“My friends?”
“Don’t you want to say good-bye to them, too? Or at least tell them what’s going on?”
“Well, I…” I fiddled with my eggcup, not knowing what to say. I had lost track of most of my friends over the past year.
“Yes, Miss Shepherd,” Willis, Sr., joined in, “you must not allow your natural diffidence to prevent you from visiting your friends before you leave. It is quite in keeping with Miss Westwood’s wishes.” Father and son stared at me, their heads tilted at identical angles, until I felt like an antisocial geek.
“There is one person I’d like to see,” I admitted finally, “but she doesn’t live in Boston.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Bill.
I looked to Willis, Sr., and he nodded.
“Okay, then,” I agreed, “I’ll give her a call.”
* * *
Meg Thomson was a short, unrepentantly heavyset woman, with an abrupt manner and a mile-wide mothering streak. If Meg thought you needed to hear something for your own good, you would hear it, whether you wanted to or not. And she was fiercely loyal. She lived in Maine, in a small coastal town about a hundred miles north of Boston, where she and her partner, Doug Fleming, owned a strange and wonderful art gallery. Doug lived in an apartment above the shop, but Meg had a ramshackle old house overlooking the beach.
The gallery specialized in science fiction and fantasy art, and touring the maze of paintings and sculptures was like traveling through a world of dreams made real. The business was usually on the verge of bankruptcy, but that never seemed to bother Meg. She had found where she wanted to be in life and she regarded the occasional scramble for rent money as just another dash of the spice that kept her life from getting too bland.
“Meg?” I said when I heard her voice. “It’s me, Lori. Think you could put up a couple of houseguests?”
“I’ll drive down tomorrow and pick you up,” she replied without missing a beat.
“No need. I have a car.” I smiled to myself and added, “A Rolls-Royce.”
That did slow her down, but only for a minute.
“Okay, Shepherd. But if this Rolls-Royce of yours crashes and I don’t get to hear the rest of the story, I’ll never speak to you again.”
I told her I’d be up the next day, sent my best wishes to Doug, and packed my bag.
8
Between traffic jams, detours, and a scenic route designed by a civil engineer with homicidal tendencies, Bill and I didn’t reach the gallery until late afternoon the next day. There was no answer when I rang Doug’s bell and the gallery was locked up tight, so we headed out to Meg’s beach house. Bill parked the Rolls in her driveway and unloaded our bags while I ran up the stairs and banged on the screen door. Meg opened it, and I pointed over my shoulder.
“Want to take a picture?” I asked.
“I never doubted you,” she said. “But who’s that carrying the luggage, your manservant? Does he do windows?”
“It’s a long story, Meg,” I murmured.
“I’ll bet,” she replied, elbowing me in the ribs. She turned and hollered over her shoulder. “Doug! They’re here!”
Doug Fleming was slender, balding, bespectacled, and gay. He and Meg had been lovers in college, and when that hadn’t worked out, they had become best friends and, eventually, business partners. Their partnership was a finely tuned balancing act: where Meg was blunt and bossy, Doug was tactful and diffident. When it came to compassion, however, they were evenly matched; I wasn’t the only friend they had helped through tough times.
I gave Doug a hello hug when he appeared, introduced Bill, then followed Meg inside, pausing in the living room to say hello to Van Gogh, Meg’s one-eared cat, who was perched in his usual place atop the bookcase. Bill put our bags beside the couch, reached up to give Van Gogh a scratch behind the ear, and we all ended up in Meg’s kitchen.
Since Meg only did housework when she was in a grumpy mood, I was relieved to see dishes in the sink and art catalogs stacked helter-skelter on every horizontal surface. Bill cleared off a chair for me, then stood behind it while Doug and Meg filled me in on the latest gallery news.
“We closed up shop early today to celebrate your visit,” Doug concluded.
“But not early enough to get any food in the house,” said Meg. “You want to hit King’s Cafe?”
“I’ve got a better idea,” said Bill. All eyes turned to him. “Why don’t you three talk while I make dinner?”
“Sounds good to me,” said Doug, “but I’ll lend a hand in the kitchen, if you don’t mind. I think these two want to get down to some serious gossiping.”
Bill scanned the kitchen, then fixed his gaze on Meg’s portly form. “Linguini,” he said. “Garlic bread. Caesar salad, heavy on the anchovies. Cheap red wine. A nice, light, chocolate soufflé for dessert. And… maybe some Amaretto with the coffee.”
“Shepherd,” said Meg, “you’d better marry this guy.”
“Oh, she will,” said Bill.
“What?” I squeaked. Meg grabbed my arm and Doug all but shoved Bill out the kitchen door.
“We’d better get to the grocery before it closes,” Doug urged.
“The grocery?” Bill’s voice came through the open window. “Is that where they have the tomato soup?”
If Meg had let go of my arm, I would have gone straight out the window after him.
“Deep breaths, Shepherd,” she murmured. “Deep breaths. Come on out on the porch. I think you need some fresh air.”
* * *
“So let me see if I’ve got this straight,” said Meg.
It had taken her a while to get a complete sentence out of me, but when she did, the whole story had come tumbling out, everything that had happened since the letter from Willis & Willis had arrived. A sense of calm had settled over me once I’d off-loaded the story, and I sat in a chair on the covered porch, Van Gogh purring drowsily in my lap, listening to the surf crash against the rocks below, and watching the sky. Dark clouds were moving in, lit now and then by flashes of lightning. A storm was brewing out at sea.
“You’re ready to throw away ten grand looking for a needle in a haystack,” Meg summarized, “but it’s a needle your mother wants found, so I can understand that. You two always were pretty tight. I like the stuff about the letters, too.”
“They’re in a cottage,” I said, “near a place called Finch.” A dreamy smile crept across my face. “A cottage in England. Isn’t that a kick? I can’t wait to see what it looks like.”
“Maybe you already know what it looks like,” said Meg.
“How could I? It’s not in the photograph, if that’s what you mean. I went over the thing with a magnifying glass and there are no houses in sight.” Van Gogh yawned and began licking my hand, and Meg directed her next comment to him.
“She sure can be thick at times, eh, Van? In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say she had the brains of a lungfish.” She leaned toward me, her elbows on her knees. “Now, think, Shepherd. In all those Aunt Dimity stories, didn’t maybe just one include a pretty little cottage? C’mon, now, think.”
I didn’t have to think. Meg was right. Aunt Dimity’s Cottage. If I closed my eyes I could almost see the lilacs and the slate roof (which my child self had pictured as a blackboard tent) and the foul-tempered cat who had driven Aunt Dimity to distraction. Suddenly I knew exactly what the cottage looked like, right down to the cushions in the window seat.
“Lilacs,” I murmured. “There were white lilacs at the funeral, just like the ones at the cottage.”