Bran New Death

“If that. More like forty-five minutes, depending on the driver.”

“Well, my flight leaves in an hour, and it’s only an hour long, so best get moving.”

“Darling, I can’t . . . but maybe . . . okay, all right.” I sat down in a chair and thought quickly. “Look, some way or another I will make sure that someone meets you at the airport.” I took down the flight details, then hung up, since his cab was waiting at the door and his ancient mother was yammering at him in the background.

I raced upstairs, woke Shilo up—she had gotten in very late the previous night—and told her about Becket and Pish and the whole shemozzle. She drowsily agreed that she could go fetch Pish at the airport in Rochester.

I stood over her watching her drift back to sleep. “Maybe I ought to go,” I fussed, glancing at my watch. “I’ll just run out, see if I can get the cat, then . . . if Becket won’t come to me, to heck with him,” I said. “I have too much to do to be ruled by that feline co

Shilo chuckled sleepily. “Don’t you worry about it. I’ll go and fetch darling Pish. If I can’t figure out how to get to the Rochester airport, I’ll rope McGill in to help.”

I sat down on the side of her bed. “What’s going on between you and McGill, Shi? I’ve never seen you spend this much time with a guy.” I knew his secret, but supposed that he hadn’t actually proposed to her yet.

She sat up and hugged her knees, yawning and rubbing her eyes. Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders in waves. “Do you remember way back, when Julia Roberts married Lyle Lovett and everyone thought it was so weird?”

I nodded.

“I always thought her biggest mistake was divorcing him,” Shilo said dreamily, and yawned again. “That guy had character, you know? I mean, they got married real quick, and that was because the co

I didn’t say another word. She was an adult, and it wasn’t up to me to caution her against moving too fast. Shilo had been beaten up by the world when she was young, I figured, and deserved to find happiness however she could. She didn’t have contact with her family, as I had told McGill—that I knew—so her friends were the only family she had. I remembered how serious McGill seemed about my darling friend. I kissed her forehead, and said, “I’m going to get dressed, see you on your way, then go out to find that little monster.”

A half hour later, after ru

He was probably all the way to Canada by now, I figured, but armed with sliced chicken breast from my di

No kitty.

“Becket, come on, boy! I have chicken!” That would have worked with a dog, but not Becket. I had been seeing his orangey hide on and off for weeks, but now that I wanted him, he had melted into the woods like an Iroquois hunter.

A breeze rustled the long grass behind me; I shivered as I mumbled a stream of invective against Gordy and Zeke, my nonexistent grounds crew. Then I took a deep breath, thinking of how pathetic Becket had looked when I found him near death, and started down the path into the woods.

“Becket! Here kitty, kitty, kitty!” I said, rattling the plastic bag. “I have chicken!”

I peered into the green, shadowy depths every few steps, looking for a streak of orange. Where had that cat gone? And why? I didn’t get it; he had a home, a litter box, food and water and a comfortable bed, with a shirt of my uncle’s draped over it, so the smell would be familiar. He had the run of the castle, his home, even if my uncle was gone. Why had he taken off first chance he got?

As I walked, I couldn’t help but let my mind drift to the troubling mystery of Tom Turner’s murder. I hoped that the mystery was like a sweater I once had, one that had a loose thread. I picked at that thread so much, it eventually unraveled and the whole sweater fell apart. Maybe if I picked at the threads of this mystery it would all fall apart and I’d see the pattern, as I had that knitted sweater.

The threads that I kept coming back to were:

There was no evidence that Rusty Turner was dead.

And the body in the woods had been there a little while, at least.

Tom Turner was following some female for Andrew Silvio.

Isadore Openshaw hated Dinah Hooper, who had taken away her job at Turner Construction.

But now, Isadore virtually ran the Autumn Vale Community Bank on her own; Simon Grover seemed to be a figurehead roaring for his coffee and reading the fu

When I thought of the bank, I wondered what Pish had to tell me. It was seriously distracting that he was coming to the castle. What would he think? What would he say? I knew that he must have something very interesting to tell me or he would not come in person, but I suspected that half the reason for the trip was his curiosity about Wynter Castle and the town of Autumn Vale.

Then my mind Ping-Ponged back to the murder. It all kept coming back to Isadore Openshaw. Was she the woman Tom Turner had been hired to follow?

Every now and then, as I walked and thought, I remembered that I was supposed to be looking for Becket, and I’d call him. There was no cat to be seen. There was rustling in the bushes, and an occasional noise, there was birdsong, and the wind tossing the treetops. I could hear a loud motor somewhere, like a dirt bike. A screeching blue jay followed me, and a group of crows—that was called a “murder,” right? A murder of crows?—chattered and cawed. No Becket.

I stopped. Did I even know where I was? It should just be a simple matter of following the path back to the castle, right? I turned around, and realized there were a couple of paths I could have come from. I’m not terrible with maps, but we’ve already established that my internal GPS is not flawless. It had seemed so easy while Lizzie was leading the way. But the forest was pretty big. Even the lousy plat I had seen in the Turner Construction office had placed the size at about three hundred acres. That’s huge. But I wasn’t going to panic.

I heard a noise in the bushes. “Becket? Here, kitty, kitty, kitty! Come on, you darn cat. I have chicken!” I waited. Nada. “Fine! Be like that.”

I sat down on a stump and opened the baggie, took a piece of chicken breast out and ate it. Weird breakfast. I hadn’t had my quota of coffee, just one cup gulped as I raced around getting Shilo out the door, and I was seriously grumpy. Somewhere, that dang engine sound, like a buzzing mosquito, echoed again through the woods, reminding me of my determination to post No Trespassing signs at the perimeter, by the highway past Wynter Castle. Just one more of a gazillion tasks to do.

Something else came back to me, while I sat on that stump in the forest pondering all of the events of the last couple of weeks.

A dirt bike parked on a side street.

Someone on a dirt bike coming out of the woods onto the highway.

The sound of a dirt bike in the woods when Lizzie and I were looking for the encampment.