Muffin But Murder (A Merry Muffin Mystery) (3 page)

“I’m ho-ome,” I sang back.

Cranston, Gordie, and Zeke came in the front door at that moment, loaded down with the rest of the stuff I had bought at the Party Stop, just as Shilo, trailed by a smiling Pish, came down the stairs to greet me. The resulting clash was tumultuous. Shilo threw herself at me with some complaint about something Pish wouldn’t let her do—I think it was paint her room fuchsia—and Cranston preened, telling Zeke and Gordy where to deposit the bags. Becket strolled into the great hall at that moment and began washing his butt; a cat can get away with that in polite society. I smiled happily. I was home.

Cranston futzed around for a while longer, then headed off to wherever he went when he left. For the first few days of our acquaintance he had hinted that he would love to stay at the castle, but I dug my heels in. Until I knew he was Melvyn’s grandson, I wasn’t going along with that. He was staying at some bed-and-breakfast or boarding house nearby, as far as I knew.

That evening Pish and Shilo told me some of what they had found up in the attic while I was slithering through Ridley Ridge. There was, according to Pish, an embarras de richesses. Shilo said she wasn’t embarrassed at all, and in fact thought all the riches were cool. There was no point in explaining what that meant to Shilo, and why would we bother? Not everyone needs to get every snobbish literary or classical reference.

There were oodles of furniture up there, as well as trunks and trunks of random goodies, they told me. While Shilo rhapsodized about the vintage clothing—she was toying with dressing as a flapper girl for the party—Pish was intrigued by what appeared to be boxes of financial records of the family dating back many years. While I couldn’t muster any excitement over those, I was interested to learn that there were old photo albums up there, too.

We spent the evening planning the party décor and the placement of the casket, which Zeke and Gordy were bringing to Wynter Castle on a flatbed truck that Gordy would borrow from his uncle, the farmer. The coffin, with a mannequin, was going to sit on a low table in the great hall and be the welcome to the castle; Pish was planning to rig up the sound system he was working on so some maniacal laughter would emanate from the half-open oak casket. That was as far as I wanted the décor to go in that direction, I reminded him. I did not want kiddie Halloween party gruesomeness or a funhouse atmosphere.

The alarm clock woke me the next morning just as a ray of autumn sunshine peeped past the drawn curtains. I rolled out of bed, groaning, “Time to make the muffins!” Mornings dawn early when you’ve promised four dozen muffins to an old-age home and another dozen to the local café. Muffins, my downfall in New York City, had proved to be my saving grace in Autumn Vale, New York. My temporary business, called The Merry Muffin for obvious reasons, was going great guns now that I had the castle kitchen vetted and licensed as a proper place in which to bake food for the masses.

I showered and snuck downstairs, trying not to awaken my friends, who were still on New York City time, where nothing gets going until ten
AM
. Or at least not in my circle. I let Becket out the door—he had his own mysterious catty business to take care of, I suppose—donned a hairnet and got to work, baking two dozen spice muffins, two dozen bran, one dozen carrot, and one dozen apple.

Since my stuff had come from storage, I had made myself comfortable in the kitchen, which boasted, thanks to my uncle’s ambition, an industrial-size oven and stovetop and stainless steel countertops worthy of any inn kitchen. Whatever holes there were in my equipment supply I had been able to fill from Janice’s junk store, so I even had industrial-size baking sheets for cookies and squares, which I had added to my repertoire.

The kitchen was a long room, and now had a cozy nook at one end where the fireplace was topped by a mantel adorned with oil lamps and the more rustic of my teapot collection. I was using what I could of my own stuff to mingle with all that had been left in the castle when I inherited it, which was a lot. The huge Eastlake-style furnishings—including a marble-topped maple sideboard in the dining room that was eight feet tall, which fit the grand size of the room—along with random samples of furniture from every era in American history, made the castle a warm environment, but it was my decorations that were bringing it to life. When I had time, I was going to work on the dining room, where a long oak dining table and a huge Eastlake china buffet were currently cluttered with the remainder of my rather large teapot collection.

I was just taking the last of the muffins out of the oven when Pish, looking spiffy and dressed for town, jogged into the kitchen and grabbed a cup of coffee. He was followed by Shilo, still wearing footie pajamas—charming on her: she’s twenty-nine but looks about ten years younger—and carrying Becket.

How had he gotten back in? “No cat in the kitchen,” I told her sternly, but she didn’t listen to me and set him down in one of the big armchairs near the fireplace.

“I have to go into town today, my
darling
dumpling,” Pish said, laying a kiss on my floury cheek. He grabbed an apple cinnamon muffin and perched on a stool by the distressed wood worktable.

I eyed the sport coat and sweater vest he wore and smiled. Pish can be flamboyant, his dialogue sprinkled with exaggerated emphasis and wild hand movements, but he buttons it down when need be, like while talking to the federal agents who were examining Autumn Vale Community Bank. He was working with them to try to uncover and minimize the damage done to the bank by the scheming Dinah Hooper, who now languished in a federal prison awaiting trial for the murders of Tom Turner and Melvyn Wynter. She had not been granted bail, as she was considered a flight risk.

I said she was a flight certainty, but then I had looked down the barrel of her rifle and survived. To say I was happy they were keeping her out of circulation would be a vast understatement. “I’m going in about twenty minutes,” I said. “Is that too early for you?”

“Not at
all
my dear. I’m going to see Isadore this morning before the bank.”

Isadore Openshaw, a former teller at the bank, had not been arrested—yet—and was cooperating with the federal agents. Pish felt sorry for Isadore, and I think she had become something of a pet project of his, the plan being to keep her out of trouble and reform her life. He told me that she reminded him of an aunt who had floated in and out of his life when he was a kid. That poor woman eventually died alone in a house overrun by cats, and he foresaw a future like that for Isadore if someone didn’t intervene. Given how unpleasant she could be, I wasn’t sure Pish was ever going to succeed, but his charm and good nature gave him a better chance at it than most.

“Will you invite her to the party?” I asked.

Shilo snorted. I turned to where she sat, curled up in a chair by the fire with Becket in her lap. “What’s up?” I asked her.

“I was trying to imagine what costume she’d come up with.”

I smiled, knowing that her laughter didn’t hold any malice. Isadore was peculiar in her dress. She tended toward homemade shifts sewn from fabric featuring frolicking cats or enthusiastic, bleary-eyed bunnies. She wore jewelry to match, dangling kitties or bunnies with carrots. “Maybe she’ll come wearing a Donna Karan skirt suit.”

Pish and I headed out twenty minutes later with six tubs of assorted muffins, most for Golden Acres and a few for the café. I dropped him off near Isadore’s home, the house she had inherited from her cousin. It was a gloomy little bungalow with a dark front porch that loomed on the house like a beetle brow. He had never yet been in the house, but I knew he would keep trying to befriend her. He’d find his own way on to the bank, then back to the castle, he told me, likely with Jack McGill, who would be making one of his daily trips out to see Shilo.

I then pulled up to Golden Acres and delivered the muffins to the back kitchen, where I had made fast friends with the sole, overworked cook. It was morning snack time in the parlor, so I joined the group and sat with Doc, who was drinking a cup of premium coffee he had filched from Gogi Grace’s private stock.

“It’s gonna close, you know it’s going to!” one old guy was stating loudly, shaking his cane at no one in particular.

“What are we complaining about today?” I asked Doc.

“Everyone’s afraid the bank is going under. That’s what happened in Ridley Ridge a few years back—to the community bank, that is . . . used to be the Ridley Ridge Savings and Loan—and look at that town now. Folks in Ridley Ridge, their mortgages have been sold to some big bank and they can’t get ahold of no one when they need to talk. Damned shame.”

I shuddered. “Was that town ever anything but a gloomy hole in the wall?”

“Sure was,” Doc said. “Used to be a happening place. When I was young we went there for the church dances. That’s where I met my wife in ’47. Since the main bank closed up, the whole town has gone into decline. Only thing there now is a couple of ATMs and a teenie branch office of Wells Fargo.”

“Pish is doing his best to keep the Feds from closing AVCB down. Maybe Wynter Castle will be the happening place now,” I said, handing him his official invitation to the party. “Gogi will bring you, or Virgil will.”

He grinned, yellow teeth exposed. I was curious, given his penchant for weird headwear, what he would decide to come as—a vintage scuba diver was my first thought; he would love an antique diving helmet, no doubt—but I looked forward to it.

I had other locals coming, too. Hannah, the local librarian, was coming as Clara from the kid’s book
Heidi
. She is a tiny young woman confined to a wheelchair, and though she has some physical disabilities, they are overcome by her huge heart, deep intelligence, and sunshiny personality. Her parents were coming as Heidi’s grandfather and Clara’s housekeeper, Fräulein Rottenmeier.

So far, Hannah had not been able to convince our young teenage friend Lizzie Proctor to come as Heidi herself. Lizzie would die rather than be seen in braids and a dirndl. She would be there, though, along with her new friend, Alcina, an oddly fascinating child who flitted through my forest wearing faery wings. I assumed
she
would be coming to the party in her normal garb. The teenagers were not guests; I had promised to pay them if they would empty ashtrays in the smoking court, take coats, and report back to me any weird goings-on. It was Autumn Vale; I
expected
weird goings-on but wanted to know about them anyway. Gordy and Zeke would be my doorman and unofficial parking valet, respectively.

“Doc, have you thought any more about Melvyn and Violet, what you remember about their courtship?”

He nodded, slowly. “Seems to me Vi might still have some family in these parts. She left and moved to New England, but her family might have kept in contact with her and be able to tell you what’s what.”

“Can you write down whatever you remember?”

“I sure will.”

“Good. Thanks.” I finished my coffee. “I’ll check in with Hannah. If anyone can track them down, she can.”

“Don’t let that Higgins fellow take the castle away from you, Merry,” Doc said, taking my hand in his gnarled fingers. “You’re a good girl,” he went on, patting my hand, “and Melvyn always regretted not having contact with you over the years. But your mom . . . she just wasn’t having it.”

“I know. I wish I knew why.”

Chapter Three

I
HATED
S
HILO
’
S
CAR
.
It was decrepit, held together by duct tape and hope and fueled by desperation. I needed another one but couldn’t bring myself to spend any of my quickly dwindling resources on something that was only going to cost me more and more as I went. When I had time, I was going to have someone come out to the castle to look at the two cars my uncle had stored in the garage—the 1940s car I remembered riding in at the age of five was still there and might be worth something to a collector—and I did hope that his 1970s Cadillac could be rescued. Until then, I had to use Shilo’s beater.

I tootled along to Binny’s Bakery and parked in front. This wasn’t a delivery; Binny would die before she would sell something as prosaic as muffins in her shop. The girl was capital-
S
stubborn. Autumn Vale would have devoured cookies and muffins, but instead she gave them brioche and mille-feuille at cut-rate costs to try to educate their palates. I kept trying to tell her that it wasn’t education they needed; they liked her stuff
once in a while
, especially since she was selling mille-feuille at oatmeal cookie prices. But the citizens of Autumn Vale, or Valers, as I had taken to calling them, wanted the foods they were familiar with most of the time. Don’t we all? It was no use; Binny was a stubborn as her father, Rusty, and that was saying a lot. The old goat had survived for months living off the land and running from imaginary Russian mobsters, with only a shed and then a tent as shelter. That takes a lot of stubborn for a seventy-something man.

So I made muffins for anyone who wanted them, with Binny’s blessing. We had gotten over the hump of our early relationship when she thought my uncle had killed her father and that I may have killed her brother. Now that she had her dad back and Dinah Hooper was in jail awaiting trial in Binny’s brother’s murder, we were actually on friendly terms. Having found out that Lizzie Proctor, my prickly teenage protégé, was her brother’s daughter had given her a boost in spirits, though Binny was never going to be a smiley girl.

I entered the bakery, which had been my first stop when I entered Autumn Vale almost two months before, since Binny lives for baking. She opens at
insanely
early hours; she figures she’s there anyway, so she may as well be open. Although I was there today for green tea powder, which I could not find in any store in Autumn Vale, I was also curious about Binny’s new employee. I approached the counter. “Hi there. You must be Juniper!” I said.

The girl looked up, and at first I thought she hadn’t slept much until I realized that it was makeup; her eyes were ringed with dark eye shadow. It was a terrible look. I used to be a stylist to models for photo shoots—that’s how I met my late darling husband, Miguel Paradiso—and for a while the “heroin chic” look was the style, but thank heavens that was over. This girl had not gotten the memo.

“What can I get you?” She indicated the glass bakery case with a lethargic gesture.

“My name is Merry Wynter,” I said, sticking my hand across the counter and examining the girl. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties, and under the obligatory baker’s apron she wore a Def Leppard tee and black jeans. Her black hair was restrained by a jaunty baker’s cap that said
Binny’s Bakery
on it, but her dark eyes, with the kohl shadows, appeared listless and dead. She did not shake my hand.

I dropped it and said, “I’m a friend of Binny’s. Is she here?”

“Yeah.”

“Could you get her, please?”

“Okay.” She turned away and ambled back to the bakery.

As I waited, I examined the teapots as usual. Binny’s collection was almost as extensive as mine, but she had some unusual pieces that I coveted. She had already given me an adorable Capodimonte with a raised relief of a girl and donkey that was given to her by Dinah. Oddly enough, it had proven to hold a note my uncle had written—actually just a snatch of Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Trees”—along with some scrawls in different handwriting, presumably Dinah’s. When I discovered a series of tree names in Becket’s collar, I thought the poem might have been pointing to some kind of mystery my uncle had planned out. We surmised that Dinah Hooper was working on finding the legendary Wynter treasure, and had stolen the piece of paper from my uncle on one of her visits, then tucked the clue in the teapot as a way of hiding it in plain sight, kind of like in “The Purloined Letter.”

We still hadn’t figured out my uncle’s code, though. It was quite possible that we were overcomplicating things, but I hadn’t had the time or brain energy to reason it out.

“Hey, Merry, I’ve got the stuff for you,” Binny said, lifting the pass-through section of her countertop and joining me in front of the teapots.

I took the baggie of green powder as Juniper eyed it with a narrowed gaze. “Green tea powder,” I said to her, in case she thought it was something else. She looked skeptical. Where had Binny gotten this winner? “Hey, Bin, you want to come have a coffee with me at the café? I have to go drop off some muffins.”

“Sure,” she said. “You can handle the store, Juniper?”

The girl nodded and slumped down on a stool behind the counter.

A brisk autumn wind had come up and swept down the lonely street. I retrieved the tub of muffins from the car and we hustled together the fifteen or twenty steps down to the café, going through the variety-store part and right back to the luncheonette. It could have been mistaken for a retro fifties diner except it was just caught in a time warp and had never been redecorated. The floor was still checkerboard tile, albeit cracked and worn, and the counter was still chrome-edged Arborite. The tables and chairs looked straight out of
Back to the Future
.

I handed the tub of muffins to the cashier, who knew what to do with them, and grabbed a seat at a table with Binny. Once we had our coffee and muffins, I asked her how she found Juniper.

“I advertised online and got a couple of enquiries, but Juniper . . . she really needed the job so badly! She’d been working in Ridley Ridge but got fired and didn’t have anywhere to go.”

“You hired her
just
because she needed the job,” I said, my tone flat.

“Uh-huh. I let her use the apartment above the shop, too, until she gets on her feet.”

“Where are
you
staying?”

“With dad, at the house. He’s still not well, and until we get everything sorted out . . .” She shrugged. “He likes the company.”

Her father, Rusty Turner, had been through a dreadful ordeal, hiding out in the woods with Dinah Hooper feeding him a line of bull about how the Russian mafia was after them because of some hinky dealings she had coordinated through Turner Construction. He finally figured out she was the dangerous one when she sent her son, Dinty, into the woods to kill him. By a stroke of good luck, the old guy managed to avoid harm and actually killed Dinty in self-defense. Dinah came after Rusty, furious about the death of her beloved son, and thanks to Becket I happened to be in the right place at the right time and, while escaping her capable aim with a gun, led the police to her.

It had been an eventful couple of weeks, but everything had settled down and the last month had been calm and relatively productive. “So Juniper was the best you could find?”

She made a face at me and looked away. “She needed this job so much.”

Maybe it was the cynical New Yorker part of me, but I would never give a job to the one who needed it most. Shouldn’t she have chosen the best candidate for the job rather than the most needy one? Not my business to encourage her to look into the girl’s past a little before trusting her too much, I told myself firmly. It was a little late for a background check anyway, because Juniper had the cash desk all to herself right that very minute. I changed the subject and told Binny about my weird experience at the party shop in Ridley Ridge the day before.

“That’s funny,” Binny said. “I’ve never been there, but Juniper actually knows that guy, the one who owns the store. That’s where she worked before me.”

“So that’s who fired her—Les Urquhart?”

“I guess.”

“Did you call him for a reference?”

“Well, no. I mean, he
fired
her. He wasn’t going to give her a good reference, right? Juniper said he harassed her.”

“Uh, Binny, did you check
any
references?”

“Not really.”

I took a deep, cleansing breath. If she wanted to put a complete stranger in charge of her till, it was Not My Business. I’d have to make up a tune and keep singing in my brain, Not My Business. I took another deep breath and let it out. I was working hard on not interfering in other people’s lives. For some reason, that’s difficult for me. Pish says I’m a compulsive empath, but I disagree. Isadore Openshaw came though the front door right then and strode to the luncheonette. She approached the clerk and said something.

The woman shook her head. Isadore hammered on the counter, and shouted, “But I need a job! I’ll wash dishes, or clean floors.” Her voice was reedy, and she seemed on the edge of tears.

I ached for her, even though she was the single most difficult woman to help that I had ever met. The store manager came in response to the ruckus and escorted Isadore out, hustling her through the tables of coffee drinkers and breakfast eaters. Binny and I were silent for a few moments, both of us looking down at our hands, but I couldn’t stand it. I rushed after them, and said, “Hey, don’t be mean to her. She just needs a job.”

The manager, a dour-looking woman in her sixties with iron gray hair in tightly permed curls, said, “Don’t care. No shouting in the café. Folks are trying to eat.”

Isadore wouldn’t meet my gaze and allowed herself to be escorted out. I was tempted to go after her, but from experience I knew she’d freeze me out. Instead I went back to Binny and told her that Pish was trying to help Isadore, but she was prickly. It was entirely possible that, even if she’d been home, she hadn’t answered the door when I dropped him off that morning. Binny looked shell-shocked. “Gosh, if I didn’t already have Juniper, I’d give the poor woman a job.”

I sighed. I was having to remind myself not to interfere
a
lot
this morning and was only having moderate success. I
wanted
to tell Binny that the last thing she needed was a secretive, morose, oddly dressed middle-aged woman selling her goods. Of course, right now she had a secretive, morose, oddly dressed twentysomething doing the same, so it would be trading laterally.

We parted ways, and I headed down the street to Crazy Lady Antiques and Collectibles. Janice Grover, wife of Simon Grover, the embattled bank manager of Autumn Vale Community Bank, owned the store. She’s a passionate hoarder who got into the junk business to try to clear out her home. At one point a few weeks before, she hadn’t even been talking to me, convinced I had railroaded her husband into trouble. We had since mended our acquaintanceship, and she was a valuable source of “stuff,” all the ephemera one needs to make a place like the castle decent.

She had, in her off-site warehouse, granite urns, wrought iron planters and outdoor furnishings, statuary, garden boxes, and lengths of ornate fencing. In the store she had chandeliers, candelabras, settees, tables, Persian rugs, and a host of other things that were slowly converting the castle to a place to some warmth. She and Pish had actually become even closer than she and I, since they shared a love of opera and period costume dramas. She was flamboyant and weird and invaluable.

I sidled into her store past a shelf loaded down with junk and let my eyes get used to the dimness. “Janice, yoo-hoo!” In the time it took to say that, I noticed a cute marbleized Formica dinette set I couldn’t use in the castle, and about a dozen bibelots I couldn’t use either but would likely buy anyway.

“I’m coming.” When she came into view, she was radiant in a fuchsia caftan and dream catcher earrings. She was also wearing a tiara. “Hey, kiddo! How’s it hanging?”

“Low and to the left,” I said. It had taken me a while to get her sense of humor, but by now nothing fazed me in Autumn Vale. I had begun to think there must be something in the water. Whenever I left the town to go somewhere else—Rochester, Buffalo, even just nearby Batavia—it felt a little like waking up from a dream, one of those odd ones where the bizarre seemed completely normal while you’re in it. “How is Simon doing?”

“Not bad. Pishy is taking good care of him, but poor old Simon is finding it hard to catch up with all the regulations he ignored for years.”

Simon Grover had been a lazy and ineffectual bank manager, content to sit in his office and roar for coffee while reading the paper and doing the Jumble puzzle. Dinah had blackmailed Isadore into several infractions of rules that Simon had signed off on without fully understanding, and they had fallen between the cracks of a complex system in a difficult banking atmosphere for a year or more. The Feds were investigating, and Pish had helped hire a professional management team from New York in his effort to save the bank for Autumn Vale. If Simon could get up to speed, he might save his job, but it was hanging in the balance.