Death of an English Muffin

by Victoria Hamilton

  Pish and I loaded the car with big tubs of muffins and squares, as well as two more boxes of books that I had gone through, from my grandmother and mother’s horde. I wanted to check in with Hannah anyway, make sure she was all right after the events of the day before, and the books made a good excuse. As I drove Pish and I talked but came to no conclusions and I dropped him off at the bank, where he was going to work with Simon Grover for a while.

  My estimation of Simon had gone up considerably since I first knew him as the incompetent boob who managed the bank almost into ruin. He had applied himself and brushed up on his financial skills and was now the actual bank manager once more, not just a figurehead. My opinion had skyrocketed, though, since he’d come to his wife’s defense. Loyalty is an underappreciated trait in a husband. Pish and Simon were working on some kind of secret project; I had a feeling it had to do with investments in Autumn Vale, but I wasn’t sure.

  I made two stops, first Golden Acres just in time for the lunch cooks to know they had the muffins they needed. After that I parked on the street outside Vale Variety and Lunch, ran their muffins in, and spoke briefly to Mabel Thorpe, who was back to being stern and uncommunicative. I then retreated down a side street and parked outside of the library. I ducked inside to the cool dimness that smelled of books. Hannah was at her desk. Isadore was at a far table continuing to un-dog-ear books.

  “I brought muffins for you two,” I said, glancing at Isadore. “And two more boxes of my grandmother’s books. There are more classic Agatha Christies and a complete set of Dorothy L. Sayers.”

  Isadore looked up, eyes wide and glistening with book lust. “I’ll come get them,” she said, her voice creaky with disuse. Her hunger for new books warmed my heart, but I already appreciated her since she was devoted to helping one of my favorite people in the world, Hannah.

  She came out to the car. I handed her one box and I took the other, topped by the baggie of muffins I had set aside for Hannah. Isadore went off to a corner table with the boxes and began unloading them while casting longing looks at the muffins. Hannah made a pot of tea using her little electric kettle behind her desk, then called, “Tea time!” to her assistant. Isadore happily took a cup and a muffin to her table and began to sort. I was overjoyed that someone would get use out of my grandmother’s books, almost all hardcover classic mysteries up to the eighties or so. The people of Autumn Vale would get many years of reading pleasure from them and my grandmother would be happy, if she only knew.

  “You just missed a nice policeman; he took my statement and talked to Isadore, too,” Hannah said, glancing up at me, then devoting herself to her muffin, ripping it into little chunks and devouring each one, like a hungry bird. “I was shocked to find out it was murder, after all! That poor woman.”

  I stirred sweetener into my tea and crossed my legs while she ate. “Did you see anything?”

  “Not a thing, or at least nothing important. I stayed well away from Miss Sanson.”

  She didn’t need to say why. “Have you faced that a lot in your life, people like her and how she treated you?” I asked. She nodded. “How do you deal with it?”

  She frowned and broke off another chunk of muffin, then took a sip of tea. “I guess I should qualify that. I’ve never faced anything as bad as what she said. She was just a sad old rude person.”

  I thought of a few better adjectives for the late Cleta Sanson that I didn’t share just then, as I tried to think kindly of the dead.

  With a thoughtful frown, she said, “I guess I can deal with the Miss Sansons of the world better than I can those who talk to my parents about me as if I’m not there. Or who avoid me and won’t look me in the eye. The rude ones I can confront, but what do you say to someone who you know is basically a good person, but they don’t realize they’re acting like I don’t have a brain? Or a heart?”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said, reaching out and touching her shoulder. “It must be tough.”

  She shrugged. “The very worst are the ones who cry, or tell me how brave I am. What can I say? I’ve tried to tell them I’m not brave, I’m just who I am, dealing with stuff just as they are, but then they argue with me.” She smiled, her huge gray eyes glowing with mischief. “Sometimes I get them running in circles. I can’t help myself! It’s so funny to ask for things from a top shelf, and then have them put it back, and ask them to read the fine print, and then have them get something else. It’s mean, I guess, because they’re only trying to be nice. Such good people! But I can’t help it sometimes!”

  I snorted with laughter and choked a little on my tea. “You are an evil woman. Fortunately for you I happen to agree with Jane Austen; pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked, so I’m glad you’re not perfect.”

  “But then I feel bad,” she said softly. “They don’t mean to be the way they are.”

  “Patronizing? Condescending?” I knew her well enough to know that she was uneasy criticizing people and I was pretty sure she didn’t think they were being either of those things. In a world of sorrow and hurt, it was so nice to find a fellow optimist, one who believed that most people were kindhearted.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” she said, straightening her shoulders. “I suppose the police are out at the castle. Is Virgil there?” she asked, eyeing me with a sly smile. Even murder couldn’t keep her romantic heart from hoping the sheriff and I would find happiness together.

  “Yes, he’s there, and no, there is still nothing going on. He is steadfastly stupid about it. Of course, the middle of a murder investigation is not exactly the time for flirtation.” My stomach lurched even thinking about it; another murder investigation! It was beyond belief. Worse, it was likely that we were harboring the killer in the castle, though that seemed a little difficult to imagine. One of those ladies, a killer? I shook my head in dismay.

  “Oh well. Did Lizzie’s photos help them out at all?”

  Lizzie’s photos. My eyes widened. Crap! How had I missed that? “You are brilliant, you know that?” I said to Hannah, and explained what I meant, that we had all forgotten that Lizzie had been snapping photos all afternoon.

  I texted Lizzie—I had given her a cell phone for her birthday in February, the only time I had ever seen her speechless—asking her to e-mail the photos to me but not to delete them! The police were going to want them, but I knew there was a good possibility they would take the camera and delete the photos from it once they had grabbed them, so I wanted a copy first.

  Lizzie called me right away. She had a spare study period and had snuck out of the library. “Do you think there’s anything in the photos?” she asked.

  “It can’t hurt to look, right? They’re time-stamped, so we’ll have some idea who was where, when. Can you e-mail me the photos?”

  “I’ll use the school library computer and send them out.”

  “Can you send a copy to Hannah, too?” I said, glancing over at my friend. Hannah had more than once caught something that I had missed. “And don’t show them to anyone else!”

  “Done giving orders yet?” she snapped.

  “See you back at the castle.” I clicked my phone off.

  “I’ll look at the photos and see if I can construct a timeline of where Cleta was and when, and who she talked to,” Hannah said. She had a librarian’s tidy, organized mind, while mine was chaotic and messy.

  “Thanks, kiddo,” I said, standing and stretching. “While you’re at it, if you wanted to snoop into the Legion ladies pasts, I would not object.”

  “I’d be delighted!” Hannah said.

  “Gotta go. The muffins aren’t getting any fresher!”

  From the library I stopped at the bakery to get some fresh rolls to go with dinner. As the bell chimed, Binny hopped out to the counter from the kitchen beyond.

  “Merry! Just who I wanted to see,” she said.

  “Nice to hear that,” I r
eplied. “I need two dozen of your Portuguese rolls, and two loaves of French bread. Oh, and maybe some of those lemon tassies,” I said, pointing out the tiny lemon-curd tarts that filled a pan in her glass pastry case. “Two dozen.” As she bagged and boxed my order, I asked, “So, what is it you want to see me about?”

  Her eyes were shining, though she looked as disheveled as usual. Her face was pink from the heat of the kitchen and her ponytail, restrained by a net, was mashed. But still . . . she looked happier than she did when I first met her, and that was good.

  She finished boxing the tarts and shoved them across the pass-through counter to me. “I found something very interesting! Check out that teapot, the one with the Alice in Wonderland scene and the treasure chest as a knob at the top.”

  I followed her pointing finger and saw the one. Binny, like me, collects teapots. It was what I noticed the very first morning I came into town and stopped at her bakery: the shelves and shelves of teapots. I took down the one she meant, and removed the lid. Inside was a folded note, and I was struck by déjà vu as I unfolded it. Last time such a note had led us into the woods and to a satchel of stock certificates that weren’t worth the crumbling paper they were printed on.

  I read the note:

  You will find your heart’s desire in the upper reaches of wynter; seek and ye shall find!

  “What does this mean?” I asked, looking over at Binny.

  “Wynter . . . spelled that way it has to mean the castle, right? And the upper reaches would be the attic? Seek and ye shall find. . . . Your uncle did leave a fortune hidden somewhere! It says so right in the note.”

  “No, it says you’ll find your heart’s desire.” I sighed and refolded the note, stuffing it back in the teapot. “We’ve been through this before, Binny. It’s nonsense. Even if it was written by my uncle”—it was his handwriting, though I didn’t want to admit it—“he was a little nuts toward the end, everyone says so. And who is to say this note is even from him? It could be some weird joke by a townie trying to make us look like idiots.”

  Binny folded her arms over her flour-coated baker’s apron. Her lower lip protruded, and I remembered that scowl from the first time I met her, when she had warned me away from Wynter Castle with dire threats of death. Her look was so much like Lizzie’s; the resemblance between niece and aunt was marked. Her eyes narrowed and she looked scheming. “Tell you what; I’ll do all the work, and if I find something we split it, seventy-thirty.”

  “You’re wasting your time, Binny.”

  “It’s my time to waste,” she pointed out. “I need money for Dad’s legal fund. We still don’t know if he’s going to be prosecuted for the bank crap.”

  She referred to the trouble her father had been in over his construction company’s dealings with the Autumn Vale Community Bank. I thought everyone was going to let go his involvement, given how much he had suffered, but you never knew. There was a new prosecutor in the county, and she was rumored to be tough.

  “Okay, all right. You can do what you want. But the split is fifty-fifty.”

  “Sure,” she said, with a smug smile. “If you don’t want seventy percent you can have fifty.”

  I tried not to laugh as I picked up my bag and pastry box. Either way, seventy or fifty percent of nothing was still nothing. “See you at the castle, then.” I got to the door, opened it, and looked back. “But you had better not do any damage or make too much of a mess. No tearing up floors or tunneling through drywall or stone. Deal?”

  “Deal. I’ll be out one evening to start.”

  I went back to my car and headed up, out of the valley and toward Ridley Ridge, or, as I call it, The Town That Joy Forgot. Even in spring, a time of green and growth, blue skies and hope, gloom seemed to stagnate the weather in Ridley Ridge. A ceiling of gray clouds scudded across the sky like a blanket pulled over your head, and a chill wind blew down the main street, chasing balled-up newspapers like tumbleweeds.

  I found a parking spot on the main street. I only had one stop, to see Susan, my favorite glum, lackadaisical, and ambitionless waitress at the café. I carried a plastic tub in and helped her pile the muffins in the domed glass display platter on the counter.

  “I heard about the murder,” she said, her eyes shining for a change. She had her limp hair wound up into an elaborate braid coiled around her head, an odd look for someone with a round face.

  “Yeah, it’s a shock,” I said as I made out an invoice for her boss, the owner, Joe.

  “I heard about the woman’s niece, you know. Folks here are saying she did it.”

  “Lauda wasn’t at the luncheon,” I said, sidestepping the implied question: what did I think happened?

  “But she could have gone out there, couldn’t she? I mean, what’s to stop her? Anyway, I heard she was listening to the wrong folks about you all at the castle.”

  I looked up as I tore the invoice from the pad and set it on the scarred Arborite counter, sliding it across to her. “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t know?” Susan leaned over the counter. “She was boarding at Minnie’s house before the murder. Is that a coincidence or what?”

  Minnie Urquhart, enemy mine, who hated me for some reason, I know not why. Lauda’s behavior when she pushed her way into the castle to stay in her aunt’s room came back to me, as well as her determination not to have me or anyone else make up the room for her. I remembered Minnie’s incessant questions and change of demeanor when I went to the post office last time. Her sudden chattiness was odd, come to think of it. I shook my head. I didn’t know Lauda well enough to know if her behavior when she moved in to the castle was a personal quirk or a determination to search Cleta’s room for something.

  She was an odd duck, for sure. If she had been listening to Minnie . . . Susan was right. Lauda had just clawed her way to the top of my suspect list. I needed to find out where she was during the tea, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. Besides, I reminded myself firmly, Virgil was in charge. He had his team searching Lauda’s room, keeping her out until it was thoroughly done. If they found anything, he’d know what to do. If they didn’t find anything, though, given that she had been in the room overnight, that didn’t mean much. I sighed. My mind was flip-flopping back and forth worse than a jumping bean. Lauda hadn’t had a chance to dispose of anything except in the garbage, which I assumed Virgil would have already checked.

  I said good-bye to Susan and headed to my car. Minnie Urquhart and Lauda—maybe I would ask the sheriff’s opinion of the likelihood of Lauda being the murderess of her aunt. If it was probable or even possible, she’d need to move on somewhere else and leave Wynter Castle for good. I drove along the back roads in a thoughtful frame of mind.

  Chapter Twelve

  I RETURNED TO the castle to find the police still there, but in a reduced presence, two sheriff’s department cars. Virgil emerged from the castle just then. He strode over and opened my door, offering me his hand to help me out. He then got the muffin tubs out of the backseat for me. What a gentleman, and no, I’m not being sarcastic. I enjoy the niceties between the sexes, and his behavior was lovely. But as usual, his presence left me a little breathless, especially with him in uniform, broad shoulders straining the khaki fabric of his shirt, brown tie askew, dark hair rumpled by the fresh spring breeze, hat in hand. The evening of Shilo and Jack’s wedding we had danced, and I enjoyed the experience too much for my heart rate. We chatted, got comfortable with each other—I thought—and parted on good terms. I’d expected a phone call, maybe an invitation to coffee, but after one brief, odd visit when he was loopy on cold meds, he backed off and became a chimera, and ever since he acted like a cat that had been scalded would around boiling water.

  “Hey, Virgil, any news?”

  He set the tubs on my car hood and stared over my head toward the woods. “Not so far. No obvious connections, no obvious culprit. I have a few things I�
��m wondering about. I have to go somewhere right now, but can I come back and talk to you this evening?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did I tell you yet? I have some news.” He told me that the last person who had killed someone in my poor castle was going to be sentenced after pleading guilty to manslaughter, a reduced charge. “I was hoping for life, but you never know with a plea deal.”

  I nodded and shivered. Violence had touched my life too often since I’d moved to Autumn Vale, and I was being blamed in the town by some who clearly wished I had never come to claim my inheritance. And speaking of that . . . I looked up at him, watching his eyes. “Virgil, I just heard that Lauda was staying with Minnie Urquhart. Did you know that?”

  He nodded. “Minnie rents out rooms in her house. No big deal.”

  “It concerns me. Minnie is still telling everyone that I’m the reason things in Autumn Vale are going to the dogs, as she calls it.”

  “Can you picture Lauda and Minnie conspiring to kill her aunt and blame you just to get you in hot water?”

  I shook my head and sighed. “Not funny, Virgil. But is it possible? Could Lauda have done it?”

  “You know I can’t divulge our investigative process, and I won’t speculate. Do I think any of you are in danger? How do I answer that? I’m not a psychic.”

  “Should I be kicking her out?”

  “Merry, I don’t know what to say. You have to follow your own instincts, I guess. Can’t believe I’m saying that. But everyone in the castle and quite a few others have not been eliminated from the list of persons of interest.”

  I glanced back at my beautiful castle, gleaming golden in the sunlight that streamed down on it. “I do have something else. I don’t know if they’ll be any help, but Lizzie took pictures most of the afternoon before wandering off into the woods. They’ll be time-stamped. I don’t think there will be any of the time closest to the murder, but it can’t hurt to look at them.”

  “I’d like to see them.”