The Grub-And-Stakers House a Haunt (19 page)

Mrs. Melloe spoke those last words in loud and ringing tones. A harried waitress gave her a dirty look and trudged over to their table, dragging an order pad out of a quaintly ruffled apron pocket. “What’ll you have?” she grunted.

Dittany decided Swiss cheese and lettuce would be the least apt to prove totally inedible. Mrs. Melloe opted for the soup of the day and a Blue Plate Special. She was all set to give a good many complicated instructions about how she wanted them served but the waitress didn’t stick around to hear, for which Dittany didn’t blame her a bit.

Waiting on tables must, she thought, be about the third lousiest job in the world, particularly when you got customers like Mrs. Melloe.

But why had Mrs. Melloe said the inn’s dining room looked like the morning after a brawl? Was it possible that she didn’t know there’d actually been one?

Come to think of it, yes. Minerva had mentioned that Mrs. Melloe was going to Toronto yesterday. It was at least a two-hour drive. If the woman had had a lot to do and stayed to eat dinner, she might well not have got back to the inn till eleven or so. The riot had been over, the prisoners carted away, and Osbert safe home a little after ten.

Most of the action had been in the ballroom. If Snarf had closed it off from the lobby, a late-returning guest wouldn’t have seen whatever was left by then of the mess.

Regardless of the fact that there appeared to be only three waitresses handling this whole roomful of hungry people, and that only about two minutes had elapsed since her order was taken, Mrs. Melloe was already fretting because she hadn’t yet got her soup. When the soup actually did arrive quite expeditiously, she didn’t so much as glance at it, but let the bowl sit there cooling off while she went on unloading her woes to Dittany.

“I’m going to have to move out of the inn, that’s all there is to it. I simply cannot endure slackness and inefficiency.”

“So you’re moving over here?” Dittany asked hopefully.

“I’m told the Scottsbeck Arms is quite comfortable.”

“But much too inconvenient for my research. I need to be right in the heart of Lobelia Falls. I’ve decided the only thing to do is rent a room in one of your lovely, spacious homes. Perhaps you might have some suggestions as to where I might look?” She smiled an arch smile and cocked an even archer eyebrow. “On Apple wood Avenue, for instance?

In the historic old Henbit house, perchance?”

“Which contains myself, my husband, who works at home and rattles the typewriter night and day, our twin babies, who plan to start teething in the near future, and our dog, who has operatic ambitions and likes to rehearse in the small hours of the morning. Our cleaning woman only shows up at the full of the moon, at which time her gums turn blue and her bite is death. If Mrs. Poppy took umbrage at having to clean up after a boarder, I couldn’t answer for the consequences. Of course if you were willing to sign a waiver-“

“Oh, no, I hardly think we’d suit. What about your aunt?”

“She has the same cleaning woman.”

“Would Mrs. Oakes consider taking a boarder?”

“For how long?” Dittany asked warily.

“That’s hard to say. My genealogical research is taking longer than I’d anticipated. Some people just don’t seem to want to cooperate.”

“Well, you can hardly blame them,” Dittany replied, knowing full well why Mrs. Melloe had spoken in just that astringent tone and with just that thin-lipped little smile.

“Having a stranger in the house is a nuisance at the best of times, and some people might find it an imposition when a person they hardly know bursts in wanting them to dig out the family album and sit talking ancestors for hours on end just as they’re about to put in a wash or start bottling their jelly.”

Mrs. Melloe wasn’t licked yet. “Then there are others who might be delighted at the opportunity to share their family history with a kinswoman who really cares. I’ve been deeply touched by the gracious welcome I’ve found almost everywhere I’ve gone. Though not quite.” She gave Dittany another of those acid-tipped smiles and essayed a taste of her soup. “Ugh! Stone cold. Waitress! Waitress, this soup is cold.”

“It was hot when I brought it.” The weary servitor slammed Dittany’s order down in front of her and went on to less obnoxiously importunate customers. Dittany concentrated on her sandwich, laid a two-dollar tip on the table, and wished Mrs. Melloe bon appetit.

“Good luck with your Blue Plate Special. I’ve got to tt

run.

And warn Minerva Oakes not, under any circumstances, to let her spare bedroom to a pain in the neck like Tryphosa Melloe. Back when she’d needed the income, Minerva had shown a positive genius for saddling herself with boarders who’d ranged from the thoughtlessly inconsiderate to the truly gosh-awful. It was bad enough that Minerva’s best buddy was harboring a bibulous apparition in her woodshed, though at least Hiram Jellyby didn’t eat hamburgers in bed and ruin Zilla’s good sheets with mustard stains as one of Minerva’s early wrong guesses had been wont to do.

Watching that small helping of casserole wane while Hiram’s eyeballs waxed had been an interesting experience, Dittany mused as she loaded her groceries and headed the car homeward. Now that she’d met the late mule skinner in person if not in the flesh, she was more inclined than before to credit his story of having been killed for a trunkful of gold in Hunnikers’ Field. Whether the gold was still there remained to be dowsed.

One thing sure, a ghost who could play the preux chevalier to Arethusa Monk while terrorizing a roomful of assorted malefactors with only a stack of plates and a pair of spark-shooting eyeballs for weapons was not a wraith to be dismissed lightly. Besides, Hiram had been a friend of Charlie Henbit. It would be less than courteous for Charlie’s great-great-granddaughter to go around assuming that her ancestor’s old buddy was talking through his ectoplasmic hat.

Getting back to the subject of money in its various forms, Dittany wondered whether Sergeant Mac Vicar and the Mounties had yet been able to determine where that stash of legal tender had come from and how much it counted up to. Perhaps Osbert had heard by now; she fed the car a little extra gas, wondering whether he’d remembered the twins’ bottles. Surely Ethel would have reminded him, Ethel had become almost obnoxiously punctilious about her charges’ mealtimes.

No, by golly, Ethel was not on the job. As Dittany pulled into the driveway she spied a black mass that resembled a bearskin rug gone berserk galumphing up Cat Alley with something long and flappy in its mouth. Something purple, moreover, and leglike.

“Ethel!” she cried. “Come here, old scout. What’s that you’ve found? Here, give it to me.”

But Ethel didn’t want to. The object was hers and she planned to chew it. With jaws stubbornly clenched, she retired into her doghouse, an imposing edifice with stained-glass windows and wall-to-wall carpeting that Henry Binkle had built back when he’d thought Ethel was his dog and bestowed on the Monks as a wedding present once she had made it clear that her heart was elsewhere.

Normally Ethel ignored her doghouse. She preferred to sprawl on the kitchen floor for her daytime siestas.

Come nightfall, her modus operandi was to drag Osbert’s bathrobe down on the floor at the foot of the connubial bed and curl up on it with much grunting and complaining.

She only entered the doghouse for periods of philosophical reflection or to masticate some interesting artifact that her alleged mistress didn’t want her to eat. These illjudged gourmandisings led to unfortunate results more often than not, usually in the kitchen just as the Monks were sitting down to a meal.

When Osbert came out to help with the groceries, Dittany told him, “I can manage the bundles. You’d better see what Ethel’s making herself sick on over there.”

As Dittany began carrying her purchases into the house, Osbert inserted his front half into the doghouse.

After a brief altercation with Ethel, he emerged triumphant, bearing a longish piece of heavy cloth, faded purple on the outside, bright purple on the inside.

“Tumultuous tumbleweeds, Dittany, look at this! See?

Buttons!”

“Well, I’ll be jiggered! Oh, where is Hiram Jellyby now that we need him?”

“Over at Zilla’s, most likely getting pie-eyed on dandelion juice. Darling, do you see what this means?”

“It means we’ve acquired a gaiter. Now all we need is a century-old leg to fasten it on and Bob’s your uncle. But, Osbert-“

“Yes, dear. You were about to observe that the man who killed Hiram Jellyby is unlikely to be still wearing his gaiters. Or more specifically, one gaiter.”

“On the other hand/’ Dittany pointed out, “Hiram’s still mooching around in his mule-skinner boots.”

“True enough, pet. However, we do have to bear in mind that, when Hiram gets ready to demanifest, he doesn’t take his boots off and park them on the hearth for Ethel to chew on.”

“That did occur to me, sweetheart. I was thinking more along the lines of the bad guy’s having perhaps left the gaiter as some kind of signal, perhaps in repentance for having killed Hiram. Although wouldn’t it have been only involuntary manslaughter, with the horsefly as an accomplice?”

“If there’d been complicity between the shooter and the horsefly, the slaughter wouldn’t have been involuntary,”

argued Osbert. “At least I don’t think it would.

You’ve raised an interesting legal quibble there, pet. If this gaiter had been lying out in Hunnikers’ Field all these years, exposed to bad weather and marauding rodents, it seems to me there’d have been no sign of it left by now, except maybe the buttons.”

“One of which is missing,” Dittany pointed out gloomily.

“Ethel’s probably swallowed it. She’ll be complaining of a bellyache once she gets over being cross with you for taking away her new toy. Anyway, this thing has to have come from somewhere, and I can’t think of anyone in Lobelia Falls who goes in for purple gaiters. It was made for somebody with a fairly big leg. Look at this.”

While she talked, Dittany had been fastening the buttons.

The resulting shape was reminiscent of the way Toulouse Lautrec used to depict can-can girls’ voluptuous limbs, only without the je ne sais quoi.

“You know,” she mused, “I have a vague feeling that I’ve seen this gaiter before. Could it have been on one of the Traveling Thespians back when my mother was treading the boards?”

“Could it have been on your mother herself?”

“Of course not, goofus, it’s miles too big for Mum.”

“Mightn’t it be something we’ve had kicking around the house and never noticed?”

Osbert himself was not much inclined to notice petty details, being so often preoccupied with buzzards over the buttes. Dittany, however, was an inspired housekeeper, which is to say that every so often she became inspired to turn out all the dresser drawers or sort through some longforgotten boxful of artifacts that had been gathering dust in a closet for a decade or so. She shook her head.

“Dear, I’ve lived in this house all my life. Believe me, I’d have noticed. Mother’s spare wigs and so forth are carefully stashed away in the cubbyhole under the eaves, with mothballs around them.”

“Mothballs don’t kill moths unless you succeed in beaning the critters with a fast pitch,” Osbert pointed out.

“I know that, dear, but they do tend to discourage mice and squirrels.”

“Oh, of course, silly of me. Do you think we might drop a line to the mothball factory and suggest they start marketing their product as mouseballs?”

“Mothballs also work pretty well against skunks and moles,” said Dittany. “What about skunkballs, or moleballs?

I’m rather inclined toward moleballs, myself. But then all the packages would have to have the old name scratched out and the new one written in, I doubt if the mothball magnates want to go to all that bother. You know what, Osbert? If you wouldn’t mind putting the perishables in the fridge and riding herd on the wee bairns a little while longer, I’d like to take this gaiter over to Mr.

Glunck and see whether perchance it’s been snaffled out of the ThorbisherFreep Collection.”

“Itching iguanas!” cried Osbert, “you don’t suppose Ethel’s been robbing the Architrave?”

“Oh, no. I was thinking more along the lines that, since Mr. Glunck’s been so avid to get his platinum prints into the Freep display cases, he might possibly have got a trifle absentminded with some of the things he took out.”

“You mean like mistaking a large-size purple gaiter for a handkerchief, wandering off with it trailing out of his coat pocket, and dropping it someplace where Ethel could get hold of it?”

“Something along those general lines,” Dittany agreed. “I believe they’re called Freudian slips, like forgetting to pick up your aunt at the airport because you didn’t really want her to come home in the first place.”

“But I feel that way even when I remember,” Osbert protested. “Anyway, you always keep reminding me at twenty-minute intervals so how could I possibly forget?”

“Darling, I was speaking hypothetically. Mr. Glunck doesn’t really have his heart in the ThorbisherFreep collection, you know, for which I can’t say I blame him. But he’s far too conscientious not to have a complete inventory of everything that’s in it, so may I please be excused?”

“Just so you don’t stay away too long, precious. You know how it tears at my heartstrings when you’re not here to fix lunch.”

“Try to be brave, dear. Au revoir, then, and for Pete’s sake don’t go putting the eggs in the freezer with the ice cream this time.”

JVLr. Glunck was affable as

always but not much help. “This is surely a genuine Victorian gaiter, Mrs. Monk. Circa 1880, I’d say offhand. But it definitely didn’t come from the ThorbisherFreep collection or anywhere else that I know of. Nor, I may say, do we need any purple gaiters. As you know, we’ve had no dearth of donated clothing.”

Dittany agreed somberly. An astonishing number of local residents had been only too happy to foist off ancestral Sunday-go-to-meetings on the Architrave; the big problem was how to display these garments in ways that wouldn’t eat up too much space without making the donors feel slighted. But if Mr. Glunck said the museum possessed no purple gaiters, then it didn’t and there was no point in belaboring the matter.