Aunt Dimity and the Next of Kin (9 page)

“They’re lovely,” I agreed. I eyed him curiously. He seemed as bowled over by the foyer as I had been. “Haven’t you seen them before?”

“Never,” he replied, switching his attention to the woodcuts. “Miss Beacham’s asked me in once or twice, but I’ve always been too embarrassed to linger. As I said, she doesn’t complain about Stanley’s intrusions, but I feel rather guilty about them. If I knew how to stop him, I would.”

“Buy an axe,” I said.

Gabriel’s sidelong glance was tinged with horror. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’m not suggesting that you chop him up,” I said hastily. “Come with me. There’s a tree I think you should meet.”

I led the way to the kitchen, opened the window over the sink, and motioned for Gabriel to look outside. He peered into the darkness, then looked over his shoulder at me.

“No,” he said. “You’re not suggesting that Stanley . . .”

“That’s how he got up here tonight,” I said. “I’m sure he’s climbed the tree before.”

“Stanley’s always been a bit of a daredevil, but this”—Gabriel glanced at the dark branches of the copper beech—“
this
verges on the
suicidal.
We live on the
ground floor,
Lori. I can’t believe he’d risk his neck climbing so high. I wonder why Miss Beacham never mentioned it to me.” He looked toward the hallway. “Where is she, by the way? Is she out of town? Are you minding the flat for her?”

I tilted my head to one side. “She’s been away from home for two weeks. Hadn’t you noticed?”

“No, I hadn’t,” said Gabriel. “Why should I?”

I leaned back against the sink and looked up at him, perplexed. “Are you new to the building?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve been here for four years. Why do you ask?”

“Let me get this straight,” I said, with a growing sense of disbelief. “Your elderly neighbor disappears for two weeks and you don’t even bother to find out if she’s alive or dead?”

“You don’t understand,” he said, raising a placating hand. “We may live in the same building, but as I said before, we’re not close friends. We’re no more than nodding acquaintances. I run into her in the lobby from time to time, and she looks after my cat occasionally.”

“Occasionally?” I reached up and opened the cupboard door.

Gabriel stared, dumbstruck, at the cans of gourmet cat food until I drew his attention to the blue willow-patterned bowls at his feet.

“Those are Stanley’s bowls.” I plucked the cat-shaped spoon from the draining board. “This is
his
spoon. Miss Beacham put a
litter box
in her utility room for him.” I could hear my voice rising in exasperation at Gabriel’s appalling naïveté. “There’s a
cat flap
in the utility room door, for pity’s sake. I think it’s safe to assume that she looked after your cat more often than
occasionally.
”

“I don’t know why you’re angry with me,” said Gabriel. “I never asked her to feed my cat.”

I hadn’t been truly angry until he spoke those fatal words. It seemed incredible to me that this shy and unassuming man, who loved his cat and was in all probability kind to his aged parents, honestly couldn’t understand why he should have taken five minutes out of the past two weeks to look in on the lonely old woman who lived three floors away from him. His bewilderment turned my mild exasperation into something that could have easily been mistaken for red-eyed rage.

“No,” I said accusingly. “You didn’t ask her to feed your cat, and I’m sure you never asked her how she was feeling. You just grabbed Stanley and left.”

Gabriel had the grace to look abashed. “Put that way, it does seem a bit callous,” he acknowledged. “But I don’t like to trouble her. She seems so . . . self-contained.”

“She’s been in the
Radcliffe
for the past two weeks,” I exclaimed.

“The Radcliffe?” he echoed, his forehead furrowing.

“That’s right,” I snapped. “And the whole time she was there, no one came to visit her, including you. And now it’s too late. She won’t be receiving visitors ever again.”

Gabriel looked startled. “She’s not . . .”

“She’s dead.” I bit the word off brutally. “She died yesterday. And no one was with her when she died, no one but Matron.” I stalked over to the utility room, seized a grocery bag from the stack stored there, marched back to Gabriel, and thrust the bag at him. “You’d better take the cat food with you. Stanley likes it and Miss Beacham won’t be here to feed him anymore.”

“I couldn’t . . . ,” he began, but I cut him off.

“Take it,” I ordered. “Miss Beacham would want you to. Stanley was a good friend to her. She’d want him to have it.”

Reluctantly, Gabriel filled the bag. By the time he’d finished, I’d rinsed and dried Stanley’s spoon and bowls. I wrapped them in paper towels and added them to the sack of food.

“Come and get your cat,” I said, and headed for the master bedroom.

Stanley uncoiled at our entrance, paused for a stretch, then leapt gracefully from the fainting couch and nuzzled Gabriel’s ankles. Gabriel lifted him with his free hand and Stanley flopped companionably over his shoulder, rubbing Gabriel’s ear with his own and purring.

I accompanied them to the front door. As Gabriel walked past me, I said, “You’ll have to break the news to Stanley. I never got around to mentioning it.”

Gabriel stopped short and tried to meet my gaze, then crossed to the elevator and pushed the Down button.

“Good-bye, Stanley,” I said softly. I closed the door and leaned against it, replayed the last few moments in my head, and felt my heart plunge as I realized how unspeakably rude I’d been. Who was I, with my ten thousand faults, to tell anyone how to behave? I flung the door wide again and said, “Gabriel?”

But Gabriel was gone.

I almost followed him. I wanted to apologize. I wanted to acknowledge that I’d been way out of line—self-righteous, overbearing, and unjust. I wanted to explain that I wasn’t angry with him, but with the stupid world he inhabited, where people could live cheek by jowl and never know each other. More than anything, I wanted to tell Gabriel that I wasn’t really angry with him for ignoring Miss Beacham, but with death itself, for snatching her away from me too soon. But Gabriel was gone, and I doubted that he’d open his door to me if I followed him. I suspected he’d push a chair against it, to keep me out. It wouldn’t be the first time my hasty temper had sent a grown man running for cover.

Promising myself that I would slip a penitent note under his door in the morning, I returned Miss Beacham’s letter to my shoulder bag, took my rain parka from the closet, and headed for Travertine Road. If I were to spend the night in Miss Beacham’s guest room, I’d need to pick up a few supplies.

 
I returned an hour later bearing toiletries, a change of underclothes, a nightshirt, a small box of tea bags, a carton of milk, a packet of sugar, and a takeout dinner from the Indian restaurant I’d seen from Miss Beacham’s balcony.

The shops on Travertine Road had served my every need, though they had done so impersonally. A cloud of homesickness enveloped me as I thought of the post office in Finch, where the smallest transaction could take up to an hour, not because of endless lines or inefficiency, but because Peggy Taxman wanted to discuss Sally Pyne’s magenta tracksuit, or Christine Peacock’s obsession with UFOs, or the unusual herbs in Miranda Morrow’s front garden. An hour spent buying a stamp was a small price to pay, I thought, for the warmth of genuine human contact.

I deposited my purchases in the appropriate rooms and sat in the kitchen to eat the chicken tikka masala—takeout meals had no place on a Hepplewhite dining table. The masala was superb and served as a salutary reminder that cities had their good points—Finch wasn’t known for the ethnic diversity of its cuisine. After I’d straightened the kitchen, I went to the living room, to take a closer look at Miss Beacham’s books.

I pulled a copy of Cynthia Asquith’s diary from the shelves and carried it to the cylinder desk to examine. As I seated myself at the desk, I spied the crumpled ball of paper Stanley had batted at me. I felt a surge of longing for the black cat’s frisky company and wondered once again where he’d found his toy.

When I smoothed the ball of paper I recognized, with a pang, the handwriting that covered it. It was a steadier version of the shaky script I’d seen in Miss Beacham’s letter. The wrinkled sheet of paper wasn’t a rejected missive, however. On it, Miss Beacham had recorded a long list of names. A number followed each name, but the numbers weren’t sequential.

“Chalmers, five hundred,” I murmured, reading down the list. “Carrington-Smith, two hundred fifty. Mehta, seven hundred. Formby, three hundred . . .”

The names meant nothing to me. I assumed they belonged to tradesmen with whom Miss Beacham had been settling accounts, and that Stanley had found the crumpled note in the office, under the banker’s desk, where it had landed after a wayward toss—a toss made by a frail hand?—had missed the wastebasket.

Eager to get back to Cynthia Asquith’s diary, I pushed the list aside. As I did so, the desk’s green leather writing pad shifted slightly.

“You
klutz,
” I whimpered, aghast. “You’ve
broken
it.”

I glanced fearfully over my shoulder, half expecting Mr. Moss to appear out of thin air and berate me. When he failed to materialize, I put the Asquith diary on the floor and tried gingerly to put the inset writing pad back where it belonged. To my horror, it came away in my hands.

“That settles it,” I said, addressing the leather-covered rectangle of satinwood. “I know what piece of furniture is coming home with me.”

Smiling sheepishly at my overblown dread of the genteel Mr. Moss, I lowered the detached writing pad to my lap—and stopped smiling. Blinking in disbelief, I bent forward and peered into the hollow compartment the writing pad had concealed, where a stuffed toy lay, peering back at me. It was a hedgehog, wearing a kilt.

“Hamish?” I said.

Eight

The hedgehog’s maker hadn’t been concerned with realism. This was a storybook hedgehog, the jolly sort who wore big green shoes and strode jauntily across flower-spangled meadows, humming a merry tune and waving cheerfully to his woodland chums.

“
Highland
chums,” I corrected, eyeing the kilt.

The kilt was made of red, black, and blue tartan, and fairly bedraggled. The pleats were limp, the fabric was grubby, and the hem was frayed. The hedgehog, too, had seen better days. His brown button eyes were scratched and dull, his bristling plush hide lay flat in places, and a formerly fluffy forepaw had been rubbed smooth, as if a child’s hand had clutched it over the course of many years.

I recalled the odd smile that had played about Miss Beacham’s lips when she’d whispered, “Hamish. I miss Hamish.” The same fond, self-conscious smile would touch my lips if I ever spoke of Reginald to someone I didn’t know very well indeed. Grown women do not, as a rule, advertise such infantile affections.

I had no doubt that Hamish was a relic from Miss Beacham’s childhood, a companion who’d been as dear to her as my pink flannel bunny was to me. I wished desperately that I’d had the courage to tell her about Reginald. If I had, she might have trusted me to retrieve her old friend from the desk and bring him to comfort her during her last few days on earth.

I lifted the little hedgehog from the secret compartment, smoothed his kilt, fluffed his plush hide, and stood him upright on the desk.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Hamish,” I said gravely, “but I’m afraid I have some bad news to deliver. Miss Beacham died yesterday. Don’t worry, though. I won’t leave you here on your own. You’re coming home with me. I’m sure you and Reginald will get along famously.”

The hedgehog’s brown button eyes remained flat and unresponsive. Perhaps, I thought, only the child who’d loved the toy could read its features. To a stranger, Reginald’s eyes were nothing more than a pair of polished black buttons. To me, they spoke volumes.

I gave Hamish a friendly pat, looked into the desk again, and saw that the hollow compartment held one more surprise. Hamish had been lying atop what appeared to be a photograph album bound in pebbled leather. I lifted the oblong volume from the desk, carried it to the deep-seated library chair, and sat with it on my lap.

It
was
a photograph album, and a new one, at that. The pages were made of acid-free archival paper, and clear plastic corners held photographs that had been arranged chronologically, from the earliest to the most recent. Miss Beacham—the handwriting was by now unmistakable—had recorded essential information on each page: dates, locations, names.

When had she assembled the album, I wondered, and why hadn’t she given it to Mr. Moss, who’d been entrusted with the rest of her family photographs? Why had these photographs been left behind, page after page of them, hidden away in the cylinder desk?

The pictures were older than the album. As I turned the pages, I became more and more convinced that Miss Beacham had culled photographs from other sources and brought them together in one place to tell a story that held a special meaning for her.

It was the story of Lizzie and Kenny.

Lizzie Beacham had been ten years old when Kenny was born. The first picture—a black-and-white snapshot dated July 21, 1960—showed the dark-haired older sister gazing adoringly at the baby brother cradled in her arms. I stared at the date in wonder and realized that I’d gotten one more thing wrong about Miss Beacham. I’d thought her an old woman, but she’d scarcely reached her midfifties by the time she died. Her brother, to whom the album seemed to be dedicated, would be in his midforties.

The album’s images reflected every facet of Kenny Beacham’s early life. His first picnic, his first Christmas, his first day at school were duly recorded, and his chubby face peered out from behind a succession of birthday cakes. When Lizzie appeared with her brother, her eyes were always on him, never on the camera, and she was always smiling indulgently—the delight she took in him never seemed to wane.