Текст книги "Bran New Death"

Автор книги: Victoria Hamilton

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“He does live here!” I said. “Who is that fellow?”

“Well, actually, that is someone I’d like you to meet,” Gogi said. She went to him and took his arm, saying something as she led him over. “Merry, this is Doc English. Doc, this is Merry Wynter, Melvyn’s niece, the one who inherited the castle.”

His pouched blue eyes, filmed by cataracts, lit up and he put one gnarled hand on my arm. “Hey, I’ve seen you before. You’re the one asked me where Wynter Castle was a few days ago. Scared the crap out of me; I thought you were a ghost, that early in the morning.”

I glanced at Gogi, then back at the old guy. “Doc, you do know you’re wearing a lady’s straw sunbonnet, right?” I said. I didn’t mention the pink-plaid sweater.

He grinned, his own real teeth a kind of yellow and spotty collection in his mouth. “I sure do. Nice girl, the nurse this morning, but she said I’d get a melanoma if I didn’t wear a hat. So I grabbed the first one I saw. Then she said I’d catch cold if I didn’t wear a sweater, so I borrowed hers. Then I headed out for my constitutional. If I walk every day,” he explained to me, “I’ll never lose the ability.”

I chuckled. He had a point, and an interesting one it was. That explained the random selection of headgear.

“You’re the one made us the muffins, hey?” he said, eyeing me. “You making more?”

“I am.”

“Bran’s good . . . keeps the pooper working . . . but what about carrot?”

“I love carrot! I’ll make some for the next batch.”

“Doc, Merry had some questions about Melvyn. Could she ask you about her uncle?”

“Sure. Get me some coffee instead of that colored water the girl is bringing around, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

Chapter Eight

"I’LL GET HIM some of my private stash,” Gogi said. “We share a love of cappuccino!” She trotted away, her paisley scarf fluttering behind her.

“What do you want to know?” Doc asked, after I made sure he was comfortable in an armchair by the wall of books.

I thought about it for a minute. What did I want to know? “What was my uncle like? I only met him once, and that was just for a few minutes.”

“Yeah, your mother was a pip, hey? Didn’t take to old Mel too good.”

“So you knew about my very brief trip here,” I said, and he nodded, his expression neutral. “Do you know why they argued?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

The young girl, done with her conversation with the old fellow, brought the tray of mugs around and asked if we wanted a drink. I said yes, but Gogi came back into the lounge at that moment with a special mug for Doc.

“Here you go; don’t say I never do anything for you,” she said, dropping him a wink. “You two okay here?”

I nodded as the girl brought me a mug of coffee. “Thank you,” I said, and she offered a hint of a smile. “What’s your name?”

“Lizzie,” she said.

“Well, thank you, Lizzie, I appreciate the coffee.”

The girl went on to the next set of folks. Gogi nodded. “Okay, I’ve got a lot to do before lunch; if you two are comfortable, I’ll see you again, right?”

“I’ll have another batch of muffins for you tomorrow,” I said. “Two dozen carrot and the same of apple spice, maybe.”

Doc sipped his coffee and closed his eyes. “Good stuff. Just what the doc ordered,” he muttered. When he opened his eyes, he fixed his gaze on me. “You look a lot like your mother.”

“You saw her?”

“Nah, saw photos. Mel kept one in his room of you with your mom and dad.”

I knew the photo he meant; there weren’t that many. It was of me and my parents on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. My father I only remembered vaguely as a shadowy, comforting figure. “My dad spent time at the castle, didn’t he?”

“He was a great kid,” Doc said with a reminiscent grin, showing his yellowed teeth. “Broke his arm jumping off the parapet once; thought he could fly.”

“Honestly?” I was uneasily aware that my knowledge of my dad was so sketchy, I didn’t even know whether he was normally a daredevil kind of guy. A little overwhelmed, I blinked back tears, which had begun to well.

Doc regarded me with sympathy in his old, rheumy eyes. He had surrendered the sun hat, but still had on the pink-plaid sweater. I cleared my throat, but found I couldn’t say another word for the moment.

“You know, we don’t hafta talk about it all at once,” he said, and patted my hand. “You can come back and ask about your pop another time. ’Bout Melvyn, too. Why don’t we talk about the castle, first? You planning on keeping it?”

“I don’t see how I can. What would I do with it? How could I afford to keep it?” Even if I wanted to stay in remote Autumn Vale, I thought, but did not add.

“You think that hasn’t dogged the last four generations of Wynters, how to keep the castle running? Ever since your family lost all its money—”

“All its money?” I blurted out. “Were we rich?”

“Now, how do you think that castle got built in the first place?”

He had a point. At one time the Wynters must have been very rich, but like me, they had been foolish and lost their money. Seems it ran in the family. “You’re right. I guess I knew that. How did that come about? And how did we lose the money?”

He waved one hand. “You want the castle history, you go talk to that little gal who’s set up the library. She’s got all kinds of info there, some useful, most not. But I can tell you about Melvyn, if you like.”

And he did just that for the next hour. I heard about the hijinks back in the day; he and Melvyn were school buddies. They went off to university together, then served in “the big one,” as Doc called World War II. Doc came back to Autumn Vale, married, and had a bunch of kids, while Melvyn . . . well, he just started working on converting Wynter Castle into something that could make money rather than lose money. I was left with a sad sense that I would have liked Melvyn, if I had ever gotten to know him.

“But my dad, he was Melvyn’s brother’s kid, right?”

Doc slurped back the last of his cappuccino, smacked his lips, then burped. “Yup. Your daddy was the only son of Murgatroyd Wynter, Melvyn’s younger brother by about three years. Murg was a good kid. Married a local girl, had one kid—your pa—but his wife, your grandma, she died real young. Anyway, Murg and Mel started working on Wynter castle, and planting trees, with your daddy running after them on his short little legs. Mel always said there was money in trees.”

“What did that mean?”

“Damned if I know.” He yawned mightily, as a buzzer sounded somewhere. At once, the old folks all got up and headed out of the room. Doc got up, too, and picked up his empty cup.

“What’s going on?”

“Lunch, my girl, lunch. No old person misses a meal if they can help it. Never know when it’s your last, I guess. You should see some of these genteel old biddies scarf down their food. ’Specially dessert.”

I jumped to my feet. “But . . . but I want to find out so much . . . like, how did Murgatroyd, my grandfather, die? And when? And what about my grandmother, Murgatroyd’s wife? What was she like? And what did Uncle Melvyn plan for the castle? And my mom . . . what did she and Melvyn argue about? You said you might know.”

He shrugged and yawned again. “I’m gonna eat, then have a nap. Nothing like an after-lunch nap to get you through the day.”

Subtle but effective, that stopped me in my tracks. “Well, it was nice meeting you, Doc. May I come back?”

“Come back all you want! And next time I see you while I’m out for my walk, we’ll walk together.”

I picked up all the ingredients I’d need for the next day’s muffins, and headed back to the castle, to find that my handyman-slash-real estate agent had gotten another few holes filled, and Shilo had made him a lunch that was more fit for Magic than McGill. Rabbit food, in other words. He was picking away at his salad when I came in, and looked up at me with hope in his eyes. I shook my head, and he sighed, a sad man doomed to a veggie-heavy lunch. I took salad, too, and we chatted for a few moments, but he had to get going to show a house in another town for a fellow real estate agent.

I had phone calls to make, one inspired by the fact that I now knew, after talking to Doc, that I wanted to stay at Wynter Castle long enough to get a sense of my father’s side of the family. I missed out on time with Uncle Mel, but maybe I could learn a little and fill in the gaps in my family history. I’d never get a better chance. After I sold the castle, I didn’t imagine I’d be coming back to Autumn Vale. I called the storage facility where all my stuff was, and asked about a mover who could pack it up and bring it to Autumn Vale for me. They assured me they knew just the fellow, and could supervise it for me.

Over dinner, I told Shilo about my decision and she hopped up and down in her place, as Magic scoured the table for more carrots and lettuce. But a moment later, she got a pensive look on her face.

“What’s up, buttercup?” I asked as I finished the last of my soup.

She gave me her trademarked “underlash” look, gazing up at me from behind a fringe of bangs and eyelashes. When I was working on the open market—in other words, before I fell under the Leatrice Peugeot spell and ruined my life and career in New York City—I occasionally styled Shilo for shoots, and had taught her that her “look” was irresistible to the public in the same way that Princess Diana’s “Shy Di” look was. She was an eighteen-year-old model when I first met her, but she had not gotten a day older looking in the eleven years since.

Now she was using “the look” on me. “Tell me what’s wrong; you only use that look on me when something is worrying you.”

“Mer, what about me?”

Maybe I was having a dim moment, but I didn’t get it. “What do you mean?”

“Can I stay and help?”

“Stay . . . what, here? Why would you want to?” I saw in a flash that I had hurt her feelings. I reached across the table and took her hand, squeezing gently. “Shi, you know you can stay as long as you want. I just meant, I’m not sure if that is what you’d really want to do.”

She looked startled. “Don’t you know? You’re my best friend. You’re the one who makes me feel good about myself, even when I’m having a bad day. You’re my . . . my BFF.”

Yeah, I teared up. I squeezed her hand again and released. “If you and Magic want to stay, I’d love to have you. You’re free to hang out here as long as you want, or go whenever you want.”

“That’s why I love you,” she whispered. “I’ve never had anyone say that I’m free, before.”

I swallowed hard. To know why, you have to understand Shilo. There is much about her past that is a mystery to me, and I have never pressed her on it. She’ll tell me when she feels like it. When I met her she had no apparent family, and shared an apartment with six other skinny, frightened, teenage models. She had come so far since then that I didn’t realize, sometimes that the skinny, frightened girl was still inside her.

We went for a long walk after dinner. It was a beautiful evening. In the cavernous wilderness of Manhattan, one could forget (if you never made it to Central Park) that pavement and concrete were not natural walking surfaces. We wove between the holes, some filled, most not, and waded through the weeds. The ground had been warmed all day by the sun, and as a cooler breeze puffed to life, I could feel Mother Earth radiating back that warmth under me.

We walked the entire open portion of my property, and even explored some of the outbuildings, like little kids looking for a playhouse. There was a huge garage, which the lane that circled the castle led to. Its big, double doors were locked, but when I stood on a cinder block by a window and cupped my hands around my eyes, I could barely make out that there were a couple of vehicles inside, one that looked like a gangster car—you know those long, low-slung forties cars with a running board, the ones you see in gangster movies? It might even be the one I remembered Uncle Mel picking us up in, from the train station, on that long-ago day. Would it still work, I wondered?

There was a falling-down ramshackle shed; when I sidled up to it while Shilo picked wildflowers (aka weeds), it was clear that the shed had not only been broken into, but it looked like someone had been camping out in it. Could be kids from town, or transients, but either way, it was going to stop. I made a mental note to ask McGill where I could get a heavy-duty padlock. Even farther from the castle there was a big barn, almost on the edge of the woods. I was not going to explore that; not today.

The woods were like walls around the castle, a long, straight line, a right angle, and another long straight line, the same over and over. The castle was boxed in by dense forest that was made impassable, in most spots, by thick, tangled weeds and vines along the perimeter. It was like a fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty, I think? The one with the impenetrable thicket of thorns. Once I got closer, I was eerily aware of something watching me, and I saw a spot of orange that melted back into the gloomy gray and green. The attack cat again, supposedly Becket, Uncle Melvyn’s faithful companion. But I was too distracted by the magnificence of the forest, and by a realization that struck me as I stood and stared. A pattern emerged in my vision. The trees were mostly lined up in perfect rows, like marching soldiers. “I wonder if the Wynter family planted all of these trees,” I said, pointing out the straight lines to Shilo.

“That sure doesn’t look natural.” She shivered.

Doc English had said my grandfather and Uncle Melvyn had planted trees. Could this forest be the results of their labor? “Someday I’d like to take a walk in there.”

“Someday,” Shilo agreed, “but not tonight.”

It was getting dark and the moon was rising. The cool breeze had become cold. “Okay,” I said and laughed, linking my arm through hers. “We’ll head back now.”

I made us cocoa, and we drank it, then headed upstairs. As we got ready for bed, I told her about my day—we kept both ends of the Jack and Jill bathroom open to talk to each other, then closed it at night—and my run-in with Tom Turner. “I don’t know what is up with him. Big galoot.” Uneasy, I looked out my window at the Bobcat excavator, and beyond to the black woods. “I wish McGill wouldn’t leave the excavator here. It’s like an invitation.”

“Can’t be helped,” Shilo said. “It’s too slow to drive it back and forth from town, and he doesn’t have a trailer to carry it. He’s locked it down. That’s the best he can do.”

“I know. Good night, sweetie.” I waved to her, grateful beyond words for her companionship, and closed my door, collapsing in bed and burrowing my face in sweet-smelling linen. It was weird living with someone else’s stuff, but in a week or so I’d have all my belongings from the storage locker in Manhattan. The castle, as big and cavernous as it was, was beginning to feel like home, since I had constructed a bedroom “nest” with some of my familiar stuff around me, and was working on the same for the kitchen. I was undecided if my increasing comfort in Wynter Castle was a good thing or a bad thing.

Despite the peace of falling asleep after a vigorous day, my dreams were tumultuous; in them I confronted various weird folks, asking them about my father as a child. Then I was running across the lawn of the castle, dodging huge holes made by giant badgers. I could feel them underground. It was like a scene from Tremors, a movie that always makes me laugh when I catch it on late-night TV.

And then I woke up. I could still hear and feel the rumble. I dashed to the window, but didn’t see anything. Was it an earthquake, maybe? It wasn’t loud, just a faint vibration. I flung on a housecoat and slippers, and dashed downstairs, through the kitchen and out the pantry door. It takes a lot longer to do that than it does to say it in such a big place. “Darn it!” I yelled. The Bobcat was in action, and someone was digging another damn hole!

I raced back into the kitchen, fished around in my purse to find my cell phone, realized it was either dead or not getting a signal, and grabbed the wall phone receiver, dialing nine-one-one. I yelled my location and emergency, and said that Virgil Grace, sheriff of the Autumn Vale police department, was well aware of the problem. I slammed the phone down and dashed back to the door.

The Bobcat motor was still going, but the operator had stopped digging. Fury was building up in me. Had the coward taken off, leaving the vehicle running? I stood in the open door. No movement. I heard a loud caterwauling a ways off. Maybe that was my feline stalker.

I waited and watched. Still nothing. Finally fed up, I stormed outside toward the excavator, the scent of newly turned earth strong in the air. “Tom Turner, come on out and fight like a man!” I yelled like an idiot. I stopped a ways away. There was no one in the driver’s seat. What the heck?

Just then, the sheriff’s car screamed up my drive, emerging from the woods. He parked it facing the Bobcat, and the bright, halogen headlights illuminated the scene, throwing long, weird shadows over it. Virgil Grace, dressed in a uniform jacket, plaid jammie pants, and little else, bolted out of the car leaving the engine running and lights flashing. “Stop, Merry! Don’t move another inch. Let me handle this.”

“There’s no one in it,” I said, waving my hand toward the machine.

He threw open his trunk and emerged from it with a big, square flashlight, then trained the light on the scene. “Tom, you there?” he called out.

Aha! So he did think it was probably Tom Turner! “There’s his red-and-black-plaid jacket, on the edge of the hole!” I said, as we walked toward it.

The chug of the motor and the smell of the raw earth he had just opened will forever haunt me and take me back to that moment. Together, Virgil and I looked over the edge of the hole, where Tom’s jacket lay, and the sheriff shone his flashlight down into it. At the bottom was the still form of Tom Turner, dressed as I had seen him earlier that day. Shilo, in her robe and slippers, was loping toward us asking what was going on.

“Oh, no!” I cried, hands over my mouth.

“Damn it!” Virgil shouted. “Tom? Tom, you okay?” He whirled and handed me the flashlight. “Shine this down in the hole and don’t waver.” He grabbed a handful of weeds at the top of the hole and gingerly lowered himself near the guy, kneeling at his side as I tried to angle the flashlight beam as best as I could so Virgil could see what he was doing. I couldn’t get close enough, and picked up a long piece of metal, which threatened to spill down on the cop and Turner, tossed it aside, then shone the light on the guy’s face.

There was blood, I could see that, as Shilo picked her way close and grabbed my arm, trembling. Virgil tried to rouse Turner, but then looked up. He shook his head. “He’s dead. Murdered.”

I was shocked, and stammered, “M-maybe he just fell and hit his head.”

Virgil grabbed a hank of roots and clambered up out of the hole. “No,” he said tersely, dusting the dirt off his hands. “You two, come with me,” he said, and headed toward his car.

We followed, holding onto each other like frightened bunnies.

“What’s going on?” Shilo whispered.

“I don’t know,” I muttered.

“Sit in the back for a few minutes,” he said, opening up the back of his sheriff’s car and motioning us to slide in. “You’ll stay warmer.”

“We could just go back to the castle.” I said.

“Not yet.”

“Why?”

“I can’t let you go until I get your statement, check your hands for defensive wounds, and fingerprint you.”

“Defensive . . . fingerprint . . . what?” I was stunned. “What’s this all about?” I was not going to be cowed into acquiescence.

Virgil faced me, his expression grim in the shadowy flash of the roof lights. “Look, Merry, everybody in town has been talking about how you threatened Tom Turner in Binny’s Bakery today. She called me to complain.”

“But Merry was just telling him to keep off the castle property, or else!” Shilo cried, clinging to my arm.

“Exactly,” Virgil said, over the thrum of the excavator engine. “And tonight he came back. And now he’s dead.”