Chapter 1
One
Nebraska
Present Day
There came a time in every woman’s life when all the skills she had gleaned from innumerable books, countless televised mystery series, and several early exits from an equal number of appallingly awkward blind dates came together in perfect synchronicity to allow her to stride boldly into her perfect future.
That striding would have been easier, admittedly, if that same woman had still been in possession of her luggage.
Harriet Delphinium Brewster stood at the end of the familial hallway and studied the living room, assessing it for miscreants, large furniture, and lamp cords that might possibly get in the way of reclaiming said luggage.
Admittedly, she possessed a handful of esoteric abilities which would have gotten her into locked cabinets, allowed her to navigate Ancient Rome, and scrounge up lunch money from perhaps not-so-observant poker players, but none of those abilities were of any use to her at the moment.
Her future lay on the other side of a big blue ocean and to get to it she needed to get into a car, drive to an airport, then get on a plane, accompanied by her stuff.
Considering that both her suitcase and her backpack had been absconded with and were now being picked over with the thoroughness of vultures who hadn’t eaten in a while, the mission was daunting.
She ignored how desperately her fingers itched for pen and notebook—both unfortunately safely stowed in her backpack—and settled for leaning against the wall and making detailed mental notes of the current crime scene.
The suitcase-swiping scoundrels were four in number and each replete with the terrible skills they had acquired in their selected fields of enterprise.
There was nothing they couldn’t cut open, count, tee-up for a lawsuit, or categorize based on the potential for trouble on a hike in the wilds of any particular forest. She had no desire to be involved with any of those things, especially the last one given that she wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t, on a recent trip to Washington State to visit her youngest sister the park ranger, espied a secretive creature dressed in a tartan blanket, grumbling as he stomped through the underbrush.
Then again, she was fairly sure Bigfoot wasn’t Scottish, so maybe she’d just been buzzed from the bug spray she’d slathered on like beauty cream.
“Why so many pairs of panties?”
“Too few socks and this pair doesn’t even match!”
“Give me her list, you idiot, and someone get me a legal pad. I’ll write up a power of attorney and we’ll have it notarized on the way to the airport. We’re going to need it.”
Harriet nodded to herself wisely. They couldn’t help mother-henning her, those adrenaline junkies she was related to.
What they failed to acknowledge was that she could most certainly help herself, and she was going to do just that by getting herself to the airport and jetting off to the start of what she intended to be an entirely different sort of life.
She could see it already. A cozy house full of books, a few plump, overstuffed chairs, a way to make use of the things she had learned from a robust number of random part-time jobs.
Her professional occupation would have to be something that didn’t involve anything unsettling, unexpected, or unbelievable, true, but she was confident she could manage that with a little foresight and some savvy planning.
Above all, she needed to know the lay of any particular piece of land before she ventured onto it.
In that at least, she and her youngest sister were in complete agreement.
“Mom, come look at this catastrophe.”
“Dad, she has three pens but no dental floss!”
Harriet looked at her parents to see how they would react to that terrible news—which was also a lie given that she had most definitely packed dental floss—and had to admit that despite their beatific smiles and serene auras, those two were the source of all that sibling over-achievingness.
Her mother, a tall, willowy botanical historian, taught at the local university and was the sort of woman who nursed injured bees back to health, spoke in flowery metaphors, and grew lots of nice-smelling blossoms in her university lab.
She also had a greenhouse in the back yard to which only she had a key, but Harriet had never dared pick that particular lock on the off chance her mother was germinating seeds that would somehow grow up and take over the world.
In the case of Petunia Brewster’s horticultural experiments, ignorance was definitely bliss.
Her father, Harold, was a less-tall, not-quite-so-willowy professor of history who also taught at the local university and was stuffed full of more noble virtues than his bowling-pin-like body could possibly contain.
His classes always had waiting lists and his thrice-a-semester symposiums on medieval courting mores were always standing room only.
He adored his wife and children and spent his evenings in his recreated Regency-era study—a sharp departure from his field of study, true, but a man needed his comforts—drinking whisky from cut-crystal glasses and complaining about taxes and light bulbs.
Harriet had inherited her mother’s uncontrollably curly hair and her father’s height.
Her father called her his Wee Snowdrop, which her mother approved of and Harriet didn’t mind because it left her feeling as if she should have been wearing an acorn cap and sporting gossamer wings.
It was the one piece of true whimsy in a reality that found her endlessly standing in the shadows of the mighty oaks that were her siblings.
Even her parents were intimidating with their degrees and hobbies and interests.
She alone was still floundering on the seas of indecision.
Only that was about to change.
“You know, there might be untoward things hiding in the wilds of England.”
Harriet dragged herself back to the present moment and wondered what she’d missed while she’d been lost in thought. Untoward things hiding in English hedgerows? Forsooth, surely not.
Actually, she’d already planned for that sort of thing by making an exhaustive list of Perils to Avoid in Quaint English Villages, organized by the severity of the peril in question along with where to avoid said severe thing.
She would keep her list in her hand, her head on her shoulders, and her wits about her.
Nothing unusual, startling, or dangerous would happen to her.
“Harriet will be fine,” her mother said soothingly. “She’s a very sensible girl.”
“Perhaps she’ll suss out all the nefarious characters in the area before we get there,” her father said with an indulgent chuckle. “She can make a list of the worst ones and use them in a book about mysterious English happenings.”
“Well, she did say in eighth grade that she was going to write some sort of little story,” mused the eldest of the brood, stroking his chin thoughtfully and no doubt rifling through his extensive catalog of things lodged in his photographic memory to find other unsettling details from the past to examine.
“She might run into some literary geniuses and be inspired to actually put pen to paper.”
And with that comment that was far too close to the mark for comfort, Harriet strode out into the living room to retrieve her belongings from her well-meaning family and, as the saying almost went, get the hell out of Omaha.
“Thanks so much for checking my stuff,” she said brightly, removing her suitcase from the clutching hands of her neurosurgeon brother with a precision he probably would appreciate later. “My ride’s out front, so I need to get going.”
“But—”
“And look how well you’ve reorganized things for me,” she continued, rescuing suitcase innards from both legal jeopardy and analysis of their monetary value and stuffing everything back where it was meant to go.
“Wait—”
“Gotta run,” she said, zipping her suitcase up and blowing kisses at them all. “Love you guys!”
“But the socks!” her park ranger sister wailed. “They’re not wool!”
True, but there was no help for it now. Harriet turned to her mother. “They have stores in England, Mom.”
Petunia smiled. “Of course they do, sweetheart. And if not, I have some lovely lavender posy socks that I sent ahead in our trunks. You’re welcome to them.”
“And I put extra money in your bag in case you can’t wait until you find them,” Harold assured her, giving her a hug. “You have the maps and rendezvous points I gave you?”
“In my backpack,” Harriet assured him.
“Do me proud, daughter, and stick to the plan.”
“Of course,” Harriet said, hoping she wouldn’t get struck down for lying right there in the living room.
Of course she was going to stick to the plan. She was planning on meeting her parents at the cute little cottage they were renting in exactly five days. As for the days leading up to that, she—and she could hardly admit it to herself without getting a bit breathless—had plans of her own.
She sniffed. “Is something burning in the kitchen? Something desserty?”
She staggered in the wake of siblings decamping for a possible culinary rescue, hugged her parents one more time, then escaped out the front door with her gear.
If she then bolted for the car waiting in front of her house, she imagined no one inside was watching.
The trunk opened at her approach, so she tossed her suitcase and backpack inside, shut the lid, then hurried and piled into the passenger seat.
“Narrow escape?”
She looked at her cousin. “You have no idea.”
“I can imagine. We’re good to go?”
“Punch it.”