Read Muffin But Murder (A Merry Muffin Mystery) for Free Online

Vale, or Valers, as I had taken to calling them, wanted the foods they were familiar with most of the time. Don’t we all? It was no use; Binny was a stubborn as her father, Rusty, and that was saying a lot. The old goat had survived for months living off the land and running from imaginary Russian mobsters, with only a shed and then a tent as shelter. That takes a lot of stubborn for a seventy-something man.
    So I made muffins for anyone who wanted them, with Binny’s blessing. We had gotten over the hump of our early relationship when she thought my uncle had killed her father and that I may have killed her brother. Now that she had her dad back and Dinah Hooper was in jail awaiting trial in Binny’s brother’s murder, we were actually on friendly terms. Having found out that Lizzie Proctor, my prickly teenage protégé, was her brother’s daughter had given her a boost in spirits, though Binny was never going to be a smiley girl.
    I entered the bakery, which had been my first stop when I entered Autumn Vale almost two months before, since Binny lives for baking. She opens at
insanely
early hours; she figures she’s there anyway, so she may as well be open. Although I was there today for green tea powder, which I could not find in any store in Autumn Vale, I was also curious about Binny’s new employee. I approached the counter. “Hi there. You must be Juniper!” I said.
    The girl looked up, and at first I thought she hadn’t slept much until I realized that it was makeup; her eyes were ringed with dark eye shadow. It was a terrible look. I used to be a stylist to models for photo shoots—that’s how I met my late darling husband, Miguel Paradiso—and for a while the “heroin chic” look was the style, but thank heavens that was over. This girl had not gotten the memo.
    “What can I get you?” She indicated the glass bakery case with a lethargic gesture.
    “My name is Merry Wynter,” I said, sticking my hand across the counter and examining the girl. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties, and under the obligatory baker’s apron she wore a Def Leppard tee and black jeans. Her black hair was restrained by a jaunty baker’s cap that said
Binny’s Bakery
on it, but her dark eyes, with the kohl shadows, appeared listless and dead. She did not shake my hand.
    I dropped it and said, “I’m a friend of Binny’s. Is she here?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Could you get her, please?”
    “Okay.” She turned away and ambled back to the bakery.
    As I waited, I examined the teapots as usual. Binny’s collection was almost as extensive as mine, but she had some unusual pieces that I coveted. She had already given me an adorable Capodimonte with a raised relief of a girl and donkey that was given to her by Dinah. Oddly enough, it had proven to hold a note my uncle had written—actually just a snatch of Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Trees”—along with some scrawls in different handwriting, presumably Dinah’s. When I discovered a series of tree names in Becket’s collar, I thought the poem might have been pointing to some kind of mystery my uncle had planned out. We surmised that Dinah Hooper was working on finding the legendary Wynter treasure, and had stolen the piece of paper from my uncle on one of her visits, then tucked the clue in the teapot as a way of hiding it in plain sight, kind of like in “The Purloined Letter.”
    We still hadn’t figured out my uncle’s code, though. It was quite possible that we were overcomplicating things, but I hadn’t had the time or brain energy to reason it out.
    “Hey, Merry, I’ve got the stuff for you,” Binny said, lifting the pass-through section of her countertop and joining me in front of the teapots.
    I took the baggie of green powder as Juniper eyed it with a narrowed gaze. “Green tea powder,” I said to her, in case she thought it was something else. She looked skeptical. Where had Binny gotten this winner? “Hey, Bin, you want to come have a coffee with me at