The Grub-And-Stakers House a Haunt (20 page)

Which was not to say that Dittany was ready to quit.

“They might have come out of the flea market stuff down cellar, Mr. Glunck. Though you wouldn’t know much about that, would you?”

In those early weeks when the Gruband-Stakers were trying to turn John Architrave’s underfinanced legacy from a rundown old house into a bona fide museum, they’d been overwhelmed by a stream of donations ranging from carved coconuts to umbrella stands made of buffalo horns and alleged locks of Ivor Novello’s hair. Therese Boulanger had got the bright idea of laying all the more obviously unsuitable artifacts out for sale on a table next to John’s ancestral coal bin, on the theory that some people would buy absolutely anything if it was cheap enough and the proceeds would at least help to pay for cleaning supplies and brooms with which to knock down the cobwebs.

Now that they had a fully operative museum and a curator who wasn’t afraid to refuse offerings of damaged bustles and whiskerless shaving brushes, people had quit thinking of the Architrave as a dumping ground for junk they hadn’t the intestinal fortitude to throw away. The flea market had therefore been phased out, but chances were good that Therese Boulanger was still hanging on to the notebook in which she’d dutifully listed each and every contribution, along with the donor’s name. It wouldn’t hurt to ask.

Not now, of course. Therese would be just about to put the teabags into her pot, and Dittany ought by rights to be doing the same. She accelerated her pace and reached Applewood Avenue in a dead heat with Arethusa, somewhat to the latter’s annoyance.

“Ods bodikins, wench, have you no sense of family responsibility? Who’s fixing lunch?”

“Good question. How about you, for a change?”

Dittany didn’t bother to wait for an answer. She opened the fridge and began setting the table with ham, cheese, salad makings, a loaf of bread, and a jar of mustard pickles, along with an assortment of plates and eating tools. “There you are, madam, feel free to browse at will.

Come on, Osbert, belly up to the bar.”

As to whether he’d remembered to feed the twins in her absence, Dittany didn’t have to ask. The state of their faces left no room for doubt. She wiped them clean and tossed their bibs down the cellar stairs in the general direction of the washing machine, then took her own place and set about composing a sandwich. As was their wont, Osbert and Arethusa were holding a Mexican standoff over the topmost little onion in the pickle jar. Dittany ended the dispute by fishing out three onions and dealing out one apiece, not forgetting herself since, after all, it was she who’d made the pickles.

It might make sense henceforth to compound the pickles of nothing but onions. However, Gram Henbit had always used cucumber and cauliflower and Dittany was not one to fly in the face of tradition unless something occurred to steer her otherward. Like for instance that purple gaiter.

“Arethusa,” she said once she’d dealt with a bite of sandwich, “you may be interested to learn that Ethel came home a while ago with a purple gaiter in her mouth.”

The reigning queen of roguish Regency romance took the news calmly, being preoccupied with fishing out the biggest piece of cauliflower as a sop to her disappointment over there being no more little onions. “Not to shatter your apparent expectations, ecod, but the plain fact of the matter is that I find your information somewhat less than overwhelming. What, prithee, does a four-legged creature of undetermined species expect to accomplish with one single gaiter? Furthermore, I hardly think purple is Ethel’s color. A bright scarlet, perhaps, with round black buttons-zounds!

Are you intimating that this purple gaiter may perchance have graced the calf of that long-ago highwayman who erst effected the demise of the gallant chevalier who rescued me from the fell clutches of Hedrick Snarf and his brawling band of bibulous boors?”

Dittany nodded. “The possibility has to be considered, the gaiter’s pretty faded. I did wonder if Ethel might have snitched it from the Architrave but Mr. Glunck says no.

I’m going to call Therese later and find out whether she ever sold a pair through the flea market.”

“Why not now, forsooth?”

“Oh, I couldn’t, not till she’s finished her tea and taken her little rest with the teabags squeezed out and laid on her eyelids. She claims it tones the system, though I can’t think why.”

“Are Therese’s teabags germane to our present purpose?”

asked Osbert.

“No, I suppose not, now that you mention it. Maybe what the teabags really do is tan the eyelids so they won’t get wrinkles. Or maybe Therese just feels she ought to get all possible good out of them because everything costs so darned much these days.”

“I should think Therese might forget her dad-blanged teabags for once in the interests of civic responsibility,”

Osbert fretted. “We can’t just sit around here eating pickles with an important clue on our hands.”

“Yes, darling,” said Dittany. “Have some applesauce, it will calm your nerves. If you’re all that itchy to telephone somebody, why don’t you call up Sergeant Mac Vicar and ask if he’s found out anything yet about that trunkful of money?”

“Splendid suggestion, darling.”

Forgetting about the applesauce, Osbert sprinted for the instrument which still hung on the kitchen wall where Gramp Henbit as a young bridegroom had caused it to be put although one no longer cranked the box and asked Central to please get the number. A good many of Lobelia Falls’s inhabitants still regretted not being able to crank the box.

Officer Ray was on the desk. He explained that Sergeant MacVicar had in fact returned from his visit to the RCMP but was at the moment eating cullen skink with Mrs. MacVicar and her cousin Matilda the mincemeat magnate, and could not be disturbed. Ray promised to pass along Osbert’s message at the earliest opportunity.

He would surely keep that promise; Ray’s admiration for Deputy Monk knew few, if any, bounds.

Somewhat mollified, Osbert went back to the table and ate his applesauce. He was helping to clear the table and put the pickles away when Sergeant MacVicar returned his call. After a polite inquiry about Cousin Matilda, by whom Osbert had been briefly employed in a case of sabotage at the mincemeat factory,* he got to the nub.

“There’s been an interesting new development in the case, Chief, that we’re trying to get a line on here. In the meantime, we’re wondering what you’ve found out about that money in the trunk.”

“Oh, aye, Deputy Monk. Noo, there’s another interesting development. The money has indeed been determined to have come from that robbery in which the banker was kidnapped and presumably murdered. His and one other’s are the only fingerprints to have been found on the packages, as has been deduced from prints that were taken at the time of the robbery from sundry articles on his office desk and in his house. It is being theorized that the banker may have been forced to make up the bundles at the kidnappers’

behest, after his abduction had been effected and before his finger was amputated.”

“Then the banker would still have been alive when the kidnappers called his wife to ask for the ransom,” said Osbert.

“Still alive and hard at work, on the strength of the evidence/’ the sergeant agreed.

“They might not have meant to kill him at all, unless he tried to make a run for it while they were telephoning.

Or else they got plumb disgusted when his wife took his kidnapping as a joke.”

“We may never know, Deputy Monk. Howsomever, yon interesting development to which I alluded is that the money in the trunk added up to less than we’d expected from the bills of large denomination that we were able to see through the plastic. The great bulk of the currency *The Gruband-Stakers Spin a Yarn

turned out to be of varying denominations, all in used bills such as would have been preferred by any bank robber conversant with the conventions of his trade. And what wad be this new development of yours?”

“A faded purple gaiter. You may recollect from Hiram Jellyby’s narrative of his demise, Chief, that the man who held him up and accidentally shot him wore purple gaiters.”

“Aye, and odd garb for a highwayman, in my opeenion.”

“That’s what Hiram thought, as do we all,” Osbert concurred. “But anyhow, Ethel went for her usual stroll this morning and came home with this purple gaiter in her mouth.”

“A man’s gaiter?”

“Man-size, anyway. Dittany’s first thought was that the gaiter must have come from the ThorbisherFreep Collection.

We checked with Mr. Glunck but he says not, unless it may have been sold through the flea market they were running before he took over as curator. We’re going to ask Therese Boulanger about that as soon as she takes the teabags off her eyelids.”

“M’phm.”

Not a whit disconcerted by the teabags, Sergeant MacVicar asked Deputy Monk to report back on his findings and rang off, perhaps to go and eat some more cullen skink.

Arethusa, who had been entertaining herself and the twins by tickling their knees with their bootie tassels, decided she ought to go home and get back to work before her cat, Rudolph, ate her latest chapter, as he was not at all unlikely to do if left long to his own devices. Like her vast reading public, Rudolph had a voracious appetite for Arethusa’s works, though he could generally be distracted by a generous helping of filet depoisson au vin blanc, rognons de veau flambŁ, or any of the more expensive brands of cat food.

Left to themselves, Osbert and Dittany attended to the dishes, got the twins settled for their postprandial snooze, eyed the telephone as Rudolph might eye a roti de boeuf poele a la matignon or a fresh batch of typescript, and finally succumbed.

Therese was gracious but brief. No, her records showed no acquisition or sale of purple gaiters either singly or as a pair. The only person she knew who owned any purple gaiters was Minerva Oakes and she was afraid she’d have to run now because her dryer was about to shut off.

Dittany hung up the phone. “Minerva Oakes! Can you beat that? Do you want to go see her, Osbert, or shall I?”

“You, dear. You’d better take the one Ethel found for purposes of comparison. You might also take Ethel while you’re about it. When you’re not around, she keeps pestering me to feed the twins even when they’ve just finished eating. Not that I begrudge the kids any time or task, as you well know, but I have all those elk to cope with and it does tend to break my train of thought when she grabs my pant leg and starts dragging me out to the kitchen.”

“I understand, dear. Come on, Ethel, let’s go for a walk. Minerva won’t mind being barged in on, unless she’s making elderberry jelly.”

Minerva was not making elderberry jelly, as it turned out, and seemed quite pleased to be barged in on. “Well, this is nice. Just let me put the kettle on. Here, Ethel, I’ve been saving you this soup bone but you’ll have to chew it outdoors. You don’t mind her having it, Dittany?”

“Not at all, provided she chews like a lady. Don’t make any tea for me, Minerva, we just got up from the table.

What I came about was this.”

Dittany opened the diaper bag she’d brought along from force of habit and took out the evidence. “Therese Boulanger says you own a pair of purple gaiters. I just wanted to make sure this isn’t one of them.”

Minerva put on her reading glasses and shook her head over the tooth marks. “It had better not be. Where did you find this?”

“I didn’t. Ethel came home with it from her morning walk. She usually wanders over toward the Enchanted Mountain and sometimes as far as Hunnikers’ Field, so we couldn’t help wondering. You know that story Hiram Jellyby told about how he happened to get shot.”

“Why, yes, I-my stars and garters! Gaiters, I suppose I should have said. Come on upstairs, I’ve got the attic all straightened up for a change. I know exactly where to put my hand on Granny’s gaiters. That was my Winona Pitcher grandmother, you know, the one who introduced archery to what was then the Gruband-Stake Gardening Club. She wore those purple gaiters the day she won the Interprovincial Lady Archers’ Roving Tournament, and they’d darned well better not be the ones Ethel’s been dragging around.

They’re not just a family heirloom, they’re a significant part of Lobelia Falls’s historical heritage. I suppose by rights they ought to be on display at the Architrave, but I just don’t have the heart to part with them.”

“That’s all right,” said Dittany. “Mr. Glunck doesn’t seem to think we’re in urgent need of any more gaiters just now. Perhaps you could bequeath them to the museum in your will.”

“Yes, so I could. Thank you for the suggestion. Watch your step here, I never could figure out why the carpenter put this funny kink in the attic stairway. It’s a mercy I didn’t break my neck the other day carrying all those boxes of trash down for the rubbish man to-Lord have mercy on us, will you look at this!”

The so recently tidied attic now looked as if it had been invaded by a posse of raccoons. Trunks, drawers, and boxes hung open, their contents strewn helter-skelter.

“Just day before yesterday I had this whole place clean as a whistle and neat as a pin,” Minerva moaned, “and now-this is awful!”

“It’s a mess, all right,” Dittany agreed. “Can you tell if anything’s missing? Where had you put those gaiters?”

“In that wicker trunk over there, under Granny’s wedding petticoat. Here’s the petticoat, down on the floor in a wad with a big smooch of dust across it. Doesn’t this make you sick? All that lovely embroidery. Honestly, some people ought to be stuffed and mounted! Who in the world could have done such a thing?”

“Somebody who was in a desperate hurry to find something and didn’t know where to look is the best I can think of. Can you tell what’s missing?”

“I suppose so, once I get straightened out.”

Minerva began picking things up and folding them away, Dittany gave what help she could. It wasn’t so bad really, they found more mess than actual damage. What they did not find were Winona Pitcher’s purple gaiters.

Minerva sank into a rocking chair with one rocker missing and fanned herself with the lid of a broken shoebox that had contained a pair of elastic-sided boots once worn by GreatGrandfather Pitcher.