by Sara Rosett
“That’s the turn for Hedgely.” I moved from thinking about the dramatic view to what I’d say to Fern. Cold-calling was nothing new to Alex or me. We’d done a lot of that sort of thing, but it was the least favorite part of my job for me.
“Any ideas on how to approach her?” I asked. Alex’s excellent people instincts made him my go-to guy in situations like this. His easy-going persona disarmed people and, in most cases, they were happily chatting with him in a few minutes.
“I think you’re up this time. I have a feeling she’s off men right now.”
“You’re probably right,” I said, then added, “but we have to find her first. We don’t even know her last name.”
“I don’t think that will be a problem,” Alex said. We rounded a curve in the road, and the village came into view. Tucked into a fold of one of the steep hills, Hedgely consisted of a grocery, a pub with a sign stating that rooms were available, and a smattering of houses.
“No, definitely not,” I said. “In fact, I think that’s her.” As Alex stopped near the pub, I pointed to a figure in a puffy gray coat moving away from the tiny village. As she strode up a narrow footpath on the hill, the wind whipped her dark hair behind her. She glanced over her shoulder once, and I could make out her heavy straight brows. “Yep, that’s Fern.” I opened my door. “Looks like she’s going out for a long walk. I’ll see if I can catch up to her.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt you can do that. You’re quite the walker,” Alex said. “I’ll wait for you at the pub.”
I set off, buttoning my pea coat, glad for the warmth of the wool. The temperature was dropping rapidly, and I wished I’d thought to grab my gloves as well. The narrow footpath twisted up the steep incline of the hill. Fern was several yards ahead of me. I concentrated on my footing. Exploring the walking paths that crisscrossed Nether Woodsmoor and the surrounding countryside was one of my favorite things to do, but the landscape around the village was much flatter than this hike. After a few minutes, I was breathing heavily. I needed to add in a couple of walks with hills to my rambles.
I reached the summit of the hill, drew in a deep breath, and admired the view for a moment. Now that I was at the top, I could see the ridge that formed the spine of the hill was limestone. Unlike the side that sloped to Hedgely at an acute angle, the other side of the hill dropped away in a sheer cliff, straight down to a thread of silver water that sparkled in the remaining sunlight as it flowed over rocks. The incoming clouds cast a shadow over the hillside on the other side of the stream. The shadow inched down the slope toward the stream at a steady pace.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” I said to Fern who had also stopped at the top and was standing a few feet up the ridge. She didn’t reply. Instead, she turned her back on me and went along the ridge to an outcropping that hung over the drop to the stream. She scrambled up the rock, then sat and let her legs dangle over the edge. The wind buffeted her face, sending her hair streaming out behind her head.
I eyed the rock and decided I wouldn’t join her on the perch. I’d caught a glimpse of her face. Now that I was closer I could see that her eyes were swollen, and her nose was pink. I felt bad about chasing her up the hill. She obviously wanted to be alone, but I’d come this far…and she might be able to provide some answers that would help straighten out what had happened with Nick. “Sorry to intrude on you like this, but I’m Kate—er—Norcutt,” I said, stumbling over my married name. “It was my wedding reception that Nick came to.”
Her head whipped toward me, and I sucked in a breath, afraid that she’d lose her balance with the sudden movement. But she had her hands braced on the rock. “You know that slut, Ava? She’s a friend of yours?”
“Ava—? You think he went to the wedding to meet Ava?” I asked.
“I know he did. I saw him beside her at the reception. He said he wasn’t seeing someone else, but I knew he was. I knew he was lying.” Anger mixed with triumph filled her tone.
“I don’t doubt that he lied to you about many things, but that wasn’t Ava he was sitting beside at the wedding. That was the organist, Sylvia. Ava is my mother.”
“Your mother?”
“Yes, I promise, it’s true.” I explained how my mother had contacted Nick then described how he had met her several times in California.
“Your mother?” She seemed stuck on that fact, and I can’t say that I blamed her. She pulled her legs back from the edge and twisted around to face me. “You’re saying he wasn’t fooling around with Ava?”
“I know he and my mother weren’t…together. My mother thought he was a nice boy who was interested in genealogy. Did you know he was interested in that sort of thing? Family trees, ancestors…stuff like that?”
“No. He didn’t care about anything like that.”
I took a step to the rock and leaned on it. “Look, Nick obviously lied to you and to my mom. Why don’t you come down and let me buy you a cup of coffee or tea or something at the pub? Maybe we can figure out what Nick was doing.” The cloud’s shadow had darkened the stream, blotting out the flashes of reflected sunlight that danced on the water, and was now creeping up the sheer fall of rock below us.
Her heavy brows lowered. “No. I hate that place. All everyone does is whisper about me. I can’t wait to get out of here.”
“Well, then, let’s talk here,” I said quickly. The stiff breeze was chilling my fingers and ears. I removed my hands from the cold rock and shoved them into my pockets. “Do you have any idea why Nick came to England?”
“No.” I thought that was all she would tell me, but then she slid across the rock and dropped down. “There’s a more sheltered place over here.”
She moved away from the ridge to a section of rock that overlooked Hedgely. The outcropping of limestone rose to about eight feet overhead, but part of it had worn away creating a curved area with a little shelf of rock that protruded from the formation, creating a bench-like seat.
She plopped down and pulled her knees up to her chest. “He started acting weird this summer. His mom had passed away, and I thought he’d get back to normal soon, but he spent hours and hours clearing out her house and a storage unit she had. He wasn’t a detailed person, but he was obsessive about her stuff. He had to look at each thing, read every scrap of paper…I didn’t get it. I tried to cut him some slack—you know, his mom had just died. Anyway, it was about that time that he got all secretive. Didn’t want me to read his texts, and he kept leaving the room when he got phone calls. I looked at his call log on his phone. He was calling ‘Ava.’ We don’t have any friends named Ava. When I asked him what was going on, he said it was all part of a plan, that he’d be able to tell me about it later when we were rolling in it.”
The stone bench wasn’t big enough for two, so I leaned against a nearby outcropping of rock. “Money? He thought he’d come into some money?” I wondered if Nick was blackmailing someone else with much deeper pockets than my mom—maybe someone with a much bigger secret, too.
“Yeah, that’s what he meant, but he’d already gotten his inheritance from his mom. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about.”
“So you suspected another woman?”
“Of course. No matter what he said, his actions said he was seeing someone else. He was vague about where he was going, and then he came home a few times smelling like Miss Dior.”
I knew that fruity scent. “That’s what my mom wears,” I said.
Fern hugged her knees tighter. “Well, I was right. He was seeing another woman, even if it was just coffee with your mom. Why would he do that? And even if he didn’t come to the wedding to see your mom, I saw the way he looked at that girl beside him. He used to look at me that way.” She focused on the fabric of her jeans as she blinked rapidly.
It didn’t sound like she knew much about what Nick had been up to, but I didn’t want her to stop talking—it might be the smallest tidbit that would unlock everything—so I said, “You followed him here. That’s a…quite a big step
to take.”
She sniffed and seemed to get her emotions under control. “My best friend thought I was insane, but I had to know. And how else could I find out? Nick always had some reason, some excuse, for everything. I figured following him was the only way to know for sure. I saw his airline ticket was from LAX to England. He’d told me he was going to Miami. Miami! I decided that if I confronted him, he’d only lie to me again. By then I wanted to catch him out and embarrass him.” She tightened her grip around her knees, drawing them closer to her chest. “I wanted to win. If I could prove he was a rat, then I’d have beaten him.”
I didn’t follow her logic, but I supposed that when a guy gives you the runaround, different girls react in different ways. I always cut my losses and moved on. Apparently, Fern was big on revenge. How big on revenge was the question. Was it important enough to her to kill Nick? Looking over the sniffling, pink-eyed woman in front of me, I wasn’t sure that she’d killed him, but she’d certainly proved that she was dogged. And the glare in her eyes indicated she wasn’t about to forgive and forget.
She sniffed again and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. I found a clean tissue in my coat pocket and handed it to her. She wiped her nose and eyes. “I had my passport already and some money saved, so I bought a ticket and made sure I was on the next plane after his took off.”
“But how did you know where he would go? Did you see an itinerary or something like that?”
“No, but he didn’t clear his computer search history. I could tell Nether Woodsmoor was the place he was most interested in, so I knew that was probably where he’d end up. But to make sure I didn’t lose him, I put a tracking app on his phone.”
“How did you do that?”
“I’m a paralegal, and we have a P.I. on retainer at the office. I told him I thought my boyfriend was sneaking around on me and that I wanted to track him. Kerry told me how to do it. It was easy. It only took a few seconds and then I knew exactly where Nick was all the time. As soon as I landed, I rented a car and followed him.”
“Where did he go?”
She rolled her eyes. “A bunch of broken down old mansions.”
“Do you remember the names of them?” I asked.
She released her hold on her knees, straightened her legs, and drew her phone out of her pocket. “Let’s see, I have it all here in the logs of the tracking app. The day he arrived, he went to a hotel and stayed there. Slept off the time change, I guess. Then Thursday, the next day, he went to Sheffield. From there he went on to Ridgeford Court and Aslet House,” she read.
I leaned a shoulder against the cold stone, mentally comparing the two estates with Parkview Hall. I’d researched those houses while working for the Jane Austen documentary, but Parkview was grander and better maintained than both of them. In fact, Ridgeford Court was a ruin. While Parkview Hall was classic Georgian, Ridgeford Court had been a medieval castle, and Aslet House was a Victorian’s dream of towers, turrets, and decorative trim. “You’re sure he wasn’t into genealogy? Maybe he’d discovered some connection with his family and those historic places while he was going through his mom’s things?”
“No, Nick was all about what was happening now. History was in the past and didn’t matter. Well, except—” she rearranged her coat lapels, drawing them more closely around her neck. “I mean, no, he didn’t care about history. He thought it was boring.”
She reminded me of an actress I’d worked with on a location shoot after she got a phone call. She had been nearly vibrating with excitement, but she wouldn’t talk about it. Several days later, she was announced as one of the leads in a popular movie sequel. Fern had that same barely contained air of secret knowledge.
She consulted her phone again. “He visited a few places in Sheffield before he went to the houses.” Her eyebrows scrunched together. “He went to a place called The Butterfly House, which is essentially a zoo, and then to an enclosed garden.” She shook her head. “I have no idea why he went to those places. He never wanted to go to the zoo or gardens before.”
I had heard about the Sheffield’s Winter Garden, an arcade of arches and glass, but had never been there. It was a modern take on the Victorian glass house. “Nick wasn’t into architecture?” I asked, probing to see if Nick had tried the same lies with her that he had with my mom. “He told my mom he was studying it.”
That made her laugh. “Nick? At school? And architecture?” She used the tissue to dab at her eyes. “Wow, that’s the first good laugh I’ve had in days. Nick had no interest in building design—or school, either.” She sobered. “At least I wasn’t the only person he lied to. In an odd way that makes me feel a little better.” She ran her hand over a dip in the rock. “He tried to call me that night, but I didn’t answer.” She lifted her chin and dusted her fingers on her coat. “If he was calling to apologize, then I wasn’t having any of it. I would already be out of this dinky place, except the police came and said I couldn’t leave here. You can’t even call it a town. It’s not big enough for that.”
“I heard that Nick was…um…into drugs?”
“No.” She shook her head. “He was a self-centered jerk—I’ve realized that now—but he was never into stuff like that.”
“Not even marijuana?”
“No. Like I said, he wasn’t into that.”
What she’d said about Nick didn’t go with what Marie had seen in his room at the inn, but Fern seemed so sure of herself. If Nick was using drugs, it seemed she didn’t know about it.
The shadow reached the top of the hill and swept over us. “Come on, we better go down before it starts to rain.” I pushed away from the rock, and Fern scooted off the ledge. I crossed the ridge, going as quickly as I could on the narrow path. I looked back and saw that Fern was following at a much slower pace. “You’ll get drenched,” I called.
“I don’t care,” she shouted back.
CHAPTER 15
“She was quite the drama queen,” Alex said over the noise of the wipers as they swished back and forth, sweeping away the torrent of rain that pounded down on the windshield.
“Fern?” I looked up from my phone.
“Who else?”
“Sorry. I got a text from Ella. She says the organist, Sylvia, will be at Parkview at one to discuss an upcoming wedding. We can see her then.” I had called Ella on our way to Hedgely and asked if she could put me in touch with Sylvia.
Alex checked the time. “We should be able to make it.”
“Getting back to Fern,” I said, “you’re right. She definitely tends toward the melodramatic. She could have easily made it back and been inside the pub before the rain started.” I was inside the cozy room with its warm fire when the first drops of rain splashed down. Fern came in a few minutes later, her hair plastered to her head and dripping down her back. I had introduced her to Alex and offered to buy her something warm to drink, but she waved me off, saying she wanted to be alone.
I’d already relayed to Alex what Fern had told me. “If Fern is telling the truth—and I’m inclined to believe her—then she doesn’t have a clue about why Nick came here.”
As the rain tapered off from a deluge to a steady patter, Alex turned the windshield wipers down. “You said Fern mentioned that Nick talked about coming into money. The prospect of big money would be enough to justify a trip from Los Angeles to England.”
“It would. But where was Nick going to get the money? Another source of blackmail other than my mom?”
“That’s my first thought,” Alex said. “I talked to the barman, who is also the pub’s owner, while you were gone, and it sounds like Fern has an alibi for Nick’s death. Everyone noticed her return on Saturday night—lots of noisy crying—then she spent the rest of the night in her room. Her rental car didn’t leave the parking area, which is right beside the owner’s bedroom window. He says he’s a light sleeper and would have heard if the car left.”
“So unless she crept out silently and had someone else pick her up, she’s not the
murderer.” I shook my head at my disappointed tone. “Listen to me. I’m sad that she’s out of the running.”
“That does seem a bit twisted, but I’ll cut you some slack since it’s your parents that you’re worried about.”
My phone rang. “It’s Dad,” I said as Alex turned the car between Parkview’s gates. While Alex told the guy in the ticket kiosk that we were expected, I asked Dad, “How’s the book-browsing?”
“Excellent. The Dickens was in good condition, only slightly foxed. I bought it...along with a few other things.”
“I expected nothing less. Once you’re in a bookstore, you’re as susceptible as Mom is in a shoe store.”
“Really? I better rein myself in, then.”
“The difference is that you resale your book purchases.”
“Most of them, yes. I don’t think I’ll be able to part with the Dickens, though.” He lowered his voice. “I still have my minder with me. Stood out like a flashing neon light in the area around the bookshop. He lingered outside, window-shopping on the street, but there were only four actual businesses in operation. I considered inviting him into the shop, but restrained myself. I could have pointed out the especially fine books. Were you able to find the girlfriend?”
“Yes, but she wasn’t as helpful as we’d hoped.” Alex had parked the car in the Parkview’s visitor lot. The rain was now more of gentle patter. I pressed the phone to my ear as Alex and I trekked through the raindrops to the staff entrance at the end of the west wing. I again summarized what I’d learned from Fern, telling Dad everything from Fern’s misguided assumptions about who Ava was to Nick’s tour of country homes, the zoo, and garden. Then I said, “I’ve got to go, Dad. Call me when you get back to Nether Woodsmoor.”
“It will be later this afternoon. I think I’ll do some sightseeing before I return.”
