The Grub-And-Stakers Quilt a Bee

GRUB-^nd-STAKERS

QUILT A BEE

ALISA CRAIG

It wasn’t every day the Grub and Stake

Gardening and Roving Club of Lobelia

Falls, Ontario, fell heir to a museum. In sober fact, all they were getting was an old, rundown house with no funds to

convert it, but that was a bagatelle.

Their real problem was how to avoid

having to exhibit all the junk people

wanted to donate. So they hired a curator.

But they needed a live one, and Mr.

Fairfield was regrettably, indubitably,

and most peculiarly dead.

How could a grown man with a phobia

about heights manage to fall out of

an attic window barely large enough

for a cat to crawl through? Why hadn’t

the roofer taken his equipment away

after he’d finished repairing the skylight?

Why was the club’s sworn and

proven enemy Andrew McNaster

(continued on back flap)

THE

GRUB-AND-STAKERS

QUILT A BEE

By Alisa Craig

THE GRUB-AND-STAKERS QUILT A BEE

THE TERRIBLE TIDE

MURDER GOES MUMMING

THE GRUB-AND-STAKERS MOVE A MOUNTAIN

A PINT OF MURDER

THE

GRUB-AND-STAKERS

QUILT A BEE

ALISA CRAIG

PUBLISHED FOR THE CRIME CLUB BY

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.

GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

1985

Lobelia Falls, its people, and their doings are all fictitious. However the esprit de corps among the Grub-and-Stakers is typical of garden club members in general.

Like Niagara Falls, they are a vast international source of natural energy, wondrous to behold in action, and adaptable to many useful purposes.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data MacLeod, Charlotte.

The grub-and-stakers quilt a bee.

I. Title.

PS3563.A31865G74 1985 813’.54

ISBN 0-385-19767-5

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 84-18726

Copyright Š 1985 by Alisa Craig

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

Affectionately dedicated to all the

grubbers and stakers in the

Sudbury Garden Club

THE

GRUB-AND-STAKERS

QUILT A BEE

“Well, fry me for a doughnut!” cried Hazel Munson.

Therese Boulanger whanged her gavel. “May we have that in the form of a motion?” Therese was a stickler for protocol.

“Stuff it, Therese,” muttered Dittany Henbit Monk, who was not.

Her utterance was drowned in cries of “I don’t believe it!” “My stars and garters,” and similar outbursts including a “gadzooks”

from Arethusa Monk, the famous author of roguish regency romances.

How could their president drag in Robert’s Rules of Order at a time like this? Never before in all its long and checkered history had the Grub-and-Stake Gardening and Roving Club of Lobelia Falls, Ontario, received a bequest of any magnitude at all, much less a whole dadblanged museum.

The “dadblanged” was contributed by the aforementioned Dittany Henbit Monk. Her vocabulary had taken strange new directions as a result of her recent marriage to Osbert Monk, better known to the sagebrush intelligentsia as Lex Laramie. Osbert would be back at the house on Applewood Avenue right now, throwing his literary lasso over the neck of some dreamed-up maverick and wondering if he’d meant to write “dogie” instead.

Did he but know! Dittany could hardly wait to tell him.

She’d jolly well have to wait, though. Therese was no slouch with a gavel. The meeting was back to order.

“For the benefit of those who may not have grasped the details of the matter before us” (Therese meant everybody who’d been too busy gabbling to pay attention, but was too good a parliamentarian to say so) “I shall read the terms of the bequest again. The subject will then be thrown open for discussion. If you wish to speak, please raise your hand and wait to be recognized by the chair. Otherwise,” she added, for Therese was human too, “we’ll be here all night.”

“Read on, Macduff,” boomed Arethusa.

Therese cleared her throat. “Under the terms of the holograph will that was found in the files down at the water department after we’d all assumed John Architrave had died intestate, his house on Victoria Street, which we all know to be a fine though sadly rundown example of Early Lobelia Falls architecture, of which we have far too little left, thanks to what some people choose to call progress …”

“Is that all in the will, for Pete’s sake?” Hazel Munson whispered to Dittany.

“Shh!” The shush was Samantha Burberry’s. Being an elected town official and chairman of the club’s legislative committee, she felt duty-bound to uphold the torch of parliamentarianism.

Therese got herself back in hand. “The gist of it is, John has left his house to the club free and clear, on condition that we maintain and operate it as a museum dedicated to the memory of John’s wife, a former president and four-time winner of the Winona Pitcher Award, and that the museum be in fact known and designated by an appropriate sign or plaque as the Aralia Polyphema Architrave Museum. Before we begin our discussion, I’d like to ask our legislative chairman whether there’s anything in the bylaws that might preclude our accepting such a bequest.”

Samantha rose, poised and elegant as always. “Nothing whatever, to my knowledge. It would appear to fit nicely under Section A, Clause 3 which states that the club shall initiate and carry out projects for the general education and beautification of our community.”

“Thank you, Samantha. Any objections?”

Hazel Munson’s hand shot up. “I’m not objecting. I’d just like to know if that old meathead left us any funds to run the place with.”

For one long, horrified moment, there was not a whisper in the room. Everyone knew John had left his life’s savings to his one surviving relative, their own beloved Minerva Oakes, co-chairman of the landscape committee. They also knew how desperately Minerva needed the cash, and they’d rejoiced over the elderly widow’s great windfall. Hazel, realizing too kte what a brick she’d dropped, clapped her hand over her errant mouth.

Minerva looked stricken, but rose gamely. “I’m quite willing to ťť

“Shut up,” barked ZiUa Trott, the other half of the landscape committee. “You’re out of order. Madam Chairman,” she waved her hand wildly, “I make a formal motion that the club refuse to accept one plugged nickel from Minerva Oakes.”

“Second the motion,” cried the members as one voice. Even Therese seconded before she remembered she wasn’t supposed to, then called for a vote before Minerva could get another word in. The ayes had it so loudly the windows bulged.

“Now,” said Zilla, “I move the chair appoint a ways and means committee.”

“Objection,” cried Arethusa. “First we elect a board of trustees, then they appoint their own committee.”

“That’s right,” Therese agreed, clearly nonplussed to find Arethusa in possession of so mundane a fact.

“Then I nominate Arethusa chairman of the board of trustees,”

Zilla amended, nothing daunted. It took a lot to daunt Zilla.

Again there was a free-for-all to second the nomination. Arethusa was not only the club celebrity but the member with the most spare cash. Furthermore, she had Dittany to keep her in hand. While still a Henbit, Dittany had been Arethusa’s typing service and voice of reason. As a niece-in-law she packed even more clout. Hence Dittany got nominated forthwith as secretary.

Therese would be a member ex officio, Dot Coskoff would be treasurer because she could both add and subtract. Hazel Munson had to be on the board because she could keep her head when all about her were losing theirs and blaming it on anybody who came handy. Minerva was named vice president as a matter of courtesy and a way of salving her conscience anent the money by giving her a reason to work her head off for the museum, which she’d have done anyway. Zilla Trott came next because nobody could envision a committee that Minerva was on and Zilla wasn’t.

Mrs. Mac Vicar then moved the nominations be closed because six trustees were plenty. Nobody cared to contradict Mrs. MacVicar, whose husband was the law in Lobelia Falls, so they elected the board and broke up the meeting. Instead of staying to participate in the wild babble that followed, Dittany sped home to her husband.

“Osbert, listen!”

“Eh?” Osbert dragged his attention away from some distant arroyo or mesa and focused it on his wife. “Darling, it’s you!”

“And whom were you expecting?”

“Well, you see, Harold the Headless Horse Thief was galloping into the haunted canyon and for just a second there I wondered if -if we mightn’t have some of those big molasses cookies with the crinkly edges hanging around anywhere handy?”

“Let’s go look,” said Dittany, for she loved Osbert dearly.

They went, Osbert nuzzling gently at the back of his bride’s neck as the faithful Appaloosa of his hero was wont to do. To the hero’s neck, of course. Dittany’s was a neck just right for nuzzling, whereas the cowboy’s must perforce be tanned to leather and perhaps not very recently washed. Osbert was feeling pleasantly one-up on the Appaloosa as he buckled down to his tea and cookies.

The mood was dispelled by his Aunt Arethusa’s barging through the back door in full cry as was her lamentable habit.

“Osbert, go away” was her greeting. “We have to hold a trustees’

meeting.”

“Stuff it, Arethusa,” said Dittany, Osbert’s mouth being full of cookie at the moment. “A man is king in his own castle.”

“What castle, prithee? This house is yours, not his.”

It was in fact the ancestral residence of the Henbits, but Dittany refused to yield her point. “It’s ours. Osbert’s spent more getting the place glued back together than it was worth before he started.

Sit down and have a cookie. We can’t hold a meeting without the rest of the trustees.”

“Why not, egad? We haven’t drawn up any bylaws yet, so how can we be in violation of them?”

“I’d have to clear that point with Therese. Anyway, I don’t want to hold a trustees’ meeting. I want to-“

“I know what you want to and I think it’s perfectly disgusting.

Can’t you wait till bedtime, forsooth?”

“Arethusa, that was not what I meant,” said Dittany with quiet dignity.

“Why not? Aha! A rift i’ the lute. What’s that beastly nephew of mine been up to now?”

“Osbert is not beastly. Osbert is a lambie pie with fur-lined booties on. What I intended to say was that I want to start supper because we horsed around at the meeting this afternoon far too long and I’m practicing to be a perfect wife.”

“Darling, you already are,” cried Osbert, having coped with the cookie.

“I haven’t ironed your shirts yet.”

“A bagatelle. I’ll wear this same one tomorrow.”

“You will not. What would the neighbors think?”

“Figo for the neighbors,” said Arethusa. “Could we get on with the meeting? The gist or nub of the matter is that we’ve got to appoint a curator forthwith.”

“Why forthwith?” said Dittany.

“Because I’ve already been approached by seventeen people who want to donate priceless artifacts to the museum, that’s why.”

“What priceless artifacts?”

“A hand-embroidered corset cover worn by Samantha Burberry’s husband’s great-grandmother on the occasion of her presentation to Queen Victoria at the Court of St. James, a set of handcarved false teeth once owned by a certain Sam Small, the first wagon driver who came to Lobelia Falls, later hanged for cattle rustling in Alberta-“

Osbert brightened. “Now, there’s an item of genuine historical interest.”

“To whom, prithee? If you think I’m going to accept any bogus bicuspids in my capacity as chairman of the board of trustees of the whatever-her-name-was museum, you can think again, eh. The trouble is, I can’t come straight out and say so, because Zilla Trott’s the one who wants to donate the teeth.”

“I see,” said Dittany.

“I don’t,” said Osbert.

“You wouldn’t,” snarled Arethusa.

“It’s quite simple, darling,” Dittany explained. “We need somebody who can winnow out the junk from the good stuff without making everybody hate him.”

“Him?”

“Or her. I used the pronoun abstractly. You remember about abstract pronouns, dear?”

“Certainly I remember about abstract pronouns. Aunt Arethusa wouldn’t know an abstract pronoun if it walked up and tipped its hat to her.”

“I would so,” said Arethusa.

“You would not. You only know words like stap my garters.”

“Garters. Egad, yes. A pair of red silk arm garters won by old Mr.

Busch in a poker game when he was a telegraph operator up in Yellowknife in 1909. You see what we’re up against?”

Dittany nodded gloomily. By nightfall they’d have been offered a wealth of hand-crocheted chamber pot covers, secondhand bee-hives, wooden legs, Moody & Sankey hymnals, autographed photos of Ivor Novello, moth-eaten army uniforms, and that umbrella stand made from interwoven buffalo horns Dot CoskofFs mother had been trying to unload on somebody for the past fortythree years. Would anybody in town have the guts to explain that none of these things was precisely what the Aralia Polyphema Architrave Museum happened to be in urgent need of at the moment? Sighing, she reached for the telephone.