Aunt Dimity and the Deep Blue Sea (2 page)

“Not one foot,” the boys repeated soberly.

“Mummy and I will be in the study for a while,” Bill went on, “and we don’t want to be disturbed. I have to speak with Mummy.”

Will and Rob exchanged looks that seemed to say, “Something’s
always
wrong when Daddy has to speak with Mummy,” but they trotted into the cottage without audible comment.

Stanley, who’d been rubbing his head on Bill’s hip in a bid for attention, now stood on his hind legs and planted his front paws on Bill’s chest. Bill took the hint, picked the cat up, and stood.While Stanley flopped over his shoulder, purring happily, Bill looked down at me. At just over six feet, my husband was nearly a foot taller than I, and he was remarkably fit. His imposing stature usually made me feel secure and protected, but at that moment I felt a strong urge to tuck him into my pocket for safekeeping.

“Bill?” I said.

“Not here.” He turned his head to look toward the hills. “Let’s go inside.”

We passed through the solarium and into the kitchen, where vegetable soup was simmering on the stove and a veal-and-ham pie was baking in the oven. Bill set Stanley down on the floor, near his food dishes, and the cat, satisfied that he’d been given his due, began nibbling. As Bill and I went down the hall to the study, we heard water running in the tub upstairs and Annelise’s voice asking the boys if they wanted bubbles in their bath. Everything in the cottage was completely normal, except for my husband.

Wordlessly, Bill closed the study door behind me, turned on the lights over the mantel shelf, motioned for me to take a seat in one of the pair of tall leather armchairs that stood before the hearth, and sat opposite me. His briefcase rested on the small table beside his chair. He gave it a sidelong glance before leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped tightly together.

“Something’s come up,” he said. “I didn’t take it seriously at first, but now I have to, because it involves you and the boys.”

“Right,” I said. It was all I could manage, because my mouth had gone dry. Bill’s fear was contagious.

“Over the past three weeks, I’ve received a number of ”—he hesitated, then plunged on—“a number of threatening messages. They were sent via e-mail, through a complex relay system.We’ve been unable to trace them back to their source.”

“What kind of threatening messages?” I asked.

Bill’s gaze drifted back to the briefcase. Then he squared his shoulders, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “Someone wants to kill me.”

I blinked. “Death threats? You’ve been getting
death threats
?” My thoughts spun wildly for a moment before coming to rest on the sheer improbability of what he was saying. “Why? You’re not a criminal attorney.You don’t deal with violent thugs. You write codicils and clauses and make sure all the wherefores are in place.Why would anyone want to kill you?”

Bill shrugged. “Revenge, apparently. The messages suggest that a former client believes I wronged him in some way. They make it quite clear that he intends to pay me back.” He tilted his head to one side and peered at me earnestly. “I would have told you sooner, Lori, but I thought it was a prank. I thought it would blow over. Instead, it’s gotten worse. Much worse.” He opened the briefcase, removed a sheet of paper, and passed it to me, saying, “This was waiting for me at my London office when I arrived this morning.”

I examined the page. It looked like a standard printout of a routine e-mail message, but the words were those of a madman:

I looked questioningly at Bill. “Abaddon?”

Bill waved a hand over the note. “It’s a mishmash of quotations and misquotations from the Book of Revelations. Abaddon’s a pseudonym, of course, but an apt one. In Revelations, Abaddon is the king of the bottomless pit. His minions come to earth to torture sinners.”

“It’s good to know that our guy reads his Bible,” I muttered.

“It’s not funny, Lori,” Bill snapped.

“I know,” I said quickly, “but it’s . . . incredible.” I reread the unholy epistle before giving it back to Bill, who returned it to the briefcase. “ ‘All that you love will perish.’ I can’t believe that anyone would hate us enough to . . . to
kill
us. It’s unreal.”

“It’s real,” Bill said heavily. “Which is why you and the twins have to leave the cottage.”

“Huh?” I said, taken aback.

“I’ve spent most of the day with Chief Superintendent Wesley Yarborough at Scotland Yard,” Bill explained. “He agrees that we should take the threats seriously. In fact, he was rather annoyed with me for not bringing them to the Yard’s attention sooner.” Bill sighed. “Yarborough intends to search my work files for clues to Abaddon’s identity, and I have to stay in London, to help with the investigation. While I’m there, the chief superintendent and I want you and the boys to be far away from here.You’ll leave the cottage tomorrow morning and stay in a safe place until all of this is cleared up.”

“We’re safe here,” I pointed out. “As soon as the villagers find out what’s going on, they’ll close in around us like a brick wall. If a stranger shows his face in Finch, they’ll sound the alarm. All we have to do is put the word out and Abaddon’s as good as caught.”

“What if Abaddon doesn’t come through the village?” Bill countered. “What if he comes over the hills or through the woods?”

“How would he know where to find us?” I asked.

“Lori,” Bill said softly, “he’s already found us.”

Time seemed to stop. My mind went blank. Although Bill had spoken quietly, his words seemed to echo through the room. He reached once more into his briefcase and handed me a sheaf of papers. As I leafed through them, my hands began to tremble.

They were photographs, electronically transmitted digital images of the apple tree in our back garden, the rose trellis framing our front door, the beech hedge flanking our graveled drive. That the pictures had been taken with some sort of telephoto lens afforded me no comfort at all. The images were far too personal. There was one of me, sitting on the bamboo chaise longue beneath the apple tree, and one of Annelise, standing in the doorway of the solarium, but the final image was the most terrifying of all.

“The twins,” I whispered. “Will and Rob, on their ponies . . .”

Bill moved from his chair to the ottoman and slid the photographs from my unresisting grasp. He dropped them onto the floor and took my hands in his.

“The photographs came this morning, with the message you’ve just read,” he said. “As soon as they arrived, I sent a security team up from London, to keep an eye on you and the boys while I met with the chief superintendent.”

“I haven’t seen anyone,” I said.

“I told them to keep a low profile,” said Bill. “I wanted them to stay in the background until I had a chance to tell you what was happening. They’ve been patrolling the woods, the hills, the lane.They’ll live here, in the cottage, while we’re gone, to make sure nothing happens to it.”

“‘All that you love will perish,’” I repeated numbly. “I suppose that includes the cottage.”

“We can’t afford to interpret it in any other way,” said Bill.

“Where do you want us to go?” I asked.

“Boston,” he said promptly. “You can stay with my father.”

“Boston?”
I exclaimed, recoiling. “Are you crazy? You know how much I love your father, Bill, but I am
not
going to Boston. There’d be a whole ocean between us, and the Concorde’s not flying anymore. If something happened to you, it’d take me forever to get back.”

Bill managed a weary smile. “It was worth a try. But I knew you’d hate the idea of going to Boston, so I’ve come up with another plan, one that’ll keep you on this side of the Atlantic.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’m not going to tell you,” he replied, and when I opened my mouth to protest, he cut me off. “I’m sorry, Lori, but you’re a chatterbox. One slip of your tongue and the news would be all over Finch in five minutes. Our neighbors may be well intentioned, but they’re addicted to gossip. A casual conversation in the tearoom or the pub would lead Abaddon straight to you. The fewer people who know where you and the boys are, the safer you’ll be, so for now I’m keeping your destination to myself.You’ll have to trust me on this, love.”

Bill gripped my hands more firmly, as if bracing himself for a wave of entirely justified wifely hysterics, but I didn’t feel hysterical. I felt cold and still and extremely focused. My husband had shouldered an unimaginably heavy burden. I had no intention of adding to it.

“Right,” I said, and got to my feet.

“Where are you going?” Bill asked.

“To pack.”

The rest of the afternoon flew by in a flurry of activity. Since it was impossible to select appropriate clothing for an unknown destination, Annelise and I crammed everything from snowsuits to bathing suits into suitcases. And since we didn’t know how long we’d be away, there were quite a few suitcases.

The only thing I knew for certain about our secret hideaway was that it was child-friendly, and the only reason I knew that was because Bill assured Will and Rob that there was no need for them to pack every toy they owned, since there would be plenty of things for them to play with where they were going.

At some point Bill called me downstairs to introduce me to Ivan Anton, the head of the security detail from London.The broad-shouldered young man declined my invitation to dinner, telling me that he and his team would be spending the night in the field, as well as on the hillsides and at strategically placed locations along the narrow lane.

“We’ve set up a secure perimeter around the cottage,” Ivan informed me. “No one will get past us, Mrs. Willis.”

“Shepherd,” I corrected automatically. It was a common mistake. I hadn’t changed my last name when I’d married Bill Willis. “I’m Lori Shepherd. But call me Lori. Everyone does.”

Ivan nodded. “You can rely on me and my team, Lori. We’ll look after your home as if it were our own.” He touched his fingers to his brow in a casual salute and went back to patrolling his secure perimeter.

I went back upstairs, to continue packing.

Stanley—wisest of cats—decided to keep clear of our flying feet by curling up in Bill’s favorite armchair in the living room. He remained there until dinnertime, when he joined us in the dining room, where he did his utmost to persuade us that the veal-and-ham pie had been baked exclusively for him.

After dinner we gathered around the kitchen table for a spirited game of Go Fish that lasted well past the twins’ normal bedtime. When the game ended, Annelise went upstairs to her room to pack her own bags, and Bill went up, too, to put the boys to bed. Stanley went with them—he was, for all intents and purposes, Bill’s cat—but I didn’t intrude. I knew I’d have the twins with me, wherever we went, but Bill didn’t know when he’d see them again. I wanted to give them as much father-and-sons time together as possible.

I put the playing cards away, emptied the dishwasher, and taped notes to the kitchen cabinets, to help Ivan Anton and his team find whatever they might need to make their own meals. It was approaching ten o’clock when I returned to the study.

The lights above the mantel shelf were still lit, but I put a match to the logs in the fireplace anyway. When the flames were leaping, I took from the bookshelves a blue-leather-bound book and settled with it in the armchair I’d occupied earlier, during my disquieting conversation with Bill.

The blue book was a journal of sorts. I’d inherited it from my late mother’s closest friend, an Englishwoman named Dimity Westwood. My mother and Dimity had met in London while serving their respective countries during the Second World War. Although they never saw each other again after my mother returned to the States at the conclusion of the war, they maintained their friendship by sending hundreds of letters back and forth across the Atlantic.

My mother treasured her correspondence with Dimity. Her letters were her refuge, her favorite escape from the routines and responsibilities of everyday life, and she kept them a closely guarded secret. I knew nothing about the letters, or her friendship with Dimity, until after both she and Dimity were dead.

Until then I’d known Dimity Westwood only as Aunt Dimity, a fairy-tale figure from my childhood, the main character in a series of bedtime stories invented by my mother. The truth about Aunt Dimity had come as quite a shock, as had the news that my fictional heroine had bequeathed to me a very real fortune along with the honey-colored cottage in which she’d grown up, the precious cache of letters, and a journal bound in blue leather.

It had come as a far greater shock to discover that Dimity, though deceased, had not altogether departed the cottage. Despite having what some might consider a significant handicap, she continued to visit her old home. She was far too civilized to announce her presence by moaning in the chimneys or hovering in a spectral mist at the foot of my bed. Instead, she wrote to me, as she had written to my mother, continuing the correspondence not in letters, but in the blue journal.

Whenever I opened the journal, Dimity’s handwriting appeared, an old-fashioned copperplate taught in the village school at a time when indoor plumbing was an uncommon luxury. I had no idea how Dimity managed to bridge the gap between life and afterlife—she wasn’t too clear on the mechanics of it either—but the
how
had long since ceased to concern me. My friendship with Aunt Dimity may have been the most surprising of surprise presents, but it was a gift beyond price, and I accepted it gratefully.