The Grub-And-Stakers Move a Mountain Read online

  “Dittany, are you sure you haven’t been overdoing?” said Jane Binkle anxiously.

  “I’m sure I have but what the heck? Want to come along and be material witnesses? Don’t trip over the shovels getting in.”

  The Binkles looked at one another, then climbed in among the trash containers, the flash bulbs, the plastic bags, and Gram Henbit’s old graniteware dishpan Dittany had brought along because, as she’d remarked to Osbert, you never knew.

  They’d barely got up to Lookout Point when Sergeant MacVicar pulled in behind them. He strode to the scene of the crime, surveyed the evidence, and delivered his awful verdict. “I see absolutely no excuse for this sort of thing whatever.”

  He impounded Ethel’s trophy as Exhibit A, sniffed knowingly at Osbert’s paper cupful of beer-soaked mud, checked over Dittany’s camera with expert care, then glared sternly through the viewfinder and began snapping pictures of the broken bottles, the soggy ground, and the tire tracks made by the van.

  “Now, Mr. Frankland, I will photograph you taking soil samples. We will put them in these plastic bags, which we will identify in numerical sequence using the sticky labels provided by Dittany Henbit. Jane and Henry, you will please stand close to Frankland so that you can be identified as witnesses. Miss Monk, you will be so good as to join them and control that great napping cape so it doesn’t block my view.”

  Ben obliged by scooping shovelfuls of the reeking earth into the plastic bags Dittany held open for him while Sergeant MacVicar took pictures from various artistic angles. “Want me to take these over to the lab at the Water Department?” he offered. “I could run a soil analysis for you.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Frankland, but I deem it more advisable to take samples to the RCMP at Scottsbeck. This must not be taken as a reflection on your ability to perform the requisite functions. It is merely correct police procedure. Also it forestalls the possibility of some miscreant’s sneaking up behind you and committing an act of aggression while your attention is focused on your work.”

  “Let ’em try,” said Frankland bravely, but he did not press the matter.

  “And now that we have all the needed veridical evidence,” said Sergeant MacVicar, “we might clean up this broken glass lest it pose a safety hazard to the workers who will no doubt be up here at first crack of dawn.”

  Even Arethusa joined in the task. “If the Book-of-the-Month Club could only see me now, gadzooks,” she murmured as she sloshed a shovelful of debris into one of Dittany’s trash cans.

  “I’d take your picture if Sergeant MacVicar hadn’t used up all the film,” said Dittany, “but posterity will just have to do without. Sergeant MacVicar, what are you putting that broken glass in my car for?”

  “Well, you see, Dittany, we are somewhat cramped for space down at the station, whereas you have that big house all to yourself.”

  “Hah! All right. I suppose you’ll pinch me for impeding justice if I try to stop you. If nobody can think of anything else to load me down with, you might as well climb aboard. Jane and Henry, you’re both slim and lissome, you slide in front with me. The rest of you pile in back. Somebody will have to sit on Ethel’s lap, I guess.”

  “I’ll walk Ethel home,” Osbert volunteered.

  “The parfit gentil knight,” sneered his aunt. “He just wants to weasel out of carrying in the trash cans.”

  But she maligned him. Osbert was there to lug his share of shards into the cellar. Not having Arethusa’s nostalgic affinity for the odor of stale beer, Dittany would have been as well pleased if he hadn’t bothered. She’d extended enough hospitality for one night. It was a good deal more than high time for this party to be over.

  Chapter 16

  GETTING UP SUNDAY MORNING was about the fourth hardest thing Dittany Henbit had ever done in her life. She might never have made it if Hazel Munson hadn’t come to make sure the casseroles were being thawed, as of course they weren’t.

  “I might have known I could depend on nobody but myself,” she sniffed.

  “But Hazel, listen!”

  “Later.” Hazel charged down to the freezer and began fishing out casseroles. Blear-eyed in bathrobe and boots, Dittany could only sigh and help her fish. Once Hazel and the food were out of the house, she rushed back upstairs, took a fast shower, put on the yellow wool dress she’d bought on sale at Effie’s Chic Boutique because everybody was supposed to wear something golden-wedding color, and was thinking of breakfast when Ellie Despard arrived to collect the centerpieces.

  “Why aren’t you over setting up tables?” she demanded crossly. “How am I supposed to arrange these if I’ve nothing to put them on?”

  “Ellie, listen!”

  “Not now.” Bristling with gold paper and righteous indignation, Ellie ran out, ran back ran out, ran back, and at last ran out and stayed out. Dittany gulped a cup of tea and a stale bun she found in the fridge, got Ethel settled with water and dog food, ferried the cupcakes into Old Faithful with no mishap except a little smudged frosting, and headed for the Burberrys’.

  Work was already in progress. Sam Pitz, Bill Coskoff, and others were lugging out furniture and stacking it on the side porch to be protected by tarpaulins until all the pomps of yesterday were one with Nineveh and Tyre, after which time it would all have to be lugged in again. A heap of card tables and folding chairs lay ready to be set up in the space they were making. Dittany picked up a table, noted with surprise that it was her own, and joined the fray.

  Soon the place had taken on a semi-festive air. The dyed sheets, some spottiness to the contrary notwithstanding, made a cheery background for Ellie’s gold centerpieces. To be sure, these proved too large for their allotted spaces and were having to get a fast wing clip with Samantha’s manicure scissors, Ellie moaning that her effect was being ruined and getting assurance from anyone who could spare the breath that nobody would ever notice, which was probably the case as people so seldom do.

  Out in the kitchen, Hazel and her crew were thawing casseroles in pans of water, sorting out plates and forks, and assembling salads. The prospective host and hostess themselves had gone to the airport to collect the in-laws. That was just as well. Samantha was too dithery to help much and Joshua always tended to get lost in some intellectual profundity when decisive physical action was most urgently called for.

  Hazel’s plan was to have everything ready and most of the helpers gone before the Burberrys returned so that it would look as though Joshua and Samantha had engineered the whole affair. Only a few would stay and help serve the luncheon. These included Dittany, Minerva, Zilla, and, oddly enough, Arethusa Monk, who could be quite useful around a kitchen as long as she kept her mind off Sir Percy. Hazel herself had vowed to hang on until the last guest was fed and the crumbs cleared away regardless of the havoc her absence would wreak in the Munson home schedule. Roger, to his everlasting credit, had not only approved his wife’s decision but offered to take the kids out for hamburgers.

  As zero hour approached the rooms were cleared, the tables set, the mantelpieces bedecked and the butterflies trimmed. Still Ellie was not satisfied with the effect. “It needs something,” she mused. “I know, plants! Dittany, go get your African violets, quick. And Minerva’s palm tree and Zilla’s begonias, only don’t spend more than ten minutes because they’ll be here. We’ll bank the plants in the bay windows for a spring garden effect. Oh, and bring some empty flowerpots for staging. And for goodness’ sake hurry!”

  “I haven’t a hurry left in me,” Dittany groaned. Nevertheless she rushed home, wrapped her cherished plants in newspapers to keep them from freezing, she hoped, tore to Minerva’s for the palm tree, then burgled Zilla’s house. Zilla herself was still up on the Enchanted Mountain, having been kept away from the Burberry kitchen all morning lest she try to slip something nutritious into Hazel’s menu. Her magic brew of old eggshells, rabbit manure, and other things Dittany didn’t care to know about had produced such magnificent specimens that Dittany got back in time with Old Faithful
looking like a portable greenhouse. She and Ellie finished the staging just as Samantha and Joshua drove up with two grim-faced senior citizens. The aspects did not appear propitious.

  Pretending to be some passing stranger, Dittany took her car home, then ran back for Hazel’s. Roger had put in an emergency call for transportation. One of the bikes he and the kids had been planning to ride to the hamburger stand had a flat tire and he was expurgated if he was going to fix it and that went to show what happened when you started horsing around with a schedule. Hazel had said, “Yes, dear,” and gone back to her casseroles.

  By the time Dittany had delivered the car and heard what Roger had to say about whose home woman’s place was in, she couldn’t have agreed with him more. She’d have loved to go home herself but she valiantly went back to the Burberrys’ and sneaked around through the back door because guests had started to arrive at the front. Hazel thrust a platter of hors d’oeuvres at her and she took them to the living room just as Mrs. Burberry, Sr., was curling a haughty lip at the display in the bay windows.

  “Samantha, I cannot see why you went to such ridiculous expense buying all these hothouse plants.”

  Samantha froze like the proverbial bird confronted by the proverbial cobra. Dittany thrust the platter between them and said, “Why, Mrs. Burberry, nobody buys plants. We just trade cuttings and grow our own.”

  “H’mph,” said Mrs. Burberry, affronted at being so addressed. “I never had time for such frivolities, myself.”

  “No,” snarled Professor Burberry, “you’re always too busy with frivolities of a more pernicious sort, running to meetings, listening to idiots spouting nonsense about nothing. Botany’s a useful study at any rate. What’s this thing, Samantha?” He poked his cane at one of Dittany’s most cherished specimens, almost upsetting the pot.

  Samantha hadn’t chaired a flower show committee for nothing. “Saintpaulia,” she answered with a modicum of her usual poise. “It’s called African violet but as anyone can see, it’s really a gesneriad.”

  “Looks like a violet to me,” sniffed Mrs. Burberry.

  Luckily or not depending on one’s point of view, another batch of guests arrived. The hot words Father Burberry was trying to squelch his wife with got lost in the shouting since one of the newcomers hadn’t bothered to turn on his hearing aid and didn’t intend to because who wanted to listen to a bunch of gabble and he didn’t see why his wife had insisted on dragging him here in the first place. Samantha gritted her teeth and kept on smiling. Dittany rushed to the kitchen.

  “Hazel, this is a fiasco and it hasn’t even begun yet!”

  “Oh, how ghastly. If only your mother were here.”

  To say that the former Mrs. Henbit knew how to liven up a sticky party would have been like remarking that Michelangelo had rather a knack for painting ceilings. Dittany asked herself, “What would Mum do in a case like this?” Then she knew. “Keep ‘em from each other’s throats if you can. I’ll be right back.”

  Once again Dittany legged it through the back yards to Applewood Avenue. There she made a quick change, dashed out again and detoured past Zilla Trott’s, where she committed another felony. She was back at the Burberrys’ before any actual blood had been shed.

  “Good God,” gasped Hazel. “What, have you done to yourself?”

  “Integrated with the group. Here, dump this in the punch bowl.”

  Hazel eyed the bottle Dittany thrust at her with understandable misgiving. “What is it?”

  “Zilla’s homemade dandelion wine, vintage of 1973.”

  “Dittany, that stuff’s practically radioactive.”

  “That’s why I stole it. Ought to blast open a few arteries if anything can, right?”

  “Well, desperate situations require desperate measures.” Hazel popped the cork, added the contents to the innocuous mixture that had been prepared, took a cautious taste, looked a good deal more cheerful, and began filling cups. Dittany took one of them in her hand, burst into the living room, and struck a John Held, Jr., pose.

  “Heigh-ho, everybody!”

  Even the man with the malfunctioning hearing aid turned to stare at her. She was well worth the stare. Her mother had been about to try out for the lead in Thoroughly Modern Millie when Bert and his eyeglasses lured her to pastures new. To another had fallen the role, to Dittany had passed the costume: the bright orange dress with the long waist and the short hem and the huge yellow silk rose bobbing two points abaft the left hipbone, the bright yellow cloche that covered her down to the eyebrows, the pink silk stockings rolled below the rouged knees, the string of fake pearls that hung well below where her waist would have been if waists had been permissible in 1925.

  Dittany had also inherited Gram Henbit’s faculty for playing by ear any tune she’d ever heard. She flipped her pearls back over her shoulder blades, blew a kiss to Father Burberry, twirled the piano stool and began pounding out, “When Polly Walks Through the Hollyhocks in the Moonlight.”

  Hazel and Arethusa passed around the punch. Ten minutes later the man with the hearing aid had his volume turned up full blast. Father Burberry was singing about the man from Azusa who was known all around as a lalapalooza at playing the big bass viol. Everybody was coming in loud and clear on the “Zum, zum, zum” except one soulful-looking lady in mauve crepe who wondered whether Dittany happened to know “Alice, I’m in Wonderland Since the Day That I First Met You.”

  This was almost certainly not the sort of party the Burberrys had envisioned, but it was, to borrow a word from Father Burberry, a lalapalooza. One spry ancient was heard to remark that he hadn’t had so much fun since the last time he’d got Mackenzie King on the ouija board. Zilla showed up to help serve lunch and was sent home for another bottle of dandelion wine. When she got back with it, a distinguished professor (emeritus) of anthropology from Acadia was wearing one of Ellie’s butterflies on her head and doing a rock-and-roll version of a tribal chant from the upper Amazon to thunderous applause.

  They had to hurry up and serve the meal because a movement was already afoot to fold up the card tables and clear the floor for what various members of the learned group were referring to as terpsichorean revels, with special reference to the bunny hug and the turkey trot.

  “The way they’re shoveling in those casseroles I slaved over, we might as well have opened a few cans of spaghetti,” Hazel grumbled to. Dittany, who was taking a well-deserved break for a cup of tea.

  “But they’re eating so fast because the food’s so good, Hazel. Everyone’s saying so.”

  “Who, for instance?”

  “For instance that woman with the butterfly on her head. It’s as well Ellie left early or she’d have a fit.”

  “Why? They’re enjoying the centerpieces, aren’t they? In their own way, of course.” Hazel chuckled. “And let that be a lesson to me.”

  At that moment Samantha popped in to give Hazel a squeeze and gasp that everything was marvelous and Mother Burberry had just gone up for a second helping and this was the first time since Samantha and Josh moved into this house that she’d tasted anything without turning up her nose and leaving most of it on her plate and could Dittany please come back and provide background music while they ate their dessert and would the “Anniversary Waltz” be too corny?

  “Having met your mother-in-law, I was thinking of ‘Hold That Tiger,’” Dittany replied with her mouth full of cupcake, “but I’m a slave to my public. Tell ’em I’ll be in as soon as I finish my tea and powder my knees.”

  Half an hour later the card tables were out on the porch and Joshua Burberry’s eyes almost out of their sockets as he watched his parents demonstrate to the satisfaction of all present that dancing the boomps-a-daisy did in fact make any party a wow. Toward the middle of the afternoon though, energies began to flag. In pairs and carloads the guests drifted off, joking about getting together for the Diamond Jubilee, which might well happen as they were a remarkably durable-looking lot. At last only the Burberrys and a cleanup
crew were left. Mrs. Burberry, despite everything, couldn’t resist a last bit of sniping.

  “Well, I must say, Samantha, I didn’t expect a big blowout like this. This catering and that professional entertainer you hired must have cost a young fortune.”

  “Gadzooks,” cried Arethusa Monk, who happened to be folding bridge chairs nearby, “you don’t think we did it for money? Osbert, shove these out on the porch and start bringing in some of that other stuff. The so-called professional entertainer happens to be our own, our very own Dittany Henbit, born right around the corner from you on Applewood Avenue. The meal was cooked and served by some of Samantha’s friends from the Gardening and Roving Club. And I”—she snapped a chair shut with a fine theatrical whump—“am Arethusa Monk.”

  “Arethusa Monk who writes all those trashy romantic novels?” gasped Mother Burberry.

  “Which you read by the cartload, Mildred, so quit looking so snotty,” said Father Burberry. “She’s got a whole closetful of them hidden in what she chooses to call her study.”

  “Which you sneak in and steal, and don’t think I’m not on to you,” his wife snarled back.

  “Drat it, Mildred, a man’s got to rest his intellect sometimes, doesn’t he? Some of your stuff isn’t all that bad, Miss Monk. Not up to Lex Laramie’s westerns, of course, but—”

  “What?” screamed Arethusa. “How dare you?”

  “How dare he what, Aunt Arethusa?” asked Osbert, coming in with a large brass umbrella stand.

  “Say my roguish regency romances aren’t up to your lousy rotten westerns, that’s what!”

  “Yours? You mean his? He’s Lex Laramie? But you called him Osbert,” said Professor Burberry, who liked to get at the facts.

  “Naturally I called him Osbert. Osbert is his name, Osbert Reginald Monk. I named him myself. His idiot parents wanted to call him Ralph. Lex Laramie is merely a pseudonym or nom de plume, the paltry device of a scurvy poltroon.”