Grab Bag

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “I asked Sister Marie Claire,” she said abruptly, “and she says they don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Sister says,” Miss Harcourt explained carefully in her precise librarian’s voice, “that the rules of the convent compel them all to be in their beds at half-past nine and not to leave their cells until six o’clock in the morning. She says none of them would dare disobey.”

  “I don’t care what she says,” I replied too sharply. “I’ve seen them out there every night since I moved in.”

  She looked at me for a moment without speaking, then went back to the desk. I knew what she was thinking. “The shock of losing her husband, poor dear.”

  That evening I had the North Branch again. On my way into the house after I got off duty, I thumped at the door of my first-floor neighbors. Their television was blasting full force and I had quite a time making them hear. Finally one of the sisters, Miss Edith I believe it was, shuffled to the door.

  “Come in, come in, Mrs. Goodbody. Helen, it’s Mrs. Goodbody from upstairs,” she screamed.

  The other sister, who must have been ever deafer, smiled and nodded but didn’t turn away from the television set. She was watching a western and seemed to enjoy being able to hear the gunshots.

  “I wanted to ask you,” I shouted over the racket, “if you ever see the nuns in the yard at night.”

  Miss Edith nodded briskly. “Fine. Not a bit of trouble since I started the new treatment. What I say is, you can’t be too careful with all this—” I think the next word was sickness. Miss Edith had a trick of raising and lowering her voice between a bellow and a whisper without regard to the sense of what she was saying. Between that and the gunfire, I lost a great deal.

  “—since she died. Though if you ask me, she plain wore herself to death sewing for those nuns.”

  “Yes, the nuns,” I shrieked. “Do you ever—”

  “Night and day. It was too much for a woman her age, but she was bound and determined. I never knew such a stubborn woman. Did we, Helen?”

  Her sister smiled and nodded again, still not taking her eyes from the screen.

  “We could hear that sewing machine of hers going at all hours. Some nights it kept us awake.”

  She must have been talking about the late Seraphine Laberes, I decided. It seemed incredible that any noise whatsoever could disturb this pair. Perhaps the empty apartment between had acted as a giant sounding board. I tried once more.

  “They’ve been keeping me awake.”

  Surprisingly, she heard most of what I said, and gave me an odd look. “It can’t be her. She’s been dead for over a month.”

  “Not Seraphine! The nuns.”

  “That’s what I said. It was doing for those nuns killed her, you mark my words. Working all day at the tailor shop and all night for them. And never getting a penny for it, I know for a fact. She even bought the material herself. She told me so. ‘They’re old,’ she said. ‘They won’t give up their habits. But I can’t stand to see them going around in rags.’ I heard her,” Miss Edith finished proudly.

  The seamstress must have had stronger lungs than mine. I gave up and fell back, like Miss Helen, on smiles and nods.

  “She made one a week, regular as clockwork. I’d meet her Sunday mornings going to the convent with a big black bundle over her arm. She didn’t care. ‘It’s the Lord’s work,’ she’d say to me. She meant to make one for everybody, but she only got thirteen of them done. They found the thirteenth finished on her machine the night she died. That was an unlucky number for her all right, as I said to Helen. Didn’t I, Helen?” These last words were spoken in a whisper.

  “You certainly did, Edith,” replied Miss Helen.

  I said good night and went upstairs.

  That night I never shut an eye. I undressed and got into bed but all I could do was lie there waiting for those maddening pinpoints of light to appear.

  Finally I could stand the suspense no longer. I got up, pulled on the first clothes that came to hand, grabbed my black coat and a head scarf, and went downstairs. I found myself tiptoeing so as not to wake the house, then feeling silly for doing it with only Miss Edith and Miss Helen below and nothing above but the empty flat where Miss Edith claimed Seraphine Laberes had worked herself to death sewing for the nuns.

  The garden was still empty when I got down there. I walked over and stood close to the iron railings, beginning to wonder why I had come. After a few minutes, though, I saw a glimmer of light over in the far corner, then another and another. I counted them one by one until the twenty-third appeared. To my annoyance, however, they stayed huddled over in the corner.

  “I wish they’d get started with whatever it is they do,” I thought crossly. I was getting chilly, standing there.

  Immediately, as if I had turned on the power that moved them, the forms started moving around. Still they stayed away from me.

  “Oh, come over here,” I muttered.

  They came, all twenty-three of them in a silent semicircle, looming toward me through the railings. No hands held the candles. No faces showed beneath the cowls. The robes were empty.

  I believe I must have fainted. The next thing I remember, I was pulling myself up by the cold iron spikes, picking dirt and leaves off my good wool coat, staring in at the barren garden, empty now in the bleak dawn. I was not frightened. I only knew I should never sleep again until I had finished what must be done.

  I went back into the house and took down the card over the top mailbox that said Seraphine Laberes, Dressmaking and Alterations. I carried it upstairs and burned it in an ashtray. Then I bathed, dressed, and put on a felt hat I seldom wore. It was still very early, so I puttered around making my bed, dusting a little, brushing my coat where I had fallen, Out of habit I made coffee, but I didn’t drink any. As soon as the sky was decently light, I went next door and rang the bell.

  The elderly nun who opened the door had on a neat, new habit.

  “Seraphine made that,” I said.

  “She … yes she did,” stammered the portress, quite startled by my brusque remark.

  “She finished thirteen of them, I understand.”

  “She did, and may the blessing of Mary rest forever on her soul.”

  “But she still had how many to go?”

  “Thirty-seven,” the portress replied promptly, as though she had the number stamped on her tongue. “Me being on the door,” she half apologized, “I got the first one.”

  “What is the name of your order?”

  “The Little Sisters of the Poor.”

  Yes, it would be. I took out my checkbook.

  Eyeing me with a mixture of hope and suspicion, she backed away from the door. “I’d better call Mother Superior. Will you step in, please?”

  I don’t know what I expected a convent to be like. The room into which the nun showed me reminded me of a dentist’s waiting room. An elderly, not very successful dentist, like the ones in our town. One of those hideous pseudo-Renaissance tables stood in the middle with a couple of straight chairs drawn up to it. I pulled out one and sat down.

  The Mother Superior didn’t keep me waiting. She bustled in, her long rosary swinging from her waist. I thought it proper to stand up. What on earth did one call her? “Mother Superior” sounded rather a mouthful and plain “Mother” hardly suitable from a non-Catholic close to her own age. I bowed and said nothing. She waved me back into my seat and took the other chair herself. The portress left the room, but I could see her black skirts just beyond the door. I got right down to business.

  “I must apologize for coming so early, but I have to do this as soon as possible for my own peace of mind.”

  The Mother Superior’s lips formed the word, “Soul.”

  “My soul isn’t involved,” I said rather tartly.

  “Oh, but the soul’s always involved, Mrs.—”

  “Goodbody. I live next door, in the apartment below where Seraphine Laberes used to live.”

  “God rest
her soul,” she sighed. “I wish we had more like her.”

  “I understand she was making you all new uniforms.”

  “Habits, yes.”

  “Can you tell me how much each one would cost to buy?”

  “More than we can afford, I’m afraid.” The Mother Superior was pretty shabby, herself. She named a figure that exactly corresponded to my weekly salary at the library.

  “And you need thirty-seven more.”

  “Thirty-seven for the sisters. Thirty-eight counting me,” she amended with childlike shrewdness.

  I figured quickly on the back of my blank check. “Is that right?”

  “It is. I’ve figured it often enough myself.”

  I filled in the amount, signed the check, and pushed it over to her. “Please buy them right away.”

  “But Mrs. … Mrs. Goodbody.” She seemed hardly to know what to say. “This is an awful lot of money.”

  “The check’s good,” I answered shortly. “My husband left me”—a phrase of my brother-in-law’s popped into my head—“well provided for.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “You must not thank me!” I think I frightened her with my vehemence. “You must take those thirty-seven nuns with you immediately into your chapel or whatever you call it, and give thanks that new habits have been provided through the efforts of Seraphine Laberes. I mean it! If you don’t do this right away, I’ll stop payment on the check.”

  “We’ll certainly do it,” she assured me nervously. “And we’ll also say—”

  “No. My name must never be mentioned. The gift is from Seraphine. Promise me, by all you hold sacred.”

  “I swear it on the Sacred Heart of Jesus.” She made the sign of the cross. Then she looked at me for what seemed a long time. Perhaps she saw something. “Seraphine Laberes was a very determined woman.”

  I nodded. Suddenly I felt drained of all my strength, as though I had sat up for many nights, sewing on black cloth that strained the eyes. “I must get to work.”

  She saw me to the door herself. That night I slept like a baby.

  I often come across the nuns in their new habits now, but only in the daytime, thank goodness. Every so often, I slip into the Catholic church and light a candle. I don’t quite know why I do it. Still, as Miss Edith says, you can’t be too careful.

  Better a Cat

  FIRST PUBLISHED IN Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine, August 1966, as “The High Price of Cat Food,” this story is hardly long enough to merit any further introduction.

  “Puss, puss, puss.”

  “There she goes,” said Miss Johnson. “That old cat of hers must have slipped his lead again. You might think she’d have more sense than to go looking for him at this time of night.”

  “Don’t tell me,” sighed Miss McGuffy. “I’ve begged and pleaded with her a hundred times. “Mrs. Quinter, I tell her, no cat’s worth getting yourself killed for. There’ve been five stranglings so far this year already. You stay off the roads after dark, I tell her, or you’ll be the sixth. But will she listen?”

  “You can’t tell her a thing,” said Miss Johnson. “I said the same thing to her myself only last Thursday. If you think so much of that precious cat of yours, I said, why don’t you keep him indoors? But she only simpered in that featherheaded way of hers and said oh no, she couldn’t do that. Tommy would be so unhappy if he didn’t have his little run. Then let him run in the daytime, I said. But you might as well talk to a stone wall.”

  “She ought to be locked up, if you ask me,” said Miss McGuffy. “Living on bread and tea herself and feeding that smelly old thing chicken and tinned salmon, if you please. It’s a disgrace.”

  “Well, she’ll get herself strangled one of these foggy nights while she’s out there hunting for him,” said Miss Johnson, tugging the tea cosy sharply down over the pot. “And then where will she be?”

  Where was she now? Mrs. Quinter thought she knew, but she wasn’t quite sure. She pulled her old black coat tighter around her bent body. There was a bone-chilling dampness coming up from the slimy cobblestones.

  “Puss, puss, puss!”

  She’d put a long way between herself and her tiny basement flat by now. Still no lithe, shadowy form had bounded out of the blackness behind the dust bins. She slapped Tommy’s thin nylon lead anxiously against the palm of her free hand. The empty collar dangled at one end. Miss Johnson had suggested that she buy the cat a smaller size, but Mrs. Quinter wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Oh no, I couldn’t do that. What if the collar got caught on something and Tommy wasn’t able to squirm loose from it? A cat could strangle that way.”

  “Better a cat than a human,” Miss Johnson had sniffed. She’d meant well, of course.

  “Puss, puss, puss!”

  It would be warm at home. She’d set the teapot on the back of the stove and fixed Tommy’s chicken on a blue willow plate. She’d been careful to remove all the bones. A cat might choke on a chicken bone. They knew how to make themselves cosy, she and Tommy.

  She did wish they were both there right now, she in her comfortable chair by the fire and Tommy purring on her lap. It was no night for an old woman and a middle-aged cat to be prowling the streets.

  “Puss, puss—oh!”

  A figure loomed out of the mist, directly beside her. She had not heard footsteps.

  “You’d best be getting home, Ma,” boomed a not unfriendly male voice. “This is no place for a woman alone. Not with a mad strangler about.”

  “I know,” she quavered, “but my cat slipped his collar and ran off. I daren’t leave him out, in this neighborhood. There’s no telling what might happen to him.”

  “A cat’s got nine lives. You’ve only one. He’ll find his way back all right, don’t you fret. They always do. Get on with you, now. You’re not safe here. Nobody is.”

  There was an edge of panic in the man’s gruff voice as he tramped on past her over the cobblestones. He was much taller than she. Mrs. Quinter had to stand on tiptoe to fling the lead around his neck.

  It was too bad he had to be the one this time. He had seemed a pleasant sort of man. But it cost so much to keep a cat properly fed these days. Her mended gloves fumbled awkwardly at his wallet. Twelve pounds. Excellent. That would take care of her and Tommy for weeks to come. She tucked the money inside her glove and replaced the wallet neatly in the dead man’s pocket.

  “Puss, puss, puss!”

  She was almost home before the familiar, sinuous form pounced out of nowhere to wind its purring length around her weary legs.

  “Tommy, you naughty cat,” she cried. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Come home this instant and get your supper.”

  She snapped the collar under his jowls and took a turn of the lead around her glove. Miss Johnson, peering out from behind her curtain, saw the light go up in the entry across the way.

  “Well, she’s found him at last.”

  “And lucky she didn’t find more than him,” said Miss McGuffy. “A night like this, it isn’t safe to be out.”

  Lady Patterly’s Lover

  A MORE OR LESS searing tale of illicit passion, diplomatically couched so as to offend hardly anybody. Unveiled in Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine, September 1965.

  “We’d be doing him a kindness, really,” said Gerald. “You do see that, Eleanor?”

  Lady Patterly ran one exquisite hand idly through the thick, fair hair of her husband’s steward. “I’d be doing myself one. That’s all that matters.”

  Born beautiful, spoiled rotten as a child, married at twenty-one to the best catch in England, wife at twenty-three to a helpless paralytic, bored to desperation at twenty-four; that, in a nutshell, was Eleanor, Lady Patterly. When old Ponsonby had retired and her husband’s close friend Gerald had come to manage the Patterly estates, Eleanor had lost no time in starting an affair with him. Discreetly, of course. She cared nothing for the world, but she was vain enough to care greatly for the world’s opinion of her
.

  Gerald had been only too willing. As handsome as Eleanor was lovely, he had the same total lack of scruple, the same cold intelligence, the same passionate devotion to his own interests. He took the greatest care of his old friend Roger Patterly’s property because he soon realized that with Eleanor’s help he could easily make it his own. It was Gerald who suggested the murder.

  “The killing part is the easiest. A pillow over his face, a switch of medicines, nothing to it. The big thing is not getting caught. We must make sure nobody ever suspects it wasn’t a natural death. We’ll take our time, prepare the groundwork, wait for exactly the right moment. And then, my love, it’s all ours.”

  Lady Patterly gazed around the drawing room with its priceless furnishings, through the satin-draped windows to the impeccably tended formal gardens. “I shall be so glad to get out of this prison. We’ll travel, Gerald. Paris, Greece, Hong Kong. I’ve always had a fancy to see Hong Kong.”

  They would do nothing of the kind. Gerald was too careful a steward not to stay and guard what would be his. He only smiled and replied, “Whatever you want, my sweet.”

  “It will be just too marvelous,” sighed the invalid’s wife. “How shall we go about it?”

  “Not we, darling. You.”

  After all, it would be Eleanor, not he, who would inherit. Unless he married her afterwards, he hadn’t the ghost of a claim. And suppose she changed her mind? But she wouldn’t. With the hold of murder over her she could be handled nicely. If he were fool enough to do the job himself … Gerald was no fool.

  “I shall continue to be the faithful steward. And you, my dear, will be the dutiful wife. A great deal more dutiful than you’ve been up to now.”

  Lady Patterly inspected her perfect fingernails, frowning. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to start showing some attention to your husband. Don’t overdo it. Build it up gradually. You might begin by strolling into Roger’s room and asking him how he’s feeling.”