CHAPTER SEVEN
My heart was beating a little faster as I set off for home.
I couldn’t wait to discover the secrets of Leonard’s wooden box.
It had started to snow again, enough to need windscreen wipers, and it seemed to add another layer of magic to the night as I drove along Sunnybrook High Street with the wooden box sitting carefully wrapped up in its plastic bag on the passenger seat.
I’d always loved the snow.
While most people liked to cosy up in the warmth to watch the icy flakes tumble past their window, I always wanted to be out there, revelling in nature, delighting in the crunch beneath my feet and loving the way the fresh fall sparkled like diamonds in the winter sun and made everything beautiful.
In truth, I loved being outdoors whatever the weather.
A fresh spring walk with Nature waking up all around you .
. . a summer stroll by the river . . . or striding out along breezy country lanes, with the autumn leaves rustling beneath my feet.
Even overcast days had their charms. I liked to feel the soft rain peppering my face and reaching that point where I couldn’t actually get any wetter so there was really no point in wondering if I should have brought an umbrella.
I’d come to the conclusion that apart from loving being out in the elements, my walks were actually a form of therapy.
Missing Dad so much, I found I was escaping for solitary walks more often these days. And taking a break from Mum and my sisters for a while was sometimes just what the doctor ordered.
Not that I didn’t love them. Of course I did. But the strained atmosphere in the house these days was more than I could take sometimes.
My phone rang when I was almost home. It was Wyatt, wanting to take me out for dinner.
It was a lovely idea but something made me hesitate.
I’d already planned my night, and looking through the nineteenth-century papers seemed far too precious a thing to share with anyone.
If I told Wyatt about it, I was afraid he might muscle in and take charge.
I could picture him getting excited about it and insisting on reading the diary out loud to me, treating it like a script for one of his TikTok stories .
. . pacing the room, flinging his arms about theatrically and putting in all the dramatic inflection.
It would be very entertaining, of course. But I didn’t want that.
This was someone’s private thoughts and feelings committed to paper, in all likelihood written using a quill pen made from a goose feather! A little thrill ran through me, just thinking about the rich history at my fingertips.
Leonard had trusted me with his box of nineteenth-century mysteries and I wanted to keep the contents all to myself, just for tonight.
So I told Wyatt a fib and said I needed an early night but that it would be lovely to see him the following evening.
I did feel guilty about lying to him. But not too much. To be honest, I was still smarting a little from that awful photo of me he’d chosen for the poster.
It wasn’t that I was desperate to be the centre of attention – far from it.
It was just that it would have been so easy for Wyatt to send me the photos to look at before the posters were printed.
Bearing in mind I was actually in them all, it would surely have been common decency to give me a say in what was used?
I had a feeling that if the stunning Caitlyn had been available for the photo shoot, as had been Wyatt’s original plan, she would definitely have featured prominently on that poster. Not turned away from the camera like an afterthought.
But maybe I was taking it too personally.
Wyatt must have been in a hurry to get the posters printed and had simply picked the photo he thought would draw in the audience . . . and it would, too, I was sure of it. Who could resist that twinkly-eyed smile of his?
I gritted my teeth, thinking how typical it was that Mr Side-Eye and his annoying female appendage should both happen to be passing when Maddy and I were looking at the poster. I could really have done without Arabella’s ‘hilarious’ remarks.
And what about when Wyatt and Dante first clapped eyes on one another? Their stares had been colder than an Eskimo’s conservatory. In fact, if looks could kill, they’d both have been lying dead at my feet! What was the beef between those two, anyway?
Dante had been so keen to criticise my lack of protective headgear the other day, getting a proper dig at Wyatt.
But was it really Wyatt’s fault? Thinking about it, Caitlyn would have surely brought her own helmet, being an accomplished horsewoman.
And I suppose when Wyatt’s plans were wrecked at the last minute, in the panic to get me involved instead, he forgot I would need one . . .
One thing I couldn’t criticise Wyatt for, though, was not caring enough.
Some people thought him ‘too much’ with his flamboyant ways. And I know my sister Kitty thought him rather self-centred and a bit of a show-off. But I’d always thought this was unfair, considering what he did for Blaize.
On the day we met, Wyatt proved in spectacular fashion just how far he was prepared to go to help others.
We’d never know what might have happened to Blaize after she got herself into such a dangerous situation.
But it was entirely possible Wyatt saved my youngest sister’s life that day . . .
*****
I’d been an only child for six years, living in relative peace, before my two sisters came along and changed everything. Not that I was complaining. I’d loved having baby sisters and I became like a second mum to both of them.
But they did make an awful lot of noise and commotion – especially Blaize, who was the youngest and yelled her lungs out from the moment she was born (the poor thing had colic when she was tiny).
Now twenty-seven – ten years my junior – she still tore about the place, laughing and shrieking like she did when she was five! (I’d always slightly envied Blaize her exuberance and the way she attacked life head-on, refusing to be beaten by anything or anybody.)
My other sister, Kitty, was ‘the serious one’, a label I knew she hated.
It wasn’t even accurate. Not really. It was just that when Blaize came along, Kitty had just turned four, and she would often cope with the noise and the chaos (especially when Blaize became a toddler and entered her wrecking stage) by retreating to the safety of her own bedroom.
There, Kitty could play with her toys without the danger of having her dolls’ heads pulled off by her rambunctious little sister.
Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Blaize was what Mum called ‘a handful’, getting into scrapes in and out of school, but with a cheeky charm that was irresistible – even to the teachers.
As a result, she tended to get away with murder.
But the tricks she played on people were always to make them laugh and never maliciously done.
Blaize wasn’t short of male admirers and had a string of boyfriends from her early teens onwards although her attention span being rather short, she was usually the ‘dumper’ when it came to a relationship ending. That was until she was twenty-six and she met Dillon.
I liked Dillon a lot. He was the complete opposite of Blaize in that he was quiet and unassuming. But he was also sharply intelligent and shared her lovely wry sense of humour.
Her previous boyfriend would arrive at the house and they’d go straight out or they’d disappear straight up to her bedroom. But Dillon made time to chat to us all first, and he’d remember little things we’d mentioned and ask about them next time.
Blaize calmed down a lot in the three months they were an item, and even seemed to be focusing more on her studies – like me, she had gone to university as a mature student and was studying law.
But then in the March, just after we celebrated her passing her driving test, Dillon made a big decision that would turn their lives upside down. He was a reporter, working on the news, and he’d been offered the chance to be a special correspondent for the TV station – based in the United States.
It was too good an opportunity to pass up, and needless to say, my poor sister was heart-broken. I suspected Dillon was devastated, too, but he was putting on a show of strength, I guessed for Blaize’s sake.
His contract would be for a minimum of two years, and as they’d been together only a few months, they’d decided that going their separate ways was the best thing to do. Neither of them could see a long-distance relationship working.
After he left the following month, Blaize moped about that summer, neglecting her friends and spending all the time when she wasn’t working alone in her bedroom listening to melancholy music.
As summer turned into autumn, and even Hallowe’en failed to jolt her out of her depression, I was beginning to wonder if my youngest sister would ever be happy again.
And then finally, one night late in December, Kitty and I managed to persuade her to come out to the pub with us.
The pub was in the next village, a few miles away, and we were planning on getting a taxi there and back. But Blaize had made up her mind that she wanted to drive us there herself, in the car Mum and Dad had bought her after she passed her test.
‘I’ll stay sober and drive us back so you two can have a drink,’ I offered, and of course they were all for that.
It was that weird time between Christmas and New Year when you walk around in a chocolates-and-cake-fuelled daze trying to work out what day it is, and the pub was packed to the rafters, everyone in a great mood.
As soon as we went in, Blaize and Kitty got chatting to a group of guys we knew, so I left my coat with them and went to get the drinks.
I stood waiting for the barman to take my order, and because it was so busy, I’d resigned myself to a long wait. But then looking around, I recognised a man who was standing chatting to his friend at the bar beside me.
I smiled at him, wondering how I knew him because he really did look familiar.
He caught my eye and gave me a big smile that seemed to envelope me with its warmth. Leaning closer and raising his voice to be heard above the chatter and laughter, he said, ‘I guess you’re wondering how you know me.’
My eyebrows rose in surprise and I laughed. ‘I was, actually.’
‘I get that a lot. Recently, you might have seen me playing the fool on TikTok?’
‘The fool?’
‘Bottom.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Everybody loves Bottom.’ His grey eyes sparkled mischievously. Then he shrugged. ‘I’m talking about the Fool in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?’
‘Oh, that Bottom.’
‘Yes. Not bottoms in general.’
‘The Bottom that found himself with the head of a donkey.’
‘The very one. I hired a donkey head to do my little soliloquy on TikTok.’
‘Right.’ I smiled. ‘I doubt I’d have recognised you in that case. Not if you were impersonating a donkey.’
‘Ah.’ He pointed at me with a sheepish grin. ‘You got me there. Yes, of course. Well, maybe you saw my Hamlet? Or my mischievous Ariel . . .’
‘From The Tempest.’
‘Indeed.’ He looked at me, impressed. ‘You know Shakespeare well, then?’
I shrugged. ‘English Literature graduate,’ I said modestly. ‘So you actually dressed up as a strange little creature that can fly? On TikTok?’
‘As Ariel, yes. It’s amazing to what depths you’ll sink to get your face out there . . . when you’re trying to make it in the entertainment industry.’
‘Oh, wow. So you’re an actor?’
‘Something like that. Still trying to catch my big break. Although I was in a popular soap a while ago.’
I actually gasped when he told me which one. ‘That’s my favourite!’
‘You’re just saying that,’ he teased.
‘No, I’m not. Who did you play? I must have seen you.’
‘I played a milkman who discovered a body.’
‘A dead body?’ I racked my brains.
‘Stone-cold dead.’
I frowned, still unable to recall a hero milkman. But obviously I couldn’t tell him that. So I smiled and said, ‘Of course! I remember . . .’
‘I’ll show you the scene sometime,’ he said, and I studied his smile, admiring the confident way he’d just assumed I’d want to see the clip. Which of course I did.
‘Great!’
He was called Wyatt and after I’d been served my drinks, we chatted a while longer, together with his friend Ellis who was a photographer on the local newspaper.
Both kept me amused with stories about their working lives and the people they met – especially Wyatt and his tales of going to acting auditions and bracing himself for the invariable rejection.
‘You’ll make it big one day, my friend,’ said Ellis putting his arm around Wyatt’s shoulder.
‘From what I’ve seen, to succeed as an actor you need to be tough and single-minded and always willing to go the extra mile for your craft.
Even if it means stepping over other people in the process.
’ He grinned at me. ‘Wyatt has all of that in spades.’
‘Hey, you make me sound ruthless,’ protested Wyatt. ‘But I agree with the single-mindedness. You’ve got to be.’
They asked about me and when Wyatt found out I loved history and visiting big country houses, he told me that he was always on the look-out for good backdrops for his TTVs, and a country manor would be perfect.
‘We could go together,’ he said. ‘Combine our interests, so to speak?’
‘TTVs?’ I queried, while thinking it sounded like fun if it was anything to do with acting.
‘TikTok Videos.’
‘Ah.’
‘So would you be up for it?’
I smiled at him. ‘Erm, yes! Why not?’
Wyatt was interesting and amusing. He was also a total stranger, of course, but there would be plenty of people milling around at a National Trust country house . . . so even if he turned out to be concealing a newly-sharpened axe inside his jacket, I’d probably be okay!
‘You don’t look certain.’
I laughed and went down the silly banter route. ‘No, I was just thinking I don’t know you, and you might be . . . well, an axe-wielding murderer, for all I know. But I really don’t think you are. So I guess I’d be willing to take a chance on you.’
They both laughed at this, and I joined in, and Wyatt said, ‘Let’s swap numbers and next time you’re planning a visit, I’ll come with you and buy the coffees.’
‘And do your . . . TTVs?’
‘Exactly.’
I was distracted at that moment by Blaize, who I’d noticed downing shorts like it was her last day on earth. She was putting on her coat – or at least attempting to – but it was clear that Kitty was trying to stop her.
What was going on?