Bran New Death (A Merry Muffin Mystery) (17 page)

“Did he mean it? I mean, my uncle, with the shotgun?”

“Well, the hole in the side of the trailer would seem to suggest he was serious!”

"Y
OU MEAN MY
uncle actually shot the place up?”

“Oh, he wasn’t aiming at anyone,” Dinah assured me. “He shot over Tom’s head, but said next time a Turner would pay.”

Holy crap, I thought. He had waved a shotgun at Janice Grover, too. Maybe old Melvyn was truly nuts and
did
kill Rusty. But he didn’t kill Tom Turner, and that was the murder I was hoping would be solved pronto. Was it all tied in together? Did the “something funny” going on have to do with those poorly drawn up plans for Wynter Acres I found? “Dinah, were you in on any of the discussions between Rusty and Melvyn about subdividing the Wynter land to build condos?”

“I came in on the tail end of it. It didn’t make a bit of sense to me,” she said, eyes wide. “I asked Rusty, who would buy a condo out in the middle of nowhere?”

“My thoughts exactly! What did he say?”

She rolled her eyes. “Men! He said to keep my pretty, little nose out of it, that Melvyn had hidden assets and the only way to get them out of him was to go along with the old fool.” She gasped. “Oh, dear. He was your uncle, and . . . I’m so
sorry
for how that sounded. Rusty wasn’t the easiest guy to deal with. It sounds bad, but he didn’t mean it . . . well, I’m not sure exactly how he meant it.”

“It sounds like Rusty was using Mel,” I said, my tone blunt. I didn’t want to reveal that I had seen the shoddy plats and subpar plans.

She put one hand on mine on the table, and said, “Merry, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression about Rusty. He’s a great guy, honest! Except he sees the world in terms of black and white; he seemed to think Mel owed him. He was worried, and had some kind of plan in mind to keep the company afloat.”

Uh-huh, a plan to cheat old Melvyn, maybe. Was that where the money in the account came from? And who else was he swindling? “You did the bookkeeping for the company, right?”

“I did.”

Interesting; she had just implied that Rusty, her boss and boyfriend was trying to cheat my uncle, but had no problem admitting she did the company bookkeeping. “Was everything aboveboard and square?” She looked a little offended. I hadn’t worded that very well. “I didn’t mean about your bookkeeping, Dinah. I guess I meant the books from
before
you took over.”

Mollified, she sighed and said, “They were a terrible mess! I started out as just a kind of office manager and receptionist, you know, but Rusty was in over his head. He used to have a gal who came in two days a week to do the deposits and payroll, but she quit. She had messed things up so badly, I didn’t even know where to begin. There were checks that hadn’t been deposited, bills that hadn’t been paid . . . it took me a year to get things straightened out, and I’m not positive that I did get it all square and shipshape. I wasn’t a very good bookkeeper myself when I started, but I took a correspondence course, and a lot of it is common sense along with the ability to look up state and federal regulations and apply them.”

“Who was it who used to come in to do the bookkeeping?”

“I . . . don’t remember the name,” she said, her gaze shifting away. “Is it important?”

“I guess not.” I had a sense that she did indeed remember very well but didn’t want to implicate someone.

She stood and shook crumbs off her lap. “I had better get down to the nuts and bolts. I have to measure this place and figure out what I’m doing. Gogi Grace is going to give me a hand.”

“She’s great, isn’t she?” I said, standing and likewise scattering crumbs from my skirt.

“She is, honest to God, like the sister I never had.”

I walked to the door, my heels clunking on the board floors and echoing in the empty place; it was a bland space right now, plain-board floors, white walls, dusty from disuse. It needed a lot of work before it could be a design store, and I hoped she knew what she was up against. I turned before I got to the door. “By the way, do you know anyone who does yard work or anything like that? I can’t seem to find any listing for a landscaping company in Autumn Vale, and I need the Wynter property taken care of on a regular basis.”

“What, you’re not going to mow it on your own?” she said with a quick grin. “I say just put up a notice at the Vale Variety. Rusty used to find day workers that way, for when we needed site cleanup.” Her grin died, as she talked again about her missing boyfriend.

“I’ll do that. Thank you, Dinah. I hope this place does great guns!”

“Me, too,
if
I ever figure out what to make it!”

I left the pastries behind for her and Gogi. On the street, I looked up and down as a young woman with a stroller passed me, a determined frown on her face. I had a lot to think about and even more to figure out. The last few days had revealed that the odd little town of Autumn Vale had seen some swirling controversies and issues over the last few years, some of them to do with my late uncle.

Was it unusual in that respect? Probably not. Get enough quirky characters together in one small space, though, and you had a recipe for disaster. The economic downturn could not have helped. Small towns across the country had been hit in a frightening way, that much I knew from reading the news. Just looking at the main street in this town you could see it had once been a thriving downtown that was now largely vacant. And it wasn’t just that people were now taking their hard-earned bucks to Rochester or Buffalo, it was that anyone left in town probably didn’t
have
any bucks, hard-earned or otherwise.

I was slowly redefining my economic situation as measured against the townsfolk of Autumn Vale, New York. My small heap of savings seemed like a larger pot than I had once considered it. I suddenly realized that Jack McGill had not given himself the job of filling the holes in my yard just to be nice to a newbie, it was part of a financial-survival strategy. Real estate in a small town as depressed as Autumn Vale had to be tough.

My eyes were open. I walked down Abenaki feeling raw and vulnerable. The boarded-up stores now represented failed dreams, lost livelihoods. Where did anyone work in Autumn Vale? There was no industry, that I could tell. Turner Construction was probably once the beacon of prosperity by the town’s modest measure, but it was history now, with no one to run it. A group of teenagers hung out in front of Vale Variety, their faces wan, smoking cigarettes and muttering to each other. They were going to have to leave town to get jobs, probably; would they ever come back? Was the lifeblood of the town leaking out, one young drop at a time? Was I just tired and edgy and making a mountain out of a molehill that wasn’t even
my
molehill?

Gordy and Zeke were coming out of Binny’s as I approached. What did they do all day? They were both in their early thirties, I figured, because Gordy had been in high school at the same time as Tom Turner, but neither appeared to work. “Hey, guys,” I said. “How’s it going?”

Both nodded. “Not bad, I guess,” Gordy said.

“I have a problem, and I’m wondering if you guys know a solution.”

They eyed me warily.

“You know the castle property,” I said. They exchanged glances and nodded. “Well, it is a massive headache to me. I can’t take care of it all. The property looks like a field, and if I’m ever going to get it back in shape, I need to start with a good cleanup. Do you know, or know
of
, anyone who does that kind of thing? Landscaping, I mean? Just basic stuff like mowing down the tall grass, and pulling weeds. There’s a lot of work to do before winter.”

They exchanged glances again. It was Zeke who spoke up, eyeing me with doubt in his squinty eyes. “You mean, you’d pay?”

“Of course!”

“We could do it.” They spoke at the same moment; it was eerie.

“Could you? It wouldn’t take you away from . . . from other things?”

“Nah, stuff can wait,” Zeke said, shoving his hands in his saggy-jeans pocket.

I was truly relieved. “You would be doing me a huge favor,” I said, and meant every word of it. “But I don’t know the first thing about machinery. It is a really
big
property, and . . . what about a mower? What kind would you use for a property like that?”

“We might be able to come up with something,” Gordy said. “My uncle’s a farmer out your way, and I could borrow his hay mower, if the grass is that long.”

“It is. I don’t think it’s been cut all summer. The place looks abandoned.” I quickly pulled a card out of my purse and wrote my cell phone number on the back as well as the castle landline. I handed it to them, and Zeke took it.

“What day of the week is it?” I asked, suddenly aware that I had, in the twilight zone of Autumn Vale and Wynter Castle, lost track.

“Friday,” they intoned together.

“Okay, call me,” I said. “I appreciate your help, guys!” I had a few more things to do in town, among them a visit to the post office to arrange continued forwarding of my mail. The post office building, one of the streetscape oldies squashed in together along Abenaki, was opposite Binny’s Bakery, so I strolled across the quiet street and walked in, a buzzer triggered by my entrance sounding somewhere.

There was a counter across the room, and along one wall a bank of post office boxes stacked from small at the top to large at the bottom. Dinah Hooper was there, pulling a wad of envelopes out of one of the medium-sized post office boxes. She turned and smiled. “Hey, fancy meeting you here!” she said.

“I just left you waiting for Gogi!”

“She was delayed at the home. One of her clients is very ill,” she said. Her expression saddened, and there was a glimmer of tears on her face. “I don’t know how she manages it—emotionally, I mean. I do what I can at Golden Acres, read to some of the residents and help them with their taxes, but it’s hard for me. My mother passed away five years ago this week, and I still think about her every day. Being there reminds me of her.”

“I know how you feel. My mom and my grandmother died within six months of each other. That was eighteen years ago, and I still miss them.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” she said, stuffing the envelopes in a cloth bag and touching my arm in a gesture of sympathy. “And here I am moaning about losing my mother when I was in my fifties!”

“It’s hard no matter the age,” I said.

“I’d better go,” she said with a watery half-smile, “before I get any more morose!”

As Dinah exited, I turned to the woman at the postal counter, who had been listening in with unabashed curiosity. “Hi. How are you today?” I asked.

“I’m just great,” she said with a huge grin plastered on her broad face. She leaned on the counter, her plump arms folded. “You’re the girl who inherited the Wynter Castle, right?”

“I am.”

“Figured you’d be in here sooner or later. Everybody comes to see the postwoman, you know.”

Minnie, a woman in her mid-sixties, I judged, and as broad as she was tall, befriended me swiftly; she seemed hungry for a fresh face, and gossiped relentlessly about many of the folks I had come to know. Doc English was a hoot, but a lot smarter than anyone took him for. Dinah Hooper was one of those women who seem doomed for unlucky lives. Virgil Grace was a mama’s boy, and his mom was a bad woman to cross.

“Gogi Grace? What do you mean?” I asked, startled by her assertion.

She looked from left to right, as if there was a crowd waiting to listen in, and leaned across the counter, fixing her gaze on mine. “The woman’s got money. How do you think she came into it?”

I shook my head.

“Inherited. Husbands number one and two!” She held up two fingers like a peace sign.

“I didn’t know that. Which one did she have her kids with?”

“Husband number one. He didn’t leave her a lot of dough, but the insurance after he died?
That
paid for the big house. It was husband number two who had the money. When he died . . .” She let out a low whistle and widened her pouchy eyes. “How do you think she afforded the renovations for Golden Acres? That cost
mucho dinero
, inherited from
numero duo
.”

I felt bad gossiping about Gogi; I’ve been on the nasty end of tittle-tattle. Taking a deep, cleansing breath, I said, “I’m here to see about having my mail forwarded from my old address for six months. I figure I’ll be here at least that long fixing up Wynter Castle.”

She straightened and instantly became professional. I filled out the forms and paid with my debit card, finishing up just as another customer came into the post office. I slipped out with a wave good-bye, figuring I’d be the next topic of conversation. Minnie was a talker, and I’d make a mental note to remember that. I wasn’t sure what she was implying about Gogi, but I was going to erase the postmistress’s insinuations from my mind.