Muffin But Murder (A Merry Muffin Mystery)

Praise for

Bran New Death

“Start with a spunky protagonist named Merry, mix in some delicious muffins, add a mysterious castle in upstate New York, and you’ve got the ingredients for a wonderful cozy mystery series.”

—Paige Shelton, national bestselling author of
If Bread Could Rise to the Occasion

“Victoria Hamilton has another winner on her hands. I love the main character and her eclectic group of friends and neighbors. It is well plotted and will keep you turning the pages well into the wee hours.”

—MyShelf.com

Praise for Victoria Hamilton’s National Bestselling Vintage Kitchen Mysteries

Bowled Over

“A true whodunit. And it’s spiced with appealing characters, a bit of romance, and a generous helping of food topics.”

—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Well plotted with several unexpected twists and more developed characters . . . In addition to murder and high school angst revisited, there are plenty of details and lore about vintage kitchenware and its history, and maybe even a book deal for Jaymie in the future.”

—The Mystery Reader

“A fun book with a likable protagonist.”

—Fresh Fiction

A Deadly Grind

“Has all the right ingredients: small-town setting, kitchen antiques, vintage cookery, and a bowlful of mystery. A perfect recipe for a cozy.”

—Susan Wittig Albert, national bestselling author of
The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star

“Smartly written and successfully plotted, the debut of this new cozy series . . . exudes authenticity.”

—Library Journal

“The first Vintage Kitchen Mystery is an exciting regional amateur sleuth . . . Fans will enjoy this fun Michigan cozy.”

—Genre Go Round Reviews

“
A Deadly Grind
is a fun debut in the new Vintage Kitchen Mystery series . . . Fans of Joanne Fluke or of Virginia Lowell’s Cookie Cutter Shop Mysteries will feel right at home in Queenstown.”

—The Season

“Hamilton’s Jaymie Leighton completely captivated me . . . I’ll be awaiting [her] return . . . in the next Vintage Kitchen mystery.”

—Lesa’s Book Critiques

“I really loved the hometown feel that Victoria Hamilton brings to this book. This is the start of the Vintage Kitchen Mystery series, and I felt this book was smart, funny, and quirky. I smiled in places, blushed for the embarrassing moments, and fell in love with cooking all over again as I read this book.”

—Two Lips Reviews

Berkley Prime Crime titles by Victoria Hamilton

Vintage Kitchen Mysteries

A DEADLY GRIND

BOWLED OVER

FREEZER I’LL SHOOT

Merry Muffin Mysteries

BRAN NEW DEATH

MUFFIN BUT MURDER

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

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A Penguin Random House Company

MUFFIN BUT MURDER

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2014 by Donna Lea Simpson.

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-14315-9

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / July 2014

Cover illustration by Ben Perini.

Cover design by Lesley Worrell.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

For Melanie, who loves Hannah as much as I do.

This book, as a finished product, has been made so much better by the close attention of a wonderful copyeditor. Thank you, Andy Ball, for making my prose more elegant, more sensible, and entirely more grammatical!

Chapter One

R
IDLEY
R
IDGE
. H
OW
had I lived a whole month and a half at Wynter Castle, my inherited digs near Autumn Vale in upstate New York, without visiting Ridley Ridge, the next closest town?

Just lucky, I guess.

And I, Merry Wynter, an almost-forty not-so-merry widow and apparent inheritor of a nineteenth-century mill baron’s castlelike home, would not be visiting the town again unless I had to. I looked up and down the windswept road—gray, drab buildings, litter on the streets, one person peeping out at me from between horizontal blinds—and shivered. The winds of October in upstate New York were upon us, and I was in Ridley Ridge because I had it on good authority that they had—wait for it—a party store in town. A party store. In the drabbest, saddest town I had ever seen. Who in their right mind would open a party store in Ridley Ridge? Did they also own a bikini shop in Anchorage? A liquor store in Salt Lake City?

Standing in a puddle of gum on the dirty sidewalk, I blew a puff of air through my pursed lips, wondering which way to go. I had not been able to confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt the existence of this party store. But Pish Lincoln, my New York friend who was living at the castle for the time being, had insisted that, if I wanted to sell Wynter Castle, I needed to introduce it to potential buyers, also known as his complete little black book of influential city dwellers.

We had a game plan. Halloween was coming up, so I would host a costume party; it would be a fun gala with lots of wine and music and many of his friends, acquaintances, and former business associates from that mythical land, my former home, New York City. Since Pish was a financial advisor—the successful kind, not one of the ones who had crashed and burned in the last decade—he knew people with a
lot
of money. I hoped that one of his clients would be interested in turning an authentic American castle into an inn, an event venue, or a retreat.

We weren’t counting on just Pish’s friends, though. As a former stylist to the occasional star and many more models, I too knew a fair number of folks, some wealthy and others loaded with connections. I desperately needed to sell Wynter Castle if I was to return to the city with money in my pocket.

The only problem with that bright and bubbly scenario was that I had already made friends in Autumn Vale. Jack McGill, the real estate agent who had been trying to sell the castle while I ignored the problem from New York for nine months, had managed to enchant and woo my quirky gypsy model friend Shilo Dinnegan. They were now a couple, and I would not have been surprised if wedding bells were in the works. I had become fast friends with Gogi Grace, the owner of a local retirement home, and one of her residents, oddball oldster Doc. Most special of all, I had made friends with Hannah, the librarian.

I had
even
made friends with Binny Turner, though her brother, Tom Turner, had been murdered on my property a couple of days after I arrived. At first she’d thought I was involved, but that suspicion didn’t last and was completely eradicated when I found Binny’s frightened father, then connected Binny with Lizzie, a local teenager I had befriended, who had turned out to be Tom’s unacknowledged daughter. If that seems like a busy month or so, it certainly had been. I was just supposed to be at Wynter Castle long enough to fix it up to sell, but with each new friend made, I realized how difficult it would be parting from them all when I had to leave.

I sighed and looked around. None of this musing was helping me a bit now, on the lonely streets of Ridley Ridge. Could I perhaps find a friendly local to guide me, or was that an oxymoron in this place? The blind twitched again and I realized I must look suspicious just standing in the middle of the sidewalk gawking like a lost tourist. The scenario did feel suspiciously like the opening of a suspense movie of the week, the kind where a lone woman goes missing and is in peril for the two hours until she is finally rescued or found dead just before the credits roll. I glanced over at the café; there was a blinking
pen
sign in the window. Being naturally bright, I surmised that the
O
had died, along with any semblance of hope in this town. But coffee shops are always a good source of information.

If only Shilo had come with me, or Pish; but no, they were both too busy. Ever since we had unsuccessfully tried to decode my eccentric late uncle’s scavenger hunt, concealed in a code in Becket the cat’s tag, they had been whispering and laughing together a lot, and I had a feeling those two were coming up with some gag that would explode over my poor, unsuspecting head at some point in the next week or so.

Ah well, it would be a welcome break from worry. Worry about money. Worry about selling the castle. Worry about Cranston Higgins, and yes, that was the real name of a person, a fellow who had shown up two weeks before. He had rung the sonorous bell on the big oak doors, apologetically claiming to be a rightful co-inheritor of Wynter Castle. It’s a long story, and I’ll get to that soon.

I opened the door to the café, expecting the fragrant scent of java and donuts to wash over me. Instead, all I smelled was burnt coffee, old grease, and apathy. A chubby waitress looked up from her cell phone, on which she was busy thumbing a text, no doubt saying,
Help me
get out of the hell that is Ridley Ridge!
One customer sat in a booth, his head down on the tabletop. Drunk? Asleep?

Dead? The fact that I considered that a real possibility shows you the depth of my loathing of the town so far.

“Hi,” I said, crossing the gummy floor, shoes sticking at every step. “I’m looking for the Ridge Gift and Party Stop.”

She stared at me for a long moment, smudgy eyes wide. “The Party Stop?”

I bit back my first instinct, which was to check for an echo. “Yes.”

She gulped and said, “Well, you go down Ash to Birch, left on Birch to Danver. It’s on the corner. You
sure
you want to go to the Party Stop?”

“Yes, I’m sure!” I said, uneasily. “Why?”

“Oh . . . no reason.”

“Okay, then. Thank you so much.” As she again began madly texting, I pried my gummy foot off the floor and left. Outside, I found the car—I had handed in the rental that was costing me several limbs a month and was using Shilo’s quirky rattletrap she had named Jezebel for some unfathomable reason—and followed the waitress’s directions to an unpromising semi-industrial section of town, more weed infested and lonely than I had expected. In fact, the Ridge Gift and Party Stop sign was peeling and pitted with random buckshot, and I wondered if the place was truly open. The parking lot in front was empty, so I pulled in, turning the car around and pointing it toward the road in case I needed a quick getaway. I turned the motor off. It didn’t rattle as it died, which in this case was not reassuring. Rattling and groaning were the car’s primary signs of life.

I got out and slammed the door. The car sighed and huddled where it sat, with a final murmur of worry. I sympathized; I was not reassured by the store’s appearance either. The Party Stop looked like a warehouse, a big, sagging barn of a building constructed of concrete and corrugated steel. Weeds, withered now in the chill embrace of autumn, grew from the foundation. There were no windows on the front, only a fireproof metal door with store hours posted. If the sign was to believed, the store was open for business.

“In for a penny,” I murmured, striding up to the steel door and jerking it open. The place was cavernous and looked deserted. Ah, we were still in the first act of our movie of the week,
Losing Merry
, wherein the heroine of the piece walks into trouble, not heeding the ominous
scritch
of a violin bow being drawn harshly over the strings. At least if I disappeared, the waitress at the café would remember where I had been going. I hoped. Maybe she’d text another
Help me
on my behalf.

It was the party shop I had been told about, I supposed, and had the requisite Halloween decorations, which did not make it look any more reassuring. Plastic gravestones and webby ghosts, mummies and spiders plastered around a metal detector entrance do not make for a cheery “come and spend” welcome. Even weirder, though, was the echoed whispering I heard from somewhere. Did I mention the place was cavernous? It had thirty-foot ceilings with dusty light fixtures up in the rafters that some bright fellow had supplied with twenty-five-watt yellow bug bulbs.

We were moving from suspense to horror, I decided. As I advanced, I was reminded of that scene in every slasher movie where the stupid girl keeps going forward, even when the ominous soundtrack is getting louder and more insistent. Everyone in the theater is saying,
Don’t do it
, but she keeps just bumbling along, saying,
Hello?

“Hello?” My voice echoed . . . no, really! It did.
Hello . . . ello . . . ello
.

There was a rustling sound, and movement. Along one of the cramped, dimly lit aisles came a figure, and it turned out to be . . . a completely ordinary looking guy, mid-thirties, slim, glasses, beard, and a smile, an out-of-place hipster dude. “Hi, there,” he said as he advanced toward where I stood, near a cluttered customer service counter that was jammed with boxes of bubble gum and playing cards, fake poop and hand buzzers, the kind of jokey junk you find at gag shops. “Les Urquhart at your service.” He slipped behind the cash desk where a copy of
Moby-Dick
was overturned and a half-drunk cup of coffee cooled by the cash register.

With a sigh of relief, I smiled, reassured by his normalcy. “Hey, hi. I was beginning to think it was a ghost shop.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know, I heard whispers when I couldn’t see anyone.”

He just stared at me. “Uh, there were no whispers. No one else is here.”

I thought he was joking for a moment, but he seemed serious. I glanced around the place and said, “It’s a little gloomy in here. Is that on purpose?”

“I like to save on electricity. Times ain’t exactly blooming,” he said with a wry grin. “So what can I do for you?”

“I’m throwing a kind of fallish Halloweenish party at Wynter Castle.”

He started. “
The
Wynter Castle?” he blurted out.

“Have you heard of it?”

He paused, scruffing his goatee, then said, “Well,
yeah
! Everybody has. Last fall a bunch of kids from town got together and took a tour out there to see if it was haunted. That was about the time the old man who owned it got killed, right?”

“He actually died a little after that, in November, and it was a car accident,” I said, not mentioning that it had been murder and that the person responsible, Dinah Hooper, was now languishing in a federal prison awaiting trial. Too much detail. “That was my Uncle Melvyn.”

“Sorry. No offense intended.”

“None taken. The castle isn’t haunted, by the way, just in case you hear of anyone intending any more midnight rides. I’ve been living there over a month, and I haven’t heard anything. Anyway, I’m looking to decorate on the cheap and I’m hoping you can help me. I need a lot of stuff, but I don’t want to make it scary Halloween: no skeletons, no zombies, no mummies. I’m looking to do more Phantom of the Opera retro cool, you know?”

“So, not kiddy Halloween, more Count Dracula’s castle from an old movie?”

“Only not
quite
so kitschy. Kind of kitsch lite,” I said. I jumped and whirled around when I heard something at the back fall with a huge clatter. “What was that?”

“Nothing important. Happens all the time here, stuff falling over. It’s just storage back there.” He smiled, and I got the feeling he was enjoying my jumpiness. “Your castle may not be haunted, but this warehouse is. So let’s get started,” he said, clapping his hands together and rubbing them, perhaps at the anticipation of some actual business.

He led me past a section labeled
Costumes for Rent
, and then past racks and racks of commercial costumes for sale: French maids, saloon girls, zombies, and such. In half an hour he had me back at the checkout with bags of spider webbing, bolts of maroon and gold fabric to drape down the stairway, a little bit of kitschy Halloween junk, and the promise of more to come, if I so wished. Next time maybe I’d send Pish and Shilo. That would keep them busy for a few hours, which would be a blessing. As much as I love my friends, together they have the energy and imagination of a class full of kindergartners.

“Thanks so much, Les,” I said, holding out my hand. We shook. “Would you like to come out for the party? I’m planning to have some locals there, as well as a lot of out-of-towners.”

“Doesn’t sound like my thing,” he said.

“There
will
be girls,” I said, eying him with raised eyebrows. “In costumes. Some probably skimpy.” Why was I trying to lure him to come? I guess I just thought the more variety the better. A party isn’t a party without a lot of people to mingle.

“Maybe I will, then!” he said.

There was another crash, and I eyed him with interest. He had blinked, but that was all, but I could tell he wanted to go back there. I wondered if the back of his store was the local pot stop. I knew from my not-too-lengthy experience that there’s one in every small town, a place where all the teenagers and stoners know to go to get an ounce for a party or a kilo to sell. I stood for another moment.