The Grub-And-Stakers House a Haunt (5 page)

Minerva pushed back her chair and buttoned her cardigan.

“All right, then, Zilla, I’ll go home and change my shoes and get that big ball of heavy twine we use to mark the trails on the Enchanted Mountain.”

“Then I’ll bring my hatchet and an armload of kindling wood that we can chop up for pegs,” her friend agreed. “I suppose we might as well each carry a shovel as well. Not that we’ll need ‘em, but just to start the ball rolling.”

“Good thinking, ladies.” Osbert collected his offspring, one under each arm, and went to push the outsize baby carriage out of the way before somebody stumbled over it. Ethel followed close at his heels, emitting naggish whines and whoofles, somewhat to Osbert’s annoyance, though he didn’t complain out loud because he knew that Ethel meant well.

The Monks didn’t live very far from Zilla; indeed, it was next to impossible for anybody to live any great distance from anybody else in Lobelia Falls. They did take rather a long time getting home, though, because they kept being intercepted by sundry fellow citizens wanting to know what was up. Dittany, skilled in the intricate diplomacy of her native heath, told the simple truth about Zilla’s desire to get a start on readying the soil for next year’s community garden. She told this truth with just enough extra earnestness to convince her hearers that she was stringing them along for dark and devious reasons.

Osbert was subtler still. He merely smiled vaguely at all interrogations and didn’t say much of anything, thus making his interrogators assume he was trying to give the impression that his mind was drifting off to imaginary arroyos, as it so often did, whereas in fact he must be thinking about something far closer to hand that he wasn’t about to mention.

By the time they did at last reach home and look out their kitchen window, which commanded a clear view of the Enchanted Mountain (which was, to tell the truth, only a pretty high hill), the Monks were gratified to spy a trickle of furtive figures already sneaking around its base toward the field that had thus far always been thought of as the more insignificant part of the Hunniker Land Grant.

Each of them shouldered a shovel, a mattock, or a spading fork. Some of them carried all three.

“Goody,” Dittany gloated, “they’re already snapping at the bait. That was brilliant of you, dear. Now that you’ve taken care of your civic responsibility for the day, how’d you like to stay here with the kids and round up your elk while I beard Arethusa about Polly James?”

“If you’re sure you wouldn’t mind, darling.” Any excuse to dodge a meeting with his Aunt Arethusa was welcome to Osbert. “I really should get down to work, now that I have a family to support.”

“Indeed you do, and it won’t be long before the twins will have outgrown their booties and be clamoring for Reeboks. Doesn’t it break your heart, dear, how fast they grow up?”

Osbert clasped his wife to his bosom and began exploring with his lips the little dimple beside her mouth.

“Awful, sweetheart. We’ll soon be facing an empty nest.

What shall we do without our wee ones racing their ponies up and down the stairs?”

“Never mind, darling, we’ll still have each other. And Annie and Rennie will be coming home for the holidays with their own sets of twins. Just think how this old house will ring with merriment as we sit in our rocking chairs and listen to the patter of our grandkiddies’ feet. Maybe we ought to buy another rocking chair and start breaking it in.”

“Couldn’t we wait awhile?” Osbert demurred. “Frankly, rocking chairs always make me feel as if I’m going to be seasick, though I expect you’ll despise me as a weakling for saying so.”

“Pooh! I’ll bet you could make a pride of African lions look like a litter of kittens if you took the notion. Only I’d as soon you didn’t till the twins are a little older. Go ahead with your elk, darling. I’d better whiz over to Arethusa’s before Polly James shows up without his divining rod and we’re stuck for another day.”

who didn’t know

Arethusa and Osbert Monk very well naturally supposed that two writers of the same family, living so close together, would spend a good many pleasant hours together talking shop about apostrophe, hyperbole, synecdoche, and other mysteries of their profession. In fact, the aunt and the nephew seldom talked amicably for long about anything at all. The only writing-related subject they fully agreed on was that typewriters were better than word processors.

Typewriters gave instant gratification. You poked the keys, you looked at your paper, and there was a word. It might be misspelled, it might have got garbled in the typing, it might even be the wrong word; but there it was, by golly, and you didn’t need to fry your eyeballs on a dinky little screen and go through a lot of technical gyrations that probably wouldn’t have worked anyway to get the word into your clutches and gloat over it.

Furthermore, typewriters clicked. When you were sitting all alone with a piece of blank paper and an even blanker mind, that familiar click could be welcome company, like a cricket on the hearth. Before you knew it, one click would have led to another and there you’d be, clicking off metaphor and simile right and left, switching painlessly from passive verb to active verb, from proper noun to mildly improper noun, popping quaint images straight from your subconscious to your fingers, lured forth by the magical rhythm of the click.

While Osbert’s faithful old Remington standard often clicked at a pace that suggested a herd of longhorns in full stampede, Arethusa’s svelte rose-colored electric was more inclined to lilt along at approximately the tempo of a Viennese waltz or mazurka, occasionally slowing to a minuet or even a pavane, speeding up to a schottische or galop in the more hair-raising moments. Arethusa was clicking along in three-quarter time this morning, she wouldn’t have heard Dittany knock, therefore Dittany didn’t bother to do so.

“Hola, Arethusa!”

Arethusa heard that all right, she jumped about six inches off her chair and left off in mid-synecdoche. “Egad, woman, hast no respect for a writer’s nerves? What do you mean, hola?”

“I don’t know,” Dittany confessed, “but I thought you might. Isn’t that what Sir Percy says to Lady Ermintrude?”

“In a pig’s eye he does. He says, ‘Good eventide, my fairest one.’ “

“Arethusa, that’s ridiculous. Nobody in the world ever said, ‘Good eventide, my fairest one.’ “

“Wouldst give me the lie, churless? Look at this, it says so right here.” Arethusa waved a sheet of typescript, somewhat frayed at the top. Her feline familiar, Rudolph Rassendyll, liked to catnap in the basket where she was wont to toss her pages as they came dancing from her typewriter, and Rudolph was a restless sleeper. “Stap me, you wouldn’t flout documentary evidence, would you?”

“Come to think of it, I wouldn’t,” Dittany conceded.

“Not at the moment, anyhow. Arethusa, I’ll make a bargain with you. I grant you the eventide and you do me a small favor in a noble cause.”

“How noble? And how small?”

“All you have to do is bat your eyelashes at Polly James when he comes slavering at your feet and persuade him to dowse for water on the Hunniker boys’ back forty.”

“A beautiful thought, in sooth. The noble cause being to get him off my back for a few hours so that I can finish my chapter, needless to say. Remind me to leave you my dining table with the gilded crocodiles in my will. Not that I expect to predecease you, since having to put up with that rumscullion nephew of mine will no doubt drive you to an early grave, but the gesture will indicate the depth of my gratitude. How soon do you want the field dowsed?”

“The sooner the better. This afternoon, for preference.

Are you expecting Polly here today?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean he won’t come.” The reigning queen of roguish Regency romance heaved a mighty sigh. “Ah, welladay! Why did I have to be cursed with fathomless pools of inscrutability instead of plain old eyeballs like everybody else?”

“Some people just don’t get the breaks, Arethusa.

Well, maybe one day your prince will bug off and leave you in peace. In the meantime, why don’t you give him a buzz and ask him to toddle on over with his divining rod?”

“Pollicot’s mother doesn’t approve of women calling him up.”

“Figo for his mother. Polly’s a big boy now. Tell him it’s a case of civic responsibility.”

“Is it, i’ faith?”

“Certainly it is. We’re preparing the ground for a community garden as part of our project to assist the disadvantaged.”

“What disadvantaged? Nobody in Lobelia Falls is any less advantaged than the rest of us. Generally speaking,”

Arethusa was forced to admit, considering the size and frequency of her and Osbert’s royalty checks as compared to the average net income of the nonwriters in town. If these latter had been writers, most of them would be a darned sight poorer than they were now, as Dittany took pains to point out.

“We’re the lucky ones. But what about all those people around the country who were thrown out of work when the Piltdown Mill closed? What about the old folks trying to scrape along on their pensions?”

“What about that big chunk of money that was supposed to have been raised to start a low-rent housing project over in Upper Scottsbeck?” Arethusa could show astonishing flashes of practicality now and then, especially where money was concerned.

“That’s what everybody else is wondering,” Dittany snarled. “You might ask Mrs. James. She was among the sponsors of the fund drive, if memory serves me correctly.

Anyway, we do want to get that garden plot ready for spring planting so that we’ll at least have fresh vegetables to hand out to people who need them. Tell Polly we’re trying to find water for the garden in Hunnikers’ Field.”

“He doesn’t like to be called Polly.”

“Then call him whatever he does like to be called.

Only for Pete’s sake call him right now or first thing you know he’ll be breezing in here all togged out like a hog going to war, wanting to drag you off to some fancy restaurant for lunch.”

“Come to think of it, you’re probably right.”

An anticipatory smile began to play about Arethusa’s ruby lips, not that they were particularly rubeous at the moment because she hadn’t put on her lipstick yet. In fact, she hadn’t put on anything except a fuzzy pink bathrobe over her nightgown and bedroom slippers on her bare feet, since she preferred to work as unfettered as was consistent with common decency and the vicissitudes of the local climate.

“If he wants to take you to lunch, that means you’ll have to get dressed,” Dittany cautioned.

“But if Pollicot agrees to dowse the field, he’ll expect me to go and watch,” Arethusa fretted.

“Tell him there’ll be a whole crowd there taking pictures for the papers while you stay home and prepare a nice high tea for after he’s finished. That will leave you almost the whole afternoon to yourself.”

“Unless he happens to find the spring right off the bat.”

“He won’t.” Dittany spoke with confidence. Zilla would make sure he didn’t. A dowser trudging back and forth all afternoon would be quite a draw for the pick-andshovel brigade. Arethusa, however, was not yet ready to acquiesce.

“That still means I’ll have to make the tea.”

“So what?” said Dittany. “By then you’ll be wanting some yourself.”

“True enough, ecod. All right then, since it’s in the interests of civic responsibility. You’ll bring the hot scones in plenty of time, I trust.”

“I have a better idea. Why don’t I mix them right here while you make your phone call? I’ll leave them in the fridge unbaked, then all you’ll have to do is slip the pan into the oven as soon as he shows up. That way you can tell him quite truthfully that you’ve baked the scones yourself.”

“So I can. Mix on, Macduff, and don’t be stingy with the currants.”

Arethusa reached for the telephone, Dittany left her to work her siren wiles. Cooking in somebody else’s kitchen was not young Mrs. Monk’s idea of fun, particularly in a kitchen as spotless as Arethusa’s. But the spotlessness was only because the room didn’t get used much, Arethusa being far more apt to invite herself over to Dittany’s when she wasn’t being squired elsewhere by one swain or another.

Anyway, a deal was a deal. Dittany mixed, stirred, patted, cut the dough in wedges, and arranged the scones on a greased baking sheet. She covered the pan with a damp tea towel and set it in the refrigerator till baking time, and resisted a mean and sneaky urge to leave the mixing bowl unwashed.

By this time, Arethusa had got through to Pollicot James. She reported that he was already speeding fieldward with his dowsing rod on the car seat beside him, ready to be whipped out of its monogrammed leather case and primed to dip like a falling arrow should the crucial spot be reached. There was nothing more to be done here, Dittany was free to tackle the next leg of her mission.

It had occurred to her while measuring the baking powder that she was going to feel awfully silly barging into the Scottsbeck post office and asking for a letter that ought to have been delivered approximately a century ago.

She’d decided it would make more sense to exercise the authority of her position as a trustee of the Architrave and send Mr. Glunck instead. Coming from the curator, a mild inquiry as to whether any antique mail might be hanging around still waiting to be picked up would sound comparatively sane. This was assuming Mr. Glunck didn’t already have the crucial document stashed away in the museum’s by now capacious archives. Dittany wouldn’t put it past him. Despite his unassuming manner, Mr. Glunck was a real go-getter.

A few minutes’ brisk walk brought her to the museum.

The chrysanthemums around the sign out front were still doing nicely, she noticed, and the brass plaque on the door was freshly shined. Mr. Glunck was sitting at his desk, happily authenticating an artifact. Dittany knocked twice at his open office door as protocol demanded and went on inside without waiting to be asked. Not that he wouldn’t have invited her if she’d waited; Mr. Glunck had a soft spot for Dittany. Most people did, at least some of the time.