“Why don’t you try asking her again?”
“You mean just… ask?” With a self-conscious glance at Bill, I opened the journal once more. “Uh, hello?” I said. “Dimity? Are you there?” I touched Bill’s arm as a new sentence appeared on the page.
Yes, of course, my dear.
“Good,” I said, “because I want to ask you about what you said before, about needing to be—”
Do you like the cottage?
“Like it? I love it, Dimity. Derek did a fantastic job.”
There are few craftsmen as gifted as Derek. I was fortunate to find him. Have you see the back garden yet?
“Only from the deck.”
Oh, but it’s no good gazing down on a garden. You must stroll through it in order to see it properly.
“I’ll do that,” I promised, “as soon as it stops pouring. But, to get back to what I was saying before, could you explain what you meant when you said—”
It’s nothing for you to concern yourself with, Lori.
“But I am concerned, Dimity. I mean, it’s great to have a chance to talk with you like this, but—”
There’s nothing you can do, you see. I want you to enjoy your time here. I want you to read the correspondence.
“I will, Dimity, as soon as—”
You must read the letters. Read them carefully. But please, take the time to make a batch of cookies for young Bill. You could find no better way to make amends. Oh, dear, it seems I must go now. Once more, Lori, I welcome you with all my heart.
I tried a few more questions, but when nothing else appeared, I closed the journal and leaned on the arm of the chair, lost in thought.
“She’s stonewalling,” I murmured. “She’s what?”
“She’s shutting me out, just like she shut out my mother.”
“What has this got to do with your mother?”
I handed the journal to Bill and got to my feet. “You stay right here,” I said. “I have something to show you.”
*
“…So Dimity bottled something up all these years and now it’s blocking her way to heaven?” Bill took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “The things they don’t teach you in law school…”
He was sitting at the desk in the study, with the manuscript, the topographic map, the letters from Dimity and my mother, the tattered old photograph, and the journal arrayed before him. Reginald sat beside the journal, watching the proceedings with an air of benign detachment, while I paced the room, filled with nervous energy. I stopped at the desk and pointed to the photograph.
“And it must have happened here, in this clearing. The photograph reminded Dimity of it and that’s why she keeled over. That’s my working hypothesis, anyway. There’s this, too.” I pulled the locket from the neck of my sweater and showed it to Bill. “I found it upstairs this morning, in a box marked with the letter W—for Westwood. It’s empty. See? No pictures. Where are they, Bill?”
“Maybe she never put any pictures in it.”
“Not just these pictures.” I perched on the edge of the desk. “Don’t you remember? My mom said Dimity was looking at photo albums when the neighbors found her. I snooped around while you were in here reading the letters and—” I hopped off the desk. “Come upstairs and see what I found.”
Bill put on his glasses and followed me up to the master bedroom. I moved Meg’s blanket from the old wooden chest to the bed, then opened the lid of the chest. A row of photo albums bound in brown leather had been packed inside it, their spines facing upward. Like the archive boxes in the study, they had been labeled with dates.
“Neat little ducks, all in a row,” I said, then pointed to a gap in the sequence. “Except that one has flown the coop, the one covering the years just before Dimity met my mom.” I let the lid fall back into place. “So what did she do with it? And don’t try to tell me that she stopped taking pictures all of a sudden, because—”
“Wait, Lori, back up a step.” Bill sat on the chest. “What do you think happened in that clearing? What could be so terrible that it would follow Dimity into the afterlife? Are we talking about murder? Suicide? Are we going to find a body buried under that tree?”
“Don’t say things like that,” I said, suppressing a shudder.
“You’ve been thinking them, haven’t you? I don’t mean to sound ghoulish, but it has to have been something fairly drastic to cause Dimity this much grief. If we’re going to go digging into the past, we should be prepared to uncover some unpleasant things.”
“But… murder?” I shook my head. “No. I can’t believe that. It’s got to be something else—and don’t ask me what, because I don’t know. I’m going to call the Harrises again.” I started for the telephone on the bedside table, but Bill blocked my way.
“You’ve already left four messages on their machine,” he reminded me.