Midnight in Austenland (Austenland 2)

“I took the alimony and ran—cruises and resorts, till I found Pembrook Park. And I don’t want to leave, ever. ’Cause back home I’ll be the fat girl Bobby Murdock dumped, and our stores aren’t mine anymore, and at least here no one can dump me again.”

A burbling sound started inside Miss Charming that soon changed into sobs.

“You’ve been a guest at Pembrook Park for how long?” asked Charlotte.

“Well … I started on last fall, but they close up for December and January, and so I went on a cruise to the Mediterranean. And Greece is snazzy, honey lamb, and the food in Italy was bushel baskets better than here, but I got lonely. I came back again in March, and now everything’s great!” She smiled with big, white teeth, her cheeks trembling a little to hold it.

“How can you afford to just stay here, session after session?”

“Oh, I got loads.” She blew her nose. “I guess that’s all I got.”

Charlotte rubbed Miss Charming’s arm. She knew from experience how little such a gesture could do to relieve that stabbing heart pain.

So she said, “My husband left me for a woman named ‘Justice.’ ”

“Seriously? ‘Justice’? That’s worse than ‘Heather’!” Miss Charming put her arms around Charlotte and squeezed her like a favorite teddy bear. “I’m so glad you’ve been dumped too.”

Charlotte guessed that wasn’t exactly what Miss Charming meant, so she hugged her back.

“We’re not supposed to talk about our other lives,” Miss Charming whispered.

“I won’t tell. Were you serious before, when you said you can tell fakes from real?”

“Lifelong talent. I should’ve seen Bobby’s affair from a mile off, but it’s hard to get a good look at someone when he’s breathing in your ear.”

“Don’t I know it. What do you think about the other Pembrook folk. Fake or real?”

“Lemme see … Colonel Andrews is real in a way, but just because his phoniness really is him. Mr. Grey seems real, but I’m not sure. Miss Gardenside is as fake as they come. Mr. Mallery and Mrs. Wattlesbrook are real as real.”

“And me?”

“You’re solid gold, weighed and minted.” Miss Charming gave Charlotte a big wet kiss on the cheek, sniffed deeply, and smiled despite her red eyes.

Charlotte left feeling determined. Miss Charming was not the murderer, but someone was. Charlotte wanted to cross a line, ford the Rubicon, commit herself to solving this whodunit so she could put it behind her and get ready to fall in love with Mr. Mallery at the ball. Her vacation was almost over, and there hadn’t been enough vacationing going on.

She marched downstairs, peeking into rooms until she found Eddie in the library. He’d asked her to include him in her investigations, after all. And he really had the most innocent face.

“Off on an adventure?” he asked.

“Yeah. Will you come with me?”

Caesar wasn’t alone as he waded into the waters of the Rubicon. When Charlotte solved a violent, shocking murder, it would be nice to have a friend beside her. Because when she thought about what she was about to do, she felt a buzzing in her fingers warning that her hands were most likely shaking. She gripped Eddie’s arm harder to try to keep them still.

“And where are we going?” he asked, placing one of his hands over hers.

“The pond.”

The pond lay dull and gray between the trees, no breeze to finger its surface into uneasy ripples. The sky was clogged with clouds, preventing reflected sunlight from winking mischievously on the waves, as one might expect if the waters did indeed hide a secret. But the pond resisted all personification, neither begging for inspection nor warning of horrors best left alone. It just lay there, uninterested.

Which was really irritating. Charlotte would have appreciated some seductive shore lapping, ripples beckoning like a curved finger, that sort of thing. But no. Thanks a lot for nothing, pond. So Charlotte did her best to supply the scene with the necessary exaggerations to provoke her to action.

See there, how that cloud’s reflection was shaped like a hand?

My, but wasn’t there a great looming shadow in the water’s depths?

Hark, but didn’t the twittering of birds in the trees seem to sort of imply that the wildlife was all aflutter about something horrid and unnatural that took place here, such as, oh, I don’t know, murder most foul?!

Eddie and Charlotte stood on the banks of the pond. Staring at it. At least one of them wishing it looked more intriguing.