A Share in Death

“Daydreaming as usual, Pen?” Her sister’s voice startled her. “Stir yourself, then. We’d best be getting to the shops if we’re to return in time to dress for the party.” Emma pulled her waterproof jacket out of the wardrobe and began buckling herself into it with her usual no-nonsense briskness.

“Yes, Emma, coming,” Penny answered. There was no need to make Emma cross, or even worse, to try her until she spoke with that unaccustomed air of gentle patience. Penny rubbed her forehead with her fingertips, as if the physical smoothing of lines would return the accustomed veneer of placid cheerfulness to her face, and smiled brightly when Emma turned to her.

Twenty-eight… twenty-nine… thirty… Hannah Alcock sat in front of the mirror and counted the smooth, circular motions of the hairbrush. Odd, she thought, how childhood habits stayed with you. She knew of no logical reason why hair should be brushed a hundred strokes a day, but if she closed her eyes for a moment she could see herself sitting at her old dresser in her nightgown, watching the arc of the brush descend through her long, brown hair, and hearing her mother’s voice from the hall, “Hannah, darling, remember to brush your hair.”

All that was a long time ago—almost thirty years, in fact, since the night she had taken the scissors to her waistlength hair. It had lain like a pall across her back, a rich, shining chestnut brown with glints of auburn, her mother’s pride, and she had brutally hacked it off just at the nape of her neck.

A share in death 11

Although she’d kept her hair cut short in the years since, she had continued the nightly brushing. A silly ritual, one that should have been discarded with that remote adolescence, but when she was nervous, as she was tonight, she found it oddly comforting. Her stomach muscles relaxed as she breathed with the rhythm of the strokes, and by the time she laid the silver-backed brush neatly beside its matching mirror, she felt a little more capable of getting through the evening.

The cocktail party had already been in progress for a quarter of an hour. If she didn’t hurry she would be more than fashionably late. Still, she continued to examine herself in the glass. A good face, she had come to think, once she had outgrown a girl’s desire for conventional prettiness. Those round, blond fluffy girls she had so envied were faded now, their skin puffy, hair streaked and tipped to cover the encroaching gray. Her own hair, now carefully and expensively cut, held only a few silvery threads at the temples, and the strong, underlying bone structure she had despised now gave her face an arresting individuality.

It had been years since she had worried about others’ opinions. Successful, confident, serene—she thought nothing could disturb her carefully built balance. Nothing, that is, until the strange, slow stirrings of the last year had grown within her, warping the shape of her life, leading her finally to take action that might prove irrevocable folly.

She had planned this face-to-face meeting with all the attention she would have given the most demanding experiment, hiring a private detective to ferret out the details of his life, buying into the timeshare for the exact same week— yet here she was, dithering at the last minute, suffering from stage-fright like the gawky schoolgirl she had once been.

What had she to lose, after all? They might spend a week passing in the halls, a greeting, a casual physical contact, and then he would leave without remembering her name or face. Surely, there could be no harm in that?

Or they might become friends. She wouldn’t think beyond that—what she might say to him, how he would react. Tonight, with an easy introduction and polite exchange of

12 deborah grombie

trifles sure to follow, was beginning enough.

She rose, picked up her bag from the sitting room, and shut the front door firmly behind her.

Duncan Kincaid leaned on his balcony rail, reluctant to move, reluctant to knot a tie around his throat, to go through the civilized motions required if he were to meet his social obligations. His earlier burst of energy had given way to a creeping lethargy.

It would be easy enough to fix himself some supper, then stretch out on the sofa with the battered paperback copy of Jane Eyre he’d found in the drawer of the bedside table. The eggs, bacon, and loaf of fresh-baked wholemeal bread he’d bought at the village shop would be sufficient provision for a quiet evening.

He had been browsing in the shop’s biscuit aisle when a girlish voice behind him chirped, “You must be the new guest. We’ve been so eager to meet you.” He turned, and found himself facing a slight woman wrapped in a voluminous, tartan cape. She was, he judged, sixtyish, with a fluffy bird’s nest of gray hair surrounding a thin face and a pair of extraordinarily blue eyes. Peeping from the folds of the cape’s bottom were a pair of oldfashioned, lace-up ladies’ boots.