Styx and Stones by Carola Dunn Read Free Book Online Page B

her as disobliging. Daisy did not care for Miss Prothero, and was not at all sure she wouldn’t put up the shutters if she saw her coming. The two or three times Daisy had popped into the shop before, for odds and ends, the shopkeeper-postmistress had not struck her as an awkward customer, so to speak.
    If Mrs. Burden could be persuaded to violate the sacred confidentiality of the Royal Mail, she might be able to tell who else had received anonymous letters. Johnnie had not kept the envelopes, but he remembered them as all being postmarked in the village and addressed in thick pencil in block capitals. Assuming there had been more than Johnnie’s half dozen, Mrs. Burden must have noticed them, even if she could not recall to whom they were addressed.
    Hatted, gloved, and stockinged in anticipation of her elevenses
with Mrs. LeBeau—lucidly the morning was still cool, though the sky was delphinium blue—Daisy collected Derek, Belinda, and Tinker Bell.
    â€œNo climbing gates,” she commanded as they set out for the shop.
    â€œIt’s all right, Aunt Daisy,” Derek said blithely, yesterday’s fright forgotten, “the shop won’t close for hours and hours.”
    â€œBut I have an engagement at eleven. No climbing gates. Or trees. Have you brought a lead for Tinker?”
    â€œYes, though she doesn’t need one.” From the capacious pocket of his grey flannel shorts, Derek produced three toffee papers, a grubby hankie with something tied up inside, a pebble, a rabbit’s foot and two pennies. “Must be the other side,” he muttered, restoring his treasures to their nest. From the other pocket he triumphantly drew a tangle of stout string. “It’s a bit knotted.”
    â€œI’ll untie the knots,” Belinda offered. “I’m good at knots. Aunt Daisy, may I get shorts with big pockets?”
    â€œWe’ll have to see what they have in the shop.”
    By the time they reached the bottom of the drive, Belinda had reduced the tangle to a useful length of string. Derek tied it to Tinker’s collar, much to her disgust, and wrapped the other end around his hand.
    While he was thus occupied, Daisy glanced at the lodge. In one of the upper windows a curtain moved. The casement was open a few inches, but there was not the slightest breath of a breeze.
    Someone had been watching them. Had the same person watched when Johnnie visited Mrs. LeBeau, all those years ago? If Mr. Paramount was the Poison Pen, his venom was probably directed only at the usurping nephew who had inherited Oakhurst, not at other victims. But why wait so long?
    Daisy frowned. The old man might just have grown more
and more embittered, or nutty, until something had to give. Yet the letters surely would have at least touched upon his chief grievance—the injustice of his exile from his childhood home—not harped solely on the LeBeau incident. More likely the writer was his servant, either aiming at eventual blackmail or gone round the bend himself after so many years shut up with his dotty master.
    Daisy sighed. She would have to try to talk to them, though it was quite possible today’s watcher had nothing to do with the letters but simply had his attention drawn by the children’s chatter.
    As they turned left into the lane, here beginning its transmogrification into Rotherden’s main street, Mrs. LeBeau’s small front garden caught Daisy’s eye and nose. She had been too interested in its owner yesterday to notice the fragrant rambler roses. White, pink, and yellow with deep golden hearts, they filled the garden with sensuous profusion, and a crimson climber draped the front porch.
    In startling contrast was the garden next door. Miss Prothero favoured rigid ranks of scarlet salvia and Oxford blue lobelia, as cultivated by a thousand municipal parkkeepers. They grew in rectangular beds surrounding a rectangular lawn where no daisy dared raise its