The Power of One by Jane A. Adams Page A

crack.
    He held the door open. ‘Shall we? Don’t worry, it’s only for a few hours. Fitch has somewhere far more comfortable in mind.’
    Reluctantly, they followed Tim in. ‘Kitchen on the left, living room on the right. There’s a toilet through the back there and I can soon get the water back on.’ He stood, uncertain, at the foot of the stairs, ‘Look. I know it’s kind of, well, primitive …’
    â€˜Do we have to stay here?’
    Edward took his wife’s hand. ‘Think of it as camping out,’ he said. ‘We’ve not done that since before we got married.’
    Looking at him, Tim was surprised to find that Edward actually looked better than he had since he’d arrived at Peverill Lodge. Some of the colour had returned to his cheeks and he had a look of purposefulness in his eyes.
    â€˜Camping out?’ Lydia stared at him in disbelief, then to Tim’s relief she laughed out loud. ‘Oh, lord; you are such an idiot sometimes.’ She kissed him gently on the cheek and Tim retreated to fetch their gear from the car. Something about that little kiss was so tender and so intimate he could not have felt more like a voyeur if he’d surprised them making love. He took his time taking the suitcases and the supplies from the car. As Edward came out to help, Tim’s phone rang. It was Fitch, with an ETA. Tim handed the phone to Edward so that he could speak with their incipient rescuer and by the time he gave the mobile back to Tim, he was looking happier and more confident.
    â€˜I’m going to have to be off soon,’ Tim said as they carried bags and supplies back into the house. ‘I’ve got to get to work and I want to take the long way round.’
    â€˜We’ll be fine,’ Lydia told him. ‘Don’t worry. And we really are grateful, you know.’ She smiled, wryly. ‘It’s all a bit surreal, isn’t it? Paul would have used this as a scenario for a game.’
    She glanced anxiously at her husband, suddenly aware that she might have said the wrong thing. Edward slipped an arm around her shoulder.
    â€˜Well,’ he said softly. ‘I think we shall have to do it for him, won’t we?’
    Rina was trying to work out where the clipping might have come from. Not having the actual article was a nuisance;
The Frantham Gazette
, a little pamphlet of a thing imparting parish news had quite a distinctive pinkish look and the
Echo
, the local free paper, purveyor of coastal news and advertising for local business had a buff hue, like most of the bigger locals, for whom that was a little offshoot.
    She dragged out various examples from the recycling bin, collecting a mug of tea on the way through the kitchen and then began the task of comparing typefaces. Her worry was this advert came from one of the national papers and therefore might be much more difficult to place but a quick flick through of the personal ads, and more precisely the funeral announcements, convinced her that she was looking at a torn up bit of the
Echo
. Same typeface, same typical layout, so far as she could tell, the real giveaway being the double black line that surrounded all funerary announcements.
    Returning to the kitchen with her discards and helping herself to more tea, Rina rummaged in the recycling for any other copies of the
Echo
; came up with three.
    â€˜Births, marriages and deaths,’ she said as she passed a mystified Steven in the hall.
    She was familiar with the layout of these columns in the
Echo
, but she had only ever scanned them before, not analysed the layout in any depth. Death announcements, as was usual, were in the later columns, with funeral information always on the right hand page and in the column closest to the edge. They all had this double black line, though they varied in size and some had other emblems of death and mourning. Ivy leaves and funeral urns seemed popular, she noted. She