Wicked Autumn (17 page)

“You’ve never met her?”

“No. Perhaps she’ll come with him to the … the…”

“Yes,” Max said. “Perhaps she will.”

The Major picked up a letter lying on one of the little tables in the room.

“This is from him. About a month old. Before…”

Max took the letter and envelope, which bore an Italian stamp and postmark. The letter was conventional in its phrasing, thanking his father for some money he’d apparently wired to his son.

Unsure how to act, scriptless for this kind of personal loss, the impulses flitted across the Major’s face now like images on a faltering television screen. Finally, as something of the finality of the situation seemed to penetrate his understanding, he suddenly gave way to wracking sobs. This display came to Max, who had been expecting a militarized version of the British stiff upper lip, as a relief. Grief was normal. Energy expended in buttoning it up was not. His face folded into an expression of compassion, Max comforted the man as best he could, giving him several resounding thumps between his shoulder blades, the standard macho expression of heartfelt sympathy. “There, there,” he said. “I’m so frightfully sorry this has happened to you.” Max knew instinctively that his human impulse to take the Major into his arms like a child would have been a gesture too much for the man to bear. When the Major’s sobs began to subside, Max said, “We’ll figure this out. Don’t you worry.”

He wasn’t himself entirely sure what he meant by that. Figure out this grief? Figure out who killed her? Or wasn’t it all part of the same process—of putting the horror of loss to rest?

Max didn’t feel this was an act, unless the Major was far more cunning and duplicitous—not to say intelligent—than he had ever credited him with being before. It was clear to Max that the man had adored his wife—the contrast with her general loathedness in the village was a conundrum.

Grief was a curious thing that had no rules. Sometimes, as Max knew, it sent you into a tailspin. When you awoke, you might find yourself halfway around the world.

*   *   *

Coming out of Morning Glory Cottage some time later, Max ran into Awena walking along St. Edwold’s Road. She told him she’d just come from giving a statement at the Bobby Pod, and as if reading his mind, informed him, “I told them it was bollocks to suspect the Major. He’d never have done away with her in such a sneaky way. Doesn’t have the brains for it. A cosh to the head in anger, maybe. But the fact is, he adored her. Thousands didn’t, but he really did, the poor old bugger. Oh, sorry, Vicar. Pardon my French, if you will.”

She bustled off in a swirl of opulently embroidered fabric. Watching her departing back, he realized the sturdy set of her shoulders reminded him of no one so much as Wanda herself. Another woman, albeit of a much different type, who would brook no interference.

He was recalled to his current mission, to find out what he could about the events surrounding the demise of the woman who would brook no interference. The woman, he thought, who liked to stir hornets’ nests. Until someone stopped her.

Where to start? It seemed to Max that a return to the setting of the Harvest Fayre would be in order. Surely whatever had prompted someone to kill Wanda, the site of the Abbey Ruins was where it had all started—sadly, at the scene of what was meant to be one of her greatest triumphs.

CHAPTER 17

At Home

The death of Wanda Batton-Smythe affected everyone in the village, some more than others. Lily Iverson, expecting to feel something like relief, found her life surprisingly unchanged. There was always
something
to worry about, after all. Wanda was just one less thing.

Lily lived just outside the village proper in a farmhouse she’d inherited from her uncle—an old farmhouse fallen into disrepair that she had proceeded, in nearly miraculous fashion, to rescue from ruin. The ground floor, where she sat watching the news, was really one large room, with a kitchen occupying one end; at the other end she’d marked out a large living area with a colorful rug, a sectional sofa, a large square coffee table, and a refectory table she used as both dining table and desk.

A typical man of his generation, Lily’s uncle had taken one look at her knobby-kneed, wiry-haired self, aged twelve, and privately predicted she would never marry unless a female-targeting plague killed off every other woman on the planet. Untypically for a man of his generation, he felt no contempt for a woman of single status, and set out to ensure she would at least have a roof over her head for her lifetime. That the roof in question leaked sporadically did not detract from the kind intent behind the bequest.

Lily gradually had turned the ramshackle farmhouse into something resembling a cozy and welcoming home—in the hours not filled to capacity by her burgeoning business. She had paved the narrow dirt track leading to the building, replaced mean little windows with larger ones to allow the sun to spill onto the old wooden floorboards, and generally applied a coat of paint to everything until the whole place shone like a showcase.

Upstairs were two bedrooms, one holding Lily’s double but virginal bed, headed by a brass Victorian bedstead purchased from Noah’s Ark; the other held a double walnut bed for guests that never arrived. (Lily’s uncle, long a widower, had been her last living relative, and she had few ties to her old life in London.) Both beds were covered in knitted bedclothes of colorful and wondrous design, and appliquéd with flowers and animals, starbursts and sunbursts. Between the rooms, down a narrow hallway, Lily had had installed a bathroom gleaming with modern fittings. When she had arrived, the only convenience had been an outhouse, the only source of water an old hand pump at the kitchen’s stone sink.

Between the kitchen and living area on the ground floor, where Lily spent much of her days, were an old spinning wheel and a loom she had found in the attic—objects that had once belonged to her aunt. Necessity being the mother of discovery (for Lily had been underemployed most of her life, and even living rent-free she needed spending money), in playing around with the equipment, Lily had come to realize that her real talent was to take wool and make from it uniquely beautiful creations in a riot of design and frill and color. Originally she had begun by purchasing wool from a neighbor’s farm, spinning and dying the wool herself. Then she became particular about which sheep the wool came from, ascribing to the lambs as they grew different personalities and traits, and from there it had been a short step to buying the sheep themselves—complete artistic control.

She began labeling every new sweater design with a sheep’s name. The Dolly model was so popular, especially in lavender, she could barely keep it in stock.

A boutique in Nether Monkslip had begun carrying her work; now Lily’s creations and the licenses to reproduce them were much in demand: clothing and home furnishing boutiques in London, Paris, and Milan carried her designs. She also sold a great many to select customers over the Internet. More than enough to have moved into one of the fine Georgian houses in the village, for on occasion Lily felt her isolation keenly, but then where would she keep the sheep? And she was already looking into raising goats, too.

It was her isolation behind a gnarl of hedgerows that made her membership in the Women’s Institute so important to her. Dolly and Co. were her friends but sometimes one needed human contact. And the threat that Wanda posed, all unawares, by her sheer awfulness was a threat that the timid, such as Lily, felt keenly.

But apart from that isolation, Lily was happy—for Lily. The care and feeding of the sheep was ridiculously satisfying, probably because they made so few demands and were unconditionally glad to see her. She even liked the smell of the well-ventilated barn, which she kept so spotless, and filled with sweet-smelling hay and straw bedding, that it was hard to believe farm animals were anywhere nearby. She had the outlet for creativity in her design work, the work itself, and the reward of running a successful business—these things, most days, were enough. She tried not to remember or dwell on the other days.

For Lily had always been an anxious, highly strung personality, her mind like a channel tuned permanently to the emergency frequency. For many years she had been nearly anorexic, not because she feared gaining weight, but because she feared food. Everything was potentially contaminating, everything a potential health threat. If she couldn’t boil it herself, she didn’t eat it. Since her inheritance of the farmhouse, with its promise of fundamental security, however, many of these symptoms—as her uncle had hoped—had gone into remission.

But she remained the type of precise, neatly hemmed woman who would run her recyclable tins and bottles through the dishwasher before throwing them away. Turning off the telly and taking her empty plate and glass into the kitchen, she started to do this now, having emptied a container of mushy peas in preparing her meal. Then, catching herself (for she had sworn to try to loosen up, just a bit), she decided, just this once, to go wild. In a what-the-fuck gesture, she merely rinsed the tin in hot water for several minutes before tossing it into the recycle bin.

Half an hour later, she came back, retrieved the tin, and put it in the dishwasher.

*   *   *

Suzanna Winship was in her bedroom at her brother’s house, touching up her French manicure while planning what to cook for their dinner. She and her brother had quickly fallen into stereotypical, sexually assigned household roles, but Suzanna didn’t mind. Bruce was providing her a refuge—rent-free—while she sorted through the worst financial debris of going through a divorce. (There didn’t seem to be a lot of emotional debris: her ex had been a faithless jerk and that was that as far as Suzanna was concerned.) If her presence in Nether Monkslip meant her brother got three square meals a day and unobtrusive, mildly entertaining company, she considered it a fair trade. She had begun helping him keep the books of his practice balanced, as well: being a doctor was 90 percent paperwork these days, it seemed.

What she was going to do in the future wasn’t certain, but for now, this life suited her perfectly well—except for occasional tiny glimmers of boredom in the late afternoons. What a pity the Vicar didn’t seem to be taking the bait.

It really was too bad, she thought, how Wanda had taken over the show at the Women’s Institute. Of course, all that had changed now. And not a moment too soon, in Suzanna’s estimation.

Suzanna had a wide competitive streak that had served her well in the thrust and parry of London life. While overall she was finding Nether Monkslip a blessed relief, she also had a vague sense of something missing, of mental muscles gone too long unused. The WI was chicken feed, of course, but it was what was available. Suzanna had enough self-awareness to realize that she didn’t care much of a toss about the WI; the real fun would be in seizing the reins now that Wanda had been sent to her reward. In a way, she was sorry to have been cheated of seeing the look of outrage as Wanda was toppled from her throne at last.

It was petty.

It was small of her.

It was the reality of life in town and village, Suzanna reminded herself. Hard cheese if you don’t like it, as her mother might have said. Suzanna stood, straightening her long, lithesome figure and throwing back her stretched-and-aerobicized shoulders. She had the carriage of someone trained to the stage, and she tended to make an entrance rather than simply walk into a room like a normal human being. It was a training that came more from knowing that every male eye followed her every move than from time spent trodding the boards, although she had done a fair amount of that in her college days.

Today she wore a short black wool skirt with a crisp white shirt. Around her neck was a frilly gray scarf of gossamer-like wool—one of Lily’s creations. It was decorated at the ends with clusters of tiny cockle shells that rattled gently as they shifted across the vast expanse of Suzanna’s chest. Silver ballet slippers that she wore at home were on her feet, replacing the spike heels on which she normally—some would say miraculously—teetered down Nether Monkslips’s cobblestone streets.

Some hours later, after a gourmet dinner of chicken and wild rice, Suzanna sat quietly with Bruce by the fire, but she tossed aside her book (a racier-than-usual biography of the libidinous Catherine the Great and her horse) after reading a few chapters.

Like Catherine, she was a woman of many and diverse talents, and they were going to waste here in the village.

She wondered if it were too soon to put the cat among the pigeons.

CHAPTER 18

The Antiquarian

Noah Caraway lived in a house that was a romantic’s dream of what a house should be. Abbot’s Lodge began as part of a Benedictine monastery before the buildings and the land they stood on, which included a lake and parkland, were appropriated by Henry VIII. Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, only the Abbot’s Lodge remained intact. Promptly forgetting the noble purpose supposedly behind these seizures, Henry handed the property over as payment to his courtiers, who themselves cashed in by selling it on. Neglect finished what greed and vandalism could not accomplish, and, apart from the Lodge, only the skeletons of these remarkable architectural achievements remained. Noah had been heard to say it was not unlike the job the Taliban had done on the ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan.

Max, walking across the fields toward Abbot’s Lodge, reflected that the complex of medieval and sixteenth-century buildings had almost certainly been built on the site of an even older religious tradition, as were most abbeys and monasteries throughout England—a fact of which Awena Owen of Goddessspell never tired of reminding him. It was true: the sixth-century St. Augustine and his monks had had an immeasurable and lasting impact on the beliefs and the very appearance of the country. Abbot’s Lodge reflected their success, with the Lodge now restored to much of its original glory.

It helped, as was always the case when indulging romantic architectural fantasies, that Noah seemed to have endless supplies of money. Noah’s Ark Antiques of Nether Monkslip was viewed by many as a front, a rich man’s hobby, and Noah himself merely a dilettante, for the shop was closed more often than it was open. The “Open by Appointment” sign on the door was felt by many to be disingenuous, at best, as the telephone number to which the visitor was referred generally went unanswered. It was widely regarded also as a tax fiddle, although no one could quite say how the fiddle benefited Noah—other than the fact that he could indulge his love of beautiful things, unrestricted, with room to store the overflow from his own house.