Mr. Holdstrom didn’t return to Finch for car maintenance alone. He came back to conduct vital research. Sally Pyne’s exceptional skills as a pastry chef had inspired him to write a feature article about her for an upcoming issue of Cozy Cookery magazine. He observed Sally in her kitchen, interviewed her suppliers, conversed with her customers, pigged out on her pastries, and promised to arrange a photo shoot, as Sally and her summer pudding were to grace the cover. When Sally asked him why he’d chosen such a commonplace confection over her more complex compositions, he’d replied simply: “It’s the summer issue.”
Opal Taylor would share Sally’s spotlight. Opal had worked for many years as a cook for a wealthy family in Gloucester. Since her retirement, she’d padded her modest pension by selling her homemade jams and marmalades through Peggy Taxman’s Emporium. When Peggy brought the jewel-like jars to Mr. Holdstrom’s attention, he agreed to highlight their contents in what the villagers had taken to calling “the tearoom issue” of Cozy Cookery. Opal, who’d always looked down on Sally Pyne as a mere baker, became the tearoom owner’s best friend overnight.
Like Sally, Opal was convinced that the wishing well had orchestrated her good fortune. I put it down to a combination of Peggy’s business acumen and Mr. Holdstrom’s fondness for jams and marmalades.
Millicent Scroggins’s good fortune owed nothing to Dabney Holdstrom. Her dental martyrdom ended the day after her visit to Ivy Cottage, and though she ascribed her swift recovery to the wishing well, I credited it to oil of cloves, ice packs, the healing power of nature, and the wonders of modern dentistry.
Nothing extraordinary happened to Selena Buxton or to Elspeth Binney, but their eyes remained bright with anticipation, as if they believed the well would grant their wishes as soon as it found the time.
A steady stream of villagers came to Ivy Cottage to pick up an empty casserole dish or to drop off a full one. Jack felt obliged to give each helpful neighbor a guided tour of his late uncle’s property and each found a reason to linger in the back garden.
Noises in the back garden roused Jack from his slumbers several nights in a row, but he wasn’t sure what had made them. It was always too dark to see what was going on from his bedroom window and by the time he went downstairs with a flashlight, there was nothing to see. He blamed a neighboring badger, but Bree and I blamed our neighbors, some of whom, we were certain, would prefer to keep their visits to the well under wraps.
No one but Sally, Opal, and Millicent would admit to making a wish, and even they spoke of it in hushed voices. When I reminded Mr. Barlow of our conversation about the Jaguar E-Type, he simply laughed and said it was a funny old world. Nearly everyone in the village discussed the well with an air of amused tolerance, yet nearly everyone visited it.
Aunt Dimity endorsed Bill’s opinion of the wishing well and she helped me to remain levelheaded by offering reasonable explanations for everything that happened in the wake of my wish for dry weather. Lilian Bunting looked upon the frenzy of well wishing as a passing fad and the vicar’s Sunday sermon reminded everyone to “put away childish things.”
I spent five of the six days toiling with Bree and Jack at Ivy Cottage. It took us two full days to trim the vines around the roof, the windows, the doors, the gutters, and the downspouts, and a further four to conduct what I thought was an excessively painstaking examination of its exterior walls. Following Jack’s lead, Bree and I lifted each fluttering leaf to search for damaged stonework, but we found none. The mortar was solid, the stones were unblemished, and Jack had no need of Derek Harris’s services.
Our minute examination of the cottage’s walls was undeniably tedious, but it was better than a gym workout for whipping me into shape. A stiff regimen of ladder climbing was exactly what I needed to strengthen my lungs as well as my legs. I wasn’t ready to sign up for a mountain bike race, but by the sixth day I could keep up with Bree, who’d begun riding her own bicycle to Ivy Cottage.
Bree continued to spar with Jack and he continued to absorb her verbal punches. My conversations with Jack were as interesting as they were informative. Though he’d spent most of his life in Australia, his work had taken him to New Zealand as well. I learned that he’d built wooden walkways to protect the fragile terrain in the Waipoua Kauri Forest, done trail maintenance work on the active Tongariro volcano, counted whales off the Kaikoura coast, and taken ice cores from the Fox Glacier. Whether by accident or design, Jack emphasized his familiarity with New Zealand whenever Bree was within earshot. I thought he was playing his cards brilliantly.
The Oxford lab gave the well a clean bill of health and Miranda Morrow returned to refill her bottles. I dropped Will and Rob off at Anscombe Manor for their riding lessons on Saturday, spent Sunday with them and Bill at Willis, Sr.’s, and regarded my neighbors’ shenanigans with silent amusement.