“Oh. Well, I’m not really an Autumn Valer, so I wish you luck, but I don’t see what I have to say about it.”
The two women exchanged looks. The lawyer’s wife shrugged and turned to get milk out of one refrigerator.
“Merry, this is Sonora Silvio, Andrew’s wife,” Janice said huffily. “She’s helping me get these sorry dopes organized, and I’m staying for the meeting whether they like it or not. I was just trying to convince Sonora to stay, too.”
“I’m sorry, Janice,” Sonora said, her voice colored with a faint accent, probably Cuban. She poured milk into a couple of pitchers and put them on a tray that already held sugar bowls, sweetener packets, and cutlery. “I have to go to my son’s school for pizza day. Petruchio likes me to be there.”
“Merry?” Janice said, turning to me. “What about you?”
I considered it; I really did. For a few seconds, at least. “I just can’t, Janice. I’m sorry. I have a million things to do, among them dropping off muffins at the café and some other baked goods at Golden Acres.” I smiled at her as I unpacked my tubs, then tried to change the subject. “Did you have fun the other night at the costume ball?”
“Sure,” she said as she scooped coffee into the huge coffeemaker, then set it to percolate. “Dumber and I had a grand time.”
“Did Pish have anything to say last night at your place?”
“You mean about Virgil accusing him of killing that idiot who got his throat slashed, as if Pish Lincoln would do anything of the kind?”
I was happy Pish had staunch support in Autumn Vale other than from Shilo and me, but Sonora was frowning over at Janice, then at me. I shouldn’t have brought up the subject. I mentally shrugged; pretty soon it would be all over the place anyway, so better to present it in the best light, as something patently ridiculous. I briefly described what was going on with the murder investigation but did not get into the specifics of my friend being under suspicion. She had already heard much of it.
“My daughter Giuletta heard from a girl in her class that the dead man was dressed like a cowboy. Is that true?”
I nodded, wondering if her daughter’s school friend was Lizzie.
“I wondered,” she said. “That explains a lot.”
“What do you mean? Did you see the guy?”
She nodded. “I saw him, I think, along with two others on his way to Autumn Vale from Ridley Ridge. I was coming back from doing some shopping, and they cut me off. I followed them to give them a piece of my mind, but I couldn’t get them to stop.”
“Your lucky day,” I said. “Given what happened later, I mean. I believe he was killed by someone he knew, maybe even someone he came with. Who else was in the car?”
She frowned and tilted her head, staring up at the stained ceiling as she pondered. “I did not get a perfect look, you understand, but there was someone with what looked like a black wig and someone else in the backseat.”
“Hullo, hullo, what are you little ladies doing here?” a voice boomed.
A tall gentleman, probably in his mid-seventies, stalked into the room and rubbed his hands together. “Gabbing, huh? Gossiping? Ah, gotta love the ladies.”
“I have to go,” Sonora said, and hopped toward the door, waving good-bye. “Talk to you all later!”
Darn! I wanted to ask her more questions and tell her to let Virgil know what she’d seen. I would have to be sure to pass her name and story on to him myself; I made a mental note . . . a car with three people in it, one with a black wig. Now, who was this fellow? I observed with interest.
Janice smiled up at the man. “Elwood Fitzhugh, just the fellow I wanted to see.”
He sidled up to her and put his arm over her plump shoulders and squeezed. “You finally ready to leave that old tub o’ lard for me, sweet missy?”
I thought she’d deck him for talking to her that way, but instead she smirked up at him. “Poor Simon. You’re too hard on him, El. No, I wanted you to meet Melvyn’s great niece, the one who inherited the castle! Merry, this is Mr. Elwood Fitzhugh, the zoning commissioner before Junior Bradley was hired.”
“Well, now, aren’t you just the spittin’ image of your mama!” he said, staring at me and nodding.
“You saw the picture Melvyn kept,” I acknowledged.
“Not at all, not at all,” he said. “I met your mama!”
“You met my mother,” I said, stupidly repeating that startling statement.
“I surely did. Don’t you remember me? I guess you were such a wee scrap of a child, and pretty tuckered. I was heading to Rochester to get some information on a builder who had done some work in Autumn Vale. I was about to head out of town when the cab driver from Ridley Ridge—the one who your mama called, you know—flagged me down.”
He turned his long, lined face up to the ceiling, squinting, then looked back down at me. “If I remember right,” he said, waggling his finger, “his cab blew a tire and he needed someone to take you and your mama to the train station in Rochester. Would I do it? he asked. I said sure, didn’t mind the company, and so I took you both to the train station, and your mama and I, we chattered the whole way, hour and a quarter—or more, the way I drive. She was a fumin’ the whole time over Melvyn and how bullheaded he was.”
I stood for a long moment staring at him, stunned. When I was very young, not long after my father died, my mother and I had made a trip to Wynter Castle, but the visit lasted only overnight. My mother and Melvyn argued, and we left abruptly. But it seemed that Mr. Fitzhugh had talked to my mother just after the fight. I had a vague memory of being moved from the cab to another car, which must have been his.
What had she said to him, I wondered? In the heat of the moment, had she spoken of issues she never would talk about later? I wanted to talk to him at length, but there was one burning question that, if answered, would give me some perspective on all that came after. “Mr. Fitzhugh, did my mom say why she and my uncle fought?”
“Oh sure,” he replied. “Your mama was a spitfire, I will say. She was mad at Melvyn because he wanted you both to come and live at the castle.”
Chapter Eleven
I HAD BEEN HEARING the noise level increase from the room beyond the kitchen but hadn’t paid much attention to it until that moment, when I heard a loud bang-bang-bang, like a hammer on wood. Elwood’s ears perked up and he half turned toward the open door.
“Meeting’s starting. Gotta go.”
“No, wait!” I cried and grabbed his shirtsleeve. “Mr. Fitzhugh, please . . . Why was my mother angry that Melvyn wanted us to come live at the castle? We were broke by then, and it would have been a lifesaver.”
His brow wrinkled and his long face held a puzzled expression as his gaze strayed back to the babble of voices from beyond the kitchen door. “Can’t remember, offhand. Seems to me there was more, but . . .” He shrugged.
I could tell his attention was more on the meeting beginning in the other room. “Mr. Fitzhugh—”
“Call me Elwood!”
“Uh, Elwood, could we meet to talk this over? I have so many questions, and you’re the only other person in Autumn Vale, besides Melvyn, who saw my mother.”
“Well, sure, missy. How about I come out to the castle? Curious to see what you’re doing out there.”
“Would you come out tomorrow for lunch? I could show you around and tell you my plans. Since you were the former zoning commissioner, I’d be curious to know what you and my uncle talked about.” And what my mother told him, I thought, but did not say.
He agreed, and then headed in to the meeting with one more saucy wink and grab at Janice.
“I’m going in there. Are you coming with me?” Janice said.
I was still stunned by meeting someone who had seen my mother in Autumn Vale, but Janice’s plight tugged at my civic concern. She was right that someone needed to confront the bozos who
thought it was okay to exclude women from a town council meeting, and if she was going to do that, the least I could do was support her. “I can’t stay, but I will go in there with you as a show of support.”
She sailed—like a majestic barge, I must say—through the door into the hall—a dimly lit, smelly cavern of masculinity—and I followed. It was dismal. There were no open curtains, so the place was dully lit by some dusty pendant lights dangling over a big, open hardwood floor, where rickety folding chairs, half of them occupied by men and the rest empty, straggled along in haphazard rows facing a lectern. Another row of folding chairs arced behind the lectern, and these were occupied by Andrew Silvio, Simon Grover, Elwood Fitzhugh, and some other locals I knew as the elected town supervisor and two councilmen. I hadn’t actually met the men, but as they spent every morning at Vale Variety and Lunch swigging coffee and acting like they were solving the problems of the United States of America, I had seen them many times. I supposed the men in the rows of chairs were Brotherhood of the Falcon members, and maybe some of the others were locals.
Simon was at the lectern blustering about how Junior Bradley had fooled them all, and how he would need to be replaced while they considered pressing charges against him, and how Simon didn’t know how this had happened and the councilmen would need to take ownership of their part in the fiasco. While he was yakking, Janice and I calmly took seats at the end of the front row and stared at him until he trailed off, looking confused.
“Uh, what do you ladies want?”
Janice stood and turned to face the men in the audience, her bearing queenly and her expression stern. “What we want is an equal say, and that means coming to town meetings as a citizen of this town, even in your little boys-only club. And if you are going to continue holding Town Council meetings at the Brotherhood Hall, then I move that the hall should be open to women at all times to foster an atmosphere of inclusiveness.”
Simon turned red and hammered on the lectern, shouting, “Janice, you can’t make a motion; you’re not a member.”
I was getting confused, so I said, “This isn’t a Brotherhood meeting, though, is it?”
“Well, no, but . . . but . . .” Simon trailed off.
Elwood stood and said, “I say we go along with the ladies. This is a new century, boys, and the old ways are gone, much as we might mourn them. For myself, I say the ladies would add a bit of interest to Brotherhood meetings that are stale.” He winked at me as murmurs of approval drifted through the seated gentlemen, and Silvio nodded. It appeared that Simon might be the only Brotherhood member who was still for the boys-only rule.
Simon had regained his poise, such as it was. “Of course ladies are welcome to any town meetings held at the Brotherhood Hall, but as to the Brotherhood of the Falcons, well, we’ll have to discuss it amongst ourselves at another time.”
Janice nodded. It was good enough for the moment, but I didn’t think she was done. Her husband had proved himself to be the doofus she had long suspected, and now he was reaping the rewards.
“I have to go, Janice,” I murmured. “Are you good here?”
“I am just fine,” she murmured. “Come by the store another day and I’ll show you some stuff I’ve got for the castle.”
Just before I exited, I turned and saw Janice survey the gathering, then turn toward the men behind the lectern. She said, in a booming town council voice, “I want to ask what we’re going to do about development in Autumn Vale? There are too many empty storefronts, and we need to encourage folks to move here if we’re ever going to revive our economy. I say we start by making one of those vacant buildings downtown our new town hall, and move meetings there! And another thing—with elections coming up, we have to consider who best will help our town and township move ahead, rather than stagnating like Ridley Ridge.”
Atta girl, I thought, as I left. I thought I may just have witnessed the birth of a local political superstar. I’d have voted for her, if I’d had a vote, for town supervisor.
I dropped off muffins for the Vale Variety and Lunch, then headed to Golden Acres, a modernized and expanded manse in a pretty section of town. It was the soporific hour after breakfast but still an hour or so before lunch; many of the old folks had toddled off to their rooms for a nap, while others sat dozing in the sunny front parlor. I had set Doc a task and wondered if he had come through. I had asked him to write down anything at all he could remember about the mysterious Violet and my great uncle.
After delivering the muffins to the kitchen, I went through to the front of the retirement home, where oldsters snoozed and gabbed on cool autumn mornings. Gogi had set up a kind of honor bar for senior ladies and gents. It was a buffet with stacked teacups and mugs and two giant urns with coffee and tea in them.
She said if folks paid their twenty-five cents, it was good, but if they didn’t, she was fine with it. The price of a cup of coffee or tea was worth it to see the smiles it induced. It gathered folks in one place who might not normally come out of their rooms or their shells. Something for free, or next to it, was a great lure for those on fixed incomes. Old age is all about connections, Gogi had stated. These folks had seen friends and loved ones die far too often, and so any new friends they could make to fill the void were welcome distractions.
I found Doc there on a sofa in a shadowy corner by a bookcase, his feet up, a book on his lap. It somehow didn’t surprise me that he enjoyed Carl Sandburg’s poetry. Doc may have appeared to many as an odd duck, but I saw the piercing intelligence in his twinkling eyes, and our conversations had ranged over a wide variety of topics. He cracked jokes, sometimes willing to appear as the crazy old dude, but his intelligence was formidable. His opinions of the world at large had been formed at home, then broadened by his time spent overseas in the war, when he and Melvyn were young bucks looking for adventure. His vigor suited Sandburg.
“How’d you like the party the other night, Doc?” I asked, sitting down beside him.
“Huh? Oh, hello, Merry. It was a good one. Met some interesting folks, ’specially your buddy, Pish. In my day we woulda called him a swish, but I don’t say that no more. He has a way about him. I like him a lot.”
“I like him, too,” I said. “What did you think of the final event of the night?”
“You mean the dead body?”
I nodded.
“You know, I saw that fella a coupla times in the evening.”
“The guy dressed as a cowboy?” Hooper had been the only cowboy, a stroke of luck for the investigation.
“Yeah. He was talking to a girl dressed kinda hoochie, with some frizzy blonde hair stickin’ out under a dark wig. Looked like they were arguing.”
Aha, so we had a connection between the two, the cowboy and the hooch, aka Zoey Channer, and an argument. Interesting. I remembered what Sonora Silvio had said about the cowboy and someone with a dark wig in a car, and I wondered if they had come together. So many questions, so few answers. “Did you hear what they were arguing about?”
“Nope. Damn music was too loud, and that Cranston, your maybe cousin, he talks a blue streak and was trying to yak over the music.”
“What did you see, then?”
“That girl . . . first he tells her off over something and walks away, then she comes up to the cowboy and shakes her finger in his face. He turns away, but she grabs his arm, and he shakes her off. Then he storms off toward the terrace, with her following like a raft in his wake.”
I mused on that. What connection could there be between Zoey Channer and Davey Hooper? Was it really them in the car together? “Did you see anyone dressed like Sweeney Todd?”
“Sweeney what?”
I was about to explain, until I saw the glimmer in his eyes. “You know who Sweeney Todd is . . . wild hair, barber coat, etcetera.”
He frowned down into his cup and twisted his lips into a grimace. “I did see him, but only early on, the
n he disappeared. Why does he figure into the tale?”
I shrugged.
“Carryin’ a straight razor,” Doc said, and nodded. “So that’s how the cowboy was done in.”
Excellent guess, as was often the case with Doc. “You mustn’t share that with anyone!” I cautioned, glancing around. Not that any one of the half-dozen dozing seniors would be listening in, but still. . . .
“Doctors keep a lot of secrets,” he said, with a nod and a wink.
My head was swimming, but I seemed to have reached the last of the information Doc had about the party. “So, what have you got for me?” I asked, wondering if he had remembered his task.
I should have had more faith. He pulled a couple of lined sheets from the poetry book and handed them over, then watched me as I unfolded them. His scrawl was as bad as any doctor I had ever known, so it took me a little time. I knew that Doc had gone to school after coming back from the war and had become a doctor on the GI Bill. He told me that Melvyn had taken advantage of another part of the program, low-interest loans for servicemen, to start improvements on the castle.
I read what he’d written:
Violet (can’t remember her last name) was a pistol, a redheaded firecracker. She and Melvyn started going out when we were all in high school, and everyone thought they’d get married right after graduation—set up house at the castle—but then Pearl Harbor happened and me and Mel enlisted. Him and Vi had a fight of some kind, but we had to go off to training, and he didn’t have time to make it up to her. He wrote, but she never wrote back. We came back to Autumn Vale after basic, but only for a few days because we were being deployed.
I don’t know what happened while we were home. Mel was going through some crap, but so was I. My old man was sick, and everyone knew he was dying. I was the oldest in my family. My old man wanted me to look after my mother. I didn’t know whether to go or stay, but I couldn’t stay, not since I had enlisted, so I tried to help my mom out as much as I could.
Muffin But Murder (A Merry Muffin Mystery) Page 13