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Authors: Frances Lockridge

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“Yes,” Pam said, “I can see you might.”

“Except,” Aunt Flora went on, “somebody miscalculated. There wasn't enough. Except just to make me sick as a horse.” She paused, reflectively. “Why a horse?” she enquired. “They never were in the old days.”

“Than a dog,” Pam substituted. She paused in turn. “Cats too,” she added, “particularly when they eat grass. They seem to enjoy it.”

“Sly,” Aunt Flora said, apparently of the cats. “Where are they, do you suppose?”

“Under things,” Pam said. “They'll come out. But for heaven's sake, darling—
arsenic!

“Think I'm crazy, don't you?” Aunt Flora enquired, in a tone more of detached interest than disclaimer. “Maybe. Your mother always thought so, Pamela. Still does, I shouldn't wonder. It's the husbands—she wouldn't understand about the husbands.”

“Listen, darling,” Pam said. “Let's get back—you're—you're worse than Jerry says I am. When it's merely that he can't follow, really. But you—” Pam paused, thwarted. “You said somebody tried to poison you. Who?”

Aunt Flora shook her head.

“Any of them, dearie,” she said. “They're all here. For my money, of course—the major's money. Because I've hung on to it, Pamela. And to the house and—by the way, I'm Mrs. Buddie again. I decided this morning. Stephen's gone, you know. The whipper-snapper. He's the only one it couldn't be, because it was after he left. But there was no reason to go on being Mrs. Stephen Anthony, was there dearie?” She paused a moment. “Silly name,” she added. “I think myself he made it up.”

“But, then, why—” Pam started to say. Aunt Flora shook her head. It involved shaking most of her torso, also, but Aunt Flora was up to it.

“Don't ask me, Pamela,” she said. “You'd never understand, anyway—you and your Jerry. But—well, take the cats, dearie. The little cats of yours. One cat gets lonely.”

“Of course, darling,” Pam said. “I didn't mean that. And I think you're probably too hard on Stephen, really. But—” Pam pulled herself back to the business at hand. “You really believe—” she began. But Aunt Flora signalled with her eyes, as Sand brought cocktails, still in their shaker.

“Just put them down, Sand,” Aunt Flora directed, pointing toward a coffee table by the side of her chair. “We'll pour them.”

Sand put them down and learned there was nothing else and went out. Aunt Flora picked up the glasses in turn and examined them; with a piece of paper tissue she polished their bowls. Then, and only then, did she pour from the shaker and before she drank she sniffed doubtfully at the cocktail. Pam sniffed too.

“Smell all right, don't they?” Aunt Flora enquired. Pam nodded, not happily.

“Well,” Aunt Flora said, reasonably, “we can't live forever, dearie. Here's to us.”

She drank. Pam wished briefly that Jerry were not so far away. Then she drank too. After the first sip both women waited, as if for an expected noise. Nothing happened. They drank again, with increased confidence.

“Well,” said Aunt Flora. “One more bridge crossed. And now, Pamela—I want you to find him. That's really why I insisted on your coming. From all I've heard, it's right up your alley. Pamela North, the Lady Detective.”

“That's nonsense,” Pam said. “Of course I'll help, if I can. But it's Bill you want—Bill Weigand. Lieutenant William Weigand. He's the detective.”

Aunt Flora shook her head and body emphatically.

“No,” she said. “Not your policeman, Pam. Not yet anyway, dearie. For now, anyway, we'll just keep it in the family. Because it's already in the family, you know. Just a little arsenic among relatives, dearie.”

2

T
UESDAY

5:15
P.M. TO
7:30
P.M.

Pam carried a squirming cat under each arm and dumped both on the bed. Then, before she did anything else, she went to one of the two windows at the end of the room and looked out into the street. She tried to look up toward Fifth Avenue, but the projecting corner of the apartment house next door cut off her view. The projecting corner of the apartment house on the east cut off her view toward Madison Avenue. Directly across the street, which was the only way left to look, another apartment house rose haughtily. The view, Pam decided, was not inspiring. She wondered absently why her first inclination on entering any room was to look out of it and decided that she would have to ask Jerry. He, she was sure, would have a theory.

“He always has theories,” she told the cats, which sat on the bed and stared at her, turning their heads in unison. “I wish Jerry were here. Particularly if there's going to be arsenic.” She paused and shook her head at the cats. “Not for him, sillies,” she told them. Ruffy talked back, cat fashion, in an affectionate growl. Toughy jumped on Ruffy's head, evidently intending to smother her. Ruffy hissed and wiggled, emerged and instantly regained calm. She began to wash behind her right shoulder. Toughy looked at her in surprise, got the idea and began to wash his tail. Ruffy jumped down, landing on the carpet with a soft plunk, and began to smell the room. It was, Pam thought, going to take Ruffy a long time if she did it all. It was interesting to discover that houses still had such large rooms.

But when you thought of it, as Pam idly did, it was odd that people should still be living in New York in such houses as the old Buddie house, which could hardly have been really a new house when Major Alden Buddie was a small boy and neither a major nor, by any reasonable stretch of the imagination, a prospective husband for so different and—well, remarkable—a woman as Flora Pickering, who was then an even smaller girl and living on a farm in Upstate New York. The house was older than any of them and, even considering Aunt Flora herself, more unexpected. More unexpected, certainly, as a final home for Flora Pickering, afterward Flora Buddie, afterward Flora McClelland and Flora Craig and Flora Anthony and now, as of this morning, Flora Buddie again.

“Well,” Pam told Toughy, her mind reeling a little, “Auntie got around, when you come to remember it. And now back here, with somebody trying to kill her.”

The old house was too dignified for such absurdities as Aunt Flora and attempted murder. Even now, when it had been hemmed in and, seemingly, pushed back, it was too dignified. It went up five stories and had a bow window on the second floor—the second floor if you counted the anomalous layer which was half under the earth and half above it as the first. Once it had been one of a row of dignified houses, all very like it in essentials, all representing good addresses for the right people. It had stood after most of the others had come down. Because Aunt Flora had been stubborn, it now stood in retreat, with a mountain of an apartment house on each shoulder.

It would once have been easy for Aunt Flora to sell it. The company collecting land parcels for the building on the Fifth Avenue corner had been willing to buy first, and after that the company building the apartment next door to the east had made an offer. But Aunt Flora had refused both, and the companies had shrugged corporate shoulders and gone on about their building. They had used all the ground the law allowed, coming flush to the building lines along the sidewalk, so that the Buddie house, which had once withdrawn genteelly from passersby and only licked at them with the tongue of its brown front steps, now looked merely sunken in.

“And,” Jerry had once told Pam as they stood in front looking at it, preparing to confront Aunt Flora and pay their somewhat awed respects, “and now it's merely something called ‘permanent light and air.' Which means that nobody will ever make another offer.”

The permanent light and air did not, however, belong to the house itself. In the house itself you looked on the outer world as through a key-hole.

Pam's room was in front, two flights up from the entrance foyer. It was wider and deeper and higher than was altogether convenient in a bedroom. Its windows were so tall and wide that it was impossible to open them for merely a little air, so that one had to choose between the resident air and a chilling hurricane. It was at a fine level to collect street noises and street dust and it had only one smallish closet, opening in the wall opposite the windows and next the door leading to the bathroom, which had a ventilator down which a peculiar, oily dust descended, when the wind was wrong, and from which the dust fell into the bathtub. But the room had dignity.

“Of course,” Pam said, in a rather lonely voice, since Toughy had now joined his sister in smelling the room, “you can't have everything.”

At the moment, she thought again, it would be nice to have Jerry. She had read his most recent letter hurriedly when she left the apartment to spend a dutiful few days with Aunt Flora—and to avoid looking at Jerry's empty bed at nights—and now she took it out of her purse to read again. Jerry said it was cold in Texas. He said it in an aggrieved tone since, being a New Yorker, he had supposed that Texas was warm, even in January. He was about a third of the way through the book, and was afraid that it was
very
like “Gone With the Wind.” He missed her.

Pam curled up at one end of the big bed when she reached this part and read it carefully. He missed her very much. He was explicit to a degree and in terms which made Pam feel deliciously unlike an accepted and familiar wife.

“Wow!” Pam said, softly, and read part of the letter again. It would be
very
nice to have Jerry home. It would also be nice to find a secure place in which to sequester the letter. Pam looked around, shook her head and put the letter back in her purse. She looked at the little ball watch dangling from a chain around her neck. She dismissed Jerry from her thoughts, went to the bathroom, wiped part of the oily dust from the tub and turned on the hot water. It ran slowly, but it ran hot. The cats followed her into the bathroom and Ruffy put forepaws on the edge of the tub and peered at the water. She was about to get in to investigate when Pam caught her.

The tub was full, finally, and the cats shut out. Pam ignored their protests at this arrangement and relaxed. She wiggled her toes and regarded them. She really should, she decided, have polish put on again. But then, in the winter, what was really the point? Jerry hadn't mentioned her toes.

“Now,” Pam told herself, “to get to Aunt Flora and arsenic.” To start somewhere, you could start with the people in the house. So—. She went over what Aunt Flora had told her while they finished their second cocktail in front of the fire. Take the servants. Sand, the butler; the new maid, Alice Something; the cook, not new, Something Jensen—Clara, that was it. Mrs. Clara Jensen. There must be a lot of work for Alice Something in a house as big as this if Sand only butlered and Mrs. Jensen only cooked. And then there was Harry.

Where you put Harry, Pam found it hard to say. He was not a servant, certainly, although often he puttered around the house, putting in fuses, pasting down loose flaps of wall-paper, putting knobs back on drawers. It had never been easy to place Harry—Harry Jenkins, that was it. He lived on the top floor, and he was almost as old as Aunt Flora and much thinner and it had always been a question in Pam's mind whether he went with the house or with Aunt Flora. Probably, she decided, squeezing water out of a sponge and letting it flow in again, he went with Aunt Flora. Probably he was something out of Aunt Flora's past. If things were really to be investigated, that would have to be found out.

Now you came to family. And things became complicated because Aunt Flora's family was apt to prove intricate.

“I'm the simplest,” Pam thought. “Just a niece, child of a sister. After that—.” Pam sighed and washed her face, absently.

It was a little simpler if you started with the Buddies, since Aunt Flora had now formally declared herself again a Buddie and since, after all, the Buddies represented the senior branch. Flora Pickering had started with the Buddies when she was a rounded, pretty girl and was visiting relatives in the Indian Territory long before it became Oklahoma. Then she had met Major Alden Buddie, of the New York Buddies, on post in country still not tame, and married him quickly and lived with him very happily until he died when they were both still young. And he had left her what must then have seemed all the money in the world and was still, Pam suspected, a good deal of it.

Of the Buddies, extant and in the house, there was first a second Alden, now also a major, and his daughters, Clem who was eighteen and Judy who was two years older. Clem and Judy, Pam gathered, were staying with their grandmother during an undetermined interim, its length eventually to be decided by the final army assignment of their father, who was now majoring at a nearby army post. In New Jersey, that was it. It was a bad time to predict the future of an army major and his daughters. The major himself stayed at Aunt Flora's when he was in the city, which apparently was often.

That evening, at any rate, there would be a fourth Buddie—Christopher. He was another grandchild, the son of Dr. Wesley Buddie, who was the second son of the first Major Buddie and Aunt Flora. All that Pam could remember about him was that he was going to be a playwright.

“If it kills him,” Pam added to herself, swabbing.

That did for the Buddies immediately under foot.

“I can widen it later if I have to,” Pam thought, and sighed.

After Major Buddie, Aunt Flora had married Robert McClelland, who later became a chief of police, and was now happily divorced. By him, Aunt Flora had one son named Something or Other McClelland and Something or Other had had, in turn, a son named Bruce, whom Pam knew rather well and liked, and who was reporting on a morning newspaper.

“And who isn't around,” she said to herself, thankfully. “Not tonight, anyway. But I don't know about arsenic day.”

After Mr. McClelland there came, surprisingly, a baseball player, named Craig and from him another son to Aunt Flora. She ran to sons, Pam decided. This son was Benjamin Craig, who lived staidly at home with his mother and who staidly managed a branch bank. He was vague in Pam's mind, but he would be there at dinner time. There would be a good many to dinner. Reluctantly, Pam emerged from warm water and towelled. Remembering Jerry's letter briefly, she regarded herself in the long mirror set into the door. She surprised herself by blushing slightly and went into the bedroom, which was chilly enough to make her dress quickly.

BOOK: Hanged for a Sheep
13.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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