Part Five

A few minutes later, however, Trixie’s fears were proved wrong.

“Oh, good. You’re here.”

Trixie turned to the door, where Honey stood with something in her hand.

“I was worried you’d still be scrubbing pans and things,” Honey continued. “Though he did take a little longer than usual to actually settle, which is probably from being in an unfamiliar place, which is maybe why we’re both here now.”

Disregarding the household details, Trixie pointed to the thing her best friend held. “What’s that?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” Honey answered. “Remember? I said there was something I needed to talk to you about.”

Trixie took the piece of cardboard, which seemed vaguely familiar, from her friend and frowned at it.

“I found it on my bed,” Honey explained, “and I’m sure it wasn’t there before.”

At last, Trixie connected where she’d seen it before. “Oh! I left it there. It was stopping the drawer from closing properly, but Elijah was annoyed with me, so I just dropped it and got back to trying to keep him happy.”

She turned it over and examined it, her eyebrows shooting up as she finally realised what it was that she’d found.

“I can’t believe I just dropped this without looking at it!”

“What even is it?” Honey wondered. “And whose?”

“I’m not sure what it is, but it belonged to Mrs. Helena Elizabeth Mansfield Clarke, born July 17, 1931,” Trixie answered, reading off the name and date. “I can’t quite read the top part. It must have been rubbing back and forth in that drawer for decades.”

“And why is it important?”

Trixie shrugged. “By itself, I don’t suppose it actually is. But it being in that room – well, it kind of suggests that the room you’re staying in wasn’t my grandmother’s. Because I’m guessing that the Lena Aunt Hepzibah keeps talking about – her other close friend – was short for Helena.” She frowned. “That must have been really confusing.”

Honey shook her head. “What would be confusing?”

“Helen and Helena,” Trixie replied. “Because my grandmother’s real name wasn’t actually Nell, it was Helen.”

“Maybe that’s why they called her Lena,” Honey suggested. “The other girl, I mean. Though, Nell and Helena might have been okay. Why is Nell or Nelly a nickname for Helen or Eleanor, anyway?”

“Search me,” Trixie answered. “But anyway, that answers one of the questions I had, but it makes me wonder about a whole lot of other things. Like, why did she have to marry a man with such a common last name?”

Honey laughed. “That’s not usually the first thing that people think about, when they’re thinking about getting married.”

Trixie pulled a face. “I wouldn’t know. But getting back to the actual thing we’re working on…”

“Which wasn’t the identity of your aunt’s friend,” Honey pointed out. “I thought we were supposed to be working on the identity of the unidentified woman.”

“And man,” Trixie added. “So, I was thinking, if people have been looking for the woman’s identity and can’t find it, maybe the man will be easier and he might give us a clue to who she might be and where she came from.”

Honey nodded. “And since we know exactly what date he died, it will be easier to eliminate people he can’t possibly be.” She paused to yawn. “But what if he really was a drunken vagrant that no one missed?”

“Then I guess we’ll have to think of something else.” She frowned as Honey yawned once more. “You’re going to go to sleep, aren’t you?”

Once more, Honey nodded, this time with a rueful expression on her face. “Elijah usually wakes around five-thirty or so and I’ll have to be up with him. And it’s been a long day already.”

Trixie suppressed a sigh. “Just go to bed, then. I’ll keep working on this by myself.”

“Are you sure?” Honey asked, around yet another yawn.

“Just go!”

Honey did just that, bidding her friend a rather sleepy “Good night,” as she departed.

Once the door closed behind her, Trixie pulled out her laptop and started looking for sites dealing with missing persons or unidentified remains. Scanning through the search results, she found herself faced with a decision.

“Do I look at the missing first, or see what there is out there on our two bodies?” she wondered, under her breath.

After a moment’s thought, she chose the latter. An hour passed. Trixie’s browser window collected over forty tabs. She signed up for a subscription to a newspaper archive, which soon added dozens more. At the end of another hour, she stood up and stretched.

“What, exactly, have I learned from all that?” she wondered, aloud.

Of the man, she had gathered exactly one short paragraph from a nearby newspaper of the time. Its scant information tallied with what she had seen in the burial register and confirmed her uncertain memory that the accident had occurred on June 12, 1948, but added nothing.

Regarding the woman, sites fell into two categories: those that focussed on the Lily White graffiti and those that ignored it but gave almost no details at all. Outside of Barclay, it seemed, the unknown woman had been almost forgotten.

Sitting back down, she turned to the other half of the question. One of the sites allowed her to sort the missing by date of disappearance, so she began there. None of the women listed seemed to match their unknown person, but as soon as she looked at the men she came up with a potential match.

Clicking on the link, she peered at the grainy black-and-white photo, which looked to have been taken from a newspaper. Clayton Lee Winter had been missing since June 12, 1948, last seen in a town called Instanter, New York, which Trixie soon located on the map, just over the state line. His date of birth, January 6, 1923, put his age at 25 at the time of his disappearance. Mr. Winter had apparently had brown hair and stood 5’11” tall, but not much else about him appeared to be known.

Scrolling down, Trixie found a short description of the circumstances of his disappearance. On the morning of June 12, Clay Winter had been seen arguing with no fewer than three different men in various locations around Instanter. He had accused two of those men of interfering with his wife. He owed the third man money and promised to pay him that afternoon, after his wife returned from visiting her sister. When the man arrived at the house to collect the money, he found it empty and in disarray. A crumpled note on the floor revealed that Winter’s wife had left him. Neither Clay Winter or his wife were ever seen again.

For a long moment, Trixie frowned at the page. Could this be him? She thought back to the scant information in the burial register. As far as she remembered, the entry had only read ‘Unknown vagrant hit by train.’ That gave no clue to his age or appearance, though to her the word vagrant suggested someone rather older than twenty-five.

She started searching again, using the details she had just discovered. The newspaper archive yielded results almost at once.

‘Fairytale Wedding’ declared the headline above a formal portrait of the bride and groom. Skimming through the article, Trixie discovered that Miss Lillian Clarke had married Mr. Clayton Winter at a church in the bride’s home town up near the Canadian border. The bride had been given away by her uncle, Mr. William Clarke, senior, due to a recent tragedy. The last line intimated that the new Mr. and Mrs. Winter would reside in Instanter, New York.

From there, Trixie found an article on the car accident which had claimed the lives of both of Lillian Clarke’s parents and that of her only sibling, a sister.

Next, she found an engagement announcement for Clayton Winter and Lillian Clarke – dated three weeks after her family’s deaths. Checking the dates, it appeared that the wedding had occurred six weeks after that and less than two years before the man had been killed by the train.

Finding the trail go old, Trixie clicked back to the wedding portrait and gazed at it.

“Is this them?” she wondered, in a whisper. “And if it is, why didn’t anyone identify him when those things happened on the exact same day?”

She returned to the map and looked for the route to follow to travel from Instanter to Barclay. While not terribly far apart as the crow flies, by road you would need to take a circuitous journey. Her eyes flicked in the opposite direction. Had everyone assumed that his wife had gone home and that he’d followed her? Or had they thought he’d run away from his debts?

Trixie traced the roads out of Barclay with her eyes. She could not exactly recall the list of towns where the police had enquired, but surely they had only included the closest few either by road or by rail. Maybe, by some chance, news of the railway accident had not spread as far as Instanter, and news of the disappearance had not spread as far as Barclay. Or, perhaps, by the time that anyone realised that Clay Winter wasn’t coming back, some weeks had passed and people’s recollections were muddied.

“Okay, I guess that’s plausible,” she reasoned to herself. “But what about Lillian? Why didn’t anyone miss her?”

Grumbling under her breath about common names, Trixie began a search on the name William Clarke, eventually turning up an obituary which matched the details she knew of his life. He had died of a heart attack in 1947 and his wife had predeceased him. He left one son, William, junior.

Bumping a fist against her forehead in frustration, Trixie happened to notice the time.

“Three-thirty? I guess I’d better get some sleep.”

She cast one last, longing look at the laptop before snapping it shut. She had other work to do and for that she needed rest.

“I thought you’d never wake up,” Honey commented, as Trixie wandered into the kitchen for breakfast. “How late did you stay up, exactly?”

“It’s not that late now,” Trixie argued, evading the question. She took Elijah off Honey’s hip and spun in a circle to make him laugh. “The first day I was here, Aunt Hepzibah stayed in bed until after nine and at the moment it’s only quarter-to.”

“Well, I think she’s almost better, because she’s been up half an hour and I’ve given her some breakfast and nearly finished washing the dishes afterwards and we’ve been sent out again – or, at least, we will have been, now that you’re here.”

“At least let me fix myself a sandwich or something.” Trixie began pulling out the supplies. “So, what is it we’re doing this morning?”

Honey pointed to a sheet of paper on the counter. “We have a list of errands to run. I haven’t looked up where all of these places are, but I’m guessing they’ll take us all morning.”

Trixie leaned over to look and groaned. “And half the afternoon as well. I wonder what it is that happens on Sundays that she doesn’t want us to know about?”

“Well, whatever it is, we’re not going to be here to know it,” Honey pointed out, as Trixie bundled away all her leftover ingredients and handed Elijah back. “Are you ready to leave now?”

“Nearly.” Trixie took a bite, then put the sandwich down. “I’ll just run upstairs and get a couple of things and I’ll be right back.”

She did just that, stopping in to the living room on the way to look in on her aunt.

“We’re just about to get going. Is there anything you need before we leave?”

The old lady shook her head. “Just take yourselves off,” she answered. “I hardly slept a wink and I’m in one of my moods. It’s best for everyone if you just go.”

Trixie nodded and let her be.

When she returned to the kitchen, she found Honey pressing the lid down on one of a series of plastic containers.

“Ready?” Honey asked, stacking them all up and sliding them into a bag.

Trixie reclaimed her sandwich. “I am now. Do you need me to carry anything?”

Honey indicated a few things, which Trixie collected. They went out to Honey’s car, where Trixie stowed all the belongings and Honey strapped Elijah into his seat.

“I hope this doesn’t take into the afternoon,” Honey commented, as she got behind the wheel and chose some music for her son to listen to. “Elijah is not going to be happy if it does.”

“Well, we’re going to just have to make the best of things,” Trixie answered. “Where are we going first? Is this list in any kind of order, or can I rearrange it?”

Honey shrugged. “As far as I know, it’s just the things she thought of, in the order she thought of them.”

Trixie scrabbled around in her bag until she found a pencil. “If we group this with these… and this with that… Okay, I think I’ve got it sorted out. And it’s given me an idea, too.”

“Am I going to regret this?” Honey wondered, as she began driving in the direction Trixie indicated.

Her best friend shrugged. “I hope not.”

They passed by the church, with its collection of cars in the parking lot. The Sunday morning service must have been in progress. The rest of the town appeared quiet, with only a few other cars on the road.

“Turn here,” Trixie directed, when they reached the crossroads. “Just follow this road until we get to the next town and I’ll tell you all the things I found out last night.”

“The things that kept you up until I was waking up in the morning?” Honey teased. “They must have been pretty good.”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “It wasn’t that late. And it wasn’t that they were that good, but more that they took a long time to find.”

“So, what did you find out?”

“I think I now know their names and where they came from.” Her brow furrowed. “I’m not convinced about how no one identified the man before, but we can work on that next.”

“But their names?”

“Clayton and Lillian Winter,” Trixie announced. “They lived in a little town called Instanter, not far over the state line. He disappeared from there the exact same day the man died on the railway crossing. And she supposedly left before that, but we really only have his word for that.”

“Lillian Winter,” Honey mused. “Could she have been known as Lily, maybe?”

Trixie shrugged. “I haven’t seen anything like that, but I guess she could. It’s not a far stretch from Lily Winter to Lily White.”

“And you’re not concerned about the fact that no one noticed her missing, only him?”

Trixie nodded. “She had hardly any family left. Her parents and sister died before she married. Her uncle and aunt died before she disappeared and that only left one cousin. And his name was William Clarke, so I have no idea how to trace him to find out if he ever missed her.”

“How sad.” Honey frowned. “So, what about him? He was missed?”

“I’m not sure that he, personally, was missed,” Trixie answered. “He sounds pretty argumentative. In fact, that’s pretty much all there was written about him. But he owed someone money and I think that was the deciding factor there. There was a note that Lillian had left, saying she’d left her husband, and I’m guessing that people probably thought he’d followed her and he’d bring her back again sometime later. It must have taken a while to figure out that he wasn’t coming back.”

Honey nodded, thinking. “Wait. Did you say something about someone called Clarke?”

“It was Lillian Winter’s maiden name,” Trixie confirmed. “And her cousin’s surname. And it’s spelled the same way as Aunt Hepzibah’s friend’s name. But I’d already decided that it was probably a coincidence.”

Honey made an affirmative noise. “Probably. But are we sure that the card belonged to Aunt Hepzibah’s friend and not to someone connected to this?”

“Helena, not Lillian,” Trixie reminded her. “And I’m not saying that they’re not connected, only that it’s more likely that they’re unrelated. Oh! Pull over; we’re here.”

Honey complied with the direction and soon they stepped inside a grocery store much larger than the one in Barclay. They set about the task of locating the list of items to be purchased there, which included a number of spices.

“So, what’s the next step in proving it’s them?” Honey wondered, as they added cumin seeds to the basket and began looking for cinnamon quills.

Trixie’s brow creased. “I’m not sure that that’s what I want to do.”

Her best friend stopped and stared.

“I think we need to know why the graffiti is happening and what my grandmother had to do with it all before we start stirring up anything to do with proof,” Trixie explained. “If I can satisfy myself that it’s a good idea, we can submit evidence to the website where I got the information on him and they can do the proving.”

“And Lily?” Honey whispered, mindful of other who might be listening.

“I hope she can get her own name back,” Trixie answered. “I hope we can fix things so that anyone who might have looked for her can know what happened. If they exist.”

“You don’t think anyone is looking for her?”

Trixie shook her head slowly. “I don’t. I found nothing on her after that date. She doesn’t feature on one single site that specialises in cold case missing persons.”

Honey stood still, thinking about this for a moment. “What if they don’t need to ask?” she wondered. “What if they already know?”

Trixie shrugged. “That’s one possibility. Or they might be old and not know about this newfangled internet stuff. Or they might have died any time in the last however many years. Who knows?”

“So, what’s our next step?”

Trixie snagged the paprika and added it to the basket. “We finish finding the things on this list and get back in the car.” Before Honey could complain about that answer, she continued, “I think I’ve figured out what might happen on Sundays and I think we’d better get back to Barclay as quick as we can.”

“Aunt Hepzibah won’t like that,” Honey warned, a worried frown creasing her brow.

Her best friend made a helpless gesture. “No, but she won’t necessarily know.”

“You mean, you want to spy on her?” Honey shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“We’ll figure out the details on the way there,” Trixie answered, waving the list. “But first, let’s buy these things.”

They made short work of buying the rest of the items to be purchased in that town, then headed back the way they had come.

“So, what is it that you think is happening, that makes it so important that we go back?” Honey asked, once they were on the road.

“Visitors. I think Aunt Hepzibah remembered that someone was coming to visit today and she decided that we would be better out of the way.”

Honey took her eyes off the road for just a moment to cast her a sceptical look. “And you think we should go and interrupt? Trixie! That’s a terrible idea.”

“I don’t if we’ll actually interrupt,” Trixie answered. “It depends on whether we get there before them or not.”

Honey groaned. “I don’t know why I’m still going in that direction. I don’t think I want to do this at all.”

“But I’m pretty sure it’s going to help. And we’re here specifically to help.”

“We’ll be turfed out on our ears for interfering,” Honey answered. “But if you’re determined, I guess I’ll go along with it for the moment.”

Trixie grinned her thanks.

Once they neared the house, she asked her friend to stop a short distance from the house so that they could see what was going on.

“There aren’t any other cars,” Honey noted. “At least, not as far as I can see from here.”

Trixie frowned. “Maybe I was wrong. Or maybe they’re just not here, yet.”

“Who, exactly, do you think is going to visit?” Honey wondered.

“I’m not sure,” Trixie admitted. “But whoever it is, they know something and that’s why we’re not supposed to be here.”

“If you wanted to make me feel better about this, you didn’t succeed.”

A car passed them and pulled into Aunt Hepzibah’s driveway.

“That’s them!” Trixie cried. “Let’s go.”

With an uneasy look, Honey did as she was told.

“You just stay in the car with Elijah and I’ll talk to them,” Trixie suggested. “We’re here because I need to change my shirt and I’m just going to drop off our shopping while I’m up there, okay?”

“Why would you need to…” Honey trailed off as she noticed the large, dirty mark on Trixie’s pale blue T-shirt. “Where did that come from?”

“I must have bumped into something,” Trixie answered, while looking all too innocent.

Opening the car door and hopping out, she announced loudly, “I won’t be a minute.” She shut the door with a bang and hurried across the front yard and up the stairs. She arrived at the front door as her aunt was welcoming a couple of similar age to herself into the house.

“Trixie!” Aunt Hepzibah snapped, clearly unhappy about her arrival at that juncture. “What on earth?”

“Sorry.” She gestured to her shirt. “You can’t take me anywhere. But I’ll be out of your way in a minute. Sorry to interrupt.”

The woman visitor turned to Trixie with an exclamation of delight. “Nell’s granddaughter! I haven’t seen you since… I don’t even remember when it was, but you were tiny and I’m sure you don’t remember me. My name is Lena Clarke and this is my husband, Bill. Your grandmother was a very dear friend of mine.”

“It’s great to meet you, Mrs. Clarke,” Trixie answered. “Aunt Hepzibah’s been telling me about the three of you. It’s been really interesting.”

“Please, call me Lena.” She smiled. “Can you stay and talk for a little while? I’d love to get to know you a little.”

“Well, not exactly. I’m supposed to be running some errands, and my friend and her baby are waiting in the car,” Trixie explained. “I just came to change my shirt.”

“Go and fetch them in,” Lena directed her husband. She turned back to Trixie. “I’m sure you can spare ten minutes.”

“What have you got there?” Aunt Hepzibah asked, still scowling.

Trixie showed her the shopping bag. “I was just going to drop this in the kitchen while I was here.”

“Give it to me.”

She handed it over and excused herself to change the shirt. As she descended the stairs a minute later, she could hear two things happening at once. At the front of the house, Honey and Elijah were coming inside, escorted by Bill Clarke. In the kitchen, Hepzibah and Lena could be heard having something of a disagreement.

Trixie met Honey not far from the front door and it was immediately clear to Trixie that Honey heard the sounds from the kitchen, too.

“Maybe we should just go,” Honey suggested. “I don’t want to intrude.”

“Nonsense,” Mr. Clarke told her. “They’re always like this. They’ll get over it in a minute or two. In the meantime, we’ll just go and sit in the living room and wait.”

“If you’re sure…” Honey’s brow creased with uncertainty.

“I think we’d better,” Trixie decided. “Because it’s not a coincidence.”

Honey’s expression turned blank for a moment, then her eyes widened. “But how do you know that?”

Trixie led the way into the living room, watching Mr. Clarke, who looked wary, all of a sudden. Instead of answering Honey’s question, she addressed her next observation to him.

“There’s been an outbreak of graffiti, lately. And it got me curious.” She smiled. “I just can’t help myself when there’s something mysterious happening.”

“Nothing much mysterious about graffiti,” he answered, gruffly. “Just kids, usually, with too much time on their hands.”

“But in this case, it’s got a story attached.” She paused for a moment. “It’s a tragic story, and it catches people’s imaginations, I think. Probably most of the graffiti is done by people who have no idea about the truth, but there are a few who know half the story and have guessed a bit more.”

“What story is that, then?” he asked, frowning.

“I don’t have all the details,” Trixie admitted, “but I think it happened something like this. One night in 1948, a young woman called Lillian Winter tried to run away from her abusive husband. Her cousin’s girlfriend lived here in Barclay and was willing to hide her. But her husband followed her and murdered her. He probably strangled her to death. Sometime that same night, he was hit and killed by a train at the level crossing.”

She paused a moment and no one broke the silence. “I don’t know whether it was an accident, or a suicide, or if someone chased or pushed him onto the tracks. Whichever way it went, the other people who were there at the time got scared, because the murderer was dead and there would only be their word for what actually happened. So they hid Lillian’s body in an abandoned house close to where she died, knowing that she had no other family to miss her. The husband was drunk when he died, so when no one claimed him, the authorities decided he was just a vagrant.”

Honey sat up straighter. “Someone kind of claimed him, I think, even if they didn’t publicly acknowledge that they knew who he was, because he was buried in the churchyard.”

Trixie nodded. “Yes, I think so, too. Anyway, Lillian’s body wasn’t found for about a year and there was no way to tell that she had died that same night so the police didn’t connect the two incidents. Everything probably quietened down until after she was buried, when someone laid a white lily on her grave. That twigged someone’s memory of meeting a young woman who met the description of the body that had been found and was somehow connected to the cousin’s girlfriend. They couldn’t exactly remember her name, but thought it might have been Lily White, or something like that.”

“And the mystery of ‘Who Killed Lily White?’ was born,” added Honey.

Again, Trixie nodded. “The people doing the guessing either didn’t know, or didn’t want to accept, that Clayton Winter was abusive. They blamed the young woman’s death on local people that they knew and disapproved of. And then it got all mixed up further when the cousin’s girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend decided that the reason he got dumped was something to do with it.”

“Which is silly,” Honey put in, “but some people just can’t seem to accept that they’re not as smart or likeable as they think they are.”

A snort from the doorway caused them all to turn in that direction.

“I always said that white lily was a mistake,” Aunt Hepzibah commented, as she and Lena entered the room. “But what’s done is done.” She turned to Trixie. “I thought I asked you not to poke around in that old stuff.”

Honey stifled a giggle. “Telling Trixie not to investigate things hasn’t ever worked for anyone.”

The old lady nodded. “I should have known better. So, what are you going to do now? Turn us all in to the police?”

“No,” Trixie answered, slowly. “When I thought you were talking about my grandmother, I was considering it, because nothing can hurt her now. But when I got here today, I suddenly realised that my grandmother was always Nell. She’d never been called Nelly. But Lena had.”

“I never liked it very much.” Lena shook her head. “And once I ran off to marry Bill and get away from the whole controversy here, I never used it again.”

Honey frowned. “Wait. I don’t understand about the flowers. Who laid the white lily? And is it the same person who keeps laying flowers now?”

“I laid the lily,” Bill Clarke admitted. “But I’ve never been silly enough to do it again.”

“Oh, that’s that silly woman from over the back fence,” Hepzibah answered. “She’s got it into her head that the woman in the grave is her father-in-law’s long lost sister.”

“That’s what she keeps arguing with the pastor about?” Trixie asked.

“But Irma Murray isn’t actually lost,” Lena objected. “And I don’t think she’s dead. She looked quite alive when I saw her a couple of months ago.”

Aunt Hepzibah let out a laugh. “I bet she did.”

“She changed her name to Stella Skye, or something like that, and became an exotic dancer,” Lena explained to Trixie and Honey. “Then she married a rich man, or rather, a series of rich men. The family pretended that she was dead when it all started, but they knew where she was the whole time.”

“Maybe that’s the way to make this all calm down, then,” Trixie suggested. “If they could do some DNA testing on the body and prove that she’s not related to the Murray family… but would you all be willing to acknowledge her, if she’s traced back to you?”

Bill and Lena Clarke shared a look.

“I’ve always felt bad about her grave not having her name on it,” Mr. Clarke admitted. “And, after all this time, there’s no way it could be proved that I was here that night.” He stared at nothing, perhaps looking into the past. “For the record, I didn’t push Clay Winter onto the railway tracks. I don’t think it was a suicide; I think he misjudged how close the train was and how fast he could move. I was chasing him, you see, trying to catch him to bring him to account for what he’d just done.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Trixie told him.

He nodded. “But I should have done more to save Lily from him. I was the only family she had left.”

“How do we get the testing done?” Lena asked. “Is there someone we should apply to?”

“We’ll help you find out,” Trixie offered. “And then we’ll go and do the rest of your errands, Aunt Hepzibah.”

“Forget the errands,” her honorary aunt told her. “You’re right. We don’t have anything to fear from Lily’s identity coming out now, after all this time. It’s probably high time that it did.”

A year later

“You’re finally here,” Trixie all but moaned, as she leaned over her best friend’s car. “I thought you were going to miss it.”

Honey shook her head. “We have half an hour to spare.”

She heaved her heavily-pregnant frame out of the car and turned to see Dan already releasing their two-year-old son from his car seat.

“Hey, Trix,” Dan greeted, then he turned to his wife. “I think I see a playground over there. I’m going to take Elijah over there and let him run around a bit.”

“Sounds good,” Honey answered. She looked around. “Are you here on your own?”

Trixie pursed her lips for a moment. “Who would I be with?”

Honey shrugged and let the subject go. “Have you talked to Aunt Hepzibah yet?”

“I stayed last night at her house.”

“And?”

Trixie smiled. “Apparently, Mrs. Murray didn’t want to accept the DNA results, but Aunt Hepzibah threatened to tell everyone in town what actually happened to her father-in-law’s sister.”

“And did that work?”

Trixie nodded. “I don’t know why, because pretty much everyone around here actually knows already. But the Murray family have dropped the subject altogether. There’s been a little bit of graffiti, but none of it has been on Aunt Hepzibah’s house, so she’s pretty happy with that result.”

“That’s good,” Honey murmured, but she seemed to have lost interest. “There are a lot of people around, aren’t there?”

“Probably the whole town will turn out for the unveiling of the plaque,” Trixie suggested. “Hey, I think that’s the Clarkes. Let’s go and say hello to them.”

The time before the ceremony soon passed. Honey and Trixie met up with Dan and Elijah and found a place to watch, where Elijah would not disturb other people.

“Wait. Why are you with us, Trixie? Shouldn’t you be helping your aunt?”

Trixie shook her head. “She picked someone else to help her and I got sent away.”

Beside them, Dan’s eyes narrowed. “Ah. I think I see what’s going on here.”

Honey peered over the crowd, eventually catching sight of what had caught her husband’s eye. “There’s Jim. He’s the one helping your aunt? How did this happen, Trixie?”

Trixie shrugged in an airy manner. “Just lucky, I guess.”

“They’re starting,” Dan warned.

At the front of the crowd, the pastor began a short address which included a highly sanitised version of Lily’s life and premature death. He gently hinted that she may have met her end at the hands of one who claimed to love her and urged his listeners to be mindful of those around them who might face a similar danger. After a prayer, he unveiled the plaque and the ceremony came to an end.

“Let’s go closer. I want to see what it says,” Honey suggested. “And I want to see Jim, too, of course.”

She set off in that direction without checking if anyone was following. They soon stood together before the grave.

“In Loving Memory of Lily,” Honey read. “Lillian Mabel Clarke, born 1926, died about 1948.”

“I’m glad they didn’t put the, er, husband’s name on it,” Dan commented, remembering just in time that the impressionable two-year-old on his hip was listening.

Trixie nodded. “Both of the Clarkes were adamant that he not be mentioned at all. And since Mr. Clarke is the closest living relative, it was his choice what it should say.”

“It looks quite nice,” Aunt Hepzibah commented, coming up to them at that moment. “I’m pleased with how all this has turned out. But let’s get out of this sun. You’re all coming back to the house, I take it?”

“If you’ll have us,” Dan answered.

She looked him up and down. “Oh, yes. You’ll do nicely.”

He grinned and followed her out of the churchyard.

“So, do you have some news for us?” Honey asked her brother, when they were all seated in the living room of Aunt Hepzibah’s house.

“What news would that be?” he asked, but immediately relented. “Yes, as you’ve probably guessed, Trixie and I have started seeing each other.”

“Did you get Aunt Hepzibah’s approval?” Dan wondered.

Jim shrugged. “She gave me a present. Does that count?”

Honey looked at him. “Really? What was it?”

“Kind of a statue, I guess you’d call it.” He didn’t quite meet her eyes. “A figure of a man. From somewhere in her travels.”

Eyes lighting up, Honey turned to Trixie. “You mean, the little man with the big… features.”

Trixie’s cheeks tinted pink. “Yes, that’s him.”

Dan looked from Trixie to Jim to Honey. “By features, you mean…” He glanced downwards.

“Yes, masculine features,” Honey confirmed, with a giggle. “Very masculine features.”

Dan turned to Jim. “Yes, I think that’s probably approval.” He thumped his friend on the back. “And in case you’re wondering, you have our approval, too. It’s about damn time.”

The End.

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