Aunt Dimity and the Widow's Curse

by Nancy Atherton

  “Were you and Annabelle enjoying fish paste sandwiches on the day Ted Fletcher died?” I asked, although the answer seemed inevitable.

  “We were,” said Gladys. “With the notable exception of Mildred Greenham, any fool will tell you that the view from our hillock was a good deal better than the view from the front office.” She bowed her head. “I wish it hadn’t been. I’d give anything to forget what I saw that day. We screamed for help when we saw Ted stumble and fall into the muck, but we were too far away to make ourselves heard. We could do nothing but stand there and watch as he . . . as he . . .” Her voice trailed off, as if she couldn’t bear to describe the nightmarish scene she’d witnessed.

  “There, there, Gladys,” Penny said, putting a comforting arm around her friend. “You’ve been very brave. You needn’t upset yourself further. We’ll let Debbie take it from here. Debbie?”

  Debbie Lacey was short and plump and made of sterner stuff than I. She’d continued to ply her knife and fork with undisguised gusto throughout Gladys’s harrowing description of Ted Fletcher’s gruesome death, stopping only when Penny called on her to say her piece. It was with the greatest reluctance that she laid her utensils aside and addressed Bree and me.

  “Before I got married,” she said, “I worked as a kitchen maid here at the manor. One of my chores was to collect wild mushrooms. Cook knew that Mr. Craven was fond of wild mushrooms, and he liked to use fresh ones in his dishes, so he taught me which ones were safe to eat and where I was likely to find them. I was out hunting for mushrooms on the morning Jim Salford drowned.”

  “Tell them where you were, darling,” Penny coaxed, as though she were speaking to a dim-witted child.

  “I was right across the river from Jim and Annabelle,” said Debbie. “I’d just found a lovely patch of chanterelles when I heard them talking. Jim was showing off for Annabelle, bragging about his catches, and not paying a lick of attention to where he was standing. You have to be careful in the spring,” she informed us in a cautionary aside, “because the rushing water can undercut the bank.”

  “Which is precisely what happened,” Penny interjected.

  Debbie nodded. “Jim went too near the edge of the bank and it gave way under him. Annabelle only just saved herself by grabbing onto a tree, but Jim went straight into the river. He was swept away before we could do anything about it.” She shrugged. “Jim was a strong swimmer, but once the current took him, he didn’t stand a chance.”

  “And after he was swept away?” Penny prompted. “Tell them what you did then.”

  “Annabelle looked too shaken up to walk out of the woods on her own,” said Debbie, “so I hollered at her to sit tight while I hightailed it back to the big house to ring the police. I told them where to find her, and they brought her here. I wrapped her in a blanket and Cook gave her a cup of tea because she was all shivery. I reckon she was in shock.”

  “What about Jim?” Bree asked.

  “They found his body three days later, caught up in some rocks downstream,” Debbie replied, adding sadly, “They never did find his fishing rod.”

  I restrained an insane urge to laugh at her sorrow for such a trivial loss.

  “Well done, darling,” said Penny. “Now tell them about William Walker.”

  Bree turned to Debbie and asked, “Were you still working here when William Walker May died?”

  “Course I was,” said Debbie. “I didn’t get married until a year later, not that I wanted to wait, but my husband had to finish his national service before we could even think of—”

  “William Walker?” Penny interrupted hopefully.

  “Right,” said Debbie, regaining her focus. “People—ignorant people—can say what they like about Annabelle, but I know for a fact that she didn’t kill William Walker. I could see his little greenhouse through the kitchen windows. Annabelle never went near it unless he went with her.”

  “William Walker didn’t win bags of blue ribbons at the flower show by being careless,” Penny said. “Flower shows are rather cutthroat affairs in Old Cowerton.”

  “It’s the same in our village,” said Bree.

  “Then you’ll understand why William Walker kept a close watch over his greenhouse,” said Penny.

  “William Walker’s Amazon lilies were his pride and joy,” said Debbie. “He kept them under lock and key—and he had the only key. He wouldn’t let anyone, not even Mr. Craven, set foot in his greenhouse without him. Besides, Annabelle was hopeless with machinery.”

  “She did all of her sewing by hand,” said Gladys, “because sewing machines made her nervous.”

  “Anyone who says she tampered with the heater in William Walker’s greenhouse is a liar,” Debbie concluded, not bothering to mince words. “Even if she somehow managed to make a copy of the key and to slip past the kitchen windows without me or Cook noticing, she wouldn’t have had the know-how to nobble the heater.”

  “There you are,” said Penny. “Two reliable witnesses who testified to both the police and the coroner that the deaths of Ted Fletcher, Jim Salford, and William Walker May, while tragic, were accidental.”

  “My boss and three of my coworkers—who are sadly no longer with us—saw Ted fall into the slurry pit,” said Gladys. “All six of us testified that he died in a workplace accident.”

  “A geologist at Jim’s inquest blamed his drowning on erosion,” said Debbie. “And the company that manufactured the greenhouse heater admitted that it was faulty.”

  “We don’t expect you to take our word for it,” said Penny. “I have a complete file on each case—newspaper clippings, police reports, postmortem documents, church records, inquest transcripts . . .” She paused to take a breath, then continued, “If Gladys and Debbie haven’t convinced you that Annabelle is entirely innocent of the absurd accusations leveled against her by certain members of our community, I’ll be happy to show you the files.”

  Bree and I stared at her curiously.

  “Why do you have files on—” I began, but I was cut off midsentence by the late entrance of the last of Penny’s guests.

  “Sorry!” Susan Jessop called as she hurried to take her place next to our hostess. “I thought my committee meeting would never end!”

  “You couldn’t have arrived at a better time, darling,” said Penny, kissing Susan on both cheeks. “We were about to tell Lori and Bree why your mother is the least reliable witness on God’s green earth.”

  Nineteen

  “Hello again,” Susan Jessop said, waving to us across the glass-topped table.

  “Hi,” Bree and I chorused reflexively. Bree seemed to be as taken aback as I was to see Susan at a gathering of her mother’s harshest critics.

  “If you don’t mind,” said Susan, “I’ll snag a little something from the buffet before we continue. I didn’t have time to eat breakfast at home, and the doughnuts at the meeting were gone before I got there.”

  “Snag away,” I told her. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  “Unlike the doughnuts,” Susan said drily.

  While Bree and the other women served themselves second helpings of kippers, eggs Benedict, smoked salmon kedgeree, strawberry crepes, chocolate pancakes, and créme fraîche–daubed caviar, I strolled across the conservatory to look through a glass wall at the knot garden. Bess and Nanny Sutton appeared to be playing a game not unlike Big Bad Bear among the meticulously trimmed box hedges. If my daughter was traumatized by my absence, she hid it well. Her dribbly grin persuaded me that she was in very good hands indeed.

  “What on earth is Susan doing here?” Bree whispered, crossing to stand beside me. “Is she some kind of mole—a double agent planted in Sunnyside to spy on her own mother?”

  “Could be,” I whispered back. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “I will,” said Bree.

  She was as good as her word. When everyone was seat
ed, she folded her arms and asked without preamble, “What are you doing here, Susan?”

  “I’m here for the same reason as Penny, Gladys, Debbie, Lorna, and Alice,” Susan replied. “I couldn’t let my mother poison your friendship with Annabelle Craven.” She held up her hand. “Don’t misunderstand me. I love and admire my mother. She raised six of us in that little house. She saw to it that we had a good education and she taught us the value of hard work. No one could have done more for us.” Susan dropped her hand and grimaced apologetically. “But she’s mistaken about Annabelle. Always has been, always will be.”

  “Mistaken?” I repeated irately. “Your mother has spent half her life tormenting Annabelle.”

  “More than half her life, actually,” Susan said without rancor. “It began on the night Zach Trotter disappeared.” She looked at the two women who hadn’t yet spoken in Annabelle’s defense. “Alice? Lorna? If you’ll walk us through what really happened that night?”

  Alice Johnson and Lorna Small had already set aside their knives and forks, as though they’d expected Susan to call upon them. When she did, they straightened their shoulders and lifted their chins, much as Mabel Parson had done when speaking of Edwin Craven at Minnie’s tea party. Annabelle’s friends, like her enemies, seemed to take their storytelling responsibilities very seriously.

  “When I was a young married lady,” Alice began, “I lived on Parkview Terrace in the terraces. Parkview Terrace is one street over from Bellevue Terrace, where the Trotters and the Jessops lived.”

  “I lived next door to Alice,” said Lorna. “The thing you have to understand is that our back bedrooms overlooked Bellevue Terrace.”

  “My back bedroom overlooked Dovecote, where the Trotters lived,” Alice clarified. “I couldn’t see their back garden from my window, but I could see their front door. I could hear it, too, every time Zach slammed it.”

  “We liked Annabelle,” said Lorna, “but we couldn’t stand her husband.”

  “No one in the neighborhood could stand him,” said Alice.

  “Zach Trotter would pinch the grass from your garden if you didn’t keep an eye on him,” Lorna said, making no effort to conceal her contempt. “And he was always coming home drunk.”

  “Sometimes he’d sing silly songs and sometimes he’d knock over rubbish bins and he nearly always slammed the door,” said Alice. “He made such a racket that my husband and I had to move from our back bedroom to our front bedroom, just to get a night’s rest.”

  “My husband and I had to do the same thing,” Lorna chimed in.

  “I had a touch of bronchitis one summer,” Alice said, placing a hand on her chest. “I didn’t want to keep my husband up half the night with my coughing, so I moved into the back bedroom. He was the breadwinner, you see, and he needed his eight hours.”

  “With bronchitis, you always get worse before you get better,” Lorna said knowledgeably. “When Alice got really bad, I stayed at her place to look after her. I slept on a camp bed in her room, so she wouldn’t be on her own.”

  I tried to imagine a world in which Bill would allow a neighbor to tend to me during a serious illness instead of caring for me himself, but I couldn’t manage it. I felt incredibly lucky to have a husband who could afford to take time off from work when his family needed him.

  “I was sitting up with Alice when Zach came home that night,” Lorna continued, and no one had to ask which night “that night” was. “He wasn’t making a racket for once, but I could hear him fumbling with his key. It must have been an hour later when I heard Dovecote’s door open again. Alice was dozing, so I got up to look through the window.”

  “When Lorna got up, I woke up,” said Alice, “and I went to look, too.”

  I felt a rush of affection for Alice. Like my neighbors in Finch, she wouldn’t allow ill health to rob her of a chance to snoop.

  “We watched from the window as Zach stepped outside,” Lorna said.

  “Did he have a bandage on his head?” Bree asked, thinking no doubt of the allegedly bloodstained rag rug.

  “He didn’t have a bandage on any part of him that we could see,” said Lorna.

  “And we could see him plain as day,” Alice put in, “because of the light coming through a gap in the curtains in Annabelle’s bay window.”

  “He stood on the doorstep for a bit,” said Lorna, “as if he couldn’t decide what to do next. Then he stuck his hands in his pockets and walked down Bellevue Terrace.”

  “He slipped out of Old Cowerton like a thief in the night,” said Alice. “We never saw him again.”

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Lorna stated firmly.

  “We saw Zach walk away from Dovecote on his own two feet,” Alice stressed. “We saw him abandon Annabelle without a backward glance, and so we told the nice young constable when he came round to question us.”

  “If Minnie hadn’t been spying on Annabelle in the back garden, she might have seen Zach leave through the front door,” said Lorna.

  “I’m sure Minnie saw Annabelle bury something in the back garden,” said Alice, “but it wasn’t Zach’s corpse because Zach wasn’t dead.”

  “Dead men don’t walk,” Lorna said.

  “We told Minnie she was mistaken,” said Alice, “but once she got a notion into her head, she wouldn’t let go of it.”

  “Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?” Penny asked sardonically.

  “I’d have sued her for defamation,” said Lorna, “but Annabelle was too busy making ends meet to worry about nasty gossip.”

  “Annabelle knew who her friends were,” Gladys piped up, “and she didn’t count Minnie Jessop and her crowd among them. Sorry, Susan,” she added with a penitant glance at Minnie’s daughter.

  Susan, who’d been making up for her missed breakfast, didn’t appear to be offended. To the contrary, she dismissed Gladys’s apology with a nonchalant shrug.

  “I’m familiar with my mother’s shortcomings as well as her admirable qualities,” she said. “I also understand why she still feels compelled to prove her case against Annabelle.”

  “Maybe you should explain it,” said Bree, “because I still don’t get it.”

  “I’m a teacher,” Susan responded good-naturedly. “I never turn down an invitation to explain things.” She washed down a mouthful of crepe with a swig of coffee, gave a satisfied sigh, and settled back in her chair. “Zach’s disappearance was one of the most momentous events in my mother’s life—and one of the most frustrating. She honestly believed that Annabelle had murdered him, and she was outraged when the police refused to take her eyewitness account seriously. She felt as if she’d been shunted aside and ignored because the police saw her as a working-class yob who couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth. Her outrage made her cling to her accusation even after Alice and Lorna proved it was false.”

  “She wasn’t the only one to make a false accusation,” Bree pointed out. “Her friends made a few of their own, and she went along with them.”

  “My mother was already convinced that Annabelle was capable of murder,” said Susan. “She had no trouble believing her friends when they added a few more alleged victims to the body count.”

  “But why did her friends feel the need to add to the body count?” Bree asked. “I can just about understand why Minnie thought what she thought about Annabelle, but I don’t understand her friends. They didn’t actually see Annabelle kill anyone. Why were they so willing to think the worst of her?”

  “Jealousy,” Gladys replied. “Even when we were at school together, they were jealous of Annabelle. They were as plain as pugs and as dull as cold porridge. She was as pretty as a princess and as bright as a new penny.” She smiled. “Even her name was prettier than theirs.”

  “They couldn’t have been jealous of Annabelle after she married Zach,” I said, shaking my head. “He wasn’t what
I’d call a great catch.”

  “I imagine her ill-judged marriage allowed them to feel superior to her for a while,” Penny said reflectively. “Once Zach disappeared, though, and a string of attractive chaps began to pursue her, their sense of inferiority must have reasserted itself.”

  “And like a pack of jackals, they decided to bring her down,” said Gladys.

  Susan Jessop raised an eyebrow. “If you’re fair, you’ll admit that an alarming number of Annabelle’s suitors died prematurely.”

  “True enough,” Gladys agreed. “But they also died accidentally.”

  “Except for Zach,” I said. “He walked off into the night and vanished without a trace. We don’t know what happened to him.”

  “In point of fact, we do,” said Penny, raising a slender finger to catch my attention. “My late brother discovered where Zach went and what he did after he left Old Cowerton.”

  “Was your brother a policeman?” I asked.

  “No,” said Penny. “He was Annabelle’s second husband. You may have heard of him. His name was Edwin Craven.”

  Bree dropped her fork.

  “Y-you’re Annabelle’s sister-in-law?” I stammered, thunderstruck.

  “I am,” said Penny, smiling delightedly at our reactions. “I’m so pleased no one tipped you off. I’m rather fond of surprises.”

  “We’re surprised,” Bree acknowledged. Ignoring her fallen fork, she gazed perplexedly at Penny, then asked, “Is it true that William Walker introduced Annabelle to your brother?”

  “Certainly not,” said Penny. “William Walker would have thought it highly improper to introduce a mere seamstress to his employer. Edwin and Annabelle met quite by chance. He walked in on her while she was mending a torn tapestry in the music room. A look passed between them and that was that.”

  There was a touch of frost in Bree’s manner when she asked, “How did you feel about your brother marrying a mere seamstress?”