A Pint of Murder (3 page)

One of Charles Treadway’s many inventions had been a revolutionary kind of cement. As a test, he’d spread his first batch on his own cellar floor, and waited for it to dry. If he hadn’t died forty-six years ago, he’d still have been waiting. The material had stood up well enough, to be sure, but anybody who stepped on it found his shoe soles spotted with a whitish deposit that was totally impossible to get off.

Virtually everything the old man had ever invented was a disaster. Even his one modest success, the improved can opener, had been the instrument of his own demise. Why, after all this time, was Jason Bain so impatient to get his claws on one of Charles Treadway’s crazy patents?

Janet couldn’t imagine. She also couldn’t imagine why she’d thought it a good idea to make Dot Fewter join her in this inventorying. Dot, however, was all for it. Pleased at being assigned what she obviously considered a glamorous job for a change, she seated herself on an upturned nail keg and arranged her papers importantly on one end of the inventor’s workbench.

“What shall I write?”

“Let’s see.” Janet gazed around at the clutter of seventy years and more, appalled at the task she’d so lightly undertaken. “You might as well put down one workbench for a start.”

“One—workbench—for—a—”

“For Pete’s sake, Dot, you needn’t write every word I say. Just put down ‘workbench.’ Three rows of shelves. I suppose we’ve got to itemize all this stuff she put up, though I can’t imagine anybody will ever dare to eat it now. Two pints tomatoes. She was almost out of them, poor soul. She loved tomatoes in the wintertime. Twelve pints peaches. Six pints pears.”

“Wait a second. How do you spell ‘twelve,’ eh?”

“Make a No. 1 and put a 2 after it. And use a
p
for pints. She didn’t use her quart jars any more. Too much for one old woman, she’d say. What’s this stuff? Applesauce, I guess. Five pints.” She’d get along faster listing them herself. “Two pints spinach or fiddleheads or something. These greenish old jars are hard to see into. Put down spinach, it’s shorter. Fourteen jars—well, I’ll be darned! Dot, what do you make of this?”

Dot climbed off her nail keg and pushed her nose close to the jar Janet was pointing at. After some deliberation, she pronounced her verdict. “It’s snap beans.”

“I can see that. But look at them. Here are thirteen other jars that have been snapped by hand more or less hit-and-miss, the way your mother or mine would have done them. But this jar’s been cut very neatly and evenly with a knife, as the home-arts teacher taught us in school. Why should a woman who’s been doing the same thing in the same way all her life suddenly turn around and do it differently?”

“I dunno,” said Dot. “Say, can you beat that, eh? Wait’ll I tell Ma! Mrs. Treadway always used to say a bean too old to snap was only fit for the pigs.”

“I remember.” Janet had a heart-wrenching picture of her old friend sitting out on the back doorstep, a heap of fresh green beans in the lap of her long white apron and her ropy hands going like clockwork, popping the crisp pieces into an old metal colander, tossing aside any bean that wouldn’t break at a touch. “Nobody’s ever going to convince me Mrs. Treadway did this.”

“But if she didn’t, who did?” argued the hired woman. “She’d never let anybody help her. I’ve offered a million times.”

That was a lie, for sure. Janet doubted that Dot Fewter had ever volunteered for any task. It was true, however, that Mrs. Treadway would have refused. She wouldn’t even have let Annabelle, or Janet herself, touch her food once it had been picked and fetched over to the Mansion.

The color that she’d begun to get back in her cheeks suddenly drained out. “Here, Dot, you count all those empty jars and write down the number. I’m going upstairs for a minute.”

She took the puzzling jar with her, cussing herself at every step for having blurted out her discovery. Now Dot would be right at her heels with an ear glued to the keyhole while she made the phone call she had to make. Mrs. Treadway had in fact died of eating botulinous string beans; the analysis and the autopsy had proved that. But had the beans that killed her been snapped or cut?

Janet knew better than to ask Marion. Either the niece wouldn’t remember or else she wouldn’t say. Dr. Druffitt had to be the one. Besides, he’d know where to send this second jar to be analyzed, as he had the first.

Mrs. Druffitt answered her call, impersonally agreeable as always. She didn’t ask after Annabelle, which was understandable, but she did mention that she’d heard Janet had had emergency surgery down in Saint John, and was it her gall bladder? Doctor was out on a call just now, but he’d be in for his office hours and she hoped Janet wasn’t in too much pain.

Janet said it was her appendix, knowing perfectly well that Mrs. Druffitt and at least one of the extraneous listeners on the party line were sure it had been something else. Since there was no hope of keeping her business a secret anyway once Dot found somebody to tell, she might as well not try.

“No, thanks, I’m making a good recovery. It’s just that I’m over here at the Mansion helping Marion with the inventory and I’ve run across a—a little matter I’d like to ask Dr. Druffitt about.”

“I see.” Mrs. Druffitt was too great a lady to ask why Janet couldn’t ask her instead, since it was she and not her husband who’d been Mrs. Treadway’s blood relative. She did unbend so far as to say, “What does my cousin think about this little matter?”

“I haven’t mentioned it to her yet,” Janet confessed. “Marion’s working in the attic and I’ve been down cellar. I thought I wouldn’t bother her till I’ve got the doctor’s opinion, since she has so many other things on her mind.”

“That’s very considerate of you, Janet. Marion does seem to be feeling the strain a great deal, eh? As we all are, of course. And so often things that appear important don’t really amount to a hill of beans, do they? I’m afraid I’ll be off to my club meeting, but if you could be here on the dot of two, I’m sure Doctor could spare you a moment.”

“Thank you,” said Janet. “I’ll be there.”

W
HEN JANET TOLD BERT
at noontime that she’d like to use the car he’d said, “Sure, go ahead. Do you good to get off the place for a while.”

Her brother no doubt thought she wanted to hobnob with her old pals in the village. In fact, as she started down the hill road, Janet was rather surprised to realize she didn’t have a soul down there whom she particularly wanted to see. Growing up two miles out from the center, she’d been too far away to run with the pack even if her parents had let her, which they certainly wouldn’t, having been middle-aged folk to whom a daughter fifteen years younger than the son before her had come as a considerable shock.

She’d got too much attention at home to mind the semi-isolation. Then Bert had brought Annabelle home, and she’d been fun, and then the babies had come and they’d been fun, too. Then, her senior year in high school, her father, who’d developed cataracts and really shouldn’t have been driving at all, much less with his wife in the car, had got in the way of a logging truck. After that, Janet had decided maybe she’d like to go down to Fredericton to business college, and Bert and Annabelle had thought that was a sensible thing for her to do. And then she’d nursed Annabelle through a bad spell and then she’d taken the job in Saint John and by now the few friends she’d known had either married fellows from out of town or moved, like herself, to places where jobs were easier to find.

Certainly there wasn’t much to do around Pitcherville. Some, like Bert, had their own farms and did pretty well. Some of the men and a few of the women worked at the lumber mill five miles downstream. They fished, they hunted, they gardened, they did whatever odd jobs came along. One way and another, they got by.

Somebody must have picked up a few dollars doing roadwork since she was last home. They’d put down a lovely new pavement, which was nice but strange, as the road never got used much. Another governmental aberration, no doubt. What a pity they didn’t have Charles Treadway still around to invent one of his super surfaces for them. He could have brought the whole country to a screeching halt in no time flat, thus saving the Conservatives, the Liberals, the N.D.P., and the rest a lot of fuss and bother. Whatever did Jason Bain want of that batty old inventor’s patent?

The patent was the least of her worries. What really mattered was this jar of mismatched string beans. She parked in front of the one private residence on Queen Street that merited the description “imposing,” and took her jar, discreetly masked in brown paper, off the front seat.

Mrs. Druffitt met her at the front door, dressed for her meeting in a lilac print dress, spotless white pumps with little bows on the toes, and an impressive Queen Mary toque of purple violets swathed in lavender veiling. Janet knew the outfit well. Mrs. Druffitt had been complaining for years that one had to keep wearing one’s old clothes because one simply couldn’t find anything fit to buy any more. It was generally agreed that Elizabeth Druffitt could find more excuses for not parting with a dollar than any other woman in Canada.

Preoccupied with pulling on her white nylon gloves and checking her handbag to make sure she had the notes for her little speech of introduction to the distinguished speaker of the day, the doctor’s wife had no time to spare for Janet.

“Good afternoon, Janet. Please go right on in. I thought I heard Doctor putting the car away in the carriage house just now, but I’m so rushed I didn’t take time to look. They’ve stuck me with the job of pouring out, unfortunately.”

As if she didn’t know every other member of the Tuesday Club would cheerfully give a back tooth to preside over the teapot. Annabelle had never been invited to join that august group, of course, and Janet never expected to be. Gripping her jar, she nodded farewell to the lilac print as it swished down the well-swept brick walk, and went into the waiting room.

The house Elizabeth Druffitt had inherited from her parents was as gloomily grand as the Mansion must have been in its heyday, and a great deal better kept. Its furnishings hadn’t changed in this century, except that pictures of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, George V and Queen Mary, George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip had been added in proper succession to the steel engraving of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. King Edward VIII was conspicuously absent.

This place looked like a museum and felt like a funeral parlor, Janet thought as she settled herself and her perturbing burden on a slippery black horsehair sofa with crocheted antimacassars pinned to the back. No wonder Gilly had balked at bringing her son back here to live. What must it have been like for that only daughter, growing up inside this well-dusted tomb?

The hands on the red marble mantel clock pointed to exactly two when she sat down. She watched them swing around to five past, ten past, then a quarter past the hour. It certainly was taking Dr. Druffitt a long time to put that car away. Perhaps he’d stopped in the kitchen for a snack or something, but why didn’t he at least poke his head in to see whether any patients were waiting? Janet began to get annoyed. She coughed once or twice, and when nothing happened she got up and tapped diffidently at the office door.

Still nothing happened. She knocked louder. At last she turned the knob and said, “Dr. Druffitt, are you—”

Then she saw the body on the floor. The crumpled mat at its feet told a clear story. The parquet floor was waxed slick as a curling rink. Dr. Druffitt must have skidded on that braided mat and bashed his head against the corner of the desk.

Janet knelt beside him, wondering if she ought to loosen his collar or something before she called for help. But something about the look of the man told her he was beyond any help she could get. Steeling herself, she slipped a hand inside his vest to feel for a heartbeat but could find none. She remembered something she’d read once, took the mirror out of her purse, and held it to his mouth. There was no clouding of breath. She hadn’t really expected any.

But why hadn’t she heard the crash when he fell? She’d been sitting right outside the whole time. Unless it happened during those few moments when she and Mrs. Druffitt had stood talking out at the front door. How dreadful, the husband lying dead and the wife tripping off to pour tea in her violet toque!

“Oh my God,” Janet thought. “I’ll have to go over there and tell her.”

Janet knew where the Tuesday Club met, in the vestry of the Reformed Baptist Church. How could she face that group of respectable ladies with a horror tale like this? How could she leave the doctor lying here alone while she went? What if some child were to come in and find him like this, or an elderly person with a bad heart?

At last her head began to function again. Janet knew what she must do. She’d telephone to Fred Olson.

Olson was Pitcherville’s town marshal, as well as its auto mechanic and sometime blacksmith. His police duties had never amounted to more than locking up the usual Saturday-night allotment of drunk-and-disorderlies or ticketing the odd Yank for admiring the scenery at sixty miles an hour, but he was a decent soul and better than nobody.

By the time she got him on the line, her voice was shaking so that he had a hard time understanding the first word or two. “Fred, this is Janet Wadman. I’m down here at Dr. Druffitt’s office and you’d better come right on over. He’s—I was waiting and he didn’t come out so I knocked and then I opened the door and—for God’s sake, will you hurry?”

She couldn’t stay there. She went back to the waiting room. It was terrible, being there alone with all those kings and queens staring down at her. Why didn’t anybody else come? Surely Dr. Druffitt must have had a few patients left.

It was too nice a day to get sick, that was why. It was too nice a day to be finding things in people’s cellars one didn’t want to find. Now she’d never know if that jar Dr. Druffitt had sent to be analyzed was a mate to the one she had here in a bag from the Dominion Stores. She’d never know for sure that this was how Agatha Treadway was murdered.

She might as well admit what she was thinking. Somebody had prepared those string beans wrong on purpose, and put them where Mrs. Treadway would find them, and eat them, and die. Two jars had been left in the cellar because there was a chance Mrs. Treadway might use the first before it had time to go bad. But there had been time enough.