Nancy Atherton - Aunt Dimity's Good Deed

It was a noisy sort of darkness. Apart from the usual chorus of insects and the distant rustle of leaves on the forested hillsides, the wind whistled and moaned around the stone buildings, the horses snuffled and stamped, and the stable’s wide wooden door, left partly open, creaked on its hinges. The rhythmic squeak would drive me mad, I decided, and the draft couldn’t be doing the chestnut foal much good. With a groan, I put my head down, pulled my collar up, and crunched across the graveled courtyard to close the stable door.

Wisps of hay sailing through the flashlight’s steady beam reminded me to keep it trained on the ground, lest I should encounter other, less pleasant reminders that horses had passed this way. I was within an arm’s length of the stable, and trying to picture Nell with a pitchfork in her soft, long-fingered hands, when the bay gelding’s braying whinny sent a sliver of ice down my spine and redoubled my determination to see to it that Anthea’s remaining darlings were securely shut up for the night.

As I reached over to tug on the door handle, something darted between my legs, and I shrieked, dancing back into the courtyard. A sharp gust banged the door, snatched the scream from my lips, and whipped a plaintive mew past my ears. The beam from my flashlight bounced along the ground until it landed on a pair of green eyes glowing weirdly in a dainty, fuzzy, black-and-white face.

“You fiend.” I clutched the front of my jacket and gulped for air as I watched the cat circle around me. “You nearly gave me a stroke,” I muttered, and was on the verge of laughing at my own taut nerves when the door rattled behind me and a hand clamped like a vise upon my shoulder.

My mind went blank with terror, but my body went on autopilot. I’d been raised by a single mother on the west side of Chicago, and she’d drilled her precious daughter in self-defense. Nothing elegant or Asian, just your basic down-and-dirty street technique.

I jammed my elbow backward and the handle of the flashlight went back with it. I heard an oomph, the vise released, and I sprinted, spraying gravel, for the house. I was two yards from the doorstep when my brain came back on-line and informed me that it knew who’d made that oomph.

I skidded to a halt, and slowly turned. The adrenaline haze subsided as I cautiously retraced my steps across the courtyard to the spot where a hulking figure crouched, bent double, just outside the creaking door. As I approached, a palm went up to block the flashlight’s glare.

“Would you point that damned thing somewhere else, please? You’ve already broken my ribs. There’s no need to blind me.”

“Bill?” I said, in a tone of voice I’d been saving for a face-to-face encounter with Amelia Earhart.

“No,” he wheezed. “It’s Jack the Ripper. Lucky thing you put me out of action. Who taught you to do that, anyway ? The nuns at your grammar school?”

“Bill?” I repeated, swaying slight on my feet.

He straightened very slowly, groaning softly as he did. “Yes, Lori. It’s me.”

“How ... ? When... ? Oh, Bill,” I cried, “did I really break your ribs?”

My husband’s arms opened wide. “Why don’t you come over here and find out?”

I took a half-step toward him, then stopped abruptly. “What happened to your beard?”

“I singed it when the stove blew up. It didn’t seem worth keeping after that.” Bill raised a hand to touch his clean-shaven chin, and I gasped.

“What happened to your arm?” I demanded, coming another half-step closer.

Bill lowered his left hand, which was partially encased in a plaster cast. “When the stove blew up, I fell into the woodpile,” he explained. “It’s only a sprain, but they wanted to keep it immobile for a while. And before you ask about my glasses, yes, they’re new. I lost the old ones when the emergency evacuation team was loading me into the seaplane. Now, would you please stop devouring me with your eyes and give me a kiss? I’ve come an awfully long way to find you.”

Bill had come by seaplane, commuter plane, Concorde, helicopter, and rental car all the way from the blighted shores of Little Moose Lake to the stableyard of Cobb Farm in two days flat.

“I couldn’t get back to sleep after that phone call of yours,” he told me, “and I couldn’t concentrate on anything once I’d gotten up. That’s why the stove exploded. I think I did something wrong with the kerosene.”

I filled a bowl with reheated vegetable soup, and put it on the table in front of him. After enveloping him in a hug that had proved the soundness of his ribs, I’d pulled my battered husband into the house and straight back to the kitchen. No one had descended to check up on us. I assumed that their afternoon jaunts had put them all into fresh-air-induced comas.

“As I lay there in the woodpile,” Bill went on, “with half of my beard burnt off and my arm pinned underneath me, watching the staff rush around with fire extinguishers while Reeves and Randi and the rest of the bloody Biddifords stood back so as not to soil their lily-white hands, I said to myself, ‘Bill, what the hell are you doing here?’ ”

He paused to spoon up more soup, and I checked on the leftovers from dinner, which were warming in the oven. I kept glancing over my shoulder at my husband, not only because it was hard to believe that he was sitting in the same room with me, but because it was hard to believe that he was my husband. He looked like someone I’d never met before.

“ ‘Lori sounds like she’s in trouble,’ ” Bill continued, still recounting his interior dialogue. “ ‘Why the hell aren’t you there to help her out?’ ” Bill shrugged. “So I told the Biddifords to get stuffed, and radioed for the evac plane to take me out. God knows I was a medical emergency by then. Any more of that warm milk?”

I brought the saucepan to the table and refilled Bill’s mug, then piled a plate with roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I cut the meat for him, because his left arm was basically useless-he’d managed to sprain the wrist attached to the hand that held the thumb he’d pierced with the fishhook. Poor old thumb, I thought, gazing tenderly at the lumpy white gauze wrapping protruding at an awkward angle from the cast.

I put the plate at Bill’s elbow, kissed the top of his head, and took a chair across the table from him. I couldn’t stop devouring him with my eyes. A combination of windburn and sunburn had brought a ruddy glow to his normally pallid complexion, and his smooth jaw was every bit as strong as Uncle Williston’s. The slim tortoiseshell frames of his new glasses didn’t overwhelm his brown eyes the way his old black frames had, and he’d topped a familiar pair of brown corduroy trousers with a bulky cable-knit fisherman’s sweater that I liked very much but had never seen before.

“The evac team took care of my arm and helped me to shave, so they could see if I’d burnt my face as well as my beard, then dropped me off in Bangor, where I caught a commuter flight for Logan. We got out just ahead of a terrific storm. I hope it blew the Biddifords to ... blazes.”

“But how did you get your new glasses?” I asked.

“Miss Kingsley. I called her from the Concorde and she had them waiting for me at Heathrow.” He touched a finger to the tortoiseshell frames and glanced at me bashfully. “Like ‘em?”

“I love them,” I said, and made a mental note to treat Miss Kingsley to champagne and caviar the next time I was in London.

Bill plucked at the sleeve of his sweater. “Miss Kingsley bought this for me, too, since I couldn’t bring my luggage on the evac plane. She also arranged for a helicopter to fly me to York and a rental car to get me from there to here. Paul’s been keeping her up-to-date on your travels.”