by Maia Chance
Berta dug a tin of Rold Golds and a Hershey’s bar from her suitcase. “Come along, Mrs. Woodby. I shall create a distraction while you purloin the diary.”
We poked our heads out the door, looking for Nurse Astrid. The coast was clear.
Grace’s room was right next door to ours. Her smile faded when she saw that I’d tagged along. “Why’s she here?” she asked Berta.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I wouldn’t dream of tattling to your mother about the pretzels and chocolate.”
“All right, come in,” Grace said, “but let’s make it snappy. Nurse Astrid is always popping up when you least expect it.”
While Berta and Grace haggled over the price of the Rold Golds, I scanned the room. Aha. That must be it: that green leather book on the bedside table. I strolled over, as though to look out the window.
Grace cut me off, snatched up the diary, and hugged it to her chest. “Fine, one dollar,” she said to Berta. “I’ll just find my coin purse.”
Berta sent me a frown.
Sorry, I mouthed.
* * *
“Are you certain you do not wish to pop into a bathing suit?” Berta said as we made our way to the outdoor swimming pool. “It will feel so lovely plunging into the cool water.”
“Not as lovely as retaining my last shreds of pride,” I said. I did not speak with total conviction, because I still wore the regulation bloomers, blouse, and tennis shoes. “Anyway, I had my share of cold water during my mineral bath therapy after luncheon. My toes turned blue for a minute.”
Berta went to the swimming pool. I found a shady spot on a wicker chaise, plopped Cedric by my feet, and slathered on a thick coat of Pond’s Vanishing Cream to protect my skin from the sun. Then I settled back with the copy of Thrilling Romance I’d brought from my suitcase.
I began to read “The Captivating First Installment” of a story titled “Hello, Darling.” Beautiful, petulant farm girl Maude, staying in the lavish Chicago apartment of her aunt Clarinda, meets the smoldering Bill Hampton at a party. Bill has a penchant for beautiful, petulant farm girls. Maude has a penchant for secretive baddies with broad shoulders. What could go wrong?
Maybe I was too old to be reading that sort of thing, but the fact of the matter was, I was a rookie when it came to men. Every day I saw flappers playing fellows like forty-seven-string pedal harps while I was stuck on the bongo drum.
I was a rookie when it came to love, too. I’d never loved Alfie, and during our marriage he’d kept himself busy giving other ladies experience. And Ralph Oliver? No flowers and bows and cupids there, and certainly no I love yous. Before he left for Cuba, we’d been too busy dancing, flirting, kissing, and drinking like it was going out of style. Sure, I had a soft spot for Ralph. I might’ve even been falling in love. But when it came to talk of feelings, well, both of us had kept as quiet as a queen’s burp.
I continued reading. Insects droned. A gardener was trimming a nearby hedge, and his clippers went zing zing zing. People splashed and murmured in the swimming pool. I closed my eyes and sank into sleep.
“Is this your dog?” a man said sometime later.
I opened my eyes and struggled upright. “What? Oh. Hello, Mr. Hathorne. Yes, he’s my dog.”
“Found him wandering across the lawn.” Raymond placed Cedric on my lap, sat down on the chaise next to mine, and studied my tennis shoes. “Say, Mrs. Woodby, you look like a million bucks in those ground-grippers.”
A million bucks? Hah. I had no beau, zero highballs, and I was wearing flat shoes. I didn’t feel like a million bucks. I felt like a buck-fifty.
“You know, despite everything your mother told me about you, I’d love to take you for a drink,” Raymond said.
“What did my mother tell you?”
“That you’re an angel.”
“She lied.”
“Trouble is, there isn’t anything but seltzer water for miles around. I shake a mean cocktail, by the way.”
“Do you?”
“Not that I admitted that to your mother. I caught a whiff of temperance about her.”
“Good nose.”
“Lucky I’m one swell actor.”
“Oh yes?”
“In an amateur sense, of course, when I’m not minding the soda pop business. Shakespeare’s always been a favorite.”
“Shakespeare? How hoity-toity. You must be an excellent actor—and you must have a wonderful memory, too.”
“Oh, I do.”
“You could be acting right now,” I said.
“I could be, couldn’t I? Say, stop by my place anytime for that cocktail. I purchased the Pitridge estate outside of Hare’s Hollow—do you know it?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
“Beautiful old place. Desperately needs repairs, of course. Plenty of time for that.” Raymond stood and strolled away. He looked a bit like a pirate in those bloomers. Ahoy.
“What’s the matter with me?” I muttered to Cedric. “Making googly eyes at Mr. Handsome the soda pop sultan?”
Cedric twisted himself to lick his tummy.
“You’re right. Ralph is out of the picture. And soda pop sounds delicious in this heat.”
4
Berta and I made our third attempt to retrieve Grace Whiddle’s diary after lights out that night. I had fallen asleep promptly, my nerves threadbare as the result of another round on the hip-slimming machine, an evening vigorology session, and rye bran biscuits for dessert. Berta had stayed up late, delivering her black-market wares. She had taken pretzel and chocolate orders from everyone in the East Ward except Muffy.
Berta shook me awake.
“All right, all right,” I mumbled, groping for my dressing gown. “Hold your horses.”
First, I tiptoed out into the corridor and twisted Grace’s doorknob. Locked.
“Locked?” Berta whispered when I returned to our room.
“Yes. On to plan B.”
Plan B was infiltrating Grace’s room by crawling along the ledge that ran outside our second-story windows. Thick ivy grew on the stones, and before dinner, Berta and I had tugged the ivy to test its strength. We’d managed to rip off only a few vines.
Berta toddled to our open window and removed the screen. “Go on, then.”
“I still don’t know why I’m doing this.” I straddled the windowsill, and my bare toes dangled in the warm night air. The lawn was a long way down.
“The fact that you are half my age springs to mind,” Berta whispered back.
“I think you’re scared of heights.”
“Being twice your age seems reason enough, does it not?”
I found a toehold, grabbed on to ivy, and brought my other leg out so I was standing tippy-toe on the stone ledge, fists full of crunchy vines. I inched over, ivy leaves tickling my face. Then there was the death-drop below me. I wouldn’t consider that part.
I made it the few yards to Grace’s open window. I peeked in.
Grace lay in bed, faintly illuminated by the driveway lamps outside. Her head tossed from side to side and she muttered incoherently. She was dreaming.
I slung my leg over the windowsill. Grace started thrashing in bed and muttering more loudly.
Uh-oh.
I pulled my leg back out, inched along the ledge, and clambered back over my own windowsill. I thumped to the floor.
“Well?” Berta whispered.
“She’s asleep, but just barely.” I picked an ivy leaf from my hair. “It’s a no-go.”
Berta sighed.
“The funny thing was, Grace was wearing makeup,” I said.
“Makeup? She was not wearing any during the day.”
“I know, but she is now. Mascara, lipstick, the works. And she’d done something with her hair.”
“How peculiar.”
“I know.”
* * *
In the morning, Berta and I trudged to our vigorology session on the rear lawn. I put Cedric on the grass and he romped to the shade. Wise pup. Violet Wi
lbur, the home décor authoress, was already marching in place on knobby legs. Red-haired rich boy Hermie Inchbald looked puffy and bad-tempered. Pete Schlump, the disgraced Yankee pitcher, stretched his brawny arms overhead. Grace Whiddle and her bejeweled future mother-in-law, Muffy Morris, weren’t there yet. The Canadian soda pop sultan Raymond Hathorne grinned as I drew near.
“Good morning, angel,” he said to me. “I see you got your beauty sleep. Nice stilts, by the way.”
“Who, me?” I said. I had thought my legs resembled blocks of cheese in those bloomers.
“Now begin stretches!” the vigorology instructor, Ulf, yelled as he strode toward us. He was once again in nothing but small white shorts. His chest muscles jumped under leathery skin.
We all tried to touch our toes. Some of us failed.
I was just squinting at the blazing sun overhead, trying to calculate the time, when a woman’s scream pealed out from the mansion.
Everyone froze mid-bend. A bird twittered.
More screams.
Ulf took off at a jog across the lawn. Violet hugged herself, and Raymond, Pete, and Hermie hurried toward the mansion.
“Come on,” I whispered to Berta. I grabbed Cedric from his shady spot and started toward the mansion, too.
Berta caught up with me. “What are you doing, Mrs. Woodby?”
“You heard the screams.”
“I am not in the habit of running toward screaming.”
“But it’s a perfect distraction. Grace’s diary is in her room. Unguarded.”
“The ward is locked.”
“I don’t think I’ll last another day here without starting to hallucinate talking strips of bacon, Berta, so if there’s even a possible opportunity to collect that diary and skate, well, I’m taking it.”
Inside the lobby, people clustered around a sobbing blonde in a nurse’s uniform.
“Calm yourself, Nurse Beaulah,” Chisholm said to her. “It simply will not do for you to become hysterical.”
Nurse Beaulah sobbed still more loudly. Her tall, curvaceous body looked like it might pop her white pinafore.
“Now, what do you mean, Mrs. Morris is dead?” Chisholm asked her.
Muffy Morris dead? I looked around for Hermie and spotted him a few paces away, his face as white as skimmed milk.
“She’s in her—her—her room!” Nurse Beaulah wailed.
“Did you leave the ward unlocked?”
“Yeah.” Beaulah smeared liquefied kohl under her eyes.
“Everyone stay here while I step into my office to telephone the police,” Chisholm said. “No one should go upstairs.”
This could be our chance to nab Grace’s diary, because if Nurse Beaulah had left the East Ward unlocked, Berta and I would have the place to ourselves.
Consulting each other was not necessary; Berta and I slipped past the clump of people and up the stairs. No one stopped us. Chisholm had already gone, and Nurse Beaulah’s theatrical sobs and heaving bosom held everyone else rapt for the moment.
* * *
“Just think,” I whispered to Berta as we slipped into the—unlocked!—East Ward. “We’ll be eating a celebratory lunch at the Foghorn. I’m going to have the chicken-fried steak.”
“How can you think of eating when there is a corpse on the premises?” Berta asked.
“I don’t know.”
We tiptoed down the corridor.
“Muffy’s room is third on the right, I believe,” Berta said. “That is the only room I did not enter last night to deliver the goods.”
“Your aptitude for criminal lingo is astonishing, Berta.”
“Thank you.”
Sirens wailed in the distance, tinny but coming closer. The police station must’ve been just down the road. “I’d like to see her for myself,” I whispered. I peeked through Muffy’s door, which had been left open. I recoiled.
Berta gasped.
Muffy Morris was sprawled facedown on the floor in a pink dressing gown. Her blond head was cocked at a terrible angle and her slippered feet were skewed. Her outstretched hand clutched an empty booze bottle by its neck. Diamond rings glittered on her fingers. She looked stiff.
“Rigor mortis.” Berta touched the locket she always wore. “Oh, is there anything more appalling?”
Cedric whined and fidgeted in my arms. I placed him on the floor.
“Looks like Muffy kicked the bucket in the middle of a bender,” I said. The desk chair was on its side and the potted fern on the windowsill had been knocked over, scattering black dirt.
“Staggering drunk,” Berta said. “We should go.” The sirens were growing louder.
“That looks like a rum bottle she’s holding, doesn’t it?” I went over and peered at the bottle. A little brown liquid remained inside. Palm trees and the words RHUM CARIBE decorated the label.
“We really should go to Grace’s room, now, Mrs. Woodby.”
“Funny—that’s a full bottle of gin over there on the desk.”
“Do not dare nick that.”
“No! I mean, why would Muffy get woozled on rum, which she said was vile, when she could’ve been drinking gin? I want to check the bathroom.” I stepped into the small pink-tiled bathroom. It reeked of alcohol, and a faint garlicky smell arose from the urine in the unflushed lavatory. I gagged, covered my mouth, and darted out.
Sirens wailed just outside.
“Mrs. Woodby, we really must attempt to locate Grace’s diary before it is too late. It sounds as though the police have arrived.”
Just outside, the sirens blipped off.
“You’re right.” I scooped up Cedric. No sooner had we entered the hallway than we heard men’s voices outside the ward’s main door.
“Quickly,” Berta whispered. “There is a second stairway at the other end of the corridor. I dodged into it briefly last night to hide from a nurse when I was making my deliveries.”
We turned tail and ran. Along the way, we passed Grace’s room. The door was open. I glanced in. Neat as a pin. “We’ll search it later,” I said.
“I do not believe there is any point.”
“What do you mean?”
“I shall tell you when we are no longer in peril.”
We pushed through a door and shut ourselves into what looked like a service stair.
“Muffy Morris was murdered,” I whispered.
“Do not dramatize. You should have outgrown that when you formed your first wrinkle.”
“What wrinkle?” My hand flew to my forehead. I thought I was the only one who’d noticed that. “Listen. Muffy hated rum. So why would she drink herself to death with a bottle of rum?”
“Perhaps her tastes changed.” Berta hurried down the steps.
I followed. “Not since yesterday. Something is fishy.”
“Be that as it may, it is none of our affair.”
“Should I tell the police my suspicions?”
“And thus reveal to them that you were snooping at the crime scene? No. At any rate, the more pressing problem is, Grace Whiddle has flown the coop.”
I stopped on the stairs. “What do you mean?”
“You did not see? Her room was empty.”
“I simply thought it was clean.”
“No. I suspect she’s gone. You see, she hinted that she might flee during our chat yesterday. She does not wish to marry young Gilbert Morris. It is not a love match.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all this?”
“Because I believed we would collect the diary before any of it became relevant.”
We reached the bottom of the stairs, swung through a door, and found ourselves blinking in sunlight at the side of the mansion.
“Grace scarpers the very same morning her future mother-in-law dies under suspicious circumstances?” I said. “Berta, I don’t like this one little bit.”
5
Oodles of policemen arrived, and Willow Acres was plunged into pandemonium. Since Berta and I had decided to keep mum about having inspected the sce
ne of the crime, we wouldn’t be edisoned by the police. We decided to hang about until the police were done in the East Ward, and then we’d grab our suitcases and leave. If Grace and her diary weren’t at Willow Acres, the Discreet Retrieval Agency needn’t be there, either.
I saw Chisholm speaking with one of the other doctors in the lobby. I sidled up to him and coughed.
Chisholm didn’t notice me and kept talking in low tones. “… and she had indeed taken the full dose of her cure last night. Nurse Beaulah removed the empty vial from her room.”
I jabbed Chisholm with my elbow.
He turned. “A simple ‘excuse me’ would be sufficient, Lola.”
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” I said, “but I think Grace Whiddle is gone.”
Chisholm turned putty-colored. “What do you mean, ‘gone’?”
“She never turned up for the morning vigorology session, and I—um, there is talk that her room has been cleared out.”
“Oh dear heaven. First Mrs. Morris drinks herself into an early grave, and now—” Chisholm pressed his lips tight.
“Is that the verdict, then?” I asked. “Death by tippling?”
“Lola, would it be too terribly much to ask for you not to meddle?” Chisholm and the other doctor hurried away.
In under ten minutes, it was confirmed that Grace Whiddle had packed her bags and fled. Another ten minutes led to an admission by the swimming pool cleaner that he’d seen her burrowing, suitcase in hand, through a hedge at the crack of dawn. Several minutes after that, the milkman reported that he’d seen Grace Whiddle step into the backseat of a blue Cole Aero-Eight motorcar on the road outside Willow Acres, after which the Aero-Eight had headed west.
“She planned it,” I said to Berta.
“Indeed. With at least one accomplice.”
Chisholm pleaded with the patients to go ahead with their usual daily regimes, but no one listened. I heard someone say the local press was already clamoring at the gates.
“We should telephone Mrs. Whiddle,” Berta said.
“Probably.”
We left the chaos of the lobby and went in search of a telephone.
“Mrs. Whiddle won’t be pleased with this new development,” I said.