Muffin to Fear, page 12
Hugh strode forward. “This is ridiculous. He’s not in here; he’s just taken off. So let’s take a look and eliminate this, then I’ll call him and straighten it all out. He probably had a friend pick him up. He’s a bit of a jerk, but he’s the most popular jerk here, and don’t any of you forget it!” Hugh yanked the door open and strode into the dim, dusty recesses.
Becket raced in after him, to my surprise, so I followed. “Becket!” I yelled. “Get out of there. I don’t want you getting in trouble.” The garage was dirty and had stuff like oil, chains, nails, and a workshop area of lethal-looking rusty saws. Of course Becket didn’t listen; when did cats ever?
I’ll admit, I was grumbling to myself as we all trooped in, but given what I’ve experienced in the last year, there was a frisson of nerves. Nothing could have happened. Could it?
Hugh strode around the garage. It’s quite large, and in daylight fairly bright since there is a row of windows up at the roof peak. “Dirk, Dirk! Are you here?”
I noticed, though, that others were not as boisterous. Some hadn’t entered at all. I looked back out the open door—someone had swung both big doors wide open to increase the amount of light in the garage—and saw Rishelle and Millicent framed in the light, huddled together, clutching on to each other. I felt an instant of worry, then heard a yelp of shock behind me. I whirled and saw, across the open space past one of the support beams, Chi-Won Zhu staggering backward and Hugh gaping in horror.
I raced over. There on the floor, his eyes horribly open and filmed with gray, was Dirk, dressed as he was when I last saw him, with his long black coat flung out, lying in a thick pool of dark, drying blood with the whole top of his head crushed by a heavy red metal toolbox that lay on its side in the blood, tools littered about him. I moaned and my stomach lurched. I shuffled backward as Todd, Stu, and some others caught up with me and saw what I saw, their voices becoming a chorus of horror and disbelief, and a wild cacophony of wailing, sobbing, hoarse croaks, and cries of dismay.
Becket, behind us, sniffed the air and headed toward the pool of blood. I grabbed him, not able to bear the thought of him getting any of that appalling liquid on his paws or in his fur. I stumbled across the floor and out the door, thrusting a struggling, yowling Becket at Lizzie, telling her to stay put outside of the garage and hold on to my cat as I bumbled around to the side of the building and emptied my stomach in the long grass.
Someone held back my hair and rubbed my shoulders. I looked up to see Virgil, who was frowning in puzzlement and staring at the garage, within which voices were still babbling. He looked dazed and tired, but a more welcome sight I don’t think I’ve ever seen. I threw myself at him and he hugged me. I felt the scrape of his whiskers—grown in thickly while he surveilled for two days—against my cheek.
“Merry, what in God’s name is going on here?” He found a tissue in my cardigan pocket, fished it out, and thrust it at me.
I wiped my mouth, then told him what we had discovered. He immediately snapped into police command mode, all traces of weariness gone. “I’ll take care of this.” He strode off toward the garage entrance. He may have been muttering “Not again,” over and over; I’m not sure.
• • •
“It’s a horrible accident, but it’s just an accident,” Hugh Langley said to Pish as they sat together on white wrought iron chairs on the terrace, watching the sheriff’s department do their job of securing the scene. The medical examiner, a local doctor I knew all too well at this point, arrived. “I don’t see why I can’t call Dirk’s brother in Ohio,” Hugh continued. “He has a right to know.”
“We need to let the authorities do their job, Hugh,” Pish said. “Now or an hour from now, the news will wait. It’s not like his brother can do anything.”
The producer shook his head in dismay. “I can’t believe it. Dirk, gone? It’s wildly improbable. What was he doing in that garage?”
It was now a half hour after our discovery, and I had been given permission to go to the washroom, brush my teeth, and put on the huge coffee urn. It was going to be a long day and would require copious amounts of coffee to get through. I paced back and forth, from the terrace where everyone had gathered, out to the open drive where I could watch the proceedings at the garage.
“And what are we going to do about the show?” Hugh lamented, ruffling his sparse hair, then smoothing it down again.
His lament may have seemed callous, but I couldn’t blame him for thinking of the show’s future, given what he had said about Dirk being its most popular cast member. And speaking of . . . there was something going on with the cast and crew. Chi looked haunted. More to the point, why were Rishelle and Millicent still clutching each other and whispering nonstop? The psychic appeared on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I paced away once again and turned my attention back toward the garage. Virgil stood talking to Sheriff Urquhart, at one time his deputy sheriff. My husband nodded, clapped him on the shoulder, and turned, stalking back toward us.
I stowed away my suspicions to ponder later and waited for Virgil. He motioned me aside and I followed him out to his car. It was a nondescript battered sedan, the better to blend into his surroundings, he said when first he showed me the disreputable vehicle he bought for three hundred dollars. He then paid Ford Hayes to soup up the guts so it revved like a Ferrari. He leaned back against the car and took me in his arms, holding me close. We kissed.
“I missed you, wife,” he murmured in my ear. “It was a long, long couple of nights, but we got the guy. He’s being charged with insurance fraud. You should have seen him; he actually lifted a mini fridge on his own and carried it up a ramp into his moving truck. And yet he couldn’t do his job.”
I knew this inconsequential talk was his way of giving me space to calm down. “I’m so glad you’re home.” We kissed again, watched intently by those on the terrace. “Virgil, what happened to Dirk Phillipe?” I muttered. “It looked like an accident, from what I saw.”
“It most definitely was not an accident,” he said, staring over my shoulder at the group. There was a deputy with them now, and no one talked.
“How do you know? It was a tool chest. If he tried to get it down off the shelf, it could have fallen on his head. Right?”
“It didn’t fall,” Virgil said.
His tone held a certainty I rarely heard from him in the past, when he was a police officer. Maybe as a private citizen he felt free to express his beliefs. I looked up at his flexing jaw and steely eyes. “How do you know . . . oh.” I thought of one way they would know it hadn’t fallen. It must have been loaded on some kind of spring or something.
I looked back at the group of people and found the one I was looking for. Chi-Won Zhu looked miserable, his head in his hands, staring down at the flagstone. He knew all about special effects. His past expertise on movies, he said, was scenes where things are made to explode and move and fall on cue. But as far as I knew, Chi had nothing in particular against Dirk, except . . . well, there was that incident of Dirk treating Millicent like crap, and Chi clearly had a thing for Millicent. Dirk had made fun of the special effects wizard’s crush. Hmm.
But . . . not my circus, not my monkeys, as I kept trying to tell myself. They’d have to sort this out on their own. Unless I wasn’t allowed to stay out of it; there was that possibility. The drawback to Virgil no longer being sheriff in Autumn Vale is that now I must deal with Sheriff Urquhart, who does not like me and never will. I had given up thinking I could change that. It was an Urquhart thing, I guess.
The crew who were not staying at the castle had been briefly interviewed and dismissed to return to their motel rooms, or wherever else they wanted to go, I guess. The gales of November swept over us. We all shuddered and trembled at the increasing cold. I was separated from my husband and we were all shepherded inside to the dining room and guided to tables. A deputy was stationed in our midst to discourage muttering, I suppose, though it was a little late for that. If anyone needed to get a story straight I’m sure they had already done so.
I checked in with Lizzie, who was curled up in a chair with Becket on her lap. He yawned and stretched and fell asleep there after his night in the great outdoors.
“You okay?” I asked, touching her shoulder.
“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “What’s going on? What happened?”
“We’re not sure yet.”
I was called to the library, where the police had set up a kind of informal interview space. One of the newer deputies, a very competent young woman, spoke to me first. I went through our evening ghost hunting, and then the night. Yes, I had the key to Dirk’s room, and no, I hadn’t been in it that morning other than to check that he was not there. Yes, they could search it all they wanted, though they didn’t need my permission, given that he was, presumably, the victim of a crime.
What crime, they weren’t telling me. It could have been one of several: death by misadventure, reckless homicide, suicide (hard to imagine, but possible, and . . . is that even a crime? Not sure.) and, of course, straight-up homicide.
Sheriff Urquhart arrived during the interview and the young woman hastily moved from behind the desk. “Miss Wynter, we meet again,” he said, grimly, as he dismissed the young woman with a flip of his hand.
“I’m Mrs. Grace Wynter now, Sheriff, if we’re going to be formal.”
“Right. Virge and you . . .” He shook his head in evident disbelief that the man he admired greatly would marry an outsider, and a New Yorker, at that.
I resisted the urge to choose a weapon and throw it at him, though there was a marble egg paperweight within reach. It would have been so perfect. However, giving him a concussion would not be a good first step in our détente.
He examined the notes the deputy had made in small, neat printing. Finally he looked up. “Who are these people and why are they here?”
I started to explain, and he held up one hand.
“I know some of this already. There’s lots of talk in AV,” he said, meaning Autumn Vale. “But I mean, why are they staying at the castle, when some of them are out at the motel?”
“It was part of the agreement, I guess. I mean, we’re set up for it. We have extra space and I’m always looking for ways to make enough money to keep the castle going. They agreed to pay a set sum for room and board for the cast and a couple of the crew.”
“What was this guy like, this . . .” He consulted his notes. “Dirk Phillipe.” He pronounced the name with extreme care and a curled lip.
“What was he like?” I looked up at the ceiling, which was coffered wood paneling, elegantly perfect in my lovely library. “He insulted people. He made fun of others. He was conceited and arrogant.” I looked Sheriff Urquhart in the eye. “He was a jerk.”
“So, you disliked him.”
“Anyone with any humanity disliked him!”
He nodded, and then took me over the same ground the deputy had. I repeated almost verbatim what I said to her, and the sheriff finally let me go. Virgil was waiting in the dining room when I emerged from the library; his expression was grim, exhaustion warring with a tightly guarded fury I recognized. A nerve jumped under the skin at the corner of his eye. My darling husband was frustrated by some aspect of the investigation.
He took me in his arms and held me close once again; I love that he always seems to know what I need, which is generally just him. I put my head to his chest and listened to his heartbeat, finding in that steady thump my center, then I looked up again into his eyes. I’m a couple of inches shorter than my stalwart hubby, and can pretty much look him in the eye.
“I’m guessing there is something going on that you would do differently,” I whispered.
He let out a bark of laughter, squeezed me, then let me go. “You could say that. Why did Urquhart let the rest of the crew go? He should have talked to all of them himself, not just let his deputy take care of it. That’s an outbuilding; there are a hundred ways to get into it, and someone could have parked on the road or on the lane near the road, snuck up, had an altercation with the vic, killed him, and then left without so much as a . . . anyway. Phillipe may have even arranged to meet someone out there, who knows? Maybe it’s not that way, but Urquhart sure as hell didn’t know that when he let those people drive away, back to their motel, ready to spread who knows what information to who knows who?”
I wanted to chuckle, but didn’t. I wanted to remind him that Urquhart was handpicked by Virgil himself to step in as sheriff, but didn’t. Discretion is the better part of marriage.
Pish joined us, looking over his shoulder at the Haunt Hunt cast and crew. His aesthete’s face—intelligent eyes, longish nose, constantly curious expression—was lined with worry, his thin, straight light brown hair tousled in unusual disarray. “I’m sorry about this, Merry, I really am.”
“So you killed Dirk Phillipe?” I said.
“What? No, of course not!”
“Then stop apologizing,” I said with a smile.
“But I think I know who may have,” he said.
Chapter Thirteen
“WHO?” I ASKED, startled by his declaration.
“Hugh.”
“Who?” Virgil asked.
“Hugh!”
“Hugh Langley, the producer,” I said to stop the “who’s on first” quality of our conversation. “That is the cultured-looking man with his legs crossed, the one looking annoyed and texting on his cell.”
“He shouldn’t be doing that,” Virgil said with a frown. “Why didn’t Urquhart ban cell phone use?”
As he had already said, my husband was concerned about what was getting out to the media. But none of this was up to him; this was Urquhart’s party now. “I don’t think he’s going to tell the press,” I said, then had second thoughts. This was TV, after all; even bad news was publicity. “Not yet anyway. He’ll wait until he can issue a statement of some sort. And Urquhart may have said no cell phone use, but people in the business never think things apply to them.” I shrugged off my worry about what that would do to our image yet again, though both Wynter Castle and Autumn Vale had taken a hit in the last year with the murders that had occurred in both places. Social media and newspapers had not been kind. But this was not about us. “Why do you say you think Hugh killed Dirk?” I asked Pish.
He sighed and frowned. “He did not like Dirk one little bit, I know that for sure. Thought he was a big phony.”
That wasn’t exactly what I had noticed, but Pish reads things differently than I sometimes. “Dirk was valuable to him, though, a ratings rock star. And as for disliking him, that goes for almost every single person on the cast and crew,” I said.
“Why is that?” Virgil asked.
I explained about Dirk Phillipe’s painfully arrogant, dismissive behavior, sharp tongue, and delight in humiliating people. “He could be nice, when it suited him, but usually he was just a horrible person.”
“There had to be more to him, though, than his assholiness,” Virgil said.
I snorted with laughter at his description, then, horrified by my own outburst, shut my mouth as all eyes turned toward me. Lizzie slunk over to me, looking more than a little frightened.
“I swear this place really is haunted,” Lizzie said, eyeing the others through a narrowed gaze. “Honestly, why does crap keep happening here?”
I sighed and shrugged, almost in tears. My emotions were veering wildly, pinging like a pinball machine ball among irritation, overwhelming sadness for Dirk’s family, and anger. I put my arm over her shoulders and hugged her to me. “Good question, to which I do not have an answer.”
An hour later, everyone had been interviewed. The sheriff had taken aside Chi-Won Zhu for a second interview and set his minions to search the bedrooms, after gaining all of our permission, which was granted. I retreated to my kitchen, while Virgil left to catch a shower, a shave, and get some rest at his old house, which was still vacant, awaiting the closing date. That was my idea; I didn’t want to chase him away, but he looked worn right out after a couple days of nonstop surveillance, and I knew darn well he’d get no rest at the castle, not with Sheriff Urquhart in charge.
Millicent, her eyes red and puffy, drifted in and sat down at the trestle table. “What are you doing?”
“I’m making muffins,” I said. It gave me pause for a moment; I had just seen a man’s dead body two hours ago, and now I was making muffins. Was I becoming unfeeling? I hoped not, but life did have to go on. “Do you want a cup of tea?”
“Do you have herbal?”
“Sure,” I said, then named off what I had. She wanted the rest and recuperation blend, so I set the kettle to boil and continued with my muffins.
“Do you use all organics?” she asked, eyeing my pound of butter and all-purpose flour with an apprehensive look.
“No.”
“You should. You’re slowly poisoning people if you don’t.”
I kept my mouth shut.
“Do you use non-GMO flour, at least? Or better yet, fair trade, non-GMO, GF flour?”
I held my breath while I counted to ten in my head, then let it out, turning away and rinsing out the teapot to make my regular, black, no-fuss tea for myself. Instead of giving her a hard time, I decided to answer part of her question. “I’ve never made gluten-free muffins, but I’ve always wanted to try. Maybe I’ll alter a recipe right now for us, if you’d like?”
“You’re nice,” she said, cocking her head. “Most people act like I’m a pain.”
I couldn’t imagine why.
I rustled around in my cupboard and came up with some coconut flour I had bought before my honeymoon and hadn’t gotten around to using. I lifted down my plastic tub of pecans from an upper shelf, then made Millicent her tea. I got myself a cup of my plain black, then set to work on a common recipe, Pecan Pie muffins, but using GF ingredients instead. We’d see how they turned out.
