“I’m worried about someone much scarier.”
I spread the crumpled sheet of paper on the countertop, smoothed it fl at with the edge of my hand, and took it with me as I headed for the study. I hadn’t lied to my husband, I told myself. I would go through my Guy Fawkes Day notes—tomorrow. I had something far more important to do tonight.
I needed to speak with Aunt Dimity.
Four
I frequently poured my troubles into Aunt Dimity’s willing ears, which might strike some people as odd, since I’d
never actually seen Aunt Dimity’s ears—or her nose or her knees or any other part of her anatomy. Although she was always around when I needed her, Aunt Dimity wasn’t, in the strictest sense of the term, alive. She wasn’t even my aunt.
Aunt Dimity was an Englishwoman named Dimity Westwood.
She and my late mother had met in London while serving their respective countries during the Second World War. When the war ended and my mother returned to the States, the two friends kept in touch by sending hundreds of letters back and forth over the Atlantic. Although they never saw each other again, their friendship became stronger and more vibrant after the war than it had been while they were dodging doodlebugs in London.
My mother’s postwar life hadn’t been an easy one. After my father’s early death, she’d raised me on her own while working full-time as an underpaid, overburdened teacher. There must have been days when she longed to run away with the circus, but she never let me know about them. Whenever she got fed up with her pinched paycheck, her crowded classroom, and/or her rambunctious daughter, she turned to Dimity.
The letters my mother exchanged with her old friend became a refuge for her, a private place where she could go to regain her sense of humor and enjoy a moment’s peace. She kept her refuge a closely guarded secret, even from her only child. When I was growing up, I knew Dimity Westwood only as Aunt Dimity, the redoubtable heroine of a series of bedtime stories invented by my Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter
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mother. I didn’t know that Aunt Dimity was a real person until after both she and my mother had died.
It was then that Dimity Westwood bequeathed to me a comfortable fortune, the honey-colored cottage in which she’d grown up, the hoard of letters she and my mother had written to each other, and a remarkable journal bound in dark blue leather.
It was through the blue journal that I came to know Dimity Westwood. Whenever I spoke to its blank pages, her handwriting would appear, an old-fashioned copperplate taught in the village school at a time when fine penmanship was still awarded prizes. Miss Archer would have called for a psychiatrist if I’d told her I could communicate with the dead, but I would never have dreamed of telling her.
Aunt Dimity was my refuge, my closely guarded secret. Apart from myself, only three people—Bill, Emma, and Kit—knew about the blue journal.
I had no idea how Aunt Dimity managed to bridge the gap between here and the hereafter, and she wasn’t too clear about it either, but I didn’t need a technical explanation. The important bit, the only bit that mattered to me, was that she was as good a friend to me as she’d been to my mother.
I entered the study quietly, closed the door behind me, and switched on the mantelshelf lights. The book-lined room was unusually tidy, considering that Bill had spent the day working there.
His laptop and his briefcase were stacked on the old oak desk that faced the ivy-covered, diamond-paned window, and the fire in the hearth had been neatly banked.
Before I reached for the blue journal, I placed a log atop the glowing embers in the hearth and stirred them with the poker until the fire was crackling again. I also paused to say hello to another friend, a much-loved companion who spent most of his time perched in a special niche on the study’s bookshelves.
Reginald was a small, powder-pink fl annel rabbit who’d been at
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my side almost from the moment of my birth. I’d started confiding in him as soon as I’d learned to talk, and I’d never found a good reason to stop. Although I was now in my midthirties, I still regarded Reginald as my oldest and most trusted confidant. It would have been unthinkably rude of me to enter the study without saying hello to him.
“Hey, Reg,” I said, touching the faded grape-juice stain on his snout. “Seen any vampires lately?”
Reginald’s hand-sewn whiskers seemed to quiver in the firelight, but his black button eyes remained neutral. He was clearly unwilling to commit himself until he’d heard more.