Isadore wept a bit, and again called Dinah names, including what I had thought she said was the “devil’s pawn,” but was apparently “devil’s spawn,” or child of Lucifer. She was convinced of that. She finally calmed enough to tell her story. She came to Autumn Vale about eight years before to live with a cousin (not a brother; she had only claimed the fellow was her brother so no one would think it scandalous that she lived with him) but when he died, leaving her his bungalow and car, she decided to stay. It sounded to me as if she had escaped a hardscrabble life, and finally had what she had always wanted: a home and a couple of jobs, one part-time at the bank, and one part-time doing bookkeeping and secretarial work for Turner Construction. Everything was good for a few years.

But then her past, in the person of Dinah Hooper (not her real name, by the way) showed up. Dinah was a grifter, and had used Isadore before in an illegal enterprise. She was sent to torment her, Isadore said, spawn of Satan that she was. Isadore had escaped her clutches, determined to go straight and stay straight, but Dinah had finally tracked her down and threatened her with exposure if she didn’t go along with a scam. Autumn Vale was the perfect town for what she had in mind, Dinah told Isadore, and her job at the bank made it even more perfect.

All Isadore had to do was first, quit her job at Turner so Dinah could have it. Coincidentally, the former bank teller was retiring about then, so Isadore was promoted to a full-time employee. Then she had to deposit the money Dinah gave her into Rusty’s bank accounts. Isadore did that, but of course the demands escalated until she was opening accounts for Dinah, using a dozen or so different shell company names, and making cash deposits to each account, small enough that the FDA would not be alerted to any impropriety. There is a threshold below which banks are not required to inform government agencies about deposits, and Dinah was careful to keep well below limits. That is called, in the banking industry, “smurfing,” as Pish had explained the night before.

Isadore babbled about a lot of stuff. Dinah had created a ghostly workforce to go along with these different shell companies, which allowed even more accounts to be opened. She was running another kind of scam, too, a version of the so-called 419 or Nigerian swindle, which was why she had the multitude of computers and the knowledge of high-speed Internet in Autumn Vale. I had a feeling we were going to find out a lot more over the next few days.

As sometimes happens, I was right.

Chapter Twenty-six

THE NEXT DAY, observed by Becket, who sat like a statue on the flagstone terrace, I supervised Zeke and Gordy’s continued cleanup of the castle grounds. Binny’s white van roared up into my now-weed-free (thanks to Zeke!) parking area. The baker got out, carrying a box, and striding toward me. Had she come bearing cannoli?

“How are you? How is your dad?”

“He’s going to be awesome, thanks to you. I don’t think I really . . . in the craziness yesterday, I didn’t get what you did for him, you know, and how much I have to thank you for.” Her face, now adorned with a more open, natural expression, was very pretty. Her dark hair tied back, she looked relaxed and almost happy. I hoped she would accept all the changes that were about to come her way.

“Don’t mention it. I’m relieved it all turned out okay. So he was hiding out since he disappeared last year because Dinah told him someone was out to kill him, right?”

“Yeah. That note I got . . . it said to meet him at the hunting cabin on the Turner Construction land—it’s an old cabin back in the woods where he used to take me when I was a kid—but like I said, he never showed.”

“You really didn’t see him until yesterday.”

She shook her head. “I wasn’t even a hundred percent sure the note was from him. I just didn’t know!”

“Look, do you want to come in for a cup of tea, or coffee?” I said, waving my hand toward the castle.

“No, I’m on my way to the hospital to pick up my dad. They say he can go home now.”

“He is one tough bird,” I said in admiration. “Did he really live out in the woods all that time?”

“Sometimes in the woods, sometimes he broke into sheds to sleep, sometimes he even went back to the house, but he didn’t dare stay there.” She shook her head. “Can you believe it? Dinah had him convinced Russian gangsters were after him.”

“Russian gangsters?” I wanted to laugh, but that would have been inappropriate.

“I know, right?” she said, shaking her head with a smile on her pink-cheeked face. “It was a couple of guys she worked with. I remember them . . . they came into town with fake accents and black suits.” She laughed out loud, a great honk of sound.

I could see Lizzie in her; the Turner gene pool was strong in both of them. “Dinah had him reeled in.”

“Still, who believes that kind of crap? I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on him, but he should have talked to me.” She shifted the bakery box from one arm to the other.

“He probably didn’t want you to be involved.” Or he didn’t want his beloved daughter to know about the mess he had made of things. “If you don’t mind me asking, did he know about what she was doing, at any point?” I had been wondered about that; was Rusty aware of the illegal nature of what Dinah was doing from the start, or was he totally oblivious?

“Not really.” She grimaced and shrugged. “He kind of knew about some of it, but she told him there was a legal way to make money by setting up some corporations. He and poor old Melvyn had been working on a plan to develop this place to be Wynter Acres.” She shuffled in place, kicking at the flagstones that edged the drive. “Tom drew up a plan, and got his buddy Junior to give it the green light, and it got bundled into the whole scam operation. My dad found out, but he didn’t want Tom to get in trouble. Then Melvyn got wind of it, got POed, filed a lawsuit to stop them using his name, and threatened to expose the whole thing.” She shook her head.

That explained the shoddy plat. “It’s a mess,” I said, “and it’s going to take time to sort out.” Junior Bradley was going to be in some trouble, too, it sounded like.

“You better believe it,” she said fervently.

“But the good thing is, it looks like we’ll be able to get rid of any outstanding lawsuits between us. We’ll talk about it another day.”

She nodded. “Anyway, when Dad got scared by her fake Russian mobsters, Dinah told him he should use his hunting cabin in the woods, just disappear for a while. She’d help him out. He took money out of the bank and gave it to her to help him. She supposedly used it for food. He lived in there for a long time, and she kept upping the ante, telling him the thugs were back, and if he came out of hiding they might kidnap me to try to pressure him.”

“She is some piece of work!”

With a glowering look that reminded me of Lizzie, Binny said, “I can’t wait to see her in court for murdering Tom!” She hung her head for a moment. “Anyway, poor Melvyn must have been suspicious, and I guess he told Dinah that he was going to the cops to tell them what he knew.”

“He got a bank statement in the name of Turner Wynter Global Enterprise, one of Dinah’s shell companies,” I explained. “He was suspicious, all right. All that time he had thought Rusty was in on it, but I think he finally figured out it was Dinah at the heart of it. Especially after Rusty disappeared.”