I had clearly put my foot in it. Which was it, I wondered, illegal or immoral? Fattening was clearly not a problem. I took another bite of chocolate croissant, chewed, swallowed, and said, “Binny, you have to know I was joking.”
She examined me for a long minute. There were so many pauses in our conversation it was the word equivalent of Swiss cheese. “I just don’t know who to turn to,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “It’s all such a mess. Dinah has been the only one . . . I mean, she’s at least someone who cared for Dad. If she honestly thinks he’s alive . . .” She shook her head and clamped her lips shut, though they still trembled. “I think she’s trying to protect me somehow. But from what? And then, I found . . .” She stopped and shook her head again.
“Found what?”
But she was mute, just shaking her head. I was touched and sad for her. When my grandmother died and then my mom, six months later, I was a mess. Virtually the same thing was happening to her now at just a little older than I had been. “What did you find?” I urged again. “Something that leads you to believe your dad is alive? Why don’t we talk about this whole mess?”
The shop door jangled, indicating customers. She grabbed a rag and blotted her eyes, settled her expression, and headed out to the shop. I could hear her talking, and then the door jangled again a couple of times, quickly. I tried to imagine what it was that had suddenly given her hope that her father was alive. When things quieted down, she came back to the kitchen, more composed. I stood, but just then the bells over the door jangled once again. She headed to the door.
“Look, Binny,” I said, stopping her by putting my hand on her shoulder. “I know what you’re going through. Or at least . . . I know some of what you’re going through. I have a lot of questions, but you’re getting busy.” I felt her tense, needing to tend to her shop. “Why don’t you . . . would it be too hard for you to come out to the castle after the shop closes? Come out for dinner?” Tom’s body was gone, but I wasn’t sure she could handle coming to the site of his murder.
She nodded. “Yeah. Okay. I will. I know the way.”
We set a time, and I left the shop with an agreement that I would come out the next day to use her ovens to bake muffins.
But I wasn’t heading home. I took out my cell phone and miracle of miracles, it decided to work! I punched in a number from memory.
“Jack McGill here,” came the real estate agent’s voice.
“Hey, McGill, it’s Merry Wynter. I wanted to check . . .”
“I’m not available right now, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll get right back to you!”
Darned voice mail! I hated the kind that fooled you into thinking you’d reached the person you wanted. I clicked my phone off and stuffed it back in my purse. McGill had said that Junior Bradley was fine, and who would know better? The township zoning offices were on a short, dead-end street off Abenaki, so I walked there after stopping back into Binny’s Bakery, leaving word with her where I was headed in case Shilo stopped by looking for me.
The door listed office hours as eight a.m. to four p.m.; I rapped and walked in. It was a dusty, dank, little space, no light, little air. Junior Bradley sat at the only desk, a metal monstrosity from the fifties or earlier, and glared at a computer screen that showed a FreeCell game in mid-play.
“Hi,” I said brightly, determined to be friendly even though his expression as he looked up at me was as if he had bitten into a lemon. “We haven’t formally met yet, but I’m Merry Wynter,” I reminded him, “Melvyn Wynter’s great-niece and heir.” I moved forward, hand stuck out, but he ignored it.
“Okay, so what do you want?”
He wasn’t going to be polite. All right, kill him with kindness, as my grandmother used to say. “I’m so sorry. I know you must be devastated, having just lost your best friend, Tom Turner. And how sad that your last dealing with him was a fistfight!”
His face turned bright red, but he only sputtered and shook his head. I sat down in the uncomfortable, rickety chair across from him and crossed my legs. The chair wobbled precariously, and I quickly uncrossed my legs and sat straight. I did not want to end up on the floor, legs in the air; so undignified. “Look, I’m not here to talk about Tom Turner or his death,” I said. Mendacity suited me at that moment. “It’s none of my business. But I am here to find out some information about my property. I understand that Turner Wynter Construction had some kind of plan to build a subdivision, or neighborhood . . . or something, on the castle property. I’ve begun to look through my uncle’s papers, but they’re a mess, and it’s going to take me a while. Can you tell me anything about it?”
He stared at his computer screen for a long minute, then pasted a weak smile on his pale face. “I can try to help,” he said. “I’m just real torn up about Tom. We were kids together, you know?”
My bull-crap radar was beeping loudly, and I never ignore that. “I had heard you were best friends, but that things had changed between you lately.”
He sighed. “Yeah, we were friends, and rivals. We dated the same girls, played the same games, sometimes on the same side, sometimes against each other. It was never serious, you know, when we fought over women.”
“Like the last time?”
“The last time?”
“The last time, when you had a bar fight, reportedly over a girl named Emerald?” I watched his expression.
His face was lined beyond his years, and he had pouches under his weak eyes. He rubbed them and pinched over his nose. “Uh, that was just . . . a misunderstanding.”
“On whose part?”
“Mine. I . . . uh . . . I thought the girl was, uh . . . trying to tell him to get lost and he wasn’t listening. Look, what’s that got to do with anything?” He squinted across the desk at me and leaned over on his elbows. “Didn’t you say you wanted to talk about your uncle’s zoning problems?”
“Problems? I didn’t actually know there were problems.”
He picked up a pencil and began tapping it on the desktop. “Well, yeah, you know, Melvyn and Rusty . . . not the two sharpest tools in the shed. And always at cross purposes. One would file a paper and the other wouldn’t know a thing about it.” He shrugged. “They would have worked things out eventually, I guess.”
Helped by him? In a town as small as Autumn Vale, you wouldn’t think two partners could be working so determinedly at cross purposes. Something didn’t seem right. “But there were lawsuits in the works, then Rusty disappeared and Melvyn died.”
He nodded. “Yup.”
“Where does that leave me?” I asked, curious about what he’d say.
He colored pinkish. “What do you mean?”
“How can I clean up my zoning problems?”
“You mean, you intend to go ahead?”
I narrowed my eyes and watched him for a moment. He seemed panicked. What about? “I haven’t decided yet. But one thing I know for sure: the zoning still being up in the air is not good news for a potential buyer. I’d like to get everything sorted out and resolve the lawsuits that were in play at the time of my uncle’s death. Can I see the paperwork?”
“What paperwork?”
I was losing patience quickly. “The paperwork having to do with the zoning of my uncle’s—and now my—acreage.” I thought way back to my few months working in a zoning and planning permissions office in New York. “I’d like to see any plans that were filed, as well as the paperwork that went with it, any zoning change requests, building permits, lot subdivisions, anything.”
“I’ll . . . uh, well, geez, I’ll need a while to pull everything together,” he said, rising and walking over toward the door. “I’ll give you a call when I have it all ready, okay? I got work to do, now, so you run along and I’ll give you a call.”