“And are you as much fun, I wonder, as your mama?” he said.

“Do you know my mother?”

“Not personally, but one reads delicious tidbits in newspapers.”

“You shouldn’t believe what you read in newspapers,” I said and ducked under his arm. I heard him chuckling as I opened the door to my room.

We assembled as instructed, bundled into our warmest clothes, and found that lanterns on poles had been stuck in the snow for us to carry. Bunty also handed out a supply of music books for those who didn’t know the words.

“I thought we’d start off with ‘Good King Wenceslas’ as we walk down the driveway,” Lady Hawse-Gorzley said, “to warm up our voices, so to speak, and then we’ll switch to ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ when we reach the Misses Ffrench-Finch. And we’ll keep it suitably subdued.”

Darcy slid into the line beside me as the singing began and we moved off. “Why are we keeping it subdued?” he whispered. “Are they true aficionados of music who would be offended by our out-of-tune renditions?”

“No, they had a death in the family yesterday morning,” I whispered back. “One of the three elderly sisters was found dead in her bed. Someone had turned the gas on and closed the windows.”

“Suicide?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Then one of the other sisters wanted her out of the way, probably. Jealous, or wanted a better share of an inheritance. Or was simply batty.”

I shook my head. “No, one gathers that they adored their sister and relied on her. She was the strong one who made the decisions.”

“When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even,” went on the singing.

He turned to me sharply. “Are you saying it was murder?”

“They’d all like to believe it was an accident,” I said. “But there have been three deaths in three days in this small village. That seems to be stretching the law of averages, doesn’t it?”

“Were the other two similar old ladies?”

“No, quite different. A landowner found shot with his own gun in a tree in the Hawse-Gorzleys’ orchard. A local garage owner fell off a bridge into a creek as he went home from the village pub—where it is said he was fond of visiting the publican’s wife. No hint from the police that they have found any evidence of foul play. The old ladies’ house was locked for the night at six and nobody seems to be able to come up with a reason for wanting Miss Ffrench-Finch dead.”

“They say deaths come in threes, don’t they?” he said. “The most logical thing is that they were all accidents.”

“There are a couple of other things I should mention,” I said. “One of them is the Lovey Curse.”

“The what?” He was laughing, his eyes sparkling in the light of the lantern.