Aunt Dimity Down Under (16 page)

The Velesuonnos regaled us with travel stories until eleven o’clock, when I could no longer keep my eyelids from drooping. We thanked them for a splendid dinner, walked them to the chateau’s main entrance, and waved good-bye as they disappeared into the fog.

“What’s a fantail?” I asked Cameron as we strolled across the lobby.

“A chatty little bird,” he replied. “If you ever hike through a New Zealand forest, chances are a fantail will accompany you. They flit around like fairies, eating the bugs stirred up by hiking boots. Very personable. Very cute.”

“Sounds like it,” I said, and as we waited for the elevator, I found myself wishing that we could stay in Ohakune long enough to explore the forest cloaking Mount Ruapehu’s lower slopes. It would be worth the risk, I thought, to have a chatty little bird flit around me like a fairy while we hiked.

“Bree’s hair worries me,” said Cameron.

“Me, too,” I said, coming out of my reverie. “If you ask me, she chopped it off because she doesn’t want to look like her mother.”

“If so, she’s rejecting her mother by disfiguring herself,” he said. “It’s a self-destructive act. Do you remember what Alison said to us at the Copthorne?”

“Alison, the waitress?” I asked after a moment’s thought.

Cameron nodded. “She said, ‘Someone needs to find that girl before she does something stupid.’ I thought she was being melodramatic, but after hearing about Bree’s hair, I’m not so sure. She’s cut her hair. What if she cuts herself next?”

We stood aside as an elderly couple tottered slowly out of the elevator. As we stepped aboard, the hotel cat appeared out of nowhere, darted into the elevator with us, and proceeded to polish Cameron’s shoes with her head. I wondered fleetingly if the cat’s name was Teresa.

“Bree must have a lot of anger bottled up inside her,” Cameron said. “If you ask me, she’s a ticking time bomb. We have to find her before she explodes.”

“Wellington tomorrow,” I said. “It’s the best lead we’ve had yet.”

“Can you be ready to leave by nine?” he asked.

I nodded. I would have preferred to stay in bed until noon the next day, but I told myself that I could catch up on sleep as soon as we’d caught up with Bree.

Cameron and the cat left the elevator when we reached his floor, but as the door began to slide shut, I stuck my hand out to stop it and hopped into the hallway after them.

“Wait a minute,” I said in an urgent whisper. “How did my husband save your life?”

“Ask him,” Cameron replied. He smiled enigmatically, leaned past me to push the call button, and strode down the dim, plaid-carpeted corridor, with the cat padding faithfully at his heels.

“You bet I will,” I murmured, gazing at their retreating backs.

 

 

“And
Bill
told me to ask
Cameron,
” I grumbled.

An hour had passed since Cameron and I had gone our separate ways. I’d spoken with Bill after returning to my room, then changed into my nightgown and climbed into bed with the blue journal. Although I was more tired than I’d ever been in my life, sheer frustration was keeping me awake. I tossed my head scornfully as Aunt Dimity’s handwriting scrolled across the page.

“Are you trying to tell me that men don’t brag?” I demanded.

“Mature? Ha!” I snarled. “Bill isn’t being mature, Dimity. He’s having a little fun at my expense. He
knows
how much I hate puzzles. He and Camo are behaving like a pair of schoolboys, keeping secrets and giggling behind my back.”

“It’s like having an itch I can’t scratch,” I seethed.

“If the child would sit still for two minutes, I might be able to help her,” I said. “But until she stays put long enough for Cameron and me to pin her down, there’s not a darned thing I can do about her fragile state.”

“It’s the best news I’ve heard since they fell ill,” I acknowledged.

“Hold on a minute,” I said. I looked up from the journal and peered intently into the middle distance. Aunt Dimity’s words had triggered a memory, but I needed a moment to capture it. “Amanda said something strange this morning, Dimity. I’d forgotten about it until now, when you mentioned the New Zealand branch of the Pym family.”

I glanced down at the journal, then looked away again, frowning in concentration. “She said that, when Ed Pym was drunk, he’d talk about ‘the English aunts.’ He ‘cursed them’—those were her words,” I went on, nodding. “Amanda thought he was delusional.”

“He wasn’t delusional, though, was he?” I said. “He must have been referring to Ruth and Louise.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “So Aubrey Pym, Senior, tells his son A. J. about the twin sisters he left behind in England. And A. J. passes the story along to
his
son, Ed. And Ed ends up cursing the English aunts. What story did Ed hear, Dimity? What made him think that Ruth and Louise were the bad guys?”

“Yes,” I said, “but Aubrey’s dispute was with his father, not with his sisters. Ruth and Louise didn’t kick him out of the house. His father did. I could understand it if he told nasty stories about his dear old dad, but why would he paint his sisters as villains? They’d done nothing to harm him. They were innocent bystanders in the whole affair.”

“Or from father to daughter,” I said. “I wonder what Bree knows, or
thinks
she knows, about her great-grandaunts?”

“I expect so,” I said, “unless Bree has taken off for Rio or Nairobi or Minneapolis. . . .”

“Good night.”

I watched Aunt Dimity’s handwriting fade from the page, placed the journal on the bedside table, twiddled Reginald’s ears, and turned out the light. As I snuggled my head into the pillows, however, a small part of my brain was still chattering away like a fantail.

How would Bree react to the Pym sisters’ letter? I asked myself. Would she rip it to shreds, or weep tears of joy over it?

And how, I wondered, had my husband saved Cameron’s life?

T
he fog had lifted by the time I met Cameron for breakfast in the Matterhorn the following morning. When we checked out of the hotel, Teresa urged us to return soon and to stay longer. I responded with a courteous nod, even though I was dead certain that she wasn’t talking to me.

I was faintly shocked when the hotel cat failed to follow us to the jeep. Eau de Cameron combined with the fragrance of dead trout should have been irresistible to her, but she stayed in her grotto, intent, no doubt, on seducing the next good-looking stranger who walked into the chateau.

It took us a little over an hour to drive back to the Taupo airport, where Aidan Dun was waiting for us, clad in brown corduroy trousers, a green oiled-cotton jacket, and a beat-up straw cowboy hat decorated with fishing lures. I shared the last of the Anzac biscuits with him—they didn’t seem to get stale—and we shot the breeze while Cameron refueled the plane.

“Has Cameron ever told you a story about someone saving his life?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Aidan. “He claims that Donna saved his life when she married him.”

My spirits, which had risen briefly, settled back into their original, frustrated position.

“Just his wife?” I pressed. “No one else?”

Aidan tilted his cowboy hat back and rubbed his jaw thoughtfully as he mulled over the question.

“I hauled him away from a bar fight once,” he said finally. “If Donna ever found out that he’d been stupid enough to get himself into a bar fight, she’d kill him, so I guess you could say
I
saved his life.”

I forced a smile, bit into my cookie, and chewed. It was healthier than grinding my teeth.

My prickly mood vanished as soon as Cameron and I were airborne. It was impossible to remain irritable while gazing down on the sparkling waters of Lake Taupo and the strange, crinkled landscape of Tongariro National Park. As we flew farther south, Cameron pointed out the green spines of the Ruahine and the Tararua ranges to the east and the telltale cone shape of Mount Taranaki to the west. He also drew my attention to a variegated patch of green in the Tasman Sea.

“Kapiti Island,” he informed me. “It’s a nature reserve. More of an ark, really. It’s the last best hope on earth for some of our most endangered species.”

I enjoyed the flight so thoroughly that I felt a jab of disappointment when he informed me that we were about to land. I was also confused. Although Angelo had described Wellington as a small city, I was certain that it had to be bigger than the farmstead Cameron was circling.

“Where’s Wellington?” I asked.

“About fifty kilometers farther south,” he said. “We’ll leave the plane here and drive into town.”

“I get it,” I said, as understanding dawned. “Whose car are we borrowing this time?”

“Mine,” said Cameron. “Hold on tight, Lori. You’re about to experience your first paddock landing.”

I had no time to panic or to plead with him to find a paved runway. One minute we were in the air and the next we were bouncing along the grass in the center of a fenced field. The bounces were surprisingly gentle and we seemed to have plenty of room, so on the whole I preferred the paddock landing to the one we’d made on the shores of Lake Taupo.

“Well done,” I said, when the plane came to a halt.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ve had a fair amount of practice landing in this particular paddock because I live here. Well, actually . . .” He pointed to a large and handsome one-story brick house a few hundred yards away from us. “I live
there
.”

I unbuckled my seat belt in record time, lowered myself onto the grass without Cameron’s assistance, and took a good look at my surroundings. Although I was anxious to get to Wellington, I wasn’t about to waste a golden opportunity to see the place my native guide called home.

Cameron’s house stood on a rise with its back to a range of rolling green hills, facing acres of tree-fringed fields that sloped gradually down to the sea. Dozens of exquisite horses grazed or galloped in the verdant pastures adjacent to the one in which we’d landed. The pastureland was dotted with tiny yellow flowers, and Kapiti Island floated offshore, swathed in a faint haze that made it appear dramatically remote and mysterious.

Cameron hopped out of the plane, retrieved our bags, and came to stand beside me.

“Will and Rob would go googly over this place,” I said. “A horse-filled pasture is their idea of paradise.”

“You’ll have to bring them with you next time.” He pointed to a dense avenue of trees to our right. “The stables and the training facilities are behind the shelterbelt.”

“What’s a shelterbelt?” I asked.

“A really big hedgerow,” he answered, grinning. “The trees protect my outbuildings from the gales that blow in off the Tassie.” He swept an arm through the air to indicate pretty much every square inch of land in sight. “My property runs from the hills down to the sea. Nice view, eh?”

“Nice?”
I cried. “Cameron, the view is
astounding
.”

“It’s all right,” he said with a diffident shrug. “Come on. Donna’s waiting for us.”

I followed him through a gate in the two-bar wooden fence surrounding the field and up a dirt driveway to his house. We’d scarcely set foot on the verandah when the front door opened and a frisky black-and-white Jack Russell terrier scampered outside to greet us.

Close on the terrier’s heels came a diminutive, dark-haired woman who appeared to be in her early thirties. She was dressed in jeans, a navy blue track jacket, and white sweat socks, and she carried a duffel bag similar to Cameron’s. While the dog sniffed his master’s cat-scented shoes, the woman stood on tiptoe to give Cameron a peck on the cheek, then nodded to me.

“Donna Mackenzie,” she said.

“Lori Shepherd,” I responded. “Thank you so much for the Anzac biscuits. I hope you won’t mind if I pester you for the recipe. My sons will gobble them up.”

“I’ll e-mail it to Bill,” she said, smiling. “As a matter of fact, he sent an e-mail to me this morning, to give to you.” She handed me a white business envelope addressed to Aubrey Aroha Pym. “It’s a letter,” she explained, “from the Pym sisters to their great-grandniece.”

“They must be feeling better, if they’re dictating letters,” I marveled, slipping the envelope into my day pack. “Thanks a lot, Donna.”