Page 88 of Welcome to Murder Week

I tell her it was worse and better than I thought. He’s a sad, angry man, but not without feeling. On the drive home, I open the window and lean my face out to feel the country air on my cheeks. The hills are lush and inviting. I try to remember that line from Sherlock Holmes that Amity quoted on our first day in the village. Something about hellish cruelty and hidden wickedness, a pretty village and a sordid crime. I think I get it now. The secrets of strangers are pure pleasure. Murder, revenge, lies, abandonment—they’re a respite from the mess and confusion of our own lives. Fictional chaos is a holiday, a beautiful distraction. We can go along for the ride and shiver fromthe danger without worrying that we’ll get hurt. And in the end, all questions will be answered, all actions explained. Everything will be clear and put back in its place. The sun will come up, the bus will run its route, the nosy neighbor will resume her watch, and the beauty at the bakery will smile and ask which kind of savory pie we’d like today. Fake mysteries are like roller coasters at an amusement park, thrills and relief without pain.

PART IIIA Letter

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

FIVE MONTHS LATER—NOVEMBER

Today is a year since my mother died. I declined Aurora’s invitation to fly to Florida to swim with manatees in her honor. I also nixed Mr. Groberg’s suggestion that I take a long walk somewhere my mom loved, because I’m in Buffalo, which she hated, and it’s pouring, a freezing rain that should be snow. On days like this, my mom and I would read, so that’s what I decide to do. I heat up some spiced cider and bring it to the living room. I stretch out on the couch, my toes tucked under a blanket my grandmother made, and I begin to read.

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day….

As usual, I’m swept into the story immediately, sharing Jane Eyre’s outrage at being treated so badly by the relatives who have taken her in. The wind howls around my house, and soon it’s raving “in furious gusts” outside the awful Lowood Institution, where Jane is sent to school. She’s such a resilient little thing.

Since learning the truth about my mother, I’ve thought a lot about coping and the myriad ways that people react to what befalls them.I don’t know why hardship makes one person mean and another kind, someone a realist and someone else a dreamer, why someone has an inner compass and someone else is forever lost. Maybe it’s DNA, or some chance encounters, a wise word or a helping hand at the right time. Maybe it’s the difference between having been hungry too long and or having been fed. Who am I to judge?

I’ve been thinking about my grandfather too. I wasn’t surprised that I never heard from him or to learn, three months after I got home, that he passed away in his sleep. The note from the nursing home said it was a gentle death, that he wasn’t in any pain, but I find that hard to believe. Leaving the world in a room like that, alone, with no one to hold your hand or wipe your brow? Not how I’d like to take my final bow.

I go back into the kitchen and warm up some lentil soup, my book open in one hand while I stir with the other. Now Jane is a governess at Thornfield Hall, and, of course, I’m picturing North Lees Hall in Hathersage and remembering standing there with Dev. At this moment, what’s inJane Eyreseems more real to me than everything that happened during my week in Derbyshire. If I hadn’t been in regular touch with Wyatt and Amity and Germaine, and wasn’t maintaining a warm, if infrequent correspondence with Dev, I’d be tempted to believe the whole thing had been a dream.

Now Mr. Rochester is disguised as a gypsy woman, his face hidden by a black bonnet as he tries to discern Jane’s true feelings for him. He challenges her to turn toward love.

“You are cold, because you are alone; no contact strikes the fire from you that is in you.”

A rumble outside. It’s the FedEx truck. Through the window, I watch the driver run up the path, head down against the slantingrain. A rap on the kitchen door. He thrusts out a package. Inside, I pull the tab and open it.

It’s from a law firm in Sheffield, England, the office of a solicitor called Angus Darpiddle, a name absurd enough to make me think this a ruse, perhaps an invitation to Willowthrop’s next murder week. I scan the words with a feeling of déjà vu, which I realize is an actual memory of finding an unexpected document related to my mother and England. Mr. Darpiddle writes to inform me that two months before his demise, George Martin Crowley, my grandfather, revised his last will and testament. He left all his possessions to me. I have to read it again.He left all his possessions to you.I read on, shocked to discover that my grandfather’s worldly goods were more than some empty bottles of booze and old racing forms. His “estate,” as Mr. Darpiddle calls it, consists of eight thousand pounds in a savings account at the Derbyshire Community Bank, 353 pounds in BetUK, which I suppose is his bookie, and a dwelling where he resided for nearly eight years before moving into Derby Oaks Care Home. This must be the cottage that he won from his gambling buddy in a bet.

I laugh out loud. I am an English heiress. Eight thousand pounds and a dilapidated cottage aren’t exactly “fit for a lord,” but still. I can’t wait to tell Amity.

“Neglected and with only intermittent tenants, the dwelling, which was once a small storage barn, may be in a state of disrepair,” Mr. Darpiddle writes. “We assume you will want to sell the property and are prepared to assist with all necessary investigations, transactions, and legal proceedings.”

He has included a few photographs. The “dwelling,” as he calls it, is a sturdy stone building with a thick wooden door. The cottage appears to be in a field or pasture. The property includes a garden and a shed. According to an enclosed map, the cottage is on theedge of Bakewell, three miles from the center of Willowthrop. My grandfather returned nearly to the scene of his crime.

I’m tempted to email Germaine, to ask how much she thinks the cottage is worth. It can’t be much. Probably whoever purchases it will knock down the dwelling, clear the property, and build a new home, a bland brick one like the house where Stanley and Pippa Grange pretended to live in wedded misery. The photographs of the cottage interior are too dark to make out clearly, but the place looks to be in decent shape.

The kitchen is small and mostly taken up by a solid country table. The walls are white, the ceiling made of thick wooden logs like in a mountain cabin. In the sitting room, there are stone walls, wood frames around the windows, a woodburning stove in a tiled corner. Old but comfortable-looking furniture.

As I look at the pictures, something strange happens. My mother called it “vision,” the ability to look at something unformed, or dilapidated, or tacky—a room or a house or even an old dress—and see how it could be made into something wonderful.

“I don’t have it,” I used to tell her, thinking that vision was some magical skill that I’d failed to inherit.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she’d say, always impatient when I found it difficult to be like her.

But now I can imagine the change. I hold up a photograph of the garden. I squint, and I can see it: the land cleared of weeds and replanted with flowers and vegetables. The roof fixed, the walkway lined with sedum, hollyhock crawling up a trellis. Sunflowers as big as a giant’s hands. The front door sanded and stained. Dare I open it?

I move back into the living room and sit down on the couch, knocking my copy ofJane Eyreonto the floor. How funny to learn of an inheritance as Jane did. To have something in a book happen to me. Can a life be changed by a letter in the mail? Is that all it takes?

My mother would love this.It’s a sign, she’d say.You must go! This is the next phase of your life. Run toward it.

And maybe I can. Maybe chasing after something new is not always delusional, a run from discomfort. Maybe for me, it’s a chance to shape my destiny.

I may have been right in learning not to trust my mother, in girding myself for disappointment. But that doesn’t mean I have to discount everything she believed in. I put the papers and photographs back in the envelope and close the clasp, thinking of what I might tell Mr. Angus Darpiddle.

I am coming, I will write, to accept my grandfather’s unexpected gift, and claim what is mine.

PART IVThe Peak

CHAPTER SIXTY

---