Chapter 1 #2
The zero-to-twenty-five was accomplished at a blistering pace, leaving the siblings soon pouring out the front door no chance to catch up.
Harriet leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes, attempted a few rounds of her Soaring with Flying Colors mantras, and finally settled for a few deep breaths to calm the butterflies that had suddenly taken flight in her midsection.
She opened her left eye slightly and peeked at her cousin to see if her nerves had been contagious, but Mac only looked as serene and unflappable as she always did.
Then again, Harriet hadn’t expected anything else and she’d had a lifetime to get used to not envying her cousin for the same.
She and MacKenzie Eleanor Buchanan were third cousins thrice removed who had suddenly found themselves living next door to each other in third grade.
She had detested Mac on sight because her cousin had been gorgeous, popular, and, even at the tender age of nine, immune to what anyone else thought of her.
Mac had been everything that she with her mousey brown hair and well-honed ability to hide amongst her mother’s flowers and remain unnoticed had not.
Things had thawed slightly during high school only because they’d traded off first chair in the flute section of their orchestra so often that they’d at least given up poking at each other with their cleaning rods. But friends? Not a chance.
And then through a whopper of a quirk of fate that she subsequently suspected had been her mother and Mac’s conspiring together over tea and marigolds, they had wound up as roommates their freshman year of college.
Harriet had spent the first twenty-four hours hiding in the library, wondering how she could hop a train and escape to anywhere else, leaving Mac to what she was sure would be a perfect university experience.
When hunger and a need for a change of clothes had driven her back to her dorm room, she’d walked in on Mac curled in a ball, weeping silently while in the middle of a panic attack over going to an acting class.
It was at that moment that she’d realized that MacKenzie Buchanan wasn’t as perfect as she seemed to be and that perhaps aloofness had been a cover for shyness and anxiety. And if Mac hadn’t needed to be perfect, perhaps she hadn’t needed to be, either.
And so, after all those years of living next door to each other but being miles apart, a true sisterly camaraderie had been born.
Mac had stood up for her without hesitation when mean girls had tried to bully her, and she’d stuck her finger in her cousin’s back more than once when she’d hesitated before marching out on stage for an audition.
At the moment, she could safely say that Mac was her best friend in all the world and if anyone would understand what she had planned, it would be her.
The problem was, she couldn’t decide where to begin to talk openly about something she could scarce discuss with herself.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
Harriet looked at her cousin in alarm. “Tell you what?”
“What you’re really up to with all this.”
“Who, me?” Harriet said, attempting a casual laugh. “I’m just going over to make sure everything’s ready for the parents. What else could I possibly be doing in England in May?”
“You mean on that island that’s covered with castles, churches, and haunted pubs?” Mac asked with a baffled look. “I have absolutely no idea. What else could you be doing?”
“Well, I won’t be investigating any of those things you just mentioned,” Harriet said honestly. “I don’t like spooky stuff.”
Mac smiled. “Trust me, I know. I was going to suggest that you stick to village greens and open spaces, but those probably aren’t much better. You’ll just have to be careful and steer clear of anything that gives off any sort of otherworldly vibe.”
Harriet heartily agreed, though she didn’t say as much. To even acknowledge the word otherworldly would mean applying it to the circumstances that had led her to where she was at present, and that she couldn’t have.
Well, maybe not at the beginning of that chain of unusual events because the beginning had involved nothing more interesting than tripping over a coffee-table book lying abandoned on the floor of her parents’ living room.
She’d rescued it from its deplorable location, then started to flip through it.
The next thing she’d known, she’d come back to herself to find she’d made herself comfortable on the sofa and was turning the final page.
The Cotswolds were one of her parents’ favorite locales in England, so finding a book in her parents’ house about the same couldn’t have been considered odd.
It also hadn’t been unusual to have her parents inform her a couple of weeks later that they were going to be attending various functions in England in the late spring. Asking if she wanted to come along and do a bit of dogsbodying for them had been nothing more than a happy piece of good fortune.
Finding out that the cottage they’d rented for their stay just happened to be within walking distance of a vintage inn that was hosting a mystery-writer’s conference that boasted her favorite author as one of the headliners …
well, that was a bit unusual, but she was certain things like that happened all the time.
“What was the name of little village you’re going to?” Mac asked. “Bradford-Next-the-Stow?”
Harriet dragged herself back to the present moment. “Something with a lot of hyphens, yes.”
“That seems like a good launching pad for lots of interesting touristy things,” Mac continued absently, keeping her focus on the traffic around them. “Living history faires, medieval battle re-enactments, that sort of thing.”
“I hesitate to speculate,” Harriet said with a shiver.
“For reasons we don’t need to discuss,” Mac said dryly.
“All right, let’s stick to the current century.
I need at least a general idea of how you’re going to keep yourself busy after you spend the first fifteen minutes making certain all the doors and windows are locked and your duty to your parents is done. ”
“Well, I’m certainly not going to do anything crazy,” Harriet said, wishing desperately that along with all her written-out dodges to questions she didn’t want to answer, she’d practiced a few careless laughs to use in throwing others off the scent.
“Harriet, your doing anything crazy is the last thing I ever worry about.” Mac smiled at her briefly. “And I’m just teasing you a little. You don’t have to tell me anything.”
Harriet put her hand over her midsection where an entirely new kaleidoscope of butterflies had just taken flight. She allowed them to settle a bit before she attempted speech.
“You really will think I’m crazy,” she admitted, “and I’m not sure I don’t think the same thing, but you know how sometimes things all fall into place and you can’t ignore it? Well, it happens for you all the time, but it doesn’t happen for me.” She had to take another deep breath. “Not usually.”
“I think you have a more charitable view of my life than I do, but go on.” She shot her a look. “Unless you need to keep it to yourself. Then I’ll just nod and smile.”
Harriet winced. “I was planning on telling you. I just didn’t want to jinx anything.”
“We’re half an hour from the airport,” Mac said with a smile. “I think you’re safe.”
Harriet shifted in her seat so she could have a better view of her cousin’s reaction to appalling things, steeled herself for the worst, and jumped in with both feet.
“Do you remember what I found on that bench the beginning January?”
“The book?”
“Yes.”
Silence fell as it tended to do when speaking of a certain tome she’d found half buried in the leavings from a recent snow storm.
She knew her cousin took an even dimmer view of all things paranormal than she did, but even Mac had agreed that the events surrounding the find had been a little unusual.
There she’d been, innocently taking a moment between part-time parental charity gigs on opposite ends of campus to plop herself down on a random bench and indulge in another bout of rethinking her entire life.
She’d immediately heaved herself back up to her feet, clutching her back and wondering how expensive the chiropractic bill was going to be to fix what she’d done to herself by sitting on a boulder-sized something unkindly left in her way.
What she’d discovered instead after she’d dug under the snow had been nothing more nefarious than a paperback book. Being the diligent lover of books that she was, she’d felt duty-bound to at least brush all the snow off the cover.
A Perfect Knight for Murder.
She’d wanted to toss it, truly she had, but one didn’t jettison the written word into the verge willy nilly.
She’d looked around to see if perhaps the owner might be coming back for it, but the only thing moving had been some sort of tartan that had disappeared into the trees.
She’d chalked that up to snow cascading down from branches onto leftover Christmas decorations someone had chucked into the verge, then decided that maybe she owed the author at least a read of the first page.
She’d sat herself down on the edge of the bench, opened the book, and started at the beginning and not the end because she was disciplined like that.
She’d snapped out of her stupor six chapters later to find that she’d become half frozen to the bench, but she hadn’t cared. For some reason, something far beyond what she’d been able to unravel since then, reading a mystery, that particular mystery, had turned on some sort of light in her soul.