by Maia Chance
Berta and I went to the stuffy kitchen. I opened the window, kicked off my shoes, and fed and watered Cedric. Berta assembled a pot, a wooden spoon, and a cutting board.
“You’re going to cook in this heat?” I said.
“Yes, and I am certain you will eat what I make.” Berta poked her head into the icebox. “Oh dear. We are out of butter. I meant to make a pot pie, but I can’t make the crust without butter.”
I thought of Berta’s flaky golden pastry crust. It seemed that my life would go from problematic to blissful if only I could eat some of that crust. “I’ll go with you to the shop. It’s so stuffy in here.”
“What about Grace? If she escapes, Mrs. Whiddle will not pay us.”
In fact, Mrs. Whiddle probably wasn’t going to pay us, anyway. Telephoning her had been wishful thinking on my part. After all, she’d fired Berta and me. Still, I hoped she’d be so overjoyed to have her daughter back that she’d get lavish with the checkbook.
We peeked into the bedroom. Grace was sprawled and snoring.
“She won’t be waking up anytime soon,” I said. “But we can lock her into the apartment, if that’s any consolation.”
“All right. We will not be gone more than ten minutes, anyway.”
Berta and I left Cedric snoozing on his pouf in the kitchen and walked out into the soft summer evening.
Along the way, we passed a newsstand. The proprietor was just closing up.
I stopped. “Excuse me, but do you have the latest issue of Thrilling Romance?” I asked him.
He laughed. “Do you know how many birds have asked me just that question today?”
I sighed. “Thanks anyway—”
“Why the long face? I got a few copies left.”
Yippee!
The cover featured a girl in golf togs getting a kiss from a gorgeous fellow. Since I hadn’t brought my handbag, Berta paid for the magazine and I rolled it up and stuck it in the pocket of my dress.
At the market around the corner, Berta purchased a half pound of butter, and we set off toward home. We rounded the corner and stepped out into the street in order to cross.
A shiny black motorcar thundered toward us.
I froze. Berta grabbed my elbow and yanked me back to the curb.
The motorcar squealed to a stop. It was a Chevrolet with a smashed front fender. The rear door fell open.
“Gee, that’s some real fancy footwork for a couple of overfed dames,” Baby Doll Mallone chirped from the shadowed interior.
“Hello, Miss Mallone,” I said coolly, even though my heart was throbbing. Eggie—aka Mr. Egghead—was crammed beside Baby Doll. The chauffeur was a mere silhouette behind the wheel.
“Enough with the chitchat,” Baby Doll said. “We got business to take care of.” She shimmied out of the motorcar. I happened to notice, even in my fog of panic, that her shoes were the bee’s knees: red kid leather with a curvaceous, teetering-high heel.
Eggie held an enormous pistol across his thighs.
“Gun,” I whispered to Berta.
“Run!” Berta whispered back.
“Don’t even think about running or we’ll shoot you down like a couple a Easter Bunnies,” Baby Doll said.
“You’d shoot the Easter Bunny?” I cried. “You’re sick!”
Baby Doll smiled. “I know. Ain’t it grand? Get in.”
Eggie lumbered out and grabbed Berta. Berta swore in Swedish and kicked, but Eggie stuffed her into the backseat.
Baby Doll jammed what felt like a gun barrel into my ribs and then somehow I was in the backseat, too. Doors slammed. Keys rattled. Eggie and Baby Doll got in beside the chauffeur, and we were off.
I jiggled the door handle. Locked. “What does Mr. Van Hoogenband want from us, anyway?” I demanded. Could this really be all about protecting his spoiled daughter, Josie?
“Beats me,” Baby Doll said.
Berta leaned forward. “You will not get away with this,” she said. “You cannot simply muscle people about.”
Baby Doll peered back at us, only her eyes visible between the top of the seat and the brim of her cloche. “Course we can. Do it all the time! Where you been living, lady? Inside Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes?” She gave a tinkling laugh.
The chauffeur grinned and Eggie gurgled.
* * *
The Van Hoogenband house was one of the few freestanding old city mansions left over from the last century. Many had been razed to make way for apartment buildings, and only the really, really Big Old Money still had mansions surrounded on all sides by gardens and iron fences. The Van Hoogenband place was stone and redbrick with all sorts of spiny turrets and pointed windows, and every last window shone yellow.
The chauffeur pulled through a gate and parked at the side of the house. Baby Doll and Eggie urged Berta and me out of the backseat with their pistols—Berta had no choice but to leave her handbag and her butter behind—up stone steps, and inside.
As we passed through a corridor, I happened to glance up at a large oil painting. I blinked.
It was the same painting that I’d seen delivered to Chisholm’s house yesterday: The Heyliger still life with the lobster and the wineglasses and lemons. Maybe Chisholm had objected to the booze in the picture and passed it off to Van Hoogenband.
I elbowed Berta. She saw the painting and her eyebrows lifted, inquiring.
“I saw the same painting at Chisholm’s house,” I whispered.
“Put a sock in it,” Eggie said.
We were shown through rooms with more fancy millwork, flocked wallpaper, and Tiffany lamps than a crazy lady’s dollhouse. In a half-lit library, Eggie shoved us down on a couch and tied our hands together at our backs.
“You gottta tie their ankles, too, you dumbbell!” Baby Doll said.
Eugene Van Hoogenband strolled in. Baby Doll and Eggie hurried over to the wall, where they stood like guards.
Van Hoogenband wore evening clothes, and pomade glossed his dark hair. He stood before Berta and me, hands behind his back, looking thoughtfully down.
I fought the urge to say something cute about the weather.
“At last we meet,” Van Hoogenband said. “You have given me a great deal of trouble, you know. You live up to your name, I am loath to admit. The Discreet Retrieval Agency. Discreet, indeed. Wily, I would even venture to say.”
He didn’t sound sarcastic.
“Say, Mr. Van Hoogenband,” I said, “did Violet Wilbur happen to decorate this house of yours recently?”
Van Hoogenband narrowed his eyes. “Yes, but I can’t think why you’d mention that now.”
“She has a terrible habit of straying from the main topic,” Berta told Van Hoogenband.
That settled it: Violet Wilbur dealt in forged paintings. The sneak!
Van Hoogenband said, “First, you break into my country house and confront my innocent young daughter, leaving her this.” He extracted the business card we’d given Josie, the one blotched with mascara. “Taunting me with the blacked-out street number, blacked out with some infernal substance that even the most careful procedures could not remove.”
Tell me about it. That mascara wouldn’t budge in a hurricane.
“Then—taunting me again—you evaded my helpers not once but twice, first with a sudden maneuver with your motorcar that caused rather costly damage to mine, and then, convincing those fools—” Van Hoogenband threw a dark look at Baby Doll and Eggie. “—that you were residing in a yacht in the Hare’s Hollow Marina. I went there. What did I find? A ghost ship! No sign of you!”
Berta and I were silent.
“Must I convince you to talk?” Mr. Van Hoogenband said. “Because I do have ways to make people talk. My family didn’t get where it is today by sitting back and allowing others to decide our fates. No, the Van Hoogenbands are leaders. Doers.”
Berta said, “What was it you wished to discuss, Mr. Van Hoogenband?”
“What is it I wish to discuss?” Van Hoogenband threw back his head and laug
hed. “Playing dumb?” He shoved his face close to Berta’s. “We’re a bit beyond that stage, don’t you think?”
“That depends,” I said.
“Foxes!” Van Hoogenband swung around and paced across the carpet, scowling.
“If he wants to believe we are wily foxes,” Berta whispered to me, “who are we to stop him?”
“No,” I whispered, “this could be dangerous! Don’t—”
“Silence!” Van Hoogenband roared. He came toward us again, dark eyes glittering. “Where is the diary?”
The diary? Oh. Things came into sharper focus. Van Hoogenband wanted the diary. So that’s why he’d sicced Baby Doll and Eggie on us. Miss Cotton had said that Van Hoogenband perused the diary in her office at the academy. So it looked like Van Hoogenband knew exactly what was in the diary … and it was something that made him vulnerable or even incriminated him.
“Grace Whiddle’s diary,” Van Hoogenband said. “Tell me where it is. In a safe, perhaps? Or hidden in your secret lair?—by the by, where is it that you two hide out on Longfellow Street? No, never mind, for soon it shall not matter in the slightest. I want that diary. I shall have it.”
“Why do you think we have it?” I asked.
“Because that absurd lady newspaper columnist Ida Shanks telephoned and told me that you, Mrs. Woodby, had linked me not only to the Morris deaths, but to Grace Whiddle’s diary.”
Ugh. I’d known that was dumb, dumb, dumb.
“You told Miss Shanks all that?” Berta whispered to me furiously.
“I very much hope, then,” Van Hoogenband said, “that you either have the diary or that you know where it is.”
I said, “We don’t—” but Berta kicked my ankle.
“The diary is in a safe location,” she said.
Okay, Berta was going to bluff. I hoped this wasn’t the Highway to Regret. Or worse.
“But,” Berta went on, “we are well aware of how valuable the diary is to you, Mr. Van Hoogenband, and we simply could not part with it … unless…”
“What is your price? My checkbook is in the desk just over there.”
My mouth went sour. The problem with Berta’s little impulse to extort Van Hoogenband—even it was simply to buy time—was that we didn’t actually know where the diary was.
“We don’t know where the diary is,” I said. “We’ve never laid eyes on it.”
Van Hoogenband’s eyebrows shot down. “Oh? But your friend here says that you know of its value to me.”
I swallowed. “Well, yes.”
“Then you know what is written in the diary?”
“Oh. Um. In a manner of speaking.” Why, oh, why couldn’t I lie more convincingly?
“But you do not have it, nor are you capable of retrieving it for me?”
“Ah…”
“Well. This rather changes things, doesn’t it? You have quite suddenly gone from being the two people I was most interested in to simply being two meddling old tabbies who know too much.”
“Old?” I said.
“We know nothing!” Berta cried.
“Get rid of them,” Van Hoogenband said in a bored voice to Baby Doll and Eggie. “Make it clean—the Miller’s Creek bridge site should do nicely. The concrete supports are scheduled to be poured in the morning, so that would be quite suitable.”
Then Baby Doll and Egghead were prodding Berta and me with their guns back through the mansion. And there wasn’t a dratted thing we could do about it, since our hands were still tied behind our backs.
We passed the lobster painting, the potted palms, and the grand staircase. My mind was a white blank of horror.
25
Outside Van Hoogenband’s mansion, the Chevrolet was waiting, but the chauffeur was gone. Berta and I were shoved and slammed inside by Eggie. I didn’t even try to resist. I was numb. Berta cursed and elbowed to no avail.
Eggie got behind the wheel. Baby Doll circled around and climbed in beside him. And I do mean climbed. She would’ve benefited from a portable stepstool.
“Wait a minute,” Baby Doll said. “We oughta blindfold ’em, just in case.”
“In case a what?” Eggie said. “They ain’t comin’ back.”
“Just do it.”
Eggie got out, opened the rear door, and tied handkerchiefs around our eyes. I was frozen with fright, too confused to even recoil. Then he slammed himself into the driver’s seat, and the motorcar rumbled to life.
We drove a long time, leaving the stops and starts and buzz of the city behind, and after an hour or more, we were on a winding road and I smelled the freshness of the countryside. Beside me, Berta softly snored. How could she sleep? I was so scared, I feared I would wet myself.
The motorcar turned onto a bumpy road. I caught a whiff of pine trees, and after a few minutes we came to a stop.
“Golly, Eggie, could you have driven any slower?” Baby Doll said in a whining voice. I heard a door open.
“I ain’t no chauffeur,” Eggie said. “I’m an expert in my field.”
“Well, then expert to your heart’s content and wake up those two hens in the backseat. And don’t go and fluster ’em either.”
The door beside me opened. “Get out,” Eggie said.
“Would you take off this blindfold?” I said.
“Nope.”
“But we’ve arrived at our destination, haven’t we?”
“Sure.”
“Then it’s okay if I can see.”
“She’s right, you know,” Baby Doll said.
Eggie tore off my blindfold.
At first, everything was pitch black. Cool wind whipped up from somewhere. My eyes adjusted and I saw trees towering up into a starry sky. The moon shimmered through the branches.
“Unhand me, you great oaf,” Berta was saying, and then she was next to me, her blindfold off, too. She gazed around, blinking. Her big black handbag dangled from her arm. Baby Doll and Eggie didn’t seem to care about the handbag.
Berta saw me looking at the handbag. She made the tiniest of nods.
Hope bloomed in my chest, because I knew what Berta sometimes carried in her handbag.
“Get a wiggle on, girls,” Baby Doll said. “You first.” She circled behind us, and both she and Eggie had their guns pointed at our backs. “Into the trees.”
* * *
We marched off the dirt road and into the forest. The ground was soft and slippery with layers of pine needles. An owl hooted and tree boughs murmured. I attempted to communicate telepathically with Berta. I wished to tell her that even though our hands were tied and we were being herded by professional thugs who had a couple of loose screws and a loaded gun each, maybe we ought to make a break for it. Especially if Berta had what I thought she had in her handbag.
No dice. Berta stared stonily at the ground as she went. She was having a tough time keeping upright, as a matter of fact, what with the slippery pine needles and her old-fashioned boots. Not that my shoes were much better. And I was willing to bet that Baby Doll in her cute-as-a-button red pumps wasn’t exactly comfy, either.
The ground abruptly sloped down, and I heard gushing water. I tripped, fell on my tokus, slid a couple feet, and hit the trunk of a pine tree.
I panted for a moment. My too-small dress had popped a couple seams, pine needles were poking into my undercarriage, and I realized that the rolled-up issue of Thrilling Romance was still in my dress pocket. What a thing to carry to your grave. “I’m sorry, but if you want us to keep walking, you must unbind our hands,” I said.
“Oh, all right,” Baby Doll snapped. “After all, we’ve got the guns. Eggie, untie ’em.”
Eggie untied our hands. “Now, keep goin’,” he said.
Berta and I led the way down the slope, keeping ourselves upright by grabbing tree trunks and low branches. The gushing water grew louder and louder, and at the bottom, we found ourselves on a riverbank. Moonlight bounced off the rapidly flowing water, and jutting rocks made foamy breakers.
If I di
ved in, would I be able to keep my head above water? What would happen if my head dashed against one of those rocks?
“Thataway,” Eggie said. He pointed with the snout of his gun.
“The bridge?” Berta asked.
“Get a move on,” Baby Doll said. “I need my beauty rest. I’m going to the pictures with a gorgeous feller tomorrow and I don’t wanna look like no raccoon with circles under my eyes. I’m hoping he’ll come up for coffee.”
The bridge was wide enough for one motorcar lane, but the funny thing was, there wasn’t a road leading up to it. It was simply an unfinished steel bridge in the middle of the woods.
We walked onto the bridge. There was a railing on only one side; the other side dropped to the gushing river. I could jump, and provided I didn’t land on a rock, well, I’d plunge out of sight underwater and be carried downstream. Baby Doll and Eggie probably wouldn’t be able to see well enough in the dark to shoot me. The wild card was Berta. Would she jump? Even now I could hear her wheezy breathing, and her footsteps were uneven. She hated heights.
“Don’t even think about jumping,” Baby Doll yipped at me. “Water’s only a foot deep down there. You’d pop like a piñata on them rocks.” She darted close and ground the gun barrel into my spine.
“Piñata, Miss Mallone?” I said. “How very cosmopolitan.”
“Went to Mexico City for a job once. Stayed for the Latin lovers.”
“I’ll bet you did,” I muttered.
“Whatcha mean by that?”
“You’re no bluenose, Miss Mallone.”
“You ain’t no nun yourself, lady. I can just picture what sort of cootchie-cooing you and Ralph Oliver get up to.”
“What? No, we do not.” Well, not anymore. And now that I was about to be fogged, never again. A lump gathered in my throat.
“Yeah, sure, whatever you say. Ralph’s just buggy about you, you know. Jeez, I couldn’t make him shut up about you down in Cuba—”
Really?
“—going on and on about your warm heart and your knockout figure. I don’t see it myself. If I saw you in a crowd, I woulda guessed you’re a farmer’s daughter with a bad apple pie habit. Especially in that gingham dress you’ve got on now. Holy cow.”