Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter

by Nancy Atherton

  “I know how we’ll talk our way into the archives,” he said. “You, my American friend, have come to Upper Deeping to do genealogical research, and you hope the Despatch’s archives will help you with your project.”

  “I always wondered where Aunt Penelope came from,” I said, rubbing my chin thoughtfully. Then I reached up and patted Kit on the head. “Brilliant.”

  I felt a pang of regret when we left the sunshine and balmy breezes behind and stepped into the newspaper’s utilitarian and fluorescently lit front office. A chest-high counter separated a waiting area—two plastic chairs, a low table, and an upright rack filled with dog-eared copies of the Despatch—from a large, untidy desk and a swivel chair that was, at the moment, unoccupied.

  “Hello?” Kit called.

  A muffled bellow sounded from afar. “Coming!”

  The door behind the untidy desk sprang open, and a pudgy young man in a tweed jacket and twill trousers bustled up to the counter. He had a round, shiny face, thinning brown hair, a ballpoint pen parked behind his right ear, and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses perched halfway down his nose.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Our receptionist is…um…” He peered nearsightedly around the reception area, as though the receptionist might be playing hide-and-seek. “Not here, apparently. No idea where she’s got to, but never mind, I’m here. Desmond Carmichael, at your service. How may I help you?”

  Kit gestured toward me and began, “My friend is—”

  “I know who your friend is,” Desmond broke in, staring avidly at me. “You’re the lady who was shot by the stalker on Erinskil Island, aren’t you? I read about you in the Times.”

  “That’s me,” I said. “Want to see my scar?”

  “Whoops. Sorry,” Desmond said, with an apologetic grimace. “It must have been a harrowing experience for you, but to be perfectly honest”—he pushed his horn-rimmed glasses up his nose and leaned his elbows on the counter—“reading about it was a thrill for someone like me, who spends his life writing about church fetes and gymkhanas.” His eyes brightened, and he pointed a finger at me. “I’ve seen you at gymkhanas, too! Your sons ride with the Anscombe Manor team, don’t they?”

  “The junior team,” I admitted modestly.

  “The Willis twins,” said Desmond, nodding, but his knowing look was rapidly replaced by one of puzzlement. “But your name is—”

  “Lori Shepherd,” I said. “That’s right. I didn’t change my name when I married, but we decided to reduce confusion all around by giving my husband’s last name to the boys.”

  “Well, I’m delighted to meet you,” said Desmond, straightening. “What brings you to the Despatch today?”

  “As you’ll know from the articles in the Times,” said Kit, “Lori is an American. She’s doing genealogical research, and she thought she might find some pertinent information in your archives.”

  My hard-won celebrity status had its uses. Desmond bounced into action as if he’d been shot from a cannon, ushering us around the counter and through the door behind the desk, past several offices, and down a stairway at the rear of the building.

  “The archives are housed in the cellar, I’m afraid,” he said, pulling a ring of keys out of his pocket and inserting one in the door at the bottom of the stairs. “We were afraid the upper floors wouldn’t take the weight.”

  The cellar wasn’t too bad, as cellars go. It had a high ceiling and finished walls, a tiled floor and ample lighting, which Desmond turned on with the flick of a switch near the door. A computer sat on the large metal desk that occupied the only floor space that wasn’t filled with shelves, and a single plastic chair sat facing the computer.

  “How far back would you like to go?” Desmond inquired. “We’ve got the last ten years on disk, but it’s bound volumes before that, six months per volume. We’re trying to put it all on disk, of course, but we never seem to have the budget or the manpower to make much progress. We do have indexes to each year’s run, though, going right back to the beginning. They’re not as detailed as I’d like them to be, but you might find them helpful.”

  Desmond showed us how to use the computer, explained how the bound volumes were organized, fetched an extra chair from upstairs, and gave us his cell-phone number, in case we needed to call on him for further guidance. After wishing us the best of luck, he closed the door and left us on our own.

  “What a helpful young man,” I said.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t ask for your autograph,” said Kit.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t want to see my scar,” I said. “Well? Shall we get to work?”

  “I don’t see the point of consulting the indexes if they’re incomplete,” said Kit. “The computer files won’t help us either. I don’t think much news about Rendor has come out of Aldercot Hall in the past ten years.”

  “Charlotte looks as though she’s in her late fifties or early sixties,” I said. “Let’s go back seventy years and work our way forward.”

  We turned to face the heavily laden shelves.

  “I’m glad we got here early,” Kit murmured.

  An hour passed, then two, the silence broken only by the ruffle of turning pages and the shuffle of our shoes as we retrieved fresh volumes from the shelves. Although I resisted the temptation to read every single article that caught my eye, I couldn’t help noticing that the function of a small-town newspaper hadn’t changed much over the years. For more than a century, the Upper Deeping Despatch had faithfully kept its readers abreast of local births, deaths, marriages, accidents, inquests, court cases, fashions, competitions, and celebrations.

  “Gymkhanas and church fetes,” I mumbled, rubbing my eyes.

  “Sorry?” said Kit, peering blearily at me across the metal table.

  “Time for lunch,” I said, more loudly. “We need a break.”

  We rang Desmond, and he came down to lock the cellar door after us. He recommended his favorite café to us as well, but we bought sandwiches at a nearby bakery and ate them on a bench in the town square, surrounded by sun-starved townspeople who’d also decided to take advantage of the fine weather. Then we plunged back into the dusty fray.

  We took another break at two o’clock. When Kit suggested that we walk over to Morningside, to look in on Will and Rob, I steeled myself and suggested that we walk to the park instead.

  “I’m sure the boys are just fine,” I said, with only a slight tremor in my voice.

  Kit put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a sideways hug. “Well done, Lori. Let’s go and feed the ducks.”

  We buckled down to our task after the ducks, flipping through volume after volume without discovering one word about the DuCarals. It didn’t dawn on me until nearly four o’clock that the Upper Deeping Despatch was exactly the wrong place to look for news about them. At which point I closed the volume I’d been scanning, leaned my weary head in my hands, and groaned.

  “We’re not going to find anything about Rendor here,” I said dejectedly. “Maurice and Madeline were too arrogant to announce their children’s births in a local rag. They’d place an ad in the Times. The same goes for anything the kids might have done in school, and I’ll bet they didn’t go to local schools, because local schools wouldn’t have been good enough for them. And after Rendor went bonkers, they shut up shop completely. They wouldn’t let the milkman near the house, so I doubt that they put out a welcome mat for reporters and photographers. We’ve spent a whole day barking up the wrong tree.”

  I released another groan, expecting to hear an echoing groan from Kit, or at least a disappointed sigh. When I heard nothing, I lifted my head from my hands and looked at him.

  He wasn’t scanning the page before him. He was staring at it, with an arrested expression on his face.

  “Kit?” I said, suddenly alert. “Have you found something?”

  “Yes,” he said, still staring down at the page. “It’s a police report about a nineteen-year-old young man who was brought up on charges for being drun
k and disorderly. It happened thirty-eight years ago.”

  “Some things never change,” I said, shaking my head.

  “The young man’s name was Leo Sutherland,” said Kit.

  “Leo?” I leaned forward. “Do you think he might be our Leo?”

  Kit lifted his gaze from the page and said wonderingly, “Sutherland was my mother’s maiden name. Before she married my father—thirty-eight years ago—my mother was known as Amy Sutherland.”

  “Whoa,” I said, falling back in my chair. “Now, there’s a coincidence.”

  “Is it a coincidence?” A slight frown creased Kit’s forehead. “Our Leo told us that he spent a lot of time near Anscombe Manor when he was young, and we know from the Pym sisters that he was going to elope with my mother’s closest friend.” He rapped the page once with his knuckles. “Now I find a Leo with my mother’s maiden name, written up in the local newspaper around the time my mother came to live at Anscombe Manor. It’s entirely possible that our Leo is…was…related to my mother.”

  “And to you,” I said. “How much do you know about your mother’s family?”

  “I don’t know anything about them,” Kit admitted. “My father remarried less than a year after my mother’s death, and he never talked about her. I grew up knowing my stepmother’s family, and my father’s, but not my mother’s.”

  I glanced toward the shelves. “Have you found any other references to Leo Sutherland?”

  “No,” said Kit. “Just the one police report. But Ruth and Louise said he was unreliable. Perhaps it was their polite way of saying that he had a drinking problem.”

  “I’d expect to find more than one police report if he had a drinking problem,” I said, “and I didn’t see any liquor bottles in Leo’s motor home.”

  “Even so…” said Kit, tilting his head to one side.

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding. “The rest of it does seem to stretch the boundaries of mere coincidence. We have to talk with Leo.” I picked up the bound volume I’d been scanning. “Call Desmond. Tell him we’re leaving. We’ll call Emma on the way back and find out if anyone’s seen Leo.”

  I returned the bound volumes to their proper places on the shelves and thanked Desmond sincerely when he showed up to escort us out of the building. Kit telephoned Emma on the way to the pickup truck, but she had no joy to report. Leo hadn’t yet returned to Gypsy Hollow.

  Since Leo was still on our missing-persons list, Kit dropped me off at the cottage, where I ate warmed-over macaroni and cheese and listened distractedly to the twins’ chatter. They were in the midst of describing the rat Clive Pickle had brought to school for show-and-tell when the telephone rang. I jumped up from the kitchen table to answer it.

  “Lori?” Kit said, sounding rather breathless. “Smoke’s rising from Gypsy Hollow.”

  “Don’t you dare go there without me!” I cried, and slammed down the phone.

  I pulled on my hiking boots and a warm sweater, grabbed my rain jacket from the coatrack in the hall, called to Annelise that I didn’t know when I’d be back, and dashed out to the Mini.

  I couldn’t explain why my hand shook as I turned the key in the ignition or why I gunned the tiny engine all the way to Anscombe Manor. I was going purely on instinct, and my instincts were telling me that the man in Gypsy Hollow held the keys to more mysteries than the ones swirling like river mist around Aldercot Hall.

  Nineteen

  I forced myself to putter at a snail’s pace down Anscombe Manor’s drive, to avoid the cardinal sin of frightening the horses, but as soon as I pulled in beside Friedrich’s Porsche, I leapt from the Mini and ran to the courtyard so fast that I sprayed gravel in my wake. Kit was waiting for me there, standing half hidden in his shadowy doorway, with his hands buried deep in his jacket pockets.

  I would have appreciated five seconds to catch my breath, but Kit took off before I’d stopped gasping, and I raced after him, splashing willy-nilly through assorted puddles in my attempt to keep up with his long strides. When we moved beyond the courtyard’s floodlight and onto the muddy track, the darkness compelled us to slow down, until Kit pulled a flashlight from his pocket, switched it on, and sped up again.

  “Good…thinking,” I panted, scampering around potholes caught in the flashlight’s bobbing beam.

  Kit glanced down at me, as if he were noticing me for the first time. “Sorry, Lori. Am I going too fast for you?”

  “Nope,” I managed, clutching the stitch in my side. “I’m as eager to talk to Leo as you are.”

  “I don’t think you can be.” Kit moderated his pace, out of kindness to me, but his voice quavered with suppressed excitement as he explained. “When I invented the story about doing genealogical research at the Despatch, I never expected it to come true. What if Leo is my uncle or my cousin? He might be able to tell me things about my mother, things my father never told me, things I’ve always wanted to know.” He shook his head. “No, Lori, I don’t think you can be nearly as eager as I am to speak with him.”

  “Hurry, then,” I urged him. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll catch up.”

  Kit was too saintly to leave me floundering in the dark, however, so he adjusted his stride to mine, and we entered Gypsy Hollow side by side. The motor home was still there, and although the night sky was strewn with stars, the patched awning had been reerected on its telescoping poles. Leo sat beneath the awning on the rickety camp chair, with his tin cup in one hand and a long stick in the other, gazing into the campfire that blazed within the ring of stones.

  He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn when he’d shared his stew with us—brown rain jacket, blue sweater, brown corduroy trousers tucked into black Wellington boots—and he’d leaned his bicycle against the side of the motor home. His bright blue eyes were somber, almost melancholy, when we emerged from the gap in the trees, but when he spotted us, they lit instantly with the same glimmer of amusement they’d held when I’d slithered down the hill into Gypsy Hollow.

  “Well, isn’t this nice?” he said. “My old mates Lori and Kit, come to welcome me home.” He rested the stick against the arm of the chair and got to his feet. “I’ll fetch the stools and a couple of cups. We’ll make a party of it.”

  October’s chill had returned at sundown, so it felt good to sit near the fire and sip the hot, sweet tea Leo brought for us from the motor home. When he’d used the word “party,” I’d remembered the police report and wondered what kind of drinks he’d serve. I’d been faintly relieved to discover that he’d filled our cups with nothing stronger than tea, cream, and sugar. The same notion must have crossed Kit’s mind, because I saw him sniff his tea surreptitiously before sampling it.

  “Drink up,” said Leo. “There’s plenty more where that came from.” He stirred the fire with the long stick, then leaned back in his chair and surveyed us amiably. “What’ve you two been up to while I’ve been away?”

  “We’ve been worrying about you,” I replied frankly. “I don’t mean to pry into your private business, Leo, but where in the heck have you been for the past two days?”

  Leo slapped his thigh and roared with laughter. “A funny way you have of minding your own business, Lori.”

  “Lori wasn’t the only one who was worried,” Kit chimed in loyally. “We were both afraid that you might have had an accident. The weather was pretty rough for cycling.”

  “True enough,” Leo acknowledged agreeably. “It was pretty rough for hunkering down in an old tin can, too. The caravan can get a bit gloomy on wet days, so I cycled to the Oxford Road, hitched a lift into town, and spent the weekend in more cheerful surroundings.” He jutted his chin toward the bicycle. “Shredded a tire on the way back, though, so I won’t be cycling again anytime soon.”

  I asked myself what kind of accommodation Leo could possibly afford in a pricey place like Oxford and thought immediately of St. Benedict’s, a homeless shelter in which Kit had stayed when he’d been down on his luck. I’d volunteered to work at St. Benedict’s often enough
to know that the place was clean, warm, and safe, but I wouldn’t have described it as cheerful. Then again, I admitted silently, I wasn’t Leo. St. Benedict’s might have seemed like a five-star hotel to him, compared to the “tin can” he’d driven to Gypsy Hollow.

  “Sorry if I gave you a fright,” he added. “An old bush ranger like me is used to coming and going as he pleases. It never dawned on me that you might miss me—but I’m touched that you did.”

  “You should have come to the manor house,” said Kit. “The Harrises have lots of spare rooms.”

  “Kind of you, Kit,” said Leo, “but your bosses wouldn’t want a stranger pottering round their house.”

  “I don’t think you are a stranger to Anscombe Manor,” Kit said slowly. “I think you stayed there a long time ago, in your younger days, when you got to know Gypsy Hollow and High Point and the Upper Deeping Fair.”

  Leo bent forward to stir the fire again. “Been checking up on me, Kit?”

  “Not intentionally,” Kit replied. “I was looking through some old newspapers when I ran across the name Leo Sutherland.”

  “You found the police report,” Leo said quietly, still toying with the fire.

  “Yes,” said Kit.

  A vagrant raindrop slid from an overhanging branch onto the awning. Ham, Nell’s Labrador retriever, barked once in the distance, then fell silent. Leo rested his elbows on his knees and clasped the stick loosely in his hands, but his gaze never left the fire.

  “It was the only time my name got into the paper,” he said. “Your father buried all the other stories. He had a lot of clout in the county. Well, he was a war hero with a knighthood to his name, and he had a bucket of cash to throw around. It stands to reason that people did what he told them to do. And he told them straight out to bury every stupid, careless thing I did. He didn’t want the world to know that his brother-in-law was nothing but trouble.”