How to Murder the Man of Your Dreams (15 page)

“Because you and Ben were married there?”

“Because of the Virgin Bride, and the wedding that didn’t take place some sixty years ago. The story is that the groom forgot to show up or was unavoidably detained. And his lovelorn lady went off her rocker as a result. She’s still alive, in her eighties, and has been spotted on numerous occasions after dusk. Only the other night Gerta saw her keeping her doleful vigil.”

Setting a saucepan of Gerta’s stew down on the Aga, I hoped I had convinced Vanessa that the Virgin Bride’s bitter unhappiness was bound to have permeated every inch of St. Anselm’s Church and cursed the once-hallowed ground on which it stood. Meaning my cousin would rather die than be married within two hundred miles of the site lest she meet with some awful fate in the years to come—my eyes went to the cappuccino machine—such as receiving a coffeepot from George on her birthday.

“You’ve just proved the point of what I was saying earlier,” Vanessa said without a tremble in her voice. “It’s a thousand times easier to remain madly in love, even into one’s dotage, with a man who fails to show up at the altar than it is to experience enduring passion for a husband with whom one lives alongside year in and year out in various stages of physical and emotional disintegration. Thanks for the warning, darling Ellie, but I think I’ll ring up the vicar this afternoon and discuss suitable dates for my wedding to George Malloy.”

Was there no escape from the grisly prospect of being
saddled with the job of attending Vanessa at every fitting for her bridal gown, and having to watch the dressmaker swallow a mouthful of pins upon realizing she was beholding the stuff of legends? An eighteen-inch waist. It did cross my mind to tell my cousin that Eudora Spike was in the midst of a crisis in her own marriage and might not be in the mood to talk with any great enthusiasm about the blessed state of matrimony. But as I vigorously stirred the stew to keep it from scorching on the bottom, I couldn’t bring myself to betray a single word of what I had discovered regarding Gladstone Spike’s impending sex-change operation. It would be bad enough when the time came for people like Vanessa to make vulgar jokes about his having a coming-out ball … now that he didn’t have the ones he received at birth.

“Ellie, you’re standing too close to the cooker, your face looks like it’s on fire,” my cousin kindly informed me. “Thank God, George understands that buttering a piece of toast is all the cooking I’m prepared to do when we are married. And how I wish Mummy would be happy that he’s got pots of money and would overlook the fact that he earned every penny without even the saving grace of a proper education.”

Knowing Aunt Astrid, a woman composed of whalebone corsets and an iron tongue, I had little hope of her ever having an egalitarian conversion and every fear she might even now be issuing a royal summons for a taxi, intent upon making a matriarchal raid on Merlin’s Court. Had I believed for a minute that Aunt A. would succeed in whisking Vanessa away to be deprogrammed by a pioneer in the field of class-defection disorders, I would have welcomed the old battle-axe with open arms. But I knew my cousin well enough to realize she would not be budged an inch were she truly hell-bent on marrying George Malloy.

Vanessa went out into the hall with the avowed intention of gazing soulfully at the staircase which one day soon she would descend in all her bridal glory. While preventing the twins from trotting after her, at the risk of missing their lunch, I reflected that it was typical of my cousin to have failed to wish me happy birthday. Admittedly she had a lot on her mind, but I knew that the date was engraved on her mind because it was the one on which she had first
appeared in
Beauty Magazine
. What did surprise me was that Mrs. Malloy had not rung me up to sing “Happy Birthday to You” in a voice guaranteed to make a songbird cringe. Was she in a snit because she had heard from George that her future daughter-in-law was at Merlin’s Court and the carriage had not been sent round to convey her here with all pomp and circumstance?

I felt guilty over this neglect as I got Abbey and Tam into their booster seats. And resentful in knowing that Vanessa was unlikely to lift a finger that afternoon to phone Mrs. Malloy. But I didn’t have time to wallow, because Gerta came in through the kitchen door, her salt-and-pepper plaits uncoiled in her haste and a carrier bag from Marks & Spencer in her hand.

“I am late, Frau Haskell?”

“No, you’re back at exactly the right moment,” I assured her. “I hope you had a successful shopping spree.”

“Yes! But I am careful in what I buy.” She took off her coat. “From now on, with no husband anywhere I look, I have to keep the werewolf from the door.”

“If you’ll give the twins their stew, and some fruit to follow, I’ll go and get ready for my meeting.” Handing her the serving spoon, I hurried upstairs and saw Vanessa flit into the bathroom in a silken drift of sea green. She would spend an hour making up her face, which didn’t require any improvement to be a work of art, while I needed to scrap everything I owned in the way of body parts and would have to make do with putting on my turquoise frock that looked as if it expected to be taken out to dinner and twisting my hair into a French pleat.

There was, through no one’s fault but my own, not a spare minute to pinch a little colour into my cheeks. But I did remember to put two notepads into my handbag. One for the Library League meeting, and the other to be used for recording measurements and creative inspirations when I went to look at the house Brigadier Lester-Smith had inherited.

The day was blue but decidedly chilly. Even so, I kept the car window down as I drove down Cliff Road and into the village. I was hoping that a good dose of fresh air would unclog my brain, thus enabling me to come up with some terrific idea for a fund-raising event that would enable
the league to commission a bronze statue worthy of the woman who had given her life to the Chitterton Fells library. I hadn’t thought of anything beyond the ubiquitous raffle when I parked the car—illegally—in the alley to the rear of the library.

I went in through the back door marked Employees Only, which entered onto the narrow hall with the toilet on one side and the stairs leading up to the reading room on the other. A glance at my watch as I took two steps at a time showed me I was one minute late.

“Sorry,” I panted to Brigadier Lester-Smith, who held the door open for me, “I hope I didn’t keep the coffee … I mean everyone waiting.”

They were all there. Gladstone Spike sat at the table with his knitting in his hands. The new bride, Sylvia Babcock, had every pin curl in place. Mrs, Dovedale handed around a plate of sponge cake. Mr. Poucher looked his usual disgruntled self. Sir Robert Pomeroy was saying “What! what!” in response to something someone had said, or just because he felt like it. And my friend Bunty Wiseman, the blond bombshell, looked wickedly sexy in earrings that were longer than her black leather miniskirt. She whipped over to me on heels that were almost as high as Mrs. Malloy’s, and dragged me into the room.

“Ellie, you have to help me convince some of these fuddy-duddies that my idea for a fund-raiser is
brilliant
beyond belief!” Bunty had grabbed hold of me and I was afraid to speak for fear she would hug me tighter and I would become impaled on one of her dangerously pointed breasts. “Maybe I’m dreaming the impossible dream but I have this feeling that if we asked nicely, he would come!”

“Who?” I gasped, looking around at the other members of the league in hopes of enlightenment.

“Karisma!” Bunty breathed triumphantly.

My fantasy life was on a collision course with reality! I didn’t know whether to burst into song, the way people do at the slightest provocation in musicals, or to tell Bunty she had another think coming if she imagined I would risk going into a lifelong trance as the result of being in the same room as Karisma. But surely I was getting all worked up over nothing! The king of the cover models must be booked from now until doomsday with public appearances. He undoubtedly had a business manager who monitored every invitation he received to breathe in public. And why would Karisma want to come to Chitterton Fells? We were charming enough in a chocolate-box sort of way, but so were hundreds of other villages.

No wonder my thoughts were in a whirl! Bunty was waltzing me in ever faster circles, as if we were Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. “You do think it’s a knock-dead idea?” she demanded, and released me with a final spin that sent me into Brigadier Lester-Smith’s arms. “When I saw Karisma interviewed on the telly yesterday morning, I decided I’d gladly go without sex for the rest of my wicked life in exchange”—orgasmic sigh—“for being able to touch the hem of that God-like man’s trousers!”

“Most intriguing.” Brigadier Lester-Smith let go of me before his blush finished burning a hole in my back.

“And then”—Bunty blew him a kiss—“you telephoned, Brigadier, and told me about how you thought it would be nice for the Library League to put up a statue of Miss Bunch, and really I’d have been a complete idiot
not
to have thought of Karisma as the perfect way to raise the lolly!” Her smile included the others, who were hovering around like extras in a movie, eager to be directed in their minuscule roles. “Is there anyone here who wouldn’t pay up like a shot for the once-in-a-lifetime chance of spending five seconds in Karisma’s heavenly arms?”

Gladstone Spike stopped knitting and looked thoughtful, but Sir Robert said, “Can’t say as I would, what! what! But I do see your point, my dear young lady. Even an old codger like me has heard about Karisma. The streets will be standing-room-only with panting women if we can bring the chap here to Chitterton Fells. M’daughter-in-law, Pamela, is always mooning on about him, as if she didn’t have a husband who, if he’s a chip off the old block”—Sir Robert gave a jocular laugh—“is quite the lady’s man.”

Mrs. Dovedale, whom I suspected of having a crush on the recently widowed baronet, twinkled at him. “The trouble is that I don’t see what on earth would make this young man, who’s riding a wave of amazing public adulation, agree to come to our little library.”

“I don’t rightly know why I come here.” Mr. Poucher, a man as grey and glum as a fog on the Yorkshire moors, gave a disgusted snort. “And I don’t know why we need to put up a statue of Old Bunch, Bloomin’ daft, that’s what I call it.”

Bunty ignored this. “I say Karisma will jump at the chance to help us out with our fund-raiser.” Her baby-blue eyes dancing, she placed her hands on her black leather hips and wiggled provocatively.

Gladstone Spike dropped a stitch. “Why?”

“Because, you dear little man”—Bunty stretched her pause into a sunbeam smile—“of the
library ghost
!”

Sylvia Babcock gave a nervous start as if the icy hand of Hector Rigglesworth had descended on her shoulder. “Oh, but do you think Karisma, who has fought all those duels and gone over white-water rapids on a banana skin, would believe in ghosts?”

“It would not make him less a man, Mrs. Babcock, if he were to concede the possibility of the impossible.” Brigadier Lester-Smith looked at me from under his gingery eyebrows; the healthy pink had faded from his cheeks. I knew he was remembering the two of us standing over Miss Bunch’s body, while something that might—or might not—have been the wind whooped with ghoulish glee at the library window. Yes, Brigadier! We both believed in the darkest corners of our minds that Miss Bunch had died of unnatural causes. I could not forget the book we had found lying on the floor beside her body. And, given the ominous significance of its title, could Lin all good conscience wish for Karisma, the embodiment of the Dream Lover, to set one manly foot within the Chitterton Fells library?

Mrs. Dovedale pulled out a chair and sat down at the long table next to Gladstone Spike, who was concentrating on picking up his dropped stitch. “I do think we have a drawing card. It’s a long shot, I’ll admit, but Karisma’s publicity people might just think it a bit of a lark to have him visit a library that was cursed one hundred years ago this month by the Man Who Hated Romantic Novels.”

“You really are giving me the shivers.” Sylvia Babcock looked ready to leap into Mr. Poucher’s arms, and he responded with a grunt that expressed what he thought of Mrs. Dovedale’s idea. I was about to say that it would be wrong to risk subjecting Karisma to the wrath of a ghost who clearly needed to talk to a psychiatrist about his irrational obsession, when Gladstone Spike put down his knitting.

“My dear friends.” He began, sounding rather like his wife speaking from the pulpit. His voice escalated to a high note that caused me to wonder if the hormones he was taking in preparation for his sex-change operation had suddenly kicked in. “Do we wish to pander to the primitive superstitions, to which even the most God-fearing are sometimes prey? It is my opinion”—he picked up his knitting again—“that inviting this man, lovely as I am sure he is, would be a grave mistake.”

“Tommyrot!” Sir Robert blew out his lips so that his moustache touched his nose, and thumped one fist on top of the other. “Don’t believe in ghosts! No one with a brain
between the ears could believe in such rubbishing nonsense. There’s always been talk of a ghost at Pomeroy Manor—goes by the name of the Wailing Woman, or the Woman in White, never could remember! Houses are supposed to be haunted. Gives them a bit of the old snob appeal. Same as a maze on the grounds, only better, because you don’t have all the ruddy upkeep. I say let’s milk the legend of Hector Rigglesworth for all its spectator—or, if you like,
specter
—value. We need to raise the money for the memorial, and this Karisma chap will get some very nice publicity.”