A Pint of Murder

by Alisa Craig

  “You don’t expect me to leave you here alone all afternoon? What if you should faint again? You could fall and crack your skull like Doc Druffitt.”

  That was definitely the wrong thing to say. Janet felt the wave of nausea again, then that wet dishrag slopping her face. Bert scooped her out of the rocking chair, carried her into the front room and plunked her down on the chesterfield.

  “Now stay there and don’t try to move. I’m going next door and get Gilly or Marion.”

  “Please don’t. They’ve got more on their hands than they can cope with already, between Gilly’s troubles and Elmer’s father making all that foofaraw over the patent.”

  “Then I’ll send Sam down for that Fewter woman we had when Annabelle was laid up. She’ll be better than nobody.”

  “Not much,” sniffed his sister. “All right, do that if it’ll make you feel any better. Tell Dot to plan on staying the night. I’ll need help getting my clothes off and on with this bunged-up hand. And be sure to phone Fred Olson and explain why I can’t come this afternoon.”

  “Hell, what difference does that make?”

  “Bert, I want Fred told!”

  “Well, all right, don’t get het up over it. For Christ’s sake take it easy till that hand heals over. One sick woman in the family’s enough for me.”

  After he’d gone and it was safe to close her eyes without getting resuscitated, Janet lay still on the couch, trying to rest and think. In a way, she, too, was a victim. If she hadn’t been so upset over the murders, she wouldn’t have had the accident. That was the way these things went, like weeds getting a foothold in a garden. If they weren’t rooted out, they’d spread until they choked out all the good plants and you had nothing left but weeds.

  Dot came. Janet got her to help her up to her room and get her clothes off. In a loose nightgown between clean sheets and dosed with aspirin, she felt easier. Having lost so much sleep the night before, she managed to drop off and sleep away the better part of the afternoon. At suppertime she struggled into a housecoat and came down, over Bert’s protests.

  “For Pete’s sake, stop mother-henning me, Bert!” she retorted. “I never got to eat my dinner, and I’m starved.”

  “Dot could bring you something on a tray.”

  “No, thanks.” She’d already had one of Dot’s trays at teatime, and a sloppier mess she never wanted to face.

  “Well, then, if you feel up to it.” He even went so far as to pull out her chair for her. “Maybe a hot meal would do you good.”

  Luckily she’d put together a casserole before she hurt herself. Dot had only to warm it up and fix some vegetables for salad. Bert had to rush through supper again since the Owls were to perform some esoteric ritual at the funeral parlor. Thanks to Janet’s clumsiness, he’d have to make do with his feathered helmet and his good gray suit instead of his full regalia.

  “I hope I can get Elmer Bain to drive over to the cleaner’s tomorrow morning and pick up Bert’s Owl tunic so he’ll have it for the funeral,” Janet remarked to Dot after her brother had left. “Elmer’s a pretty decent sort, isn’t he? I never really got a chance to know him till now.”

  “Elmer ain’t a bad scout, far’s I know,” Dot agreed with her mouth full. “Kind o’ quiet. Them Bains don’t waste nothin’, not even words. Say, that’s a hot one! I got to tell Sam.”

  “Yes, why don’t you?” said Janet. “Elmer doesn’t seem to take after his father much, does he?”

  “Favors his ma. Miz Bain was a nice enough woman for all she was a McDermott. Gee, no, thanks. If I take one more bite, I’ll bust wide open.” Dot laid down her fork with obvious regret. “Sam always says you folks set the best table in town. If I was at Miz Druffitt’s now, I’d be lucky to get a fried-egg samwitch, an’ she’d be countin’ how many grains o’ sugar I put in my tea.”

  It would take her a while to count them, Janet thought, the way Dot was ladling it in. How that woman managed to stay so thin on what she ate was another unsolved mystery. Dot was built a good deal like both Elizabeth Druffitt and Marion Emery, now that Janet happened to notice. If the woman would go a little easier on the makeup and do something about her clothes and hair, she might almost pass for another cousin.

  Dot rambled on. “Miz Treadway, now, she’d give you all you was o’ mind to eat, such as it was. But Miz Druffitt, boy, I can tell you an ant would starve to death in that woman’s garbage can. She’s got stuff in that house from the year 1, boxes piled up in the attic right to the eaves, and closets full o’ clothes she must o’ bought thirty years ago, just hangin’ there.”

  It did seem a pity, Janet had to agree, that good stuff should be let go to waste like that when some poor soul—Dot, for instance, no doubt—could be getting the wear out of it. Still she wasn’t keen on the idea of sitting here with the hired help gossiping about a woman whose husband was to be buried the next day. She found, though, that Dot was a lot easier to turn on than to shut off.

  “She sure is a caution to work for! She’ll put on white cotton gloves an’ run her fingers over the furniture lookin’ for dust.” Dot shrugged. “It’s no skin off my nose if she wants to ruin a perfectly good pair o’ gloves. The doctor wanted to send for one o’ them foreign maids once, but Miz Druffitt wouldn’t hear of it. They’d have had to board her, see. ‘An’ besides,’ she says, ‘she might be pretty and it would cause talk.’”

  “Naturally Mrs. Druffitt wouldn’t want to cause talk,” said Janet. Nobody ever wanted to in Pitcherville, but somehow a lot of people did.

  “Oh no, Miz Druffitt’s dead set against talk,” Dot replied, not recognizing the irony, as Janet hadn’t really expected her to. “That’s why she’s always at Gilly to move back home. ‘What do you think people are saying,’ is how she goes on, ‘you living like a pauper when you have a lovely home to come back to?’ Gilly always gets sore an’ says, ‘Who the hell cares what anybody says?’ so her ma might as well save ‘er breath. They’ve had some rare ol’ hairtangles, I c’n tell you.”

  Dot decided she could manage one more cookie. “Soon as Miz Treadway died, Miz Druffitt started on Gilly to live up here at the Mansion but Gilly wouldn’t go for that one, neither. Can’t say as I blame ‘er there. Ain’t it kind of lonesome, being’ stuck up here where there’s nothin’ to see an’ nobody to talk to? At least down in the village there’s somethin’ doin’ all the time, even if it’s only Fred Olson fixin’ somebody’s flat tire.”

  That reminded Janet of the appointment she’d wanted so desperately to keep. “I hope Sam gave Fred my message,” she fretted. “I was going to see him this afternoon.”

  Dot pounced. “What about?”

  Good grief, what had she used for an excuse? Janet racked her brain. “Oh just an old pan I was hoping he could fix. It belonged to my sister-in-law’s grandmother.”

  Dot chewed the last bite of cookie. “You got a fat chance of gettin’ any work out o’ Fred till after the funeral. He’ll be Owlin’ all day tomorrow. They’re marchin’ in solemn procession all the way to the graveyard.”

  “Yes, I know, and there’s that tunic of Bert’s to be got. I do rather hate asking Elmer when I barely know him. You don’t suppose Sam could take a run over first thing in the morning?”

  “I don’t see how. Soon as he finishes his chores here, Sam’s got to get slicked up an’ go help Ben Potts.”

  “Then it’s Elmer or nobody. I can’t possibly drive onehanded all that way and Bert won’t have time. Is he at the Mansion now, I wonder?”

  Dot applied a well-schooled eye to the edge of the curtain. “Yep. Leastways his car’s in the yard. You’d o’ thought he’d be down at the funeral parlor with everybody else.”

  “Why should he?” said Janet. “The Bains and the Druffitts have never been all that chummy, have they?”

  “You c’n say that again! Say, you should o’ been a fly on the wall that time Elmer ast Gilly to the high-school dance. I thought Miz Druffitt would throw a fit. No daughter of hers was g
oin’ to be caught out in public with no Bain, she says. So then Elmer got up on his high horse an’ says to Gilly if he wasn’t good enough for ‘er folks he wouldn’t ast ‘er no more.”

  “How did you happen to hear that?”

  “Oh I heard,” said Dot airily. “So the next thing anybody knew she’d run off an’ married that no-good Bob Bascom an’ if that ain’t cuttin’ off your nose to spite your face, I’d like to know what is.”

  “Gilly’s had a rough time of it,” Janet sighed.

  “Don’t talk to me about rough times. I got no sympathy to spare for anybody that don’t know which side their bread’s buttered on.”

  Dot sounded so exactly like Marion Emery that Janet blinked. Maybe there was some private reason why Mrs. Treadway and Mrs. Druffitt had continued to tolerate the woman’s slapdash ways for all their complaints. Maybe the reason wasn’t so private, just stale gossip that nobody had ever got around to telling young Janet Wadman. Well, what difference did it make?

  “Want me to run over an’ ast Elmer about gettin’ that tunic?” Dot was offering, eager to be up and doing now that she’d eaten everything in sight.

  “Yes, I’d appreciate that.” Janet had had about all she could stand of Dot Fewter for a while. “You can wash the dishes,” she added firmly, “when you come back. I’m going up to bed.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Henry Druffitt had not been the warmhearted old country GP beloved of sentimental novelists. He’d been punctilious about collecting his bills, when he had any to collect, and caustic with patients who waited till after the late movie on television to demand house calls. However, he had been a lifelong resident, a leading citizen of sorts, and a prominent Owl. Pitcherville turned out in force to give him a grand sendoff.

  The Wadmans were doing their bit along with the rest. Bert was marching in full Owl regalia, Elmer having been most co-operative about the dry cleaning. Janet, feeling very lady-of-the-manor, had spent half the morning out in the garden showing Dot which blossoms to cut for the church, and sent them down by Sam when he made one of his mysterious trips back to the hill.

  She dropped over to make sure the group from the Mansion got something to eat before they left, and found them already dressed for the funeral, self-consciously elegant in newly purchased mourning clothes, except for Elmer, who wasn’t to be included in their party. Mrs. Druffitt was having Potts send up a special car for them.

  “Mama wants us down there early,” Gilly told Janet, “so she can get us bawling good. She thinks it’ll make a better impression going up the aisle.”

  “Now, Gilly,” said Elmer, “you shouldn’t talk that way in front of the kid.”

  Marion went so far as to thank Janet for her thoughtfulness and wish she could sit with them in church. That, of course, would not be possible. Rigid protocol was being observed.

  In the end, Janet rode down with Elmer and Dot Fewter, since Bert had to go on ahead to form up with the Owls. When they got there, Dot cavorted away to join a livelier group. The other two were ushered to a seat of no importance near the back.

  Though this was supposed to be a sad occasion, the church had a festive air about it. Outside its high palladian windows, trees made patriotic maple-leaf patterns against a sapphire sky. The altar was ablaze with zinnias, marigolds, gaillardia, splashing their wild reds and yellows against the gentler shades of cosmos and lupine.

  Many children were present, gay as the flowers in resurrected Easter finery. Why not? What if they’d come only because they’d begun to find the long summer holiday hanging heavy on their hands and wanted to see the Owls march in? Let them experience a funeral as a sort of celebration, Janet thought, one that was solemn yet somehow comical, a death that was really a birth.

  The Owls looked no more outlandish in their feathered regalia than some of the rest in their go-to-meeting clothes. There was old Mrs. Nurstead in the Empress Eugenia hat she’d bought to greet the then Prince of Wales back in 1932. There was Malcolm Webb in the bright green suit he always wore to weddings and funerals, a red bandanna handkerchief peeping modishly out of the breast pocket. There was Bill Hendricks wearing his World War II uniform, not wanting anybody to forget he’d been a sergeant major, as if anybody could. There was Mrs. Fewter looking like the leftovers from a rummage sale.

  Dot Fewter had gotten herself up regardless for the occasion, in a dashing black velvet hat somebody must have given her and a black satin dress with a rhinestone dagger plunging dangerously down the bosom. Her costume accentuated the likeness to Marion and Elizabeth that Janet had noticed the night before. No doubt some of the older village gossips could explain the coincidence, if she’d been interested enough to ask.

  This was no time to be thinking of such things. Janet folded her right hand over the fresh bandage on her left and stared down at her demure gray-and-white polka-dot lap. She ought to be meditating about Dr. Druffitt, quietly and reverently as befitted the occasion and the place. All she could think about was that he ought not to be dead.

  Who beside herself knew that? Fred Olson did, but he wasn’t here yet. He was out front, no doubt, ready to march in with the Owls. And the killer, where was he, or she? Sitting here in one of these hard pews, pulling a long face? Somewhere far away, laughing at the farce that was being played out here today? Or standing in the vestibule clad in new black mourning garb, crying so it would look better going up the aisle?

  The organ began to play. The minister entered, his black robe dingy and somber against the glory of the flowers. The Owls marched in, six of them carrying the coffin, the rest keeping the slow, even step they’d been practicing down at their meeting room. Every face was grave under its fluffy, speckled helmet, every eye fixed on the altar.

  Bert looked as well as any and better than most. Fred Olson’s tunic was strained too tight over his middle-aged paunch. He’d be lucky to get through the funeral without popping a seam. What was the man doing here anyway, parading around in a silly costume when he ought to be out tracking down the killer?

  Janet’s burst of fury died down as quickly as it had swept over her. Lord pity him, Fred was no more a policeman than she was. He’d married late and made up for lost time, still had three kids in school. How could he afford to be highminded about risking his position in the village?

  The mourners were filing in now: Mrs. Druffitt on the arm of Ben Potts, heavily draped in black, her spine stiff, her face blankly pallid; Gilly clutching Bobby’s hand, both of them looking small and scared and lost; Marion sharp and pinched but with a city-smart air about her new black suit. Mrs. Druffitt had paid for all the mourning clothes, even Marion’s.

  Several out-of-town Druffitts followed, all wearing black bands around their sleeves. It was being whispered about the church that one brother had flown all the way from Vancouver.

  Dr. Druffitt got a long service. The minister seldom had the chance to preach to an overflowing church, and Janet couldn’t blame him for making the most of his opportunity. But her hand was smarting and she still felt wobbly. She was immensely relieved when the Owls finally marched back down the center aisle with their mournful burden and the congregation was free to straggle out of the pews.

  This, too, was done according to protocol, front rows first. It was some time before Janet and Elmer could work their way to the door. In the vestibule, Mrs. Druffitt and her entourage stood having their hands squeezed by a seemingly endless line of sympathizers. Janet, almost at the tail end of the procession, made her condolences as brief as possible. She was uncomfortably aware of people nudging each other and hissing, “There’s Janet Wadman, the one who found him.”

  Elmer, behind her, had got no farther than, “Gilly, I—” when Mrs. Druffitt cut in.

  “Come, Gillian, we must get out to the car.”

  Deliberately, she turned her back on young Bain, taking her daughter by the arm and forcing Gilly to do the same. Elmer turned dull red. Quickly, Janet touched his sleeve.

  “Could you get me home quick
, Elmer? I think I’m going to faint.”

  “Eh? Oh sure. Glad to. Maybe you better stay here and I’ll bring the car around.”

  He was pathetically eager to help, to reassure himself that he was good enough for somebody.

  “No, please don’t leave me alone in this mob. I can walk, if you’ll give me a hand going down the stairs. My word, Elmer, I don’t know what we’d all do without you.”

  She was laying it on thick, trying to get the hurt look off his face. A man that size had no business being so vulnerable.

  “Some folks can do without me fine,” he muttered.

  “Don’t take any notice.”

  That was stupid, but what else could she say?

  They were in his car and halfway up the hill road before he let himself explode.

  “That old bitch! I’m sorry, Janet, but—”

  “Don’t apologize. I was trying to think of something stronger, myself, but I don’t know any words bad enough. How any woman could stoop to such a trick at her own husband’s funeral is beyond me!”

  They fumed in companionable silence for a hundred feet or so, then Elmer broke out again.

  “I don’t know what she’s got against me. I always tried to act decent in front of her, but she never gave me a chance. Can I help it if my name’s Bain?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Gilly an’ me,” a wistful smile curved his lips, “I always liked her, even when we was little kids. I ‘member pushin’ her on the swing at recess. She was skinny an’ big-eyed then like she is now. She don’t change none. Neither do I, I s’pose.”

  His jaw set harder. “I’d have stood up to the Druffitts if it wasn’t for Paw. He was all for me grabbin’ Gilly because she’d be comin’ into money someday. That night I went to ask her to the high-school dance, her mother accused me of fortune-huntin’ and what could I say, with Paw shootin’ his mouth off like that? I lit out from there right then an’ said I’d never go back. Then Gilly run off with Bob Bascom that wasn’t worth the powder to blow him to hell, and I—ah, what’s the sense rakin’ it up again? What I should o’ done was take Gilly an’ go out West somewheres, away from the whole damned lot of ‘em.”