Grab Bag Page 4

She gave me a look. “Ed an’ Fred spent fifty-two hard-earned dollars on barbed wire, an’ three days’ worktime stringin’ it. He’d et his way through an’ bit the tail off Fred’s Sunday shirt before they’d got the posthole digger put away.”

  “You ought to sue his owner for damages.”

  “That’s real bright o’ you, Willie.”

  “Well,” said Carter-Harrison, “why don’t you?”

  “Because,” said Aunt Aggie, “that’s why.”

  She nodded over toward the baby blue house with the pink shutters. A fluffy little blonde with a fluffy pink coat on was tripping winsomely down the steps. The goat ran to meet her and she flung her arms around its neck.

  “Oh, you naughty Spotty,” we heard her coo.

  “What have you got in your mouth?”

  She came across the yard to us, snuggling the goat against her pink fluff. “Has Spotty been a bad boy again, Auntie Agapantha?”

  I expected Auntie Agapantha to snap the blonde’s head off and swallow it in one gulp. Instead, she only shrugged.

  “’Twasn’t nothin’, Lily Ann. “Just an old dish-rag.

  “I’ve told him and told him.” Lily Ann gave her curls a sad little shake. “I’ve said time and time again, Spotty, if you don’t leave Auntie Agapantha’s clothesline alone, I’ll have to give you a spanking. But he never pays a mite of attention.”

  “Now don’t you fret yourself,” Aunt Aggie insisted. “Lily Ann, I don’t believe you’ve met my nephew James that’s a doctor down to Boston. An’ this here’s his friend William that helps around the hospital some. Lily Ann’s the one that married Claude, James. You remember I told you Claude got married?”

  “Yep,” said Carter-Harrison. “And killed. Did they ever find the murderer?”

  Lily Ann burst into tears. Carter-Harrison began to look uncomfortable but didn’t drop the subject.

  “Stands to reason, doesn’t it? Claude was supposed to have caught his necktie in the cream separator and been strangled to death. Whoever wore a necktie separating cream? Claude wouldn’t have known how to tie one anyway even if he’d owned a necktie, which he didn’t.”

  “He did s-so,” sobbed Lily Ann. “He w-wore a tie at our wedding.”

  “Rented it with the suit,” snorted Carter-Harrison.

  “And I g-gave him another one for Christmas. He w-wore it because he l-loved me.”

  The young widow settled down to some serious bewailment. Aunt Aggie gave her eminent nephew what can best be described as a look.

  Then she put her arm around Lily Ann’s shoulders and led her away toward the baby blue house with the pink shutters. We two were standing there feeling like a nickel apiece when an old pickup truck clunked into what I had been assured was the driveway. Two men got out, one a clone of the other, though it would have been impossible to say which was the original and which the copy. They were both wearing ragged blue work shirts, ragged gray work pants, and ragged navy blue pea jackets. Both looked a lot like Carter-Harrison.

  “Hahyah, James,” said one.

  “Hahyah, James,” said the other.

  “Hahyah, Fred. Hahyah, Ed,” said James, as I may as well call him now. “This is Bill Williams, a friend of mine from the lab. My cousins, Ed and Fred, Bill.”

  “Hahyah, Ed. Hahyah, Fred,” I replied. “Mind my asking which is which?”

  “We don’t mind,” said Ed, or Fred.

  “But it wouldn’t do no good,” said Fred, or Ed.

  “You’d mix us up anyway.”

  “Folks always do,”

  “So do we, sometimes.”

  “What ails Lily Ann?”

  “She’s cryin’ again.”

  The first part of our conversation had been amiable enough, but these last two remarks were made in definitely accusatory tones. It was clear that both Ed and Fred had strong feelings about Lily Ann.

  “It’s because I just happened to ask who murdered Claude,” James explained.

  “Some Boy Scout, maybe,” said one twin.

  “Doin’ his good deed for the day,” said the other.

  “Lily Ann done all right out of it.”

  “Got rid o’ Claude.”

  “Got his folks’ house.”

  “An’ the farm. Fifty acres, prime land. Prime for Beagleport, anyways.”

  “Seaweed makes good top dressin’. Lot o’ seaweed been spread over them acres down through the years.

  “Raise anything you’ve a mind to.”

  “Lily Ann’s not farming it herself, is she?” James broke in.

  “Nope. Rents it to Abner Glutch.”

  “Abner Glutch? I thought he owned the hardware store.”

  “Does.”

  “Owns the fillin’ station, too.”

  “Gets men to run ’em for him.”

  “Got eight, nine workin’ for him now.”

  “Makin’ money hand over fist.”

  “Come to think of it,” said James, “didn’t I hear something about Abner’s trying to buy Claude out when his parents died?”

  “Ayup. Claude wouldn’t sell.”

  “Claude would o’ sold.” It was the first sign of disharmony between Ed and Fred. “Mother wouldn’t let ’im. Told ’im he’d blow the money in two, three years. Then where’d he be?”

  “’Bout where he is now, like as not. Damn shame the poor bugger never got the chance to spend it.”

  “Would o’ left Lily Ann holdin’ the short end o’ the stick.”

  “Then she’d o’ needed a new husband, wouldn’t she?”

  Aha, I thought. Now we were getting to the crux of the matter.

  “She could hardly have picked a worse one than Claude,” said James. “I can’t imagine why she’d cry over a clown like that. Claude had an I.Q. of about fifty-six and looked just like that blasted goat. Beats me what she ever saw in him.”

  “Beats me,” Ed affirmed.

  “Beats me,” Fred agreed.

  At least they both said it beat them, though I’m not sure of the order. I was comparing one craggy face with another and it appeared to me that they all three looked about equally besotted.

  You may argue that it was impossible for Dr. James Carter-Harrison to have become smitten by a fluffy blonde head and a weepy blue eye in so short a space of time, but that’s because you don’t know Dr. James Carter-Harrison. He’d already fallen in love three times during that same week, all three with semi-disastrous results. Maybe this was a family trait. Anyway, it made me nervous.

  “Let’s go take a look at that clothesline your aunt was complaining about,” I suggested to divert his attention. “It’s cold standing here.”

  None of the three cousins answered me, they just wheeled and stomped around behind the house, two of them wearing seaboots and the other walking as if he did. I was a little surprised they’d been so willing to let the subject be changed, then I wasn’t. If in fact Claude Harrison had been willfully done to death by the unlikely instruments of a necktie and a cream separator, it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that one of Lily Ann’s lovestruck neighbors might have had a hand and possibly even a cravat in his sudden demise.

  Since I was going to be their house guest, I thought it would be rude to pursue the matter. Instead, I joined the cousins in grim contemplation of Aunt Aggie’s clothes reel.

  “Pitiful,” was my diagnosis, and nobody disputed it. The upper halves of various items were hung on the lines that stretched among the various poles that poked out from the center like the ribs of an umbrella—only less so, if you get my drift. You’ve seen the things, you know what I mean. Anyway, the bottoms of said items were either hanging in shreds or missing altogether. Around the pole lay the remains of attempted fortifications: shattered picket fencing, tangles of chicken wire, oil drums, and suchlike futile measures.

  “Have you tried land mines?” I suggested.

  “Can’t do that,” said one twin.

  “Lily Ann wouldn’t like it,” said the other.

/>   “Can’t say I’d go for ’em much, myself,” snapped a now-familiar voice behind us.

  “Oh hello, Aunt Aggie,” said James. “Have you tried putting cayenne pepper in the rinse water?”

  “He found it appetizin’. Speakin’ of which, I s’pose you’re hungry as usual.”

  “We had a snack at the motel.”

  “Huh!”

  She tossed her head toward the kitchen. We followed. This turned out to have been the correct move. She fed us home-cured ham, new-laid eggs, home-grown and home-hashed potatoes, homemade biscuits with homemade jam and a few other odds and ends. I attempted a little light conversation to be polite, but James sat lost in thought. At last he quit chewing and spoke.

  “Aunt Aggie, is there any place around here we could buy one of those supersonic dog whistles?”

  “Ed got me one. Spotty swallered it.”

  “Well, I’ll think of something,” he muttered, absentmindedly helping himself to a few more biscuits.

  He continued to ponder. You could practically hear the brains churning, or maybe it was the biscuits. At last, as his aunt was making a pointed remark about did we think we was going to set here all day, he leaped from his chair like Archimedes from his bath.

  “I’ve got it! Mind if I borrow your truck, boys?”

  “We was goin’ to pick up a mess o’ lobsters,” one of them demurred.

  “Thought Bill here might like ’em,” added the other.

  “Might get a few extra.”

  “Ask Lily Ann over.”

  “We can go in my car,” I said.

  So we did, all but James, who drove off in the truck by himself whistling, “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

  His aunt followed his departure with jaundiced eye. “Got another of his fool notions, I’ll be bound. Been like that ever since he was knee-high to a sculpin. Beats me how James ever lived to grow up.”

  She was off on a stream of reminiscences. James had always been an ingenious little cuss, it appeared, right from the time he’d tried to hatch a clutch of duck eggs in his Sunday rompers.

  “But he’s one of the most respected men in his field,” I protested. “We consider him a genius.”

  “Genius is as genius does,” she sniffed, and went on picking out lobsters.

  They steered me down the shore road so I could view the breaking waves dashing high on a stern and rockbound coast, then we went back to the house, arriving in a dead heat with James.

  “Ah, good,” he said. “I can use some help unloading.

  “Go ahead, fellows,” I said, quick-thinking as always. “I’ll take care of the lobsters.”

  Aunt Aggie had taken advantage of my good nature to make a few extra stops, but I didn’t care. There was a lot of nautical language coming from the back yard and I figured I’d got the best of the bargain. After I’d lugged in her manifold purchases, though, she remarked that if there was a worse nuisance than a man around a kitchen, she didn’t know what it might be and I better go see what them three out there was up to. So I went.

  One of the twins was up on a ladder screwing a pulley into the side of the house. The other was threading a vast amount of new manila rope through some more pulleys that had been attached to the center pole of the clothes reel. Carter-Harrison was horsing around with one of those heavy metal gas cylinders we see so many of back at the lab.

  “Great idea,” I exclaimed. “You’re going to anaesthetize the goat.”

  “I don’t think Lily Ann would go much for that,” said the twin on the ladder.

  “Me neither,” said the one on the ground.

  The goat wasn’t saying anything, just sitting there waiting to see where his next meal was coming from.

  “Then what’s in the tank?” I asked. “Oxygen? Isn’t there enough of that floating around up here already?”

  “It’s helium,” Carter-Harrison explained. “Would you mind stepping over to the truck and bringing us that brown baglike object we took the precaution of leaving locked in the cab? Got the keys, Ed?”

  “Fred’s got ’em,” said the man on the ladder.

  Ah, at last I knew which twin was which. Provided Ed stayed up on the ladder, anyway. I took the keys, said “Thanks, Fred” to flaunt my newly acquired knowledge, and went to get the brown baglike object, still unscathed by goatly tooth. I could swear Spotty snickered when he saw it.

  When I got back to the scene of the activity, Carter-Harrison had both hands full of rope and an end between his teeth. “Gaha bawoo? Gooh!”

  Being expensively educated, I was able to translate. “Balloon? What do you want that for?”

  He spat out the rope end. “Elementary, my dear Williams. We hitch the balloon to the top of the clothes reel, Aunt Aggie hangs out her wash, we inflate the balloon with helium from the tank, then pay out enough line to raise the reel out of the goat’s reach. The ropes will be fastened to those cleats up beside the window where she has her washing machine, so she needn’t even go outdoors to raise or lower the reel, just haul it in as far as she wants.”

  By this time, his aunt’s face had in fact appeared at the aforesaid window. Carter-Harrison hitched a short length of hose from the tank to the balloon, let the brown bag fill, then started paying out the guy ropes.

  “See, Aunt Aggie, we’ve got ’er ballasted, and you can adjust the ropes to keep the pole upright. When you want to reel in, just give a tug on this hunk of fishline. That will pull the stopper out of the balloon and let the gas escape slowly. You just keep hauling in your lines and she’ll come up all standing.”

  He raised the reel about fifteen feet above the ground, then handed the guy ropes to Ed, who fastened them to the cleats beside the window, came down, and took away the ladder. Spotty made a few frantic leaps at the clothes flapping high above, then fell back, a shattered goat.

  “I do declare, James,” cried Aunt Aggie. “I b’lieve it’s goin’ to work. But what happens when that there gas tank gits empty?”

  “Take it to Lem Maddox and he’ll give you another.”

  “An’ charge me a fortune for it, I’ll be bound.”

  “Oh no. You’re not paying for the tank, you know, just the gas.”

  “Huh. Forkin’ out good money for a passel o’ wind.”

  Spotty made another futile leap.

  “But I guess it’ll be wuth it. You know what? I’m goin’ upstairs an’ get that old dress suit Uncle Hector wore to Warren G. Harding’s inauguration. It ain’t had a good airin’ since Lily Ann got that dratted goat. Could you just haul that reel down for a minute an’ let it up again without emptyin’ the balloon, James? No sense wastin’ gas when you just filled it.”

  “I expect we can manage. Go get the suit, Aunt Aggie.”

  By the time she returned, we’d collected an audience. Lily Ann was back, pinker and fluffier than before, and she had a man with her. Quite a large man, who looked a lot like Teddy Roosevelt in his later and portlier years. His name was Abner Glutch and he was wearing a necktie. In fact, as Aunt Aggie remarked, he was all togged out like a hog goin’ to war.

  “How come you’re so fancy, Abner? It ain’t Sunday till tomorrow, in case you lost count.”

  “Nope,” he told her, “I ain’t lost nothin’. I just gained me a helpmeet. Me an’ Lily Ann snuck off quiet by ourselves an’ tied the knot.”

  “We didn’t want any fuss,” Lily Ann explained, “out of respect for Claude.” She strove manfully, or rather womanfully, to keep the quiver out of her voice.

  “Well, I swan!” cried Aunt Aggie.

  I swanned, too. So Abner Glutch had found a way to get his pudgy mitts on the late Claude’s ancestral acres, Aunt Agapantha notwithstanding. I looked at his necktie and wondered where he’d been when Claude got snarled up in the cream separator.

  Now, it appeared, all we could do was celebrate the event. As soon as she’d finished hanging up Uncle Hector’s dress suit, to the admiration of all present except Spotty, Aunt Aggie invited everybody into the fro
nt parlor for tea and cake. The goat stayed outside, banging one of the oil drums around in hopeless frustration. Ed and Fred had been made to take off their seaboots before they joined the party, but I didn’t think this was what made them so glum. They sat chomping down cake and looking as if they’d rather be out back with Spotty, banging oil drums around.

  No doubt to disarm us into believing he loved Lily Ann for herself alone, Abner insisted on telling us what he was giving her for wedding presents. He’d already insured his life in her favor and deeded over both his store and his filling station.

  “And I’m going to deed over the farm to Abner,” said Lily Ann, sweet innocent that she was. “It’s the least I can do.”

  “Not that I exactly what you’d call need it,” said Abner, toying with his new wife’s hand so everybody could get a good look at the sparkler she was wearing. “Business ain’t been so bad.”

  He proceeded to tell us how good it was while Ed and Fred ate more cake and Aunt Aggie grew restive. As soon as she could get a word in, she started dropping a few hints about her own family.

  “Well, us Harrisons ain’t much on braggin’ about what we got. Let’s talk about somethin’ more int’restin’. What was that you was tellin’ me, Willie, about James flyin’ clear out to California because all them bigwigs out there wanted to hear about the research he’s doin’? Even paid ’is fare for ’im an’ put a big piece in the paper, didn’t they?”

  “James, you never told us,” cried Lily Ann.

  “Oh, one honor more or less doesn’t mean much to James,” I said. “He’s always winning some award or having some head of state or delegation of scholars drop in to offer him another research grant.”

  That was true enough, Carter-Harrison’s activities being more inscrutable than anybody else’s and scholarly veneration for those great brains who are doing that which nobody else can figure out the whereof or whyfor being ever immense.

  “Can’t be much money in it,” Abner snorted, “or he wouldn’t be drivin’ that rattletrap out there.”

  “Oh, that’s mine,” I said. “My kid brother’s, I mean.” I felt I owed this to Aunt Aggie. “My Ferrari’s in the shop. James never drives himself. It wouldn’t be quite the thing, you know, for a man in his position.”