Bran New Death (A Merry Muffin Mystery) (13 page)

Behind me, in the house, I could hear Shilo clattering up and down stairs, yelling, “Magic! Magic!” like a demented conjurer. The sheriff had lines under his eyes, and I almost reached out to smooth his ruffled hair back from his temple. I shivered. “What do I know about Junior Bradley? Just what I told you earlier, that I heard he and Tom got into it at some sleazy dive bar. Why?”

“Nothing.”

But there was something, and I’d swear it was more than just a bar fight over a woman. I stared at him, unblinking.

“Look, I know this is awkward for you, being new here, and the owner of this place,” he said, waving to include all of Wynter Castle and its environs. “But just let me do my job, which is to figure out who killed Tom Turner. Believe me, I want to know. Tom was a good guy. You didn’t know him that way, but I did.”

“I heard he was a bully in high school.”

Virgil shrugged. “High school was a long time ago. People change.”

“One more question,” I said as he started to walk away, and he turned back again. “Do you think that Tom’s murder has anything at all to do with his father’s disappearance?”

“Disappearance? You mean Rusty? So you believe that story that Dinah’s spinning, that Rusty just up and disappeared. He left his son and daughter and business and just evaporated, poof, into a puff of smoke.”

That statement told me more than anything about his own beliefs on the matter. “Okay, so you think Rusty Turner is dead. Is Tom’s murder a part of the whole mess? Do you suspect Dinah?”

“Not specifically. And I don’t know where Rusty is, dead or alive. Other than that, I can’t comment,” he said, turning away and stalking toward his cruiser. “Lock your doors at night,” he hollered back at me, then got in, slammed the door, gunned the motor, and skidded out of my weedy drive with a screech of tires. Was he angry? At what?

“Man, he was pissed,” Shi said from behind me.

I turned around, and she was holding Magic. The bunny was nibbling at her chin. “I know. But why? Is it because he hasn’t got a clue who killed Tom Turner, or because he thinks he may know, and doesn’t like it?”

I
CALLED HANNAH
and asked her—since she had a computer and Internet access—to do research for me on New York State rules and regulations as far as making food for a nursing or retirement home. She called me back and confirmed Gogi’s statement that I needed a licensed, inspected premise to bake the muffins. I was skating on dangerous ground by making them in the castle kitchen without a permit. She gave me a list of phone numbers to call to ask about getting the official paperwork I needed.

I made calls to the state licensing board and set up a preliminary inspection, just to tell me what I needed to do before getting a permit to make muffins in my kitchen. Of course, the end result of that was a stiff warning not to do any baking for the public until I received a permit. Which meant that I needed to find a kitchen to work in immediately if I was going to keep supplying Golden Acres with muffins.

It was a good excuse to visit Binny again, since that was one of the few places that had a license to make food, but there were a couple of other possibilities that Hannah suggested, among them the nursing home itself. She also said the Brotherhood of Falcons hall had a permit. Of
course
the men themselves never cooked, but they did rent it out for weddings, and the local women’s guild borrowed it for dinners and events. I just didn’t know if I could deal with a group of men who actually had a meeting to discuss a formal order to bar women from the premises. I concluded it was too risky—to their genitalia, such as it was—and mustered up the fortitude to call Binny, not sure what the reception would be like.

To my surprise, she asked me to come in the next morning to talk.

Shilo and I spent the rest of the day planning the work the castle needed, while I tried to avoid thinking about Tom Turner, and the fact that there was a murderer out there. After the last twenty-four hours, we were both exhausted and turned in early to read, my selection a book of poetry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
Sonnets from the Portuguese
. My uncle, surprisingly, had an extensive collection—Keats, Longfellow, Blake, Tennyson, Shelley, Coleridge—but it was all over the place in a tiny, airless dungeon of a room with bad lighting. That was one big change I planned. Books deserve better conditions, and there was a library downstairs that would be perfect once cleaned and aired.

I was up early the following morning, and sat at the kitchen table with my notepad and a cup of coffee, planning my next few days and all I had to do. I got the surprise of my life when Shilo joined me. She is a lay-abed, as I call her, loving to sleep in, cocooned in blanketed comfort. But there she was, dressed and ready for coffee, appearing in the kitchen doorway, Magic in hand, while I was only on my second cup.

While I made her some coffee, she grabbed lettuce and carrots out of the fridge and set Magic on the table with his vegetarian munchies. Magic was just a plain bunny, kind of a brownish-gray color, completely undistinguished, but Shilo loved him with a fierce protectiveness that was almost maternal.

Maternal. I cocked my head and watched her. My funny friend had always flitted from man to man, as if she were a butterfly in the garden of love. But did the ever-increasing noise of the female’s biological clock sound
tick-tick-tick
even in
her
ears? Was her interest in McGill more than as another fleeting romance in a long string?

Nah. Impossible.

“What are you going to do today?” I asked Shilo as I got ready to head to Autumn Vale.

“I’m coming to town with you,” she said.

I was surprised, but glad of the company. She confined Magic to his cage, and we set off in my car. As soon as we hit town, however, Shi headed off alone to “explore,” as she called it.

I had timed my arrival at Binny’s Bakery to be after the morning baking was done, but before the customers started arriving. As suggested by Binny, I went to the back, where there was a steel door off the alleyway. I rapped on it and was admitted, the warm, yeasty air flooding over me in waves and taking me back to my grandmother’s kitchen. My mom wasn’t much of a cook; she had been too involved in social committees and action plans, marching and protesting and burning her bra in public places, much to my teenage mortification. But my grandmother more than made up for it. Taking in a good, deep sniff of the air, I happily followed Binny through the bakery kitchen, lined with stainless steel, commercial-size ovens, to a little table in the corner, where she had a French press coffeemaker and chocolate croissants on a platter.

For little old moi?
I felt like crying. It was like being back in the Village at a favorite coffee shop. Why was she being so nice, especially since her brother and I had had a heated disagreement practically hours before his murder? But I would take whatever I could get.

Once we had steaming cups in front of us, and I had devoured a chocolate croissant, I regarded her with interest. Her hair was flyaway in the steam-bath atmosphere of the kitchen, and her cheeks were red, but she seemed serene, not at all as testy as she had been with Gogi and with me. It was odd, considering her brother had died just the day before.

“You do love baking, don’t you?” I asked, to break the ice.

She nodded. “I call it dough therapy. When I’m baking, I let go of everything: every stress, every pain, every rotten memory.” She paused, then continued. “It’s the one thing my dad really came through on, this bakery,” she said, waving her strong hands around at the kitchen. “He sent me to culinary school, and paid for this place.”

“What about your mom? I hear that she left your dad when you were a kid.” That was a little personal, but I was still trying to figure out what was the best way to deal with someone as prickly as Binny. Would she freeze up under direct questioning, or was she the type who liked straightforward talk?

“I still talk to my mom often,” she said. “She was dying in this little town. I didn’t see it that way at the time, but now I know that she and Dad weren’t getting along, and she had to leave. My dad is a huntin’, fishin’, woodsy kind of guy, you know? Guns and camo and outdoors stuff.”

“I’ve seen the photos of you with your dad, and Dinah with your dad, too. I was surprised Dinah would go hunting. She doesn’t seem that kind of woman.”

“Everyone in this town hunts and fishes . . . well, pretty much everyone, anyway. Even Mrs. Grace. You’d be surprised, but she wins the lady’s target shoot at the fall fair every single year.”

“Wow. Gogi Grace?”

Binny nodded.

“I would have taken her for the uptown kind of woman,” I said, thinking of my new friend’s elegance.

Binny returned to the subject of her mother. “Anyway, she hated Autumn Vale. We went to Chicago to stay with her mom and dad. I’m glad we did because I learned to bake from my grandmother.”

“Me, too!” I said, surprised by some of the weird connections we had. I shared my own upbringing, which was, in a way, similar to hers, and then silence fell between us. I was just about to discuss my proposal that I use her ovens, when she burst into speech.

“Okay, so here it is,” she said, rapping her knuckles on the tabletop. “I was wondering . . . I mean, you’re new in town, and I was thinking . . .” She shook her head.

I was intrigued. “What’s up, Binny? Talk to me.”

“I don’t know what to think,” she said, staring into my eyes. “Tom said he thought Dad was dead, and that Melvyn killed him and buried him at the castle. But that’s dumb. Melvyn Wynter was, like, a hundred years old.” She paused and screwed up her mouth, before saying, “Dinah thinks that Dad is alive, and just took off. But she can’t tell me
why
she thinks it.”

Her voice had clogged with tears. I thought of all I had heard, and how everyone assumed that her dad was dead. But what if he wasn’t? “So what if Dinah is right, and your dad isn’t dead, just missing?”

“
Exactly!
What if he’s alive but just staying away from Autumn Vale for some reason?”

It seemed a little far-fetched. “Why do you think Dinah is saying he’s still alive? What is going on that she thinks he might purposely disappear like that?”

Binny was silent for a long minute. “Look, can I trust you?” she finally asked.

How do you answer a question like that? It seemed to me that faint hope of her father being alive was distracting her from her brother’s death, so I’d play along. “You can trust me to keep my mouth shut unless what you have to tell me is about something illegal, immoral, or fattening,” I joked.

She clapped her mouth shut. And it stayed shut. “You need to use my ovens,” she finally said. “That’s why you’re here, right? You can use them any afternoon, because I do all my baking in the early morning.”

I had clearly put my foot in it. Which was it, I wondered, illegal or immoral? Fattening was clearly not a problem. I took another bite of chocolate croissant, chewed, swallowed, and said, “Binny, you have to know I was joking.”

She examined me for a long minute. There were so many pauses in our conversation it was the word equivalent of Swiss cheese. “I just don’t know who to turn to,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “It’s all such a mess. Dinah has been the only one . . . I mean, she’s at least someone who cared for Dad. If she honestly thinks he’s alive . . .” She shook her head and clamped her lips shut, though they still trembled. “I think she’s trying to protect me somehow. But from what? And then, I found . . .” She stopped and shook her head again.

“Found what?”

But she was mute, just shaking her head. I was touched and sad for her. When my grandmother died and then my mom, six months later, I was a mess. Virtually the same thing was happening to her now at just a little older than I had been. “What did you find?” I urged again. “Something that leads you to believe your dad is alive? Why don’t we talk about this whole mess?”

The shop door jangled, indicating customers. She grabbed a rag and blotted her eyes, settled her expression, and headed out to the shop. I could hear her talking, and then the door jangled again a couple of times, quickly. I tried to imagine what it was that had suddenly given her hope that her father was alive. When things quieted down, she came back to the kitchen, more composed. I stood, but just then the bells over the door jangled once again. She headed to the door.

“Look, Binny,” I said, stopping her by putting my hand on her shoulder. “I know what you’re going through. Or at least . . . I know some of what you’re going through. I have a lot of questions, but you’re getting busy.” I felt her tense, needing to tend to her shop. “Why don’t you . . . would it be too hard for you to come out to the castle after the shop closes? Come out for dinner?” Tom’s body was gone, but I wasn’t sure she could handle coming to the site of his murder.

She nodded. “Yeah. Okay. I will. I know the way.”

We set a time, and I left the shop with an agreement that I would come out the next day to use her ovens to bake muffins.

But I wasn’t heading home. I took out my cell phone and miracle of miracles, it decided to work! I punched in a number from memory.

“Jack McGill here,” came the real estate agent’s voice.

“Hey, McGill, it’s Merry Wynter. I wanted to check . . .”

“I’m not available right now, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll get right back to you!”

Darned voice mail! I hated the kind that fooled you into thinking you’d reached the person you wanted. I clicked my phone off and stuffed it back in my purse. McGill had said that Junior Bradley was fine, and who would know better? The township zoning offices were on a short, dead-end street off Abenaki, so I walked there after stopping back into Binny’s Bakery, leaving word with her where I was headed in case Shilo stopped by looking for me.

The door listed office hours as eight a.m. to four p.m.; I rapped and walked in. It was a dusty, dank, little space, no light, little air. Junior Bradley sat at the only desk, a metal monstrosity from the fifties or earlier, and glared at a computer screen that showed a FreeCell game in mid-play.

“Hi,” I said brightly, determined to be friendly even though his expression as he looked up at me was as if he had bitten into a lemon. “We haven’t formally met yet, but I’m Merry Wynter,” I reminded him, “Melvyn Wynter’s great-niece and heir.” I moved forward, hand stuck out, but he ignored it.

“Okay, so what do you want?”

He wasn’t going to be polite. All right, kill him with kindness, as my grandmother used to say. “I’m
so
sorry. I know you must be devastated, having just lost your best friend, Tom Turner. And how sad that your last dealing with him was a fistfight!”