“It’s dreary enough to make anyone tired,” I agreed.
Annelise went up to her room and I went to the living room to round up the twins. As I shepherded them upstairs, I kept thinking about Lizzie Black and the Butterfly Man. I couldn’t imagine why Aunt Dimity had encouraged me to pay attention to someone who was so clearly out of touch with reality. Perhaps, I thought, Lizzie had misplaced a few marbles since Aunt Dimity had known her.
By half past eight, Annelise and the boys were in bed and asleep, and I was seated in the high-backed leather armchair before the fire in the study, with the blue journal open in my lap and Reginald nestled in the crook of my arm. Stanley had elected to spend the night with Will and Rob.
“Aunt Dimity?” I said. “I went to Hilltop Farm. I met Lizzie Black.”
Aunt Dimity’s fine copperplate curled instantly across the page.
Would she speak with you?
“Yes,” I said, “after I told her that I was your best friend’s daughter.”
Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter
103
Your mother would be pleased to know that she’d smoothed the way for you. Did Lizzie tell you about the DuCarals?
“She told me that they were Dracula’s cousins, Dimity.” I giggled.
“If she read Bram Stoker’s novel, she must have mistaken it for history rather than fiction. According to her, the DuCarals drank the blood of orphaned housemaids until the supply dried up—so to speak. Now they live on deer’s blood. I guess good help really is hard to find these days.” I stifled a gurgle of laughter and tried to sound more sympathetic. “I’m sorry, Dimity. I know that Lizzie was your friend, but she’s become rather eccentric in her old age.
Annelise called her a crackbrained old crone,” I added gently.
Elderly women who live on their own are often ridiculed, Lori. Did you think her crackbrained?
“No,” I admitted candidly. “When she talked about the way she lives, she sounded perfectly sane, if a bit fed up with the human race. And when she talked about the other stuff, about the bloodsucking DuCarals and the unmarked graves at Aldercot Hall, I sort of . . . got caught up in it. She’s a convincing storyteller, Dimity, and her farmhouse is . . . atmospheric. It was easy to fall under her spell. But once I got home, I snapped out of it and realized that she was spouting nonsense.”
Bram Stoker was a convincing storyteller, too, because he did extensive research before writing his novel. He based his fictional Count Dracula on the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler, a Romanian ruler who lived in the fi fteenth century.
“Yes, but his Dracula was still fictional,” I pointed out. “Fictional characters don’t have cousins living in the Cotswolds.”
I know they don’t, Lori. I’m merely suggesting that Lizzie’s story, like Mr. Stoker’s, may contain a kernel of truth. Why are the DuCarals associated with bizarre tales of unnatural monsters and unmarked graves? Why do they keep their neighbors at bay? Why are they so reluctant to welcome visitors? Are they perhaps hiding something—or someone—at Aldercot Hall?
104 Nancy Atherton
A shiver slithered down my spine like a slowly melting ice cube.
I stiffened in my chair and tightened my grip on the blue journal as I asked, “What do you mean?”
I don’t wish to upset you.
“Too late,” I said. “If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, I’m already upset. So tell me what you’re thinking.”
Very well. I’m thinking of the man who shot you. His family knew that he was a murderous madman, but instead of turning him in to the proper authorities, they shielded him, protected him, locked him away in a private institution from which he ultimately escaped. What if a similar scenario is being played out at Aldercot Hall?
I lifted my eyes from the curving lines of royal-blue ink and stared into the fi re uneasily. Aunt Dimity’s thoughts corresponded almost too closely with my own. I’d already suggested to Kit that the footprints and the scrap of crimson silk we’d found on Emma’s Hill might have been left there by a man with a vampire fixation.
What if the man wasn’t a guest at Aldercot Hall but a member of the DuCaral family? What if the family knew that he was insane but kept him under lock and key in the hall instead of in an institution?
“You could be right,” I said, looking down at the journal. “The DuCarals might be shielding a killer. Lizzie told me that someone was murdered at Aldercot Hall, not in the dim and distant past but forty years ago. She said the murder was never reported to the police.”