A Stitch in Time
Kelley Armstrong
Praise for Kelley Armstrong
“Armstrong is a talented and evocative writer who knows well how to balance the elements of good, suspenseful fiction, and her stories evoke poignancy, action, humor and suspense.”
The Globe and Mail
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“[A] master of crime thrillers.”
Kirkus
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“Kelley Armstrong is one of the purest storytellers Canada has produced in a long while.”
National Post
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“Armstrong is a talented and original writer whose inventiveness and sense of the bizarre is arresting.”
London Free Press
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“Kelley Armstrong has long been a favorite of mine.”
Charlaine Harris
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“Armstrong’s name is synonymous with great storytelling.”
Suspense Magazine
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“Like Stephen King, who manages an under-the-covers, flashlight-in-face kind of storytelling without sounding ridiculous, Armstrong not only writes interesting page-turners, she has also achieved that unlikely goal, what all writers strive for: a genre of her own.”
The Walrus
Also by Kelley Armstrong
Rockton series
City of the Lost
A Darkness Absolute
This Fallen Prey
Watcher in the Woods
Alone in the Wild
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Standalone Thrillers
Wherever She Goes
Every Step She Takes
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Past Series
Cainsville series
Otherworld series
Nadia Stafford trilogy
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Young Adult
Aftermath
Missing
The Masked Truth
Darkest Powers trilogy
Darkness Rising trilogy
Age of Legends trilogy
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Middle-Grade
A Royal Guide to Monster Slaying
The Blackwell Pages (with Melissa Marr)
A Stitch in Time
Kelley Armstrong
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
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 the written permission of the Author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
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Copyright © 2020 K.L.A. Fricke Inc.
All rights reserved.
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Cover Design by Cover Couture www.bookcovercouture.com
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Photo (c) Shutterstock/ASC Photography
Photo (c) Shutterstock/Irina Alexandrovna
Photo (c) Depositphotos/romansl
Photo (c) Depositphotos/tolokonov
Photo (c) Depositphotos/Avella2011
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ISBN-13 (print): 978-1-989046-19-7
ISBN-13 (ebook): 978-1-989046-18-0
Acknowledgments
A Stitch in Time is a departure from my usual fare, which means I have a host of people I need to thank, both for encouraging me to write it and for helping get it into shape.
In 2018, I sat in on Jennifer Barnes’s Writing for Your ID workshop. I’ve known Jen for years, and I love how she delves into the psychology of fiction. This particular workshop encouraged authors to embrace the story they most want to write. That got me thinking of an idea that had been at the back of my mind for years.
After Jen’s workshop, I half-jokingly mentioned on Twitter that I’d like to write a time-travel-Victorian-haunted-house-mystery-romance. I expected nothing more than a few laughs from followers. Instead, the response was huge and overwhelmingly encouraging.
So, thank you to Jennifer Barnes, for giving me the first nudge with her workshop, and thank you to my online followers for turning that nudge into a shove.
With something this different, I knew I needed editorial help. Lots of it. Here my thanks goes to Melissa Marr, who read multiple drafts as I endlessly tinkered with the plot. Thanks, too, to my daughter Julia, who listened to all my revision ideas and helped me work them through.
Thanks to Yanni Kuznia and everyone at Subterranean Press for publishing the hardcover version. We’ve worked together for years, but this is the first time I’ve come to you with an original (non-series) project, and I appreciate how open you were to a new direction.
Finally, thanks to my freelance copyeditor, Margaret Morris. You’ve been working with me for years, Maggie, on projects where I didn’t do acknowledgements pages so I never properly thanked you. You always do amazing work, but you went above and beyond with this book, and I am so grateful for your help.
If you’re a reader picking this one up, thanks to you too, for giving it a try.
Contents
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
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Upcoming Stories
A Twist of Fate: Chapter 1
A Twist of Fate: Chapter 2
About the Author
1
Six months ago, I inherited a haunted house. I also inherited the ghosts that go with it. Or that’s what Aunt Judith said to me in her final letter, smelling of her tea-rose hand cream, the scent uncorking a fresh spate of ugly crying. But I understand what she meant. Not that the house is haunted, but that it haunts me. If I can wave burning sage and tell myself I’ve put the spirits to rest, then I should. What happened there twenty-three years ago does indeed haunt me.
It’s time for me to face that, and so I’m heading to Yorkshire, where I’ll spend the summer ostensibly on sabbatical in my great-aunt’s country house while I decide what to do with it. What I really want, though, is answers.
As my taxi rolls through the Yorkshire countryside, I tick off the landmarks, as if I’m a child again, plastered to the window of our rental car as we make our way to Thorne Manor. Outside Leeds, I saw changes—houses where I remembered fields, shopping centers where there’d been forest—but as we roll into the moors, we seem to slip back in time to my childhood, every tiny church and stone sheepfold and crumbling barn exactly as I remember it.
The last time I came this way, I’d been fifteen, a girl just starting her life. Now, I return at thirty-eight, a history professor at the University of Toronto. A widow, too, my husband—Michael—gone eight years.
We drive through High Thornesbury itself, a picture-perfect village nestled in a dale. As we start up the one-lane road, the cabbie has to stop to let sheep pass. Then he begins the tre
acherous climb up the steep hill. At the top stands Thorne Manor, and my heart trips as I roll down the window to see it better.
The house appears abandoned. It is, in its way. Aunt Judith rarely visited after Uncle Stan died here all those years ago. Yet from the foot of the hill, Thorne Manor has always looked abandoned. A foreboding stone slab of a house, isolated and desolate, surrounded by an endless expanse of empty moor.
As the taxi crunches up the hill, the house comes into focus, dark windows staring like empty eyes. No light shines from windows or illuminates the long lane or even peeps from the old stone stables. I push back a niggle of disappointment. The caretaker knows I’m coming, and yes, I’d hoped to see the house ablaze in welcoming light, but this is more fitting—Thorne Manor as a starkly beautiful shadow, backlit by an achingly gorgeous inky purple sunset.
The driver pulls into the lane and surveys the lawn, a veritable weed garden of clover and speedwell.
“Are you sure this is t’ place, lass?” he asks, his rural Yorkshire accent thick as porridge.
“I am, thank you.”
The frown-line between his bushy brows deepens to a fissure. He grips the seat back with a gnarled hand as he twists to look at me. “You didn’t rent it from one of those online things, did you? I fear you’ve been played a nasty trick.”
“I inherited it recently from my great-aunt, and there’s a caretaker who knows I’m coming.”
I hand him the fare with a heftier tip than I can afford. He scowls, as if I’m offering blood money for his participation in a heinous act against innocent female tourists.
“That caretaker should be here to greet you properly.”
“I already texted,” I say. “She’ll be here soon.”
“Then, I’ll wait.”
He turns off the diesel engine, takes exactly the fare from my hand and settles in with a set of his jaw that warns against argument. When I say that I’m stepping out to stretch my legs, he mutters, “Don’t go far. Nowt out here but sheep and serial killers.” And then he peers around, as if one of each hides behind every jutting rock.
I close the car door and drink in the smell of wild bluebells. As I walk toward the house, I catch a sound on the breeze. A rhythmic squeak-squeak, each iteration shivering up my spine.
A figure labors up the hill on an ancient bicycle, the chain protesting. Atop it sits a black-clad figure, long coat snapping in the wind, the hood pulled up, face dark except for a glowing red circle where the mouth should be.
Squeak-squeak.
Squeak-squeak.
The figure turns into the laneway, and the cab driver gets out, slamming the door hard enough that I jump.
“I thought you said the caretaker was a woman,” he says.
I see now that the bicycle rider is a man with a lit pipe clamped between his teeth. He wears a macintosh draped over the back of the bike, the hem dancing precariously close to the rear wheel. Under his hood is a round, deeply lined clean-shaven face and bristle-short gray hair.
“Miss Dale?” The rider’s voice . . . is not the voice of a he. I look again, and in that second glance, I’m far less certain of gender.
“Ms. Crossley?” I say, sloshing my pronunciation of the title, in hopes it could go either way.
“Aye.” She eyes me with a sharp gaze. “You were expectin’ someone else?”
“No. Just making sure. We’ve never met.”
As I say that, moonlight illuminates her face, and I hesitate.
“Have we met?” I say. “You look . . . familiar.”
“I’ve been takin’ care of t’ place twenty years now. Never seen you visit, though.”
There’s accusation in those words. I say, evenly, “Yes, I used to come out as a child, but after my uncle’s death, I only visited Aunt Judith in London.” I turn to the driver. “Thank you very much for staying with me. It wasn’t necessary, but I appreciated the company.”
Delores Crossley looks at him, her arms folded. When he doesn’t move fast enough, she shoos him with one leathery hand. “That was the lass bein’ polite. Get gone. She’s not askin’ you in t’ tea. Or owt else you might’a been hoping for.”
He straightens, affronted. “I was keeping an eye on her—”
“I’m sure you were. And now you can keep your eyes t’ yourself. Go on. Git.”
The driver stalks back to the car as I call another sincere thank-you. He ignores it, and the taxi peels out in a spray of gravel.
I say nothing. Translating Delores’s North Yorkshire accent is taking all my brain energy right now. At least she isn’t using “thees” and “thous” as you sometimes find with locals her age. Dad says, when I was four, I came back from our summer trip talking like an eighty-year-old North Yorkshire native, and my junior kindergarten teacher feared I’d suffered a brain injury, my speech garbled beyond comprehension.
The more Delores talks, though, the faster my internal translator works, and soon my brain is making the appropriate substitutions and smoothing out her accent.
After the taxi leaves, she turns to me. “So, you’re staying.”
“For the summer, yes. As I said in my e-mail.”
“I hope you didn’t buy a return ticket just yet, ’cos I have a feeling you’ll be needing it sooner than you expect.”
I meet her gaze. She only locks it and says nothing.
“I’ll be fine,” I say firmly.
With two brisk taps of her pipe against an ivy-laced urn, she sets the pipe on the edge and stalks inside.
I drag my suitcase through. The smell of tea wafts past, the distinctive Yorkshire blend I haven’t drunk in so many years. I pause, and I swear I hear my father’s “Hullo!” echo through the hallway and Aunt Judith calling from the kitchen, where she’ll emerge with a tea tray, pot steaming, having calculated our arrival to the minute.
Grief seizes me, and I have to push myself past the grand entranceway. To my right, footsteps echo, and lights flick on, and I follow the trail of illumination into the sitting room. The sweet scent of tea roses wafts over me, as if it’s engrained in the wood itself. The last time I saw this room, it was mid-century modern. Now, it’s cottage chic, in cream and beige with pink accents. A striped couch begs me to sink into its deep cushions, as does a massive wooden armchair buried under pillows and blankets. Books are artlessly strewn over a rough wooden coffee table.
Aunt Judith also painted the woodwork, and I try not to cringe at that. When Michael and I married fresh out of college, we’d rented a house for which the term fixer-upper would be a compliment. A crash course in home renovation turned into a shared passion I haven’t indulged since his death. Now, I imagine stripping that paint and refinishing scratched wooden floors, and a long-buried thrill runs through me.
“Miss Dale,” Delores calls from the next room.
“Bronwyn, please,” I say as I follow her voice into the kitchen.
At one time, cooking would have been done outside the house—in a courtyard kitchen. The modern version would have been more of a service area. It’s compact but pretty with painted wood cupboards and a smaller refrigerator than I have in my condo. A good quarter of the space is dedicated to the AGA stove, already lit, warming the tiny room enough that I peel off my sweater. The faint smell of oil wafts from the stove, the scent as familiar as the Yorkshire tea I smell here, too, an open box on the counter, as if Delores drank it while preparing the house.
“Got a few groceries in the cupboard. Fresh scones and a loaf of bread, too. My wife baked them.” Her gaze lifts to mine, defiant now, waiting for a reaction.
“Please thank her for me.”
A grunt, and she waves at the AGA stove. “You know how to work that?”
“I do.”
“You’ll need to do a proper shopping. Don’t know how you’ll manage ba’ht a car.”
Ba’ht. It takes me a moment to access my rusty North Yorkshire dictionary, substitute “without” for “ba’ht” and realize she’s commenting on my lack of a vehicle.
“My aunt’s will said my uncle’s car was still in the garage?”
A bark of a laugh. “You couldn’t get that mouse motel running down a steep hill, lass. You’ll need to get sowt else. I can’t be running you around. You saw my mode of transportation. I’m not giving you a croggy.”
I smile. “I don’t think I’d fit on the handlebars anymore. I’ll be fine. I won’t need anything more now that I’m here.”
“Nah, now that you’re here, I can fix that mullock of a yard. Been wanting to for years, but your aunt insisted it wasn’t worth the effort. Her will pays me five years of wages, so I’ll be fixing up the property.”
She circles through the dining room, a small office and then the formal parlor. The last stands empty.
“Your aunt had me sell the furniture. She asked me to put it in the town shop and use the dosh for the upkeep. I have her letter, if you want to see it.”
