That would have worked with a dog, but not Becket. I had been seeing his orangey hide on and off for weeks, but now that I wanted him, he had melted into the woods like an Iroquois hunter.

A breeze rustled the long grass behind me; I shivered as I mumbled a stream of invective against Gordy and Zeke, my nonexistent grounds crew. Then I took a deep breath, thinking of how pathetic Becket had looked when I found him near death, and started down the path into the woods.

“Becket! Here kitty, kitty, kitty!” I said, rattling the plastic bag. “I have chicken!”

I peered into the green, shadowy depths every few steps, looking for a streak of orange. Where had that cat gone? And why? I didn’t get it; he had a home, a litter box, food and water and a comfortable bed, with a shirt of my uncle’s draped over it, so the smell would be familiar. He had the run of the castle, his home, even if my uncle was gone. Why had he taken off first chance he got?

As I walked, I couldn’t help but let my mind drift to the troubling mystery of Tom Turner’s murder. I hoped that the mystery was like a sweater I once had, one that had a loose thread. I picked at that thread so much, it eventually unraveled and the whole sweater fell apart. Maybe if I picked at the threads of this mystery it would all fall apart and I’d see the pattern, as I had that knitted sweater.

The threads that I kept coming back to were:

1. There was no evidence that Rusty Turner was dead.
   

2. And the body in the woods had been there a little while, at least.
   

3. Tom Turner was following some female for Andrew Silvio.
   

4. Isadore Openshaw hated Dinah Hooper, who had taken away her job at Turner Construction.
   

5. But now, Isadore virtually ran the Autumn Vale Community Bank on her own; Simon Grover seemed to be a figurehead roaring for his coffee and reading the funny papers.
   

When I thought of the bank, I wondered what Pish had to tell me. It was seriously distracting that he was coming to the castle. What would he think? What would he say? I knew that he must have something very interesting to tell me or he would not come in person, but I suspected that half the reason for the trip was his curiosity about Wynter Castle and the town of Autumn Vale.

Then my mind Ping-Ponged back to the murder. It all kept coming back to Isadore Openshaw. Was she the woman Tom Turner had been hired to follow?

Every now and then, as I walked and thought, I remembered that I was supposed to be looking for Becket, and I’d call him. There was no cat to be seen. There was rustling in the bushes, and an occasional noise, there was birdsong, and the wind tossing the treetops. I could hear a loud motor somewhere, like a dirt bike. A screeching blue jay followed me, and a group of crows—that was called a “murder,” right? A murder of crows?—chattered and cawed. No Becket.

I stopped. Did I even know where I was? It should just be a simple matter of following the path back to the castle, right? I turned around, and realized there were a couple of paths I could have come from. I’m not terrible with maps, but we’ve already established that my internal GPS is not flawless. It had seemed so easy while Lizzie was leading the way. But the forest was pretty big. Even the lousy plat I had seen in the Turner Construction office had placed the size at about three hundred acres. That’s huge. But I wasn’t going to panic.

I heard a noise in the bushes. “Becket? Here, kitty, kitty, kitty! Come on, you darn cat. I have chicken!” I waited. Nada. “Fine! Be like that.”

I sat down on a stump and opened the baggie, took a piece of chicken breast out and ate it. Weird breakfast. I hadn’t had my quota of coffee, just one cup gulped as I raced around getting Shilo out the door, and I was seriously grumpy. Somewhere, that dang engine sound, like a buzzing mosquito, echoed again through the woods, reminding me of my determination to post No Trespassing signs at the perimeter, by the highway past Wynter Castle. Just one more of a gazillion tasks to do.

Something else came back to me, while I sat on that stump in the forest pondering all of the events of the last couple of weeks.

• A dirt bike parked on a side street.
  

• Someone on a dirt bike coming out of the woods onto the highway.
  

• The sound of a dirt bike in the woods when Lizzie and I were looking for the encampment.
  

Why hadn’t I mentioned any of that to Virgil Grace? I hadn’t thought it important at the time, but it sure did seem like a lot of run-ins with what could be the same dirt bike. It was that cumulative effect of several sightings, not the dirt bike itself, that made me wonder. I couldn’t hear it anymore. Maybe the rider had gotten bored and left. I hoped so. I didn’t want to be run down on the trail.

But none of this was helping me find Becket. I got up and looked around. Wait . . . was that a patch of orange? I hared off after it, and damned if it wasn’t Becket, just ahead of me! He paused, looked back, and then headed off again, loping with a staggering gait.