Much Ado About Muffin (3 page)

“
Most
unfairly!” Pish said, patting her hand and gazing at her with fondness. “Poor dear had been working too hard.”

“Not fair,” I agreed. “Maybe if you went back to them and—”

“Ah, but you haven't heard all of it,” she said, wagging her finger at me and giving a trilling laugh that lightly tripped on a descending scale. “As a soprano I'm high-strung. That was
not
the end of it.” Wryly, she explained that she ended up threatening the LOC conductor with graphic violence, though she made it seem like a comic scene in an operetta, merely a charming flight of fancy on her part. The conductor unexpectedly (in her telling) took it personally, especially when she added some insulting language toward his wife and ugly children. She was about to be charged but fled and ended up on the GWB (the George Washington Bridge) threatening to jump.

“I wasn't
really
going to jump,” she said. “I just needed to think.”

“Poor darling,” Pish said. “I talked to the LOC conductor, got the police to drop any thought of charges, and after a little bit, brought her back here. This is the best place for her to recover. And now we are working on her voice,
and
her confidence.”

I got up to make a pot of tea, not wanting Pish to read my mind. I turned on the jet under the kettle and stared out the window, which looked off toward the forest, just beginning to get that tinge of rusty brown and gold that is a precursor to full-on upstate autumn. I was being totally unfair—and after he had been so good as to watch over the castle while I was away—but I had been looking forward to having the place just to us. I knew he was taking Lush back to the city, but he hadn't, in all the times we spoke, told me about bringing Roma to Wynter Castle. I felt blindsided and slightly resentful, especially given my own personal history with her, which he may have forgotten. I struggled to push those feelings back. I'd acknowledge and deal with them later.

When I came back, full teapot in hand, I was composed. “I'm sorry I wasn't here to welcome you to Wynter Castle, Roma, but I hope you're enjoying your stay.”

“I am, though it's taking longer than I thought to . . . to regain my confidence.” She fluttered her lashes and cast down her gaze, the first real sign I had seen of her lack of self-assurance.

Pish put his hand over hers on the table. “And
that
is why I have decided that the Autumn Vale Community Players' next work will be a little opera piece, something obscure, nothing anyone has heard before. Our mistake last time was in trying something too big, too well-known.” He spoke of them tackling
Die Zauberflöte
, Mozart's incredibly challenging opera.

That was not their
only
mistake, or even their most grievous; the biggest mistake had been giving “Der Hölle Rache,”
one of the most supremely difficult soprano arias of all time, to a dear friend, Janice Grover, who couldn't hit high C with any tone. “Too well-known? Pish, no one in Autumn Vale has heard
any
opera before—except Janice, of course.” She was our local bank president's wife and the owner of Crazy Lady Antiques and Collectibles; her slaughter of the Queen of the Night aria in their last production had been an epic fail, though it had generated enough talk and laughter to keep everyone smiling for weeks at her expense. “And Gogi, and maybe Doc.”

“Ah yes, but we're going to tackle an opera version of
Much Ado About Nothing
. It has some
lovely
bits, and we've started working on it.”

Shakespeare's romantic comedy as an opera? Who knew? “So why were you working on ‘O Mio Babbino Caro'?”

“That was Pish's idea,” Roma said, with an affectionate glance at her new impresario. “He thinks that if I record a few pieces and he puts them on the Internet, he can make me a sensation!”

“I've got Zeke working on making a video to back her singing, and we're going to take some footage or photographs of her in costume, out in the woods, and set it to the video and put it online.”

“And how is your writing going, Pish?” He had been working on a follow-up book to his
NYT
bestseller,
Cons, Scams, and Flimflams
, using as inspiration the banking scandal that had plagued the Autumn Vale Community Bank.

He shrugged. “I'm stalled right now, but it'll come.”

Stalled because he was putting all his creative energy into a diva? I eyed Roma with distaste. Maybe I wasn't being fair, but she is one of those women who suck up every little bit of attention and still crave more. Was there more to his writers' block? Pish had been hurt by his last romantic fling and subsequent breakup with a senior federal agent,
Stoddart Harkner, so perhaps this distraction was what he needed.

I spent the rest of the day unpacking, doing laundry, and napping after the long flight. I ordered a new cell phone, which would arrive by courier the very next day. I went out briefly to look for Becket, my uncle's orange tabby, who Pish said had spent most of the summer outdoors. I called and called, and thought I saw him on the edge of the Wynter Woods, but he didn't come home. It was just us for dinner, and after, Pish and Roma retreated to the library to attempt the song again. I felt oddly lonely.

I went to bed early, determined to make an apology round of visits the next day. I had been out of touch and totally self-focused for weeks; it was time to expend some energy outward. Not that I had been wrong to stay away so long. I felt more at peace in my heart. I now had a handle on what many thought was excessive grief and mourning for my husband and understood why it had gone on so long, and what I now was ready for.

I had plans.

*   *   *

The next morning I tried to call Shilo; I wanted to get together with my best female friend, have tea, and visit, but there was no answer at her home. All I got on Jack's real estate line was a recorded message. I'd try again later. My cell phone arrived by courier, and I set it up immediately, relieved to be back in contact with my world.

The Merry Wynter Apology Tour would have to start in Autumn Vale. I took a brief walk toward the woods, calling Becket, but the grass and weeds had gotten too long, and though I tried my best, I couldn't see anything near the woods but a brief flash of orange. I was heartsick; poor Becket must have thought I'd abandoned him. After my uncle died, Becket spent most of the year in the woods, and
he'd gone back to those habits after I left. I thought I wasn't important to him, that I was someone handy who made sure he had fresh food and water, but it seemed that my “abandonment” had affected him more deeply than I could have expected.

Maybe some of my humans—like Shilo—felt the same?

My gorgeous old boat of a car, a Cadillac Fleetwood left to me by my great-uncle Melvyn Wynter, started up with a cough and a hesitation, like an old person getting up in the morning. As I drove along the road toward Autumn Vale I remembered the morning, more than a year ago, when I had first approached the village to ask directions to my castle. I had met Doc English (an old friend of my great-uncle's) in the village, though then I just knew him as an odd, scuttling, weirdly dressed elderly gentleman. I also encountered Sheriff Virgil Grace, who had ogled my cleavage then led me out to Wynter Castle, where I met Jack McGill, the real estate agent who had been trying to sell it for me. From there, I encountered the dozens of wonderful, odd, happily strange people who had become friends and, in some cases, enemies.

It took me a while to get used to the castle and village but now, driving along Abenaki, the main street in Autumn Vale, which still had some boarded-up shops, along with the various businesses that fed, clothed, and entertained the townies, I felt that I had come home. I pulled into a street parking spot outside of Crazy Lady Antiques and Collectibles and, since I was right there, I opened the door to the antique shop and edged in past the fire hazards—also known as her stock—Janice Grover has piled in the way. As I crab-walked in, I heard a shriek and a crash.

I hurriedly threaded my way through the junk toward the noise and saw a huge, framed antique mirror on the floor, cracked from side to side, with Janice, in a colorful floor-length dashiki, standing over it, staring. Her face was
ghostly white, and she said, “Seven years of bad luck! Oh Lord, as if I haven't had enough of that.”

“Janice, it's okay,” I said. “You don't believe that superstitious nonsense, do you?”

She looked toward me through the dust-specked gloom. “Oh, Merry, you're back. About
bloody
time. I was beginning to think you'd gone for good. Poof, a disappearing act!” she said, waving her hands.

“I never intended to stay that long, but things happened.” I started helping her clear up the big shards of mirror.

“Hmph. So now that you're home, what are you going to do about that
awful
woman Pishie's taken up with?” she said, her voice fading in and out as she disappeared to get a broom and came back. “Kick her out of the castle?”

Not a fan of Roma Toscano, apparently. “I know her from years ago. I'll tell you how if you come to the Vale for a coffee,” I said, giving the short local name of the Vale Variety and Lunch, which was, as it sounded, a variety store and luncheonette.

She sighed and nodded. As we cleaned up the glass I listened to her complaints about Roma, who she said was pushy and snobbish, then we walked down to the Vale. I felt like dancing my way down, I was so happy to be back. But I had to wonder, had my time away changed perceptions of me? I hadn't been in Autumn Vale long enough to be considered a fixture, and folks could view my two-and-a-half-month runner as a symbol of how uncommitted to the place I was. I'd have to work my way back into their good graces.

We wove through the variety store aisles, mounted the two steps to the coffee shop in back, and nabbed a table, the same funky fifties diner–style ones that had been there since the fifties, when they were new. I eyed the domed glass dessert containers on the lunch counter and noticed muffins, not mine. So
someone
was baking muffins, but who?

Mabel Thorpe, the manageress, a tiger lady with a
redoubtable beehive of stiffly sprayed curls (often gray, but at that moment radiantly orange and yellow, like autumn leaves), came over to the table and threw down the gauntlet in the shape of the specials of the day sheet. “We have muffins; really,
really
good muffins,” she said, glaring at me. “You want one? On the house.”

Good Lord, I hadn't thought
she
would be angry at me. “I'm happy you have someone baking them for you. Did Binny finally break down and start baking normal stuff?” Binny Turner, who owned the only bakeshop in town, was rigid in her insistence on making European-style treats to suit international palates. Of which there were few in Autumn Vale. Or none.

“Nope. Pattycakes has taken over where you left off.”

“Pattycakes, huh?” The daughter of a former tenant of mine, “Pattycakes” was Patricia Schwartz, a fifty-three-year-old woman who had a deft hand with cakes and cupcakes.

“Come on, Mabel, her muffins aren't as good as Merry's.” Janice was a staunch friend and defender. “No one's are. So what was going on in here yesterday? I heard you had quite the commotion. Virgil even showed up, siren blaring.”

Mabel's frostiness thawed, and she sat down with us and signaled her waitress to bring coffee and some of the muffins. Once I tasted one I was happy to note it was
not
as good as mine.

“It's Minnie again,” she griped, naming Minnie Urquhart, the local manager of the postal station. “Isadore was doing her job—”

“Her job?” I squawked.

Just then I saw Isadore Openshaw, Autumn Vale hermit and bad-tempered library helper, hairnet in place, slump out from behind the lunch counter with a bus tub. She cleared the tables near the back wall of breakfast dishes and coffee cups, then turned and saw me. Her eyes widened, but she
made no other signal that she noticed. She retreated past swinging doors behind the counter into the kitchen.

“Her
job
,” Mable said firmly. “She's the best dishwasher I've ever had. She doesn't socialize, doesn't smoke, and I can practically
feed
her her wages. She takes home whatever is left at the end of the day.”

I was happy for Isadore. She was a perpetual outsider, mostly because of her personality disorder, which I can only call Hates-the-World-itis. But I
did
hope she was getting paid at least minimum wage. One never knew with Mabel, who was tight-fisted, if rigidly upright: had the skinflint side won out, or the rigid code of ethics?

“
Anyway
?” Janice prompted, glaring over at me, then returning her gaze to Mabel.

“Isadore was doing her job when Minnie Urquhart came barging in and bumped into her,” Mabel said, her gruff voice tinged with annoyance. “She knocked poor Isadore flying, then stormed over to Crystal's table and began yelling at her about something Crystal was getting Brianna to do.”

I was mystified. Crystal, Brianna? But Janice seemed to know who these people all were. I had been gone only two and a half months, but felt like I had fallen back out of the rabbit hole and now did not know who was who in Wonderland.

“O
h, come
on
,
Merry,” Janice said, when I complained of being out of the loop. “Crystal Rouse is the crazy dame who runs Consciousness Calling, that new age mumbo jumbo crap that Emerald is involved in.”

I felt a tingle of uneasiness. “But Em is doing so well with them! She's straightened out her life, gotten Lizzie settled down, and . . .” I caught a glance between Janice and Mabel and the tingle buzzed up the scale into wholesale anxiety. “What's going on?”

“You'll figure it out soon enough,” Mabel said, with a throaty chuckle. “I need a cigarette. You fill her in on the rest of that crew, Janice.” The manageress disappeared through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

“‘Rest of that crew'? What does that mean? Is Emerald okay? There's some trouble between Minnie and . . . what was the name? . . . Crystal?”

“Shush, let me drink some coffee.” Janice cleared her throat,
took a long slurp. “Okay, so last time, on
How the Stomach Turns
—”

I chuckled and eyed her affectionately as she took another slurp of coffee, appreciating her humorous asides. Janice is two hundred fifty dashiki-covered pounds of forthright laughter. She and Simon, her banker husband, are big people, and Janice favors a Bohemian-on-crack appearance: colorful muumuus, big earrings, hair done up in an extravagantly curled bun that gradually comes loose through the day until it resembles a bird's nest once the chicks have learned to fly. She once told me she was never going to disappear in a crowd, so she may as well stand out. “Be serious for a few minutes. You're the only one who will tell me all the gossip in Autumn Vale. Doc will tell me exaggerated stories and Gogi will tell me what she thinks I ought to hear. Pish has been too taken up with Roma, and Shilo . . . well, she's not speaking to me, I think.”

“She's always been such a ray of sunshine, but lately she's a ghost of herself,” Janice said, with a frown. “Jack is worried, I know that.”

“I'll look into it. So what
is
going on with Minnie and this Crystal person?”

“I know you don't like Minnie. She can be a proper pain in the posterior. But she's got her good points. She rents rooms out, you know.”

“Is that the limit of her good points?”

“Seriously, she
does
have good points,” Janice insisted, her chins wobbling in sincerity. “She rents rooms out for reasonable rates to folks who couldn't afford anything else. She makes meals for her ‘kids,' as she calls her boarders. It's her own dysfunctional family.”

I was silent for a moment, not sure how to respond. Minnie had made it her mission in life to make me miserable, as had other members of her
real
dysfunctional family.

“Aha, those are two of the current boarders right now,” Janice said, lowering her voice as two young fellows slouched in and took seats across from each other at a table along the wall. “Karl Mencken and Logan Katsaros; I don't know which is which. Cripes, boys are such pains at that age. My own boys looked like that: greasy, unkempt, like they didn't have a home or family.”

I eyed the two guys. Both were medium height and skinny, but that's where their looks diverged. One had blue eyes, light brown hair, and acne, with the beginnings of a weedy beard or goatee on his chin and multiple piercings, both lobes stretched with so-called flesh tunnels. The other guy had stooped shoulders, greasy black wavy hair, brown eyes, olive complexion, and no visible piercings, though he did have a neck tattoo of a peace dove on his right side.

They seemed shifty to me. If this were a bank and they were acting as they were, talking in whispers and looking around at each individual, I'd have hugged my purse and gotten out of there quickly. But all they did was get coffee and drink it, while still muttering to each other.

“Lovely pair.”

“I know. There's one more, a girl, Brianna something or other.”

“Does Minnie have any kids of her own?”

“I don't know. She
could
, for all I know. She's lived here for a long time, since getting the job taking care of the post office, but originally she's from Ridley Ridge, like all the Urquharts.”

“That doesn't surprise me.” I call Ridley Ridge, a town slightly larger than Autumn Vale that is up the ridge and down the highway a few miles, the Town That Hope Fled, or The Saddest Place on Earth.

Janice gobbled down the muffin, then mumbled, “It's not bad, I guess, but your muffins are better.
Any
way, as I said,
Minnie's current boarders are those two jokers and Brianna something or other.”

“They look shifty. What do you know about them?”

“Not much. Both from out of town.”

I don't get “vibes,” as some people call it, but there seemed something off about those two.

“Anyway, back to Crystal Rouse,” Janice said. “With Emerald's help she has gathered quite the bunch of dummies who go to her meetings, which are supposed to be all about motivation and self-fulfillment. You know the shtick: if you put your desires out into the universe, you will receive what you need. Load of crap. Sure,
some
of what you get from life is from what you put out there, but
no
one deserves cancer, or divorce, or a crippling accident.”

“It's a scam made to make people who aren't successful or healthy feel guilty,” I agreed. “So that's what Consciousness Calling is all about? Have you been to a meeting?”

“I did go out of curiosity,” Janice admitted. “But the relentless
cheeriness
got me down!”

I smiled and chuckled. “Couldn't the world use a little more cheerfulness?”

“Not the idiotic variety that spouts platitudes like it's philosophy!” A few people around us had heard our conversation, and one nodded, her eyes wide.

“You got it, Janice!” the woman said, leaning across her table toward us. “I went and asked Crystal what to do about my lousy cheating almost-ex. She said I clearly had let myself go, and that's probably why he cheated!”

I eyed her and saw a middle-aged woman who was pretty normal: some spreading across the middle and the bottom, graying hair, and a few crow's-feet tracking around her sparkling eyes. “Any guy I've known who cheated did it for their own reasons, something lacking inside themselves.”

She nodded. “I'm not taking the blame for getting old when
he's
the one who looks like a pregnant sumo. I didn't complain about
his
sorry butt, and he thinks
I've
let myself go?”

“Anyway . . . Crystal Rouse?” I said to Janice as the other woman got up to pay and leave. “I'm concerned Emerald has been roped into a scam.”

“She's a big girl; she can figure it out on her own,” Janice said. “I like Emerald, but if she's going to keep spouting this crap I'll avoid her until she's recovered.”

“I guess I'm more worried about Lizzie,” I said. “I'd better get going. I have a few more people to see today, now that I'm back.” I paused. “You know, Janice, I am sorry I didn't come back for so long.” I told her about Maria's passing. “Time there helped me figure things out. As much as I loved Miguel, he was used to me doing whatever he wanted. I think he and I would have had to renegotiate our marriage as we got older.”

“There is not a marriage around that doesn't require renegotiation as the years go by, honey,” she said, and patted my hand.

Reminded about Roma by my mention of Miguel, I told her in brief how I knew the woman, and Janice rolled her eyes. Mabel came back and crouched down near our table, the smell of tobacco smoke on her breath. It's not an odor I find offensive, oddly enough. Lots of models smoke, and sometimes they did so while I was styling them, a profession I picked up after my brief plus-size modeling career.

“I s'pose Janice has brought you up to speed. Anyway, Minnie came in yesterday afternoon, sent poor Isadore flying, then stomped over to Crystal and Em's table—whole damn luncheonette shook; you know Minnie—and shrieked at her that Crystal was trying to turn Brianna over to the devil, that she was brainwashing a kid who didn't know any better, and she'd better be careful, or there'd be hell to pay.”

“What did Crystal say?” Janice asked.

“It was Emerald who jumped up and told Minnie to keep
her fat trap shut, and that she'd better not threaten Crystal, or she'd get what she had coming to her,” Mabel said.

“I thought this Consciousness Calling stuff was making Em calmer,” I said.

“Hah!” Mabel brushed some ash from her sweater sleeve, poked an errant sunset curl back into place on her forehead, and continued. “Anyway, Crystal gave Emerald this look—chilled
me
to the bone—and the girl quieted down right away. It was like hypnotism or something. Crystal stood and faced Minnie. You haven't met her yet, right, Crystal Rouse?”

“Not yet,” I replied.

“She's one of those people who always has a self-satisfied smirk on their faces, the kind you want to smack off. She told Minnie that she was clearly a deeply unhappy woman. She said if she'd just give Consciousness Calling a chance, it might help with her
weight
problem, she said, and her
anger
issues. I tell you, if Crystal says
one word
to me about smoking I'll dump an ashtray on her head.” Mabel growled in the back of her throat. Her employees call the lunch counter manageress “the dragon lady,” mostly for how smoke so often curls out of her mouth after a deep drag, but also because of that growl. “Anyway, Crystal said Brianna showed a lot of promise and was on her way to finding peace and happiness.”

Standard self-help group fare. “Peace and happiness are good, right?”

Mabel's mouth twisted in a sour look. “Minnie gave Crystal a shove, and that's when someone called the cops, giving them a play-by-play. Emerald jumped up and bopped Minnie on the nose, made it bleed.”

I rolled my eyes skyward.

“All the while, Crystal was chanting,
this too shall pass
,
it is what it is
,
we must agree to disagree
, and
let's put a pin in this and talk later
! I tell you, I felt like bopping
her
in the nose after a few minutes of that mindless drivel.”

Janice snickered and so did a couple of others. Some
clapped. “
Way to go, Mabel
!” one called out, while a few patrons called her
Bruiser
and
Mabel Dempsey
, asking when the fight was scheduled. The two young fellows exchanged looks and got up, shambling out of the café.

Mabel watched them go, then said, “Virgil came, but it was all over by then except for the blood on the floor. No one is pressing charges. But then this morning Brianna came waltzing in asking people for money for that Consciousness Calling crap! Trying to gather
followers
, for the
cause
!” Mabel stood, towering over our table as she eased the kinks out of her knees. “I won't have that. Told her to can it unless she was collecting for veterans, and then she said, maybe I valued dogs and cats over humans but I shouldn't.”

I bit my lip. “Did you clarify veterans versus veterinarians?”

“Nope. Told her to hustle her butt out of here and that's it.
And
I told her to tell Crystal not to send her lackeys in to collect dough from my customers.”

“Are you sure the money was for Consciousness Calling?” Janice said. “Could have been a handy excuse to make some pocket change.”

“Maybe,” the manageress said. “Anyway, as much as I'm not fond of Minnie, that Crystal character gets on my last shaky nerve and shreds it like a cat on terry cloth. I'm choosing sides in this one, and I stand with Minnie. Rouse is not welcome here, and neither are her followers.”

Janice and I left soon after. She had her shop to run, and I had a lot I wanted to accomplish. It felt good to get back in the swing of Autumn Vale happenings. The Villa Paradiso torpor was drifting away like mist on the wind, and I felt alive again.

We stood outside the variety store and luncheonette for a moment, then walked toward her store. Zeke and Gordy slouched out of the door that led to their apartment over Binny's bakery. It warmed my heart that both fellows' eyes lit up when they saw me. They eagerly told me what was
going on in their lives. Gordy was headed out to his uncle's farm, where he was working fairly steadily.

“Gordy's giving me a ride to work,” Zeke said. “I got a job in Ridley Ridge in the sheriff's department, doing custodial.”

Getting a steady job in a depressed area was a big deal. I congratulated him sincerely. Gordy pointed out his “new” car parked at the curb. His uncle had given it to him so he could get to work and back. It was a real beater, with damage on the front end and lots of Bondo and duct tape holding it together, but if it got him from A to B, then he was better off than he had been.