Page 3 of Welcome to Murder Week

“I said, she was going to take you,” she says.

“That’s impossible.”

The last time my mother and I traveled together was on a fall weekend when I was nine and we drove from Buffalo to Vermont. We held hands as we hiked along a gorge, visited a toy museum, and stayed in an old hotel where we slept together in a canopy bed. The next day, we moved into an ashram. My mother gave me an old book about girls in boarding school, which I read while she did hot yoga. At the end of the long weekend, we drove to Rochester, where my mother put me on a bus back to Buffalo, my grandmother’s address and phone number scrawled on an index card she’d zipped into my jacket pocket. For weeks, she said she’d be home soon, but by Christmas, she’d moved in with a massage therapist she’d met in a silent meditation. From then on, she never returned to Buffalo for more than a few days at a time.

“What made her think that I’d agree to go?” I ask Aurora.

“Again, astrologer, not mind reader.”

“But why me? Why on earth would my mother book this ludicrous trip to England with me?

“I haven’t the foggiest,” Aurora says. “I suppose that’s another mystery for you to solve.”

CHAPTER THREE

Dear Miss Little:

I am so sorry about your mother. I had the fortune of corresponding with her at length and am deeply sorry that her untimely death has prevented her from indulging in what she said would be the fulfilment of a dream: to visit England with her only child.

In answer to your inquiry, no, we are not monsters. As such, we will graciously refund half of your mother’s payment. The other half, which she was chuffed to bits to allocate for you, is unfortunately not refundable, as you are not presently deceased.

However, you can recover a portion of the payment made by transferring from the two-bedroom cottage your mother selected to one of our shared accommodation offerings, Wisteria Cottage, along with two other participants, each traveling solo. The three of you can work as a team. See details in the attached reimbursement notice.

I trust this will suit you and we look forward to seeing you on the 27th of May, when the festivities begin!

Yours most sincerely,

Mrs. Germaine Postlethwaite

Owner, The Book and Hook

Willowthrop Village

Derbyshire, England

It is 9:50 a.m., ten minutes until the shop opens, and I read the email again. Who is this Germaine with the unpronounceable last name? And why does she assume I want to fly to England to solve a fake murder? I have nothing against English-village mysteries; I’ve spent hours watching them on television with Mr. Groberg. We watch only at night or on rainy days, always with tea and gingersnaps, though I never drink the tea. Mr. Groberg usually identifies the culprit well before I have the slightest idea of whodunit. My mother used to make fun of me for watching “dowdy people solve crimes in bad weather with no sex.” It didn’t occur to her that what I loved was not so much the shows themselves as the time with Mr. Groberg. Had she thought I’d be into this trip?

I rest my head on my desk, not looking up when the antique sleigh bells on the door jingle and a blast of cold air rushes in. I know by the scent of patchouli that it’s Kim. The tinny sound of electronic dance music escapes from her earbuds.

“Everything okay?” Kim shouts.

I lift my head and nod toward my computer screen. “I got a response.”

Kim takes out her earbuds and pulls off her wool beanie, a messof long blond ringlets tumbling down her back. Unraveling her scarf, she reads the email over my shoulder.

“Wisteria Cottage sounds lovely,” she says.

“Wisteria is an invasive species.”

I walk to the door, pull up the blinds, and flip the sign to “We’re Open.” Outside, it’s still snowing, thick flakes making slow-motion cartwheels to the ground. The plow has been through once already, but the street is white again. Across the road, the shops look warm and inviting. These are my favorite days, cold and muffled and clean, in the city where I’ve lived my whole life, the place my mother fled without looking back.

“How can youstilllive there?” she’d said the last time we spoke, about a month before the stroke that killed her at fifty-five.

She had never intended to settle in Buffalo. She was twenty when she left home in Indiana to seek adventure in a big city. Buffalo was supposed to be a pit stop, an overnight visit with a friend at the state university. But down the hall in her friend’s dormitory was Ben Little, the bearded, soft-spoken resident adviser. He was a senior, an English major who wrote poetry without punctuation and played Spanish guitar in the stairwell, where the acoustics were good. Within a few days, my mother was ensconced in Ben’s single room. When he graduated a month later, they moved into a garage apartment near Anchor Bar. My mother took a job at a coffee shop while he prepared to start teaching high school English. Within a year, she was pregnant with me.

Buffalo may have been an accident for my mother, but for me it has been the source of everything good. Here was love and consistency. Here was my beloved paternal grandmother Raya, who stepped up when my mother left. Who took me to the public library every week, attended my parent-teacher conferences, combed the knots out of my thick hair, suffered my brief stint playing the oboe,and indulged my love of Polly Pockets. Who taught me how to bake challah, make a sundial, hang wallpaper, and catch and cook a brown trout. Who told me stories about my father, who used to read to me every morning and every night from the same books she’d read to him when he was a child.

“A week away from home could be what you need,” Kim says when I’m back at my desk.

---