Bran New Death(92)

The threads that I kept coming back to were:



There was no evidence that Rusty Turner was dead.



And the body in the woods had been there a little while, at least.



Tom Turner was following some female for Andrew Silvio.



Isadore Openshaw hated Dinah Hooper, who had taken away her job at Turner Construction.



But now, Isadore virtually ran the Autumn Vale Community Bank on her own; Simon Grover seemed to be a figurehead roaring for his coffee and reading the funny papers.





When I thought of the bank, I wondered what Pish had to tell me. It was seriously distracting that he was coming to the castle. What would he think? What would he say? I knew that he must have something very interesting to tell me or he would not come in person, but I suspected that half the reason for the trip was his curiosity about Wynter Castle and the town of Autumn Vale.

Then my mind Ping-Ponged back to the murder. It all kept coming back to Isadore Openshaw. Was she the woman Tom Turner had been hired to follow?

Every now and then, as I walked and thought, I remembered that I was supposed to be looking for Becket, and I’d call him. There was no cat to be seen. There was rustling in the bushes, and an occasional noise, there was birdsong, and the wind tossing the treetops. I could hear a loud motor somewhere, like a dirt bike. A screeching blue jay followed me, and a group of crows—that was called a “murder,” right? A murder of crows?—chattered and cawed. No Becket.

I stopped. Did I even know where I was? It should just be a simple matter of following the path back to the castle, right? I turned around, and realized there were a couple of paths I could have come from. I’m not terrible with maps, but we’ve already established that my internal GPS is not flawless. It had seemed so easy while Lizzie was leading the way. But the forest was pretty big. Even the lousy plat I had seen in the Turner Construction office had placed the size at about three hundred acres. That’s huge. But I wasn’t going to panic.

I heard a noise in the bushes. “Becket? Here, kitty, kitty, kitty! Come on, you darn cat. I have chicken!” I waited. Nada. “Fine! Be like that.”

I sat down on a stump and opened the baggie, took a piece of chicken breast out and ate it. Weird breakfast. I hadn’t had my quota of coffee, just one cup gulped as I raced around getting Shilo out the door, and I was seriously grumpy. Somewhere, that dang engine sound, like a buzzing mosquito, echoed again through the woods, reminding me of my determination to post No Trespassing signs at the perimeter, by the highway past Wynter Castle. Just one more of a gazillion tasks to do.

Something else came back to me, while I sat on that stump in the forest pondering all of the events of the last couple of weeks.



A dirt bike parked on a side street.



Someone on a dirt bike coming out of the woods onto the highway.



The sound of a dirt bike in the woods when Lizzie and I were looking for the encampment.





Why hadn’t I mentioned any of that to Virgil Grace? I hadn’t thought it important at the time, but it sure did seem like a lot of run-ins with what could be the same dirt bike. It was that cumulative effect of several sightings, not the dirt bike itself, that made me wonder. I couldn’t hear it anymore. Maybe the rider had gotten bored and left. I hoped so. I didn’t want to be run down on the trail.

But none of this was helping me find Becket. I got up and looked around. Wait . . . was that a patch of orange? I hared off after it, and damned if it wasn’t Becket, just ahead of me! He paused, looked back, and then headed off again, loping with a staggering gait.

“What is wrong with you, cat?” I muttered. I should have just let him come back on his own, but it felt like it was my duty to look after him now. Becket had been important to my uncle, and now he was my responsibility. I checked my watch. Another fifteen minutes and Pish would be landing at the airport in Rochester, some time in baggage claim, then another forty-five minutes or so for McGill, Shilo, and Pish to make the return trip. So I could look for the cat for another few minutes, but then I wanted to get back to the castle and make sure it was presentable for Pish’s first view.

Reenergized, I stuffed the chicken baggie in my pocket and charged off in the direction Becket had disappeared. I caught sight of him again, on the path and followed. I was just opening my mouth to call out to him when I heard a shot. I ducked and huddled in the shadows, cowering as another shot rang out.

What the hell was going on?

And how did I get out of it?

Was there some kind of hunting season I didn’t know about? Even so, it was my property and no one had permission to hunt. Again, I needed to post signs, copious signs: No Hunting! Private Property! No Trespassing! Lots of exclamation marks. The dirt-bike driver . . . were he and the hunter one and the same?