I can't resist sharing with you all a bit from that unpublished first book. Elizabeth is on vacation at the coast and has discovered a body on the beach. This is a bit with Aunt Dodie -- you all may remember her from UNDER THE SKIN and her phone message at the end of IN A DARK SEASON.*******************************************************
No sooner had Elizabeth put down the phone than it rang again. “Elizabeth, dear,” quavered the voice at the other end. “This is Aunt Dodie.” With an amused smile and a resigned glance toward the waiting journal, Elizabeth leaned back, prepared to listen. Aunt Dodie Russell was not actually her aunt, but had been a good friend of her mother, and now, years after Elizabeth’s mother’s death, Aunt Dodie still kept in touch, phoning or sending cards several times a year. She lived, as it happened, in New Bern and Elizabeth had been planning to pay a formal visit during the course of the next week. Aunt Dodie had visited Elizabeth and Sam on the farm years ago, and had admired everything politely while confiding, “You know, it’s all so charming but I would miss the concrete.”
Though unwilling to travel now, Aunt
Dodie still lived in the house she and her husband had bought as newlyweds. They
had had no children, one of the reasons for her continuing interest in
Elizabeth. Now, since the death of “the old gentleman,” as Aunt Dodie always
referred to her late husband, she lived quite alone with the occasional help of
Keith and Raul, her next door neighbors, who ran an interior decorating
business and antique shop. The “boys,” as she called them, had adopted Aunt
Dodie for their own, referring to her as “a perfect period piece” and helping
out in countless ways.
“Aunt Dodie!” Elizabeth said
cheerfully, for she was very fond of the scatter-brained little octogenarian,
“I was going to call-”
“Well, dear, I called your home and that nice
nephew of yours, so polite, it’s
quite a pleasure to speak with him, well he told me that you were in Beaufort
and gave me your phone number and I said, then she is the one in the newspaper, my dear, how awful for you and what a
coincidence but when I read the story, the newspaper was a few days old because
the paperboy, well she’s a girl
actually, so nice that girls do so many things nowadays, but she’d thrown it
onto the roof. Raul wanted to go up after it but I said absolutely not with your bad back and I know Keith
has a thing about heights from that time their cat was up the tree so I finally caught the girl this morning and
made her get it down for me; the roof isn’t high and there’s such a stout
lattice by the front door almost a ladder really so she was in no danger whatsoever but we ought to pay
for the consequences of our carelessness, don't you think so, my dear?”
Aunt
Dodie’s in good form, thought Elizabeth, wondering briefly how Ben had
dealt with her ramblings.
“And the odd
thing, well the really odd thing is
that I know the Harper family, though
when I say family, it’s really Genevieve the mother that I know, she was in my garden club till she moved away
but she had the most beautiful and really unusual caladiums, those beautiful
pinks and greens and whites do so
well with azaleas and she was always generous about dividing them. She gave me
quite a few and they’ve absolutely flourished
so when I saw in the newspaper that an Elizabeth Goodweather had discovered
poor Charlotte’s body and I remembered how you and Sam used to spend time down
around Beaufort, I said to myself, it must be my little Elizabeth and then I-”
“Aunt Dodie,” Elizabeth broke in, “will you
be at home tomorrow? I’d like to come
see you.”
“Well, of course, dear, that is just what I was going to propose. I’ll
go to early church and then we can have lunch here at my house on the veranda. These
days are so lovely for being outside, not too hot or too chilly and the veranda
is screened so we don’t have to worry
about bugs though they’re not so bad at this time of year. You do remember how
to get here, don’t you? You and poor Sam
visited me just the year before he- Such a sweet man and you go on so bravely, your mother would have been proud
. . .”
Five long minutes later and Aunt Dodie had decided she needed to end the conversation so she could attend to the chicken salad she was making for the next day. “It’s always much better when the ingredients can get to know each other overnight, don’t you think, my dear?”
