Bran New Death

Chapter One





AS A METAPHOR for my life, the crossroads rocked. I sat in my rented Chevy, glaring at the GPS screen, then got out of the vehicle and looked around. On one side of me was an evergreen forest, into which one road descended, and on the other was a rocky prominence, the highway cutting through it like a kebab skewer through shish.

I was not reflecting on my metaphorical lostness, however, but my literal situation. The GPS told me I was in front of a Denny’s on I-90 as it cut through upstate New York. Looking around at the gloomy walls of evergreen and granite, I reflected that a Denny’s breakfast would be welcome right about then, but no shiny, happy hostess came melting out of the woods with a coffeepot and a smile.

My odyssey began in a car rental lot in Jersey City before midnight August 31, also known as the night before, and just now the rosy beginnings of dawn were glimmering through the piney treetops. September first, a good date for a fresh start, if I could ever find my way out of the woods.

Some of my worldly belongings were piled in the backseat and trunk of the Chevy rental and the rest were stacked in a locker at a Manhattan Mini Storage near SoHo. Merry Wynter, adventuress, I thought, my mouth twisting in a grimace. But I wasn’t just wandering, I was looking for my inheritance. I leaned back into the car and grabbed the plastic tub of carrot muffins, prying off the lid and inhaling the cinnamony aroma. I took out the last one, peeled off the paper liner, and munched away, the melting goodness of my homemade muffins sweet on my tongue.

While I ate, I considered my options.

After a long night of driving all the way from Jersey City to upstate New York, I was exhausted. With a GPS in the rental I thought it would be easy going, but the trouble was, the probate lawyer who gave me instructions on how to get there had assumed I was familiar with Wynter Castle and its environs, and that I have a reasonably good sense of direction. I wasn’t, and I don’t. I’d only been there once, as a child. I’d like to say my navigational skills have come a long way since then, but my grandmother told me lying is wrong. I may be thirty-nine, and Grandma may be long gone, but I still hear her voice in my head. When the GPS started screwing up, I wasn’t aware of it until I was hopelessly lost.

I learned I inherited Wynter Castle many months before and put it up for sale, sight unseen, with a local Autumn Vale real estate agent named Jack McGill. Why would I do something so stupid? It’s complicated, and in retrospect not the brightest move I’ve ever made. Here’s the thing . . . that visit as a kid is not a happy memory, and my own life has been in turmoil the last several years.

Long story short: once upon a time (briefly), I was a plus-size model. I quit work when I married a photographer, but then my beloved husband died. I was still young, and I needed something to do, but I didn’t want to be a model again, and I was getting too old for that line of work, anyway. So even as I fought my overwhelming grief, I began styling a few model friends, plus-and regular-size, choosing their clothes, helping each define her look. It’s like an advanced game of playing dress-up, the same game I played with Barbie dolls when I was a kid, much to my hippie mother’s chagrin. In the meantime, though, my darling Miguel left me reasonably well settled; I thought I could do better and began to play the stock market with my savings.

You guessed it; the economy tanked, my investments disappeared into the pockets of the wealthiest investors while those of us foolishly toying with our life savings suffered, and I was left with very little. But it was okay; my career as a stylist was beginning to take off. As I started doing all right, making enough to live on without touching what was left of my savings, an opportunity came up that I could not ignore. When someone offers you a six-figure salary, what do you do? You grab it and hope no one notices you don’t deserve it, right?

So this is what happened. A few years back, Leatrice Pugeot, the internationally famous supermodel (born plain old Lynn Pugmire more years ago than she admits), happened to be at New York Fashion Week, and so was I. I came across her in a corner of a show venue weeping her eyes out. Concerned, I asked if I could help, and she asked me to get her some Xanax. Where was her purse, I asked. She said “No, dummy, just score some from a dealer.” I refused, gave her a cup of herbal tea instead, and talked to her for an hour.

At the end of that hour she asked me to come work for her as a personal assistant. I demurred, but she was persistent. Over the period of a few days, she steadily sweetened the pot until it was up to six figures. Here’s where it gets tricky; I heard, through the grapevine, that Leatrice was difficult to work with—like, Naomi Campbell difficult, but she seemed like a sweet, if troubled, soul, to me.