“Forming a new partnership? But Nell, that’s ...” Entirely possible, I finished silently. Bill had been elbowing his father to the sidelines for months now. What if he’d finally succeeded in elbowing him out of Boston altogether? Willis, Sr., had made no secret of his desire to establish a European base for Willis & Willis, but Bill hadn’t taken him seriously.
Perhaps Cousin Gerald had. Gerald was out of a job at the moment, and any lawyer in his right mind—let alone one who was currently unemployed—would jump at the chance to work with my experienced and extremely well-connected father-in-law.
“But why Gerald?” I said aloud. “Why not his respectable cousins? Can you picture William hooking up with a womanizing embezzler?”
“No,” said Nell, “but William might not know about Gerald’s reputation. He didn’t ask Miss Kingsley.”
“Well, that’s the first thing he’s going to hear about from me,” I said, pressing down on the accelerator.
No wonder Aunt Dimity had sounded the alarm. The idea of Willis, Sr., discussing business with a black sheep like Gerald was bad enough, but the thought of him putting the entire Atlantic Ocean between us was far worse. My own father had died before I’d learned to walk, so Willis, Sr., was, in all the ways that counted, the only father I’d ever known. I would do everything I could to keep from losing him.
The Willis mansion without Willis, Sr., would be a much colder and lonelier place to live.
The closest thing to a hotel in Finch was the upstairs back room in Mr. and Mrs. Peacock’s pub. A handful of tourists had stayed there over the years, but few had returned, put off, perhaps, by the fact that the Peacocks had changed nothing in the room—not even the sheets and pillow cases—since Martin, their army-bound son, had vacated it some twenty years ago.
Haslemere, Derek had assured me, offered a much wider range of accommodation. It wasn’t a touristy place—not a chain hotel in sight—but its wooded hills and open patches of heath had drawn a steady stream of city-worn Londoners since the coming of the railway in 1859, and the town catered to their needs with a goodly number of small hotels, B&Bs, and guest houses.
In the end, my choice of lodgings was based on pure panic. After four weary hours of highway driving, we found ourselves in Haslemere at last and moving rapidly toward the top of the High Street, where five roads converged in what looked to me to be a life-threatening maelstrom of traffic. When the Georgian Hotel loomed on my right, with its name spelled out in graceful gold letters on a creamy Queen Anne front, I bailed out.
Panic paid off. The Georgian was a comfortable hotel a stone’s throw from the center of town, with a spacious bar lounge that opened onto a walled garden. The staff seemed friendly, too. Miss Coombs, the red-haired, freckle-faced young receptionist, welcomed us at the front door and escorted us into her sunny office, where we signed in for an overnight stay.
I registered under my own name—Lori Shepherd—rather than my husband‘s, in part to avoid drawing attention to a possible connection between myself and Gerald Willis, but mainly because it was still my legal name.
Nell registered under the name of Nicolette Gascon. I had no idea why, or what it portended, but she announced her new identity with such self-assurance that I decided to ask questions later rather than risk an argument in front of the amiable, but no doubt observant, Miss Coombs. As soon as we’d finished the paperwork, Nell went up to our room, with a heavily laden porter in tow, to call her parents and let them know we’d survived our ordeal by tire.
I stayed behind to ask Miss Coombs for directions to Gerald Willis’s house. The address Miss Kingsley had provided was, as were so many addresses in England, useful only to those already familiar with the area. “The Larches, Midhurst Road,” didn’t appear in Nell’s road atlas, but I thought it might mean something to the receptionist at a local hotel.
It did.
7.
“The—the Larches?” Miss Coombs’s freckled face turned as pink as one of Emma’s prizewinning peonies. “You’re going to see Ger—Mr. Willis?”
“That’s right,” I replied. “Do you know him?”
Miss Coombs nodded and her cheeks grew even brighter. “That is to say, he stops by once or twice a week for a drink in the lounge. He came in yesterday, in fact, to use my telephone”—her hand drifted over our registration cards to touch the instrument on her desk—“since his own wasn’t working.”
“So I discovered.” I smiled cordially, but couldn’t help staring at the young woman’s fingers as she caressed the receiver.