The Grub-And-Stakers House a Haunt (21 page)

“I’m so mad I could spit! Not a blessed scrap missing except Granny’s gaiters, the one thing above all that I really do treasure.”

“Who besides yourself has been up here since you cleaned?” Dittany asked her.

“Nobody, or so I thought. Of course I haven’t been home every minute of the day. You know how it is, you’re popping in and out. But I always lock my door. Most always anyhow, unless I’m just running over to Zilla’s or down to your place, or-well, you know.”

“Sure. And sometimes you’re gone for hours at a time.

And when you do lock the door, you stick the key under the mat on the back doorstep.”

“Well, naturally. I have to get back in, don’t I? Why shouldn’t I stay out if I feel like it? There’s nothing special to keep me here, now that I’ve quit taking in boarders.

Though Mrs. Melloe did mention that she’s thinking about finding a quieter place to stay. She’s fed up with the inn, which doesn’t surprise me much considering the way Hedrick Snarf runs the place.”

“Minerva Oakes, if you take that woman into your house you might as well book yourself a reservation at the booby hatch while you’re about it. She’d drive you crazy in a week.”

“Yes, but the poor soul-“

“Poor soul, my eyeball!” Dittany snarled. “Mrs. Melloe’s got more gold clanking around her neck than most miners ever took out of the Klondike. Probably a darn sight more than Hiram Jellyby claims to have seen in that chest we haven’t been able to find. Why can’t she move over to Scottsbeck and rent a car to get back and forth?”

“She says she doesn’t drive.”

“Good, then maybe she won’t come so often. Let her take a taxi, or hire a limousine and chauffeur. Or better still, go away and quit pestering us all to dig up her roots for her. Come on, Minerva, if we’re through here we’d better let Sergeant Mac Vicar know what’s happened. Too bad you cleaned so thoroughly, we might have found some footprints in the dust. I suppose he’ll be mad at us for straightening up, but none of this stuff would have taken fingerprints very well and nowadays everybody knows enough to wear gloves anyway.”

“And furthermore, I’m not keen on having it told around town what a slack-twisted housekeeper I am,” Mrs.

Oakes confessed. “Do we really have to call the sergeant?”

“I think he’d feel terribly slighted if we didn’t,” Dittany replied, knowing the best way to Minerva’s heart.

“And so would his wife, though of course Margaret wouldn’t let on for fear of hurting your feelings. You know how careful Margaret Mac Vicar is about people’s feelings.”

“Yes, of course, I should have thought. Do you want to call the station, or shall I?”

“Well, it’s your attic.”

“And my gaiter, or was. You don’t suppose Ethel’s eaten the other one?”

“Gosh, I hope not. She’d be sick for a week. No, of course she didn’t. Go ahead, Minerva.”

“Donald MacVicar won’t think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill?”

“Absolutely not,” Dittany insisted.

“All right then, if you say so.” Grudgingly, Minerva Oakes picked up the phone.

,/lnd you’re certain this

is your esteemed Granny’s gaiter?” said the sergeant.

“As certain as I can be,” Minerva replied in no uncertain tone. “I had the gaiters out to show Mrs. Melloe just yesterday afternoon. I’d come across them the day before when I was cleaning the attic and thought she’d be interested to see them because she’s so red-hot on finding her roots. Her own greatgrandmother was a Pitcher, she told me, though she hasn’t yet figured out just how we’re connected.

Assuming we are, that is. I’m not altogether sure I want us to be, if you care to hear the plain truth. Any woman who keeps her gloves on while she’s eating a buttered scone is just too cussed refined for my simple tastes.”

“She didna!”

“I’ll bet you she did,” said Dittany, never one to hang back when she had a perfectly legitimate excuse to come forward. “She wore them this noontime at the Cozy Corner, eating soup. Though actually Mrs. Melloe wasn’t so much eating her soup as complaining about it and waving her spoon at the waitress, who was in no mood to be spooned at, as who could blame her? Anyway, the gloves were navy blue to match her shoes, stockings, hat, and handbag. I couldn’t see her slip. Mrs. Melloe does have lovely clothes, I must say. Today she had on a blue flowered shirtwaist with-oh, all right, Sergeant, you can quit glaring at me and get on with the grilling. I just thought Margaret would enjoy hearing about the outfit.”

“Nae doot.” Sergeant MacVicar’s tone implied that Dittany was growing more like her mother every day, though this time he didn’t come straight out and say so.

“Noo then, Minerva Oakes, what did you do with yon gaiters after you’d shown them to Mrs. Melloe?”

“I took them back to the attic and put them in a wicker trunk with some other things of Granny Pitcher’s, down at the bottom under her archery skirt and her wedding petticoat.”

“And who knew you kept your granny’s clothes in yon wicker trunk?”

“Why, nobody. I’d had them put away in different boxes and whatnot, but while I was straightening around up there, I got the bright idea of putting them all together in the wicker trunk. So I took everything else out of the trunk and repacked it with Granny’s things and wrote out a list and stuck it inside the lid so that when the time comes to settle my estate, my children will know whose they were and not go tossing them out or selling them to an antique dealer. And I must say I’m none too happy about the way everything got slung around the floor, nor do I appreciate what happened to Granny’s gaiter. Do you think there’s any hope of finding the other one, Sergeant?”

“We can always hope, Minerva. Were you here all last evening?”

“Well no, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t. I dropped over to Hazel Munson’s for a few minutes to return a cake plate of hers that I’d been forgetting to take back, what with the excitement about the community garden and all. We got to talking, you know how you do. And it was a lovely night and Hazel’s boys were out and Roger was down at the firehouse playing cribbage, so we thought we’d take a little stroll. We stopped for a while to listen to the madrigal singers rehearsing for the concert, which is going to be just lovely, then there was that big ruckus at the inn. What with one thing and another, I suppose I was gone a good part of the evening, though I hadn’t meant to be.”

“Did you lock your door as you left the house?”

“Come to think of it, I don’t suppose I did. I’d only intended to be gone those few minutes, you see. And you know how it’s been all these years, nobody ever thought to lock a door till Andy McNaster snatched the old Hendryx place and turned it into a honky-tonk. After Andy reformed, the inn got to be a really nice place, but since that Hedrick Snarf came along, it seems to be no more than a den of iniquity. Is it true that all those so-called swells last night were really a bunch of crooks?”

“Oh aye, we made quite a lucky haul.” Sergeant Mac Vicar was trying to appear humble but he had so little to be humble about that he missed his mark by a long shot. “For a while it was standing room only at the Scottsbeck jail. And noo I must be off in search of your stolen property. By your leave, I’ll take yon remaining gaiter with me so that my men will know what to look for.”

“Yes, of course.”

“And, Dittany, I think I must also borrow Deputy Monk and Ethel.”

“You’re taking Hiram Jellyby’s story about the purple-gaitered highwayman seriously, then?”

“Let us say that I am taking seriously the suspeecion that somebody else is trying to make use of the late Mr.

Jellyby’s story for reasons that can thus far only be conjectured but must be looked into. Not wishing to disappoint either you or my wife, Dittany lass, I fear Margaret will not be available to mind yon wee bairns so that you can join the hunt.”

“If you wanted to bring them over here-” Minerva offered with no great enthusiasm.

“Oh no, I wouldn’t think of it,” Dittany assured her.

“You’d better get out your slingshot and stand guard by the attic stairs in case that ornery coyote comes back for Winona’s wedding petticoat. I expect Zilla would be glad to keep you company.”

“I doubt it. Zilla’s got her hands full shooing Hiram Jellyby away from the dandelion wine crock. A ghost in your woodshed’s bad enough, but that pie-eyed old mule skinner’s something else again. I told Zilla she’d better get Mr. Pennyfeather over to exorcise Hiram before he conjures up his mule team and has them stomping around out there with him, but she says she feels funny asking.”

“You can hardly blame her for that,” said Dittany.

“Exorcism’s not a very kind thing to do to a ghost who’s just trying to be sociable.”

“Oh, I suppose you’re right. Frankly, I think Zilla kind of likes having Hiram around because he reminds her a little of Michael Trott. You’re not old enough to have remembered Michael, Dittany, and I can’t say you’ve missed much, though I hope you won’t tell Zilla I said so. She’s over at Hunnikers’ Field just now. She figured there might be a few hopefuls out digging again and one of us had better show up, just in case. There’s the gaiter, Sergeant. I’d be grateful if you’d keep it in this bag so that it won’t get mauled around any worse than it’s already been. Maybe I’m being foolish, but those gaiters mean a lot to me.”

Sergeant MacVicar said he understood how Minerva felt, wrote her an official receipt on a leaf out of her grocery pad, and took his leave with the remaining artifact tucked under his arm. Dittany walked along beside him, oddly silent. Until Minerva mentioned digging just now, she’d entirely forgotten Hiram’s tale about Charlie Henbit’s having been a dowser and her own promise to try her hand at witching up that trunkful of gold pieces. Whatever had made her say she would? All she knew about dowsing was from watching Pollicot James walk back and forth with that little contraption of assorted metals held out in front of him.

One thing sure, Dittany Henbit Monk was not about to make a fool of herself in front of whoever might be out there now. She wondered whether Hiram’s eyeballs were up to another after-dark treasure hunt. She’d like to ask Osbert, but it didn’t look as though she was going to get the chance since Sergeant MacVicar was coming in with her.

Osbert greeted them both like a pair of long-lost cousins.

“Swiveling sidewinders, am I glad you’ve shown up!

I’ve had an epiphany.”

“Really?” said Dittany. “Where did you put it?”

“Nowhere, yet, but I’m-well, the thing of it is, I’ve been referring to the females in the herd that’s getting poached by the bad guys as lady elk. ‘Female’ sounds too coldly biological and ‘she-elk’ a trifle peremptory, don’t you think? But then ‘lady elk’ began to strike me as too drawing-roomish for a split-hooved ruminant who’s married to a galloping hat rack. So then it occurred to me that ‘cow elk’ might be the appropriate term. As in ‘cow moose,’

you know. And then all of a sudden it struck me about the cow.”

“As it naturally would.” Dittany was not unused to Osbert’s epiphanies. “When you say ‘the cow,’ are you referring to cows in general, cows as the significant others of bulls, or one specific cow?”

“That’s what I love about you, dear, you’re so brilliantly logical. The specific cow I have in mind is the cow who trampled the bank clerk to death in an unexplained fit of pique.”

“Oh, of course. Silly of me not to have realized. What about that cow, darling?”

“Well, as you know, dairy cows aren’t precisely my field. But I couldn’t recall Zane Grey’s ever mentioning anything about a cow trampling its milker to death for what was apparently no good reason, so I got to thinking about that bank guard’s cow. And the more I thought, the odder it got. So what I’m getting at is, how would you feel about calling up the RCMP, Chief, and asking them if they know what happened to that cow, and whether they ever found out what made her turn so belligerent all of a sudden?”

“M’ph. I was about to ask you, Deputy Monk, to assist in a hunt for that purple gaiter of which Mrs. Oakes was robbed last night. Howsomever, if you feel strongly that the late bank clerk’s cow is in any way germane to the problem at hand, I will authorize you to make the call yourself whilst I round up a posse.”

“Ormerod Burlson’s better than I am at finding things.”

“Officer Burlson lacks your quickness of perception.

Pairchance you may care to join the hunt once your curiosity about yon cow is satisfied?”

“Oh, yes, sure. Thanks, Chief. Would you know the RCMP’s phone number offhand?”

It went without saying that Sergeant MacVicar did.

He suggested that Osbert ask to be connected with Constable Alexander MacVicar, Corporal Andrew MacVicar, or Sergeant Archibald MacVicar, depending on which of his three sons might be available at the moment, and explain to them that the matter was urgent. He would leave it to Deputy Monk to think of a reasonable excuse for chasing down information about an animal that had probably been transmigrated into dog food eight years ago.

Sergeant MacVicar didn’t add this last thought aloud because he’d learned through experience to respect Deputy Monk’s hunches even when they popped up at inconvenient times. He went off to assemble his posse, Osbert rushed to the telephone. Dittany, left alone with her dilemma, decided she might as well wash a load of diapers.

She’d barely got the detergent measured out when Osbert stuck his head down the cellar stairway.

“I’m off, dear. Charlie Evans is flying me down to Kingston in the crop-dusting plane and Andrew MacVicar’s arranged for a police car to meet me at the airport. I should be home by suppertime.”

“Hasta la vista.”

What else could she say? Time was when Dittany would have crowded happily into that small and smelly airplane and flown into the blue with her husband. Now she could only wait and hope the cow had seen the error of its ways. The beast must still be alive, at any rate, or Osbert wouldn’t be dashing off like this. Darn it, why did men have all the epiphanies and women get stuck with the laundry?

As Dittany added the softening agent that was supposed to be kinder to infant Burns than any other leading softening agent, her eye drifted to the heavy overhead beams. Gramp Henbit had been a great one for driving nails into those beams and hanging things on them, such as bunches of rusty keys that didn’t unlock anything and strange little gadgets for doing things that probably didn’t need doing and wouldn’t have got done even if a person ever found out what they were intended to do. Dittany felt about Cramp’s artifacts much as Minerva Oakes felt about Winona Pitcher’s purple gaiters: they weren’t good for much but she wouldn’t part with them for the world.