She nodded. “Yeah. Okay. I will. I know the way.”

We set a time, and I left the shop with an agreement that I would come out the next day to use her ovens to bake muffins.

But I wasn’t heading home. I took out my cell phone and miracle of miracles, it decided to work! I punched in a number from memory.

“Jack McGill here,” came the real estate agent’s voice.

“Hey, McGill, it’s Merry Wynter. I wanted to check . . .”

“I’m not available right now, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll get right back to you!”

Darned voice mail! I hated the kind that fooled you into thinking you’d reached the person you wanted. I clicked my phone off and stuffed it back in my purse. McGill had said that Junior Bradley was fine, and who would know better? The township zoning offices were on a short, dead-end street off Abenaki, so I walked there after stopping back into Binny’s Bakery, leaving word with her where I was headed in case Shilo stopped by looking for me.

The door listed office hours as eight a.m. to four p.m.; I rapped and walked in. It was a dusty, dank, little space, no light, little air. Junior Bradley sat at the only desk, a metal monstrosity from the fifties or earlier, and glared at a computer screen that showed a FreeCell game in mid-play.

“Hi,” I said brightly, determined to be friendly even though his expression as he looked up at me was as if he had bitten into a lemon. “We haven’t formally met yet, but I’m Merry Wynter,” I reminded him, “Melvyn Wynter’s great-niece and heir.” I moved forward, hand stuck out, but he ignored it.

“Okay, so what do you want?”

He wasn’t going to be polite. All right, kill him with kindness, as my grandmother used to say. “I’m so sorry. I know you must be devastated, having just lost your best friend, Tom Turner. And how sad that your last dealing with him was a fistfight!”

His face turned bright red, but he only sputtered and shook his head. I sat down in the uncomfortable, rickety chair across from him and crossed my legs. The chair wobbled precariously, and I quickly uncrossed my legs and sat straight. I did not want to end up on the floor, legs in the air; so undignified. “Look, I’m not here to talk about Tom Turner or his death,” I said. Mendacity suited me at that moment. “It’s none of my business. But I am here to find out some information about my property. I understand that Turner Wynter Construction had some kind of plan to build a subdivision, or neighborhood . . . or something, on the castle property. I’ve begun to look through my uncle’s papers, but they’re a mess, and it’s going to take me a while. Can you tell me anything about it?”

He stared at his computer screen for a long minute, then pasted a weak smile on his pale face. “I can try to help,” he said. “I’m just real torn up about Tom. We were kids together, you know?”

My bull-crap radar was beeping loudly, and I never ignore that. “I had heard you were best friends, but that things had changed between you lately.”

He sighed. “Yeah, we were friends, and rivals. We dated the same girls, played the same games, sometimes on the same side, sometimes against each other. It was never serious, you know, when we fought over women.”

“Like the last time?”

“The last time?”

“The last time, when you had a bar fight, reportedly over a girl named Emerald?” I watched his expression.

His face was lined beyond his years, and he had pouches under his weak eyes. He rubbed them and pinched over his nose. “Uh, that was just . . . a misunderstanding.”

“On whose part?”

“Mine. I . . . uh . . . I thought the girl was, uh . . . trying to tell him to get lost and he wasn’t listening. Look, what’s that got to do with anything?” He squinted across the desk at me and leaned over on his elbows. “Didn’t you say you wanted to talk about your uncle’s zoning problems?”

“Problems? I didn’t actually know there were problems.”

He picked up a pencil and began tapping it on the desktop. “Well, yeah, you know, Melvyn and Rusty . . . not the two sharpest tools in the shed. And always at cross purposes. One would file a paper and the other wouldn’t know a thing about it.” He shrugged. “They would have worked things out eventually, I guess.”

Helped by him? In a town as small as Autumn Vale, you wouldn’t think two partners could be working so determinedly at cross purposes. Something didn’t seem right. “But there were lawsuits in the works, then Rusty disappeared and Melvyn died.”

He nodded. “Yup.”

“Where does that leave me?” I asked, curious about what he’d say.

He colored pinkish. “What do you mean?”

“How can I clean up my zoning problems?”

“You mean, you intend to go ahead?”

I narrowed my eyes and watched him for a moment. He seemed panicked. What about? “I haven’t decided yet. But one thing I know for sure: the zoning still being up in the air is not good news for a potential buyer. I’d like to get everything sorted out and resolve the lawsuits that were in play at the time of my uncle’s death. Can I see the paperwork?”

“What paperwork?”

I was losing patience quickly. “The paperwork having to do with the zoning of my uncle’s—and now my—acreage.” I thought way back to my few months working in a zoning and planning permissions office in New York. “I’d like to see any plans that were filed, as well as the paperwork that went with it, any zoning change requests, building permits, lot subdivisions, anything.”

“I’ll . . . uh, well, geez, I’ll need a while to pull everything together,” he said, rising and walking over toward the door. “I’ll give you a call when I have it all ready, okay? I got work to do, now, so you run along and I’ll give you a call.”

I didn’t get up to leave, I just turned in my seat to watch him, standing there, the door open to the outside, where autumn sunshine was flooding the street. A breeze fluttered in the open doorway, clarifying the musty air. “You’re playing a computer game, Mr. Bradley. Surely you can pull away from that to get me some paperwork.”

“Uh, I don’t even know if I can show it to you, you know,” he said, and cleared his throat. He rocked onto the balls of his feet and back. “It’s, uh . . . well, I don’t know. You know, it was Rusty’s project, too, and with Tom gone, maybe Dinah is in charge.”

“Or maybe Binny is,” I said.

He was getting redder by the minute. “Binny doesn’t know a damned thing about her father’s business.”

“Is that why Tom is dead and Binny’s alive?” I asked. It just popped out. It was a dumb thing to say.

“I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about,” he said.

His mystification seemed genuine. I got up and strolled toward the door, stepping through and turning back. “When can I come to look over the paperwork?”

His expression hardened. “When you’ve got a court order.” He slammed the door in my face and I heard the lock snick.

Jerk.

I rounded up Shilo, who had been shopping in a couple of places, and we got groceries and headed back to the castle. About six, Binny Turner rolled up to the parking area in a white van that read Binny’s Bakery on the side. She strode up to the castle with her gaze resolutely turned away from the hole that was still cordoned off with police crime scene tape. I met her at the door and showed her around the place, then we sat in the kitchen and ate dinner. I’d made chicken spaghetti, which went nicely with the focaccia she had brought and the bottle of merlot I found tucked away in my uncle’s wine cellar. I was definitely going to have to explore the cellar a little more thoroughly, because the merlot was not half bad.

Over dinner, I told her and Shilo what had happened with Junior Bradley in the zoning office.

“What is his problem?” Shilo said, indignant on my behalf.

“He and Tom really were lifelong friends,” Binny said, doubt creeping into her voice. “He’s probably just reacting, you know, to Tom dying.”