Death of an English Muffin (27 page)

Pish shook his head. “Seems like there was more than enough stubbornness to go around among the Wynter males. So your grandfather died in an accident, and your father blamed Melvyn?”

I nodded. “Daddy took me away and didn’t speak to
Melvyn for a year. But I think he was coming around; he had just begun to talk to him again, and spoke of bringing me back to the castle for a visit. But then he died. I vaguely remember that. Daddy was an oil company engineer. He was up in Alaska doing some preliminary work on a pipeline project, and the small plane he was in crashed. It took them two weeks to find his body. I don’t think my mother ever recovered.”

“My poor child,” he said, taking my hand. “You’ve had so much tragedy in your life. Your mother brought you here not long after. Why?”

“Melvyn says she did it because she knew it was what Daddy wanted. But then he pushed her to bring me to live at the castle. Pushed so hard they quarreled. As we drove away he was shaking his fist; I remember that so clearly. And Mom would never talk about it again. After a while, I thought Melvyn had died and everything was gone, or at least that was the impression I got. I never really understood about the castle and the Wynter legacy.”

“And now you’re here.”

I nodded. I felt the prickle that forewarned of tears as I said, “And I know my daddy, my uncle, and my grandfather loved me.
So
much that they were building a fairy forest just for me!”

“What are you going to do about it?”

I shook my head, puzzled for words. What
was
I going to do about it? “I just don’t know.” We were silent again, for a long few minutes. “One thing I can’t figure out,” I finally said, “is how the original note pointing to the treasure ended up in yet another teapot in Binny’s Bakery. I think he may have intended to send it to me, once he got my address, hoping to tempt me to come to Wynter Castle.”

“I would bet it was another remainder of Dinah Hooper’s attempts to find the Wynter treasure. She stole one thing from your uncle’s desk and stuffed it in a teapot; why not the note, too? It did mention treasure, right? Anyway, we’ll
never know, I guess. I learned a long time ago that there are too many questions in life to which there is no answer.”

“I guess.” We both lay down on my bed, holding hands and staring up at the ceiling. I traced the border of the raised ceiling, where putti cavorted among blue skies and clouds. “Pish, do you think . . . Is there any way I could possibly save this place? I mean . . .
keep
it?”

He sat up suddenly, bouncing the bed, and clapped. Staring down at me, he said, “Anything is possible, my darling.
Anything!
”

“You’ve just been waiting for me to ask that, haven’t you?”

J
UNE IS A
lovely time of year in upstate New York. Everything had finally bloomed in the gardens I had planted in late autumn the year before, freezing my fingers off to plant hundreds and hundreds of tulip, daffodil, crocus, and hyacinth bulbs, and were now dying back. We had rain for so long in May that I hadn’t gotten back to the woods, but we had finally had some decent weather. Now that I knew the fairy-tale park had been built for me, I wanted to see it again. It was the legacy left to me by three men who loved me very much: my dad, my grandfather, and my great-uncle.

So on a sunny day I put on a long skirt, a sleeveless blouse, and some comfortable shoes, told Pish where I was off to, and went for a walk with Becket springing along in front of me, leading me onward. I walked around the castle, examining the vista from every angle. There was so much open space. How was I possibly going to fill it all? There were acres and acres and
acres
of open grassland. I walked
across it, past the beautiful old garage, past a couple of other sheds, and along a path to the backwoods.

I approached and stood at the beginning of the path, Becket beside me. He meowed and I looked down into his golden eyes. “I guess I ought to just go in, right?”

I had hired Zeke and Gordy to do more work, cutting a path into the fairy-tale buildings and covering it with mulch. I entered the woods. Immediately the scent of the pine mulch, warmed by the heat of the day, enveloped me. I wanted to weep at the beauty surrounding me in this section of the untamed forest. There were great swathes of trilliums, white and luminous in the shadowy depths. There were other plants, purplish and pink, distant hints of yellow, but I didn’t know their names. I’d have to learn. Hannah, my go-to gal, would probably be able to point me in the right direction.

I reached the fairy-tale structures and explored. I was sired by a richly imaginative stock of male Wynters. Where my mother’s side of the family was practical, all business, loving but stern, the Wynters were whimsical, odd, and interesting.

The Hansel and Gretel house was well built; with some sanding and painting it could look like new again. But it was the cobblestone structure that fascinated me. It was tall and built entirely of rounded river rocks that must have been laboriously brought in wheelbarrows. There was a tiny wooden door at the base, but I didn’t think it was meant for anything but decoration. The tower looked just like the sand-drip castles I had made at the beach on the Jersey Shore when I was a kid. The mortar had dried and was crumbling, and the whole thing looked like it was going to fall over.

“So your grandfather and uncle built this for you?”

I screeched and jumped, turning. Virgil, in jeans and a white open-collared shirt, stood on the path, some papers in his hand and a plaid blanket over one arm. “You scared the crap out of me!” I said, hand over my pounding heart.

“Sorry.” He joined me and stared at the building. “This
is really something. I’ve heard tales about the buildings from town kids, but never did come out to take a look before.”

“It makes me feel like I belong here,” I said softly. “This was built just for me. I’ve always thought of New York City as home, but maybe this is, too.”

“Can we talk?” he asked, his voice gruff.

I turned and saw the intense look on his face, the hard jaw, the worried eyes. “Sure. What’s up?”

“Not here. I brought a blanket. Thought we could sit out in the field in the sun.”

I raised my brows, but followed him back down the path out into the open. Becket leaped through the grass, hunting mice, and more power to him. The more vermin he caught, the fewer there were. Except bunnies. I didn’t want him to catch bunnies. Virgil spread the big plaid blanket out in the longest part of the grass. When we sat, we were hidden from the world in a circle of green, with just the sun overhead.

We were silent for a while, and that was okay. Miguel and I could sometimes go a whole day without saying a word, just reading the paper, listening to music, napping. And there I went again; every time I was with Virgil, I thought of Miguel and what we had had together, comparing it. I had to stop that. It wasn’t fair to Virgil. I turned my mind from my late husband and regarded the sheriff, who still frowned up at the sky, like the sun had done him a disservice.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“I’m trying to think of a way of bringing up a personal subject.” He glanced over at me. “Between us.”

“Shall I start? There is something between us, isn’t there?”

“I’ve never met anyone like you,” he said.

“Is that good?”

“You could say that.”

“We’ve both been married before. There are bound to be complications. I loved Miguel so deeply; I
still
love him.
But . . .” I took a deep breath. Here it came, ready or not: “I think I’m ready to . . . to fall in love again.” That was as far as I was willing to go. He needed to do some of the talking, so I just shut my mouth.

He grabbed a dried piece of grass and chewed on it, turning the envelope in his hands over and over. Finally, he said, “I was only married for two years. It was a mistake, I suppose, but Kelly didn’t want to just live together. Her dad wouldn’t approve, she said. And I wanted to be married, wanted that permanency in my life right about then, with Mom sick. I did love her, so I asked her to marry me.”

The floodgates were open. I stayed silent.

“But it just wasn’t . . . I don’t know how to explain what went wrong. She was spoiled rotten, her daddy’s only daughter and the light of his life. She’d go home to him and say I was being a jerk, and he’d come to Autumn Vale and chew me out. I told him to get the hell out of our marriage.” He sighed. “I
was
a bit of a jerk, I guess. I wasn’t sheriff then, not yet. It all happened at once; I was elected sheriff and Kelly left, ran home to Daddy. Even though he didn’t like me, he was old-school; a wife doesn’t abandon her marriage. He told her to go back to her husband and she said she couldn’t, that she was afraid of me.” He stopped and snuck a look at me. “I’d hit her, she told him.”

I gasped and examined him. His jaw worked, and he stared straight off into the woods. I watched, but he wasn’t going to go on. Not just yet. “But you didn’t do it,” I said, not as a question, but as a statement. “Virgil, I will never believe you did that.”

He turned his gaze on me and his brown eyes were so full of bewilderment, I reached out and cupped his cheek. He turned his lips into my hand and I think he kissed my palm. I made a fist, catching the kiss and holding on to it.

“I didn’t,” he said, shifting restlessly. “I’ve never hit a
woman in my life. But Sheriff Baxter believed her. He tried to get her to press charges. Tried to get my badge.”

“Did you tell him you didn’t do it?”

“I never got the chance. He just . . . believed her. She’s his daughter; what’s he going to think?”

A goldfinch flitted by and lit on a spike of some flower; it flitted away again, swooping over the tall grass. I’d have to get the boys to cut it soon, but maybe I’d leave some of it long. There was milkweed growing, and it apparently was a much-needed habitat for monarch butterflies, Shilo had informed me. I couldn’t think what to say, so I waited.

“She didn’t file charges, but it’s a sticky situation. Baxter despises me, and I can’t blame him. He’d like to see me lose my job.”

“Your ex needs to tell her dad the truth.”

“I think she feels stuck now, not sure what to do.”

“She needs to grow a pair and tell him the truth,” I repeated, indignant on Virgil’s behalf. “Does anyone else know about this?”

“Only Mom.”

Now I understood Gogi’s pleas for patience on my part, and her wish that we would talk and figure things out between us. I met his gaze; he liked me, I could tell. I hadn’t been wrong. This was holding him back, being afraid to tell the truth, afraid to go into something new
not
telling the truth.

“She’s going to tell him; she
knows
it’s the right thing to do. Read this,” he said, handing me the paper. It was a printout of an e-mail to him from Kelly.

She apologized to Virgil. She wanted to tell her dad the truth, she said, but she was so afraid her dad would turn against her if she admitted she’d lied. The only thing her father loved more than her, Kelly said, was the law, and if he knew she had jeopardized Virgil’s career he might never forgive her.

“You’ve got everything at stake,” I said to him, looking
up from the letter. “If Sheriff Baxter spoke once about the allegations, you’d be sunk.”

He nodded, his mouth in a grim line. “I’d lose everything and I couldn’t even blame folks. I don’t know what else to do. False allegations of domestic abuse are extremely rare; I’ve been a cop long enough to know that. In this case they
are
false, but what would people think if they found out? What could I say that wouldn’t make it look like I was trying to blame her?”

“Where is she now?”

“She moved to Ohio two years ago, a while after we broke up. The divorce was final last spring. I think . . . I
hope
 . . . that she’ll tell her dad the truth. I have to believe that!”

I reread the letter. She was terrified of losing her father’s love; that came through in every word she wrote. She said she intended to tell her father, but I wasn’t convinced.

I met Virgil’s gaze. He had come expressly to tell me about this, but why? I hoped I knew the answer. “I hope she does the right thing. Does she have reason to worry about her father?”

“I don’t know. Baxter is a tough nut . . . retired army. Honor is really important to him. That’s why he thinks I’m such a piece of crap and why I can’t blame him, given what he thinks he knows. I just don’t know if Kelly is ever going to tell him the truth.”

I touched his arm. “I’m sorry, Virgil. It must be tough to deal with Baxter given what he thinks.”

“Right now it’s more important to me what
you
think.”

“I think this has nothing to do with anything between us.”

We stared at each other, and he pulled me up to my knees as he knelt, too. We stared into each other’s eyes for what felt like an eternity, then he wrapped me in his arms and kissed me. I closed my eyes. This was the real deal, the heart-pounding, knee-buckling kind of chemistry I had
experienced only once before. He paused briefly and I opened my eyes and stared up at him. Why was he stopping? He searched my eyes, and then again, he swept me into a kiss, deep, passionate, nice. I could feel his pulse where I touched his neck. I could feel the scruff of whiskers biting into my chin and the strength of his arm holding me firm against his body.

This kiss had been nine months coming, but it was worth every minute of the wait. If I needed another reason, here was a good one for staying put at Wynter Castle. We sank down onto the blanket, still entwined in each others’ arms.

And whatever else happened—if anything did—is no one’s business but mine and
Virgil’s.