Aunt Dimity's Death (22 page)

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.

“Wrong answer,” Bill whispered. “Look—right here.”

Still holding my hand over the phone, I bent down to skim the page. It was the conclusion of the
Aunt Dimity’s Cottage
and as I read through it I realized that I had gotten it wrong. Confused, and a little shaken, I straightened and spoke once more to Willis, Sr.

“That is to say …” I cleared my throat. “What I meant to say is that the cat has no redeeming qualities
at first
, but then, when you get to the end of the story—and the letter— he turns out to be kind of a sweetie. I mean, he still does ail sorts of awful things and he still makes Dimity lose her temper, but he also amuses her, and he … he keeps her feet warm in bed.”

“Thank you, Miss Shepherd,” said Willis, Sr. “If you have no further commissions for me, I shall ring off. I have no wish to impede your progress.”

“No, no further commissions. I’ll talk to you again soon.” I hung up the phone and looked down at the story. “I don’t understand this…. I thought I remembered every word.”

“Did Dimity change the ending?” Bill asked.

“No. That’s what’s so strange. As soon as I began reading it, the words came back to me, exactly as they’re written on the page.”

“So your memory slipped up a bit. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

But I was worried. I had been utterly convinced that I knew these stories inside out, but it seemed as though I had been wrong. I felt disoriented, bewildered. What else had I forgotten? I turned to the beginning of the manuscript and began reading.

We were fogbound for three days.

Emma swore she had never seen anything like it. She dropped by to let me know that Ruth and Louise Pym had accepted my invitation to come to tea on Saturday, and to reiterate her warning about Pouter’s Hill. “It may not be Mount Everest,” she said, “but it can be just as hazardous in weather like this.” I confounded Bill’s expectations by agreeing with her, and confounded them further by postponing the trip for another twenty-four hours after the sun finally appeared on the morning of the fourth day. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to give the hill a chance to dry out—a path mired in mud would be no easier to climb than one covered in fog.

Our time wasn’t wasted, though. Bill finished a first read-through of the correspondence and handed me a complete index of letters that related in one way or another to the Aunt Dimity stories. I was amazed at the speed with which he had completed his reading, but he shrugged it off, saying that it was a breeze compared to reading contract law.

He failed to find so much as a hint about Dimity’s problem, but he set to work compiling a list of the people mentioned in her letters, everyone from Leslie Gordon of Starling House to Mrs. Farnham, the greengrocer’s wife. If Ruth and Louise Pym didn’t pan out, we would go down the list until we found someone who did.

While Bill was busy with the correspondence, I continued to pore over the manuscript, testing my memory against the written text. All too often, my memory fell short, and the ways in which it did were disturbing. I clearly remembered the very large man who had stepped on Aunt Dimity’s foot at Harrod’s, for example, but what happened next had somehow been edited from my recollection.

And Aunt Dimity did take his arm, and they did face the crowds together, and he escorted her to the train afterward and said a cheery farewell. And, although she left without the torch, the bright memory of the kind man lit the way home.

All I had remembered was her squashed foot. It was as though I had twisted the story to fit an entirely different view of the world, one which was harsher and more harrowing, and the same was true of almost every story in the collection. Disquieted, I said nothing of it to Bill, but I wondered—when had I grown so bitter?

When I had finished the stories, I made a careful search of the cottage, starting with the utility room and going from there through every cupboard, cabinet, drawer, and shelf, looking for the missing photographs, a personal diary, anything that might help us figure out what had happened to Dimity. I went so far as to try tapping walls and floorboards to discover hidden recesses—a procedure that amused Bill no end—hut my hunt proved fruitless.

I used Bill’s index to cull from the correspondence all of the letters related to the stories, then used them as an excuse to drive into Bath. I told Bill I was going there to find a photocopy shop, and he agreed that it made sense to work with copies of the letters rather than the originals. It was a plausible story—I believed it, too, until I found myself browsing through the dress shops. That’s when I decided that I had
really
gone to Bath to find something to wear to tea on Saturday. After all, it was my duty as a hostess to show up in something more presentable than jeans and a sweater.

So, after wandering through the splendid arcades and elegant crescents of the prettiest of Georgian towns, and after duly copying the letters, I did
a little shopping. Maybe more than a little. Once I’d found the dress—a short-sleeved blue silk one, with a dainty floral print—I had to find the shoes to go with it, and then came all the bits in between, and by the time I was finished, I had squeezed my supply of personal cash dry. Why I didn’t ask Bill for an advance was a question I avoided like the plague.

I tiptoed upstairs to stash my new clothes in the master bedroom, then floated innocently back down to the study, photocopies in hand. When Willis, Sr., called, late in the afternoon on the fourth day of our hiatus, I greeted him with the self-assurance of someone who knows that all the bases are covered.

“What’s it to be this time, Mr. Willis? Do you want to know about Aunt Dimity’s adventures at Harrod’s? Or maybe we’ll stick closer to home—Aunt Dimity setting aside a patch of garden for the rabbits.”

“I am heartened to hear the enthusiasm in your voice, Miss Shepherd,” said Willis, Sr. “It is reassuring to know that Miss Westwood’s wishes are being carried forward with such zeal. My question, however, has to do with Aunt Dimity’s experiences at the zoological gardens. Can you recount for me the original version of that story?”