Bran New Death

“Let me refill your cup with fresh coffee,” I said. When I came back and handed him the fragrant steaming brew, he sighed in contentment.

“Your coffee’s better’n my wife’s.”

“A lot of people like perked coffee better than drip.” How could I talk to him about my uncle’s affairs, I wondered. To make conversation, I said, “It’s great of you and your volunteers to come out this afternoon.” I wasn’t sure how they could possibly help or what they were doing other than standing around talking, drinking coffee, and eating muffins. It was more likely that he had come out for one more excuse to avoid his wife’s company, although maybe that was unfair. “I got the mugs from your wife’s shop,” I said, testing the waters.

“Bunch of old crap she’s got there. Never makes a pe

Okay. “It must have been awkward for you, with both Melvyn and Rusty as founding members of the Brotherhood, and them being at legal loggerheads.”

“It sure the hell was! Pardon my French. Those two old arseholes—again, pardon the French—were getting more and more cantankerous. I tried to get ’em to see sense, but they just . . .” He trailed off and shook his head. “Couldn’t get ’em to stop feuding.”

“Toward the end, was my uncle okay?” I still feared that the body in the woods was Rusty Turner, and that my uncle had gone off his rocker and killed him.

“Okay, as in, all his marbles?”

I nodded.

“Well, yeah, I’d say your uncle was sharp as a tack and just as painful, if you sat on him.”

I pondered what that meant. “In other words, he was fine, unless you crossed him?”

“Yup. Then he was like a wasp, wouldn’t let you out of his sight until he’d given you what for.”

His chagrined tone made me wonder if Simon Grover, bank manager, had crossed Melvyn Wynter before he died. I knew too well that Rusty Turner had, repeatedly. “Did he, uh, come in to the bank ever?”

Grover shrugged. “Sometimes. Not often.”

“Was my uncle worried about anything? Before he died, I mean.”

“He was mad as hell that Rusty had disappeared. Said the old coot was trying to avoid the lawsuit.”

I pondered my discovery that Uncle Melvyn had been heading into town that fateful morning when he went off the road. “Was he angry enough that he’d be confronting someone about it?”

The banker frowned into his empty cup. “Like who?”

A sudden inspiration made me say, “The lawyer, maybe? Mr. Silvio was trying to get them both to agree, though, right? Like you were. He was trying to solve things between my uncle and Rusty Turner?”

The man snorted into a chuckle, then a wheezing, coughing guffaw. “Have you ever heard of any lawyer trying to settle out of court unless there was a wad of cash involved? No way! Silvio was lining his pockets from the money two old men with grudges brought him. He wasn’t mediating; hell, he was exacerbating, egging each one on to file more and more lawsuits!”

I heard a noise behind us, but it was just McGill, filling a couple of mugs with the fresh coffee. He had an odd look on his face, one that I couldn’t translate.

“Merry? Virge wants to see you outside.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Grover heaved himself out of his chair and set his mug in the sink as he waddled past. “I guess I’d better go home, see what the little woman’s got for supper,” he grumbled, heading for the door. “She can’t make coffee worth a damn, but at least she can cook.” He lumbered outside.

Darn! I had just been about to ask him about finding my uncle’s car off the road, hoping to quiz him on what he had seen. It still seemed odd to me that he was returning home to Autumn Vale at six in the morning! And I hadn’t had a chance to inquire about my uncle’s bank dealings and what was up with Isadore Openshaw. That would all have to wait.

I took my time, delaying going out to see the sheriff. Instead, I stacked dirty mugs in the sink and ran soapy water, then washed them and set them on the drain board to air-dry. I had a lot to consider, and what the bank manager had just said about the lawyer made me wonder. The tangled mystery of who killed Tom Turner in the middle of the night on my property had many threads. Who wanted him dead being the central thread, of course, or even, who needed him dead and why? I knew so little about the local dynamics that I was afraid I was missing much of what could help me figure it out. But then, Virgil Grace was local, and he might even now have a solid idea of who killed Tom. I wouldn’t discover that until he made an arrest. I sure hoped it wouldn’t be me led away in handcuffs. I had to believe Sheriff Grace would realize that an argument in town in front of witnesses did not make me guilty of murder.

But Mr. Lawyer Silvio . . . I hadn’t even put him in the mix until now. Far from trying to put a stop to the back-and-forth lawsuits between the two old men, as he said he was doing, it appeared—or so the bank manager said—that he had been spurring both men on. But why? The answer that made sense was, to make as much money as he could with the fees he would accrue from one or the other. But Silvio had already told me he represented neither man in the lawsuits, since that would be a conflict of interest.

Did I believe him? It should be easy enough to find out the truth. Or maybe he was making money off the discord somehow. Could I really see Silvio creeping across my property in the middle of the night wielding a crowbar and cracking Tom Turner over the head? I wouldn’t put it past him, especially the creeping part. One thing I had to keep in mind when dealing with anyone was, there could be motives that I just wasn’t seeing because I had not been in town long enough. That went for Mr. Silvio, too. He had not always been an Autumn Vale citizen, but maybe he had been there long enough to have a grudge against Tom Turner. Ha

I had a lot of questions, and very few answers. I wandered outside. McGill was still hard at work, despite it getting darker by the minute and the grim scene of police vans and patrol cars. Shilo talked earnestly to one of the investigators, Miss State Police Khaki Uniform.

The sheriff saw me and approached, full tilt. “Didn’t McGill tell you I wanted to talk to you?”

“Yes, he did.” I looked up at him, examining the line of scruff along his jaw. “If this is twenty questions, it’s my turn. Did you know that you constantly have an unpleasant look on your face? One of these days, you’re going to turn into a grumpy old man with a peptic ulcer.”

I turned away and watched McGill push dirt into a hole not that far away from us. He had been working steady, making progress while I mooned around weeping to old friends on the phone, talking to a hypertensive bank manager, and washing mugs.

The sheriff settled his expression some, and said, “Well, I just thought you’d like to be the first to know. We don’t think the dead body is Rusty Turner.”

I actually felt a leap of joy at that; one thing poor Bi

“We’re still working on that. The medical examiner might be able to tell us more.”

I watched Sheriff Grace’s profile; he was a good-looking man, no doubt about it. But his permanent scowl damaged that, and I was serious about him ending up with a peptic ulcer if he didn’t watch it. Looking at it from his viewpoint though, this was serious business and nothing to smile about. And these folks were his friends and neighbors. “You know, it’s probably just the body of some hiker who got lost, set up camp, and had a heart attack in his sleep.”

“I wish I thought that,” he said. “But he has blunt-force trauma to the head, from what the ME says, and in his pockets he had some stuff that makes me think he’s local. I just can’t figure out who the hell it could be.”