A Pint of Murder

by Alisa Craig

  “She was dead,” Elmer insisted. “I wouldn’t o’ gone off if there was anything we could o’ done to help. But I could see right away it was no accident, an’ what with Gilly’s Aunt Aggie an’ her father dyin’ like that one right on top o’ the other I had a pretty shrewd idea what the Mounties was doin’ up here. I wasn’t havin’ Gilly mixed up in no more murders. But how—”

  “It was Dorothy Fewter you saw,” Rhys explained. “She happened to be wearing,” his mustache twitched, “one of your mother-in-law’s dresses.”

  “Then how could he know?” said the new Mrs. Bain. “Black dresses all look alike in the dark, don’t they?”

  “It wasn’t black,” said Elmer doggedly. “It was that same dress she had on the night she told me I couldn’t take you to the high-school dance an’ slammed the door in my face. Would I be likely ever to forget what that one looked like, eh?”

  “But Mama wouldn’t have been wearing a light-colored dress last night, honey. She’s in mourning for Daddy.”

  “Grandma says she ain’t going to wear anything but solid black for a whole year,” Bobby piped up.

  “Don’t say ‘ain’t,’” his grandmother reproved automatically.

  “Pop says it.”

  “Pop!” Mrs. Druffitt went totally out of control. “Pop! My God in Heaven, Gillian, have you no sense of shame at all? First that Bascom creature and now this—this Bain! How could you be so heartless, after all I’ve done for you?”

  Rhys gazed at the raging, trembling woman, light dawning at last in his sad, bloodhound eyes. “You have a very strong sense of duty, have you not, Mrs. Druffitt?”

  “I hope I know what’s right!”

  “Did you really think it was right to kill three people because you didn’t care for the house your daughter was living in?”

  The July sun beamed down on the dry grass where old Aggie Treadway’s hired girl had lain dead the night before. A flock of sparrows twittered down, trim in their patterned uniforms of brown and beige, then whirled away. Inside the kitchen, nobody noticed. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved, until at last Marion Emery broke the silence.

  “So it was you, Elizabeth.” She didn’t even sound particularly surprised. “I always did wonder if you might be a little bit nuts.”

  CHAPTER 21

  “Marion, how dare you? You’re the one who’s crazy! You’re all crazy, all of you. I’m telling you that man tried to kill me!”

  “And we are not believing you, Mrs. Druffitt,” said Rhys. “You see, you have not been very clever. You have only been lucky, because you took risks somebody who was thinking straight would not have taken. I hope you will start trying to think straight now.”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,” she replied with her usual hauteur.

  “Then I must explain carefully, must I not? Sergeant Twofeathers, would you mind standing here next to Mrs. Druffitt? Marshal, would you be good enough to get Ben Potts on the telephone for me?”

  “Sure thing.” Olson, looking stunned, went to put the call through. The others clustered together, waiting. Mrs. Druffitt looked from one to the other, then averted her eyes from them all. “Ben’s on the line, Inspector,” he called out a moment later. “What shall I tell him?”

  “I’ll talk to him myself. You come back here and be prepared to assist Sergeant Twofeathers if necessary.”

  Rhys left the door into the hallway open behind him. Those who were waiting could hear him giving curious but explicit instructions to the undertaker. Then there was silence, a seemingly endless silence. At last Rhys spoke again.

  “And you can’t get it off with anything, not even steel wool? Thank you. No, that’s all I wanted to know. Leave things exactly as they are. I’ll be down soon.”

  He hung up and came back to the puzzled group. “You see, Mrs. Druffitt, that was one of the ways in which you were not very clever. When you gave that outfit of yours to Dorothy Fewter yesterday, you should not have included the shoes.”

  She looked coldly down her nose at the Mountie. “Don’t be ridiculous. What harm was there in giving away a pair of shoes?”

  “Well, you see, that was the pair you were wearing when you came up here and left those two jars of botulinous string beans in your aunt’s cellar.”

  “You’re out of your mind! I’ll have you put off the Force for this. Anybody in town can tell you that I hadn’t set foot in this house for more than fifteen years, not until this very morning.”

  “Then anybody in town would have to be mistaken, Mrs. Druffitt, because those shoes of yours have your Uncle Charles’s patent-floor cement all over the soles of them.”

  “That’s a lie! It’s white shoe polish. I spilled it while I was cleaning the shoes to give to Dot.”

  “You did put a great deal of polish on the shoes, but you see the polish came off when Mr. Potts wet it and the spots on the soles did not.”

  “Then Dot must have worn the shoes down cellar last night herself.”

  “Dot was not in this cellar last night. She was with Janet Wadman all evening, and later with Sam Neddick until just before she was killed. Anyway, she could not have worn them to walk so far because the shoes were too small for her. She did not have them on when she came over here from the Wadmans’. She carried them in her hand, and she did not put them on after she left Sam Neddick, either. You know what a hard time you had cramming them on her feet after you killed her, don’t you? You couldn’t even get the left one all the way on, because her left foot was a little bit bigger than the right, as many people’s are. Yet Dot had to be wearing shoes when she was found, because it was not reasonable that anybody would mistake a barefoot woman for you, even in the dark. You would never go barefoot outdoors, would you, Mrs. Druffitt?”

  “Damn right she wouldn’t,” Marion snorted. “Elizabeth’s too respectable. She’s got to uphold the family name, which is no easy job when you consider how her noble ancestors made their money, and how her uncle liked the girls and her father liked the boys and her dear old Aunt Aggie got hitched to a screwy inventor and she herself married an incompetent doctor who’d lost all his patients and was gambling away the money she needed to put on the dog with in front of a few old hens who know more about your private affairs than you do and laugh at you behind your back, like as not. Right, Elizabeth?”

  Mrs. Druffitt ignored her. “I’m afraid I have to confess, Inspector, that those shoes I gave Dot were an old pair I’d had in the house for years and years. I must have got that stuff on the soles back when I still used to come here and visit Aunt Agatha.”

  “No you didn’t, Mama,” said Gilly stonily. “You bought them new a year ago last Easter. You’d never in a million years buy another pair of shoes until the old ones were past fixing.”

  “Gillian, how can you?”

  Gilly plunged on, her voice shaking. “You had two of Aunt Aggie’s jars, right down there in your own pantry. That’s what you and she fought about, the time you quit speaking. I’ve heard the story often enough, God knows, and so had Daddy. Aunt Aggie had given you two jars of mustard pickles she’d made, and told you to be sure to give her back the jars when the pickles were gone. But you’re such a miser you couldn’t bring yourself to part with them, and that’s how the battle started and you wound up saying you’d never set foot in the place again so you’d have an excuse not to bring them back.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s the truth all the same. I remember once when we were doing science in school I took the jars for me and Elmer to catch pollywogs in, and you raised holy hell about taking family heirlooms out of the house. You called Elmer a common thief. You remember, too, don’t you, Elmer?”

  Her husband nodded. “I remember.”

  “That’s why you had to kill Daddy, isn’t it, Mama? As soon as he saw that jar of green beans Janet was bringing to show him, he’d have had to admit what he’d known ever since Aunt Aggie died, wouldn’t he? He mu
st have known where those poisoned beans she ate came from, mustn’t he? All he had to do was look in the pantry and notice those two jars you’d made such a rumpus about weren’t on the shelf any more. He couldn’t have kept on covering up for you any longer, could he? Daddy might have been sort of a jellyfish and no great shakes as a doctor, but he wasn’t a complete fool.”

  “Was that why he said you ought to go away that day you and him had the big fight?” said Bobby. “Huh, Grandma, was it? That day you were yelling so loud?”

  “Be quiet, Bobby,” shrieked Mrs. Druffitt. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. A lady does not raise her voice!”

  “Bobby, did your grandpa say ‘go away’ or ‘be put away’?” Marion asked. “In case you don’t know it, Elizabeth, you’re screeching your head off right now. Sure, that’s what happened, isn’t it? When Janet phoned down and said she’d found something funny in the cellar that she wanted to show the doctor, you knew it must be that extra jar of beans you’d left, probably hoping I’d get hold of it and go the same way Auntie did. You didn’t dare let him see the jar, so you whammed him over the head the way you did Dot, then staged your little scene and went waltzing off to your goddamn club. Boy, when it comes to nerve, you take the cake!”

  Rhys interrupted. “Bobby, would you happen to recall what day it was that you heard this argument between your grandmother and grandfather?”

  “Can’t we keep Bobby out of this?” Gilly started to say, but her son was not a baby any more and his grandfather had sometimes been kind to him. He answered readily enough.

  “Sure, it was the day of Aunt Aggie’s funeral. Grandma made me dress up in that dumb navy-blue suit she bought me when I was about eight years old, that’s a mile too small.”

  “Where were you when you heard them talking?”

  “I told you, they weren’t talking. They were yelling their heads off. That’s how I could hear. See, they were in the front room and I was in the pantry where she’d put the stuff left over from the party.”

  “Are you saying your grandmother gave a party on the day her aunt was buried?”

  “Well, I guess it wasn’t exactly a party. She asked people back to the house for cake and stuff after the funeral.”

  “Did she know you were in the pantry?”

  “No, I guess not,” he admitted. “Mama went home with a headache when the rest of the people left and I was supposed to go with her, but there was all this cake and stuff left so I went back again.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that, Bobby,” his mother reproved. “But he’s right about the spread Mama put on, Madoc. I suppose she figured she had cause to celebrate.”

  “Gillian!” cried her mother. “How can you be a party to this—this dreadful slander?”

  “Oh knock it off, Mama. I knew what you’d done the minute I found out the Mounties were in town. And I know why you did it. It was on account of me, wasn’t it? You don’t even know I exist as a human being, but you can’t let go of me because you think I’m something that belongs to you. And because I’m one of your possessions, I’m supposed to be kept dusted and polished and stuck up on the mantelpiece with the rest of the knickknacks. You couldn’t stand to see the way I was living because it didn’t fit in with your notion of what was right and proper. When you finally had to face the fact that I wasn’t going back to that torture chamber you call home, sweet home, you started conniving about getting me into the Mansion. You knew I’d inherit a share of it, but Aunt Aggie wasn’t dying fast enough to suit you so you decided to help her along.”

  “Gillian, you’re raving! Can’t you all see she must be mad?”

  “Oh no, I’m not. You didn’t care how many you had to kill, did you, Mama, just so you could stick me up here in this frowsy old bats’ nest and be able to twitter to the ladies over the teacups about how your daughter was living in grand style up at the Mansion. When killing Daddy and Aunt Aggie didn’t do the trick, you burned my own house down so I’d have no place else to go.”

  “Nonsense, Gillian. I was at home in my own bed when that—that hovel caught fire.”

  “Sure you were. But you’d lit one of those sticks of incense Bobby gave me for my birthday while I was getting dressed in the bedroom and you were out in the front room yelling at me to hurry up. You left it someplace where it would be sure to catch onto something when it burned down far enough. Then you hustled me out fast, leaving your own grandson asleep in the house. The only reason Bobby got out alive was that the fire took longer to get going than you thought it would.”

  “Why do you say it was incense, Gilly?” Rhys asked quietly.

  “Because I can remember smelling it when I got home from Ben Potts’s. I didn’t think too much of it then because I was used to it. Bobby’d given me some for my birthday, you see, and we’d been burning a stick every evening because I—I wanted him to know how much I liked his present. But we had this little incense burner we always put it in, so it would have been safe enough there. Where did you put it, Mama? In that basket down behind the couch where I kept the newspapers and magazines?”

  Mrs. Druffitt’s lips tightened. It was clear Gilly had scored a hit. She was crying now, in shuddering gasps. “I suppose you thought it didn’t matter if Bobby burned to death because he was only a B-bascom.”

  “If your father had had an ounce of backbone—”

  “He’d have put you straight into a mental hospital where he knew damned well you belong,” the daughter interrupted, “and he’d still be alive today. So would Dot Fewter. Why did you have to kill poor Dot?”

  “I did no such thing! My car never left the carriage house all night. You can ask the neighbors. They’d have heard me going in and out.”

  “Sure they would,” said Marion. “That’s why you walked instead, two miles up and two miles back in the dark. That’s why you were so bushed when you got here that you slept most of the day. You’re not used to walking like us poor relations.”

  Mrs. Druffitt sniffed. “You’d say anything to get me in wrong and cover up for yourself, wouldn’t you?”

  “Shove it, Elizabeth! They’ve found your fingerprints on the rock you bashed her with.”

  “That’s a lie! I—” the mouth snapped shut, just too late.

  “I know,” said Marion. “You wore gloves. Black ones, and that black dress and black shoes and black stockings like you’ve got on now, and a black mourning veil down over your face so that Dot wouldn’t be apt to see you in the dark when she came out of the barn as you knew she would, because you’re as big a gossip as she was, in your own nasty-nice way. I should have known it was you the minute I saw how carefully that rock had been put back where you got it from. Who else would be so goddamn picky?”

  Marion turned to Rhys. “You go search her house. You’ll find a freshly washed pair of black nylon gloves hung up to dry in the bathroom on cute little glove stretchers and you’ll find an old-fashioned black net mourning veil with a heavy black border folded up in her top left-hand drawer. She’ll have shaken it out, but you’ll still be able to get enough dust and stuff off it to analyze, won’t you, Madoc?”

  “I should expect so,” he replied. It was as well Marion herself hadn’t turned out to be the murderess. She must read a lot of detective fiction. Marion’s voice shrilled on. “That was pretty smart, giving Dot your clothes. You knew her well enough to realize she wouldn’t be able to resist wearing the dress when she came out to the barn for a roll in the hay with Sam. You just hung around in the shadows till she came out, let her have it, and left her lying there so you could start the story of somebody’s trying to murder you and cover up for killing Henry and Aunt Aggie. It would have made more sense to kill me, instead, but I suppose you picked Dot because she was dumb and easy.”

  “Women who consort with low characters,” Mrs. Druffitt began, glaring at Elmer.

  “Oh shut up!” shrieked Gilly Bain. “Madoc, do you know why I’ve been saying these awful things against my own mother? It’
s because I knew when Elmer woke me up and said we were leaving that she’d done something else. I didn’t ask him what it was because I couldn’t bear to know. I just took my kid and went, because Elmer’s the only—” she choked up, twining her tiny birdclaws over her husband’s enormous hand.

  “We found a nice old JP somewhere—I don’t even know where—and did it right, with flowers and everything.” She glanced down reverently at her battered corsage. “But when he got to the place about till death you do part, I just turned cold all over. I knew that if I let her, she’d get Elmer the way she got Daddy and Aunt Aggie.”

  Gilly wheeled and screamed straight in her mother’s face. “Well, I’m not letting you! All my life you’ve been telling me what’s best for me. Now I’m telling you. What’s best for me is having what I’ve got right this minute: my kid and my dogs and a decent man to take care of us. We’re going to live on what Elmer makes. I’ll never touch one cent of Aunt Aggie’s money. I’m signing over my share to Marion, and you’ve killed three people for nothing!”

  Elizabeth Druffitt turned fish-belly white. Then she spoke, softly and sadly in her best Tuesday Club voice.

  “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is the tongue of a thankless child.”

  CHAPTER 22

  The bush pilot steadied the bucking single-engine plane with one hand on the controls, and reached into his pocket with the other. “Sorry, Inspector, I forgot to give you your letters.”

  Rhys took his eyes off the dun-colored muskeg five hundred feet below and scanned the envelopes. Two were official business, red tape winding itself clear into the middle of nowhere. The third was light blue with a deeper blue trimming on the flap, and was gracefully addressed in blue ink. That one he opened.

  “Dear ‘Cousin Madoc,’” Janet wrote. “It was such a pleasant surprise to get your lovely box of chocolates with the Mountie on the lid. No, of course I don’t wish all Mounties looked like that one! Don’t you know beauty’s in the eye of the beholder?”