A Dismal Thing To Do

by Charlotte MacLeod

  Madoc didn’t suppose for one second the two-by-fours had been prime new wood, or that they’d run to anything like the footage Bain claimed he’d lost. The odds were they’d been bean poles instead of studding, for that matter. Any story Bain told tended to contain a grain of truth, but perhaps not a great deal more than a grain.

  “Precisely where were these two-by-fours taken from, Mr. Bain?” he asked. “I assume that long, rectangular bump over there is your lumber pile?”

  A few brown stumps were bared in a grin of contempt. “You ain’t assumin’ very good, Inspector. That ain’t my lumber pile. It’s seventeen o’ them travelin’ privies from a construction company, laid on their sides so’s no smart-aleck kids’ll come whoopin’ in here an’ try to shove ’em over. The lumber’s behind them bushes.”

  Bain pointed to a lump that didn’t look like anything in particular, half-concealed by a clump of bowed-over saplings. “Anybody that happened to have eyes in their head might o’ noticed where the snow’s been dug out fresh at the end an’ them two-by-fours hauled out from under the tarpaulin I had coverin’ the pile. I spotted it soon as I druv into the yard.”

  “Sharp of you, Mr. Bain.”

  Madoc strapped on the snowshoes he’d been carrying slung over his shoulder and made his way to the lumber pile. Bain didn’t follow, but stayed on the doorstep watching him like a hawk as he hitched up the frozen tarpaulin and took a peek underneath.

  At least the old devil hadn’t amused himself by sending the Mountie on a wild goose chase. It was in fact a lumber pile and there was a gap among the boards where something that might as well be assumed a group of two-by-fours had been snaked out rather cleverly without toppling the rest. Judging from what he could see, Madoc doubted more than before that the studding had been either new or prime.

  Could that explain why the top-heavy truck had fallen over? Suppose Bain’s vanished studding had been stolen to make a cradle for Mr. X’s unknown quantity, and suppose the wood had been too rotten to sustain so much weight when a real strain was put on it? That would mean the thieves had more confidence than skill in their carpentry.

  So that let out all the local handymen, not to mention the ones who worked in the lumber mill. Fred Olson would know who they were. Meanwhile, on with the detection. Madoc went back to the steps.

  “Since you noticed the intrusion right away, Mr. Bain,” he said, “I assume you immediately began looking for tracks in the snow.”

  Bain made a strange noise through his nostrils.

  “And what did you find?” Madoc was a patient man.

  “Not a jeezledy goddamn thing. Looked to me like what they done, they come in draggin’ a big toboggan behind ’em an’ went out the same way so’s it would wipe out the marks where they stepped. They must o’ stood on the toboggan when they was gettin’ the two-by-fours out, too. I couldn’t find nothin’ but a wide levelin’.”

  “You say ‘they.’ Would this necessarily have been a two-man job?”

  “Don’t see why it should. I said ‘they’ ‘cause I don’t know if ‘twas one or two or a whole goddamn pack of ’em, an’ I ain’t puttin’ myself out on a limb. Seems to me one could o’ done it in a pinch. Don’t take a whole hell of a lot o’ strength to pull a toboggan over hard crust.”

  “Even with a heavy load of two-by-fours.” Madoc made the statement and let it lie there. “Let’s assume one reasonably healthy person, then. Two might have had a hard time keeping their feet inside the toboggan’s track, don’t you think? They’d have been on snowshoes, I expect.”

  “Dumb fools if they wasn’t. Never know when you might hit a soft spot.”

  “Oh, I’d say whoever did this was no fool.”

  Maybe not so clever as he or she thought, but hardly a fool, and definitely no stranger to Jase Bain’s junkyard, since the toboggan had made a beeline for the right one of those many deceiving snow-covered mounds. And perhaps no stranger to Bain, either, since he’d known March 14 would be a safe time to excavate without risking that load of buckshot.

  “And you were gone that entire day, Mr. Bain. Wouldn’t that have been a somewhat unusual thing for you to do?”

  “I had important business,” Bain snapped.

  “I’m sure you did. Can you tell me if it was private business or what might be termed public business?”

  “Huh. Name me one thing that ain’t public business around this goddamn village.”

  “You have a point there,” Madoc conceded. “In fact, though, you’re pretty well outside the village here, aren’t you? If you really wanted to, I should think you might be able to come and go more or less as you pleased without anybody’s knowing.”

  And often did, no doubt. “What I’m driving at is whether this business was something that would have been impossible for you to keep quiet. Such as an auction or a court case, for instance, that might have been announced in the papers.”

  “ ’Twa’nt a court case,” Bain growled. “Not yet, anyways.”

  “Then it did involve a dispute of some kind, news of which might well have got around. Did it take you out of the Pitcherville area?” Over toward Harvey Station, for instance? Madoc didn’t ask him that.

  “Could of,” the maddening old goat admitted after thinking it over.

  Madoc had had enough of this. “Mr. Bain, if you want to play guessing games, you’ll have to find another playmate. Either give me a straight answer or I’ll wish you a very good afternoon and be on my way.”

  That did it. “You don’t have to be so goddamn hotheaded,” Bain yelled. “A man’s got a right to mind his own business, ain’t he? All right, I was over to Woodstock, lookin’ up some stuff in the county records an’ talkin’ to a few people out around there. I had to call ’em up the day before to tell ’em I was comin’ so’s I wouldn’t waste the gas gettin’ there an’ not findin’ ’em home. So it was a matter o’ public record, if you want to call it that.”

  “Why? You’re not on a party line out here by yourself, are you? I don’t see any wires.”

  “I ain’t got no phone. They’d o’ made me pay a fortune to run the line in an’ I wasn’t goin’ to stand for it. I druv into the village an’ used the one at the Busy Bee. Bunch o’ good-for-nothin’ bastards settin’ around there as usual, flappin’ their ears so’s they wouldn’t miss nothin’.”

  “Couldn’t you have used the pay phone at the drugstore?”

  Bain gave him a sideways look and said nothing. The one at the drugstore wouldn’t take slugs, perhaps. Anyway, if he’d called from the Busy Bee, it was a safe bet the news had been well spread. That was Maw Fewter’s hangout.

  So perhaps the raid on Bain’s junkyard had been an inspiration born of opportunity. Since Bergeron’s truck had been used in the hijacking plot, and since a cradle had to be built inside to hold the hijacked object, it followed as the night the day that the materials to build it with had to come from somewhere. Armand and his home-grown floor show came to mind. Why spend money for what you can get without paying?

  Swiping a few old boards from Jase Bain was not a crime anybody around these parts was going to take seriously. They’d either assume some kids did it for a bonfire at the skating pond or to build a hut in the woods or some such trivia, or else that Bain was lying for some deep and devious reason of his own. On the other hand, if anybody was seen going to the lumberyard for new studding, a natural curiosity would arise as to what was going to be built, and where, and why, and wouldn’t the builder maybe like a hand in the building of it? Odd-jobbing was a major industry around here, especially in the cold weather when there wasn’t all that much doing around the farms. Eyeball Grouse would see the logic and so, no doubt, would his relatives and former neighbors.

  “I see the toboggan tracks have been pretty thoroughly tramped over,” Madoc remarked.

  “That was Fred Olson, mostly.”

  Like hell it was. It was Bain marching back and forth counting his boards after the fact. Not that it mattered. Fred wou
ldn’t have gone to any special pains to preserve the tracks, because Fred wouldn’t have taken the matter seriously. Neither would Madoc, under different circumstances.

  “Well, no matter,” he said. “I gather they simply came out here to the driveway, or whatever you call it, and got lost in the general confusion.”

  “Seemed like.”

  “You didn’t notice any unfamiliar tracks as you drove in?”

  “It’s pretty dug up.”

  It was, though far from pretty. Madoc didn’t pursue the matter. Whether the lumber thieves had come in by jeep, snowmobile, or flying saucer was not particularly germane to the issue. What did matter was where they’d taken the two-by-fours after they got them. There was also the problem of what they’d done with the hijacked van after they’d transferred the stolen object to Bergeron’s bull box.

  If Mr. X did indeed come from Bigears, and Janet would never have taken so positive a line if she weren’t sure of her ground, then he must have grown up knowing all about Elzire Bergeron’s historic landmark. If there’d been a war on and no other suitable vehicle at hand, he might conceivably have requisitioned the old truck for military purposes. If he’d been on the enemy’s side, he might have looted it as a trophy. Neither being the case, he or whoever was in charge of odd vehicle procurement had probably done the sensible thing and rented a milk truck or a moving van or one of those big drive-it-yourselfers. Or a circus wagon or a gypsy caravan, assuming there were any left around.

  The first news of the hijacking had been the discovery of the van with me two retching drivers locked inside. If Madoc’s deduction about Perce’s bull box and Bain’s two-by-fours was correct, that meant there’d been three vans involved. The first and probably largest of the three, which had contained the object that was transferred to the bull box, must not have been found by the time Mr. X appealed to the RCMP for help.

  No, that didn’t necessarily follow. Mr. X had been too carefully ambiguous on that point. He’d told them the drivers were transferred to a different van—Madoc had envisioned a small one—and kept there incommunicado while the hijackers made their getaway. Madoc and perhaps the deputy commissioner also had inferred that the second van was the one they were found in, but was that in fact the case? Might they not have been put back into the first one after the object of the hijacking was transferred to the bull box?

  If they were in the second van, couldn’t it have been traced? Perhaps it had, and turned out to have been stolen from a little old lady who’d been selling pot holders at a church fair during the whole period while the outrage was being committed. In that case, why couldn’t Mr. X have said so? Had it been funk, orders from above, or general cussedness that rendered him so overwhelmingly uncommunicative? Or had it been a pretty strong hunch that some Grouse or McLumber was involved in the hijacking and that the less he told of the facts, the less likely the case was to be solved. And the failure would be Madoc Rhys’s, not Eyeball Grouse’s. Very neat.

  Madoc walked back to the car, opened the thermos, poured himself a cup of Annabelle’s tea, tasted her sandwich and found it good, realized after some minutes’ cogitative chewing that he’d finished the sandwich and was well into the fruitcake, poured out the rest of the tea to wash down his snack, pondered whether the next leg of his expedition should be over to Armand’s or out to Bigears, made his decision, stoppered the thermos, stuck the rest of the fruitcake into the glove compartment for a rainy day, turned the car around, and drove back to the farm.

  Chapter 10

  PERHAPS HE’D HAVE BEEN well employed tracking down each and every member of Armand Bergeron’s vaudeville troupe and questioning them one by one. Madoc deemed it a far, far better thing to be lounging here on the old daybed in the corner of the kitchen with Janet curled up against his chest and Julius the cat perched on the cushions behind him, purring down the back of his neck.

  Bert had the pieces of Annabelle’s toaster spread out on the kitchen table, trying to figure out why the damned thing had started hurling pieces of bread all over the kitchen lately. Sam Neddick was sitting across from him whittling a wooden duck decoy which he would later stain with tobacco juice, rub down with wood ashes and peddle to some ecstatic tourist as having been carved by his great-grandfather. Annabelle was mending a pile of shirts and socks belonging to the three young replicas of Bert who were allegedly doing their homework while in fact eating popcorn. All six were assisting Madoc with his inquiries, though at least four of them didn’t know it.

  Neatly docketed in his mind at this point were various pieces of information, among them that Cecile Bergeron wasn’t much on housekeeping (Annabelle) but sure was a good-looker (Bert, trying to get Annabelle’s goat) and that she read too damn many books and got funny ideas (Sam Neddick). Pressed to explain what sort of funny ideas, Sam was not clear. In his opinion, any female that sat around with her nose in a book all day was bound to get funny ideas. Goaded to the defense of her sex, Annabelle demanded to know who could blame a woman for seeking romance and adventure in books, there being darned little of it to be got from the men around Pitcherville.

  Bert Junior volunteered the information that Cecile had a new boy friend who thought he was pretty hot stuff because he could throw a hunting knife up in the air and catch it in his teeth. This led to a digression of some length, with young Ed and young Charlie saying young Bert ought to try it in front of his girl and their father retorting that he (Bert Junior) damned well hadn’t better and that he (Bert Senior) would tan the pants off any kid of his he caught handling a hunting knife or any other knife in a reckless and irresponsible fashion and didn’t they realize what dentists’ bills ran to nowadays?

  Janet roused herself enough to tell Julius to get his tail out of her mouth and demand that the rest quit yammering about hunting knives and tell her about Cecile ‘s new boy friend. Who was he and where did he come from?

  That stopped them. Not even Sam Neddick knew much of anything. His name was Pierre. He’d wandered into Armand’s place one Saturday night, done his hunting knife trick to wild applause, hung around the piano a lot while Cecile was playing, offered to buy her a beer and been turned down because Cecile wasn’t that kind of girl, at least not in front of so many Bergerons. Thereupon he’d shown up at Mass the following morning, wily cuss that he was, been permitted to walk Cecile home and invited by Perce’s wife to stay for Sunday dinner so the family could look him over and decide whether he was halfway reasonable husband material, since Cecile wasn’t getting any younger.

  The family’s decision was still pending, Sam believed, but there could be no doubt that Pierre’s being a man of mystery appealed to Cecile’s sense of romance and adventure and that Armand didn’t mind having Pierre around on Saturday nights now that his hunting knife trick had proved a surefire crowd pleaser.

  “But what does he do when he’s not catching knives in his teeth?” Janet demanded.

  “Good question,” Sam grunted, squinting along his duck to see whether he’d got the two sides reasonably symmetrical. “Claims he’s a guide an’ a nature writer.”

  “What’s a nature writer?” Ed wanted to know.

  “A person who writes pieces about nature for the magazines, I suppose,” said his mother. “Birds and flowers and—”

  “Watch it, Belle,” Bert teased. “Ed’s kind of young for that stuff.”

  Ed said he was not and what stuff? His mother said never mind and asked Sam where Pierre got his pieces printed. Sam shrugged and went on shaping his duck.

  “Well, what’s his last name?” Annabelle prodded.

  “Dubois, he calls hisself.”

  And why wouldn’t he? Madoc thought. Peter of the Woods was a fine name for an alleged guide and nature writer who could catch a hunting knife in his teeth, not that he’d have many teeth left before long if he didn’t quit showing off in front of the fair though unhousewifely Cecile. Pierre Dubois sounded promising. But what of the other members of the band?

  Well, Raoul was ste
ady enough but Etienne was wild as a hawk. In Sam Neddick’s considered opinion, Blaise wasn’t a damn sight tamer, for all he could play the guitar and the trombone with equal felicity. Sam didn’t say felicity. He didn’t say trombone, either, because he couldn’t think what to call them cussed brass things that slid in an’ out an’ made such a god-awful blattin’ noise.

  Young Charlie could. He was himself taking lessons on the trombone and practiced every afternoon out in the barn, to entertain the cows on these dull late-winter days. For this act of charity he was loudly praised and much encouraged by his entire family. He offered to play right now for Aunt Janet and Uncle Madoc. Janet suggested instead that they come out tomorrow afternoon and listen along with the cows, provided she felt up to it and Uncle Madoc didn’t have to go off detecting somebody.

  Getting back to the Bergerons, as Madoc gently insisted they do, Marie-Claire was her Aunt Cecile all over again. If she didn’t stop mooning around over books and music and that Clarence McLumber from Bigears, she was going to wake up one of these days and wish she had, was Annabelle’s none too humble opinion. Sam, however, had it on good authority that Clarence McLumber seemed to be less interested in Marie-Claire these days than he was in hanging around with Blaise and Etienne and the enigmatic Pierre Dubois.

  “Where do they hang around?” Madoc wanted to know.

  “Out in the woods, mostly. Admirin’ nature with a six-pack o’ Moosehead apiece, though I guess they cut a little cord wood for Armand now an’ again when the spirit moves ’em,” Sam answered.

  “Any more in their crowd go with them?”

  “Shouldn’t be surprised. Lyon Grouse an’ his cousin King McLumber was over to the Busted Antler with Dubois a couple o’ nights ago.”

  “Sam means the Deerhead Restaurant,” Janet explained to Madoc. “The one with all those dozens of deer horns nailed all over it. We stopped there once on our way here, remember?”

  “Whatever for?” cried Annabelle. “Didn’t you think I was going to feed you?”