Bran New Death(5)

But holy catfish, no wonder it hadn’t sold! First I scanned the land and shook my head. The landscape, a huge open area rimmed with dense forest, was riddled with holes dotted around the long grass—big holes, all with mounds of dirt beside them. The yawning cavities littered the open landscape, right to the edge of the woods. The sun rose up over the forest and beamed down beneficently on the weird and troubling scene. Turning in a complete circle, I counted about thirty holes, give or take, and there might be more beyond my field of vision or behind the outbuildings that dotted the landscape. The sheriff stood staring, glancing back and forth between my face and the gaping wounds. “This may be one of the problems with selling Wynter Castle,” I said. That was probably the understatement of the century.

He didn’t say anything, and I turned to finally look at the building itself. My inheritance really was an American castle, old and shrouded in ivy that coated the hewn, stone walls, almost concealing the diamond-pane, Gothic-arched windows. It was big, even bigger than I remembered from my one visit so long ago.

Just then another car pulled up the lane, a tiny Smart car with a sign on the side that read Autumn Vale Realty. It shrieked to a stop, and a tall, gangly man emerged, unfolding himself like a backward origami. “Miss Wynter?” he asked, approaching at a lope, his hand stuck out. “Jack McGill, your realtor.”

“Hey, Jack,” Virgil said.

“Hey, Virge, what you doing here?” he said, dropping his hand to his side.

“Showing Miss Wynter the way to her property.”

“You should have stopped at my office,” he chastised, shaking his finger at me. “I would have showed you the way!” He extended his hand again.

I took it and shook. “I couldn’t find your office. I couldn’t find anything.” I paused and looked around, then back at him, examining his beaky, honest face topped by a shaggy shock of reddish-brown hair. “I’m beginning to see the problem here, Mr. McGill, why Wynter Castle won’t sell. We have giant gophers on the property.”

He broke out into astonished laughter and doubled over, folding like a jackknife, slapping his thigh. “That’s a good one, Miss Wynter.”

“Call me Merry.” It wasn’t that funny.

Sheriff Grace, who had been leaning against his patrol car listening in, cocked his ear at a scratchy call on the radio in his car and said, “I’d better get going. I would seriously suggest, Miss Wynter, that you not stay out here alone.”

“Why?”

He let his gaze travel over the hole-riddled property. “Wouldn’t want to see you end up in one of these.”

I gasped and spluttered, openmouthed.

“You know, like falling in.” He got in and drove off, a hail of gravel from the edge of the drive shooting up in a shower from his back tires.

Was that a threat of some sort? Ridiculous man!

“Don’t mind him,” the realtor said.

“I don’t mind him at all. In fact, I doubt if I’ll even think of him after this moment.”

He cast me a glance, shaggy eyebrows raised. “Now, I suppose you’ll be wondering what caused all these holes here?”

“No, not at all.”

“Oh.” He was silent.

“I was being facetious,” I said, stifling a sigh. “Bad habit of mine. So . . . who is digging the holes? And why?”

“Well, that’s just it. We don’t know.”

I looked at him in amazement. “You don’t know?” He shrugged, and I strolled over to one of the holes, looking into it, then turned back to McGill. “Why didn’t you tell me about this? You’d think you could have mentioned it in all the conversations we had.”

His face turned red, right up to his ears. “I tried.”

“You did not.”

“Okay, well, I tried to get you to come here.” He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “I told you there were things you ought to handle yourself, and that we needed to talk face to face.”

He was right about that. “Why did the baker in town say all I’d find out here is death?” I asked.

“You talked to Binny? Last person you should talk to.”

“Why?”

“Well, Binny claims that your great-uncle Melvyn killed her daddy, Rusty Turner, and buried him somewhere on the grounds of Wynter Castle. We think the holes have something to do with her, or with her brother, but we can’t prove it.”

*



“HONEST, SHILO, THIS PLACE IS CREEPIER THAN I EVEN remember.” I paced beside the rental, holding my cell phone to my ear. It kept cutting out on me and blinking back in, so our conversation had the constancy of a distant radio station. “Shilo, you there?”