A Design of Deceit (The Dickinson Sisters Mysteries Book 5) Read online

  A Design of Deceit

  Blythe Baker

  Copyright © 2021 by Blythe Baker

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Contents

  Description:

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  About the Author

  Upon hearing rumors of “dark” goings on at a nearby country estate, Iris Dickinson cannot resist the pull to become involved. When a sudden storm traps her on the property, she must navigate the dangerous waters of a family mystery she does not fully understand, without the help of her sister Lily.

  But there is more than one mystery haunting Iris, as shadowy childhood memories resurface. Can she survive one “storm” before being overtaken by another?

  1

  “…Three hundred and one, three hundred and two, and…three hundred and three!” I said, laying the last glass bead inside the small, red velvet lined box. Exhaling happily, I looked up. “All accounted for, Lily.”

  “You counted all of them?” Lily asked, looking up from her own box of wooden buttons. “How many did you say? Three hundred?”

  “Three hundred and three, precisely,” I said.

  Lily’s forehead wrinkled and her lips pursed. “Well, now I will have to order more,” she said, letting some smooth, beech buttons slide off her palm, back into the box. “I typically use anywhere from eighty to one hundred on a single necklace alone. Three hundred will not get me very far, no sir, indeed…”

  My small snort of laughter caused my sister to look up at me, with a look that said ladies do not make that sort of sound.

  “Oh, come now, sister. Do we have nothing better to do today?” I asked.

  For it being nearly three in the afternoon on a Friday in late November, the shop remained surprisingly quiet. The weather had remained mild, despite the lateness of the year. A pleasant, peaceful sort of calm had spread through Grangehurst and we had welcomed it with open arms.

  Evenings were no longer spent awake until all hours, searching for a killer or for the clues to locate one. Instead, they were spent in front of the fire together, reading, talking. I worked on my needlepoint, hoping that Mrs. Minford’s continued advice, though sometimes unsolicited, would pay off as I continued to practice.

  It seemed as if life had returned to the typical routines…

  I knew the truth, however. Something had indeed changed but neither of us wished to discuss it any further. At least…at least not yet.

  Earlier that morning, we had been graced with the presence of Mrs. Minford, who had come to seek out a silk scarf in a particular color. After she had departed, Mrs. Clark stopped by, hoping for a replacement button for her coat, which led Lily to pull out the box and sort through the rest she had. That then led us to the moment where we were, with a pen in Lily’s hand, marking down the exact number of the supplies we had.

  “Yes, this is vitally important,” Lily said, glaring at me with her dark eyebrows knit together in one, perturbed line. “How else will we know what all we have? It has been far too long since I did this. It is well overdo and will help me be able to assist our customers when I can give them a precise answer about what I can make for them. We can make for them.” She gave me a nervous look. “I’m sorry. You know what I meant.”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “Very well. I do wonder, however, where the customers all might have ended up today.”

  “Perhaps no one has a fancy dinner party to attend,” Lily said. “We did fill quite a few orders last week. It only makes sense that it would be rather quiet today.”

  “I should think with Christmas only a few weeks away, we would be busy as we typically are,” I said. “Is that not strange, sister?”

  Lily, who had resumed her button counting, gave me an annoyed look and dumped the buttons she had been counting back into the box once again.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. I moved my attention to the glass beads, returning the wooden cover to the box, and set them back on the shelf.

  As I did, a memory flashed across my vision, too fresh and too clear to ignore.

  The coolness of the metal against my palm. The staleness of the air in the attic. The frantic beating of my heart as my eyes fixed on the trunk…that blasted trunk that my sister had so foolishly risked her life for –

  “Iris?”

  I looked up to find Lily’s expression hard.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I said again. “Of course I am. Why do you ask?”

  “You have the same look on your face that you did last night when I left you to your own devices for too long…” Lily said, folding her arms in front of herself.

  My throat tightened. I did not like lying to my sister but we had hashed this conversation out over and over again, so many times that I knew precisely how it would unfold before it began.

  “I’m fine,” I said, turning away, reaching up to another small, wooden box. “Shall I count the red beads next?”

  “I only counted those a few weeks ago,” Lily said. “Though it has been some time since I made note of the white beads…if you would not mind, that is.”

  “Not at all,” I said, glancing toward the door. “It isn’t as if we have a great deal to do at the moment.”

  I gave Lily the chance to start counting her wooden buttons and busied myself with the white beads. They were smooth in my hands as I rolled a few around on my palm.

  The image of a string of pearls flashed across my mind, pearls that I had not seen in almost twenty years.

  I shook my head. It was best not to dwell on those matters right now. If I did, it would only…

  I blinked, gently setting the beads down on the counter beside me.

  If I did think about them, I knew the path would only lead me to the same place it continued to; a dead end.

  I glanced at Lily, watching her mouth as she silently counted each and every button…entirely absorbed in her own world at the moment.

  I frowned, looking away.

  The greatest frustration I had with Lily was that she kept that trunk such a secret, never allowing me anywhere near it…until almost a week ago when she finally, finally decided that I was ready enough to see what was inside.

  Her reasoning was…well, sufficient, was perhaps the right term. She feared showing me the contents of the trunk would, as she put it, “trouble” me. As I had grown, she felt I had been too delicate to hear the truth, to be reminded…

  I remembered holding the key she gave me with great care. With great fear, as well. I thought, what could be inside this trunk that Lily risked her life for?

  As I approached the trunk, my heart had caught in my throat. I could think of nothing else. What could be inside? What was I to find?

  I dreaded the truth. I feared it meant that I would see myself differently, see my sister differently. Had my sister been hiding dark secrets from me? What had been so ter
rible that she had to conceal it from me?

  I set the key into the lock. It slid home effortlessly. Without protest, it turned as easily as if it had been recently oiled. I knew my sister, and that was likely the case.

  My heart pounded, my fingers trembled…and I threw back the lid –

  “Iris, could you fetch that box of white ribbon for me?” Lily asked now, breaking into my thoughts. “I only just remembered that Mrs. Newton wished for her hat to have that, as well as the blue.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said, leaving the three white beads upon the counter, the rest of their companions still yet uncounted.

  I turned to retrieve the box that Lily had asked for, and as if slipping back into a dream, my mind continued to recall what I had experienced.

  As I looked inside the trunk, my heart thundering in my ears, I searched for something, anything that might explain Lily’s reservations at once. I had not known what to expect. An ancient treasure? A weapon of some sort? A wedding ring from a husband I never knew she had?

  “I…I don’t understand,” I had said, reaching inside. I pulled a pink, silk dress from inside, something very similar to a dress I would choose to make for myself. Beneath it, I found a string of pearls, so clean and pristine it was as if they had been strung just the day before. “What is all this?”

  Lily knelt down beside me, a sad smile on her face. “This belonged to our mother,” she said.

  My eyes widened as the weight of her words settled over me. “Our mother?”

  We hardly ever spoke of Mother. Not since we were children. In truth, I barely remembered the woman.

  “Yes,” Lily said, rummaging around and pulling forth a small portrait of a woman who –

  “She looks…just like me,” I said, taking the portrait and staring down into the face of a woman with the same blue eyes, same round face, same smile. “Except she has your hair, Lily. And that expression…that is yours.”

  Lily nodded. “Yes, I have always thought the same. We are the perfect representation of her, the two of us together.”

  As I looked at the portrait once more, a strange feeling swept over me. A sense as if…as if I had done this before.

  “The other items in this trunk are ours,” Lily said, reaching inside and withdrawing a doll with painted glass eyes. She handed it to me. “Do you remember her?”

  I gazed down at the doll, at the pretty red dress she wore with the large bow. She wore a pair of satin slippers and there was a scuff on her cheek.

  I ran my finger over the mark and a memory flooded back.

  “I dropped her down the stairs…” I said, staring up at Lily with a mix of awe and sorrow. “The poor thing. She fell all the way down, right to the very bottom…”

  “That’s right,” Lily said. “There are dozens of pieces of our childhood within this box.”

  We spent a great deal of time going through them. We found puzzles, dresses, books…even a gold locket with a lock of my hair inside. Supposedly, our father wore one from each of us.

  “I hardly remember her,” I said. “She died when I was so young…”

  “You could not have been older than eight,” Lily said sadly. “I wish you remembered her better. Mother was a wonderful woman. So full of life. She always wore a smile and it made her so beautiful. Father used to say it was the best thing she could wear.”

  “That’s quite sweet,” I said. “I wish I remembered her more, as well.”

  It had been well after midnight when we closed the trunk once again. Lily went to slide the key into the lock but stopped.

  “I suppose I do not need this any longer,” she said, and pocketed it. “It feels rather strange, if I’m honest.”

  “Why were you so frightened of showing this to me?” I asked when we had returned to the sitting room and taken seats beside the fire. “There was nothing in there to be ashamed of.”

  “It was not shame that caused me to hide it from you, dear sister,” Lily said. She sighed heavily. “When Mother died, it…well, it troubled you quite deeply. As young as you were, I do not think that you were quite able to handle the truth.”

  “Why was I so troubled?” I asked. “What happened?”

  “It…” Lily said. “Iris, this is why I did not wish to share this with you. I was worried that seeing her things would be enough to draw out the memories.”

  “You won’t tell me how she died?” I asked.

  “In truth, I was not present when it happened,” Lily said. “You, however, were.”

  Knots twisted in my stomach.

  Lily reached over and grabbed my hand. “I am sorry to bring this all back up, Iris. Death is…well, it is one of those matters that follows us all throughout our lives. It sneaks up on us when we least expect it. I am not certain that either of us would like to remember that day if we did. Let us leave it at our mother died far too young and we have missed her greatly since.”

  I nodded. “So…you do not remember what happened, either?”

  Lily gave me a flat look. “I remember that it was a whirlwind time in our lives. After she died, I became the sole caregiver for you. I was barely nineteen. It wasn’t as if I did not know how but I…” she drifted off.

  I understood. “You were a young woman in the prime of her life and you sacrificed that so you could care for me.”

  I reached over and took her hand in mine, which she reciprocated by laying her hand atop my own.

  “It was my pleasure and my duty,” she said. “And if we were meant to do it all over again, I would do so in a heartbeat. I never regretted my care for you. Not once.”

  I smiled. “I know,” I said. “But it still warms my heart to hear it.”

  After that, I did not think it prudent to ask just how our mother had died. Lily had quite deliberately avoided the subject all together. As much as I felt that I had every right to know, because she was my mother, as well, I knew that Lily would likely do what she could to avoid answering me.

  She told me she feared that hearing more about Mother’s death would somehow cause me to regress to how I had acted as a child. From what she told me, I had quite nearly taken leave of my senses. It seemed that everything distressed me, even the food Lily had tried to feed me. I would not sleep at night but could barely stay awake during the day. She said the distant look on my face made her quite frightened of what I was dealing with in my mind. She feared for me, day in and day out, and she said it took many, many weeks for me to make any sort of progress. She and my father consulted a doctor, the reverend, close family and friends…anything that might help me to move past the terrible thing that was happening to me.

  Unfortunately, it was not long after our mother died that our father fell ill and passed away, too. I did not remember any of that. Lily told me that she did her best to keep me sheltered from his illness. His sorrow at losing Mother, as well as attempting to care for everything on his own after her death, caused him to fall ill. Lily said that he would not sleep, either, and spent far too much time alone. When he fell ill, she was not entirely surprised and did all she could to help nurse him back to health. He refused, however, and allowed himself to die. She told me that she didn’t think he cared any longer. To die was to be with Mother once again and that was precisely what he wanted in the first place.

  I twisted these truths around in my mind many, many times since seeing the trunk. I had grown up in the care of my aunt and uncle, alongside my cousins. I had known my parents passed when I was younger but it never mattered a great deal to me. I remembered them so little, and as I grew, those memories became even more fleeting…

  When I asked Lily why she cherished these items as much as she did, her answer was simple.

  “I find comfort in looking at these things,” she said. “They are part of our past and they remind me of a time when our family was whole.”

  I could understand that. But to have hidden it for so long…

  “And you are quite certain that you are not…remembering anything trou
blesome, yes?” Lily had asked me that night, as we sat by the fire together.

  “Of course not,” I said. “I am pleased that you have shared this with me, finally. And it was good to see Mother’s face again. Perhaps one day I shall remember more of her.”

  That made Lily’s face pale. “When you do, I hope they are nothing but pleasant memories.”

  But since that night…my dreams had been dark.

  “Iris!”

  Drawn back into the present again, I wheeled around, only to find Lily standing near the back of the shop with her hands on her hips.

  “What?” I asked, eyes wide, staring around.

  Lily rolled her eyes upward. “Good heavens. Lost in your thoughts again? I asked if you had finished counting the white beads.”

  I glanced down at the box, still full, entirely uncounted. “Well, not yet sister, no,” I said.

  Lily huffed, turning on her heel toward the wardrobe where she kept some of our supplies. “Very well,” she said. “But let us complete these menial tasks so that we will not have to worry about them when customers come in.”

  I nodded and began to count.

  The front door swung inward at that moment. The sound of shuffling feet caused me to look up, forgetting my number at once when I realized who it was.

  “Lady Wilson,” Lily said, nearly dropping the scissors she carried in her hands.

  It was indeed Lady Wilson, dressed in a traveling cloak of deep plum, wearing a black hat with a peacock feather tucked into it.

  My heart skipped. What in the world was she doing here?

  At once, every nerve in my body began to sing. I became quite aware of the fact the dress I had chosen that morning was one of my shabbier ones and the way I had done my hair was perhaps a bit too hasty, too messy for someone like Lady Wilson.