Текст книги "Bran New Death"

Автор книги: Victoria Hamilton

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“Sure. Want to meet my bunny?” Shilo said, leading the girl away.

“As long as that’s not code for something weird,” Lizzie said, trudging after her.

“I’ll be in soon,” I yelled after them. Shilo waved without looking back. “And don’t let her out of your sight.”

“I won’t,” Lizzie shot back.

I chuckled and shook my head. “I know a bit about her story,” I said, turning to Virgil. “Gogi told me she was caught spray-painting gravestones.”

He nodded. “Yeah, not good, I know; her mom is a piece of work. Just showed back up in Autumn Vale a year or so ago with Lizzie in tow, after being gone for years. Lizzie will not say why she was vandalizing tombstones.”

I turned and watched Shilo and Lizzie as they entered the castle. “I heard that she’s living with her grandmother?”

“Yeah, her mom’s mom. No one knows who Lizzie’s dad is, or even if he’s local. The dad could be some dude her mother picked up wherever she took off to after high school.”

One more mystery in a town that seemed to offer them by the gross. “What do you want to know, Sheriff?”

He took me back through my interaction with Tom, and even my brief encounters with Binny, giving me no hint what he was looking for. I also told him all that I’d heard in town, about Junior Bradley and Tom Turner’s fight a while ago. When I was done, he shook his head.

“Keep everything locked up tight, okay? There was another break-in last night not too far from here, just a farmer’s shed, but I want you to be careful.”

“Maybe that was Tom’s killer, have you thought of that?”

With a disgusted look on his face, he said, carefully, “Well, Miss Big City, no, gee golly gosh, I never would have thought that a break-in and a murder the same night might be connected. Thank you so much for pointing that out.”

Okay, he had a point. He turned and started walking away.

“Hey, wait a minute!” I called after him. “Do you have any leads? Are you going to interview Junior Bradley? What’s going on?”

“I can’t comment on that,” he said.

“What do you mean, you can’t comment?” I raced after him and caught his sleeve. “I’m not a reporter, for crying out loud; I’m the one who found Tom’s body.”

“All the more reason.” And he was gone, off talking to the team, which appeared to be wrapping up. I watched as they moved Tom’s body, bagged in black, into the hearse and cleaned up the area of all of their tools. It was sobering, and left me with the familiar desire to leave, to run away from sorrow. It tugged at my heart, urging me to abandon ship. So far, life in Autumn Vale had been such a mixed bag of fear, sadness, and bafflement that I just didn’t know what to make of it all.

Just as the hearse started to clear out and the cops looked like they’d be doing the same soon, Jack McGill booted up the lane in his Smart car. Together we watched the hearse drive off, then I said, “Want to come in? A teenage girl named Lizzie is here; she kind of hitched a ride with us. Maybe you can take her back to town.”

“Lizzie Proctor? I know who you mean.” He looked toward the castle. “Troubled girl. Doesn’t get along with anyone.”

“Neither do I,” I grumbled. I was tired and completely worn out. “You people have the strangest little town I’ve ever seen.”

As we walked toward the castle, I asked him about Dinah Hooper, telling him what Isadore Openshaw had said. “But Dinah seemed like an okay woman to me. What does Isadore have against her?” I could not believe their feud was over catnip mice.

“Beats me. Isadore is a little odd. Never married. Has cats. Lives alone.”

“And that makes her odd?” I challenged. “Good lord, McGill, I thought better of you than that.”

He held up both hands in protest. “That’s not me!” he protested. “I’m just repeating what the locals have been saying. Even folks at the bank find her odd. My mom knows her from book club and says she’s kind of got a conspiracy-theory paranoia. Thinks people are watching her home. She moved here about ten years ago to take care of her brother, and when he died, she stayed.”

“So she’s not a born-and-bred local?”

“Not exactly.”

“Could’ve fooled me. She certainly has the Autumn Vale stamp of peculiarity.” I glanced over at McGill, but he didn’t seem offended by my grumpy honesty. We circled the castle and entered through the butler’s pantry door to find Shilo and Lizzie sitting together companionably, eating muffins and drinking milk. McGill’s eyes lit up when he saw Shilo, but first he said, “Hey, Lizzie. How’s school going this year? You’re a junior, right?”

“I’m just the belle of the ball, y’know? Half the boys in love with me, the girls all jealous bitches. Five dates lined up for junior prom already. Which lucky guy shall I choose as my escort? And gee whiz, will he bring me a wrist corsage?”

I cocked my head and examined her. She had a definite edge to her, but I’d bet she was smarter than any of the kids in her class. If I didn’t watch it, I’d find myself liking her. “Why aren’t you in school today?”

“Got suspended.”

“Already?” I exclaimed.

“Yup. New record.”

“Hi, McGill,” Shilo said, throwing him a muffin. “Sit. Eat!”

“Be honest,” I said, sitting down. “Why did you hide out in Shi’s trunk, Lizzie?”

She chewed and swallowed a bit of her muffin, drank some milk, made a face, and set her glass down carefully. “I think I know who killed Tom Turner.”

Chapter Twelve

OF COURSE WE all shouted at once, but since we all shouted different things it was kind of a scramble of “Who?” “How do you know?” and “What did you see?”

I was the one who shouted “Who?”

Lizzie looked a little scared, and Magic, the bunny, who had been sitting quietly munching on a carrot—I didn’t mention that before, did I?—squeaked and jumped off the table.

I put up my hands for silence, let Lizzie finish her last bite, and said, calmly, “Who do you think killed Tom Turner?”

“That weirdo Gordy Shute,” she mumbled.

“Gordy?” I was puzzled. “Why would Gordy kill Tom Turner?”

Lizzie looked calmly across the table to McGill. “Why don’t you tell her?”

The real estate agent looked puzzled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lizzie.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on! I’ve only been here a year, and I know about this old crap. Everyone knows that Tom was always a big old bully, and that he used to pick on Gordy back in high school.”

“Where did you hear that?” I asked. “That was forever ago, if they were teenagers.”

“It’s a small town,” Lizzie said. “People still talk about the earthquake of 1957 as if it happened last week.”

I blew air out through pursed lips. The amount I didn’t know about living in a small town . . . well, it was a tonnage. I eyed her with some respect; the kid was smart. Could a grudge live that long in the incubating atmosphere of Autumn Vale? Did proximity fester rage?

Shilo was staring at McGill. “Did you go to school with them, Tom and Gordy and Zeke?”

He was kind of pinkish as he said, “I went to school in another town, a . . . a religious school.”

He seemed embarrassed. Maybe in Autumn Vale that made him an oddball? In New York, every second kid went to Hebrew school, a Roman Catholic academy, or a new age arts school. “Just because Tom bullied Gordy,” I said, “it doesn’t mean that Gordy would want to kill the guy, Lizzie.” To her, high school was the current state of her suffering, but about fifteen years later? Folks might remember that Tom was a bully, but the feelings from past events could not be running as hot. It was possible though, that there was a more current tension between them.

“Whatever,” Lizzie said, shrugging her shoulders. “Are you going to show me around this place, or what?”

I stared at her, bemused by her moodiness. “How old are you?”

“How old are you?” she shot back.

Shilo suppressed a snort.

McGill, two spots of red on his gaunt cheeks, said, “Lizzie, you might want to try being polite for a change.”

“She has a point,” I said, watching her. “Why should she answer, unless I’m willing to do the same? I’m thirty-nine. And three-quarters.”

Her eyes widened. “Geez, my mom is only thirty-two. I turned fifteen a month ago.”

“Happy belated birthday. Was the camera a gift?”

“You could say that.”

Not exactly a straightforward answer, but maybe it was none of my business. I was not going to be bullied in my own castle, however, by a teenager with bad manners. “Lizzie, you might want to consider this; you have a long life to live ahead of you. At the rate you’re offending people, you’re going to run out of folk to talk to before you’re twenty.”

Shilo snickered and McGill smiled.

“That doesn’t matter because I’m going to be out of this hick town the moment I turn eighteen.”

“Where are you going to go?” Shilo asked.

“New York, where people actually have lives,” she grumbled, slumping down in her chair.

“Look, I know being fifteen can suck at times,” I said. “Been there, done that. But like it or not, you’re stuck here for at least another three years, right? Not everyone is out to make you miserable, and it’s up to you to figure out who might be an ally, and who just needs to be ignored.”

She was silent, for once, and looked like she might actually be thinking about that.

“Gogi Grace is an ally; you’ve already figured that out, I think.”

More silence.

“Besides, even in New York you have to be nice to people sometimes,” I said. “Now, do you want to rephrase your request for a tour?”

She watched my eyes, fiddling with her camera. “Okay. Can I see the castle? Please?”

“That’s better. Sure.” I left McGill and Shilo to flirt cautiously in the kitchen, and I took the kid on a tour. I even let her take photos. As we left one of the bedrooms—not mine or Shilo’s . . . I left those out of the tour—I said to her, “No Facebooking them, okay? No sharing them at all without my permission, and that goes for anything on my property.” I thought it best to lay the groundwork so there would be no misunderstandings later.

She shrugged. “My grandma doesn’t have Internet access,” she said, “and no one will buy me a cell phone. So I don’t have Facebook or anything. I’m a pariah.”

A pariah . . . how did she even know that word? What an odd girl! “Just putting it out there. What do you photograph?” I asked as we moved back down the stairs to the main hallway.

She didn’t answer until she had framed and taken a photo of the rose window, and the double oak doors. Then she sat down on the steps. “Wanna see?” I sat beside her and together we scrolled through all the photos on her SLR digital camera. She took all kinds of pictures . . . people, places, and nature. She was pretty good. Better at framing photos than me, that was for sure.

“Where is that?” I asked, as she scrolled to a photo of a wooded area, and a sad, leaning tent spotted with mildew.

“That’s in your woods . . . or I think it’s probably your woods,” she said. “I don’t know where the property line is, or anything. There’s a few trails. I followed one, and then there’s kind of a clearing beneath a hill; that’s where this camp is. Creepy. All kinds of crap there . . . old tins, clothes, other stuff.” She brought up an interesting photo of a burned-out fire, with a can of beans, the label charred and the lid half opened.

I made a mental note to walk through the woods sometime. If there was an old encampment, that was the kind of thing I wanted cleaned out, so it didn’t encourage trespassing. “Can you show me where this is sometime?”

“Sure. If I remember. Like I said, there’s a kind of path to it, but it’s overgrown and weedy. This picture was from, like, June or something.”

“Do you ever come across other camps?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“If you do, I want to know. I’d appreciate it.” Of course, I didn’t want her to be wandering in my woods alone, but that was a conversation for another day. If I had made enough of an impression, she might just ask me when she wanted to explore, instead of sneaking around.

She nodded, but was silent. She was a complicated girl. Chatty and gushing while I showed her around the castle, she had now clammed up and become broody again, as moody as fifteen can be. She clicked through to another photo, and I yelped. “Hey, that orange cat,” I said, pointing to the picture on the screen. A big orange fluffy cat was sitting on a stump, staring directly at the photographer. “Do you see it often?”

“Sure. Whenever I’m in the woods it follows me, but I can’t get close to it, I don’t know why.”

I stared at the photo, wondering if it was indeed my uncle’s cat, Becket. I was going to have to remember to take treats in my pocket when I went for a walk in the woods. If it was Melvyn’s cat, I wanted to rescue it.

McGill came out to the entry hall, with Shilo trailing behind him.

“McGill, is this my uncle’s cat? Show him the picture, Lizzie.”

He bent over and looked at the photo. “Yup, that’s Becket all right.”

Wow. The cat had been living in the woods for so long? Amazing.

“I gotta get going,” McGill said, straightening to his full height. “Come on, Lizzie, I’ll give you a lift back to town.”

She rose and nodded. She turned to me and said awkwardly, “Thanks for showing me the castle. It’s cool.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “If you’d like to come out again, let me know. Just don’t stow away in a car trunk.”

Her eyes lit up, but she merely nodded, and trailed McGill to the double oak door.

“McGill, would you have a moment free tomorrow?” I asked.

“I might. How can I help you?”

I was aware that I was seriously imposing on his time, but there was so much I needed to know about Autumn Vale, and people I needed to talk to. “I have to talk to Junior Bradley about the zoning for this real estate venture my uncle and Rusty Turner were involved in. Would you go with me to talk to him?”

“Well, sure, I can go. But Junior’s an okay guy. He’s just got a lot on his plate lately.”

“You think it would be all right to talk to him alone?”

“Yeah,” McGill said. “I have to deal with him all the time, and he’s fine, once you get past his attitude. All business when it comes down to it.”

“Okay.”

“But if you still want me to go with you, just give me a call.” McGill said he’d be back to continue filling in holes when the cops released the site, and then he and Lizzie left, the Smart car tootling down the winding laneway. McGill beeped the horn just before they disappeared around the bend.

Shilo said she was going to find Magic, who had hopped away after being startled in the kitchen. I stood looking out over the scene, leaning against the door frame. I was so tired, for a moment I felt like I was floating away above the grounds, looking down the hole to poor Tom at the bottom. It was a nightmare vision, and I shook my head, trying to rid myself of the lingering impression. Whatever he had done in life, he hadn’t deserved to be murdered.

Who wanted him dead? I had a host of possibilities.

Junior Bradley had to be at the top of my list because of his fight with Tom at that bar. Dinah Hooper, his father’s girlfriend . . . well, I didn’t actually know of any reason, but there were such close ties there. One man in her life was missing and one was dead. She had to be a suspect.

I guess I had to add Gordy Shute to the mix, given Lizzie’s description of the torment Tom had inflicted on him, and even Binny made the list. She didn’t appear to be on particularly close terms with her brother. Neither of those seemed likely to me, though.

This was ridiculous. I squeezed my eyes shut. Why had I promised Hannah I would try to figure out who did it? I had a feeling that whenever Hannah wanted something, she would just turn her luminous gray eyes on the person, and they would agree to anything. Even she hadn’t been able to answer the one outstanding question that was bugging me the most; what was Tom Turner digging on my grounds for? It was absurd to think he was looking for his father’s body. Only Binny apparently believed that.

And I had told Gogi I’d try to find out if my uncle was murdered. Melvyn was eighty and driving along a treacherous, icy road. Why did it have to be murder? And was I really going to play Nancy Drew?

When I opened my eyes, it was to find Virgil Grace standing before me, a mixture of sympathy and weariness on his face. “Hi, Sheriff. Sorry. I guess I drifted off for a moment just standing here.”

“I don’t blame you. We’re pretty much finished there, but I’m putting crime-scene tape around the hole and I’d appreciate it if you could keep away from it until I say different. I know Jack wants to get going on filling it in, but he’s going to have to find another excavator for now, and work on other holes.”

“Another excavator?” That was bad news. I was prepared for a delay, but not the barring of the little excavator’s use altogether. “For how long?” I asked, dismayed.

“Can’t say,” he grunted, his tone clipped. “Until I say so.” He turned to go.

“Sheriff, hey! I’m sorry, you know . . . about Tom Turner. Were you and he friends?”

He had turned to watch me, and shrugged. “Kinda. I mean, we were on the high school football team together. We hung out, but not in recent years. He passed his time with a different crowd.”

“With guys like Junior Bradley?”

“What do you know about that?” he asked, squinting at me as the sun set behind him, the gleaming shards of light streaking his dark hair with silver. It made him look older and, to me, more attractive. He moved back to stand in front of me, looking down into my eyes with his curious, flat gaze.

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?”

Chapter Thirteen

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.