Something in the Water

by Charlotte MacLeod

  Andrew’s relationship with the woman who paid his wages could perhaps be described as feudal; in fact they feuded quite often, nor did the alleged Mistress of the Manor always triumph over the Old Retainer.

  As for Guthrie Fingal’s relationship with Catriona, Peter and Helen were both wondering what, if anything, was going to happen now that Guthrie was back to being a bachelor. At the moment, Guthrie seemed to be both pleased to hear that his friend was coming home sooner than he’d expected and piqued that she hadn’t bothered to let him know. Whatever happened, the Shandys had agreed, it wasn’t going to be all roses.

  As her reputation in the field of mystery writing had grown, Catriona had become accustomed to alternating periods of semi-solitude in the old brick house where she parked her typewriter and pecked out her tales with spurts of travel urged upon her by her publishers in the interests of generating ever greater sales. About once a year, sometimes twice, she attended one of the burgeoning assortment of mystery conventions, to greet her fans and hang out with other practitioners of her odd profession. Lately she’d taken to slipping off on private junkets with particular friends such as Helen Shandy, Iduna Stott, and a few others whom she’d known and cherished over the years.

  Guthrie Fingal, on the other hand, was a confirmed stick-in-the-mud. He seldom went anywhere he didn’t have to go, except in his professional capacity, and then only when he couldn’t find a way to weasel out of the trip. The paradoxical result of their contrasting life-styles was that Catriona never knew what was going on in her own home town while Guthrie’s bush telegraph kept him up to the minute on everything that happened over a well-nigh incredible range of territory. Peter was, therefore, surprised to find himself the conveyor rather than the recipient of the startling news from Pickwance.

  He had barely uttered the dead man’s name, however, when Guthrie interrupted. “Jasper Flodge? Great big piss-cutter dressed to the nines, with patent-leather hair and squinchy little eyes the size of granny’s shoe buttons? Won every pie-eating contest in the county for the past thirty-seven years or so.”

  “That sounds like him,” said Peter. “He was shoveling in Mrs. Bright’s chicken pot pie as if he’d been a fireman on a Mississippi steamboat when all of a sudden he flopped over into his plate and that was the end of him.”

  “And damned good riddance!” snorted his friend. “I’m not a vindictive man as a rule, Pete, but there’s one bastard I’m glad to know got what was coming to him. Flodge was the skunk who got me and the college into that god-awful mess over the woodlot that was bequeathed to us by the founder’s daughter’s niece, I believe she was. Nice old soul, she lived to be almost a hundred. I used to drop by now and then and take her little doodads and whatnots: magazines, fruit off the college trees, maybe a box of candy or a bottle of port for what ailed her. Sit and visit awhile, clip the burdocks out of the cat’s tail, maybe do a chore or two around the place. You know how it is with an old house, there’s always something.”

  Guthrie fell to contemplating a lineup of shags perched on a spit of rock that hadn’t yet been covered by the incoming tide. Peter waited for him to get on with the story.

  “So anyway, she died. When it came time to settle the estate, didn’t that goddamn Flodge horn in with a faked-up family tree claiming he was her cousin’s great-nephew and the legal heir, which he damned well wasn’t. He claimed I’d been using undue influence, getting the old lady drunk while she was of unsound mind, which she sure as hell wasn’t, and tricking her into signing the will. He bad-mouthed me from here to hell and gone, even went to the college board of trustees and tried to get me kicked out of my job. Of course there wasn’t a word of truth in any of the things he said. He got turned down flat at the hearing but the judge happened to be a third cousin of mine twice removed or some damned thing—I’m related to half the county, as you know—so naturally there was talk over that. Needless to say, it didn’t help the college any, nor me, either.”

  “You should have sued the bastard for defamation of character.”

  “Huh. Do you think that would have made any difference? You know as well as I do, Pete, you can’t touch pitch without getting smirched. And we weren’t the only ones he tried his tricks on, not by a long shot. The hell of it is, sometimes he won.”

  “Flodge must have made plenty of enemies, then.”

  “You bet he did. To know him was to hate his guts. Don’t be surprised if they have cheerleaders at the funeral. I might take a run up there myself and help with the yelling, if I thought he was worth wasting the gas on. If somebody wanted to rent an excursion bus, you can bet there wouldn’t be any trouble filling the seats.”

  Guthrie was really wound up by now. He went on to regale Peter with some of Flodge’s other perfidies, some of them verging on the ridiculous, others downright evil, all of them adding to the roster of persons who had reason to hold the name of Jasper Flodge in obloquy. As far as Guthrie knew, Elva Bright and her late husband weren’t on the list, nor was any member of their family; perhaps Flodge had been smart enough not to inflict his shady deals on his near neighbors. Catriona had given Guthrie the impression that Miss Frances Rondel, though relatively unblessed with worldly goods, had always wielded a good deal of power locally and that Flodge or anybody else would have known better than to risk tangling with her. Peter wondered.

  “Maybe you know something about a couple of—I think they might be brothers—who seem to have some kind of standing in the town. I’ve seen them in the inn dining room, they seem to be regular patrons. I don’t recall their last name, but one’s called Fred and the other’s Evander.”

  “I’ve heard of them. Wye, their name is. They own a tourmaline mine. You probably know there’s a lot of first-rate tourmaline in Maine. Fred’s the brains of the outfit, I believe, and a pretty big gun in Maine politics, though you mightn’t think so to look at him. I’ve never heard of anybody saying a word against Fred Wye, which is going some, I can tell you. The other one, I don’t know much about him. Works in the mine some, I guess. He seems to be on close terms with his brother but that’s about it. Everybody seems to like Fred but, when Evander’s name comes up, they just shrug and pass him off. One fellow from up that way did tell me that Evander was a handy cuss in a row and it didn’t do to provoke him because you wouldn’t know what he might do. I don’t suppose you’re likely to run afoul of him.”

  Peter shook his head. “Apparently I already have, though I don’t know why. When he comes into the restaurant, he seems to make a point of sitting where I can’t help seeing his face, and glowers at me all the time I’m eating.”

  “I’ll be damned. You haven’t said anything to turn him ugly?”

  “Not a yip. The only thing I can think of is that when I was walking up the path to Miss Rondel’s house yesterday morning, Wye came charging down, yelling back over his shoulder about something he was going to do that she wouldn’t like. He could be angry that I overheard him, though I’ve no idea what he was talking about.”

  “Um. You never can tell with somebody like that. Maybe you ought to stay here for the night. I might have a pair of clean sheets around somewhere.”

  “Thanks, but I told Mrs. Bright I’d be back for dinner. I’m coming over tomorrow to collect Helen, I thought we might all have lunch together before I take her to the inn. She wants to see the lupines, what’s left of them. And we have a couple of other things planned,” Peter replied somewhat evasively.

  He couldn’t quite bring himself to let Guthrie know he’d fallen in love with a painting. Furthermore, he had a superstitious fear that if he so much as mentioned their existence, the whole roomful might have vanished into thin air by the time he got back to Pickwance.

  “Helen and I are only planning to stay the one night,” he went on. “I expect we’ll stop at Catriona’s on our way home, though. You going to be around?”

  “Oh, I expect likely I’ll be able to spare you a few minutes of my valuable time.” Guthrie glanced at his watch and le
aped up as if the rock had suddenly turned to molten lava. “Sorry, Pete, but we’ve got to head back. I’m supposed to be doing some damn thing or other exactly twelve and a half minutes from now. So when do we meet tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know, it depends on how early Helen and Catriona start out and how many pit stops they make on the way. I’ll probably be here by noontime. Miss Rondel’s expecting us out at her place around half past three, so I may have to just stuff Helen into our car and whomp her on up there. I shouldn’t be surprised if we stayed a night in Sasquamahoc on the way back, though, unless Catriona sics Carlyle and Emerson on us. We could come to your seminar and root for the earwigs.”

  “Like hell you could. I don’t tolerate any coarse ribaldry in my classroom. Added to which, this crowd will have pulled out by then and I don’t have another lot coming till week after next, thank God.”

  They made it back to the college with half a minute to spare. Peter got into his own car and headed for Pickwance. He was in no great rush to get there, he stopped at a barn that had a “Used Books” sign nailed to the front, and treated himself to a browse. Peter liked some of the early-twentieth-century novels, he wasn’t much for modern poetry but he did have a penchant for old-fashioned narrative verse, the cornier the better. An hour or so later and sixty-seven dollars poorer, he emerged from the barn triumphant with a paper bag full of treasures.

  Along with Holman Day’s King Spruce and The Go-Getter, the collected Mr. Glencannon stories of Guy Gilpatric, and a few more priceless tomes, he’d unearthed a scrapbook that some noble soul had pieced together out of the poetry pages that used to appear on the back page of the magazine section of the Boston Sunday Globe when Boston was still the cultural hub of the universe and New Englanders could gloat over such deathless epics as “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” and “Some Little Bug Is Going to Find You Some Day.” Peter’s grandmother Shandy had collected a shoe box full of these pages but she’d never got around to pasting them in a scrapbook. When the farm had to be sold and the house cleaned out, some officious bastard had chucked out the shoe box before Peter could get to it. He’d always suspected his great-aunt Bedelia, a fanatical housekeeper who’d never picked up a newspaper except for the purpose of starting a fire in the wood stove or spreading the pages over her freshly scrubbed linoleum to keep anybody from tracking it up. He wondered where Great-Aunt Bedelia was spreading newspapers now. Probably on the road that was paved with good intentions, he decided.

  By the time Peter left the bookshop, the clouds that had begun threatening while he and Guthrie were warming their behinds on the sun-heated rocks were assembled in full force. He barely had time to stash his trove in the car’s trunk alongside the lupine seeds before it started to rain. This wasn’t going to be one of the summer thunderstorms that pelt awhile, let up awhile, and then pelt some more; this was a down-to-business rain that set Peter to worrying about whether farmers in the area had got their hay in.

  It was a long time since Peter himself had been engaged in any of those desperate races against the elements that used to lend extra pep and ginger to life on a small farm. He felt a stirring to be out in somebody’s field with a pitchfork, doing the neighborly thing; but either the early crop of hay was already in around these parts or else nobody had got around to cutting any as yet. Anyway, they wouldn’t be using pitchforks these days. He flipped on his windshield wipers and headed for Pickwance, grateful not to be lurching along some dirt road behind a truck piled high with logs destined for some pulp mill and a scary great log-lifter on behind looking like the leftovers from a Tyrannosaurus rex.

  Peter rather liked driving in the rain, particularly on a secondary route when he had the road pretty much to himself. He didn’t see another car for quite a stretch. When he did come upon one, it was pulled over to the side of the road with its hood up and a denim-covered backside protruding from underneath. This wasn’t the greatest place to break down, he hadn’t passed a house since shortly after he’d left the book barn and there didn’t look to be another up ahead. He drew up and opened his window.

  “Need a hand?”

  The stranded driver straightened up and shook the rain out of his eyes. “Don’t suppose you’d have a spare fuel pump with you?”

  “No, but I might be able to get you one, if you’ll tell me where.”

  “Don’t want to put you to the trouble.”

  That was a typical Mainer’s reaction, Peter thought. What the man really didn’t want was having to feel beholden. He could understand that well enough, he didn’t like having to feel beholden either. He put on the raincoat and shapeless tweed hat that he’d thrown into the back seat just in case, got out of the car, and leaned over the engine as protocol required. “Mind if I take a look?”

  “She’s all yours, mister.” The man was looking at Peter’s own car with mingled scorn and awe. “You a mechanic?”

  “No, but I’ve doctored plenty of ailing tractors.”

  This crate could certainly stand some doctoring. Peter spotted at least four potential causes for a breakdown without even trying, no doubt there were more. The car hadn’t been neglected, it wasn’t more than reasonably dirty inside, it was just plumb worn out. He had a repair kit in his own car but he wouldn’t dare go fiddling around with this one for fear the whole shebang would collapse in a heap of rust. He straightened up and wiped his hands on one of the bandanna handkerchiefs that he always carried from force of habit, even to weddings and funerals if Helen didn’t frisk him and make him take a white one instead.

  “I see your problem, but we can’t do much in this rain. Where were you heading?”

  “Up the coast a ways. Place called Pickwance.”

  “Oh, well then, we’re in business. I’m staying at Bright’s Inn. I was just on my way back from seeing a friend in Sasquamahoc.”

  “You don’t say. I figured you was just a tourist, with them Massachusetts number plates. Got folks in Sasquamahoc, have you?”

  Peter decided his old roommate could count as a folk. “You know Guthrie Fingal at the forestry school?”

  “I’ve met him. Had a nephew went there. Seems to be doing all right. Name’s Tilkey.”

  “Mine’s Shandy. You wouldn’t be related to Eustace Tilkey who runs the Ethelbert Nevin out of Hocasquam?”

  “Yes, but I ain’t proud of it. You know Eustace?”

  “I suppose you could say so. My wife went on one of his whale-watching trips.” And damned near didn’t make it back, Peter winced at the memory.* “Look, hadn’t we better tow your car someplace where it will be safe? Have you anything we can use for a towrope?”

  “Nope, but I’ve got a cousin with a tow truck. If you’ll drive me to a telephone, I can give him a call. He’ll come and pick up the pieces when he finds the time. Just let me get my good clothes out of the back, there’s nothing else worth stealing. Including the car. It’s just a piece of junk my boy cobbled together. Didn’t want to leave my wife stranded, so she’s got the pickup. She could have come but she didn’t want to. Can’t say’s I blame her, considering, but I wouldn’t miss this for all the tea in China.”

  “You’re on your way to some—er—function?”

  “You could call it that. And I’m going to enjoy every minute of it. Say, I don’t want to get your upholstery wet.”

  “Don’t worry, my wife always keeps a few old towels in the car. I tend to get pretty grubby myself often as not. Here, spread this one under you. What’s the big excitement at Pickwance?”

  As if Peter didn’t know. The excursion bus that Guthrie Fingal had hypothesized might turn out to be not such a bad idea after all. After Jasper Flodge was safely planted and the cheering had died down, Mr. Tilkey could book a seat and ride the bus home.

  * Vane Pursuit, 1989

  Chapter 9

  IT WAS LUCKY FOR the stranded one that Peter had stopped. They were almost four miles up the road before they managed to locate a gas station that had a pay phone in working order. Tilkey didn’t w
aste many words because he only had one quarter, he was naturally reluctant to bum another off his rescuer and the manager didn’t look like the type to break a bill for a non-customer. Peter then decided he’d put some gas that he didn’t really need into his tank not only to demonstrate that they weren’t pikers, but also to drag the surly lout into the rain, where he obviously didn’t want to go. Their mission accomplished thus far, Shandy and his new acquaintance set off again.

  Tilkey wasn’t a bad companion in his way, sociable enough to relieve the monotony of a longish drive but no ear-bender. When he did talk, it was mainly about tractors and root vegetables. Both subjects were, of course, entirely congenial to Peter. By the time they got near to Pickwance, he himself had waxed almost magniloquent on the cultivation of turnips. It was only then that Tilkey realized he was in the presence of greatness.

  “Gorry mighty! You wouldn’t happen to be that Professor Shandy from Balaclava Aggie? I’ve heard of you.”

  Peter hunched his shoulders. “Whatever you’ve heard, don’t believe a word of it. Were you planning to put up at Bright’s Inn for the night?”

  “Not when I can sponge on my relatives. I’ve got a couple of second cousins baching it out at their folks’ old place. You happened to run into the Wye brothers?”

  “Yes, though I didn’t know they were brothers until Guthrie Fingal told me this noontime. Fred and Evander, would they be the ones you mean? I’ve seen them in the dining room, they seem to be regular customers of Mrs. Bright’s.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me any. I expect I’ll be eating there tonight myself, it’s either that or starve to death. What them two boys need is a woman in the house. My wife keeps telling them to hire a housekeeper, but Evander’s scared to death she might want to marry him, though God knows why any woman in her right mind would want to. And Fred’s still pretty bitter about the way his wife walked out on him. She took him for everything but his hernia truss, and all for that conniving son-of-a—Godfrey, I’m gabbing away like some old hen at a tea party. I ought to watch my mouth for saying that, my wife always claims men gossip a damn sight worse than women do.”