The Grub-And-Stakers Quilt a Bee (6 page)

“Could you identify her by her voice?” Sergeant Mac Vicar persisted.

Dave pondered, then shook his head. “I don’t think she said anything. Anyway it couldn’t have been any of Mum’s special pals like Dittany here or Miss Monk or Mrs. Trott or Mrs. Oakes. I’d have recognized them fast enough.”

“And so you would. Where did she go from the kitchen, can you tell me that?”

“No, I’m afraid I can’t. I’m so used to people wandering in and out of the museum, I don’t pay much attention. Maybe the plumber would know.”

“Then it behooves us to ask the plumber,” said Sergeant MacVicar, nothing daunted. “Good shooting, lads. Come, Deputy Monk. We may as well nip on over to Scottsbeck and draw a bow at a venture.”

It was not to be supposed that Dittany, having been separated from Osbert for two interminable days and, more importantly, nights, would take kindly to the prospect of his tootling off to Scottsbeck without her. When this fact was pointed out to him, Sergeant MacVicar not only understood but kindly volunteered to drive so the newlyweds could sit together in the back seat. Osbert blushed and said he didn’t mind driving and why didn’t they get Mrs. MacVicar and take her along, too, so she and the sergeant could sit in the back seat instead?

Sergeant MacVicar did not blush, but he did rub his chin and allow his bright blue eyes to twinkle once or twice. In the end, Mrs.

MacVicar and Dittany sat in back and discussed archery and garden club affairs, while their spouses sat in front and talked archery and crime detection, for that was how things were done in Lobelia Falls.

Cedric Fawcett, when they finally tracked him down sitting on a bench beside a muddy, sluggish creek, staring lugubriously into an empty Labatt’s bottle, was no earthly help at all. There’d been women in and out from time to time, and that was as far as they could get him to go. He hadn’t paid any attention to them. Why should he? He’d come to fix the sink trap, the sink trap he had fixed, and what more could they reasonably expect of him?

When had he left the museum?

After he’d fixed the sink trap.

Was that before or after Mr. Fairfield had been killed?

Cedric Fawcett didn’t know. He wouldn’t have known unless the body had turned up in the sink trap, which it hadn’t, eh.

What had he done after he’d left the museum?

He’d gone home and had a Labatt’s, naturally.

What were Mr. Fawcett’s plans for the immediate future?

He planned to go and get another Labatt’s. He arose from the bench to signify the interview was over and wandered, presumably beerward, through the gathering gloom. Mrs. MacVicar picked up her handbag and asked, “What shall we do next?”

“We might go get a Labatt’s,” Osbert ventured.

That struck them all as a reasonable suggestion. They went.

Nobody would admit to being hungry but they ordered a Welsh rabbit anyway and found it good. As they were taking a poll on whether anyone wanted a final Labatt’s, who should stroll over to their table but Andrew McNaster?

“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 Mac Vicar. 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 Mac Vicar 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. Mac Vicar 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 Mac Vicar, “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 overcredulous 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 out 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.

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.