Aunt Dimity: Snowbound

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Epilogue

  Catchpole’s Apricot Compote

  ALSO BY NANCY ATHERTON

  Aunt Dimity’s Death

  Aunt Dimity and the Duke

  Aunt Dimity’s Good Deed

  Aunt Dimity Digs In

  Aunt Dimity’s Christmas

  Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil

  Aunt Dimity: Detective

  Aunt Dimity Takes a Holiday

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

  Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario,

  Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany,

  Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2004 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Nancy T. Atherton, 2004

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Ather ton, Nancy.

  Aunt Dimity, snowbound / Nancy Atherton.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-04396-7

  1. Dimity, Aunt (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—England—Cotswold Hills—Fiction. 3. Cotswold Hills (England)—Fiction. I. Title: Snowbound. II. Title.

  PS3551.T426A9348 2004

  813’.54—dc22 2003062152

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Set in Perpetua

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please urchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Wendy Lindboe, rambler

  One

  The holidays nearly killed me. While my clever lawyer husband used work as an excuse to avoid all but the most pressing social engagements, I flung myself at Christmas with the carefree abandon of a lemming rushing headlong toward a cliff.

  While Bill barricaded himself behind legal files in our honey-colored cottage, I volunteered for every committee and attended every party given in or near Finch, the tiny English village we’d called home for the past six years. I adorned St. George’s Church with evergreen boughs, warbled carols on a multitude of unsuspecting doorsteps, constructed scenery for the nativity play, prepared our four-year-old twin sons for their stage debuts as singing shepherds, baked enough angel cookies to choke a reindeer, and gave nearly as many parties—for children as well as adults—as I attended.

  Even when the holidays were over, even when we flew to Boston in January for our annual visit with Bill’s family, I couldn’t shake the tinsel from my hair. While Bill spent his days enjoying cozy chats before the fire with his delightful father, I took the twins sledding and skating and sleigh-riding and compounded my folly by whisking Bill off on sentimental journeys to revisit old friends and dine out in favorite restaurants every evening.

  By the time we returned to the cottage in mid-February, I was a burnt-out husk of my formerly jolly self. I winced when our sons burst into song, my gorge rose at the thought of nibbling another angel cookie, and I could scarcely bring myself to repack our Christmas decorations because the mere sight of them made my head throb. I was, in short, the pitiful victim of a self-induced holiday hangover.

  Emma Harris had no trouble diagnosing my condition. As my closest neighbor and dearest friend in England she’d seen it all before, and when she found me lying listlessly on the bamboo chaise longue beneath the apple tree in my back garden, she knew exactly what had happened.

  Appearances notwithstanding, I wasn’t merely lounging. Since Bill was catching up on paperwork at his office in Finch, and Annelise, the twins’ saintly nanny, was spending the afternoon with her mother on the family farm, I’d retired to the back garden to keep a sleepy eye on Will and Rob, who were busily building highways in the well-mulched vegetable patch.

  Although I wasn’t prepared to receive visitors, I was always glad to see Emma, who’d strolled over from her manor house to welcome me home and bring me up to date on local gossip. As she called a cheery hello to Will and Rob and seated herself on the deck chair opposite mine, I found myself envying her vitality. It was a gorgeous day, unseasonably warm and sunny, but I could barely summon the energy to acknowledge her arrival.

  Emma surveyed me critically before commenting, “You’ve been burning the yule log at both ends. Again.”

  I hung my head, knowing what she would say next.

  “What happened to the simple family Christmas you raved about?” she asked, right on cue. “What happened to staying at home and making angel cookies—”

  “Please don’t mention angel cookies,” I muttered as my stomach whimpered.

  “—and singing carols around your own hearth?” Emma went on. “What happened to a simple Christmas in the cottage with Bill and the boys?”

  “Bill stayed in the cottage,” I reminded her, “but the boys and I kind of . . . didn’t.” I held a hand out to her pleadingly. “I can’t help it, Emma. I’m addicted to holly. When sleigh bells ring I lose my head. I can’t keep myself from hopping up next to Santa and grabbing the reins. It’s a fun ride, truly it is, and Will and Rob loved every minute of it.”

  “I’m sure they did,” said Emma. “But you’re a wreck.”

  “I’m not the perkiest elf on the block,” I admitted.

  “You’re about as perky as a tree stump.” Emma pursed her lips and gazed thoughtfully toward the meadow beyond the garden wall. A pleasant silence ensued, a silence that was suddenly shattered by the sharp snap of her fingers as she exclaimed, “I know what’ll pull you out of your funk!”

  “A large box of chocolates?” I murmured.

  “No. Not chocolates.” Emma got to her fee
t, took two paces, and turned to face me. “You’re going for a walk.”

  I sank deeper into the cushioned chaise longue. “I’d prefer the chocolates.”

  Emma shook her head decisively. “You have to give energy to get energy,” she said. “I’m not talking about running a marathon, Lori. I’m talking about a stroll through some lovely countryside. Solitude, fresh air, and communion with nature—that’s what you need.”

  I gazed pointedly at the apple tree’s bare branches. “Not much nature to commune with, this time of year.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Emma. “If you’re lucky you’ll see rabbits, deer, woodpeckers, owls—maybe even a few foxes. And the early lambing is underway.” She took an invigorating breath and let it out in a whoosh. “There’s nothing like the sight of a gamboling lamb to refresh the spirits.”

  “Do lambs gambol in snow?” I inquired dryly. “I mean, Emma, it’s February. Last I heard, February wasn’t considered the balmiest month of the year in jolly old England.”

  “It hasn’t been so bad this year.” Emma swept a hand toward the clear blue sky. “We haven’t had a drop of rain or a flake of snow since December, and the meteorologists predict that the fine weather will last till the end of the month.”

  “I can’t disappear for the rest of the month,” I protested.

  “How about one day, then?” Emma proposed. “Surely you can manage to escape for one day. Bill won’t mind, and Annelise is more than capable of looking after the boys while you’re gone.”

  “Let me think about it,” I said, nestling my head into the cushions.

  Emma regarded me sternly. “You’re not doing the twins any good, sitting there like a lump.”

  I knew that my best friend was taking advantage of my tender maternal instincts by inserting the boys into the conversation, but I also knew that she was telling the truth. Will and Rob deserved a wide-awake and active mummy, a mummy who would get down in the dirt and play trucks with them, not a Drowsy Drusilla, yawning at them from the sidelines. Perhaps a walk would wake me up. Perhaps the sight of gamboling lambs would refresh my spirits. If nothing else, it would get me off of the chaise longue.

  Emma must have sensed an opening in my defenses because she began to press her case. “I’ve got the perfect trail for you. I hiked it last summer. It’s easy terrain, the path’s well-marked, and it’s not far from here. You can stop along the way for a picnic lunch. I’ll drop you off at the trail head and be waiting for you when you reach the other end.”

  “Why don’t you come along?” I suggested.

  “Because you need peace and quiet, that’s why.” Emma resumed her seat. “We’ve hiked together before, Lori. I know what you’re like on the trail. Talk, talk, talk, from beginning to end. You need a break from people, and that includes me.”

  I was forced to admit that she had a point. Emma and I had much in common—like me, she was a transplanted Yank with two children—but there were differences as well. Emma’s husband was English, for one thing, while Bill was American. Her children were nearly grown, whereas mine weren’t quite finished being babies. She weighed every decision carefully, while I tended to be a bit impulsive. And although we were the best of friends, we weren’t the best of hiking companions.

  To me, a hike was a chance to release the mind and engage the senses. I loved to ramble aimlessly, savoring whatever surprises nature had in store for me along the way. I believed that lost was a relative term because all trails led somewhere, particularly in England, which was, after all, a very crowded little island where you could scarcely walk ten steps without tripping over a pub, a farmhouse, or a charming village. I’d gotten lost so often that Emma had, only half-jokingly, offered to attach a homing device to my day pack, but I’d refused. Getting lost on a beautiful spring day was, for me, part of the fun.

  Emma, on the other hand, belonged to the map-and-compass crowd. She owned a veritable library of Ordnance Survey maps and never left home without a half dozen in her day pack. To Emma, hiking was an intellectual activity, a mission to be accomplished, a puzzle to be solved. While on the trail, she seemed to spend more time studying maps than gazing upon the natural beauty surrounding her. If she got lost—which she did, even when I wasn’t around to distract her with talk, talk, talk—she felt she’d failed. It seemed to me that the only advantage her method of navigation had over mine was that, at the end of the day, she could figure out exactly where she’d gone wrong.

  The more I thought about it, the more I agreed with Emma: If the proposed walk was to have any beneficial effects, it would best be taken without her company.

  “How long is this trail of yours?” I asked.

  “Nine miles, give or take a few hundred yards,” Emma replied. “You’ll be able to manage it in five hours, six at the most. I’ll pack your lunch for you,” she offered. “I’ll even pack your day pack.”

  I smiled. “Be sure to tuck in a few hundred maps, will you? In case I end up in Borneo or Venezuela . . .”

  “I’ll put in a map of the trail.” Emma leaned forward and patted my arm. “But I promise you, you won’t get lost this time. Honestly, it’s a simple, straightforward route. I’ll show it to you on the map. There’s only one turning, and,” she sailed on, blithely uttering the curse that had doomed travelers for centuries, “you can’t miss it.”

  Her enthusiasm was so infectious that the curse drifted past me, unnoticed, and in all innocence I agreed to spend a day hiking her straightforward trail, providing Bill agreed that he could live without me for five hours (six at the most). I paid no attention whatsoever to the tiny voice screaming in the back of my mind, warning me that a simple walk could be every bit as treacherous as a simple Christmas.

  Two

  Annelise took the news of my impending departure in stride, and Bill’s most memorable comment about Emma’s cure for my holiday hangover was that he wished he’d thought of it himself.

  “Go,” he told me when we sat down to dinner that evening. “Take advantage of the good weather while it lasts. The fresh air will put the bounce back in your step. But bring your cell phone, just in case.”

  “In case I get hopelessly lost?” I said, lifting an eyebrow.

  My husband responded with more gallantry than truth. “In case you discover someplace so glorious that you can’t resist the urge to describe it to me on the spot.”

  “I’ll bring the cell phone,” I promised, and rewarded his gallantry with a kiss. “Care to come along?”

  “I’d love to, Lori, but I can’t,” he said. “You know how work piles up over the holidays. I haven’t seen the top of my desk since we got back from Boston.”

  I felt a pang of disappointment, but I tried to conceal it. I couldn’t back out now—Emma had already organized my day pack and prepared my picnic lunch. Apart from that, Bill was so pleased with the ingenious plan that I couldn’t bring myself to admit that I was having second thoughts.

  Did I really want to spend a day in the woods, alone? The past couple of months had been intensely social. Could I handle five or six hours with no one to talk to but a handful of gamboling lambs? I suddenly felt as if my nearest and dearest were thrusting me, cold turkey, into an isolation chamber.

  “Lori,” Bill said, taking note of my furrowed brow, “you don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

  “I do want to go,” I said. “But I’m not sure I want to go by myself.”

  “Take Aunt Dimity,” he suggested. “You can chat with her if you get too lonely.”

  “What a good idea!” My brow smoothed. “Communing with nature is right up her alley.”

  “Take Reginald, too,” Bill said. “Reg can ride with his head sticking out of your pack, and Aunt Dimity’ll fit inside. They don’t weigh much, and Emma won’t have to add extra food for them.”

  “They’ll be perfect trail mates,” I agreed, and passed the roast potatoes to my husband, beaming.

  A stranger eavesdropping on our dinnertime conversation
could be forgiven for assuming that Bill and I were clinically insane. Why couldn’t Reginald walk on his own two feet? the stranger would wonder. And how on earth will they stash nature-loving Aunt Dimity inside a day pack?

  The stranger would no doubt be relieved to learn that Reginald was a stuffed animal I’d had since childhood, a small, powder-pink flannel rabbit who would be perfectly content to view the passing scenery from the confines of my pack. An explanation of Aunt Dimity’s extreme portability, however, would only confirm the stranger’s suspicion that my husband and I were a pair of raving loonies.

  Easy explanations were hard to come by when discussing Aunt Dimity. As a child, I’d known her as the main character in a series of bedtime stories invented by my mother. I was astonished to learn many years later that my mother had based her fictional heroine on a decidedly nonfictional Englishwoman named Dimity Westwood.

  My mother had met Dimity Westwood in London, where both women had served their respective countries during the Second World War. They’d become fast friends during those dark years and had shared the stories of their postwar lives in letters that had flown back and forth across the Atlantic by the hundreds.

  I first learned of their friendship after Dimity Westwood’s death, when I found that she had bequeathed to me the precious correspondence, a honey-colored cottage in the Cotswolds, a comfortable fortune, and a curious journal bound in dark-blue leather.

  It was through the journal that I finally came to know my mother’s dearest friend. When I opened the blue journal, its blank pages came alive with Dimity’s graceful script, an old-fashioned copperplate taught in the village school at a time when motorcars were still a rare and wondrous sight. Although I’d nearly fainted the first time Dimity’s words had scrolled across the page, I’d long since grown accustomed to her extraordinary, ongoing presence in my life.

  But I’d never try to explain it to a stranger.

  “I’ll fetch Reginald and the journal from the study after dinner,” I said, refilling Bill’s wineglass. “I’ll recharge the cell phone overnight and be ready to leave first thing in the morning.”