The Grub-And-Stakers Move a Mountain (21 page)

“To fetch Samantha Burberry, of course. Do you not realize we have but an hour to Candidates’ Night? Come, Dittany, do not loiter.”

Sergeant Mac Vicar marshaled his posse down Applewood Avenue to Queen Street and took a purposeful left turn. At first Dittany thought they were heading for Ye Village Stationer.

“Sergeant, surely you don’t mean Mr. Gumpert has her?”

“I do not.”

“Then Sam Wallaby?”

“No. He insisted on having his place searched, naturally. Sam is no fool.”

“Unlike some people I could mention,” muttered Ben. Since neither he nor Osbert was willing to let the other walk unchaperoned beside Dittany, the three of them were marching in solid phalanx behind their leader. As they passed the bandstand and the last of the shops, they began to hear faint but raucous strains from a rock band.

“Oh, I get it. Old Blood and Guts here thinks she’s at the inn.

He’s nuts. They couldn’t keep a hostage in a place like that.”

“Please maintain a respectful attitude toward my superior officer or I shall be required to take official action,” said Deputy Monk.

Frankland began to breathe heavily through his nostrils. Partly to prevent bloodshed and partly because the truth had hit her straight between the eyes, Dittany intervened.

“Of course she’s not at the inn! She’s next door, in that big empty house of Mr. Architrave’s. Why on earth didn’t we think of it sooner?”

“I thought of it straight off,” said Ben. “I even started over here after I got off work, but I overheard some people saying they’d got in and searched the place from cellar to chimney without finding hide nor hair of her. I’m afraid this is another false alarm, Sergeant.”

“Indeed, Mr. Frankland? And who were these people you heard talking?”

“Sorry, I can’t tell you that. I’ve only been in town a week.”

“So you have. Then it is possible the information to which you allude was a deliberate attempt to mislead. I think we will proceed. Let us maintain vigilance. A guard may be posted inside the house.”

“If there is one, I could knock his block off,” Frankland offered, “and Monk here could write about it afterward.”

“Honestly,” said Dittany, “I don’t know what’s got into you two all of a sudden. You were pally enough Saturday night.”

“Yeah,” said Ben, “and then he started his bloom-on-the-sage routine yesterday at the Burberrys’ while I was straining my guts out moving the piano.”

“Not the sage,” said Osbert. “The yucca or Spanish bayonet.

And I was laboring under the delusion at the time that Miss Henbit and I were having a private conversation.”

“Both of you,” said Dittany, “stuff it.”

Ben stilled the acrimonious retort that was obviously rising to his lips. Trying to look nonchalant, they sauntered on past the flashing neon sign that disfigured what had once been a decent little country inn, toward the Architrave house. This was another Victorian hulk like the Burberrys’ but ill kept and now wearing the bleak, deserted aspect appropriate to its present condition.

“Ugh,” said Dittany. “It looks haunted already. Have you your jackknife, Osbert? He’s awfully clever at burglary,” she explained to Sergeant Mac Vicar, “or shouldn’t I have said that?”

All the sergeant replied was, “Let’s go around to the back and give it a try.”

They found the rear entrance, well screened by overgrown lilacs, and Osbert tried his skill on the catch. After having looked on impatiently for a moment, Ben brushed him roughly aside.

“Okay, you’ve played long enough. I’ll smash it in with my shoulder.”

“Do,” said Osbert.

Ben heaved his bulk against the paneling. He had failed to observe that Osbert’s effort to open the door had already succeeded.

As he struggled to get up off the entryway floor, he roared, “You did that on purpose,” if one can be said to roar in a hoarse whisper.

“Of course I did,” Osbert hissed back. “You watched me, didn’t you? Did you bring a flashlight?”

“No,” growled Ben.

“Fortunately I came prepared.”

“In point of fact, the electricity is still working.” Sergeant Mac Vicar switched on a light, to reveal as depressing a welter of broken-down furniture, dirt, and cobwebs as the most Dickensian imagination could conjure up. “Oh, my! This will present a problem for whoever finally inherits. You will perhaps be interested to know that we have traced John’s sister. She met her demise some time back in an auto crash with the man who may or may not have been her third husband.”

“But what happened to the child Aunt Arethusa says she was -er-” Osbert cast an embarrassed glance at Dittany, for writers of western stories are a pure-minded lot who do not lightly toss around words like “pregnant” in the presence of unmarried ladies.

“What happened to Samantha?” she retorted, sticking tenaciously to the point from which these perverse males showed such a regrettable tendency to stray. “Let’s look upstairs. If they have any common decency they’d at least put her near the bathroom.”

“Okay, you do that,” said Ben. “Monk here can look downstairs and I’ll check the cellar.”

“We will all stay together,” said Sergeant MacVicar. “Who knows what evils lurk in the heart of her captor?”

Whatever evils might lurk, they were apparently not to be molested by. They poked without interference through the hideous rooms together. The downstairs was a mess, but it at least looked as if somebody had lived there. Three of the four bedrooms upstairs were furnished only in dust and mildew. Architrave had used the fourth, and it was not pleasant to see his crumpled shirts and soiled long Johns thrown about the floor.

The attic was hopeless: never floored over properly and strewn with junk. There was, Dittany was relieved to see, no trunk big enough to hold a body. That left only the dirt cellar and there they found Samantha, bound and gagged and thrown into the coalbin, her handsome face gray with dirt and exhaustion, streaked with tears of thanksgiving as they loosened the gag and the ropes that had kept her helpless.

At first she couldn’t even talk, only laugh and cry hysterically at the same time. They rubbed her arms and legs until the blood was circulating freely again, then got her upstairs to the bathroom.

By then, with Dittany’s help, she managed to pull herself together, drink several glasses of water to wash down the coal dust and the taste of the gag, sponge some of the grime off her face, and use, with ineffable gratitude, the facilities.

Luckily nobody had got around to disconnecting Mr. Architrave’s phone. Sergeant Mac Vicar called his wife to request that she put out an allpoints bulletin to the effect that the lost had been found and dispatch Bob and Ray forthwith in the police cruiser to pick up Samantha. In the meantime Dittany rooted around the old man’s kitchen, managed to find a packet of tea, boiled a kettle, and washed a cup. The hot drink and a few stale crackers, which were all Architrave’s larder afforded, revived Samantha enough so that she could tell her story. It didn’t take long.

“All I know is that I’d been over returning that silver tray of Dot Coskoff s. You know about that, I expect. I suppose I should have known better than to go out alone after dark with things being as they are, but I was still keyed up from the party and felt a walk would do me good, and I just didn’t think. Anyway, it was just around the corner. I never dreamed anything could happen in so short a distance.”

Samantha took another swallow of the black, sweet tea. “But as I was going back up our own walk coming home from Dot’s, I heard what I thought was a child crying in the shrubbery around to the side. I thought it might be that little imp of Ellie Despard’s up to his tricks again. You remember the time Petey shinned down their porch pillars in his Doctor Dentons and almost froze to death because everybody in town was watching that Lex Laramie special on television and we couldn’t hear him yelling? So anyway, I started to look for him, then somebody clapped a hand over my mouth and started pulling on my scarf. I suppose it was the same person who’d been making the noises to attract my attention. I thought sure I was being strangled, but apparently I wasn’t.”

“No doubt the miscreant was merely cutting off your breath so that you would lose consciousness,” said Sergeant Mac Vicar.

“It was adroitly done. You were probably then drugged.”

“I think I must have been, because I don’t remember anything else until I came to in that filthy coalbin with the most God awful headache and with my hands and feet tied and that rag or whatever it was in my mouth. And after that I kept dropping off to sleep again, I believe. It’s all foggy. I’ve no idea how long I’ve been here.”

“Approximately twenty-two hours, so far as we are able to ascertain without further information,” said Sergeant Mac Vicar.

“Twenty-two hours! Then it’s Monday night and we’ve missed Candidates’ Night!”

“No, we haven’t,” said Dittany. “My watch says two minutes of eight.”

“Then what are we fooling around here for? Come on!”

“Mrs. Burberry, you’re not fit,” Ben objected.

“In a pig’s eye I’m not. You get me over to that auditorium if you have to carry me in a basket.”

“Don’t you at least want to get cleaned up first?”

“Don’t I ever! But they’re going to see me just the way I am so they’ll know that skunk for exactly what he is. Oh, but I am so hungry.”

“They won’t start on the dot, they never do,” said Dittany.

“Here’s the police car now. We’ll stop at my place just long enough to get some soup into you.”

“And while you are doing that,” said Sergeant Mac Vicar, “my lads can be loading those trash cans full of broken beer bottles into the cruiser. Since you are putting on such a valiant show, Samantha, you may as well give them a smashing encore.”

To say that Samantha Burberry created a sensation when she staggered into the auditorium fifteen minutes late under heavy police escort and covered with coal dust would be to utter the understatement of all time. The meeting had already been called to order, but it had to be called again and then a third time when Sergeant Mac Vicar and his myrmidons (including Ben, whom he had deputized for the occasion over Frankland’s modest protests), having deposited Samantha in a chair handy to the tea and buns so she could finish her impromptu repast, went back outside and returned, each rolling a trash barrel that smelled like Arethusa Monk’s father’s cellar the time the home brew exploded.

In years to come, Dittany’s fondest memory of that meeting would be the sight of Andrew McNaster trying to withdraw his overstuffed form quietly from the auditorium under cover of the furor.

Perhaps some of the other candidates got to speak their pieces.

If so nobody remembered or gave a hoot. All were jittering on the edges of their chairs, breathless for the moment when Samantha Burberry confronted Sam Wallaby on the platform and explained why she’d come looking like a chimney sweep.

The moderator, realizing after a while that the others weren’t getting a fair shake and being pretty itchy for the details himself, moved them up on the program and, out of gallantry, gave Samantha first chance to speak. She’d had no time to read over the speech Dittany had written for her but that fact bothered her not at all. By now the rescue, the hot soup, the tea, the buns, and the look on Sam Wallaby’s face had restored her usual aplomb. It was a confident Samantha Burberry who stepped to the microphone.

“I apologize for appearing before you in this condition,” she began, “but I had no time to change. Since I understand you’ve all been out looking for me, and I want to thank you here and now for your wonderful efforts, I don’t have to tell you that I’ve been kidnapped since about ten o’clock last night. Sergeant MacVicar and some kind friends found me only about half an hour ago, tied up and gagged in John Architrave’s coalbin.”

Naturally that news caused an outbreak of gasps and babbling.

Samantha held up her hand for silence.

“Please bear with me. As you can imagine, I’m wobbly on my legs and my throat’s sore from that gag and I’m absolutely dying for a hot bath, so I’d like to make my remarks brief. You all know, of course, that John Architrave was found shot last week up on the Enchanted Mountain with an arrow in him that nobody’s been able to identify. I have no idea how that happened.

I can only point out to you that my assailant, whom I can’t identify, took me to poor old John’s house for hiding.

Whether you choose to draw any connection between those two facts is up to yourselves.”

A buzz of connections surged through the hall. The moderator whanged his gavel. Samantha took a sip of the tea she’d brought to the podium with her and found voice enough to go on.

“As you also know, John Architrave was up on the mountain that day evidently because he’d ordered percolation tests to be done for a reason that has not been officially established. His death did serve one useful purpose. It focused attention on one of Lobelia Falls’s most valuable natural resources; one, I may say, that has been grossly neglected by previous Development commissions.

Perhaps having some open land where our children can see wildflowers that have been wiped out elsewhere by the so-called progress of ill-managed urbanization doesn’t seem important to some people. Not so important as putting a lot of town money and effort into a high school annex that somehow wound up in the hands of a private business, for instance. Not so important as defacing our main street by the removal of some fine old trees in order to create a parking lot that attracts litter and riffraff.”

Loud cries of “You tell ‘em, Samantha” led by Zilla Trott prevented her from continuing until she again had to plead for silence.

“Some of us less imaginatively endowed citizens have never quite understood the alchemy by which town property gets diverted to the particular interests of certain individuals. A group became quite reasonably alarmed at the prospect of such a thing’s happening in the case of the Hunneker Land Grant and urged me to offer myself as a write-in candidate for the Development Commission because they know I stand squarely on the side of maintaining public lands for the use of all our citizens instead of a privileged minority. The fact that so many have turned out to help turn the Enchanted Mountain into a workable park leads me to believe that the town as a whole feels the same way as I do.”