The Grub-And-Stakers House a Haunt (4 page)

She bent over the twin-sized baby carriage and scooped up the pink bundle that lay within. Osbert picked up the blue one. Ethel, a large, black, shaggy creature reputed to be a dog, although nobody really believed she was, watched nervously. Dittany was mildly annoyed at her solicitude.

“For Pete’s sake, Ethel, don’t be so bossy. I wish we’d never let her watch Peter Pan on the television. She’s bound and determined to play Nana.”

“We wouldn’t mind if only she were a little handier at changing diapers,” said the justifiably proud papa.

Osbert Monk looked almost too young to be the father of twins, though obviously he wasn’t. He cut a personable figure withal, tall and slim, with a rampant cowlick in his fair hair and an intellectual though pleasant expression on his lightly freckled face. Well there might be, for Osbert was a widely read author of Western stories, greatly admired by the sagebrush intelligentsia for his erudition and literary style even if he did occasionally forget which was the mustang and which the maverick.

Osbert and Dittany had so often been called upon to address their combined acumen to various problems involving Lobelia Falls residents that it was only to be expected people would start bugging them about this latest development. Indeed, a number of somebodies had already done so.

“What we’re really here for is to get away from the telephone,” Dittany confessed as she loosened the tie of her daughter’s sacque. “It’s been ringing off the hook since half past six. Nobody dares to call you, Zilla; they’re all scared of getting scalped. I’ll bet your phone’s been buzzing, though, Minerva.”

“It was, till I took it off the hook. Before I even found the time to put in my partial plate, I’d had calls from Caroline Pitz, Therese Boulanger, and that woman who’s staying at the inn trying to find her roots. What’s her name? Belinda somebody?”

“No, Tryphosa, with a y,” Dittany amended. “Tryphosa Melloe. I hope she digs up her darned old roots pretty soon and plants them someplace else. Trying to tell Minerva that her greatgrandmother may have been a connection of the Henbits! No Henbit ever had a nose like a slide trombone.”

“She could have got it from the other side of the family.”

Minerva was always ready to come down on the side of charity, often to the expressed annoyance of her friends and neighbors.

Dittany was not to be pacified. “Maybe she could, but why would she want to? To heck with Mrs. Melloe, what’s this about you and a posse of desperadoes trying to dig up the loot from some old stagecoach robbery?”

“Dittany darling,” Osbert corrected gently, “desperadoes don’t come in posses. They’re the bad guys, remember?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, dear. I keep forgetting. Anyway, let’s skip the technicalities and get down to the loot. Where is it, Zilla?”

Mrs. Trott raised a warning hand. “Wait a second till we make sure nobody’s listening at the keyhole. Too bad I didn’t think to do that last night. Honest to Pete, a person can’t open her mouth in this town without somebody leaning in over her tonsils for fear of missing a syllable. I’d just like to know who was snooping around here last night. Go take a look, will you, Minerva? You’ve already heard what I’m going to say.”

“All right, but don’t you go tacking on anything new till I get back.”

“I’m not tacking on anything. I’m just telling it the way it happened. If you won’t believe me, that’s no skin off my nose.”

“Zilla, why shouldn’t Minerva believe you?” Dittany protested. “You’re the most relentlessly truthful person in Lobelia Falls, not counting Roger Munson, and he only sticks to the facts because he doesn’t have imagination enough to think up a convincing lie. Do get on with the story. Osbert’s rustlers are about to snaffle a herd of elk, he has to get back and head ‘em off at the pass. We only came because we thought the situation must be desperate. You don’t want a gang over here digging up your parsnip patch, do you?”

“They wouldn’t dare.”

“Don’t be too sure of that, Zilla,” said Osbert. “You never know what people will do once somebody gets them worked up. Look at lynch mobs, for instance.”

“I wouldn’t look at a lynch mob if you paid me a million dollars on the spot. Anyway, Canadians have more sense. Some of ‘em, anyway. Sit down, can’t you? Want a cup of sassafras tea?”

“No, thanks, we just had breakfast a while ago. What’s happened and where’s that man you’ve got staying here?”

So Zilla had to go through the whole recitative again, this time to a more receptive audience. As a writer of fiction, Osbert was always willing to entertain the possibility of the improbable. As a native and lifelong resident of Lobelia Falls, Dittany was schooled by experience to believe anything about anybody. Only the twins, having been born not quite three months previously, showed little or no interest in Zilla’s story.

“So there you are,” she wound up. “Take it or leave it, but it looks to me as if the only way I’m going to get that old coot out of my woodshed is to dig up his bones and bury them properly.”

“I expect you’re right, although it seems to me the gold’s more urgent than the coot,” said Dittany. “If we don’t find that cache of his pronto, we’ll have this whole darn town dug up and reburied before you can say scat.

No, Nemea, not you. You know how people are, Zilla, I don’t have to tell you what a mess this could turn out to be. Didn’t old Hiram give you any clue about the gold?”

“He told me he’d drawn a map up at the Mountie barracks and mailed it to himself in care of the Scottsbeck post office. I suppose we could drop over there and ask whether it’s been delivered yet.”

Osbert shrugged. “Why not? You read stories in the papers every now and then about some hundred-year-old letter that turns up in a drawer somebody finally got around to cleaning out. As far as the digging’s concerned, why not turn it to good purpose? Let’s spread a rumor about the field out beyond the Enchanted Mountain that the development commission said it would be okay to use for a community garden because it’s part of the Hunniker Land Grant and belongs to the town.”

“What we really want that land for is an old folks’

housing project, though the Lord knows whether we’ll ever get together money enough to build one,” said Minerva.

“But you’re right about the community garden, Osbert.

Why not? Digging there now would at least save us the cost of getting the land plowed and tilled for planting next spring. Somebody’ll have to stick around and make everybody fill in their holes after they’ve messed the place up and not found anything, needless to say.”

“I should darn well hope so,” Zilla snorted. “How do we go about starting the rumor?”

“In this town?” said Dittany. “Nothing easier. We just rope off the area we want dug up and march out there with pickaxes and shovels over our shoulders and a smug look on our faces. On second thought, what if Hunnikers’ Field should happen to be the right place and somebody dug up the chest of gold by accident, the way old Hiram’s mules did? There might very well be an underground spring; it’s a bit squishy in some places. Maybe we’d better get Polly James to dowse the field before we start our stampede.”

“You’d better not let Pollicot James’s mother hear you calling him that,” Minerva cautioned.

“Why not? It’s her own fault, saddling the kid with her maiden name just because the Pollicots were supposed to be descended from dukes or earls or lesser seraphim or somebody. Mrs. James is always quick enough to point out other people’s mistakes, she might have given a little thought to her own. I wonder how she ever let Polly take up anything so down-to-earth as dowsing, anyway?”

“Oh, dowsing isn’t plebeian,” said Minerva. “Being hipped on folklore is quite the thing these days. Remember, Zilla, the time Mrs. James offered to sing folk songs about flowers to the garden club? She brought along a two-string dulcimer and sat there strumming those same two strings and squealing ‘Willow, willow, waly’ for a solid hour and a quarter before Therese could get her turned off.”

Zilla sighed. “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to forget that afternoon, Minerva Oakes, and I’ll thank you not to remind me again. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to get the son to dowse, though, long as he doesn’t have any funny ideas about being paid.”

“We could tell him we’re anxious to find water for the community garden and appeal to his sense of civic responsibility,”

Dittany suggested. “Mrs. James seems to be awfully big on civic responsibility, she’s always spouting off about it in the Scottsbeck Sentinel. Maybe we could gently suggest that we’ll send his picture to the paper. Of course the Jameses don’t exactly live in Lobelia Falls, but Polly’s over here all the time lately, asking Mr. Glunck dumb questions about the artifacts at the museum and having soulful chats with Arethusa.”

“Which of them does the chatting?” asked Zilla.

“Polly does, naturally. Arethusa just sits there looking like a Burne Jones painting and letting him think she’s listening. Little does he reck that she’s actually entertaining lustful fantasies about snaffling all the pickled onions next time she invites herself to supper at our house.”

The “little does he reck” came easily to Dittany’s lips.

During her pre-Osbert period and even occasionally after her marriage while still in the pre-twin phase, she’d typed manuscripts for Osbert’s aunt. Roguish Regency romance was Arethusa Monk’s all-too-fertile field of fictional fabrication.

Not only rich and famous, the authoress was also possessed of a magnificent head of jet-black hair and eyes like fathomless pools of mystery; hence she was always being fallen in love with by somebody or other. Since her own two loves were her work and her meals, she often failed to notice who belonged to whichever heart was being laid before her feet at any specific point in time.

Mrs. Pollicot James, as she liked to be known, seemed to be fairly important in provincial garden-club circles.

Recently, she’d invited members of the Gruband-Stake Gardening and Roving Club to tea at her more or less palatial house just over the line in Scottsbeck. This could have been merely a hands-across-the-border gesture, or it could have been a preliminary softening up in the hope of getting the Lobelia Falls group to do all the dog work at the upcoming spring flower show. It might also have had something to do with the fact that the Gruband-Stakers had inherited a rundown Victorian house, turned it into the by now lavishly endowed and increasingly acclaimed Aralia Polyphema Architrave Museum, and thus boosted their organization to a level of civic responsibility that even Mrs. James would have been hard put to snoot.

Dittany had missed Mrs. James’s tea on account of the twins, but of course she’d heard all about it. No Mr. James the elder had been present. He was said to have departed this earth some years ago and probably wouldn’t have been caught dead at his wife’s hen party anyway. Mr.

James the younger, however, had been right there with bells on. Pollicot hadn’t seemed to mind a bit being the only male present. He’d mingled freely with the company until Arethusa Monk had shown up rather late, firmly escorted by a somewhat tight-lipped Dot Coskoff and muttering darkly of abduction.

To any discerning female eye, it must have been clear that Arethusa had forgotten all about the tea until Dot showed up to collect her and that she had been forced to dress in an almighty rush. Usually a model of elegance, Arethusa had on this occasion displayed that sweet disorder in her dress whose effect Robert Herrick had so accurately assessed some three centuries previously. Thus also had been kindled a certain wantonness in the bosom of a middle-aged bachelor who’d been kept all his life under the heavy thumb and the eagle eye of a domineering mother.

Nor had the siren’s allure worn off. Pollicot James was still lugging along his tributes of flowers and candy with monotonous regularity. For Arethusa to beguile him into an afternoon’s worth of free waterwitching ought to be a piece of cake. Dittany said so and her hearers agreed, all but the littlest two. Ditson Renfrew (named for Dittany’s late father and Osbert’s favorite literary hero) and Dittany Anne (named for her mother and Dittany Senior’s favorite literary heroine) showed as yet no interest in the subtleties of local lives and events. They would come to it, no doubt, in the fullness of time. At the moment they were both busy waving their legs and examining their fingers, perhaps speculating on the desirability of getting one or more of these small but shapely digits into their respective mouths. Dittany studied them with a mother’s pride and a mother’s foreboding.

“Osbert, I think we’d better get these kids home before they start yelling. Okay, Zilla, we’ll check out the post office and get Arethusa to work her wiles on Polly. Why don’t you two get hold of some pegs and string and begin staking out the area we want dug up?”

“Someone had better see Mr. Glunck too,” said Osbert.

“There might be something useful in the museum files.”

“I thought of asking Grandsire Coskoff whether he’d ever heard of a mule skinner named Hiram Jellyby getting shot out in Hunnikers’ Field,” said Zilla. “Grandsire wouldn’t have known Hiram himself, I shouldn’t think, unless he’s been lying about his age all these years, but his father might have.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Osbert. “Grandsire might also have heard talk about a payroll robbery that happened back before the turn of the century. It would be nice to know where the gold came from.”

“It would be nice to know whether there ever was any gold in the first place.” Minerva Oakes still wasn’t buying that spectral mule skinner. “Before you try nailing Grandsire Coskoff about any big gold robbery, you’d better find out from Dot whether his hearing aid’s back from the repair shop. You know what Grandsire’s like when he gets going on something you don’t want to listen to and can’t hear you trying to shut him off.”

“It might be interesting to get him in a room with Mrs. James and her two-string dulcimer some time and see who comes out ahead,” said Dittany.

“Just so I’m not around the day you decide to try it.

Dittany, you really are your mother’s daughter. I just hope Annie here doesn’t take after Clorinda’s side of the family.”