The Grub-and-Stakers Quilt a Bee Page 5

  “Well, well, look who’s here” was his predictable greeting. “I thought you folks would be back in Lobelia Falls picking up the pieces. Say, how about me buying you all a beer?”

  “We would not impose on your generosity to that extent, Mr. McNaster,” the sergeant’s wife replied with stately dignity. “You have already put us in your debt with the assistance your staff has rendered to the museum. We have in fact just been talking to one of your men who was working there this afternoon when the tragedy occurred.”

  “You mean Ceddie? I thought he’d left before it happened.”

  “That point is still moot,” Mrs. MacVicar told him. “My husband has not yet been able to reach a firm conclusion as to the exact time Mr. Fairfield met his death. Moreover, your Mr. Fawcett was unable or perhaps merely unwilling to tell us precisely when he left. Perhaps you could do so?”

  “Who, me? Listen, what’s the idea here?” McNaster was a tall, portly man with shiny black hair and shiny red cheeks that gave the impression he was sucking jawbreakers. His lips were red and shiny, too, but right now there was no suggestion of sweetness about them. “I try to do you a favor, and this is the thanks I get. Give a dog a bad name and hang him, eh? Just because I may possibly have made one or two little errors in judgment a while back—”

  “We are none of us perfect, Mr. McNaster,” said the sergeant, although nobody thought he really meant it. “Therefore it behooves us to vouchsafe unto others that mercy which we are so desirous to receive ourselves, does it not? As my wife has indicated, we four came over to Scottsbeck endeavoring to extract some information that might help us make sense of the sad occurrence to which you have alluded. Thus far our expedition has not met with success. My wife’s words to you were spoken not in censure but in hope.”

  “Then how come she wouldn’t let me buy her a beer, eh?”

  “Because she’s already had two and she doesn’t want any more,” Osbert Monk put in. “She won’t let me buy her one either, if it makes you feel any better. We’d have asked you to sit down with us, but we were getting ready to leave.”

  “My husband’s been away on a business trip and he’s tired,” Dittany added for what that was worth.

  She’d never thought to see the day she’d be deliberately trying to placate Andy McNasty, as he was more commonly known around town, but as a dutiful wife she felt bound to follow where Osbert led. Besides, she knew Osbert was trying to find out how Andy McNasty knew Mr. Fairfield had fallen off the roof instead of out the window as was commonly supposed.

  It was sad to see all this diplomacy trickling down the drain. McNaster’s reply was as unsatisfactory as Cedric Fawcett’s, though less phlegmatically given. The gist of it was that he’d stopped at the inn for supper as usual, seen the commotion over at the museum, and gone to see what was up. He’d known Fred Brown was doing a job on the museum roof. He’d assumed Mr. Fairfield had gone up to inspect Brown’s progress, or lack of it, because that was what he himself would have done, though he wouldn’t have fallen off the edge because he wasn’t an absentminded intellectual like Mr. Fairfield. Now they mentioned it, he’d heard somebody say something about the attic window but those windows hadn’t looked to him like the sort a person would be apt to fall out of. So he figured it must have been the roof, wasn’t it?

  “At this juncture we are not sure of anything, Mr. McNaster,” said Sergeant MacVicar. On that equivocal note, they parted.

  “My stars and garters!” was Dittany’s comment once they’d got back into the car and headed for Lobelia Falls. “What do you make of that?”

  “Of all possible encounters,” Sergeant MacVicar agreed, “that was the one I should least have expected.”

  “You were marvelous, Mrs. MacVicar,” said Dittany. “How in the world did you ever think what to say?”

  “Mrs. MacVicar is never at a loss for a word,” said the sergeant, keeping his eyes on the road. “Were praise to the face not open disgrace, I should be inclined to agree that she was indeed marvelous.”

  Mrs. MacVicar said not to be silly and didn’t Dittany think the restaurant cook had gone a little too heavy on the mustard in the Welsh rabbit?

  Dittany said Osbert liked plenty of mustard and did Mrs. MacVicar think McNaster had been telling the truth or putting it on?

  “He is a man of devious ways,” Mrs. MacVicar conceded.

  “I wouldn’t trust that ornery coyote one inch, myself,” said Osbert. “Furthermore, I’d a good mind to get up and paste him one, the way he kept ogling my wife. Not that she isn’t oglesome, if that’s the right word.”

  “Please, darling. Praise to the face is open disgrace. What got me, aside from the ogling,” Dittany inserted parenthetically, though in truth she hadn’t noticed it, having had eyes only for Osbert, who was no mean ogler, either, “was his saying Mr. Fairfield was dumped off the roof. How does he know those attic windows are too small to push anybody out of, unless he’s been up there poking around, eh?”

  “Strictly speaking,” said Sergeant MacVicar, “the attic windows are not too small. A form of so slight a build as Mr. Fairfield’s could have been projected from yon orifice if you lined him up straight and gave him a hefty shove. The difficulty would lie in obtaining his cooperation for such a maneuver.”

  “But what about the fuzz on the railing?”

  “We must e’en ask ourselves whether that fuzz could have been put there by conspiratorial hands to make us think the victim was not in fact dumped out the attic window when in fact he was, although I cannot for the life of me think why. As to how McNaster happened to take so keen an observation of the attic windows, we must remember he is by profession a builder. I doubt not it would be second nature for him to notice windows in the same way a milliner, for example, would notice hats.”

  “A milliner would find few hats to notice these days, more’s the pity,” said Mrs. MacVicar. “I would remind you, Donald, that while McNaster chooses to call himself a builder, he is by avocation a schemer and conniver. One would wish to believe he has learned his painful lesson and abandoned his perfidious ways, but one would have to be either a saint or the possessor of a very short memory to do so. The circumstances under which we acquired the Aralia Polyphema Architrave Museum preclude our being over-credulous about this sudden outpouring of the milk of human kindness. On reflection, Dittany, and with reference to your earlier question, I think Andrew McNaster was more than likely having us on. If I mistake his motives, you can put it down to human frailty or the mustard in the Welsh rabbit.”

  “Mustard,” said Dittany. “That reminds me, I wonder if Mrs. Fairfield is still awake.”

  “I don’t get the connection, darling,” said Osbert.

  “That,” said Mrs. MacVicar, “is because you don’t know Mrs. Fairfield as we do. Donald, you needn’t bother pulling that Deacon Jeremiah face at me. With all compassion for her sudden bereavement, we’ve found her to be only superficially endowed with those qualities of sweetness and light you profess to find so attractive in womankind, despite or perhaps because of the years you’ve lived with me.”

  “Deputy Monk, as an old married man to a young married man, I advise you never to try answering a remark like that. Dittany, I misdoubt Dr. Somervell’s potion will have assured Mrs. Fairfield a solid night’s sleep. Any attempt to grill that most material witness must be postponed until we can be sure of getting rational answers and not incurring the wrath of Minerva Oakes, who has already been sorely tried this night and is herself perhaps asleep by now. The morn, or e’en the morn’s morn, will be time enough.”

  Dittany thought the morn’s morn would be stretching patience beyond the breaking point, but she knew Sergeant MacVicar worked in mysterious ways his wonders to perform and there was no earthly use trying to hurry a Highland Scot who didn’t want to be hurried. And if everybody else was knocking off for the night and trotting off to bed, who were she and Osbert to buck the trend?

  But she did wish to heck they’d been able to find o
ut who that woman in the blue or green or purple dress was, and what she’d been doing in the museum’s kitchen. Because the kitchen was next to the back stairs, and the back stairs led to the attic, and going up attic had been her idea in the first place. She had a nasty feeling that if she hadn’t obeyed that impulse, Mr. Fairfield might still be alive.

  CHAPTER 7

  IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN vestigial guilt that sent Dittany to the museum as soon as she’d given Osbert his breakfast and seen him happily cuddled up to his typewriter. She hadn’t expected to find anybody around the place this morning, not even the odd loiterer on the sidewalk. Lobelia Falls folk had better things to do than lollygag around gawking when there was nothing to see. Therefore, she was utterly flabbergasted to get inside and find Mrs. Fairfield seated at her late husband’s desk, writing busily in one of his notebooks.

  As she hesitated in the doorway, the widow looked up. “Good morning, Mrs. Monk. You’re an early bird today.”

  “You could have knocked me over with a feather,” Dittany told Hazel Munson later. “I just stood there with my mouth open.”

  In fact, she didn’t. She gulped once or twice, then got her vocal cords straightened out. “Mrs. Fairfield, whatever you’re doing, you don’t have to. Wouldn’t you rather go home and bathe your temples in cologne or something?”

  “Mrs. Monk, I have no home.”

  “But Minerva would—”

  “Mrs. Oakes has been kindness itself. But one can hardly expect her to wait on a lorn widow hand and foot, can one?”

  “I don’t see why not. Minerva’s a natural-born mother duck, I expect she’s over at Zilla Trott’s right now, borrowing some camomile tea to soothe your fractured nerves. She’ll be sick as a cat when she finds you’re not around to drink it. Besides, shouldn’t you be doing things about the—about Mr. Fairfield?”

  “Oh, that’s all done.” With a sad little sigh, Mrs. Fairfield turned another page, awkwardly because of her cast, and made another note. “That undertaker from Scottsbeck seems efficient enough. I’m meeting with Reverend Pennyfeather in a while at the parsonage to plan the funeral service, and I’ve telephoned Mr. Fairfield’s nephew in Duluth. There are so few relatives. My husband was the last of his generation, and I’m an only child, sad to say. You are more fortunate than I in that regard, I’m sure.”

  “Nope,” said Dittany. “I’m an only child, too.”

  Panic seized her, though, as she realized she herself might some day, God forbid, become a widow. She thought of Osbert back home now, with another herd of rustled cattle thundering through his inspired brain, no doubt, and that cowlick behind his left ear swirling so adorably she’d had a hard time tearing herself away from it just now. Maybe she ought to run back this instant and take another good, long look, just in case.

  No, this was no moment to be dithering over Osbert’s cowlick. She ought to be saying something consolatory to Mrs. Fairfield. Her problem was that Mrs. Fairfield wasn’t actually looking overwhelmingly bereft. On the contrary, to Dittany’s discerning eye she appeared a weentsy bit smug, sitting there in the curator’s chair—albeit the chair was an ugly old wooden thing painted to look like mahogany, with wobbly legs on tiny metal casters that resembled babies’ roller skates—plying the gold-plated fountain pen that had been another farewell gift from her late husband’s erstwhile colleagues.

  “What about the people where he used to work?” she asked.

  “I called my husband’s former secretary as soon as I got here. I didn’t like to keep putting long-distance phone calls on Mrs. Oakes’s bill. I don’t suppose any of them will come to the funeral, but I daresay they’ll send a nice floral tribute.”

  She tapped the end of the gold pen against her front teeth, scanning her notes. “Now, Mrs. Monk, if you’re looking for something to do, you might try making those dining room chairs presentable. I want that room set up as soon as possible so I can start thinking about the upstairs. Wash them down with mild soap and water, being careful not to soak the wood. You’d better do it outdoors. They must be thoroughly dry before you start rubbing in the lemon oil. By the way, the kitchen sink still isn’t draining properly. Kindly give that plumber a ring right now.”

  Bereavement or no bereavement, this was a bit much. “Can’t,” said Dittany. “You accepted that plumber as a donation from Andrew McNaster, remember? Since we didn’t hire him, I don’t see where we have any authority to call him in.”

  “Then how am I to get my sink fixed?”

  “Let’s wait and see. He may be planning to come back later today.”

  Dittany could have thought of other things to say, but she refrained. Young as she was, she’d seen enough of death to know it could affect those left behind in strange ways. Maybe all this bustle and bossiness was just Mrs. Fairfield’s way of handling her grief. Little did she know there was worse news to come about her husband’s precipitous demise.

  Dittany wasn’t about to be the one to tell. She went and washed the dining room chairs.

  As she was setting them out to dry, on the side porch which was screened by a high hedge, because everybody in town would naturally be assuming the museum was closed today out of respect for its late curator and would be shocked to the marrow did they but know not only a trustee but Mr. Fairfield’s very widow were here working, a van pulled into the driveway and a man got out. He wasn’t the plumber; he was the long-lost roofer.

  “Morning, ma’am. Here for my stuff.”

  “You mean those ropes and buckets you left in the stairwell?” Dittany replied. “I’m afraid you can’t have them.”

  “Huh? Who says so?”

  “Firstly, the board of trustees, of whom I’m one. We don’t intend to settle your bill until we’ve made positively sure that skylight isn’t going to leak again. Unless you can give us a positive ironclad guarantee, you might as well leave that stuff right where it is till after the next rain.”

  “Look, lady, when I fix a skylight, it’s fixed. I want my gear.”

  “That brings us to objection number two,” said Dittany, “namely and to wit, Sergeant MacVicar. In case you hadn’t heard, we had a sudden death here yesterday.”

  “What’d that to do with me?”

  “That remains to be seen,” Dittany replied darkly. “Anyway, Sergeant MacVicar’s in charge of the investigation, so you’d better trot yourself down to the station and get his permission before you start tampering with the evidence.”

  “What’s all this?” That was Mrs. Fairfield, right on the job. “Is that the plumber you’re talking to, Mrs. Monk? Did you tell him about the—why, Frederick Churtle! After all these years. If you’ve come to borrow more money from Peregrine, I’m afraid you’ve left it a bit late.”

  “Haven’t changed a bit, have you, Evangeline?” The roofer squinted up at her with what could be dimly discerned through his three-days’ growth of whiskers as an expression of deepest distaste. “Hey, you don’t mean that was Perry who got killed yesterday?”

  “It was, since you’re so kind as to inquire.”

  “I’ll be damned.” He took a moment to digest the news, then shook his head. “Poor old Perry. How’d it happen?”

  “He went up to shut the attic windows Mrs. Monk here left open, and fell out.”

  The roofer shifted his gaze yet farther upward and shook his head again. “You trying to kid me?”

  Mrs. Fairfield’s not inconsiderable jaw dropped. “Frederick, whatever do you mean?”

  “Cripes, Evangeline, I always knew you weren’t anyways near so smart as you took credit for, but I’d never have believed you could be that dumb. Take a look at ’em.”

  Instead of following his suggestion, Mrs. Fairfield turned to Dittany. “Mrs. Monk, if you have any idea what Frederick Churtle is driving at, would you be kind enough to enlighten me?”

  She did look thunderstruck, as well she might. Dittany tried to think of a tactful way to explain. “Well, you remember yesterday when we were up attic?”

&nbs
p; “How could I forget? If you hadn’t chosen that particular time to go—”

  Dittany’s tact began to wear thin. She fought the urge to remind Mrs. Fairfield that she had gone alone and would have been better content to remain so, and furthermore that she wasn’t the one who’d said to leave the windows open.

  “Yes, well, we can’t change that now, can we? What I started to say was, don’t you recall how tiny those windows are?”

  “Why no, I can’t say I do. When you say tiny—”

  “I mean they’re hardly more than portholes. Come out on the lawn and see for yourself.”

  Mrs. Fairfield heaved a mighty sigh, stepped down to the ground, and did as she was bidden. “Oh, dear. I do see what you mean. All right, Frederick, for once in your life, you were right and I was wrong. But if Peregrine didn’t fall out the window, then—”

  The roofer snorted. “Then I guess we know now why this young woman says Sergeant MacVicar doesn’t want me to take my rigging down, eh?”

  “Are you trying to say he fell off the roof? That’s absurd, and you should know it better than I. You know how Peregrine always was about heights, Frederick.”

  “I know. Wouldn’t even climb up on a chair to change a light bulb. Puts you on kind of a sticky wicket, eh, Vangie?”

  Mrs. Fairfield didn’t say anything for what seemed a long time. Then she sighed again, more heavily than before. “Yes, Frederick, it does. If Sergeant MacVicar is—but I mustn’t even think of that, must I? After all, you were Peregrine’s friend once.”

  “Evangeline, what the bloody hell do you think you’re talking about?”

  “Oh, Frederick, how can I tell? Such a dreadful, dreadful—Mrs. Monk, do you think you could possibly find me a cup of tea?”

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” said Dittany. “You go on into the parlor and stretch out on the chesterfield.”

  “No, no. I mustn’t give in. Peregrine wouldn’t have wanted that I’ll just go into my office and get back to work. Frederick, if you happen to run across that plumber, I’d thank you to tell him I want him here at his earliest convenience.”