Aunt Dimity Digs In Read online

  “They’re not just cleaning it,” Mr. Barlow informed me. “ They’re renaming it and putting up a new sign.”

  “Foolish nonsense.” Old Mr. Farnham had joined us, teetering precariously across the cobbles from his greengrocer’s shop. “Pub doesn’t need a sign. Everyone knows it’s Peacock’s pub.”

  “It’s that wife of Dick’s,” Mr. Barlow explained. “She’s full of queer ideas.” He leaned toward me. “She reads science fiction, you know.”

  “ There’s nothing wrong with reading science fiction,” I protested.

  “Not when you know it’s fiction,” retorted Mr. Barlow. “Christine Peacock thinks it’s all true!”

  “Too bad that son of hers joined the army instead of the space program,” said Mr. Farnham. “He could’ve given his mum a lift in his rocket ship.”

  I smiled thinly at the mean-spirited little joke, then tossed Buster’s rubber ball in the direction of the tearoom. “What do you suppose Sally Pyne is up to?”

  “ Turning the tearoom into a juice bar, probably,” said Mr. Farnham. “You know Sally—always trying to lose weight. Fat lot of good it’s ever done her.”

  “I heard she’s doing it up Roman,” said Mr. Barlow, “on account of that chap at Scrag End field. Sally thinks his dig’ll pull in tourists.”

  “Delusions of grandeur,” Mr. Farnham scoffed. “There’s never been tourists in Finch and there’ll never be tourists in Finch.”

  Mr. Barlow nodded his agreement. “Folks may come here to live, but they don’t come just for visits.”

  I turned to Mr. Barlow. “Did you move here from somewhere else?”

  He nodded again. “Came from Bristol, same as Jasper Taxman. Why do you ask?”

  “I was just wondering.” I was wondering if anyone had been born and raised in Finch. The Buntings were from London, Sally Pyne was from Plymouth, Mr. Barlow and Mr. Taxman were from Bristol. Even Peggy Kitchen, the empress herself, had moved to Finch from Birmingham.

  Mr. Barlow eyed the tearoom reflectively. “It may be that Sally’s just trying to get up Peg Kitchen’s nose. Never been the best of friends, those two. Ancient history, of course, but they do say history has a way of catching us up.”

  I glanced down at Buster, who’d returned, rubber ball clamped securely between his jaws. “Did Sally and Peggy know each other before they came to Finch?”

  “No.” Mr. Barlow shook his head decisively. “Their quarrel started right here. No telling where it’ll end.” He squinted over his shoulder at Kitchen’s Emporium. “Planning to sign the petition?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’ve heard that the bishop’s not likely to pay attention to it.”

  “Bishop doesn’t run the shop, does he?” said Mr. Farnham. “If Her Majesty wants us to sign the petition, I reckon we’d best sign the petition, eh, Mr. Barlow?”

  Mr. Barlow nodded sagely, then bent to snap the leash on Buster’s collar.

  “I’d better sign it, then,” I said, “before Her Majesty comes gunning for me. Here, Mr. Farnham, let me walk with you.”

  I took Mr. Farnham by the arm and steered him back to his shop. Finch’s greengrocer was in his seventies and painfully thin—if he stumbled on the cobbles, he’d shatter. The day’s warmth inspired me to buy a bag of lemons at his shop, for lemonade, before heading for Kitchen’s Emporium.

  Peggy’s shop sat unobtrusively in the center of the row of buildings that made up the west side of the square. Apart from the display in the window, it looked very much like its neighbors: a two-story building of Cotswolds stone, with a gabled roof and dormer windows above, a white-painted door, and a large white-framed window below.

  The interior of Kitchen’s Emporium featured a long wooden counter running from front to back, with an ancient cash register at the end nearest the entrance. A grilled window at the far end denoted the post office. Rows of shelves and racks opposite the counter held the usual assortment of groceries.

  Behind a small brown door at the rear of the shop, however, lay a realm so vast and wondrous that Bill had dubbed it Xanadu. Few travelers had roamed its byways and lived to tell the tale, but Peggy seemed to have a map tattooed upon her wrist. From its depths she’d extracted, on demand: sun hats, gumboots, strange elixirs to ward off colds, fishing poles, freckle cream, cricket bats, puce-colored thread, and the vicar’s favorite brand of tinned prawns. The merest glimpse of Xanadu’s shadowed aisles had convinced me that Peggy’s shop was very much like Peggy: a facade of normalcy concealing the unfathomable.

  Sleigh bells jingled as the shop door opened and a straggle of villagers emerged, murmuring quietly among themselves. The empress of Finch was no doubt holding court behind the counter, extending credit to the favored, withholding mail from the damned.

  I pushed the door open, silently cursed the sleigh bells, and paused in the doorway to scan the aisles. Peggy Kitchen was nowhere in sight. Instead, an oddly silent Rainey Dawson sat cross-legged on the counter, her elbows on her knees, her pointed chin cupped in her grubby palms, staring fixedly at a man who stood in Peggy’s place behind the cash register.

  As I closed the door, Rainey’s eyes slewed toward me and she hissed, in a whisper that could be heard in twenty counties, “Say something to him.”

  I smiled awkwardly at the man behind the counter. He was middle-aged, of middling height, with brown hair going gray at the temples. His brown tie matched a plain brown suit that in turn matched a pair of brown eyes peering out from behind brown-framed glasses. He was nondescript to the point of invisibility, but he held himself erect and seemed unflustered by Rainey’s penetrating whisper.

  “Mr. Taxman?” I guessed. “I’m Lori Shepherd, Bill Willis’s wife. How do you do?”

  “Very well, thank you,” said Mr. Taxman. “And you?”

  “Fine, just fine,” I said, taking stock of Peggy Kitchen’s alleged boyfriend. “Are you looking after the shop for Mrs. Kitchen?”

  “I am,” said Mr. Taxman.

  “It’s a nice day to be out and about,” I commented. “A bit warm, of course.”

  “It is,” Mr. Taxman agreed.

  “Good window-washing weather, though,” I prompted.

  Mr. Taxman nodded.

  I put my sack of lemons on the counter and tried again. “The spring-cleaning bug seems to have bitten everyone lately. Sally Pyne, for instance . . .” I paused, but Mr. Taxman was evidently impervious to cues. “And the Peacocks,” I continued doggedly. “Must be a bit of a nuisance for you. Hard to avoid tripping over all of those buckets and rags and . . . and puddles,” I finished lamely.

  The Great Stone Face registered no opinion.

  Rainey leaned toward me to confide, in a stentorian murmur, “He hardly ever talks.”

  “Rainey,” I scolded, “this isn’t a zoo and Mr. Taxman isn’t a caged animal, so stop treating him like one.”

  Rainey fixed her eyes virtuously on the ceiling. “I’m sorry, Mr. Taxman,” she said. “I don’t think you’re one bit like a monkey or an elephant. They’re much noisier.”

  A shy smile touched Mr. Taxman’s lips. “Apology accepted,” he said, then turned to me. “May I help you?”

  “The petition,” I said. “I’d like to sign it.”

  “Of course.” As Mr. Taxman reached below the counter, a jangle of sleigh bells announced the arrival of Adrian Culver’s young assistants.

  Simon Blakely and Katrina Graham looked as bedraggled as Rainey. Their shorts were filthy, their T-shirts drenched in sweat. Simon was pulling bits of debris from his ponytail, and Katrina was massaging her biceps. Simon said hello to Rainey, then slumped against the counter, but Katrina used the counter as a barre, bending and flexing like a ballerina.

  “Hard day at the dig?” I asked.

  Simon gave a dispirited laugh. “We haven’t even been to the dig. Katrina, queen of the Amazons, brought ten tons of the wrong equipment, so we’ve spent the entire morning repacking the van.”

  “Stop whining, Simon.” Katri
na rose from a deep knee bend. “You wouldn’t be so tired if you took care of yourself.”

  “If you think I’m working out with you tonight, after what you’ve put me through this morning, you’ve got another think coming.” Simon slouched over to grab a bottle of soda from a shelf. “You’re a fitness freak.”

  “Dr. Culver expects us to be fit and healthy,” Katrina retorted. “And I thought he’d want to use the equipment I brought. I don’t know how we’re going to do a proper job of soil analysis, chromatography, or spectrographic scans without it.”

  “This is a preliminary survey,” Simon reminded her, “not the dig at Herculaneum.” He unscrewed the cap on the bottle and gulped the soda noisily.

  Katrina eyed the soda with disgust and selected a bottle of springwater from a shelf at Simon’s elbow. “We’ll take a case of these, if you have one, Mr. Taxman.”

  “I’ll bring it over when Mrs. Kitchen returns. No need to pay now,” he added, waving off Katrina’s cash. “I’ll put it on your account.”

  Simon choked on his soda. “Mrs. Kitchen extended credit to us?” he sputtered.

  “ To your project,” Mr. Taxman replied.

  Katrina frowned. “Why would Mrs. Kitchen—”

  Simon nudged her toward the front door. “Don’t argue,” he muttered. “See you at supper, Rainey.”

  Katrina tried to stand her ground, but as Simon hustled her out into the square, her question remained unanswered.

  Why would Peggy Kitchen extend credit to the very people she was trying to evict? I looked at Mr. Taxman, who was conscientiously recording the pair’s purchases in the shop’s ledger. If he knew what Peggy was up to—and I was sure that she was up to something—he would no doubt keep it to himself. I was beginning to get the hang of his courtship strategy.

  Mr. Taxman closed the ledger and pulled a clipboard from beneath the counter. “The petition,” he announced, placing the clipboard, and a pen, in the space between Rainey and the cash register.

  The petition was, predictably, printed on harvest-gold paper. A paragraph at the top of the first page stated Peggy’s version of the case—with yet another biblical verse thrown in, excoriating “spiritual wickedness in high places”—and demanded that the bishop exert his moral, legal, and ecclesiastical authority in restoring control of the schoolhouse to local hands. The numbered lines below the paragraph were already filled with signatures, as were three-quarters of the lines on the following page.

  My eyebrows rose when I saw Emma’s hasty scrawl near the top of the second page. “Rainey,” I said, “were you here when Mrs. Harris stopped by today?”

  Mr. Taxman might be able to hold his peace, but Rainey was reliably irrepressible. “Mrs. Harris’s little girl is in France,” she replied, “and her little boy is in New Guinea, but she told me that’s not where guinea pigs come from so I asked her, if she wasn’t sending lettuce leaves to feed the pigs, what was in the package? And she said it was photographs Nell wanted her to post to Peter, her little boy.”

  Smiling smugly, I picked up the pen, bent to add my name to the list, and caught sight of a signature that drove all thoughts of Emma’s surrender from my mind. “Is that . . .” I pointed to a bold, barely legible line of script halfway down the page. “Does that say Dr. Adrian Culver?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Taxman, a muted note of triumph in his voice.

  His effusiveness caught my attention.

  “Odd, isn’t it?” I commented. “ That Dr. Culver should sign a piece of paper that could put him out of the schoolhouse?”

  “Indeed,” Mr. Taxman replied.

  A brick wall would have been easier to read. I scribbled my name on the page, wondering how Adrian Culver had managed to hold a pen with Peggy Kitchen twisting his arm.

  “I’d like to make a copy of the petition before Mrs. Kitchen sends it to the bishop,” I said.

  “We have no photocopier,” Mr. Taxman pointed out.

  “My husband has one,” I told him. “It won’t take him more than a minute to make a copy. Please tell Mrs. Kitchen that a . . . a historic document like this should be preserved for posterity.”

  “I will.” Mr. Taxman slid the clipboard beneath the counter.

  Rainey’s foot began to jiggle and I turned my attention to her. She had no business sitting indoors on such a beautiful day. At her age, I’d spent the summer months climbing trees, hopping fences, and racing through alleys from dawn to dusk. But then, I’d had a gang of neighbor children to play with, whereas Rainey, according to Bill, had no one. On impulse, I said, “I’m going for a walk, Rainey. Want to come along?”

  Rainey sprang from the counter in such a tangle of arms and legs that she would have broken a dozen bottles of vinegar, as well as her neck, if I hadn’t caught her in midair.

  “Yes, please,” she piped as I set her firmly on her sneak ered feet.

  “You’ll have to get your gran’s permis—” A cacophony of sleigh bells cut me off as Rainey tumbled headlong out of the shop.

  Mr. Taxman gazed after her. “How kind of you to invite her to accompany you on your expedition,” he said softly. “Such a quiet little mouse. I’d half forgotten she was here.”

  8.

  Rainey Dawson didn’t walk. She bounced, skittered, twirled, and all but took to the air in flight as we made our way across the square. The oppressive heat had no effect on her, and her prodigal expenditure of energy contributed nothing to our progress.

  She was infinitely distractable. She dropped onto the cobbles to pry a thumbtack from the sole of her left sneaker, ran to the war memorial to retrieve a willow wand, paused for a refreshing splash in the Peacocks’ puddles, and scampered over to Bill’s office to admire—and “accidentally” break off—a pendant of wysteria, which she presented to me as a token of affection.

  It wore me out to watch her, but I made no move to check her. The boys wouldn’t require my presence in the churchyard for another twenty minutes, and Rainey clearly needed to blow off a little steam. I let her stretch her legs at random for a few minutes more before I finally lassoed her with a question.

  “Did your grandmother send you over to the Emporium,” I asked, as she whizzed by, “so she could concentrate on the tearoom?”

  “Sort of.” Rainey skidded to a halt, then launched into a word-flurry that would have taxed Peggy Kitchen’s well-developed lungs. “Gran and Mrs. Kitchen aren’t speaking to each other because Gran said Mrs. Kitchen’s petition should be used to line the cat’s box, and Mrs. Kitchen called Gran a greedy old cow, but Gran needed a pound of butter for the Pompeii puffs so she sent me to fetch it.”

  “Pompeii puffs?” I said, with a twitch of foreboding. “Is that something new?”

  “It’s cream puffs with a new name,” Rainey informed me, trotting beside me into Saint George’s Lane. “Gran and Katrina’ve made up all sorts of new names for Gran’s goodies. Chariot wheels is doughnuts, and Hadrian cakes are the ones with jam in the middle, but Gran won’t eat any because she’s slimming again. And Gran’s tearoom isn’t Gran’s tearoom, it’s the Empire tearoom, with a capital E and a helmet sort of thing next to it. Gran says Bath’s made a packet off the Romans, so why shouldn’t we?”

  I quaked as my little oracle bubbled over with fresh portents of madness in Finch. We’d come abreast of the vicarage, and while Rainey put her willow wand to use, beheading thistles, I gazed worriedly at the overgrown shrubs.

  The long-running feud Mr. Barlow had mentioned seemed to be heating up. Sally Pyne was clearly in open rebellion against Peggy Kitchen, and she was using Dr. Culver as a weapon. First, she’d taken his assistants in as lodgers. Then she’d refused to sign the petition demanding his departure. Now she was transforming the tearoom into a little corner of ancient Rome. She seemed bound and determined to get up Peggy’s nose in every way imaginable. It wasn’t difficult to conceive of her going one step further, and stealing the Gladwell pamphlet in pursuit of her vendetta.

  When I informed Rainey that the
twins were waiting for us in the churchyard, she flung her willow wand into the air—narrowly missing my eye—and rocketed up the lane to get a firsthand look at “WillanRob.”

  I picked up my own pace, pausing at the Mercedes to exchange the bag of lemons for a bottle of My Milk from the ice chest. The sprig of wysteria I kept with me, to place on a headstone in the churchyard.

  Because Saint George’s was the focal point of Finch’s tourist trickle, the churchyard was kept in better order than the vicarage garden. The lych-gate’s shingled roof didn’t leak, and the sword-shaped weather vane atop the church didn’t squeak. Weeds were not allowed to choke the roses twining on the low stone wall, nor were they permitted to stem the fall of ivy clinging to the moss-topped sundial. The headstones might be crooked and the tombs defaced by weathering, but they rose from a cool green pool of cropped lawn, among graveled walks that were raked smooth once a week.

  A pair of graceful cedars of Lebanon grew within the churchyard walls; the taller sheltered a stone bench with a well-worn seat and backrest. The twins’ toy and diaper bags sat on either end of the bench, and a blanket covered the thick, soft bed of needles in front of it. Will and Rob lay on the blanket, and Rainey knelt between them, talking a mile a minute. I could tell by my sons’ vigorous kicks that they were doing their level best to keep up their end of the conversation.

  Francesca stood nearby, half in and out of shade, gazing northward, toward the belt of woodland that curved along the riverbank. The vicar had said that Scrag End field lay beyond the woodland, alongside Hodge Farm. Was Francesca worried about Adrian Culver’s dig? Her dark eyes were grave, her lips tightly set, as though she sensed danger lurking in the shadows. I was about to call her name when she turned, and I caught my breath. Francesca, silhouetted against the cedar’s deep-green boughs, with dappled sunlight striking coppery sparks from her auburn hair, was more than handsome. She was resplendent, an olive-skinned goddess in a glowing white shirtdress and grass-stained flats.