The Burglar in the Library (6 page)

“I meant to, Carolyn.”

“You meant to.”

I sighed. “When I made the reservation,” I said, “it was for me and Lettice, and I specified a double bed. As a matter of fact, I made a special point of specifying a double bed.”

“I bet you did.”

“And when I sent them a deposit, I put that in the note I enclosed along with the check.”

“And then Lettice decided to get married instead.”

“Right.”

“And you brought me in off the bench.”

“To save the game,” I said. “And I realized we would be happier with twin beds, and I started to make the call, and I felt like an idiot. ‘Hi, this is Bernie Rhodenbarr, that’s R-H-O, right, and I’ll be arriving as scheduled a week from Thursday, but I want twin beds instead of a double. Oh, and by the way, Ms. Runcible won’t be coming with me. But Ms. Kaiser will.’”

“I see what you mean.”

“I figured I’d wait until I could think of a graceful way to do it, and I’m still waiting. Look, we’ve been friends a long time, Carolyn. Neither of us is
going to turn into a sex maniac in the middle of the night. We can share a bed platonically.”

“I just wonder if we’ll get any sleep. This bed’s comfy, but it sags in the middle. We may keep rolling into each other.”

“We’ll manage,” I insisted. “Anyway, we’ll probably be sleeping in shifts.”

“I brought pajamas.”

“I mean we’ll take turns. The middle of the night’s the best time for me to check out the library shelves.”

“Won’t that be suspicious, Bern?”

“Why? What else do you do when you have insomnia? You look for a good book to read.”

“Preferably a signed first edition. So you figure you’ll be up nights?”

“Most likely.”

“So I’ll be all alone in a haunted house.”

“What makes you think it’s haunted?”

“If you were a ghost, Bern, would you pass up a place like this? The walls tilt, the floorboards creak, the windowpanes rattle every time the wind blows. You might as well hang out a sign—‘Ghost wanted—ideal working conditions.’”

“Well, I didn’t see any sign like that.”

“Of course not. The position’s been filled. I’ll be lying here awake and you’ll be downstairs looking for
The Big Sleep.
Bern, look at Raffles, he’s pacing back and forth like an expectant father. Open the bathroom door for him, will you?”

I opened the door and looked straight at a batch of coat hangers.

“Bern, don’t tell me.”

“It’s an old-fashioned authentic country house,” I said.

“Does that mean they don’t have bathrooms?”

“Of course they have bathrooms.”

“Where?”

“In the hall.”

“Gee,” she said, “I sure am glad we’re not in some impersonal modern resort, with numbered rooms and separate beds and level floors and rattle-free windows and private baths. I’m glad we don’t have to put up with that kind of soul-deadening experience.”

I opened the hall door and followed Raffles through it. I came back to report that the bathroom was just down the hall, between Uncle Edmund and Aunt Petra. “And Raffles doesn’t seem to mind that it’s a communal john,” I added. “He found it perfectly suitable.”

“How’s he going to get in there by himself, Bern? If the door’s closed, he won’t be able to turn the knob.”

“If the door’s closed,” I said, “that means somebody else is in there, and he’ll have to wait his turn. If the john’s not occupied, you leave the door ajar. That’s how it works with communal bathrooms.”

“What about this door?”

“Huh?”

“How’s he going to get out in the middle of the night,” she said, “if our door’s closed?”

“Hell,” I said. “We should have brought a cat box.”

“He’s trained to use the toilet, just like a person. You can’t go and untrain him.”

“You’re right. I guess we’ll just have to leave the door open a crack.”

“That’s great,” she said. “You’ll be downstairs, and ghosts’ll be dragging chains through the halls, and I’ll be lying in here in the dark with the door open, waiting for the young ’un to murder me in my bed. This gets better every minute.”

“‘The young ’un.’ Orris? Why would he murder you in your bed?”

“Because that’s where I’ll be,” she said, “unless I’m hiding under it.”

“But what makes you think he—”

“‘Better to have him plowing driveways than locked away his whole life.’ What do you figure he did that made them lock him away?”

“But that’s the point, Carolyn. They
didn’t
lock him away.”

“It evidently crossed their minds,” she said, “and they decided against it. What do you figure gave them the notion?”

“He’s evidently a little slow,” I said. “Maybe there was some sentiment in favor of institutionalizing him for that reason, but instead it was determined that he could lead a productive life outside.”

“Plowing driveways, for instance.”

“And being a general handyman.”

“And lurking,” she said. “And drooling. And slipping into Aunt Augusta’s Room with an ax.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “when people are cranky, it’s because they’re hungry.”

“And sometimes it’s because they need a drink, and sometimes it’s both.” She got out of bed, combed her hair with her fingertips, brushed some
imaginary lint off her blazer. “C’mon,” she said. “What are we waiting for?”

After all that, I was expecting dinner to be a disaster—translucent roast beef, say, and vegetables boiled into submission. The outlook improved, though, when we got to the bottom of the stairs and met a woman with feathery blond hair, plump chipmunk cheeks, and an air of radiant well-being. “The Rhodenbarrs,” she said, beaming, and who could presume to correct her? “I’m Cissy Eglantine, and I do hope you’re happy in Aunt Augusta’s Room. I think it’s quite the coziest, myself.”

We assured her it was charming.

“Oh, I’m so glad you like it,” she said. “Now we’re getting a late supper laid for you in the dining room, but I wonder if you might want to stop in the bar first? Nigel’s especially proud of his selection of single-malt Scotches, if you have any interest at all in that sort of thing.”

We admitted to a sort of academic interest and hurried off to the bar. “The trouble with trying to compare different whiskies,” Carolyn said when we finally moved on to the dining room, “is that by the time you’re sipping the fourth one, it’s impossible to remember what the first one tasted like. So you have to go back and start over.”

“And before long,” I said, “you have trouble remembering other things. Like your name.”

“Well, nobody else remembers my name, so why should I? I just got here an hour ago and already I’ve been Ms. Runcible and Mrs. Rhodenbarr. I can’t wait to see what the future holds. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” I said. “Something smells terrific.”

And so it was. A rich and savory soup, a salad of romaine and Boston lettuce with walnuts and dill, and a thick slab of prime rib flanked with crisp little roasted potatoes. The waitress, a skittish country girl who might have been Orris’s sister (or his wife, or both), brought us mugs of brown ale without asking, and filled them up when we emptied them.

Dessert was some sort of fruit cobbler, topped with what Carolyn said had to be clotted cream. “Look at this,” she said. “You could float a scone on it. You could float the Stone of Scone on it. Bern, forget everything I said.”

“Starting when?”

“Starting when we got here. You want to know something? I don’t give a rat’s ass if the place is haunted. If the ghost’s got any sense he won’t come anywhere near our room, anyway. He’ll hang out in the kitchen. Bern, this is one of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life.”

“You know what they say. Hunger’s the best sauce.”

“I was hungry enough to eat my shoes,” she said, “I’ll admit it, but it was still an incredible meal. Can you believe it? The coffee’s good. I meant to order tea, because everybody knows the English can’t make a decent cup of coffee. But this is great. How do you explain that, Bern?”

“Maybe they didn’t come straight here from England,” I suggested. “Maybe they stopped off in Seattle.”

“That must be it,” she said, and wiped her
mouth with her napkin. “Look at me, Bern. A couple of pops and a decent meal and I think I died and went to heaven. I’ll tell you something. I like it here. I’m glad we came.”

A
fter dinner we drifted from room to room, getting our bearings on the first floor of Cuttleford House. There was, God knows, an awful lot of it, and one room just sort of led to another. We started out in a sort of sitting room called the East Parlour, and I might have taken it for the library if I hadn’t already seen the Great Library in the brochure. The parlor had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. The other walls sported memorabilia—crossed spears, West African ceremonial masks, and the stuffed head of one of those crossword-puzzle animals. An oryx, say.

There were more books on a breakfront, braced by a pair of bronze Abraham-Lincoln-seated-and-looking-pensive bookends, and there were revolving bookcases flanking the floral-patterned sofa.

“There are books all over the place,” Carolyn murmured. “You saw the bookcase in our room, didn’t you?”

“Uh-huh. It reminded me of my bargain table.”

“No
Big Sleep,
huh?”

“Just a large yawn. Mostly late-model paperbacks. Last year’s best-sellers. The kind of book you take along to a resort and leave behind when you go home.”

“If you managed to finish it.”

“Or even if you didn’t,” I said.

We broke off to get into conversation with Colonel Edward Blount-Buller, a florid-faced gentleman in moleskin trousers and a tweed Norfolk jacket. We’d been introduced to him in the bar before dinner, and he’d evidently lingered there amidst the single-malt Scotches. Now he was moved to discourse upon the inherent nobility of the hunting trophy on the opposite wall.

“It’s the horns, don’t you know.” We must have looked puzzled. “The horns, the horns,” he said. “The long graceful tapering horns. What would he be without them, eh?” He held up a finger, its knuckle knobby with arthritis. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “Be a bloody nanny goat.”

“I’d rather be a live nanny goat,” Carolyn said, “than have some jerk shoot me and stick my head on his wall.”

“Ah,” he said. “Well, you’re a woman, eh?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“No slight intended, I assure you. But the gentler sex has a more practical nature, takes short views. Better to munch grass and give milk than to take a bullet, eh?”

“If those are the choices,” she said, “I wouldn’t have to spend a long time thinking it over.”

“Without his horns,” the colonel said, “our springbok would have gone on grazing until age
made him easy prey to a lion or a dog pack. He’d have left his bones bleaching in the hot African sun. The world would have long since forgotten him.” He gestured at the mounted head. “Instead he lives on,” he announced, “countless years past his ordinary lifespan. It’s immortality of a sort, wot? Not quite the sort you or I might choose, but quite the best available to him.”

“A springbok,” I said.

“And a fine one, sir, wouldn’t you say?”

“You’re sure it’s not an oryx?”

“Hardly that.”

“Or an ibex,” I suggested. “Or an okapi, or even a gnu.”

“Fine beasts, all of them,” he said. “But our friend here is a springbok. You have my assurance of that.”

In the Sitting Room, the walls were given over to framed Ape and Spy caricatures from the old
Vanity Fair,
with not a single stuffed head to be seen. There were books, though, filling a three-tiered set of glassed-in shelves and propped between a pair of sailing-ship bookends.

I had a quick look at the books while Carolyn leafed through a year-old copy of
Town & Country.
When I dropped into the chair next to hers she closed the magazine and looked at me.

“Better books,” I said. “Hardcover fiction, most of it between fifty and eighty years old. Some mysteries, all by authors that nobody reads nowadays. A lot of general fiction. James T. Farrell, one of the books in his Danny O’Neill tetralogy. And
Mammonart,
by Upton Sinclair.”

“Are they valuable, Bern?”

“They’re both important writers,” I said, “but they’re not very actively collected. And of course the dust jackets are long gone.”

“What do you mean, ‘long gone’? For all you know they were there until five minutes ago.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I jumped to a conclusion, based on the fact that all but two or three of the books in the case are missing their jackets.”

“Then it’s a good thing they’re inside, Bern. In this weather, they’d freeze their flyleaves off.” She pointed at the window. “Still coming down,” she said.

“So it is.”

“You hardly looked at those books, Bernie. You just scanned each shelf for a couple of seconds, and you knew what was there and what wasn’t.”

“Well, I’m in the business,” I said. “When you look at books day in and day out, you develop a knack.”

“Makes sense, Bern. I’m the same way with dogs.”

“And it’s easier,” I said, “when you know what you’re looking for. There’s just one book I’m looking for, so I don’t have to take a careful inventory of everything else. As soon as I know I’m not looking at Raymond Chandler, I can go on and look at something else.”

“Like a springbok,” she said. “If that’s what it was.”

“What else could it be?”

“You named a whole lot of other things, Bern. You didn’t want it to be a springbok. How’d you learn so much about African antelopes?”

“All I know about them I learned from crossword puzzles,” I said, “and that’s why I didn’t think it was a springbok. It’s nine letters long, for God’s sake. When’s the last time you saw a springbok in a crossword puzzle?”

“You should have pointed that out to the colonel. Don’t you love the way he talks? I guess that’s what you call a pukka sahib accent.”

“I guess so.”

“If he were any more English,” she said, “he couldn’t talk at all. This is great, Bern. It’s not just that Cuttleford House is something straight out of an English mystery. The guests could have stepped right out of the pages themselves. The colonel’s perfect in that respect. He could be Jane Marple’s neighbor, recently retired to St. Mary Mead after a career shooting people in India.”

“People and springboks,” I said.

“And those two women we met in the Sewing Room. Miss Dinmont and Miss Hardesty. The frail Miss Dinmont and the outgoing Miss Hardesty.”

“If you say so,” I said. “I couldn’t keep them straight.”

“Neither could God, Bern.”

“Huh?”

“Keep them straight.”

“Oh. You figure they’re gay?”

“If this were an English mystery,” she said, “instead of life itself, I’d go along with the pretense that Miss Dinmont is a wealthy invalid and Miss Hardesty is her companion, and that’s all there is to the relationship.” She frowned. “Of course, in the last chapter it would turn out that the wheelchair’s just a prop, and Miss Dinmont would be capable
of leaping around like a gazelle, or one of those other animals you got from the crossword puzzle. That’s because in the books things are never quite what they appear to be. In real life, things tend to be
exactly
what they appear to be.”

“And they appear to be lesbians?”

“Well, it doesn’t take x-ray vision, does it? Hardesty’s your typical backslapping butch, and Dinmont’s one of those passive-aggressive femme numbers. If you want to remember which is which, incidentally, try alliteration. Dim little Miss Dinmont and hearty horsey Miss Hardesty. As a matter of fact—”

She broke off the sentence when a small force of nature burst into the room. We’d encountered her before in another room—don’t ask me which one—but then she’d been accompanied by her parents. Now she was all by herself.

“Hello,” she said. “Have we met? I saw you both before, but I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I’m Millicent Savage.”

“I’m Bernie Rhodenbarr,” I said. “And this is Carolyn Kaiser.”

“It’s ever so nice to meet you. Are you married?”

“No,” Carolyn said. “Are you?”

“Of course not,” Millicent said. “I’m just a little girl. That’s why I can get away with asking impertinent questions. Guess how old I am.”

“Thirty-two,” Carolyn said.

“Seriously,” the child said.

“I hate guessing games,” Carolyn said. “You’re really going to make me guess? Oh, all right. Ten.”

“That’s your guess? Ten?” She turned to me. “How about you, Bernie?”

“Ten,” I said.

“She already guessed ten.”

“Well, it’s my guess, too. How old
are
you, Millicent?”

“Ten,” she said.

“Then we got it right,” Carolyn said.

“
You
got it right. He just tagged along.”

“You’re disappointed that we guessed your age, aren’t you?”

“Most people think I’m older.”

“That’s because you’re precocious. That probably makes them guess you’re twelve or thirteen, but if you were you wouldn’t be precocious, and you obviously are. So that would make you about ten, and that’s what I guessed, and I was right.”

She looked at Carolyn. She was a pretty child, with straight blond hair and Delft-blue eyes and a crescent-shaped half-inch scar on her chin. “Is that what you do?” she wanted to know. “Do you work in a carnival guessing people’s age?”

“It’d be a good sideline,” Carolyn said, “but it’s a tough business to break into. I’m a canine stylist.”

“What’s that?”

“I have a dog-grooming salon.”

“That sounds super. What’s your favorite breed of dog?”

“I suppose Yorkies.”

“Why? Appearance or disposition?”

“Size,” she said. “There’s less to wash.”

“I never thought of that.” She turned to me. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What do you do? Are you a canine stylist too?”

I shook my head. “I’m a burglar.”

That got her giggling. “A burglar,” she said. “What kind of a burglar? A cat burglar?”

“That’s the best kind.”

“Well, there’s a cat here,” she said, “just waiting for somebody to burgle him. But I’m afraid his tail has already been stolen.”

“It’s our cat,” I said.

“Is it really? Is he a Manx?” I nodded. “I’ve never actually seen a Manx before,” she said. “Did you get him on the Isle of Man?”

“Close. The Isle of Manhattan.”

“And they let you bring him here? I didn’t know you were allowed to bring pets.”

“He’s not a pet,” Carolyn said. “He’s an employee.”

“At Carolyn’s salon,” I said quickly. “Burglars don’t have employees, human or feline. But there are a lot of supplies at the salon, and the mice were getting into all sorts of things. It’s Raffles’s job to put a stop to that.”

If Raffles was a working cat, she demanded, then why wasn’t he on the job now, guarding the stock from rodent damage? I told her I’d wondered about that myself.

“He needs company,” Carolyn said. “We won’t get back until late Sunday, or possibly not until Monday. How would you like it if your parents left you home alone that long?”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“Well, you’re not a cat,” Carolyn said. Millicent
agreed that she wasn’t, and I asked her what she did for a living.

This elicited another burst of giggles. “I don’t do anything,” she said. “I’m a little girl.”

“Are you English?”

“No, I’m American. We live in Boston.”

“You sound English.”

“Do I?” She beamed. “It’s an affection.”

“You mean an affectation.”

“Yes, of course that’s what I meant. But I have an affection for England, too. I must have been English in a past life. Do you know who I think I was?”

“Not a scullery maid, I’ll bet.”

“Lady Jane Grey,” she said. “Or possibly Anne Boleyn. They were both queens, you know.” She leaned forward, eyes narrowed. “And they were both put to death,” she said.

“Well, I certainly don’t think—”

“Oh, that was then and this is now,” she said airily. “But I love to watch
Masterpiece Theatre,
and all the other English programs on PBS, and I get yelled at in school all the time for spelling words like ‘colour’ and ‘harbour’ with a U, and ‘programme’ with two M’s and an E. I think it looks ever so much nicer that way, don’t you?”

“I don’t think there’s any question about it,” Carolyn said.

“And I love coming here,” Millicent went on. “This is our third time at Cuttleford House. I have my own room this time. I’m in Uncle Roger’s Room. That’s right near you, because you’re in Aunt Augusta’s.”

“How did you happen to know that?”

“Oh, I know everything,” she said. “People tell me things. I know you’re a burglar, Bernie, and I bet nobody else here knows that.”

“Maybe it could be our little secret,” Carolyn suggested.

She mimed locking her lips with a key. “My lips are sealed,” she said, “and only Bernie can pick the lock. And if I’m locked out of Uncle Roger’s Room, you can let me in. Except I shan’t be.” She lifted a string encircling her neck to show a key dangling from it. “I’ve never stayed in Aunt Augusta’s Room. The first time I came here all three of us were in the Vicar’s Upstairs Parlour. It’s the largest sleeping room of all, the one with three beds. How many beds do you have?”

“One at the most,” Carolyn said.

“The last time we came the Vicar’s was taken, and they were going to put us in Poor Miss McTavish’s, but it was too small. My father said he drew the line at that, and my mother said perhaps it was time I had my own room. Do you know what I said?”

“You probably said that was jolly good.”

“How did you know? Anyway, Nigel put Mummy and Daddy in Lucinda’s Room, and I had Poor Miss McTavish’s all to myself.”

“Why do they call it that?” Carolyn wanted to know. “Is it the room that’s poor, or Miss McTavish?”

“I think it must be Miss McTavish,” the child said, “because it’s a perfectly lovely room. The walls are bright yellow and it’s very cheery. Miss McTavish must be the governess, don’t you think? Someone must have broken her heart.”

“The butler,” Carolyn suggested.

“He’s a bounder,” Millicent agreed. “Or a cad. Is there a difference between a bounder and a cad?” Neither of us knew. “Well, whichever he is,” she said, “he’s certainly a bad hat. And Poor Miss McTavish—”

She broke off when a woman darted into the room, looking a little harried. “There you are,” she said. “Millicent, I’ve been looking all over for you. It’s time you were off to bed.”