Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil (Aunt Dimity Mystery) (20 page)

“He’s talking about the Devil’s Ring,” Nicole said. “Uncle Dickie took me there once. He tried to frighten me with a horrible old legend.”

“Those who enter the Ring must be pure of heart or risk losing their immortal souls to the devil.” Adam’s dark eyes sought and held mine. “I agree with Edward. He and Claire had nothing to fear from the devil. If ever hearts were pure, theirs were.”

I gave a small nod and he replied with a half-regretful smile. We needn’t fear for our souls, he was saying. Our embrace was a gift to Claire.

“You speak as if you know them,” Nicole observed.

“I feel as if I do,” said Adam. “Don’t you?”

“I suppose so,” Nicole conceded. “Claire, more than Edward. She was young and lonely and…and afraid. For Edward, I mean.” Her expression became solemn, as if she’d realized that Claire’s problems weren’t so different from her own. “Please, Adam, go on reading.”

Adam bent to his task.

In July 1917, Edward and a fellow subaltern called Mitchell were given a temporary assignment at Corps Headquarters.

The next letter, written two days later, proved intriguing.

The hoped-for meeting never came, and the vows were never spoken. A newspaper clipping, folded in among the letters, gave notice that on Saturday, September 8, 1917, three years after he’d enlisted, Edward Frederick Cresswell was killed in action, in the Third Battle of Ypres, known to the soldiers who fought there as Passchendaele.

He’d just turned twenty-one.

“Poor Claire,” Nicole said softly. “She must have died of a broken heart.”

The last letter of all was written in a careful, copybook script quite different from Edward’s scrawl.

The first light of dawn was seeping into the room when Adam finished Lieutenant Mitchell’s letter. His voice was hoarse, his face drawn, as if the night’s journey had exhausted him. He placed the last frail sheet beside the newspaper clipping, rose from his chair, and crossed to the brass telescope, where he stood staring out across the gray and empty moors.

I listened to the ticking of the ebony clock, filled with a sense of numbing defeat. Edward had survived so much and for so long that he’d come to seem invincible. I couldn’t quite believe that he was dead.

“Passchendaele.” Adam spoke with his back to us, in a hollow, faraway voice. “A lowland village surrounded by bogs drained by a system of dikes and canals. Artillery barrages destroyed the drainage system, and when the rains came, the bogs were reborn.

“Farm fields became sucking quagmires that swallowed horses whole. Wounded men pitched forward into the mud and drowned. The dead sank without a trace. More than forty thousand soldiers vanished in the insatiable sea of mud. Local farmers still harvest their bones.”

I exchanged a worried glance with Nicole and went to
stand at Adam’s side. His eyes were glazed, unblinking, as if he were in a trance, and I felt a stab of guilt for leaving so much of the reading to him. It had been hard enough to listen to Edward’s words. To read them, in the boy’s own hand, on paper stained with battlefield filth, must have been wrenching.

“He has no grave,” Adam murmured. “Josiah has a mausoleum, but Edward has no grave.”

Adam knew better than I that Flanders was littered with military cemeteries, but it wasn’t the time or the place to remind him.

“He had Claire’s love,” I said softly. “Surely that was enough.” I twined my arm in his. “It’s been a long night. I think we could all do with a little sleep.”

He raised a hand to rub his tired eyes. “Yes. We’ll talk more in the morning.”

“It’s morning already,” I said, but Adam made no reply.

He turned and left the room, moving like a sleepwalker, with Nicole and me trailing after him, each of us grieving in silence for a young man we’d never known and the young woman who’d loved him.

I
stayed up longer than I’d intended, curled on the fainting couch in my flannel nightie, savoring the fire’s warmth and telling Aunt Dimity about the staircase, the tower room, and Edward. When I finished, her first response was one of almost comic indignation.

I simply cannot abide ghost impersonators. Wyrdhurst is troubled enough without adding amateur apparitions to the mix. Apart from that, they’ve no sense of subtlety. The tape-recorded laughter wouldn’t have frightened you for more than two minutes if you hadn’t been under Claire’s influence. I can’t imagine why any self-respecting faker would use such a silly, childish toy.

“Jared might have rigged the black box to serve as an alarm,” I suggested. “The laughter would confuse an intruder and warn Jared that someone was on his staircase.”

You’re convinced that Jared’s responsible, then?

“He’s the most likely suspect,” I replied. “He has the motive and, as far as I know, the opportunity.”

Don’t you find it odd that he never entered the tower room?

“I’m pretty sure that the door to the tower room was locked until last night,” I said, “when Claire unlocked it for me.”

Yet she couldn’t enter the room herself. I have a bad feeling about that place, Lori.

I heard a soft tap at the door, set the journal aside, and called out, “Come in.”

Adam stepped into the room. “I saw the light under your door,” he said. “Mind if I join you?”

“Not at all.” I swung my legs to the floor, to make room for him on the fainting couch.

He closed the door behind him. He was still wearing the clothes he’d worn all night, and he looked dog-tired, as if he hadn’t slept in weeks.

As he sank onto the couch I said, “I know this’ll sound ridiculous, coming from me, but you really should be in bed.”

“I know.” His voice was rough with fatigue. “It’s absurd, isn’t it? I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep.”

“It’s my fault,” I said. “I shouldn’t have left all of the reading to you. I know how deeply you sympathize with the soldiers who—”

“Please, Lori,” he broke in. “Please don’t apologize to me. I don’t think I could bear it.” He sat with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. “Besides, it’s not the letters, it’s that room, that awful room. I can’t get it out of my mind.”

“Dimity has a bad feeling about it,” I told him.

“So do I.” He looked over his shoulder at the barred windows. “It’s all of a piece—the bars, the telescope, the peepholes, Claire’s fears.…I keep thinking about the embroidery frame and that pathetic collection of children’s books.” He turned his red-rimmed eyes toward me. “Shall I tell you why the room was built?”

I nodded reluctantly. I didn’t really want to hear his answer.

“Josiah treated his daughter like a prisoner,” Adam said. “I think he finally built a prison for her.”

I envisioned the isolated, barren room, with its heavy door and slender windows, but shook my head.

“We’re not talking about the Middle Ages,” I protested. “Josiah wasn’t a feudal lord. He couldn’t snap his fingers and make people vanish.”

“Couldn’t he?” Adam’s gaze intensified. “Wyrdhurst is a world unto itself, Lori, and Josiah built it. He created the staircase and the tower room, and he made sure that he alone had access to both. Do you think he excluded them from the floor plans by accident?”

“But someone would notice that Claire was missing,” I insisted. “Someone would…” A sick feeling of dread welled up inside of me. “Clive Aynsworth. He must have found the hidden door in the library and figured out what Josiah was up to.
That’s
why Josiah killed him—to prevent him from telling people that Claire was in the tower.”

Adam motioned toward the windows. “Josiah tried putting bars on her bedroom windows, but they didn’t do the trick. I believe he shut her up in the tower to keep her from running away.”

“He couldn’t keep her there forever,” I said.

“Not forever.” Adam gave a shuddering sigh. “Just until Edward was dead.”

A coal fell on the fire, sending up a shower of sparks. Beyond the windows, the sun had risen on another crisp autumn day. How often had Claire looked out from her cell, I wondered, remembering sunny mornings on the moors?

“He must have been insane,” I murmured.

“There was a time,” said Adam, “when we would have called him evil.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have dropped this on you, not at this hour, not after last night.”

“I’m glad you did.” I went to the bedside table and brought Major Ted to Adam. “Here. Take Teddy with you. He’ll stand guard over your dreams.”

“No nightmares shall pass?” Adam smiled, took the bear, and stood. “Thank you, Lori, for—”

“Don’t be silly,” I scolded. “Now go to bed.”

When he’d gone, I took up the blue journal. The handwriting began the moment I turned the first page.

Adam seems deeply disturbed.

“He’s had a tough night,” I reminded her. “He’s studied the First World War. He knows what Edward went through and”—I hesitated—“and I suppose he feels close to Claire. She chose him to stand in for Edward. In a sense, he’s held her in his arms.”

He has feelings for you as well, Lori.

“I know.” I hadn’t missed the half-regretful smile or the shadow of sadness in his eyes, and I couldn’t deny a certain sadness of my own. Adam and I had been through a lot together, in a very short period of time. It would have been inhuman to feel nothing.

It seems almost inevitable, given the circumstances.

“Yes.” Dimity had touched a tender place and I shied away from her probing. “Dimity, Adam believes that Josiah imprisoned Claire in the tower room. Do you think he’s right?”

I do. It explains so much. Still, I feel certain that something else happened in that room, something terrible, more terrible than imprisonment, more terrible even than Edward’s death.

I blanched as a horrifying possibility presented itself. “Do you think Josiah
murdered
Claire?”

I don’t know. I only know that Claire’s tormented by unfinished business and unhealed wounds. This house is haunted by its past, Lori.

I shrugged helplessly. “I can’t change the past.”

But you can change the present. Claire led you to Edward’s letters for a reason.

I thought for a moment. “The treasure,” I said finally. “She wants me to find the treasure Edward sent to her.”

She wants you to piece the puzzle together properly, the way it should have been done so many years ago. Only then will she be able to rest in peace.

Now follow your own advice, my dear, and go to bed. You’ll need your wits about you to help Claire reach her final destination.

Nicole was the first to broach the intriguing subject that had been justifiably overshadowed by Edward’s death.

We’d gathered in the dining room for a hearty English breakfast served by Hatch at the unconventional hour of two o’clock in the afternoon. Seven hours of sleep had restored Nicole’s peace of mind, but Adam still looked troubled. He
ate in silence while Nicole and I discussed the tantalizing hint Edward had dropped in his final letter to Claire.

Nicole kicked the conversation off by announcing that she’d telephoned Uncle Dickie, to tell him of the night’s adventure, and discovered that he knew nothing about the hidden staircase or the tower room. What’s more, he’d never heard of Edward Cresswell or the treasure that had supposedly come into Claire’s possession in 1917.

“I do wish Edward had been more specific about the
kind
of thing he’d sent,” Nicole complained, scooping marmalade from a pretty porcelain jam pot.

“What would the owner of a French château bury in his garden?” I asked.