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Mum has swept her ash-blond hair on top of her head with a green bandanna and has a nearly empty glass of red wine in her hand, with two full ones waiting on the table. She's hovering over the massive range, sautéing onions, which is her sole culinary skill. Something's in the oven, but I suspect it's ready-made and soon to be garnished with the sautéed onions.

"There's post for you on the table," Mum says without turning around.

"Hello to you too, Laura," Jenny says to Mum. Her tone is teasing, but Mum looks a bit chastened as she turns around and gives Jenny a quick kiss on the cheek.

She moves to say hello to me, but instead hands me the nearly empty glass she's holding and then takes a full one from the table.

I taste gas fumes on the back of my tongue, but Mum beats me to it. "Cooker's gone out, just a sec." She lights a long match from the ring under the frying pan, then twists a knob on the cooker to the 'off' position and wrenches open the oven door. The cooker's so old you've got to lean all the way inside and light it with an actual flame, risking certain death in the process. I know better than to bring up replacing it, because it's a discussion we've had too many times over the years. Mum thinks it's retro and cool. I, on the other hand, work hard not to think of Sylvia Plath every time I look at it.

I sag into the hard wooden chair next to my bag and pick up the thick envelope with my name on it. My heart pounds for a second, because I recently entered several fiction-writing competitions. But no one has replied by post to those for years; it's all online. My brain is just doing silly things with the expectation that someone might notice me for something I wrote. I throw back the remaining swig of what is most certainly supermarket-brand table wine. It already tastes like a headache.

I slide open the heavy flap of the envelope and pull out a letter printed on headed paper:

Miss Annabelle Adams,

Your presence has been requested at the offices of Gordon, Owens, and Martlock LLC for a meeting with your great aunt, Ms. Frances Adams. Ms. Adams would like to discuss the responsibilities that will come with being sole benefactor of her estate and assets.

I pause there. "Wait, this is from Great Aunt Frances's solicitor," I say. "Looks like he mislabeled this letter, and it was supposed to say Laura. It's about the inheritance."

Jenny leans over my shoulder and skims the letter. "It does say 'great aunt'," she says, and points to the words on the page. "That doesn't seem like a mistake."

"Oh, she 'didn't'," Mum snaps. She crosses over to the table and snatches the letter out of my hand. She stares at it long enough for the onions to give off a burned caramel smell, then tosses the letter onto the table and returns to the stove. Mum moves the cast- iron frying pan off the hob before the whole thing catches fire.

Jenny mumbles the rest of the letter's contents as her eyes scan the typeface again. "'Please present yourself at the offices of' blah blah...it's just instructions for the meeting. It's in a couple of days, somewhere in Dorset called Castle Knoll. Oh my God," she whispers, "an estranged aunt in a sleepy countryside village? A mysterious inheritance? This is a serious case of life imitating art."

"I'm sure this is meant for Mum. Apparently Great Aunt Frances is superstitious to the extreme, so I doubt she'd just change her mind about something like this and disinherit Mum. Though actually," I add slowly, "given the stories I've heard about Great Aunt Frances, this might be the kind of thing she'd do." I look at Jenny's awestruck expression and decide that I owe her a real deep dive into the weird background of Great Aunt Frances. "It's family lore," I say. "I've really never told you?" Jenny shakes her head and sips from the remaining glass on the table. I look over at Mum. "Do you want to tell the story of Great Aunt Frances? Or shall I?"

Mum goes back to the oven and wrestles with the door again, pulling out an aluminum tray of something unidentifiable. She takes the cast-iron frying pan and scrapes the singed onions onto the top of it, grabs three forks from the basket where she keeps loose cutlery, and sets the whole thing between us, forks stuck in at odd angles. Then she sinks into a chair and takes another drink of wine, shaking her head at me slightly.

"Okay then," I say, and I try to put on my best storytelling voice. Jenny takes the wine bottle and fills my glass. "Great Aunt Frances was sixteen, and it was 1965. She and her two best friends went to a country fair and had their fortunes read. Great Aunt Frances's fortune came out something like this: 'You're going to be murdered, and end up a pile of dry bones.'"

"Ooh, very over the top, I love it," Jenny says. "But if you're going to write mystery novels, Annie—and I say this with all the love in my heart—you need to work on your delivery."

Mum has the letter again, and studies it as if it's evidence of some crime. "That wasn't the fortune," she says quietly. "It was: 'Your future contains dry bones. Your slow demise begins right when you hold the queen in the palm of one hand. Beware the bird, for it will betray you. And from that, there's no coming back. But daughters are the key to justice, find the right one and keep her close. All signs point toward your murder.'"