But why wasn’t Pattycakes in the car with Patsy and Barbara, on her way back to New York? Well, despite loving her mother to bits, Pattycakes had found something in Autumn Vale she hadn’t been able to find anywhere else and that she needed badly, given how broke her family now was: a job. She was Binny’s new bakery assistant, and already the good folks of Autumn Vale were lining up out the door and down the street for the lightest, most heavenly cakes and cupcakes this side of New York City. Every day a new selection of German chocolate, vanilla layer, red velvet, and coffee cakes decorated the glass cases in Binny’s Bakery. Binny’s had begun taking specialty orders for birthday cakes, too, as Pattycakes was a whiz at cake decorating.
Elwood Fitzhugh, the seventy-something lady-killing scoundrel, was smitten and had asked her out about ten times already. She was weakening. Despite the age difference he was a charming man, Elwood was, and between her baking and his bonhomie, they could become the power couple of Autumn Vale if they so desired.
Pattycakes shared an apartment above the bakery with Juniper, who had started her own cleaning service in town. Jumpin’ Juniper Superclean, she called it. Elwood had come up with the name. I missed Juniper terribly, if not for her sparkling company, at least for her sparkling toilets, which I was back to scrubbing on my own when Emerald was too busy with Consciousness Calling business.
On a lovely early June day I was stuck up in the attic with Binny, while Pattycakes minded the bakeshop in town. My objective was to dismantle Juniper’s “room” and see what furniture I wanted to use downstairs in the next bedroom to be redecorated. Binny was still intent on finding the clue to the millions she was convinced Melvyn had stashed.
I was dusty, hot, tired, and dirty. I longed for a cup of tea. Fortunately, Pish was cooking dinner, as Stoddart was joining us, so I could work as long as necessary and still have time for a shower in my reclaimed room, Cleta’s former space. I loved my luxurious room with walls that were actually painted and a bathroom that functioned the way it was supposed to.
I had done as much as I planned to do and plunked down on a trunk, watching idly while Binny, on a ladder, searched rafters. Yes, rafters. I was examining my nails and deciding I needed a manicure when I heard a yelp. Binny almost fell off her ladder, but when she scooted down, it was to flap in my face a dusty chunk of paper.
“Read this!” she crowed.
I read it. In my uncle’s sloping hand—I recognized it by now—I read You will find the treasure you seek in the pages of your family. “Pages of my family? What does that mean?”
“Do you have a family Bible or something?” she asked.
“Not that I know of. Pages. Pages of a book? There are other kinds of books. I wonder if he meant in one of the old photo albums; they have pages.”
“Where are they?”
“In a box in the library. I’ve started going though them, but there are still some to go.”
“What are we waiting for?”
I knew I was torturing Binny, but I was not going to go into my beautiful library and start looking through the boxes until I had had a shower and felt clean. I handed her a couple of towels and pushed her to one of the now-empty rooms and told her to take her time. I like to be tidy. An hour later, with clean hair, skin, and clothes, makeup-free, in yoga pants and a T-shirt, I had the boxes out in front of us. Pish ducked his head in. “Binny, you staying for dinner?”
“No, thanks, Pish. Patty is making nachos. I’m going to have dinner with her and Juniper, then I’m taking dad to the Falcon meeting tonight.”
“Okay, just asking.” He looked at me. “I hope you’re wearing something other than that tonight. You know Stoddart likes to dress for diner.”
When he ducked back out I stuck my tongue out at the door.
“Don’t you like Stoddart?”
I shook my head. “He’s judgmental and snarky and sarcastic. He acts like all the folks of Autumn Vale are beneath him. He makes jokes at their expense and doesn’t understand why Pish and I like them.”
“Why do you put up with him?”
“Because I love Pish; he’s family.”
“Speaking of . . .” She grabbed a photo album and began flipping through the pages, while I did the same.
We were silent for about fifteen minutes, when I finally came to the back of the album—the one with the photos of me as a toddler—and realized the paper stuck down on the back cover bulged; there was something beneath it. For the first time I wondered if Binny was right and I was wrong.
Hands shaking, I carefully peeled the paper back and found a two-page letter in my uncle’s hand. I read it out loud.
My dearest Merry,
If you have found this, then good; you followed the trail and found the treasure. Family is the treasure, your past and my past . . . We’re connected. I don’t have much anymore. Fact is, I’ve lost about everything I ever had, except for a few odds and ends, but I know you’re out there somewhere, and that gives me solace. That’s what my friend Doc calls it . . . solace.
Do you know what your granddad called you? He called you Merrywinkle, because you liked the pretty periwinkle plants in the woods. Merry, I want you to know what took me too damned long to figure out: Life’s short. Family is all we have. Money doesn’t matter much. I wish I’d tried harder to get to know you, but I was a damn stubborn prideful fool, and your mama and I never saw eye to eye about anything. She didn’t like me, and I thought she was a hard woman. After your daddy died, I wanted you both to come live here, since Murg was gone, too, by then, but your mama and I fought, and when she left I said I’d burn in hell before I’d ever talk to her again.
I was wrong about that, and I did try, but all I got were the letters back. Don’t blame your mama for that; I didn’t give her any reason to think I had your best interests at heart. But I did. Things are kinda complicated here right now, but I have a mind to set out to find you. I’m gonna try, anyway, and see if I can make amends.
I paused, taken aback. It was like he was talking to me across the divide between life and death, and he had already told me more than I had ever known about my grandfather. And Melvyn . . . He had planned to come find me. I felt tears prickle my eyes. I looked up to see Binny regarding me carefully. “I think we found the treasure Melvyn left me.”
She nodded, solemnly, then got up, touched my shoulder, and said, “Don’t read it out loud to me. Read it to yourself later. It’s from his heart to yours, and I know how important that is. If I’d lost Dad . . .” She stopped, choked with emotion. “I gotta get back to town, have dinner, then go home to Daddy.”
She said good-bye and I refolded the letter, then went upstairs to dress. I had dinner with Lush, Pish, and Stoddart, told them the bare bones of our treasure-hunt results, then excused myself to read the whole letter.
I learned a lot. Pish came to my room after Lush toddled off to bed with an Agatha Christie novel from the Autumn Vale library, coincidentally one of the books I had given them from my grandmother’s stash. Pish told me Stoddart had already gone, driving back to his own home. I sat up in bed and he sat cross-legged on the end.
“We had a quarrel,” Pish said. “Stoddart just doesn’t understand why I love this place so much, how I adore Janice and Hannah and . . . you.”
“He doesn’t like me, does he?”
He shrugged. “My darling child, no one will come before you in my life.”
“Pish, you deserve love as much as the next fellow.”
“As long as it isn’t Stoddart?” he asked, eyeing me.
I chuckled.
“Tell me what the letter says,” he demanded.
I took a deep breath. “‘Once upon a time two brothers and the son of one of them set out to build a fairy-tale forest for the son’s little daughter. They all loved her so much.’” My voice choked and I cleared my throat as Pish waited. “‘The three of them worked
together, building a Hansel and Gretel house, a fairy tower, and some other buildings. But because they didn’t really know what they were doing, something happened one day, and the little girl’s grandfather was hurt by a falling tree and died. The father blamed his uncle for what happened, and the two fought, and the young man took away the little girl, Merrywinkle, never to return to Wynter Forest again.’”
Pish shook his head. “Seems like there was more than enough stubbornness to go around among the Wynter males. So your grandfather died in an accident, and your father blamed Melvyn?”
I nodded. “Daddy took me away and didn’t speak to Melvyn for a year. But I think he was coming around; he had just begun to talk to him again, and spoke of bringing me back to the castle for a visit. But then he died. I vaguely remember that. Daddy was an oil company engineer. He was up in Alaska doing some preliminary work on a pipeline project, and the small plane he was in crashed. It took them two weeks to find his body. I don’t think my mother ever recovered.”
“My poor child,” he said, taking my hand. “You’ve had so much tragedy in your life. Your mother brought you here not long after. Why?”
“Melvyn says she did it because she knew it was what Daddy wanted. But then he pushed her to bring me to live at the castle. Pushed so hard they quarreled. As we drove away he was shaking his fist; I remember that so clearly. And Mom would never talk about it again. After a while, I thought Melvyn had died and everything was gone, or at least that was the impression I got. I never really understood about the castle and the Wynter legacy.”
“And now you’re here.”
I nodded. I felt the prickle that forewarned of tears as I said, “And I know my daddy, my uncle, and my grandfather loved me. So much that they were building a fairy forest just for me!”
“What are you going to do about it?”
I shook my head, puzzled for words. What was I going to do about it? “I just don’t know.” We were silent again, for a long few minutes. “One thing I can’t figure out,” I finally said, “is how the original note pointing to the treasure ended up in yet another teapot in Binny’s Bakery. I think he may have intended to send it to me, once he got my address, hoping to tempt me to come to Wynter Castle.”
“I would bet it was another remainder of Dinah Hooper’s attempts to find the Wynter treasure. She stole one thing from your uncle’s desk and stuffed it in a teapot; why not the note, too? It did mention treasure, right? Anyway, we’ll never know, I guess. I learned a long time ago that there are too many questions in life to which there is no answer.”
“I guess.” We both lay down on my bed, holding hands and staring up at the ceiling. I traced the border of the raised ceiling, where putti cavorted among blue skies and clouds. “Pish, do you think . . . Is there any way I could possibly save this place? I mean . . . keep it?”
He sat up suddenly, bouncing the bed, and clapped. Staring down at me, he said, “Anything is possible, my darling. Anything!”
“You’ve just been waiting for me to ask that, haven’t you?”
Chapter Twenty-five
JUNE IS A lovely time of year in upstate New York. Everything had finally bloomed in the gardens I had planted in late autumn the year before, freezing my fingers off to plant hundreds and hundreds of tulip, daffodil, crocus, and hyacinth bulbs, and were now dying back. We had rain for so long in May that I hadn’t gotten back to the woods, but we had finally had some decent weather. Now that I knew the fairy-tale park had been built for me, I wanted to see it again. It was the legacy left to me by three men who loved me very much: my dad, my grandfather, and my great-uncle.
So on a sunny day I put on a long skirt, a sleeveless blouse, and some comfortable shoes, told Pish where I was off to, and went for a walk with Becket springing along in front of me, leading me onward. I walked around the castle, examining the vista from every angle. There was so much open space. How was I possibly going to fill it all? There were acres and acres and acres of open grassland. I walked across it, past the beautiful old garage, past a couple of other sheds, and along a path to the backwoods.
I approached and stood at the beginning of the path, Becket beside me. He meowed and I looked down into his golden eyes. “I guess I ought to just go in, right?”
I had hired Zeke and Gordy to do more work, cutting a path into the fairy-tale buildings and covering it with mulch. I entered the woods. Immediately the scent of the pine mulch, warmed by the heat of the day, enveloped me. I wanted to weep at the beauty surrounding me in this section of the untamed forest. There were great swathes of trilliums, white and luminous in the shadowy depths. There were other plants, purplish and pink, distant hints of yellow, but I didn’t know their names. I’d have to learn. Hannah, my go-to gal, would probably be able to point me in the right direction.
I reached the fairy-tale structures and explored. I was sired by a richly imaginative stock of male Wynters. Where my mother’s side of the family was practical, all business, loving but stern, the Wynters were whimsical, odd, and interesting.
The Hansel and Gretel house was well built; with some sanding and painting it could look like new again. But it was the cobblestone structure that fascinated me. It was tall and built entirely of rounded river rocks that must have been laboriously brought in wheelbarrows. There was a tiny wooden door at the base, but I didn’t think it was meant for anything but decoration. The tower looked just like the sand-drip castles I had made at the beach on the Jersey Shore when I was a kid. The mortar had dried and was crumbling, and the whole thing looked like it was going to fall over.
“So your grandfather and uncle built this for you?”
I screeched and jumped, turning. Virgil, in jeans and a white open-collared shirt, stood on the path, some papers in his hand and a plaid blanket over one arm. “You scared the crap out of me!” I said, hand over my pounding heart.
“Sorry.” He joined me and stared at the building. “This is really something. I’ve heard tales about the buildings from town kids, but never did come out to take a look before.”
“It makes me feel like I belong here,” I said softly. “This was built just for me. I’ve always thought of New York City as home, but maybe this is, too.”
“Can we talk?” he asked, his voice gruff.
I turned and saw the intense look on his face, the hard jaw, the worried eyes. “Sure. What’s up?”
“Not here. I brought a blanket. Thought we could sit out in the field in the sun.”
I raised my brows, but followed him back down the path out into the open. Becket leaped through the grass, hunting mice, and more power to him. The more vermin he caught, the fewer there were. Except bunnies. I didn’t want him to catch bunnies. Virgil spread the big plaid blanket out in the longest part of the grass. When we sat, we were hidden from the world in a circle of green, with just the sun overhead.
We were silent for a while, and that was okay. Miguel and I could sometimes go a whole day without saying a word, just reading the paper, listening to music, napping. And there I went again; every time I was with Virgil, I thought of Miguel and what we had had together, comparing it. I had to stop that. It wasn’t fair to Virgil. I turned my mind from my late husband and regarded the sheriff, who still frowned up at the sky, like the sun had done him a disservice.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“I’m trying to think of a way of bringing up a personal subject.” He glanced over at me. “Between us.”
“Shall I start? There is something between us, isn’t there?”
“I’ve never met anyone like you,” he said.
“Is that good?”
“You could say that.”
“We’ve both been married before. There are bound to be complications. I loved Miguel so deeply; I still love him. But . . .” I took a deep breath. Here it came, ready or not: “I think I’m ready to . . . to fall in love again.” That was
as far as I was willing to go. He needed to do some of the talking, so I just shut my mouth.
He grabbed a dried piece of grass and chewed on it, turning the envelope in his hands over and over. Finally, he said, “I was only married for two years. It was a mistake, I suppose, but Kelly didn’t want to just live together. Her dad wouldn’t approve, she said. And I wanted to be married, wanted that permanency in my life right about then, with Mom sick. I did love her, so I asked her to marry me.”
The floodgates were open. I stayed silent.
“But it just wasn’t . . . I don’t know how to explain what went wrong. She was spoiled rotten, her daddy’s only daughter and the light of his life. She’d go home to him and say I was being a jerk, and he’d come to Autumn Vale and chew me out. I told him to get the hell out of our marriage.” He sighed. “I was a bit of a jerk, I guess. I wasn’t sheriff then, not yet. It all happened at once; I was elected sheriff and Kelly left, ran home to Daddy. Even though he didn’t like me, he was old-school; a wife doesn’t abandon her marriage. He told her to go back to her husband and she said she couldn’t, that she was afraid of me.” He stopped and snuck a look at me. “I’d hit her, she told him.”
I gasped and examined him. His jaw worked, and he stared straight off into the woods. I watched, but he wasn’t going to go on. Not just yet. “But you didn’t do it,” I said, not as a question, but as a statement. “Virgil, I will never believe you did that.”
He turned his gaze on me and his brown eyes were so full of bewilderment, I reached out and cupped his cheek. He turned his lips into my hand and I think he kissed my palm. I made a fist, catching the kiss and holding on to it.
“I didn’t,” he said, shifting restlessly. “I’ve never hit a woman in my life. But Sheriff Baxter believed her. He tried to get her to press charges. Tried to get my badge.”
“Did you tell him you didn’t do it?”
“I never got the chance. He just . . . believed her. She’s his daughter; what’s he going to think?”
Death of an English Muffin Page 27