The Grub-and-Stakers Spin a Yarn (3 page)

“Never laid eyes on him in my life. And never will again, from the way he looked when they lugged him off.”

“Yes, it’s sad to think he never did know which was who. He must have thought you were in charge, Arethusa, since it was you he approached about his knitting problem. If in fact he had one,” Clorinda sniffed. “That was no doubt a ruse or a hidden threat. What he must have meant, Miss Jane, was that he’d rip out all your sweaters if you didn’t pay up. That’s the sort of thing the mob would do.”

“But he couldn’t,” cried Miss Jane. “The place was full of sweaters. Lots of customers bring me their pieces after they’ve done the knitting, you know, and I do the assembling and blocking for them. The true fit’s in the blocking and it’s an art to get it right, if I do say so. Why, I have half a dozen sitting on my work table right now. I’d better go make sure he hasn’t gone and bled all over them just to assert his evil will.”

“He’d have had to bleed backwards,” Arethusa pointed out. “Considering his enfeebled condition, that would have presented no small problem in logistics.” A writer of regency romances, in which heroes and villains were always fighting duels and odding each other’s bodkins, naturally had to think of such things.

“Anyway, he didn’t.” Miss Jane was now at the work table behind the island display, sorting through a pile of knitted bits and pieces. “They’re all right, thank goodness. Now let’s see, Mrs. Pusey, you wanted the two-ply Babytoes Blush, didn’t you? How many balls?”

“How clever of you to ask,” said Clorinda. “Let’s see, what did I want it for? Oh yes, to finish a bed jacket I started out of what I had left over from the bunting. Or was it the carriage robe? Anyway, it’s for my daughter. Or somebody’s daughter,” she qualified, having to face the possibility that she might have got a wee bit carried away by an excess of zeal as far as Dittany’s needs were concerned.

Clorinda and Miss Jane became involved in technical discussion. Sergeant MacVicar, having accomplished what little he could in the shop, went back to the station to put out a request for the apprehension of two bullet-riddled passenger cars last seen leaving Lobelia Falls, one with only a driver and one with a live driver and a what might or might not have been but probably was a dead passenger, all three of them wearing trench coats and felt hats.

Arethusa, left to herself beside the four-ply worsteds, was doing some earnest winking. Why was she wearing this unfamiliar lilac tweed suit? What was the dark secret that gnawed at her very vitals? Who was the intense-looking woman standing in front of the mirror that Miss Jane kept hanging next to the work table so that customers could see how handsome they looked in their artistically blocked cardigans?

After a while, it dawned on Arethusa that the woman was herself. Others had often compared her to the Gainsborough portrait of Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth. Now she too caught the likeness. Perhaps it was all those daggerlike goose feathers shooting out of her hat. “Is this a dagger that I see before me?” she murmured whimsically.

Zounds, that was it! “A jeweled dagger and a ream of plain white paper,” she exclaimed, and bolted from the shop.

Naturally assuming the worst, Clorinda hastily completed her negotiations with Miss Jane and rushed after her friend. Instead of a semi-demented wanderer, she found a briskly competent Arethusa standing at the counter of Ye Village Stationer, asking Mr. Gumpert for a ream of plain white paper and selecting for herself a new purple pen and a box of typewriter ribbons as a special treat.

Greatly relieved, Clorinda picked out a funny card to send to Bert and two extra-long pencils with little clowns on the tops, one red and one blue. “They’re for the twins’ pencil boxes,” she explained.

“A trifle premature, aren’t you?” said Mr. Gumpert.

“I like to think ahead.”

What Clorinda really liked was to buy things like foot-long pencils with little clowns on top, as Arethusa well knew. “What do you want to do now?” she asked indulgently.

“Don’t you want to get back to your writing?” Clorinda replied.

“Not particularly. Lady Ermintrude can stay tucked up in her sack a while longer, she’s used to being abducted. You, on the other hand, may have to rush off at a moment’s notice to another optical convention. I tell you what, let’s go over to your house and have a cup of tea.”

In point of fact, the house now belonged to Dittany, and it was Dittany who’d refilled the kettle as soon as she’d heard the click of feminine heels and the sound of familiar voices coming down Applewood Avenue. Filling the kettle was no great chore; she’d been in the kitchen anyway, making hermits. During the earlier part of her wedded life Dittany would have been more apt to make molasses cookies with little crinkles around the edges, but those involved more bending, stretching, and juggling of cookie sheets than she found comfortable in her present condition. Hermits could be baked in one flat pan and cut up afterwards. Once she’d got her pan in the oven and the tea in the pot, she was glad enough to collapse into Gram Henbit’s old rocking chair and visit a while.

“What’s new downtown, Mum?”

Her mother’s reply was hardly what she’d expected. “The mob is taking over Lobelia Falls.”

Arethusa shook her quills. “Clorinda, I’m still not convinced it’s the mob. I’ve thought it over carefully, and I’m quite sure there were no violin cases at the scene. You are quite positive international spies never wear trench coats?”

“But of course spies wear trench coats,” said Dittany. “Ask anybody. Whatever are you talking about, Arethusa?”

“About the two men in the bullet-riddled car who—”

“Excuse me,” said Clorinda firmly. “The car in which the two men arrived was not riddled, merely pocked. It was the first man who came in the bullet-riddled car, the one who bled all over Miss Jane Fuzzywuzzy’s floor.”

“Whoa!” said Dittany. “Don’t say another word till I’ve checked the hermits and pried Osbert away from the ostriches.”

“What for?” demanded Arethusa, sneaking a poke at the hermits and burning her finger slightly. “Can’t you let sleeping Osberts lie, forsooth?”

Osbert Monk, nephew to Arethusa, husband to Dittany, son-in-law to Clorinda, and prospective father to the twins, was not sleeping, as the steady tap-tapping from the dining room attested. The house was not small, there was no special reason why Osbert had to work squashed into a little alcove off the dining room. However, that alcove was where Dittany had set up her secretarial service back when she was a self-supporting spinster. That was where she still typed up Osbert’s final drafts and answered his fan mail; and where Dittany typed was where Osbert preferred to type also, for his was a love that transcended even the minor inconveniences which can be so much more testing than major calamities. The two in the kitchen were not at all surprised to hear glad cries and small sounds of the sort not usually made by Western writers interrupted in the midst of an ostrich stampede unless the interruptee is particularly fond of the interrupter.

Clorinda smiled the indulgent smile of a doting mother-in-law. Arethusa snorted. True to their respective daughter’s and niece-in-law’s admonition, however, neither said a word until Osbert and Dittany got stuck in the kitchen doorway.

“Oops!” said Dittany. “I keep forgetting there are four of us now. Back up a little, darling, and take your arm away from where my waist used to be. Only temporarily, of course. You can put it back as soon as we get clear.”

“Aren’t they sweet?” whispered Clorinda.

“I find them sickening,” snarled Arethusa. “One might think the father of a growing family would have learned a little self-restraint by now.”

“One might think a person who’s written seventy-three amalgamations of ill-chosen verbiage which are loosely referred to as books would know how to spell words of one syllable by now,” Osbert retorted. “What’s all this about the mob muscling in on Miss Jane Fuzzywuzzy?”

“International spies,” said Arethusa.

“They sound more like saboteurs if they were bleeding all over the mohair,” said Dittany. “Maybe they were sent by a rival yarn shop to drive Miss Jane out of business. Start over again from the beginning, so Osbert can catch the nuances.”

The witnesses were happy to oblige, pausing only to replenish their teacups from time to time and munch on hermits hot from the oven. Once Osbert found out Sergeant MacVicar was involved, he paid careful attention, breaking into the narrative only when it strayed too far from the point, which happened about one sentence out of three.

“Wait a minute, Aunt Arethusa. Go back to where the second man grabbed you by the arm. What did he say?”

“He said, ‘What did he say?’ ”

“And what did you say?”

“Meseems I may have said, ‘A jeweled dagger and a ream of plain white paper,’ ” his aunt replied somewhat sheepishly. “I was trying to remember what I wanted to write about the dagger till I’d got the paper to put it down on.”

“Yes, of course.” Far from greeting the remark with derision, Osbert understood perfectly. He’d had the same problem with a stray ostrich only the previous Thursday. “And what did the man say to that?”

“I forget. I have a vague idea he may have begun to request clarification when he was interrupted.”

“By you?”

“No, by his confederate. The other spy who said, ‘Cheese it, the cops.’ They cheesed, which effectively terminated the conversation.”

Osbert frowned. “Aunt Arethusa, are you quite sure he said ‘Cheese it, the cops’?”

“What else would he have said?” Clorinda broke in. “The expression is standard among members of the underworld. I distinctly recall having heard gangsters say, ‘Cheese it, the cops’ any number of times on those reruns my darling Ditson used to watch. You wouldn’t remember, Dittany. Daddy used to send you to bed before the gangster movies came on. He liked to think of you as a delicate bud of innocent maidenhood.”

“As any doting father naturally would.” Osbert had been giving the subject of fatherhood a good deal of thought lately, for reasons that were daily becoming more obvious. “But, Mother Clorinda, those movies were made back in the nineteen-thirties. ‘Cheese it, the cops’ would nowadays be considered hackneyed, trite, and dated.”

“It did cross my mind at the time that the words sounded a trifle démodé,” Arethusa conceded. “It struck me that these might have been elderly spies trying to pass themselves off as cousins of Al Capone. On the other hand,” she added in deference to Clorinda, “they may have been young gangsters on a nostalgia kick, if I employ the correct phraseology. Vintage clothes and swing music are back in fashion, why not vintage colloquialisms? You might perhaps inquire of Sergeant MacVicar as to the current status of ‘Cheese it’ in the underworld lexicon.”

“A splendid suggestion, Aunt Arethusa,” cried Osbert. “Feel like taking the kids for a walk, darling? Let’s you and I go ask him right now.”

“PERCHANCE WE OUGHT TO
go, too,” said Arethusa.

“I don’t see why it should take a whole posse to ask one simple question,” Dittany replied, knowing full well that Osbert was champing at the bit to get into harness as Lobelia Falls’s one and only official unpaid deputy. “Surely you and Mum have more urgent and meaningful things to do.”

Her mother was quick to take the hint. “Indeed we do, now that you remind us. What’s the most urgent and meaningful duty on our agenda at the moment, Arethusa?”

“Hermits.”

“You’ve had enough hermits. How about our going back to your house? You can fish Lady Ermintrude out of the sack while I try on all your hats. Then we’ll have lunch at the inn. After that, we’ll think of something.”

Secure in the knowledge that her mother would in fact think of something, Dittany handed Arethusa the ream of plain white paper she’d been about to forget and shepherded them all out the door, not bothering to lock up because people usually didn’t in Lobelia Falls. At the corner of Applewood and Chestnut they split up, the two senior members of the party skipping off like a pair of sixth-graders wearing each other’s hats and the prospective parents making their decorous way toward the police station.

“I do love having your mother around,” said Osbert. “She’s so good at keeping Arethusa off our backs. Do you suppose any of that stuff they were talking about really happened?”

“Well, I find it hard to entertain the supposition that Miss Jane Fuzzywuzzy would scrub her shop floor twice in one morning if she weren’t confronted with actual bloodstains,” Dittany replied. “And I’m ready to believe Arethusa did tell that man ‘A jeweled dagger and a ream of plain white paper.’ That’s precisely the sort of thing Arethusa would say if she found herself with a bullet-riddled corpse at her feet and an international spy or a superannuated mobster, as the case may have been, clutching her by the arm. Anyway, I expect the MacVicars themselves will have seen at least part of what went on. They’re right across the street and never miss a thing, as you well know.”

“Yes, dear, I know. You’d better let me lift you over that curbstone, it’s an awfully high step for a fragile flower of femininity in your condition. Maybe I ought to run for Road Commissioner and get it lowered.”

“Would you really do that for me, Osbert?”

“Sweetheart, you know there’s nothing in this world I wouldn’t do for you. Except of course to let Arethusa move in with us. Did I tell you she wants us to name the twins Flossie and Freddy?”

“No,” said the fragile flower, “but I might have guessed. She still reads the entire Bobbsey Twins series straight through religiously once a year.”

“It shows in her writing,” snarled Osbert. “I wonder if Aunt Arethusa’s the only best-selling author alive today who dedicates all her books to the Stratemeyer syndicate.”

“Darling,” Dittany protested, “I do wish you wouldn’t tell fibs in front of the children. Arethusa’s dedicated a book to me and one to Mum and even one to Ethel.”

Osbert welcomed a chance to change the subject. “Speaking of Ethel, where’s she been all morning?”

Ethel was the family friend, commonly referred to as a dog although her true lineage was anybody’s guess.