Eva Mallory’s Husband Hunt, page 1
Also by Katherine Dyson
Lily Bennett’s Bucket List
EVA MALLORY’S HUSBAND HUNT
KATHERINE DYSON
One More Chapter
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2023
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Copyright © Katherine Dyson 2023
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Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023
Cover illustration © Dawn Cooper / The Artworks
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Katherine Dyson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
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Source ISBN: 9780008532000
Ebook Edition © July 2023 ISBN: 9780008532017
Version: 2023-03-21
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
Acknowledgments
Thank you for reading…
Chapter One
Chapter Two
You will also love…
About the Author
Also by Katherine Dyson
Credits
One More Chapter...
About the Publisher
For all teachers, but particularly mine.
Mrs Bateman, Mrs Frobisher, Mrs Hegarty, Mr Todd.
Mrs Newns, the first person who made me believe I could be a writer.
And Mr Brown and LJL, for everything.
Mr B, you told me to dedicate something to you one day. Here it is.
Chapter One
There were a few ways that Eva had imagined she might mess up her twin sister’s anniversary party. Something like calling her sister’s husband by Hanna’s ex-girlfriend’s name, or a poorly timed sneezing fit, perhaps. Unavoidable lateness, that was an old favourite, though it didn’t seem nearly grand enough for the occasion.
She didn’t imagine, not even for a second, that there was a chance she would have ruined the day with a bit of casual arson. That hadn’t been on her list at all.
And yet here she was, standing in the car park of a beautiful four-star hotel with her equally bewildered family, each wrapped in a foil blanket, as a paramedic nodded sagely at Ciocia Irenka’s bilingual ranting and held an oxygen mask firmly to her face. In the background, small licks of flame fought the flow of the firefighters’ hoses as smoke spiralled up the old stone walls and spat small flecks of ash at the assembled crowds from high up in the sky.
It would probably have been fair to say that Eva was shocked at how the day’s events had unfolded, but she wasn’t surprised. Not one bit.
Because she, Eva Mallory, was the unluckiest woman in the world.
It had all started with her great-grandfather, Jozef Mallory. He’d been Jozef Malinowski in those days, but, exiled from his home country in a post-war resettlement camp and still reeling from the years of horror he’d endured, he’d set about the process of changing his surname.
He’d told his family that it was because he wanted them to fit into the land they’d unexpectedly found themselves permanent citizens of. And maybe that was the reason, in part. It was a good enough reason as any. Certainly as good as trying to escape from a past that he could never have made his peace with.
He’d seen it on a street sign on the bus ride to the registry office.
Mallory Avenue.
It had seemed like fate, like a sign from God or something like that, that his eyes had darted towards the sign at just the right time to see it, and how he’d noticed the similarity between Mallory and Malinowski quickly enough to scribble it down in the small leather-bound journal that he always carried.
‘Jozef Mallory,’ he’d repeated to himself in a strongly accented whisper, a huge smile spreading across his face as his mind whirled with the possibilities of this bold new beginning.
Two weeks later he was dead.
How could he have known, with barely enough English to get by, that he had chosen to saddle his family with a name which literally meant unlucky?
How could he have known, on that crisp winter morning, that decades later his great-granddaughter would not be a bit surprised that she’d accidentally burned down a hotel because she had become so accustomed to a life of back-to-back misfortunes?
‘It was me,’ Eva blurted, trying her hardest to maintain eye contact with the dark-haired police officer who was taking her statement. ‘I did it. There was a candle on our table, and I think my necklace or maybe my handbag might have caught on the tablecloth, because when I stood up to leave, everything was fine, and then I looked back two minutes later and the whole table was in flames.’ The smallest of sobs crept up her throat. ‘Are you going to arrest me?’
‘Don’t worry, Miss Mallory,’ the officer replied, his brows nipping into a frown. ‘You’re not under suspicion.’ He scribbled in his notebook for a few more moments before shoving it, along with his pen, into a pocket. ‘There’ll be an investigation, of course, but from the other witness statements it’s clear to me that this was an accident.’ A small smile softened the hard lines of his face. ‘Just a bit of bad luck.’
Try an entire lifetime of bad luck, Eva wanted to say, but she didn’t. She didn’t think it wise, not with how she’d just escaped a criminal record. Instead she returned the officer’s smile and thanked him, noticing how her words made his smile widen, just a little, and how that seemed to transform his entire face.
He was handsome, she thought to herself, but she didn’t voice that either, just nodded once and turned back to her family, now huddling like foil-wrapped potatoes on a fire.
‘How long do we have to stay?’ her sister was asking as Eva re-joined the group. At that, their mother’s eyes darted towards Ciocia Irenka, still giving the paramedic an entirely misdirected piece of her mind. ‘Can we leave her here?’
Eva couldn’t help but smile at her tone. Hanna had always been the outspoken twin.
Their mother found no such amusement. ‘Hanna!’
‘Can we though?’ Hanna’s voice was strained, as if she were fighting a tut, and there was a certain fury to the way she stomped at the ground. ‘She’ll be fine, you know what she’s like.’
Irenka, their paternal great-aunt, had been on the brink of expiring the entire time the twins had been alive, but was much too stubborn to actually die. She liked instead to flirt with the afterlife, occasionally going almost all the way into the light before suddenly and dramatically recovering from her deathbed, doling out insults like Halloween sweets as her family, once again, relaxed their vigil.
‘We can stay,’ said a steady voice to Eva’s right, and that made her smile, too. Hanna’s husband Owen was a good egg. It helped that he had not yet been subjected to one of Ciocia Irenka’s near-death jaunts, and as such had significantly more sympathy for her than the average member of the family.
Hanna shot her husband a look but softened almost immediately, still firmly in the grip of the honeymoon phase at 364 days of marriage. ‘Fine,’ she huffed, no edge to it this time. ‘We can stay.’ She tightened her foil blanket around herself, a smirk creeping onto her face. ‘But can we at least talk about how Eva just nearly got arrested for burning down a stately home.’
‘Hanna!’ Eva shrieked in reply, sounding much more like her mother than she’d like. ‘It is not a stately home. And I’m not getting arrested, the policeman said so.’ Her anxiety about the whole situation hadn’t lessened any, and she started to feel the familiar grip of it around her throat. ‘Plus it wasn’t even my fault. It was the curse.’
Sylvia laughed a little, tightening her own foil blanket even thought it
They all looked at her then, all at once; Eva’s mother and her mother’s German husband, Hanna and Owen, and sweet old Ciocia Nelka, all with varying degrees of concern on their faces as Eva herself spiralled into a pit of confusion.
‘You forgot?’ she asked, the words clumsy and slow. The very idea was incomprehensible. The curse sank its icy fingers into every day of Eva’s life. In fact, she couldn’t think of a single day – not one – where something hadn’t gone wrong.
She looked up and five expectant faces looked back, each hovering a different distance between intrigued and concerned.
Like always, it was Hanna who broke the silence. ‘You know,’ she said, tucking a strand of her perfectly curled dark hair behind one ear, ‘I feel like I’ve had much less bad luck this year.’ Her eyes moved to her husband, who shrugged gently back at her. ‘I can’t remember the last time something even went wrong.’ The smirk returned, and she motioned to the smouldering wall of the hotel behind them. ‘Except for this whole business, obviously.’
‘You broke the curse,’ Sylvia said, her voice quiet and confident as she pushed her purple-rimmed glasses up her face with the heel of her hand. ‘It was the same for me when I married Stefan. Everything just started’—she shrugged, as if searching for the right words—‘going to plan.’
Eva couldn’t process what was happening. ‘But bad things still happen, all the time.’ She motioned to the smoking mess behind her. ‘I mean—’
‘It’s you,’ Hanna interrupted. ‘Bad things happen when you’re with us. When you’re not here, everything’s gravy.’
Sweet old Ciocia Nelka, who hadn’t said a word up until then, straightened up to her full height of not-quite five feet. ‘Gravy is good, yes?’
‘Yes, ciocia,’ Owen said with a smile, resting a hand on her foil-covered shoulder. ‘Gravy is good.’
Ordinarily, Eva would have been cheered by her elderly great-aunt’s unexpected knowledge of slightly out-of-date slang, but at that particular moment she was feeling much too discombobulated to even react.
‘Are you saying’—she almost couldn’t get the words out—‘that it’s just…’
Sylvia’s mouth hitched into a smile. ‘Gone?’
‘Well, for us it’s gone.’ Hanna stretched her arms out aimlessly, the foil blanket crinkling and creasing as she did. ‘It’s the Mallory curse. You’re the only Mallory left. Well, you and Ciocia Irenka, but I doubt she’s cursed.’ One of her immaculately groomed eyebrows lifted. ‘She’s the one who curses.’
Eva felt her blood run cold, a shiver which started at the base of her neck and then crawled outwards, down her arms and around her ribcage. A secret she’d been suppressing suddenly sank sharp claws into the pit of her stomach.
Because there had been a time when she hadn’t been a Mallory either. She’d changed her name once, by deed poll, when she was barely out of her teens. She’d chosen Smith, figuring that there were so many Smiths in the world that they couldn’t all be either lucky or unlucky. A Smith curse would surely already have spelled disaster for the whole population.
So she walked out of the registry office one day as Eva Smith, and on that very day, her father dropped dead.
There was nothing they could have done, Sylvia had told the girls. No way they could have known. It was just one of those things.
Just random chance.
But Eva didn’t believe in random chance. Only in the curse. And the curse, she was quite sure, was what had actually killed her father. That, and the fact that she had tried to outsmart it. Which meant, of course, all added up, that there was only one possible conclusion that a young Eva could possibly have come to.
She had killed her dad.
She changed her name back the day after his funeral, never telling a single other soul about the change while she submitted to a life of bad luck and small annoyances. It had been her penance, an extra weight draped across her shoulders as a reminder that she couldn’t side-step the curse, nor could she outrun it.
It was here to stay.
At least, that was what she’d thought for the remainder of her thirty-one years.
But her mother had escaped the curse, and now so had her sister. Which must mean, she reasoned, her brain frantically grasping at ideas while her family looked at her with expressions of increasing concern, that it wasn’t the change of name that the curse had objected to, but the fact that she had cheated fate.
It all made perfect sense in Eva’s mind. She believed wholeheartedly in such things, in fate and in chance. In the stars lining up, and conversely, in bad omens and destiny, whichever way the needle spun. But Eva was also a teacher, and she knew enough primary school level maths to know that in a sample size of three, two good outcomes was not something to ignore. And in their sample size of three, one of those things had not been like the others.
Which all added together to give one hypothesis: that the curse must see changing your name by deed poll as cheating, because taking someone’s name in marriage was, thus far, the only known way to break the curse.
She sucked in a breath, holding it a moment before exhaling slowly and looking back up at her family, all now looking at her expectantly, blue lights flashing reflections in their silver capes. And in that moment, in the ridiculousness of that situation, she knew exactly what she had to do.
She didn’t need to live in the shadow of the curse at all.
What she needed was a husband.
And fast.
Chapter Two
‘A husband?’ Ciocia Irenka shrieked from the wingback chair in her living room later that evening. ‘Kochanie, we did not think it would ever happen. Did we, Nelka?’ She looked over at her sister, perched like a tiny, delicate bird on the ageing sofa opposite, before looking back at Eva with a single eyebrow raised. ‘Nelka has sold her hat.’
Ciocia Nelka waved her away, always hating to make a fuss. ‘I can buy another one.’
‘You always go straight to the hats.’ Eva chuckled. ‘I have to find him first.’
Ciocia Irenka did not acknowledge her words at all, just stuck steadfastly to her train of thought. ‘At your age we thought you were the other kind, you know? Hitting at the other players? How you say?’
‘Batting for the other team,’ Stefan said, calmly, his accent clipping the tone of his perfect English.
Eva rolled her eyes.
Irenka ignored him completely. But that was nothing new. She consistently refused to acknowledge Stefan’s presence on account of him being German.
‘There was a war, kochanie,’ she’d said to Sylvia the first time the ciocias had met him, Irenka’s brows drawn into a heavy line above her eyes. ‘I don’t know if you heard of it?’
‘He wasn’t even alive in the war,’ Sylvia had replied, with the patience of a saint. Dealing with Irenka demanded such a thing.
Stefan had smiled, his manners impeccable. ‘I wasn’t born until 1958,’ he’d offered, with a docile shrug, but Irenka had pretended she hadn’t heard him at all, a habit she had stuck to faithfully ever since.
‘There was maybe no war for you,’ the old woman had said, addressing Sylvia. ‘And there was maybe no war for him.’ Her nose had crinkled in disgust at the acknowledgement, though she hadn’t even looked Stefan’s way. ‘For us, there was a war.’
