01 - Aunt Dimity's Death

by Nancy Atherton - (ebook by Undead)

  “A sad place,” he said. “Terribly sad. Hated to come to work, myself. No children around, and the place all boarded up.” He pulled a handful of corn from his pocket and tossed it to some passing ducks. “It was a strange time. People were afraid there’d be lions in the streets if a bomb fell in the wrong place, and they had enough to worry about without lions. So we put them down, the lions, and others as well. Perfectly healthy they were, too. It’s not something we tell the kiddies, you understand, but perhaps we should. I sometimes think they’d be better off knowing it’s not all crisps and candy floss during wartime.”

  11

  Paul had been too young to enlist. “Not that I didn’t try, mind you,” he told us. “Lied like a rug, I did; used boot-blacking to give myself whiskers. Board told me to go home and wash my face.” We were speeding along a narrow, twisting lane, on our way to the cottage. We had left London very late in the afternoon the day after our visit to the zoo. I had wanted to leave earlier, but Bill had gone off to make some more of his mysterious arrangements and hadn’t surfaced again until after tea.

  “That’s why I went to the Flamborough,” Paul continued. “The bartender there was a chum of mine, and I liked to listen to the lads. We were taking such a pasting in London that it was good to hear the Jerries were getting some of their own back. Finch should be coming up shortly, miss.” I had tried to break him of the “Miss Shepherd” habit, but he had been trained at the Old Servant’s School of Etiquette and “miss” was as far as he would unbend. “The cottage lies about two miles beyond the village.”

  It was too dark and we passed through Finch too quickly for me to see much of it, but as we pulled into the drive, I could see that lights had been lit in every window of the cottage. It was exactly as I had pictured it. And it seemed to be waiting for me.

  “Here we are,” said Paul, switching off the engine. An absolute silence settled over us. We climbed out of the limo to stand on the gravel drive and I shivered as the cold night air hit me.

  “Touch of frost tonight, I’d say.” Bill blew on his hands and I could see his breath.

  “A bit nippy for this time of year,” Paul agreed. “You two run along in and get warmed up. I’ll see to the luggage.”

  Paul unloaded the limo and Bill headed for the front door, scrounging through his pockets for the keys Willis, Sr., had given him. I started to follow Bill, then stopped on the path to confirm my initial impression that the cottage looked… as it was supposed to look.

  It was just as my mother had described it in her story, a two-story stone house with a broad front lawn, sheltered from the road by a tall hedgerow. The yard light glinted from diamond panes of leaded glass and hinted at the golden glow the walls would have in sunlight. The slate roof, the flagstone path leading from the drive to the weathered front door, all was as I had envisioned it, down to the bushes that were already heavy-laden with white lilacs.

  “Lilacs in April,” I murmured. “They must bloom earlier here than they do at home.”

  Paul came to stand beside me. “Lovely old place this is, miss.”

  “Too good to be true,” I said, searching the facade for some flaw that would jar it, and me, back into the real world. I didn’t like the sense of belonging that was seeping into my bones. It made it too easy to forget that I was only a visitor.

  But the yard light revealed no imperfection. With a shrug, I joined Bill on the doorstep. He seemed to be having difficulty with the lock.

  “Let me try,” I offered. I turned the key, and the door swung open to reveal a brightly lit hallway.

  “Look at the place,” said Bill. “It’s lit up like a Christmas tree.”

  “The Harrises probably came by today to get things ready for us,” I said. “They must have forgotten to turn off the lights.”

  “I’d talk to them about that if I were you, miss,” said Paul, Old Servant’s School disapproval in his voice. “The electric doesn’t come cheap these days.”

  “Cheap or not, I’m glad they turned on the heat,” said Bill. “Let’s get inside before we all catch colds.”

  Paul set the bags in the hall and returned to the car for the last of them. As I stepped across the threshold, the cottage seemed to pull me into its warm embrace, and when the door swung shut behind me, I thought: I may be only a visitor, but I sure do feel like a welcome one.

  There was a gentle knock at the door. The Old Servant’s School again, I thought, rolling my eyes.

  “For heaven’s sake, Paul, you don’t have to knock,” I called out. “Come on in, it’s open.”

  His muffled voice came through from the outside. “Sorry, miss, I can’t budge it.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t—” The door opened at my touch. Paul stood on the doorstep, a bag in each hand and a perplexed expression on his face.

  “These old places do have their quirks, miss.” He set the bags beside the others while Bill fiddled with the door handle.

  “There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it,” Bill said, “but I’m not a locksmith. I think I’ll ask the Harrises to have this checked out.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Now, how about a cup of tea before you go back to London, Paul? Or would you like to stay here for the night? You’re more than welcome.”

  “Thanks very much all the same, miss, but I’d best be getting back, if it’s all right with you. Up early tomorrow, you know, can’t keep the ambassador waiting.” He offered to carry our bags upstairs, but we assured him that he had done more than his fair share of work for the day and walked him to the limousine. After he’d driven off, I turned in the still night air for another long look at the cottage.

  The feeling of familiarity was uncanny. There was the shadowy oak grove and, there, the trellis ablaze with roses. Each item was in its proper place and the whole made a picture I remembered as clearly as the apartment house in which I had grown up. I probably would have stood there all night, lost in the déjà vu, but the crunch of Bill’s shoes in the gravel reminded me that I was not alone. He held out his jacket and I pulled it around my shoulders, grateful for the warmth.

  “You seem to be a million miles away,” he said softly.

  “More like a million years,” I said. “One of my mother’s stories has a cottage in it, exactly like this one. I feel as though I’ve been here before.”

  “It’s a strange feeling,” said Bill, “to see a legend from your childhood come to life.”

  “Mmm.” I nodded absently. “I was a little worried, after the zoo. She told a story about that, too, and she made it sound like… like Disney World. And it wasn’t like that at all—not during the war, at any rate. But the cottage is just as it should be.”

  “As she promised it would be,” Bill murmured.

  It was an odd comment, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was already walking toward the door, curious to see if the inside of the cottage would be as true to the story as the outside was. Bill followed me into the hall, then stopped. He pointed to the ladder-back chair beside the hat rack. “I’ll wait here. You go on ahead, get acquainted with the place.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  He shook his head. “It’s your story.”

  I searched his face for a trace of mockery, but there was none to be found.

  “I’ll be right back.” I handed him his jacket and started up the hall.

  The two front rooms on the ground floor were the living and dining rooms. A study was just beyond the living room, to the rear of the cottage, and there was a pretty little powder room just beyond that, complete with lavender-scented hand soap and ruffled towels. I wasn’t big on ruffles, as a rule, but here I couldn’t imagine anything else.

  Having completed a quick once-over, I returned for a more leisurely examination of the living room. I saw no sign of the renovation Willis, Sr., had mentioned until I found a television and a snazzy sound system hidden in the cabinetry along one wall. The room had to have been enlarged to accommodate these additions, but even so,
I had no trouble picturing Aunt Dimity eating brown bread and drinking tea before that fireplace.

  The room was spacious yet snug, with deeply upholstered chairs and a beamed ceiling. Bowls of lilacs had been placed here and there, filling the room with the scent of early summer. A bow window overlooked the front garden, and its window seat was fitted with cushions straight out of my mother’s story.

  Or were they? If I remembered the story correctly, Aunt Dimity’s cat had spilled a pot of ink on one of the cushions (having already chewed the fern to bits, scratched the legs of the dining room table, and tipped over the knitting basket). Aha, I thought, feeling extremely clever, I’ve caught you. Surely, that had only been part of the story. Surely…

  The inkstain was there. Someone had tried many times to remove it, and it had faded over the years, but it was still there, a defiant blue patch in the back corner near the wall. I gazed at it, then crossed the hall to check the legs of the dining room table. They bore the claw marks of a cantankerous cat. I glanced over my shoulder, half expecting him to stalk through the doorway, demanding a bowl of cream. No such thing happened, of course. The cat had undoubtedly gone on to harass his mistress in another world.

  Even without the cat, the dining room was recognizably Aunt Dimity’s. It mirrored the living room, with its fireplace, bow window, and cabinetry, though here the cabinets were glass-fronted and filled with delicate bone china and crystal. A door in one wall opened on to the kitchen and it was there that I found the first big discrepancy between the cottage of my mother’s story and the one in which I stood. I also discovered that Willis, Sr., shared his son’s fondness for under-statement.

  This was no “minor improvement.” This was the most fully equipped modern wonder of a kitchen I’d ever seen, with everything from a microwave oven to a set of juice dispensers in the refrigerator door. As I opened doors and drawers and examined countertops, my first coherent thought was: This is a kitchen for someone who can’t cook.

  In other words, a kitchen designed with me in mind. It was a farfetched notion, to say the least. My former husband had been as good a cook as my mother, and I had been too intimidated to learn, but even if Dimity had known of my culinary incompetence, she couldn’t have revamped the kitchen for my benefit. I was only going to be here for a month, after all. The truth had to be that Dimity Westwood had been a lousy cook, too. It would certainly explain why Aunt Dimity seemed to subsist on brown bread and tea.

  I wasn’t one bit disappointed to find that the kitchen bore no resemblance to the primitive one of Aunt Dimity’s Cottage. I loved the idea of an open hearth, but if I’d been forced to cook on one, I would have starved.

  A second door led into a well-stocked pantry and a roomy utility area, and the third and last door led into the hallway. Directly across the hall was the book-lined study, and a white-painted, fern-bedecked solarium stretched across the back end of the cottage.

  I paused to survey the study. A stack of papers sat on the desk that faced the ivy-covered windows, and I crossed the room to investigate. I thought it might be miscellaneous bits and pieces of the correspondence—selected letters, perhaps, related to the stories—but it proved to be the stories themselves. They had been written in longhand on fine, unlined paper, and the title page brought me up short.

  “Lori’s Stories,” I whispered. It was as though Dimity had foreseen my reluctance to share my heroine with the masses, and had offered this title to reassure me: no matter how far afield these tales might travel in years to come, they would always be mine. I straightened the edges of the manuscript with hands that were none too steady, glanced idly at the bookcases—and found the correspondence.

  Books filled several vertical sections of shelves, but the rest of the wall was reserved for row after row of neatly labeled archive boxes. Talking about the letters, reading about them, even thinking long and hard about them, hadn’t prepared me for the impact of seeing them. More than forty years of my mother’s life had been captured in those boxes and the sight left me feeling slightly dazed. Stan Finderman had once mentioned something called “the mystique of the manuscript” and I finally understood what he had meant. My mother had touched these pages, and in their presence, I felt hers. I wanted to pull down a box right away, but I held off. Not now, not yet. Not with Bill cooling his heels in the hall. After a moment’s thought, I picked up the manuscript and headed for the front door.

  Bill stood as I returned.

  “That good?” he asked.

  “Better,” I replied with a grin.

  “And there’s still one more floor to go.”

  “You can come up with me, if you want,” I offered. “Aunt Dimity never went upstairs in the story, so it won’t change anything to have you there. Here, you can put this on your nightstand.” I handed him the manuscript, grabbed my bags, and started up the stairs.

  Bill stayed where he was. He looked down at the manuscript, then up at me on the stairs. “You’re sure you want me to read these?”

  “I’m sure,” I said; then, more gruffly, “Well, don’t just stand there. They’re bedtime stories. They belong upstairs, next to your bed.”

  A full bath was at the top of the stairs, and two cozy bedrooms occupied the front of the cottage, each with twin beds, wardrobes, reading chairs, and fireplaces. I put my bags in one and Bill put his and the manuscript in the other.

  “You wouldn’t think they’d need so many fireplaces,” Bill remarked as he emerged from his room. “The central heating seems to work well enough.”

  “But central heating doesn’t warm the soul the way an open fire does. It’s so”—I skirted around the word “romantic” and finished lamely with—“old-fashioned.” Bill was about to reply when the sight of the master bedroom silenced him.

  The master bedroom took up the entire back half of the second floor. A sliding glass door opened on to an outside deck, and another sliding door led to a bathroom that brought to mind the changing room in the Willis mansion. The main difference was that, instead of a simple whirlpool bath, it had a strange-looking Jacuzzi/steam-bath installation. Bill, of course, knew how it worked and showed me how to use it. A good thing, too—I would have parboiled myself if I had tried it on my own.

  This room seemed to combine bits and pieces of all the other rooms in the cottage. Aside from the wardrobe and bureau, there were bookshelves, glass-fronted cabinets, and a desk, all of which appeared to be empty. Two overstuffed chairs were in one corner and a tea service had been placed on a round table between them.

  The bed was the size of a small football field, and another grin broke across my face when I saw Meg’s blanket folded atop a wooden chest at its foot. Seeing it there was like seeing an old friend. I began to say something about it to Bill, then noticed that he’d left me alone again so I could enjoy my discoveries in private. The bed faced yet another fireplace, in which a fire had been laid, but I was too distracted to contemplate that pleasure. For there, on the mantelpiece, was a vase filled with deep blue irises. My knees buckled and I sat, stunned, on Meg’s blanket.

  Bill reentered the master bedroom, carrying my bags. He placed them on the bureau, folded his arms, and declared: “This is your room.”

  “Bill,” I said, “did you come here today?”

  “No. Why?” He walked over to stand in front of me.

  “I was wondering how those got here.” I pointed to the flowers.

  Bill glanced over his shoulder. “So that’s where they put them. With so much to look at, I nearly missed them. The Harrises must agree with me—about this being your room, that is.”

  “The Harrises?”

  “I called them today and asked them to put some irises in the cottage for you. I thought they’d add a nice welcoming touch.”

  “So you’ve really never been here before?”

  “Lori, I may have an odd sense of humor, but I’ve never lied to you. I have never set foot in this cottage before this evening.”

  I twisted a strand of th
e fringe on Meg’s blanket. “I didn’t mean to sound so …”

  “Suspicious? Paranoid?” Bill suggested helpfully.

  “It’s just that, for a minute there—”

  “You thought someone else had opened your birthday present.”

  I ducked my head. “It sounds pretty childish when you put it that way.”

  “What’s wrong with that? I’d feel the same way if I found out that someone had been snooping around Arthur’s dome. By the way”—he stepped aside to give me an unobstructed view of the flowers—“do you like them?”

  “You know I do.” I stood up. “But you haven’t seen the rest of the place yet. Come on, I’ll give you a guided tour.” We were halfway down the stairs when I heard tires crunching on the gravel drive.

  “Who on earth—” I backed up a step. “Oh, no… not Evan.”

  “You stay here,” said Bill, squaring his shoulders. “I’ll take care of this.”

  12

  If Bill had his heart set on giving Evan the boot, he must have been disappointed when he opened the door. I know I was, but for very different reasons. Our unexpected guests turned out to be Emma and Derek Harris, and one look was enough to tell me that they couldn’t possibly be the couple who had given my mother the photograph. They weren’t the doddering, white-haired caretakers I had envisioned. In fact, unless my ears deceived me, Emma wasn’t even English.

  “You’re American?” I asked, coming down the stairs.

  “Yes, I am,” said Emma, looking up from the doorway. She was shorter than I, a bit plumper and some years older, wearing a bulky hand-knit sweater beneath a lightweight parka, and a gorgeously mucky pair of Wellingtons. Dishwater blond hair hung to her waist and she peered shyly at me through a pair of wire-rim glasses. “But my husband is the real thing. Harrow, Oxford—he even plays cricket when he has the chance.”