Aunt Dimity's Death

by Nancy Atherton

In that case

  Nothing more appeared on the page. I looked up at Bill and shook my head.

  “Try again,” he said.

  I tried again, several times, but not another word was added. Finally I closed the book and put it back in the envelope.

  “I guess that answers our question,” said Bill.

  “Or raises a few more,” I said.

  “Such as?”

  “What if we’ve gone too far? What if Dimity’s gone for good?”

  Bill had nothing to say to that. With a pensive sigh, I left him to his reading. I brought Reginald, the manila envelope, and the bowl of cookies to the living room, and as I approached the hall closet to get my jacket, the doorbell rang.

  “I’ll get it,” I called, and went to open the door, wondering who would come visiting on such an awful day.

  Evan Fleischer was standing on my doorstep. He shook his greasy locks from his shoulders and sniffed. “Nice little place you have here,” he said. “It’s a shame about the modernization, but I’m sure that doesn’t bother you.”

  Stunned, I took an involuntary step backward. The door flew past me and slammed in his face. If I’d had any presence of mind, I would have left it that way, but my politeness reflexes kicked in and I opened it again without thinking.

  “Strong winds today,” he commented as he brushed by me to inspect the hallway. “Yes, yes, very nice. Plebeian, but it suits you. Ooh.” He shivered. “Drafty, though.”

  He was right. The indoor temperature had plummeted. I was at a loss to explain how that had happened, but I hoped against hope that the chill would drive Evan away.

  Fat chance.

  “I’ll keep my coat on, since your heating is so primitive,” he said, striding into the living room.

  “You’ll get everything wet,” I protested.

  “For heaven’s sake, Lori, it’s only water.” Still bundled up in his sopping wet pseudo-Burberry, he sat and held his hands to the fire.

  I stood poised in the doorway for a moment, decided not to hit him over the head with the poker, then marched to the study, which was as toasty as ever. Bill looked up as I entered. “I’ll be in in a minute,” he said.

  “I think your services are required immediately, Mr. Facilitator. Your guest has arrived and I have to leave.”

  He looked perplexed for a moment, and then the penny dropped. “Evan?”

  “Live and in person and dripping all over the— Good Lord, what’s he done now?” Loud noises from the living room brought me running. The room was filled with smoke, and Evan was choking and coughing and banging at the windows, trying to get them open.

  “Evan, you idiot, stop it!” I shouted. “If you break my windows I’ll break your neck!”

  I elbowed him aside to Open the windows, and the smoke dissipated rapidly. Evan collapsed in a chair, panting and sputtering, while I checked the flue in the fireplace. It was closed. I opened it, then eyed Evan suspiciously.

  “Were you messing around with the fireplace?” I demanded.

  “I was not,” he gasped indignantly. “I was sitting quietly when the room began to fill with smoke. The damned chimney is obviously defective. You should have it replaced at once. I could have suffocated.”

  “Welcome, Dr. Fleischer.” Bill was standing in the living room doorway, smiling weakly. “So you’ve taken me up on my invitation. Lori said you might.”

  The arrogant smirk returned to Evan’s face. “I wouldn’t miss a chance to visit this part of England,” he said. “I am, of course, intimately familiar with it. I once wrote a monograph on the Woolstaplers’ Hall in Chipping Campden. It was never published—academic publishing is so political, so corrupt—but I should be only too happy to summarize it for you.”

  “I’d love to hear it,” said Bill, “but unfortunately, you’ve come at a bad time. I’m afraid that Lori was just about to—”

  “This piece is quite nice, actually,” said Evan, running his fingers along the smooth leg of the table beside his chair. “A Twirley, unless I’m very much mistaken.”

  “Evan,” I said, backing toward the hall, “I really have to be—”

  “Aha,” said Evan, now on his knees and peering closely at the bottom of the table. “There’s his signature, a whirligig, you can see it quite clearly. Nice. Very nice. Augustus Twirley carved only twenty-seven of these tables, and thirteen of them are known to have been destroyed in fires.”

  “Fascinating,” I said, although I was convinced that he was making it up as he went along.

  “Not at all.” Evan rose, brushed his palms lightly together, and seated himself once more. “Knowledge is a gift that must be given freely. I dare say you knew nothing of the treasure lying under your own nose.” He sighed wistfully as he helped himself to a cookie from the bowl I’d left on the table. “It is my considered opinion that Americans have become blind to quality.” He was about to dispense more pearls of wisdom when he bit into his cookie and let out a yelp of agony.

  “Evan, what’s wrong?” I asked in alarm.

  “My toof!” he howled, grimacing horribly and gripping the front of his face with both hands. “I broke a toof!”

  I raised a hand to my own jaw. If there is anyone for whom I have complete and instantaneous sympathy, it is someone with a broken tooth. The first time I broke one, I was a twenty-six-year-old, independent, and—in most other ways—mature human being, but I was so traumatized that I called my mother in tears, long-distance, right after it happened. I was shocked, therefore, to find myself suppressing a smile at Evan’s misfortune.

  I was also just plain shocked. Bill and I had both sampled the cookies and none had caused bodily harm. I took one from the bowl and bit into it cautiously. It contained nothing more tooth-threatening than some chewy raisins.

  “Would you like me to call a local dentist?” Bill was saying. “It’s a little early, but I’m sure—”

  “Sod the local dentist!” Evan roared. “No country clown is going to touch a tooth of mine. I’m going back to London. I should never have left civilization in the first place.” He pitched the remnants of his cookie into the fireplace and stalked to the front door. Another gust of wind caught it as he crossed the threshold and I think it may have helped hasten his departure with a gentle shove as it slammed shut.

  I held my breath until I heard his car speed down the road, then turned to Bill, who was sitting on the couch, looking dumbfounded.

  “What did you do to the cookies?” I asked.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  We stared at each other, then spoke in one voice: “Dimity.”

  I shook my head, torn between pity and relief. “Poor Evan. Well, she tried to freeze him out, then smoke him out, but he wouldn’t pay attention.”

  “Attending to others doesn’t seem to be one of Dr. Fleischer’s strong points. All the same, we owe him a debt of gratitude. Thanks to him, we know that Dimity hasn’t left us.”

  “But she still won’t talk to us.” I fetched my jacket and an umbrella from the hall, then gathered up Reginald, the cookies, and the manila envelope. “Not about the album, at least, and that makes me more determined than ever to find it. You’re sure you don’t want to come along?”

  “One of us should be here in case Father calls,” said Bill, opening the door. “Besides, I’m making good progress with the correspondence. Who knows what the next letter will bring?”

  *

  **

  The entrance to the Harrises’ drive was less than a mile from the cottage, but the drive itself was a good half mile long, curving between rows of azalea bushes, then skirting the edge of a broad expanse of lawn. Ahead of me and to the left was what appeared to be a very soggy vegetable garden, while to the right stood a rambling three-story farmhouse built of the same honey-colored stone as the cottage. Low outbuildings clustered behind it, and the drive led into an open gravel yard littered with the debris of Derek’s profession: sawhorses, a sandpile, bricks, fieldstones, ladders.
As I turned off the ignition, raucous barking sounded from the house, and a moment later Emma appeared on the doorstep, wearing a rose-colored corduroy skirt and a pale green cowl-neck sweater. Her long hair billowed behind her as she came to welcome me, sheltered from the storm by a striped golf umbrella.

  Clambering out of the car, I began to deliver a string of apologies for my cool reaction to her warning about Dimity, but she stopped me. “No need for that,” she said, taking charge of Reginald. “I didn’t accept it at first, either.”

  I cast an admiring glance at my surroundings. “This is an amazing place.”

  “Six bedrooms and four baths in the main house.” Emma raised a hand to indicate the other buildings. “My potting shed, Derek’s workshop, the children’s lab—much safer to have it at a distance—the garage, and general storage. You never know what you’ll find in there.” A satellite dish lent an incongruous touch of modernity to the shingled roof of the children’s lab, and a two-foot-tall stone gargoyle leered demonically from the half-open door of the storage building. When we reached the doorstep of the main house, Emma stopped. “Do you like dogs?”

  “Very much.”

  “Good. We couldn’t have heard ourselves speak if I’d had to lock up Ham. He’ll calm down once he’s finished saying hello.” The low doorway led into a rectangular room with a flagstone floor, where we were greeted by an ebullient black Labrador retriever. He wagged his tail, grinned, and barked exuberantly, while I scratched his ears and told him what a handsome hound he was.

  “My daughter found him when he was still a puppy,” Emma explained, “trussed up and tossed on the side of the road not far from here. She brought him home, we nursed him back to health, and she named him after her favorite tragic hero.”

  “Hamlet?” I hazarded.

  “As Nell is fond of pointing out, he always wears black.” Emma handed Reginald back to me, then put our umbrellas in a crowded stand beside the door and hung my jacket on a row of pegs with many others. Wellington boots, hiking boots, sneakers, and clogs lay in a jumble beneath a wooden church pew that stood against the far wall, and fishing poles, walking sticks, and four battered tennis rackets leaned in one corner. “We call this the mudroom, for obvious reasons. Come into the kitchen. I’ve just filled the pot.”

  A brightly colored braided rug covered most of the kitchen floor, burgeoning herb plants trailed over the windowsills, and copper pots hung on hooks near the stove. From a crowded shelf on a tall dresser, Emma took cups, saucers, and a hand-labeled mason jar, placing them beside the teapot on the refectory table in the center of the room. Ham leaned against my leg adoringly as I sat in one of the rush-bottom chairs.

  “Oh, Ham, stop flirting.” Emma ordered the dog to his blanket by the stove, then sat across from me. Her eyes lit up when I presented her with the bowl of oatmeal cookies. “Derek and the children will be so pleased. They’ve been after me to make some, but I simply haven’t had the time. You don’t mind if we talk in here, do you?”

  “I can’t think of a better place.”

  Emma handed me a steaming cup of tea, then pushed the mason jar toward me. “Raspberry jam I put up last summer. Try some in your tea.”

  I stirred in a liberal dollop, took a sip, and sighed with pleasure. “Yum. Now, about our mutual friend. Would you like me to go first?”

  Emma smiled. “Derek says that my orderly mind drives him crazy sometimes and right now I understand what he means. I can hardly wait to hear what’s happened to you, but …”

  “First things first,” I said.

  “I’m afraid so. And I’m terrible at making long stories short.”

  “Take all the time you need,” I said. “I’m in no hurry.”

  Emma gathered her thoughts, then leaned forward on her elbows. “Derek and I moved to Finch five years ago. Although we knew of Dimity through a mutual acquaintance, we had met her only in passing. It didn’t take us long to learn more about her, though. According to the baker, she had been born and raised in the cottage. According to the vicar, she continued to live there after her parents had died. And according to the greengrocer, she joined up the day war was declared, and served in London until the Armistice.

  “That was when Dimity came into her inheritance. It was left to her—according to everyone—by a distant relative, and the money enabled her to return to London, purchase her town house, and become involved in charity work. After that, she rarely returned to the cottage. It was a simple country cottage then: two up, two down, no electricity, and rudimentary plumbing. It must have seemed fairly primitive compared to her digs in London.

  “At any rate, I was clipping the azaleas one day when Dimity’s Bentley pulled into our drive. Derek had done some restoration work on the church in Finch, so Dimity knew of his skill as a builder, and she’d come to ask him to do some work on the cottage. Derek thought she meant a simple renovation and he jumped at the chance.” Emma laughed. “As you can tell, he landed up to his chin.

  “Dimity’s ‘simple renovation’ lasted for two years. Derek had to turn down scores of other jobs, and I cut way back on my consulting work in order to do what I love best. Dimity gave me a free hand with everything except the front garden.”

  So that it would match the cottage in the story, I mused silently, offering Emma another cookie and taking one for myself.

  “But the rest was mine,” Emma continued, “and it was heaven. Derek was as happy as I was. He loved the challenge Dimity threw at him: rebuild the cottage, expand it, update it, but keep its soul intact. It was the biggest project he’d ever undertaken and it seemed to get bigger as he went along. Dimity would stop by once a month, each time with another suggestion to make. Derek began referring to the cottage as our own private Winchester House.

  “But during that whole time, we never knew why Dimity was doing it. We thought at first she might move in permanently, but she just shook her head when we mentioned it. We doubted that she’d ever sell it, so what was the point? There it stood, like … like Sleeping Beauty, waiting for her handsome … Lori? Are you okay?”

  I finished choking on my cookie and took a swallow of tea. “Yes, of course. Please, go on.”

  “Just before Dimity died, we ran into all sorts of problems with the project. Building materials weren’t delivered on time, the ones that arrived were substandard, and some of the workmen decided to disappear when the weather turned ugly. It drove Derek mad. Dimity was quite ill by then and he had his heart set on finishing the work before she died. Dimity called it the ultimate deadline.” Emma began to smile, then stopped and blushed self-consciously. “I’m sorry. That must seem heartless. But if you’d known Dimity …”

  “I can imagine,” I said. “It’s a good line. I’ll bet she thought it was funny.”

  “She had a wonderful sense of humor. And she never worried about whether the cottage would be finished in time or not. She arranged it so that Bill’s father would oversee the financing of the renovation after her death and she told Derek to do the best possible job and not to worry—if she didn’t see it then, she’d see it … later.”

  “Little did you know….” I murmured.

  Emma nodded. “Her attitude helped Derek cope with the fact that she died before the renovation was complete. But that’s not all that helped.” Emma rested her chin on her hand, a puzzled expression on her face. “We didn’t notice it at first, but gradually everything about the project began falling into place. Derek said he didn’t think he could hit his thumb with a hammer if he tried. And the garden!” Her voice was filled with wonder. “I’d drop a seed on the ground and I could almost watch it take root. But, as I said, we didn’t notice. We just went along from day to day, feeling very proud of our progress.

  “Which may explain why the accident happened. Or rather—didn’t happen. Perhaps we had become overconfident and careless. Whatever the reason, Derek dropped his welding torch in a pile of paint-soaked rags. They should have gone up in smoke and taken the cottage with them, and D
erek, too.” She tightened her hold on her teacup. “But nothing happened! Nothing. Derek ran out into the garden to find me and I went back inside with him to see. There wasn’t so much as a scorch mark anywhere.

  “We were both shaken up, and as we sat there that afternoon, we began to remember all sorts of things that we had dismissed as they were happening, little things—warped boards that straightened overnight, tools that were always at hand when we needed them, boxes of nails that never seemed to run out—all sorts of things that we could explain in all sorts of ways, except when we added them up. When we did that, we had to admit that, as impossible as it seemed, something—or someone—was … helping us. I thought it sounded preposterous, until Derek reminded me of an even stranger experience we’d had in an old chapel in Cornwall. In the end, I was forced to agree that something extraordinary was taking place.”

  It sounded so familiar; all the little, easily explained happenings that added up to something inexplicable. I realized that I was sitting there with my mouth hanging open, so I closed it, then said, “Well, at least she’s a friendly ghost.”

  Emma laughed. “Yes, we were pretty sure we knew who was helping, but we didn’t know why.”

  “Until Bill’s father called you.”

  “Almost a year after Dimity died, the cottage was as complete as we could make it. Soon after that, Mr. Willis contacted us to ask us to get it ready.” Emma stood and rummaged through another shelf on the dresser until she found a tin tea caddy similar to the one at the cottage. Prying off the lid, she sat down again. “The day before you arrived, I went over to the cottage to stock the pantry. In the middle of the kitchen table I found this.” She pulled from the caddy a single piece of pale blue stationery. The note read: Thank you. By then I knew the handwriting as well as I knew my own.

  “I can see now why you wanted to warn me,” I said.

  Emma put the note back in the caddy and returned the caddy to the shelf, giving me a sidelong look. “Our motives weren’t entirely selfless. If all of that had happened to the bit players, we couldn’t wait to see what would happen to the star. I take it that there have been further developments?”