This was ridiculous. I squeezed my eyes shut. Why had I promised Hannah I would try to figure out who did it? I had a feeling that whenever Hannah wanted something, she would just turn her luminous gray eyes on the person, and they would agree to anything. Even she hadn’t been able to answer the one outstanding question that was bugging me the most; what was Tom Turner digging on my grounds for? It was absurd to think he was looking for his father’s body. Only Binny apparently believed that.

And I had told Gogi I’d try to find out if my uncle was murdered. Melvyn was eighty and driving along a treacherous, icy road. Why did it have to be murder? And was I really going to play Nancy Drew?

When I opened my eyes, it was to find Virgil Grace standing before me, a mixture of sympathy and weariness on his face. “Hi, Sheriff. Sorry. I guess I drifted off for a moment just standing here.”

“I don’t blame you. We’re pretty much finished there, but I’m putting crime-scene tape around the hole and I’d appreciate it if you could keep away from it until I say different. I know Jack wants to get going on filling it in, but he’s going to have to find another excavator for now, and work on other holes.”

“Another excavator?” That was bad news. I was prepared for a delay, but not the barring of the little excavator’s use altogether. “For how long?” I asked, dismayed.

“Can’t say,” he grunted, his tone clipped. “Until I say so.” He turned to go.

“Sheriff, hey! I’m sorry, you know . . . about Tom Turner. Were you and he friends?”

He had turned to watch me, and shrugged. “Kinda. I mean, we were on the high school football team together. We hung out, but not in recent years. He passed his time with a different crowd.”

“With guys like Junior Bradley?”

“What do you know about that?” he asked, squinting at me as the sun set behind him, the gleaming shards of light streaking his dark hair with silver. It made him look older and, to me, more attractive. He moved back to stand in front of me, looking down into my eyes with his curious, flat gaze.

Behind me, in the house, I could hear Shilo clattering up and down stairs, yelling, “Magic! Magic!” like a demented conjurer. The sheriff had lines under his eyes, and I almost reached out to smooth his ruffled hair back from his temple. I shivered. “What do I know about Junior Bradley? Just what I told you earlier, that I heard he and Tom got into it at some sleazy dive bar. Why?”

“Nothing.”

But there was something, and I’d swear it was more than just a bar fight over a woman. I stared at him, unblinking.

“Look, I know this is awkward for you, being new here, and the owner of this place,” he said, waving to include all of Wynter Castle and its environs. “But just let me do my job, which is to figure out who killed Tom Turner. Believe me, I want to know. Tom was a good guy. You didn’t know him that way, but I did.”

“I heard he was a bully in high school.”

Virgil shrugged. “High school was a long time ago. People change.”

“One more question,” I said as he started to walk away, and he turned back again. “Do you think that Tom’s murder has anything at all to do with his father’s disappearance?”

“Disappearance? You mean Rusty? So you believe that story that Dinah’s spinning, that Rusty just up and disappeared. He left his son and daughter and business and just evaporated, poof, into a puff of smoke.”

That statement told me more than anything about his own beliefs on the matter. “Okay, so you think Rusty Turner is dead. Is Tom’s murder a part of the whole mess? Do you suspect Dinah?”

“Not specifically. And I don’t know where Rusty is, dead or alive. Other than that, I can’t comment,” he said, turning away and stalking toward his cruiser. “Lock your doors at night,” he hollered back at me, then got in, slammed the door, gunned the motor, and skidded out of my weedy drive with a screech of tires. Was he angry? At what?

“Man, he was pissed,” Shi said from behind me.

I turned around, and she was holding Magic. The bunny was nibbling at her chin. “I know. But why? Is it because he hasn’t got a clue who killed Tom Turner, or because he thinks he may know, and doesn’t like it?”

Chapter Thirteen

I CALLED HANNAH and asked her—since she had a computer and Internet access—to do research for me on New York State rules and regulations as far as making food for a nursing or retirement home. She called me back and confirmed Gogi’s statement that I needed a licensed, inspected premise to bake the muffins. I was skating on dangerous ground by making them in the castle kitchen without a permit. She gave me a list of phone numbers to call to ask about getting the official paperwork I needed.

I made calls to the state licensing board and set up a preliminary inspection, just to tell me what I needed to do before getting a permit to make muffins in my kitchen. Of course, the end result of that was a stiff warning not to do any baking for the public until I received a permit. Which meant that I needed to find a kitchen to work in immediately if I was going to keep supplying Golden Acres with muffins.

It was a good excuse to visit Binny again, since that was one of the few places that had a license to make food, but there were a couple of other possibilities that Hannah suggested, among them the nursing home itself. She also said the Brotherhood of Falcons hall had a permit. Of course the men themselves never cooked, but they did rent it out for weddings, and the local women’s guild borrowed it for dinners and events. I just didn’t know if I could deal with a group of men who actually had a meeting to discuss a formal order to bar women from the premises. I concluded it was too risky—to their genitalia, such as it was—and mustered up the fortitude to call Binny, not sure what the reception would be like.

To my surprise, she asked me to come in the next morning to talk.

Shilo and I spent the rest of the day planning the work the castle needed, while I tried to avoid thinking about Tom Turner, and the fact that there was a murderer out there. After the last twenty-four hours, we were both exhausted and turned in early to read, my selection a book of poetry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. My uncle, surprisingly, had an extensive collection—Keats, Longfellow, Blake, Tennyson, Shelley, Coleridge—but it was all over the place in a tiny, airless dungeon of a room with bad lighting. That was one big change I planned. Books deserve better conditions, and there was a library downstairs that would be perfect once cleaned and aired.

I was up early the following morning, and sat at the kitchen table with my notepad and a cup of coffee, planning my next few days and all I had to do. I got the surprise of my life when Shilo joined me. She is a lay-abed, as I call her, loving to sleep in, cocooned in blanketed comfort. But there she was, dressed and ready for coffee, appearing in the kitchen doorway, Magic in hand, while I was only on my second cup.

While I made her some coffee, she grabbed lettuce and carrots out of the fridge and set Magic on the table with his vegetarian munchies. Magic was just a plain bunny, kind of a brownish-gray color, completely undistinguished, but Shilo loved him with a fierce protectiveness that was almost maternal.