Aunt Dimity and the Wishing Well (Aunt Dimity Mystery) - Softcover

Atherton, Nancy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143126989 ISBN 13: 9780143126980

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2015

Synopsis

The nineteenth in the New York Times–bestselling series, featuring the original paranormal detective. Watch out for Nancy Atherton's latest, Aunt Dimity and the King's Ransom, coming in July 2018 from Viking! 

In this New York Times bestseller, dashing Australian Jack McBride arrives in the village of Finch to wrap up his reclusive late uncle’s affairs. While helping Jack clear out his uncle’s overgrown garden, Lori finds a long-forgotten wishing well. As a joke, she makes a wish—and it comes true! Word spreads, and soon the entire village besieges the well with wishes of their own. As more and more wishes come true, chaos ensues, and Lori—with Aunt Dimity’s otherworldly help—races to prove there’s something other than magic at work before her beloved village implodes.

About this title

About the Author:

Nancy Atherton is the bestselling author of twenty-two Aunt Dimity Mysteries. The first book in the series, Aunt Dimity's Death, was voted "One of the Century's 100 Favorite Mysteries" by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. She lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Praise for Nancy Atherton and Her Aunt Dimity Series

Aunt Dimity and the Wishing Well

Aunt Dimity and the Lost Prince

Aunt Dimity and the Village Witch

Aunt Dimity and the Family Tree

Aunt Dimity’s Death

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

One

It was a fine day for a funeral. Rain plummeted from a leaden sky and a blustery wind blew the chill of mortality through the mourners clustered in St. George’s churchyard. It was early May, but it felt like the raw end of March.

The funeral was well attended, despite the dismal weather. CLOSED signs dangled in shop windows throughout the small village of Finch, and cottage curtains, so often twitched aside to allow one inquisitive neighbor to observe another, hung motionless. Everyone who was anyone stood shivering in the churchyard, and in Finch, everyone was someone.

Short, plump Sally Pyne, tearoom owner and baker extraordinaire, shared an umbrella with her equally plump fiancé, Henry Cook. Christine and Dick Peacock, the pub’s well-fed proprietors, served as a human windbreak for the more slightly built retired railroad employee, George Wetherhead. Ruddy-cheeked Mr. Malvern, a local dairy farmer, stood beside Grant Tavistock and Charles Bellingham, whose business was the purchase, sale, and restoration of fine art.

Near the three men, draped in a black woolen cape that hung to her ankles, stood Finch’s resident witch, Miranda Morrow, who’d left her holistic health hotline unattended in order to pay her respects to the deceased. The presence of a pagan at a Christian burial might have raised eyebrows in a less tightly knit community, but Miranda’s neighbors were accustomed to her funny little ways.

Four women—two widows and two spinsters, all retired—huddled together for warmth in the lee of a marble angel. Elspeth Binney, Opal Taylor, Selena Buxton, and Millicent Scroggins never missed a funeral if they could help it, but their patented piety was, on this occasion, undercut by the volley of resentful glances they cast at a fifth woman, Amelia Thistle. Amelia had wounded them grievously by winning the heart of the village’s most eligible widower, who happened to be my father-in-law. The quarrelsome quartet had almost forgiven Amelia for succeeding so spectacularly where they had failed, but the cold rain had made them cranky.

Peggy and Jasper Taxman occupied their usual positions at the forefront of the assembly. Mild-mannered Jasper Taxman was a mere blip on the village’s radar, but his wife was a supernova. Peggy Taxman ran the post office, the general store, the greengrocer’s shop, and every village-wide event in Finch, and she did so imperiously, with an iron hand and a voice that could crack granite. None but the brave would dare to question Peggy’s right to plant her Wellington-booted feet wherever she chose to plant them.

By contrast, Mr. Barlow, who was the church sexton and village handyman, stood at a respectful distance from the grave, while Bree Pym, the twenty-year-old New Zealander who’d helped Mr. Barlow to lower the coffin into its final resting place, rested her muddy hands on the headstone shared by her great-grandaunts, Ruth and Louise Pym, whose house and modest fortune she had inherited. Brave Bree rarely missed an opportunity to goad Peggy Taxman, but she’d sheathed her sharp wit for the day and watched the proceedings in solemn silence.

I, too, stood in the churchyard, along with my husband, Bill, and our eight-year-old twins, Will and Rob. My father-in-law, William Willis, Sr., had hoped to join us, but as he’d only recently recovered from a nasty inflammation of the lungs, he’d been ordered by his physician, his housekeeper, his gardener, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his sweetheart to stay at home.

My best friend, Emma Harris, had also been unable to attend the funeral because of illness, though in her case it was a horse’s illness rather than her own. Pegasus, Emma’s beloved chestnut mare, had been diagnosed with a mild case of colic, which had been all the excuse Emma had needed to spend the day in a nice, dry barn. She’d acknowledged the gravity of the occasion by canceling the day’s classes at her riding academy, but since horses could not be relied upon to clean their own stalls, her staff and stable hands had been too busy to come to St. George’s.

Theodore Bunting, Finch’s vicar, stood in his customary place at the foot of the grave. While he struggled to control his prayer book’s flapping pages, his wife, Lilian Bunting, attempted to shield him from the worst of the wind with a large black umbrella.

As the vicar spoke of dust and ashes, the eyes of the congregation darted furtively from the rain-dappled coffin to Lilian’s umbrella, which tilted alarmingly with each passing gust. The men and women in the churchyard were too mature to speak their thoughts aloud, but my sons were not.

“Mrs. Bunting is going to fly straight over the church if she doesn’t let go of that umbrella,” Rob observed dispassionately.

“Like Mary Poppins,” added Will. “Only older.”

Bill emitted a brief but regrettably audible snort of laughter. I elbowed him in the ribs and quelled Will and Rob with a look, but the damage was done. Mr. Barlow snickered, Bree Pym giggled, and soon the only shoulders that weren’t quivering with suppressed mirth belonged to Peggy Taxman, whose gimlet gaze eventually silenced the unseemly tittering.

The good people of Finch weren’t given to giggling at funerals. Finch was a tiny hamlet set amid the rolling hills and the patchwork fields of England’s Cotswolds region. Although Bill and I were Americans, we’d lived in a honey-colored cottage near Finch for a decade. Our sons had never known another home.

Bill’s widowed father completed our family circle. Will and Rob had the run of their grandfather’s splendidly restored Georgian mansion, but the wrought-iron gates guarding his estate kept less welcome visitors—Elspeth Binney, Opal Taylor, Selena Buxton, and Millicent Scroggins, to be precise—at bay.

While Willis, Sr., tended his orchids and courted Amelia Thistle, Bill ran the international branch of his family’s venerable law firm from an office overlooking the village green, the twins attended Morningside School in the nearby market town of Upper Deeping, and I juggled the ever-changing roles of wife, mother, daughter-in-law, friend, neighbor, gossip monitor, and community volunteer. Over the years, Bill, Will, Rob, Willis, Sr., and I had become vital threads in the fabric of our village and we did our best to keep the cloth intact.

We could do little, however, to repair the gaping hole left by a villager’s death. In a tiny place like Finch, the loss of a neighbor usually sent shock waves of grief through every household. As a rule, a death in Finch was regarded as a death in the family, and no one with the faintest sense of decency would laugh during a family funeral.

Mr. Hector Huggins, however, was the exception that proved the rule. His death hadn’t sent so much as a ripple of grief through Finch, not because he’d been disliked, but because he’d lived among us as a stranger. In a village where everyone knew virtually everything about everyone else, Mr. Huggins had managed the miraculous feat of remaining anonymous.

A few useless things were, of course, known about him. He’d been a senior partner in an accounting firm in Upper Deeping. He’d patronized local businesses, attended local events, and never missed a Sunday service at St. George’s, but he’d made neither friends nor enemies in the village. He’d simply made no impression at all. Bill had once described him as a wallpaper man, someone who hovered quietly in the background, unable or unwilling to involve himself in other people’s lives.

Upon his retirement, Mr. Huggins had taken to spending his afternoons sitting silently on the bench near the war memorial and his evenings fishing silently from atop the humpbacked bridge at the south end of the village green. No one knew how he’d spent his mornings, but it seemed likely that he’d spent them in silence.

Mr. Huggins had lived in Ivy Cottage, a modest stone dwelling across the lane from my father-in-law’s estate, but since Ivy Cottage was completely hidden from view by a tall hedgerow, it was possible to drive past it many times without knowing it was there. Neighborly concern had prompted me to call on Mr. Huggins from time to time, but I’d never set foot inside his front gate. He’d always turned me away at the gate with a gentle smile and the soft-spoken assurance that he required no assistance.

Neither I nor my neighbors had known that Mr. Huggins was ailing until an ambulance had arrived at Ivy Cottage to take him on what had proved to be his final journey. He’d died ten days later in the hospital in Upper Deeping. Shortly thereafter, the vicar had received a letter from a London solicitor containing the payment as well as the arrangements for Mr. Huggins’s funeral, but whether the same solicitor would handle the disposal of his late client’s worldly goods, no one could tell.

A faint communal memory suggested that Mr. Huggins had relatives living abroad, but none had shown up to bury him. Mr. Malvern, Dick Peacock, Henry Cook, and Grant Tavistock had volunteered to serve as Mr. Huggins’s pallbearers, but it had been left to the vicar to eulogize him because no one else could think of anything to say.

The vicar had done what he could with an awkward situation, basing his sermon on a pair of verses in which St. Paul exhorted his brethren “to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands . . . so that you may command the respect of outsiders, and be dependent on nobody.”

Mr. Huggins hadn’t worked with his hands, exactly, and the villagers had bristled slightly at the suggestion that they might have been regarded as “outsiders” by a man who’d never made the least effort to become a part of the community, but they couldn’t deny that their late neighbor had lived quietly, minded his own affairs, and depended on nobody but himself. The general feeling seemed to be that, if self-reliance were a virtue, then Mr. Huggins had earned his place in Heaven.

What he had not earned was a place in our hearts. I doubted that anyone in the churchyard felt a deep and abiding sense of loss at his passing. They might have felt pity for a man whose family had, apparently, abandoned him. They might have regretted their failure to get to know him better. They might even have felt sorry for not feeling sorrier about his death. But no one was heartbroken.

I suspected that the vast majority of my neighbors had, like myself, come to Mr. Huggins’s funeral out of a sense of duty, and a sense of duty could hardly be counted on to inoculate them against a contagious bout of giggling. Even so, we all looked a bit shamefaced after our indecorous descent into comedy, and redoubled our efforts to appear somber. A neighbor had died, he had no one to mourn him, and we owed it to the honor of our village to see him off properly.

The vicar was about to drop a morsel of mud on the coffin when he was distracted by a commotion in the lane. Heads that had been bowed rose alertly as a white Ford Focus splashed to a halt on the grassy verge beyond the lych-gate, and the vicar’s hand fell to his side as a tall figure leapt from the car, vaulted the churchyard’s low stone wall, and sprinted across the sodden grass, dodging nimbly between headstones and skidding to a halt mere inches from Mr. Huggins’s open grave.

The newcomer was a young man—in his midtwenties, perhaps. He was dressed in a dark-brown rain jacket, khaki cargo shorts, and a pair of rugged hiking sandals, and though his clothes were slightly shabby, he was much more than slightly good-looking. His blond hair was like tousled corn silk, his eyes were as blue as a summer sky, and his deeply tanned face made his teeth seem almost too white. Even his toes, which were rapidly turning pink in the cold air, were handsome. As he paused to catch his breath I could sense hearts fluttering among the faithful, but though many mouths had fallen open, words seemed to be in short supply.

Once again, a child led us.

“Hello,” Will said brightly. “Who are you?”

“I’m Jack MacBride,” the young man replied in a broad Australian accent. “And I’ve come to say good-bye to Uncle Hector.”

Two

The young man gave Will a friendly wink, then turned to face the vicar.

“I’m in the right place, aren’t I, Padre?” he inquired anxiously. “St. George’s church? In Finch? Only, Finch wasn’t on my map, so I had to stop in Upper Deeping for directions and the bloke who gave them to me was a bit of a wally.”

“Calm yourself, Mr. MacBride,” the vicar said gently. “You are in the correct place. You may, if you wish, be the first to cast earth into your uncle’s grave.”

“Beauty,” said Jack.

He scooped a heaping handful of mud from the mound near the grave and let it fall with a mighty splat on the coffin lid. The gruesome noise broke the spell he’d cast over the churchyard. Gaping mouths snapped shut, astonished gazes were averted, and the ancient ritual continued as if a golden-haired Adonis hadn’t burst upon the scene like a ray of sunshine.

The women stepped forward to drop damp posies into the grave and the men contributed modest lumps of dirt, but Will and Rob, delighted by Jack MacBride’s exuberance, had to be restrained from hurling great gobs of mud in the grave’s general direction. Bill and I clamped our hands onto their shoulders until the vicar had pronounced the final blessing.

Amelia Thistle nodded sympathetically to Jack, then strode off to visit her recuperating beau in his graceful Georgian home, but the rest of the villagers formed a line and shuffled past the newcomer, studying him covertly while murmuring impromptu words of condolence. Bill and I allowed the boys to throw one small mud-ball apiece into the grave, then joined the vicar and Lilian at the end of the line, while our neighbors lingered near the lych-gate to await developments.

“I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. MacBride,” the vicar began.

“Jack’ll do,” the young man interjected. “Mr. MacBride’s my dad.”

“I’m very sorry for your loss, Jack,” the vicar began anew. “I’m Theodore Bunting, vicar of the parish.”

“And I’m Lilian Bunting, Teddy’s wife,” said Lilian, furling her troublesome umbrella. “Please allow me to introduce our friends: Bill Willis, his wife, Lori, and their sons, Will and Rob.”

“G’day,” said Jack, with a nod to each of us.

“Your feet look cold,” said Rob.

“They are, a bit,” Jack admitted.

“Why don’t you have socks on?” inquired Will.

“And why are you wearing shorts?” Rob added.

“Because it’s hot where I come from,” said Jack. “My warm clothes are at the bottom of my pack and I didn’t have time to fish them out.” He looked apologetically at the vicar. “Sorry for buggering up the ceremony, Mr. Bunting. I’d’ve been here sooner, but my plane was late getting into Heathrow and it took for-bloody-ever to rent a halfway decent car and traffic was a bloody nightmare because half the bloody roads were flooded and—”

“Apology accepted,” the vicar bro...

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0143126989
• ISBN 13: 9780143126980
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288