“Hello again,” Susan Jessop said, waving to us across the glass-topped table.
“Hi,” Bree and I chorused reflexively. Bree seemed to be as taken aback as I was to see Susan at a gathering of her mother’s harshest critics.
“If you don’t mind,” said Susan, “I’ll snag a little something from the buffet before we continue. I didn’t have time to eat breakfast at home, and the doughnuts at the meeting were gone before I got there.”
“Snag away,” I told her. “We’re not going anywhere.”
“Unlike the doughnuts,” Susan said drily.
While Bree and the other women served themselves second helpings of kippers, eggs Benedict, smoked salmon kedgeree, strawberry crepes, chocolate pancakes, and créme fraîche–daubed caviar, I strolled across the conservatory to look through a glass wall at the knot garden. Bess and Nanny Sutton appeared to be playing a game not unlike Big Bad Bear among the meticulously trimmed box hedges. If my daughter was traumatized by my absence, she hid it well. Her dribbly grin persuaded me that she was in very good hands indeed.
“What on earth is Susan doing here?” Bree whispered, crossing to stand beside me. “Is she some kind of mole—a double agent planted in Sunnyside to spy on her own mother?”
“Could be,” I whispered back. “Why don’t you ask her?”
“I will,” said Bree.
She was as good as her word. When everyone was seated, she folded her arms and asked without preamble, “What are you doing here, Susan?”
“I’m here for the same reason as Penny, Gladys, Debbie, Lorna, and Alice,” Susan replied. “I couldn’t let my mother poison your friendship with Annabelle Craven.” She held up her hand. “Don’t misunderstand me. I love and admire my mother. She raised six of us in that little house. She saw to it that we had a good education and she taught us the value of hard work. No one could have done more for us.” Susan dropped her hand and grimaced apologetically. “But she’s mistaken about Annabelle. Always has been, always will be.”
“Mistaken?” I repeated irately. “Your mother has spent half her life tormenting Annabelle.”
“More than half her life, actually,” Susan said without rancor. “It began on the night Zach Trotter disappeared.” She looked at the two women who hadn’t yet spoken in Annabelle’s defense. “Alice? Lorna? If you’ll walk us through what really happened that night?”
Alice Johnson and Lorna Small had already set aside their knives and forks, as though they’d expected Susan to call upon them. When she did, they straightened their shoulders and lifted their chins, much as Mabel Parson had done when speaking of Edwin Craven at Minnie’s tea party. Annabelle’s friends, like her enemies, seemed to take their storytelling responsibilities very seriously.
“When I was a young married lady,” Alice began, “I lived on Parkview Terrace in the terraces. Parkview Terrace is one street over from Bellevue Terrace, where the Trotters and the Jessops lived.”
“I lived next door to Alice,” said Lorna. “The thing you have to understand is that our back bedrooms overlooked Bellevue Terrace.”
“My back bedroom overlooked Dovecote, where the Trotters lived,” Alice clarified. “I couldn’t see their back garden from my window, but I could see their front door. I could hear it, too, every time Zach slammed it.”
“We liked Annabelle,” said Lorna, “but we couldn’t stand her husband.”
“No one in the neighborhood could stand him,” said Alice.
“Zach Trotter would pinch the grass from your garden if you didn’t keep an eye on him,” Lorna said, making no effort to conceal her contempt. “And he was always coming home drunk.”
“Sometimes he’d sing silly songs and sometimes he’d knock over rubbish bins and he nearly always slammed the door,” said Alice. “He made such a racket that my husband and I had to move from our back bedroom to our front bedroom, just to get a night’s rest.”
“My husband and I had to do the same thing,” Lorna chimed in.
“I had a touch of bronchitis one summer,” Alice said, placing a hand on her chest. “I didn’t want to keep my husband up half the night with my coughing, so I moved into the back bedroom. He was the breadwinner, you see, and he needed his eight hours.”
“With bronchitis, you always get worse before you get better,” Lorna said knowledgeably. “When Alice got really bad, I stayed at her place to look after her. I slept on a camp bed in her room, so she wouldn’t be on her own.”
I tried to imagine a world in which Bill would allow a neighbor to tend to me during a serious illness instead of caring for me himself, but I couldn’t manage it. I felt incredibly lucky to have a husband who could afford to take time off from work when his family needed him.
“I was sitting up with Alice when Zach came home that night,” Lorna continued, and no one had to ask which night “that night” was. “He wasn’t making a racket for once, but I could hear him fumbling with his key. It must have been an hour later when I heard Dovecote’s door open again. Alice was dozing, so I got up to look through the window.”
“When Lorna got up, I woke up,” said Alice, “and I went to look, too.”
I felt a rush of affection for Alice. Like my neighbors in Finch, she wouldn’t allow ill health to rob her of a chance to snoop.
“We watched from the window as Zach stepped outside,” Lorna said.
“Did he have a bandage on his head?” Bree asked, thinking no doubt of the allegedly bloodstained rag rug.
“He didn’t have a bandage on any part of him that we could see,” said Lorna.
“And we could see him plain as day,” Alice put in, “because of the light coming through a gap in the curtains in Annabelle’s bay window.”
“He stood on the doorstep for a bit,” said Lorna, “as if he couldn’t decide what to do next. Then he stuck his hands in his pockets and walked down Bellevue Terrace.”
“He slipped out of Old Cowerton like a thief in the night,” said Alice. “We never saw him again.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Lorna stated firmly.
“We saw Zach walk away from Dovecote on his own two feet,” Alice stressed. “We saw him abandon Annabelle without a backward glance, and so we told the nice young constable when he came round to question us.”
“If Minnie hadn’t been spying on Annabelle in the back garden, she might have seen Zach leave through the front door,” said Lorna.
“I’m sure Minnie saw Annabelle bury something in the back garden,” said Alice, “but it wasn’t Zach’s corpse because Zach wasn’t dead.”
“Dead men don’t walk,” Lorna said.
“We told Minnie she was mistaken,” said Alice, “but once she got a notion into her head, she wouldn’t let go of it.”
“Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?” Penny asked sardonically.
“I’d have sued her for defamation,” said Lorna, “but Annabelle was too busy making ends meet to worry about nasty gossip.”
“Annabelle knew who her friends were,” Gladys piped up, “and she didn’t count Minnie Jessop and her crowd among them. Sorry, Susan,” she added with a penitant glance at Minnie’s daughter.
Susan, who’d been making up for her missed breakfast, didn’t appear to be offended. To the contrary, she dismissed Gladys’s apology with a nonchalant shrug.
“I’m familiar with my mother’s shortcomings as well as her admirable qualities,” she said. “I also understand why she still feels compelled to prove her case against Annabelle.”
“Maybe you should explain it,” said Bree, “because I still don’t get it.”
“I’m a teacher,” Susan responded good-naturedly. “I never turn down an invitation to explain things.” She washed down a mouthful of crepe with a swig of coffee, gave a satisfied sigh, and settled back in her chair. “Zach’s disappearance was one of the most momentous events in my mother’s life—and one of the most frustrating. She honestly believed that Annabelle had murdered him, and she was outraged when the police refused to take her eyewitness account seriously. She felt as if she’d been shunted aside and ignored because the police saw her as a working-class yob who couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth. Her outrage made her cling to her accusation even after Alice and Lorna proved it was false.”
“She wasn’t the only one to make a false accusation,” Bree pointed out. “Her friends made a few of their own, and she went along with them.”
“My mother was already convinced that Annabelle was capable of murder,” said Susan. “She had no trouble believing her friends when they added a few more alleged victims to the body count.”
“But why did her friends feel the need to add to the body count?” Bree asked. “I can just about understand why Minnie thought what she thought about Annabelle, but I don’t understand her friends. They didn’t actually see Annabelle kill anyone. Why were they so willing to think the worst of her?”
“Jealousy,” Gladys replied. “Even when we were at school together, they were jealous of Annabelle. They were as plain as pugs and as dull as cold porridge. She was as pretty as a princess and as bright as a new penny.” She smiled. “Even her name was prettier than theirs.”
“They couldn’t have been jealous of Annabelle after she married Zach,” I said, shaking my head. “He wasn’t what I’d call a great catch.”
“I imagine her ill-judged marriage allowed them to feel superior to her for a while,” Penny said reflectively. “Once Zach disappeared, though, and a string of attractive chaps began to pursue her, their sense of inferiority must have reasserted itself.”
“And like a pack of jackals, they decided to bring her down,” said Gladys.
Susan Jessop raised an eyebrow. “If you’re fair, you’ll admit that an alarming number of Annabelle’s suitors died prematurely.”
“True enough,” Gladys agreed. “But they also died accidentally.”
“Except for Zach,” I said. “He walked off into the night and vanished without a trace. We don’t know what happened to him.”
“In point of fact, we do,” said Penny, raising a slender finger to catch my attention. “My late brother discovered where Zach went and what he did after he left Old Cowerton.”
“Was your brother a policeman?” I asked.
“No,” said Penny. “He was Annabelle’s second husband. You may have heard of him. His name was Edwin Craven.”
Bree dropped her fork.
“Y-you’re Annabelle’s sister-in-law?” I stammered, thunderstruck.
“I am,” said Penny, smiling delightedly at our reactions. “I’m so pleased no one tipped you off. I’m rather fond of surprises.”
“We’re surprised,” Bree acknowledged. Ignoring her fallen fork, she gazed perplexedly at Penny, then asked, “Is it true that William Walker introduced Annabelle to your brother?”
“Certainly not,” said Penny. “William Walker would have thought it highly improper to introduce a mere seamstress to his employer. Edwin and Annabelle met quite by chance. He walked in on her while she was mending a torn tapestry in the music room. A look passed between them and that was that.”
There was a touch of frost in Bree’s manner when she asked, “How did you feel about your brother marrying a mere seamstress?”
“I never regarded Annabelle as a mere seamstress,” Penny responded easily. “I used the phrase simply to illustrate William Walker’s prejudices. I knew from the moment I met Annabelle that she was Edwin’s ideal mate. They had the same sense of humor and the same deep appreciation of beauty.” Penny chuckled. “They even shared a fondness for wild mushrooms! If ever a match was meant to be, it was theirs. My only regret was that they had to postpone their wedding until they could ascertain whether Annabelle’s marriage to Zach was still valid.”
“Which is why your brother set out to discover what happened to Zach,” I said, nodding.
“He was also determined to refute the vile accusations made against his intended by Minnie and her chatty chums,” said Penny. “The files I mentioned were his.”
“It sounds as though Annabelle brought out the white knight in your brother,” I said, smiling.
“Any decent man familiar with the trials Annabelle endured throughout her first marriage would feel protective of her,” said Penny. “Fortunately, Edwin had the means to track Zach’s movements. It took him the better part of three years to do it, but he eventually succeeded in retracing Zach’s steps from a cargo ship in Liverpool to a rather uncouth drinking establishment in Adelaide.”
“So Zach the drunk ended up in Australia,” Bree said. “I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“Do I detect a Kiwi prejudice?” Penny asked, her eyes twinkling.
I laughed and Bree had the grace to blush.
“By the time my brother caught up with him,” Penny continued, “Zach had nearly drunk himself to death. Edwin had no trouble persuading him to go through with a long-distance divorce.”
“We couldn’t have been happier for Annabelle,” said Gladys. “She was finally free to marry the man she was meant to marry.”
“She would have been free in any case,” said Susan. “Seven years had passed. If Edwin hadn’t found Zach, Annabelle could have applied for a legal declaration of death.”
“If I’d been Edwin,” said Bree, “I would have nailed the divorce papers to Minnie’s door.”
“Believe me, he wanted to,” said Penny, “but Annabelle wouldn’t let him. She honestly didn’t care about what people like Minnie thought of her. She’d been through so much already—she was eager to put it all behind her and to begin again with a man who was truly worthy of her.”
“She didn’t even care when they accused her of killing your brother?” Bree asked.
“Not even then,” Penny said, losing some of her twinkle. “I would gladly have nailed their mouths shut, darling, but it wouldn’t have done any good. They would have brushed aside my eyewitness account as easily as they brushed aside Gladys’s.”
“Sorry?” said Bree, frowning. “Are you saying that you saw—”
“Oh, yes,” Penny interrupted quietly. “I was staying at Craven Manor on the night my brother died.”