The Grub-And-Stakers Move a Mountain Page 4

  “Nice-looking?”

  “Not bad. He must have a first-rate dentist.” Dittany could have been charitable enough to say something agreeable about his smile instead, but she knew what Hazel was driving at: namely that a single young woman with a big house to keep up must automatically view every new man who came along as potential husband material and was he or wasn’t he?

  “I’ll bet you a nickel that’s Minerva Oakes’s new boarder,” Hazel mused. “She was saying at the club that she has a perfectly darling fellow staying there now.”

  “I know it is because Mrs. MacVicar said so, and all Minerva’s boarders are perfect darlings till proven otherwise. Her last perfect darling stole her autographed photo of John Diefenbaker, don’t ask me why.”

  “Probably because it wasn’t a picture of Pierre Trudeau instead,” sniffed Hazel, a Tory to the bone. “Are you sure Frankland wasn’t simply digging in the wrong place?”

  “Of course I’m sure. He had a plot plan with Hunneker Land Grant printed right on it and a bunch of dots in red ink marking the places where he was supposed to do his tests. And furthermore, any woman who can even think of Pierre Trudeau without getting goose bumps—”

  “If you’d lived with Roger Munson for twenty-three years the only thing that would give you goose bumps would be having to go to the bathroom in the night and not being able to find your bathrobe. How did we get started on politics, anyway? What I want to know is where that map came from. John Architrave never drew a plan in his life. He’d just wander around till his bunions began to twitch and then tell his men to start digging.”

  “Hazel, you’re right! I wondered about that, too. As a guess, I’d say the plan came from the town surveyor’s office and the dots were added by somebody who wanted it on the record that tests had been duly performed at certain locations. Doesn’t that sound like a typically McNasterish stunt to you? Look, Hazel, is there any chance of pumping Margery Streph a little? Can’t you happen to drop in with a cutting from your piggyback plant or something, and get her talking?”

  “Oh, I’d have no trouble getting Margery talking.” Hazel permitted herself a ladylike snicker. “The problem is, I’d have to wait till she gets back from Calgary. Jim was going there on business, so she went along. That’s why we had them to dinner between trips, as a sort of hail-and-farewell party.”

  “Oh, rats! Then I’ll have to think of something else.”

  “Do. What I’ve got to think about is what sort of meal I can throw together in three minutes flat.” Hazel made for the door. “Thanks for the sherry, Dittany. After I’ve fed Roger and got him into a good mood, I’ll try to joggle his memory and see if he has any idea what Jim Streph was getting at.”

  Dittany refrained from smiling. Roger did something extremely technical with computers for a large engineering firm over near Scottsbeck. She couldn’t imagine his ever having an idea that wasn’t too complex for any layman to understand. By the time he’d worked out a viable program and run it through the electronic jungle, the Enchanted Mountain could be one solid mass of blacktop and neon. Why hadn’t Hazel had presence of mind enough to marry a member of the town council instead of a walking transistor circuit?

  She ate the few sweet meal biscuits that were left on the plate, carried the tray with the used wineglasses back to the kitchen, wondered about supper and decided she wasn’t quite ready after all those biscuits, then from force of habit wandered into her workroom and sat down at the typewriter. Since her appetite was temporarily spoiled anyway, she might as well get on with Arethusa’s inevitable dueling scene.

  Sir Percy tensed the muscles of his finely molded jaw. He was about to pink that rotter Baron Blackavise smack in the right radial extensor and get blood all over his ruffles. Instead, Dittany was astonished to find herself rattling out a scene in which one Andrew McNaster got run plunk through the snuffbox with lethal effect. Maybe she’d better get some solid food inside her, at that.

  She fried up a panful of chicken livers with lots of garlic—Gram had always grown it around the roses to keep the bugs away—made herself a green salad, toasted a chunk of her homemade bread, and turned on the television because it was so dismal eating alone.

  But the bombings, earthquakes, airplane crashes and other minor diversions of the outside world held little interest in comparison to what was happening here in Lobelia Falls, and when the macho type in the plaid sports jacket began reeling off the hockey scores, she got up and shut off the set. It was almost dark now. Without the light from the picture tube, she could hardly see her plate. The Enchanted Mountain was still plainly visible, though, through the big south-facing kitchen window.

  They’d always sat here at mealtimes when there wasn’t company, around the golden oak table that had had all its varnish scrubbed off ages ago, with the black iron cook-stove warm at their backs in winter as it was warming Dittany now. First there’d been Gram and Gramp and Daddy and Mum and herself in a high chair. Then there’d been Gramp and Daddy and Mum and herself sitting on the telephone book, then there’d been Gramp and Mum and herself big enough to reach her plate without being boosted, then Mum and herself and now there was only herself, sitting where she’d always sat.

  And always the mountain had been there. It wasn’t so far away, actually. Not so far you couldn’t wheel your doll carriage to where the pussytoes grew and still be within sound of your mother’s voice calling you to supper. Not too far to watch for Daddy’s car turning into Applewood Avenue and run like the dickens so you’d be there when he shut off the motor and called out, “Where’s my big girl with a bear hug for her dad?” How would it feel to be sitting here and looking over there and find one’s self staring at a brand-new split-level house with a fake fieldstone front and pea-green aluminum sides?

  For a moment Dittany lost all interest in her food. Then she began to eat almost angrily. It wasn’t going to happen, that was all. She wouldn’t let it. She was chasing the last fragment of chicken liver around her plate in a determined and relentless manner when the telephone rang.

  That would be Arethusa Monk, no doubt, wanting to know how Sir Percy was getting on. Arethusa took a possessively maternal interest in her brain children, nitwits though they were. Still chewing, Dittany picked up the receiver and managed a mangled “Hello.”

  No, it was not Arethusa. The novelist had a voice that rang, as Harry Leon Wilson might have described it, like a brazen gong. This was more like a hoarse whisper. At first Dittany assumed it was some youngster playing the same sort of lame-brained trick with the telephone that she and her nasty little friends had played back in their grammar school days. Then she realized she was connected with Mrs. Poppy, the lady who came and did housework once a week provided something more pressing didn’t intervene. Mrs. Poppy’s excuses for begging off were usually interesting, with that air of fresh spontaneity created by the speaker’s making them up as she went along. This one, however, sounded legitimate and dull.

  “Miss Henbit,” she croaked, “I’ve had this awful cold, since Saturday and now I’m losing my voice. I’m sure I’ll be too sick to come tomorrow and I thought I’d better let you know while I can still talk.”

  That was an interesting change. Mrs. Poppy’s customary approach was to wait until about five minutes after she was due to arrive, then deliver her fairy tale in tones of well-feigned panic. She really must be ill.

  “What a shame,” said Dittany as she had said so often before, but meaning it this time. “You do sound perfectly awful. Are you staying in bed and keeping warm?”

  Mrs. Poppy said she was trying to but Miss Henbit knew how it was with a husband and three kids to feed. Miss Henbit didn’t know how it was, never having been in that position herself, but she said she could imagine and did Mrs. Poppy think she might be able to make it later in the week?

  “I’ll have to wait and see how I feel,” Mrs. Poppy gargled. “You know me, if there’s one thing I hate it’s saying I’ll come and then having to let a person down. As it
is, I’m going to renege on Mrs. Duckes and I feel awful about that. I said I’d fill in for her tonight because she’s down with her leg again and you know how she depends on the money.”

  Dittany didn’t know that, either. She had a vague idea who Mrs. Duckes was, but the details of that lady’s pecuniary situation were to her as a riddle wrapped in an enigma. However, she obligingly asked, “What were you supposed to do for Mrs. Duckes?” since Mrs. Poppy was always gratified when she showed an interest and she was, in spite of everything, fond of Mrs. Poppy.

  “Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Her off-and-on employee, sick as she was, appeared to perk up at this chance to impart some news. “Mrs. Duckes got a job working for McNaster Construction. She’s supposed to go in every night after they close up, see, and empty the wastebaskets and tidy around and wash out the teacups and that. She says it’s a scandal how many half-empty cups of tea they leave sitting around. Not that McNaster s hurting for the money to buy it, I daresay. No flies on him, they, say, though Mrs. Duckes says he’s not the easiest person in the world to work for, which I know you won’t repeat because you know how things get back to people and there she’d be. He’s going to be hopping mad tomorrow when he goes in and finds she hasn’t been. I just hope he doesn’t fire her on account of me. I’d feel awful.”

  “I’m sure you would.”

  Dittany made the response automatically but even as she spoke a great light was dawning. “You know, Mrs. Poppy, I have nothing special to do this evening. I could go over there and pinch-hit for you.”

  “You? Oh, Miss Henbit, that wouldn’t be right.”

  “Why not? I know I’m not the world’s prize housekeeper, but at least I could empty the wastebaskets and wash the teacups so they’d know somebody had been around.”

  “Well, my gosh,” croaked Mrs. Poppy, “I never would have—I hope you don’t think I was—it would certainly be a Godsend for Mrs. Duckes, but—you don’t honestly mean it, do you?”

  “Certainly I mean it. Think of all the favors you’ve done for me.” Dittany couldn’t think of any herself offhand, but she knew it was the sort of argument Mrs. Poppy would fall for.

  Now that she’d committed herself, she was scared but exhilarated. No doubt Mrs. Poppy thought she was slightly crazy, but she’d be crazier still to miss the chance of poking around McNaster’s inner sanctum. To be sure, she hadn’t the faintest idea what to look for, but the chances were she’d recognize it if she saw it, assuming there was anything to see. Having long been aware that the best way to wring a decision from Mrs. Poppy was to take it for granted the decision had already been made, she said crisply, “What time am I supposed to show up?”

  “About seven or quarter past is when Mrs. Duckes generally goes over. She gets supper on the table, eh, then she leaves the dishes for Jenny to do. That’s her oldest and of course Jenny’s like the rest of them at that age but it doesn’t hurt her to pitch in and show a little sense of responsibility as I was saying to—”

  “Right. How do I get in?”

  “I’ve put the keys in the sugar bowl right here on the mantelpiece. Mrs. Duckes sent Jenny over with them this morning after I said I’d do it on her way to school but my cold’s kept getting worse and worse and now I’m so choked up—”

  “Yes, you mustn’t say another word. I’ll be there to pick them up as soon as I can get ready.”

  Dittany hung up before Mrs. Poppy could think of any more reasons why she couldn’t talk, and whizzed into action. Too bad she didn’t have a Jenny of her own to stick with the dishes, but they could wait. The important thing now was to think up a disguise.

  Having typed so many of Arethusa’s effusions, Dittany had a natural inclination toward cloaks and daggers. Furthermore, if anyone she knew happened to catch her emptying Andy McNasty’s wastebaskets, it wouldn’t be good publicity for the Henbit Secretarial Service. And besides, there had been that black form sprawled on the mountain with the arrow through its back and maybe it wasn’t an accident, and maybe Andrew McNaster was a better shot than he let on to be.

  Chapter 5

  THE PHONE RANG SEVERAL times while Dittany was upstairs changing. She let it ring. Curiosity about John Architrave’s death would be building and word must have got round that Dittany Henbit had been among those present when the body was discovered. Now that their families were fed and the tables cleared, her friends wanted the details. They’d have to wait. She had more urgent business at hand.

  Luckily the former Mrs. Henbit was a woman of adventurous tastes when she got turned loose in a store, and luckily Mum had left many of her more insane purchases behind when she’d flown off into the wild blue yonder with Bert. Dittany ran her mind over the inventory.

  There was that lovely red wig, for one thing. At any rate the wig had been lovely till Mum had worn it in her dramatic triumph as the Madwoman of Chaillot with the Traveling Thespians, who in fact never traveled any farther than the high school auditorium. Since then it had been lent to sundry neighborhood children for dressing up at Halloween and had gone overboard into the apple-bobbing tub on several occasions. The wig should do nicely.

  Plenty of makeup was available in all shades and varieties. Dittany sat down at her mother’s dressing table—she’d kept the room pretty much as Mum had left it since she never knew when Bert’s business would bring the pair of them back here—and set to work.

  First she laid on a foundation that was labeled Maiden’s Blush but came out looking more like Hectic Flush. Over this bright pink base she dotted a luxuriant crop of freckles, for which she’d always yearned as a child. Then, selecting a Sultry Sable eyebrow pencil, she obscured her own pleasantly arched brows with a ferocious black pair that came, up to points in their middles and swooped down toward her nose. She added Pixie Purple, Tantalizing Tan, and Frosted Banana eyeshadow in alternating bands and veiled her blue-green eyes with a screen of inch-long false lashes set on slightly askew because time was running short. By this stage it was a fairly safe bet her own mother wouldn’t have known her unless of course Mum happened to recognize the wig.

  Encouraged with her progress thus far, Dittany shed the clothes she had on, pulled on an old sweatshirt of Gramp’s to make her look fatter and covered that with an awning-striped tent dress that had been one of her mother’s biggest mistakes ever. Maroon knee socks and holey old sneakers through which the socks peeped here and there completed the ensemble.

  If that didn’t do it, nothing would. Dittany put on a long hooded raincoat to hide the costume, hoped Mrs. Poppy would be too preoccupied with her own woes to notice what she’d done to her face, and scrambled for her car keys. Five minutes later Old Faithful, the 1966 Plymouth that had served the Henbit family through thick and thin, snow and sleet, trips to the dump and Girl Guides getting carsick on the seats, pulled up in front of the Poppy home.

  It was perhaps fortunate for Mrs. Poppy’s fragile state of health that Dittany didn’t have to confront her in person. A teen-aged girl dressed not unlike Dittany herself explained that Ma felt so awful she’d gone to bed with a couple of aspirins, and handed over the McNaster office keys along with a few sketchy and no doubt misleading instructions.

  Dittany said thanks and sped off into the darkness before this budding Poppy could get too close a look at her.

  She knew all too well where to go. The McNaster Construction Company offices in all their chrome and stucco-hideousness, sat out beside the main highway to Scottsbeck on land that had been cleared, landscaped, and given a blacktopped parking lot before the town council suddenly decided the site was, after all, unsuitable for the proposed high school annex. They’d then sold the lot to the ubiquitous Andrew at a scandalous figure on the pretext that his bid, though far too low, was the only one received by their appointed deadline when everyone knew perfectly well that several other firms would have bid more if they’d known about the deadline before it had already passed.

  As Dittany pulled into the serendipitous parking lot, she was rather disconc
erted to see several other cars including Andy McNasty’s own brand-new twenty-thousand-dollar gas guzzler still there. Either they were holding some sort of after-hours meeting or else everybody was working overtime. That didn’t bode well for her chances of doing any effective snooping. She might have known this harebrained scheme would come to nothing. Well, she’d got herself into it so there wasn’t much she could do now but go through the motions and clear out before her eyelashes fell off.

  Mrs. Poppy’s daughter had mentioned something about a side door from the parking lot. Dittany managed to locate it and found it open. The girl hadn’t mentioned there’d be a tough-looking watchman lurking just inside. Luckily he was nobody Dittany recognized but he scared her half to death anyway.

  True to his trust, the watchman offered challenge the moment Dittany set sneaker inside the door. She explained in a hoarse voice that was partly assumed and partly stark terror that she was pinch-hitting for Mrs. Duckes, who was down with her leg again, and where did they keep the brooms and stuff because the kid that gave her the keys didn’t know nothing and she didn’t want to bother Mrs. Duckes because she was in bed with a couple of aspirins—Dittany saw no point in dragging Mrs. Poppy into her monologue—and where was she supposed to dump the waste-baskets and was it okay if she didn’t vacuum but just dusted around and straightened up because she was only doing it as a favor, not that she minded because Mrs. Duckes would do the same for her, and where the heck was that mop closet because how could you expect a person to get anything done if nobody showed her where the stuff was?

  By then Dittany was genuinely hoarse and the watchman looking totally bored as she’d hoped he would. With any luck, he’d steer well clear of her from now on. He did condescend to lead her to the mop closet, roll out a large canvas hamper for the trash, and tell her to leave it down here by the door and he’d attend to it later. Dittany was warming up for an elaborate complaint about the mop bucket when the watchman fled out of earshot and the first small victory was hers.