Aunt Dimity and the Buried Treasure by Nancy Atherton

do a lot of digging.”
    I have no idea what Badger’s profession was. He never revealed his given name, either. I knew him only as Badger, the nice young man I met from time to time at my neighborhood café.
    â€œDid he look like a badger?” I asked interestedly. “Did he have white streaks in his hair and a long, pointy nose?”
    He bore not the slightest resemblance to a badger, Lori. He had a beardand a mustache and a headful of dark, tousled curls—like yours, only darker. He had large, lovely dark eyes, and his nose was no longer or pointier than Bill’s.
    â€œHow old was he?” I asked, with a villager’s thirst for details.
    I’m not sure, but he couldn’t have been much older than I—in his late twenties or early thirties. His clothes were dated and a bit threadbare—patched elbows on his tweed jacket and pleats in his trousers—as if he’d purchased them from a secondhand shop or inherited them from an elderly relation. I assumed he was a gardener.
    â€œBadger would work as a nickname for a gardener,” I said. “Gardeners do even more digging than church sextons.”
    He certainly looked as though he worked outdoors. He was fit and trim and very brown, and he had a gardener’s strong, rough hands. I doubted that he was an ordinary jobbing gardener, though. He had the accent and the vocabulary of a well-educated young man.
    I gave a small snort of exasperation.
    â€œGuesswork,” I said. “Speculation. It’s not your style, Dimity. Forgive me, but I’m not the only Finch-trained snoop here. I find it hard to believe that you didn’t have Badger’s life story down pat within five minutes of introducing yourself to him.”
    But I didn’t introduce myself to him. Not properly. I would have, but Badger stopped me.
    â€œWhy?” I asked.
    He said that, once we started down the road of conventional conversation, there would be no turning back. We’d inevitably end up rehashing the war years, and he, for one, had no desire to go through them again. We could, he proposed, discuss the war with everyone else, everywhere else, but while we were together, in the café, we would put it out of our minds, along with our jobs, our families, our backgrounds, and every other predictable topic of conversation. He would be Badger, and I would be . . . well, I had no nickname, so Ihad to be Dimity, but we would check our surnames at the door, dismiss formality, and chat freely about whatever took our fancy.
    â€œAnd you went along with it?” I asked.
    I did. I found his suggestion delightfully liberating. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how completely the war had dominated every conversation I’d had for the past five years. It was a relief to put it aside and make room for other things.
    â€œSuch as?” I prompted.
    Art, music, literature, architecture—the first hour I spent with Badger was one of the most enjoyable I’ve ever spent with anyone, and I’m happy to report that it wasn’t the last. We shared a table at the café two or three times a week for the next three months.
    â€œYou spent three months talking to a stranger about art, music, literature, and architecture?” I said doubtfully.
    Among many other things. My conversations with Badger inspired me to visit art galleries and museums, to attend plays and concerts, to broaden my cultural horizons. The war had shown me man’s capacity for destruction. Badger reminded me of man’s capacity to create. When I studied a painting or listened to a symphony or stood beneath St. Paul’s magnificent dome, I felt a renewed sense of hope for the future. Though much had been destroyed, much remained, and much would be restored. Civilization would endure.
    â€œWow,” I said ruefully. “Your conversations with Badger make my small talk seem pretty trivial. A cure for diaper rash doesn’t