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“Oh, look,” says Wyatt, now standing beside me. “A lady detective.” He leans out the window in the same way he greeted me, but this time he says, “Tally ho, petal!” And then to me: “Shall we go welcome our housemate?”
In the front hall, the new arrival introduces herself as Amity Clark from Northern California. She has a soft, pretty face and, up close, looks younger than she had from above. She’s maybe in her early fifties, about my mother’s age, but with an entirely different vibe; I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have a tattoo of a baby armadillo above her clavicle. She reminds me of some of my wealthy customers back home, with the same understated, forgiving, but obviously expensive clothes. Her silvery shoulder-length hair is thick and well cut.
Amity doesn’t wait for a tour to walk through the cottage.
“An umbrella stand! Delightful. A woodburning stove! Hopefully we’ll have some chilly nights.” She touches the blankets in a basket. “Cashmere. Nice.” She runs a finger along the books in the built-in shelves and pulls one out. “Hello, my pretty.” She opens the book,brings it up to her face, and inhales its pages. “Did you know that Mr. Darcy lived in Derbyshire?” She looks at me with a playful smile. “You’re young and lovely. Are you married?”
“No,” I say. She’d better not be the matchmaker type. “And I’m fine with that.”
She squints at me.
“So, you’re not looking for a single man in possession of a fortune stepping out of a pond in a wet shirt?”
“Blimey,” Wyatt says.
Amity giggles. “Forgive me, occupational hazard. I’m a romance writer.”
She moves into the kitchen, where she opens the refrigerator, peers into the cabinets. She takes out a package of Hobnobs. “Biscuits!” She touches jars of jam. “Do you think they have Marmite? I’m dying to try some.” She looks around, hands on hips. “This is all just what I’d hoped. So cozy and pretty. So English.” She picks up the kettle. “Fancy a cuppa?”
Wyatt says sure, and I decline. I don’t like tea. I tell them I’ll make coffee and ask Amity to put some extra water in the kettle for me.
Amity opens a bright red tin. “Oh dear, tea bags. That’s disappointing. We’ll do a pot anyway.” She takes a ceramic teapot from the shelf, lifts off the top, and drops in two tea bags.
Wyatt sits at the kitchen table, his long legs stretched out toward the middle of the room. Amity is smiling at each of us in turn, apparently as delighted with her cottage mates as she is with the cottage itself.
“How extraordinary that we each came alone! And I thought I might be the only person traveling solo. It’s new to me, you know. I’m a recentdivorcée. That’s an elegant word for it, don’t you think? Much prettier than ‘jilted wife.’?”
She doesn’t seem too crushed about it.
The water boils, and Amity fills the teapot. I take the kettle andpour some water into the French press. Wyatt and Amity are both so talkative; I hope they don’t expect the same from me. How can I explain why I’m here when I’m still not sure myself?
“Are you working on a romance while you’re in Willowthrop?” Wyatt asks Amity.
“Me? Fall in love this week?” Amity winks at me, a hint that she’s deliberately misunderstanding Wyatt. “As my sons’ Magic 8 Ball would say, ‘Outlook not so good.’?”
She takes the teapot and two mugs to the table.
“You have little kids?” I ask.
“Ha! You’re adorable,” Amity says. “No, my boys are ‘grown and flown,’ as they say. They’re twenty-three and twenty-five. They haven’t lived at home for a while now, but I’m sentimental about their things. The Magic 8 Ball is just one of their old toys I couldn’t bring myself to give away. Will I ever play Apples to Apples again? I will not, but should you need it, my basement playroom’s the place.” She fills Wyatt’s mug and then her own.
“I meant, are you here to research a new novel?” Wyatt says.
I push down the plunger, pour myself a coffee, and join them at the table.
“Oh, no, this is pure pleasure,” Amity says. “I’ve always wanted to travel to the English countryside, and murder mysteries are so much fun. Now that I’m solo, here I am. It’s a much-needed break from my routine. For the first time ever, I’ve been experiencing writer’s block.”
Amity tells us she’s had four books published, all of which found enough of an audience that her editor wanted more. But for the past year, she’s been struggling. “I’m still good at the meet-cute, the falling in love, even the steamy sex, and at creating an obstacle to pull my lovers apart. But I can’t seem to find plausible ways to bring them back together. I keep writing stories that end in misery.”
This is unexpected. Nothing about Amity suggests a dark nature.
“My latest is about an oyster farmer and a mezzo-soprano who meet at a benefit on Cape Cod. He’s shucking oysters while she’s performingCarmen’s ‘Habanera’ and the noise of the shells hitting the pail throws off her cadence.”
“Nice setup,” Wyatt says, putting one and then another heaping teaspoon of sugar into his tea.
“Then what happens?” I ask.
“They fall in love,” Amity says, “but when everything is going swimmingly, she’s asked to fill in for an opera star whose appendix burst at the start of a lengthy tour through Eastern Europe. She’s reluctant to leave her new love but it’s an offer she can’t refuse, so she ends things with the oysterman and goes off to Riga, where she discovers what had been missing from her singing to take it from good to great.”