Grab Bag Page 3

  I was in the hospital for several days before any visitors were allowed. I’d developed a rather spectacular case of pneumonia, it appeared, perhaps from the alternate steaming and chilling. During all this time, I wondered off and on about telling the police, but then somebody would come along to adjust my oxygen or pump some more antibiotic into me and I’d drop off to sleep again.

  Finally they let my co-worker in to see me. I thanked him for his efforts on my behalf and for the strong, healthy, blooming plant the office staff had sent. I couldn’t very well say I wished they hadn’t because it made me think of unwholesome yellowish leaves and doughy white fingers dropping into buckets. He said that was okay, they all missed me.

  “I was worried sick when you didn’t show up on Friday. I thought you’d been hurt in the fire.”

  “What fire?” I asked him.

  “Oh, didn’t you know? That place where you got your hair done.”

  “My hair?” I had to stop and think. Then I remembered he’d dropped me off once on his way home. I’d forgotten Monique’s sign read HAIRDRESSING.

  “Yes, it was a bad one,” he said. “The whole shop was gutted. It started from overheated wiring, I believe, a dryer left on too long or something like that.”

  The chair. I hadn’t thought to switch off the steam. Neither, of course, had David.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t feeling well Thursday?” he was asking in a somewhat injured tone. “I’d have been glad to run you home. Anyway, you sure picked the right time to skip your appointment. One of the hairdressers … hey, probably I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  “No, tell me,” I said. “I want to know.”

  “Well, they found a body. The remains of one, anyway. A young fellow who worked there.”

  “David?”

  “I guess so. Did you know him?”

  “I’d seen him a few times. He just came in to do … odd jobs. Was he the only one?”

  “Yes, and the police are wondering why. The woman who owned the place seems to have disappeared.”

  I started to say, “Did they look in the buckets?” Then I didn’t. What was the point, now?

  “It turns out she didn’t have a very good record.” He was trying to be delicate, I noticed. Prostitution or pandering, I guessed, thinking of those coarse white hands, the restaurants and taxicabs, the fluffy powder puff, and the way she hadn’t liked to walk the streets anymore. “They think she may have torched the building for the insurance, then got scared when the man was trapped in the fire, and took off.”

  “That’s as reasonable an explanation as any,” I said.

  It was, you know.

  Rest You Merry

  THIS LITTLE VIGNETTE WAS written sometime around 1965, rejected with the speed of light by Yankee magazine, and allowed to lie fallow for ten years or more. Then it occurred to me that here was the beginning of a full-length mystery novel. Peter Shandy’s original approach to the Yuletide scene was retained, but prosaic Bemis College metamorphosed into Balaclava Agricultural College for the Peter Shandy novels.

  “I do think, Professor Shandy, you might show some consideration,” sputtered the bursar’s wife.

  “It’s only once a year,” pleaded the Dean of Women. “I’d be only too glad—”

  “I thank you,” said Professor Shandy. “I shall keep Christmas in my own way, as usual.”

  “But you don’t keep it,” wailed the bursar’s wife, sounding like Scrooge’s nephew only less cheerful.

  The professor did not reply, “Bah, humbug.” He merely backed his visitors out the door. His adroitness was the result of long practice.

  This was the seventy-third such interview. Professor Shandy had kept count. He had a passion for counting. He would have counted the spots on an attacking leopard. If the hairs on his head were indeed numbered, he would have known the exact number. As it happened, however, he was bald.

  Every Christmas season during the eighteen he had spent teaching natural science at Bemis College, he had been tackled by virtually every faculty wife and civic leader in Bemisville. Over the years faces had altered, come and gone, but the plaint was ever the same.

  “We have a tradition to maintain.”

  The tradition dated back, as Professor Shandy’s research had revealed, no farther than 1907, when the wife of the then president of the college had found herself stuck with a box of Japanese lanterns left over from the alumni ball. Being of a temperament which combined artistic leanings with Yankee thrift, she conceived the notion of staging a Grand Illumination of the common on Christmas Eve, producing a dramatic effect at practically no expense. As the years wore on, the professor had come to feel a deep sense of personal injury because it had not rained that night.

  In fact, the event had attracted so much attention that it had been repeated with ever-accumulating embellishments ever since. As time went on, the village green had become a positive welter of blue lights, red sleighs, and whimsical figurines of carolers in quaint costume.

  The householders around the common, and eventually throughout the village, had thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the jollification. Of late years, Bemisville had become one multicolored blaze of Yuletide spirit. People drove miles to look at the lights. Pictures appeared in national magazines.

  However, the photographers always had to avoid one dark spot in the gala scene. This was the home of Professor Shandy. He alone, like a bald, pudgy King Canute, stood firm against the all-engulfing Christmas tide.

  In the daytime, as even the bursar’s wife admitted, it was not so bad. In fact, the small house of rosy old bricks looked quite festive in its frame of snow-covered evergreens. This was what really galled the ladies of the village.

  “You could do so much with it,” they moaned.

  Their fingers itched to hang Styrofoam candy canes on the professor’s gleaming brass knocker. They yearned to bedeck his magnificent blue spruces with little lights that winked on and off. One after another, they had volunteered as decorators. They had showered the professor with garlands of gilded pine cones, with stockings cut out of red oilcloth, with wreaths of sour balls that had tiny pairs of scissors dangling whimsically on red satin ribbons to snip off goodies as required.

  He had thanked them all courteously and passed on their offerings to his cleaning woman. By now, Mrs. Lomax had the most bedizened place in town, but the brick house on the common remained stubbornly unadorned.

  Left to himself, the professor would have been perfectly willing to make some small concession to Christmas: a spray of holly on the door, perhaps, and a wax candle flickering pleasantly after dark in the parlor window. No matter what the bursar’s wife said, he rather enjoyed the holidays. Every year he sent off a few carefully austere cards to a few old friends. He then avoided as many as he decently could of the Christmas festivals, Christmas dances, and Christmas cocktail parties, and went to visit relatives.

  These were a cousin and his wife: quiet, elderly people who lived a comfortable three hours’ journey from him. They would thank him for the cigars and the box of assorted jellies, then sit him down to an early dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire puddings. Afterward, the cousin would show his stamp collection. The professor did not care for stamps as such, but they were splendid things to count. As soon as he had finished his tabulation, the cousin’s wife would serve tea and her special lemon cheese tarts and remark that he had a long ride ahead of him. Professor Shandy considered his cousin to have married exceptionally well.

  About nine o’clock, agreeably stuffed, he would sneak home and settle down with a glass of good sherry and Bracebridge Hall. At bedtime, he would step outside the back door for a last whiff of fresh air. If it was a fine night, he would feel an urge to stay out and count stars for a while. However, if he indulged the whim, some neighbor was sure to spot him and insist on inviting poor, lonely Professor Shandy over for a drink.

  Altogether too many of his Christmasses had been spoiled in just such ways by the overw
helming holiday spirit of Bemisville. When the wife of the head of the chemistry department showed up on the morning of December twenty-first with a pot of poinsettias fashioned from bits of old detergent bottles, something snapped. He thrust the loathsome object at Mrs. Lomax, grabbed his coat, and ran for the Boston train.

  The following morning, two men drove up to the brick house in a large truck. Professor Shandy met them at the door.

  “Did you bring it all, gentlemen?”

  “The whole works. Boy, you folks sure take Christmas seriously out here, don’t you?”

  “We have a tradition to maintain,” said the professor briskly. “You may as well start on the spruce trees.”

  All morning long the men toiled. Expressions of delighted amazement appeared on the faces of passers-by. As the day wore on and the men still toiled, the amazement remained but the delight faded. Neighbors began to peer nervously from around the edges of their curtains.

  It was after dark when the men got through. Professor Shandy saw them to the door. He was wearing his coat and hat, and carrying a suitcase.

  “Everything in order, gentlemen? Lights timed to flash on and off at precisely fifty-three-second intervals? Amplifiers turned up to full volume? Switch boxes provided with sturdy locks? Very well, then, let’s throw the switches and be off. I’m going to impose on you for a lift back to Boston. I have an urgent appointment at the waterfront.”

  “Sure, glad to have you,” they chorused, feeling the pleasant crinkle of bills in their hands. It had been an interesting day.

  On the evening of December twenty-fifth, Professor Shandy stepped out on deck for a breath of air. Around him rolled the mighty Atlantic. Above him shone only the lights from the bridge and a skyful of stars. The captain’s dinner had been most enjoyable. Presently he would go below for a chat with the chief engineer, a knowledgeable man whose hobby was counting the revolutions of the ship’s engines.

  Back in Bemisville, the floodlights would be illuminating the eight life-size plastic reindeer on the roof of the brick house. The twenty-three plastic Santa Claus faces would be glowing, one to each window, above the twenty-three sets of artificial candles, each containing three pink and two purple bulbs.

  He glanced at his watch. At that precise moment, the seven hundred and forty-two red, green, blue, and yellow oversize bulbs on the spruce trees would have flashed on and off for the four thousand, five hundred and eighty-seventh time; a total of three million, three hundred eighty-eight thousand, seven hundred and fourteen flashes.

  The amplifiers would by now have blared three hundred and thirty-five renditions each of “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” and “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” They would at this moment be on the seventh bar of the three hundred and thirty-sixth performance of “I Don’t Care Who You Are, Fatty, Get Those Reindeer Off My Roof.”

  Professor Shandy smiled gently into the darkness. “Bah, humbug,” he murmured, and began to count the stars.

  Fifty Acres of Prime Seaweed

  THE PRINCIPAL FIGURES IN this story are old friends. They first popped out of my typewriter back in the 1960s, but didn’t show up again until February 1985, when this story appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine as “The Unlikely Demise of Cousin Claude.”

  You know how it is around a medical research laboratory around half past five on a Friday afternoon. Or maybe you don’t, but it certainly is. So when Carter-Harrison emerged from the fastness wherein he does whatever he does and suggested a spot of research involving a couple of boiled lobsters and a seidel or two, I cheerfully acquiesced.

  We were nicely settled in a booth at Ye Olde Lobster Trappe, a Boston landmark since 1973, with our paper bibs around our necks and our nutcrackers at the ready when Carter-Harrison remarked, “You ought to taste a real lobster.”

  “I’m about to,” I replied as the waitress, whose name is neither Marge nor Myrtle but in fact Melpomene, set one in front of me.

  My companion, being a man of science first and foremost, reached across the table and tore off one of its claws, which he proceeded to excavate and consume the meat thereof.

  “Not bad, considering,” he admitted, wiping melted butter off his chin. “But wait till you toss a bicuspid over a genuine Beagleport lobster, hauled from the briny blue Atlantic about fourteen minutes before you get your grubhooks on to it.”

  “You owe me a claw,” I said. “Where’s Beagleport?”

  Carter-Harrison ate one of his own claws—or, to be scientifically accurate, one of his own lobster’s claws—and wiped more melted butter off his chin. He has one of those long, bony New England jaws ideally adapted for getting dripped on. Then he punctiliously gave me his other claw. Then he uttered.

  “Did I ever tell you about my family?”

  “I never knew you had one,” I replied. “I thought you sprang full-armored from the brow of Dr. Spock.”

  He thought that one over for a while. “Ah, I see. One of your jokes. No, Williams, I was born pretty much according to normal procedure, of not exactly poor and almost ridiculously honest parents, in the village of Beagleport, Maine.”

  “I’ll bet you were a beautiful baby,” I said with my mouth full of tail meat.

  “My mother always thought so. That’s why she insisted on splicing her maiden name of Carter to the paternal cognomen. My parents have now passed to the Great Beyond, namely Palm Springs, but the old family homestead is still occupied by my Aunt Agapantha and my cousins Ed and Fred. I was thinking we might take a run up there this weekend.”

  “Are you sure this is the right time of year to go?” I asked, gazing out the window at the lashing sleet that gives our city so much of its gentle springtime charm.

  “The perfect time,” he assured me. “We won’t run into any tourists.”

  “I wouldn’t mind running into some tourists,” I said, but he wasn’t listening. These excessively brainy types never do.

  And that’s why, some three hours later, we were groping our way up the Maine Turnpike in my old Chevy. I was groping, anyway, trying to sort out the road from the surrounding frozen wastes by the occasional glimpses I was able to get through my slush-caked windshield. Carter-Harrison was thinking deep thoughts. At least I assumed he was. He never said.

  By ten o’clock, I’d had it. We found a motel open somewhere between Kittery and the Arctic Circle, and turned in. I woke expecting more of the same, but Saturday dawned crisp and clear. We got out of the motel early—there wasn’t much there to hang around for—and fetched Beagleport around the middle of the morning.

  Carter-Harrison started barking orders like “Left at the fire station” and “Right at the general store.” At last he sat back with a sigh of satisfaction. “Now we’re on the home road.”

  “This is a road?” I cried in startled disbelief.

  He didn’t answer. He was busy sniffing, his bony nose straight forward like a bird dog’s at the point, his bony cheeks flushed the way they get when he’s about to give birth to another bright idea. I felt an ominous twinge.

  “What’s eating you?”

  “It’s the air,” he replied.

  There sure was a lot of it. I tried a few sniffs myself, a rich blend of salt, pine trees, and ancient vehicle. We sniffed our way along until we came to two houses, one of them painted baby blue with scalloped pink shutters. The other was merely white. It was when we reached this latter that Carter-Harrison yelled, “Starboard your helm.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Turn right. This is our driveway.”

  And so it proved to be. Ah, I thought, civilization at last. Then a powerful voice welled up from the bulkhead and ricocheted off my eardrums.

  “What in time are you settin’ there for like a pair o’ ninnies?”

  Carter-Harrison leaped from the car. “Hello, Aunt Aggie.”

  “Well, James. I might o’ known. Couldn’t you of wrote first?”

  A woman of un
certain years wearing an awfully certain kind of expression emerged and confronted her nephew. She was almost as tall as he, though not so skinny. After a certain amount of glaring back and forth, he bent his head to kiss her on the cheek. She let him. Neither of them appeared to enjoy it much. I thought I might as well join the party, so I got out of the car and Aunt Aggie turned her glare on me.

  “Who’s the young’un?”

  “My colleague, Dr. Bill Williams,” Carter-Harrison told her. “I brought him up to see the place.”

  “Doctor, eh?” She hauled a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles out of her sweater pocket, gave them a wipe with her apron, put them on, and looked me over. “Huh, he don’t even look dry behind the ears yet. ’Least he ain’t all skin an’ bones like you, James. Ain’t enough meat on you to grease a griddle with. Well, come on in. Can’t stand here lollygaggin’ around the dooryard all day. Oh, drat an’ tarnation! Go on, git! Scat! Shoo!”

  At first I thought Aunt Aggie meant us, but it soon became clear she was addressing a large brown goat with white spots. As she pursued it across the yard, we could see the creature was chewing on a piece of rag. Aggie made pretty good time, but the goat was faster. At last she came back, her apron at half-mast, her expression one of mingled fury and despair.

  “There went the last o’ my good pillowcases. I’d like to wring that critter’s neck.”

  “Then why don’t you?” asked her nephew, ever the keen, inquiring mind.

  “’Cause he ain’t my goat, that’s why.”

  “Ergo, why do you let him into the yard?”

  “I don’t let him, you dern fool. He comes.”

  “Isn’t there any way to keep him out?”

  “Might try a deer rifle, but I misdoubt he’d just eat the bullet an’ want another.”

  “Have you thought of building a fence?” I asked her.