The Grub-And-Stakers Move a Mountain (6 page)

Plenty of makeup was available in all shades and varieties. Dittany sat down at her mother’s dressing table-she’d kept the room pretty much as Mum had left it since she never knew when Bert’s business would bring the pair of them back here-and set to work.

First she laid on a foundation that was labeled Maiden’s Blush but came out looking more like Hectic Flush. Over this bright pink base she dotted a luxuriant crop of freckles, for which she’d always yearned as a child. Then, selecting a Sultry Sable eyebrow pencil, she obscured her own pleasantly arched brows with a ferocious black pair that came up to points in their middles and swooped down toward her nose. She added Pixie Purple, Tantalizing Tan, and Frosted Banana eyeshadow in alternating bands and veiled her blue-green eyes with a screen of inch-long false lashes set on slightly askew because time was running short. By this stage it was a fairly safe bet her own mother wouldn’t have known her unless of course Mum happened to recognize the wig.

Encouraged with her progress thus far, Dittany shed the clothes she had on, pulled on an old sweatshirt of Cramp’s to make her look fatter and covered that with an awning-striped tent dress that had been one of her mother’s biggest mistakes ever. Maroon knee socks and holey old sneakers through which the socks peeped here and there completed the ensemble.

If that didn’t do it, nothing would. Dittany put on a long hooded raincoat to hide the costume, hoped Mrs. Poppy would be too preoccupied with her own woes to notice what she’d done to her face, and scrambled for her car keys. Five minutes later Old Faithful, the 1966 Plymouth that had served the Henbit family through thick and thin, snow and sleet, trips to the dump and Girl Guides getting carsick on the seats, pulled up in front of the Poppy home.

It was perhaps fortunate for Mrs. Poppy’s fragile state of health that Dittany didn’t have to confront her in person. A teen-aged girl dressed not unlike Dittany herself explained that Ma felt so awful she’d gone to bed with a couple of aspirins, and handed over the McNaster office keys along with a few sketchy and no doubt misleading instructions.

Dittany said thanks and sped off into the darkness before this budding Poppy could get too close a look at her.

She knew all too well where to go. The McNaster Construction Company offices, in all their chrome and stucco hideousness, sat out beside the main highway to Scottsbeck on land that had been cleared, landscaped, and given a blacktopped parking lot before the town council suddenly decided the site was, after all, unsuitable for the proposed high school annex. They’d then sold the lot to the ubiquitous Andrew at a scandalous figure on the pretext that his bid, though far too low, was the only one received by their appointed deadline when everyone knew perfectly well that several other firms would have bid more if they’d known about the deadline before it had already passed.

As Dittany pulled into the serendipitous parking lot, she was rather disconcerted to see several other cars including Andy McNasty’s own brand-new twenty-thousand-dollar gas guzzler still there. Either they were holding some sort of after-hours meeting or else everybody was working overtime. That didn’t bode well for her chances of doing any effective snooping. She might have known this harebrained scheme would come to nothing.

Well, she’d got herself into it so there wasn’t much she could do now but go through the motions and clear out before her eyelashes fell off.

Mrs. Poppy’s daughter had mentioned something about a side door from the parking lot. Dittany managed to locate it and found it open. The girl hadn’t mentioned there’d be a tough looking watchman lurking just inside. Luckily he was nobody Dittany recognized but he scared her half to death anyway.

True to his trust, the watchman offered challenge the moment Dittany set sneaker inside the door. She explained in a hoarse voice that was partly assumed and partly stark terror that she was pinch-hitting for Mrs. Duckes, who was down with her leg again, and where did they keep the brooms and stuff because the kid that gave her the keys didn’t know nothing and she didn’t want to bother Mrs. Duckes because she was in bed with a couple of aspirins-Dittany saw no point in dragging Mrs. Poppy into her monologue-and where was she supposed to dump the wastebaskets and was it okay if she didn’t vacuum but just dusted around and straightened up because she was only doing it as a favor, not that she minded because Mrs. Duckes would do the same for her, and where the heck was that mop closet because how could you expect a person to get anything done if nobody showed her where the stuff was?

By then Dittany was genuinely hoarse and the watchman looking totally bored as she’d hoped he would. With any luck, he’d steer well clear of her from now on. He did condescend to lead her to the mop closet, roll out a large canvas hamper for the trash, and tell her to leave it down here by the door and he’d attend to it later. Dittany was warming up for an elaborate complaint about the mop bucket when the watchman fled out of earshot and the first small victory was hers.

She selected a tasteful assortment of mops and dusters, loaded them into the hamper, and dragged her collection to what she gathered must be the reception area, a typically McNasterish assemblage of imitation wood paneling, monstrous plastic philodendrons in styrofoam pots, vivid green wall-to-wall carpeting, and a truly revolting abstract painting that looked like an explosion in a pickle factory hanging behind a salmon-pink metal desk that held a green phone, a white phone, a red phone, a box of pale mauve tissues, and a digital clock with a picture of Spider Man on the dial. There she picked up one of the dusters and began flapping it around with an air of great industry in case the watchman hadn’t really gone.

She did manage to sneak a look at the contents of the wastebasket as she dumped it into the hamper, but learned only that the receptionist chewed sugarless gum, drank diet cola, and needed a new bottle of Sexy Siren nail polish, or so she deduced from the empty one that showed up in the trash. It must have been a dull day at the front office.

Trailing the tools of her adopted trade, Dittany worked her way through the ill-planned one-story building. McNaster employed more desk workers than she’d realized, but aside from the facts that some of them smoked too much and they were one and all incapable of hitting a wastebasket at close range with a wad of paper, she learned nothing of interest. Even when she became emboldened to search their desk drawers she found only what people’s desks might logically be expected to contain: pictures of wives and babies, tangles of rubber bands and paper clips, half-eaten candy bars, cough drops, empty aspirin bottles, mechanical pencils with no lead in them, felt-tipped pens that had run dry, ballpoints that had probably never worked at all, stationery, graph paper, blueprints, contract forms, and in one drawer a cache of the sort of magazines that led her to suspect this particular employee didn’t keep his mind fully occupied with the construction business.

By now her canvas hamper was almost full, her mop trailing an impressive agglomeration of fuzz, her dusters thoroughly begrimed and her face no doubt the same. She was tired, fed up, and also puzzled. There were all those cars in the parking lot, but so far she hadn’t run into one living person except the watchman. The logical inference was that they must all be together somewhere, but where? Not in the conference room.

She’d already cleaned that, or tried to. It appeared to be used mainly as a catchall for oddments like billheads, lumber, plastic moldings, the handles for about three hundred kitchen cabinets, half a sundial, two lobster buoys, the remains of a salami sandwich, somebody’s golf umbrella, and a plastic flamingo on a long green rod that was presumably meant to be planted in the lawn of somebody who didn’t know any better.

There was one closed door at the far end of the corridor. Unless they were all down cellar inspecting the boiler, they must be behind that. So what should she do? Tiptoe past? Knock boldly?

Or simply barge in and start mopping?

Why not knock and then barge? That was what she was ostensibly here for, wasn’t it? Clutching her mop as a Roman legionary might have elevated his eagle, Dittany approached the fateful orifice. Somehow or other her feet showed a tendency to drag, though certainly not from the weight of her sneakers as there wasn’t all that much left of them. Her knuckles also showed a surprising reluctance to rise to the occasion.

In plain fact, now that the moment of truth, if such a commodity existed at McNaster Construction, was at hand, Dittany was scared stiff. She stood there like Lot’s wife after that regrettable incident at Sodom, gritting her teeth and cursing herself inwardly for a poltroon, a caitiff knave, and a scurvy varlet. As she lingered, however, she gradually became aware that the door, like everything else McNaster built, was of shoddy quality and poorly hung. By straining her ears only a little, she could hear pretty much everything of the discussion that was taking place inside the room.

“What do you think I’m paying you for?” somebody was demanding angrily.

“Now, Andy,” somebody else replied in a tone that could best be described as unctuous, “we all know what you pay me for, and I’m sure everybody here would agree that I’ve always come through for you. But what you want now is simply too hot for me to handle. I could wind up being run out of Scottsbeck and disbarred for life. And if I was put in a position where I faced criminal prosecution, I’m sure you realize it wouldn’t be in my best interest to keep quiet. These people here in Lobelia Falls can’t possibly be quite such idiots as you seem to think they are.”

“But you said yourself the trust could be broken,” McNaster argued. “Look, Charlie, I want that land and I mean to have it.

You’re making a big song and dance out of a simple little deal.

All you have to do is draw up the papers. Then as soon as Sam here gets elected to the Development Commission, he strongarms those other dodoes into passing an emergency ordinance and it’s in the bag.”

“And suppose for the sake of argument Sam doesn’t get elected? Then I’d be left holding that bag you so casually mention.”

“How the hell can Sam not get elected? Nobody’s running against him, and it’s too late now to file nomination papers. The election’s next Tuesday, for the cat’s sake! Sam’s a shoo-in.

Right, Sam?”

“Right,” said a voice Dittany knew all too well and would never have dreamed of hearing in these surroundings. “I’m in like Flynn. The only way anybody could vote against me now would be on a write-in ballot, and who’s going to bother? You know who turns out for these local elections, about six old diehards and the candidate’s relatives. Anyway, I’m a popular man. Everybody knows who’s the public-spirited citizen who kicks in the eggnog for the Old Folks’ Christmas Party and the keg of beer for the Policemen’s Picnic and all those other benevolent gestures.”

“Which he takes off his income tax as charitable deductions,”

mocked a voice Dittany couldn’t identify.

Her fear had turned to rage. The public-spirited citizen was Sam Wallaby, proprietor of Lobelia Falls’s one and only liquor store. Sam had even donated the sauterne and Seven-Up for the mock champagne punch at the Grub-and-Stakers’ Spring Flower Festival year before last and she herself, as then Corresponding Secretary, had been delegated to write him a nice little thank-you note. She’d even spent two dollars of her own money for a box of pretty flowered stationery to write it on. To think she’d been an unwitting tool of his perfidy!

“See, Charlie,” McNaster went on in a coaxing tone, “you don’t have a thing to worry about. This deal will go smooth as a kitten’s wrist. Before anybody knows what’s happening, I’ll have me a swell big house right smackdab on top of that Enchanted Mountain. And you guys can live around the edges.”

“Catch me living in any house you’d build,” chortled the unidentified voice.

Charlie was not convinced. “I don’t care, Andy. I’m not going to risk having my name linked with the kind of mud you’re bound to stir up. And I particularly don’t like the business of old Architrave’s getting shot with a black arrow up there this morning.

If that’s the way you’re going to play it-“

“Hey, wait a minute!” yelped McNaster. “You don’t think I had anything to do with that?”

“Andy, as a lawyer I know better than to make any direct accusation.

I’m simply saying it happened at a strangely opportune time. Architrave might have been stupid, but I don’t recall ever having heard he was dishonest, beyond reasonable limits. You might have got him to rush those leaching tests through, but I doubt if you could have persuaded him to falsify the results.”

“Charlie, you’re crazy. It was a hunter from the States. Everybody knows that.”

“I don’t know it, do I?”

“Look, I was right here in my office all day. Anyway, I’m not the world’s best shot, as any of these boys here can tell you.

Hell, I don’t mind being kidded about it, but if you think I-“

“I’m only going by the evidence, Andy. I have no doubt that you have an alibi tighter than a drum. But you do have a fairly large staff, Andy. And among them may be some good shots and some talented liars. Mind you, I’m not making any accusations.

I’m just stating what might be termed an academic hypothesis.

And you needn’t start yelling because you wouldn’t dare fire me and we both know it.”

“The hell I wouldn’t! If you think-“

“That’s just it, Andy. I do think. And it will pay you to think.

Regardless of how Architrave was killed, the fact remains that his death is going to focus attention on this Hunneker Land Grant. People are already asking questions about why he had that new chap up there doing perk tests. Who was that woman from the Conservation Committee?”

McNaster said an extremely bad word. “I wish I knew. What the hell, this town doesn’t even have a Conservation Committee.

Some old bag with a bee in her bonnet about the pretty pussy willows, maybe. For all I know, she was the one who plugged him.”

“Well, you’d better find out what she was up to and how much she knows or guesses if you know what’s good for you.