“What about Malua Bay?” I demanded. “And his parents still living there? And the mysterious black box?”
“Lilian Bunting dug the Malua Bay nugget out of him,” Bill pointed out. “I’ll give you a couple of points for the bit about his parents, but none for the black box. If Jack has to resolve his uncle’s affairs, it stands to reason that he’d have a box full of legal papers.” He shook his head. “It’s not much to show, by Finch’s standards, and it hardly makes my sacrifice worthwhile. While you were out there with Jack, learning very little, I was peeling Will and Rob off the ceiling.”
“Sorry,” I said, snuggling closer to him.
“No worries, mate,” he said, in a truly dreadful Australian accent.
“I’ll have another crack at him on Monday,” I reminded him.
“Ah, yes, lunch at Ivy Cottage,” said Bill. “You’ll be the envy of every woman in the village.” He nuzzled my ear. “I suppose you’ll want to bring a certain person up to date on today’s exciting turn of events?”
“Do you mind?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “As long as you don’t stay up too late. Stanley is a very nice cat, but I’d rather share my bed with my wife.”
“I’ll keep it short,” I promised.
“Good.” Bill kissed me until I ran out of breath, then headed upstairs, with his faithful feline padding after him.
I loosed a quivering sigh, then went to the study, to give a certain person the day’s news.
Four
The study was as silent as it could be with raindrops dashing themselves against the diamond-paned windows above the old oak desk. The strands of ivy crisscrossing the windows shivered beneath the onslaught and I felt a chill creep through me on their behalf. Though I hadn’t intended to light a fire, I struck a match, held it to the tinder in the hearth, and waited until the flames were dancing before I paused to say hello to my oldest friend in the world.
“Hi, Reginald,” I said. “If it doesn’t stop raining soon, the river will overflow, Finch will be flooded, and the villagers will be forced to abandon their homes and flee to higher ground. And I’ll have to wait until the summer drought to ride my new bike.”
Since Reginald was a small, powder-pink flannel rabbit, I didn’t expect him to reply, but the gleam in his black-button eyes seemed to suggest that he understood how much my new bike meant to me. The bicycles of my childhood had been purchased from thrift stores or garage sales, and I’d bought the bicycle I’d ridden as a young adult from a guy at a flea market. My new bike was the first brand-new bike I’d ever owned. The thought of turning pedals no one else had turned thrilled me to the core.
Reginald looked very snug in his special niche in the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves beside the fireplace and snug was how I liked to keep him. Reg and I went way back. He’d been made for me before I was born by a woman I’d met only after her death.
The woman’s name was Dimity Westwood and she’d been my late mother’s closest friend. The two women had met in London while serving their respective countries during the Second World War. The shared experience of living in a city under siege created a bond of affection between them that was never broken.
When the war in Europe ended and my mother sailed back to the States, she and Dimity strengthened their friendship by sending a constant stream of letters back and forth across the Atlantic. After my father’s sudden death, the letters became my mother’s refuge, a quiet retreat from the daily pressures of teaching full time while raising a rambunctious daughter on her own.
My mother was extremely protective of her refuge. She told no one about it, not even me. As a child, I knew Dimity Westwood only as Aunt Dimity, the redoubtable heroine of a series of bedtime stories invented by my mother. I was unaware of the real Dimity’s existence until after both she and my mother had passed away.
It was then that Dimity Westwood bequeathed to me a comfortable fortune, the honey-colored cottage in which she’d spent her childhood, the precious postwar correspondence, and a curious blue leather–bound book filled with blank pages. It was through the blue journal that I finally met my benefactress.
Whenever I opened the journal, Aunt Dimity’s handwriting would appear, an old-fashioned copperplate taught in the village school at a time when pupils practiced their penmanship on slate tablets. I stopped breathing for a full minute the first time it happened, but it didn’t take me much longer than a minute to realize that Aunt Dimity’s intentions were wholly benevolent.