“How will you get home?” she asked.
“I’ll cadge a lift from Kit or Emma,” I said.
“Good,” said Annelise. “I’m going to do some shopping after I drop the boys off at Morningside, so I’ll stay in town until they’re ready to come home.”
“Have a good time,” I told her, and rang off.
62 Nancy Atherton
I slipped the cell phone into my pocket and finished drinking the tea. I’d just returned the insulated flask to Kit’s pack when he strode into the clearing, looking both pleased and rather ashamed of himself.
“I should never have doubted you or the twins, Lori,” he called as he crossed to the stone bench. “Someone has passed this way.
Come along—I’ve lots to show you.”
We donned our packs and headed into the woods, walking away from Anscombe Manor and toward the cleft between Emma’s Hill and the unnamed hill to the north, still following the level shelf we’d been following since we’d left the apple tree. We hadn’t gone far when I spotted a neon-orange plastic ribbon tied to a short length of stiff wire protruding from the ground beneath a fountain of damp brown bracken.
I pointed to the eye-catching ribbon. “Rendor didn’t leave a calling card for us to fi nd, did he?”
“It’s mine,” Kit informed me. “I always carry a pocketful of flags with me. I use them to mark protected species of wildflowers, so Emma can find and photograph them when she has the time. Fortunately, they work just as well for footprints.”
When we reached the neon-orange flag, Kit pushed the withered bracken aside to reveal the unmistakable print of a long, narrow, pointy-toed boot.
“The bracken kept the print from being washed away by the rain,” he explained. “You can still see where Rendor bent a few fronds in passing.”
I gave a low whistle. “So I was right. I did find a footprint back at the apple tree.”
“You certainly did. And it was made by the same boot that made the print you see here. The toe marks are identical.” Kit plucked the fl ag from the ground and put it in his pocket.
“Good idea,” I said. “If Rendor comes back this way, we don’t want him to know we’re trailing him.”
Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter
63
Kit glanced over his shoulder, toward the pet cemetery, then let his gaze roam up and down the hill, as if he were taking stock of the terrain.
“This is the route I’d take,” he said, “if I wanted to move quickly without being seen. It’s not an established trail, so I’d run little risk of meeting anyone. The footing’s not bad, and there’s plenty of cover. I’d be far less exposed here than I would be along the ridgeline.”
“So I was right about that, too,” I said happily. “Rendor was sneaking around in the woods.”
“He was certainly behaving in a suspicious manner,” Kit conceded, and took off again. “Come along. I found more traces up ahead. I may be mistaken, of course, but I think I know where Rendor was going.”
We moved on, pausing every few yards to examine the telltale signs Kit had marked with his flags—a broken branch, a crushed plant, a partial boot print. If he wanted to impress me with his tracking skills, he succeeded. It would have taken me a month to find half the clues he’d discovered in just over an hour.
Gradually the shelf began to curve around the shoulder of Emma’s Hill, becoming narrower and narrower until it petered out completely on a ledge that overlooked the river valley to the east.
“I stopped here to go back and fetch you,” Kit explained, bending to pull the last flag from the ground. “If I’d continued to follow Rendor’s tracks, I’m almost certain that I would have ended up down there.”
He drew a wavering line through the air to indicate a sketchy trail that wound downward from the ledge and vanished in a dense grove of trees extending from the bottom of the hill outward into the valley.
“What’s down there?” I asked.
“Aldercot Hall,” he replied. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s nestled in among those plane trees.”
64 Nancy Atherton
“Aldercot Hall?” I said, peering curiously at the stand of trees he’d indicated. “I thought I knew our neighborhood pretty well, but I’ve never heard of Aldercot Hall. Who lives there?”
“The DuCaral family,” said Kit.
“I thought I knew my neighbors pretty well, too,” I said, chagrined. “Why haven’t I heard of the DuCarals?”
“They live in the wrong valley,” said Kit, smiling. “You’re familiar with the families on the other side of the hill, the families in and around Finch, and they tend to be a bit parochial. As far as they’re concerned, Aldercot Hall might as well be on the dark side of the moon. Apart from that, the DuCarals like their privacy. They don’t go out of their way to mix with their neighbors.”
“If Rendor’s gone there, the family might be in trouble,” I said.