The Grub-and-Stakers Quilt a Bee

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “Family records are always helpful, naturally.”

  “Georgina?” said Dittany. “Oh, yes, the brass molder’s widow. Wasn’t she the one Samantha was telling us about, who tried to institute a breach of promise suit against Lord Tweedsmuir while he was off at a Presbyterian conference?”

  “Egad, yes,” said Arethusa. “Also the Duke of York, if memory serves me, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. How Samantha happened to mention her was that the last time they visited her at the Eventide Home, they saw a steel engraving of the Prince Regent on her dressing table. In his earlier, handsomer, and slimmer days, naturellement. It had ‘To Georgy Girl with love from Georgy-Porgy’ written on it.”

  “That’s right. Samantha said Georgina was having a heck of a time trying to get a lawyer to take on the case. The thing of it is, eh, Georgina’s always been addicted to what you might call romantic embroidery.”

  “Ah, like that bridal quilt.” You really had to hand it to the old trout. “My niece-in-law mentioned last evening that you’d been showing her the pieces. I must say I was a little surprised at that, when poor Peregrine didn’t even get to see them before he died. I’ve been hoping to get a peek at them myself. They’re not still spread out on your dining room table, by any chance?”

  “Pas du tout,” said Arethusa. “They’re all safely—mon Dieu!”

  Mon Dieu, Dittany thought, hardly covered it. Over the threshold came, first, a box of tools and second, a foot wearing a cutaway shoe revealing the pink and white striped sock of Cedric Fawcett. These were followed in rapid succession by the rest of Fawcett and by Andrew McNaster.

  Mrs. Fairfield stepped right up to them, ready for battle. “Well, this is a pleasant surprise. I was led to believe you weren’t coming back at all. Now, you get this and get it straight, Fawcett. I want that sink fixed. I want it fixed right, and I want it fixed now. I’m not shelling out good money—”

  “That is quite correct, Mrs. Fairfield.” Arethusa could be the grandest of grandes dames when she chose, and she chose now. “Any disbursement of museum funds is handled by our treasurer, Mrs. Coskoff, under my personal direction. In any case, we are obtaining Mr. Fawcett’s services through the disinterested generosity, or so we perhaps naïvely believe, of Mr. McNaster. Is that not correct, Mr. McNaster?”

  Andrew McNaster laid a large, beefy hand on that region of his waistcoat where his heart might be presumed to reside, assuming he had one after all.

  “That is wholly and entirely correct, Miss Monk. And may I take this opportunity of saying I deem it an honor and a privilege to be associated, however distantly and humbly, with a lady whom I—I—aw, shucks.”

  McNaster turned as pink as Cedric Fawcett’s sock and floundered himself into silence. Arethusa bowed her gleaming freight of jetty tresses in gracious acknowledgment. Dittany gaped in wild surmise. What the heck was going on here? She essayed a tactful inquiry.

  “How come you’re on the loose, Mr. Fawcett? My husband said you’d had one Labatt’s too many and wound up in the slammer.”

  Fawcett jerked his head toward McNaster. “He sprung me.”

  “How come?”

  “For her.”

  “Her who? Mrs. Fairfield?”

  Fawcett gave her a cold look. “Not her. Her.”

  “You mean Arethusa? Miss Monk? My husband’s aunt?”

  Fawcett grunted, picked up his tool box, and disappeared sinkward. Arethusa was left face to face, or vis-à-vis as she herself would perhaps have expressed it, with Andrew McNaster.

  “Mr. McNaster, am I to place any credence in the word of that man with the bunion?”

  “Jailbird though he may be,” McNaster replied in a voice choked with emotion, “Cedric Fawcett does not lie.”

  “He says you got him out,” Dittany protested. “Last I heard, you were determined to press charges.”

  “I was, but I didn’t.”

  “Why not? He crowned you with a plunger.”

  McNaster winced at the recollection. “He did. He offered me the supreme insult. Nevertheless, I dropped the charge. It was a far, far better thing I did than ever I have done before. I know, Miss Monk. I have been a reprobate. I have indulged in chicanery and malfeasance. I have schemed. I have dallied with the truth. I have looked upon the wine when it was red. I have consorted with loose women. I have risked my all at the gaming tables.”

  “You have?” Arethusa was looking at him with a strange dawning of interest.

  “I have. Just like Sir Percy, before he fell under the redeeming influence of Lady Ermintrude. Well, maybe not quite like Sir Percy, but I used to play the slot machines a lot.”

  He turned his eyes bashfully floorward. “You scowl, Miss Monk, and I am powerless before your glance. Your very frowns are fairer far than smiles of other maiden ladies are. Even as I stood there with that plunger crammed down over my ear, something inside me kept saying, ‘Miss Monk wants that sink fixed.’ Even as those two deputies of Sergeant MacVicar were putting the collar on old Ceddie and I was yelling for his head as any red-blooded member of the landed gentry would naturally do, that little voice kept saying, ‘How the heck is Miss Monk going to get that sink fixed if I allow my baser nature to prevail and exact my petty revenge on old Ceddie?’ It was like there were two Andrew McNasters, each clamoring for supremacy over the other one. You know what I mean?”

  “You might think of them as self A and self B,” Dittany suggested.

  “I never heard such drivel in my life,” said Evangeline Fairfield.

  It was the most injudicious remark she’d ever made. Arethusa turned on her like a wounded tigress.

  “Madam, I write such drivel!”

  “Hear, hear,” Dittany murmured, but nobody was paying any attention to her. Andrew McNaster was goggling at Arethusa much as Sir Percy might have goggled at Lady Ermintrude in a similar instance. So was Mrs. Fairfield, only hers was a goggle of consternation. It must be dawning upon her that she had finally and irrevocably cooked her goose with the Aralia Polyphema Architrave Museum. If it hadn’t, Arethusa’s next utterance left no room for doubt.

  “Mrs. Fairfield, go away.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Granted. Now go away.”

  “Very well,” said Mrs. Fairfield haughtily. “If you wish to continue this conversation in private, I shall be in my office.”

  “Mrs. Fairfield, you do not have an office. You do not have a position at the Architrave.”

  “What do you mean, I have no position? You can’t just fire me out of hand.”

  “Correct. I can’t fire you because you were never hired. The only contract we had was with your husband, and that was terminated on his death.”

  “And what, pray, does a writer of trashy romances know about contracts?”

  “A great deal more than you do about antiques. I sign one about every three months. Now go away.”

  Mrs. Fairfield, without another word or so much as a backward glance, went. Arethusa raised a shapely hand to toy idly with her Venetian glass beads.

  “Please forgive the interruption, Mr. McNaster. You were explaining the supreme soul-searching struggle that led you to discover the essential nobility of your character beneath the false veneer of the hardened rake.”

  “Yeah, that was it. Somehow when Ceddie zonked me with that plunger, it sort of made everything come into focus. Miss Monk, I will confess all. Ever since the day when you walked past the parking lot wearing your Spanish shawl with a rose between your teeth, I have—maybe your little niece here better step aside.”

  “Heck, no,” said Dittany. “I’m a married woman. You mean you lusted after her flesh?”

  “Well, I was going to put it more genteel, but that was the general idea. But you snooted me, Miss Monk. I was desperate. I even thought of—well, you know in Vilest Villainy in Velvet where the wicked baronet comes along in his barouche landau and puts the snatch on Lady Ermintrude while she’s taking a bucket of soup to the poor widow lady?”

/>   “An abduction?” Arethusa’s bosom was heaving much as Lady Ermintrude’s would have done in a similar circumstance, making the Venetian beads rattle like castanets.

  “Devil-may-care rogue that I was, I entertained that notion, Miss Monk. I thought of using your little niece here as a decoy, even called up a car-hire place and found out how much it would cost me to rent a Rolls Royce limousine. What the heck I might be a villain and a rotter, but I wouldn’t have wanted you thinking I was a chintzy cad.”

  “Why, you swashbuckling scoundrel.” Arethusa was still trying to look haughty, but a hint of a smile was playing about her rosaceous lips. “But your better nature prevailed,” she said with the merest tinge of regret.

  “I saw the light just in time, Miss Monk. What happened was, I picked up a copy of Saving a Swine at the drugstore. Then I realized I must not aspire to capture your favor but rest content to worship you from afar, like a moth trying to get inside a light bulb but it can’t on account of the glass is in the way. That was me, beating my wings in vain against the cold disdain of which my rotten ways had made me so contemptibly deserving. But I can still serve you, Miss Monk. I ask no greater boon than to fork out union wages to Ceddie Fawcett to sit out there under your sink trying to figure out which end of the wrench is up.”

  “Nobly spoken, Mr. McNaster. I will confess that I am not insensible of the esteem in which you appear to hold me, but you must give me time. Time to think. Time to study my heart. Time to ponder whether there might be a usable plot in this. Excuse me, I have to find a pencil.”

  McNaster gazed after her, his heart bulging out of his eyes. “What a woman!”

  “She’s all that and then some,” Dittany agreed. “Excuse me, Mr. McNaster. I’d better go after her in case she needs her smelling salts or anything.”

  “I could get them for her!”

  “It’s not the done thing. Why don’t you find a quiet corner somewhere and memorize some poetry?”

  “Great idea. I’ll go read the greeting cards at Gumpert’s. The mushy ones, I mean. Not those other kind.”

  Well, it was a start. Not that it was likely to get him far. First Ethel and the woodchuck, now Andy McNasty and Arethusa Monk. What was the world coming to?

  CHAPTER 21

  “WHOA THERE, GAL,” SAID Osbert. “Back up and come at me again. I thought I heard you say Andy McNasty’s in love with my aunt.”

  “That was the impression he conveyed,” Dittany insisted. “He claims to have worshipped her from afar ever since he saw her sashay past the inn parking lot doing her impersonation of Carmen.”

  “Does that strike you as a plausible tale?”

  “Darling, your aunt Arethusa is a stunning woman, with all that black hair and those great big flashing eyes.”

  “And that tiny little brain flashing on and off. What was her reaction to this astounding news?”

  “She burbled something about a plot and ran to get a pencil.”

  “Good old auntie. I knew there must be a vestige of intelligence in there somewhere. Of course it’s a plot, darling. Don’t you see what’s happened? First Andy gets Fawcett mad at him, knowing Fawcett’s tendency to have at it with snake and plunger when his dander’s up. Then Andy gets Fawcett jugged for assault, as is only natural under the circumstances. Then Andy says no, he won’t press charges after all because his nobler nature—”

  “Self B,” Dittany interjected.

  “Thank you, darling. Self B has been stirred to action by the rose between Aunt Arethusa’s teeth, so he gets Fawcett sprung. What in fact happened was that underhanded old self A whom we know so well and detest so heartily was conniving to put Fawcett in a position where he’d have to do self A’s dirty work for him or else self B would cancel his cancellation of charges and Fawcett would be back in the jug.”

  “Then it was Cedric Fawcett who burgled us?”

  “Isn’t it obvious, darling? You know that uncanny ability plumbers have to appear and disappear when you least expect them to. And they’re always hunting for things.”

  “Darling, hunting for a leak in a gas pipe isn’t quite the same thing as rifling Gram Henbit’s cedar chest.”

  “I grant you that, darling. It’s an infinitely more subtle process. Therefore, by a simple process of deduction, to a plumber rifling a cedar chest ought to be easy as pie.”

  “But what about Arethusa’s visitation? Do you honestly believe Cedric Fawcett could have gone padding into her bedroom in his pink and white socks and stood there looking majestic long enough to fool her? Long enough to fool anybody?”

  “Arethusa isn’t just anybody, darling. If there’s a cockeyed way of looking at anything, you know perfectly well she’ll find it. Besides, she admits herself she only caught the merest glimpse of him before she ducked under the bedclothes.”

  “That’s true. And I suppose if she had realized who it was and challenged him, Fawcett could always say he’d had an emergency call about a leak in the gas pipe.”

  “And got into the wrong house by mistake,” Osbert finished. “You see, dear, it all hangs together. And we wouldn’t have thought of Fawcett because we’d have assumed he was safely tucked up in the hoosegow.”

  “But that scheme didn’t work, so now McNaster’s trying to lure Arethusa with lying heart and flattering tongue. The blackguard! Now who’s that coming up the walk? Oh, Zilla. Look, darling, don’t say anything about McNaster to her. She’d go after him with a tomahawk. She looks as if she’s on the warpath about something already.”

  She was. Zilla Trott was no sooner in the door than she had Dittany pinned against the wall, demanding, “What’s all this about Arethusa attacking poor Mrs. Fairfield?”

  “Attacking Mrs. Fairfield? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, abusing her. Telling her she wasn’t wanted.”

  “She isn’t. You said so yourself a few days ago. You said Mrs. Fairfield was a pest and a know-it-all and you wished she’d go fly her kite.”

  “That was before her husband got killed.”

  “Since which time she’s been flapping around the museum proving that she is in fact a pest and a know-it-all. She apparently thought if she stepped right in and started throwing her weight around, we’d be deceived into thinking she was capable of taking her husband’s job.”

  “Well, he was no human dynamo. At least she’s got a little get up and git to her. Anyway, what’s this got to do with the museum? As I understand it, Arethusa flew off the handle because Mrs. Fairfield happened to intrude upon a scandalous scene between her and some man. He was described as Andrew McNaster but of course that’s ridiculous. Arethusa’s done some pretty outrageous things in her day, but even she draws the line somewhere.”

  “Zilla, you’ve been the victim of misinformation. In the first place, Arethusa didn’t fly off the handle. She remained icily calm as she pointed out to Mrs. Fairfield the error of her ways, and no more than graciously attentive when Andy was baring his soul on the side porch.”

  “He wasn’t!”

  “He sure as heck was, eh. Andy’s been panting like a hart on the mountain ever since she slunk past him one day wearing her Spanish shawl. He’s even reading her books. He says they’ve made him a far, far better man.”

  “Hogwash!”

  “Quite possibly, but that’s what he was saying when Mrs. Fairfield was so rude as to interrupt. How it happened was, Mrs. Fairfield started bawling out the plumber.”

  “What plumber? Cedric Fawcett’s in jail. For beaning Andy with a plunger, as who wouldn’t, given the opportunity.”

  “No he isn’t. Andy refused to press charges for love of Arethusa.”

  “Well, I’ll be gum-swizzled! He told her that?”

  “Cedric Fawcett did.”

  Not, come to think of it, that Dittany had any special reason to assume Fawcett had been telling the truth. A man who’d go prowling into people’s bedrooms impersonating a higher being was perhaps not the most reliable of informants. Perhaps
he hadn’t meant to impersonate a higher being. More likely, he’d simply meant to rifle the room while Arethusa slept.

  But why should he have been so bold in assuming Arethusa was going to be asleep? Because her house guests had gone reeling around the village stewed to the gills and it would be assumed they’d left their hostess in similar condition? At least that might be assumed by somebody to whom Arethusa was either only a distant dream or a proposed gull or catspaw, as the case might be. In point of fact, Arethusa never got even marginally sozzled. Only the other day Osbert had remarked, watching her lap up their best sherry as if it had been weak tea, that his aunt had inherited her father’s hardness of head along with his softness of brain.

  The case against the McNaster/Fawcett contingent was looking stronger by the minute. However, Dittany wasn’t about to tell Zilla that. Instead, she gave her a carefully edited account of just how outrageously Mrs. Fairfield had been behaving since her husband’s death. By the time she got to the part about authenticating Cousin Georgina’s brass sconces, the well-defined planes of Zilla’s face were shifting like the San Andreas Fault.

  “Mrs. Fairfield actually fell for one of Cousin Georgina’s fairy stories?”

  “Zilla, would I lie to you?”

  “Probably not,” Zilla conceded. “You’re surprisingly truthful, all things considered. But I still think Arethusa could have been a little more tactful. What if Mrs. Fairfield decides to slap the museum with a suit for negligence in the death of her husband? Even if she doesn’t know beans, we’d have done better to jolly her along till she could get her feet back under her and find a place to go.”

  “Zilla, if we gave that woman a chance to dig herself in, you know darn well the devil and all his angels wouldn’t be able to dig her out again. The way I see it, we’d have had a fight on our hands sooner or later anyway, so it might as well have been sooner.”

  “Huh. That may be the way you see it, eh, but you can bet your boots a lot of other people are going to see it differently. Arethusa’s made us look like a bunch of skunks irregardless of whether she was in the right or in the wrong. If she’s taken up with Andy McNasty, that will put the capsheaf on it. It looks to me as if we’re going to have to ask for her resignation from the board, Dittany.”