Vane Pursuit

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “That sounds delicious,” Peter replied gallantly. In fact, it was. After a final round of sassafras tea, they were replete.

  “And now,” said their hostess, “I suggest we all turn in. There’s no telling what tomorrow will bring, but whatever it is, I’m sure we’ll handle it better after a good night’s sleep. Let me see now, this presents an interesting problem for the housekeeper. I think what we’d better do is drag these spruce boughs down on the floor and spread them wide enough for the two of you to share. Luckily I have somewhat sybaritic tastes in bedding, so there should be plenty.”

  She was working as she spoke. “We’ll put one blanket over the boughs and the other one over you. Keeping out the chill from the floor is the essential thing. Even though it’s probably still quite warm outside, you see, the lair stays comfortably cool. Comfortable for me, anyway. We can leave the fire going if you like.”

  “But what about you, Miss Binks?” Cronkite protested. “We don’t want to put you out of your bed.”

  “You won’t, never fear. I shall retain all the deerskins for my own use. A few below, a couple above, and voila! I’ve slept much rougher than this before I learned how to make myself comfortable. Now, who wants first crack at the bathroom?”

  Her guests both insisted Miss Binks go first, so she did. By the time Peter and Cronkite were ready to hit the spruce, she was fast asleep with a smile on her face.

  Their own bed could have been a lot worse. And no doubt would have been if they’d climbed a different tree, Peter couldn’t help thinking. He wondered whether there was a bloodhound stationed at each of Miss Binks’s escape hatches, and decided there probably wasn’t. She was too wily a vixen for those precautions she’d taken against hunting hounds not to be effective—unless, of course, they were Miss Binks’s hounds and this cozy lair of hers was about to turn into a prison for Swope and himself. Time would tell. He pulled his half of the blanket up over him. It smelled of wood smoke. Better than burning soap grease. Much better. He shut his eyes and followed his strange hostess’s example.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “ ‘Call me pet names, dearest, call me a bird, That flies to your side for one—.’ Fried or scrambled?”

  “The bird or your brain?” Helen asked. One couldn’t help wondering with Catriona. “You’re in splendid voice today, Miss McBogle. Wherever did you pick that one up?”

  “From an old book called Heart Songs. It’s right next to ‘See at Your Feet a Suppliant One.’ As I was endeavoring to ascertain, how do you want your eggs?”

  “I’m not sure yet whether I want eggs at all,” Helen demurred.

  “Eat your eggs like a good girl and I’ll show you a picture of Lillian Nordica with her straight-front corset on.”

  “You’re all heart, Cat. How about just a cup of tea and a piece of toast for a poor tired librarian? What does one wear to a whale watch?”

  “What do you care? It’s not as though you were likely to meet any whales with whom you’re personally acquainted. And if they don’t know you, what difference does it make? I’m going to wear my fuzzy red running pants and my Save the Whales sweatshirt, and take my slicker in case they spout at us.”

  “Whales don’t really spout at people, do they?”

  “How do I know? I’ve never had a close encounter with one before. Or even a distant encounter, which I frankly think I’d prefer. I suppose some whales spout and some don’t. Or vice versa, as the case may be. White toast or brown?”

  “Brown, please.”

  “That’s a relief. I forgot to buy white bread, mainly because I never eat the stuff myself. White bread makes your eyebrows fall out.”

  “Does it really? I never knew that.” Helen pulled a green-painted chair out from the kitchen table and sat down near the window where she’d be able to catch the morning sun. “I love your house, Cat.”

  “I love having you in it. It’s been too long, Marsh old scout.”

  “Yes, it has. Isn’t it awful how time flies? Or blips, or whatever it does. Come to think of it, an egg mightn’t be such a bad idea, at that. Do we get lunch on the boat?”

  “Madam, you are pleased to jest. I’m only hoping we get a halfway civilized John on the boat instead of an old bait bucket. I thought I’d pack us a few odds and ends of this and that, including a pint of spiced rum I bought last year to make fruitcake with and never got around to using. Spiced rum has a nice nautical aura about it, don’t you think?”

  “I think we’d have a nice, nautical aura about us if we drank any,” Helen replied. “Don’t you have something plain and wholesome, like scotch or bourbon?”

  “Certainly I do. Which would be more medicinal in case of seasickness?”

  “We’re not going to be sick, Catriona. We’re going to watch the pretty whales and have a lovely time. Seasickness is all in the mind.”

  “I thought it was in the inner ear.”

  “Whichever.” Helen waved a dismissive hand and began eating the herb-stuffed omelet her hostess had produced, seemingly by accident. “Where’s Iduna?”

  “Up, I think. What will she want for breakfast?”

  “Just show her the refrigerator and she’ll take it from there. I move you go ahead and pack us a picnic. Or should we stop along the way and pick up some sandwiches and things?”

  “We might do that,” Catriona agreed, “assuming there were any place to buy them. The road between Sasquamahoc and Hocasquam is not precisely the crossroads of America, my dear. Although I want to tell you we are getting into la nouvelle cuisine around these parts. Edna’s Diner over in Squamasas has started serving fried clam tacos. Do you like mustard on your ham?”

  “By all means. And cheese if you have it, and lettuce unless you think it will get too wilty. Iduna puts her lettuce in a separate plastic bag and doesn’t add it until she’s ready to serve the sandwiches.”

  “Iduna’s out of my class. What do you yourself do?”

  “Come to think of it, I don’t do anything. Peter and I haven’t been on a picnic since we were married, to the best of my recollection. We do eat out a lot, but it’s usually with friends or at the faculty dining room. We live right on campus, you know. The dining room’s just a couple of minutes from the house and the food’s excellent. I expect Peter’s there now, getting his breakfast. It’s a relief not having to worry about his meals while I’m away.”

  She glanced at the kitchen clock. “I’d better run upstairs and get prettied up for the whales.”

  By the time she was back downstairs, showered and dressed in her blue jeans, her pink jersey and sneakers, and her heavy cardigan just in case, Iduna had worked her way through a plate of ham and eggs and taken over the picnic basket. Catriona was busy arranging a lavish buffet for two Maine coon cats; one a glorious orange with russet markings, the other a more conventional black, gray, and white tiger.

  “There, that ought to hold you ungrateful critters for a week or two. Be good cats and Mama will bring you back a herring. I always leave extra food, just in case, since the time I went down to Lewiston to give a talk at the college and got stuck in a blizzard.”

  “Do you let them out?” Helen asked.

  “Oh, sure. Andrew will play doorman when he gets here. I have him trained not to show up before nine o’clock so that I can get a good start on my writing before he starts bending my ear about some damned thing or other. I don’t want to rush you, ladies, but we’d better get rolling forthwith. The Ethelbert Nevin has to catch the tide or we’ll spend the day on the mudflats. I don’t know why Eustace thinks he can run excursions out of a tidal cove, but that’s his problem, not mine. Mind going in my car? It’s not so grand as yours, Iduna, but it does know the way.”

  It was as well they hadn’t brought the Stotts’ elegant vehicle, Helen thought as they wiggled and bumped their way up and down steep hills with hairpin curves and tiny wooden bridges at their bottoms. Cat took the roads at a steady fifty-five, slowing down to forty or so at the more spectacular hazards and deli
vering her friends to the dock in mint condition.

  The Ethelbert Nevin wasn’t much for looks, but probably was seaworthy enough. She—Helen knew, of course, that a vessel was always a female even when her first name happened to be Ethelbert—was a typical Maine-coast lobster boat. Rather larger than some, perhaps thirty feet in length, broad in the beam, with a good-sized open cockpit cluttered with gear Tilkey hadn’t bothered to unload and a small enclosed cabin painted white but not recently. The middle-aged man who must be crew as well as captain, since he appeared to be the only one aboard, stood in the cockpit gazing morosely out over the gunwale. When he saw the three women getting out of Catriona’s equally middle-aged American car, he straightened up but didn’t look any happier.

  “Thought you wasn’t comin’.”

  “Eustace, you told me eight o’clock sharp,” Catriona protested. “According to my watch it’s only six minutes to.”

  “Ayup. I ain’t arguin’ with no redheaded woman. Come aboard if you’re comin’. Here, gimme that basket. This all you got for dunnage?”

  “What did you expect us to bring? We weren’t exactly planning to spend the night.”

  “Hell, that don’t make no never mind. I git ‘em comin’ with movie cameras an’ telescopes an’ duffel bags an’ foldin’ chairs, enough culch to last ‘em till doomsday. Well, might’s well set down an’ take a load off your feet. Looks as if you’ve got ‘er all to your ownsomes this mornin’.”

  That would have been fine with the three women, but their luck didn’t hold. Eustace had his engine idling and was starting to cast off the mooring lines when a large green van hauled up to the dock and five young men bounded out, yelling and waving twenty-dollar bills. They ran down the dock and clambered aboard the Ethelbert Nevin, much encumbered by a superfluity of equipment.

  Two of them had binoculars and enormous suitcases, one had a video camera and an immense gadget case. One, for some unfathomable reason, carried a light little fly rod and a creel big enough to hold a whale. The last one had a tackle box but no rod. By the time they got themselves settled, there was hardly room in the cockpit to move, even with the suitcases lashed to the forward deck. Helen and her friends were beginning to ask each other with their eyebrows whether this had been such a great idea, after all, when two of the men leaped to cast off the bow and stern mooring lines, Eustace revved his motor, and they headed out to sea.

  “Well, that settles the question of whether we go or not,” Iduna chuckled. “Might as well make ourselves comfortable, if we can.”

  The influx of passengers had crowded the three women over to the port side of the boat, which was as good a place to be as any. They stowed their hamper as best they could under the bench that ran around three sides of the cockpit, and sat down: Iduna next to the cabin wall so she’d have something to lean against, Catriona next to her, and Helen closest to the stern.

  Two of the newcomers sat on the stern bench, the other three along the starboard side facing the women. Even though four of them were practically indistinguishable, it didn’t take Helen and Iduna long to recognize the group as the same fellows who’d parked next to them at the rest stop on the turnpike. Nor were the men slow to spot them. It was the clean-shaven one with the grin and the crewcut who spoke.

  “Well, ladies, we meet again. How are you enjoying Maine?”

  Helen had been right about his being older than the rest, she decided. It was the beards that put extra years on his companions, and the grin and the breezy manner that helped this one to give the false impression of youth. He must be forty or thereabouts, not that it mattered a hoot. If they were going to be jammed in here all day like peas in a pod, Helen saw no sense in being standoffish. She smiled back.

  “Marvelous, so far. How about you?”

  “We’re having a ball. Is this your first whale watch?”

  Helen said it was, and he said it was theirs, too. They exchanged a few more commonplaces, but it was hard to keep shouting back and forth over the noise of the engine and the slap-slap-slap of the water against the boat’s hull. Pretty soon they both quit trying.

  That suited Helen just fine. Men who laid themselves out to be fascinating and kept staring to make sure one was being sufficiently dazzled by their inanities were a type she could do nicely without. She laid a bet with herself that their chummy fellow passenger wouldn’t sit in silence for long, though, and he didn’t. His next ploy was to unfold a large map and make the men on either side of him hold it out flat while he expounded something or other with a great deal of pointing and gesticulating.

  “Showing them what course he thinks we’re going to take, I suppose,” Catriona explained into Helen’s ear. “Whales generally come up the Stellwagen Bank off Massachusetts into the Gulf of Maine, then swim out past the islands.”

  “Which islands?” Helen asked her.

  “Whichever islands they take a fancy to pass, I guess. We have scads to choose from. The Great Glacier chewed up the coastline and spat out bits and pieces offshore, then the waves took it from there. If that gink tries to muscle in on us with his bloody chart, I move we mutiny.”

  The man with the map had finished lecturing his seatmates. Now he was hectoring the two in the stern to change places with the others so he could go through the whole performance again. Helen agreed that people with maps needed to be firmly dealt with.

  He wouldn’t bother Iduna, anyway. She was gently dozing, her face shielded from the sun and wind by an old-fashioned blue calico sunbonnet, and Helen’s extra sweater tucked between her head and the side of the cabin as a cushion against the unending vibration and rocking.

  After a while Helen began to wish Iduna didn’t look so comfortable. She hated to disturb her friend, but she would rather like to get her sweater back. The sun that had been so bright when they started out was retiring behind what looked to her ominously like the approach of a fog bank. She wasn’t frightened but she was getting awfully bored, crammed in here with nothing to do and nothing to see but choppy water.

  The five male passengers seemed to be affected much the same as she. They’d quit their mild horseplay, put away the map, and fallen into silence. Even Crewcut wasn’t talking. Helen hoped they weren’t all going to be seasick. In such cramped quarters, that would be the ultimate disaster.

  They were coming to an island. At least Helen assumed one could call it an island: a long, low grayish bump rising out of the water. Eustace cut his speed and steered the Ethelbert Nevin closer. The island opened one small eye. Catriona nudged Iduna.

  “Wake up, quick,” she whispered. “We’ve found a whale.”

  Iduna sat up straight, flipped back her sunbonnet, and turned to face the monster of the deep. The whale looked back at her. Quite unmistakably, it winked. Then it put down its head and sounded with barely a ripple.

  Iduna nodded a pleasant good-bye. “Nice whale. Here, Helen, you’d better put this on. Wake me up when we meet another.”

  She handed over the cardigan Helen had been longing for, donned her own raincoat, flipped the sunbonnet brim back down over her face, and went back to her nap.

  Now they were really among the islands, not very exciting ones so far, nothing but tumbles of rock with sometimes a little sparse vegetation and, on one, a weathered fishing shack. Far ahead in the channel another whale was so obliging as to breach, shooting its vast bulk clear of the water and landing with a horrendous splash. Catriona put her slicker on.

  “Just as well the gamesome little dickens wasn’t so close as the first. Having fun, Marsh?”

  “I’m not quite sure,” Helen replied honestly. “It’s awesome watching something bigger than the boat cavort in the water like a kid at the beach. Why do they leap like that?”

  “Sheer animal spirits, I expect. Whales have to get their kicks where they find them, Marsh. There are no bingo games in the ocean.”

  “Thank you for telling me. Where do you suppose Eustace parks his bait bucket?”

  “I was beginning to wond
er that, myself,” her friend confessed. “Shall we?”

  “Let’s.”

  They picked their way through the men’s impedimenta the few steps to the cabin overhang. The wheel was on the outside rear wall of the cabin, on the starboard side. Eustace was standing there, hands on the spokes, eyes on the channel. Without waiting for Catriona’s question, he answered.

  “Head’s inside. Step down. Port door.”

  “Thanks, Eustace.”

  The cabin didn’t contain much except a strong odor of engine, fish, and Eustace. They had no trouble locating the portside door; it was the only door there was. To go through, they had to step up, then down into a little well. Catriona hung back.

  “Go ahead, Marsh. I’ll wait. Watch out, there’s probably another step inside. You okay?”

  “Yes,” said Helen, “but I can’t find a light. I don’t think there is one. Never mind, I can manage.”

  The plumbing was nothing fancy; still, it was better than a bait bucket. There was even an Old Farmer’s Almanac with half the pages torn out hanging ready to hand. Helen found a tissue in her sweater pocket and used that instead, found another and saved it for Catriona. Iduna had some wash-and-dry packets in the picnic basket; she’d fish a couple out when they got back to their seats.

  Because there’d been no light in the cuddy, Helen had wound up having to leave the door open a crack so she could see what she was doing. Cat had stood in the stairwell, holding the knob against a possibly embarrassing sudden swing. As they changed places, Helen was about to perform the same service for her friend, but Catriona shook her head. “You needn’t bother. I’ve found my pocket flashlight. Go ahead before the smell gets to you.”

  Nothing loath to get away from the odor of bilge and fish, Helen stepped up into the cabin. She was just in time to see the man with the crewcut stand up behind Eustace, whip out what looked like a short piece of pipe, and whang it down with all his might on the boatman’s head. As Eustace’s knees buckled, Crewcut flicked his weapon sideways over the port rail and grabbed the falling body under the armpits. The man sitting nearest sprang up and grabbed Eustace by the feet. Together they swung the now inert form over the gunwale and let go. The first murderer smiled sweetly at his mates and sat down. The second remained standing and took Eustace’s place at the wheel. A thoroughly professional operation.