Aunt Dimity's Good Deed

by Nancy Atherton

  Table of Contents

  A PENGUIN MYSTERY

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Chapter 19.

  Chapter 20.

  Chapter 21.

  Chapter 22.

  Chapter 23.

  Chapter 24.

  Chapter 25.

  Chapter 26.

  Chapter 27.

  Chapter 28.

  Chapter 29.

  Chapter 30.

  Chapter 31.

  Epilogue

  Uncle Tom’s Butterscotch Brownies

  A PENGUIN MYSTERY

  AUNT DIMITY’S GOOD DEED

  Nancy Atherton is also the author of Aunt Dimity’s Death (the winner of the Mystery Guild New Discovery Award), Aunt Dimity and the Duke, Aunt Dimity Digs In, Aunt Dimity’s Christmas, Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil, and most recently Aunt Dimity: Detective. She lives next door to a cornfield in central Illinois.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,

  London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

  Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1996

  Published in Penguin Books 1998

  Copyright © Nancy T. Atherton, 1996

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the

  product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

  to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-12799-5

  1. Women detectives—England—Fiction. 2. Inheritance and succession—

  Fiction. 3. Family—Fiction. 4. England—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3551.T426A-17263

  813’.54-dc20

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For

  Mark G. McMenamin,

  Patron of the Arts

  1.

  They say that three wishes are never enough, and maybe what they say is true. There’d been a time when, given a genie and a lamp, I’d have wished for nothing more than a job I didn’t hate and a rent-controlled apartment in the part of Boston that reminded me of England, a country I’d loved since childhood.

  My third wish—the result, no doubt, of a dreary first marriage and an even drearier divorce—would have been for a more or less stable relationship with a guy who wasn’t a total creep, who would tell me the truth at least as often as he picked up his socks. Back then no one could have accused me of having great expectations. In those days my wildest dreams were so tame they’d eat out of your hand.

  But when Aunt Dimity died, all of my wishes came true in ways I’d never dreamt possible. Aunt Dimity left me a honey-colored cottage that actually was in England, and enough money to ensure that I’d never have to work again. She also saw to it that her will was administered by a guy who was not only honest and scrupulously considerate about his socks, but head over heels in love with me.

  Thanks to Aunt Dimity, I’d had a fairy-tale courtship, complete with a Handsome Prince—for so Bill Willis appeared to me, though he was neither handsome nor a prince—and a cozy, honey-colored castle in which he had finally popped the question. It all happened so quickly, so effortlessly, that I’d fallen deeply in love with Bill before I knew who he really was. And maybe that’s where I made my mistake.

  Because the trouble with a fairy-tale romance is everything that comes after. I’d been married before, so I wasn’t naive—I knew we’d run into rough seas on occasion—but I never suspected that my own sweet Bill would try to sink the boat.

  I thought I knew all there was to know about him. During our time together in Aunt Dimity’s cottage, I watched expectantly for a fatal character flaw to surface, but it never did. Despite his slightly warped sense of humor, Bill Willis had been a comfortable, easygoing companion, a genuinely decent guy, and he remained that way—as long as we were in the cottage.

  The problem was that I’d never observed Bill in his natural environment. I’d never seen him sitting behind his desk during regular working hours. He’d been on a vacation of sorts when I’d met him, a long leave of absence from his family’s law firm—a condition of Aunt Dimity’s will—and our courtship had taken place in strange and romantic surroundings. It had been a wonderful idyll, but it had in no way prepared me for life back in the States, where my relaxed and carefree fiance became a work-obsessed, absentee husband.

  Even our honeymoon had been interrupted by a flurry of faxes from the firm. It had seemed amusing at the time, but in retrospect I saw it as an early sign of less amusing things to come.

  Bill’s native habitat wasn’t a cozy cottage, after all. He’d grown up in the Willis mansion, a national historic landmark occupying some of the priciest real estate in downtown Boston. We lived with Bill’s father, William Willis, Sr., in the mansion’s west wing and central block, but the east wing was devoted to the offices of Willis & Willis, one of the oldest and most prestigious law firms in New England. Willis & Willis could trace its roots back to before the Revolution, and so could most of its clientele, a fusty lot of old Bostonians whose litigious habits had made the Willis family rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

  Bill had been born to serve a demanding bunch of blue-bloods, and the moment we got back to Boston, he vaulted into an endless round of phone calls, meetings, luncheons, banquets, and paperwork. Up before dawn and in bed after midnight, Bill ran like a rat in a cage, losing weight and adding lines of worry to a brow I seldom had the opportunity to smooth.

  Bill’s manic schedule was designed, in part, to ease his father’s workload. Willis, Sr., hadn’t asked for a lighter workload, but Bill wasn’t convinced that his father knew what was best for him. My sixty-five-year-old father-in-law was usually in blooming good health, but he had a history of heart trouble, and Bill dreaded the thought of losing him. Gradually, Bill took over much of the day-today running of the firm, in order to reassure his father that all would be well with Willis & Willis should the old man decide to retire.

  I suspected that Bill was trying to prove something to himself, as well. It wasn’t always easy being the son of the great William Willis, Sr. It wasn’t always easy being a Willis, period. Bill’s predecessors had been bringing glory to the Willis name since they’d come over from England; some had been judges, others had been congressmen, but all had done something remarkable. It was a weighty tradition to uphold, and Bill had reached an age, in his mid-thirties, when he felt the need to demonstrate that he was worthy of wearing the Willis mantle.

  So my husband had good and understanda
ble reasons for working himself into an early grave, and I had good and understandable reasons for tearing my hair out. The Handsome Prince Handbook is mute on the subject of chronic workaholism—Prince Charming, apparently, knew how to delegate—and I didn’t know where else to turn for help. What do you do when life begins to go wrong and you’ve used up all three wishes?

  I refused to sit around the mansion, pining. My friend and former boss, Dr. Stanford J. Finderman, had plenty of jobs for me to do. Stan was the curator of the rare-book collection at my alma mater’s library, and he was more than happy to stretch his tight academic budget by dispatching me to England—at my own expense—to attend auctions or evaluate private collections.

  For two long years, I threw myself into my work. I met scores of fascinating people and visited hundreds of beautiful places, and each assignment served to distract me from the low-pitched, incessant, and wholly irrational voice that murmured insidiously in the back of my mind: It’s you. You’re why Bill’s keeping such long hours. He’s wondering why on earth he married you.

  It was an absurd, ridiculous thought, yet it wouldn’t go away, and as months flew by in which a dent in Bill’s pillow was the only sign I had that he’d been to bed at all, I began to think it might contain a tiny germ of truth.

  However much we had in common, Bill and I didn’t share the same background. He’d been raised in a national historic landmark, for pity’s sake, whereas I’d grown up in a nondescript apartment building on Chicago’s west side. He came from a long line of distinguished men and women who’d sailed first-class from England before the United States was united. I came from Joe and Beth Shepherd, an overworked businessman and a schoolteacher, whose ancestors had probably paid for their passage to America by scrubbing decks. I’d gone to a good college, but it was Bill who wore the Harvard crimson, and if it hadn’t been for Aunt Dimity, my net worth wouldn’t have equaled what my husband spent annually on shoelaces.

  I’d lost all the family I had when my mother died, but Bill still had his father, several cousins out on the West Coast, and two aunts who lived nearby in Boston. I hadn’t met Bill’s cousins, but his father was an absolute peach, and we got along famously.

  His aunts, however, were a different kettle of fish. Honoria and Charlotte were pencil-thin, silver-haired widows in their late fifties, and the moment I met them I understood why Bill’s cousins had fled to California and never returned. My aunts-in-law were as thin-lipped as they were slim-hipped, and they’d welcomed me into the family with all the warmth you’d expect from two women whose hopes of finding a suitable match for their favorite nephew had been dashed when he’d proposed to me.

  They objected to me on any number of grounds, but the front-runner seemed to be that, although I was thirty-two years old and had been married once before, I still had no track record as a potential brood mare for the Willis stables. They didn’t put it quite so baldly, but if looks could impregnate, I‘d’ve had twins every Christmas.

  The galling truth was that, as a brood mare, I wasn’t likely to win any prizes. I was the only child of two only children who’d taken a decade to produce me, so my chances in the fertility sweepstakes weren’t overwhelmingly favorable.

  It didn’t worry me. Much. I won’t deny that I spent more than a few mornings staring at Bill’s dented pillow and wondering if I’d ever hear the patter of his big feet, let alone little ones, but I never admitted it to anyone except to my friend Emma Harris, in England, once, in a moment of abysmal weakness, and she’d promised never to mention it again. But Honoria and Charlotte mentioned it, often. “Have you any happy news for us today, Lori?” was a question I’d come to loathe, because I’d had no happy news for anyone for two long years.

  I could have had triplets, though, and Bill’s aunts would have gone on resenting me. Thanks to Aunt Dimity’s bequest, they couldn’t accuse me outright of being a gold digger, but the suggestion of social climbing was always in the air, and they never failed to comment acidly on my numerous gaffes and blunders.

  Bill’s friends and, associates commented, too, but to them I was “refreshing.” The governor found my description of the primitive washing facilities in certain Irish youth hostels “refreshing.” A board member of the Museum of Fine Arts had been equally “refreshed” by my story of rescuing a rare Brontë first edition from the birthing stall of a barn in Yorkshire. It seemed that, every time I said something that would shrivel the tongue of a well-bred society matron, I was “refreshing.”

  Maybe having a “refreshing” wife got old after a while. Maybe Bill was listening to his aunts. Maybe all of those deeper things we’d discovered in each other at the cottage didn’t matter if the surface things weren’t quite right.

  When I tried to talk to Bill about it, he just ruffled my curls and said I was being silly. And I couldn’t confide in my father-in-law. Willis, Sr., had been so utterly delighted by his son’s marriage that I couldn’t bear to tell him that things weren’t exactly working out as planned. Emma Harris was my best friend in England, and Meg Thomson was close by in the United States, and I know they would have listened, but I was too embarrassed to say a word to them. People who get all three wishes aren’t supposed to wish for anything ever again, yet there I was, wishing with all my might that someone would brain Bill with a metaphysical two-by-four and bring him back to his senses, and to me, before it was too late.

  In desperation, I arranged an event which I dubbed our second honeymoon. Bill astonished me by going along with the idea, agreeing that we would stay at my cottage in England, unplug the phones, repel all messengers, and spend the entire month of August getting to know each other again. That was the plan, at least, and it might have worked, if it hadn’t been for the bickering Biddifords.

  After thirty years of wrangling over the late Quentin Biddiford’s will, the Biddiford family had finally agreed to discuss a settlement. They’d asked Bill to mediate, and with what seemed like malice aforethought, they’d chosen the first of August, the exact date of our planned departure for England, as the start of their summit meeting. The Biddiford dispute was the professional plum Bill had been waiting for—plump, juicy, and decidedly overripe—and since it had been handed to him instead of his father, it had been a no-contest decision. Bill had to stay in Boston.

  Heartsick, I’d flown off to England, and Willis, Sr., had flown with me, graciously offering to keep me company until his son arrived. Bill had promised to fly over the moment he’d wrapped up the negotiations, but I couldn’t help feeling that Fate—in the form of the pea-witted Biddifords —was conspiring against me. Thanks to that fractious brood, I was about to spend my second honeymoon with my father-in-law.

  It was too much. I couldn’t talk to Willis, Sr., but by then I needed to confide in someone, and Emma Harris was right next door. And that’s why I was knee-deep in Emma’s radishes, and Bill was back in Boston, working, the day Willis, Sr., disappeared.

  2.

  Emma Harris’s radishes flourished in the southeast corner of her vegetable garden, a verdant patch of land that lay within view of the fourteenth-century manor house where Emma lived with her husband, Derek, and her stepchildren, Peter and Nell. Emma was an American by birth, but her love of gardening had brought her to England, and her love for Derek, Peter, and Nell had kept her there.

  Emma’s manor house was about halfway between my cottage and the small village of Finch, in the west of England. It had been three days since Willis, Sr., and I had arrived at the cottage, delivered safely after an overnight in London by a chauffeur friend of ours named Paul, and although I was still too jet-lagged to trust myself behind the wheel of a car—especially in England, where I found driving to be a challenge at the best of times—I’d recovered sufficiently to walk over to Emma’s after breakfast and offer to lend a hand with the radishes.

  She needed all the hands she could get. Emma was a brilliant gardener, but she’d never quite learned the lesson of moderation where her vegetables were concerned. In t
he spring she overplanted, muttering darkly about insects, droughts, rabbits, and diseases. During the summer she lavished her sprouts with such tender loving care that every plant came through unscathed, which meant that, when harvesttime hit, it hit with a vengeance.

  Prizewinning onions, cabbages, lettuces, leeks—I’d told Emma once that if the local rabbits ate a tenth of what she grew they’d be too fat to survive in the wild. I was still in awe of anyone who could get an avocado seed to sprout in a jar, however, so perhaps I wasn’t competent to judge. All I knew was that, come August, my normally placid and imperturbable friend became a human combine-harvester, filling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow with an avalanche of veg.

  Derek Harris took his wife’s annual descent into agricultural madness in stride. Like Emma, he was in his mid-forties, but where Emma was short and round, Derek was tall and lean, with a long, weathered face, a headful of graying curls, and heart-stoppingly beautiful dark-blue eyes.

  There were deep lines around those eyes. Derek had gone through hard times in his life—his first wife had died young, leaving him with two small children to raise—but he’d survived those difficult years, and his marriage to Emma had healed his grieving heart. He was a successful building contractor, specializing in restoration work, but he gladly put everything on hold in August, in order to help his veg-crazed wife pile up the produce.

  He’d made an exception today, though, allowing himself to be called away—by the bishop, no less—to slap an emergency patch on the leaky roof of Saint James’s Church in Chipping Campden, where His Reverence was scheduled to conduct a rededication ceremony in ten days’ time.

  Peter, Derek’s seventeen-year-old son, wasn’t at home, either. He wasn’t even in the country. Peter was studying medicine at Oxford and spending the summer in a rain forest in Brazil, battling Amazonian rapids and jungle fevers while searching for the cure for cancer. To someone like me, who’d spent every summer of her adolescence shelving books at the local library, Peter’s adventures seemed just a tad exotic. A letter from him had arrived the day before, postmarked Manacapuru, and bearing his ritual apology for not being on hand for the harvest.