Aunt Bessie Assumes: An Isle of Man Cozy Mystery

by Diana Xarissa

  “Tea? I’m surprised you have the stomach for it,” Bessie said a bit snappishly as she turned on the kettle.

  The woman looked startled for a moment and then began to shake. “You’re right, of course; I can’t imagine what I was thinking.” Tears began to fall at an impressive rate as Bessie found mugs and filled her teapot with a couple of teabags.

  “Now, now,” she muttered towards the sobbing woman. “Everything’s going to work out in the end, you’ll see.”

  “How can it, with Danny dead?” the woman asked miserably.

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll get over Danny eventually,” Bessie replied. She wasn’t usually so determinedly rude to guests in her home, but she really couldn’t find anything to like in this woman.

  “Oh, sure, eventually,” the woman agreed as she wiped her eyes on a tissue from the box that Bessie handed her. “But that could take months. I’m ever so devastated now.”

  Bessie forced herself to count to ten before she replied. “I’m sure everything will work out in the end,” she repeated herself. “The police here are excellent and I’m sure they’ll find out what happened to your husband in no time.”

  “He must have drowned, or had a heart attack or something,” Vikky said, her eyes filling with tears again. “I should have been with him.”

  Bessie poured out two cups of tea and found a box of biscuits that she quickly emptied onto a plate. Then she joined the young woman at the table, choosing a seat opposite her guest. She handed the woman her tea and a small plate to use for her biscuits.

  “There probably wasn’t anything you could have done,” Bessie muttered a polite response that was at odds with her actual thoughts. “Anyway, the police are very good at their jobs; I’m sure they’ll figure it out quickly enough.”

  “I hope you’re right,” the woman said intently. “I have to know what happened to Danny. I feel like this is all my fault.”

  Bessie nodded. “I’m sure that Inspector Rockwell will be able to answer all of your questions in due course.”

  “He spent his summers here just about his whole life,” Vikky told her. “They used to stay in a bed and breakfast in Ramsey before they bought the land and built the cottage here. Danny and his whole family love the island so much. We even talked about moving here.” The widow’s voice broke as she spoke and tears began to fall again.

  Bessie stared at her, puzzled and unsettled by her behaviour. “Drink your tea,” Bessie counselled. “And then we can find you something to put on.”

  Bessie watched the woman blush under her heavy makeup. “I wanted to look nice for Danny when he got back,” she explained. “I did my hair and makeup and put on my sexiest nightie. We had, well, we had a bit of a disagreement last night and we needed to patch things up.”

  “Yes, well, I’m sure I can find something for you put on that will be more suitable for being out and about in this weather,” Bessie replied.

  They finished their tea in silence, Vikky nibbling her way through half a dozen biscuits, and then Bessie and her guest headed upstairs. Bessie had always been slender, and she wasn’t about to let age become an excuse for letting her figure go. She should have plenty of things that would fit the young widow. Unfortunately, Vikky was several inches taller than she was, so any trousers that she lent her were going to be rather short on her.

  Vikky sat on the edge of Bessie’s bed, marvelling at the pink walls and the plethora of cuddly toys that filled every spare space in the room.

  “Why do you have so many cuddly toys?” Vikky asked after a moment.

  “I never experienced the joy of having children of my own,” Bessie told her as she dug through her wardrobe. “I’ve been fortunate, however, in that many of the children in the area have adopted me as an honorary auntie. For some reason that seems to include buying me cuddly toys at every opportunity. I suppose I don’t have to keep them all, but I could never find a reason to part with any of them.”

  Bessie grabbed a long tweed skirt and a large woollen sweater from the wardrobe. She also found a pair of thick tights that were size “extra-tall” which she had purchased by mistake. After a moment’s hesitation, she added a pair of plain white cotton underpants to the pile. No doubt the other woman had never worn anything so ordinary, but at least they would be comfortable.

  “Here you are. It’s the best I can do.” Bessie handed the clothes to Vikky who stood up and dropped the police blanket she had still been clutching around herself. “Cool, I can look like somebody’s old auntie,” Vikky muttered as she flipped through the clothes.

  “Feel free to stay in your nightie,” Bessie replied coolly.

  “Oh, no,” the woman backtracked quickly. “I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful,” she insisted. “Everything is just too much today. I’m sure I must be behaving very badly.”

  Bessie resisted the temptation to agree with her. “I should let you get changed then,” Bessie suggested, heading towards the door.

  As she turned back towards Vikky, she was shocked to see the other woman had already pulled off her nightie and was climbing into the borrowed underwear. Apparently modesty belonged to a different generation, Bessie thought as she made her way into the hall to wait for Vikky to finish.

  Vikky followed her out of the room only seconds later, and the pair made their way back downstairs. Now Bessie led her guest into the small sitting room that was next door to the kitchen.

  “Please have a seat; we might as well be comfortable while we wait for the police to arrive.”

  “Yes, I guess so,” Vikky said hesitantly. “Maybe I should go down and talk to them there,” she suggested.

  “I’m sure you’d just be in the way,” Bessie told her.

  “You were going to tell me what happened to your lover,” Vikky suddenly remembered.

  “We weren’t lovers,” Bessie said primly. “We were in love.”

  “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean anything,” Vikky waved a hand. “Anyway, what happened?”

  Bessie smiled grimly at Vikky. She was prepared to tell the story, but she was determined, in exchange, to find out some things about her guest as well.

  “My family moved to America when I was just a baby, really,” she began. “Then, after fifteen years there, they decided to move back to the island. I had fallen madly in love with a man I met through a friend, but my parents wouldn’t let me stay behind with him. They made me leave him when they returned to the island.”

  “That’s awful. You shouldn’t have gone with them,” Vikky told her.

  “I was under eighteen; I couldn’t have stayed on my own. Anyway, this was a great many years ago. Children obeyed their parents in those days.”

  Vikky snorted. “You wouldn’t catch me leaving a man I loved just because my parents said I had to,” she insisted.

  “Yes, well, as I said, the times were very different then,” Bessie said patiently.

  “So they dragged you back here and you bought this cottage?” Vikky checked that she understood the story.

  “There was a bit more to it than that,” Bessie told her. “Matthew, that was the man I loved, decided to come and get me.”

  “Good on him!” Vikky shouted.

  “Yes, well, unfortunately for him he fell ill on the journey here and died just before his ship docked in Liverpool.”

  “He was sailing? Why didn’t he just fly over?”

  “There weren’t any commercial transatlantic flights in those days.” Bessie shook her head. “And even if there had been, tickets probably would have been far too expensive for someone like Matthew to afford.”

  “So then you bought the cottage?” Vikky asked.

  “Yes,” Bessie nodded. “Matthew wrote a new will just before he left America, leaving everything he owned to me. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to buy this cottage, which was much smaller in those days. I’ve extended it twice, you see.”

  “It must have been pretty small,” Vikky said, looking around the space.

&n
bsp; “It was really only two rooms when I bought it,” Bessie told her.

  “Danny’s family’s cottage is huge,” Vikky replied. “It has separate wings for staff and stuff like that.”

  “From what I’ve heard, Danny’s family has a great deal of money.”

  “Yeah, they own a bunch of stuff like grocery stores and shopping malls,” Vikky shrugged. “I loved Danny because he was a good person, not because he was loaded.”

  “That’s good to know,” Bessie said, forcing herself to keep the doubt out of her tone. “So now that he’s gone, who inherits his share of the fortune?” she asked boldly.

  “Me,” Vikky giggled. Bessie couldn’t keep the shocked expression off her face.

  “Oh dear, that didn’t sound good, did it?” Vikky shook her head. “I’m just so confused. I can’t even begin to believe that Danny’s gone. He was always so much more serious than I was. He insisted that we rewrite our wills just before the wedding. I guess that means I’m going to be a very rich widow.”

  With those words Vikky burst into tears again. Bessie sighed as she got up to find another box of tissues. Perhaps it had something to do with the generation gap, but she was finding it very difficult to muster up any sympathy for this woman.

  The day wore on and, as Bessie made frequent trips to the kitchen for more tissues and endless cups of tea, she could just see the tented area where the police were busily going about their work. The rain finally stopped altogether and even the wind slackened as morning turned to afternoon.

  Bessie offered the use of her phone to Vikky, if she wanted to call anyone, but she demurred.

  “I don’t want to break the news to Danny’s parents myself and I can’t begin to explain anything. I just want to sit here and feel numb.”

  Bessie made soup with tea and toast for lunch, which they ate at the kitchen table. “You need to try to eat something,” she told Vikky when she shook her head at the soup.

  “I’m just not hungry,” Vikky moaned. “How can I eat when I know that Danny is….”

  “You have to keep your strength up,” Bessie counselled her. “The next few days are going to be difficult; you need to stay strong.”

  She knew she was a fine one to talk. When she found out that Matthew had died, she had refused to eat for nearly a week, sobbing almost continually and only sleeping when her body gave in to exhaustion. But she didn’t need to tell Vikky any of that. With one more final urging, the younger woman fell on the soup and toast as if she hadn’t eaten in days. Within minutes, half a loaf of bread was gone and Vikky was halfway through a third bowl of soup.

  “You were right,” she told the older woman as she emptied the bowl the third time. “I really needed that.”

  Bessie bit her tongue and looked out the window at the activity further down the beach. The police vehicles that were parked in her driveway and along the road next to her house had been coming and going throughout the morning. When Bessie spotted the ambulance that arrived shortly after lunch, she quickly moved her guest upstairs and away from any chance to watch her husband’s body being removed.

  “I have an office up here,” she told Vikky as she ushered her upstairs. “And I have a lot of books. Maybe you’d like to read while you wait.”

  Vikky wrinkled her nose. “I’m not really much of a reader,” she replied. “Where’s your telly?”

  Bessie fought back a frown. “I don’t have a telly.”

  “Too cheap to pay the licence fee?” Vikky snorted.

  Bessie bit back a dozen angry replies. After several deep breaths, she finally spoke. “Television has simply never interested me,” she told the woman, keeping her tone as even as she could manage. “Money is not an issue.”

  “What did you do before you retired?” Vikky asked.

  Bessie bristled. This woman was unbelievably rude. “I don’t believe that’s any of your business,” she couldn’t stop herself from saying.

  Vikky looked stung. “Oh, am I prying now? I thought, since we talked about my marriage and your dead boyfriend and whatever that we could talk about stuff. Never mind.”

  Bessie was saved from having to reply by a loud knock on her door. The two women hurried down the stairs, both welcoming the interruption.

  Hugh Watterson stood at Bessie’s door. The rain had stopped some time earlier but Hugh, who had been out in it for hours, was still almost dripping wet. He forced himself to smile at the two women.

  “Inspector Rockwell has asked me to collect Mrs. Pierce and bring her over to the station. He needs to talk to her and he felt that the station was the best place.” Bessie grinned at the look on Hugh’s face as he looked into her cosy kitchen. No doubt it would be hours before he could get changed out of his wet clothes and relax.

  “I don’t want to go to the police station,” Vikky protested. “It isn’t like I’ve done anything wrong.”

  “No, ma’am, of course not,” Hugh was quick to agree. “But the Inspector wants to get right to interviewing susp…, er, witnesses. He’s gone back to the station and asked me to bring you. Other constables have been sent to gather up the rest of the victim’s family.”

  “You’re going to bring Danny’s parents to the police station? It’s worth going just to see that.” Vikky laughed now and looked around. “I didn’t even have my bag or my phone, did I?” she said to Bessie.

  “You didn’t bring anything with you,” Bessie assured her. “As for what you were wearing when you arrived, well, I’ll drop that off to you another day. You don’t want to be worrying about it all afternoon.”

  “Thank you.” Vikky didn’t seem to be paying much attention to Bessie. She was staring down the beach, where teams of uniformed constables were slowly walking along the sand, studying every inch of it. Bessie could see that the tent was still standing, but it was obvious that the body had been removed.

  Hugh noticed where she was looking and exchanged a quick glance with Bessie. “Let’s get going then,” he blustered. “Off we go.”

  Vikky was shaking as Hugh took her arm and guided her out towards his car.

  “Thank you, Aunt Bessie,” he called over his shoulder.

  “It was no problem,” she replied to the man, waiting for a similar word of thanks from Vikky.

  Vikky climbed into the passenger seat of the police car without looking back.

  Bessie frowned. Manners should always trump tragedy, she thought to herself as she went back inside. She tried hard to understand the other woman’s feelings, but there were no two ways about it. Bessie couldn’t make herself like Vikky Pierce, no matter how sorry she felt for her.

  Chapter Three

  Bessie bustled around her cottage, quickly washing the lunch dishes and tidying them away. She went back upstairs and rescued the left-behind nightie. The label identified it as pure silk and dry clean only, so Bessie simply threw it into a shopping bag to take back to Vikky later. If it had been sensible cotton, Bessie would have washed it for the other woman out of simple courtesy.

  She folded the police blanket carefully and put it into a second bag. She would return it to Doona, who would take care of laundering it. Even if she did wash it, Doona would have to do it again anyway. Doona had explained it to her once, something about having everything the police used washed in the same detergent for reasons having to do with evidence. Bessie wasn’t sure she understood, but she knew there was no point in washing the blanket herself.

  Chores finished, she sank down on a couch in the sitting room and then realised that her morning routine had been completely disrupted by events. She hadn’t even turned the ringer on her phone back on. She sighed as she got to her feet again. Her mobile phone was used for emergencies only and was in her handbag, probably switched off. She had a single line into the house, and that phone sat in the kitchen next to the overpriced answering machine that her advocate had nagged her into getting.

  When she went to bed at night, Bessie always turned the phone’s ringer off. It was a minor concession to
her age. She felt she was too old now to be running up and down the stairs in the middle of the night if the phone rang. Any call between nine at night and six or seven the next morning was going to be a wrong number anyway. Bessie’s friends would never bother her at those hours, and she couldn’t imagine any emergency that couldn’t wait until morning.

  With all of the comings and goings with the police cars and the ambulance, Bessie was unsurprised to find that she had twenty-two messages on the machine. She made herself a cup of tea and pulled out a pad and pen to write down the important ones.

  Bessie split the list into two columns, those who had called because they were genuinely concerned and those who had called out of sheer nosiness. It didn’t take long to return the handful of calls from the sincerely worried. The others could wait a bit longer to get their skeet, she decided.

  She was just reassuring her advocate that the excitement hadn’t been too much for her when she heard a knock on her door. Hugh Watterson was back.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Bessie, but I’m meant to ask you to come into the station to make a statement,” he said apologetically. “I told Inspector Rockwell that I could take your statement here, but he wants to talk to you himself.”

  “I suppose inspectors can make whatever rules they like,” Bessie shrugged. She had no real objection to going to the station; she often spent time there visiting with Doona anyway, but it would have been nice to have been given options.

  Hugh opened his mouth and then snapped it shut. Bessie wondered what he wanted to say, but didn’t pry.

  “Just let me get my bag,” she told Hugh. “You pop in and make yourself a cuppa. The kettle has just boiled.”

  Hugh grinned at that and Bessie could hear him grabbing a cup and making himself tea as she headed towards the stairs. She always welcomed houseguests and the neighbourhood children always knew they could “run away” to Aunt Bessie’s whenever they felt the need, but Bessie wasn’t the sort to wait on her guests hand and foot.

  As soon as they were old enough to not get hurt, she taught them to make their own tea and where the biscuits were kept. Everyone knew that, at Bessie’s, biscuits had to be put on a plate and then eaten neatly so that the plate caught the crumbs. Visitors also quickly learned that they should wash their cups and plates for themselves when they were finished. Bessie was terrific at providing tea and sympathy, but she wasn’t going to clean up after everyone on top of that.