The Grub-And-Stakers Quilt a Bee (22 page)

“What a woman!”

“She’s all that and then some,” Dittany agreed. “Excuse me, Mr.

McNaster. I’d better go after her in case she needs her smelling salts or anything.”

“I could get them for her!”

“It’s not the done thing. Why don’t you find a quiet corner somewhere and memorize some poetry?”

“Great idea. I’ll go read the greeting cards at Gumpert’s. The mushy ones, I mean. Not those other kind.”

Well, it was a start. Not that it was likely to get him far. First Ethel and the woodchuck, now Andy McNasty and Arethusa Monk. What was the world coming to?

“Whoa there, gal,” said Osbert. “Back up and come at me again. I thought I heard you say Andy McNasty’s in love with my aunt.”

“That was the impression he conveyed,” Dittany insisted. “He claims to have worshipped her from afar ever since he saw her sashay past the inn parking lot doing her impersonation of Carmen.”

“Does that strike you as a plausible tale?”

“Darling, your aunt Arethusa is a stunning woman, with all that black hair and those great big flashing eyes.”

“And that tiny little brain flashing on and off. What was her reaction to this astounding news?”

“She burbled something about a plot and ran to get a pencil.”

“Good old auntie. I knew there must be a vestige of intelligence in there somewhere. Of course it’s a plot, darling. Don’t you see what’s happened? First Andy gets Fawcett mad at him, knowing Fawcett’s tendency to have at it with snake and plunger when his dander’s up. Then Andy gets Fawcett jugged for assault, as is only natural under the circumstances. Then Andy says no, he won’t press charges after all because his nobler nature-“

“Self B,” Dittany interjected.

“Thank you, darling. Self B has been stirred to action by the rose between Aunt Arethusa’s teeth, so he gets Fawcett sprung. What in fact happened was that underhanded old self A whom we know so well and detest so heartily was conniving to put Fawcett in a position where he’d have to do self A’s dirty work for him or else self B would cancel his cancellation of charges and Fawcett would be back in the jug.”

“Then it was Cedric Fawcett who burgled us?”

“Isn’t it obvious, darling? You know that uncanny ability plumbers have to appear and disappear when you least expect them to.

And they’re always hunting for things.”

“Darling, hunting for a leak in a gas pipe isn’t quite the same thing as rifling Gram Henbit’s cedar chest.”

“I grant you that, darling. It’s an infinitely more subtle process.

Therefore, by a simple process of deduction, to a plumber rifling a cedar chest ought to be easy as pie.”

“But what about Arethusa’s visitation? Do you honestly believe Cedric Fawcett could have gone padding into her bedroom in his pink and white socks and stood there looking majestic long enough to fool her? Long enough to fool anybody?”

“Arethusa isn’t just anybody, darling. If there’s a cockeyed way of looking at anything, you know perfectly well she’ll find it. Besides, she admits herself she only caught the merest glimpse of him before she ducked under the bedclothes.”

“That’s true. And I suppose if she had realized who it was and challenged him, Fawcett could always say he’d had an emergency call about a leak in the gas pipe.”

“And got into the wrong house by mistake,” Osbert finished.

“You see, dear, it all hangs together. And we wouldn’t have thought of Fawcett because we’d have assumed he was safely tucked up in the hoosegow.”

“But that scheme didn’t work, so now McNaster’s trying to lure Arethusa with lying heart and flattering tongue. The blackguard!

Now who’s that coming up the walk? Oh, Zilla. Look, darling, don’t say anything about McNaster to her. She’d go after him with a tomahawk. She looks as if she’s on the warpath about something already.”

She was. Zilla Trott was no sooner in the door than she had Dittany pinned against the wall, demanding, “What’s all this about Arethusa attacking poor Mrs. Fairfield?”

“Attacking Mrs. Fairfield? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, abusing her. Telling her she wasn’t wanted.”

“She isn’t. You said so yourself a few days ago. You said Mrs.

Fairfield was a pest and a know-it-all and you wished she’d go fly her kite.”

“That was before her husband got killed.”

“Since which time she’s been flapping around the museum proving that she is in fact a pest and a know-it-all. She apparently thought if she stepped right in and started throwing her weight around, we’d be deceived into thinking she was capable of taking her husband’s job.”

“Well, he was no human dynamo. At least she’s got a little get up and git to her. Anyway, what’s this got to do with the museum? As I understand it, Arethusa flew off the handle because Mrs. Fairfield happened to intrude upon a scandalous scene between her and some man. He was described as Andrew McNaster but of course that’s ridiculous. Arethusa’s done some pretty outrageous things in her day, but even she draws the line somewhere.”

“Zilla, you’ve been the victim of misinformation. In the first place, Arethusa didn’t fly off the handle. She remained icily calm as she pointed out to Mrs. Fairfield the error of her ways, and no more than graciously attentive when Andy was baring his soul on the side porch.”

“He wasn’t!”

“He sure as heck was, eh. Andy’s been panting like a hart on the mountain ever since she slunk past him one day wearing her Spanish shawl. He’s even reading her books. He says they’ve made him a far, far better man.”

“Hogwash!”

“Quite possibly, but that’s what he was saying when Mrs. Fairfield was so rude as to interrupt. How it happened was, Mrs. Fairfield started bawling out the plumber.”

“What plumber? Cedric Fawcett’s in jail. For beaning Andy with a plunger, as who wouldn’t, given the opportunity.”

“No he isn’t. Andy refused to press charges for love of Arethusa.”

“Well, I’ll be gum-swizzled! He told her that?”

“Cedric Fawcett did.”

Not, come to think of it, that Dittany had any special reason to assume Fawcett had been telling the truth. A man who’d go prowling into people’s bedrooms impersonating a higher being was perhaps not the most reliable of informants. Perhaps he hadn’t meant to impersonate a higher being. More likely, he’d simply meant to rifle the room while Arethusa slept.

But why should he have been so bold in assuming Arethusa was going to be asleep? Because her house guests had gone reeling around the village stewed to the gills and it would be assumed they’d left their hostess in similar condition? At least that might be assumed by somebody to whom Arethusa was either only a distant dream or a proposed gull or catspaw, as the case might be. In point of fact, Arethusa never got even marginally sozzled. Only the other day Osbert had remarked, watching her lap up their best sherry as if it had been weak tea, that his aunt had inherited her father’s hardness of head along with his softness of brain.

The case against the McNaster/Fawcett contingent was looking stronger by the minute. However, Dittany wasn’t about to tell Zilla that. Instead, she gave her a carefully edited account of just how outrageously Mrs. Fairfield had been behaving since her husband’s death. By the time she got to the part about authenticating Cousin Georgina’s brass sconces, the well-defined planes of Zilla’s face were shifting like the San Andreas Fault.

“Mrs. Fairfield actually fell for one of Cousin Georgina’s fairy stories?”

“Zilla, would I lie to you?”

“Probably not,” Zilla conceded. “You’re surprisingly truthful, all things considered. But I still think Arethusa could have been a little more tactful. What if Mrs. Fairfield decides to slap the museum with a suit for negligence in the death of her husband? Even if she doesn’t know beans, we’d have done better to jolly her along till she could get her feet back under her and find a place to go.”

“Zilla, if we gave that woman a chance to dig herself in, you know darn well the devil and all his angels wouldn’t be able to dig her out again. The way I see it, we’d have had a fight on our hands sooner or later anyway, so it might as well have been sooner.”

“Huh. That may be the way you see it, eh, but you can bet your boots a lot of other people are going to see it differently. Arethusa’s made us look like a bunch of skunks irregardless of whether she was in the right or in the wrong. If she’s taken up with Andy McNasty, that will put the capsheaf on it. It looks to me as if we’re going to have to ask for her resignation from the board, Dittany.”

“Zilla, you can’t do that. Arethusa’s done more than all the rest of us put together to get that museum going. Besides, she’s the only one in the club who really knows anything about antiques.

And furthermore, if she got kicked off the board she’d feel obliged to resign from the club. If she did that she might as well leave Lobelia Falls and be done with it. She’d be a dead duck around here and you know it as well as I do. This is her home, darn it. You can’t run a person out of town just for pointing out a few home truths to a pushy ignoramus we hardly know from a hole in the ground.”

“Well, I’ll see what Minerva has to say,” Zilla sighed. “But I warn you, she’s pretty hot under the collar right now.”

“So am I,” Dittany snarled. “Send her over to me, I’ll straighten her out in a hurry.”

“Now, you lay off Minerva. She’s got her hands full already.”

“I’ll say she has. She’ll probably have to set fire to the mattress to get that incubus out of her spare room. Sorry if I’ve wounded your sensibilities, Zilla, but you might as well realize I’m one hundred percent on Arethusa’s side in this wrangle. If she has to go, then I’ll have to go with her. You might bear that in mind before you start putting on the war paint. How about a cup of tea, since I haven’t a peace pipe to offer you?”

“Peppermint tea?”

“Why not?”

They drank the cup of amity, but before it was drained Therese Boulanger was already on the phone wanting to know the ins and outs of Arethusa’s cruel persecution of Mrs. Fairfield. By the time Dittany had got Therese silenced if not entirely placated, Hazel Munson was at the door, allegedly to return a ladder Roger had borrowed from the toolshed but in fact to find out whether Arethusa had really visited Mrs. Fairfield with bodily violence before eloping with Andy McNasty or if the story had somehow got blown out of proportion. Dittany brewed up another pot of peppermint tea and settled herself for a long, hot afternoon.

She’d grown thoroughly fed up with repeating what really happened when she hit upon the happy thought of switching her evergrowing circle of listeners to plans for the quilting bee. This entailed laying the pieces out on the dining room table and started a good deal of wrangling over which piece looked better next to what. By the time they all said well they guessed they’d better go home and start thinking about supper, Arethusa’s alleged outrage had simmered down to a mere tempest in a teapot-although it was doubtless growing in magnitude outside their own little circle -and Dittany was too exhausted even to think about putting the pieces away. When Osbert emerged from his office, where he’d barricaded himself and his typewriter during the invasion, he spied them and made, not surprisingly, a beeline for the table.

“Ah, there they are, the intriguing little rascals.”

Dittany came in from the kitchen. “Hi, darling. Had a rough afternoon among the yaks?”

“Yaks? Oh, they’re out to pasture. I averted a train wreck.”

“Good for you. How did you manage that?”

“Well, you see, the rustlers had got to fiddling around with the semaphore signals-leaping lariats, Dittany, I’ll bet that’s it! Was any of the Architraves ever involved with the railroad, do you know?”

“I’d be surprised if they weren’t. Western Canada would never have been hatched if it weren’t for the railroads, you know that. I could call Minerva. She’d know, I expect.”

“Never mind. Have you got an old Girl Guides’ manual around here anywhere?”

“Sure. You mean that stuff with the flags? We never learned codes because somehow or other we always wound up practicing archery instead. Just a second.”

Dittany ran up to the small bedroom that had always been hers till she’d moved into the big one with Osbert and fished in the bookcase Gramp had made to hold her personal library. There was the manual, right between Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard ofOz. She flipped the pages and found the little diagram figures with their arms waving in twenty-six different positions. “Here you are, darling.”

“Great.” Osbert began comparing the diagrams with those hitherto puzzling multicolored antennae. “Yep, pardner, I think we’ve struck pay dirt. Here’s a B. And this one’s definitely an F. Could you find a paper and pencil?”

“Sure, just a second. That was a B and an F.” Dittany scribbled them down. “And there’s another B, only the first one was yellow and this is green. Any more green whiskers?”

“Yes, but it’s signaling an F. I think it’s an F. They’re so darn little. Put down an F anyway. And a third F, only it’s purple. Does BFBFF mean anything?”

“Sounds Welsh to me. Are there any L’s? Welsh words always seem to have scads of L’s and Y’s.”

“L, L-ah, here we are. One L, red. Second L, blue. And a third L, by gad, orange. We’re getting somewhere, but I’m danged if I know where.”

“I spy a Y, a fat yellow Y. And a blue P. See, that one thumbing its nose at the daisy.”

“I wish we’d get some vowels for a change,” Osbert fretted.

“We’re almost out of bees. Any A’s?”

“Would you settle for a UP”

“It might help. Aha, and here’s an E.”

“BLUE,” cried Dittany. “That’s a word. But it doesn’t explain all those other colors. What about that scrawny-looking little bee over there on the scrap of pink velvet?”

“It’s a C.”

“Marvelous! CLUE. Clue, not blue. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“Maybe so, darling, but don’t ask me where. So far we’ve gotwhat?”

Osbert scanned Dittany’s list. “BFBFFLLLYPUEC. And that’s it, as far as I can see. No more bees.”

“Maybe some of the pieces fell out when we opened the box,”