The Grub-And-Stakers Quilt a Bee (3 page)

“Then we’ll hold a quilting bee,” said Dittany. “That will attract more people to the museum, and we’ll hit ‘em up for donations.

While we’re about it, we can make up a modern copy of this one, and raffle it off.”

“But Mrs. Monk, that’s an extremely ambitious project. It would require a crew of expert needlewomen.”

Dittany opened wide the eyes which Osbert had compared favorably to the azure-tinted skies which o’erspread the western deserts when gentle rains of spring awake the cactus buds to bloom. After the rains had done their thing, he’d meant, and gone away and let the sun come out, but that had been on their honeymoon when he’d been filled with too great a euphoria to boggle at meteorological detail. Nor had Dittany been in any mood to carp.

Right now, her mood was less yielding.

“Mrs. Fairfield, there isn’t a woman in Lobelia Falls who can’t embroider. Minerva Oakes featherbones like a house afire. My mother does, too, when she puts her mind to it. She’s at an optical convention with my stepfather just now, but they may stop over for a while on their way back to Vancouver. Then again,” for Dittany knew the nomadic habits of Mum and Bert, “they may not. But anyway, I’m sure we can manage a quilting bee. We even have a bee to quilt. Look.”

She pointed a grubby index finger at one of the scraps Mrs.

Fairfield was still fingering. “Two bees, in fact. There’s another on that piece of blue velvet stuck to the inside of the lid. I wonder why.”

Mrs. Fairfield flashed her gums. “Why the bees, you mean? I should venture to say it was because the bride’s name happened to be Beatrice and people nicknamed her Bea. Or eke she had several friends called Betsy and Bertha and so forth, and they called their sewing circle the Busy Bees. This really is a nice find. I’m sure Mr. Fairfield will be pleased.”

She shut the lid and tucked the box under her cast. “Now don’t you think we’ve earned the right to get out of this filthy old attic?

I’m longing for a bath and a change, myself. We can leave the windows open to air out the dust we’ve stirred up. I’ll leave word for somebody to close them before nightfall. Don’t you think?”

The “don’t you thinks” were rhetorical. Dittany knew perfectly well that Mrs. Fairfield didn’t give a hoot what she thought. Dittany was to take it for granted Mrs. Fairfield knew best. Dittany reached over and took the small wooden chest gently but firmly into her own hands.

“I’m quite ready to quit, and I’ll take this with me. I want the other trustees to see the quilt pieces.”

“But Mr. Fairfield should look them over first, surely? They may need special treatment to preserve them.”

“I don’t see why. That can’t be all that old, and they’ve been well protected. Anyway, Arethusa will know. She’s a shark on this sort of thing because her heroes wear satin waistcoats and velvet knee breeches. Or vice versa, as the case may be.”

Dittany made sure all the scraps were safe inside, shut the lid with a businesslike snap, fastened the hook, and tucked the box under her own arm. It was high time she got home anyway. Osbert was due back at suppertime and she wasn’t about to welcome him in the guise of a chimney sweep who’d had a rough day among the cinders.

Mrs. Fan-field looked a bit sniffy when they parted, but Dittany merely gave her another wide-eyed smile and went home. She’d got herself prettied up and had supper on the table when Osbert came in eager for their joyous reunion. They were still reuniting two hours later, when Arethusa rushed in with a message of doom.

“Arethusa, you’re bonkers” was Dittany’s reaction.

“And why, prithee?”

“You just told us Mr. Fairfield fell out an attic window at the museum and killed himself.”

” ‘Demised5 seemed a bit literary, and ‘met his end’ had overtones of flippancy, considering that he landed on his head.”

“Arethusa, stuff it. How could he? Those attic windows aren’t big enough to swing a cat through. Besides, they’re set into the roof. There’s a ledge outside he’d have had to crawl over, for Pete’s sake.”

“You’re mighty cocksure, forsooth.”

“I ought to be. I opened the windows myself, this afternoon.

Mrs. Fairfield and I were up there scrounging around. We found a box of quilt pieces.”

Dittany’s lip quivered. She wished now she hadn’t been so mean about letting Mr. Fairfield see them. Osbert rushed to comfort her.

“Darling, you’re not feeling guilty about opening the windows?”

“Will you two cease canoodling?” snarled Arethusa.

“Why the heck should we? Those idiotic characters of yours are always hurling themselves at each other in fervent embrace and all that garbage,” her nephew argued, juggling his wife into a yet more fervently embraceable position to illustrate his point.

“Unhand me, sirrah,” Dittany told him absentmindedly, though making no effort to be unhanded. “Why should I feel guilty? If I hadn’t opened the windows, we’d have been stifled. I’d have shut them myself when we left, but Mrs. Fairfield said we should leave them open to air the pkce out. I suppose she sent him up to shut them before they left. I cannot for the life of me imagine how he managed to fall out.”

“I suppose he was struggling with a sticky sash.”

“Struggling, my left eyeball! I had to prop the silly things open with bits of old chair rungs. All he had to do was snatch away the props and mind his fingers. Besides, the openings would have been down around his waist and only about a foot square. He’d have had to double up and wiggle out on his belly. In so doing, he’d have knocked out the prop, eh, and the window would have come crashing down and pinned him to the ledge. I think we ought to go and talk to Sergeant Mac Vicar.”

Osbert repressed a sigh. The homecoming that had begun so auspiciously was not turning out in the way he’d envisioned. However, he knew his Dittany. When duty whispered low, “Thou must,” she was constitutionally incapable of murmuring back, “Sorry, I had something else on the agenda.” He contented himself with tucking her into a cardigan to assert his role as manly protector, but missed out on the fun of fastening the buttons because his Aunt Arethusa kept her eye on him and something of the old terror still remained.

Arethusa was not wearing her purple cape on so warm a night, merely a Spanish shawl some six feet square with a pattern of exotic flora done in reds and pinks and a black silk fringe nine and a half inches long. As an act of defiance, Osbert put on his buckskin vest with the Indian beadwork. Thus accoutred, they set off for the museum.

They found Sergeant Mac Vicar standing like the stag at eve on Monan’s rill, two points north-northeast of a recently pruned viburnum on what had erst been John Architrave’s front yard. He vouchsafed a greeting with stately affability.

“Ah, Dittany.”

The wee, fatherless bairn, as he still tended to think of her, was a special favorite of Sergeant Mac Vicar’s. Osbert, who had served as his special deputy on an earlier occasion*, rated a comradely nod and Arethusa a gallant though far from subservient bow.

“This is indeed a direful and inauspicious beginning to your new venture.”

Sergeant Mac Vicar intoned the words through his impressive Highland nose in a way that not only gave due emphasis to the awfulness of the event but conveyed to Dittany a hint that Sergeant Mac Vicar knew pretty well what it was she’d come to tell him, and why. She gave him the briefest possible glance, and he * The Grub-and-Stakers Move a Mountain, Doubleday Crime Club, 1980.

replied with the merest hint of a nod. Since a fair-sized crowd had by now gathered on the sidewalk around the museum, no more overt communication would have been politic, nor was it needed.

“I was the one who opened the windows in the first place,”

Dittany decided it would be safe enough to say. “I thought I’d better come and tell you.”

“And rightly so. You did not, I gather, shut the windows again before you left the attic?”

This was purely for the benefit of the assembled multitudes.

Sergeant Mac Vicar knew when to dispense a few loaves and fishes.

“No,” Dittany replied in a good, clear voice so nobody would miss anything. “Mrs. Fairfield was with me. We were just hunting around. We found the pieces for a bride’s quilt,” she threw in because naturally people would want to know.

“Anyway, the air was pretty bad up there as you can imagine, so I opened some windows. When we decided to call it quits, Mrs.

Fairfield said to leave them open and she’d have somebody shut them later.”

So that was what the husband had been doing in the attic. No question who’d worn the trousers in that family, eh. A comfortable buzzing went through the crowd. Now was the strategic moment for Sergeant Mac Vicar to suggest ever so casually, “Ah, yes. Suppose we step inside so you can show me just how you left the windows.”

Leaving the spectators well entertained, with Sergeant Mac Vicar’s two henchmen Bob and Ray keeping them under benign surveillance, Dittany and her entourage followed the leader into the museum. Nobody else was inside the place now. Earlier on, Dittany recalled, the Munson boys had still been painting woodwork in the bedroom Mr. Fairfield was to have occupied with his spouse, and a plumber she’d recognized as one of McNaster’s men had been gazing despondently into some piece of equipment he’d removed from the kitchen piping.

It was surprising, the amount of interest McNaster had been showing in the museum all this time. Some were theorizing that he expected the place to be a drawing card for his restaurant.

Others thought he was intending to stick the Grub-and-Stake Gardening and Roving Club for a hefty bill once work had been completed.

McNaster had been standing on the fringe of the crowd outside just now. Perhaps he’d strolled over from the inn. He often ate his supper there after he’d left his office out on the property he’d finagled from the town by one of his shady deals. Perhaps he’d come to brood over what might have been if John Architrave hadn’t left that astonishing will. Perhaps he wasn’t brooding.

“Did you notice McNaster out there just now?” Dittany murmured to Arethusa.

“Egad, yes. I wonder where he was when Fairfield took that header out the window,” Arethusa muttered back.

Osbert gave his aunt a reproving look. Sergeant Mac Vicar, however, did not.

“Ladies, am I to infer you suspect yon McNaster of dark and perfidious deeds?” he inquired.

“Have you taken a good look at those attic windows?” Dittany replied.

“I have.”

“You’ve noticed how small they are, and how wide the ledge is in front of them?”

“I have.”

“Did you try getting them to stay up without being propped open?”

“I did.”

“Then would you care to speculate, eh, on how the flaming heck Mr. Fairfield could have managed to fall out by accident?”

“I have speculated, Dittany. I have also remarked the absence of smudges, stains, or deposits of bird droppings on his garments despite the fact that yon aforementioned ledges have visibly served-as roosting places for our feathered friends for, lo, these many decades. I have concluded that it would have taken a degree of ingenuity, agility, and persistence most remarkable in an elderly man of sedentary habit and scholarly inclination for Mr.

Fairfield to have accomplished such a feat.”

“But he is dead,” said Osbert, who believed in facing facts even when he had to invent them himself.

“He is indeed defunct, Deputy Monk. I have seldom,” Sergeant Mac Vicar amplified, “seen anybody deader, at least not on such short notice. There was a fracture of the occiput as well as of the cervical vertebrae.”

“Meaning he landed smack on his head, bashed in his skull, and broke his neck, eh?”

“Correctly and succinctly stated.”

“Ergo, he fell out the window belly-bumper, wearing an apron to keep his clothes clean, and then plummeted to earth as a feather is wafted downward from an eagle in its flight,” said Arethusa.

“Now that one sees the complete picture, it’s all drearily commonplace, isn’t it? Too bad.”

“Except that this eagle you cite so glibly couldn’t have just wafted a feather and flapped away,” her nephew pointed out.

“He’d have had to be hovering around ready to zero in on the apron and fly off with it.”

“Don’t be absurd, Osbert. The apron blew away, that’s all.”

“There is no wind tonight, Miss Monk,” said Sergeant Mac Vicar.

“Nor has any protective covering that might have been worn by the demised or spread over the ledge been found anywhere in the vicinity. I am inclined to the opinion that Mr. Fairfield fell not from the window, but off the roof.”

“Poppycock! What would he have been doing up there?”

“That, Miss Monk, I have not as yet ascertained.”

“Mr. Fairfield had no head for heights,” said Dittany. “Last week, when they were fixing the ceilings, Hazel Munson’s son asked him to climb the ladder and take a close look at the plaster doodad around the light fixture to see if it could be restored or ought to be taken down. He turned eau de Nil at the mere suggestion.”

“He did what?” demanded Arethusa.

“He looked seasick,” Dittany interpreted. “He claimed he wasn’t supposed to climb ladders on account of his high blood pressure. In my considered opinion, he was plain chicken.”

“An interesting observation.” Sergeant MacVicar took out his notebook and made a neat memorandum. “I will elicit information as to her late husband’s physical condition from Mrs. Fairfield.”

“Speaking of Mrs. Fairfield, where is she now?”

“She is back at her temporary lodgings, being ministered to by Mrs. Oakes and Mrs. Trott.”

“Was she around when her husband fell?”

“It would appear she was not. The sequence of events, according to testimony thus far received, is that Mrs. Fairfield left her husband still working here at about a quarter to five and went back to Minerva Oakes’s house to get bathed and changed. She said she had been working in the attic all afternoon with young Mrs. Monk.

You confirm this officially, Dittany?”

“Yes, we’d been at it since half past one and we were both filthy.