Read Online Bridesmaids Revisited by Dorothy Cannell - Free Book Online

resistance.
    When she went to slam the door I kicked it open, gave her a shove with both hands, causing her to shift just enough for me to duck under her arm. Lumbering out of the ditch I ran smack bang into a human wall made up of Tom, Frank, and Irene—who had either shinnied down a drainpipe or exited her cottage by the more prosaic means of the stairs and the front door.
    “Get out of my way!” I shouted.
    “Try making us!” Tom’s square face was set. His short hair bristled.
    I stood still, sensing rather than hearing Susan come up behind me. There was no dream-like quality to the moment, no rosy-hued hope that someone would appear out of the drizzle to rescue me. But that is exactly what happened. A woman was coming down the lane. A tall woman with wild black and orange hair billowing out around her shoulders.
    She moved with long strides, unencumbered by the rain cape that reached almost to her ankles.
    “Shadow, where are you, Shadow?” she called, looking to the left and right and on reaching our gathering asked if we had seen a dog. “He’s a lanky beast, rather like a greyhound with long hair. I left him in the garden at the Old Rectory when I arrived there about half an hour ago. He must have jumped the wall.”
    “He was over at my gate a short time back.” Tom jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Haven’t seen him since.”
    “Could have cut over into the fields.” Susan came up from behind me to stand with her fellows.
    “I’d get after him quick.” Frank sucked in his cheeks and tapped the ground with his stick. “Traffic’s busy on the main road this time of day and the man that farms over the way doesn’t take kindly to dogs in his fields.”
    “Yes, I wouldn’t waste time.” Irene was barely polite.
    The woman’s eyes met mine. They were a startling grass-green, the sort one only reads about in romance novels, and they were made even more remarkable by being set under straight black brows. Could this be the village witch? Given my situation I didn’t really care if she was the Archduke of Transylvania. She spelled safety. And beyond that I felt an inexplicable feeling of familiarity that came not with an electrical jolt but as in a warm whisper from somewhere in my everyday world.
    “Are you all right?” she asked me.
    “No, I’m not,” I shot glances right, left, and center. “These people seem to be in a muddle about who I am and what I’m doing in Knells.”
    “But surely”—her voice made me think of hot chocolate—“you’ll be the one they’re expecting at the Old Rectory.”
    “They told you they were expecting me?”
    “You don’t sound as though you’re looking forward to the visit.” She pushed her black and orange hair off her brow with long purple fingernails and I found myself thinking that it wasn’t so surprising, perhaps—that feeling of recognition. She was younger than Mrs. Malloy by a decade or more, in her early fifties was my guess, and didn’t appear to lay on the makeup with such a heavy trowel, but they were both undeniably theatrical in appearance.
    “It’s hard to look forward to meeting people who have told their neighbors up and down the street a whole bunch of nasty things about me.”
    “Really?” She looked from Irene and Tom to Frank and Susan.
    “And with good reason,” growled Mrs. Muscle Woman in a floral pinny. “Those dear good ladies at the Old Rectory have every reason for hating the idea of having Miss Amelia Chambers invade their home.”
    “Who?” I had the feeling that light might be about to dawn, although not, perhaps, without a struggle.
    “Don’t go talking daft.” Tom wiped away the sheen of rain from his face and hunched his shoulders so that his neck disappeared into the collar of his plaid shirt.
    “It’s no good pretending you’re not that horrible woman.” Irene sounded as belligerent as ever; but her blue eyes looked a little uncertain.
    “She’s not, you know.” The woman with the black