Nancy Atherton: Aunt Dimity's Good Deed

“That’s never stopped her before,” Emma pointed out.

I felt a faint, uneasy flutter in the pit of my stomach. “True,” I said. “But I mean really dead. Not like before.”

Emma gave me a sidelong look. “Are you telling me there are degrees of deadness?”

“I’m simply saying that the situation has changed,” I replied. “Dimity had unfinished business to take care of the last time she ... visited. That’s why she couldn’t rest in peace. But we settled all of that two years ago. It’s over. She’s gone.”

“Perhaps she has new business,” Emma suggested.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Dimity can’t just flit in and out of the ether at will.” Because, if she could, I. added mutely, she’d have come through for me with some whiz-bang advice on How to Save My Marriage. “There must be rules about that sort of thing, Emma.”

“If there are,” Emma commented dryly, “then I’m willing to bet Aunt Dimity’s rewriting them.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but shut it again without saying a word. Emma had a point. Nothing about my relationship with Aunt Dimity had ever been remotely conventional. For starters, we weren’t related by blood or marriage but by a bond of friendship. Dimity Westwood had been my mother’s closest friend. They’d met in London during the war and kept up a flourishing correspondence long after my mother had returned to the States. When I was born, Dimity became my honorary aunt, and when my father died shortly thereafter, she did what she could to help my mother bear the twin burdens of a broken heart and a bawling baby.

Dimity was always helping someone. She worked with war widows and orphans and parlayed a small inheritance into a considerable fortune, which she used to found the Westwood Trust, a philanthropic enterprise that was still going strong. Dimity had made a name for herself in the financial markets at a time when women didn’t do that sort of thing, and although she’d made enough money to kick back and swig champagne with the smart set, she’d chosen instead to live a reclusive life, going quietly about the business of doing good.

Dimity Westwood hadn’t been a conventional woman, aunt, or millionaire, so why should she have a conventional afterlife? She’d already exploded the myth that hauntings had to be spooky. No moaning in the chimney for her, no materializing in an eerie green haze or rattling chains in the dead of night. When Aunt Dimity wanted to communicate with me across the Great Divide, her messages appeared on the pages of the blue journal, an unobtrusive little book bound in dark-blue leather.

I still took the blue journal down from its shelf in the study every time I arrived at the cottage, still hoped to see Aunt Dimity’s fine copperplate curl and loop across the page, but my hopes had begun to fade. I’d told myself that it was foolish to expect to hear from Aunt Dimity again, because the problems that had bound her spirit to the cottage had been solved—or so I’d thought.

Why would she return now? What kind of “new business” would induce her to go anywhere with Willis, Sr.? Was he in some sort of trouble? What kind of trouble could a respectable, sixty-five-year-old attorney get into, sitting quietly in an armchair, reading a book?

I’d asked myself so many questions that I felt a little dizzy. I didn’t know what to expect. But the first thing I noticed when we turned into my drive was that Willis, Sr.’s car was missing.

3.

I kept two cars in England: a secondhand black Morris Mini for my own use, and a shiny silver-gray Mercedes for my guests. When I was away, I garaged both cars in Finch with Mr. Barlow, the retired mechanic who’d come to depend on the income he earned banging out the dents and retouching the scratches I tended to accumulate whenever I drove in England. Mr. Barlow had ferried both cars from Finch to my graveled drive that morning, but only the Mini was there now.

“William’s car is gone,” Emma noted, pulling in beside the black Mini and shutting off her engine.

“Maybe he’s driven to Bath to see the bookseller Stan told him about.” A devoted armchair traveler, my father-in-law had assembled a splendid collection of books on Arctic exploration. He was always on the lookout for new finds, so he might very well have taken my old boss’s advice and gone to see a man in Bath about a book.

Emma maintained a wait-and-see attitude, but I got out of the car and walked back along the driveway to the edge of the road, studying the tire marks in the gravel. Each set curved out of the driveway in the direction of Finch except one, which turned in the opposite direction.

“See that?” I said triumphantly, pointing to the gravel. “William turned south, in the direction of Bath. I’m sure that’s where he is.”

“Uh-huh,” Emma replied noncommittally.

Apart from the missing car, the cottage looked as it had when I’d left it earlier that morning. The stone walls were the color of sunlight on honey, the slate roof was a patchwork of lichen and moss, and a cascade of roses framed the weathered front door. Even in winter’s thin gray light, with the rosebushes bare and a dusting of snow on the rooftop, the cottage looked warm and inviting. Now, in early August, with the mosses baked golden by the high summer sun, and the scent of new-mown hay from a neighboring field lingering sweetly in the air, Aunt Dimity’s cottage was, to my eyes, the prettiest place on earth.

All the same, I examined it carefully as I followed Emma up the flagstone path to the front door. I was convinced that the cottage would glimmer or gleam or do something to herald Aunt Dimity’s return, but it didn’t. The house martins flitted to and from their little round nests under the eaves, and a plump rabbit eyed us from the safe refuge of the lilac bushes, but if Dimity had come back, the cottage wasn’t telling.

Nell was waiting for us in the living room, where she and Willis, Sr., had set up the green-lacquered gaming table for their competition. Nell and Willis, Sr., were fairly evenly matched as chess players—their duels lasted for weeks, sometimes months, depending on how often Willis, Sr., came to visit. They were good friends, too, and though it gave my heart a pang when Willis, Sr., referred to Nell as his adopted granddaughter, I couldn’t resent it. Nell Harris was an exceptional child.

Nell was twelve years old, but she seemed to have bypassed the awkward preteen pupa stage and gone straight into being a butterfly. She was tall, slender, and exquisite, a Botticelli angel with a flawless oval face, a rosebud mouth, and her father’s dark-blue eyes. In the light from the bow windows, Nell’s blond curls gleamed like a halo of spun gold, and she moved with an inborn grace that made her seem regal even when dressed, as she was now, in khaki shorts, scuffed hiking boots, and a pale-blue T-shirt.

Bertie, Nell’s chocolate-brown teddy bear, was sitting on a pile of cushions in what should have been Willis, Sr.’s chair, perusing the chessboard with unwavering intensity, but Ham, Nell’s black Labrador retriever, clearly overcome by the excitement of the match, lay sprawled across the cushioned window seat, half asleep. Ham’s tail thumped twice to alert his mistress to our entrance, but her attention was, like Bertie‘s, focused on the board—as Ham’s tail rose for a third thump, Nell slid a white bishop three squares and smiled benignly.

“That should do it,” she murmured before turning to greet us. “Hello, Lori. Hello ... Mama!” she exclaimed. “You’re still wearing your wellies. I thought you loathed driving in them.”

“I do,” Emma replied, stepping out of her soiled black boots, “but I was in a hurry. What’s all this about William disappearing?”