The Grub-And-Stakers Pinch a Poke (6 page)

She says the aunt had told her several times in the past that everything would be left to her. Bledsoe, on the other hand, insists the aunt wanted him to have the property because she didn’t approve of the way her niece was carrying on with the postman.”

“Was she really?” asked Dittany.

“Mrs. Bledsoe says not and the postman says not, but he’s got quite a reputation as a roving Romeo. The consensus at the bookshop appears to be that there’s no smoke without fire. Anyway, Mrs.

Bledsoe moved to Toronto after the divorce and Wilhedra moved in for the kill. Now Mrs. Bledsoe’s back raising the dust and goodness knows what will happen, especially with Arethusa in the picture.

Wilhedra ThorbisherFreep’s love life is none of my business, of course, but a person can’t help being interested in the ever-changing kaleidoscope of human relationships.” Being around so many books sometimes lent a literary tinge to the Binkles’ conversation.

The ever-changing kaleidoscope of human relationships was a never-ending source of interest around Lobelia Falls, too. Dittany got pretty sick of being backed into corners and being asked, “Which of them do you think she’s going to take?”

“She who?” Dittany said to Margery Streph, who’d got her pinned behind the greeting card rack at Mr. Gumpert’s stationery shop while she was trying to pick out a birthday card for her mother-in-law. Margery was the seventeenth pinner so far, and Dittany didn’t care much for her anyway.

“Your Aunt Arethusa, of course,” Margery replied with a little laugh.

“She’s not my aunt. She’s Osbert’s aunt.”

“Well, it’s all in the family, isn’t it? Come on, Dittany, who’s leading the pack? Jim says Andy’s so wound up he doesn’t know which end he’s standing on.”

Jim Streph was an architect who designed the houses McNaster Construction built. He’d also not got to design a few that Andy had been prevented from building in the wrong places as a result of a public outcry spearheaded by the Grub-and-Stake Gardening and Roving Club. Dittany didn’t have a good deal of use for Jim, either.

“As far as I know,” she replied shortly, “Arethusa’s still wedded to her art and intends to remain so. The reigning queen of regency romance has a responsibility to her vast reading public, you know.”

Margery had the bad judgment to snicker. “Where did that reigning queen stuff come from? Her press agent?”

“Arethusa has no press agent. She’s never needed one. The title came out of a worldwide poll held by the International Moonlight and Roses Writers’ Organization. She was crowned last month at their convention in New York.”

“What do you mean she was crowned?”

“Really, Margery, I should have thought you’d know the meaning of a common transitive verb. She had a coronation. Sort of like when they crowned Elizabeth the Second only a good deal flossier, Arethusa says.”

“How could it be, for heaven’s sake?”

“Well, for instance, they didn’t release two hundred snow-white doves wearing frilly pink pantalettes in Westminster Abbey, did they?”

“Not to the best of my recollection,” Margery had to concede.

“And Elizabeth wasn’t borne to her throne on a palanquin draped in purple velvet, balanced on the shoulders of eight Nubian slaves wearing leopard skins, was she?”

“Of course not. Prince Philip would never have stood for having eight leopards killed to make work shirts for Nubians. He’s a big gun in the World Wildlife Rind, you know. A big anti-gun, I suppose I should have said. Arethusa should have known better.”

“It was only fake fur made to look like leopard, for Pete’s sake,”

Dittany said crossly. “I doubt very much they were real Nubian slaves either, if it comes to that. One had red hair and freckles as big as the leopard spots. Arethusa says it’s the symbolism that counts with the Moonlight and Roses crowd. She had a rose-colored velvet coronation robe with a train about five metres long, all trimmed with ermine.”

Margery sneered. “For ermine, read rabbit, I suppose.”

“If you find rabbit easier to read, certainly. Her crown was of golden filigree in the fairy princess style, not one of those big bulbous affairs, and her scepter a slender gold rod with a big pink glass heart that lit up and had diamonds all around the edge.”

“Symbolic diamonds, no doubt.”

“No doubt whatsoever. There were also symbolic pink cupids circling above the throne wearing baby-blue satin diapers. They had golden curls and cute little white wings. Arethusa says they were too utterly precious for words.”

“The whole affair sounds too utterly precious for words, if you ask me,” Margery scoffed. “You’d never catch me at that kind of circus.”

“No, I’m sure I wouldn’t,” Dittany replied sweetly. She’d been told in confidence by Hazel Munson that Margery Streph couldn’t even write a thank-you note without boring its reader to tears.

“Good-bye, Margery. I’ll tell Arethusa you were asking for her.”

Pleasantly conscious of having pinned Margery Streph’s ears back, Dittany took her birthday card home to be addressed and signed.

She’d already arranged by telephone for the senior Mrs. Monk to receive an elegant basket of assorted fruits, Mother Monk being on a diet even grimmer than Hazel Munson’s and fruit being the one gastronomic pleasure the doctor was allowing her to enjoy. All the right things had been done. Yet as she walked up Applewood Avenue and entered to dump her bag on the kitchen table, Dittany’s inner voice kept nagging at her, “Something’s wrong.”

It must be all this flak she was getting about Arethusa, she thought. But Arethusa wasn’t doing anything wrong. Was it Arethusa’s fault she couldn’t turn around without tripping over three besotted males? She wasn’t favoring one over another as far as Dittany could see. She was addressing herself to keeping peace among them as best she might; and she was doing her utmost to make a triumph of her nephew’s play even if Arethusa did keep insisting she wasn’t doing it for Osbert but for the Architrave.

Yet Dittany’s mind was still in a state of perturbation as she hung up her coat, dumped her purchases on the kitchen table, and took out the magenta-colored pen she kept for special occasions. She fretted inwardly as she signed her name to the birthday card and added an affectionate message. She’d grown fond of her mother-inlaw, and her father-in-law, too, for that matter, even though both were still groping audibly for an explanation to the riddle of Osbert’s choosing to live in a poky backwater like Lobelia Falls and write silly cowboy yarns when he could have carried his bride to a cozy high-rise apartment in Toronto and become a high-powered executive like his dear old dad.

They weren’t blaming Dittany for their son’s aberrant ways. They blamed his Aunt Arethusa, which was really unfair of them because Arethusa disapproved of Osbert’s writing career even more vociferously than his parents did. That wasn’t jealousy, it was just Arethusa’s way. She’d have disapproved of any nephew who’d never fought a duel, pledged his vast estates at the gaming table, or swashbuckled around town in a velvet suit and a satin waistcoat.

Osbert couldn’t have worn a velvet suit even if he’d wanted to, which he most emphatically dadblanged didn’t, because Ethel shed quite a lot. He had quit wearing tight Levis because he and Dittany hoped to raise a family some day, but he stuck to his flannel shirts and his buckskin vest, and had even been known to flaunt a red bandana when the call of the range was strong upon him.

A little chat with Osbert might be just the nerve tonic she needed. Dittany peeked into the alcove off the dining room that they called the office. Osbert was hunched over his faithful typewriter, lashing it on to full gallop. The machine was a big old Remington manual that he preferred to a newer model because it presented more of a challenge. Besides, the letters didn’t fly off the bars during his bursts of inspiration as had those of an electric portable his mother had bought him once in a well-meant effort to accept what she could not understand.

He must be heading the outlaws off at the pass, Dittany thought.

This was clearly not the moment to shatter his concentration over a vague feeling of unease. Osbert had been feeling uneasy about his Aunt Arethusa all his life anyway, and would feel quite reasonably, from his point of view, that his wife might have chosen a more opportune time to unload her qualms. Dittany left the birthday card on the dining room table where he’d see it when he emerged from his rustler-rife ruminations, and went back to the kitchen.

There were more immediate crises to be dealt with, the main one at the moment being that they were almost out of molasses cookies.

Dittany got Gram Henbit’s old yellow crockery mixing bowl out of the pantry and began assembling ingredients. It was soothing work measuring out flour and sugar and shortening, spooning in fragrant spices, cracking an egg on the side of the bowl, pouring molasses by the glug as her forebears had done. She stirred the batter to optimum consistency with confidence born of much practice, and parked it in the fridge to rest its gluten while she found the rolling pin and the time-darkened tin cookie cutter with crinkles around the edges, and floured the ancestral breadboard.

Dittany had lit the black iron wood stove for company even though she preferred to bake in the less picturesque but more predictable electric oven. The kettle on the stove was simmering, reminding her gently that a restorative cup of tea mightn’t be a bad idea before she tackled the agreeable but exacting task of rolling and cutting. Dittany hauled up the rocking chair and was sitting there with her cup in her hand and her feet in the oven when it hit her.

All at once, she knew why Carolus Bledsoe’s voice sounded so familiar, and wherefore she’d been having these worrisome forebodings.

There was that of which she might well be foreboded.

The struggle which the Grub-and-Stake Gardening and Roving Club had been forced to wage against Andrew McNaster and his myrmidons back when Dittany was still Miss Henbit* was fresh in her memory, as why wouldn’t it have been? Dark, dire, and dirty had been the dealing and derring had been the do. Dittany’s personal epiphany had come when, disguised in molting false eyelashes and Gramp Henbit’s holey sweatshirt, she’d eavesdropped on a conversation between McNaster and a lawyer from Scottsbeck.

Dittany had not been able to get a look at the lawyer, but she’d heard his voice frighteningly loud and all too clear. She’d heard Andy call him Charlie and assumed his name was Charles. The name Charles was derived, although that detail had slipped her mind until just now, from the Latin Carolus. Naturally a man named Carolus would rather be called Charlie than Carrie. She took a deep breath and reached to steady the teacup that was jittering dangerously in its saucer.

So it wasn’t only their rivalry for Arethusa Monk’s grace and favor which had provoked that instant show of enmity at the airport.

Those outbursts of mutual antipathy that had been electrifying the cast at rehearsals weren’t prompted by histrionic urges but by simple hatred of each other’s guts.

Andy and Charlie had been at odds during that overheard meeting.

They must have had later differences of an even more serious nature. If Andrew McNaster’s reformation was sincere, he must have struggled to tear himself loose from his former disreputable association. Carolus Bledsoe might be losing his erstwhile eagerness to affiliate himself with Wilhedra ThorbisherFreep’s social position * The Grub-and-Stakers Move a Mountain.

and Jenson ThorbisherFreep’s money, but he still wanted to win that lawsuit against his ex-wife.

Evidently his case rested on how successfully he was able to present himself as a man incapable of chicanery, malfeasance, buttering up old ladies for personal gain, or associating with rogues like the then still unreformed Andrew McNaster. Yet here the pair of them were, inexorably bound by their joint record of past skulduggeries and their present infatuation with the reigning queen of regency romance. She must tell Osbert!

Dittany took her feet out of the oven and was looking for a safe place to park her teacup when she froze. She must not tell Osbert! If she so much as breathed a word about Charlie, even in her sleep, the story would get around. Osbert wouldn’t utter a yip to a living soul, of course, but that wouldn’t make any difference. Dittany hadn’t lived in Lobelia Falls all her life without coming to realize that walls do in fact have ears and every little bird is a stool pigeon at heart.

Only this morning, Osbert had had a long distance telephone call from his agent. Archie was planning to fly up for the premiere with a well-known theatrical producer in tow. Yet it wasn’t the possibility of blowing another big sale that rooted Dittany to the linoleum. She and Osbert were not lavish in their tastes. They already had a wellstocked pantry to feed them and a freshly reshingled roof to shelter them, plus a nice, fat cushion of cash in the bank to fall back on.

Osbert wouldn’t mind so much if he didn’t make any money on Dangerous Dan, but what if the play never got performed?

He’d been working like a sheepdog, developing his scraped-together bunch of amateurs into a pretty slick cast. Fired by his enthusiasm and by their complex emotional tensions, the cast had not only memorized everything they were supposed to learn but vied with each other in performing their roles to perfection. Everyone came on when he should, did his part without a flaw, and left on cue without tripping over his own or anybody else’s feet en route.

Even Jenson ThorbisherFreep, who was still dropping in on rehearsals to see whether any technicality might have popped up that required his expertise, had done some audible marveling at how well the Traveling Thespians were shaping. He hadn’t come right out and said they were a shoo-in to carry off” the prize at the competition, but he certainly hadn’t dashed any hopes.

And now they were galloping down the home stretch. Tomorrow night was the dress rehearsal. Minerva had made Dittany a really delightful little girl’s frock of sprigged blue calico with a ruffled white pinafore. The flat-heeled Mary Janes, the white socks and pantalettes, the corkscrew curls, the blue hair ribbon Dittany would wear in the first act and the red one she’d coerced Desdemona into letting her flaunt in the Malamute saloon were all packed and ready to travel. She was rather proud of that red ribbon. It would send the signal that Dittany Henbit Monk had at last outgrown tiny tot roles.