When I thought of real friends, Pish Lincoln’s name popped into my head. Pish was a brilliant, witty, intensely alive older gentleman who had been a money manager for many a lucky model of my acquaintance. If I had trusted him with my investments I would not now be broke, but I had stubbornly thought that the insurance money from Miguel’s death was like funny money to be played with. I tossed it willy-nilly like confetti, drifting toward stocks in companies that sounded good to me, or whose products I liked. Pish had tried to steer me, but I hadn’t, to my current chagrin, listened.
When I figured out more of what Turner Construction was involved in, maybe he was someone who could answer a few money questions for me. I trusted him implicitly, and missed his daily dose of calm, good sense. In fact, a need for information or not, I was going to call him. When I left New York, I hadn’t been sure I could handle all the fond and teary farewells my friends would have foisted on me, and I had slipped out of the city like a thief in the night. He was going to be angry, but he never stayed angry for long. Not with me, anyway.
I set Magic down on the table and wrote a list of things to do on the morrow. Lists are my thing. I love lists, so making one felt like I was returning to some semblance of my former self, the self before Leatrice stabbed me in the back and twisted the knife.
The list:
1. Call Pish Lincoln and throw myself on his mercy.
2. Go to the police station and demand to know what they took from the castle.
3. Question Dinah Hooper about the financial dealings of Turner and Turner Wynter Construction.
4. Find someone to mow the freaking field that’s growing up around the castle.
Seriously, Wynter Castle was beginning to look like an abbey abandoned during the Reformation, only not as neat and tidy.
Oh yeah . . . I jotted one more thing down on my list.
5. Go for a long walk in the woods with Lizzie, and get her to show me the abandoned encampment.
I wanted that torn down, removed, cleansed. Picking up Magic again, I went back upstairs and actually slept for three hours, waking up feeling more like myself than I had in years.
Chapter Fifteen
THE LIST WOULD need to be tweaked, I discovered. I got a call first thing in the morning from Sheriff Grace asking me to come in and sign a statement. If I was going to be out and about, then I may as well do the things on my list that required a trip to town.
Shilo and I, following directions—turn left off Abenaki at the Autumn Vale Community Bank—found the tiny police station. Located at the end of obscure and brief Valley View Avenue, the sheriff’s department was a small, modern building with a barracks-like look, narrow, slit windows, and overall gray, drab appearance. I left Shilo in the car, went in past the big, glass, double doors, and was guided to Sheriff Grace’s office by a young female deputy. I sat down in an uncomfortable chair across the desk from his leather swivel chair. He joined me moments later, but not before I examined his walls, the “artwork,” such as it was, included local citations for his coaching of the town’s Little League baseball team and an honorary membership in the Brotherhood of the Falcon. They had made him an “Eyas,” which I guess was a fledgling falcon. Other than that there was a pleasant if nondescript watercolor of an autumn forest.
As he took a seat across the desk, I remembered my late-night thoughts and blushed. I don’t blush. Ever! But he was very good looking: dark, wavy hair, thick enough to catch your fingers in, and just that bit of shadow along the jaw, very much like Miguel always had five minutes after shaving. I have been alone a long time, I thought. Nothing wrong with a little late-night fantasizing if it was left to late at night. I took a deep breath as he slid some paperwork across the desk to me, regarding me with that steady, unsmiling look he had perfected.
“This is the list of what we took from the castle,” he said. “It’s mostly paperwork, anything with Tom Turner’s name on it.”
“Was there a lot with his name on it? Why would there be?” I squinted and examined the paper. Pretty soon I was going to have to admit that I needed close-up glasses—cheaters, my mother had called them. Oh, joy. Anyway, it was a simple list, though from it I could not tell what each document pertained to.
The sheriff shrugged. “Old Melvyn and the Turners were involved in some real estate deal that went bad, and there were lawsuits, so there was a fair bit of paperwork and we just wanted to look it over more closely, see if we can find anything that has to do with Tom. It’s a mess of bank loans, defaults, zoning problems, and missed deadlines.”
Bank loans? Oh, lord, I thought, I hope that the estate is not saddled with a mountain of debt, undiscovered until now. I was going to have to take this seriously and untangle the mess before the property was actually salable. I felt like I had been wearing blinders, and they had just fallen off. Lawyer Silvio, among others, had some ’splainin’ to do.
“Your uncle also wrote nasty notes to the Turners, and vice versa,” the sheriff went on. “I know about a lot of this because I was occasionally involved, called in by both parties at different times. I know very well what those two old men were like.”
“But they’re all dead now,” I said, glossing over the fact that no one truly knew what had happened to Rusty. Despite Binny’s and Dinah’s hopes, I figured the old guy had probably died, and his body just hadn’t been discovered yet. Maybe he went for a walk and fell off a cliff. Who knew? “What does this have to do with Tom’s murder?”
“We don’t know. But there were things mentioned in the letters . . .” He stopped abruptly.
I was intrigued. “What kind of things?”
He regarded me calmly. “Tom was well-enough liked by many, but he had his peccadilloes.”
Peccadilloes; is that what they called them in a small town? I smiled inwardly. “Such as?”
“Girlfriends he had cheated on. Friends he had betrayed in some way or another. Don’t we all have those dark spots in our past?”
I stiffened. It felt like his comments were aimed at me. It would only take a phone call or two to come across Leatrice’s accusations of thievery against me. Maybe he already knew about it. But that had nothing to do with this. “What’s your point, Sheriff?”
He leaned across the desk. “Now, locally, folks are kind of looking at you oddly because you threatened Tom Turner, and then he winds up dead in your yard.”
“That’s ridiculous. I’m not the kind of woman who goes around bashing people over the head!”
“Maybe so, but folks around here don’t know you, right? And you must admit—”
“I don’t have to ‘admit’ anything,” I snapped. “I didn’t kill him, but I sure would like to know who did so I can sleep better at night.”
He thrust his fingers through his hair, and it stood straight up. Combined with his dorky uniform, a dark-blue shirt done right up to his neck and adorned with a clip-on tie, it made him just too cute in a way my perfect, suave, dignified Miguel never was. Come to think of it, that was Miguel’s only fault, his lack of a sense of the ridiculous, especially about himself.