The Doctor Makes a Dollhouse Call

by Robin Hathaway

  Gradually, the guests (if that’s the correct designation for funeral attenders) began taking their leave and Fenimore was able to make his way into the dining room. Soon all that remained were himself and members of the Pancoast family. The adults, that is. The children, twelve and under, had been excluded on the pretext that exposure to death might upset them (although they were exposed to a steady diet of violent death on television every day).

  Fenimore found a cup of coffee and a chair. Once seated, he sipped his coffee and settled back to wait for someone to broach the subject which had brought them all there.

  CHAPTER 5

  Marie, Pamela’s mother, was the first to raise the subject. She drew up a chair beside Fenimore and confided, “My daughter Pamela was too young to record her burial wishes, but I did overhear her say once that she wanted to be cremated and ‘tossed to the four winds.’” The cremation had been taken care of, but the contents of the small wooden box on the mantel still awaited disposal. How this was to be accomplished had yet to be decided, although several suggestions had been made.

  Adam, the physics teacher, had suggested they divide the ashes into four parts, check the direction of the wind each day, i.e., north, south, east, or west, and scatter one fourth of the amount on the appropriate day. Tom had come up with another, less scientific scheme: wait for the hurricane season, toss the whole lot out at once, and trust the wind to carry the ashes off in all directions—and with much less fuss.

  Fenimore was impressed by both ideas, but thought the latter had more flair.

  “We do appreciate your coming … .” Marie murmured to Fenimore.

  “When we know how busy you are …” Judith said.

  “And such a long distance …” Emily added.

  It was obvious that Emily had not informed the family about her phone call to the doctor. And Fenimore had not informed Emily about the other, more urgent reason which had brought him hurtling down to Seacrest.

  “Nonsense,” Fenimore assured them, almost adding, “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” but caught himself in time. Awful how frequently funerals took on the character of a party, he thought. But, after scanning the faces of his companions (their color and animation had increased markedly since he had arrived), he revised his opinion. A little party atmosphere was probably a good thing. The Irish Catholics had the right idea—providing plenty of whiskey at their wakes. He could use a drink himself right now. Unfortunately, the Pancoasts were Presbyterians.

  “Would you like some sherry, Doctor?” Judith had read his mind.

  He would have preferred Scotch, but he settled for sherry.

  When everyone was supplied with refreshments, the aunts with their cups of tea and Marie and Fenimore with their thimblefuls of sherry, he began gingerly, “I wonder if you could tell me what time you discovered the … uh … deceased?”

  Marie looked away in distress. Judith and Emily exchanged glances, each hoping the other would answer. Finally Judith spoke. “We had just finished a game of charades. It was beginning to grow dark. I think it was about five o’clock.”

  While Fenimore began his impromptu interrogation, the other family members drew near. Even Mildred, who had been huddled in a corner with her cellular phone, put it away and joined the others.

  “And after you found her, what did you do then?”

  “Edgar tried mouth-to-mouth resus … oh, dear …” Emily could not go on.

  “And I called the ambulance,” Judith said.

  “They came right away,” Mildred put in.

  “Yes, they were very quick,” Susanne agreed.

  “I believe,” Adam said, “the preliminary cause of death was ‘asphyxiation due to aspiration.’”

  “He means she choked,” Tom broke in, helping himself to the sherry decanter. (From somewhere he had acquired a large tumbler.)

  “Was anyone present in the house besides the family?” Fenimore asked.

  “No,” Judith said firmly.

  “There was Carrie,” Emily corrected her.

  “Oh yes. But she just popped in at the end.”

  “Carrie?”

  “A child from the village. We hire her sometimes to help clean up after parties,” Judith explained. “She comes from a large family and appreciates the chance to earn a little extra money.”

  “Did Carrie have anything to do with the food preparations?”

  “Oh no. I did all that myself.” Judith was unable to conceal a note of pride.

  “I peeled the potatoes and onions,” Emily reminded her mildly.

  “In fact,” Judith continued, “I sent Carrie home right after the … when the paramedics left. And Emily and I did the cleanup ourselves the next day.”

  “If dinner was over, why was Pamela in the dining room—alone?” pressed Fenimore.

  “She wanted to finish her crossword puzzle ‘in peace,’” Susanne explained.

  Judith looked slightly embarrassed. “You see, Doctor, when we play charades, we get quite raucous.”

  “Pamela was always stretching her mind.” Edgar quickly came to his daughter’s defense. “She didn’t have time for frivolity.”

  “Did anything else happen prior to her death, besides the two upsets in the dollhouse?”

  “Two upsets?” Edgar repeated.

  The sisters looked embarrassed.

  “Yes,” Judith finally answered their questioning stares. “The dining room in the dollhouse was disturbed once before you came.

  “We blamed it on mice,” Emily murmured.

  “Why the third degree, Doc?” Tom, fortified with sherry, broke the strained silence.

  (Emily and Judith were the only ones who knew about the doctor’s avocation.)

  Fenimore cleared his throat. “I’m afraid I’m here under false pretenses.” He looked only faintly chagrined. “You see, I learned yesterday from the coroner that the autopsy report on Pamela disagreed with the preliminary cause of death.”

  He had everyone’s fixed attention.

  “Now they believe she was poisoned.”

  “I knew it!” cried Mildred. “Pluto moved into the Twelth House today, and that always means disaster!” Her comment was punctuated by the doorbell’s harsh clamor.

  Judith started up, but Dr. Fenimore placed a restraining hand on her arm. “Let me go,” he said gently. “That will be the police.”

  CHAPTER 6

  When the police had finished their questioning and left with their standard warning, “No one is to leave the area until this matter is cleared up,” Fenimore set about restoring the family’s equilibrium.

  “It’s not enough to lose your daughter,” Edgar fumed, “but you also have to put up with the police.”

  “Don’t, dear.” Marie squeezed his hand.

  “It’s just routine, sir,” Fenimore soothed. “Until the real culprit is found.”

  “I think it’s dreadful,” Emily said. “Why, it was probably a simple case of food poisoning.”

  “I’m sure everything I cooked was fresh, Emily,” Judith turned on her sister.

  “Oh. I didn’t mean—” Emily bit her tongue.

  “Have they determined what poison was used?” Adam asked.

  Fenimore nodded. “But I’m not at liberty to divulge—”

  “Say—exactly what do you have to do with all this, anyway?” Tom demanded. “Are you some kind of a private dick or something?”

  Fenimore coughed. “Let’s say I’m a family friend with experience in criminal investigations and a knowledge of police procedures. I thought I might be useful to you, but if you would prefer …”

  “Oh no, Doctor.” Judith was aghast. “Please stay.”

  “Yes. We’re so grateful.” Emily cast Tom a withering look.

  The others nodded in agreement. Tom left the room in a sulk.

  “Perhaps she had some jealous colleague in the academic world who wanted to do her in,” suggested Adam. A member of the academic community himself, he knew the power of such emoti
ons.

  “So Professor what’s-his-name crept in the back door with a spoonful of cyanide, carried it into the dining room where Pamela just happened to be, and said, ‘Here, dearie, have a taste,’ and left the same way.” Mildred’s voice had a hysterical edge.

  “What about the dollhouse?” Marie reminded them. “Only a member of the family would think of disturbing that.”

  Avoiding one another’s eyes, they silently pondered her words.

  “Anyone for a drink?” Tom stood in the doorway waving a bottle of brandy.

  “Oh, Tom, you’ve been into the medicine cabinet!” Judith cried.

  “I think we could all use a little medicine tonight.” He splashed a large dose of the brown liquid into the tumbler that had recently held his sherry.

  “Tom, I want to go home,” Mildred pleaded. “I promised the sitter we’d be home hours ago.”

  “That’s my wife for you. She’s suspected of murder and worries about the sitter!” He wasn’t about to give up his hard-won prize so easily.

  “I think we should all go home,” Fenimore said quickly, “and give the aunts a rest.” For a moment his detective self gave way to his physician self; he had noticed that the two elderly women looked worn-out.

  Everyone looked at the aunts and came to the same conclusion. Susanne and Adam started to move to the coat closet. The rest followed. Even Tom gulped his drink and accepted his coat from his wife.

  Fenimore was the last to leave. “Could you give me Carrie’s address? I’d like to drop by and have a word with her.”

  Judith gave him her address and the directions to her house.

  “If it’s agreeable,” he said, “I’d like to do some unofficial snooping.”

  “Oh, Doctor, thank you,” Emily said.

  “We didn’t dare hope …” Judith’s voice overflowed with gratitude. She knew the doctor only accepted the cases of very special friends.

  “I’ll be in touch.” He set off on foot in search of Carrie, whistling. Suddenly remembering the somber nature of the occasion, Fenimore stopped. But as soon as he was out of earshot, he took it up again even more vigorously.

  CHAPTER 7

  Carrie lived in a small cottage tucked behind the inn, on the wrong side of town. Fenimore decided to walk. He could always think better on foot. Carrie was sixteen, the oldest child in a family of six, Judith had told him. She served as a surrogate mother to her younger brothers and sisters because her mother was an alcoholic. Her father had left them years ago.

  The house was a summer bungalow that someone had attempted, ineffectively, to winterize. Dirty sheets of plastic were tacked across the windows on the sea side of the house and tufts of pink insulation stuck out between the windows and their wooden frames. Tacked to the front door was a handwritten note: “Bell don’t work. Knock loud.” When Fenimore knocked, a teenage girl answered the door. Two towheaded youngsters clung to her legs and an odor of cabbage and cats overwhelmed him.

  “Are you Carrie?”

  She nodded.

  She looked tired and older than her years. He was sorry he had come without warning. He hastened to make amends. “Sorry to burst in on you like this. I’m Dr. Fenimore, a friend of the Pancoasts. I hear you were helping out there on Thanksgiving Day, when the unfortunate … er … accident occurred.”

  “Oh yes. I came to wash up.” Two more towheads, of varying sizes, appeared behind their sister to stare owl-like at Fenimore.

  “I wonder if we might talk?”

  “Sure.” She shook herself free of the children. “Scat, now.”

  They scattered like leaves to the four corners, but remained in the room. She led him to a decrepit couch in front of a cold fireplace. A pair of rusted andirons stood inside, but there were no logs in sight. Carrie unceremoniously dismissed a limp gray cat from the seat of a wooden rocker. The chair had obviously seen heavy use—one arm was missing and the brown paint was worn and chipped. A TV droned with a soap opera in another part of the house.

  “There was something funny about Miss Pamela’s death, wasn’t there?” Carrie took her seat in the rocker. “She didn’t choke like they said, did she?”

  Modern telecommunications were no match for the village grapevine, Fenimore decided. “That’s right,” he said.

  She waited expectantly for more information, but none was forthcoming.

  “What time did you arrive at the Pancoasts’?”

  She frowned. “It was getting dark. It must have been nearly five. I told Miss Judith I couldn’t come earlier because I had my own family to feed.”

  “Of course. When you arrived, what was the first thing you did?”

  “Well, I came in the back door—they always leave it open. The kitchen was a terrible mess. Pots and pans all over the place. Miss Judith is a wonderful cook, but sloppy!” She raised her eyebrows. “Then I decided to check the dining room and see if the table had been cleared. Of course it wasn’t. The dessert dishes were still there. But things were even worse than usual. Chairs were turned upside down, dishes were on the floor. I remember thinking, it must have been some party!”

  Fenimore waited.

  “And then I noticed Miss Pamela—her head was on the table. At first I thought she had fallen asleep or passed out. Sometimes folks take a bit too much on the holidays,” she confided knowingly.

  Fenimore nodded encouragingly. “What did you do next?”

  “Well, I was trying to decide whether to wake her. She’s a bit of a crank at the best of times—” She placed a hand over her mouth, remembering she was speaking of the dead.

  Fenimore smiled. “Go on.”

  “I decided she’d take my head off if I woke her, so I quietly cleared the plates around her and went back to the kitchen.”

  “And then?”

  “I hadn’t been there more than a minute when I heard someone scream. Then there was all this commotion. There’s a little window in the top of the kitchen door. I peeked through that and saw Mr. Edgar shaking his daughter. Then he dragged her down on the floor and started breathing mouth to mouth. Miss Judith almost knocked me over when she burst into the kitchen. She wanted to use the phone in the pantry to call the ambulance.”

  “What did you do then?”

  She shrugged. “I started to clean up the kitchen.”

  “In spite of all the commotion?”

  “Oh yes. You see, I’m used to commotion.” She nodded at the towheads around the room. Two had crept over to her while she was talking. One hung on the back of her chair. The other knelt beside her, his head in her lap. She had been stroking his hair absently as she talked. “Not a week goes by that we don’t call the Emergency because one of them’s fallen out of a tree or swallowed a button or something.” When Carrie smiled, her face lost its careworn expression and Fenimore was reminded how young she was.

  “I see.” He smiled. “You do have your hands full.” He glanced around the room. “I’m sorry to have taken so much of your time.” He stood up.

  “No trouble.” She gently removed her brother’s head from her lap and rose too. “Wouldn’t you like a cup of tea?” Belatedly, she remembered her manners.

  “No thanks. I have to get back to Philadelphia.”

  From Carrie’s expression, he might have been returning to Mars.

  He shook her hand. “You’ve been very helpful.” As he started out the door, he turned. “No one else came into the kitchen while you were there?”

  “No, sir. Except Miss Judith—to tell me to go home. Before I’d half finished the cleanup too. And the next day she came here to pay me my money. The full amount, although I told her it wasn’t right.”

  He thanked Carrie again and left her as he had found her, standing in the doorway, two children clinging to her. Confound it, where was the child’s mother? It wasn’t right shoving all that responsibility on a teenager. She should be at her studies. Or with friends—having a good time. Absorbed in his anger, he almost forgot where he was going. Then he saw the lighted s
ign. SEACREST INN. It had grown dark while he was talking to Carrie. And colder. A sea breeze in November was no joke. Pulling his coat more closely about him, he headed for the glowing sign.

  CHAPTER 8

  The bar wasn’t crowded. But there were more people than Fenimore would have expected on an off-season evening. The decor was “fake seacoast.” Garish reproductions of sailing ships alternated with fishnets and lobster pots along the walls. A large ship’s wheel hung behind the bar. Anchors decorated every available surface—napkins, glasses, ashtrays, and coasters. Fenimore supposed that the captain’s cap that the bartender wore at such a rakish angle had once been white. He ordered Scotch.

  At the other end of the bar a small group of locals were discussing something in subdued tones. Fenimore could barely hear them, but every now and then a voice would rise and he caught the name “Pancoast.” He knew the family had founded the village of Seacrest before the American Revolution. There was a Pancoast Street and a Pancoast Library. Any happening in the Pancoast family—birth, wedding, death—would be of major interest to the inhabitants of the village. If the group at the end of the bar had access to the same grapevine as Carrie—there could be no doubt about what topic they were discussing.

  Gradually Fenimore began to grow warmer. He shed his coat, folded it, and placed it on the barstool next to him.

  “Remember old Caleb Pancoast?” A voice rumbled down the bar. “There was a seaman for you.” The voice went on to relate a sea story of which Fenimore caught only snatches.