The Grub-and-Stakers Quilt a Bee

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “Not that one,” Dittany insisted. “The front parlor was the one room the Architraves hardly ever used. I’ll bet there hasn’t been a fire in that stove for the past eighty years. Come on, let’s go take a look.”

  “But darling, we haven’t finished working out the code.”

  “Maybe it’ll work itself out when we take the stovepipe down. Oh gosh, and we just paid for having that Axminster carpet shampooed.”

  “Take some newspapers.” The blood of the MacVicars was up. The sergeant grabbed yesterday’s Lobelia Leader which the Monks hadn’t even got around to reading yet and led the charge on the museum.

  Again they had the place to themselves. That was a good thing. After all the hard work that had been put into redding up the parlor, the act of vandalism they were bent on committing might have evoked strong protest. But commit it they did, with Dittany holding the ladder while Osbert took down the pipe and Sergeant MacVicar barked out instructions in words no doubt learned from his father and mostly unintelligible to his hearers.

  “All right,” Osbert panted at last. “The flue’s open. Now what?”

  “BBLEC,” said Dittany.

  “Daft,” said Sergeant MacVicar.

  “Not if B stands for brick,” Osbert retorted. “The flue’s all lined with them, right up to the—aha! C. Chimney. Behind the brick. Entering chimney. And the L must be for left-hand side. Got something sharp I can poke with?”

  Sergeant MacVicar passed up his jackknife. Osbert prodded, yelled, “Wahoo!” pulled out a loose brick and then a small tin box, somewhat kippered, with Mail Pouch Chewing Tobacco painted on the lid.

  “Here, darling, take this till I—”

  “Ooh!”

  Dittany hadn’t meant to open the box till Osbert got down, but she couldn’t help it. The overcooked hinges gave way. Something heavy and glittering fell smack into her hand.

  “It’s the fly,” she gasped. “Look!”

  It was indeed a fly, a huge one, almost two inches long. The body was an emerald the size of an almond, the wings were carved crystal. The head was a single, blazing ruby and the eyes were glittering diamonds.

  “And I’ll eat my badge if they’re not genuine,” murmured Sergeant MacVicar in awe and reverence. “Yon bauble must be worth a wee fortune.”

  “Wee, my eyeball,” said Dittany. “Have you priced any rubies and emeralds lately? Where on earth do you suppose it came from?”

  “Was any of the Architrave ladies ever the mistress of a foreign potentate?” Osbert wondered.

  Dittany shook her head. “We don’t get many foreign potentates in Lobelia Falls. He could have been an admiral of the fleet, I suppose. That would account for the semaphore code. But why hide it in the chimney? I should have thought she’d want to wear it.”

  “I misdoubt she’d have found sic a gaudy breastpin somewhat dressy for Wednesday night prayer meeting,” Sergeant MacVicar replied. “Though so light a leddy might have been nae muckle churchgoer. Guid losh! John Architrave left you a far greater inheritance than he knew, Dittany lass.”

  “Me? Oh, you mean us. The club.”

  “Aye. The house and all it contained was how the will read, if memory serves me. What would a thing like this fetch now?”

  “I couldn’t even begin to guess.” Dittany turned the fly this way and that, watching the stones flash. “Poor Mr. Fairfield! What a thrill this would have been for him. Osbert, you don’t suppose he actually had found its hiding place, and somebody knew?”

  “I doubt that, darling. Why would they have put it back and called attention to themselves bashing around after the code? I just wish to heck I could get my hands on that letter so we’d know what this is all about. Darn, why couldn’t Miss Paffnagel have learned French?”

  “Mayhap she had,” said Sergeant MacVicar drily.

  “That’s right,” cried Dittany. “Nothing went wrong till old Hunding blew into town, did it? Why don’t you pinch her, Sergeant? Give her the third degree and make her squeal. Or shut her up without any food. That should make her confess quick enough.”

  “Noo, lass, let us refrain from hasty judgment. True, Miss Paffnagel is the only person so far who admits to having been shown that hypothetical letter. Her frankness in this regard may indeed be a ruse to disarm suspicion. Knowing Mr. Fairfield of old, she would have assumed he also showed it to others. Indeed he may have done so. Its being in French would present no great bar to any Canadian. There are enough French-speaking pairsons about. Even Cedric Fawcett could have easily found someone to read it to him. Churtle also, needless to say, had ample opportunity to abstract the letter from Mr. Fairfield’s desk, even as you and I. The field appears wide open still.”

  Osbert shook his head. “Not exactly, Sergeant. There’s that question of why Mr. Fairfield was taken up to the roof and thrown off. We know he wouldn’t have gone under his own steam because of his acrophobia. We also know from the sweater fuzz we found on the railing that he’d been there, unless somebody else went up wearing his sweater, then went back and put it on him, which is silly. What I think is, somebody whopped him with something heavy, then hoisted him up through the skylight by means of Fred Churtle’s ropes, and dumped him off. I think we’d better get Fred back here, tout de suite.”

  CHAPTER 25

  “FRED,” DEMANDED OSBERT, “WHAT did you lie to us for?”

  “Huh?”

  It was half an hour or so later. They were in, of all places, Minerva Oakes’s dining room. Sergeant MacVicar had gone to collect the roofer while Osbert and Dittany went back to see how Arethusa was doing. They’d found her sipping beef tea made by Hazel Munson from a cup held by Dot Coskoff while Therese Boulanger swathed her head in a gauzy silken scarf to hide the bandages and Ellie Jackson tiptoed in with a bunch of black-eyed Susans picked by her angelic little son Petey, no doubt from somebody else’s yard. Sensing they were not needed here, they’d gone on to their appointed rendezvous, although Dittany still wasn’t quite sure why.

  “Come on, Fred,” Osbert insisted. “Night before last up at Little Pussytoes, you told Dittany and me you’d gone over to the museum to pick up your tackle, looked at the place and figured there was nobody around. You led us to believe you didn’t even try the door. You claimed you’d merely taken a stroll around the yard, looking up at the roof from force of habit, and stumbled over Peregrine Fairfield’s body by accident. That’s a lot of garbage, right?”

  “Now look,” Churtle began.

  Sergeant MacVicar stopped him. “We have looked. That is why we now request your cooperation.”

  “Some cooperation,” Churtle snorted. “Dragging me off the church steeple in full sight of Reverend Pennyfeather. The Lord giveth a job and the cops taketh it away.”

  “Blasphemy will get you nowhere, Mr. Churtle,” said Sergeant MacVicar severely. “I suggest you answer Deputy Monk’s question.”

  “All right,” said the roofer sulkily. “It’s a lot of garbage. See, what really happened was, I hadn’t gone back for my gear because I was what you might call ambivalent about meeting up with Perry again. I mean, I wouldn’t have minded seeing him, but I sure as heck didn’t want to tangle with Vangie. On the other hand, I didn’t much give a hoot one way or the other because it was all so long ago and far away, if you get what I mean.”

  “We follow your drift, Mr. Churtle. Go on.”

  “But see, the thing of it was, I needed my gear because I’ve got a big job coming up on the new curling rink over in East Scottsbeck that Andy’s building. So I figured if I went to the museum just at suppertime, eh, I might be able to sneak in and get my stuff and sneak out again without meeting anybody. So that’s what I did.”

  “Continue your narrative,” said Sergeant MacVicar relentlessly.

  “Well, to make a long story short,” which Churtle clearly had no intention of doing, “I tried the door. It was unlocked, so I peeked in and didn’t see anybody. So I said was anybody around, you know how you do, and nobody answered, so I went
on in. So there was my gear only somebody’d been fiddling around with the ropes which I might have known they would be. So I go to straighten ’em out so’s I can haul ’em down. But no sooner do I give a tweak to see if the pulleys are jammed than I hear this noise. Kind of a mixture of a heavy thud and a muted slam, only mostly thud. So I think to myself, what the heck? I mean, what would you think?”

  “Any conjecture of mine would not be germane to the issue, Mr. Churtle.”

  “Okay, so anyway there I am, analyzing the situation as you might say. I didn’t know whether to give the rope another pull or what. To tweak or not to tweak, that was the question. What if it was a hunk of the chimney that fell off? That was another question, see. So I said to myself, Fred, I said, you better go out there and see what it was made that thud you just heard.”

  “A reasonable conclusion,” Sergeant MacVicar conceded. “So in short and without wishing to put words in a witness’s mouth, you went.”

  “I went. And there was Perry, dead as a proverbial mackerel. It took an awful hike out of me, I can tell you.”

  Churtle fell silent, perhaps in mourning for the departed, perhaps in retrospective horror at his gruesome discovery. Whichever it was, Sergeant MacVicar wanted none of it. “And how, Mr. Churtle, did you know he was dead?”

  “Well, heck, how wouldn’t I? I knelt down beside him and said, ‘Hey, Perry, old buddy, it’s me, Fred,’ and he never answered. And his hand was cold and there wasn’t any pulse and he just sort of flopped when I turned him over.”

  “Turned him over?” yelped Osbert. “Holy tumbleweeds, Sergeant—”

  “Aye, Deputy Monk. Mr. Churtle, are we to gather that when you found Mr. Fairfield, he was lying face down?”

  “Why else would I have had to turn him over? See, I wasn’t really sure it was Perry. I mean, here’s this gray-haired geezer hunched up in a heap among the bee balm. Mostly what I could see was the seat of his pants and the back of his sweater and naturally they wasn’t the same ones he’d had on when I’d last set eyes on him some thirty-eight years previous.”

  “But how could you be immediately sure he was dead? Did it not occur to you there might still be a spark of life that you might extinguish by turning him over?”

  “Nope. Not with the back of his head bashed in.”

  “Dang it, Fred,” howled Osbert, “why couldn’t you have told me that before?”

  “Because I had this natural aversion to getting pinched for a murder I didn’t do,” Churtle replied without hesitation. “That’s why I dropped him like a hot potato and hightailed it out of there, being darn careful not to crush the bee balm. Then I realized somebody might have noticed my van, so I went back the next morning so’s I could act the part of the innocent bystander, added to which I still needed and shall continue to need my tackle and buckets, assuming you’re not going to shove me in the slammer despite the fact that I stand before you purified and shriven by a full confession of my involvement, such as it was, in this mysterious and sinister happening.”

  “Sinister but hardly mysterious,” said Osbert, “now that we know for sure Mr. Fairfield was dead by the time he was put on the roof, and that the ropes had been arranged so all you had to do was give a tweak and he’d fall to the ground and the skylight would slam shut. Let’s go see how Minerva’s doing.”

  To Dittany’s ineffable relief, they found their unwitting hostess sitting up in bed, sipping orange juice. “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Like my Uncle Abednego after he’d been on one of his toots. Used to beg us to put slippers on the cat so’s its toenails wouldn’t click. Zilla here tells me I’ve been doped. In the camomile tea. Can you imagine? Poor Evangeline’s still asleep. She must have got a worse dose than I did.”

  “How so?” Sergeant MacVicar wanted to know. “Did you give her a bigger cup?”

  “Why no. We both had the same. My nice bone china with the rosebud pattern. But maybe she—”

  “Maybe me no maybes, wumman. This is a desperate crime we’re investigating. Did you watch Mrs. Fairfield sup her tea?”

  “Come to think of it, no. She took the cup to her room. She wanted to read her Bible before she dropped off, poor soul.”

  “Umph. Minerva Oakes, I want your offeecial pairmission for Deputy Monk and myself to search her room in the public interest.”

  “Quit gargling your r’s at me, Sergeant. My head can’t stand it. Of course, if you must. Only don’t wake Evangeline if you can help it. She’s been through enough already. Maybe I’d better go with you. Hand me my bathrobe, Zilla.”

  “You’re not going without me,” Zilla insisted.

  “Or me.” Dittany wasn’t going to be left out.

  The three women clustered in the doorway like Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos while Osbert and the sergeant made their search. It didn’t take long. They found the letter tucked in between Amos and Obadiah, and Sergeant MacVicar waxed grim over the use of Holy Writ for so base a purpose. They found a drapey dark nylon dress with a thread from Arethusa’s rose-colored bedspread clinging to the skirt. They found sensible black walking shoes with rose-colored fuzz from Arethusa’s deep-piled bedroom carpeting caught on the crepe soles. They found the scent of Romaunt de la Rose emanating from a pair of hastily washed black panty hose hanging over the doorknob.

  When Zilla, at Sergeant MacVicar’s request, drew back the covers and sniffed, she found the identical scent arising from the sleeper’s left leg as well as from the badly chipped plaster cast on her broken wrist. Sergeant MacVicar drew up a chair to the bedside and sat himself down to maintain grim vigilance until Evangeline Fairfield should awaken and be duly and properly taken into custody.

  CHAPTER 26

  “IT WASN’T MUCH OF a mystery, really,” Osbert half apologized. “The only one who’d have had any special reason to haul Mr. Fairfield up through the skylight and dump him off the roof was his wife. She was handicapped by that bum wrist, and didn’t dare let the body be found before she could get away and establish herself an alibi. So what she did was bop him over the head with her cast while he was sitting at his desk, drag his body out into the hall still in that office chair—it’s got casters on it, remember—and hitch him to Fred Churtle’s hoist. Then all she had to do was haul him up to the skylight, go back upstairs, and climb the ladder.”

  “Just as you and Sergeant MacVicar did later on,” cried Dittany.

  “That’s right, darling. From the ladder, she could boost him through the skylight and swing him outside by means of the hoist. The body must have caught on that ornamental railing and snagged the sweater. I expect Mrs. Fairfield had some trouble juggling him into position, but she’s a pretty hefty woman and he was a little runt of a guy. Anyway, she must have got him out on the slope of the roof with the rope looped across his body and caught under the skylight so he wouldn’t start to roll until she gave it a yank from below to turn him loose and shut the skylight. Then she went off to show Minerva how dirty she’d got grubbing around the attic.”

  “With me cracking the whip over her,” Dittany interjected.

  “Yes, darling. So she cleaned herself up in case anybody noticed she had the wrong kind of smudges on her, went through her act of getting worried when Mr. Fairfield didn’t show up, and got Minerva to walk back to the museum with her. Once they were inside, all Mrs. Fairfield had to do was make sure she steered Minerva away from the stairwell and pull on the rope. Fred Churtle had already pulled it, of course, but that didn’t matter. For a spur-of-the-moment murder it was pretty ingenious, you have to admit.”

  “But why kill him at all?” Zilla demanded.

  “Because Dittany’d just found the bees, and Mrs. Fairfield knew they were the clue to the jeweled fly. It’s right there in the letter she stole. Read it, darling. Your French is better than mine.”

  Dittany took the yellowed page from him and read aloud, translating as she went. “You know, Aralia chérie, how my great-grandmother got the fly. She was lady’s maid to the Empr
ess Josephine and delighted to deck her mistress in the wonderful jewels Her Majesty loved so well. You know how extravagant the Empress was, how impulsive, how generous. She could refuse nothing to anyone—except the Emperor, poor man! At the end she proved his loyal friend, so who is to judge? But to the fly. To honor the Emperor, Josephine ordered a ruby and emerald brooch in the form of the imperial bee. The jeweler, a Bourbonniste enraged at this Bonaparte’s pretensions, made a common fly of the jewels instead. Another in her place would have had him guillotined; Josephine only laughed. ‘Here, Mouche,’ she said. That was her pet name for my great-grandmother, who was so tiny and always flitting about like a fly. Take your namesake for a wedding present when you join your new husband in Canada, and keep it always to remember me.’

  “So I entreat you, my darling, to keep the fly safe and secret as I have done, in memory of the Empress and of me. That new husband of yours is funny about money, I think. Your loving Grand’mère, Henriette.”

  Dittany cleared her throat. “There’s a footnote in a different writing, Aralia’s, I suppose. ‘To my daughter, when I have one: The bees know the hiding place. Grand’mère and I worked them together after we hid the fly. We thought the Empress should have her bees at last. Discover their message for yourself and keep the secret as I mean to do. Your loving mother-to-be.’ She spelled it ‘bee.’ I suppose she couldn’t resist.”

  “But Aralia never had a daughter,” said Minerva, “and John didn’t know a word of French. I wonder where she hid the letter all those years.”

  “I suppose Evangeline won’t tell us, just for spite,” Zilla sniffed. Too bad her husband couldn’t have kept his mouth shut like Aralia. And they say women are the blabbermouths. Huh! Struck lucky for once in his life, and it killed him.”

  “Mrs. Fairfield must have known what that bee meant as soon as she opened the box and saw it stuck inside the lid,” said Dittany. “I’m surprised she let me get away with the pieces.”