A Brush with Death: A Penny Brannigan Mystery - By Elizabeth J. Duncan Page 0,15

a cup and, holding it by the handle, admired the delicate pattern of violets. Violets. A violet ribbon holding the letters. A bank of violets in the paintings. The paperweight she’d noticed yesterday in Emma’s bedroom with its little purple flowers.

As she stood in the old-fashioned kitchen, she realized that she hadn’t inherited just Emma’s home. She’d also inherited all the secrets that went with it. And to live in the cottage, she’d have to peel away all the layers of pain that hid and protected the secrets until she uncovered the darkest one of all.

She replaced the cup on the shelf, sighed, and looked at her watch. Deciding it was not too late to ring him, she went in search of her mobile.

“It’s me,” she said to his voice mail a few minutes later. “I need your help with something. I wonder if you can get some information on a hit-and-run accident for me. Please call me.”

“Of course I’m staggered that she was a lesbian and I never realized that,” Penny said to Gareth the next afternoon. “You’d think I would have picked up on that, but I didn’t. She certainly never made a pass at me, or whatever you’d call it. Never so much as laid a finger on my knee.” She looked down at the untouched scone, with its sad little raisins, sitting on a small plate. Idly she picked off a corner, raised it to her lips, then set it down, and pushed the plate away. She looked around the tearoom, with its low, beamed ceiling and whitewashed walls covered with old pictures of the town, platters, small wooden agricultural tools, and brass plates. Normally, afternoon tea in the Ivy was a treat, the warm biscuits sinfully slathered with unsalted butter, a spoonful of strawberry jam, and large dollops of clotted cream, but today, she was starting to think, it might have been a mistake to come.

He covered her hand with his.

“Look,” he said. “You’re beating yourself up over something that doesn’t matter. None of this changes how you feel about her.”

He leaned over to her.

“I think the problem is that you’re bringing your perspective and your point of view to her life and times. She was much older than you. She came from a different time, when it wasn’t okay to be homosexual. And I use that word deliberately because nobody was gay back then. Think about it. She was a schoolteacher in a small Welsh town! She couldn’t have been open about her relationship. It had to be a secret.” He thought for a moment, and then added, “It had to be a very big, dark secret. Homosexuality wasn’t even legal in this country until the late sixties. Well, that was for men, I don’t know about women.”

Penny started and withdrew her hand.

“That’s right,” Gareth continued. “Nineteen sixty-seven or sixty-eight. And remember, her sensibilities would have been different. She might have been confused or even ashamed by her feelings. Who knows?”

“But the one thing that really comes across in those letters,” said Penny, “is how much they loved each other. Really, it’s to be envied, having that kind of love in your life. So sad the way it ended, and that’s why I want to know everything I can about how her partner died.”

He couldn’t resist smiling at her. “Partner! Emma’d probably be rolling over in her grave if she heard you call her that.”

“Well, what then?” said Penny. “Lover? I don’t think she’d be too comfortable with that, either. Girlfriend?”

Gareth took a sip of his tea, replaced the cup in its saucer, and glanced at his watch.

“Sorry, love, but I’ve got to get over to Conwy by seven to help out at a community policing meeting. Tell me how I can help. What would you like me to do?”

Penny leaned forward.

“It’s about this hit-and-run accident.” She reached into her bag, pulled out her new notebook, and flipped over a few pages.

“Let me see. Here, it is. Alys Jones, killed in a hit-and-run accident, December 1970.”

She looked at him expectantly.

“Well?”

“And the rest of it?” he asked.

“The rest of what?”

“Well, there are two big questions to be answered. First, where did it happen, and second, why do you want to know? I have a bad feeling you’re going down that road again.”

She gave him a flirty smile.

“The sleuth road.”

She laughed.

“Of course I am! What would you expect? This accident affected a woman who was a dear friend of mine for years and whose house I’m