File "M" for Murder Librarian and former New Yorker Catherine Penny has already sleuthed out the truth behind a deadly house fire since settling in the tiny English town of Far Wychwood. But nowhere is too far for painful memories to find her when her ex-husband, who left her single in her sixties, arrives with his new lady love to attend a family affair. Catherine can't avoid him at the awards ceremony honoring their son-in-law, Peter, who is a shoo-in for a prestigious appointment at Oxford's Mercy College. But the shock of Peter not being chosen is matched only by who is: pompous, womanizing scholar Edgar Stone. And when Stone is found murdered, Peter's guilt seems hardly academic.... Patricia Harwin, who introduced a "charming, compassionate" (The New Mystery Reader) heroine in Arson and Old Lace, shows once again why an American woman in an English town can unearth a whole lot of trouble. PATRICIA HARWIN is the author of the national bestseller Arson and Old Lace, the first novel in her acclaimed Far Wychwood mystery series. Like her heroine Catherine Penny, she is a librarian. She lives with her husband in Rockville, Maryland, where she is hard at work on the next Far Wychwood mystery. Chapter One Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part. Nay, I have done, you get no more of me, And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart, That thus so cleanly I myself can free. Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows, And when we meet at any time again, Be it not seen in either of our brows That we one jot of former love retain. -- Michael Drayton It was no use lying to myself, the baby was not in the house. I had searched every nook a sixteen-month-old boy could fit in, and Rowan Cottage had far more nooks than most houses. He was gone. And it was my fault. What kind of grandmother leaves a toddler sleeping on the sofa and goes out to dig a damn perennial border, just because a sunny April day is a rarity in England? Although Archie had never shown any ability to reach, let alone turn, a doorknob, I knew how determined he was to figure things out. Emily was right, I wasn't fit to watch him. This time she would cut us apart. When I had moved to this Gloucestershire village almost two months before, the plan had been for me to take care of him almost every day while my daughter practiced psychotherapy at the hospital in Oxford. But when I unwittingly put him in mortal danger not once, but twice, she had revised it to a visit or two a week. Not that I'd ever intended to put him in harm's way, but Archie, at barely a year and a half, and I, at sixty, were so alike in our impulsiveness -- our need to pull back veils had caused us to stumble through one where a murderer waited. I went to the front door and grabbed hold of the lintel, weak with apprehension, looking out at the one road through Far Wychwood, a two-lane that connected with a main route to Oxford a mile beyond the village. People went down our little road pretty fast, although there was a four-lane several miles away that got most of the traffic. The scruffy black cat that had adopted me peered around the door of the potting shed by the stone wall. It was his favorite place of refuge when Archie visited, though I had also known him to simply disappear for days. He was so easily spooked that I hadn't yet been permitted to touch him. I had no doubt he deeply resented that I gained his trust with tuna fish and then brought in a toddler on him. "Where's he gone, Muzzle?" I murmured. That ridiculous name was the one he had come with, given by the old man who had lived across the road when I first moved to Far Wychwood, the only person the cat had ever completely trusted. I glanced over at the piece of ground where his cottage had stood, just an empty rectangle of tall weeds under the April sun. The ruins of the burned-out building had been cleanly removed, as if George Crocker's long life there had never been. "Muzzle" was the old man's country pronunciation of "mouse hole," the cat's field of operations in that ancient cottage. I stepped out into my front garden, and he came toward me warily, tail in the air. The scar on my right arm throbbed dully as the sight of the old man's property raised subconscious memories of the day I'd been caught in the blaze that destroyed the cottage. A few seconds later a shock went through my whole body at a screech of brakes and a shout off to my right. I ran into the road, my heart knocking the breath out of my chest, knowing what I would see. A tiny shape lay unmoving on the shoulder of the road by the waist-high stone wall in front of the old village schoolhouse. I knew it was Archie by the overalls and the ringlets of yellow hair, and despair slumped like a sinkhole into my brain. Running toward him, I was vaguely aware of some kind of car sitting slantwise across the road and a male figure with something red about him, standing there looking down at Archie. I stopped a few feet from th