Текст книги "Bran New Death"

THE NEXT DAY MCGILL, AFTER GASSING UP THE excavator with fuel he brought with him, was back at it, filling in holes—the sheriff didn’t swab the blood he found or check for fingerprints, since there was no way the county was going to do blood testing or any other forensic examination for the “crime” of someone starting up an excavator illicitly, he said—and I knew I had to get down to work if I was going to have a couple dozen muffins for Gogi Grace when she came that afternoon.

“I wish I had Granny’s cookbooks here,” I said, standing at the counter and looking at the pile of ingredients uneasily. “The bacon and cheddar muffins yesterday were easy; just a basic, savory muffin recipe. I vaguely remember the proportions necessary for bran muffins, but I wish I was sure.”

McGill came to the door, rubbing his hands together. An unseasonable cold snap had taken hold of the valley. “I smell coffee. Mind if I grab a cup?”

I waved at the percolator on the stove, and Shilo got him a chipped mug from the meager store of dishes.

“We can’t disturb her,” Shilo whispered to him. “She’s trying to figure out a recipe. She promised Mrs. Grace two dozen bran muffins for the old-age home today.”

“Ah, muffins! For Golden Acres? That’s swell.”

Shilo stared at him. “Did you say that was ‘swell’? I feel like I just stepped back into the fifties.”

McGill grinned at her, then sidled up next to me. “Say, Merry, I’ve always wondered, what’s the difference between a muffin and a cupcake?”

Shilo groaned, hand on her head in dramatic fashion. “Oh, you’ve started her up now! Prepare to be lectured. You’ve just enrolled in Muffins 101.”

“Huh?” he said, looking back and forth between us.

I bit my lip to keep from laughing at the tragic look on my friend’s face. She’s just heard the lecture once too often, I thought. “You go feed your bunny, or something, while I tell McGill all about it.” I got the other three sets of my brand-new muffin tins out of the bag—I think I had wiped out the town of Autumn Vale where muffin tins were concerned—and washed them, then dried and lined them with paper cups as I answered McGill. “It’s easy. Most people think that if it’s frosted or iced, then it’s a cupcake, but that’s not so. Some muffins can be frosted, too. Instead, think of the difference between a banana cake and a loaf of banana bread.”

“Okay,” he said. “I got that.”

“Well, with the batter of a banana cake, you can make cupcakes, and with the batter for banana bread, you can make banana muffins. You can do the same with any cake batter or quick-bread batter.”

“Ah!” he said, his eyes lighting up. “Cakes are to cupcakes as, uh, what did you call it?”

“Quick bread,” Shilo, who had not gone to feed Magic, filled in.

“Right . . . cakes are to cupcakes as quick breads are to muffins!”

“Correct!” I scanned my pile of ingredients. I hadn’t been able to find bran at the general store, so I’d bought a big box of bran cereal. “In general, muffins are denser and a little less sweet. They’re a whole lot easier and less finicky than cupcakes, let me tell you, but right now I’d give my right arm for my cookbooks.” Why hadn’t I thrown them in the car instead of in a bin at the self-storage? Because I hadn’t foreseen a retirement home full of seniors needing bran muffins. “Well, here goes.”

“Feel free to experiment on me,” McGill said. “But right now, I’d better get back to work.”

For a few minutes, Shilo was my assistant, but eventually she wandered off, and I was left to work alone. I like it that way, when I’m baking. One batch came out too coarse and dry. I hadn’t let the bran cereal soak up the moisture for long enough, I thought, so I increased the milk content and waited a little longer for the next batch. They turned out a lot better, and I tried another recipe that I vaguely remembered from my grandmother’s handwritten recipe cards, locked in a storage container in Manhattan at that moment. In the end, I had two dozen each of banana bran and peanut butter–bran muffins, and a whole bunch suitable only for the birds. It had been good to cook again, even in the huge unfamiliarity of the castle kitchen, and I had gone overboard, as usual.

Once more I offered McGill lunch, and as we three ate at the long table, I pumped him for information on Sheriff Virgil Grace and his mother, the elegant Gogi Grace.

Gogi, he told me, was a local who had left Autumn Vale to go to college in the sixties; she did the hippie-chick thing for a few years—and had been at Woodstock, it was rumored—then came back to town and married a local boy. She would have loved my mother, I interjected. Mom always claimed she was at Woodstock, too, but then, there were a million or so people there, right? Anyway, McGill went on to explain that Virgil was her youngest, the only one of her kids who stayed in town. With Rusty Turner’s help, she had bought and renovated Golden Acres, a century-old house that had been completely redone, with modern lifts so her oldsters didn’t have to climb stairs.

“What about the sheriff?” I asked, still wondering about those scratches on his face and the long time it took to respond to our call the night before.

“Yeah, is he married?” Shilo, said, leaning against McGill’s arm and batting her long eyelashes up at him.

McGill looked down at her, his mouth pursed, and said, “No, he’s not. Why, you interested? You wouldn’t be the first outsider to try to get him.”

Shilo reared back and frowned. She looked especially pretty today, her long, black hair tied up in a ponytail with a paisley scarf. “I’m not interested,” she sniffed, her dark eyes snapping with irritation. “I was asking for Merry!”

“Don’t do me any favors.” I said. “I’m just curious about him, McGill. How well do you know him? What’s he like?”

He shrugged, his favorite evasion. “I’ve known him our whole lives. He’s divorced, owns his own house, which I sold him, and works a lot. When his mom had breast cancer . . . whoops!” He looked stricken. “That’s private info; I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“It’s okay. Consider it forgotten,” I said.

“Well, when she was sick, he looked after her. Her other kids don’t get back to Autumn Vale much, but he’s stayed.”

“He sounds like a good guy,” I mused.

McGill shifted in his seat. “He is,” he said shortly. “I gotta go back to work. See you gals later.”

“Swell,” Shilo said softly, grinning up at him.

I showered and dressed carefully, choosing a soft, gray jersey Kiyonna wrap dress and letting my long, dark hair flow over my shoulders. I scanned myself in a cheval mirror in my bedroom, when a wolf whistle made me whirl around; Shilo stood at the door, grinning.

“Who are you dressing up for?” she asked. “Some man coming that I don’t know about?”

I laughed and turned back to the mirror, making sure the dress tie was properly draped. “Don’t you know? Women dress mainly to impress other women. You have to see Gogi Grace. That woman is stylish, and I don’t want to look frumpy.” I hooked sterling silver hoop earrings in my ears, slipped an art-glass pendant over my head, and stood looking at myself. It was good to have an occasion to dress nicely for, and I was glad I’d thrown the Kiyonna dress in my bag at the last minute.

“And she’s the mother of that good-looking Sheriff Virgil Grace, right?”

“Yes, but that has nothing to do with anything,” I said primly, slipping my feet into red Marc Jacobs pumps. “You were way out of line with what you said to McGill earlier. I’m not interested in him or anyone else. Let’s go downstairs. If someone knocked on that gargantuan door, I wouldn’t hear a thing from here.”

“Doesn’t the doorbell work?”

“I don’t know, I never thought of—”

Just then a sonorous gong sounded.

“It works,” we both said at once, and laughed.

I clattered down the stairs and across the flagstone floor, followed by Shilo, then threw the door open for Mrs. Grace, who entered bearing a large box with a huge bow on top.

“Housewarming gift, my dear,” she said, as she handed it to me and walked past. “Or should I say castle-warming?”

I handed the box to Shilo with raised eyebrows, and followed Mrs. Grace, who had strolled into the middle of the great hall and was looking around.

“I haven’t been in here for years,” she said, slipping off her violet cashmere wrap. “Melvyn got a little . . . odd . . . these last few years.”

“Odd? In what way?” I folded her wrap and put it on the side table in the entryway.

Gogi met my eyes and smiled. “Patience, my dear. I have a feeling that there is a lot you would like to know about your uncle, and Wynter Castle, but one step at a time.”

I watched her eyes, veiled today by a fringe of soft, silver bangs. There was something there beyond what she was saying. I remembered what I had said to Shilo about the woman being a valuable ally, and nodded. I could be patient. But still, I was curious. First things first: I introduced Gogi to Shilo, and both women looked each other over.

“Jack McGill told me about your friend,” Gogi said, taking Shi’s hand and giving it a gentle shake. “He mentioned how beautiful you are, Shilo. I haven’t heard him say that for a long time.”

My friend smiled, then pardoned herself to go clean Magic’s cage.

As Gogi and I started up the stairs for her tour, I said, “I hear that Rusty Turner did the renovations on your retirement home.”

“True. There are a few handymen in Autumn Vale, and they can do things like installing a toilet or painting a room, but Turner Construction was virtually the only game in town for large operations.”

We walked through the castle, but she clearly knew it a lot better than I did. I felt like I was being guided the whole way, by how she turned into a room I hadn’t intended to enter, or walked along the gallery, showing me the view from above of the gigantic crystal chandelier that was still draped in what she called a “Holland cloth.”

“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.”