The Grub-And-Stakers House a Haunt (16 page)

Callin’ themselves Dr. Cure-Ail or some damn thing an’

claimin’ that worthless muck they was peddlin’ would fix anything from an ingrown toenail to a fractured skull!

Should o’ been strung up, the whole passel of ‘em. Charlie was awful down on them patent medicines. He wouldn’t even carry ‘em in ‘is store, ‘cept for a few he knew was reliable.

Mostly he’d tell you to bile up some tansy tea or put a mustard plaster on your chest, dependin’ on what ailed you. An’ it would work, because Charlie said it would.”

“Thank you, Hiram, I just wanted to make sure. Actually Osbert and I have another candidate in mind, sort of. As it happened, we were just over visiting his Aunt Arethusa, whom you met last night, I understand, and in came this man wearing a black frock coat and bright purple socks.”

“You don’t say? What was the bugger callin’ hisself?”

“Hedrick Snarf. He’s the new innkeeper in town, or thinks he is. We couldn’t help wondering if you happened to run across anything in the Akashic Record about reincarnation.”

“Lemme think. Yup, seems to me I recollect a few entities lined up behind me lookin’ to see who they was s’posed to be next time around, so’s they’d know where to get theirselves born again once they’d taken the refresher course on teeth-cuttin’ an’ yellin’ in the nighttime, all them things babies have to know. So what you’re really wonderin’ is whether this Snarf bird’s the crook that done me in back when he used to be somebody else?”

“It did cross our minds. Mine, anyway. Osbert’s more inclined to think those purple socks might have something to do with the DNA cycle, but it mightn’t hurt to mosey on over to the inn and take a close look at Snarf, if you feel so inclined. Why, Hiram, I’m beginning to see you.”

Whether it had been the strengthening essence of Dittany’s casserole or just that the late muleteer was getting adjusted to his present surroundings, Hiram Jellyby had indeed begun to manifest himself. At first he resembled nothing more impressive than an underexposed blackand-white negative. Gradually, however, he assumed the three-dimensional appearance that Eliphalet Monk had captured so well in the platinum print, the only difference being that Hiram was now without his mules, which was probably just as well under the circumstances.

Dittany felt a surge of relief. She hadn’t realized how much it took out of a person, trying to be a thoughtful hostess to a disembodied entity. Even in full ectoplasm, Hiram wasn’t much to look at and that bullet hole he was now sporting in the middle of his forehead took a little getting used to. At least he was here, though, or seemed to be. Something was better than nothing.

“You weren’t planning to go over to the inn right now, were you?” asked Zilla, knowing her hostess’s propensity for not letting the grass grow under her feet.

“Oh no,” Dittany reassured her. “We still have dessert.

It’s just applesauce and cookies; I finally got around to doing a little baking.”

“What kind o’ cookies?” asked Hiram.

“Big molasses ones with crinkles around the edges.

They’re Osbert’s favorite.”

“Mine too.” Hiram Jellyby was one happy ghost, that was clear from the smile on his face, now that they could see it. “Used to be a woman over in LammergenFlossie, her name was-wonder what happened to

Floss?”

“You might try looking up her phone number in the Akashic Record,” Zilla told him rather nastily. “How come Arethusa isn’t here, Dittany? Doesn’t she usually have supper with you folks?”

“Unless she gets a better offer,” said Dittany. “Tonight, Hedrick Snarf’s throwing some kind of reception for her at the inn because she pinned his ears back about letting the place go to heck and told him Andy’d give him the heave-ho if he didn’t straighten up and fly right. Which Andy certainly would do, as you well know. So Snarf’s been pestering her for advice about fixing things up. I don’t know whether he was afraid to spend Andy’s money on calling in a professional consultant or if he’s hoping to get his hooks into some of Arethusa’s. Anyway, that’s why she’s not here.”

Zilla was not satisfied. “Humph. What kind of reception?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why aren’t you and Osbert there? Couldn’t you have found somebody to sit with the twins?”

“We might have, I suppose, if we’d been invited.”

“Not invited? Didn’t Arethusa tell Snarf about you, for Pete’s sake?”

“She forgot she herself was invited till Snarf arrived to pick her up.”

“I must say, that’s some way to run a reception. Who else is going?”

“Don’t ask me. None of our friends, as far as I know.

Surely we’d have heard.”

“Well, this is one for the books! You’re sure this reception’s actually going to happen?”

“Now that you mention it, no. I’m not sure at all.

Osbert, you don’t suppose Arethusa’s been abducted again?”

Cysbert attempted to calm

his wife. “Simmer down, darling, she can’t have been abducted.”

“Why not?” Dittany rejoined somberly. “She was once before. You know perfectly well what a sink of iniquity that inn used to be before Andy McNaster got religion.

Who’s to say this Snarf bird hasn’t sunk it again?”

“Since when did Andy McNaster get religion?” demanded Zilla.

“I was making a figurative allusion to Andy’s pure and holy reverence for Arethusa, dag-nab it. Surely I don’t have to remind you how fast he cleaned up his act once she started letting him ply her with champagne and steak dinners on the house.”

“No, nor do you have to remind me that Andy’s now down there in the Babylon of America, playing suave and sinister villains just the way he used to do when he was pulling sneaky deals right here in Lobelia Falls. Some reformation!”

Having said her piece, Zilla essayed a bite of Dittany’s casserole. “My stars, this is tasty. Could have used a pinch less sage, maybe, but I suppose you have to think of Osbert’s profession.”

“You’re dern tootin’, ma’am,” Osbert agreed. “We riders of the purple sage have to keep our taste buds attuned to our work. I don’t believe Hollywood’s so iniquitous as it used to be, eh, now that it’s become a suburb of Tokyo.

And I’ll tell you why I don’t believe Aunt Arethusa’s been abducted, Dittany. It’s because Hedrick Snarf’s only about half her size and weight.”

“So what?” Dittany argued. “He’s got henchpersons, hasn’t he?”

“What henchpersons? According to my secret informants, namely Bob and Ray down at the police station, nary a one of the inn employees would give Hedrick Snarf the time of day, much less a helping hand in a nefarious enterprise.”

“Snarf could have sent out for henchpersons, couldn’t he? I don’t care what anybody says, I think it’s pretty darned skulduggerous that Hedrick Snarf hasn’t invited one single, solitary person we know to that probably spurious shindig he’s allegedly throwing tonight. I’d like to go down there and see for myself what’s going on. But I suppose it wouldn’t look right to barge in uninvited, now that I’m a mother.”

Hiram Jellyby cleared his throat, or at least made the sort of noise people make who have throats to clear.

“Ahem. If I was to dematerialize, I might sneak down there unbeknownst an’ have a gander, assumin’ I could remember what the lady looks like. I was so took up with findin’

my bones last night, I didn’t much notice nothin’ else. You wouldn’t happen to have a platinum print of her kickin’

around, I don’t s’pose?”

Dittany perked up. “That’s a marvelous idea, Hiram.

We do have lots of photographs of Arethusa. Osbert, would you mind bringing the album off the parlor table?”

“Sure thing, pardner.”

Osbert galumphed parlorward and returned in a trice with a bunch of photographs taken the previous February, showing his aunt costumed for her role in Osbert’s melodrama.

It was the one of Arethusa in her black Merry Widow corset and red silk skirt that caused the late mule skinner’s eyes to flash emerald green with purple sparks.

“Oh gosh,” fretted Dittany. “I hope his ectoplasm’s not short-circuiting. Hiram, are you all right?”

“Hoo boy! I’ll tell the cockeyed world I am. This dame sure as hell don’t look like nobody’s aunt to me.”

“Well, you don’t have to get profane about it,”

snapped Zilla.

She might perhaps have been feeling a trifle greeneyed herself. After all, Zilla was Hiram’s closest friend, if one could be said to have formed any sort of meaningful relationship with a phantom. Dittany understood perfectly.

“He’s right, Zilla. Arethusa isn’t the auntliest person in the world, as I’m sure Osbert will be only too willing to testify. Would you like another cookie before you start out, Hiram?”

“Nope, thanks, I better get started. They’ll be swillin’

booze an’ orgyin’ around over there, I shouldn’t be surprised.”

Hiram tried not to sound too hopeful, but he wasn’t fooling a soul, particularly Zilla. “Am I fadin’ yet?”

“You’re beginning to thin out a little around the edges,” Osbert told him encouragingly. “Maybe if the rest of us were to join hands and help you concentrate, it would help to speed up the dematerializing process.”

“Wouldn’t hurt none to try, I don’t s’pose.”

In fact it helped quite a lot. In a twinkling, Hiram was gone, all but the eyeballs. They were still shooting the odd purple gleam, although the emerald green had by now faded to a relatively unnoticeable teal blue. Like a good host, Osbert started to get up and open the door for the departing muleteer, but he needn’t have bothered. Hiram had already oozed his way through the panels and was down the path, leaving a pretty sprinkling of pale lavender sparks in his wake.

“Those eyeballs of his had darned well better not be shooting sparks when he tries to crash that party,” Zilla fussed. “Old fool!”

“I think Hiram’s rather sweet,” said Dittany. “I do hope we haven’t landed him in a mess.”

Though she didn’t yet know it, Dittany needn’t have worried about hired abductors. A reception, or a reasonable facsimile of one, was in fact taking place at the inn.

Women in expensive and sometimes elegant gowns and men in well-pressed suits and ties, some of them even in dinner jackets, were passing to and fro from bar to buffet, stopping en route to exchange the vapidities that pass for conversation at such affairs. Hedrick Snarf was flitting around like a swallow over a swarm of mayflies, playing host with unabated fervor, herding all comers over to be presented to the guest of honor much as ancient Greeks might have presented their sacrifices before Aphrodite.

Arethusa herself was standing stock-still in front of a bank of potted palms rented for the occasion from one of Scottsbeck’s swankiest funeral parlors. In her hand was a champagne glass, on her face was a vaguely Mona Lisaish smile. Her eyes were fathomless pools of inscrutability, her thoughts were elsewhere, as Arethusa’s thoughts so often were. Even so, she was going through the motions with such finesse and savoir faire as only undertakers and reigning queens of roguish Regency romance are capable of displaying.

Whether Arethusa sensed an alien presence at her side was problematical. Whether she noticed that the level of the champagne in her glass was slowly being lowered without her having so much as touched her lips to the rim was doubtful. Arethusa wasn’t even aware of the two points of light half a head below her own that showed first as a feeble glimmer, then brightened watt by watt and ohm by ohm into a pair of piercingly brilliant blue-green orbs shooting fuchsia-colored sparks that gathered around her jetty coiffure like an aureole and clashed almost audibly with the deep crimson of her gown.

Others were noticing, though. Glances were being cast, murmurs were being exchanged. When Hedrick Snarf spied Arethusa’s empty glass and dispatched a waiter to fill it, and a disembodied male voice said to the waiter, “Don’t mind if I do,” the waiter, taken aback, sent a stream of champagne fizzing over Arethusa’s velvet sleeve. When that same disembodied voice growled, “Watch it, bub,” a sequined matron standing nearby squeaked like a startled mouse, which was about as close to manifesting extreme perturbation as Canadian matrons in polite company usually get.

But when the incandescent eyeballs, now the cynosure of every other eyeball in the ballroom, including at last Arethusa’s, became surrounded by fuzzy gray whiskers, and when the whiskers attached themselves to a face, and when the amorphous gathering of fog below the face developed arms and legs and a sturdy though but rudely garbed torso, the squeak became a shriek, the shriek became a general outcry, and the revel, such as it had been, turned into a rout.

It was truly astonishing to see how many alleged stockbrokers, uncertified public accountants, speculators, and other presumed titans of industry became totally disoriented upon finding themselves in the presence of a genuine, grade-A specter. Even redoubtable females claiming to be real estate brokers lost their aplomb and demonstrated their willingness to leave the reception without even pausing to thank their host.

Champagne glasses fell from trembling hands, to be trampled by pounding feet that didn’t seem to care whither they sped so long as they wound up somewhere else. Hedrick Snarf was well up in the pack, though he tried to save face by pretending he was there for the sole purpose of bringing order out of the rapidly accelerating chaos. Only Arethusa Monk remained beside the rented palm trees, aloof and alone save for the ghostly figure that had by now fully manifested itself as that of Hiram Jelly by”How

very kind of you to appear,” she said in her most gracious manner. “Haven’t we met before?”

“Yep,” rejoined the muleteer. “Last night out by the water hole where your nephew dug up my bones an’ your great-granny’s weddin’ china.”

“Oh, yes, of course. I thought those eyeballs looked familiar. You were the subject of Greatgrandfather’s platinum print. Would you care to sample the buffet with me?

I must confess to feeling a trifle peckish.”

“Thanks, but I already et, or whatever it is I do, over at your nephew’s place. They sent me to find out if you’d been abducted.”

“No such luck, unfortunately, but it was kind of them to think of me. Do try the caviar. It’s quite tolerable though not of the best quality.”