Chapter Five
CHAPTER FIVE
“Helloooo? Anyone home?”
In the garden below is a petite woman in a belted trench coat standing beside a large aluminum suitcase on wheels.
“Oh, look,” says Wyatt, now standing beside me. “A lady detective.” He leans out the window in the same way he greeted me, but this time he says, “Tally ho, petal!” And then to me: “Shall we go welcome our housemate?”
In the front hall, the new arrival introduces herself as Amity Clark from Northern California.
She has a soft, pretty face and, up close, looks younger than she had from above.
She’s maybe in her early fifties, about my mother’s age, but with an entirely different vibe; I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have a tattoo of a baby armadillo above her clavicle.
She reminds me of some of my wealthy customers back home, with the same understated, forgiving, but obviously expensive clothes.
Her silvery shoulder-length hair is thick and well cut.
Amity doesn’t wait for a tour to walk through the cottage.
“An umbrella stand! Delightful. A woodburning stove! Hopefully we’ll have some chilly nights.
” She touches the blankets in a basket. “Cashmere. Nice.” She runs a finger along the books in the built-in shelves and pulls one out.
“Hello, my pretty.” She opens the book, brings it up to her face, and inhales its pages.
“Did you know that Mr. Darcy lived in Derbyshire?” She looks at me with a playful smile.
“You’re young and lovely. Are you married? ”
“No,” I say. She’d better not be the matchmaker type. “And I’m fine with that.”
She squints at me.
“So, you’re not looking for a single man in possession of a fortune stepping out of a pond in a wet shirt?”
“Blimey,” Wyatt says.
Amity giggles. “Forgive me, occupational hazard. I’m a romance writer.”
She moves into the kitchen, where she opens the refrigerator, peers into the cabinets.
She takes out a package of Hobnobs. “Biscuits!” She touches jars of jam.
“Do you think they have Marmite? I’m dying to try some.
” She looks around, hands on hips. “This is all just what I’d hoped.
So cozy and pretty. So English.” She picks up the kettle. “Fancy a cuppa?”
Wyatt says sure, and I decline. I don’t like tea. I tell them I’ll make coffee and ask Amity to put some extra water in the kettle for me.
Amity opens a bright red tin. “Oh dear, tea bags. That’s disappointing. We’ll do a pot anyway.” She takes a ceramic teapot from the shelf, lifts off the top, and drops in two tea bags.
Wyatt sits at the kitchen table, his long legs stretched out toward the middle of the room. Amity is smiling at each of us in turn, apparently as delighted with her cottage mates as she is with the cottage itself.
“How extraordinary that we each came alone! And I thought I might be the only person traveling solo. It’s new to me, you know. I’m a recent divorcée . That’s an elegant word for it, don’t you think? Much prettier than ‘jilted wife.’?”
She doesn’t seem too crushed about it.
The water boils, and Amity fills the teapot. I take the kettle and pour some water into the French press. Wyatt and Amity are both so talkative; I hope they don’t expect the same from me. How can I explain why I’m here when I’m still not sure myself?
“Are you working on a romance while you’re in Willowthrop?” Wyatt asks Amity.
“Me? Fall in love this week?” Amity winks at me, a hint that she’s deliberately misunderstanding Wyatt. “As my sons’ Magic 8 Ball would say, ‘Outlook not so good.’?”
She takes the teapot and two mugs to the table.
“You have little kids?” I ask.
“Ha! You’re adorable,” Amity says. “No, my boys are ‘grown and flown,’ as they say. They’re twenty-three and twenty-five.
They haven’t lived at home for a while now, but I’m sentimental about their things.
The Magic 8 Ball is just one of their old toys I couldn’t bring myself to give away.
Will I ever play Apples to Apples again?
I will not, but should you need it, my basement playroom’s the place.
” She fills Wyatt’s mug and then her own.
“I meant, are you here to research a new novel?” Wyatt says.
I push down the plunger, pour myself a coffee, and join them at the table.
“Oh, no, this is pure pleasure,” Amity says. “I’ve always wanted to travel to the English countryside, and murder mysteries are so much fun. Now that I’m solo, here I am. It’s a much-needed break from my routine. For the first time ever, I’ve been experiencing writer’s block.”
Amity tells us she’s had four books published, all of which found enough of an audience that her editor wanted more.
But for the past year, she’s been struggling.
“I’m still good at the meet-cute, the falling in love, even the steamy sex, and at creating an obstacle to pull my lovers apart.
But I can’t seem to find plausible ways to bring them back together.
I keep writing stories that end in misery. ”
This is unexpected. Nothing about Amity suggests a dark nature.
“My latest is about an oyster farmer and a mezzo-soprano who meet at a benefit on Cape Cod. He’s shucking oysters while she’s performing Carmen ’s ‘Habanera’ and the noise of the shells hitting the pail throws off her cadence.”
“Nice setup,” Wyatt says, putting one and then another heaping teaspoon of sugar into his tea.
“Then what happens?” I ask.
“They fall in love,” Amity says, “but when everything is going swimmingly, she’s asked to fill in for an opera star whose appendix burst at the start of a lengthy tour through Eastern Europe.
She’s reluctant to leave her new love but it’s an offer she can’t refuse, so she ends things with the oysterman and goes off to Riga, where she discovers what had been missing from her singing to take it from good to great. ”
Wyatt leans forward. “What was missing?”
“Heartbreak,” Amity says. “She gets standing ovations at every performance. She’s stuck with a choice—stay for fame and misery or go home for true love and mediocrity. And I’m stuck with a story going nowhere.”
“It’s a good ending,” I say. “That’s life. I like it.”
“So does my writing group,” Amity says. “But that’s not the kind of story I want to write.
Despite everything, by which I mean the predictable saga of how Douglas—that’s my husband, oops ex -husband—dealt with turning fifty, I believe in romance.
I can’t help it. I like making readers feel so tingly they want to go back to page one and bathe in the whole experience again.
I want only enough tension to make it absolutely delectable to arrive at bliss. ”
Amity takes a sip of tea. On the back of her hand are a few sunspots. My mother always chased a happy ending too. But somehow, Amity’s searching doesn’t seem frantic. The visions dancing in her head seem harmless, even pleasant, not dangerous at all.
“What about you?” Amity asks. “How’d you end up here solo?”
“That’s the million-dollar question,” Wyatt says. “It was ostensibly a gift from my husband.”
“Why ostensibly?” Amity tops off Wyatt’s tea.
“I’m not sure who the real beneficiary is.” This time, Wyatt puts three teaspoons of sugar into his tea. “I think Bernard wanted a break from me.”
“And shipped you all the way across the ocean?” Amity says. “That can’t be right.”
I’m afraid Wyatt might get offended, but he just laughs and says, “Let’s hope not,” though he doesn’t seem too convinced of it.
“I can’t compete with Bernard’s passion for birds,” he says.
“Is he an ornithologist?” Amity asks.
Wyatt shakes his head. “Technically, an ornithophile.”
“A bird lover?” I say.
“Through and through.”
“My neighbor has a bird feeder,” I say. “He calls it a squirrel jungle gym.”
“Tell him to get a squirrel baffle for the pole,” Wyatt says with absolutely zero enthusiasm. “Nineteen-inch width. $23.99 plus tax.”
“I’ve never really understood bird-watching.
” Amity takes a sip of tea. “My husband and I went on a safari in Kenya for our honeymoon, and one day we were joined by an English couple on a birding trip. We’d be looking at a lion tearing into a gazelle or a baby giraffe wobbling on its long legs and the woman would be completely uninterested.
She’d have her binoculars up to the sky saying, “Oh, look, Nigel, I do believe that’s a cinnamon-breasted bunting. ”
“Pair of twitchers there. That’s what they call birders in England,” Wyatt says, and takes a big gulp of tea. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down his long neck. “I adore Bernard, but sometimes I wish he’d put down the binoculars and watch me instead. That’s weird, right?”
“Not in the slightest.” Amity reaches across the table and pats Wyatt’s hand.
After a few moments of silence, I have the sinking suspicion that it’s my turn.
Sure enough, Amity says, “What brought you here?”
I try to figure out the best way to put it, to not elicit more sympathy than I want or deserve, yet also not sound callous. In the end, I blurt out, “My mother bought this trip for the two of us but didn’t tell me, and then she died, and here I am.”
I can tell from their expressions that this information didn’t land the way I’d hoped.
“You poor dear,” Amity says. “You’re much too young to lose a mother.”
She has no idea.
“So sorry,” Wyatt says. “That must have been tough.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “We weren’t close.”
“Is that so?” Amity says. “I always thought having a daughter would be like having a best friend.”
That’s so far from my experience that I share the truth.
“She left me when I was nine,” I say. “My grandmother raised me.”
Now it’s my turn for a tender hand pat from Amity.
“Oh my.” She takes a sip of tea. “But your mother must have cared about you to plan a surprise like this. It’s a lovely gesture.”
It figures that Amity likes surprises. Optimists generally do.
I don’t feel like saying more, so I push back my chair and, trying to sound casual, say, “Well, I guess I’ll unpack and take a shower before I’m totally crushed by jet lag.”
“You mean you’ve just flown in?” Amity says. “You didn’t visit London first?”
Coming early never occurred to me. Signing on for the full week was almost more than I could handle.
Wyatt looks at his watch. “How about you two unpack and shower and then we’ll go check out the village before death comes a-knocking? I’ll wait down here; I’ve already had a kip and a scrub.”
“Have you now?” says Amity, looking delighted.
“A what and a what?” I ask.
“British English, pet. A nap and a shower,” Wyatt says. “Sorry, I always fall into foreign accents. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid and discovered Monty Python. Imagine ten-year-old me on the playground: “?‘Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!’?”
“I think it’s good fun,” Amity says. “You feel a Britishism coming on, accurate or not, let it rip. You do you.”
“Hear, hear,” I say.
“By golly, you two are enchanting,” Wyatt says. “We’re going to have a cracking good time solving this murder.”
Amity claps her hands and says, “Indeed we are.”
I’ve never been much of a joiner, but Mr. Groberg made me promise to throw myself wholeheartedly into the game, to get into the spirit and all that.
There’s no way I’m going to match the enthusiasm of these two, but I figure I’d better at least try.
In my best British accent, which is admittedly pretty pathetic, I say, “By Jove, we’re going to be bloody brilliant. ”