Page 42 of Welcome to Murder Week

I give Germaine a quick account of my mother’s history, which is not very worldly. She was born in Indiana and raised in a place called McCordsville, where the big excitement was watching the CSX freight train barrel through. After high school, she went to a community college part-time for a while, and when she’d saved enough money, she left home. Her first stop was Buffalo, which ended up being considerably longer than a layover. After leaving me with my paternal grandmother when I was nine, she lived in Vermont, California, New Mexico, New York, and Florida.

“We often went long stretches without being in touch, so I guess she could have come to England, but she probably would have told me,” I say. “She wasn’t good at keeping secrets.”

Germaine looks puzzled.

“Your mother seemed so thrilled to have discovered our mystery week,” she says.

“She’d been searching for a fake murder to solve?” Wyatt asks.

“I don’t think the mystery mattered to her at all,” Germaine says. “She said it was ‘a hoot’ that she thought you would enjoy.”

Did my mother know me at all?

Germaine continues. “She had so many questions. Here, look.” She hands me a printout of an email. She’s right, it’s almost all questions. Was the town very small; were there new buildings or only old ones; who lived there, mostly old people or were there young families too? What was the surrounding countryside like? Was it clean or polluted?

Amity, who’s reading over my shoulder, says, “It sounds like she was doing research, almost like she wanted to move here.”

“That’s not like my mother,” I say. “She’d never do research. She’d just get it in her mind to go somewhere and off she’d go.”

“Could she have met someone from here who invited her to visit?” Wyatt asks.

“But why wouldn’t she have said as much to Germaine?” Amity says.

I’m uncomfortable with the way they’re all looking at me, like I should have the answers. I thought I was used to my mother’s mercurial ways, but having them exposed like this makes me embarrassed that I know so little about her. What had I missed?

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Amity and Wyatt head over to the King George Inn to check on Lady Blanders’s alibi, after which they’re going back to our cottage to hook up Amity’s tiny portable printer so we can have photographs for our evidence board. I hang back at the bookstore to look around. I start at the nearest shelf, where I’m surprised to find a Hardy Boys book,The Secret of the Lost Tunnel.I’ve never read the Hardy Boys, but there’s an old set in my attic that belonged to my grandfather.

“Funny to find this here,” I say as I flip through the pages.

“Your Hardy Boys had many fans in England,” Germaine says. “My brother adored them.”

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. My favorite book as a child was about English girls at boarding school.More Stories of Melling School. It was part of a series but I only had that one.”

“Is that so?” Germaine bends down and takes a book from the bottom shelf, groaning a little and pressing her lower back as she stands and hands it to me. It’sSummer Term at Mellingby Margaret Biggs. On its cover is a colorful drawing of three girls in identical white blouses and khaki skirts lolling on the grass, reading and talking under an oak tree.

“Well, hello!” I say, recognizing the spunky Blake sisters, whose adventures at a weekly boarding school in 1950s England I adored. I open the book and dip my head down to smell the pages. How I longed to be part of the Blake family and go to a school like Melling, with visits to the village tea shop, and field hockey games, a kind headmistress, and the drama of who would be named head prefect, which I was convinced was a misspelling forperfect.

“I still have my Melling School book. It’s ancient, already old when my mother got it for me secondhand.”

It may seem ironic how much I loved reading about girls away at school, considering how reluctant I was to leave my own home, even for playdates and sleepovers. I wasn’t a true homebody; I was just afraid that my mother might show up when I wasn’t there. I believed that if I stayed put, she would come. And, of course, sometimes she did, which reinforced my magical thinking that I had made her arrival happen by remaining home. But now I see another reason I might have been so enchanted by stories of Melling School. They were about girls on their own during the week, without mothers or fathers, having a grand time while their parents were home, waiting for them. The girls got to waltz in, waltz out, and have all the fun.

The way Germaine is staring at the book in my hands puzzles me until it occurs to me that she wants to know if I’m going to buy it.

“How much?” I ask.

She tells me, and I ask her to ring it up, and to add a copy of Roland Wingford’s first Cuddy Claptrop novel,Murder Afoot.

“As you wish,” she says, with a look that suggests she’s not one of Roland’s biggest fans. She steps around to the back of the counter and calculates the cost.

I hand her the money, and she gives me change.

But as she turns to get a bag, she glances outside and gasps. “Crikey!” She thrusts the books at me and dashes out the door.Dev’s mother is standing in the middle of the road in a housedress and slippers handing out wildflowers to passersby. I watch from the front window as Germaine talks to her and eventually takes her hand and guides her inside the store.

“There, there, Penelope, you come here and sit awhile.” Germaine settles her friend on the couch by the window.

Germaine takes out her phone and makes a call. “C’mon, Dev. Pick up. Oh, bother!”

---