“So what you’re saying is that a fourth person was most likely involved, right?”
“That’s what it looks like to me, Fred. Regardless of what Miss Rondel thinks, I can’t see how in Sam Hill Mr. Bliven could have got cyanide into Jasper Flodge. I was there in the dining room when Flodge died, as you probably know; I had a ringside seat for the whole performance. It’s conceivable, I suppose, that Bliven could have found some mad dentist to anesthetize Flodge and fit him with a hollow tooth programmed to squirt out a lethal dose of cyanide when he got well into his chicken pot pie, but I can’t say I’m sold on the notion. I’d help you put this stuff away if I knew where anything was intended to go.”
“Don’t sweat it, Pete. Iolanthe’ll be here in a minute to find out what’s taking us so long. So where does that leave us?”
“It leaves me right where I’ve been for the past three days, wondering who killed Jasper Flodge. Are you really serious about slapping a warrant on Iolanthe’s father?”
“If we have to. It’s not so much the money, Pete, it’s what he did to Iolanthe that I can’t stomach. Though I can’t say I’d mind getting back some of the money I spent trying to trace her after Jasper Flodge showed up a few months later with another woman on the string. Old bastard, sixty years old and still tomcatting around. If he’d been twenty years younger, I’d have beaten the bejesus out of him. Claimed all he’d done was give Iolanthe a ride to the Portland Airport so she could fly to Boston with her cousin Willie. She never had a cousin Willie and she’d have been scared to death to fly. Jasper knew he was lying and so did I, but that didn’t cut any ice.”
Fred Wye snorted like a wild bronco. “I even tried to get some sense out of my father-in-law, which was the dumbest thing I ever did. He lit into me about being a child molester and threatened to set the police on me. I had to get out of there or I’d have killed him with my bare hands. Anyway he didn’t know where she was and didn’t want to, or said he didn’t, which I can well believe. I hired detectives and they were no more good to me than he was. I put one on Jasper’s tail for a while but all it came to was another hole in my bank account. I tell you, Pete, if it hadn’t been for Evander holding me together, I’d have either gone crazy or killed myself. Ah, what the hell, it’s over now and we’re back together. And she’ll be wondering what’s keeping us. Damn, I wish you folks weren’t leaving tomorrow. Ah, here’s the old woman now, right on deck.”
And there she was, giving her husband a tug on the ear and a peck on the cheek. “What’s been keeping you two? We thought you must have got lost on your way to the kitchen. I hate to interrupt a stag party, but Miss Rondel’s getting fidgety.”
“I believe she wants to stop at the inn and say hello to Mrs. Bright before she goes home,” Peter explained. “Fred and I were saying we’ll have to get together in Balaclava Junction before too long. Algernon must be missing you, Iolanthe.”
“Sweet old bunny. I do want to stay in touch with the Enderbles. You’ll like them, Fred. They were so good to me.”
Sensing that an intimate moment was about to occur, Peter went back to the veranda and assured Miss Rondel that he was ready to roll as soon as their host and hostess got untangled and came out to say good-bye. They did come, slightly flushed and disheveled and not altogether reluctant to speed their parting guests. Everyone was firm in the opinion that it had been a lovely afternoon and they must do it again, then Miss Rondel took a firm and determined step toward the Shandys’ car and the tea party was over.
“Well, that was delightful.” Miss Rondel spoke for them all. “I do hope Fred and Iolanthe have a child fairly soon, I hate to see the old families dying out. Iolanthe was just a little thing when her mother died. Claire Howard, she’d been. Claire’s sister Margery came to help out, but once she realized what she’d let herself in for, she eloped with an encyclopedia salesman. Absalom’s sister Virginia had been living with them right along; she took decent enough care of Iolanthe, but then another traveling salesman came to town. By that time Iolanthe was almost through high school and Virginia was fed to the gills with Absalom’s bullying, so off she went and nobody blamed her a whit.”
“That left Iolanthe stuck here alone with her father, then?” said Helen.
“Yes, but she’d always spent a good deal of time with her great-aunt. Prunella had been married to a plumbing-supply magnate who’d left her wealthy as Croesus’s widow with no children of her own. Absalom would have been only too happy to pray Prunella into her grave, but she couldn’t stand him and wouldn’t have him in the house. She knew better than to give Iolanthe any money while she was still alive, but she used to send away for pretty clothes out of mail-order catalogs. Left to her father’s tender mercies, Iolanthe would have grown up wearing sackcloth and ashes. Thanks to Prunella she was the best-dressed girl in her class.”
“And the prettiest, I’ll bet.”
“Without question. All the boys would have run after her if they’d been given the chance. Needless to say, Absalom chased them off. He had a husband all picked out for Iolanthe, a piece of chewed string named Heber something—nobody ever remembered Heber’s last name, he was that sort of fellow—who made ghastly noises on the broken-down old church organ and worshiped at his beloved pastor’s feet. Absalom’s expectation seems to have been that his daughter and her apology for a husband would stay meekly in the house and do all the work while he swanked around on the money he was vain enough to think he’d inherit from Prunella. But some dear soul dragged Fred Wye to a church supper one night when Iolanthe was waiting tables, and that was that.”
Helen smiled. “How long was it before Fred proposed?”
“I don’t know the precise moment, but three weeks later she was wearing his ring and within six months they were married. If Fred had had his way, the wedding would have been even sooner. However, Prunella, who’d been ailing for a long time, died only a few days after she’d sent the engagement announcement to the newspapers and given a lovely party to which she’d invited both Margery and Virginia to make sure that Absalom wouldn’t come. Naturally Iolanthe wanted to honor her great-aunt’s memory with a decent period of mourning and also, I suspect, to get her trousseau together. They worked the same stunt at the wedding, Virginia was matron of honor and Margery’s husband gave Iolanthe away. The wedding took place right there in the house with the Methodist minister officiating. I just wanted to give you a little background because I can see that you and the Wyes are going to be friends and you might as well have the straight story before you hear too many variations. I hope I live long enough to see their baby.”
Considering the mean rate of longevity around here, not factoring in the homicides, Peter didn’t see any great need for the Wyes to rush headlong into parenthood, but it was time he said something.
“Maybe they ought to start drinking your magic spring water.”
He wished he’d picked something less provocative to say, but Miss Rondel took no umbrage. “A very sensible suggestion, Peter. I’ll see to it that Iolanthe gets a jugful tomorrow. Not that I claim any special curative properties for my spring, mind you; though there are some who do, or pretend to. I hope Elva isn’t expecting me to stay for dinner.”
They’d reached the inn by now, Peter pulled up at the front door. “Why don’t you two hop out here? I’ll drive the car around back.”
“No,” said Miss Rondel. “We’ll go around with you and in through the kitchen door. I do want to see Elva, but I don’t want anything to eat after that enormous tea. Furthermore, Claridge Withington’s bound to be either in the lobby or in the dining room and I refuse to get involved with him.”
“Can’t say I blame you,” Peter grunted. “He’s about as much fun as a toothache.”
“He’s a good deal worse than that. He did something once that I’ve never forgiven him for.”
“Good Lord! He didn’t—er—” Peter floundered. The thought of Miss Rondel in the lustful embrace of Claridge Withington was mind-boggling and then
some. But worse was to come.
“You may think I’m foolish, but it was the most—oh dear, I’m no good at this sort of thing. Anyway, Michele had brought me some supplies I needed—this was some years ago—and Claridge came along for the ride. He was better able to walk then, and he wanted to see the lupines. I set up a lawn chair for him a little down the slope, and he seemed quite content to sit there while Michele and I went inside and took care of our business. After a while I thought it would be only courteous to take Claridge a drink of water, so I started down the hill with the tumbler in my hand. And there he was, with an elastic band twisted around his fingers, ripping seeds out of the lupine pods and snapping them at the butterflies. I saw two mourning cloaks, a beautiful yellow swallowtail, a monarch, and a spangled fritillary, all lying dead on the ground.”
Peter almost wrecked the car.
The wrapping-up process was, on the whole, rather dull. Withington couldn’t run, of course. Neither could he explain away the very workmanlike slingshot, the small heap of egg-sized pebbles, or the cellular phone via which a neighbor trying to reach her husband at the pool hall had, by some technological quirk, overheard that old coot from the inn coaxing some married woman to meet him outside the inn, on the dark side of the drive. This happened to be the side toward which Withington’s bedroom windows faced. Seeing so many cops around all of a sudden, the neighbor had thought maybe they’d like to know.
Even more interesting were the architect’s rendering of the spa that Withington was intending to build at Rondel’s Head once he’d disposed of Miss Rondel and the careful notes he’d made of the steps by which he had meant to hasten her demise; not to mention the will that would reveal his true identity as her only living relative, hence her lawful heir. The will would be discovered on the afternoon of the third day after the funeral, under the winter underwear in her bottom left-hand dresser drawer. A master criminal left nothing to chance.
The novel that Withington had been writing about a master criminal who wove his sinister webs far and wide while posing as a nice old gaffer to whom everybody came for advice and comfort was so excruciatingly dull that the detectives and handwriting experts assigned to study it would most likely have to be shaken awake and refueled with black coffee at frequent intervals. A quick riffle through the hand-written text revealed, however, that the meat of the matter was all there, from the master criminal’s early attempt at ruining Guthrie Fingal just for practice to the far more expertly plotted scam that had worked so well on Fred and Iolanthe Wye until the necessary removal of a rebellious henchman had so regrettably brought them back together. The master criminal could at least congratulate himself on the cool finesse with which he’d projected the cyanide pill smack into the midst of Jasper’s chicken pot pie.
Withington had projected further travails for the beleaguered pair, but had not got much done about it by the time Constable Frank and a contingent from the state police got the evidence neatly packed together and escorted the master criminal to a quaint little cell at the county lockup until something more permanent could be arranged.
Withington was still cocky when they carted him away. He must either be plotting a dramatic getaway or else psyching himself up to stun the bewildered prosecutor with the brilliance of his self-defense and leave the courtroom free as a butterfly, surrounded by worshiping jurors, beautiful adventuresses bent on tucking their telephone numbers in his breast pocket, and media people waving microphones in his face and urging him, quite unnecessarily, to talk.
Luckily for those others involved in the case, the process of the law had taken a remarkably short time, considering. Tomorrow morning, Peter, Helen, Miss Rondel, Mrs. Bright, and Thurzella would all be asked to show up at the state police station and give their formal statements. Right now it was still a few minutes short of eight o’clock and all of them, even Miss Rondel, were avid for the dinner that Elva Bright had saved for them. Understandably, they took a table as far as possible from the one in the far corner where Claridge Withington had been for so long a fixture.
Once the food was ready to serve, Elva herself came out of the kitchen and joined the rest at the table. Thurzella got a kick out of waiting on her grandmother as if she were a tourist. The innkeeper was ready to drop, but no end relieved to have her own most worrisome mystery solved.
“At least now we know how that cyanide pill got into Jasper’s chicken pot pie. Imagine Claridge Withington just sitting there in his corner, cool as a cucumber, popping it across the room with an elastic for a slingshot! Anyway, maybe I’ll feel able to put chicken pie back on the menu one of these days without having to wonder whether I’ll wind up with another corpse on my hands. I hope to goodness there aren’t any more mysteries floating around.”
“Er—” Peter glanced uneasily from the innkeeper to Miss Rondel. “There is one thing that’s been puzzling me, though I expect it’s none of my business.”
Elva Bright sighed. “Go ahead, Professor. Spill it and get it over with.”
“M’well, it happened the morning I went to pick lupine seeds. As I was walking up toward the house, Evander Wye came storming down the path, shouting back over his shoulder ‘I’ll do it, and you won’t like it.’ He sounded a trifle—er—”
Miss Rondel only smiled. “Evander can be somewhat intimidating on first acquaintance. I’d suggested that he write me a paper about his school days. Busybody that I am, I thought it might prove a form of catharsis, get some of the anger out of his system. However, he’d already found a different way to work off steam.”
“Throwing rocks at trees?”
“Oh, dear, is he at that again? I’ve told him and told him—Elva, I believe you have a customer.”
The innkeeper didn’t even turn around. “Thurzella, go tell whoever it is that we’re closed.”
Her granddaughter giggled. “It’s Evander Wye.”
“Speak of the devil! Come on, Evander, haul up and set. Have you had your supper?”
He shook his head. “I ate at the house. I just wanted to—ah, hell. Here.”
Peter and Helen were sitting side by side, Evander laid a rectangular object about the size of a novel on the table between them. A piece of white paper, the remains of a doughnut bag, was wrapped around it. When Helen slipped off the improvised wrapping, she uncovered a deep shadow-box frame, with a piece of plastic wrap stretched over it to protect a small miracle. The paint was still wet, the subject was nothing but a few inches of dirt road, a lichen-covered granite boulder, and a blur of something that might be anything.
“Yet it’s all here,” Helen marveled, “the sea, the spring, the cliff, Miss Rondel, the house, the hens—and Peter. He’s in it too. And so are you, Evander.”
Even librarians get carried away sometimes. Helen pushed back her chair, flung her arms around the grinning, blushing artist, and planted a kiss on his chin because she couldn’t reach any higher. Immediately, she apologized.
“I’m sorry. I don’t usually get so familiar on such short acquaintance.”
“Heck,” said Evander, “I don’t mind a bit. Come on, Miss Fran, I’ll run you home and pick up those other canvases you’ve been itching to get rid of. Iolanthe claims she’s going to hang one in the front parlor. There’s a hole in the plaster that wants covering up.”
“Well, that’s how it is when you’re rich and famous,” said Peter. “Thanks for the painting.”
“Thanks for the business. Let me know next time you’re coming and I’ll teach you how to play pool.”
“You and who else? Don’t worry, Evander, we’ll be seeing you soon. We’re coming to fill up our water jugs, if Miss Fran has no objection.”
“None whatsoever.” Frances Rondel smiled, and the face Peter Shandy saw was that of a young woman in the prime of her health and beauty. “Just so you don’t tell anybody where the water comes from. People do get the oddest notions.”
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Something in the Water Page 22