Muffin But Murder

by Victoria Hamilton

  We still hadn’t figured out my uncle’s code, though. It was quite possible that we were overcomplicating things, but I hadn’t had the time or brain energy to reason it out.

  “Hey, Merry, I’ve got the stuff for you,” Binny said, lifting the pass-through section of her countertop and joining me in front of the teapots.

  I took the baggie of green powder as Juniper eyed it with a narrowed gaze. “Green tea powder,” I said to her, in case she thought it was something else. She looked skeptical. Where had Binny gotten this winner? “Hey, Bin, you want to come have a coffee with me at the café? I have to go drop off some muffins.”

  “Sure,” she said. “You can handle the store, Juniper?”

  The girl nodded and slumped down on a stool behind the counter.

  A brisk autumn wind had come up and swept down the lonely street. I retrieved the tub of muffins from the car and we hustled together the fifteen or twenty steps down to the café, going through the variety-store part and right back to the luncheonette. It could have been mistaken for a retro fifties diner except it was just caught in a time warp and had never been redecorated. The floor was still checkerboard tile, albeit cracked and worn, and the counter was still chrome-edged Arborite. The tables and chairs looked straight out of Back to the Future.

  I handed the tub of muffins to the cashier, who knew what to do with them, and grabbed a seat at a table with Binny. Once we had our coffee and muffins, I asked her how she found Juniper.

  “I advertised online and got a couple of enquiries, but Juniper . . . she really needed the job so badly! She’d been working in Ridley Ridge but got fired and didn’t have anywhere to go.”

  “You hired her just because she needed the job,” I said, my tone flat.

  “Uh-huh. I let her use the apartment above the shop, too, until she gets on her feet.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “With dad, at the house. He’s still not well, and until we get everything sorted out . . .” She shrugged. “He likes the company.”

  Her father, Rusty Turner, had been through a dreadful ordeal, hiding out in the woods with Dinah Hooper feeding him a line of bull about how the Russian mafia was after them because of some hinky dealings she had coordinated through Turner Construction. He finally figured out she was the dangerous one when she sent her son, Dinty, into the woods to kill him. By a stroke of good luck, the old guy managed to avoid harm and actually killed Dinty in self-defense. Dinah came after Rusty, furious about the death of her beloved son, and thanks to Becket I happened to be in the right place at the right time and, while escaping her capable aim with a gun, led the police to her.

  It had been an eventful couple of weeks, but everything had settled down and the last month had been calm and relatively productive. “So Juniper was the best you could find?”

  She made a face at me and looked away. “She needed this job so much.”

  Maybe it was the cynical New Yorker part of me, but I would never give a job to the one who needed it most. Shouldn’t she have chosen the best candidate for the job rather than the most needy one? Not my business to encourage her to look into the girl’s past a little before trusting her too much, I told myself firmly. It was a little late for a background check anyway, because Juniper had the cash desk all to herself right that very minute. I changed the subject and told Binny about my weird experience at the party shop in Ridley Ridge the day before.

  “That’s funny,” Binny said. “I’ve never been there, but Juniper actually knows that guy, the one who owns the store. That’s where she worked before me.”

  “So that’s who fired her—Les Urquhart?”

  “I guess.”

  “Did you call him for a reference?”

  “Well, no. I mean, he fired her. He wasn’t going to give her a good reference, right? Juniper said he harassed her.”

  “Uh, Binny, did you check any references?”

  “Not really.”

  I took a deep, cleansing breath. If she wanted to put a complete stranger in charge of her till, it was Not My Business. I’d have to make up a tune and keep singing in my brain, Not My Business. I took another deep breath and let it out. I was working hard on not interfering in other people’s lives. For some reason, that’s difficult for me. Pish says I’m a compulsive empath, but I disagree. Isadore Openshaw came though the front door right then and strode to the luncheonette. She approached the clerk and said something.

  The woman shook her head. Isadore hammered on the counter, and shouted, “But I need a job! I’ll wash dishes, or clean floors.” Her voice was reedy, and she seemed on the edge of tears.

  I ached for her, even though she was the single most difficult woman to help that I had ever met. The store manager came in response to the ruckus and escorted Isadore out, hustling her through the tables of coffee drinkers and breakfast eaters. Binny and I were silent for a few moments, both of us looking down at our hands, but I couldn’t stand it. I rushed after them, and said, “Hey, don’t be mean to her. She just needs a job.”

  The manager, a dour-looking woman in her sixties with iron gray hair in tightly permed curls, said, “Don’t care. No shouting in the café. Folks are trying to eat.”

  Isadore wouldn’t meet my gaze and allowed herself to be escorted out. I was tempted to go after her, but from experience I knew she’d freeze me out. Instead I went back to Binny and told her that Pish was trying to help Isadore, but she was prickly. It was entirely possible that, even if she’d been home, she hadn’t answered the door when I dropped him off that morning. Binny looked shell-shocked. “Gosh, if I didn’t already have Juniper, I’d give the poor woman a job.”

  I sighed. I was having to remind myself not to interfere a lot this morning and was only having moderate success. I wanted to tell Binny that the last thing she needed was a secretive, morose, oddly dressed middle-aged woman selling her goods. Of course, right now she had a secretive, morose, oddly dressed twentysomething doing the same, so it would be trading laterally.

  We parted ways, and I headed down the street to Crazy Lady Antiques and Collectibles. Janice Grover, wife of Simon Grover, the embattled bank manager of Autumn Vale Community Bank, owned the store. She’s a passionate hoarder who got into the junk business to try to clear out her home. At one point a few weeks before, she hadn’t even been talking to me, convinced I had railroaded her husband into trouble. We had since mended our acquaintanceship, and she was a valuable source of “stuff,” all the ephemera one needs to make a place like the castle decent.

  She had, in her off-site warehouse, granite urns, wrought iron planters and outdoor furnishings, statuary, garden boxes, and lengths of ornate fencing. In the store she had chandeliers, candelabras, settees, tables, Persian rugs, and a host of other things that were slowly converting the castle to a place to some warmth. She and Pish had actually become even closer than she and I, since they shared a love of opera and period costume dramas. She was flamboyant and weird and invaluable.

  I sidled into her store past a shelf loaded down with junk and let my eyes get used to the dimness. “Janice, yoo-hoo!” In the time it took to say that, I noticed a cute marbleized Formica dinette set I couldn’t use in the castle, and about a dozen bibelots I couldn’t use either but would likely buy anyway.

  “I’m coming.” When she came into view, she was radiant in a fuchsia caftan and dream catcher earrings. She was also wearing a tiara. “Hey, kiddo! How’s it hanging?”

  “Low and to the left,” I said. It had taken me a while to get her sense of humor, but by now nothing fazed me in Autumn Vale. I had begun to think there must be something in the water. Whenever I left the town to go somewhere else—Rochester, Buffalo, even just nearby Batavia—it felt a little like waking up from a dream, one of those odd ones where the bizarre seemed completely normal while you’re in it. “How is Simon doing?”

  “Not bad. Pishy is taking g
ood care of him, but poor old Simon is finding it hard to catch up with all the regulations he ignored for years.”

  Simon Grover had been a lazy and ineffectual bank manager, content to sit in his office and roar for coffee while reading the paper and doing the Jumble puzzle. Dinah had blackmailed Isadore into several infractions of rules that Simon had signed off on without fully understanding, and they had fallen between the cracks of a complex system in a difficult banking atmosphere for a year or more. The Feds were investigating, and Pish had helped hire a professional management team from New York in his effort to save the bank for Autumn Vale. If Simon could get up to speed, he might save his job, but it was hanging in the balance.

  Pish talked about banking a lot, but much of what he said was beyond me. He talked about “regulatory burdens,” “syndicated loans” and “sticky deposits” (which sounded like something to be handled with an SOS pad, to me) along with other such junk about which I knew little. I’m not stupid, just bored by the whole thing. My dear, dapper friend is a passionate defender of diversity in the banking industry and has said, in his serious moments, that the history of small- town America has often times been the history of its locally owned bank. He was very It’s a Wonderful Life about it.

  “I saw Isadore this morning,” I said to Janice, letting my gaze roam over the store to see if there was anything new I just had to have. “She’s trying to find a job.”

  “She’s cooperating with the Feds, but she still can’t work at the bank, not after what she did,” Janice said, her expression serious for once. “They’ve got a professional in there right now doing the work while they look for someone local. If Isadore gets out without being prosecuted, she’ll be lucky.”

  After a moment of silence, I got down to the reason I was there, which was to pick up a quirky piece for the smoking pit I was devising to keep people from smoking in the castle. In an outdoor corner just off the terrace I had built, with the help of Gordy and Zeke’s labor, a graveled area with a few wrought iron tables and some ashtrays would make a little smoking pit. Janice brought out the piece we had spoken of on the phone.

  “It’s perfect!” I said. It was a papier mâché tombstone. Inscribed on it in gothic lettering was: Jimmy knew what would happen if he smoked. His doctor said, “Coffin.”

  “Speaking of which, when are you going to pick up the casket?” Janice asked.

  “I’ve got Zeke and Gordy coming out the day before the party to pick it up.”

  I paid her and we parted ways. I carried the lightweight tombstone out to the car and put it in the trunk, hoping the trunk lid would stay closed; it had a fifty-fifty chance betweeen locking tight and staying that way for the next year, or flying open at an inopportune moment. Just as I heard the snick of the latch catching, a sloppily dressed middle-aged woman strode toward me, her flyaway hair, back in a tight ponytail, fluttering in wisps on the breeze.

  “You!” she shrieked, a string of spittle landing on my blouse as she pointed at me. “You and your highfalutin friends! You’re oughta be ashamed of yourself, bringing people like that gypsy and that . . . that man to our town! Everything was fine until you came, and now it’s awful. Go home!” She then strode away at a furious clip.

  I stood on the sidewalk, mouth open, staring at her retreating backside. “Crazy!” I muttered. “This town is freaking loony tunes!” I grabbed some kind of note off the windshield of Shilo’s car, crumpled it up, and stuck it in my purse, then got in and headed back to the castle, troubled by the confrontation. What the heck had I done to deserve that kind of treatment?

  At the castle, I parked the car in the empty parking area and frowned; no one was there, and that meant no one was working. The party was in just a week, and I needed to get stuff done as quickly as possible. It was all turning out to be much more expensive than I had anticipated, so I needed to get moving on finding a buyer for the castle before I bankrupted myself.

  The big oak doors opened easily; as always, the squirt of WD-40 added to the hinges was the cheapest fix I had found for any problem in the castle. But when I opened the doors and entered, it was not to silence but to the gentle strains of Satie’s Gymnopédies soaring through the cavernous great hall. I stopped, eyes closed, overwhelmed by the lovely sound, violins and harp. Tears welled in my eyes as the ache of missing Miguel ate into my heart. I sank down on the stairs and let the music flow through me.

  Miguel and I had made love to Gymnopédies one long, lazy rainy October Sunday in New York. Slow, passionate, sweet, soft, fulfilling; it had been magic. We slept together in a heap, bedcovers tossed around us, water streaming down the window; when we awoke, I restarted the CD and we made love again. I never felt so beautiful as when I was making love with Miguel.

  The following day, he had died in a horrific highway accident while driving to a photo shoot in Vermont. It had been awful, the worst thing I had ever experienced, and it still haunted me. I had been trying to ignore it, trying to silence the weeping in my soul, but the next day would be the eighth anniversary of his death.

  “Merry?”

  I looked up and wiped the tears from my eyes. The owner of the gruff voice was Virgil Grace; he stood in the doorway watching me, his gaze troubled. The music finished and I stood, trying to smile. “That music . . . it makes me think of Miguel. I was missing my husband.” At that moment, Copland’s “Hoe-down” came on, the rambunctious, energetic strains filling the great hall and the clicking beat of the woodblock percussion echoing from the ceiling. The contrast was absurd, and I couldn’t help it—I laughed—a little wildly, I must say.

  “Merry?” That was Pish, and he emerged from the hallway toward the kitchen. “I thought I heard you!” He stopped and cocked his ear. “Isn’t it grand? I picked up the last bits and bobs I needed in town and just finished installing the music system for the party!” He charged for me, grabbed the crook of my arm in his, and we did a hoedown, twirling in abandon on the marble floor. Shilo darted out, having followed Pish, and she grabbed Virgil, who did not comply so readily, though he allowed himself to be hauled around by my slim and vigorous friend until the last, triumphant duh-duh-duh!

  Panting, we laughed and I hugged Pish to me, tears still streaming down my face. Thank heaven for wonderful friends. I’d be so alone at the castle without them. I shook my clothes into place and turned toward Virgil. “I’m assuming you came here for something other than a barn dance?”

  He just stood and stared at me wiping the last of my tears from my cheeks with my sleeve until I felt a little uncomfortable. There was something in his eyes, dark and shadowed by his thick brows, something that disturbed my insides. Maybe it was the vivid reminder I had just experienced of Miguel making love to me, his hands, his body, his breath warm on my cheek. Virgil’s eyes, like Miguel’s, were dark, a mellow brown like milk chocolate, though in almost every other way the two men were so very different. Or were they? Something to ponder.

  He shook himself and blurted out, “I, uh, the federal agents want Mr. Lincoln to call them. They tried calling his cell, but—”

  “Let me guess; it didn’t go through. We seem to be in this weird cell-tower dead zone,” I chirped. “It’s only when I really want to make a call that it doesn’t work.”

  Pish and Shilo looked back and forth between us, and Shilo got this funny secretive smile on her face. Pish said, “What on earth could they want now? I just spoke to them an hour ago, and we were good to go, I thought.” He headed off to the kitchen.

  “Want a cup of coffee, Virgil?” I asked to cut the zinging tension. I retreated to the kitchen, assuming Virgil would follow, and he did.

  Becket sat on the kitchen table, against all health codes and my remonstrance to the two guilty parties, Pish and Shilo, who both constantly let him in. When I first got Uncle Melvyn’s ginger tabby to move back into the castle—he had been wandering the woods since my uncle’s death—I found that the tag on his collar
had a paper insert that slid out and unfolded in accordion pleats. Pish and Shilo had it open on the table, spread out on a pad of paper. Pish’s neat handwriting was evident in a list he was creating from the cat tag enclosure. He finished something up as I entered and gave me a bright smile. “I think we’ve got it, sweetie.”

  “You’ve cracked the code?” I put on a pot of coffee.

  “Perhaps. . . . Could it truly be as simple as being a list of the trees we need to follow to find his hidden loot?” Pish asked me.

  “Maybe we’ve been overcomplicating it all along.” Given that we had been investigating the Latin names and trying to find some kind of cipher in the list, that was likely. I explained the list to Virgil as I looked over Pish’s work. I’d have to talk to my friends about it later.

  “Shall we move into the parlor? I’m not supposed to let Becket sit in here,” I said, glaring at Shilo and Pish, who looked innocent and slightly hurt.

  “I’d better call the agents,” Pish said, retreating to the sitting area near the fire, where the best landline phone was hooked up.

  “And I’m doing laundry,” Shilo said, melting away, her vanishing act being one of her gypsy tricks, as she called them.

  So I was stuck with an uncomfortable Virgil Grace for a half hour as we chatted about his mother, Gogi, and her work at Golden Acres, and how the case against Dinah Hooper was shaping up. He left with an obvious sense of relief, and I stormed off to clean something with the uneasy feeling that I was using work to replace something more fun.