Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil (Aunt Dimity Mystery)
Read Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil (Aunt Dimity Mystery) Online
Authors: Nancy Atherton
Praise for Nancy Atherton and the Aunt Dimity Series
Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil
Filled with “irresistible flair and charm.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A zippy update of the old-fashioned puzzler.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Aunt Dimity’s Christmas
“Here is a rarity: a book with a Christmas theme that is an engagingly well-written literary work.”
—Rocky Mountain News
Aunt Dimity Digs In
“The coziest cozy of them all.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Aunt Dimity’s Good Deed
“Atherton has a whimsical, fast-paced, well-plotted style that makes this book a romantic and graceful romp.”
—Houston Chronicle
Aunt Dimity and the Duke
“Nancy Atherton is the most refreshingly optimistic new storyteller to grace the shelves in years…charming!”
—Murder Ink
Aunt Dimity’s Death
“A book I thoroughly enjoyed in the reading and which leaves me richer for having met charming people with the courage to care; and in places we all visit, at least in dreams.”
—Anne Perry
A PENGUIN MYSTERY
AUNT DIMITY BEATS THE DEVIL
Nancy Atherton is the author of six other Aunt Dimity novels:
Aunt Dimity’s Death
,
Aunt Dimity and the Duke
,
Aunt Dimity’s Good Deed
,
Aunt Dimity Digs In
,
Aunt Dimity’s Christmas
, and most recently
Aunt Dimity: Detective
. She lives next door to a cornfield in central Illinois.
Aunt Dimity
Beats the Devil
N A N C Y A T H E R T O N
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., 2000
Published in Penguin Books 2001
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Nancy T. Atherton, 2000
All rights reserved
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED
THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Atherton, Nancy.
Aunt Dimity beats the devil/Nancy Atherton.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-54963-6
1. Dimity, Aunt (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—England—Cornwall (County)—Fiction. 3. Cornwall (England: County)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3551.T426 A934 2000
813’.54—dc21 00–034965
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Perpetua • Designed by Lorelle Graffeo
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
FOR E. TERRANCE ATHERTON SOLDIER, BROTHER, FRIEND
CHAPTER
I
t was a dark and stormy afternoon on the high moors of Northumberland. A cold October rain battered the Range Rover’s roof and the fog was as thick as porridge. I hoped my hosts at Wyrdhurst Hall would hold high tea for me, because it looked as though I might be a bit late.
Thanks to the murky weather, I’d almost certainly missed the turnoff for Wyrdhurst’s gated drive. To judge by the Rover’s lurching progress, I’d somehow left the paved road altogether and veered onto a narrow, muddy track that seemed to be climbing straight into the clouds.
I could do nothing but climb with it. The moorland rose steeply to my right and fell sharply to my left. There was no place to turn around and I had no intention of backing down a road I could barely see.
I had even less intention of using my handy cell phone to
inform my husband of the vehicular pickle I’d gotten myself into. Bill had already expressed grave reservations about my ability to drive without incident from our home in the Cotswolds to a remote location near the Scottish border. If I called to tell him where I was—or more precisely, where I wasn’t—he wouldn’t say “I told you so,” but he’d think it loudly enough for me to hear.
Apart from that, there was nothing Bill could do to help, short of sending a Hercules helicopter to airlift me to safety, and I couldn’t imagine even the most intrepid chopper pilot volunteering to fly in such wretched weather.
The only phone call I was tempted to make was a transatlantic one to Boston, to pour my frustration into the ear of Dr. Stanford J. Finderman, my former boss. The farther I climbed, the more willing I was to blame Stan for every splash of rain that blurred my windshield. After all, the trip had been his idea. I ground my teeth as I recalled the way in which he’d goaded me into driving to a distant corner of northeastern England in the monsoon month of October.
“Shepherd! How the hell are ya?” Stan was the curator of my alma mater’s rare-book collection, but his colorful language owed more to a stint in the navy than to his years in the rarefied world of rare books. “You remember Dickie Byrd?”
I shook the cobwebs from my professional memory and came up with: Richard Fleetwood Byrd; head of a thriving family firm based in northern England; a hardnosed, irascible rascal with a soft spot for illuminated manuscripts. I hadn’t laid eyes on him for the past eight years, but I doubted that he’d changed much since then.
“The scrap-iron king of Newcastle?” I sat at the desk in the study, where I’d taken the call. “Sure, I remember him. What’s up with Dickie?”
“His niece Nicole just got married,” Stan informed me. “Goes by the name Nicole Hollander now. Hubby’s called Jared.”
“You want me to drop off a wedding present?” I asked.
“Just listen up, will ya?” Stan replied testily. “Dickie’s Nicole’s legal guardian and she’s the apple of his eye. Little Nickie wanted a country house for a wedding present, so Dickie let her choose one of the family estates. She chose a big old Victorian heap way the hell up in Northumberland. It’s called Wyrdhurst Hall.”
“Weird hearse?”
I echoed, grimacing. “Creepy name for a wedding present.”
“Dust off your Old English dictionary, Shepherd. It’s spelled W-Y-R-D-H-U-R-S-T. Means ‘watch-place on the wooded hill.’ Dickie’s grandpa built it. Came complete with its own library—more than a thousand books, Dickie tells me.”
“Now,
that’s
a nice wedding present,” I observed.
