Wicked Autumn (22 page)

“Oh, certainly you’re right. Wanda always was one to overdo. No harm in her, really, although…”

“Although?”

“Well, she generally ended up
doing
a lot of harm. There are people like that, you know.”

“Thousands, actually.”

“Quite.”

“Most of them in politics, or government.”

She nodded.

“Won’t you have another slice of cake, Vicar?”

The conversation moved on to matters ecclesiastical (Miss Pitchford was against most of the encroaching inroads of secularism, as she called them) and it was half an hour before Max could say his final good-byes on the doorstep.

He had eaten far more than he’d intended. Miss Pitchford had a mean way with a Dundee cake, one that included a large splash of brandy in the ingredients. Apparently she felt no need to warn anyone of this beforehand, and Max suspected it was part of her arsenal for extracting information from her visitors. She also had in her repertoire a dandelion wine that tasted like water used to boil cabbage but that had brought grown men to their knees. It had been, he recalled, in great demand at Harvest Fayre.

He said his farewells in an effusion of tipsy goodwill, forgetting his umbrella in the process (which item she would hold hostage until he agreed to another visit) but only later realizing the reason for his cheery bonhomie.

He had the niggling sense that one or two interesting points had emerged from the conversation, but for the moment, what they could be, and whether they got him any further, he couldn’t have said. But something the redoubtable Miss Pitchford had told him didn’t match what he felt he knew to be true.

*   *   *

Miss Pitchford stood and fondly watched Max make his moseying way in the general direction of the vicarage. She was essentially an observer, a village spy whose coin of exchange was information. She would have been most at home in Elizabethan England, employed, like Chris Marlowe, in skullduggerous affairs of state. Nether Monkslip, she had often thought regretfully (in an unconscious echo of the thoughts of Wanda Batton-Smythe), offered too small a canvas for the full display of her talents.

The woman who ran the newsagent’s fondly believed she was the hub at the spoke of village information. Miss Pitchford was magnanimous in letting her think so.

Usually Miss Pitchford was content to wait like a hatchling for tidbits of data and gossip to be delivered to her chintzy, slip-covered nest, but this was too much excitement to be contained. Feet on the ground—that’s what was called for.

Setting her felt hat atop her head and throwing on her cape, grabbing her shopping basket to disguise her true intent, she set out for the village at the brisk pace of a woman half her age. Not knowing, she often thought, was the worst, and this was far beyond the usual parish-pump type of event. She’d pick up both word of mouth and a few papers at the newsagent’s—and some milk, while she was at it. Nether Monkslip being in the national news didn’t happen every day, after all.

It was one for the scrapbooks, she thought. It certainly was.

CHAPTER 21

Goddessspell

Another Sunday had arrived, passing without incident, unless one counted the religious revival that had gripped Nether Monkslip: attendance at St. Edwold’s continued to break records. Now, tired from a long week in the village spotlight, Max was nearly late for drinks at seven, dinner at eight. This time it was an invitation of short standing, from Awena Owen.

When she had telephoned him earlier at the vicarage, she was clearly in search of information. Max was happy to oblige, since he hoped for information from Awena in exchange, much as he had done with Miss Pitchford. An added inducement, however, was that Awena was an excellent, adventurous cook, and Max was always grateful for a reprieve from Mrs. Hooser’s cholesterol-laden idea of what constituted a proper British meal. It helped that he’d dined at Awena’s on several occasions in the past, without its giving rise to scandal: her solid reputation in the village was such that even the villagers saw no reason for pointed comment on these unchaperoned meetings.

But in the early days of his arrival in the village, he’d been a hard sell, rejecting her invitations less because of concerns about his reputation or hers, but from a fear the menu would consist of something made only of beans. Perhaps legumes ground into a fine paste, molded, and artfully painted to resemble a rack of lamb.

“No, no,” he’d murmured, hoping he did not sound as deeply wary as he felt. “I have … things … at the vicarage. Things to eat.”

“Like what?” Awena demanded.

Like what? That was quite a good question, actually, he’d realized. Normally, Mrs. Hooser would leave him some mystery odds and ends wrapped in foil to reheat in the oven. He had even been known to whip up some beans on toast for himself. But his larder had been unusually empty at the time, the housekeeper distracted by an outbreak of measles in the Hooser household. Moldy bread loomed large in his gastronomic future.

Awena had said, “Come on. I’m quite a good cook, if I say it myself. And you look like you could use a good meal.” With her usual uncanny ability to intuit the truth of a situation, she said, “I doubt Mrs. Hooser, for all her good intentions, and in the best of circumstances, is much of a chef.”

And so she had surprised him, seduced him, even, into a rustic way of eating that would have astounded his friends from his gluttonous-gourmet life in London. He was a carnivore, as Awena was not, but she had demonstrated to his admiring satisfaction that she gave up nothing in the way of flavor by her diet. That night, long ago, seeing his look as she brought out the main course, a pasta dish made with spinach, goat cheese, and pine nuts, she had said, “I know what you were thinking. It would be a meal of roots and shrubs or, at best, berries and stinging nettles, all gathered at the full of the moon. Which it happens to be tonight. A full moon. No nettles, however.”

He smiled self-consciously.

“Something like that. Sorry.”

“No need to be sorry. People don’t half think the most absurd kind of rot about people of my persuasion. I’m quite used to it, actually.”

Tonight he walked the few minutes to her house under gray clouds as a cool breeze played at his back. The moon was again full, appearing intermittently as the clouds shredded and regrouped.

Leaded-glass windows lined either side of Awena’s door, where she had hung an intricately woven wreath of grasses, leaves, and ribbons to celebrate the season of harvest. The wreath surrounded a brass door knocker, representing the face of a Celtic warrior-goddess. Awena’s own face appeared in one of the door windows as she checked to see who it was before opening. This was new behavior, and undoubtedly a reaction to the recent murder. His heart sank to realize how much Wanda’s death had changed things.

Awena herself could only be described as an earthy type of woman, and past experience of her had shown Max that for all her otherworldly preoccupations, she had a healthy skeptical streak. He imagined that running a business as successful as Goddessspell required ballast to stabilize her clearly genuine preoccupation with the well-being of her soul. Today she was looking particularly priestessy in a robe of a deep saffron color, gathered at the waist by a belt of red beads—the usual high-waisted style she wore to accentuate her buxom figure. Her dark hair was held back by a matching band that caught the light as she moved. She had a slow walk, as if perpetually on pilgrimage; she might have been starring in a singularly campy revival of
The Phoenician Women
. Her face was, as usual, devoid of makeup—not that she needed to enhance the creamy English rose complexion: her plump rosy cheeks, red lips, and blue eyes were striking left as they were.

He handed her the wine he’d brought as a gift, and she showed him into the sitting room, a space she’d filled with good-quality furniture with clean, modern lines and upholstered in cheerful patterns and colors. The art was Art Deco by way of China and India, the walls hung with bright woven tapestries and the floors thick with beautiful rugs. Max had the idea that Noah might have given his eyeteeth for just one of the rugs. All in all, the place was an unusual but pleasing mixture of Spartan ethos and homey charm.

She left him to fetch the before-dinner drinks, soon returning from the kitchen with a lacquered tray, her voluminous dress billowing out behind her. The tray held bottles of homemade hawthorn wine, a specialty of hers, and a wine from Montepulciano—not from Mme Cuthbert’s shop, then, for Madame recognized no other wine than French. Max had thought he’d never see the day, but he found himself choosing the hawthorn wine.

“Dinner will be ready in a few minutes,” she told him.

He knew from previous visits there was an atrium at the back of the house that she had turned into a sort of prayer space, filled with luxuriant green plants, a small tinkly fountain, and an altar of sorts on which candles, flowers, seashells, and polished stones were arranged. The room smelled of incense and the oils that she used in whatever rituals she performed as part of her prayer and meditation. She had explained to him that the objects in the room—the incense, candles, the fountain, and the plants—were there to represent air, fire, water, and earth.

The Anglican Church stretched wide to embrace all points of view, but Max had wondered if it would reach to encompass Awena’s gently wacky worldview, a view that included all manner of things that went bump in the night. Taking in the beautiful and peaceful atrium, he had expressed his skepticism, but politely—a skepticism both inbred and reinforced by the orthodoxy of his theological training. Awena had merely turned to him and quoted, “‘It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason.’ That’s Pascal, if you didn’t know.”

He had been struck by her calm assurance as she went on that night to talk of something she called rhamanta, a method of finding omens by surrendering the self to nature—a listening to the heart in stillness until a sign was revealed.

“I suppose much like the monks that used to live on Noah’s property,” he had said.

“What do you mean,
used to
?” she asked him. She had been smiling … but a seriousness underlay her words. “Just wait until Halloween. If ever a place was haunted, it’s the Abbey Ruins. I don’t know how Noah gets any sleep.”

Despite this kind of thing, or because of it, of all the people in the village, he had come closest to unguarded friendship with Awena. He recognized the attractiveness of her person and her personality, while acknowledging their differences in outlooks, in approaches to this world (and the next). These differences seemed to him insurmountable, particularly for someone in his position. Knowing this, he did not dare risk—realized he was afraid to risk—the friendship in an attempt to replace it with something more. Awena was too important to him.

But even given his trust of her, he found it impossible to pierce the veil he had drawn across his former life. How to tell her why he’d left his old life behind, or even to tell her a fraction of what he’d witnessed and helped perpetuate? In polite conversation, it just didn’t fit anywhere. Awena hardly came from a background of protected privilege—her father, he knew, had been a Welsh fisherman, and she had told Max something of the man’s struggle to raise a large family on his own. Presumably she knew something of the occasional brutality of real life—of strife and hard times. But there was a level at which it seemed impossible to expect anyone to understand what he himself had once been paid to do.

The sitting room overlooked a walled garden in the back, its boundaries marked by a hawthorn hedge, probably the source of their current drink.

“We’ll have rain later,” she said to him now, looking out the picture window.

He followed her gaze to where peace reigned in the moonlight. The silence of Nether Monkslip was one of its qualities he had slowly come to embrace. They were miles from any flight path, and the train stuttered in so infrequently as to cause very little noise. The stillness was total, suggesting a purity of place and people unlike anywhere else on earth. Max, who had been used to uncontained traffic noise in London, had taken some time to grow accustomed to the few night sounds of the village, which struck him as a riotous cacophony of alarming and unwarranted outbursts, each more life-threatening than the last. The snap of a twig was surely a wild animal approaching, of a type long thought to be extinct. The rustle of the trees in the wind, a portent of doom, of the King’s men coming to string up some hapless serf for some unknown, minor offense. His mind had run riot as he tossed uneasily in his bed, uncertain what dangers the countryside might hold.

But certain he was now, with Wanda’s death, that the dangers were not of his imagining.

He took a deep swallow of his wine. The chances were good that someone in his bran-muffin-eating, antioxidant guzzling, holistic congregation was guilty of murder. Impossible. But true.

He raised his glass. “Here’s to rain to make a beauty spot more beautiful,” he said, adding, “It’s easy to believe in God, isn’t it, when we live in such an idyllic village, in such a pretty part of the world. It’s in places like Darfur that belief must be nigh impossible.”

Awena’s fine blue eyes met his in a graceful, upward movement of her head. A necklace of azure stones set in gold gleamed against her neck. She was one of the most physically attuned people he thought he’d ever met, with the deliberate movements of a ballet dancer or an accomplished actress. “I’d have to agree,” she said. “On the surface, at least, we have it made—living in our own little Eden, untouched by the world’s pain.” She again looked out the window that gave on to the back garden.

Eden
, thought Max. Funny she should mention …

“You would almost expect to see Wanda out there now, walking across the lawn, wouldn’t you? Coming to collect for something, or to ask for something, or to simply ‘borrow’ something from the potting shed without asking.” She turned to look directly at him. “I’m sure you’re the person to find him—or her. The killer. She would want that.”