“Are Ted and Abigail friends of yours?”
“I like Abigail very much, but Ted seems to be of rather questionable character. I wonder—”
“You wonder what?”
“It just came to me. Those men may be officers from Texas sent here to arrest Ted for something he’s done. I never meant to set them on his trail, but I may be responsible for his arrest.”
Chapter Five
Jack smiled broadly as he edged the car from its parking space by the curb.
“You certainly have a vivid imagination, Jane. Those two men didn’t look like plainclothes men to me. Anyway, if Ted Whitely has committed an illegal act, wouldn’t it be your duty to turn him over to the authorities?”
“I suppose so,” I admitted. “Ted stole one of Truman Kip’s chickens earlier today. It was a dreadful thing to do, but in a way, I can’t blame him too much. I’m sure the Sandersons frequently go hungry.”
“Stealing is stealing. I don’t know the lad, but if a fellow is crooked in small things, he’s usually dishonest in larger matters as well. Speaking of Truman Kip, he was the man who hauled the big rock to the museum.”
“Was he? I understand he does a great deal of rock hauling around Greenville. He’s an odd fellow.”
I became absorbed in my own thoughts and had little to say until we drew up in front of my home.
“Won’t you come in?” I asked Jack.
“Can’t tonight,” he declined regretfully. “I have to meet the team at a bowling alley.”
Jack had been using that excuse a lot lately. A few months ago, he’d joined a bowling team, and to hear him tell it he was indispensable. It was taking up most of his evenings and nearly every weekend.
“Why don’t I come along and watch,” I suggested.
“No!” Jack said, far too quickly. “I mean, having a woman there will make the other fellas nervous.”
“Where did you find this team of yours? Don’t tell me they’ve never seen a woman before.”
“Of course, they’ve seen a woman before,” Jack said defensively. “They’re just shy, that’s all.”
“Shy! Phonus Bolonus. If that bowling team of yours is so shy, then providing them with the opportunity to spend a little time in the company of a sympathetic female will be just the thing to bring them out of their shells.”
“You may be female, and you may be sympathetic—on the interior at any rate—but your outward appearance is that of a woman who might very well carry a cosh in her handbag.”
“I do carry a cosh in my handbag,” I pointed out.
“And you look like someone who wouldn’t hesitate to use it. Perhaps I shall start calling you Wild Jane Hickok.”
“I might not hesitate to use my cosh, should the occasion call for it,” I protested, “but I only visit violence on black-hearted evil-doers. I, unlike Wild Bill, never employ a weapon save in self-defense.”
I kissed Jack with rather more fervor than usual before I exited the car, just so he’d have something to remember me by during his long evening bowling with his team of social misfits.
I tried not to think about this hitherto-unmentioned elderly aunt Jack had neglected to mention. I’d been seeing far too little of Jack lately, and I didn’t want to waste what little time we had together arguing about bowling teams with inferiority complexes and elderly aunts with overgrown gardens.
Upon entering the house, I discovered that Dad had been called downtown to attend a meeting. Unable to tell him of my trip to the museum, I tried to interest Mrs. Timms in the story. However, Mrs. Timms, who was eager to be off to a moving picture at the Pink Lotus Theater with her friend, Mrs. Amhurst, soon cut me short.
Excuse me, Jane, but I really must be leaving, or I’ll be late,” she apologized, putting on her hat.
“I thought you were interested in unsolved mysteries, Mrs. Timms.”
“Unsolved mysteries, yes, but to tell you the truth, I can’t become very excited over an old stone, no matter what’s written on it, and I’ve never thought very highly of that Mr. Hickok. I can’t say that I’d be terribly pleased to have proof that he’d ever been in these parts. I’ve been only too happy, all these years, to dismiss those rumors of him killing his lady-friend’s fiancé at that farm over east of town as baseless rumors.”
After Mrs. Timms had gone, I was left alone in the house.
I should have been up in my bedroom, sitting at my typewriter, pounding out another twenty pages of Lady Ramfurtherington’s Revenge, but the weather was unseasonably balmy for early May, and it was uncomfortably warm in my second-story bedroom. Besides, I couldn’t decide what indignities and vicissitudes to subject Lady Ramfurtherington to next.
I sat down on the davenport in the living room to read one of Mrs. Timm’s old National Geographic Magazines, but “In the Land of Kublai Khan” failed to fascinate; likewise, “Costa Rica, Land of the Banana,” and finally “Through the Heart of England in a Canadian Canoe.” I laid the magazine aside.
I decided that I must be hungry. I looked in the cookie jar, which was almost never empty, but there was nothing but half a broken snickerdoodle laying forlornly in the bottom. When I took a bite out of it, I found it was stale.
I thought I would make a batch of fudge. But no sooner had I mixed the sugar and chocolate together than that, too, seemed like a useless occupation. Fudge, I decided, was too sweet. Besides, it was too warm in the house for baking. I set aside the mixing bowl for Mrs. Timms to finish upon her return from her moving picture.
“I know what I’ll do!” I said out loud to the empty house. “I wonder why I didn’t think of it sooner?”
I telephoned Florence and asked her to come over at once.
“What’s so pressing? I’m rather busy. Mother has me painting posters for the Annual Spring Pilgrimage.”
“You? Painting posters? Doesn’t your mother want the Pilgrimage to be its usual success?”
“I’m a tolerably good sign-painter,” Flo said sniffily. “I can manage to letter on a straight line.”
“So your mother’s finagled her way onto the Pilgrimage Committee this year?”
“Yes, Mrs. Arnold Pruitt’s attempted coup has not materialized. Just as Mrs. Pruitt’s campaign to oust Mother was gaining traction, my mother circulated the rumor that Mrs. Pruitt used to be a showgirl and that rather rendered her a spent force.”
“Did Mrs. Pruitt used to be a showgirl?”
“Not exactly, she used to be a dancing instructress.”
“Does having worked as a dancing instructress qualify as scandalous for the club women of Greenville?”
“Not necessarily, but I gather that my mother implied that when Mrs. Pruitt was a young woman, she specialized in giving dancing lessons exclusively to male clients.”
“Did Mrs. Pruitt give lessons exclusively to male clients?”
“Technically, she did. Mrs. Pruitt was dancing mistress for an all-boys school just outside of Minneapolis. I gather the oldest students were no more than twelve and it was the sort of institution where the curriculum was confined to the sedatest of Victorian waltzes—I gather the student body was required to practice with broomstick partners outfitted with little muslin skirts—but my mother still contrived to make it all sound very tawdry.”
“I suppose the woman deserves it for putting about the rumor that your mother was incapable of discharging her duties as pillar of the community on account of it being ‘her time of life,’ but I still feel rather sorry for Mrs. Pruitt. She obviously didn’t realize your mother is such a force to be reckoned with.”
“People rarely do,” said Flo, and sighed. “I’d better get back to my charitable duties.”
“The Pilgrimage isn’t for ages. Surely posters can wait. If your mother objects, tell her we’re going to carry out a philanthropic enterprise for which time is of the essence.”
“What philanthropic enterprise?” Florence sounded supremely skeptical.
“I’ll tell you about it when you ge
t here,” I said and hung up the phone.
Fifteen minutes later, Flo arrived to find me garbed in an apron, working industriously in the kitchen.
“What is this all about?” Florence demanded suspiciously. “If you’re expecting help with the dishes, I’m going straight home again.”
“Oh, relax.” I laughed. “The dishes were done ages ago. We’re going to help out the old wishing well.”
“I wish you would explain what you mean.”
“The Sandersons are as poor as church mice, and they need food. At Roseacres this afternoon Abigail made a wish—that her family would have more to eat. Well, it’s up to us to make that wish come true.”
“You’re preparing a basket of food to take out to the camp?”
“That’s the general idea. We can leave it on the doorstep of the cottage and slip away without revealing our identity.”
“That’s a splendid idea.”
I opened the porcelain door of the icebox and peered inside. I handed out a masala-flavored meatloaf, a potato salad dressed with cumin and ground cloves, bunches of radishes, scrubbed carrots, celery, and a dozen fresh eggs.
Flo sniffed doubtfully at the meatloaf.
“This smells funny.”
“It’s flavored with Mrs. Timm’s secret ingredient,” I said. “Garam Masala powder.”
“What’s Raram Mosulla powder?”
“Garam Masala. It’s a mixture of Indian spices.”
Until recently, Mrs. Timms had been able to satisfy her unusual tastes in culinary seasonings by receiving regular parcels from her sister Henrietta, whose diplomat husband was stationed in Calcutta. However, ever since Henrietta and Mr. Henrietta—I’ve forgotten his name, he’s never figured very prominently in Mrs. Timms’ narratives about her sister’s exotic existence on the Indian subcontinent—were transferred to Hong Kong, Mrs. Timms has had to find a new source. Fortunately, she has a cousin in San Francisco—where apparently one can get such things as powdered fennel and blades of mace—who now keeps her supplied.
“Dash down to the basement and get some canned goods from the supply shelf,” I instructed Florence briskly. “We ought to have jelly, too, and a sample of Mrs. Timms’ strawberry preserves.”
“You do the dashing if you don’t mind,” Flo said. “I prefer not to become too deeply involved in this affair. At this rate, Mrs. Timms is going to have to do the grocery shopping all over again.”
“Oh, Mrs. Timms won’t care—not one bit,” I insisted as I started for the basement. “She’s the most charitable person in the world.”
In a minute I was back, my arms laden with heavy canned goods. I found a market basket in the garage, and we packed the food inside, wrapping the perishables carefully in waxed paper.
“There! We can’t crowd another thing into the basket,” I said at last.
“The icebox is as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard,” Florence pointed out. “What will you all eat tomorrow?”
“Oh, Mrs. Timms can buy more. She’ll be a good sport about it, I know.”
I had no misgivings as I carried the heavy basket to the garage and loaded it into Bouncing Betsy. Old Bets’s gasoline gauge registered low, so I siphoned an extra two gallons from my father’s car, and then announced that I was at last ready to go.
“Don’t you ever patronize a filling station?” Florence protested as we headed down the street.
“Oh, now and then,” I said. “Dad won’t begrudge me a couple of gallons.”
“You certainly have your family well trained,” Florence sighed. “I wish I knew how you get away with it. I’m completely under Mother’s thumb. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to call my life my own.”
“Put your foot down,” I said. “Make a stand. Draw a line in the sand. Take a firm stance.”
Flo scowled in the passenger seat as I cast about for additional metaphors.
“Stiffen the sinews!” I said, finally locating another. “If only you didn’t live with your parents, it would be harder for your mother to work you to the bone.”
“But I can’t afford an apartment,” Flo pointed out. “I only have my part-time salary from the library, and that’s not nearly enough to pay rent and keep me in stockings.”
I had a sudden inspiration.
“What if you moved in with us?”
“I couldn’t,” Flo protested. “It would break my father’s heart.”
“Would it? I should think that if you stopped by the house and stuck your nose in at his study door every week or so, he’d hardly notice a thing had changed.”
Reverend Sidney Radcliff is an intelligent man, but he has rather the air of a clergyman who lives on a higher plane, or at least a plane where he takes very little notice of the minor tasks and routines of daily life—or the wretched time that his only daughter is having.
“You’re probably right about Father,” Flo said. “Mother would be furious, of course.”
“A pox and a pestilence on your mother,” I said peevishly. “If you move out it will only be because she brought it on herself.”
“I don’t think Mrs. Timms would appreciate me permanently taking over your guest room.”
“But you wouldn’t have to,” I said. “A while back, my father started to build himself a study in the basement. The fascination faded after he’d hit his thumb with a hammer for about the thousandth time, so he abandoned the project.”
“You want me to move into your basement?” Flo said. “I was just down there. It’s jammed full of old newspapers and pasteboard boxes and about twenty years’ worth of empty milk bottles.”
“It was just a suggestion.”
“Well, moving out is a lovely thought,” Flo said. “But I’m not quite desperate enough to camp out in the midst of a pile of milk bottles.”
We drove through Greenville and on to the Dorset Tourist Camp. An attendant stopped us at the entrance but allowed us to drive on when he learned that we did not wish to make reservations. I drew up not far from the Sanderson’s cottage.
“A light is still burning inside,” Flo pointed out. “We’ll have to be careful if we don’t want to be seen.”
As I lifted the heavy basket from Betsy’s rear compartment, I noticed another car parked nearby.
“It’s that same Texas car,” I told Flo. “Those men must still be here.”
“What car? What men?”
“Earlier this evening two strangers inquired the way to this tourist camp,” I explained. “They said they were looking for Ted Whitely.”
“Friends of his?”
“I don’t know who they are or what they want. It did strike me as odd that they would come from such a long distance.”
“Whoever they are, they must be at the cottage now. Should we leave the basket on the doorstep or wait until they’ve gone?”
“We can’t very well wait, Flo. They might decide to stay half the night.”
Carrying the basket between us, we moved stealthily toward the cottage. The curtains had not been drawn, and I could see Mr. and Mrs. Sanderson, Abigail, and the two men seated at the table carrying on an animated discussion.
“I wish I knew why those Texas fellows came here. If we wanted to find out—”
“I’ll not listen at any keyholes!” Florence cut me short.
“I was merely thinking that we could, theoretically speaking. Of course, I never would do such an ill-bred thing.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t,” Florence said archly. “For a very good reason, too. I shall take you away before temptation overcomes you.”
We reached the stoop. Flo relinquished her hold on the basket of food and forcibly pulled me back to Bouncing Betsy.
Chapter Six
At the next meeting of the Palette Club, Florence and I eagerly awaited some indication from Abigail Whitely that the basket of food had been discovered by the Sanderson family. When the girl had failed to appear twenty minutes after all the others had arrived, I began to wonder if she intended t
o absent herself from the Palette Club. I hoped that she had not been so embarrassed by our finding out about Ted’s theft of the chicken that she would avoid us altogether.
“Oh, by the way, what did Mrs. Timms say about last week’s little episode?” Florence asked me.
“Entirely too much.” I sighed. “She subjected me to at least three thousand words on the budget problems of a housekeeper. She also waxed eloquent on the considerable time involved in the procuring of the quantity of food-stuffs required to satisfy a household of ‘voracious eaters.’ Tell me, would you describe me as a ‘voracious eater’?’
“Yes, I would.”
Just then, Abigail, breathless from hurrying, descended the steps into the basement room where we were meeting. Her eyes sparkled.
“Something marvelous happened since the last time we met,” she told us. “You’ll never guess!”
“We couldn’t possibly,” Florence said.
“Two baskets of food were left at the door of our cottage. It’s silly to say it, I know, but it seems as if my wish at the old well must have had something to do with it.”
“Did you say two baskets of food were left?” I asked her, looking sideways at Florence as I spoke.
“Yes, last Saturday, one came early in the evening . Then, the following Sunday morning when Mrs. Sanderson opened the door, she found still another. You don’t suppose any of the members of the Palette Club did it, do you? We shouldn’t like to accept charity—”
“I’ll ask the girls if you want me to,” I said. “But if any of them did, no one breathed a word of it to me.”
“Maybe the old well did grant your wish, Abigail,” Florence added. “You know, folks say it has a reputation for doing good deeds.”
One of the girls interrupted to ask Abigail for help mixing her paints, and this brought the conversation to an abrupt end.
“Who do you suppose left that second basket on the Sandersons’ doorstep?” I asked Flo as we waited outside the church for Abigail. I had offered to drive her home.
“Probably one of the other club members had the same idea you did,” Florence suggested. “Anyway, I expect that the Sandersons were well fed last week at least.”
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