Bran New Death (A Merry Muffin Mystery)

by Hamilton, Victoria

  A newcomer. I blew air out of my lips, my bangs fluffing out, and she grimaced in sympathy. “I guess I’d better go and find the other newcomer in town,” I said. I took a last look around at the boxes and tables and shelves jammed with junk. It was so packed in the shop, I was on sensory overload, and I’d need a day or more to explore. “I’m going to have to come back and look around. You might even have some stuff I need.”

  “You bet! That place needs dressing up. Say, I have a storage place—kind of a warehouse on the outskirts of town—where all my big stuff is stored, like outdoor stuff. You need to have a look. I’m usually here, even when the sign says Closed, so just bang on the door anytime and I’ll take you there.” She sighed. “It’s my hobby and my addiction, I suppose.”

  I went out and circled to the side of the building, on a narrow lane, finding the door right where Janice had said it would be. I hit the buzzer, and after a few seconds, a window slid open above me. The nicely coiffed Dinah stuck her head out.

  “Good morning,” I said, looking up. “Can I come up and talk to you?”

  “I was just on my way out,” she said. “Do you want to meet me at my new shop?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Would you like coffee, or something from Binny’s Bakery?”

  Her expression brightened. “That would be nice! Meet you there in ten minutes!”

  Food smoothed social communication, I’ve always thought. There was a reason many deals were done over lunch at nice restaurants, and it wasn’t just the booze. I got a selection of pastries from Binny’s and two coffees to go from the Vale Variety, and headed to Dinah’s storefront.

  The door stood wide open, and she was inside, moving a couple of folding chairs to a small, teetery, wrought-iron table. I “hallooed” and entered, carefully navigating through boxes with the cups, box of pastries and my purse.

  “Here, let me help you!” she said. She took the box and trotted back to the table, propped it open, and set a stack of paper napkins beside it.

  I put the coffees on the table, as well as the creamers and sugar packets, then tucked my purse under one of the chairs and sat down.

  “This is nice!” she said with a bright smile. She eyed my skirt suit, pointed, and said, “I love the color!”

  It was a robin’s egg blue, not perhaps very fallish, but it was a lovely cut and fit well. I had put my hair up and was wearing gray pumps and chunky jewelry to make the color seem less out of sync with the season. After all, it was after Labor Day but not quite autumn yet. “Thank you! Loehmann’s Back Room,” I said with a grin.

  She sighed. “I miss shopping. I only make it to the city once or twice a year. Rochester and Buffalo are okay, but they are not Manhattan!”

  She was stylish, like Gogi was. I wondered if the two women were friends, being of similar age and tastes. I wondered why Dinah stayed in Autumn Vale, now that Rusty and her job were gone. I wondered a whole lot of things, but didn’t want to rush the inquisition . . . er, chat. “You do manage to find Prada, though,” I said, pointing my spoon at her handbag. “And Balenciaga!” I shifted my pointer to her shoes, chunky-wedge platforms.

  “Rochester has a few good shops. I’ll take you there sometime, maybe?”

  Having bonded over a similar taste in nice clothes, handbags, and shoes, we continued over awful coffee and wonderful French pastry. “Binny is wasting her talents here,” I mumbled around mille-feuille, which crumbled in my mouth and showered my lap with crumbs.

  “That is God’s own truth,” she muttered. “She should still be working in New York City.”

  As we drank coffee and ate pastry, I mentioned my problems with cell reception. She nodded. Autumn Vale itself was kind of a dead zone, she said, because of its location in a deep valley with few towers close by. It was definitely underserved.

  “Your best bet is to switch providers.”

  She went on to advise me that if I didn’t want to do that or didn’t think it would help, I could have Wi-Fi installed at the castle and have my cell phone jigged to ping off it, or some such nonsense. I’m substituting words; it was all too technical for me. “I am impressed, and a little in awe,” I admitted.

  She shrugged. “I have to deal with stuff like that all the time, so I’ve worked out the bugs.”

  I looked around the empty, uninspired space, wondering what Dinah would do with it. But I had other fish to fry, as my grandmother used to say, and many questions to ask. “So what is a nice, stylish woman like you doing in the cultural desert that is Autumn Vale?”

  She shrugged and took a sip of coffee. “It’s as good a place as any, I guess. Cheaper than a city.”

  “I’d take you for a Florida sort,” I said. It was true; she looked like a Boca Raton real estate agent, or a senior sales associate at an upscale boutique catering to wealthy retirees.

  “Can’t stand hot weather,” she said with a laugh.

  “I still can’t imagine why you came here to live, of all places!”

  “I knew someone who lived here, and it seemed like a nice area. Then I found a job, and just . . . stayed.”

  “Who did you know in town?”

  “It was an old friend, but she died a year ago,” she said, her eyes watering. She ducked her head down and dabbed at her eyes with a napkin.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I gave her a moment, then asked, “What do you plan on doing with this shop? Have you decided?”

  For the next ten minutes, she sketched out her plans for a florist-slash-design boutique. It sounded like the kind of place I’d shop, but I had to say, “Do you think that will fly in Autumn Vale?”

  “I hope so,” she said. “I need to find some way to make money. I have a little cash to set up with, but if it goes under, I’ll be broke. I’ve tried looking for a job, but there’s nothing. Since Rusty disappeared, most of Turner Construction’s jobs dried up, too, and I didn’t even take a salary for the last three months or so. Tom just wasn’t like his father, you know? The boy had no hustle.”

  Rusty’s disappearance had hurt her in more ways than one, it seemed. “I don’t want to probe a delicate subject, Dinah, but you seem sure Rusty is alive. Where do you think he went?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Then why do you think he’s still alive?”

  She set her lips in a straight line and frowned, wrinkles gathering on her forehead, below her fluffy, white-blonde bangs. “He left a note, see.”

  “He did?” That was the first solid evidence I had heard that he had skipped town and not died. Binny hadn’t said anything about a note.

  “He did. He went to the bank and withdrew ten thousand dollars, and when I went to work the next morning, I found a note on my desk.”

  “What did it say?”

  “It said he had business to take care of, and not to worry, that he would be back.”

  “He didn’t say how long he’d be gone?”

  She shook her head. “He didn’t say anything to his kids, which surprised me. Him and Tom had been fighting, so I guess I shouldn’t have expected Rusty to say anything to him, but Binny . . . Lord, the sun rose and set by that girl, according to Rusty. He would have done anything for her. Him not telling her . . . well, it’s odd. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think why he up and left like he did.”

  She sniffed and reached into her bag, drawing out a packet of tissues and blotting her mascaraed blue eyes carefully. “He’s been gone so long. I have to . . . I’m starting to think something happened while he was away. If I knew where he was going, I could check with the police there and hospitals, but . . .” She trailed off and shrugged. “That sheriff is no good at all. I keep hounding him to try to find Rusty, but he’s not doing a darn thing. I just don’t know what to think! And now, with Tom dead . . . poor Rusty! He’s going to be devastated with how he left things with Tom. When . . . if he comes back.”

  “What did they fight over?”

  “I just don’t know. I think it was business, but I’m not sure. There
was something going on between Rusty and Melvyn. I knew that, but I didn’t think Tom was involved, other than it had to do with his father. There were lawsuits and bickering and turmoil. Gosh, it was nasty! Old Melvyn came out to the office with a double-barrel shotgun one day and called Rusty a low-life, lying snake.” She shook her head, but there was a faint smile curving up her lips.

  “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!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  "YOU 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.”