The Grub-And-Stakers Quilt a Bee (16 page)

“Would you like a cup of tea?” said Dittany, not knowing what else to say.

Miss Paffnagel pulled out a kitchen chair, although Osbert would have been quite willing to do it for her, and sat down. “Sure, why not? Might as well make myself at home. Any idea how long I’m going to be here?”

“Sergeant Mac Vicar hasn’t told us yet.”

The sergeant made a point of not noticing the nasty look Dittany threw him. “It’s hard to say just the noo. Having Miss Paffnagel turn up at the funeral was a serendipitous occurrence, ye ken. I can only reiterate my gratitude for her willingness to disrupt her holiday by remaining here as a material witness.”

“I still can’t believe it.” Miss Paflhagel accepted the tea Dittany poured out for her and put in a great deal of sugar. “I must have been talking to Perry less than an hour before he died. It makes you stop and think.” She added more sugar with an all-flesh-is-asgrass look on her face.

It wasn’t an unpleasing face, Dittany thought. Surely not what one might think of as a sinister face. That didn’t signify. She’d known another face that hadn’t looked sinister, either, until Sergeant Mac Vicar arrested the murderer it belonged to.

“How long had it been since you’d seen Mr. Fairfield?” she asked, passing the cookies and not being surprised when Miss Paffnagel took three.

“Perry? Oh, six months or so. I was at his retirement party.

Wouldn’t have missed it for a trip to Machu Picchu. It was oodles of fun once we’d managed to get Evangeline accidentally locked in the ladies’ loo. Whoops, I shouldn’t have said that. How’s she bearing up, or need I ask?”

“Mrs. Fairfield seems to be coping,” Dittany replied warily.

“How did you happen to be in Lobelia Falls, Miss Paffnagel? Did you come specially to see Mr. Fairfield?”

“Lord no. I’d no idea this was where he’d come to roost. I’m rather out of touch with the old gang these days. Been down in the Yucatan doing research on human sacrifice for a book I’m writing.

Popular stuff, you know. My working title is “Disembowelment Through the Ages,” but I’m not sure that’s got enough punch for the mass market.”

“How about ‘Evisceration for Everyman’?” Osbert suggested.

“M’not bad. I’ll have to give it careful thought. But anyway, there I was and here I am. I buzzed up to attend a conference in Ottawa and thought I might as well go on to British Columbia and take a shufti at a few totem poles while I’m in this neck of the world. Happened to stop for lunch in this quaint little backwater and heard somebody mention a museum next door, so I popped over to see what it was all about, and there was Perry. We were having a real old home week till he told me Evangeline was around the place somewhere. That was when I picked up my heels and lippity-lipped out of there.”

“Then how did you find out Mr. Fairfield was dead?” Dittany asked.

“Eh? Oh, I heard it on the car radio. Trying to catch a weather forecast, as it happened, and got the news thrown in. It mentioned the Architrave and said the curator had been killed. I knew that meant she’d finally managed it, so I came whizzing back to find out how. I still can’t believe her modus operand! though. Perry was totally paralytic about heights. He’d get queasy if a woman walked past him wearing high-heeled shoes.”

“This she you mentioned,” Osbert began.

Miss Paffnagel favored him with a stare of wide-eyed innocence.

“Did I absentmindedly employ the feminine pronoun? Merely a rhetorical device. Far be it from me to lay myself open for a lawsuit I know that old hairpin too well. Mind you, I’m not saving which old hairpin.”

She ate her third cookie, then shook her head. “Anyway, it’s no go. Perry’s pension from the Bugleheim stopped when he died, and I don’t suppose there’ll be anything coming from the Architrave.

The hypothetical female I may or may not have had in mind would never be fool enough to kill the goose that laid her golden eggs, pullet-sized though they might be. Not that Perry was a goose, mind you. We used to call him the worm that never turned.”

Having by now finished her tea, Miss Pafihagel began scraping wet sugar from the bottom of the cup and licking it off her spoon.

“Sergeant Mac Vicar tells me you and Evangeline were together all that afternoon, Mrs. Monk.”

“That’s right,” said Dittany. “We were doing some research in the attic.” She thought “research” sounded more scholarly than “mucking around.”

Miss Pafihagel looked amused again. “Mucking around, eh? You didn’t find any pre-Colombian artifacts, I don’t suppose?”

“Not that I can recall.”

“Or anything else of value, I don’t suppose. Poor Perry. He never gave up hope, though, I’ll say that for him.”

“Hope of what, Miss Paflhagel?”

“Fame and fortune, what else? Perry was always going to strike it big. You know, make some great discovery that would astound the whole museum field. We all are, of course, when we’re young and enthusiastic, but most of us get a bit more realistic as the years go by. Perry kept right on dreaming the impossible dream. He tottered on the brink a few times, or thought he did, but in the long run his golden apples always came up lemons. Even when I talked to him day before yesterday, he was bubbling about an old letter that he said contained a clue to a cipher.

“What was the cipher supposed to be about?”

“Hidden treasure, of course. ‘Right here in Lobelia Falls,’ he told me. ‘Can you believe it?’”

She lapped up the last of the sugar. “Well, needless to say, I couldn’t, but I wasn’t about to break Perry’s heart by saying so. I just smiled and nodded and said wasn’t that nice.”

“He didn’t say what the treasure was?” Osbert asked her.

“Uh-uh.”

“Did he tell you how he’d recognize this cipher when he found it, assuming it does in fact exist?”

“Not a yip. Mind you, I wasn’t exactly pressing him for information.

I’d been through all that with Perry before, and so had everybody else he’d ever worked with. We all knew his dream was not so much of winning fame for himself as of boosting Evangeline’s status to the point where she’d decide he wasn’t classy enough for her and find herself another victim.”

“Then you in fact placed no credence whatsoever in this alleged find of Peregrine Fairfield?” asked Sergeant MacVicar.

“I wouldn’t say no credence whatsoever,” Miss Pafihagel demurred.

“I’m sure Perry’d got hold of something. He wasn’t incompetent, you know. He wouldn’t have been fooled by a fakedup modern letter or a totally implausible yarn. The thing of it was, he wanted so desperately to fulfill that great ambition of his, and he must have realized if it didn’t happen here, it never would.

Poor old coot, in a way I’m glad he didn’t live to see another of his bubbles burst. Mrs. Monk, would you mind steering me in the general direction of my room? I think I’d like to lie down a while.”

Dittany set out the company towels with mixed feelings. It must be galling for a hunter of pre-Columbian artifacts to find herself being held in protective custody, or whatever the proper term might be, in connection with an old friend’s sudden death. On the other hand, if Hunding Paffinagel saw Lobelia Falls merely as a quaint little backwater, she must be so lacking in perception that she wouldn’t notice or care what Sergeant MacVicar wanted her there for, provided the food held out.

Dittany herself had a few things to say to the sergeant, however.

She made sure there was a fresh cake of pink soap to go with the towels and went downstairs. Before she’d had a chance to unload the words that were hovering upon her lips, though, Sergeant MacVicar began what her stepfather Bert would describe as a snow job.

“Ah, Dittany lass. I was just telling Deputy Monk how greatly Mrs. MacVicar and I appreciate your kindness in offering lodging to Miss Paffnagel.”

Dittany snorted. “In a pig’s eye you were, with all respect.

Osbert and I both know the only reason you brought her here was so that you could con us into keeping her under house arrest, so let’s cut the cackle and get to the bosses. Have you caught our burglar yet?”

“Burglar?”

“Certainly burglar. Didn’t Ray tell you?”

“I have not yet checked in at the station.”

For the first time in Dittany’s life, she detected a faint note of uncertainty in Sergeant Mac Vicar’s voice. She leaped on that note like a terrier on a bug. “A fine thing, when our senior law enforcement officer falls down on his job.”

“Dittany!” cried Osbert, scandalized.

“Well, darling, you must admit it’s a bit much, dumping another probable malefactor on us without so much as offering a word of sympathy about the one we’ve already had. Being a literary man yourself, maybe you can straighten Sergeant Mac Vicar out on the relationship between quid and quo.”

“Are we the quid or the quo?”

“Both, darn it. What about last night, when we paddled our own canoe out into the middle of nowhere at peril of life and limb just to grill Fred Churtle for him?”

“It was only up Little Pussytoes, darling, and it was partly to heal Ethel’s broken heart.”

“And a fat lot of good that did. She’s down in Cat Alley right now, making goo-goo eyes at another woodchuck.”

“La donna & mobile,” said Sergeant Mac Vicar. “That minds me, Deputy Monk, I have not yet heard your report on yon Churtle.”

“You haven’t heard about our burglary, either,” Osbert retorted, for he was no wimp and never had been, his aunt to the contrary notwithstanding. “But anyway,” he went on, for neither was Osbert a contumacious young man except when goaded by Arethusa, “we did have a long talk with Fred Churtle, in fact we spent the night at his camp. He seems like a nice guy. He told us all about Peregrine Fairfield.”

Osbert proceeded to tell what Churtle had told. As any of his multitudinous readers would have expected, he told it well. Sergeant Mac Vicar hung upon his words, nodding sagely from time to time, pursing his lips when pursing seemed called for, finally delivering the deserved accolade.

“Well done, Deputy Monk. My compliments to you, and to your lady wife as well. As you have doubtless noted, Churtle’s explanation of that alleged five thousand dollar loan ties in neatly with what Miss Paffnagel has told us of Peregrine Fairfield’s eternally futile quest. Yon swindle must have been the first in a long series of disappointments.”

“Second,” Dittany contradicted. “He’d already married Evangeline.”

Sergeant MacVicar rubbed his chin to conceal the smile that rose unbidden to his lips. “Lass, lass, did I not ken ye so weel, I might suspect you of harboring thoughts less than kind toward her who is e’en now suffering the effects of her tragic bereavement.”

“Well, I am sorry about the pension’s getting stopped.”

Dittany could have added, “because that makes it stickier for us to get rid of her,” but forbore partly out of decorum and partly because Sergeant Mac Vicar doubtless knew what she was thinking anyway, the pious old fraud. Right now he was favoring her with one of those indulgent smiles she’d been getting ever since her fourth birthday, when she’d stormed the police station demanding he arrest a robin that had committed an indecent assault on her brand-new party dress.

“Aye, Dittany, we must consider all practical aspects of the case.

From a practical point of view, eh, we may eliminate Frederick Churtle as your burglar, since you had him under surveillance all night at a distance of some twenty miles from here.”

“Not exactly,” said Osbert. “Fred insisted Dittany and I use the lean-to because we were company. He took his sleeping bag off to the other side of the campfire, allegedly to give us more privacy.

What’s to say he didn’t sneak downstream in his dinghy, or in our canoe, for that matter, while we were asleep?”

“He would have been taking a parlous risk, would he not, to have absented himself for a period long enough to have accomplished his felonious mission?”

“Not if he got somebody else to do the felonizing. He had an outboard motor on his dinghy and a CB radio in his van, which was parked about five miles back at the portage. As soon as he was out of earshot of the camp, he could have started the motor, beetled on down to the van, and radioed to a henchman. Or henchwoman.

His wife, most likely. She’d only have had to drive over from Scottsbeck.”

“Or what about Andy McNasty?” said Dittany. “Churtle works for him, and he lives in Scottsbeck, too.”

“Ah,” said MacVicar. “And what would this alleged confederate be told to look for?”

“As a guess,” Osbert replied, “that cipher Peregrine Fairfield mentioned to Miss Paffhagel. Fred might think we had it because Dittany’d been at the museum shortly before Mr. Fairfield died.

We have only Fred’s word, you know, that he hadn’t got together with his old pal Perry after the Fairfields moved to Lobelia Falls.”

“He admitted he’d seen the piece in the paper about them,”

Dittany added. “Osbert wrote the publicity release. It was lovely.”

“Thank you, darling. Maybe Fred was lying to us. In any case, if he and Perry did get together, they wouldn’t have dared let Mrs.

Fairfield know or she’d start telling everybody what a skunk Fred was. The only way they could have stopped her would have been for her husband to tell her the truth and get his ear chewed off for the rest of his life. Then most likely she’d force him to get off that trail Miss Paffnagel says he thought he was on, for fear he’d wind up suckered out of another five thousand dollars.”

“Astutely reasoned, Deputy Monk,” said Sergeant MacVicar.

“You assume, then, that since Mr. Fairfield confided his new quest to Miss Paffnagel, he would also have told Churtle about it.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Nor do I. This plot is thickening like a haggis on the hob. And I must say at this juncture I see no practical way of dishing it up. Did you ascertain whether Churtle’s two-way radio was in working order?”

Osbert flushed. “No, I didn’t.”

“Darling, why should you have?” cried Dittany. “How could you have known it might be important?”

“I should have guessed. Maybe it’s not too late.”

“I misdoubt it would do us no good to investigate the radio at this time,” said Sergeant MacVicar. “If it is working, Churtle could say he just fixed it. If it is not, that may be because Churtle saw his peril and put the contraption out of commission after you left him.