Aunt Dimity and the Widow's Curse

by Nancy Atherton

  Apart from a few wall-mounted wire baskets filled with sphagnum moss, the garden’s only natural feature was a well-tended lawn. In the middle of the lawn sat a round glass-topped table surrounded by six plastic lawn chairs.

  The table looked as though it had been set for afternoon tea, with six place settings, two creamers, two sugar bowls, a Victoria sponge cake, a stout plum cake, and several serving platters heaped with crustless sandwiches, cream buns, madeleines, meringues, petit fours, and the light-as-air confections known as Melting Moments, which were a great favorite of mine.

  A tiny old woman in gold-rimmed spectacles was seated at the table, facing us. Despite the day’s warmth, she was bundled up in a puffy jacket, a bobble cap, a plaid lap robe, and a pair of fingerless mittens. I tried not to stare at her, but it was hard to look away. I felt as if I’d been transported to an alternate universe in which afternoon tea was served at ten o’clock in the morning by a wizened gnome who’d mistaken a balmy day in April for a frigid day in February.

  The woman had been talking on a cell phone when we entered the garden, but she slid the phone into her jacket pocket when Susan crossed to stand beside her.

  “Here they are, Mum,” Susan said. “I’ll switch the kettle on before I leave. The teapot’s on the kitchen table.” She glanced at her watch again, then looked pleadingly from me to Bree. “Would one of you be kind enough to fill the pot when the kettle whistles? Mum isn’t as steady on her feet as she used to be, and I really must dash. I’ll see you later, Mum. Have a nice time.”

  Susan bent to kiss her mother’s sunken cheek, then hurried back into the house. A moment later, I heard the front door open and close, followed by the sound of a car driving away from Sunnyside.

  Though my head was in a whirl, my manners didn’t desert me. I cleared my throat and said, “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Jessop.”

  “Call me Minnie,” the old lady croaked, smiling toothlessly at us. Her lack of teeth gave her speech a sibilant quality, but she had no trouble making herself understood. “Bring that daughter of yours to me. I want to take a good look at her.”

  I lifted Bess from the pram and carried her to Minnie, but I didn’t hand her over. I wasn’t convinced that Minnie was strong enough to hold her.

  “She’s pretty as a princess,” Minnie declared, shaking Bess’s foot with a knobbly hand. “Healthy as a horse, too. Turn her loose. She won’t come to any harm. The grass is warm and dry.” She released Bess’s foot and pointed a gnarled finger at the kitchen door. “You can fetch some saucepans for her to play with, if you like.”

  “Thanks, Minnie, but I brought toys for her to play with,” I said, gesturing toward the diaper bag.

  “Little ones prefer saucepans,” Minnie said complacently. “I should know—I raised six of my own.”

  The kettle whistled.

  “I’ll get the tea,” said Bree.

  “The saucepans are in the cupboard next to the cooker,” Minnie instructed her. “Don’t forget the lids. Children love putting them on and taking them off again.”

  Bree nodded and retreated into the kitchen. I scanned the garden for hazards, detected none, and sat Bess on the lawn at a safe distance from the table and chairs. She seemed content to stay put while she explored the grass with her fingers, but I kept half an eye on her as I returned to Minnie’s side.

  “Are you expecting company?” I asked, surveying the six place settings.

  “Just a few old friends,” Minnie replied happily. “You and your chum are my guests of honor.”

  “We are?” I said, unenlightened.

  Minnie patted the chair next to hers. “Take a seat, dear. I’ll get a crick in my neck if I keep looking up at you, and at my age, cricks are a serious business.”

  I apologized for looming over her and lowered myself into the chair before asking the question I was burning to ask: “How did you know that Bree and I would be, um, available for your party?”

  “Bob Nash rang me yesterday,” Minnie explained. “Told me he’d had words with a daft Yank and a clueless Kiwi at the Willows. Described that fancy pram of yours, too. Susan knew what to look for.”

  I brushed aside Bob Nash’s curmudgeonly adjectives and reformulated my question. “But how did you and Susan know we’d come here? We didn’t share our plans with Mr. Nash.”

  “My great-grandson Giles tipped me off,” Minnie replied. “Giles is a florist. He looks after the plants at the White Hart.”

  In my mind’s eye I saw a young man with a watering can going silently about his business in the White Hart’s library.

  “He overheard us talking to Francesco,” I said as comprehension dawned.

  “Giles is a good lad,” Minnie said proudly. “When he heard you tell the Italian chap that you planned to visit Dovecote this morning, he rang me straightaway. He knew I’d want to meet you. My daughter Tina rang, too, after she saw you chatting with Hayley Calthorp in Nash’s News.”

  A second image flitted across my mind.

  “Does Tina wear a blue anorak?” I asked. “Did she go to Nash’s News to buy travel supplies?”

  “She’s flying to Stockholm next week,” Minnie informed me. “I hope she brings her anorak. It’s bound to rain.”

  I sat back in my chair and regarded Minnie Jessop with a mixture of respect, admiration, and wariness. Minnie was no ordinary gossipmonger. She was a spymaster with a network of agents placed in strategic locations throughout Old Cowerton. Her slick operation made Finch’s grapevine seem antiquated.

  “Tea is served!” Bree announced.

  She emerged from the kitchen carrying an oversized cobalt-blue teapot as well as a net shopping bag filled with saucepans and their attendant lids. She left the teapot on the table and emptied the bag in front of Bess. Bess didn’t need any tips on what to do with the saucepans, but Bree played with her for a few minutes before returning to claim the chair next to mine.

  “One of you will have to be Mother,” said Minnie. She gazed ruefully at her twisted hands. “I can’t lift the big teapot anymore.”

  “Allow me,” I said, and filled our cups.

  “Susan and I did the baking last night,” said Minnie, “but we made the sandwiches fresh this morning. Go ahead, help yourselves.”

  I could almost hear the Melting Moments call to me, but it seemed impolite to sample them before the rest of Minnie’s guests arrived. Bree, on the other hand, didn’t hesitate to reach for a cream bun. Minnie eyed her approvingly, then got down to brass tacks.

  “Is it true that you know Annabelle Craven?” she asked.

  “It is,” I replied. “She’s a good friend of ours.”

  Minnie patted my arm consolingly. “You’re not to blame, and so I told Bob Nash. Annabelle always was a charmer. I’m sure Hayley Calthorp told you that I made up hateful stories about Annabelle, but I know what I saw.”

  “What did you see?” Bree asked eagerly.

  Minnie opened her mouth to speak, then cupped a hand around her ear to catch the sound of a vehicle pulling up in front of Sunnyside. A moment later, the doorbell rang.

  “Oh, good,” she said, grinning gappily. “They’re here.”

  Thirteen

  Bree stifled a frustrated groan and volunteered to answer the door. As she darted into the house, Minnie withdrew a set of dentures from the pocket of her puffy jacket and inserted them into her mouth.

  “I hate wearing my teeth,” she told me, after poking them into position, “but I can’t chew properly without them.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I confined myself to a sympathetic nod. Bess had switched from the lid-on, lid-off game to the bang-a-lid-on-a-random-saucepan game. The noise seemed to delight Minnie, but I found her toothy grin faintly menacing.

  I was beginning to think that Bree had gotten lost on her way to the front door when she returned, trailed by three
elderly women, each of whom walked at a snail’s pace with the aid of a three-pronged metal cane. Like Minnie, the newcomers were dressed as if they were on a polar expedition, though their jackets were noticeably shabbier than hers. When they caught sight of Bess, they began slowly but surely to converge on her.

  “They love to play with saucepans,” one of the women observed in a quavering voice, and the other two croaked their agreement.

  When Bess saw three three-pronged canes and six legs moving toward her, she let out a cry of alarm. I jumped to my feet, skirted the oncoming traffic, lifted her from the ground, and introduced her to the ancient trio. Freed from the fear of being simultaneously trampled and skewered, Bess accepted their praise with aplomb until the tasty treats on the table reminded her—and me—that lunchtime was nigh.

  “Minnie,” I said to our hostess, “I’m afraid Bess needs her lunch. I don’t mean to be unsociable, but would you mind if she ate it in the kitchen? She’ll be too distracted to eat if I feed her out here.”

  “You go ahead.” Minnie tilted her head toward the three old ladies. “It’ll take a while to organize this lot. They don’t get out much.”

  “Bring the pram, will you, Bree?” I said, giving her a meaningful look. “Bess can nap in it after she has her lunch.”

  Bree took her cue and wheeled the pram into the kitchen. I gently withdrew Bess from her circle of admirers and followed in Bree’s footsteps, making sure to close the door behind me. I didn’t want to run the risk being overheard again.

  Bess sat in my lap to gorge herself on the buffet I’d packed for her, but Bree prowled the room like a caged tiger, talking sometimes to herself and sometimes to me.

  “Did you see the staircase, Lori?” she asked. “Did you see the hallway? Annabelle could have hauled a morgueful of corpses into the garden without breaking a sweat. How did Minnie know you’d spoken with Hayley Calthorp? How did Susan know we’d come here? How did she know our names? What’s with the tea party? Who are those old ladies? The van from the local nursing home dropped them off, but I don’t know why they’d want to meet us. What’s going on?”

  “Are you done?” I asked when she stopped prowling.

  “For the moment,” she answered, and sank into the chair opposite mine.

  “I admit that Sunnyside’s layout makes Mrs. Craven’s story seem less bonkers than it did before,” I conceded, “but I still don’t think we should jump to any conclusions.”

  “The jump’s getting shorter and shorter,” Bree muttered.

  “As for how Susan knew our names . . .” I filled her in on Minnie’s spy network, concluding with Bob Nash’s pithy description of us as “a daft Yank and a clueless Kiwi.”

  Bree chuckled in spite of herself. “Perfect! We should print business cards for ourselves: The Daft and Clueless Detective Agency.”

  “Wouldn’t it send the wrong message to our clients?” I asked.

  “Probably not,” she said. “I’m still clueless about the old ladies.”

  “My guess is that they’re the women Hayley Calthorp talked about,” I said, “the ones she called Minnie’s cronies. I’ll bet Minnie invited them here for moral support. She knows we’ve heard Hayley’s side of the story and she wants us to hear hers. She must be desperate to convince us—or anyone else who will listen—that she’s been right about Annabelle all along.”

  “But why have a tea party?” Bree asked.

  “Kindness?” I replied, catching a wheat cracker before it hit the floor. “Didn’t you notice? Every treat on the tea table is easy to chew. It seems to me that Minnie made them because she and her chums have the same dental challenges. And you heard what she said. Her friends don’t get out much.”

  Bree nodded gravely. “A nursing home tea party probably isn’t as much fun as a tea party at a friend’s house.”

  “Probably not,” I said.

  Bree lapsed into silence, then said quietly, “It’s a lot to take in.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “And there’s more to come. If I’m right, we’re about to hear the gospel according to Minnie.”

  —

  After her busy morning, Bess didn’t need much encouragement to fall asleep in her pram. I wheeled her close to the kitchen doorway, where I could keep her in view and at the same time insulate her from the hubbub of conversation and cackling laughter in the garden.

  At least one of Minnie’s cronies must have been strong enough to lift the big teapot because the tea party was well under way. By the time Bree and I resumed our seats at the glass-topped table, the ladies had dispatched half of the sandwiches, most of the plum cake, and, to my disappointment, every last one of the Melting Moments. Their speedy demolition of Minnie’s offerings made me wonder if they got enough to eat at the nursing home.

  Minnie waited for us to be seated, then took charge of the introductions. The woman wearing a fine hair net over her sparse white curls was Mildred Greenham. The woman with a bulky hearing aid in each ear was Mabel Parson. The woman with the hunched back was Myrtle Black.

  “Mildred,” “Mabel,” and “Myrtle,” I recalled, were the names Annabelle preferred to her own. I wondered if these were the girls who’d teased her in the school yard because her mother had wanted her to stand out from the other children.

  “I told my chums about your friendship with Annabelle Craven,” Minnie informed us.

  “Minnie rang us yesterday,” said Mildred, “after Bob Nash, Giles, and Tina rang her.”

  “You don’t want to believe everything Hayley Calthorp tells you,” Mabel advised. “We came along to set the record straight.”

  Myrtle chuckled. “I’ll bet Hayley had some choice things to say about you, Minnie.”

  “I’m sure she did,” Minnie said unflappably. She was clearly the queen bee in her small circle. “But it’s not her fault. She’s only parroting what her gran told her, and her gran was as gullible as a newborn babe.”

  The cronies nodded, and Minnie turned her head to face us.

  “What I’m about to tell you is God’s own truth,” she said solemnly. “Hayley Calthorp believes differently, but I know what I saw.”

  “It was a moonless night,” said Myrtle.

  “I’ll tell my own story, thank you very much,” Minnie snapped. “You’ll have your turn later.”

  “Get on with it, then,” Myrtle retorted, transferring a thick slice of Victoria sponge to her plate. “At the rate you’re going, we’ll be here until Christmas.”

  “My story begins before the moonless night,” Minnie explained, turning her back on Myrtle and fastening her attention on Bree and me. “It began before the children came along, a few months after my husband and I were married. We thought it would be nice to live next door to another pair of newlyweds, but it wasn’t. The Trotters weren’t the kind of neighbors we’d hoped for.”

  “No one would want to live next door to Zach Trotter,” said Mildred, unknowingly echoing Hayley Calthorp’s comment about living next door to Minnie Jessop.

  “He was a bad lot,” Minnie stated firmly, “a liar, a drinker, and a brawler. My husband and I got used to hearing him come home at all hours, drunk as a lord. He never raised his hand to Annabelle, but he raised his voice, and the things he said to her don’t bear repeating.”

  The cronies nodded sadly.

  “No one would have blamed Annabelle for leaving him,” Minnie opined, “but she stuck by him until—”

  “The moonless night,” Myrtle put in excitedly.

  “Yes, Myrtle, it was a moonless night,” Minnie said, glaring at her old friend. She gathered herself, then went on. “My husband and I were in the front parlor, drinking a cup of cocoa before bed. We were just finishing up when we heard Zach Trotter come home. We could tell by the way he fumbled with his latch key that he was sozzled.”

  “As usual,” Myrtle mumbled through a mouthful
of Victoria sponge.

  “We heard him go upstairs,” Minnie went on, “and a little while later, we heard a dreadful noise—a sort of bump-thud-rumbling noise. We were sure Zach had fallen down the stairs.”

  “Why not Annabelle?” I asked.

  “Annabelle was a slip of a girl,” said Minnie. “If she’d fallen down the stairs, she wouldn’t have made half as much noise as a big chap like Zach.”

  “Makes sense,” Bree allowed.

  “Of course it does,” Minnie said irritably. “It’s what happened.”

  “What did you do after you heard the terrible noise?” I asked, to keep Minnie from biting Bree’s head off.

  “Nothing,” Minnie answered. “We reckoned that if Zach was bad hurt, Annabelle would ring for the doctor. If he wasn’t, we’d see him all bruised the next day.”

  “And serve him right!” Mabel said fiercely.

  “We waited up for a bit,” Minnie continued, “to see if the doctor would come. When he didn’t, my husband went up to bed and I took our empty cups to rinse in the kitchen. I was in the back garden when I heard—”

  “Why were you in the back garden?” Bree interrupted.

  The cronies tittered. Minnie gave them a withering look, then turned toward Bree.

  “Why do you think I was in the back garden?” she asked tartly. “We didn’t have modern conveniences in those days.” She pointed to the kitchen’s rear wall. “The WC used to be right there, behind the scullery. We got rid of it when we expanded the kitchen—after we installed the indoor loo.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Bree, blushing crimson. “Sorry.”

  “As I was saying,” Minnie resumed, “I was in the back garden when I heard a queer sound coming from over the wall.” She waved a mittened hand at the brick wall separating her garden from Dovecote’s. “I was afraid it might be burglars, so I stood on an upturned bucket to take a look. And what do you think I saw?”

  Her cronies seemed to hold their collective breath.

  “Not much,” Bree said irrepressibly. “It was a moonless night.”