Much Ado About Muffin (2 page)

H
oo boy, I
had forgotten how good-looking Virgil Grace is: six feet something of dark-haired, dark-eyed, steel-jawed man. Two-plus months without my muffins—and I don't mean that as a euphemism; the man loves my baking—had worked off the slight thickening at his waist, and his jawline was now as chiseled as granite, his cheekbones razor sharp, his dark eyes shadowed.

“I'm ready,” I said, hefting my carry-on over my shoulder and grabbing the handle of my one suitcase on wheels.

“Is that
all
your luggage?” He glared skeptically at it.

“Yes, this is
all
my luggage!” I didn't mention that Tony was sending the rest after me. I had beat a hasty retreat from Villa Paradiso, but while in Spain I had done a
lot
of shopping. Gucci and Bulgari shops litter the Costa del Sol like Dollar Tree stores in Buffalo, and both Tony and Maria insisted on funding me in my extravagance. Where would I wear Euro fashion in upstate New York? I hadn't a clue.
Truth was, I had relapsed into old spendthrift ways, shopping out of habit and boredom.

“
I'll
take it,” he said, and jerked the suitcase handle out of my hand. He grabbed my carry-on for good measure—all I was left with was my sizable Balenciaga handbag—and strode off toward the sliding glass doors.

I trotted after him, my face flushing with heat. “What happened to Pish?” I called after him, trying to keep up with his lengthy strides. I was wearing heels, darn it. “He was supposed to be picking me up.”

“Your houseguest needed him,” he growled over his shoulder.

“My
houseguest
?”

“You'll find out soon enough.”

That sounded ominous, but then I was back in the nutty world of Autumn Vale, where odd people descend on Wynter Castle like falling leaves in the vale in autumn.

He led me to his official sheriff's department vehicle, which he had parked wherever he damned well pleased, as cops do around the world. He expertly got us onto the 490, then the 90, driving all that way in virtual silence, other than the conversational feints I thrust, which he parried with grunts and then more silence. Finally, I twisted around in the seat, the belt straining at my shoulder, and said, “Virgil, I think we need to pull off somewhere and have a chat. You're clearly angry.”

He slowly swiveled his jutting jaw and stared at me before returning his attention to the highway. “Why would I be angry?”

“Because, well, it would be understandable. I mean, we . . .” I trailed off, shook my head, and turned back in my seat to stare straight out the front window at the countryside as we headed down the 90 for a short jaunt before we would thread through Batavia to catch the 98. It was a boring stretch along the 90—or the Governor Thomas E. Dewey
Thruway—ditch to the left of us, beyond which was the other lane, and ditch to the right of us, with a view of fields, broken only by an occasional line of scrubby, dry-looking trees, soared over by hawks hunting for mice. We drove on in even deeper silence, other than squawks and shrieks from the police radio, until we threaded through Batavia and turned onto 98. He reduced his speed accordingly as we drove through the green landscape, rural patches broken by small towns along the way.

“Virgil, I care about you a great deal,” I said, carefully tiptoeing around the edges of his angry silence. “I love my life in Autumn Vale; that's what's bringing me back.”

He was silent. When I stole a glace, I saw his dark, thick brows knit in a frown over his chocolaty eyes. His grip on the steering wheel, at ten and two, was white-knuckled. Finally, he growled, “So this isn't just a pit stop to pick up your stuff so you can move to Málaga, or wherever the hell that Tony character lives?”

I got it,
finally
, the reason behind his mysterious fury. I recalled our last phone conversation, when I had talked about Tony, how good he was to me, how sophisticated, how learned. His fluency in four languages, his kindness to his mother, his love of the arts. Virgil Grace was
jealous
! And jealous, in this case, was good; when a relationship is new and fragile, it's natural to feel jealousy, and really, I had given him plenty to feel jealous and insecure about. My stomach jittered. How could I reassure him? I half turned in the seat again and watched his profile. “Virgil, it's not a pit stop. I'm coming
home
.”

His stern look relaxed a smidge.

“I missed you all like crazy,” I continued, my tone soft. “I missed Autumn Vale. I missed Becket; I've never had a cat before, and didn't realize how much a part of my life he is! And I missed Gogi, and Pish, and Shilo . . . and . . . Virgil, I missed
you
.”

He looked like he wanted to say something, but he focused back on the road. He shook his head, stared out the window, and brooded for a while. “Did you honestly miss . . . us?”

I wasn't going to go into the various emotional stages I experienced, missing them all like crazy for weeks, and then the gradual Novocain numbness as I let Tony take over my life. I didn't want to talk about that just then, though I needed to, at some point, to let him know how I now had a different perspective on my marriage to Miguel after having been in his family home for two months.

“I figured a lot of stuff out while I was gone,” I said. “Maybe we can talk about it, but not right now. I did miss you all in so many different ways. Autumn Vale and you all fill in the holes in my life.” I sighed and played with the strap of my purse. “This is going to sound sappy. Gogi is the mom I miss so much, the mom I never really had. Binny is the sarcastic little sister. Janice is the kooky aunt. And you . . .” I looked over at him. I couldn't go on; I wasn't sure where we stood. But I reached out and rested my hand on his arm, where the dark hairs lay across his forearm like silk, his shirtsleeves rolled up. His muscles flexed under my fingers. “
You
most of all.”

The drive wasn't long enough to get it all sorted out, and just forty minutes or so after leaving the airport we turned onto the winding lane and drove up to Wynter Castle.

Wynter Castle. It was almost noon, and the slanting sunlight of late September gave a golden hue to the beautiful old stone of my early nineteenth–century real American castle. It is so lovely to me now, but when I first arrived it seemed desolate; the ivy creeping up the stone walls, the huge Gothic diamond-paned windows that line it, and the arched double oak doors seeming giant-size after the compact apartments of Manhattan.

Virgil pulled to a stop on the gravel drive, right by the flagged terrace, hopped out, and grabbed my bags out of the
trunk. His radio crackled to life again, as it had intermittently on the drive, this time with a dispatcher's voice squawking something about a disturbance at the Vale Variety and Lunch.

“I gotta go,” he said, rounding the car and slamming into the driver's seat.

“Wait, Virgil, when can we talk?”

“Gotta take this call. I'll call you. Later,” he said, waving out the driver's-side window as he backed around, skidding off down the drive with a spray of gravel.

“Well, hello to you, too!” I stood for a moment, and breathed deeply, letting the quiet of the country, the smell of warm grass, the sound of the slight breeze tossing the treetops, calm me. I was home.

I toted my bags up to the fieldstone terrace and pulled open the oak door, hit by a wave of sound. Pish's expensive audio system, which he had installed as a gift to me—or to the castle—blared some opera singer belting “
O Mio Babbino Caro
,” a glorious Puccini aria with soaring high notes, one of the few opera pieces that most folks recognize. I had heard the singer before; the trembling top notes sounded familiar.

I let the door close behind me as I stood in the cavernous great hall, turning slowly and taking in the tapestries that covered some of the stone walls, the grand staircase that swooped up, splitting in two, and the galleries above that let onto multiple rooms, and the glorious rose window above the stairs. I felt tremulous and emotional, ready to burst into tears.

Until the opera singer did it for me. Just then the opera CD took an odd turn, the singer breaking into a storm of weeping. As I set my carry-on bag on the big round table in the center of the great hall she spoke.

“Pish, darling, I can't do it, I
can't
!”

Huh?

The storm of weeping again, then Pish's soothing murmur. Not a recording, then, but what was going on? I stood silent. The speaking voice was even more familiar than the singing. I located the source of the sound despite the amplified version piped through the sound system, turned, and headed into the dining room, a long room with the arched diamond-paned windows that looked over the drive and lane, and off of that, the library, one of the turret rooms. I went to the door and looked in.

Tears welled in my eyes. There was my darling Pish, my sixty-something, lean, brown-haired, best friend and kind-of father figure. And he was with another woman! She was an auburn-haired beauty, lush figure (not quite as voluptuous as my own), medium height, with lovely hands that fluttered as she wept on Pish's shoulder. A microphone hooked up to a bank of audio equipment on an ugly modern stand took up the center of my library.

“I'll never get the high notes again, I swear it, Pishie! Much
less
perform in front of
people
!”

I cleared my throat, and you would have thought I'd caught them in
flagrante delicto
, the way they leaped guiltily apart, and how Pish stared, his blue eyes wide. She, her fluttering hands pressed to her bosom, well exposed in a low-cut tank top, stared at me with gorgeous false-lashed contact-fake green eyes.

Roma Toscano. Oh, yes, I remembered her all too well. She had tried to steal my husband, Miguel.

“Merry,
darling
!” Pish yelped after a moment. He skipped across the room, taking me into a hug, his slender frame pressed to my more ample body.

After a babble of welcome and our teary reunion, he reintroduced me to Roma Toscano, though I reminded him that we had met. She was a minor-league opera singer, a friend of Pish's. We had met about ten years before at one of Pish's opera galas in support of the Lexington Opera
Company. Roma had virtually ignored me while she flirted outrageously with Miguel. I learned later that she had stalked him, to some degree, showing up at one of his shoots in St. Barths and retaining his talent agency as her own.

All—supposedly—a coincidence. Miguel laughed it off, but I knew the truth. She had tried to encroach on my territory, and I didn't appreciate it. Still, that was ten years ago.

We repaired to the kitchen and sat at the long trestle table that centered the work area, which I affectionately examined, having been absent from it for so long. The kitchen was designed and modernized, astonishingly, by my late great-uncle, who had thought to make a professional kitchen for an inn, into which he had at some point considered making the castle. The work area is long, with stainless steel surfaces, a deep professional sink, a six-burner stove, and a huge stainless steel fridge. At the other end of the long space is a more homey seating area, with big wing chairs in front of a fireplace. It is my favorite room in the castle.

I wanted nothing more than to catch up with my dearest friend, to ask after all our mutual acquaintances, hear every little detail of the last two months. But instead I had to listen to Roma as Pish coaxed her into telling me her story and how she had ended up at Wynter Castle.

“This darling,
darling
man came to me in my hour of greatest need!” she explained, clutching his arm and laying her head on his shoulder, which in the past had been available for only my head.

Pish explained that in late July he took Lush, his aunt who had been staying at the castle, back to the city. She missed her friends terribly. That was when he connected with some of his old friends in the arts community. “Roma is the principal soprano of the Lexington Opera Company in the city.”

So she had worked her way up. When I knew her she was one of the minor singers and a stand-in.

“Or at least she
was
principal soprano until she had a little problem.”

She chuckled, a warm, throaty sound, and patted Pish's upper arm, flirtatious as usual. I surmised that she was one of those women who flirt with everyone: male, female, gay, straight.

“He's being far too kind, as usual,” Roma said, fluttering her fake eyelashes. She hugged him harder, making her cleavage bloom over the low-cut tank top until it was as if two mounds of pale bread dough were struggling to escape a loaf pan. “I had a breakdown of epic—I might say,
operatic
—proportions.” She threaded her fingers through his longish hair and mussed it. “I had an incident of stage fright, my voice locked up, and I ruined an LOC performance of
Linda di Chamounix
.” She looked across the table at me. “That's a Donizetti piece; you wouldn't know it. Anyway . . . I was let go.”