“He is one tough bird,” I said in admiration. “Did he really live out in the woods all that time?”
“Sometimes in the woods, sometimes he broke into sheds to sleep, sometimes he even went back to the house, but he didn’t dare stay there.” She shook her head. “Can you believe it? Dinah had him convinced Russian gangsters were after him.”
“Russian gangsters?” I wanted to laugh, but that would have been inappropriate.
“I know, right?” she said, shaking her head with a smile on her pink-cheeked face. “It was a couple of guys she worked with. I remember them . . . they came into town with fake accents and black suits.” She laughed out loud, a great honk of sound.
I could see Lizzie in her; the Turner gene pool was strong in both of them. “Dinah had him reeled in.”
“Still, who believes that kind of crap? I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on him, but he should have talked to me.” She shifted the bakery box from one arm to the other.
“He probably didn’t want you to be involved.” Or he didn’t want his beloved daughter to know about the mess he had made of things. “If you don’t mind me asking, did he know about what she was doing, at any point?” I had been wondered about that; was Rusty aware of the illegal nature of what Dinah was doing from the start, or was he totally oblivious?
“Not really.” She grimaced and shrugged. “He kind of knew about some of it, but she told him there was a legal way to make money by setting up some corporations. He and poor old Melvyn had been working on a plan to develop this place to be Wynter Acres.” She shuffled in place, kicking at the flagstones that edged the drive. “Tom drew up a plan, and got his buddy Junior to give it the green light, and it got bundled into the whole scam operation. My dad found out, but he didn’t want Tom to get in trouble. Then Melvyn got wind of it, got POed, filed a lawsuit to stop them using his name, and threatened to expose the whole thing.” She shook her head.
That explained the shoddy plat. “It’s a mess,” I said, “and it’s going to take time to sort out.” Junior Bradley was going to be in some trouble, too, it sounded like.
“You better believe it,” she said fervently.
“But the good thing is, it looks like we’ll be able to get rid of any outstanding lawsuits between us. We’ll talk about it another day.”
She nodded. “Anyway, when Dad got scared by her fake Russian mobsters, Dinah told him he should use his hunting cabin in the woods, just disappear for a while. She’d help him out. He took money out of the bank and gave it to her to help him. She supposedly used it for food. He lived in there for a long time, and she kept upping the ante, telling him the thugs were back, and if he came out of hiding they might kidnap me to try to pressure him.”
“She is some piece of work!”
With a glowering look that reminded me of Lizzie, Binny said, “I can’t wait to see her in court for murdering Tom!” She hung her head for a moment. “Anyway, poor Melvyn must have been suspicious, and I guess he told Dinah that he was going to the cops to tell them what he knew.”
“He got a bank statement in the name of Turner Wynter Global Enterprise, one of Dinah’s shell companies,” I explained. “He was suspicious, all right. All that time he had thought Rusty was in on it, but I think he finally figured out it was Dinah at the heart of it. Especially after Rusty disappeared.”
“Melvyn’s death scared Dad. He heard about it, and I think that’s when he began to wonder if Dinah was scamming him. He left the hunting cabin in the late spring, from what he told me last night, and Dinah has been looking for him ever since.”
“That’s why she kept showing up on her dirt bike in my woods! If I’d known it was her . . . but everyone looks alike, on a dirt bike in a helmet.”
“Anyway, that’s why I want to give this to you,” she said, shoving the box at me.
I stared at the box, which clunked when it moved. Okay, so not cannoli. Darn!
“It’s the Italian teapot you admired in my shop. It’s something Dinah gave to me, and I don’t want it. She said it was valuable . . . real valuable. Told me to keep it on a shelf in the shop for good luck. But you like it and have no connection with it so . . . would you take it? Partly as thanks for . . . for everything?”
And partly just so she didn’t have to look at such a vivid reminder of Dinah Hooper and all she represented, I thought. “I’d love it,” I said sincerely. “I’ll look after it well.”
“I’d better go,” she said, looking off to where Zeke and Gordy were taking a break in the shade. “It’s looking better out here. Not so much like an abandoned graveyard.”
Which reminded me . . . “Binny, there’s one thing I still can’t figure out . . . why was Tom digging holes on my property? Did he or did he not know that Rusty was still alive?”
“I just don’t know,” she said on a sigh. “I can’t believe he knew Dad was alive, or he’d have told me. Maybe Dinah will spill her guts.”
“If Dinty was alive you’d have him to contend with, too.”
“I know, but Dad still feels bad about that. Dinty was a lug, but I don’t think he knew what his mom was up to. My dad has a feeling Dinah told Dinty that he—Dad—was trying to kill her, and that’s why Dinty went after him.”
“Hey, it was him or Dinty. I just don’t understand why Dinah stayed around Autumn Vale for so long. It would have made sense for her to tie up loose ends and take off, start fresh somewhere else.”
Binny shrugged, then snuck a look at my face, and looked away, shuffling awkwardly. “I gotta get going. I’m going to pick up my dad, and we have a lot to talk about. Uh . . . Gogi Grace said . . . she told me something in confidence, something she says you already know.”
I waited.
She eyed me again, but then broke eye contact and looked up at the sky. “I guess . . . that girl who has been hanging around, that Lizzie Proctor . . . she’s Tom’s daughter, Gogi says. Now I get why Emerald kept coming into the bakery. She always looked like she wanted to talk. Maybe she was trying to get the guts to tell Tom the truth. I only knew her as an old high school girlfriend of Tom’s, but I guess they were more.”
I believed that Tom already knew the truth, or suspected, and that’s why he wanted to make money, to help his daughter, but I didn’t say anything. “Have you told your dad yet?”
She shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes. “I want to be sure, first.”
“Gogi is sure and Hannah is sure; I think they both have good instincts about it all. By the way, Lizzie took some pictures out here of the castle and promised to take them in to the library to show Hannah. Can you—”
“I’ll make sure she does it,” said Binny, already in stern-aunt mode.
They were all going to be okay.
*
TWO DAYS OF HECTIC ACTIVITY FOLLOWED. I BAKED muffins at the bakeshop, fielded a few irate phone calls from Janice Grover (she thought I was behind the tub of boiling-hot water Simon Grover and his bank were now in; I set her straight, then went there to buy some stuff), orchestrated, along with Gogi Grace, an emotional meeting among Lizzie Proctor, her grandmother, and mother, and Binny and Rusty Turner. Among all the bustle, I chauffeured Pish back and forth to the police station. My dear friend was “helping” federal officers as they tried to figure out, with the assistance of Isadore Openshaw and a sniveling, frightened Simon Grover, all the financial monkey business Dinah Hooper had created. The woman had been busy with several different scams, among them, ones using the US Postal Service, which, ironically, could wind up costing her as much jail time as the murder charges would net.
I finally had a day to myself, and was out on the front step, drinking a cup of coffee, accompanied by my ginger cat, Becket. Gordy and Zeke struggled manfully along the arboretum forest, clearing brush from the edge; they were almost halfway along. Those guys were proving to be worth every penny I paid them, and the goodwill I was getting in town from hiring locals was astounding. I was making friends. Befriending Gogi Grace, capturing the
murderer of Uncle Melvyn and Tom Turner, and restoring Rusty Turner to his daughter and the community didn’t hurt, either.
Shilo was gone somewhere with McGill, who had finished all of the hole filling, even the one poor Tom Turner died in, and she had offered to ferry Pish into town this time, where he was yet again consorting with the federal forensic accountant. This was like a grand holiday for my wise and wonderful pal; financial scams were a hobby of his, and he knew a lot about them, enough so that he was writing a book on the topic, of which this would be a chapter, I was sure. It said a lot about his reputation that he was actually being utilized rather than shut out of the process.
I heard before I saw the giant truck lumbering up my long and winding drive. It finally came into sight, and pulled up in front of the castle. A burly, sweaty driver jumped down, grumbled his way over to me, and announced, in a growl, that he had my stuff.
He had my stuff . . . yay! It was here, out of storage, at long last! I gave a little hop of happiness, overjoyed at the prospect of unwrapping treasures that I hadn’t seen in years. Zeke and Gordy helped him offload, which only took an hour or so; I directed and Becket oversaw the whole affair from a place of honor, the round table in the center of the great hall. Everything labeled “Teacups” or “Teapots” was to go into the dining room, where the box with the Italian teapot still sat, unopened, on the huge dining room table. Everything labeled “Kitchen” went into the kitchen. Every other box should be piled in the great hall, I told them, so I could unpack and disseminate the contents.
I then declared I was serving a big meal in the kitchen for Zeke, Gordy, and the sweaty driver, who proved to be more human once he was given a towel and washcloth and offered a place to cool off. They all accepted my invitation. We were having a spurt of indecently hot weather in upstate; it was enough to make anyone a little tetchy, as locals called it.
But I still had made soup and sandwiches, as well as a batch of corn muffins. After a long lunch, the truck driver gave the two fellows a ride back into town—neither had a car, but that hadn’t been a big problem while they used Gordy’s uncle’s tractor, which had now been returned—and I was left alone in my beautiful castle.
My insanely beautiful, despicably impractical, infinitely precious, huge castle.
I wandered through, admiring the furniture. Once Shilo and I had taken all the Holland covers off, we found there was a theme to the furnishings, in the largest part of the castle. Eastlake was the most common style, but Pish told me that it was all part of a Gothic neo-medievalist–style revolution of the late Victoria, era. I’m glad he knew that, because I didn’t have a clue. It was all big, garish, and yet strangely magnificent, scaled to fit thirty-foot ceilings and forty-foot rooms.
I made my way into the dining room, where the boxes labeled “Teacups” and “Teapots” had been piled. I hadn’t opened the box Binny had brought yet, but I pulled it toward me across the oak table and used my fingernail to cut through the tape, which held down the lid. I opened the flap and took out the gorgeous Italian teapot, a Capodimonte piece with a raised relief pattern of a girl and donkey. It was in beautiful condition. I took the lid off and examined it carefully, but there were absolutely no chips.
But there was something inside. A piece of paper. Maybe Dinah had left a little note for Binny. I plucked it out and opened it, smoothing it on the tabletop. No, it was a snatch of poetry.
For some are sane and some are mad
And some are good and some are bad
And some are better, some are worse—
But all may be described in verse.
What the . . . ? I recognized the piece; who was it by? It was . . . I searched my brain, sure I had heard those same words before. Aha! T. S. Eliot. From “Old Possum.”
Becket leaped up on the table and nosed the box, causing it to fall on the floor.
“Stop it, Becks!” I hollered, pushing him away. He came right back and nosed at the teapot, then at the note in my hand. “Becks, don’t . . .” I paused as my hand brushed against his collar, which I had put back on him. The tag on it that gave his name and that was all, was plastic, and had survived the almost-year he had spent in the wild since his master was killed. But the tag was oddly thick.
Why hadn’t I noticed that before?
My attention was pulled back to the note. The quote was in different handwriting, a nice, cursive script, than some of the other scribbles on it. And there were underlined words in the verse. It all seemed gibberish, and there was a string of exclamation marks, and a faint penciled phrase. I held the paper up to the light. “What the hell does this mean?” was scribbled in a slanting hand different from the poem.
I wished I knew.
I couldn’t shake the sense that there was some significance to it all, something I was missing. I retired to the kitchen, made a pot of tea, and sat in the chair by the empty fireplace, where, for the first time, Becket leaped up onto my lap. I toyed with his collar, and the tag. The plastic disc covering his name fell out, and out of the opening came a thin packet of paper, which folded out like a paper doll, maybe twenty discs long.
Just then Shilo came into the kitchen with Pish, both of them overheated but excited from their day. I couldn’t attend to what they were saying, though, because I was still puzzling over the paper disks. On each disc was a Latin word or phrase, beginning with Quercus macrocarpa, and on through Acer pseudoplatanus, Tilia Americana, and so on. On the back of the last disk was the name “Kilmer.”
Well, of course when I shared all of this with my friends, Shilo said, popping the lid on a can of cola, “Val Kilmer? Why would old Mel write down Val Kilmer’s name on his cat’s tag?
Pish frowned over at her. “Are popular references the only ones you know? Perhaps it refers to Joyce Kilmer . . . you know, ‘I think that I shall never see a poem so lovely as a tree?’”
“So she liked trees and poetry, huh?”
“It’s not a ‘she,’” I said absently. “It’s a he . . . I mean, Joyce Kilmer is a ‘he.’ They’re actually distant cousins, I’ve heard, Joyce and Val. Pish, do these Latin words mean anything to you?”
He leaned over the chair arm. “Hmm. Well, animals and plants are often called by their Latin names. Does that help?”
My eyes widened. I had actually seen some of these same words, on plaques in the arboretum! I shared my discovery with my friends, and said, “I wonder . . . okay, is this crazy? My mind is making connections. Could this be associated with the woods, and, perhaps a treasure hunt, or something? There are rumors that my uncle left a stash of money somewhere. Maybe that’s why Tom was digging holes on the property. Maybe Dinah thought it was true, that there was money here somewhere, and set Tom onto the task?”
“Could be,” Pish said.
Shilo hopped up and down. “A treasure, a treasure! Let’s go look for it.”
“How?” I said. Wait . . . tree names. Slowly, I came to a conclusion and spoke up. “I think that there is something to this, and I think it has to do with the arboretum. If these are tree names, then the woods is the place to look.”
Pish plunked down on the chair next to me as Shilo danced around the kitchen. “You know what, my dear, I think you just may have something. And I want to be in on the fun. I have a proposal to make. I would like to rent a room from you for the foreseeable future, and move some of my things here. This fraud investigation has got my juices going, and I’d like to make it the central story of my book-to-be.”
“Is it going to be that big a story?” I asked, startled.
“Sadly, my dear, I think so. I’m pretty sure it’s going to go national, if the financial papers get ahold of it. I am trying to do all I can to help the Autumn Vale Community Bank stay alive, because it is in grave danger of folding. That is the more important story here. Those federal investigators don’t really care, but I do. I hate to see small, local banks fail. Diversity in the banking industry is unfortunately becoming quite rare.”
“Yikes. I care,
too. These folks have been through enough tough times.”
His tone honeyed and persuasive, he said, “If I stay and rent a room, Merry, it would help you with the utility bills, which are not going to be pretty this winter. And I can help, then, with the treasure hunt!”
“Deal,” I said, not adding that he had not needed to sweeten the pot, so to speak. Having him around was a treat.
“Deal, deal, deal,” Shilo sang, spinning around.
I took a deep breath. An adventure had begun. In fact, I was in the middle of an adventure, but hadn’t stopped to realize it. I grinned over at Pish, who smiled back, then we both turned to watch Shilo spinning around the kitchen, out of control with love and joy and happiness, followed by Becket, who lunged and batted at her fluttering scarf.
I couldn’t wait to get started.
Recipes
Golden Acres Banana Bran Muffins
Yield: 12 Muffins
1 1/2 cups bran flake cereal
1 cup mashed ripe banana (2–3 large)
1/2 cup milk
1 egg
3 tbsp. vegetable or canola oil
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/8 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 cup chopped pecans (optional)
Preheat oven to 400 F. Grease or paper line muffin cups. If greasing, use cooking spray.
Combine cereal, bananas, milk, egg, and oil in a bowl, mix well and let stand. Stir occasionally to break up cereal. Let stand at least 10–15 minutes or however long it takes for the cereal to break down completely.
Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, spices, and nuts (if using) in a separate bowl.
Bran New Death (A Merry Muffin Mystery) Page 27
