Vane Pursuit Read online

  She wasn’t getting any answer on the phone. Peter must be off counting weather vanes and Cronkite Swope either dead to the world or up and away. She tried the Enderbles and got John.

  “Oh, Helen. Good to hear your voice. Made it all right, did you? You’ve missed Mary by a whisker, she just this minute went over to have a little visit with Jane. Want me to holler out the door?”

  “No, it doesn’t matter a bit. I promised Peter I’d let him know we got here. Maybe you could buzz Mary at our house and ask her to leave a note on the kitchen table. He has my friend’s number if he wants to call me back.”

  Helen exchanged a few more words with John on the subject of Sasquamahoc’s local fauna, mainly to the effect that she herself hadn’t seen any yet but she had it on good authority that the skunks all wore pink sneakers. Then, mindful of her hostess’s phone bill, she hung up and went to get her tea.

  “I was thinking,” said Catriona, when Helen’s cup had been refilled and she’d been equipped with another Joe Frogger she certainly didn’t need but wasn’t about to pass up. “If we zipped over and took Helen’s pictures today while the light’s still good, we’d have tomorrow free to go whale watching.”

  Iduna set down her cup. “Whale watching? Whatever put that into your head?”

  “It’s rather a done thing these days. Eustace Tilkey over in Hocasquam has started running excursions on his lobster boat, the Ethelbert Nevin. I haven’t had a chance to go out with him yet myself, so I thought it might be fun if we all went together. Unless you’d rather do something else,” Catriona added out of politeness.

  But Helen and Iduna were all for the whales. “Those are one kind of animal we don’t have at Balaclava. Though we do have President Svenson,” Helen added out of fairness. “How far from here is the forestry school?”

  “About half a mile. We could walk it in ten minutes if you feel like stretching your legs.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a little stroll.”

  “Then why don’t you and Cat go?” said Iduna. “I’ll stay here and wash up the dishes. Maybe I could get supper started, Cat, if you’ll tell me what to fix.”

  “We’ll bung the dishes into the washer and supper’s all fixed except for heating it up and putting it on the table,” Catriona told her firmly. “If you’re tired from the ride, why don’t you stretch out on the sofa? Or sit on the terrace and watch the swallows?”

  “Now, that’s a thought. They’d sort of get me in practice for the whales. I think I will, then, if you don’t mind.”

  Iduna picked up a magazine and headed out to the old-fashioned wooden swing that sat under an apple tree near the house. Helen and Catriona set off down the road.

  “I could have offered to take the car,” Catriona half apologized. “I forgot walking isn’t exactly Iduna’s thing.”

  “Don’t give it a thought. If she’d wanted to come, she’d have said so. I suspect what Iduna really wants is a nap. She dozed a bit on the way up, but you know what it’s like trying to sleep in a car. I don’t suppose she got much rest last night. None of us did.”

  “Oh, on account of that fire in the soap factory? They had a snatch of it on the news last night. I wondered how near you were.”

  “Actually, Peter and I were right there. I’d been over in Lumpkinton taking pictures of the factory weather vane, oddly enough, just a few hours before the place caught fire. We’d stayed to have supper with friends, and when they all rushed off to be volunteer firemen, Peter and I went up on a hill where we could look right down into the fire. You can’t imagine how awesome it was.”

  “Sure I can. How do you think I make my living? Damn, I wish I’d been there. I understand by now the town’s a seething mass of soapsuds.”

  “You wouldn’t think it was funny if it were your house the suds were getting into,” Helen rejoined somewhat tartly. “Or your job that had just got washed away. I don’t know what those people are going to do for work.”

  “Won’t the factory be rebuilt?”

  “I have no idea. Even so, it would take a long time.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Catriona demurred. “These days they prefabricate everything and stick up buildings overnight. Just truck in the hunks and whomp ‘em together. With robots, I believe. You did bring your camera?”

  Helen started to laugh. “I may have aged a few years since you last saw me, but I’m not quite senile yet. It’s in this little blue bag over my shoulder.”

  “Oh, is that what the bag’s for? I thought perhaps Iduna had packed us a lunch,” Catriona replied somewhat regretfully. “As far as age is concerned, you look younger now than you did in South Dakota. So does Iduna. What’s her husband like? Five foot three and skinny as a rail, I’ll bet. Little men always go for big women.”

  “Not Daniel. He’s taller than she and what you might with all temperance call portly. Actually, Daniel looks a great deal like a particularly handsome and distinguished pig. He was a widower with two sets of quadruplets, all married and fecund. Iduna’s up to the eyeballs in grandchildren and loving it. None of them live very close, so she doesn’t get stuck with a lot of babysitting, but they visit back and forth. She gets to cook huge holiday dinners, which she adores doing as I don’t have to tell you. She also does some teaching in the home ec department and attends a good many of the college social events. Daniel used to be rather stodgy, but she’s loosened him up. They performed an exhibition tango together at the alumni ball last month. It was lovely.”

  “I can imagine,” said Catriona, who no doubt could. “So what’s this windmill project in aid of?”

  “Weather vanes.” Helen explained about Praxiteles Lumpkin and the Smithsonian. “He used to travel around with a few sheets of copper, a bag of tools, and a jug of hard cider lashed to the back of his faithful mule Apuleius. The jug was for bait, to help him wheedle the local blacksmith into letting him use the forge. The cider worked quite well, except for one time when he found himself traveling just behind a temperance evangelist.”

  “These things are sent to test us, no doubt. I can’t think what else they’re good for.”

  “Neither can I. Of course, a good many of Praxiteles’s weather vanes have been destroyed one way or another. Most of them sold for junk and melted down, I suppose, though it breaks my heart to think so.”

  “Blah. Your heart isn’t broken that easily. How come you married Peter Shandy? You never married any of the others who kept panting down your neck.”

  “Our president’s wife doesn’t stand for any shenanigans. Besides, Peter’s the kind of man one feels like marrying.”

  “Would I have felt like marrying him?”

  “Quite possibly, but I’d never have let you. Anyway, you have Andrew.”

  “I do not have Andrew in the carnal sense, thank God for small blessings. Our relationship is purely that of lady of the manor and loyal serf. Or so I like to believe, though I have to admit Andrew has never quite grasped the principle of serfdom. You wait and see, I’ll wind up having to eat all those damn potatoes, get fat as a pig, and become a hissing and a byword in the streets of Sasquamahoc.”

  “But think how nice and warm you’ll be next winter,” Helen reminded her. “You know Mrs. Beeton said there was no better insulation than an inch or so of extra fat on the ribs. Is that the forestry school we’re coming to? Oh, I think I see the weather vane!”

  She scrabbled her field glasses out of the blue bag and trained them on a spiderlike object she’d discerned atop a huge old barn. “It’s glorious. Can we walk faster? I can’t wait.”

  Catriona McBogle shrugged. “De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum. I must say, I never thought to see the day when the blond bombshell of the ALA would be turned on by a weather vane.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Do we have to get permission?” Helen asked as they neared the barn.

  “Shoot first, ask later is what I’d do,” Catriona replied. “Anyway, I thought you had permission.”

  “I suppos
e I do, now that you mention it. It just seems a bit brassy barging in like this. I’ll have to stop in and pay a courtesy call on President Fingal, anyway, and explain why Peter couldn’t come with me.”

  “Oh, Guthrie isn’t one to stand on ceremony. Stall around awhile and maybe he’ll have gone home. You don’t want to waste the light, do you?”

  “Good point. There is a lot of it, isn’t there? The quality of the light up here is incredible.”

  “It’s just that we have more room to put it in,” Catriona replied modestly. “Maine’s bigger than all the rest of New England put together, you know. As big as, anyway. Or so I’ve been told. I haven’t taken the measurements myself. If I did, I’d most likely get them wrong. Do you want me to hold your bag or anything?”

  “No, thanks, I’ll be wanting it. I think what I’d better do is climb up on the fire escape of that building over there so I’ll be more on a level with the weather vane. What is it, a dormitory?”

  “Yes, but don’t worry. I doubt if there’s anybody inside. Summer sessions won’t be starting for another week or so, I believe. At least I haven’t heard any shouts of ‘Timber’ lately. Go ahead, they don’t have any campus cops here. Just brawny lumberjacks with double-bitted axes. Hurry up, the thing’s starting to wiggle.”

  The breeze had been almost too light to be felt on the skin. Now it was strong enough to move the vane so that the lumberjack felling the tree was directly broadside to the dormitory. Helen ran up the open iron steps to the topmost platform, leaned out over the railing, her telephoto lens in place and her shutter finger ready, waited for the vane to settle, and snapped.

  She took exposure after exposure as the sun and shadows cast marvelous color effects on the oxidized copper. Wanting some black-and-whites, too, she fished an already loaded duplicated camera out of her blue bag.

  As she was switching the lens, she became aware that the dormitory was not empty. From somewhere inside, she could hear male voices. Young men, from the sound of them. As why wouldn’t they be? Intent on getting the right focus and fretting lest the wind take a sudden notion to change direction, Helen paid no attention to what was none of her business anyway until one place name caught her ear.

  The only other time she’d heard Woeful Ridge mentioned had been last night at the Horsefalls’, just before the fire alarm had gone off. She forgot for the moment what she was doing up here and strained to hear more, but the students either stopped talking or left the dormitory. On their way to the dining hall, most likely. She’d better get a move on, herself. Iduna was no doubt beginning to feel a trifle peckish.

  Helen managed to get some excellent broadside shots before the wind freshened enough to be bothersome. Then she picked her way down, wondering why she hadn’t been nervous coming up, and grievously smudging her new pink sneakers on the iron treads. Soot, she supposed, from wood fires in old stoves. One might think a forestry school would have heard about catalytic combustion.

  One might also consider that Sasquamahoc, like other schools, was no doubt feeling the pinch of inflated overhead costs. She dusted off her sneakers as best she could and asked Catriona where they’d be likely to find President Fingal, assuming he was still around.

  They tracked him to his office in the administration building. He said he was pleased to see them and looked as if he meant it.

  “This is great, Mrs. Shandy. Sorry, it’s Dr. Shandy, isn’t it? Or Dr. Marsh? Or Marsh-Shandy, or Shandy-Marsh?”

  “It’s Helen, please. You call my husband Peter, don’t you?”

  “I’ve called him a few other things in my time, the old—” President Fingal caught himself. “And he calls me Guthrie, as I hope you will. We were in college together, as he may have mentioned.”

  “Any number of times. Peter was sorry he couldn’t come with me as we’d hoped. I expect you’ve heard about the big fire down our way.”

  “Yes, I saw it on the news. Don’t tell me Pete’s a volunteer fireman these days?”

  “No, he isn’t, but it’s rather an all-hands-to-the-pumps situation just now.” Helen didn’t see why she had to go into details. “He was asked to stay and help and didn’t think he ought to refuse. So I came along to Catriona’s with a mutual friend. Peter’s hoping to get up later.”

  “I hope he makes it. It sure would be nice to see old Pete again. Now what were you planning to do about our weather vane, Helen?”

  “Actually I’ve already done it,” she confessed. “The light and the wind were exactly right as we came on campus. Cat said you wouldn’t mind if I just went ahead and took some shots, so I did. Can you tell me anything of the weather vane’s history? How did it come into the school’s possession?”

  “By accident, far as I know. It was on the barn when Old Hickory bought the place. That was what they used to call Eliphalet Jackson, who founded the school. We’re not so old as Balaclava, but we do go back a ways. The barn’s all that’s left of a farm that used to be here. The house and the other outbuildings had burned down, which is how Old Hickory managed to get the place cheap. Cheap being practically for nothing in those days, or we’d probably never have got started.”

  He brought an old scrapbook of newspaper clippings and class photographs: small groups of short, dark, thickset men who made Helen think of bears wearing plaid shirts and heavy dark work pants tucked into high laced boots. They all had their axes with them.

  “Old-time woodsmen didn’t like to be parted from their axes,” President Fingal explained. “They were pretty fussy about taking care of them, too. They’d smooth away at the handles till they got just the heft they wanted and kept the blades honed till they could shave with them, though I don’t suppose many did. I’ve heard a man could pick up an axe in pitch dark and know whether it was his or somebody else’s just from the way it felt in his hand.”

  He turned to another class photo. “Our boys have always looked pretty spruce, comparatively speaking. Years ago, the school blacksmith used to cut their hair and trim their beards with the horse clippers. We’ve got a set of real barber shears and clippers now,” the president added proudly. “We like to move with the times, though they kind of get away from us now and then. The real old-time lumberjacks tended to get a trifle unkempt after a winter in the woods. My grandfather used to tell me what they looked like coming out in the spring. They’d be farmers, a lot of them, and they’d hire out to lumber camps after harvest was over. Sewn up in their winter long Johns, like as not. By the time they got out, the horses would have grown long winter coats and the men would have hair down over their shoulders and beards to their waists.”

  He turned a few more pages. “There, I knew I had a picture of one somewhere. That’s my Great-Uncle Mose. Looks like a wild animal, doesn’t he? Gramp took that with an old box Brownie. He said you could hardly see Mose’s face, just dirt and hair. Aunt Laviney had to shave and barber him and give him a bath before she was sure she’d got the right husband back. Not but what she might as soon have had somebody else’s, from a few things I’ve heard.”

  President Fingal shook his head and shoved the scrapbook aside. “You couldn’t blame the men. Those lumber camps weren’t always the height of class, you know. Some of them did pretty well by the loggers, but Gramp said Mose wound up in one where all they had for bedding was piles of straw on the floor and one great big blanket. The men would lie down in their clothes, then the ones on the outsides would take hold of the blanket and spread it out over the whole pack of them at once. Maybe they took off their boots, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it. Hope I’m not offending your aesthetic sensibilities, Cat.”

  He grinned at her and she grinned back. “You know me better than that, Guthrie. Well, I expect we ought to be moseying back to the house. We left our friend Iduna Stott communing with the swallows.”

  “Maybe you two would like to bring her over here to dinner tomorrow noontime?”

  “Thanks, but we’re going whale watching with Eustace Tilkey. How about the day after?”


  “Sure thing. Just let us know you’re coming, so’s we’ll have time to lay the plates over the spots in the tablecloth and pour a little extra water in the soup. Nice to meet you, Helen. Say hi to Pete for me.”

  “I’ll do that, Guthrie. He’ll probably be phoning me this evening. Oh, by the way, where is Woeful Ridge?”

  “Cussed if I know. I never heard of it.”

  “Likable fellow,” Helen remarked as they left the school. “He reminds me a little of Smokey the Bear. Do you see a lot of him, Cat?”

  “Off and on. Guthrie’s pretty busy most of the year, and so am I. Nobody ever believes writers do any work, but we do.”

  “Yes, I know,” Helen replied demurely.

  “Oh, that’s right. Welcome to the club. How’s the book going?”

  “Rather well, considering nobody ever expected The Buggins Family in Balaclava County to be a runaway best-seller. They’ve just run off a second printing. The first one was two thousand copies. That’s not bad for the Pied Pica Press, you know.”

  “Not bad at all,” Cat agreed. “Maybe I can work in a quote from it in my next book and give sales another boost.”

  “Don’t you dare! I’ve already let one idiot who calls herself an author use some of my genealogical material, which she of course carefully and properly attributed to me, only she got my dates mixed up. I’ve been getting polite letters of inquiry from complete strangers wanting to know how I could possibly have made such an imbecilic mistake.”

  “Don’t let it upset you too much. Everybody comes a cropper sooner or later. As Harry Truman used to say, ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the typewriter.’ “

  “I thought professional writers used word processors these days.”

  “Not me, kid. If God had meant us to spend our lives staring at green neon letters on a dinky little screen, She’d have given us styrene eyeballs is how I look at it. Are you hungry?”