Aunt Dimity and the Next of Kin

by Nancy Atherton

  “I wonder if she was talking about her brother,” I said. “I wonder if Kenneth’s one of the lost things waiting to be found.”

  “If he is, I’m sure Messrs. Pratchett and Moss will find him. When it comes to locating next of kin, lawyers are like bloodhounds.” Bill smiled. “Hungry? Leek-and-potato soup’s on the lunch menu.”

  “Fill a bowl for me,” I told him. “I’ll join you in a minute. And by the way . . .” I crossed to sit on the ottoman at his knee, looked up into his brown eyes, and said, very seriously, “If you decide to pop off, I want fair warning, okay? None of this kicking the bucket before I get a chance to tell you how much I love you. No leaving without saying good-bye. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly clear,” he said, and sealed the deal with a kiss.

  He went to join the boys and Annelise in the kitchen while I stayed behind to put the letter and the parking permit in the desk drawer for safekeeping. I scooped the keys up, too, but before putting them in the drawer, I turned them slowly in the light from the desk lamp.

  Why had Miss Beacham given them to me? She’d been so reserved at the hospital. She’d revealed almost nothing of her private life. Why was she willing to open her home to me now? Had she truly wanted me to do nothing more than select a memento and leave? Or had she been asking a last favor of me? As I dropped the keys into the drawer, I had a sudden premonition that I would find something more valuable than books and armchairs in Miss Beacham’s flat.

  “You’ve left me with a bucketful of questions,” I murmured. “Have you also given me the keys to find the answers?”

  Four

  When the kitchen telephone rang the following morning, it wasn’t heralding a call from Finch’s infamous postmistress, but from Mr. Barlow, the retired mechanic who served as the village’s general handyman.

  “ ’Morning, Lori,” he said. “Grim weather we’ve been having, eh?”

  I was making breakfast for the twins while Annelise sorted clean laundry in the utility room. I finished buttering triangles of toast, wiped my fingers on a dish towel, and peered through the rain-streaked window over the sink at another dreary day.

  “Grim’s the word for it, Mr. Barlow,” I agreed, placing the plateful of toast before my ravenous sons. “Bill’s been driving to the office lately, instead of riding his bicycle, and I don’t blame him. It feels more like November than March.”

  “Not much to choose between ’em, if you ask me.” Mr. Barlow cleared his throat. “Queerest thing’s happened, Lori. Terry Edmonds stopped by my house this morning. You’ll never guess what he—”

  “I’m pretty sure I will,” I interrupted. I turned to the stove to stir the twins’ porridge. “Terry delivered a letter telling you that a total stranger left money to you in her will. Right?”

  “Let me see, now . . .” Mr. Barlow fell silent, but I heard a faint rustle of paper in the background, as if he was checking to see whether my story tallied with the one he’d been on the verge of telling.

  “Right you are,” he said finally. “This Mr. Moss who wrote the letter said you’d know all about it, and you do. Maybe you can tell me who this Miss Beacham is, and why she left me five hundred pounds?”

  It didn’t take long to explain who Miss Beacham was, but it took a fair amount of head-scratching to figure out why she’d chosen to leave such a tidy sum to Mr. Barlow. Will and Rob had finished their toast and were attacking their bowls of porridge by the time an answer came to me.

  “Your chimney!” I exclaimed, waving the porridge ladle in triumph. “I told her about the fire in your chimney.”

  “Why?” asked Mr. Barlow, clearly perplexed.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, lowering the ladle. “It was something interesting that happened in Finch.”

  “But why would she be interested in Finch?” Mr. Barlow pressed.

  “She just was,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. “She liked hearing about the village, so I gave her a rundown of local news. You’ve got to admit that the fire was pretty exciting.”

  “I could’ve done without it all the same,” Mr. Barlow said dryly. He paused for a moment, then went on. “You think this Beacham woman left the money to me to help me pay for the repairs to my chimney?”

  “It’s my best guess,” I told him. “You’re the only villager who’s had such a big, unexpected expense crop up recently.”

  “True enough.” Mr. Barlow paused again before adding gravely, “She must have been a very kind woman, to lend a helping hand to someone she’d never met.”

  “I’m only just discovering how kind she was,” I said.

  “Well, thanks for explaining the matter to me, Lori,” said Mr. Barlow. “I’ve spent the past hour convincing myself that the letter was a hoax. I don’t mind telling you how relieved I am to know it’s not. Insurance never covers what it promises to cover, and there’s a hole in my roof that’s letting rain in. The five hundred pounds won’t be wasted.”

  “I know it won’t.” I was reaching for the juice jug when an idea struck me. “Mr. Barlow,” I said, “would you do me a favor? Will you let me know if you hear of Miss Beacham leaving money to anyone else in Finch?”

  “I’ll keep my ear to the ground,” Mr. Barlow promised. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “Now that you mention it . . .” I eyed Rob and Will thoughtfully as I refilled their juice glasses.

  My decision to cancel our normally scheduled visit to St. Benedict’s had come as a great disappointment to the boys—they’d been eager to feel the bump on Big Al’s head—but perhaps, with Mr. Barlow’s help, I could make it up to them. To avoid the possibility of further disappointment, I left the juice jug on the table, stepped into the pantry, and lowered my voice, so my request wouldn’t be overheard.

  “How would you feel about having a pair of junior handymen tagging along with you today?” I asked.

  “Will and Rob, do you mean?” Mr. Barlow laughed. “Bring ’em in. They’re good little helpers. I’ll put ’em to work sorting nails.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Barlow,” I said fervently. “I’ll drop the boys off on my way to Oxford, and Annelise will bring them home for lunch.”

  “She will not,” Mr. Barlow stated firmly. “Workmen lunch together, Lori. The nippers’d never look at me again if I sent ’em home before we had our sausage rolls and fizzy lemonade at the pub. Just drop ’em off with their rain gear, in case we have to go out on a call. I’ll bring ’em back to the cottage when they’re done for the day.”

  I happily agreed to the plan, as did the twins and Annelise, and by ten o’clock Mr. Barlow’s mini-crew was busily sorting nails in his workshop, Annelise was filling the boys’ chests of drawers with clean clothes, and I was on my way to Oxford with a clear conscience, a detailed street map, and a bucketful of questions.

  I had never, however, grown accustomed to driving in traffic-choked Oxford, where my screams of panic came more frequently and weren’t stifled. I knew the routes to St. Benedict’s and the Radcliffe by heart and could drive them with ease, but when it came to improvising under pressure, I was hopeless.

  I had, therefore, spent some time the previous evening carefully working out and memorizing a path through Oxford’s quaint macramé of streets, lanes, squares, closes, and crescents that would, in theory, lead me to flat 4, 42 St. Cuthbert Lane—the address Miss Beacham had written at the bottom of her letter.

  All was going according to plan until a few hair-raising encounters with one-way streets—not identified as such on the map, of course—forced me to drive in circles, twitching, for an hour or so, while attempting to regain mastery of the situation. My attempts at mastery were in vain. It was pure dumb luck that landed me on a road I recalled seeing on the map.

  Travertine Road was a pleasant thoroughfare lined with small shops, cafés, and businesses, but to my mind its most noteworthy feature was that it would, at some point, coincide in a T intersection with St. Cuthbert Lane. Where that intersection mi
ght be remained an open question. Though I came from a country blessed with an abundance of clearly posted, standardized street signs, I’d chosen to live in England, where street signs took many forms and could turn up almost anywhere. Experience had taught me to search walls, windowsills, curbs, and lampposts for creatively placed hints about location.

  The intermittent gouts of rain splattering my windshield made my task more challenging than usual, so when I spied St. Cuthbert Lane painted in black on the cornice of a one-story redbrick building on my right, I heaved a sigh of relief, made an immediate right-hand turn, and darted nose-first into a parking space that miraculously appeared a few doors down from Mrs. Beacham’s building.

  While poring over the map the previous evening, I’d formed a clear mental picture of 42 St. Cuthbert Lane based on nothing but my impressions of Miss Beacham. It would, I thought, be a charmingly decayed older building made of mellow stone, with ivy trailing from attractively crumbling balustrades, broken window boxes brimming with bright geraniums, and perhaps a bit of chipped stained glass over the lobby door.

  My mental picture bore no resemblance to reality. Miss Beacham’s building was, in fact, a modern, well-maintained, four-story apartment house made of blond brick with large, aluminum-framed windows. Four cement-floored balconies, stacked one atop the other, projected from the building’s east wall, each hemmed with plain, brown-painted metal railings. The lobby door was made of glass and aluminum. There were no geraniums. Forty-two St. Cuthbert Lane was, in short, clean, neat, functional, and profoundly charmless.

  I surveyed the nondescript cube with a jaundiced eye and began to understand Miss Beacham’s fascination with Finch. I had little doubt that a tiny village filled with cozy, quirky cottages—and even quirkier residents—would appeal strongly to a sensitive woman immured in a soulless pile of dull bricks.

  Sighing, I pulled my rain parka’s hood over my head, grabbed my shoulder bag, and climbed out of the Rover. The wind promptly slapped my face with a handful of cold raindrops, as if to remind me of why I’d dressed the boys warmly and dressed myself in a snuggly cashmere pullover, wool trousers, and waterproof leather boots before embarking on my journey.

  I scurried up the front walk to the shelter of the gray-tiled lobby, pushed my hood back, and shook the rain from my parka as I turned to examine the mailboxes set into the wall on my right. Four boxes were arranged in a row above a rectangular metal table scattered with advertising leaflets. A plastic wastebasket sat beneath the table, half-filled with discarded leaflets, torn envelopes, and balls of crumpled paper. I was inordinately pleased to discover the trash. It was the first proof I’d seen of human habitation.

  “Four mailboxes, four floors, four apartments,” I said aloud. My words echoed hollowly from the blank walls. “Miss Beacham must’ve had the whole top floor to herself. Good for her!”

  A buzzer protruded above each mailbox, and an intercom telephone hung beside the lobby’s inner door. I scanned the mailboxes’ labels and found Miss Beacham’s name handwritten in beautiful calligraphy on the box for apartment number 4. The contrast between the label’s bold, elegant calligraphy and the letter’s shaky, feeble script was striking. Clearly, Miss Beacham’s illness had taken its toll. I raised a fingertip to trace the elaborate B in Beacham, then pulled the keys out of my pocket.

  I used the brass key to unlock the door to a vestibule, where I had to choose between a well-lit, carpeted staircase and an elevator. I gladly chose the elevator. I hadn’t been looking forward to climbing three flights of stairs.

  The elevator delivered me to a short corridor. Its white walls and gray carpet were spotless, and there wasn’t a speck of dust on the light fixtures’ frosted globes, but the decor’s general effect was so coldly institutional that it made me shiver.

  I pictured the comfortable chaos of my own front hall—the braided rag rug, the overflowing coatrack, the ever-changing jumble of shoes, boots, umbrellas, riding helmets, and miscellaneous toys heaped around the telephone table—and wondered how Miss Beacham could bear to live in a place that had no personality.

  “Homes should look like homes,” I muttered, “not like operating rooms.”

  A fire door at one end of the short corridor opened onto the staircase I’d avoided climbing; the door to Miss Beacham’s apartment was straight across from the elevator. The silver key turned easily in the lock, the door swung inward, and I reached inside to fumble for a light switch. I found one and flicked it on, then fell back a step and blinked, not because light had flooded the inner darkness, but because of what the light had revealed.

  Five

  “Holy cow,” I whispered.

  There was nothing impersonal about Miss Beacham’s foyer. The small entrance hall was like a jewel box filled with priceless gems. Recessed ceiling lamps shed soft pools of light on a rich-hued Persian rug and glinted from the gold-shot textured paper covering the walls. The wallpaper was utterly exquisite. Its tiny horizontal pleats appeared to be hand-folded, and the irregular gold streaks against the subdued sand-colored ground were simply sumptuous.

  Dazzled, I stepped inside and shut the door on the sterile corridor. I felt as if I’d entered an alternate universe. To my left a mirror framed in ebonized bamboo hung above an ebony half-moon table inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. To my right, framing a door papered to blend in with the walls, hung two Japanese scrolls displaying delicate brushwork calligraphy.

  A neatly furled black umbrella protruded incongruously from a knee-high, black-and-gold cloisonné vase sitting beside the papered door. When I opened the door, I discovered a cedar-lined closet containing a modest selection of serviceable coats clearly purchased with the vagaries of the English climate in mind. A pair of old-fashioned black galoshes perched humbly in an enameled tub on the closet floor, waiting to do their duty on rainy days. It pained me to think that the feet they’d once protected would never again stride confidently through puddles.

  I dropped my rain-speckled parka in the tub with the galoshes and left the closet, drawn onward by a set of four framed Japanese woodcuts facing each other across the far end of the foyer. I paused to admire them before entering a hallway that led back through the apartment, past a number of closed doors. The narrow passage was hung with the same gold-shot, pleated paper as the foyer, and a pair of Persian runners ran its length.

  A quick left turn took me under an archway and into a rectangular living room that stretched east and west across the entire front of the building. Here the extravagant paper ended. A second wall switch lit sconces that revealed walls painted a deep burgundy and a Persian carpet large enough to hold Ali Baba and at least twenty well-fed thieves. I fleetingly recalled the thieves’ fabulous hidden treasure as I drifted dreamily across the room, mouth agape, struggling to reconcile my vision of a cheaply furnished cold-water flat with the splendor that surrounded me.

  A row of stately mahogany bookcases graced the rear wall, divided in two by the arched entry. Lush gold brocade drapes hung along the front wall, concealing a pair of plain, aluminum-framed picture windows that overlooked St. Cuthbert Lane. Matching drapes hid a similarly innocuous window in the short east wall, and a glorious, hand-painted bifold screen camouflaged the utilitarian glass door that gave access to the small balcony.

  I parted the brocade drapes briefly, but the gray daylight was so dreary that I promptly closed them again and lit lamps instead. The room looked better by lamplight and would look better still, I thought, washed by the golden glow of candlelight. Almost everything in it was from a candlelit time. The “pretty little desk” alluded to in Miss Beacham’s letter had to be the Sheraton Revival cylinder desk that stood between the picture windows and beneath a large, gilt-framed beveled mirror. I stood with my back to the desk and tried to take in an array of furnishings that would have made an antiques dealer dizzy with desire.

  A superbly carved pine fireplace held pride of place in the west wall, flanked by glass-fronted display cabinets that held a stunning colle
ction of silver snuffboxes, Venetian glassware, Georgian candlesticks, and portrait miniatures. A walnut-framed Queen Anne settee sat before the hearth, grouped with a George IV elbow chair and a Gainsborough chair with the original needlework upholstery. Above the mantel shelf hung a seventeenth-century Dutch painting of peasants skating on a frozen canal, and pieces of early Chinese porcelain littered the Regency rosewood sofa table behind the settee.

  A double-sided Regency bookstand stood at the east end of the room, between a deep-seated Sheraton library chair and a George I wing chair upholstered in gold damask. In one corner, near a mahogany corner cupboard, four slender-legged Chippendale chairs clustered around an eighteenth-century satinwood card table.

  “The games room,” I murmured with a bubbling giggle, but the laughter died in my throat when I thought of a sick old woman playing endless games of solitaire in her lovely, lonely flat.

  The living room should have felt crowded, but it didn’t. Each piece of furniture was perfectly proportioned to fit the space it occupied, and each was in excellent repair. A thin film of dust dimmed the wood surfaces, but none were scratched or chipped or stained, and although the luxurious fabrics showed signs of wear, the colors were still brilliant.

  It was too much, entirely too much to take in all at once. I felt overwhelmed, overheated, as if I’d overindulged in a rich meal. I put a trembling hand to my forehead, reached into my shoulder bag, retrieved my cell phone, and punched the speed-dial for Bill’s number.

  My husband must have detected a note of incipient hysteria in my greeting because the first words out of his mouth were: “What’s wrong, Lori?”

  “Ohmygod, ohmygod,” I babbled. “It’s incredible, Bill. It’s . . . just . . . simply . . . incredible. If you were standing here next to me, you wouldn’t believe it. And I’ve only seen two rooms! If the rest are like this, my head will explode.”

  “Breathe, Lori,” Bill advised. “Sit down and take a deep br—”