The Luck Runs Out (10 page)

So far, the Viggies, as they had been dubbed, had succeeded in arousing considerable amusement, a certain amount of wholesome conscience-searching, and a few yelling matches; and a good deal of support for Oxfam and Care. Shandy suspected that Thorkjeld Svenson was privately amused by his firebrand daughter, and rather egged her on than otherwise.

The trouble with student activism, however, is that it may sometimes become hyperactive. During the past few weeks, Professor Stott had become the target for pointed attention. His obtaining large subsidies for his work in breeding meat animals was taken as a personal insult by a few of the more militant Viggies. While the rest of the student body was, as Moira Haskins had explained, making book on Belinda’s progeny, Shandy had detected a few ominous murmurs among the anti-pork faction.

He himself, as an official ambassador to the vegetable kingdom, was apparently thought by some of the Viggies to be on their side. He had received veiled assurances that when the gravy started running in the gutters, his own giblets would be left intact. This would perhaps have been a comfort if he’d been inclined to take the matter with any degree of seriousness, but so far he hadn’t, and suspected that almost none of the students had either, since there were so many other things on the fire, notably the Annual Competition.

Even Birgit Svenson was more interested in horses than their oats just now. Her own selected swain, one Hjalmar Olafssen, was the odds-on favorite to capture the Junior Plowmen’s event, and had even received a bit of private coaching from Thorkjeld himself. Yet Svenson would expel Hjalmar without a second thought if he caught him up to any porcine hanky-panky, much less actual mayhem. Would the student jeopardize his chances at the Competition by engaging in such a stupid stunt as kidnapping Belinda of Balaclava?

He would if Birgit told him to. Moreover, if there was a way to botch up the operation, Hjalmar would be apt as not to find it. Although a master hand on the plow, a titan in the turnip field, and remarkable in a number of other areas, Hjalmar had his off moments. He was either incredibly brilliant or spectacularly inept at everything he tackled, and nobody ever knew which would happen until it had irretrievably happened.

He was a straight A student in some subjects, a straight F in others. Last year he had won top awards and almost wrecked the bleachers when he stumbled clambering down to collect them on prize-giving day. He had guided his flock to a flawless first finish in the sheep-handling trials, then tripped over Balaclava’s Bruce of Bannockburn, the collie with whom he had been working. Bruce, a sober and self-respecting animal, had been looking forward to another blue ribbon and a just meed of applause for a job well done. When the collie bit Hjalmar, everyone realized he did it more in sorrow than in anger, but the judges had to disqualify them anyway.

Hjalmar would be able to manage Belinda, of that Shandy was quite sure. He was big enough and strong enough, and had a way with animals. Even Bruce of Bannockburn bore him no lasting grudge. Balthazar of Balaclava had been known to rouse from his slumbers and waddle over to the side of his pen for the express purpose of having his back scratched by Hjalmar. Any sow would be putty in the student’s hands.

Putty, perhaps, but never sausage. If Hjalmar had in fact committed the incredible folly of letting himself get mixed up in a pignapping, he would take care that no harm came to the pig. Nor, for that matter, would he wantonly have disarranged one tidy hair of Miss Martha Flackley’s head. The snag was that Hjalmar was so very, very large, and that he had this ham-fisted streak in him. Miss Flackley’s mohair stole would be exactly the sort of thing he couldn’t go near without tripping over. Suppose he’d crashed into her, and sent her reeling headlong against the mash feeder? What would he do then? How was it possible to know what Hjalmar would ever do at any time?

Shandy tried to remind himself that Birgit and Hjalmar were by no means the only ones involved in the Viggies movement At least a dozen other granola-breathing firebrands had tackled him only the previous week to see if he would support their campaign to get research funds for Professor Stott’s projects shut off.

Birgit had not been among them. She at least had sense enough to realize that Professor Shandy was not the sort to stab a respected colleague in the back.

Neither had Hjalmar. The young man was not opposed to Stott’s getting the money; he simply wanted the research directed into new channels, such as training pigs to be potato diggers, security guards, seeing-eye guides, and such, where their natural talents and sagacity could be utilized on a continuing basis rather than their natural succulence exploited as a one-shot deal. He had written a brilliant and persuasive paper on the subject. Professor Stott was said to be giving his arguments careful thought.

Knowing the rate at which Professor Stott’s thought processes worked, though, Hjalmar might have reasoned that a little gingering-up mightn’t hurt. Perhaps he’d intended to keep Belinda in some secret place pending her confinement, train the piglets according to his own enlightened methods, then parade them through the campus bearing placards with the message,
EDUCATION, NOT ASSIMILATION
.

Shandy was momentarily intrigued by the notion, then rejected it. Olafssen simply wouldn’t have the time, for one thing. He was carrying a stiff academic schedule, doing an elaborate and potentially important research project of his own on cucumber scab, and participating in practically every extracurricular activity on campus, from chess to horseshoe pitching; not to mention fighting off rival claimants for the favor of Birgit Svenson, which in itself would be a full-time occupation for the average male.

But Hjalmar wouldn’t have been attempting this alone; that was the crux of the matter. What if he had in fact bumped against Miss Flackley and thought he’d only knocked her out? Might not some other member of the party have said, “You go ahead and get the pig away. I’ll attend to her,” or words to that effect? What if the other student then realized Miss Flackley was dead and jumped to the erroneous conclusion that it would be a noble act to conceal Hjalmar’s crime? The handsome senior was a hero of sorts around Balaclava, and he was also one on whom many were pinning their hopes of winning the Competition. It was not impossible to suppose that some other student would take such an insane risk to protect him from the consequences of what he’d done.

Especially if that student was a young woman who was not Birgit Svenson. It was well known that many females were eating their hearts out over Hjalmar, just as the males yearned in vain after Birgit. But there was the problem of Miss Flackley’s cut throat. The female of the species might be deadlier than the male, as Kipling claimed, but would any of them go that far?

There must be some other explanation for the sunflower seeds. Unfortunately, Shandy could think of one. Professor Stott’s compassionate interest in the
Paridae
and
Fringillidae
was well known and Professor Stott was an absent-minded sort of man. If one happened to have a pocketful of birdseed and a handkerchief about one’s person, and if one should reach into the pocket to get the handkerchief to mop one’s brow during a particularly harrowing adventure, one would be likelier than not to scatter a fair number, such as twenty-six, of the seeds over the seat and floor of the van without noticing what one was doing.

If one couldn’t think straighter than this, one had better stop trying to think at all. Shandy got busy helping to search the area around the van. Nowhere did he or anybody else turn up any more sunflower seeds, nor did they find the imprints of Belinda’s feet, much less the signs of rooting that would probably have been Belinda’s first act on being released from the van. The inference was that wherever she had been taken out, it wasn’t up here on Old Bareface, and since Shandy had already decided this would be an extremely silly place to keep a pig, he was no further along than he’d been before.

When the van had been thoroughly searched, photographed, fingerprinted, and whatnot, the question arose as to whether it should be impounded as evidence or returned to the frustrated farrier at Forgery Point There was indeed a schedule posted in the cab. According to its timetable, Flackley should at this moment be over in Hoddersville, attending to several draft animals belonging to various members Of the Headless Horsemen, who had all but nosed out the Balaclava Brigade last year and were bragging that they’d surely capture the trophy this time.

Shandy felt a mean satisfaction at their being thwarted, then his better nature asserted itself and he threw his weight on the side of getting the van back to Flackley, or at least making available to him such tools as were essential to his craft. Since most of the van’s contents had been removed and dumped in a heap back at the pigpens, presumably by the pignappers, then checked for fingerprints and bloodstains and found wanting, therefore useless as evidence, the state police agreed to strike a compromise. If the college would lend Flackley a van, they’d release the equipment.

Shandy took it upon himself to say they would and persuaded Stott to drive him back to arrange the matter. On the way, he managed to bring the subject around to sunflower seeds, turning out his own pockets in a semijocular way to see if he himself could have dropped them, although he knew perfectly well he hadn’t, and getting Stott to stop the car and do the same.

Stott cooperated without hesitation, surveying with gentle wonderment the agglomeration of articles he had been carrying around, but finding no sunflower seeds. That ruled out the possibility that he himself had inadvertently spilled them when he’d visited the van after it was first found.

It did not obviate the possibility that Stott had spilled them last night, though, because he’d been wearing different clothes then. Why in Sam Hill couldn’t Shandy think of a suspect who was somebody he didn’t like?

B
Y THE TIME SHANDY
had talked the superintendent of buildings and grounds into lending a van, got Flackley’s tools and equipment loaded into it, and driven the vehicle out to Forgery Point with Helen following in their own car so he’d have transportation home, the farrier appeared to have lost his former zeal to snatch up the fallen torch.

He and Officer Madigan had made themselves snug in front of an open fire, with a card table set up and a game of gin rummy well under way. Various mugs, plates, and empty glasses showed they hadn’t lacked for refreshment. Officer Madigan had removed her uniform jacket and looked flushed and rosy, no doubt from the heat of the fire; also a trifle vexed at being interrupted in the performance of her duty.

Shandy hadn’t noticed before, but Frank Flackley was what he supposed some women would consider a reasonably good-looking man. He must ask Helen about that when they got back out to the car. In any event, Flackley took the keys of the college van with a moderate amount of grace, and did not seem overwhelmingly chagrined when he saw the schedule and realized how many horses he’d disappointed that day. He merely remarked that he probably ought to call them up from somewhere and explain but the chances were they’d already heard about Aunt Martha on the news. Then Flackley cast a thoughtful eye back at the card table and Officer Madigan.

The day was, in fact, further spent than Shandy had realized by the time he was back in his own comfortable car. It felt good to be alone with Helen. She drove as she did everything else, in a spirit of amused wonder, as though she’d embarked on a fascinating experience for the first time and found she was surprisingly good at it. After being trundled about in Stott’s ancient leviathan and jolted in the van, Shandy was altogether content to sit passive and let her go on driving. He liked the way her small hands in their brown leather gloves gripped the wheel. There was nothing about her he did not like. After a while, however, the gloves stirred a thought he’d as soon not have been bothered with again.

“If you were a Viggie, you wouldn’t wear those.”

“Wear what?” she asked.

“Leather gloves.”

“Oh.” Helen pondered the matter for a moment. “No, I suppose I wouldn’t. Whatever put that observation into your head?”

“Sunflower seeds.”

“I see. That explains everything.”

“Helen, I’m a tired man.”

“I know you are, poor pet, and you shall have rest. If anybody comes poking jars of pickled pigs’ feet at you tonight, they’ll have me to contend with.”

“Noble woman! But seriously, getting back to the Vigilant Vegetarians, what do you think of them?”

“How do I know what I think of them? I’m not sure I’ve ever thought of them at all. My grandfather, Deacon Marsh, always maintained that the Lord gave man the birds of the air and the beasts of the field for his use, and I suppose I took the preachment at face value. I don’t honestly see what’s so awful about an honest working woman’s warming her hands with a pair of gloves made from the hide of an animal that has already contributed its high-grade protein to the betterment of the race, though naturally I wouldn’t buy a fur coat and I think leghold traps are an abomination. How did we get started on the Viggies, anyway?”

“I told you, the sunflower seeds. They found twenty-six sunflower seeds in the cab of Miss Flackley’s van.”

“Peter, I do see what you mean. One does manage to collect the odd seed or two in one’s cuff or wherever from filling the bird feeders, but twenty-six is a lot for someone as neat as Miss Flackley was, so it must have been the pignappers. I can see them buying birdseed to feed the pig because it would throw people off the scent—oh dear, that’s a strange choice of words—but why get sunflower seeds when cracked corn or millet would be so much cheaper and more suitable? It does suggest somebody who has them around to munch on, doesn’t it? Like Matilda Gables, which of course is ridiculous.”

“Matilda who? Why?”

“You know that cute little sophomore with eyeglasses about twice the size of her face, who wears the T-shirt that reads, ‘He prayeth best who loveth best All creatures great and small.’ She leaves a trail of sunflower seeds every time she comes into the library. I think she must have a hole in her blue jeans.”