“I want to see the plans for the development of Wynter Acres. Do you know if Turner Wynter ran their business out of these same offices?”
“I suppose so,” Binny said, looking around dejectedly. “I mean, this is the only office that I know about. I wish I could help more.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “You’ve helped a lot just by letting me in here.” More than Junior Bradley had with his obstructionism, I thought.
“Well, if there was—or is, rather—a Turner Wynter Construction Company, then you and I might end up being co-owners of at least part of this mess. I’m going to need help to figure it out.”
That wasn’t a welcome prospect, because it tied me more firmly to a place I needed to leave, sooner rather than later. But if there really were lawsuits filed, maybe that could be resolved by the two of us more equitably than if Tom had still been involved. “Let me just riffle though the plans, see if I can come up with anything.” I pulled a stool over to the cabinet and read the labels, looking for anything that referenced Wynter property. None of the labels made any sense to me, so I just started at the top.
I soon figured out that most of the big jobs had been done years ago, and that lately—whether it was because of the economy or something else—the jobs had been getting smaller and smaller. The most recent big project appeared to be Binny’s bakeshop remodel. Turner Construction had redesigned and rebuilt the place to include room for the ovens and front shop area. The upstairs apartment had been renovated. Other than that, there were some sloppy-looking drawings for an addition proposed to the Brotherhood of the Falcon clubhouse, and a proposal for another addition to Gogi Grace’s Golden Acres.
I was vaguely aware that Binny was looking over Shilo’s shoulder, and I wondered what they were up to. I was about to ask when I suddenly came across charts and drawings that appeared to reference Wynter Acres. I pulled them out of the drawer and rolled my chair over to the drafting table, turning on the powerful light over the desk.
My first impression was that whoever had done the plan was a rank amateur.
First, the plat. A plat is a scale map showing the proposed subdivision of the land, and often includes vegetation and other considerations. This plat was crude; barely legible; and with few markers to show landmarks, elevations or even the lot sizes. It didn’t look like they had had a surveyor do the necessary work to mark out the proposed subdivision of the land. If this was the plat registered with Junior Bradley’s zoning office, it should have been rejected immediately. Would my uncle have understood enough to know that?
I sat and stared at it for a long time, trying to figure out what was going on. There was no way they could have intended to proceed in subdividing the Wynter land using this plat as a planning device. It was impossible. There wasn’t even a compass indication on it, or access roads marked. Why would Rusty’s office draw this shoddy plan up in the first place? And it was while Rusty was still in the mix; I could tell by the date, which indicated the plan was from the previous spring. If that date was legit. Careless work like this could have numerous mistakes or deliberate errors.
There were so many considerations if they planned on subdividing Wynter land into a community; what about water? Roads? Drainage? Electricity?
And what about buyers?
The town of Autumn Vale was barely viable as it was, with empty storefronts along Abenaki, and more houses for sale than anyone could ever want. Who did my uncle and Rusty Turner think was going to buy these condos at Wynter Acres? Silvio had claimed the idea was to attract aging boomers who wanted to live in the country but have the convenience of condo living, but the plans I saw were for sizable, single-family dwellings, not condos.
It was ridiculous. Maybe my uncle had been a pie-in-the-sky dreamer, but from all evidence Rusty Turner had been a pragmatic man with many years of experience in the building and development business. He had sent his daughter to culinary school. He had taken whatever small jobs were available in their town. Why have this shoddy plat drawn up? To fool Melvyn?
But . . . why?
I remembered something Andrew Silvio had said; Melvyn accused Rusty of cheating him. Based on the plat I had examined, that could well be, if Mel was paying to have the advance work done, and this pathetic piece of crud was what Turner had come up with.
I rolled back to the drawers and leafed through anything else I could find, and concluded that there was no way anyone had had serious plans to develop Wynter Acres. I had gone through a few of my uncle’s papers so far, and hadn’t come across anything to indicate some long-term strategy . . . unless . . . I cocked my head as I remembered the envelope I had found in my uncle’s desk to Turner Wynter Global Enterprises. Was that related to the real estate development? It had to be; it was the only thing the two men were involved in together, as far as I knew.
But had Virgil Grace taken stuff out of the castle when they searched it? He said he did, but I didn’t have the receipt yet, so I didn’t know what. That was going to be my first order of business the next day. Did items taken away by the police have anything to do with Wynter Acres?
My head hurt. I was confused, even worse than I had been before this little field trip. I stared at a map of Autumn Vale and followed the valley until I got to a road that rose up to a town on a ridge . . . ah, Ridley Ridge. There was a bar in that town where Tom and Junior Bradley had fought.
Maybe I would need to talk to Emerald and find out a little more about Tom Turner and Junior Bradley and the truth behind the fight. So far he was my star suspect for Tom Turner’s murder. Why? I didn’t have a clue at this point, except that I was following the violence.
I had one more thing to do. I looked up, but Shilo and Binny were still engrossed in something on the computer, so I went back to the drawers. I began searching through, and found that all of the old stuff was properly drawn up. When Golden Acres was redesigned, for example, it had been perfectly planned and executed, judging by the professional-looking drawings I came across, which included site elevations, blueprints, and drainage locations. Zoning permissions were all in place, as were building permits, with official seals and the zoning office stamp of approval, though the zoning commissioner at the time must have been Junior’s predecessor, since the signature was different.
That was the last indication I needed that Wynter Acres, no matter what Uncle Melvyn thought, was never a serious plan, at least as far as Rusty Turner was concerned. Was it possible that my uncle had found this out and turned nasty? I didn’t believe for a second that he had killed and buried Rusty on the property, but had he killed him and dumped him somewhere else?
“You done yet, Mer?” Shilo said, her eyes shining with excitement.
“Uh, yeah . . . what’s up with you two? What have you been doing?” Though Shilo looked excited, Binny appeared troubled.
“I think . . . I think my father and my brother were involved in something shady,” Binny said.
“I was just coming to the same conclusion,” I said. “Why do you think so?”
“The figures don’t add up,” Shilo said.
Oh, did I forget to mention that Shilo, among her other talents, can look at a list of figures and add them up in her head at warp speed? She can also see anomalies, little things that don’t make sense in the numbers. She’s an odd duck, to be sure.
“There is a heck of a lot of income coming in,” she continued, “but almost no work done to account for it. And there are, like, shadowy references to other accounts, but nothing to back it up. There might be something I’m missing, but I doubt it.”
“What could that mean?” I wondered out loud.
Binny spoke up. “The logical explanation, I guess—the legitimate explanation—is that if Dad and your uncle were going into business together to develop your uncle’s land, maybe they had started up accounts to use for equipment purchases and rentals.”
That actually made a lot of sense, and if it was true, then the accounts could have to do with that, and there woul
d be no mystery. “Who did the bookkeeping for your dad’s company?”
“Lately? Dinah Hooper.”
“Then I think we’ll have to ask some questions of Ms. Hooper tomorrow,” I said. “I have some of my own for Mr. Silvio and Sheriff Grace, too.”
*
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS FOR ME. The next day was going to be full, and the anxiety of unanswered questions, financial worries, and a plethora of other problems had me awake at three a.m. I brewed tea made in my new Brown Betty teapot and filled a mug. As I stood in the pantry doorway, a cool breeze wafted in, the smell of night-scented phlox drifting toward me from the weedy yard, as well as the comforting chirp of crickets. Disregarding the necessity of selling this property—I honestly did not see anything changing that—if I could, would I stay here at Wynter Castle? If it were financially feasible, would it be my choice?
Though I had been a city girl most of my life, settling in at the castle had come surprisingly easy. I loved the place; it suited me somehow. Oh, it was way too big, and in winter it was going to be hell to heat, and if Shilo hadn’t happened to stalk me all the way to upstate New York I would be hideously lonely. But right now, leaning in the doorway of the back door and drinking tea, I was weirdly content for someone who had found a dead body just a couple of nights before.
I had my notebook in the kitchen and I returned to the table and began doodling, which soon enough became a list of ideas that would let me keep the castle. It could become a rest home, a retirement home, an inn, or an event venue, if I chose to run it as one of those things. I could sell off some of the land—if anyone would buy it—or I could . . . I ran out of ideas, and my wayward mind began roaming over random thoughts.
Those random thoughts began to settle around the enigma that was Sheriff Virgil Grace; what did I make of him? He was good-looking in a surly way. Kind of scruffy, but a manly man, to be sure. I do like a manly man. When you’re a big girl, being held by a big guy makes you feel fragile and feminine. Dumb, right? But I can’t help it! I’m a modern woman with retro hormones.
I recalled a little tidbit that McGill had let slip; Sheriff Grace had other siblings, but when his mom was sick, he was the one who looked after her. Tears welled and one dripped onto the notebook page, smearing my ink; I thumbed the droplet away, which smudged the page even worse. That was my Miguel, all over. When his mom came down with a virulent form of influenza in the first year of our marriage, he flew back to Spain to be with her for six weeks. It had been our only source of contention, but looking back, I was being petty and selfish. If I could only turn back the clock, I would have behaved much differently. If only. I wished with all my heart I could tell him now, that what I had complained of then made him a very good man, and I wouldn’t have wanted him to do anything different. Miguel’s selflessness and nurturing ability was some of what made me love him so much.
Was Virgil Grace another very good man? I had not been in love, or had a crush, nor had I even kissed another man in seven years. Erotically charged dreams of the past had been my only outlet. Would I ever love again? Would the part of me that died the night Miguel crashed his car ever come back to life?
I sniffed back tears and abandoned that morose nighttime melancholy. I couldn’t undo the past, and I couldn’t live in it. Picking up and petting Magic—he had somehow, as his name suggested, escaped Shilo’s closed room—I reflected on the changes Wynter Castle had worked in me. I felt, like the night-scented phlox that bloomed in wild profusion among the weeds, that I was opening up, blooming to new possibilities in my life. Leatrice’s betrayal of me and the friendship I had thought we had was a closed book. Her treachery had poisoned the well of the New York fashion world in a way that hurt to my core, but it had shown me who my real friends were.
When I thought of real friends, Pish Lincoln’s name popped into my head. Pish was a brilliant, witty, intensely alive older gentleman who had been a money manager for many a lucky model of my acquaintance. If I had trusted him with my investments I would not now be broke, but I had stubbornly thought that the insurance money from Miguel’s death was like funny money to be played with. I tossed it willy-nilly like confetti, drifting toward stocks in companies that sounded good to me, or whose products I liked. Pish had tried to steer me, but I hadn’t, to my current chagrin, listened.
When I figured out more of what Turner Construction was involved in, maybe he was someone who could answer a few money questions for me. I trusted him implicitly, and missed his daily dose of calm, good sense. In fact, a need for information or not, I was going to call him. When I left New York, I hadn’t been sure I could handle all the fond and teary farewells my friends would have foisted on me, and I had slipped out of the city like a thief in the night. He was going to be angry, but he never stayed angry for long. Not with me, anyway.
I set Magic down on the table and wrote a list of things to do on the morrow. Lists are my thing. I love lists, so making one felt like I was returning to some semblance of my former self, the self before Leatrice stabbed me in the back and twisted the knife.
The list:
1. Call Pish Lincoln and throw myself on his mercy.
2. Go to the police station and demand to know what they took from the castle.
3. Question Dinah Hooper about the financial dealings of Turner and Turner Wynter Construction.
4. Find someone to mow the freaking field that’s growing up around the castle.
Seriously, Wynter Castle was beginning to look like an abbey abandoned during the Reformation, only not as neat and tidy.
Oh yeah . . . I jotted one more thing down on my list.
5. Go for a long walk in the woods with Lizzie, and get her to show me the abandoned encampment.
I wanted that torn down, removed, cleansed. Picking up Magic again, I went back upstairs and actually slept for three hours, waking up feeling more like myself than I had in years.
Chapter Fifteen
THE LIST WOULD need to be tweaked, I discovered. I got a call first thing in the morning from Sheriff Grace asking me to come in and sign a statement. If I was going to be out and about, then I may as well do the things on my list that required a trip to town.
Shilo and I, following directions—turn left off Abenaki at the Autumn Vale Community Bank—found the tiny police station. Located at the end of obscure and brief Valley View Avenue, the sheriff’s department was a small, modern building with a barracks-like look, narrow, slit windows, and overall gray, drab appearance. I left Shilo in the car, went in past the big, glass, double doors, and was guided to Sheriff Grace’s office by a young female deputy. I sat down in an uncomfortable chair across the desk from his leather swivel chair. He joined me moments later, but not before I examined his walls, the “artwork,” such as it was, included local citations for his coaching of the town’s Little League baseball team and an honorary membership in the Brotherhood of the Falcon. They had made him an “Eyas,” which I guess was a fledgling falcon. Other than that there was a pleasant if nondescript watercolor of an autumn forest.
As he took a seat across the desk, I remembered my late-night thoughts and blushed. I don’t blush. Ever! But he was very good looking: dark, wavy hair, thick enough to catch your fingers in, and just that bit of shadow along the jaw, very much like Miguel always had five minutes after shaving. I have been alone a long time, I thought. Nothing wrong with a little late-night fantasizing if it was left to late at night. I took a deep breath as he slid some paperwork across the desk to me, regarding me with that steady, unsmiling look he had perfected.
“This is the list of what we took from the castle,” he said. “It’s mostly paperwork, anything with Tom Turner’s name on it.”
“Was there a lot with his name on it? Why would there be?” I squinted and examined the paper. Pretty soon I was going to have to admit that I needed close-up glasses—cheaters, my mother had called them. Oh, joy. Anyway, it was a simple list, though from it I could not tell what each document pertained t
o.
The sheriff shrugged. “Old Melvyn and the Turners were involved in some real estate deal that went bad, and there were lawsuits, so there was a fair bit of paperwork and we just wanted to look it over more closely, see if we can find anything that has to do with Tom. It’s a mess of bank loans, defaults, zoning problems, and missed deadlines.”
Bank loans? Oh, lord, I thought, I hope that the estate is not saddled with a mountain of debt, undiscovered until now. I was going to have to take this seriously and untangle the mess before the property was actually salable. I felt like I had been wearing blinders, and they had just fallen off. Lawyer Silvio, among others, had some ’splainin’ to do.
“Your uncle also wrote nasty notes to the Turners, and vice versa,” the sheriff went on. “I know about a lot of this because I was occasionally involved, called in by both parties at different times. I know very well what those two old men were like.”
“But they’re all dead now,” I said, glossing over the fact that no one truly knew what had happened to Rusty. Despite Binny’s and Dinah’s hopes, I figured the old guy had probably died, and his body just hadn’t been discovered yet. Maybe he went for a walk and fell off a cliff. Who knew? “What does this have to do with Tom’s murder?”
“We don’t know. But there were things mentioned in the letters . . .” He stopped abruptly.
I was intrigued. “What kind of things?”
He regarded me calmly. “Tom was well-enough liked by many, but he had his peccadilloes.”
Peccadilloes; is that what they called them in a small town? I smiled inwardly. “Such as?”
Bran New Death (A Merry Muffin Mystery) Page 15
