Aunt Dimity's Death ad-1

by Nancy Atherton

  “And it must have happened here, in this clearing. The photograph reminded Dimity of it and that’s why she keeled over. That’s my working hypothesis, anyway. There’s this, too.” I pulled the locket from the neck of my sweater and showed it to Bill. “I found it upstairs this morning, in a box marked with the letter W—for Westwood. It’s empty. See? No pictures. Where are they, Bill?”

  “Maybe she never put any pictures in it.”

  “Not just these pictures.” I perched on the edge of the desk. “Don’t you remember? My mom said Dimity was looking at photo albums when the neighbors found her. I snooped around while you were in here reading the letters and—” I hopped off the desk. “Come upstairs and see what I found.”

  Bill put on his glasses and followed me up to the master bedroom. I moved Meg’s blanket from the old wooden chest to the bed, then opened the lid of the chest. A row of photo albums bound in brown leather had been packed inside it, their spines facing upward. Like the archive boxes in the study, they had been labeled with dates.

  “Neat little ducks, all in a row,” I said, then pointed to a gap in the sequence. “Except that one has flown the coop, the one covering the years just before Dimity met my mom.” I let the lid fall back into place. “So what did she do with it? And don’t try to tell me that she stopped taking pictures all of a sudden, because—”

  “Wait, Lori, back up a step.” Bill sat on the chest. “What do you think happened in that clearing? What could be so terrible that it would follow Dimity into the afterlife? Are we talking about murder? Suicide? Are we going to find a body buried under that tree?”

  “Don’t say things like that,” I said, suppressing a shudder.

  “You’ve been thinking them, haven’t you? I don’t mean to sound ghoulish, but it has to have been something fairly drastic to cause Dimity this much grief. If we’re going to go digging into the past, we should be prepared to uncover some unpleasant things.”

  “But… murder?” I shook my head. “No. I can’t believe that. It’s got to be something else—and don’t ask me what, because I don’t know. I’m going to call the Harrises again.” I started for the telephone on the bedside table, but Bill blocked my way.

  “You’ve already left four messages on their machine,” he reminded me.

  “But where can they be?”

  “Still bailing out the vicarage is my guess. The storm hasn’t let up.” Bill patted the space next to him on the wooden chest. “Come here and sit down. The Harrises will call when they call, and not one minute sooner. You can’t help Dimity by running in circles.” He waited until I was seated, then went on. “We have no idea where the missing photo album might be. For all we know, Dimity might have burned it.”

  “A depressing possibility,” I conceded.

  “On the other hand, she may have kept it somewhere else—a bank vault, a safe-deposit box—somewhere special. Maybe it got mixed up with the rest of her papers. I’m sure that Father would be—”

  “Your father!” I clapped my hand to my mouth. “Oh, my gosh, Bill. I was talking with him when I saw Reginald. I slammed the phone down on him. He must be worried sick.” I rose halfway to my feet, then sat down again. “But he’ll want to know why I hung up on him. What am I going to say?”

  “That’s easy,” said Bill. “Tell him that you were distracted by another one of my stunningly clever stunts.”

  I shook my head. “No way. When I told him you were haunting the cottage, he threatened to recall you and fly over himself.”

  “I hope you talked him out of it,” Bill said quickly.

  “I did, but I don’t want to risk stirring him up again.”

  “Definitely not. Tell him… tell him that you were distracted by one of my stunts, but that you’ve had it out with me. You’ve taught me the error of my ways and I’ve promised never, ever to do anything so childish again.” He looked at me brightly. “How’s that?”

  “Will he believe it?”

  “It’s what he wants to hear.”

  “That always helps.” I went over to dial the number on the bedside phone and Bill stood beside me, listening in. Willis, Sr., answered on the first ring.

  “Ah, Miss Shepherd,” he said. “So good of you to call back. I was beginning to become concerned. Was there an emergency of some sort?”

  “No, no, Mr. Willis,” I replied airily, “no emergency. Just another one of Bill’s silly jokes. The last one, as a matter of fact. I’ve given him a… a stern lecture and he’s promised to behave himself from now on.” Bill signaled that I was doing fine, but I felt sure Willis, Sr., would hear the deception and guilt in my voice.

  But he began to chuckle. “Well, well, Miss Shepherd, if my son has stubbed his toe on your temper, I’ve no doubt he’ll watch his step in future.”

  I put my hand over the receiver and whispered, “Is he saying I’m bad-tempered?” but Bill waved the question away and hurried to the foot of the bed to point at the wooden chest. He mouthed the word “Photos.”

  “Uh, Mr. Willis?” I continued. “While I have you on the line, do you think you could answer a couple of questions for me?”

  “I am at your service, Miss Shepherd.”

  “It’s just that I found some old photo albums here in the cottage and one seems to be missing. I was wondering what could have happened to it. Did you come across anything like that when you were going through Dimity’s papers? It’s an old album, from around 1939….” I listened to Willis, Sr.’s reply, said a polite good-bye, and hung up.

  “Well?” said Bill.

  “He doesn’t think so. He’ll check, though, and get back to me.”

  Bill nodded, but his mind was somewhere else. “Let’s go back to the study,” he said. “It just occurred to me that the answers we’re looking for might be right under our noses.”

  I trailed after him. “If you’re thinking of the correspondence, Bill, you’re way off base. My mother had her antennae out. If Dimity had dropped the slightest hint, she would have told me.”

  Bill entered the study and approached the shelves. “True, but what if Dimity didn’t mail all the letters she wrote to your mother? What if she couldn’t bring herself to send some of them?”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Scanning the crowded shelves, I felt a flicker of hope. If Bill and I worked together, we could read through the letters in a matter of hours. If there were any clues to be found—to Dimity’s past, or to the origins of the stories—we would find them. With Bill’s help, I might be able to keep everyone happy. Still, I hesitated.

  “Bill,” I pressed, “have you thought this through? Looking for answers to my mother’s questions could take a lot of time, more time than I have. I may not be able to write Dimity’s introduction. Bill…” I tugged on his sleeve and he looked down at me. “Your father has gone to a lot of trouble to see to it that Dimity’s wishes are obeyed. Won’t he be furious with you for helping me disobey them?”

  “He’d be dismayed, certainly. But I’m not helping you.”

  “You’re not?” I blinked up at him, confused.

  “No.” He reached for the first box of letters. “I’m helping Dimity.”

  15

  I don’t know what made me think we could rush through the correspondence. There were sixty-eight boxes full, for one thing, letters from my mother interfiled with those from Dimity in strict chronological order, but it wasn’t the quantity that slowed us down. It was the quality. I had expected the letters to be moving, fascinating, enlightening—and they were—but I had not expected them to be so entertaining. I found myself pausing frequently to reread certain passages, to translate my mother’s handwriting for Bill when he had trouble with it, and to read the best parts aloud.

  I also found myself watching Bill. He never caught me at it—the slightest movement on his part would send my eyes scurrying down to whatever I was supposed to be reading—but it happened time and time again. Of all the strange things that had happened that day, his presence in the stud
y was perhaps the strangest. Only that morning I had been ready to throw him out of the cottage, and now he was sitting peacefully across from me, his jacket and tie thrown carelessly over the back of the chair, his collar undone and his shirtsleeves rolled up, calmly stroking his beard while he read his way through this most intimate correspondence, as though he belonged there. With each passing hour, it became more difficult to imagine journeying into my mother’s past without him.

  The seeds of the stories were scattered everywhere we turned. I think Bill was even more thrilled than I was each time a familiar situation or setting surfaced. He crowed in triumph less than an hour after we’d gotten started.

  “I’ve found Aunt Dimity’s cat!” he exclaimed. “Listen to this:

  “My Dearest Beth,

  “My cat is terrorizing the milkman.

  “You didn’t know I owned a cat, did you? That’s because I didn’t, until a week ago. I do now. The only trouble is that I’m not quite sure who owns whom.

  “He showed up on my doorstep last Monday evening, a ginger torn with a limp and a very pitiful mew. A bowl of cream miraculously cured the limp, and after a night on the kitchen hearth, the mew was replaced by a snarl that caused the milkman to shatter a fresh pint all over my kitchen floor. I strongly suspect premeditation, since the cat promptly lapped it up.

  “There’s not a plant in the house that’s safe from his depredations and he’s learned to sharpen his claws on the legs of my dining room table. I’ve lost my temper with him a dozen times a day. I know I should put him outside to fend for himself, Beth, but I like him. There hasn’t been a dull moment since he walked through my door, and he keeps my feet warm in bed. Surely that’s worth the loss of a few houseplants. Or so I keep telling myself.

  “I have dubbed him Attila.”

  Bill chuckled as he jotted the date of the letter in his notebook for future reference. “Wait,” I said. “Don’t close that notebook.”

  “Why? What have you found?”

  I shushed him and read aloud:

  “My Dearest Beth,

  “My dear, why do we put ourselves through Christmas? If the Lord had known what He was about, He surely would have announced His son’s birth privately to a small circle of friends, and sworn them to secrecy. Failing that, He might at least have had a large family and spaced their arrivals at decent intervals throughout the year. But no. In His infinite wisdom, the Almighty chose to sire but one Son, thus setting the stage for a celebration only a merchant could love.

  “I have just returned from the vale of tears which is London the week before Christmas. Should I ever suggest such a venture again, you are encouraged to have me bound over for my own protection”. Only the weak-minded would willingly enter the holiday stairwells at Harrod’s, of all places.

  “Picture a trout stream of packed and wriggling humanity; picture the rictus-grins of clerks exhausted beyond endurance; picture my foot beneath that of a puffing and alarmingly well-fed gentleman.

  “And picture, if you can bear to, my chagrin at having survived it all, only to depart empty-handed. [Enter Greek chorus, cursing Fate.] The torch, my sole reason, for braving the savage swarm, was not to be had, and I shall have to make do with candles until March, or perhaps June. Please God, the crowds will have thinned by then….”

  “No wonder your mother treasured this friendship,” Bill said. “Can you imagine getting letters like that all the time?”

  I told him the date of the letter and kept on reading. It was fun to run across those familiar-sounding passages, but I was even more captivated by the unfolding story of their everyday lives, and by their frequent references to the time they’d spent together in London.

  “How do you like that?” I said at one point. “Dimity the matchmaker.”

  Bill started at the sound of my voice. “What’s that?”

  I glanced up. “Sorry,” I said, “but I just found out that Dimity introduced my mom to my dad.”

  Bill blinked a few times, then grinned. “You don’t say.”

  “It’s right here in black and white: ‘…that night in Berkeley Square when I introduced you to Joe.’ I knew they had met during the war, but not that Dimity was behind it. Well, they were a great match.”

  “Do you believe in that sort of thing?” Bill asked.

  “What, matchmaking?” I paused to consider. It wasn’t something I’d given much thought to. “I guess there’s nothing wrong with it. If you know the people well enough, if you think it might work—why not bring them together? What harm could it do?”

  “None that I can think of,” said Bill.

  “Why? Has your father tried it?”

  “No,” he said, going back to his reading. “He’d consider it impertinent, bless him.”

  It must be the “desiccated aunts,” I thought, the ones he’d mentioned that morning in the guest suite. Did they parade their favorite nephew before a bevy of suitable females? It might explain why his father thought he was shy around women. I felt a touch of pity for him, but the temptation to tease got the better of me. “Bill?”

  “Yes?”

  “Does your matchmaker consider you a tough assignment?”

  He put down the letter he was reading and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, you’re not married yet. Do you have something against matchmaking?”

  Bill tilted his head to one side, as though debating whether to joke or give me a straight answer. I was a little surprised when he chose the latter.

  “Not at all,” he said. “There have been a few romances along the way, but nothing that stuck. It’s a matter of time as much as anything. First college, then the Peace Corps—”

  “You were in the Peace Corps?” I was impressed.

  “For four years. I re-upped twice. Then came law school, then learning the ropes at the firm. No breaks for the son of the house, I’m afraid. And my job entails a lot of traveling, which makes it difficult to maintain any sort of ongoing relationship. But now that you mention it, maybe I am a tough assignment.” He held up a frayed cuff and shrugged. “Let’s face it. I’m not movie star material.”

  “But I think you’re—” I broke off midprotest, realizing that I was on the verge of telling him that he was more attractive than any movie star and that the women who had rejected him had probably been shallow, vain, and dumber than doorstops. “I think you’re forgetting,” I said carefully, “that you were busy establishing yourself in your career.”

  “Mmm, maybe that was part of it. Anything else you’d like to know?”

  “No, no, I was just, uh, wondering….” I returned to my reading, but a short time later, I couldn’t help looking up again. “Bill?”

  “Mmm?”

  “What did you do in the Peace Corps?”

  “I gave puppet shows,” he replied, still concentrating on the letter in his hand.

  “Puppet shows?”

  He put the letter down. “Yes. I gave puppet shows. I was sent to Swaziland—that’s the place in southern Africa, by the way, not the place with the Alps—to teach English and after two years of using more traditional teaching methods, I added puppet shows.”

  “What a great idea.” My mother had tried the same thing in her classroom.

  “They were a big hit, education and entertainment in one neat package. I ended up traveling around the country in a Land Rover, giving shows in schools, churches, kraals, anywhere they sent me.” He lifted his hand and began to talk with it, as though it were a puppet. “Sahnibonani beguneni.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, delighted.

  “Roughly? ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.’ That’s about all the SiSwati I remember after all these years. Oh, and: Ngee oot sanzi, Lori.”

  “What’s that?”

  Bill smiled. “Let’s get back to work, Lori.”

  * * *

  The news about my parents’ meeting was the biggest revelation, but even the small ones fascinated
me. After demobilizing, Dimity had remained in London: busy, happy, and unexpectedly up to her elbows in children.

  My Dearest Beth,

  You will think me quite mad, for I have decided not to return to Finch. Moreover, I have taken off one uniform and put on another. No, I have not taken holy orders—perish the thought!—but I have signed on with Leslie Gordon at Starling House, a quite sacred place in its own right.

  I believe I told you of my friend, Pearl Ripley. She married an airman, young Brian Ripley, who was killed in the Battle of Britain. She was a bride one day, a widow the next, and a mother nine months later. I once questioned the wisdom of wartime marriages—even you waited until after the Armistice to marry Joe

  —but I have since come to admire Pearl greatly for making what I now feel was a very courageous decision. Surely Brian was fortified and comforted as he went into battle, knowing that he was so dearly loved.

  Starling House is meant to help women like Pearl, war-widows struggling to support young children on a pittance of a pension. The kiddies stay there while their mothers work. Isn’t it a splendid idea? Leslie asked only for a donation, and I have made one, but I think I have more to give these little ones than pounds sterling.

  To be frank, I am not cut out to be a lady of leisure. Although I now have the means, I lack the experience. In fact, it sounds like very hard work. I suppose I could sit with the Pym sisters knitting socks all day, but I’d much sooner change nappies and tell stories and give these brave women some peace of mind.

  Mad I may be, but I think it a useful sort of madness, a sort you understand quite well, since you suffer from similar delusions.

  My mother’s “useful sort of madness” had sent her back to college in pursuit of a degree in education. Despite exams, term papers, and long hours at the library, she managed to write at least twice a month.

  D,

  Midterms! Yoicks! And you thought D day was a big deal!

  I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying all of this. Joe says that I’m regressing and I do hope he’s right. After all of those gray years in London, I think I’ve earned a second childhood, don’t you?