Tourists Are for Trapping

by Marian Babson

  Yet, I still kept looking for her, with an obscure sense of unease. It was probably, I told myself, because she represented the familiar—almost pleasant—sort of difficulty I could deal with, if the need arose. Concentrating on her was a psychological device by which my subconscious intended to keep me from thinking about Tour 79 and the moral implications of their passage.

  But why was Daphne hanging about the tour? None of them had struck me as so scintillating I couldn’t tear myself away. I’d watch them go quite happily, and with a considerable sense of relief. Tomorrow.

  The hill sloped down toward the cathedral and I recognised several familiar figures tarrying in front of shop windows, with Kate trying to urge them along, promising there’d be time for shops later. I slowed down. I wasn’t anxious to catch them up, I just wanted to keep them in view.

  At the turning, they took the high road for the cathedral, and I took the low road for the lake and park leading to the Verulamium Museum.

  Even there, there was no escape. Sitting on a bench facing the River Ver, I found John and Sandra Peters—and Pandora. They all greeted me.

  “Come and sit down,” John said. They moved over to make room for me.

  “We thought we’d stay outside with Pandora,” Sandra said. “It seemed a shame to leave her in the bus all day, but we were afraid people might think it was disrespectful if she went into the cathedral.”

  “That’s right,” John said. “Your little girl seemed kind of interested in the cathedral, so we told her we’d look after the cat while she went in.”

  “She’s my secretary,” I said defensively.

  “That’s right”—his brow wrinkled in perplexity—“that’s what I said. Your little girl said she’d never been here before, and it seemed a shame for her to miss it, since she was really interested. It doesn’t matter to us.” He sighed heavily. “You see one cathedral, you’ve seen them all, far’s I’m concerned.”

  “I agree,” I said, a trifle too heartily. I’d thought he suspected Penny was my daughter, the way he’d phrased it. Not that she was that young—well, perhaps, just. But I was glad to have the misunderstanding cleared up, and a bit surprised at the vehemence of my reaction. “It’s very kind of you to take Pandora.”

  “We don’t mind,” Sandra said. “One set of arches looks just like another to us—especially after all we’ve seen. Right now, the only arches I care about are my own—I think they’re falling.”

  Pandora, settled in her lap, seemed perfectly happy and contented. I looked at her thoughtfully. Animals were popularly supposed to know, to be able to tell the good people from the bad, and react accordingly. Either the legend was wrong, or I’d drawn a dud cat. So far, Pandora had snuggled up to everyone on the tour, at one time or another, distributing her favours with fine impartiality and giving every sign of approving every member of the tour. If her judgment was anything to go by, the murderer must be Miss Carstairs, the courier who had remained in Switzerland. Somehow, I doubted this. It seemed more likely that Pandora was totally lacking in discernment.

  As though suspecting that I was thinking about her, Pandora opened her eyes and gave me a long, enigmatic look. I returned it, and she yawned unconcernedly. It meant nothing to her that she was supposed to be a reliable barometer of good and evil. So long as people fed her, petted her, and admired her, they were all right in her book.

  Still, she couldn’t help it—I found myself making excuses for her—her formative weeks had been spent in a TV studio. What chance does a poor innocent kitten have of growing up with any set of values with a background like that?

  “It’s a nice day.” John Peters pitched the stub of his cigar into the water and we watched a flock of ducks, swans, and assorted waterfowl converge hopefully on it.

  “Too bad it’s our last day in England,” Sandra said. “After how long we saved to make this trip.” The observation rolled out automatically, as though it had been delivered before—and often.

  “Too bad,” I agreed, and stopped at that. I didn’t want to give them any encouragement about staying on.

  “It isn’t as though we even liked Carrie very much.” The remark, although made to me, was directed at her husband.

  “Respect is respect.” His jaw set in a stubborn line.

  “We could be respectful without going all the way back to the funeral,” she urged. “A nice wreath is respectful enough. Especially when the whole town knows what we thought of her. After the way she treated us!”

  I didn’t want to hear any more. A burning urge to see the museum swept over me and I stood up abruptly, collecting Pandora. Let them rehearse their motive for murder to each other, or to the swans fossicking for tidbits along the bank. To Pandora, even. But let them leave me out of it.

  They stood up, loathe to let their audience escape. Once Americans have decided to confide their deepest and darkest secrets to you, you are going to hear them, regardless of your desire to. There is no way to stop them, short of providing an immediate and irresistible distraction.

  “The museum,” I said quickly. “If we go there now, we can be in and out before the others arrive.”

  They brightened and quickened their pace. If there’s one thing a tourist can’t resist, it’s the opportunity to steal a march on other tourists. But it wasn’t quite good enough.

  “Carrie was a hard and unforgiving woman,” Sandra said. (It seemed to be another, perhaps harsher version of Professor Tablor’s evaluation of the late lamented as a “difficult woman.”)

  “I had the gravest doubts about coming on any tour Carrie was on,” John said. “Only she’d seemed so subdued and different lately, I thought maybe it was time to let bygones be bygones.”

  “She hadn’t changed, though,” Sandra said. “She couldn’t—she was set too much in the mold. Just like her grandparents and her parents. ‘Right is right,’ they always said, and so did Carrie. They were a very righteous family.”

  “Too bad the rest of the town couldn’t live up to them.” At the entrance to the museum, John halted and faced me. I was going to hear it now, and no escape.

  “Once she thought she was right and somebody else was wrong,” his wife said, “there was no letting up with her. It was disgraceful, the way she hounded that poor boy.”

  “Hounded?” That hadn’t been the way I’d heard it, but probably the situation looked different to another woman. “The professor told me she’d defended him—against all sorts of charges.”

  “Oh.” They glanced at each other. “That boy, yes. But not our boy.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I hadn’t known—”

  “No, you don’t understand.” Sandra was determined to explain it to me.

  “Our own sons are grown up, married, and living in another state,” John said, taking over again. “So, like most of the folks in the town, we have a student to board with us. Most of them stay the full four years—unless something happens—and you grow fond of them—”

  “It isn’t the money,” Sandra put in earnestly. “Not in most cases—not in our case. It’s having young ones around the house again. The noise and laughter and horseplay again. Your own student brings his friends in, and you feel a part of things. You make a lot of new young friends and”—she grew wistful— “as John says, you get very fond of them. Their joys are your joys, their problems—” She broke off and turned away.

  “I think, Mother,” John said, “it’s time for us to take in another student again. We haven’t been able to bring ourselves to have one for the past couple of years”—he looked at me—“because of what happened. But we’ve missed having young life around the place. We’ll reregister with the Housing Committee when we get back.”

  “If you really want to.” She turned to him with sudden hope. “But”—her face darkened—“if we do that—right on top of Carrie’s dying, won’t people think…?”

  “They wouldn’t expect us to be chief mourners, anyhow.” Again, the gaunt face tightened. “Not after what Ca
rrie did.”

  “What did she do?” I couldn’t stop myself asking. I didn’t want to be involved, but my momentary curiosity outstripped my natural cowardice.

  “We had a fine young man staying with us a couple of years ago. He came to us in his freshman year—and I swear to you he was as fine and upstanding a young fellow as I’ve ever seen. Just high-spirited, that was all—”

  “I see.” I’d heard that one before. Probably I’d heard it all before, but I was committed to hearing it again now.

  “We never had any trouble with him. The authorities never had any trouble with him. There was none of that nonsense about marching around, demonstrating, or”—his mouth twisted bitterly—“drugs.”

  I began to see where this might be leading. Sure enough—

  “Then, in his junior year, he ran afoul of Carrie’s pet drug addict. No, he didn’t start experimenting with drugs—” He held up his hand, cutting off the idea before it had time to form fully in my mind. “He was too sensible for that. They played cards together, that was all. For money. Oh, perhaps he shouldn’t have, I agree—”

  “There was nothing wrong in it,” Sandra defended immediately. “He’d have paid, if he’d lost. But naturally, with that other one in the state he was usually in—”

  “I take it,” I said, “that your—er—boy won. Won … heavily, perhaps?”

  “No ‘perhaps’ about it,” John said with proprietary pride. “He took that lousy drug-taker to the cleaners. And why not? He could afford it. You look at someone like that, given every advantage, no need to struggle …”

  Perhaps that was the trouble. But I said it silently. It was obvious that we were reaching the core of the American dilemma, and a sore and tender core it was. It was not for me to offer facile comments.

  “The best of everything, good home, fine parents, plenty of spending money, and—”

  “And everyone falling all over themselves every time he opened his mouth,” Sandra finished bitterly. “Especially Carrie. If he was so smart, what was he doing drugging himself like that? ‘A great career in front of him’—like fun! He landed up just where everybody knows those kind land up—swinging from a shower rail, on one of his trips.”

  “Now, now, Mother.” John tried to calm her, but it was apparent that the conversation had struck a throbbing nerve.

  “Carrie shouldn’t have done it,” she wailed. “She shouldn’t have. Accusing that poor, dear boy of cheating. Just because her tame drug addict was too far gone to see the cards he was holding, let alone play them. It was wicked of Carrie—wicked! And God punished her!”

  “Sandra!” John thundered. He glanced at me nervously. “I’m sorry. Mother still gets a mite het up about it. Not that I blame her. Carrie just wasn’t normal about that boy. But you can’t condemn her entirely. It was partly her age, and partly her position in the community, and—”

  “Quite,” I said hastily. We were getting into deep, uncharted waters here. “Quite.”

  “It was a lie,” Sandra said firmly. “A wicked lie. And Carrie kept repeating it. Everyone knows if you fling enough mud, some of it will stick. And Carrie made it stick. She saw to it that Bert was expelled. Much good it did her,” she added vindictively. “It didn’t save her ‘brilliant’ drugger, and—in the end—it didn’t save her, either.”

  “Mother!” Her husband grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her sharply. She took a couple of deep, shuddering breaths and seemed to regain control.

  “I don’t care,” she said stubbornly. “Carrie deserved everything that happened to her—and that’s the truth.”

  “We’re here in England now.” Again her husband called her back to reality. “That’s over. A long time ago. We might as well go in and look at this museum, as long as we’re here.”

  They seemed to have forgotten me, for which I was grateful. I watched them walk slowly into the museum, two elderly people, arm in arm, who had slipped into the trap of trying to live their lives through a younger generation. Who had taken on the joys and sorrows of someone else, and found themselves close to heartbreak through the machinations of a harsh, unforgiving, relentless woman. Who had hated that woman for the sake of their protégé.

  Enough to murder her?

  Chapter 12

  I looked up to see Penny bearing down on me. She had the look in her eye of a woman determined to tell me something unpleasant. For my own good, of course. That decided me. It was six of one and half-dozen of the other—and I’d already been hit for six by the two inside the museum. There was nothing else that they could do to me. Especially if I managed to keep my distance.

  “Here.” As Penny approached, I held Pandora out to her. “Take care of Pandora while I look through the museum. Then I’ll take her while you go through. We might as well see the place, now that we’re here.”

  Sandra and John were well ahead of me, looking blankly at the display cases on the far wall. Just a couple of pleasant, elderly American tourists again, doing their duty by grimly amassing all the culture on offer, absorbing history until it threatened to run out of their ears, and seeming a bit dazed by it all. They’d be much happier when they got back home and could project their slides onto a screen and relive it all in the comfort of their home, while boring the neighbours to tears.

  I sauntered slowly around the museum, keeping well behind them. It was a nice little museum, as museums go. So far as I’m concerned, there’s always too much emphasis on the dead in the dead past, and I wondered what the tourists would think as they were paraded past the artifacts of one more dead civilization. The assortment of skeletons was too graphic a reminder of our inevitable end at the best of times. And this was not the best of times for Tour 79; the spirit of the relentless Carrie seemed always to be with them, a ghost unwilling to be laid to rest by time and distance. Some of them—one of them—must be made very pensive at the sight of the crumbling skeleton in the lead coffin.

  It was well that the museum was scheduled before lunch. Mere loss of appetite wasn’t so drastic as an attack of conscience on a full stomach might be.

  I heard a commotion at the entrance, which meant that the rest of the tour had caught up with us. That was my cue to slide out quietly. I didn’t want to watch them going around the exhibits. I might catch more expression than intended on one of the faces, and I didn’t want to know.

  Nodding pleasantly to them as I passed, I went back outside. After a minute, I found Penny around at the back, siting on a stone and gazing thoughtfully into the middle distance, utterly oblivious to everything around her. She was alone.

  “Where’s Pandora?” I asked.

  “Pandora?” She looked around vaguely. “She won’t go far. She’s very good about that. Look, I think you ought to know—”

  “Later.” I had spotted Pandora. With impractical ambition, she was stalking a large white swan. (Perhaps it was time I fed her.) I raced down the bank and caught her just as she was crouching to spring.

  “Pick on something your own size.” I snatched her up, ignoring her bitter complaints. I was always spoiling her fun.

  Penny was standing up, frowning, when I returned. “You’d better hurry,” I told her. “The others are already going through the museum. It won’t take them long—they looked ready for lunch. If you don’t hurry, you’ll miss it.”

  “Yes,” she said, but still seemed reluctant to move away. “Yes, but honestly, I think I ought to tell you—”

  “I know all about it,” I assured her. “Believe me, the situation is well in hand—or as in hand as it can get. The thing to do is just hold tight and concentrate on tomorrow. They’ll all be gone then. Meanwhile, don’t worry about it.”

  “Well”—she still seemed dubious—“if you’re sure.”

  “I’m positive,” I said rashly. “Just run along and we’ll see you at lunch.”

  It was all going smoothly now. With the end in sight, I could begin to relax. I strolled down into the village and into the nearest pub. Pubs have te
lephones, along with their other attractive features, and I still hadn’t managed to contact Neil.

  Pandora twitched restlessly on my shoulder. She knew all about pubs, too. They had sausages, cheese, and other delicious items—plus a lot of friendly people ever willing to share a snack with a hungry cat. Why were we wasting time in this phone booth?

  It was a good question. Neil wasn’t available. Gerry still appeared to be elsewhere than the office. However, through the glass, I could see Jim signaling me to come and join him when I finished telephoning. He looked as though he needed cheering.

  “What-ho!” I greeted him, and gave my order to the barmaid.

  “What-bloody-ho, yourself,” he said glumly. “Same again.”

  I looked at him closely and the alarm bells started ringing wildly. That wasn’t going to be his second drink, perhaps not even his third. And he was driving. What kind of PR can you do for a tourist company with a driver in jail for drunken driving? It didn’t bear thinking about. I had to say something.

  “Er,” I said carefully, “do you really think you ought?”

  “Yes, I ought.” He didn’t try to pretend that he didn’t know what I was talking about. “Don’t worry, mate, it’s dead easy. If they stop you with that breathalyser, you say you’ve been eating pickled onions. And I ’ave, too, see?”

  There was a plate of cheese and pickled onions in front of him. Pandora dropped from my shoulder to the bar and approached the plate cautiously, with a hopeful look.

  “’Ere you are, mate.” He rolled a small pickled onion over to her. “’Ave one on me.”

  Pandora sniffed at it delicately, recoiled, and tried to bury it. She had the right idea.

  “No gratitude,” Jim said gloomily. “That’s the trouble with the whole bloody world. No gratitude and no sense.”