She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice thick with unshed tears. “I don’t understand what’s going on anymore.”
Another local who had just entered, a fellow about the same age as Gordy, chimed in, “You gotta know it was probably Junior Bradley who did Tom in.”
“What are you talking about, Zeke?” Binny asked sharply. “Tom and Junior were best friends.”
“Who is Junior Bradley?” Shilo said.
Gordy, who had been watching Shilo with that hopeless admiration most men felt for her, said, “Junior is the zoning commissioner in town. Him and Tom were good buddies, but they had a big fight the other night at the bar up Ridley Ridge.”
“What was the fight about?” Shilo asked.
“A girl,” Gordy said.
Zeke chimed in. “Yeah, Tom and Junior were both after Emerald, one of the dancers at the bar. They got into it, and Junior threatened Tom. Said he’d better leave Emerald alone if he knew what was good for him.”
I had been right; there were others out there who had been less than thrilled with Tom. “Were you guys there?” I asked.
Both men turned crimson.
“Uh, nope. I heard about it from a friend,” Zeke said, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down his throat, his gaze turned away from all of us women. He stared steadily at the wall of teapots.
“Or, the awful event could be connected to . . . the Brotherhood,” Gordy said, his tone sententious.
Both Zeke and Binny rolled their eyes.
“The Brotherhood?” I said.
“You’ve got to get off that kick,” Zeke replied to his friend, with the air of someone who has said the same thing many times before. He turned to me. “The Brotherhood of the Falcon is a bunch of old farts who sit around and make exclamations, or declamations, or whatever they do.”
“Declarations,” Binny said. “The last one was something about keeping the Brotherhood all male, as if any women would want to join! Zeke’s right, Gordy. Those are just a bunch of old guys drinking beer and remembering their glory days.”
“I don’t know,” Gordy said, his tone slow and doubtful as he nodded and winked with that knowing expression of someone who is in on a deep, dark secret.
“For God’s sake, Gordy . . . Dad was a member!” Binny said.
“Well, I heard they’re connected to the Freemasons, and you know who they are!” He was clearly waiting for someone to take the bait, but no one did and he looked disgruntled.
“Anyway, I’ve got work to do,” Binny said, and whirled around, stomping back to her ovens without another word.
Shilo and I stood and stared at each other for a moment, uncertain of what to do. I wished I could help, but I was the last person who could offer Binny comfort. I looked to the two locals. “Well. I guess we’ll be going.”
“You’re old Mel Wynter’s niece, right?” Gordy said. “The one who’s inherited the castle.”
“And you were there last night when Tom was killed, right?” Zeke said, looking me over closely.
“Uh, yes.”
“What’d you see?” Gordy asked softly, glancing over at the kitchen.
“Not a thing,” I said, using the tone that forbids further discussion. “Did you guys know my uncle?”
“Nah,” Zeke said. “But every kid in school snuck out to the Wynter estate and tried to look in the windows. I got chased away from there a couple of times by old Mel with a shotgun.”
Lovely. “We have to go,” I said. But I didn’t move. These guys probably were my best source for local info at that moment, I realized. It would be stupid to ignore that. “As we were coming in to Autumn Vale, we noticed a warehouse property just past the edge of town. Is that where Turner Wynter is located?”
“Well, it’s Turner Construction, yup,” Zeke said.
Binny started banging pots around in back, and I heard one loud sob. If I was a friend, I’d barge back there and comfort her, but I didn’t quite know what to say to a girl who didn’t seem to want or need consolation, preferring to hide in her kitchen and cook. Or maybe I did know too well what that was like. I had done the same when Miguel died. Gordy gave a look, then hitched his head toward the door. Shilo and I followed him and Zeke out to the street.
“Don’t go mentioning Turner Wynter around Binny,” Gordy said, joining us at the curb.
“There’s a lot of bad feelings there,” Zeke added. “Tom was sure in a tizzy about it all, the lawsuits and such. Don’t know what’ll happen now that they’re all dead.”
“I’ve heard about the lawsuits; what were they about?” I asked, interested in the gossips’ take on the situation.
Gordy and Zeke explained in their tag-team manner that there was once a plan for Turner Wynter to develop Wynter Acres, using some of the land attached to Wynter Castle. It devolved into lawsuits slung at each other, with both Rusty Turner and Melvyn Wynter claiming that the other man had cheated him. Other than that, they didn’t appear to know the details of who sued who, or about any possible resolution.
“Y’know, you’ll probably have to settle the lawsuit,” Zeke said, hitching his thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans. “Along with Binny.”
“Me?” I squawked, taken aback. “It has nothing to do with me.”
“Your land now, your lawsuit,” Gordy said, rocking back on his heels.
“But there’s no one left to continue against!” Shilo exclaimed.
I saw both young guys shutter like blinds, and their gaze became shifty.
“I guess that’s so, isn’t it, Zeke?” Gordy said.
“Mighty interesting, that,” Zeke said. “Mighty interesting.”
And with that, the two cast me one long, thoughtful look, and ambled off down the sidewalk with their heads together, chattering like gibbons. Great. I felt like I was now back in the center of some kind of local suspicion.
“We’re going to visit a certain lawyer,” I said to Shilo.
Silvio was in, and Shilo and I entered, but this time he seemed out of sorts. “What do you want this time, Miss Wynter?”
And he had been so friendly last time! “I take it you’ve heard about Tom Turner’s death in my yard?” I said, steeling myself against hurrying in the face of his irritation.
He nodded.
“People are suspicious, it seems, of my connection to the whole case because of those darned lawsuits. Can’t we resolve things, now that it’s all water under the bridge?”
He sighed heavily, very much the put-upon legal eagle. “There is nothing I can do about it, I told you. Nothing to do with me.”
“The point is, it is a complication in the estate.”
“Yes. It’s unfortunate. Rusty and Mel started out working together on Wynter Acres, and it all seemed so promising. It was to be a housing development meant to attract retiring baby boomers who wanted to live in the country but have the convenience of condo living. Then Mel accused Rusty of cheating him and it all went to hell in a handbasket. Though I could not get legally involved, I was trying hard to mediate between those two bullheaded, old men.”
“Until Rusty disappeared and Melvyn died.”
He nodded. “I don’t even know where everything stands. It’s all in limbo until we know the legal determination in Rusty’s death or disappearance.”
“In other words, it could go on forever,” I said. “What does that mean to my wanting to sell the estate?”
He shrugged.
Anger was building up in me. “So you can’t even tell me if I’ll be able to sell the estate, is that it?”
“Oh, you should be able to sell, but there will be conditions attached to the sale.”
Great. Buyers just love conditions. His next appointment, a young woman, entered, and we were forced to leave, me feeling kind of huffy about the whole thing.
“We may as well find this library folks keep telling me about,” I said. Shilo and I walked the streets of Autumn Vale, the locals watching and whispering about our every step.
Finally, along a side street in the downtown section, up a sloped alley, I saw the sign I had noticed before, hanging out from the building. Autumn Vale Library it read, in curly script that looked hand painted. According to the placard attached to the wall it was open, so Shilo and I strolled up the wheelchair access ramp to the door and entered to the sound of weeping.
Shilo gripped my elbow, as full of consternation at the woeful, echoing sounds as I. It was like the place was haunted by a mournful ghost. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I looked around the cavernous, gray room lined with bookshelves, most not above shoulder height, and finally saw what looked like a desk.
We approached. Behind the desk was a girl in a wheelchair. I say “girl” because at first glance she appeared to be no more than ten or eleven. But on closer inspection, as she turned red-rimmed eyes—beautiful, luminous, huge eyes—toward me, I could see within them a woman’s full measure of pain.
“Are you okay?” I asked my voice faltering.
She stared at me for a long moment, then said, “When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of a book, but translated into a better language.”
Shilo said “Huh?”
But I’d heard or read the quotation before. I closed my eyes; it took me a moment, but I finally replied with the next, more famous part of it, my voice softly echoing up into the gray shadows of the library’s upper reaches. “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” It was from a prose piece written by John Donne, and was the source of Hemingway’s most famous title.
The girl bowed her head for a long moment, and we were silent. But she looked up, and said, “It’s true, isn’t it? He’s dead. Tom Turner is gone.”
“You were friend of Tom’s,” I said.
She nodded, her large, gray eyes fixed on me. “He was a good man, despite what others say. Despite what you may think.”
“You mean because of my run-in with him?”
She nodded.
“You know who I am.”
She nodded again.
“I just wanted him to stop digging holes on my property,” I said, on a sigh. “I really wish it hadn’t ended this way. I’m sure you feel the same.”
“I do . . . I’m so s-sad! That’s where he died, isn’t it?” Her breath caught on a sob, but she was trying to be brave. I could tell.
It was my turn to nod.
Shilo was looking back and forth between us. “I think I’m going for a walk,” she said.
Once Shi was gone, the girl said, “I suppose you’re here to learn about the Wynters of Wynter Castle.”
“I’m in no hurry,” I said. “That can wait. Why don’t we talk about Tom Turner, first. I know so little about him or anyone here. You know who I am, but I don’t know who you are. What’s your name?”
“Hannah,” she said. “It means ‘God has favored me.’”
She smiled through tears, and she was beautiful. I pulled a chair over to sit beside her, and we talked. Hannah was a little person, tiny of frame and fragile as a bird, with pale skin like bone china. But her heart was huge, too big for her small frame, and she seemed filled with an eager grace. I don’t know how else to express it. A beautiful yearning poured from her, expanding to fill the dim recesses of her library.
“How did you come to work here, in the library?”
“It’s my library; I applied for a grant, I talked them into it, and I got the place renovated. I’ve always loved reading,” she said. “When I was a kid, I read a book The Little Lame Prince and His Traveling Cloak. It opened up the world to me. I’ve been to Cameroon with Gerald Durrell, and to Yorkshire with James Herriot. Isak Dinesen showed me Kenya. I’ve been around the world with books as my traveling cloak.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “I’ve lived and breathed in Regency England with Jane Austen. I’ve walked the Yorkshire moors with Emily Brontë and the streets of Victorian London with Charles Dickens. Books are a marvelous transport. Tell me about why you were crying for Tom Turner.”
Her smile illuminated the shadows. “We were going to be married.”
Chapter Ten
"MARRIED?” I STARED at her. Was she serious? I examined her serene face. Yes, she was serious. “Uh, did he tell you that?”
“No, of course not. He didn’t know it,” she said, her head tilted to one side, her huge gray eyes dreamy. “But it would have happened. I was the only one he told things to, you know? He talked to me.”
“It sounds like you were friends,” I said carefully.
“We were. Good friends. And he loved me.” Her eyes flooded, and one big drop fell on her hands, which were folded in her lap. “Eventually he’d have seen that no one would have . . . no one . . .” She sniffed and shook her head, looking down at her hands, struggling with her emotion.
“I’m sorry, Hannah,” I said, gentling my tone. “He was lucky to have someone in his life who loved him so much.” It seemed an impossible match to me, this little, bookish miss and the hulking, angry Tom, but perhaps she would have been the making of him. That she loved him so fiercely changed how I saw him and strengthened my sorrow at his death.
She told me good things about Tom Turner, that he was the one who had built the wheelchair ramp for her and all the shelves for the books, many of which were from her own collection. The library truly was hers, supported in part by the Brotherhood of the Falcon that Binny made such sport of, and with other grants that she zealously pursued. She was quite accomplished, I gathered, at writing grant proposals. As Hannah spoke, I thought about how a person could be so many things at once, good and bad and sometimes ugly. I recalled what Gordy and Zeke had said, about Tom and Junior Bradley fighting over some bar dancer named Emerald. Which Tom was the real deal, the one who hung out in bars looking for a fight, or the one who built shelves and a ramp for a sweet-faced librarian? I guess he was both.
“I want to know who did this,” Hannah finally said.
“Me, too.”
“Then let’s figure it out.”
I gaped at her. “Let’s . . . you mean you and I?”
“Why not? We’re both smart women, right?” Hannah smiled even as tears welled in her eyes. She sobered, and said, “I won’t rest until I know who killed him. He didn’t deserve it.”
I stared at her for a moment, then said, “You know, some are probably going to think I killed him. In fact, I know they do.”
“Did you?”
“Of course not.”
“Good. Then let’s get started figuring this out.”
But how to do that? Maybe if I got to know Tom posthumously, it would help. “What was he like? From your viewpoint?”
“Rough around the edges,” she said, staring off into the distance. “I’ve known him a long time. Mrs. Turner used to babysit me before she left town.”
“Mrs. Turner?”
“Binny’s mother.”
“She left town? When? Why?”
“She took Binny and left . . . oh, let’s see . . . Binny was about ten, I was fifteen, so I guess about fifteen years ago or so? No one knows why.”
“Hmm. Odd that she took just her daughter and left town.” It seemed to me in a small town, someone should know why, unless it was something so breathtakingly horrible that no one wanted to be the first to say it.
Her eyes flashed, and she fastened them on me. They glittered strangely in the shadowy dimness. “And don’t you go thinking anything nasty. It wasn’t anything like that.”
My eyebrows climbed. She was not quite so sheltered as I had thought, if she had picked up on the direction of my wandering musings. But then, a voracious reader does learn much of the world, if only through books. “I’ll take your word for it.” I hadn’t truly thought the woman had taken Binny away to avoid some kind of abuse by father or son anyway; it had been a possibility, though not high on the list. There were dozens of other explanations, most of wh
ich didn’t involve anything sinister at all. “How did father and son get along after Tom’s mom left?”
“She actually wasn’t Tom’s mother . . . Rusty’s wife, I mean, which I guess was why she didn’t take Tom with her when she left; plus he was, like, nineteen or so. Tom was from Rusty Turner’s first marriage. His mom died soon after having Tom.”
“You do know a lot about folks, don’t you? What do you know about my uncle Melvyn?”
She waved one delicate hand airily. “Tom’s murder first. Focus, Merry.”
What would have been annoying from anyone else, was charming coming from her, and she knew it. I had to smile. “What was Tom looking for on my property? Do you know?”
“He said he was looking for his father’s body—and that’s what he told Binny—but that wasn’t true.” She hesitated.
“And . . . ?”
She shrugged, and engaged the joystick of her wheelchair, whirling around and wheeling to one of the bookshelves. I followed. Her mood had changed abruptly. She looked at the spines of the books at her eye level, pulled one out, and handed it to me. “This will tell you more about Autumn Vale and your ancestors. The town is called Autumn Vale because of them, you know.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, looking down at the plain, hardbound book.
“The town was supposed to be called Wynterville, but one of the earliest settlers was dead-set against it. Said the Wynters were already too powerful. He got folks on his side, and the town was named Autumn Vale, it is said, so it would never be Wynter.”
“Wow.” It sounded like the kind of story that gets started when a town mythologizes its past, but it could be true. I paused for just a second, but then charged ahead. “Hannah, do you know what Tom was digging on my property for?” It had not escaped my notice that she had avoided the question neatly.
She pressed the joystick and returned to her librarian desk. “I don’t know, exactly, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t really believe that Rusty’s body was buried there. He had Binny convinced, though, at least for a while.”
“So what was he looking for?” I insisted. “Come on, Hannah, if you have any idea, please tell me!”
Bran New Death (A Merry Muffin Mystery) Page 10