Muffin But Murder (A Merry Muffin Mystery) (9 page)

That could be a public relations disaster. As much as I shouldn’t be thinking of that in the face of a murder on my property, self would intrude. “Unless we handle it swiftly.”

“Handle it?”

“Figure out who killed Davey Hooper.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Pish replied.

“Afraid or hoping?” I said, knowing my friend too well.

“A little of both,” he admitted.

A ruckus outside the door erupted. “No, I want to see her!” came Shilo’s “hysteria” voice, a tone I know too well. “Why have you got her locked away?”

The rumble of a masculine voice that came after was a puzzle to me, until I figured out that Virgil must have posted a police officer at our office door. The jerk! What did he think I was going to do, slip away into the night, never to be seen again? Did he have someone at the ground beneath my window, too, fearing I’d crawl out of the tiny window like an overweight Rapunzel and scale down the wall using my hair as a ladder? I crossed the room in two steps and jerked the door open. “It’s okay, Shilo,” I said in a calming tone.

“Why are you locked up in there?” she asked, her voice shaking, tears forming in her eyes. McGill was holding her to him, his eyes betraying his worry.

He had never yet seen this side of Shilo, the frightened child she managed to hide most of the time. “I think the sheriff is just being cautious about who talks to whom,” I said. The tall, solidly built officer shrugged. I wondered if Shilo had been more affected by our last adventure than I knew. Her life before modeling had, I surmised, been a series of frightening events. For my dear friend I stood in place of family, and I was all she had, she often told me. I brushed it off, but I believed she’s serious when she said it. I turned to the officer. “Why are you here?” I asked the young cop. I wasn’t going to stand for any foolishness.

“The sheriff just told me to keep an eye on everyone, ma’am.”

Oh lord, I was a
ma’am
to this fresh-faced young man. I was ready to cross the great divide between flirtable chick and respectworthy older lady, or . . . oh, who was I kidding? I had already crossed it, at least for a fellow this young. “You tell the sheriff to get his butt up here now,” I demanded. “I am not going to be sequestered from my friends like this.”

“He’s . . . uh, he’s busy right now.”

“I know that,” I said, softening my tone. This was not his battle; he was just doing his job. “But I don’t want to stay up here all evening. We’ve done what he asked us to do. Please let him know that.” I turned to my friends. “Everything is okay, Shilo, and I’m sure I’ll be downstairs in no time. McGill, please take Shilo back downstairs. Pish and I were just helping the sheriff by making a list, and he wants to be aware of where everyone is in the castle. Until it’s thoroughly searched, it’s all a crime scene to him.” I was actually making sense, and proud of it.

“Okay, Merry. You know I’ll take care of her.” He encircled Shilo with his arms and gave me a look that spoke volumes about how he felt.

I knew what he meant. He hadn’t done it yet, but he was going to propose to my friend. He had fallen swiftly and hard for the girl, and though they had only known each other a couple of months, I had a good feeling about their relationship. He led her away, murmuring to her as she nodded and whispered back.

Pish smiled over at me. “Good work, my darling,” he murmured, and took my hand, squeezing it.

The young cop had radioed something to his superior, and as my friends disappeared down the stairs, he said, “Sheriff Grace said he’ll be right up.” His expression held something like awe, and I wasn’t sure if he always looked like that or he was impressed that my request had an immediate result.

Virgil was as good as his word. To my surprise, instead of a curt word that we could join our friends, he came into the office and closed the door behind him. We sat down, and given that Becket had taken his chair and didn’t look ready to give it up, he rested his tush on the edge of the desk, folding his arms over his chest. He had undone the top button of his shirt and was showing a dark swirl of chest hair. He was, in the words of some of my friends at the party, swoonworthy.

“I want to bring you up to speed regarding what we’ve learned in the last half hour or so,” he said. “We’re sure this is Davey Hooper. Authorities at the jail where Dinah Hooper is being held, awaiting trial, asked her about her son, Davey. She claimed she had no contact with him, but that was a lie, because she has had phone conversations with him in the last month. We’re reviewing those tapes now. When she was told about his probable death, she collapsed. We’ll be matching Hooper’s prints; his fingerprints are on record because he’s served time for fraud and uttering, and we even have photos of a couple of his tats. They match.”

“Uttering?” I asked, loath to interrupt him since he was being so forthcoming, but I was confused.

“A type of forgery, my dear,” Pish offered.

“Oh! I’ve heard the phrase
uttering a forged document
. Is that what they mean?”

“Kind of a redundancy, but yes, that’s the case.”

“Davey’s done time,” Virgil continued. “But not a lot. We don’t know why he was in Autumn Vale or why he was here at the party.”

“It has to be connected to his brother’s death, right? And his mother’s arrest?” I asked.

“Too early to say. Can’t speculate.” Virgil clamped his mouth shut and pushed himself away from the desk. “You can go down to the kitchen or that other room—whatever you call it, the one where the others are.”

“The breakfast parlor,” I supplied.

“Yes, there, if you want. Do you have the list?”

I handed it over to him and explained about the footballers. “They aren’t checked off on the list, so we thought Zeke and Gordy might know them. They
may
be the same guys who showed up here yesterday expecting an invitation to the party. I turned them away. They’re about the same age, anyway—thirtyish—and might be friends or old schoolmates of the boys. The sleazy girls looked like they were with them.”

Virgil looked at the list, his dark brows drawn together, wrinkling his forehead. “Sweeney Todd,” he said, his voice hollow.

“Does that mean something?”

Virgil and Pish exchanged a look, then Pish turned to me. He took both my hands in his and rubbed them, thumbing my palms in an intimate fashion. “Darling, there was an
awful
lot of blood. I’m glad but
surprised
you didn’t see it. It looked to me like the cowboy—Davey Hooper, if it’s him, and I suppose we must think it is—had his throat slit. If the Demon Barber was carrying a straight razor, it would have made a dandy weapon. The fact that we don’t know the person dressed as Sweeney Todd is troubling.”

“Slit his throat?” My voice broke and I shivered. “What an awful way to go.”

“Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” Pish quoted from the Scottish play.

“Except that he wasn’t an old man, but a young one,” I amended, as tears welled and began running down my cheeks.

Virgil’s jaw flexed. “We’ll get whoever did this, Merry, I promise,” he said.

And I believed him.

Chapter Nine

E
VENTUALLY
, D
OC
, B
INNY
,
Emerald, and the girls were allowed to go home. Binny gave Gogi and Doc a ride, as Virgil was going to be busy for the foreseeable future. It took the rest of the night, but the police officers finally cleared the castle room by room—they never did find the murder weapon, though, I was told—and my friends and I went to bed. The federal agent was going to stay the night in Pish’s suite. Pish had one of the more spacious rooms, one with a sitting room attached, because he insisted on paying me top dollar, and I wanted him to have the best. He had a pullout sofa bed for guests.

The next morning was astonishingly, weirdly normal, as long as I kept my mind off the body I had found and the police officers who still lingered. I hadn’t slept well, but lying awake thinking all night had its benefit. I realized that Davey Hooper dying where he did might not mean anything about me. This could have been a convenient place for him to meet someone, or maybe he just wanted to see where his brother had died. It was even possible that he had come intending to cause trouble but had been followed or stalked by someone with an ax to grind. Or a straight razor to use. Whoever had killed him, they were long gone now.

“Who do you think did it?” Shilo asked, yawning and scrubbing her eyes as we drank our morning brews at the table in the kitchen.

The Fed was already up and long gone. I deduced that from the absence of his sleek black car from the parking area, which I had noted when I let Becket out that morning. Pish hadn’t come down yet.

“I wish I knew. Did you notice anything weird at the party last night?” She gave me a look and I rolled my eyes. “Okay, so that was a dumb question. There was a lot of weird going on. But you must have seen stuff that I didn’t.” We had already discussed who the cowboy was, and how odd it felt that he had been milling about our guests and then had been murdered. At my lovely party! I truly felt awful for Davey Hooper, and despite how horrible she was, I even pitied Dinah. I had to keep reminding myself that these people had freely made the choices that brought them to where they now were. “Did you notice the cowboy particularly?”

“I saw him a couple of different times but didn’t think anything of it. I was mostly catching up with some of the New York crowd.” She flipped her long, dark, tangled hair out of her eyes. “Did you hear? Leatrice has signed up to be a guest judge on some modeling show.”

“Good luck to the producers,” I said in all sincerity. Keeping Leatrice on schedule and sober/straight had been my job for too long. “Anything else catch your attention last night?” I said, trying to keep my flighty friend on track.

“Other than Virgil staring at you longingly?” she said, casually watching me.

I sighed and got up to make some breakfast muffins, setting raisins to soak, then getting out a wooden cutting board and grating some carrot. Everyone kept trying to shove Virgil and me together, but I hadn’t noticed any sign that he was truly interested. Nor was I. “Those football players, for example. Did you see them talking to anyone at the party?”

“Mostly they kept to themselves, except one or two of them kept trying to get girls to dance, especially our model friends.” She drank some of her herbal tea, a blend McGill’s mother, who I understood was an herbalist, had recommended.

“Did you see the two girls who were dressed provocatively? They were party crashers, too.”

“I thought there were three of them?” she asked as she yawned and stretched.

As I blended the oils and eggs with the sugars for some Morning Glory muffins, then chopped some apple and got down the glass jars with sunflower seeds and shredded coconut, I pondered my sense about the group. I liked to cook while I thought; it helped. “That’s the thing,” I finally said in answer to her question. “There were three similarly dressed, but I felt like there were two who were following the footballers around, and then one other who wasn’t really with them, even though she followed them sometimes.”

Shilo frowned down at her peeling manicure, chewing on her lip as she thought. “The third one, the one alone, did she have frizzy blonde hair peeking out under a black wig, and was she wearing Manolo Blahnik Kahika floral cutout boots?”

I was taken aback at the precision of her memory, but I shouldn’t have been. Shilo’s eye for the very best in couture was puzzling to me, since she was content with boho/hobo chic most of the time. Her odd costume at the breakfast table was a case in point: she wore a long, floaty skirt, a peasant blouse, a man’s vest, and cowboy boots. It was her eye that had made her a good model; she knew clothes, even though she didn’t care to be fashionable all the time. Like a lot of models, once she knew what the customer wanted, she could turn it on and crank it out. “Uh, maybe,” I said, not sure what the Manolo boots she was talking about looked like. My memory pinged on something. “Did you say she had frizzy blonde hair under the dark wig?”

“Yup.”

“And wore expensive boots?”

“They were black cutout boots that came up—”

“Got it! Expensive boots.” It
had
to be Zoey Channer, with that combination of frizzy blonde hair and expensive footwear. So she had gone from observing to sneaking in; I hoped none of my guests were missing anything, because I did not trust her one little bit. That was something I needed to tell Virgil, because I had completely forgotten to call him to tell him about Zoey Channer hanging about in my woods.

Pish finally joined us, and after popping the muffins in the oven to bake, I shared my thoughts. “I knew after finding her in my woods that the only reason her father came here was to look for her. So why didn’t he show up at my party? I don’t get it.”

Pish nodded slowly, getting a cup of coffee. “Also, why did
she
sneak into the party? And why do you think she was following the other two girls all night?”

“At first I had the impression she was trying to blend in with them. That could still be true, but there may be something else. I have got to remember to tell Virgil about this.”

“What does it have to do with the murder?” Shilo asked.

“I don’t know, but anything might help.”

“Might help what?”

I jumped and turned. It was Cranston, who had the annoying habit of just walking into the castle whenever he felt like it. “How did you get in?” I asked.

“Brought Zeke and Gordy up to work,” he said, affably sidestepping my question. He did that often, answering another question instead of the one asked. It got irritating very quickly. “You said there’s a lot more to do, and the boys seem anxious to get back to it,” he added.

I sighed. It was useless to reprimand someone so cheerfully obtuse. “Have a coffee, Cranston. Oh, by the way, you’ll be pleased that I’m finally moving forward.”

“Moving forward? What do you mean?” he asked, grabbing a mug off the stainless steel counter and filling it. He liked his coffee black and strong. He sat down by Pish, who gave him a look and got up to leave. Pish wasn’t crazy about Cranston, but my possible cousin was, as I said, either cheerfully obtuse or willfully ignorant of people’s dislike.

“I’ve made an appointment for us to have our DNA tests done.” I told him the date. “We have to go to the hospital in Rochester, so I figured I’d make it a shopping trip, too. Want to go, Shilo?”

“Maybe,” she said, dreamily.

When I glanced back to Cranston, his eyes were wide and startled looking; he sat, mug in hand, like a tribute statue honoring the benefits of caffeine in promoting alertness. “What’s wrong, Cranston? It’s what you wanted, right?”

“Yes, of
course
. It’s just . . . I didn’t know . . . I didn’t think . . .” He shook his head and took a sip of coffee, putting the mug down. To my embarrassment, he got up and came around the long trestle table to me, leaned over, and hugged me hard. “You don’t know what this will mean to me,” he finally said as he released me, more serious than I’d ever seen him. He clasped his hands in front of him. “It’s
more
than the castle, Merry. I’ve never had much family, and if it turns out we’re cousins, how cool will that be?”

I was moved that that was how he saw it, and I reached out to touch his hand. “Thanks, Cranston. I hope we’re really cousins, too.” I paused a beat and looked over at Shilo, who was unresponsive to our touching family scene. “I have to go into town in an hour or so. Let me know if either of you need anything.”

Cranston was still staring at me with fervent hope. “My granny Violet is smiling down on you from heaven, my dearest,” he said.

His voice was choked by a sob that was ruined for me by Shilo rolling her eyes. I had to restrain a snort of laughter, not an appropriate reaction to a man talking about his late, beloved grandmother. I understood Shilo’s reaction, even though it was unsuitable; everything about Cranston was larger than life. He wore his fervid emotions on his sleeve and expected to be taken seriously even while saying things nobody’s said since the nineteenth century. “I’m sure she is,” I said to Cranston while giving Shilo a stern look behind his back. She stuck her tongue out at me, the brat! She then bounced off to clean Magic’s cage, which, the way she did it, could take the rest of the day.

Cranston left, heading off to wherever it was he went. I didn’t know if he had ever worked, but he didn’t have a job right now, that I knew of. He had vaguely talked about being lucky in finance, and I pictured a situation much like Pish’s, My dear friend had done well enough to retire early but for a few clients he still retained.

Once Cranston was gone, I went outside to talk to Zeke and Gordy, wrapping my sweater around me to ward off the late October chill. They were busily tidying up the terrace outside the front door, picking up cigarette butts and random bits of paper and the occasional costume piece that couldn’t have been seen in the dark the night before. The rest of the terrace was off-limits, as the police were keeping a perimeter around the scene of the crime. Both fellows studiously avoided my eyes, and I knew them well enough to know what was up. “Hey, guys, come here,” I said.

They trudged over to me and stood, identical hangdog expressions on them both.

“I just wanted you to know that you are not to blame for what happened last night.”

Zeke, a shocked look on his face, looked me in the eye finally, and said, “That murder? Course not!” His Adam’s apple goggled in his throat like a fish rising to bait.

“I think it was a hit,” Gordy whispered, his gaze slewing between the lane and the forest. “Weird folk been hanging around hereabouts lately.”

“I wasn’t talking about the murder! I meant it wasn’t your fault that stray, uninvited guests got into the party. I didn’t equip you properly, so I’ll rethink our system, I promise.” Both looked relieved, but I wasn’t done. “However, the football team is another matter. You didn’t even
try
to account for them on your list. How come?”

They exchanged guilty glances.

“Are they friends of yours?”

They shook their heads. Gordy swiped a hank of wispy hair out of his eyes. I thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t.

“Well, then, who were they? I know you know them.”

Zeke sighed. “It’s just . . . those guys were from our high school, back in the day. They . . . we . . . you don’t understand.” He choked to a stop.

But I thought I did. Everyone has known a group of guys who were the kingpins of their school, the elite, the top dogs. And what did guys like Gordy and Zeke do? Placate.
That
was likely why they let them into the party. Old habits die hard. The football uniforms probably took Zeke and Gordy right back to their spot on the bottom of the pecking order. “But you’ve been out of school for what . . . twelve or more years now?”

“Maybe that matters in New York City, but in Autumn Vale, things kind of freeze around high school.” Zeke glumly stuck his hands in his pockets as Gordy nodded in agreement.

“Were they hanging out with two girls or three?”

Zeke glanced over at his friend, then said, “We were talking about that, and figured we ought to tell you the truth. We weren’t sure at first, but we were when we saw them again. The two girls were Candy and Sylvia Frobisher. They’re twins.” His tone was worshipful, and I knew who those girls were, though I’d never met them. They were the girls every guy in school wanted to date. They were the prom queens, the cheerleaders, the social butterflies. They were probably still coasting on their looks and would until life offered them a wake-up call.

Neither guy knew who the third girl was, and they weren’t even sure they had let her in. It was one of the Frobisher twins who had impersonated my friend, Melanie Pritchard—I had a feeling that, despite what Zeke said, the boys knew that when they let them in—but the two were not with the third girl at that point. This was not good. It seemed some of the crashers could have come by way of the terrace door through the smoking-pit area, bypassing the doormen, such as they were. That was going to complicate Virgil’s job, no doubt, but I was sure he had already thought of that.