“None, yet. She said she was just getting ready to strike back by calling the police when this horrible thing happened. Which struck me as funny. Why didn’t she call the police right away?”
“In Bosky Dell,” I explained, “we don’t call in the cops for minor vandalism and theft, except as a last resort.”
“Why, what have you got? Your own gang of vigilantes?”
“It’s not that so much as, well . . .” I trailed off, and Emma came to the rescue.
“Usually,” she said, “it turns out to be some of the locals, you know, high spirited . . .”
“You mean you cover up for the local hoodlums?”
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no. We just check it out first. A couple of years ago, when somebody lifted the weathervane off the Schenks’ boathouse, and old man Schenk went screaming to the cops, it turned out Dorothy Schenk had lost the thing to Angela Hopkins in a poker game. Dorothy hadn’t had the nerve to mention it. It was quite embarrassing.”
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this place is a hive of activity.”
“Thank you, dear,” said Emma. “Go on about Winifred Martin.”
“Oh, yeah, where was I?”
“You—or rather Winifred—was about to fight back against a reign of terror.”
“That’s right. Well, before she got around to calling the cops, this horrible thing happened.”
“Old Charlie Tinkelpaugh, Emma,” I started to explain. “He was—”
“I know, I know,” Emma replied, and of course she did. Probably knew what he’d had for breakfast that day.
“Get on with it, Hanna.”
“Well, actually, there isn’t much more. Winifred just said that, for the past three or four weeks, there have been things happening at the golf course, wicked things she called them, and she thinks they have something to do with the murder.”
“She’s crackers. And for this you told her I’d pay her a hundred dollars?”
“You did, Hanna?” asked the widow. “That’s rich. Where’s Carlton going to get a hundred dollars?”
“Oh, he’ll manage. Well, at least it’s something, not just a whole bunch of garbage about the good old days in the bush. Carlton,” she added, “spent the whole day gabbing to Art Martin about flying, and left all the investigating to me.”
I got up from the table. “This woman,” I told Mrs. Golden, “she . . . ahh, what’s the use?”
Emma beamed. “Well, this is more like it,” she said. “I couldn’t stand it when you two were being polite to each other all last week. I presume this means that you’re lovebirds again?”
Lovebirds. That’s Emma talk.
“No, we are not lovebirds,” huffed Hanna.
“What you are looking at over there,” I told the widow, “is not a lovebird, but a bird of prey. Note the beak.”
This, at least, got under the Klovack skin. She is sensitive about her breathing equipment for some reason, although there is absolutely nothing wrong with it beyond this slight, and to me entrancing, bend in it, about halfway down the pike. She shot me one of her death-ray looks, and jumped up from the table. Emma rapped for order.
“Well, never mind. Sit down, the two of you, and have some more stew.”
We glowered, but we sat, and as we began digging in again—this historical research whets the appetite—Emma asked, “Hanna, did she say anything about the Fearsome Foursome?”
“The Whosome Whatsome?”
I saw that a word of explanation was in order.
“Fearsome Foursome. A golf group, and the terror of Ladies’ Day.”
Wednesday is Ladies’ Day at the Bosky Dell course; when one of the Young Moderns moved to rename it Women’s Day, she got a frozen look, but no support.
“Ethyl Podmeyer is the gang leader; the others are Lucille Farnham, Fern Armstrong, and Annabelle Wentworth.”
Hanna chewed on this, along with a bit of crust, then asked, “And why are they the Fearsome Foursome?”
“Very forceful and athletic types, the F.F. In the vanguard of modern thought—they introduced the metal driver hereabouts—community leaders, tough cookies, and solid golfers. They know all the rules.”
“Oh, yeah? Do they know about Winter Rules? Carlton says you can tee your ball up on the fairway because it’s always Winter Rules here, because we are so far north of the equator.”
“Carlton,” purred the kindly widow, “takes the broad, flexible approach to golf.”
“The Fearsome Foursome do not,” I chipped in. “They like to catch other golfers in some minor transgression and chew them out. If you don’t replace your divot, they’re on you like a duck on a June bug. But what does all this have to do with the murder, Emma?”
“Probably nothing. I just wondered, when Hanna mentioned about these things going on down at the club. You know, of course, that somebody spiked the well on the seventh hole, and the Fearsome Foursome all got sick.”
“No. Nobody ever tells me anything.”
“Right,” put in Hanna. “That’s why they call you a reporter.”
I ignored this. “When did this happen, Emma? And how sick were they?”
“Well, not so much sick. More embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed?”
“Uh-huh. The way I heard it, they all stopped for a drink at the well. You know the well, Carlton.”
Indeed I do. It is part of the ritual of a golf game at Bosky Dell to pause at the old hand-pumped well out on the seventh fairway and pump up a drink, which you down quickly amid glad cries of appreciation, pointing out how much better it tastes than crummy old tap water, even though, in point of fact, it tastes metallic and weird. I think it is where the local spiders go to pee.
“Well, anyway, the girls all had a drink at the well, and about twenty minutes later, on the ninth, they were all caught short.”
“Egads. Caught short, as in . . .”
“Uh-huh. The medical officer of health for the county, they called him in later, and he found traces of a very powerful laxative on that tin-cup thing.”
To add to the atmosphere out at the old well, there is a huge, bent, tin cup, attached to the well handle by a chain, and you drink out of this. Ugh.
“Carlton,” Emma snapped crossly. “It was not funny.”
“No, no, of course not. I was just thinking of the Fearsome Foursome, casting their customary sang-froid to the winds and dashing all the way to the clubhouse, where there is only one women’s john. I wonder who waited outside till last? Not Ethyl Podmeyer, that’s for sure.”
“Well, that’s probably the most shocking thing about it, Carlton. The Ladies’ was out of order, so Ethyl Podmeyer went right into the Men’s, and kicked Barney Marston out. He was just settling down with the newspaper.”
I miss all the good stuff. Barney Marston is a retired stockbroker, a plump and pompous old buzzard, and in losing out on the sight of Ethyl Podmeyer chivvying him out of the water closet I had obviously missed one of the highlights of the season.
“When was all this, Emma?” Hanna wanted to know.
“And how did they keep it hushed up?” I asked.
“Just last week. Ladies’ Day, it was, a week ago Wednesday. And of course they kept it hushed up, Carlton. It’s not the sort of thing nice people talk about.”
“How did you find out about it?” asked Hanna.
“Oh, I have my ways.”
There are two theories about Emma Golden’s intelligence-gathering service. One—mine—is that she has trained all the animals and birds to come and spill their guts to her, the way Tarzan of the Apes used to do, according to Edgar Rice Burroughs. The other—Mundane Whittaker’s—is that she uses a combination of blackmail and bribery, centred on her output of pizza and other foodstuffs, to worm things out of anyone who comes within her sphere of influence.
“Well, anyway, Carlton, this lets you off the hook with Winifred Martin,” said Hanna.
“It does? How?”
“Obviously she was withholding information from me. If I were you, I wouldn’t give her more than fifty bucks.”
And she got up, brushed breadcrumbs off the front of her sweater, although I would have been happy to do it for her, and started out the door.
“Hey, where are you going? I thought maybe we could talk some more.”
She paused with one hand on the open door. “Oh, I know what you thought, Carlton, but in my books, you’re still a creep.”
The door banged to behind her.
“Rats,” said Emma Golden. “There goes five dollars.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I bet Marianne Huntingdon five dollars that this breakup of yours with Hanna was only temporary. You’ve let me down, Carlton.”
Chapter 6
The next morning, I went round to the clubhouse to sort things out with Winifred Martin. I expected the interview to be painful, based as it was on a one-hundred-dollar shortfall between her expectations and my ability to fulfil them, and about twenty-seven times on the mile-long walk from Third Street to the golf course—Marchepas was feeling indisposed today—I cursed the day Hanna Klovack had entered my life. Was there ever, I wondered, a woman more high-handed and imperious? Catherine the Great, maybe, but it was hard to think of another. Now, thanks to this autocratic Ukrainian, I was going to have to face Winifred Martin, the Ayatollah of the Nineteenth Hole, and explain to her that the five crisp twenties she was planning to sock away into the old mattress were not going to be forthcoming. She wasn’t going to like it. The plan I had in mind, if you can call it a plan, was to explain to her that, when Hanna offered to buy her information yesterday, it was just one of those amusing practical jokes. Then I would slap her on the back, and we would have a good laugh about it. The closer I got to the clubhouse, the less this plan appealed to me, but I had no other. When I mounted the porch and opened the door of the “Pro Shop,” which is what we call the small cubicle off the lounge where Winifred holds sway, she was bending over, rearranging the golf balls in the display case. I was thus able to watch her unobserved for a moment.
She was what James Stephens, the Irish poet, would have called “a lanky hank of a she,” a woman past the first blush of girlish beauty, if she had ever had any, by about two decades. She had tight little lips, innocent of makeup, a large nose, flared at the end and suitable for sniffing out misbehaviour, and mousy brown hair, streaked with grey and pulled back in a bun. She was wearing a dress that bore the unmistakable stamp of her favourite boutique, Bargain Harold’s. Taken all in all, she looked quite a bit like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz, and I was not certain that the Withers charm, even if applied by the bucket, was going to satisfy her as a suitable replacement for a hundred bucks. If it didn’t, she would probably have me carried off by flying monkeys.
I let the screen door close behind me, and stepped into the room.
“Well, what do you want?” She straightened up and shot a glare across the counter, modifying the glare a trifle when she saw who it was.
“Oh, it’s you, Carlton. I expect you’ve come to give me that hundred dollars.”
“Well, you see, Miss Martin . . . this is really going to make you laugh . . .”
“Well, you can just keep your money.”
“. . . when Hanna, Miss Klovack—she’s a great kidder, Hanna, did you know that?—when she . . .”
“I don’t want your filthy lucre.”
“. . . likes to have her little . . . You don’t?”
“No.”
“Ah.”
“And it’s no use offering me more, because it won’t do the slightest good.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, it wouldn’t matter.”
“How about five hundred?”
Her eyes went round.
“Five hundred!”
Why did I say five hundred? I just seemed to get into the swing of the thing, once it started to sound like an auction.
“Only kidding, Miss Martin. I know you wouldn’t change your mind on a matter of principle, just for a little more money.”
“Quite right, Carlton. Nor would I.” She put her hands on her hips and gave me the full glare. “So you can just forget about it.”
“I will.”
“The very idea.”
“Hanna’s idea, Miss Martin.”
“To think I would betray confidences to the press just because I was offered money.”
“But you didn’t, did you Miss Martin?”
“Certainly not.”
“For example, you didn’t tell Hanna about the Fearsome Foursome and the stuff in the well at the seventh hole.”
“Carlton! Who told you about that?”
“A good reporter never reveals his sources, Miss Martin. But may I ask you, why did you say yesterday that you would tell Hanna what was going on around here, and then not tell her about the Fearsome Foursome?”
She gave a shifty-eyed look around, found the coast was clear, and leaned across the counter, giving me a pretty good blast of what seemed to have been fried onions that she’d had for breakfast.
“Carlton, can you keep a secret?”
Can I keep a secret? What a question to ask a journalist! Of course not.
“Of course, Miss Martin. Every journalist knows when to keep a secret. It’s part of our code.”
She nodded. “I thought so. I know you have a code. Like Lou Grant.” Lou Grant, you will recall, was a TV newspaperman heavily afflicted with ethical codes. We still get his show, along with Leave It to Beaver and I Love Lucy, beamed at us over the Barrie TV station. Apparently, Winifred was a fan, and drew her mental portrait of journalists from that stern and principled man. I never met an actual, honest-to-God journalist so afflicted in real life, but something told me this was not the time to say so.
“Sure, Miss Martin, just like Lou Grant.”
“Well, Carlton—you’re sure you won’t tell anybody this?”
“Cross my heart and spit, Miss Martin.”
“Well, then, yesterday, when I was talking to Miss Klovack, I decided to tell her a little bit about what was going on around here, because someone has to know.”
“I see.”
“Something has to be done.”
“Quite right.”
“The golf course is really becoming quite unmanageable, Carlton, quite unmanageable. What I told Miss Klovack was entirely true; there have been break-ins, and stolen carts, and a lot of vandalism. But of course I didn’t tell her about the incident at the seventh fairway well, because that was serious.”
“The break-ins, the thefts, they weren’t serious?”
“I didn’t think so; I thought they were just, you know, some of the teenagers. Teenagers these days . . .”
I did not want Winifred to get going on the younger generation, one of her favourite subjects.
“So you thought it was okay to tell Hanna about the unimportant stuff, but not the important stuff, is that it?”
“That’s it, Carlton. You know, sometimes you’re quite quick.”
“Thank you, Winifred.”
“Miss Klovack, she said you were a creep.”
“Yes, well, skipping Miss Klovack and her views, can you think of any reason why anyone would set out to sabotage the golf course? Because that’s what it amounts to, doesn’t it, Miss Martin, a deliberate campaign of sabotage?”
Winifred’s eyes went round, and her nose twitched, giving her the look of a wicked rabbit, if there is such a thing outside the pages of Beatrix Potter.
“You’re quite right, Carlton. That’s just what it is, a campaign of sabotage. And wha
t the developers are going to do about it, I’m sure I don’t know.”
“The developers! What are you talking about? Has the golf course been sold to a developer?”
Winifred’s hand flew to her face, the way maidens’ hands used to do in Victorian novels. “Oh dear oh dear oh dear,” she said. “Now you’ve wormed it out of me.”
“Miss Martin . . . Winifred . . . the golf course belongs to the village, in perpetuity, according to Sir John Flannery’s will. It can’t be sold. Can it?”
“No, no, of course you’re right, Carlton. I’ve just made a silly mistake. And you won’t say anything about my foolish slip, will you, Carlton?”
“Well, gee, Miss Martin, if the course has really been sold, that’s a news story. I’d have to report it.”
“But it hasn’t, don’t you see? I just made a silly mistake. We’ve agreed on that.”
Just then, a foursome of male golfers clumped onto the porch, and Winifred rushed off to sign them in. It was a moody and thoughtful C. Withers who walked back to Third Street. The golf course sold? Impossible. Wasn’t it? I was going to have to lay this material before a higher authority, as quickly as possible.
Chapter 7
By a higher authority, I meant the Widow Golden, of course. She was out in her garden, massacring plant lice with enthusiasm and a can of Raid when I got back to Third Street, and I wasted no time laying the facts before her. For once, I was able to tell her something she didn’t already know. Our lovely little golf course was about to become festooned with town houses and boat slips, with maybe a motel thrown in.
“Oh, Carlton, I don’t think they can sell the golf course. Can they?”
“I don’t know. I’m on the way to the office now, and I’ll see if there’s anything in the files about it. But it might explain things, mightn’t it?”
“Explain what, Carlton? Why would anyone commit murder just because they sold the golf course to a development company?”
“I don’t know, but they might get up a campaign to scare people off. The break-ins, the vandalism, even the stuff in the well on the seventh—maybe it’s to frighten off the golfers, so the sale won’t go through. Nobody is going to buy a golf course without customers. Or, maybe it’s the developers, whoever they are, wrecking the golf course so people won’t mind so much when it goes.”
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