Aunt Dimity's Good Deed Read online

  My offer of help had been hastily, though politely, declined, Emma having learned through painful experience of my inability to tell a ripe radish from a rotten rutabaga; and twelve-year-old Nell, Emma’s golden-haired step-daughter, had strolled over to the cottage, with Emma’s blessing, to continue her ongoing chess game with Willis, Sr., who was, as far as I knew, where I’d left him: in the study, comfortably ensconced in one of the pair of tall leather chairs that sat before the hearth, with a cup of tea at his elbow and a first edition of F. W. Beechey’s A Voyage of Discovery Towards the North Pole in his hand. He’d been sitting, in fact, precisely where Bill should have been.

  The thought filled me with gloom, and I heaved a woeful sigh as I watched Emma pluck radishes from the ground and toss them deftly into the wheelbarrow at my side.

  “That’s the third time you’ve done that,” Emma noted. She tucked up a long strand of hair that had escaped from her straw sunhat, and adjusted her wire-rim glasses. “That’s the third time you’ve blown a great tragic sigh all over my radishes. They’re beginning to droop, poor things.”

  “Sorry.” I thrust my hands into the pockets of my jeans and paced carefully to the eggplants and back before taking a seat on the lip of the wheelbarrow—between the handles this time, so it wouldn’t tip over again—and staring crossly at the oak grove that separated the Harrises’ property from my own. I wasn’t feeling very generous. I’d spent the last hour pouring my heart out to Emma, and her only advice had been to fly straight back to Boston and smack Bill in the kisser.

  “I’ll bet you’ve never smacked Derek in the kisser,” I grumbled.

  “That doesn’t mean I haven’t wanted to,” Emma responded airily. “I have it on good authority that a smack in the kisser is the only reliable way to get a man’s attention. I mean, really, Lori, a second honeymoon? You’ve only just gotten back from your first. Bill probably thought you were being frivolous.”

  “I wasn’t being frivolous,” I retorted. “I wanted this trip to be special. I wanted to get Bill away from the office so he could relax a little and—”

  “You’re the one who needs to relax.” Emma climbed slowly to her feet and brushed dirt from the padded knees of her gardening trousers. As she peeled off her work gloves and tucked them into the pocket of her violet-patterned gardening smock, she came a step closer, eyeing me shrewdly. “Been to see Dr. Hawkings already?”

  I felt my face turn crimson, and dropped my gaze. “You said you wouldn’t mention that again.”

  Emma put a hand on my shoulder. “Calm down, Lori. Pressure never helps.”

  Dr. Hawkings had said the same thing in London, and so had my gynecologist back in Boston. Even Emma had said it once before, when I’d foolishly confided in her. Relax, they all told me. Let Nature take its course. Everything will be fine. But I had my doubts.

  “What if I’m like my mother?” I said, still avoiding Emma’s knowing gaze. “She took ten years to have me.”

  Emma shrugged. “Then you’ll have ten more years of peace and quiet. Is that so bad?”

  I smiled wanly. Medical experts on both sides of the Atlantic swore that nothing was wrong with me or Bill, but how could I believe them? I’d been to see Dr. Hawkings almost as soon as I’d arrived in London, given him permission to shout the news from the rooftops if the test results were positive, but I knew they wouldn’t be. I didn’t need Honoria or Charlotte to remind me that Willis, Sr., still had no grandchild.

  “You don’t seem to get the picture,” I said stubbornly. “Bill’s working all the time, and when he’s not, he’s so tired he can hardly hold his head up, let alone—”

  Emma suppressed a snort of laughter as she gave my shoulder a shake. “You’ve got to get your mind off of it,” she said firmly. “Why don’t you give Stan Finderman a call? Better still, why don’t you go into the village and have a heart-to-heart with Mrs. Famham? She was forty-three years old, you know, before she had—”

  “Stop!” I said, wincing. “If you dare mention Mrs. Famham and her miraculous triplets again, I’ll pelt your house with radishes.”

  “I was only trying—”

  “Thanks,” I said shortly, “but I fail to see how the idea of waiting until I’m forty-three years old to start a family is supposed to cheer me up!”

  At that moment the phone in the wheelbarrow rang and, glad of the interruption, I dug through the radishes to find it. It was a durable cellular model, a Christmas gift from Derek inspired by Bill’s comment that Derek would have less trouble getting hold of his wife if he installed a phone booth in the garden.

  A phone booth would have been more practical, since Emma, a former computer engineer, had a somewhat cavalier attitude toward high-tech toys. The cellular phone had been hoed, raked, fertilized, and very nearly composted, so finding it buried at the bottom of a barrow ful of radishes was par for the course. I pulled the carrying case from a tangle of greens and passed it to Emma, then strolled over to the cucumber frames, out of earshot, where I waited until she’d finished her conversation.

  “That was Nell,” she called, dropping the phone back into the wheelbarrow. “She says William’s not at the cottage.”

  “He was there when I left,” I said, picking my way back to her.

  “Yes, but Nell says he’s not there now. In fact ...” Emma bent to pull a tarp over the barrow, looking thoughtful. “When was the last time you heard from Dimity?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, coming to an abrupt halt. “Aunt Dimity’s not at the cottage anymore.”

  Emma straightened. “Yes, but Nell says that William’s. disappeared. And she seems to think Aunt Dimity’s gone with him.”

  My stomach turned a somersault and the tilled earth seemed to shift beneath my feet. “Aunt Dimity?” I said faintly. “How—?”

  “I have no idea,” Emma replied. “That’s why we’re driving over to the cottage right now. Let’s go.” She pulled off her sunhat and tossed it onto the tarp, letting her dishwater-blond hair tumble to her waist as she hurried toward the central courtyard of the manor house, where her car was parked.

  I blinked stupidly at the barrow for a moment, then ran to catch up with her. “If Nell’s pulling my leg ...” I began, but I left the sentence hanging. If Nell Harris was pulling my leg, I’d have to grin and bear it. Nell wasn’t the sort of child one scolded.

  Even so, I told myself as I climbed into Emma’s car, it had to be some sort of joke. My father-in-law was a kind and courtly gentleman. He was also as predictable as the sunrise. He wouldn’t dream of doing something as inconsiderate as “disappearing.” He simply wasn’t what you’d call a spontaneous kind of guy.

  I said as much to Emma while we cruised down her long, azalea-bordered drive. “William never even strolls into Finch without letting me know,” I reminded her. “And as for Aunt Dimity going with him—impossible.”

  “Why?” asked Emma.

  “Because she’s dead!” I cried, exasperated.

  “That’s never stopped her before,” Emma pointed out.

  I felt a faint, uneasy flutter in the pit of my stomach. “True,” I said. “But I mean really dead. Not like before.”

  Emma gave me a sidelong look. “Are you telling me there are degrees of deadness?”

  “I’m simply saying that the situation has changed,” I replied. “Dimity had unfinished business to take care of the last time she ... visited. That’s why she couldn’t rest in peace. But we settled all of that two years ago. It’s over. She’s gone.”

  “Perhaps she has new business,” Emma suggested.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Dimity can’t just flit in and out of the ether at will.” Because, if she could, I. added mutely, she’d have come through for me with some whiz-bang advice on How to Save My Marriage. “There must be rules about that sort of thing, Emma.”

  “If there are,” Emma commented dryly, “then I’m willing to bet Aunt Dimity’s rewriting them.”

  I opened my mouth t
o protest, but shut it again without saying a word. Emma had a point. Nothing about my relationship with Aunt Dimity had ever been remotely conventional. For starters, we weren’t related by blood or marriage but by a bond of friendship. Dimity Westwood had been my mother’s closest friend. They’d met in London during the war and kept up a flourishing correspondence long after my mother had returned to the States. When I was born, Dimity became my honorary aunt, and when my father died shortly thereafter, she did what she could to help my mother bear the twin burdens of a broken heart and a bawling baby.

  Dimity was always helping someone. She worked with war widows and orphans and parlayed a small inheritance into a considerable fortune, which she used to found the Westwood Trust, a philanthropic enterprise that was still going strong. Dimity had made a name for herself in the financial markets at a time when women didn’t do that sort of thing, and although she’d made enough money to kick back and swig champagne with the smart set, she’d chosen instead to live a reclusive life, going quietly about the business of doing good.

  Dimity Westwood hadn’t been a conventional woman, aunt, or millionaire, so why should she have a conventional afterlife? She’d already exploded the myth that hauntings had to be spooky. No moaning in the chimney for her, no materializing in an eerie green haze or rattling chains in the dead of night. When Aunt Dimity wanted to communicate with me across the Great Divide, her messages appeared on the pages of the blue journal, an unobtrusive little book bound in dark-blue leather.

  I still took the blue journal down from its shelf in the study every time I arrived at the cottage, still hoped to see Aunt Dimity’s fine copperplate curl and loop across the page, but my hopes had begun to fade. I’d told myself that it was foolish to expect to hear from Aunt Dimity again, because the problems that had bound her spirit to the cottage had been solved—or so I’d thought.

  Why would she return now? What kind of “new business” would induce her to go anywhere with Willis, Sr.? Was he in some sort of trouble? What kind of trouble could a respectable, sixty-five-year-old attorney get into, sitting quietly in an armchair, reading a book?

  I’d asked myself so many questions that I felt a little dizzy. I didn’t know what to expect. But the first thing I noticed when we turned into my drive was that Willis, Sr.’s car was missing.

  3.

  I kept two cars in England: a secondhand black Morris Mini for my own use, and a shiny silver-gray Mercedes for my guests. When I was away, I garaged both cars in Finch with Mr. Barlow, the retired mechanic who’d come to depend on the income he earned banging out the dents and retouching the scratches I tended to accumulate whenever I drove in England. Mr. Barlow had ferried both cars from Finch to my graveled drive that morning, but only the Mini was there now.

  “William’s car is gone,” Emma noted, pulling in beside the black Mini and shutting off her engine.

  “Maybe he’s driven to Bath to see the bookseller Stan told him about.” A devoted armchair traveler, my father-in-law had assembled a splendid collection of books on Arctic exploration. He was always on the lookout for new finds, so he might very well have taken my old boss’s advice and gone to see a man in Bath about a book.

  Emma maintained a wait-and-see attitude, but I got out of the car and walked back along the driveway to the edge of the road, studying the tire marks in the gravel. Each set curved out of the driveway in the direction of Finch except one, which turned in the opposite direction.

  “See that?” I said triumphantly, pointing to the gravel. “William turned south, in the direction of Bath. I’m sure that’s where he is.”

  “Uh-huh,” Emma replied noncommittally.

  Apart from the missing car, the cottage looked as it had when I’d left it earlier that morning. The stone walls were the color of sunlight on honey, the slate roof was a patchwork of lichen and moss, and a cascade of roses framed the weathered front door. Even in winter’s thin gray light, with the rosebushes bare and a dusting of snow on the rooftop, the cottage looked warm and inviting. Now, in early August, with the mosses baked golden by the high summer sun, and the scent of new-mown hay from a neighboring field lingering sweetly in the air, Aunt Dimity’s cottage was, to my eyes, the prettiest place on earth.

  All the same, I examined it carefully as I followed Emma up the flagstone path to the front door. I was convinced that the cottage would glimmer or gleam or do something to herald Aunt Dimity’s return, but it didn’t. The house martins flitted to and from their little round nests under the eaves, and a plump rabbit eyed us from the safe refuge of the lilac bushes, but if Dimity had come back, the cottage wasn’t telling.

  Nell was waiting for us in the living room, where she and Willis, Sr., had set up the green-lacquered gaming table for their competition. Nell and Willis, Sr., were fairly evenly matched as chess players—their duels lasted for weeks, sometimes months, depending on how often Willis, Sr., came to visit. They were good friends, too, and though it gave my heart a pang when Willis, Sr., referred to Nell as his adopted granddaughter, I couldn’t resent it. Nell Harris was an exceptional child.

  Nell was twelve years old, but she seemed to have bypassed the awkward preteen pupa stage and gone straight into being a butterfly. She was tall, slender, and exquisite, a Botticelli angel with a flawless oval face, a rosebud mouth, and her father’s dark-blue eyes. In the light from the bow windows, Nell’s blond curls gleamed like a halo of spun gold, and she moved with an inborn grace that made her seem regal even when dressed, as she was now, in khaki shorts, scuffed hiking boots, and a pale-blue T-shirt.

  Bertie, Nell’s chocolate-brown teddy bear, was sitting on a pile of cushions in what should have been Willis, Sr.’s chair, perusing the chessboard with unwavering intensity, but Ham, Nell’s black Labrador retriever, clearly overcome by the excitement of the match, lay sprawled across the cushioned window seat, half asleep. Ham’s tail thumped twice to alert his mistress to our entrance, but her attention was, like Bertie‘s, focused on the board—as Ham’s tail rose for a third thump, Nell slid a white bishop three squares and smiled benignly.

  “That should do it,” she murmured before turning to greet us. “Hello, Lori. Hello ... Mama!” she exclaimed. “You’re still wearing your wellies. I thought you loathed driving in them.”

  “I do,” Emma replied, stepping out of her soiled black boots, “but I was in a hurry. What’s all this about William disappearing?”

  “He wasn’t here when I arrived for our chess game,” Nell replied. “And you know William—he always keeps his appointments.”

  That much was true. Anything written in Willis, Sr.‘r engagement book was written in stone, and he wrote everything in that book. A game of chess with Nell would be recorded as meticulously as a luncheon date with a client, and treated with equal respect.

  “I rang the bell and knocked,” Nell went on, “and when there was no answer, Bertie and I let ourselves in.” Whereas most twelve-year-olds would rather shave their heads than admit to a lingering affection for childhood toys, Nell was unabashedly devoted to her teddy bear. She took Bertie with her everywhere, consulted with him regularly, and referred to him un-self-consciously, whether she was in the privacy of her own home or in the company of strangers. Mindful of a certain pink flannel bunny with whom I’d developed a special, if less publicly acknowledged, relationship, I applauded Nell’s chutzpah. “We had a look round,” she concluded, “found the note, and called you.”

  “There’s a note?” I asked sharply.

  Nell nodded. “It’s on the desk in the study. It’s addressed to you, Lori. Bertie thinks—”

  “Not now, Nell.” I waved her to silence, left the living room, and hastened up the hallway to the study, feeling a vast sense of relief. Willis, Sr., had left a note. Of course he’d left a note. The story about him disappearing with Aunt Dimity had been just that—a product of Nell’s over-fertile imagination. I should have guessed. Nell had a flare for the dramatic, and I knew better than anyone how readily flights of fancy
took wing at the cottage.

  The study was dim and silent, the hearth cold, the lamps unlit. Layers of ivy filtered the sunlight that fell through the windows onto the large wooden desk and cast murky shadows on the book-lined shelves and the pair of leather armchairs facing the fireplace.

  I went straight to the desk, turned on the lamp, and saw a cream-colored envelope lying square in the middle of the blotter. I reached for it, hesitated, then turned back to face the hearth, vaguely disturbed. Willis, Sr.’s armchair was empty; his morning cup of tea sat, apparently untasted, on the low table where I’d placed it for him that morning; and the book he’d been reading was lying face-down and open on the ottoman.

  It was the book that bothered me. The first edition of F. W. Beechey’s Arctic memoirs had been a birthday present from Stan and a welcome addition to Willis, Sr.’s collection. He valued it highly, yet there it lay, carelessly abandoned, treated as though it were a cheap airport paperback. Emma noticed it, too, when she followed Ham into the study with Nell and Bertie. She gave me a puzzled glance, picked up the volume, closed it, and placed it on the low table beside Willis, Sr.’s now frigid cup of tea.

  I turned back to open the cream-colored envelope, rapidly scanned the message it contained, then read it again, aloud:

  “My dear girl,

  “I must leave shortly, so I will be brief. I have been called away unexpectedly on urgent business. It may take some time and I may have some difficulty apprising you of my whereabouts while I am gone, but there is no need to worry.