Something in the Water

by Charlotte MacLeod

  Since Elva Bright didn’t have a liquor license, Peter surmised that Lucivee Flodge must have tanked up someplace else before she got to the inn. If she was in fact the clever lawyer she cracked herself up to be, she ought to know better than to go shooting her mouth off like this in public. Either she was drunker than she looked or else she was sending a message to somebody or other, he thought. If so, she needn’t worry about its reaching the intended party, not with all these ears flapping in unison to catch every syllable she uttered, and all those toes twitching to rush off and spread the word to anybody who’d listen. There’d be a hot time in the old town tonight, that was for sure.

  Ah, now came the big scene. The conversation had worked its way around to Jasper Flodge’s last moments. Peter, having adjusted himself comfortably in his spectator’s seat, was startled to hear Claridge Withington calling upon him to join the show.

  “Ask Professor Shandy here, he saw the whole episode, from start to finish. He even wiped the gravy off Jasper’s face. Didn’t you, Professor? Wasn’t that a shocking way for a man to go?”

  “Er—” Damn it, why did Withington have to drag him into it? “I still don’t know how he went. Has there been any—er—report?”

  “There certainly has, and you’re not going to believe it. Remember the odor of bitter almonds that you attributed to the almond extract found in Jasper’s pocket after I’d suggested the possibility of cyanide poisoning? According to Dr. Bee, it was in fact cyanide poisoning that killed him.”

  And I win the chocolate-covered jelly bean. Smarmy old bastard. Peter felt a momentary urge to shove Withington’s face down into his fudge cake. Such a death was hardly a thing to be smug about, no matter how big a bastard Flodge might have been.

  Oh, what the hell? Let old Claridge have his moment of glory, if such it could be called. He probably didn’t get many opportunities to shine. Peter said what he had to.

  “How in Sam Hill did he get hold of cyanide?”

  “Dr. Bee claims Jasper must have bitten into one of those capsules that spies used to keep tucked behind their back teeth in case they got captured. As to where the capsule came from, we can only surmise.”

  Sure they could, and Peter didn’t have to be told what Withington was surmising. Not when the old snoop had that self-satisfied smirk on his face and his head cocked in the direction of Elva Bright’s kitchen. So poor Jean-Luc was to be dragged from the grave and dusted off to keep the gossip mill running.

  It was not an impossible scenario, the late hero of the Resistance hanging on to his cyanide capsule for auld lang syne the way too many soldiers had lugged home live hand grenades and parked them on the mantelpiece for their relatives to admire and their kids to play with. It even made sense, in a way, considering the shape Jean-Luc had been in, according to Withington, by the time he’d wooed and won the innkeeper’s daughter. He must have accepted the fact that he was past mending. His suffering, both physical and mental, might often have been intense. He could have drawn some small comfort from knowing he had the means at hand to give himself a quick way out if the pain got beyond all bearing.

  A man who had steeled himself to withstand unspeakable torture would not have been apt to reveal his deadly secret to outsiders. Peter found it less incredible that Elva Bright could have mentioned the capsule sometime during her widowhood when Withington happened to be the only other person around and she’d felt a desperate need for a sympathetic listener. If in fact such a capsule had even existed, the only really credible way for Withington to have known about it, Peter decided, was that he’d at some time taken it upon himself to do a little unauthorized prospecting. Having been a regular patron for years on end, the man must gradually have acquired something like the status of a visiting relative. The odds were that he’d often been left alone for a while when Elva was without an assistant and had gone off on some errand or other. A natural-born snoop like him could hardly have resisted an opportunity to go rummaging.

  Nobody but Withington himself appeared to be much interested in how Jasper Flodge had come by his lethal dose. What they all wanted to know was why Jasper had chosen to commit suicide when and where he did. It was Fred who voiced what was probably the consensus of those present.

  “Hell, if I’d known he was that anxious to kill himself, I’d have been glad to come and lend him a hand. Whatever possessed the bugger, do you suppose?”

  “I’ll tell you what!”

  Lucivee Flodge was on her feet, her cheeks as red as her lapels, her eyes shooting sparks. “He did it to spite me, that’s what. Him and his big deals! He gets himself tied up with a big-time mob, thinks he can outsmart them, pulls a fast one that backfires, and finally gets it through his thick head that he’s about to be measured for a pair of concrete overshoes. So what does he do? He knows he’s a dead duck no matter what, so he decides to go out with a big whoop and a holler right here where he knows there’ll be witnesses around and there can’t be any question about the verdict.”

  “But what’s that got to do with you, Lucivee? Hell, it’s been—what? Six or seven years since Jasper dumped you?”

  “He never dumped me! Listen, Fred Wye, I’m the one who walked out when Jasper started bringing his floozies home for the night and expecting me to get up and cook their breakfasts in the morning. I told him to keep away from those crooks, but would he listen? Naturally once he got it through his fat head that he’d landed himself in big trouble, he claimed it was all my fault. So I had to suffer.”

  “Like how?”

  “Like getting shafted the way that bastard’s shafted me, you backwoods half-wit. The day we were married, I made Jasper take out a hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. With me as the sole beneficiary, needless to say. Well, he paid the premiums once or twice, then love’s young dream started to wear off and he quit. Not being quite so dumb as he thought I was, I kept on paying the premiums, figuring somebody was bound to kill him sooner or later for one reason or another. That’s the only reason I never divorced him. And now, damn his hide, the bastard’s gone and done me out of my hundred thousand because no insurance company will pay out on a verdict of death by suicide. God, I could spit!”

  “Well, don’t do it here.” Elva Bright had come out of the kitchen, not pausing to take off her apron. “This is a respectable inn, as you ought to know by now, and I’ll thank you to help me keep it that way. Jasper Flodge may not have been any great, shining light but I’d known him all my life, we went to school together, and I see no call to go ripping him up the back now that he’s gone. I can’t say I’m any too happy about Jasper’s cashing in his checks at my table because it wouldn’t be true, but if you’re going to start running down a dead customer of mine, I’d rather you did it someplace else. Now if anybody wants anything more to eat, you’d better speak up. This dining room’s going to close in fifteen minutes. Will you be wanting early breakfast, Professor Shandy? You said you’d be checking out in the morning.”

  “Er—yes, I did but now I’m not, unless you want to get rid of me. I spoke with my wife after I got back from Miss Rondel’s. You were busy in the kitchen, I believe. Anyway, she wants to ride back with Catriona McBogle and spend a night here. They have something planned for tomorrow, so she’ll have to come on Thursday, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Did you tell her about Jasper? I wouldn’t want Mrs. Shandy coming up here and getting an earful from some stranger and starting to wonder what I’ve put in the food.’

  That was telling them. Peter didn’t try to hide his smile. “No fear, Mrs. Bright. Helen knows all about it. She sends her sympathy and looks forward to meeting you. So if you can stand having me around—”

  “You’re both welcome to stay as long as you like. I expect I sounded a mite snappish there a minute ago, but this has been a tough two days, in case you hadn’t noticed. I guess I’m kind of frazzled around the edges. I don’t know how I’d have managed without Thurzella here. She’s a good little worker when she takes a mind
to be, I’ll say that for her.”

  “You goin’ to be servin’ breakfast tomorrow?” somebody wanted to know.

  “Oh, I guess likely. Just don’t expect anything fancy.”

  “Huh? No paper pants on the bacon or caviar stuffing in the doughnuts?” Fred pushed back his chair and gave the innkeeper a hearty thump on the shoulder. “I guess we can make do with what you’ve got for once. Come on, Evander, let’s get out of here and let Elva rest her bunions. See you in the morning, Elva.”

  Fred Wye seemed like a decent sort of cuss, Peter thought, too bad his brother wasn’t more like him. At least Evander wasn’t glowering as he settled up for the meal and followed Fred out the door. He even managed a curt nod, though it was impossible to tell whom he was nodding at.

  The brothers seemed to be persons of some consequence, others were getting up to follow their example. Elva moved up to the front desk, whipped off her apron in the name of propriety, and busied herself taking money and making change. Thurzella was clearing tables at top speed. The only ones not participating in the mass exodus were Claridge Withington and Lucivee Flodge; she had sat down with him again and was swiveled around in her chair, demanding more coffee from the already overworked young waitress.

  Had Peter been thirty years younger and unattached, he might have offered to give Thurzella a hand with the trays. Since he wasn’t, he joined the queue at the cash register, paid his tab like the rest, then went on upstairs, carefully refraining from glancing back lest Withington nab him for another postprandial chat.

  Lucivee Flodge had been casting a few speculative glances his way, Peter had noticed while he was still at the table. He was glad he’d spoken out loud and clear about the impending arrival of his wife. God forbid that he should become in any way embroiled with a panther woman, particularly after his long day of cliff-scrambling and seed-sorting. Not that he’d ever met a panther woman, but the great P. G. Wodehouse had given one of his more beleaguered male characters a particularly rough time with a mate who, as Peter recalled, fitted Lucivee Flodge’s description too closely for comfort.

  He was quite willing to accept Wodehouse’s negative verdict as to the wisdom of tangling with panther women. What failed to stir an acquiescent chord was Mrs. Flodge’s yarn about Jasper bumping himself off in the midst of his chicken pot pie for the alleged purpose of canceling an insurance policy on which she claimed to have been keeping up the payments.

  Nor did Peter put much stock in that knowing glance of Claridge Withington’s, once he’d got up to his room and had leisure to think it over. It seemed crazy that a man with two small daughters whom he’d loved would have risked having anything so lethal around the house, but what if the late Jean-Luc had in fact hung on to his wartime souvenir? Peter had no idea what the shelf life of a cyanide capsule might be, but half a century did seem to him an excessive span of time for a pill to have retained so immediately effective a knockout punch.

  He could understand why that romantic tale of the heroic Frenchman could hold a special attraction for Withington. An intelligent semi-invalid must often draw on his imagination for entertainment. Jean-Luc would have been the ideal fantasy figure to appeal to a steady visitor with an active brain and a partially dysfunctional body. There was also, Peter supposed, the alternative possibility that Withington was simply a malicious old bastard who liked to stir up trouble. Infirmity did not necessarily convey instant sainthood, why should a handicapped person be any less human than his haler and often meaner fellow creatures?

  Peter took off the shirt he’d worn to dinner and hung it up with reasonable care. It would have to do for tomorrow now that he was staying another day. Maybe he ought to take a run over to Sasquamahoc and bum a rag or two off Guthrie. It was less than a two-hour run, and would be something to do while he was waiting for Helen. He could take Guthrie to lunch at that place where they served fried-clam tacos, and be back at the inn in time for supper.

  Before he took off, though, he ought to give Miss Rondel a buzz and let her know that his wife would be coming on Thursday afternoon to see the paintings. Better still, he could stop at Rondel’s Head on his way to Guthrie’s, take its doyenne a little present of some kind, and get another look at his special painting. Mrs. Bright could tell him what Miss Rondel would like and where to buy it, if she wasn’t too busy with the breakfast orders to take the time. Between Lucivee’s insistence that her husband had taken his own life and the backup Elva had got from her pal Fred Wye and his brother, not to mention Peter’s own small contribution and the fact that nobody got poisoned last night, Elva’s customers must surely have got the message that it was perfectly safe to eat at the inn.

  He hoped. As Peter was tying the string of his pajama pants, he had a vision. It was not an agreeable vision. It was of a middle-aged woman in a restaurant kitchen, holding a small, roundish object very carefully between the points of a pair of tweezers. She was dabbing it with a cotton swab dunked in green food coloring, blowing on it to dry. Finally, she was tucking what now looked like a fresh pea under the crust of a large slice of chicken pot pie.

  Chapter 7

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN the chicken pot pie. Peter gave his pillow an angry thump and got into bed. In the first place, the green food coloring most likely would have washed off in the gravy. And what if it had? What were the odds that Flodge would have noticed? The speed at which he’d been shoveling in his grub would hardly have allowed any pause for the analytical inspection of a single off-color pea.

  Peter told himself not to be a blithering idiot, thumped his pillow some more, conjured up a mental picture of Dan Stott in his green porkpie hat driving an endless litter of piglets under a gate, counted up to four hundred and thirty-seven piglets, switched to sheep, got bored, tried cows and found himself milking them, filled two hundred and three imaginary milk pails, finally dropped into fitful slumber wondering what the flaming perdition he was going to do with all that milk, and dreamed he was an off-color pea making a tedious journey through the convoluted coils of Jasper Flodge’s intestines.

  About the time he’d intended to get up, Peter fell sound asleep. He woke an hour or so later, gummy-eyed and irritable. A shower and shave helped some, but not enough. He was annoyed with himself for not having thought to bring an extra shirt. His left shoe eluded him for some time, it had perversely concealed itself under the patchwork quilt that he’d kicked off the foot of the bed sometime during his busy night. He went downstairs at last, fully expecting to be told that the dining room was closed and nobody would give him any coffee.

  But it wasn’t. Thurzella came charging down on him with the coffeepot in one hand and the juice pitcher in the other before he’d even got settled into his chair. For a moment, Peter resented the fact that she’d given him no excuse to glower. He began to perk up, though, once the coffee started warming his gullet, and decided he’d have a pancake or two with his ham and eggs. To hell with the calories, he’d park farther down the lane from Miss Rondel’s and work them off climbing up to the house. Maybe he’d locate her magic spring on the way, he wouldn’t mind another swig or two of that delicious water.

  Breakfast was by no means over, there were still several tables occupied, he’d begun to recognize faces. A few of the patrons nodded to him, one or two vouchsafed the Mainer’s formal greeting.

  “Mornin’.”

  “Mornin’.”

  He got a fairly cordial “Mornin’” from Fred and a glower from Evander, who changed his seat in order to plant himself directly in Peter’s line of sight. Peter gave their table an impartial nod to show he was amenable to being greeted but didn’t give a hoot if he wasn’t, and got down to business on his eggs. When Thurzella came back to refill his coffee cup, he asked whether her grandmother was too busy to give him a minute.

  “Right now she’s frying bacon with one hand and pancakes with the other,” was the girl’s discouraging reply. “Is it something important?”

  Peter shook his head. “Not really. I just thought
it would be appropriate to take Miss Rondel a small present by way of thanks for her having let me collect lupine seeds yesterday, and I haven’t the foggiest notion what she might like.”

  “Oh, then what you’d better do is stop in at my mother’s shop. Mum will know, she’s got lots of great stuff and she’s a great friend of Miss Fran’s. It was Miss Fran who taught her to weave. I’ll go see if your pancakes are ready.”

  Thurzella was wearing plum-colored tights today, and a lavender sweatshirt that had pink and blue lupines embroidered on the front. The period of mourning was clearly over with; sic transit Jasper Flodge. Peter wondered whether the merry widow had stopped in for breakfast this morning. However, the only person he knew well enough to ask was Claridge Withington and he had no appetite for another lesson in local history so early in the day. Mrs. Flodge’s eccentric doings were none of Peter Shandy’s business anyway, he kept his eyes on his plate to avoid meeting Withington’s, finished his breakfast rather quickly, and left the dining room.

  Finding the shop took no time at all, there weren’t many places to look in a town the size of Pickwance. “Michele Cluny, Master Weaver,” as a modestly sized but elegantly calligraphed card in the window announced, was a good advertisement for her wares. Peter had seen plenty of handweaving in the Native Arts Department at Balaclava, he could recognize the quality of the handsome garment that Mrs. Cluny was wearing over a pair of stirrup pants like her daughter’s. The tight pants looked just as good on her, she and Thurzella must be just about the same size and alike as two peas.

  Drat it, why couldn’t he get his mind off peas? Neither the mother nor the daughter resembled a pea in any respect. Both were dark-haired, dark-eyed, red-cheeked without apparent resort to artifice, and as lissome as could reasonably be expected, considering that they’d both grown up on Elva Bright’s cooking. Neither favored the innkeeper, though, they must take after Jean-Luc.