Aunt Dimity: Snowbound

by Nancy Atherton

  I nodded as Dimity’s words came back to me: I found her almost too bright, too cheerful. Everyone spoke of how brave she was, but I couldn’t help wondering if she was concealing a great deal of anger behind her pretty smile. I couldn’t be sure, of course. People sometimes are what they present themselves to be. . . . If Dimity, knowing of Lucasta’s losses, had been unable to see through the girl’s cheerful facade, what chance had James and Wally had?

  “I think I understand what you’re getting at,” I said. “James and Wally were a pair of humble GIs who saw Lucasta DeClerke as a fairy princess living in a castle. The poor guys must have been shocked and disappointed when the princess turned into an ogre, but that still doesn’t give you the right to—”

  Wendy sniffed impatiently. “If jumping to conclusions were an Olympic sport, you’d have a closet filled with gold medals,” she scolded. “Will you please try for one minute to pretend that you don’t know everything?”

  I wanted to fire back a snappy retort, but since I’d already jumped to an embarrassingly large number of wrong conclusions, I couldn’t argue Wendy’s point.

  “Sorry,” I said stiffly, and told Jamie to go on.

  “The next part of the story isn’t as clear as the rest,” he said, “but I think I can guess what happened. As James and Wally regained their strength, they began to explore the abbey.”

  “Wally was interested in architecture,” Wendy put in, “so he spent time studying the structure of the house and the outbuildings surrounding it. He would have loved the conservatory.”

  “He would have feasted on Ladythorne like a starving man at a banqueting table,” Jamie said with a wan smile. “James, who’d always been bookish, explored Ladythorne’s library, where he happened upon an album filled with fascinating photographs.”

  He bent to lift the Jubilee album from the floor, placed it on the walnut table, and paged through it until he came to the photograph of Grundy and Rose DeClerke, costumed as Night and Day. Their faces seemed strangely alive in the quivering firelight.

  “One photograph in particular fired his imagination,” Jamie murmured, gazing down at the fabulous image. “When asked, the servants told him that the jewels were real and that Miss DeClerke had them in her possession, but that she’d hidden them so cunningly that she alone knew where to find them.”

  “Wally must have found the floor plans by then.” Wendy jerked her chin toward the roll-top desk. “Jamie tells me they were in the library, so I suppose James could have found them. Or maybe Lucasta loaned the plans to Wally, to help him learn more about the house. Whatever the case, the two friends put the floor plans together with the tale of the Peacock parure and decided to go on a treasure hunt. It may seem frivolous, but—” She broke off when I shook my head.

  I had no trouble understanding the treasure hunt’s appeal. James and Wally had been little more than kids. They’d been transported from hell to a magical place untouched by enemy bombs. How could they resist the excitement of a treasure hunt? How could they resist anything that would allow them to forget, if only for a while, the carnage of Omaha Beach?

  “It doesn’t seem frivolous at all,” I said. “Did you come here to finish the hunt for them?”

  “We didn’t have to,” Wendy replied, “because they succeeded. They were determined young men with time on their hands. They found the parure.”

  I looked in confusion from her face to Jamie’s. He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips, as if his mouth had gone dry, and when he spoke, he seemed to be speaking to the mustachioed man and the sturdy, round-faced woman gazing serenely back at him from the Jubilee album.

  “I don’t think they intended to steal the jewels,” he said, “but when they saw the diamonds shining like a thousand suns, they . . . they couldn’t help themselves. Surely you can understand what drove them to it. Lucasta was a wealthy young woman destined to one day marry an equally wealthy man. She’d never have to worry about earning a living or paying a mortgage or feeding a growing family. The parure could make no possible difference in her life, but it would make a world of difference in theirs. It would make all of their dreams come—”

  “Hold on,” I broke in, my thoughts in disarray. “What are you saying, Jamie? Are you telling me that—”

  Jamie’s dark eyes locked on mine. “I’m telling you that Wendy and I aren’t trying to steal the parure. We’re trying to put it back.”

  Seventeen

  My head spun as the last of my preconceptions struggled frantically to realign themselves. If I’d understood Jamie correctly, he’d just accused his own father, and Wendy’s, of committing a despicable act against a young woman who’d treated them with nothing but kindness. If Jamie was telling the truth, then I’d been wrong, Dimity had been wrong, and—most important of all—the military authorities had been wrong to ignore Lucasta’s cries for help.

  “Let me get this straight,” I managed. “Are you saying that the theft actually happened? Are you telling me that James and Wally stole the Peacock parure?”

  Jamie nodded, once. He closed the Jubilee album, but remained sitting forward in his chair, his head bowed, his long hair curtaining his face. “Captain James Macrae was my father. Corporal Walter Walker was Wendy’s father. Captain Macrae and Corporal Walker stole the parure, divided it between them, and smuggled it out of England when they were shipped back to the States.”

  For one wrenching moment the only thing I could think about was Lucasta, railing against the men who’d betrayed her, demanding justice, and receiving none.

  “James and Wally lied to their commanding officers.” Jamie’s voice was barely audible. “They lied to the men with whom they’d served. When others were accused of the theft, they said nothing. They hurt an innocent girl who’d already been hurt beyond comprehension. I believe their actions drove her mad.” He pinched the bridge of his nose wearily. “I wish you’d been right, Lori. I wish I were a clever criminal, but I’m not. All I’m trying to do is to make amends for my father’s sins.”

  “And my father’s,” Wendy said bitterly. She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “Let’s not forget that half the blame lies with Wally. He would’ve taken the secret with him to the grave if Jamie’s father hadn’t shocked him into speaking.”

  I heard the complex emotions in her voice, the deep love and the disillusion, and felt a pang of envy. I’d never known my father well enough to feel much of anything for him. He’d died before I’d learned to talk.

  My mother had been the hero of my life, and though she’d kept her share of secrets from me, she’d never committed any sin for which I had to atone. I couldn’t put myself in my companions’ shoes, but I could recognize heartache when I saw it. I had no doubt that they were telling the truth, a truth they both found difficult to bear. Captain Macrae and Corporal Walker hadn’t broken faith with Lucasta alone when they’d stolen the parure. In the end, they’d betrayed their children’s trust as well.

  I felt a sudden impulse to rise quietly, return to my room, and leave Jamie and Wendy to complete their private act of expiation in peace, but before I could move, Wendy went on with the story. She spoke with her face turned toward the fire and continued to refer to her father by his first name, as though to distance herself from his misdeeds.

  “Wally never talked about the war,” she said. “I knew by the scars on his chest that he’d been wounded, but he never told me what happened. He never attended a single reunion of his old army buddies. He never told me about his good friend James.”

  Jamie confirmed that his father had been similarly reticent.

  “Then how did you find out about the parure?” I asked.

  “In my case, it started with the Alzheimer’s.” Jamie leaned back in his chair, his hands resting lightly on the arms. “When the disease took hold of my father, he became obsessed with memories of the war. His disjointed recollections didn’t make much sense to me, but I listened because . . . because he was my father.” Jami
e took a shaky breath and let it out slowly. “It wasn’t easy. He kept apologizing for hurting a girl he’d met in England, a Lady Thorne. He said he hadn’t known about her sweetheart and her dad. I thought he was talking about a wartime fling, so I didn’t mention his ramblings to my mother. I didn’t realize that he was making a last-ditch effort to confess to something far more serious. Then Wendy called.”

  Wendy had spent the previous Fourth of July weekend with her parents at their home in Long Island. On the morning of the Fourth, the telephone had rung. Her father had answered it and been struck down by a massive stroke.

  “I found him lying on the floor, muttering about his faults,” she said. “He gripped my arm and whispered: ‘Put it back.’ I thought he was talking about the telephone, but before I could put it back on the hook, he died.”

  Wendy blamed the phone call for her father’s death. When she traced the call, she learned that it had come from a VA hospital in Illinois. After the funeral, she telephoned the hospital. Jamie answered. She’d reached his father’s room.

  “I didn’t believe Wendy, at first,” Jamie admitted. “I thought Father was too far gone to use the telephone, but when she mentioned Wally’s name, I began to pay attention. A soldier named Wally had cropped up often in Father’s ramblings. ‘Put it back, Wally,’ he’d say.‘We have to put it back.’ ”

  “The same words Wally breathed in my ear as he lay dying.” Wendy drew her arms more tightly around her knees. “Two old soldiers, saying the same words—it had to mean something. Had they known each other? What did they need to put back? Did it have something to do with this woman, this Lady Thorne?”

  “We needed answers,” said Jamie. “To find them, we dug into the past.”

  Army records revealed that James and Wally had served and been wounded together, and that Ladythorne wasn’t a woman, but a convalescent home in England. Further research led Wendy to eleven other American officers who’d been at the abbey near the end of the war in Europe. The eleven men remembered James and Wally, and gave vivid accounts of Ladythorne’s beauty and comfort, but said nothing about the scandal that had erupted during their stay there.

  “That’s when I found the letters,” Jamie continued. “Father kept his army gear in a trunk in the attic. I was going through the trunk one day when I noticed a loose floorboard underneath it. Father had hidden two ammunition boxes in the cavity below the loose floorboard. The boxes held hundreds of letters. They were hateful, spiteful things, signed by a woman named Lucasta DeClerke.” Jamie rested his head against the back of the chair and gazed toward the ceiling. “I don’t think Father knew about Lucasta’s father and her fiancé until he read her letters, and even then he couldn’t have known how they died. She didn’t include the details.”

  “We didn’t know until Catchpole told us during lunch yesterday,” Wendy interjected. “Hearing that her fiancé had been a soldier, that he’d died at Dunkirk, and that her father had been killed in a bombing raid—that’s what spoiled my appetite.”

  “Mine as well.” Jamie’s brow furrowed. “I’m sure Father wouldn’t have stolen the parure if he’d been aware of the sacrifices Lucasta had already made.”

  A faint note of uncertainty undermined Jamie’s statement and told me that he wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Would his father have behaved differently if he’d understood the full extent of Lucasta’s suffering? Jamie would never know. I recalled the stillness that had come over him when Catchpole had mentioned Lucasta’s ghost. Perhaps, I thought, Jamie sensed her restless spirit in the house. Perhaps he felt as though he deserved to be haunted.

  “Lucasta had written to Wally, too,” said Wendy. “It wasn’t until Jamie described James’s letters that I remembered the ones Wally had gotten. They were identical to the ones under the floorboard—ivory envelopes, handwritten addresses, foreign stamps. Wally tossed them, unopened, into our wood stove as soon as they arrived.”

  “Father kept every one,” Jamie said. “They helped me understand what he was trying to say to me. I realized as I read them that he’d been struggling desperately to tell me that he and Wally had stolen the parure.”

  “Wally couldn’t burn Lucasta’s letters fast enough.” Wendy unfolded her legs, seized the poker, and stabbed savagely at the fire. “He was too cowardly to face the truth, and he didn’t want me to know about it, ever.”

  What father would? I wondered. No father would want his daughter to know about the mistakes he’d made, especially if she worshipped him as unreservedly as, I suspected, Wendy had worshipped her father. I felt a rush of sympathy for Wally. How could he confide in a daughter who would judge him so severely? How could he risk the hard fall from the high pedestal on which she’d placed him?

  Wendy slumped back against the ottoman, her flash of temper spent. “We found out that Lucasta had written to each of them, each of the Americans who’d been at Ladythorne when the robbery occurred. Most of the men thought she was batty, but a few weren’t so sure.”

  The military’s refusal to investigate the theft had driven Lucasta to take matters into her own hands. She’d spent the rest of her life writing to the men she suspected of stealing the parure. She cursed the thieves. She assured them they’d never profit from their crime. She berated and belittled and badgered them so persistently that she managed to arouse an element of suspicion in three of the accused. Those three kept a watchful eye on the rest.

  “Lucasta’s curse worked,” Wendy commented succinctly. “Neither Wally nor James ever profited from their crime. They couldn’t sell the jewels because they were being watched too closely. If their bank accounts got too fat too fast, vague suspicions might have hardened into accusations.”

  Jamie shifted uneasily in his chair. “There was something else that prevented Father from selling the jewels: My mother had been a nurse during the war. She would never have forgiven him for robbing a woman who’d dedicated herself so selflessly to helping the wounded. When she accepted Father’s long-distance proposal of marriage, he put the necklace and the earrings into a canteen pouch, hid the pouch under another floorboard in the attic, and tried to forget about it.”

  “Wally stashed the tiara, the brooches, and the bracelets in a coffee can under his workbench,” Wendy added. “It took me a month to find them.”

  “Why didn’t they send them back?” I asked. “Once James and Wally realized they couldn’t sell the jewels, why didn’t they mail them back to Lucasta, anonymously?”

  Wendy’s eyebrows rose. “You’ve seen the parure, Lori. Would you trust it to the postal system?”

  “I suppose not,” I conceded.

  “They could have brought the parure back in person,” Wendy observed, “if they’d been willing to own up to what they’d done, if they’d had the courage to face the conse quences.”

  “They wouldn’t have faced the consequences alone.” Jamie sounded tired and a tiny bit impatient, as if he’d made the same point many times before. “Can you imagine how loudly Lucasta would have crowed if she’d been proven right after all these years? She wouldn’t have agreed to settle things privately, Wendy. She would have dragged the army into it, and our families. The tabloids would have had a field day. Can’t you see the headlines? YANKS PINCH FAMILY JEWELS—ARMY COVERS UP. Would you have wanted your mother to go through that kind of humiliation?”

  “No,” Wendy murmured, chastened. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Jamie got to his feet and paced restlessly to the darkened window. He stood facing it for a time, then turned, leaned back against the sill, and folded his arms.

  “I would have found a way to return the jewels to Lucasta,” he said, “but she was dead by the time I pieced together Father’s story, and she left no heirs.”

  “So we decided to do what our fathers couldn’t bring themselves to do,” said Wendy. “Put it back.”

  It wasn’t hard to fill in what happened next, but Jamie spelled it out for me. By making discreet inquiries among his Oxford friends he’d
learned that Ladythorne Abbey would be deserted in February. He and Wendy had flown to England separately, with the jewels tucked into their backpacks, for all intents and purposes two innocent hikers anticipating the tranquility of winter’s uncrowded trails. They’d planned to rendezvous at Ladythorne, enter the house surreptitiously, return the parure, and leave.

  “Unfortunately, no one mentioned Catchpole,” said Jamie. “And no one could have told us that a blizzard would send you our way.”

  “You were a mixed blessing, Lori.” Wendy tilted her head to one side. “On the one hand, you managed to tame Catchpole by threatening to sic your husband on him, for which we were grateful.”

  “On the other hand,” Jamie continued, “you were far too bright not to notice that something odd was going on.” He glanced at Wendy. “Especially when certain people ran around making loud noises in the dead of night.”

  “Stupid blanket chest,” Wendy muttered. “How was I to know that the hinges were shot?”

  Jamie turned back to me. “Apart from that, your husband had told you too much about Lucasta for our peace of mind. We had to think of a way to keep you from interfering with our task.”

  Wendy grinned mischievously. “Jamie agreed—reluctantly—to bat his big brown eyes at you. And I decided to be Miss Rude. I hoped you’d stomp off to your room in a snit after our little chat in the library last night, but you refused to budge. You wanted another glimpse of those brown eyes, right?”

  “They’re lovely eyes,” I admitted, with a wry smile.

  “They’re beautiful,” Wendy agreed, and flung her arm dramatically into the air. “They’re the kind of eyes that could make any woman—”

  “All right, you two, that’s enough.” Jamie blushed to his roots. “I’m more sorry than I can say for my part in the deception, Lori. It’s not something I . . . that is to say, I don’t make a habit of . . .”

  “It’s okay, Jamie,” I broke in, taking pity on him. “I’m a big girl. I’ll get over it. So what’s next? Can’t you dump the parure in a drawer and be done with it?”