“If there are,” Emma commented dryly, “then I’m willing to bet Aunt Dimity’s rewriting them.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but shut it again without saying a word. Emma had a point. Nothing about my relationship with Aunt Dimity had ever been remotely conventional. For starters, we weren’t related by blood or marriage but by a bond of friendship. Dimity Westwood had been my mother’s closest friend. They’d met in London during the war and kept up a flourishing correspondence long after my mother had returned to the States. When I was born, Dimity became my honorary aunt, and when my father died shortly thereafter, she did what she could to help my mother bear the twin burdens of a broken heart and a bawling baby.
Dimity was always helping someone. She worked with war widows and orphans and parlayed a small inheritance into a considerable fortune, which she used to found the Westwood Trust, a philanthropic enterprise that was still going strong. Dimity had made a name for herself in the financial markets at a time when women didn’t do that sort of thing, and although she’d made enough money to kick back and swig champagne with the smart set, she’d chosen instead to live a reclusive life, going quietly about the business of doing good.
Dimity Westwood hadn’t been a conventional woman, aunt, or millionaire, so why should she have a conventional afterlife? She’d already exploded the myth that hauntings had to be spooky. No moaning in the chimney for her, no materializing in an eerie green haze or rattling chains in the dead of night. When Aunt Dimity wanted to communicate with me across the Great Divide, her messages appeared on the pages of the blue journal, an unobtrusive little book bound in dark-blue leather.
I still took the blue journal down from its shelf in the study every time I arrived at the cottage, still hoped to see Aunt Dimity’s fine copperplate curl and loop across the page, but my hopes had begun to fade. I’d told myself that it was foolish to expect to hear from Aunt Dimity again, because the problems that had bound her spirit to the cottage had been solved—or so I’d thought.
Why would she return now? What kind of “new business” would induce her to go anywhere with Willis, Sr.? Was he in some sort of trouble? What kind of trouble could a respectable, sixty-five-year-old attorney get into, sitting quietly in an armchair, reading a book?
I’d asked myself so many questions that I felt a little dizzy. I didn’t know what to expect. But the first thing I noticed when we turned into my drive was that Willis, Sr.’s car was missing.
3.
I kept two cars in England: a secondhand black Morris Mini for my own use, and a shiny silver-gray Mercedes for my guests. When I was away, I garaged both cars in Finch with Mr. Barlow, the retired mechanic who’d come to depend on the income he earned banging out the dents and retouching the scratches I tended to accumulate whenever I drove in England. Mr. Barlow had ferried both cars from Finch to my graveled drive that morning, but only the Mini was there now.
“William’s car is gone,” Emma noted, pulling in beside the black Mini and shutting off her engine.
“Maybe he’s driven to Bath to see the bookseller Stan told him about.” A devoted armchair traveler, my father-in-law had assembled a splendid collection of books on Arctic exploration. He was always on the lookout for new finds, so he might very well have taken my old boss’s advice and gone to see a man in Bath about a book.
Emma maintained a wait-and-see attitude, but I got out of the car and walked back along the driveway to the edge of the road, studying the tire marks in the gravel. Each set curved out of the driveway in the direction of Finch except one, which turned in the opposite direction.
“See that?” I said triumphantly, pointing to the gravel. “William turned south, in the direction of Bath. I’m sure that’s where he is.”
“Uh-huh,” Emma replied noncommittally.
Apart from the missing car, the cottage looked as it had when I’d left it earlier that morning. The stone walls were the color of sunlight on honey, the slate roof was a patchwork of lichen and moss, and a cascade of roses framed the weathered front door. Even in winter’s thin gray light, with the rosebushes bare and a dusting of snow on the rooftop, the cottage looked warm and inviting. Now, in early August, with the mosses baked golden by the high summer sun, and the scent of new-mown hay from a neighboring field lingering sweetly in the air, Aunt Dimity’s cottage was, to my eyes, the prettiest place on earth.