The Grub-and-Stakers Spin a Yarn (21 page)

“How awful! Then what?”

“Then I woke up lying on the ground with the cloak all wadded up around my head. I pulled it away, sat up, and looked around for Arethusa. But she wasn’t there! I thought maybe she’d gone into the house, so I went and knocked and tried to get in but the doors were locked and there were no lights inside. That was when I realized those men must have abducted her. I found her handbag with her keys in it, but I was too scared to go inside the house alone. So I ran over here and—and here I am.”

“We’ll have to let Sergeant MacVicar know what’s happened,” said Osbert. “I’ll phone the station for whatever good it may do. You didn’t hear a car drive off?”

Daughter Matilda shook her head. “I was really out of it, I can’t tell for how long. Do you remember when we left here?”

“It was two minutes past eleven,” said Clorinda. “I noticed because my husband hadn’t called. If Bert hasn’t called by eleven that means he isn’t going to, so I decided I might as well go and get ready for bed. It’s twenty till twelve now. You’ve been here maybe six or seven minutes. It doesn’t take more than three or four minutes to walk to Arethusa’s, so allowing say five minutes to look at the gargoyles and be attacked—how long does it take to chloroform somebody, Osbert?”

“Not long, I shouldn’t think. Say another five minutes at the most for the abductors to get Arethusa unconscious and into their car. I’m assuming they must have had some kind of vehicle, I don’t see how they’d have managed without. We’ll have to ask the neighbors whether they noticed anybody driving off.”

“But the only neighbors close enough to have seen are Grandsire Coskoff and his second wife,” Dittany pointed out. “They both take off their hearing aids and eyeglasses and go to bed with the birds, so a fat lot of help they’d be. What it boils down to is that Matilda must have been lying there unconscious for as much as ten minutes, maybe even more. By now, Arethusa could be halfway to—heaven knows where.”

Her own voice had grown a bit wobbly by now. “Osbert, do call the station. Maybe the Mounties—”

“Yes, darling, I’m calling. Sit down and take a few deep breaths. Look after her, Mum. Hello, Bob? Deputy Monk here. I want to report a probable kidnapping. No, it’s my Aunt Arethusa. She appears to have been snatched from her own backyard about twenty minutes ago. We’re guessing the kidnappers are the same two who shot Charles McCorquindale, but we have no description except that they were both wearing trench coats and felt hats and had bandanas tied over their faces.”

Dittany could hear loud squawks from the telephone clear across the room. “Tell him to shut up and listen,” she said crossly.

“Yes, darling. Bob, shut up and listen. Mr. McCorquindale’s daughter Matilda was with my aunt. Matilda was knocked unconscious by the kidnappers, and didn’t come to until just a few minutes ago. She couldn’t get into Arethusa’s house so she ran back here. You’d better alert the chief and start canvassing the neighborhood to see if you can get a make on a strange car or van, or even a truck. No, no idea whatsoever. This would have to be a different vehicle than they had before. As far as I know, that car with the bullet holes in it is still over at Scottsbeck.”

Osbert hung up and came back to Dittany. “Feeling all right now, pet?”

“I don’t know. Are you going out with Bob?”

“No, I’m staying right here with you, and so is Cousin Matilda. You’d better get Matilda to bed, Clorinda. Can she bunk in with you for the night?”

“She may have my bed. I’ll sleep down here on the cot.”

“Let me sleep on the cot,” Matilda protested. “I don’t want to put you out of your room.”

“I don’t want you down here where you’d be easy to get at,” Osbert objected. “Not to scare you any worse than you are already, Matilda, but hasn’t it occurred to you that Arethusa may not have been the person they meant to kidnap?”

“Well, of course,” said Dittany. “Matilda and Arethusa look so much alike, and they were wearing each other’s wraps. Who wouldn’t have been fooled? So this is the bold stroke.”

“The what, dearie?” asked Clorinda.

“What Sergeant MacVicar misdoubted the bad guys would be trying next. Don’t you see what this means? They’re planning to hold her for ransom, and the ransom’s going to be Mother Matilda’s mincemeat recipe.”

“They can’t do that!” cried Daughter Matilda. “Granny’s recipe is a sacred trust. Mother would never give it up, not for anything.”

“Can you be sure of that?” said Osbert. “Your mother’s just lost her husband on account of the recipe. Would she risk losing her daughter, too?”

“But she hasn’t lost me. I’m right here.”

“Yes, but only by a fluke. And you’re going to stay here till we find out what the heck is going on. Furthermore, you’re going to lie low and keep out of sight because once those crooks realize they’ve got hold of the wrong hostage, they’ll be out looking for the right one. You don’t want to put your mother through another ordeal, do you? Go on upstairs with Clorinda and try to get some sleep.”

“But what’s going to happen to Cousin Arethusa when they find out she’s not me?”

That was what the Monks were trying not to think about. Osbert wet his lips. It was Dittany who found the wits to answer.

“Arethusa’s a very rich woman, Daughter Matilda. I expect what the kidnappers will do is simply change their plans and hold her for ransom instead of you. We’ll be getting a request for a million dollars in unmarked bills, no doubt, as soon as they’ve had a chance to get hold of some paste and a newspaper.”

She didn’t believe what she was saying. She didn’t suppose any of the others believed it, either; but this was the one straw they had to cling to, so they clung. “Such a nuisance for them having to hunt out all those menacing words and stick them down one by one,” said Clorinda, “but it serves them right for being so nasty. Come along, Matilda. You’ll have to wear one of Dittany’s maternity nightgowns, I’m afraid. We don’t have anything else to fit you.”

“That’s all right. I can sleep in my slip.”

Daughter Matilda had sense enough left to yield to reason, at any rate. Everybody breathed easier as she allowed Clorinda to lead her upstairs.

Osbert sat down on the cot and put his arms around Dittany. “Want to go up now, pardner?”

“Hadn’t we better wait for Sergeant MacVicar? Won’t he want to grill Cousin Matilda?”

“Why should he? She can’t tell him any more than she’s already told us. Darn it! Aunt Arethusa’s such a pain in the neck, why do I have to be so worried about her?”

“Because you’re a darling pussycat, that’s why.”

“Scratch my whiskers.”

“Harr’mph.”

“There,” Dittany sighed, “I knew he’d be along just as we got comfortable. We should have remembered to lock the door. Sergeant MacVicar, why aren’t you out hunting for Arethusa?”

“I did not wish to lose time following up false leads,” their unwelcome visitor replied. “If you can bring yourself to let go of young Romeo there, lass, perhaps he and I might hold a wee council of war. Deputy Monk, I infer you do not care to join our search party?”

“Sorry, Chief, but we’ve got Daughter Matilda bedded down in the spare room and somebody’s got to stand by to repel attackers. Since I can’t imagine why anybody in his right mind would want to abduct Aunt Arethusa, I’m operating on the premise that those ornery coyotes snatched the wrong hostage. As soon as the chloroform wears off and they realize what happened, they’ll probably come galloping back to try their luck again.”

Osbert explained in detail what Matilda had told them and why it would have been easy for the kidnappers to make so grave a mistake. “Dittany thinks this is the bold stroke you were expecting and I’m inclined to agree with her.”

“Aye,” said the chief. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Well, maybe not the only thing,” Osbert demurred. “I can think of six or seven other plots which might work pretty well in the same circumstances, but that’s just my professionalism leaking out. Anyway, I don’t dare leave Dittany and her mother alone here with Matilda. Somebody’s got to try to get a line on those two sidewinders though, so I guess it’s up to you and the guys, Chief. I expect your wife’s pretty sore at me for hauling you out of bed, but what else could I have done?”

“Dinna fash yoursel’, lad; a policeman’s lot is not a happy one. You might as well get on with scratching his whiskers, lass.”

But the magic had gone out of the moment. Clorinda was downstairs again with a pink-and-white polka-dot boudoir cap over her curlers and her arms full of assorted bedding, a box of peppermint wafers, and
Anne’s House of Dreams.
Osbert helped his mother-in-law make up the cot while Dittany rinsed out the last batch of teacups and saucers. Then he and his beloved left Clorinda in the kitchen with Ethel to guard her from frustrated abductors and whatever other things might conceivably go bump in the night, and made their grateful way upstairs.

At least Daughter Matilda wasn’t lying awake bemoaning the vicissitudes of fate. They could hear some fairly brisk vibrations of the soft palate from the spare room.

“Snoring her head off, bless her heart,” Dittany whispered. “The poor thing must be plumb tuckered out. Darling, what are we going to do?”

“Hit the hay and grab a few winks ourselves is the best thing I can think of at the moment. We do still have that key to Arethusa’s house, don’t we?”

“Yes, of course. It’s hanging in the pantry.”

“Good. I was thinking maybe what we ought to do is send Matilda over there tomorrow. She can sit pounding the typewriter and pretending to be Arethusa so the kidnappers won’t catch on to their mistake.”

“But they’re bound to, darling, as soon as Arethusa comes to and starts threatening to stap their vitals.”

“Maybe she won’t get the chance.”

“Osbert! You don’t mean—”

“Precious, of course I don’t mean. What I mean is, if her abductors are really VP Lemon Peel and VP Suet or anybody else from the mincemeat factory, they’ll have to show up at VP Nutmeg’s funeral tomorrow morning. That means they can’t be off in some fell den standing guard over Aunt Arethusa. It might be quite a while before they get back to her.”

“Then it might also be quite a while before she gets anything to eat. Maybe they’ll forget where they put her and she’ll starve!”

“Darling, they won’t forget where they put her. Kidnappers aren’t that absentminded. Anyway, I believe they always have a deaf old crone on the premises to fetch the prisoner’s bread and water, though I suppose it’ll be mincemeat tarts in this case. Darn it, that brings up another problem. Mother Matilda’s really going to be bent out of shape if Daughter Matilda fails to show up for her father’s funeral. We’ll have to get her there somehow.”

“But if the kidnappers are there, too, they’ll see right away that they’ve got the wrong hostage,” Dittany objected. “Then they’ll whiz back and kill Arethusa so she won’t expose them for the rotters they are. What we’ll have to do is send Daughter Matilda to the funeral disguised as Arethusa impersonating Daughter Matilda in order to spare Mother Matilda the pain of learning that her daughter’s been kidnapped.”

“You’re right,” said Osbert. “It’s the only sensible thing to do. Since we’ve got that matter settled, pet, I don’t suppose you’d care to consider giving a poor, tired ostrich rustler a little good-night kiss?”

Gradually slumber overtook all the inhabitants of the ancestral Henbit homestead. Came the dawn, even Daughter Matilda woke with her lip considerably stiffened and came downstairs to breakfast looking fairly chipper in a pair of Osbert’s pajamas and a frisky robe his mother had brought him from Hawaii although nobody could ever figure out why.

“I thought I might feel a little more up to facing the day if I had a cup of tea into me first,” she half-apologized.

“Don’t we all?” said Dittany. “Here you are. Pass her the milk, Mum. Toast or muffins, Matilda, and how do you like your eggs?”

“Toast, please. Muffins seem a bit too self-indulgent at such a solemn time, don’t you think? Poor Daddy, I can’t help thinking—”

“Of course you can’t. How about scrambled?”

“Why not? That’s the way I feel. Just one egg, please. I’ve been racking my brain about Arethusa. What are we going to do?”

“I’m glad you asked,” said Osbert. “Dittany and I have a plan all worked out. It’s going to require some clever acting on your part.”

“How clever? I’m not much of an actress.”

“Nonsense,” said Dittany. “You’re your father’s daughter, aren’t you? All you have to do is go to the funeral pretending to be Arethusa pretending to be you.”

“Oh. Well, I—how?”

“Easily enough. After breakfast, you’ll put on the same clothes you wore last night and go over to Arethusa’s house. Mum will go with you, she and Arethusa have been running back and forth ever since she got here. If any of the neighbors see you, they’ll just take it for granted you’re Arethusa and you’ve dropped over here for breakfast, as she sometimes does.”

“Or came for a midnight snack and just finished eating it,” Osbert put in, then looked abashed. “I wish to heck she had!”

“I know, dear, don’t we all.” Dittany gave him a pat on the cowlick. “Have a muffin, you’ve got to keep your strength up. Here’s your egg, Matilda. It won’t be too hard for you to impersonate Arethusa. Just remember to look infathomable and mutter an occasional ‘gadzooks’ or ‘by my halidom’ if any of the VPs starts sidling up to you.”

“They’ll think I’ve gone nuts. VP Nuts.” She laughed a bit jerkily. “That’s all right. If I can spare Mother needless grief and agony while not jeopardizing Cousin Arethusa’s life any worse than it’s jeopardized already, I don’t care what they think.”

“Noble soul!” cried Clorinda. “You weren’t planning to send this poor child to the funeral alone, were you, Osbert?”

“Not on your tintype. Matilda’s not going anywhere without a bodyguard. What I have in mind, Matilda, is to ask Sergeant MacVicar’s wife—that’s your mother’s recently discovered Cousin Margaret—to drive you both to the funeral with her. Nobody’s going to think it strange for her to pay her respects as a relative. Clorinda, maybe you can be another cousin who takes after the other side of the family. You’ll think of something, you always do. I want you handy to help Matilda out if she wobbles in her lines.”