Bran New Death (A Merry Muffin Mystery) (6 page)

“When I was planning my wedding,” she said, leaning on the oak railing, “back many years ago, I always thought I’d like to be married here. I’d have a harpist up here so the sound would float down, like it was coming from heaven.”

When we descended the stairs to the main floor, she headed for the breakfast parlor, one of the two turret-shaped rooms in the front corners of the castle. She flung open the double doors and walked into the middle near a cloth-draped dining table. “I always pictured this as a tearoom.”

Shilo had rejoined us, and followed her in, while I was last. My brain flooded with images as I slowly walked around the circular table in the center . . . I could see it. Shelves with my best teapots covering one wall . . . the antique sideboard—it was covered in a Holland cloth right now, but Shilo and I had peeked under the cloth, and it was a gorgeous Eastlake beauty—adorned with silver trays of treats . . . small tables dotted around the large room, and lots of people at the tables, enjoying tea and muffins.

Gogi was smiling as I looked up into her eyes, and nodded. “Jack is right about you,” she said. “You’ve got the vision.”

Shilo and I exchanged glances. “I was only here once, when I was about five,” I said.

“I know.”

“You . . . know?”

“Melvyn and my husband used to drink together at the tavern. Mel was upset about something that happened between your mother and him. He wanted to make it up to her, but she would never take his phone calls, and sent back letters with ‘deceased’ written on them.”

Why had my mother shut out my father’s only living relative like that? Life had not been easy. We had to move in with Grandma because Mom just could not make ends meet on her own. She was a typist for many years at a law firm that took on a lot of pro bono civil rights cases, but eventually arthritis crippled her hands and she couldn’t work. So why had she shut out the one family member who may have been able to help?

I had been assuming it was some kind of argument related to my mother’s quixotic sense of right and wrong, but it could have been other things, things I didn’t know about. It could even have had to do with my father, or his inheritance, or . . . who knew? Had Mom gone to Uncle Melvyn for financial aid, and he refused? I asked Gogi that.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said with a sympathetic smile. “I wish I did. I can see you’ve got a lot of questions.”

“Why didn’t Uncle Melvyn come see us in New York, if he was so concerned?”

“I think he did, but Charmaine still wouldn’t see him.”

“Maybe we should go to the kitchen. I have a few muffins for you to taste.” I felt numb, flooded with strange new insights about my father’s side of the family. I had been relatively content for the last thirty-four years with not knowing anything concrete about this part of my past. But by coming to Wynter Castle I had pried the lid off a can of worms, the story of the Wynter side of my DNA.

I needed time alone to process what I was learning. In all the months of having this inheritance, I had never once thought that coming to Autumn Vale would answer some decades-old questions. And pose a whole lot more.

McGill came in from the butler’s pantry just as we entered the kitchen from the other direction. “Hey, Mrs. G, Shilo! I got five more holes filled in, Merry,” he said, eyeing Shilo with a bit of a smile. “I’ve got to go, but I’ll be back tomorrow. I’ve locked the Bobcat; maybe that will keep your late-night gopher out of it.”

Gogi looked from one of us to the other, and I told her what had happened the night before, surprised that her son hadn’t filled her in on the event.

“And you say something attacked your hole digger?”

“Some kind of cat, I’d say.”

“Becket!” Gogi exclaimed.

“Do you think so?” McGill asked.

“What are you two talking about?”

The realtor said, keeping his eye on Gogi, “Melvyn had a cat named Becket, but that animal disappeared the very night after Mel died. I thought he got himself killed.”

“This was no housecat,” I demurred.

“Oh, there is nothing ordinary about Becket,” Gogi said. “He’s a big fellow, a ginger tom.”

“Ginger,” I said. That was another word for orange, like the flash of orange I had seen at the edge of the woods and in the attack on the unknown hole digger. But still . . . “No housecat could survive in the woods for almost a year, and all through the winter,” I said, shaking my head. “We’ll see you tomorrow, McGill.”

“Right-o. Gotta go. See you, Shilo!” He exited.

“Isn’t he cute?” Shilo said, racing to the window to watch him leave, her black ponytail swinging. “He rhymed everything with my name!”

I ignored her odd infatuation with the lanky realtor and turned to the muffins on the worktable. “I’d like you to try these, Mrs. Grace,” I said. “Let me know what you think.”

“You’re to call me Gogi, my dear, everyone does.” But the woman obediently tasted one of the buttered bran muffins. “Mmm!” she said, nodding, her mouth full. “These are splendid!”

“I can give the recipe to your cook.”

“She won’t have time to make them,” Gogi said with regret, brushing crumbs from her fingers. “I simply couldn’t ask it of the poor woman. She’s already overworked. And any new staff I hire has to be for the guests’ health care.” She squinted over at me, a calculating look in her blue eyes. “How much would you charge me for, say, ten dozen assorted muffins a week?”

“Ten
dozen
? As in one hundred and twenty muffins? Every week?”

“Sure.”

“But I’m not staying here!” I exclaimed.

“You’re staying long enough to fix the castle up and sell it, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then you’ll need something to do.” The woman took a calculator out of her shoulder bag, slipped on a pair of glamorous, rhinestone-studded cheaters, and tapped at the number keys. “It’s just for the short term, until I can source muffins and cookies. You’ll need to get the kitchen inspected so I can buy the muffins from you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“State rules. I can take
these
because they are a gift,” she said, fluttering her hand at the muffins. “But if I buy muffins from you for the oldsters, they need to be made in a commercially licensed kitchen. This one is fitted with everything it needs, you just have to have it licensed.”

Shilo snickered, and I threw her a warning glance, before saying, “Mrs. Grace . . . Gogi . . . I have no intention of going into the muffin business, so there is no need to get the kitchen commercially licensed. Period.” I was putting my foot down. She was not going to run me over again.

“Maybe I misunderstood,” she said, head cocked to one side. “You’re thinking that this place could be sold to become an inn or event venue, right? That’s what Jack McGill told me.”

“Yes, I’m hoping so.”

“If the kitchen is already commercially licensed, that’s one step toward selling it for one of those uses.”

It made a dreadful kind of inevitable sense. “I’ll think about it.”

“Per dozen, times ten,” Gogi said, and showed me the sum on the calculator.

It wasn’t a fortune, but it would help pay the utility bills while I stayed. “I’ll make coffee,” I murmured, a little stunned at the way things were moving along.

She slipped her glasses and the calculator in her shoulder bag. We sat, ate a couple more muffins with steaming coffee, and she told me about Turner Wynter, the development company Rusty Turner and my uncle had co-owned. It employed both Tom Turner, Binny’s brother, and Dinah Hooper, Rusty’s girlfriend.

“Turner Wynter was a real estate development company,” I reiterated. “Was it going well? This is kind of the boonies for development, especially with the economy the way it’s been for the last few years.”

“I won’t say they got along well,” Gogi, said, her well-shaped brows raised. “There was quite a bit of trouble in the last little while before Melvyn died, some lawsuits about the business. Most of the townsfolk sided with Rusty because no one got along with Melvyn except me and Doc English, one of my residents.”

“Things got that bad?”

“Two men like Rusty and Melvyn were never going to work together well. Things got pretty heated. Virgil had to step in a couple of times, because the two old fellows got into fisticuffs.”

“Fistfights?” I said. “
Really?
What did they do, a swing and a miss, or was it walkers at dawn?”

Shilo snorted, but Gogi only smiled. “You’d be surprised the damage a couple of old guys can do to each other. Believe me, I’ve had to deal with it at my home. And even though Rusty was not as old as Melvyn, he’s the one who ended up on the short end of the stick. Your uncle was not afraid to whip out a rifle to defend his property. That’s one of the things that made me wonder . . .” She shut her mouth and shook her head. “Never mind.”

“No, go on . . . what were you going to say?” I asked.

She stared at me for a moment, but when she spoke again it was about the night Rusty Turner disappeared, and how my uncle Melvyn died, exactly one month later. Rusty was just there one day, and gone the next, she said. All kinds of rumors swirled, but his girlfriend, Dinah, appeared heartbroken and said she didn’t know where he went. One story was that he had removed a large amount of cash from the bank, and called someone he knew from the city; he was on the run, some said. But no one knew for sure. Tom Turner swore Melvyn had murdered him, at last, after all their fights, and buried him somewhere on the property.

Then on an icy day in late November, an early frost slicking the road on the rocky ridge, Melvyn was driving; no one ever knew where or why so early in the morning. It was thought that he lost control on a bend and went off a cliff, his car exploding in flames when it hit the bottom, near the river.

“But I knew Melvyn fairly well,” Gogi said, leaning across the table. “Why was he driving that time of morning? Even though he’d gone a little peculiar, he still knew he was getting on, and that his skills weren’t what they used to be. And where was he going? I just don’t believe he was out there alone. Or if he was, that he went off that cliff by accident.”

“Are you implying that he was
murdered
?”

She nodded and pursed her lips, sitting back in her chair. “But no one, not even my own son, will take it seriously.”

I
HATED TO
say it, but had to. “Maybe that’s because it’s not murder.”

Gogi shrugged, an elegant insouciance in her manner. “I suppose no one will ever know, but I’ll always believe Melvyn’s death wasn’t an accident.”

There was no real answer to that, and we sat in awkward silence for a long minute. “I’m curious about Binny Turner, the owner of the bake shop,” I finally said as I got up to make a pot of tea. I was coffeed out, and needed my caffeine in a gentler form. “I get the impression she won’t make anything she deems ‘ordinary.’ What gives with that?”

“What are you talking about?” Shilo asked.

We both explained Binny Turner’s bake shop to Shilo, who said, “She made the focaccia we had for breakfast? Why doesn’t she just open a bakery in New York? I’d sure go there.” Shilo, like many models, loves to eat, and irritatingly does not gain an ounce. Superfast metabolism, she’s always said.

“She seems to have a mission to get the people of Autumn Vale to broaden their tastes.”

Gogi smiled and nodded. “Her dad put her through cooking school and she apprenticed for a year in Paris. But she’d get a lot more people in if she made some other goods, like muffins and peanut butter cookies.”

“She seemed pretty busy.”

“Only because she sells her wares for too little. If she sold them for what they were worth, no one would come in.”

“Hmm, you’re right there,” I agreed. “But costs must be a lot lower here than if she had a shop in Manhattan.”

“Maybe. She lived with her mom for most of her life, but after her dad offered to put her through school, they got closer.”

“And then he disappeared. Must be tough on her.”

Gogi shook her head, and said, “I feel for the girl, I really do.” She watched me get up and toss a tea bag into a saucepan, and said, “Merry, why don’t you open that housewarming gift I brought?”

“Okay,” I said, and retrieved it. I set it on the table and took the gorgeous, pink gauze bow off the large robin’s egg–blue box, then lifted the lid. There, nestled in pink tissue, was a teapot—and not just any teapot, but a real Brown Betty. I lifted it from the box and smiled.

Shilo stared at it, her forehead wrinkled in puzzlement, while Gogi watched.

“Thank you,” I said, not trusting the steadiness of my voice to say more.

“Do you like it?”

“I do. So much!”

“Do you know what it is?” she asked.

Shilo laughed out loud. “Who doesn’t know what a teapot is? Do you think we’re from the Antarctic or something?”

Gogi stifled a laugh while I shot my friend a look. “It’s a Brown Betty,” I answered. “It looks just like the one my grandmother used to make tea for all her Village cronies in our apartment in New York. Every Friday afternoon, her old friends would come around and they would have tea and ‘muffings,’ as I called them when I was little.” My vision blurred, and before I knew it I was sobbing, great wrenching, embarrassing sobs.

“Oh, no, what did I . . . is she okay?” I heard Gogi say.

“I don’t know,” Shilo said. “I’ve never seen her do this before, not even when her husband died!”

Two sets of arms were soon around me, and I just let it all go, the years of pent-up anguish that I had been holding onto even through my most recent tribulations, the accusations of theft leveled at me by someone I had once considered a friend. Stupid that a teapot finally broke my control, but that’s what happened. To my surprise I could feel and hear that the other two women were sniffling and sobbing, too.

After a minute, I blindly reached out and someone—probably Gogi, because Shilo was never prepared for anything—pressed a tissue into my hand. I dabbed my eyes, carefully pressing the tissue under them to staunch the flow of tears and keep the inevitable trails of mascara to a minimum, then blew my nose.

“Feel better?” Gogi said, her lovely pale eyes on mine. She smiled gently.

I could see no evidence that she had wept, and wondered if I was wrong after all. Shilo had tears still pooling in her eyes as she mournfully gazed over at me. I took a deep breath, cradled the Brown Betty in my arms, and said, “You know what? I
do
feel better.”

“I’m so glad you didn’t apologize for crying,” Gogi said. “I’ve always wondered why men think of crying as a weakness, when it is what helps women vent, then stand up and do what needs to be done. It’s a sign of strength, not weakness.”

“Then I must be a
really
strong woman,” Shilo said with a long sniff.

Gogi handed her another tissue, and my friend blew her nose. “So what happened to your grandmother’s Brown Betty?” the older woman asked.

“It broke the day she died. My mother dropped it while she was trying to make tea. I think she was stifling how awful she felt, and she was shaking from the effort. I didn’t know what to say; she just seemed to not want me to help, or comfort her, or anything.”

“I think it’s hard for a mother to let her kids see her cry,” Gogi said. “Virgil hates it, but he’s good about letting me do what I need to do.”

I knew she was likely referring to grief and pain during her battle with breast cancer, but didn’t say anything. If she wanted me to know, she’d tell me. I made tea in the lovely pot, poured for us all, and told Gogi about my teapot collection, and how I had felt a kinship for Binny the moment I saw her cool collection of teapots.

Shilo said. “You mean there is another woman in the world obsessed with teapots? And I thought you were the lone lunatic!”

I smiled. “Nope, there are a lot of us.”

“Merry, since you’re here for a while, I wonder if you’d consider doing something?”

I was wary immediately; Gogi Grace already had me agreeing to make 120 muffins a week, and that was about the limit of what could be expected from me, I would hope. “Uh, I don’t know. Do you need a kidney?”

Her eyes widened and she was startled into laughter. “No, I have very healthy parts, thank you very much, and the ones that weren’t healthy were lopped off.”

Again, I caught her wry reference to breast cancer, but I wouldn’t have understood it if McGill hadn’t already spilled the beans.

She drank the last gulp of her tea and stood. “I want you to think about something you could do while here. Since I can’t get my darling son to take me seriously, I wonder, would you sniff around and see if Melvyn’s death seems on the level to you?”

I was not expecting that and I laughed, thinking she was joking. She apparently wasn’t. I coughed, shrugged, and looked to Shilo for help.

But she was watching me, too, and said, “Maybe you should, Mer. I mean, he was your uncle, and he left you this big, beautiful castle! Poor guy . . . hey, maybe
he
could tell us what happened?”

I gave her an exasperated look. “Shi, really? Do you remember what happened the last time you tried to hold a séance?”

She had the good grace to look embarrassed. I turned to Gogi, who had a definite question in her eyes. “Shilo fancies herself a gypsy. We held a séance to contact my grandmother at Shi’s place. Shilo invited some friends, and the lights were out.”

Shilo snickered, and I threw her a dirty look.

“What happened?” Gogi said.

“My friend Gregory got fresh with Merry,” Shi said, giggling. “She decked him, and at the same time my bunny—his name is Magic—had gotten loose and hopped up onto the table, turned the candle over, and sent my neighbor shrieking out of the room and down to the superintendent to tell him my apartment was possessed.”

“And the candle set fire to the tablecloth and we had to put it out with the wine I’d brought,” I finished.

“But you had enough left to throw some in Gregory’s face,” Shi finished, still giggling.

“And your neighbor was
really
scared because you kept yelling ‘Magic! Magic!’ like a maniac, and she thought you were out of your gourd, when you were just yelling at your rabbit.”

Gogi Grace laughed heartily, but then finally said, with a sigh, “I have to get going. It’s getting toward supper, and some of the oldsters need help getting to the dining room. I’m always there at dinner.”

“I’ll bag these muffins for you,” I said. “And maybe pop them in a box; it might make them easier to carry. Four dozen muffins are kind of heavy. We’ll bring them out to the car for you.”

She graciously accepted our help, and Shilo and I followed her out to her car, parked by my rental in the weedy driveway. She put the muffins on the passenger seat and slammed the door. She surveyed the potholed land with her hand shading her eyes from the slanting sun, then her gaze settled on me. “You didn’t answer my question. Will you at least think about looking into Melvyn’s death?”

I felt uneasy, and I wasn’t sure why. An old man had died going off a slippery highway. There didn’t seem to be much of a mystery there, but then, Gogi Grace knew my uncle, and I didn’t. “Your son is professional law enforcement; if there was something there, I’d think he’d know.”

“He thinks I’m imagining things, but there were so many people who didn’t like Melvyn. And with his dealings with Rusty . . .” She shook her head. “The whole thing has upset me.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Promise me you’ll
really
think about it, not just let some time lapse then say no.”

I shifted from one foot to another. She had certainly caught me at what I was planning. “I will seriously think about it, I promise,” I said, meeting her gaze.

She came around the car to me and enfolded me in a warm hug. “Thank you, Merry. And you, too, Shilo. You know, you’re right about Jack McGill,” she said, winking at my friend. “He is cute, and he’s a very smart fellow. A good catch!” She waved, popped into her car, and drove away.

As I watched her go, I had the troubling thought that maybe I
would
have to look into my uncle’s death. If it had anything to do with the Turners’ obsession with my property, and even, perhaps, their father’s disappearance, I might need to know so I could protect myself and my inheritance.