Auntie Mayhem

by Mary Daheim

  It was, and Renie knew it. Sighing, she grasped the receiver. Two minutes later, her mother’s voice was humming in her ear.

  “Dearest! Where are you? What’s happened? Are you all right? Did you get sick? Have you been hurt? Did you lose Bill? I’m listening to the morning news, and the most terrible things are happening!”

  “I’m fine, Mom,” Renie finally managed to get in. “Judith is fine, too. So are Bill and Joe.” She glanced at Judith, whose teeth were now clamped on her lower lip. “We’re calling about Aunt Gertrude. Judith can’t seem to…ah…find her.”

  Deborah Grover’s voice took on a note of umbrage. “Well, how should I know where Gertrude is? Does my sister-in-law ever call to tell me anything? No, not her—she sits over there in that nice remodeled apartment of hers just a stone’s throw from her daughter and never lifts a finger to dial my number. She could be dead for all I know.” It sounded as if the thought was not altogether displeasing to Deborah Grover.

  Judith was now wringing her hands. Renie was wringing the receiver, as if she could choke the information out of her mother. “Where is Aunt Gertrude exactly?”

  Renie’s mother sniffed audibly. “I’d be the last to know. Ordinarily, dear, that is. By chance—merely by chance, you realize—your Auntie Vance, who isn’t nearly as big a poop as your Aunt Gertrude, filled me in. She and Uncle Vince have taken Gertrude up to their house on the island for a few days. Gertrude had to go somewhere, after they threw her out of the hospital.”

  Hastily, Renie put a hand over the mouthpiece and relayed Gertrude’s whereabouts. “How did that happen?” Renie asked her mother, not wanting to cause Judith further alarm. Yet.

  “Your aunt can be so ornery.” Deborah Grover emitted a put-upon sigh. “And don’t I know it, after all these years of playing bridge with her. Just last week, she wouldn’t speak to me for two days because I didn’t bid my hand. Or so she said. I had thirteen points but no suit. Now how could I bid no-trump with cards like that? She insisted we would have had a small slam, just because she opened. Well, sometimes Gertrude takes terrible risks. Oh, she had fifteen points and a slew of spades, I’ll admit, but how was I to know? I passed at three diamonds. I see no point in—”

  “Mom!” With her free hand, Renie clutched at her hair. “Mom,” she repeated in a softer voice, “tell me about now. How Aunt Gertrude…um…left the hospital.”

  “Under a cloud,” Deborah replied with malice. “She accused the nurse of cheating at cribbage. You know your aunt, she will not give in. She always has to be right. The nurse wouldn’t apologize and she refused to play with Gertrude anymore. So your aunt said, ‘Fine, then let me out of here.’ You know how she is—if Gertrude can’t play cards, she’d rather be dead. The doctor came to check on her, and she told him off, too. She always has to have her say, as she puts it. The poor man must have been at wits’ end when she unplugged her roommate’s heart monitor. Then she lit a cigarette. Such a filthy habit, and it’s not allowed in hospitals, thank goodness. No wonder the doctor decided to send her home.”

  Renie was nodding in a dazed fashion. “Well, certainly. Except she didn’t go home, she went up to the island with Auntie Vance and Uncle Vince, right?”

  “That’s right,” Deborah agreed. “They’d come down to visit her in the hospital—of course they stopped to see me for a bit and brought some lovely clam chowder—I do wish they could have stayed longer, but they’re just like you, always in such a hurry to be off.” The note of reproach in her mother’s voice caused Renie to wince. “They got to the hospital around seven, just when the nurses were wheeling Gertrude’s roommate off to intensive care. Or was it the nurse they were taking away? I don’t recall. Anyway, after some discussion, your aunt and uncle promised to take Gertrude with them. It’s a good thing, if you ask me. The only person who can get the better of your Aunt Gertrude is your Auntie Vance.”

  On any given day, Auntie Vance could get the better of Ivan the Terrible, as both Judith and Renie well knew. With her rough tongue and good heart, Vanessa Grover Cogshell was a study in contradictions. She was also capable of holding Gertrude’s head under water until she cried “Uncle.” Which, if she were crying for Uncle Vince, would do no good, because he’d probably be asleep. He usually was, except when driving. Even then, there was often some uncertainty about his level of consciousness.

  “It sounds,” Renie said, trying to keep her voice even, “as if things are under control.”

  “I should hope so,” Deborah responded. “The Rankerses are feeding the cat. And taking care of the B&B, of course. Such nice people—I do wish they’d drop in here more often. Arlene always has such a lot of news. I spoke with her on the phone the other day, and she told me that Sophie Weinerhoffen’s gall bladder had—”

  “Mom,” Renie interrupted gently, “I really should go so I can tell Judith about Aunt Gertrude. She’s been pretty worried. You know how that is.”

  “Oh!” Deborah’s gasp was palpable. “I do! Worry—that’s all I’ve done since you and Bill left town! You can’t imagine how relieved I’ll be when you’re safe at home! Just last night I was talking on the phone to Mrs. Parker, and she said that—”

  Frantically, Renie poked a random button on the receiver. An ear-splitting squawk ensued. “Hey, Mom! I think we’ve got transmission problems! I’d better hang up! Love you!”

  “What, dear? What was that you uttered? Now Serena, don’t go out in the rain without your plastic bonnet—”

  Renie poked another button. “This interference is deafening. Don’t worry, everything’s great, take care.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Deborah Grover said, at her most pitiful. “I’ll be all right, alone here in my squalid little—”

  Holding her head, Renie hung up. “Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind,” she murmured. “Or something like that. Your mother got tossed from Good Hope Hospital. You’re lucky they don’t cancel her membership plan.”

  Judith groaned. “Oh, jeez! What did she do now?”

  Renie told Judith everything. Her previous desire to spare her cousin the gruesome details had been obliterated by Deborah Grover’s martyred whine.

  “They’ll outlive us yet,” Renie said in conclusion. “Wait and see. When we’re gone, they’ll both bitch about what rotten daughters we were because we croaked from aneurisms and left them in the lurch.”

  Numbly, Judith nodded. “At least Auntie Vance may be able to cope with Mother. Oh, dear.” Raising her head from where it was lying on the desk, Judith tried to shake off the most recent dual maternal experiences. “Maybe I’ll call Mother tomorrow.”

  Renie made no comment. Judith stared off into space for some time, then finally gave herself a good shake. “Let me show you the will. If it’s still here.” She opened the desk drawer cautiously. “Ah!—it is. I’m almost surprised.”

  Quickly, Renie read through the lines of spidery blue ink. “It’s just as you—and Tinsley—said.” She sighed, as woefully as her mother. “We’ve got to get out of this mess, coz.”

  Judith lifted an eyebrow. “The inheritance? Or the murder?”

  “Both,” Renie said firmly. She started to push the single sheet back at Judith, then suddenly retrieved it. “You’re right,” Renie said, gazing at the handwritten will. “There is something odd about this paper. It’s short.”

  Judith stared. “Short?”

  “Right. It’s off a standard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-and-three-quarter tablet used in the U.K. But this is only about ten and a half inches long.” Renie noted Judith’s uncertainty. “Hey, don’t argue—visuals are my life. I’m a graphic designer, remember? Find a ruler, measure it. You’ll see. Part of the page must have been cut off.” Renie, who wasn’t wearing her glasses and was farsighted, held the sheet at arm’s length. “See? It’s too smooth to have been torn, so it must have been cut.”

  Renie was right. Judith held the page up to her nose and saw the merest waver at the top, probably made by scissors. “Why
would anybody cut this off? It starts out with ‘The Last Will and Testament of Petulia Henrietta Victoria Ravenscroft’—which is perfectly logical. What else could it say?”

  Renie considered. “Maybe she made a mistake, cut it off, and started over.”

  Judith disagreed. “Aunt Pet would have torn it up and used a fresh sheet. She might have been an advocate of the ‘waste not, want not’ school, but this paper is cheap. The date is at the bottom. So is the part about leaving us the gatehouse.”

  For some moments, the only sound in the library came from the ticking of the mahogany long-case clock. Renie pulled the sheet back in front of her, scrutinizing the date. “It’s dated 24 April of this year, which would be right. But are the codicil and date written in the same ink as the main part of the will?”

  It was Judith’s turn to study the single sheet again. “Ink variations notwithstanding, it’s definitely her handwriting throughout. The date’s another matter. There aren’t any numbers in the will itself to make a comparison.”

  “Maybe she switched pens,” Renie suggested. “Or even bottles of ink. Let’s say she wrote out the part about the family, just like it was in the earlier will. Maybe she did that Saturday morning or even Friday after Arthur Tinsley left. Then we came along, and were so filled with good English breeding despite our half-assed superficial American ways, that she wrote the gatehouse section later.”

  Judith’s nod came slowly. “That’s very possible.” She hesitated, feeling she had missed something.

  But Renie had moved on: “What else is in that desk? Have you looked?”

  Judith had, in a cursory manner. “I found the will sitting right on top in one of the drawers. The rest seems to be household ledgers, old bills, and a bunch of stuff pertaining to the All Fools Revels. Apparently Aunt Pet kept her personal papers in her room. I suppose Charles and Claire keep theirs at their London flat.”

  Renie gave a short nod of agreement. Judith let her eyes roam the tall bookshelves, drawing a modicum of comfort from being surrounded by great works in a worthy setting.

  “Aunt Pet,” Judith said, seemingly from out of nowhere. “The old photo in her nightstand—I’ll bet it was Clarence Chelmsford. He looked familiar because he resembled his son, Chummy.”

  “Brilliant.” Renie’s tone was wry. “So what?”

  Judith made a self-deprecating gesture. “I was trying to add some detail to the big picture. The colonel brought that photo of his father, which must have been taken about the time of the ill-fated romance.”

  “Coz—we’re getting nowhere. I thought you were going to make notes.” Renie slung one pants-clad leg over the arm of the oak chair.

  Judith blinked. “It’s not a painting, it’s a tapestry. Just like the ones that are hung on these walls.” She waved a hand at the falconry scenes flanking the library door. “Each thread is separate, but when they’re woven together, they create a—”

  “—bunch of bull,” Renie interrupted. “So what if we’ve got two different young women in two different generations taking a hike out of Little Pauncefoot? Who cares if Aunt Pet pined away for Clarence Chelmsford? I love history, but at the moment, I don’t want to go back beyond last Friday. Who knew Aunt Pet had already made out that will and that it would stand up in court? The only person who comes to mind is Arthur Tinsley, and he doesn’t have a motive.”

  Having had Renie take the wind out of her sails, Judith was drooping behind the desk. “True. It’s just that I’m fascinated by little scraps of people’s lives, and I always feel as if…Ah!” Judith sat up and snapped her fingers. “That scrap of paper you found in Aunt Pet’s desk—what did it say?”

  Briefly, Renie looked confused. “I don’t remember…oh! It was a date.” She started to shrug, then gawked at Judith. “It was in April, like the twenty-ninth. No, it was the twenty-seventh.”

  Judith beamed at Renie. “What year?”

  Renie concentrated again. “There was no year. It was just the month and day. The year part had gotten torn off in the drawer, maybe.”

  Judith sprang out of the chair. “Let’s go see if we can find it. By the way, did you say ‘torn’ or ‘cut’?”

  Renie was hurrying after Judith, racing out of the library and up the main staircase to Aunt Pet’s third floor suite. “I said ‘torn.’ But come to think of it, the scrap could have been cut.”

  “Exactly,” Judith agreed as they reached the top of the stairs and knocked on the door to Aunt Pet’s rooms. “Now let’s see if we can—Hi, Dora,” she said as the maid opened the door. “Do I smell smoke?”

  Flustered, Dora backed into the sitting room. “No, certainly not. Well, a teensy bit, perhaps. It’s no cause for concern.” Her cheeks were very pink, and she stopped short of the door to her mistress’s boudoir. “Really. I’ll see to it.” With surprising agility, she whirled around, entered the bedroom, and slammed the door in the cousins’ faces.

  Dora hadn’t thrown the latch. Judith and Renie stormed into the room. Dora was pouring a glass of water into the wastebasket. She looked up, an embarrassed expression on her wrinkled face.

  “I miss her so,” she said, as if that explained everything. Maybe, Judith thought, it did. Dora started to cry. Judith put an arm around her shaking shoulders.

  “You see,” Dora went on, trying to stifle her tears, “I had no family of my own. Miss Ravenscroft was like a mother to me. And she lived ever so long. While she was alive, I was safe. Now she’s gone, and there’s nothing that stands between me and…” The quavery voice faded as Dora buried her head in Judith’s breast.

  Judith patted her gently. “I know. The very elderly are our barricade against mortality.” Fleetingly, she thought of Gertrude, facing off with Auntie Vance. The two old women danced through her mind, dueling with cribbage boards and soup ladles. As long as they could carry on the good fight, Judith was safe. Of course it was an illusion, but there was comfort in it, all the same.

  “Sludge,” Renie said in a disgusted voice. “There’s nothing in this wastebasket now but sludge.”

  Over the top of Dora’s head, Judith eyed the still smoking burned-out mess. “Was that emptied today, Dora?”

  “What?” The maid had stopped crying. With an unsteady step, she drew away. “Oh! No, Millie would have done, but she gave notice.”

  Judith nodded once, then fixed Dora with a kindly, if probing, eye. “Dora, did you set a fire in there over the weekend?”

  Dora was aghast. “Oh, never! That is, not until now! I wouldn’t burn anything of Miss Ravenscroft’s! But she’s gone, so it doesn’t belong to her anymore, does it?”

  Judith’s expression grew puzzled. Her gaze followed Renie, who was on her hands and knees, and had pulled out a desk drawer.

  “If there’s any more of that paper scrap here, I can’t dig it out,” she announced. “I’ve already wrecked two fingernails.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Judith said in a vague tone. “I think I know what it said.”

  Renie stood up. “You do? Have you replaced logic with psychic powers?”

  Judith gave Renie a crooked smile. “Maybe. The rest of the paper gave the rest of the date—which was last year. What else? It couldn’t be this year. The twenty-seventh is tomorrow. Aunt Pet couldn’t have written that—she died on the twenty-fifth.”

  Dora began to cry. Again.

  Arthur Tinsley had gone home early, according to the small sign on his office door.

  “I’m not walking to Mon Repos again,” Renie declared, looking as if she were taking a solemn oath.

  Judith started to argue, but stopped. “We won’t have to,” she said, waving frantically. “Alex! Yoo-hoo!”

  The red Alfa was purring down the High Street. Alex swerved to the curb, almost hitting a planter of petunias. Judith asked for a ride. Alex asked her where to. Judith told him. Renie took one look at her previous perch under the dashboard and shook her head.

  “Forget it. I’m not going.” She leaned against a lamppost and cr
ossed her arms in a defiant manner.

  Judith knew better than to plead. Besides, she didn’t blame Renie. “Okay,” she agreed, leaving the curb to whisper in Renie’s ear. “But go to the library. Look up hyoscyamine. I’ll meet you back at the house in half an hour.”

  With ill grace, Renie gave in. Judith slid into the Alfa and gave her driver a smile. “We’re trying to do something about the will,” she said as Alex turned onto the main road. “We’d like to get this gatehouse situation squared away.”

  Alex showed little interest in the cousins’ problems. “I won’t be thirty for over a year. What shall I do meanwhile? I’m not as keen as Nats on getting married.”

  It occurred to Judith that Alex was unusually subdued. He was also sober. Or so she thought, until he turned to look straight at her. The black eyes were definitely glassy. Involuntarily, Judith reached for the wheel.

  “Careful, Alex,” she said nervously. “Here’s the bridge.”

  Alex responded like a robot, scarcely looking at the road, but somehow managing to avert disaster. “Nats will find someone now that Paget’s out of the running. She’ll do well enough.” Alex was growing downright morose.

  They passed into the vale with its farms and orchards. Judith was on edge, poised to make another grab for the wheel or to hit the brake. She wondered if he was in a suicidal mood. Making an effort, Judith tried to cheer Alex.

  “You’ll have the interest to live on until you’re thirty,” she said, gritting her teeth as Alex swerved over the imaginary center line.

  Alex scoffed. “It’s next to nothing! Damn Charles anyhow!” Pressing down on the accelerator, he drove so fast that Judith had to yell at him to slow down or they’d roar right by the Tinsley house.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, relieved to be turning into the drive of Mon Repos. “Are the family finances in trouble?”

  Braking to a stop, Alex cradled the wheel and sighed heavily. “It’s a disaster. We got the bad news this afternoon. Charles has bungled everything. He’s no businessman, if you ask me! I used to think Aunt Pet put him in charge and then set him an’ Claire up. Now I wonner.” Alex’s words were growing slurred. “Was’t t’other way ’round?”