The Grub-And-Stakers Move a Mountain (19 page)

“Arethusa Monk who writes all those trashy romantic novels?”

gasped Mother Burberry.

“Which you read by the cartload, Mildred, so quit looking so snotty,” said Father Burberry. “She’s got a whole closetful of them hidden in what she chooses to call her study.”

“Which you sneak in and steal, and don’t think I’m not on to you,” his wife snarled back.

“Drat it, Mildred, a man’s got to rest his intellect sometimes, doesn’t he? Some of your stuff isn’t all that bad, Miss Monk. Not up to Lex Laramie’s westerns, of course, but-“

“What?” screamed Arethusa. “How dare you?”

“How dare he what, Aunt Arethusa?” asked Osbert, coming in with a large brass umbrella stand.

“Say my roguish regency romances aren’t up to your lousy rotten westerns, that’s what!”

“Yours? You mean his? He’s Lex Laramie? But you called him Osbert,” said Professor Burberry, who liked to get at the facts.

“Naturally I called him Osbert. Osbert is his name, Osbert Reginald Monk. I named him myself. His idiot parents wanted to call him Ralph. Lex Laramie is merely a pseudonym or nom de plume, the paltry device of a scurvy poltroon.”

“But Aunt Arethusa, I couldn’t write westerns under a name like Osbert Reginald Monk. I’d never get anything at all published under my right name.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Father Burberry. “Some of the lighter scientific journals might not object to Osbert Reginald Monk. Why don’t you try a short article for Popular Palaeontology?”

“I don’t know anything about palaeontology.”

“You don’t know anything about punching cows, either,”

snorted Arethusa, “but that doesn’t stop you from cranking out acres of bilge about ornery cayuses and lone prairies.”

“And when did you last haul out your rapier and pink somebody through his well-stapped vitals, Arethusa?” said Dittany, who thought Osbert looked rather sweet and pathetic standing there clutching the umbrella stand. “Hazel wants to know where you hid those extra cup towels she told you to bring.”

“Who’s Hazel?” demanded Father Burberry.

“Hazel Munson. You probably knew her as Hazel Busch. She has a sister, the former Rose Busch.”

“Oh yes. Married one of the Tree boys. Wasn’t there another named Weigela or something of the sort?”

“You’re thinking of her brother Euonymus.”

“So I am. It all comes back to me now. And what does Hazel write?”

“Nothing that I know of.”

“I must go and congratulate her on her restraint. Come, Mildred.”

“You’d better go too, Arethusa,” said Dittany. “Hazel’s pretty steamed about those towels.”

As the rest departed kitchenward, Osbert turned shyly to Dittany.

“I wish I knew how you do it. Whenever Aunt Arethusa starts to swash, I buckle.”

“Just tell her to stuff it. Would you mind untangling my pearls for me? They seem to be caught on something.”

“I’m afraid I’ve folded them into this bridge chair. Aunt Arethusa always gets me so rattled. I think it’s because she named me Osbert. Don’t you think Osbert Monk is the world’s most God-awful name?”

“Not compared to Henbit. At least the kids at school didn’t call you Chicken Little.”

“Chicken Little is better than Ozzie the Chimp. And Dittany is like the music of song around the campfire with the stars shining down from the black velvet canopy o’erhead. Would you mind terribly if I were to name my next heroine Dittany?”

His voice became dreamy. “I think I’ll make her sort of smallish and slimmish, but cuddly. And she’ll have blondish hair with reddish glints in it like dawn over the mesa, and cheeks like the bloom on the sage, and this perky little dimple at the corner of her mouth when she smiles her perky little smile. Of course I can’t shove in a lot of slush the way Aunt Arethusa does, but maybe I could allow my hero to gaze upon her with awe and wonderment and imagine what it might be like to kiss a girl with a little dimple at the corner of her mouth.”

“As a change from his horse, eh?” Dittany smiled, showing the perky little dimple at the corner of her mouth, and smoothed back the blondish hair that very well might, for all she knew, show reddish glints like dawn over the mesa. Being so well traveled, her mother and Bert might have some information on dawns over mesas, though as they weren’t much for early rising it was more likely they wouldn’t. “I like the awe and wonderment part, but I’m a little bothered by the bloom on the cheeks.

Isn’t sage either screaming red or bluish purple?”

“Good Lord, ‘Riders of the Purple Sage.’” Osbert himself flushed a tasteful magenta. “Zane Grey would turn over in his grave.”

“You might use yucca, or Spanish bayonet,” Dittany suggested.

“That has a lovely creamy white blossom.”

“Yes, but yucca doesn’t sound very romantic, somehow. I mean, as a hypothetical question, you understand, if I happened to clasp you in a strong, manly embrace and murmur, ‘Your cheek is like the bloom on the yucca or Spanish bayonet,’ would you react favorably or otherwise?”

“I do see your point. Maybe, again speaking hypothetically, you should skip the horticulture and settle for the manly embrace.”

“Do you think I could get away with it? You see, what with trying to remember the difference between a pinto and a palomino and all those other technical details, I’ve never seemed to get around to women much. Not that I wouldn’t like to, you understand.

It’s only that, well, I never have.”

“What are you two nattering about in there?” yelled Arethusa from the kitchen. “Osbert, come and dry the cups.”

“Stuff it, Aunt Arethusa.” And with a steely but tender gaze fixed on some far horizon, Lex Laramie strode manfully into the sunset.

Sometime after that, Samantha Burberry also walked into the sunset. Actually, nobody knew at what hour she disappeared.

She’d been at home when Joshua and his parents drove off to catch the plane because she’d walked out to the car and kissed all three of them good-by. Several neighbors could testify to that fact. The sight of Samantha taking an affectionate farewell of her in-laws was one nobody in Lobelia Falls was likely to forget in a hurry. She’d still been there when Hazel called in a swivet to ask whether a silver tray that should have been returned to Dot Coskoff after the party was still on the premises. Samantha had promised to take the tray back to Dot herself and had in fact done so. But where she went after she’d left the Coskoffs’ was the big mystery.

She might have gone home to bed. By the time she’d had a chat and a cup of tea with Dot it was getting on for ten and she’d had a spectacularly taxing weekend. But nobody had seen her walking home. Nobody phoned her after ten, so far as anyone could discover. None of the neighbors could recall seeing her bedroom lights go on and off, nor could they remember noticing that the lights had not gone on and off as would have been the customary procedure. They were all pretty exhausted by the excitement themselves.

A good many people did observe that her porch lights were still burning the next morning, and that a lamp in the back parlor was on. The circumstance elicited no immediate concern. Everybody assumed she’d spent the night there alone. With Josh away, it was natural that she’d feel safer with the place lit up. It was also natural that she’d want to sleep late because who wouldn’t if they had the chance?

But at half past nine, when Dittany Henbit had been trying for the best part of an hour to get Samantha on the phone with regard to the Candidates’ Night speech she was supposed to deliver that evening, doubt set in. Dittany thought maybe she’d better drop over and find out why Samantha wasn’t answering.

When she found the lights still on and no kimono-wrapped figure responding to her repeated rings and knocks at the door, she began to ask nervous questions. When nobody could give her an answer, she went to Sergeant Mac Vicar.

“It’s not like Samantha, Sergeant. She knew I’d be after her about this speech. If she had to go somewhere, she’d have let me know, and she’d have turned off her lights before she left the house. Besides, where would she be? She’s not down at Mr.

Gumpert’s or around the stores, because I’ve checked. She can’t have driven anywhere because Joshua took their car to the airport and left it there, and I can’t find anyone who gave her a lift.

Con-considering”-Dittany found that her teeth were chattering -“considering Mr. Architrave’s being shot and the big schemozzle with the broken beer bottles Saturday night and all, I-I wish you’d tell me I’m making something out of nothing.”

Sergeant Mac Vicar tugged thoughtfully at the left side of his magnificent chestnut-colored walrus mustache. “Dittany, if you are being silly, we are going to make fools of ourselves together.

Come.”

Shortly afterward, anybody who happened to be looking out a window that faced the Burberrys’ back porch would have seen Dittany Henbit’s small rump being given an official, no-nonsense boost through a jimmied casement. Once inside, she opened the door for Sergeant Mac Vicar and they began searching.

First they shouted and got no reply. That was a relief, in a way. One of Dittany’s milder imaginings had been of Samantha lying helpless on the floor all night with a broken leg. Nor did they find a corpse in a welter of gore. They didn’t find much of anything. The house was in tolerable order; at least they could see no sign of a struggle. The connubial couch was made up complete with counterpane and bolster. To be sure, Samantha could have straightened the bed this morning after she’d slept in it last night. She tended to perform such tasks automatically so she wouldn’t have to think about them later, unlike Dittany, who tended to think of them first and then forget to do them at all.

At Sergeant MacVicar’s behest, Dittany went through Samantha’s closets. The only thing she could find missing was the heather-colored tweed coat, skirt, and twin set Dot Coskoff said Samantha had been wearing when she delivered the tray. A pocketbook with about fifty dollars in cash but no house keys lay on the dresser. The inference was that Samantha had taken the keys but not her bag as one would normally do when running over to a neighbor’s for a short while, and gone to the Coskoffs’ and never got back.

But where could she have gone on foot at night, apparently with no money? Nothing had been open in Lobelia Falls so late Sunday evening except the inn. Samantha was hardly the type to drop in for a quick one, much less in the haunt of the enemy.

There was no bus or train she could have taken anywhere. Dot had said she appeared tired but pleased at the way the party had gone, and had avowed her intention of going to bed as soon as she got home. That would have meant a walk of perhaps three minutes on a well-lighted sidewalk in a built-up neighborhood where she knew everybody and could have screamed for help if she’d been accosted.

What if she’d never got a chance to scream? What if that unmarked black van, which, come to think of it, Samantha had never seen because she’d been campaigning at the dump on the day of the bake sale and home chewing her fingernails the night of the debacle at Lookout Point, had pulled up beside her? The driver might have pretended to ask directions. Being Samantha, she’d have given a courteous answer. Being a lady, she’d have stepped over to the van rather than stand back and raise her voice in an unseemly manner. She could thus have been grabbed, silenced with a hand over her mouth or even the wad of cotton wool soaked in chloroform beloved of the Victorian mystery writers, and hustled into the closed vehicle. Once shut up in the back, she could probably have yelled her head off without being heard in the street. Dittany offered this suggestion and was dismayed when Sergeant Mac Vicar didn’t try to josh her out of it.

“Yes, we must redouble our efforts to trace that van. You remember nothing at all except that it was painted black and had Manitoba number plates?”

“No, it was just an ordinary van. But it must be around town somewhere if it keeps popping up like this.”

“Dittany, the van is probably back in Manitoba by now. However, I shall relay this new turn of events to the RCMP, with whom I have already been in consultation as you know, and shall also alert my entire staff for the search.”

As Sergeant MacVicar’s entire staff consisted of Ormerod Burlson and two young chaps named respectively Bob and Ray, the call up was a matter of moments. However, word spread as word always did in Lobelia Falls, and the search crew that turned out was by no means puny. Dot Coskoff naturally felt personally responsible since it had been her silver tray that precipitated Samantha’s disappearance. So did Hazel Munson, as she was the one who’d borrowed the tray. Zilla Trott, Minerva Oakes, and everybody else who could spare the time started prowling through back yards and vacant lots, opening bulkheads, peering scaredly down boarded-up wells, buttonholing people and asking questions that only brought more questions.

Dittany got the bright idea of enlisting Ethel. The dog sniffed intelligently at one of Samantha’s shoes, tracked her briskly to the Coskoffs’, then tracked her straight back home. Dittany got excited until Ethel started for the Coskoffs’ again and it became clear that she was simply following the same set of tracks back and forth. Ethel was retired from duty and Dittany went to see what was happening on the Enchanted Mountain.

Sergeant Mac Vicar stood atop the mound like Napoleon at Ratisbon, though his place of vantage still reeked of malt and hops. He was deploying his forces with the skill of a master tactician but getting no result. That was a relief in a way, but also a source of frustration. The day was wearing on and opening time for Candidates’ Night getting closer. Dittany didn’t bother beating the underbrush but went straight to the top.

“You didn’t really expect to find her here, did you?”

“Now that the party is over, this is the most logical place for a member of your worthy organization to be, is it not? There is always the chance that Samantha may have chosen to relieve the tensions of recent days by a spot of physical labor, and suffered an injury.”

“The same kind of injury old John Architrave suffered up here, you mean? That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”