Punch With Care

by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

  Asey tucked the prescription blank into his pocket as Douglass came panting back with the glass of water.

  “Fine. Thanks.” Cummings drank the water, to Douglass’s obvious surprise. “Now, you go along with Asey and get a prescription filled for Louise.”

  “But should I leave?” Douglass asked uncertainly, clearly not wanting to at all.

  Cummings nodded. “Be the best thing in the world,” he said with firmness. “You’ve been under a strain—need a change. She’s coming to—needs complete quiet. Worst thing you can have in a situation like this is a lot of people staring you in the face when you recover. She’ll want to talk to you and tell you things, and you’ll want to ask her questions—can’t have that! Bad business! Got to give her a chance to rest. Get long, now. I want that stuff from the drug store!”

  Asey herded Douglass toward the door.

  “Oh!” he paused on the threshold. “Don’t forget about your phone call up the cape, doc, will you?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Cummings said.

  As he got into Asey’s roadster, Douglass said diffidently that he didn’t feel at all right about leaving Louise like this.

  “But I suppose Cummings knows best—what an incredible car! I’m glad to have the chance to meet you, Mayo, after hearing so much about you. Louise and I were thinking of asking you to come to this sort of buffet supper we seem to be throwing tomorrow—we have a house guest, Carolyn Barton Boone. You’ve probably heard of her?”

  “Uh-huh,” Asey said.

  He didn’t have to turn his head sideways to know that he was being stared at sharply. Thanks to the Balkan prince’s lavish specifications on side-view mirrors, Douglass’s face was entirely visible.

  “Louise and I really got thrown, trying to figure out who might want to come,” Douglass continued. “After a lot of debate covering five towns, we could only settle on Cummings and his wife, and you—someone on the party line said you were home. We thought you three might be amused, no matter how you felt about her—of course, asking anyone to meet Boone is a tough problem! Fraught with pitfalls, as Louise put it.”

  “So?” Asey asked. “Why?”

  “Well,” Douglass shrugged, “you know how it is with that sort of woman. Boone’s never been exactly lukewarm in her opinions or her sentiments, or reticent in expressing ’em, either! And then there’s always the political angle of Senator Boone in the background. You’re not just for Boone, or against her. You’re very-very-for, or very-very-against. In fact, you stand out as the only person I ever mentioned her to who didn’t either spit in my eye at the sound of her name, or else purr like a kitten.”

  “I’m neutral,” Asey said. “Doc, on the other hand, is very-very-for.”

  “No! Is he? I didn’t know! Never happened to discuss her with him,” Douglass said. “Anyway, we decided we’d have to sift out the local guests with great care, because God knows if a pro-Boone and a con-Boone took to battling it out in our living room, Aunt Della’s early Cape Cod decor would bite the dust! That’s not the ideal room for tempers to blow in!”

  Asey agreed.

  “An’ what about you?” he asked in what he hoped was a casual tone. “Are you pro, or con?”

  He saw the corners of Douglass’s mouth curve upward slightly.

  “My role in this, Mayo,” he said, “at least, the role I’m working at like a dog, is that of the perfect parent.”

  “The perfect parent? Er—whose?”

  “Layne Douglass, who is twenty-four and an instructor at Larrabee College,” Douglass said with a certain amount of resignation in his voice, “might be summed up impartially as pro-Boone.”

  “Twenty-four?” Asey mentally revised his first estimate of the Douglasses respective ages.

  “And you do not tell a modem girl of twenty-four what you think of her boss,” Douglass said, “or present your somewhat biased personal opinion as a sufficient reason for her taking another similar position somewhere else. Instead, you firmly tell yourself a lot of silly tripe about her being an adult now, and you try to be reasonable, and rational, and fair—mind you,” he added, “you don’t slop over and pretend you think the whole business is wonderful, either!”

  “In short,” Asey remarked, “you take it with dignity?”

  “With dignity,” Douglass said, “with our eyes wide open, and with no illusions. Rather the way that two adults might suffer a dose of castor oil.”

  Asey chuckled. In spite of Cummings’s suspicions about the man, he found that he was beginning to enjoy Harold Douglass.

  “To think,” the latter continued, “that Layne could have catapulted Carolyn Barton Boone into our house last night—without notice! Without any notice at all! Dar-lings!” he assumed a very creditable falsetto, “darlings, we’ve come to make a check on a project?”

  “So that’s the real cause of the invasion, huh, that project?”

  “Yes. Boone suddenly took it into her head to do a little field work and find out just exactly why some of the various projects kept getting gummed up so badly—you know,” he said with a reminiscent sigh, “we’ve seen Layne through a lot—measles, wisdom teeth, that riding master with the moustache, all those pilots suffering from delusions of grandeur, and all those beardless ensigns, and the interne who didn’t come up to her chin. But this! Bringing Boone here!”

  “How long,” Asey glanced at him in the side-view mirror, “is she plannin’ to stay?”

  “Three days!” Douglass shook his head. “Three whole days—of course, as Louise pointed out, if you look back on any three-day period in your life, you find that it passed. There’s no reason for me to assume that time might take to standing still now. We’ve gaily opened our house to the project members, we’re throwing this fish fry and buffet supper for them and Boone tomorrow, we’ve promised everyone a ride on the railroad, and we’re doing it all with a fixed smile. If only our faces don’t break! Well, to answer your question of way back there by the swamp, Mayo, no. No, I am not a pro-Boone man!”

  “Difference in political concepts,” Asey suggested as he stopped for the four corners light, “or social concepts, or don’t you approve of her college, or her educational notions, or what? I’m sort of curious, because Doc Cummings is so very pro!”

  “Purely personal reasons,” Douglass said. “One of those emotional reactions that should have faded with the years, but hasn’t. When Boone stuck her beautifully coiffed blonde head into our living room last night, I felt that same old urge to rise up—right in the middle of Aunt Della’s decor—and murder her in cold blood.”

  “Oh?” Asey said aloud, and mentally ordered himself to keep his eye on the ball and stop being distracted by details like Aunt Della, and Layne Douglass’s beaux!

  After all, Cummings had warned that the Douglasses were stalling—and Cummings knew them, and Cummings wasn’t easily carried away by unfounded suspicions. While all this light, airy conversation about Mrs. Boone was disarming enough, and informative enough—wasn’t it maybe just a little too disarming, when you thought it over, and a little too pointedly informative?

  “You see, we knew Boone on her way up in the world,” Douglass said, “and that’s so often a disillusioning time to know the great!”

  “What was Mrs. Boone doin’ then?” Asey asked.

  Douglass laughed shortly. “What she’s done all her life. What she’s doing now. Smashing down everything that stands between her and her goal of the minute. Specifically, it was back in the old days of radio. We were all writing for it—Louise still does, you know. In fact, we both do.” He was silent for a moment, and then he smiled. “Of course, you would take a professional interest in motivation, wouldn’t you? But don’t worry, Mayo. It was a long time ago that Louise and I got in Boone’s way! I assure you we won’t provide you with any new business now—good God!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I just thought! I shouldn’t be going to the village with you!”

  “Why not
?” Asey said as he swung the roadster to the curb. “Besides, you’re already here.”

  “In all the excitement of Louise fainting, I forgot! We’ve lost Boone—oh, not really lost! She’s just wandered off somewhere. And my aunt, Mrs. Framingham, is out hunting for her—I ought to be home straightening things out! My God, to think that could have slipped my mind! But I just forgot everything else when I found Louise lying there in the hall!”

  “D’you often lose your guests?” Asey inquired as he got out of the car. “Mrs. Douglass’s phoned me a couple of times in great anguish about your—er—displaced persons problems.”

  “Has she? She never told me that! But Louise does get panicky when people are mislaid. We’ve had a few grim experiences with guests who foolishly set off in small boats and had to be rescued by the coast guard. We padlock the oars and the boathouse, now, and hide the keys,” Douglass said, “and we’ve put signs on all the marshes, warning people off. It’s tricky territory over there at the point. I don’t think Boone has met with any dire accident, but I feel I should hurry back—will Cummings’s medicine take very long, d’you think?”

  Asey looked across the street at the drug store, and decided that there were still enough questions he wanted to ask Douglass to warrant his maintaining the fable of Cummings’s prescription.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, “an’ anyway, isn’t the medicine for your wife probably more important than locatin’ Mrs. Boone?”

  “Of course!” Douglass said contritely. “You’re absolutely right. I didn’t mean to rush you—and actually, I don’t care if Boone is up to her neck in the bog of the east marsh! My real concern is Louise—she’d go berserk if any little thing went wrong with Boone while she’s staying with us. Even a good horse-fly bite would upset her!”

  “Haven’t you any idea where Mrs. Boone went to?” Asey asked casually. “Golly, how could you lose track of her?”

  “How? You might as well try to keep tabs on a flea!” Douglass said. “She started off to meet the Larrabee project when it came this morning, but then she had to come back to the house—phone calls were pouring in from all over. She finally decided they were too distracting, and had them all relayed back to her college office. Then as I had her all set for a ride on the railroad, she disappeared—for a phone call, I thought. But when I went indoors, Louise said she wasn’t there—oh, you can’t keep track of anyone like her!”

  4‘But didn’t any of your servants see her?”

  “Servants? Are you kidding?” Douglass said. “We haven’t been able to get any for years, except for a cleaning woman on Fridays! Layne and some of the project crowd had gone over to the shore earlier, so my aunt set out in our beachwagon to see if Boone might’ve followed them. I was just starting to take a look around the marshes when I found Louise there on the hall floor—Mayo, I still can’t figure out what happened to her! She must have felt ill, and called Cummings—that was how you two happened to turn up, wasn’t it?”

  Asey evaded the question.

  “Cummings’ll turn me over his knee if I don’t get his prescription filled,” he said. “I’ll be as quick as I can.” Inside the drug store, he made his way out to the small back room that served as a pharmacy, and asked cheerfully for a four-ounce bottle of tap water.

  “Just color it pink, an’ label it ‘Cummings-Special’, Billy,” he added. “The doc’s humorin’ a patient who fainted.”

  The druggist grinned.

  “Last week he wanted dark green—said it was to comfort some woman in Wellfleet who was getting her fourth divorce. Doc sure is busy, isn’t he? I just saw his car rattle by here for about the twentieth time today.”

  “His car?” Asey said. “Rattlin’ by here? But his car’s over at my place!”

  “He parked right around by the post office, Asey—why, I couldn’t miss that car!”

  While the druggist typed out the label, Asey strolled to the front part of the store and looked out the side window.

  There was no sign of Cummings’s sedan by the post office.

  Neither, he discovered with a start of surprise as he turned his head, was there any sign of his own roadster, out front!

  While Billy, brandishing the bottle of tinted water, called out after him, Asey rushed out into the street.

  His chrome-plated car was nowhere to be seen.

  “Huh!” Asey shoved his yachting cap on the back of his head. “Now what in time would he do that for?”

  Probably half the shoppers on main street had seen the man go, but there was no sense steaming into the A and P, or the post office, or the fruit store, and asking a lot of silly questions.

  The point was that Douglass and the car were gone!

  Turning on his heel, Asey strode off to the four corners and hitched a ride on an oil truck that deposited him at the foot of his own oystershell driveway.

  True enough, Cummings’s sedan wasn’t parked up by the house, but Asey dismissed that fact as unimportant after discovering that Jennie wasn’t at home, either. Without question, she had taken the car.

  “But why the doc’s?” he murmured to himself as he walked on to the garage. “Whyn’t she take her own coupe, or my old roadster?”

  He was still asking himself questions as he took out the latter, and started to drive it back to the Douglass’s house.

  Who had Mrs. Douglass telephoned—providing that she actually had telephoned anyone? And why had she thereupon fainted—or pretended to faint? And why hadn’t Douglass guessed that her long drawn out period of unconsciousness was all a fake?

  “An’ why’d he swipe my car an’ beat it? What about that feller, anyway?”

  If Douglass had been improvising, Asey conceded that the man had done a good job. Without in the least seeming to set up a lot of facts, he had in effect done just exactly that. He’d pointed out that Mrs. Boone was. after all, a highly publicized figure, and that many people disliked her intensely. Just the mere mentioning of her phone calls brought out the picture of an active, busy woman whose life was under constant outside pressure.

  “Outside pressure,” Asey said to himself. “He kept pushin’ her away from Pochet Point out into the world, didn’t he? Away from himself an’ his wife. They didn’t know she was comin’! That was just the daughter’s doin’. Just college business. Nothin’ to do with them! They don’t like Boone for two cents, but they’re as nice as Mrs. Post could wish, all for their daughter’s sake. Just selfless, that’s what!”

  And through no one’s fault, Boone was lost. Lost, that was all.

  “Like a doggone collar button!” Asey muttered.

  Yes, he had to hand it to Douglass. His story was good.

  “An’ if he’s asked for more details, like about startin’ to give her a ride in Lulu Belle, an’ about her disappearin’,” Asey added, “why gee whiz, in his excitement at findin’ Louise all fainted on the hall floor, why gee whiz, everything’s slipped his mind!”

  And as the doctor had already sardonically insinuated, Louise probably wouldn’t remember much after her prolonged faint, either.

  In short, he decided, the Douglass family would remember just what it wished to remember, and not a whit more.

  “An’ they’ll be simply charmin’ about it, too! Disarmin’ as all get out!”

  The gravel spun under his wheels as he braked to a stop in the Douglass’s driveway.

  There was no sign of Cummings’s sedan—that meant that Jennie, too lazy to walk to the garage, had taken it to go shopping in.

  There was no sign of his new roadster—and what that meant, Asey didn’t know.

  “Where in time did he go to in it?” he said aloud as he strode into the house. “Hey, doc—”

  He stopped on the threshold of the empty living room.

  Then he went to the center hall.

  “Doc! Mrs. Douglass! Cummings!” He drew a long breath and bellowed out his best quarter-deck roar. “Cum-mings! Cum-mings!”

  Nobody answered.

&n
bsp; The house was empty. Asey went through it twice, room by room.

  As he came down the back stairs to the kitchen, he helped himself to some sandwiches from a plate on the kitchen table, and then went out on the back step and sat there, munching thoughtfully.

  He had topped off his impromptu lunch with fruit and some cookies when he noticed the little green slip of paper blowing along the driveway, an inch or two at a time.

  A little green slip?

  Asey jumped up and grabbed it as it bobbled along past him.

  It was a ticket. A green ticket.

  A punched green ticket!

  Asey started off toward the Pullman on a dead run.

  Like the Douglass’s house, he found that the Lulu Belle was empty, too.

  4

  “Now YOU SEE IT,” Asey muttered, “now you don’t! Rub your eyes, Mayo! Look again!”

  But it was no mirage.

  The Lulu Belle really was empty, and Carolyn Barton Boone’s body was no longer there.

  The pointed silver bud vase was back in its holder above Seat One. The gold plush swivel chair beside which Cummings had knelt was now back in line with all the fifteen other gold plush swivel chairs. A Boston newspaper—that morning’s paper—which had apparently been casually dropped on the thick red carpet, actually covered the dampish spot where someone had been busy eradicating blood stains.

  In another half hour, when the carpet was thoroughly dried out, the presence of blood stains would never be suspected by anyone who wasn’t hunting for them. The only extraneous object in the car would be an old discarded morning newspaper, which certainly wouldn’t move anyone unduly!

  Asey pushed one of the plush chairs around toward him, and sat down.

  This situation, he decided, required a brief review!

  He and Cummings had left the Lulu Belle at roughly quarter to two. They had spent perhaps a quarter of an hour in Aunt Della’s sitting room before he’d driven Douglass to the village. Say twelve minutes for that trip. He hadn’t hurried.

  He had been in the drug store not more than five or six minutes, Asey decided. Twenty more had taken him from the oil truck at the four corners back to the Douglass’s again, via his own house. The oil truck had been slow, but he hadn’t dallied any after taking his old roadster.