Muffin But Murder (A Merry Muffin Mystery)

by Victoria Hamilton

  “Magnificent!” I breathed, staring at a chest of drawers with an ornate mirror topping it. It made the set I was using seem modest in contrast.

  We actually moved some of the furniture downstairs to an empty room so I could use it for the turret bedroom once I was done redecorating. It was fortunate that I was a strong woman and that McGill looked stringy but was strong, too. We then moved a bunch of stuff to the edge of the attic stairs, ready to take downstairs as well. I could already picture the turret bedrooms finished. One would be the Eastlake room, complete with a washstand topped by a pitcher-and-bowl set, with a wardrobe that was too big to move without help but was earmarked for one of the few walls without windows. The other turret bedroom would be done up in traditional Victorian style. I was having far too much fun with the planning, and it was worrisome, given that I was doing all of the work for someone else.

  I dug through a stack of boxes, many of which had china and serving pieces I couldn’t wait to investigate further. Then I came across a box of photo albums and started trembling. Was my dad in there, in that box? Would I recognize him if he was in a photo? I moved it from place to place, then finally shoved the box aside. I was on the edge of my nerves shattering. I told Shilo I’d had enough and needed to go back downstairs.

  It’s hard to explain to people who have had family their whole lives, but I’ve been independent a long time, and my “family” has always been my circle of friends. It was hard to get a grasp on this whole other part of my past, a Wynter family that had existed for hundreds of years and of which I was the living relic. I had to get away, out of the stuffy attic, where I sensed the ghosts of Wynters. Shilo understood and let me go.

  It was time for me to make dinner, anyway, and cooking soothes me like nothing else. I put on a pot roast, surrounding it in the Dutch oven with lots of potatoes, carrots, garlic, onions, and wild herbs. The aroma was divine, wafting in puffs of steam from the pot. While it was cooking, I tried to go back to planning for the sale of the castle, but my mind was just not in it. I was in no-man’s-land, wandering between worrying about a second death at the castle and who was guilty to Pish’s situation as a suspect to Cranston’s claim on the estate to what the heck I was going to do with it all. Despite how frantic the uncertainties were in my mind, at least it was a change from a few months before, when my worries had been about my career, how I was going to make a living, and who would hire me.

  We ate in the kitchen, Shilo, Pish, McGill, and I. The tension began to unknot from my shoulders as I listened to Pish’s plans for his book. He was using the Autumn Vale Community Bank as an overarching story line, with chapters in between discussing various aspects of bank frauds. He was going to have to travel some for it, but he was wealthy and had the time and means. I wondered when he was going to get bored with the isolation of Wynter Castle and want to go back to the city. What would I do without him?

  I turned to ask Shilo something and caught her smiling over at McGill; his expression, goofy with love, made me smile. I was just so grateful for friends at a time like this that I forgot about my worries for the moment. “Let’s retire to the parlor,” I said of the newly furnished room just beyond the dining room. “We can start a fire and plan a wedding!”

  The parlor was a smallish nook, in comparison to the size of the other rooms, and was furnished now with antiques, some that belonged to the castle collection and some I had found at Janice’s shop. I loved the room, from the rich wine-colored Victorian draperies to the Persian rug, and including the antique settee and low rosewood table, upon which I had centered my silver tea set, a wedding gift from my mother-in-law.

  While Pish worked on building a fire in the parlor, McGill, Shilo, and I paced out the great hall, and I expanded on the ideas I’d had for a winter wedding the very first time McGill had shown me the place. It amazed me how the last two months had progressed: he hadn’t known the wedding we’d be planning would be his own! I had them stand, hands joined, in front of the fireplace, and my vision blurred. Suddenly I had become a crybaby, but I was so happy for Shilo, who looked up at McGill with trust and love in her eyes, her head back and long dark hair flowing down in waves. I had styled her many times, and this time I could see her in front of a roaring fire, a vision in white, a circlet of flowers on her hair. McGill I would put in a jacket but no tie, and certainly no tuxedo. He didn’t suit anything too formal. It was going to be beautiful.

  We gathered in the parlor around the fire with Shilo and McGill on a low settee, and Pish and I, like a mother and father, sitting in wing chairs opposite them with the low round table between us. I made tea for myself and Shilo, while Pish cradled a brandy and McGill sipped his ever-present Dr Pepper. We chatted about the wedding, but then the conversation inevitably turned to the murder.

  It was a ball of confusion to me, I admitted.

  Pish said, “You’ve assumed that Juniper attacked this Zoey girl because she was dumped by Les in Zoey’s favor, right?”

  I nodded. “There wasn’t anything specific that gave me that idea, except . . . well, I assumed Les fired Juniper because their relationship ended, and it sure seems like Zoey is with Les now.”

  “But you just told us that there was a long-haired guy hanging around Les, right? Maybe you didn’t notice, but Davey Hooper had long hair. And couldn’t he equally as likely be the guy Zoey met through a cellmate? Hooper was in jail, too.”

  “Yeah, I had thought about that. And actually, I did tell Virgil about the guy hanging around Les’s store, and that maybe he was Davey Hooper, but I guess everything that happened just knocked the waitress’s skinny, long-haired ‘vampire’ out of my mind. So you think that maybe Hooper is the guy Zoey was hooked up with, not Les? If so, she sure doesn’t seem cut up that he’s dead.”

  “But Juniper does, right?”

  I thought about Pish’s conjectures, but McGill was ahead of me in some ways.

  “So maybe Davey Hooper was hanging out in Ridley Ridge to be near Autumn Vale so he could get close to where his brother died?” he asked.

  We had gone over the possible reasons behind Davey Hooper’s sojourn in Ridley Ridge many times, and I had privately considered that he was setting up to blackmail Pish some more. But how had he figured out Pish was at Wynter Castle? It wasn’t something I could talk to anyone about, so I was left to my own conjectures.

  Shilo said to me, “Maybe he was out to hurt you because you were his mom’s downfall, you know?” She paused and shook her head. “No, I guess that doesn’t work. He wouldn’t wait for the party to attack you, would he? That would be a bad time. He’d just . . . I don’t know, run you off the highway or something.”

  “That’s not a bad point, though, Shilo, that he may have been stalking me using Zoey. After all, I’m the reason his mom’s in prison. But the fact remains: I am not the one who ended up dead—Davey is.” I pondered that for a long moment. “I feel like there’s this big part of the story we’re not seeing, something that would make it all gel. Something that would connect it all together.”

  “Let’s go back to Juniper,” Pish said, sitting back and swirling his brandy. “She was distraught after the party, as you learned from Binny, or if not right after the party, once word got to her about who was killed at the party.”

  I thought about that for a moment, because if Juniper hadn’t been upset until she’d found out who had been killed, that let her off the hook as the killer. “So you’re saying maybe Juniper Jones had been hooking up with Davey Hooper, and that’s why she was distraught when she found out the identity of the victim.” I stared into the fire briefly, then said, “I know the timing of her meltdown seems to indicate otherwise, but I still say we can’t rule Juniper out as killer, if she was the spurned lover. I can attest to that girl being handy with a knife.” I stared into the fire. “And the handprint!” I explained my finding of the bloody handprint on the wall by the smoking terrace.

  Shi
lo shivered. “It’s like some gothic book . . . Curse of the Bloody Handprint!”

  “Maybe she became distraught because she was the one who murdered Hooper and the police questioning scared her,” I mused. “I keep coming back to one question: why did she disappear from the party? Well, she would have had to if she were covered in blood. No one knows how she got home, or even if she went right home.” Unless she had told the police all of that.

  Shilo shuddered and clung to McGill. “Do we have to talk about this right after planning my pretty wedding?” she complained.

  “Yes, we do, honey,” I said, sitting cross-legged in the wing chair. “I won’t rest until this is cleared up.”

  “I know,” she murmured. “Sorry, go on!” McGill patted her hand on his arm and kissed the top of her head.

  Pish said, “Let’s go back first, before talking about Juniper as the possible killer. Say something happened between Hooper and Juniper, and maybe he dumped her for Zoey Channer.”

  I readily adjusted my thinking to having Hooper and Juniper and Zoey in a love triangle instead of Les Urquhart as the male lead.

  “Zoey is rich, or at least her daddy is,” Pish went on. “We know the Hooper family is all about the money. That’s Zoey’s attraction . . . money.”

  “But if Alcina’s fat vampire is Percy Channer, I still think he’s our most likely killer,” I said. I like simplicity, and it just seemed so obvious now that I knew someone fitting Channer’s general description was at the party, had fought with Hooper, and had clearly avoided me. “He was seen arguing with Hooper, and now we know he told him to get out on the terrace. Wouldn’t be the first dad to kill a guy like that if he was buzzing around his wealthy daughter just to score some money.”

  McGill said, “You know . . . that guy, Percy Channer, he may be stocky, but he’s short. I never noticed, but maybe he has small hands and the handprint is his! You have longer fingers than a lot of men, Merry.”

  “That’s true. Okay, you may have a point: the handprint could even be Percy Channer’s.”

  Pish looked unsettled. “But how do we know—”

  As sometimes happens in real life, two things happened at once: Pish’s cell phone rang, and there was a loud gong that meant someone was at the door.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I TROTTED OUT OF the room and toward the front door as Pish answered the phone. Who on earth would be coming to my door late at night in the middle of nowhere? I got nervous for a moment, but McGill had followed me, perhaps with the same thought. We advanced, and I cautiously opened the heavy door, surprised to find that it was pouring rain. In the castle with the drapes drawn, it could be World War III outside and you wouldn’t notice.

  Standing on my doorstep was a very wet, bedraggled Juniper Jones. I started back, and McGill stepped in front of me.

  Wearily, she held up one hand, and said, “Give it up, already. Do I look freakin’ dangerous?”

  I exchanged a look with McGill as Shilo drifted into the great hall after us. She saw Juniper and bolted forward. “You poor kid!” she cried, her voice echoing. “You’re soaked. C’mon in and get dry.” She gave us both a look that told me she wasn’t impressed by our defensive attitudes and pulled the young woman through the door.

  Fine for her, I thought. She had not witnessed the Tasmanian-devil side of young Juniper. I could not forget the way she’d slashed out at Zoey, and I kind of wished I had a metal detector over the castle door, like in your average high school.

  I followed McGill back into the parlor, where Shilo had Juniper ensconced in my chair and was helping her dry her matted hair with a kitchen dish towel. Pish, still on the phone, met my gaze, his eyebrows up around his sparse hairline. Neither of us had seen this side of Shilo. She was a great girl, but humans were generally not her thing. Nurturing was saved for her bunny, Magic. Perhaps she was practicing becoming a mother.

  Becket, who had been sitting on the hearth purring contentedly, paws tucked under his big orangey body, now sat upright and glared at the intruder. Pish had turned away and was murmuring into his phone, so there would be no guidance on this particular social situation from him. What to do with a fugitive from justice, someone I considered a murder suspect?

  She didn’t appear to be dangerous for the moment, though, so I would do what I do best: feed folks. I scooted to the kitchen and made the girl a plate of warmed, buttered muffins and a hot cocoa. She scarfed it all down as Shilo combed out her wet hair.

  “You know the Ridley Ridge Police are looking for you after that little performance at the Party Stop the other day?” I finally said, hovering nearby and watching her.

  “What else could I do?” Juniper said, tears rolling down her cheeks. She swallowed her last bit of muffin and took a long drink of cocoa. “That little rich bitch stole my Davey away and then killed him, like a dog she was tired of.”

  “Zoey Channer killed Davey Hooper?” I blurted out, only part of my brain dealing with wondering what kind of people Juniper knew who would kill a dog of which they had tired. “How do you know? Did you see it?”

  “No, but isn’t it obvious?”

  “Not to most people.” I crouched down beside her and looked up into her troubled face. “Juniper, you have got to have some evidence if you expect us to believe that. Right now you are a contender for the position of suspect number one.”

  “Me?” she cried, sitting up straight in the chair. “Why would I kill Davey? I loved him!”

  “People have killed out of jealousy before; you just told us Zoey stole him from you.” Which was news to us, but I’d ask her about that in a moment. “You were angry about it. And you sure are handy with a knife.” I was wondering what I should do about her showing up out of the blue like this. Turning her in to Virgil would be the obvious choice, but somehow, sitting on my chair full of muffins and cocoa looking young and scared, she just didn’t seem like a killer. A grief-stricken young woman yes, but not a killer.

  Pish hung up and approached us, eyeing Juniper warily. “Why don’t you tell us what happened the night of the party, then, if you want us to believe you didn’t kill him?”

  She sighed, heavily put-upon by our determination to view her with suspicion. My shoulder still ached from trying to pull her away as she slashed at Zoey, so Juniper could just take her martyr attitude and stuff it.

  “I have a better idea,” I said, pulling over a footstool and setting my butt down. “Why don’t you start at the beginning, when you hopped off a bus in Ridley Ridge and got a job at the Party Stop. Or before that, when you first met Davey Hooper.” If I got a feel for whether I thought she was telling the truth, it might help in my decision about what to do with her.

  Had she killed Davey Hooper, as we had speculated? Now I seriously doubted it, and if the police got her in custody, it could possibly end any search for the real killer. I hadn’t ruled out turning her in, but I wasn’t going to leap up and do it that moment. She lowered her gaze and stared into the fire.

  “Juniper, how did you meet Davey Hooper?” Shilo asked, her tone soft.

  Somehow the question sounded better coming from her. Pish took his chair back, and McGill perched beside Shilo. Juniper looked up at Shilo, tears in her eyes. “I met him at a party. I was living in Buffalo working for this dude, this guy who organizes parties and books entertainment. I was just supposed to clear tables and stuff, but he kept harassing me, making me do sh . . . crap jobs. There was this table of guys; I went over to ask if they wanted anything, and when my boss started hassling me, Davey—I didn’t know his name then—said why didn’t the guy go f-f . . . uh, forget himself.”

  It was interesting to me that Juniper was censoring her language in our presence. Why was she bothering?

  “So Davey Hooper stuck up for you,” Shilo said.

  “Yeah,” she said with a broken, tearful smile. Her gaze became dreamy, her complexion in the
firelight taking on a rosy hue. I was reminded of how young she was, only about twenty or so. “He asked me if I had a place to crash. I did, kind of, a friend’s couch, but he told me he could put me up.”

  I was silent. Such offers usually came with strings of the booty-call type from what I had heard and observed.

  “So we started going together,” Juniper continued, “and it was so cool. He was such a chill dude and looked after me, you know?”

  “I heard he had been in jail before,” I said.

  She gave me a withering look. “Who hasn’t been?”

  Everyone else in the room, I was about to say caustically, but I restrained myself. While she gushed, I wondered what she was leading up to. I wasn’t completely certain of her innocence just yet and questioned why she had shown up at the castle door. Could she have attacked Hooper in a fit of jealousy over his new relationship with Zoey? Pushed beyond endurance, had seeing them together at the party, Zoey in her expensive clothes while Juniper served her hors d’oeuvres, driven her to murder?

  I tried to do the mental gymnastics, to stretch my belief system to picture her killing the guy she adored, but on reflection, I didn’t think so. If she was going to kill anyone, it would have been Zoey. I still strongly favored Percy Channer as the culprit since finding out he had been at the party. I tuned back in to her story as she admitted to following Davey to Ridley Ridge. “Why on earth did he come to Ridley Ridge in the first place?” I asked.

  Juniper looked uneasy. “He, uh . . . he was mad about his twin brother dying and his mom being put in jail.”

  As we suspected. My skin crawled when I thought of someone plotting revenge or trying to come up with a way to make me sorry. I didn’t know if that was his intent, but just knowing he had been out there and angry about Dinty’s death . . . Had he sent Zoey to spy on me? Is that why she had been watching the castle?

  “How did you know where he was going? How did you know to follow him to Ridley Ridge?”