Nancy Atherton - Aunt Dimity's Death

“Listen!”

“I don’t hear anything.”

“That’s what I mean. It’s stopped raining!”

I could scarcely believe my ears. The steady drumming of the rain had been replaced by a stillness as heavy as Devonshire cream, and when I leaned forward to look through the windows I saw that a dense fog had settled in the storm’s wake.

Bill closed the notebook and put it in his pocket, then walked over to have a look for himself. “Ah, the glories of English weather.”

“I’ll bet it’s a big relief to Derek and the vicar. You think it’ll clear by tomorrow?”

Bill shrugged. “Something tells me that we’re going up that hill tomorrow even if it snows. You have many virtues, my dear Miss Shepherd, but patience is not one of them.”

“I’m always halfway up the block before I know where I’m going,” I admitted. “My mother used to say—” I broke off and looked out at the fog again. “I’ve been meaning to thank you, by the way.”

“For what?”

“For believing me when I told you about the journal, even before you’d seen it with your own eyes. If you had come to me with a story like that, I would have—”

“Wait,” said Bill. “Let me guess.” He put his hands on his hips and his nose in the air and launched into what I feared was an accurate imitation of me at my indignant worst. “‘Bill,’” he said with a sniff. “‘What kind of a fool do you take me for? I don’t believe in ghosts!’” He relaxed his stance, then raised an eyebrow. “Did I come close?”

“A direct hit.” I winced. “I’ve been pretty impossible, haven’t I?”

“No more than I,” said Bill, “and you had a much better excuse. Finding yourself alone in a very strange situation, I can understand why you’d be on guard.”

“On guard, maybe, but not hostile,” I said. “I don’t know—maybe I acted that way because I was confused. I didn’t understand why you were being so… friendly.” I dusted an invisible speck from the edge of the desk. “To tell you the truth, I still don’t understand it.”

“Can’t you just accept it?” he asked.

“It’s hard for me to accept something I don’t understand,” I said.

“Like your mother?” he said gently.

I planted my hands on my hips and shot a fiery glare in his direction, then realized what I looked like and sank back in the chair, deflated. “Yes, like my mother.” I pointed to a picture in Dimity’s album. “That’s her. That’s my mom.”

Bill put one hand on the back of my chair and watched over my shoulder as I paged through the rest of the album. It was filled with pictures of my mother, in uniform and in civilian dress, her dark hair pulled back into a bun or braided in coils over her ears. “She wore it that way to keep her ears warm,” I said. “She said that coal rationing in London during the war meant chilly offices. She had beautiful hair, long and silky. She used to let me brush it before I went to bed, and every night I prayed that my curls would straighten out and that I’d wake up in the morning with hair just like hers.” I ran a hand through my unruly mop. “It didn’t work.”

“You have her mouth, though,” said Bill. “You have her smile.”

“Do I?” The very thought brought a smile to my lips. It had been a long time since I had talked to anyone about my mother, and now it seemed as though I couldn’t stop talking about her. “Yes, I guess I do. See this one, where she’s making a face? She used to make that same face at me, wrinkle her nose and cross her eyes, and it killed me every time, just laid me out flat, giggling. We used to have pillow fights, too, and she’d chase me all over the apartment until Mrs. Frankenberg banged on her ceiling with a broom handle. She’d made up this whole set of holidays. I was in kindergarten before I realized that no one else celebrated Chocolate Chip Tuesday.” I turned the page. “Other mothers seemed like cardboard cutouts compared to her.”

“Were you in any of her classes?” Bill asked.

“Never. She knew what kids could be like, so she enrolled me in another school entirely.”

“PTA nights must have been tricky.”

“Tricky? Try being in two places at once sometime. But she always managed to take care of everyone.” I closed the album and sighed. “Everyone but herself.”

“Lori—” Bill began, but the telephone cut him off. He snatched it up before it could ring again.

“Yes?” he said. “How are you, Father? Good, good. Of course I’m behaving myself. You don’t think I want to go through that again, do you? Yes, in some ways she’s very much like my old headmaster, though she lacks his little mustache, of course…. Yes, she’s been hard at work on the correspondence.” Bill glanced at me, then turned away. “I’m sorry, Father, but I don’t think she can come to the phone right now. Would it be possible for you to call—”

“It’s all right, Bill,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

“One moment please, Father.” Bill covered the receiver with his hand and said to me, “This can wait.”

“I know. But I’m all right. I’ll talk to him.”

Bill gave me a measuring look, then spoke into the phone again. “You’re in luck, Father. She’s just come down. Here, I’ll give you to her now. Yes, I will. Good to speak with you, too.” He passed the phone to me.

“I’m so glad to have caught you, Miss Shepherd,” said Willis, Sr. “I looked into the matter we discussed yesterday, as you requested. There are photographs with Miss West-wood’s papers, but I regret to say that none of them were taken before the year 1951. They are official portraits, having to do with her role as founder of the Westwood Trust.”

“That’s a shame,” I said, shaking my head at Bill, “but thanks for checking it out.”

“You are most welcome. My son tells me that you’ve made great progress in your reading. Since that is the case, I wonder if I might trouble you to answer a few of Miss Westwood’s questions?”

“Questions? Oh—you want to ask about the letters,” I said, tapping Bill’s breast pocket. I had forgotten all about our question-and-answer sessions. If I’d been attending to my research, it wouldn’t have mattered, but as it was, I was relieved to see Bill pull out his notebook and open it, poised for action. “Why, certainly, Mr. Willis. Fire away.”

“The first concerns the letter in which Miss Westwood’s cat is introduced. Have you run across it in your reading?”

“Aunt Dimity’s cat?” I said. Bill consulted his notebook, ran his hand along the rows of archive boxes, and took one down. “Yes, that one appeared fairly early on.”

“Excellent. Miss Westwood wished for you to explain to me the ways in which the original anecdote differs from the finished story. Would it be possible for you to do so?”

“The differences between the story and the letter,” I said. “Let me see, now. …” Bill located the letter and handed it to me. I scanned it, then closed my eyes and ran through the story in my head. “The story is more detailed, for one thing. The letter doesn’t mention the cat overturning the knitting basket or spilling the pot of ink on the window-seat cushions.”

“Yes,” said Willis, Sr., with an upward inflection that suggested I wasn’t off the hook yet.

“And in the letter, the cat is named Attila. In the story, he’s just called ‘the cat’.”

“Very good,” said Willis, Sr., but I got the feeling that I was still missing something. I put the letter down and tried to concentrate.

“In the story,” I said, “the cat is a monster. Honestly, he has no redeeming qualities. He’s played for laughs, but he’s—Just a moment, please, Mr. Willis. What?” This last was to Bill, who was waving wildly to get my attention. He had opened the manuscript of the stories and was now pointing urgently to a page.