The Donaldson Case (2 page)

“It has ridiculous
eyelashes,” Joan said.

Janet looked
it over and then laughed.
 
“It’s
rather, um, eccentric, but I think I love it.”

“I’m glad you
do.
 
I think I hate it.”

“Piggy can
live in my room,” Janet replied.
 

“You’re welcome
to her, but maybe not what’s inside,” Joan said.

Janet
laughed.
 
“I was so excited to find
her, I didn’t even think about what might be inside.”
 
She gave the pig a gentle shake and was
rewarded by a jingling sound.
 

“Sounds like
there is definitely something in there.”

“I just hope
we don’t have to break Piggy to get it out,” Janet said worriedly.
 
She turned the pig around in her hands
and was relieved to find a small black rubber stopper in the bottom of the
figure.

“You can break
it as far as I’m concerned,” Joan said dryly.

Janet ignored
her as she wiggled the stopper to try to get it out.
 
After a minute, she gave up.
 
“We need something to pry this open
with,” she said.
 
“Something that
won’t break Piggy.”

The pair went
into the kitchen.
 
Janet put the
bank on the counter and the sisters dug around in drawers, looking for
something that might work to remove the stopper.
 
Janet tried sliding a knife around the
edges of the stopper, but it did nothing but move it around.

“Maybe some
sort of screwdriver or something?” Janet suggested.

“I think all
the tools are in the carriage house,” Joan told her.
 

Janet grabbed
Piggy and the sisters quickly headed out to the carriage house, both equally
eager to open the piggy bank and see what they’d found.

Chapter
Two

The door to
the carriage house was open when the sisters reached it.

“Hello?” Janet
called as she squinted into the dimly lit building.

“Hello,” a
voice called back.
 

Janet smiled
as she
recognised
the voice of their
neighbour
from the semi-detached house across the
street.
 
Stuart Long looked after
the grounds of
Doveby
House for the sisters.
 
He was a retired gardener who loved
working with plants and flowers.
 
The sisters paid him a nominal sum for a huge amount of work and
supplemented the payments with as much tea as the man could drink.
 

Stuart used the
carriage house for storing the many garden implements that he seemed to
need.
 
He kept his things in a very
tidy pile by the door.
 
The rest of
the carriage house was still the same mess that the previous owner had
left.
 
Janet planned to tackle it
once she’d finished with the library, but now, as she looked at the piles of
haphazardly stacked boxes, she didn’t feel in any rush to get started on the
job.

“Ah, Stuart,
how are you doing?” Joan asked.

“I’m fine,
thanks, how are you?”

“We’re well,” Joan
told him. “But we found this piggy bank and we’re anxious to get it open.”

“That’s easy
enough,” Stuart said.
 
“He looks as
if he’ll smash without any difficulty.”

Janet shook
her head.
 
“I don’t want to smash
her,” she said.
 
“There’s a rubber
stopper in the bottom of her.
 
We
need to find a way to remove it.”

She handed the
bank to Stuart, who turned it over in his hands.
 
“I see,” he said after a moment.
 
“Let me see what I have here that might
pry that out.”

Janet watched
anxiously as he tried a couple of different things, but nothing seemed to shift
the stubborn stopper.

“Are you sure
you don’t want to just break it open?” he asked, giving the pig a shake.
 
“There’s definitely something in there.”

“I really
don’t want to break her,” Janet said.
 
“I quite like her.”

Stuart’s look
suggested that he didn’t agree with Janet’s opinion of the pig, but he turned
it over again and went back to work on the stopper.

“Ah, there you
go you little
bug…,
um, ahem, that is, I think I’ve
got it,” he said a short time later.
 
He held up the troublesome rubber piece and then handed the pig back to
Janet.

“One of you
should turn it over and shake the contents out,” he said, sounding as eager as
the sisters to see what was inside.

Janet moved a
few boxes into a new pile to make a reasonably flat surface to work on.
 
She shook Piggy gently and grinned.

“Coins,” she
said as the first few items tumbled out of the bank.
 
“What else would you find in a piggy
bank?”

A further
shake answered her question for her.
 
“A key,” she said excitedly.
 
“I wonder what it’s for?”

Stuart looked
the small pile of coins and the key and then shrugged.
 
“Nothing too exciting in that lot,” he
said.
 
“I suppose one or two of the
coins could be valuable, but if they were you’d expect them to be kept
properly, not in a piggy bank.”

“Maybe Maggie
Appleton didn’t know they were valuable,” Janet suggested.

Stuart
laughed.
 
“You wouldn’t say that if
you had known Maggie.
 
She knew
exactly what every single thing she owned was worth to the penny.
 
We used to have long conversations about
house prices and she tracked every sale in the village so she had a good idea
what
Doveby
House was worth at all times.
 
If those coins were very valuable, she’d
have put them in her safe.”

“She had a
safe?” Janet asked, pretending she didn’t know about the wall safe in the
office.
 
She was intrigued to find
that Stuart knew about it and she couldn’t help by try to find out how he’d
come to learn of it.

“She had a big
old safe that sat on the floor in the storage closet in the sitting room,”
Stuart replied.
 
“The charity that
inherited the house from her probably took it if it isn’t there now.”

“It most
certainly isn’t there now,” Janet said, trying to hide her disappointment.
 
“I wonder if this key is for that safe?”

“The safe had
a combination lock,” Stuart told her.
 
“Maggie let me store a few things in that space once, that’s why I
know,” he explained quickly, answering the question Janet had been about to
ask.

“I don’t
suppose you knew the combination?” Janet asked, wondering if Maggie would have
used the same combination for both of her safes.

“No, I
certainly didn’t,”
Stuart
replied.
 
“But if the safe isn’t there anymore,
why do you want to know?”

Janet
shrugged.
 
“Just curious, I suppose,”
she said.
 
“Sometimes people use
combinations that are made up of numbers from their birthdays and the like, and
I just wondered if Maggie Appleton did that, that’s all.”

“She might
have,” Stuart replied.
 
“But I never
knew the combination, or when her birthday was, either.”

“Never mind,”
Joan interrupted.
 
“Thank you for
getting the bank open for us.
 
We’ll
have to have the coins checked out, but I expect they won’t be worth any more
than their face value, if they’re even worth that.”

“They’re all
foreign,” Janet said.
 
She was looking
through the small pile.
 
“I’m not
even sure what country or countries they’re from.”

“Maggie loved
to travel,” Stuart told them.
 
“She probably
just threw random leftover coins in the pig when she got back from her
travels.”

“Probably,”
Joan agreed.
 

“And you don’t
know what the key might be for?” Janet asked, holding it up.

“It’s just a
key, isn’t it?
 
I imagine I could be
for just about anything,” Stuart replied with a shrug.

Janet took the
rubber stopper from Stuart and gently wiggled it back into place in the bottom
of the bank.
 
“There, good as new,”
she said happily.
 
“I think I’ll put
all my change in her every night.
 
It shouldn’t take long for me to fill her up.”

“She’s going
in your room,” Joan reminded her as they walked back towards the house.

“Oh, yes,”
Janet agreed.
 
“I wouldn’t dare
leave her in the public areas.
 
She
might get broken.”

“That would be
a shame.”

Janet could
hear the sarcasm in her sister’s voice, but she didn’t care.
 
There was something sweet and loveable
about the odd little piggy, and she was going to give her a good home no matter
what Joan thought.

“What about
the key?” Janet asked once they were back in their sitting room.

“What about
it?” Joan replied.
 
She’d put the
handful of coins and the key into her pocket for the walk back to the house;
now she pulled them all out and put them on a small side table.

“We should work
out what it’s for,” Janet said.
 
“There
are some numbers and letters stamped on it, but they’re really hard to
read.
 
Maybe it opens another wall
safe, one
we
haven’t found yet.
 
Or a safety deposit box at a bank.
 
Or a trapdoor hidden in the floor
somewhere.”

“Or the back
door to the house,” Joan added.
 
“Or
even the front door.
 
Maybe you
should start there before you go on another of your flights of fancy.”

“It doesn’t
look like the front door key,” Janet argued as she picked up the key.
 

“It could be a
key to one of the guest rooms, perhaps,” Joan suggested.

Janet opened
the front door and tried to slip the key into the lock.
 
“It doesn’t even come close to fitting,”
she told her sister happily.

“There are
lots more doors you can try,” Joan reminded her.
 
“Meanwhile, I’d better get some dinner started.
 
At least we have leftover apple crumble
for pudding; I don’t have to worry about making that as well.”

Janet
grinned.
 
“Apple crumble for lunch
and dinner?
 
It must be my lucky
day.”

“I think I’ll
just do spaghetti Bolognese for tonight, if that’s okay?” Joan asked.
 
“It’s quick and easy.”

“That’s fine,”
Janet agreed.
 
“In the meantime, I’m
going to try this key in every door in the house.”

“And then you
can get back to cleaning the library,” Joan suggested.
 

“Yeah, sure,”
Janet muttered as she headed towards the stairs.
 
Cleaning the library was much less interesting
than investigating the mysterious key.
 
On her way out of the sitting room, she’d grabbed her new piggy
bank.
 

In her room,
she took a minute to rearrange the top of her dresser to make room for the new
addition.
 
She dug around in her
handbag and found a handful of coins, which she dropped inside the bank.
 
“Can’t have you getting hungry,” she
told the little pig.
 
After patting
the pig’s head gently, she turned to her door.
 

When the key
didn’t fit into the keyhole, she felt a rush of relief.
 
It would have been a shame to find that
the key Maggie Appleton had gone to all the trouble to hide inside the pig,
inside a hidden wall compartment, was simply a spare to one of the bedrooms in
the house.

Feeling as if
the key was the wrong shape for the internal doors at
Doveby
House, Janet nevertheless tried it in the locks on the two guest bedrooms.
 
Back
downstairs,
she tried it in the door to the library itself, as well as in the house’s back door
and even the French doors that opened off the sunroom.
 
It didn’t fit into any of them.

“Did you try
the carriage house?” Joan asked when Janet joined her in the kitchen.

“Not yet.
 
I thought I’d try that after
dinner.
 
And I’ll try it in the
small lock on the gate that opens into the back lane, as well.”

There was a low
fence that ran around the large garden that surrounded
Doveby
House, with a small gate at the back.
 
While there was a lock on the gate, the sisters didn’t have a key for it
and neither did Stuart Long.
 

“It would be
good if it opened the gate,” Joan said.
 
“I’ve never wanted to go out that way, but it would be nice to have the
option.”

Janet
grinned.
 
There was something
weirdly frustrating about having a gate but being unable to use it, even
though, like Joan, she’d never yet actually wanted to get through it.

“I can’t help
but feel that it’s the key to something more important than that gate, though,”
Janet said.

“That’s
because you have an overactive imagination,” Joan replied.
 
“I’d much rather have a key to the gate
than a mystery key taking up space in a drawer.”

Janet
sighed.
 
Joan was always so boringly
practical.
 
Neither sister had ever
married and they’d always lived together.
 
Just sometimes Janet wondered what her life might have been like if
she’d separated herself from her sister when they’d been younger.
 
Joan was two years older and she’d
always seemed to feel responsible for her younger sister, which had allowed
Janet to enjoy being less responsible and more whimsical.
 
Perhaps both sisters could have
benefitted if they’d lived apart rather than together.

“Anyway,
dinner is ready,” Joan interrupted her sister’s thoughts.
 
“You sit down and I’ll serve.”

Janet smiled
to herself as she sat down at the small kitchen table.
 
As a steaming plate full of spaghetti
was put in front of her, she remembered why she’d lived with Joan for all these
years.
 
Joan was an excellent
cook.
 

“There’s
garlic bread,” Joan told her, opening the oven.

The smell of
melted butter and garlic made Janet’s mouth water.
 
The bread was Joan’s own homemade loaf,
split lengthwise and covered in a very generous layer of butter mixed with
garlic and herbs.
 
Joan sliced it
into several pieces and Janet grabbed a slice the moment Joan set it on the
table.

“This is
wonderful,” Janet said after her first bite of the crunchy and buttery
bread.
 

“Make sure you
leave room for the apple crumble,” Joan reminded her.

“I always have
room for apple crumble,” Janet said with a laugh.

After dinner and
crumble, Janet helped her sister load their plates into the dishwasher before
heading out into the garden with her key.
 
Although Joan insisted she didn’t really care what the key was for, she
did follow Janet out into the garden.