I elbowed him aside to open the windows, and the smoke dissipated rapidly. Evan collapsed in a chair, panting and sputtering, while I checked the flue in the fireplace. It was closed. I opened it, then eyed Evan suspiciously.
“Were you messing around with the fireplace?” I demanded.
“I was not,” he gasped indignantly. “I was sitting quietly when the room began to fill with smoke. The damned chimney is obviously defective. You should have it replaced at once. I could have suffocated.”
“Welcome, Dr. Fleischer.” Bill was standing in the living room doorway, smiling weakly. “So you’ve taken me up on my invitation. Lori said you might.”
The arrogant smirk returned to Evan’s face. “I wouldn’t miss a chance to visit this part of England,” he said. “I am, of course, intimately familiar with it. I once wrote a monograph on the Woolstaplers’ Hall in Chipping Campden. It was never published—academic publishing is so political, so corrupt—but I should be only too happy to summarize it for you.”
“I’d love to hear it,” said Bill, “but unfortunately, you’ve come at a bad time. I’m afraid that Lori was just about to—”
“This piece is quite nice, actually,” said Evan, running his fingers along the smooth leg of the table beside his chair. “A Twirley, unless I’m very much mistaken.”
“Evan,” I said, backing toward the hall, “I really have to be—”
“Aha,” said Evan, now on his knees and peering closely at the bottom of the table. “There’s his signature, a whirligig, you can see it quite clearly. Nice. Very nice. Augustus Twirley carved only twenty-seven of these tables, and thirteen of them are known to have been destroyed in fires.”
“Fascinating,” I said, although I was convinced that he was making it up as he went along.
“Not at all.” Evan rose, brushed his palms lightly together, and seated himself once more. “Knowledge is a gift that must be given freely. I dare say you knew nothing of the treasure lying under your own nose.” He sighed wistfully as he helped himself to a cookie from the bowl I’d left on the table. “It is my considered opinion that Americans have become blind to quality.” He was about to dispense more pearls of wisdom when he bit into his cookie and let out a yelp of agony.
“Evan, what’s wrong?” I asked in alarm.
“My toof!” he howled, grimacing horribly and gripping the front of his face with both hands. “I broke a toof!”
I raised a hand to my own jaw. If there is anyone for whom I have complete and instantaneous sympathy, it is someone with a broken tooth. The first time I broke one, I was a twenty-six-year-old, independent, and—in most other ways—mature human being, but I was so traumatized that I called my mother in tears, long-distance, right after it happened. I was shocked, therefore, to find myself suppressing a smile at Evan’s misfortune.
I was also just plain shocked. Bill and I had both sampled the cookies and none had caused bodily harm. I took one from the bowl and bit into it cautiously. It contained nothing more tooth-threatening than some chewy raisins.
“Would you like me to call a local dentist?” Bill was saying. “It’s a little early, but I’m sure—”
“Sod the local dentist!” Evan roared. “No country clown is going to touch a tooth of mine. I’m going back to London. I should never have left civilization in the first place.” He pitched the remnants of his cookie into the fireplace and stalked to the front door. Another gust of wind caught it as he crossed the threshold and I think it may have helped hasten his departure with a gentle shove as it slammed shut.
I held my breath until I heard his car speed down the road, then turned to Bill, who was sitting on the couch, looking dumbfounded.
“What did you do to the cookies?” I asked.
“I was about to ask you the same thing.”
We stared at each other, then spoke in one voice: “Dimity.”
I shook my head, torn between pity and relief. “Poor Evan. Well, she tried to freeze him out, then smoke him out, but he wouldn’t pay attention.”
“Attending to others doesn’t seem to be one of Dr. Fleischer’s strong points. All the same, we owe him a debt of gratitude. Thanks to him, we know that Dimity hasn’t left us.”
“But she still won’t talk to us.” I fetched my jacket and an umbrella from the hall, then gathered up Reginald, the cookies, and the manila envelope. “Not about the album, at least, and that makes me more determined than ever to find it. You’re sure you don’t want to come along?”
“One of us should be here in case Father calls,” said Bill, opening the door. “Besides, I’m making good progress with the correspondence. Who knows what the next letter will bring?”
* * *
The entrance to the Harrises’ drive was less than a mile from the cottage, but the drive itself was a good half mile long, curving between rows of azalea bushes, then skirting the edge of a broad expanse of lawn. Ahead of me and to the left was what appeared to be a very soggy vegetable garden, while to the right stood a rambling three-story farmhouse built of the same honey-colored stone as the cottage. Low outbuildings clustered behind it, and the drive led into an open gravel yard littered with the debris of Derek’s profession: sawhorses, a sandpile, bricks, fieldstones, ladders. As I turned off the ignition, raucous barking sounded from the house, and a moment later Emma appeared on the doorstep, wearing a rose-colored corduroy skirt and a pale green cowl-neck sweater. Her long hair billowed behind her as she came to welcome me, sheltered from the storm by a striped golf umbrella.
Clambering out of the car, I began to deliver a string of apologies for my cool reaction to her warning about Dimity, but she stopped me. “No need for that,” she said, taking charge of Reginald. “I didn’t accept it at first, either.”
I cast an admiring glance at my surroundings. “This is an amazing place.”
“Six bedrooms and four baths in the main house.” Emma raised a hand to indicate the other buildings. “My potting shed, Derek’s workshop, the children’s lab—much safer to have it at a distance—the garage, and general storage. You never know what you’ll find in there.” A satellite dish lent an incongruous touch of modernity to the shingled roof of the children’s lab, and a two-foot-tall stone gargoyle leered demonically from the half-open door of the storage building. When we reached the doorstep of the main house, Emma stopped. “Do you like dogs?”
“Very much.”
“Good. We couldn’t have heard ourselves speak if I’d had to lock up Ham. He’ll calm down once he’s finished saying hello.” The low doorway led into a rectangular room with a flagstone floor, where we were greeted by an ebullient black Labrador retriever. He wagged his tail, grinned, and barked exuberantly, while I scratched his ears and told him what a handsome hound he was.
“My daughter found him when he was still a puppy,” Emma explained, “trussed up and tossed on the side of the road not far from here. She brought him home, we nursed him back to health, and she named him after her favorite tragic hero.”
“Hamlet?” I hazarded.
“As Nell is fond of pointing out, he always wears black.” Emma handed Reginald back to me, then put our umbrellas in a crowded stand beside the door and hung my jacket on a row of pegs with many others. Wellington boots, hiking boots, sneakers, and clogs lay in a jumble beneath a wooden church pew that stood against the far wall, and fishing poles, walking sticks, and four battered tennis rackets leaned in one corner. “We call this the mudroom, for obvious reasons. Come into the kitchen. I’ve just filled the pot.”
A brightly colored braided rug covered most of the kitchen floor, burgeoning herb plants trailed over the windowsills, and copper pots hung on hooks near the stove. From a crowded shelf on a tall dresser, Emma took cups, saucers, and a hand-labeled mason jar, placing them beside the teapot on the refectory table in the center of the room. Ham leaned against my leg adoringly as I sat in one of the rush-bottom chairs.