The Grub-and-Stakers Pinch a Poke Read online

  Roger nodded approval. “That’s fine. Now the bell.”

  Dittany shook her head. “No bell.”

  “You don’t have one? That’s all right, I can bring—”

  “Don’t you dare, Roger Munson! Carolus Bledsoe is not getting a bell. Men are the world’s worst invalids. They get bored lying in bed and start pestering for attention. I’m not going to stand for being dingalinged at every two minutes by somebody I don’t even particularly care for, if you want the honest truth. Osbert or I will go up and check on Carolus at reasonable intervals, and we’ll decide for ourselves what’s reasonable so don’t bother to tell us. We’ll provide him with books, jigsaw puzzles, a radio, crayons and a coloring book, or whatever else will keep him amused. We’ll keep him warm and fed and—oh gosh, we won’t have to do baths and bedpans?”

  “No,” Roger assured her. “He’s allowed to get up long enough to attend to his personal needs. He’ll need crutches or a cane and perhaps some assistance getting in and out of bed. A bell would—”

  “No it wouldn’t. We have a pair of crutches Carolus can use. Mum bought them for Dad the time he broke his leg trying to learn the samba. If he needs help getting up he can holler down the stairs. Why don’t you scoot along home to your dinner and let us take it from here? Since you have everything so well organized,” Dittany added, for she did like Roger Munson despite his perfectionistic tendencies.

  “Yes, I’d better get cracking,” he agreed. “I mustn’t upset Hazel’s schedule. I’ll drop over again later on and bring that portable television set Dave won last year in the hockey club raffle. Nobody at our house ever watches it anyway.”

  That stood to reason. Few Lobelia Falls residents ever did have much time to spend with the tube, not that they cared. Everyday life there was far too crammed with action and drama for the prepackaged variety to hold much attraction. Being from Scottsbeck, however, Carolus Bledsoe would no doubt welcome the diversion.

  Roger didn’t really have to bring his set over as the Monks had a perfectly good one of their own that they didn’t watch often, either, but they said it was very nice of him and handed him the tray to take up. He came back downstairs a few minutes later with a list of commissions from the invalid, explained at some length what he was going to do about them, and finally, to the Monks’ ineffable relief, went home.

  “Okay, pardner, now what about Charlie?” Osbert asked when he’d got Dittany arranged to their mutual satisfaction.

  Dittany repeated what she’d told Sergeant MacVicar. Osbert understood perfectly.

  “That was positively noble of you, darling. And how could you possibly have anticipated what happened? After all, whoever had it in for Carolus could just as easily have got at him before the performance. Easier, I should think, and nothing happened then. As it is, we’ll be able to keep him under guard until his toe heals and by then we ought to have found out who switched those cartridges. I just wish Sergeant MacVicar would get back here. He didn’t say when he was coming?”

  “No, but three o’clock probably wouldn’t be far off the mark, unless Nancy comes with some more eggs.”

  Sunday dinnertime for Lobelia Falls was from half past one to half past two, allowing half an hour’s leeway in either direction for getting the kids’ hands washed, making the gravy, organizing the dishwashing, and taking postprandial snoozes. This was not a municipal ordinance, merely a way of causing the smallest number of persons the least amount of inconvenience in scheduling archery meets, rehearsals of the madrigal society, family visits, and the myriad other activities in which all the townsfolk got involved to a greater or lesser degree. Dittany supposed she ought to be thinking about their own dinner, although she and Osbert were the neighborhood iconoclasts when it came to keeping on schedule.

  She’d as soon not bother, herself, but what about Archie and Daniel? Was Andy planning to bring them back here in time for the meal he might assume she was cooking when in fact she wasn’t, or would he keep up his angel of mercy act long enough to feed them someplace else? She asked Osbert, but he didn’t know.

  “Couldn’t we just make some ham sandwiches?” was his suggestion.

  “No we couldn’t,” Dittany said. “Carolus got the last bit of ham.”

  “Then an omelet?”

  “The eggs are all gone. We’re still pretty well fixed for doughnuts, jelly, and dog food.”

  “Well then, not to worry. Ethel won’t mind sharing in a pinch. Will you, faithful friend?”

  It need hardly be said that Ethel had joined them on the couch. Rather, roughly half of her had joined them. The half there wasn’t room for remained sprawled on the floor or suspended in between. She seemed comfortable enough. The interlude was a pleasant one and they’d all three have been happier if the doorbell hadn’t put an end to it.

  “Oh gosh,” Dittany groaned, “don’t tell me they’re back already. What the heck did they go to the front door for? Arethusa knows we’re always in the kitchen.”

  “That’s not Aunt Arethusa,” said Osbert. “She’d be thumping and hollering by now. I’ll go, dear. You stay here and rest yourself.”

  “Hah! As if anybody in this dad-dratted town was going to let me.” She wiggled off the couch and straightened her blouse. “No, let us both be up and doing with a heart for any fate. You can be the right ventricle this time. Come on, Ethel, why should we break up the party?”

  Their expedition proved to be not only over-manned but also over-womanned and over-dogged. Nobody was at the door. However, a long white box from the Scottsbeck florist lay on the doormat.

  “Oh how lovely,” Dittany cried. “Mum and Bert must have ordered flowers by phone.”

  “Nope,” said Osbert, who had eyes like an eagle’s but more amiable. “The card says they’re for Carolus. Here, let me—Ethel, get out of the way.”

  The dog had leaped in front of him and straddled the box, baring her teeth. As Osbert tried to get it out from under her, she actually growled at him.

  “Ethel, what’s got into you?” Dittany scolded. “You know better than that. Osbert, stop her!”

  But there was no stopping Ethel. She caught up the box by its cord, leaped over the veranda railing, and raced off to Cat Alley with Carolus’s present clutched in her jaws like a giant bone.

  “She’s gone plumb loco,” yelled Osbert. He was over the railing, too, racing after her. “Ethel, you mutt, come back here.”

  “She’ll ruin those flowers.”

  Dittany ran down the steps and joined in the race, though she wasn’t much of a runner herself. Osbert was fast, but Ethel easily outdistanced him. Before he could get anywhere near her, she braked and started ripping at the box like a hunger-maddened malamute. Growling, snapping, pawing, she had it apart in no time. But no broken blossoms appeared. Instead, something long, thin, and brown slithered out of the wreckage, reared about a third of its length upright, spread an ugly hood of skin over its head, and hissed.

  “Galloping longhorns, it’s a cobra!” yelled Osbert. “Dittany, stay back! Ethel! Ethel, come here. Come on, old girl! Come on!”

  No longer a raging, snarling demon-dog, Ethel bounded back to them, ears flapping, tail churning, delighted with herself as well she had reason to be.

  “She saved his life,” Dittany marveled. “Ethel risked her own life to save Carolus Bledsoe’s.”

  “I doubt if Ethel read the card, dear.” Osbert had one arm around Dittany and the other around their faithful friend. “Ethel, old pard, I don’t know how to—Dittany darling, have we a really big steak in the house?”

  “No, but we’ll get you one, Ethel.” Dittany was sniffling into the thick black fur. “We’ll get you anything you want, forever and ever. Oh Ethel, what if the cobra had bitten you? Osbert, what are we going to do about that thing? We can’t leave it crawling around loose.”

  “I don’t think any snake’s going to crawl far in this weather, dearest,” he reassured her. “Look, it’s already got its hood down, it’ll be torpid i
n a minute. So will we if we stay out here any longer without our coats. Come on back in the house before you catch pneumonia.”

  “Ethel wouldn’t let a germ get near us,” Dittany laughed, rubbing away her tears on Osbert’s sleeve. “Would you, old buddy? Are you quite sure that cobra’s not about to start chasing us, Osbert?”

  “What it’s about to do is freeze to death if it doesn’t find a place to get warm pretty soon. I see a bunch of tissue paper in what’s left of that box, which would have given it some insulation against the cold. Probably not quite enough, though, which was a lucky break for us. If it were warm it would have reacted a darn sight faster.”

  The cobra would have warned up fast enough once it got inside the house. Dittany realized she was shivering. “Darling, don’t you find this totally unbelievable?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, dear. I shouldn’t say a cobra was any more unbelievable than the tarantula that showed up on Carolus’s coat at the airport.”

  “But that came out of Arethusa’s corsage. Didn’t it?”

  “Darling, Aunt Arethusa must have been toting that mess of shrubbery around for hours before we met her. Even she’d have had a hard time not to notice a spider the size of a kitten somewhere along the way.”

  “Then it must have been in the bouquet Andy McNaster—darling, Andy wouldn’t have done a thing like that. Would he?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, darling. People were coming and going all the time, you know. We weren’t paying any attention to them because we were talking among ourselves. It could have been anybody. Come on, it’s wiggling. Let’s get away from here.”

  Safe inside the door, Osbert turned around for a last look at the deadly reptile. It was flat on the snow now, trying to crawl away but getting no traction on the cold, slippery surface. Loathesome as the snake was, he felt a twinge of pity.

  “What a rotten thing to do. Darling, I think I’ll put on my high boots and heavy gloves and see if I can rig a snare at the end of my fishing pole. We can’t just let it die out there.”

  “It would have let Ethel die,” said Dittany soberly. “But after all, it’s only a snake. I don’t suppose it understands how we feel about her. I’ll go find one of those heavy cardboard boxes Mum bought the time she was going to get organized. Then I’ll put on my own boots and come with you.”

  “No, darling, I’m afraid it would be too traumatic for Ethel if we both went. You’d better stay here and be ready to administer first aid if she swoons.”

  Ethel’s was, after all, the greater need. “All right, darling,” Dittany conceded, “but I move we give the cobra a few minutes’ more refrigerating time before you go back out there.”

  Chapter 14

  AS THINGS TURNED OUT, capturing the cobra was no great feat. By the time Osbert had rigged a wire noose on the end of his fly rod and Dittany had got him togged out in a manner that suggested the White Knight’s safeguards against the bites of sharks, the cobra was so thoroughly refrigerated that Osbert could simply have picked it up by the tail and tossed it into the box. However, he carried out the operation by the book, then set the box down cellar next to the furnace with a cord around the middle and a brick on top in case the cobra should revive feeling frisky.

  “Maybe we should have set a saucer of milk inside,” Dittany fretted. “The poor thing will be hungry when it thaws out.”

  “Are you quite sure cobras drink milk, dear?” Osbert was having a tough time getting out of his protective gear, and spoke in short grunts.

  “That’s what the villain fed the snake in The Speckled Band.”

  “Possibly his was a milk snake. Would you mind helping me off with these boots? They’re so full of socks I can’t budge them.”

  “Not at all, dear,” Dittany replied, suiting the action to the word. “That third pair was probably redundant, but I wasn’t about to take any chances of his biting you in the calf. Or her, as the case may be. Darling, has it occurred to you that Roger Munson’s going to be awfully miffed because we didn’t let him tell us how to catch the cobra?”

  “Actually, it hadn’t. What does occur to me is that we’ve got to find out pronto who left that box. Would you mind calling the Binkles and asking them if they saw a messenger stop here?”

  “I’ll call but they won’t be home. They both sing in the choir at St. Agapantha’s.”

  “One of them could have come down with laryngitis,” Osbert pointed out.

  Evidently neither of them had; Dittany got no answer. That was bad. At this end of Applewood Avenue, there were only themselves and the Binkles. The road, which was no avenue at all, petered out into a cul-de-sac connecting only with Cat Alley, the lane that rambled across to the Enchanted Mountain and trickled up and over into the country road on the opposite side of what was really no mountain, either, but only a fair-sized hill.

  Cat Alley hadn’t been plowed all winter but the young bloods of Lobelia Falls had done plenty of skiing, sliding, and snowmobiling on it. By now the snow was packed down so hard that a four-wheel-drive vehicle could probably get through from the other end without much trouble. As could a skier or a snowmobiler, of course. The hitch there was that the Monks’ kitchen windows gave them clear views of the lane and the mountain, and Osbert and Dittany had been in the kitchen some little while when the doorbell rang. Granted, they hadn’t been concentrating on the scenery but they could hardly have missed anybody approaching the house.

  “I can’t believe that messenger came the back way,” said Osbert. “We’d surely have seen him. Or her.”

  “But we didn’t hear a car in the road,” Dittany argued.

  “The messenger could have parked at the corner and walked in. Or ridden a bike. Or a horse with muffled feet. Hooves, I mean,” Osbert amended, as he was a stickler for technical equine accuracy. “Darling, why don’t you phone around to a few of the neighbors and see whether anybody saw anything? I’d better check on Carolus.”

  “You’re not intending to question him?”

  “Oh no, that would hardly be according to protocol. We have to wait for the sheriff.”

  “What sheriff?”

  Osbert blushed a little. “I mean Sergeant MacVicar. I like to think of him as the sheriff. You understand, don’t you, dear?”

  “Of course, dearest. You’re not going to get to brooding on distant mesas up there and forget to bring down the tray, are you?”

  “Nary a brood, pardner. I wonder whether Carolus would like some of my Max Brands to read.”

  “Why don’t you give him that new book of Arethusa’s instead?” Dittany suggested. “Perfidy in a Peruke ought to send him galloping back to Wilhedra’s waiting arms, though what she wants of him is beyond me.”

  She gave Osbert a bon voyage kiss to help him upstairs and went to the telephone. Three numbers later, she was still dialing in vain. Everybody and his grandfather must have gone to church. Was this a sudden mass craving for divine guidance, she wondered cynically, or an urge to buttonhole fellow congregants after the services and exchange views on the play, the Architrave’s acquisition of the Thorbisher-Freep collection, and Carolus Bledsoe’s middle toe? Why the heck couldn’t a few of them have stayed home and peeked through the front room curtains? Dittany gave up after the sixth try and went to see what she could scrape together for dinner assuming she got stuck with having to cook one.

  She didn’t. Arethusa and her entourage rolled in about half past two burbling about the marvelous pizza they’d stopped for at a place Andy knew and insisting they couldn’t possibly eat another bite. Unless Dittany had been planning to offer them tea and some of that leftover coffee cake, Arethusa added thoughtfully. Dittany replied with relief that she had in fact been about to do just that, and sat them down around the kitchen table because she was darned if she’d mess up the dining room twice in one day.

  It didn’t take long to discover that Arethusa had another fish in her net. Archie was keeping his eyes fixed on her as if he were Coventry Patmore gestating some s
entimental line like, “Ah, would I were that blob of raspberry jelly upon thin alabaster cheek.”

  Andy was looking similarly moonstruck, though that was nothing to write home about, and Carolus Bledsoe was no doubt wondering why Arethusa wasn’t up there cheering his bed of pain instead of down here gobbling up everything edible. Only Daniel seemed immune to her allure. His full attention was still fixed upon Andrew McNaster.

  Dittany, having refilled the teapot and got its cosy tugged firmly down over its fat brown sides, fixed her own attention on Daniel. She knew, of course, about the boy bees and the girl bees. She accepted the fact that boy bees sometimes preferred boy bees to girl bees, whereas girl bees might choose to buzz along with other girl bees to the total exclusion of boy bees. It was not her place to pass judgment on their proclivities even though she herself was firmly aligned with the boy bee-girl bee faction. But Daniel’s interest in Andy didn’t strike her as that of a boy bee getting up his nerve to invite another boy bee to join him at the next buttercup for a sip of nectar and maybe a little roll in the pollen. What the heck was Daniel up to?

  Daniel was up to eating another slice of coffee cake, at any rate. Dittany cut it for him and went on making tea-table conversation even as she pondered his odd behavior. She wasn’t able to get in much pondering time, however, as Sergeant MacVicar showed up on the dot of three in strict accordance with local protocol.

  He’d changed into his customary uniform, which didn’t make him any less awe-inspiring a figure. He refused tea, to Dittany’s relief since Arethusa had by now pretty much cleared the table, and got straight to business.

  “Deputy Monk, hae there been any new developments?”

  Osbert swallowed the last of his own cake and made his brief report. “We’ve acquired a cobra.”

  Whatever Sergeant MacVicar might have been expecting, it clearly was not a cobra. He actually went so far as to raise his eyebrows.