Aunt Dimity and the Next of Kin by Nancy Atherton Read Free Book Online Page A

Beacham could bear to live in a place that had no personality.
    “Homes should look like homes,” I muttered, “not like operating rooms.”
    A fire door at one end of the short corridor opened onto the staircase I’d avoided climbing; the door to Miss Beacham’s apartment was straight across from the elevator. The silver key turned easily in the lock, the door swung inward, and I reached inside to fumble for a light switch. I found one and flicked it on, then fell back a step and blinked, not because light had flooded the inner darkness, but because of what the light had revealed.

Five
    “Holy cow,” I whispered.
    There was nothing impersonal about Miss Beacham’s foyer. The small entrance hall was like a jewel box filled with priceless gems. Recessed ceiling lamps shed soft pools of light on a rich-hued Persian rug and glinted from the gold-shot textured paper covering the walls. The wallpaper was utterly exquisite. Its tiny horizontal pleats appeared to be hand-folded, and the irregular gold streaks against the subdued sand-colored ground were simply sumptuous.
    Dazzled, I stepped inside and shut the door on the sterile corridor. I felt as if I’d entered an alternate universe. To my left a mirror framed in ebonized bamboo hung above an ebony half-moon table inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. To my right, framing a door papered to blend in with the walls, hung two Japanese scrolls displaying delicate brushwork calligraphy.
    A neatly furled black umbrella protruded incongruously from a knee-high, black-and-gold cloisonné vase sitting beside the papered door. When I opened the door, I discovered a cedar-lined closet containing a modest selection of serviceable coats clearly purchased with the vagaries of the English climate in mind. A pair of old-fashioned black galoshes perched humbly in an enameled tub on the closet floor, waiting to do their duty on rainy days. It pained me to think that the feet they’d once protected would never again stride confidently through puddles.
    I dropped my rain-speckled parka in the tub with the galoshes and left the closet, drawn onward by a set of four framed Japanese woodcuts facing each other across the far end of the foyer. I paused to admire them before entering a hallway that led back through the apartment, past a number of closed doors. The narrow passage was hung with the same gold-shot, pleated paper as the foyer, and a pair of Persian runners ran its length.
    A quick left turn took me under an archway and into a rectangular living room that stretched east and west across the entire front of the building. Here the extravagant paper ended. A second wall switch lit sconces that revealed walls painted a deep burgundy and a Persian carpet large enough to hold Ali Baba and at least twenty well-fed thieves. I fleetingly recalled the thieves’ fabulous hidden treasure as I drifted dreamily across the room, mouth agape, struggling to reconcile my vision of a cheaply furnished cold-water flat with the splendor that surrounded me.
    A row of stately mahogany bookcases graced the rear wall, divided in two by the arched entry. Lush gold brocade drapes hung along the front wall, concealing a pair of plain, aluminum-framed picture windows that overlooked St. Cuthbert Lane. Matching drapes hid a similarly innocuous window in the short east wall, and a glorious, hand-painted bifold screen camouflaged the utilitarian glass door that gave access to the small balcony.
    I parted the brocade drapes briefly, but the gray daylight was so dreary that I promptly closed them again and lit lamps instead. The room looked better by lamplight and would look better still, I thought, washed by the golden glow of candlelight. Almost everything in it was from a candlelit time. The “pretty little desk” alluded to in Miss Beacham’s letter had to be the Sheraton Revival cylinder desk that stood between the picture windows and beneath a large, gilt-framed beveled mirror. I stood with my back to the