A Dismal Thing To Do

by Charlotte MacLeod

  The boy followed Madoc’s example, cupping his nose between his mittens to thaw it out. “Hey, yeah! That’s like we smelled when we opened the door. First we thought it was the wires under the hood, and jumped back for fear she was going to blow. Remember, Pete?”

  Pete remembered. There’d been this funny stink, sort of like burning rubber. He’d wanted to lift the hood, but Duane said they’d better not, so they hadn’t. Anyway, it hadn’t been all that much of a stink.

  “More as if somebody wearing smoky clothes had been in the car?” Madoc suggested.

  “Yeah, like that,” said Pete. “But then we found this lady’s purse.”

  “Where?”

  “Underneath the driver’s seat. We didn’t notice it right away.”

  “Did you open it?”

  “Well, sure,” said Duane. “I mean, what the heck, why not? We had to find out who owned the car, didn’t we? We never took anything, honest.”

  “All right, I’m not blaming you.”

  Madoc picked up the slender pouch of dark blue leather. Janet wasn’t one to clutter herself up with a bunch of stuff she didn’t need. Her checkbook, a wallet with fifty dollars in the billfold and two dimes in the change purse. Driver’s license, registration, charge cards from a couple of department stores, a snapshot of himself that might have earned him a kidding from the sergeant if the situation had been less dire. A clean blue plastic comb, a blue pen to go with the checkbook, a lipstick in a light coral shade that went well with Janet’s bronzy brown hair, and a clean handkerchief with forget-me-nots embroidered in the corner and a scent of lavender wafting from it. That was what the car should have smelled of, if anything. Madoc’s sister Gwen had presented Janet with a great flagon of Welsh lavender cologne to take away the whiff of sheepdip while they were over visiting Great-uncle Caradoc, and she’d been dabbing it on herself and her possessions, though not to excess because Janet didn’t go in for excesses.

  They hadn’t raised any fingerprints from the wheel, but there was again that odor of greasy smoke, along with something more pungent that none of them could identify. Janet’s handbag, on the other hand, smelled only of good leather and just barely of lavender. So it would appear that the lout who’d had his greasy gloves on the wheel hadn’t handled the bag at all. Maybe he’d never even noticed it.

  “I’d say she got out of the car for one reason or another, and some thief jumped in and drove off with it,” he told his driver.

  “Sure, Inspector,” the constable replied kindly.

  “Damn it, she must have!”

  Madoc kept on pawing around until he found it jammed down behind the gadget the seat belt fitted into: a slip torn off Janet’s grocery pad like the one he had in his pocket, with more or less the same directions scribbled on it. So she had gone to look for the washstand and he’d wasted all this time fiddling around in the wrong direction.

  “Come on,” he barked, and raced back to the police car.

  This time Madoc drove while the constable sat beside him and recited poetry to himself, for the constable was a man of literary tastes. “Back he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky.” Funny how this mild-mannered wisp of a Welshman, who seldom raised his voice above a murmur and tended to disappear into the background unless one kept a pretty sharp eye on him, could turn into Sir Francis Drake all of a sudden. “If ever she needs me, living or dead, I’ll rise that day.” Only Mrs. Rhys, not England. That was Alfred Noyes, too, only a different poem. The constable was all mixed up.

  He wasn’t the only one, the constable decided some while later, after they’d sped back past Fredericton and over toward Oromocto. Those directions Inspector Rhys was trying to follow were getting him lost, from the look of things. Instead of being furious, though, he was acting grimly pleased.

  “That’s what happened, you can bet your boots on it.”

  This was the first thing Madoc had said since they left the Harvey Road. The constable was naturally nonplussed by the remark. Being also outranked and somewhat unmanned, he agreed.

  Abruptly, Madoc slewed the car around in a hair-raising swoosh. The constable started to say, “What—” then he shut up. He could smell the smoke, too, and see the glow in the sky to the northeast. This might be the wrong fire, but any fire was better than none.

  Even as he was straightening out of his deliberate skid, Madoc pointed at the sawhorse and the detour sign tossed into the snowbank at the corner of the side road that led to the glow.

  “Firemen must have done that,” he grunted. As he wound his way up the long lane that had turnings enough but nothing around them, though, he neither saw nor heard any sign that engines had arrived. Maybe the fire hadn’t even been reported. How could he radio in an alarm when he still hadn’t the foggiest idea where they were? Muriel had really outdone herself this time.

  “Open the window,” he told the constable. “Keep your ears peeled.”

  But it was Madoc himself who heard his name called, and caught the silvery glint of a plastic emergency blanket being waved wildly from the middle of a snowfield between two separate fires.

  Chapter 4

  HE EITHER RAN OR flew over the icy crust. Madoc couldn’t have said which, and it didn’t matter. Janet was in his arms, smelling like a finnan haddie and shivering like a toad eating lightning, but all there in one piece, self-possessed enough to warn him, “Watch out how you hug me. I expect I’ve got slivers of glass in my coat.”

  “What from?”

  “The kitchen window. It stuck when I tried to open it, and I didn’t have time to fuss.”

  Madoc started to laugh. He laughed a good deal longer and harder than the situation called for, and it finally occurred to him that he was having a fit of hysterics. That sobered him down enough to ask, “Were you really shouting my name just now?”

  “Of course. I knew it was you.”

  “How?”

  “I just did. You didn’t think to bring along a cup of hot tea, by any chance?”

  “I hope so.”

  The constable was coming toward them, carrying the snowshoes Madoc had again forgotten about. “Have we got a thermos?” Madoc yelled.

  “Ayuh.”

  What the hell was the man’s name? Michael? Gabriel? Raphael? Something that went with Archangel, anyway, or ought to be. Janet was telling the constable so as he handed her a red plastic mug full of scalding coffee. It would be loaded with sugar and she preferred hers plain, but no matter. When they got back to the car, the archangel even produced a box of sweet meal biscuits.

  “Always keep a little something in the car,” he remarked. “You never know.”

  “You don’t, do you?” Janet agreed politely as she accepted a biscuit. “Madoc, how did you think to look for me out here?”

  “Muriel’s directions. Actually, how it started was that your car was found ditched and empty except for your keys and pocketbook down on the Harvey Road.”

  “Oh Madoc, I’m so sorry. It was my own stupid fault. If I hadn’t left the keys in—” Janet stopped eating her biscuit. “If I hadn’t left the keys, I’d be—”

  “You’d what, darling? Here, what’s the matter? Put your head down between your knees.”

  “No, I’m all right.”

  They had her in the back seat with her feet up, a woolly gray blanket wrapped around her and the emergency blanket on top of that. Madoc was supporting her head and shoulders against his chest, nicking his finger on a shard of glass that was, sure enough, caught in the soft wool of her coat, and not giving a damn. The constable was back in the driver’s seat, fiddling with the two-way radio, letting them know back at headquarters that the lost had been found, that there was a fire out here but he didn’t know where here was and it didn’t much matter now anyway because Mrs. Rhys said the place was derelict and there’d been nobody else inside.

  She didn’t say anything else till the driver had turned his car around in the melted-out circle that had been left from the burning truck and
they were passing the smoldering remains of the barn. Then she remarked rather offhandedly, “I’m in there.”

  “What?” Madoc was jolted. “Jenny, are you—”

  “I mean they thought I was. That’s why they burned it. The man who stole my car claimed he kicked—I tried to dry my boots but the stove wasn’t—and then they pushed it over.”

  “We’ll have you home soon.” Madoc had never before in his life felt so totally useless.

  “Delayed reaction,” said the archangel in charge of biscuits. “She’ll be okay once you get home. You warm enough, Mrs. Rhys? Want me to turn up the heater?”

  “I think she’s asleep.”

  Madoc thought perhaps he was, too. The driver began a long and confusing conversation with the dispatcher about how to get out of wherever they were. Eventually they achieved a meeting of the minds, then there was no more talk until the car drew up in front of the right house. That set off a bustle of explanations and cups of tea and hot soup and sandwiches—Muriel knew how to find her way around a kitchen well enough—and at last Janet was in bed with her boots off and her nightgown on and her short hair still damp from a hot bath. Her gown was respectably hidden by a fancy blue bedjacket Grandma Dupree had crocheted, no doubt with visions of Janet’s cutting a dash in a maternity ward. She put on the prim and proper expression Madoc liked to tease her about and said, “Now I expect you’d like me to make a statement.”

  “Ayuh,” said Arthur. That was the constable’s name, Madoc had remembered at last. Good man, Arthur. Maybe they’d name their first son Arthur. He still felt a little woozy himself, but Janet appeared to be in full possession of her faculties, thank God.

  “Muriel, I never did find that place with the washstand.”

  It was a beginning, anyway. Janet picked up steam once she got going. Madoc was trying to take notes and keep his arm around her at the same time, perhaps so she wouldn’t take a notion to go back for the washstand. He was joggling her sore ribs, so she had to protest.

  “For goodness’ sake, Madoc, either let go of me or leave the note taking to Arthur.”

  Janet settled the matter for him by taking the pencil out of his hand and hanging on to the other arm so he couldn’t take it away. “Anyhow, I got mixed up somewhere along the line and there I was, out on this long, empty road when I met a truck coming toward me over the top of the hill. I was wondering how on earth we were going to squeeze past each other when all of a sudden the truck tipped over.”

  “How do you mean it tipped over, Jenny?” Madoc was still a detective, come what might. “Did it skid and jack-knife?”

  “No, it wasn’t that kind of truck, more like what your father would call a pantechnicon. A big box on wheels. It didn’t do anything that I could see, just flopped over on its side in the snow and lay there with its wheels spinning.”

  “I’ll be darned!” exclaimed Muriel, who naturally wasn’t about to be excluded from the denouement when she’d been, so to speak, the author of the drama. “Whatever did you do?”

  “Stopped the car and sat there like a lump. The truck was all across the road. There was no way to get around it and no place to turn back. Then it came to me I’d better try to do something about getting the driver out.”

  “Could you see him, Jenny?” Madoc asked.

  “No, I couldn’t. The truck was over on its left side, with the cab half-buried in a drift. He’d have been on the down side. I thought he might have bumped his head and got knocked unconscious or something. Anyway, I got out to have a look, but the truck was so high and I’m so short I couldn’t figure out how to climb up and get the door open. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Clear enough. Go on.”

  “There was this old barn next to the road a little way back, so I decided to look in there for a ladder or some boards or something I could get up on. I yelled up to the driver so he wouldn’t think I was leaving him stranded, then I backed the car down to the barn and went in over the snowbank.”

  “Leaving your keys and pocketbook,” Madoc amplified, “but taking that plastic blanket.”

  “That’s right. Actually I started to take my purse, but tossed it back because I figured it would just be in my way. I wanted my hands free to carry the ladder or whatever, and I thought maybe the blanket would come in handy one way or another. I was assuming the man was trapped, you see. It made sense at the time.”

  “Of course it did, Jenny. So you got into the barn.”

  “Yes, and I did find a ladder. An apology for one, anyway. Only it was iced into the floor, and while I was trying to pull it free, the barn blew in on me.”

  “Jenny, what—”

  “I’m sorry. I should have said the truck blew up and the explosion knocked the barn down. About half the roof landed smack on top of me.”

  “Jenny!”

  “Now Madoc, don’t get all hot and bothered. I landed on a heap of moldy straw. That and my heavy clothes saved me from the worst of it. A few bruises here and there, that’s all.”

  “A few bruises?” Muriel burst out. “You should see her—”

  “You don’t have to draw them a blueprint,” said Janet with an old-fashioned glance at Arthur. “Anyway, there I was, trying to wiggle out from under and wondering if I was going to bring the rest of the barn down on me and there he was, out in the road pinching my car, if you please. If that wasn’t enough to curdle the milk of human kindness, I’d like to know what is. You don’t have to write that down, Arthur.”

  “About this explosion, Mrs. Rhys,” said Arthur. “You’re sure it was the truck? I mean, mightn’t the man who took your car have blown up the barn and then gone back with a crane or something to get the truck away? The thing of it is—”

  “I know,” Janet interrupted. “You’re going to tell me you didn’t find any wreckage in the road. All you found were the remains of an old red chesterfield and a couple of armchairs.”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, yes. What we think was, it must have been a moving van and some of the furniture inside it caught fire so they shoved it out, but the truck itself—”

  “Arthur, I stood there for darn near two solid hours watching that truck burn down enough so I could get safely past it to the path into the house. Fool-like, I never thought of trying whether the crust would bear my weight. I was too scared about what might happen to me if it didn’t.”

  Madoc’s arm tightened around her till she squeaked. “I’m sorry, Jenny. Darling, what happened to the burned truck?”

  “They came and took it away. With a wrecker, I think.”

  “Who did?”

  “The men who set fire to the house and barn. I never did get to see them, but I heard them talking. I’d built a fire in the parlor stove to keep from freezing, and fallen asleep. When I woke up, I decided I’d better go back to the woodshed for some more firewood, and luckily I was still out there when they came into the kitchen. They had a bottle of brandy they were drinking. I’d taken a little nip of it myself earlier on. What happened was this.”

  Janet told them every bit she could remember, except what she’d really been doing in the woodshed and what they’d said about having fun with her. She was not about to let anything of that sort sneak into Arthur’s notes. The wife of a detective inspector ought to be sans peur et sans reproche, and what Janet hadn’t learned about reproche growing up in Pitcherville wasn’t worth writing home about. Maybe things were different in Fredericton, but she didn’t intend to find out the hard way.

  They let her talk almost without interruption until Arthur had got it all down in his notebook. Then everybody had another cup of tea and a piece of the cake Muriel’s husband Jock had brought over as an excuse to get in on the excitement, naturally enough. Then Arthur said he’d better clear out and let Mrs. Rhys get some sleep. Muriel and Jock took the hint, though they’d obviously have preferred to stay and hash over the details.

  Madoc started taking off his clothes, putting his shirt, socks, and underwear in the hamper, leavin
g his shoes where he could jump into them, not taking the stuff out of his trousers pockets because a man in his position never knew when he’d have to get dressed again in a hurry. Janet had spruced him up a good deal, but he still bagged about the breeches. All the Rhys men bagged, Janet had learned on her honeymoon visit to the ancestral sheep farm. Sir Caradoc bagged the most, of course, because he’d worn his trousers longest. Madoc’s brother Dafydd bagged the least because if half the rumors were true, and she could well believe they were, he never kept his on for long at any given time.

  “I suppose you’d like to go straight off to sleep,” Madoc said in his gentle, wistful way as he reached for his bathrobe.

  Janet was still propped up against the pillows, wearing her fluffy bed jacket. “Go take your shower and let me think about it,” she answered. By the time he got back, she’d taken off the jacket and hidden his pajamas.

  Chapter 5

  “SLEEPY NOW, LOVE?”

  Madoc had been very gentle with his wife. Janet’s bruises were every bit as spectacular as Muriel had intimated. As far as his extensive researches could show, however, nothing was broken. He still thought she ought to have X rays in the morning. Janet didn’t.

  “I’m all right. Truly, Madoc. It’s just so good to be home.”

  She tried to burrow closer to him, but that was hardly possible, so she stayed where she was. “No, I’m not sleepy. I suppose I’m still keyed up. You know, those hijackers or whatever they were must have been awfully well organized in some ways. Putting out detour signs to keep other cars off the road till they could clear away the wreckage took some doing, wouldn’t you say? Those were great big hunks of metal. I don’t see how they could have managed it all by themselves.”

  “I expect they’d brought acetylene torches to cut the wreckage into manageable pieces. One of them was probably driving a dump truck to cart the junk away in, and the other a tow truck to hoist it aboard. It’s a wonder you didn’t see them.”

  “If I had, I’d probably have charged out and got carted away with the rest of the wreckage.” Janet could say it matter-of-factly now that the risk was over. “It must have been that awful brandy I drank that put me to sleep and saved my life. I do remember having a weird dream about dinosaurs prowling around outside. I suppose that was the noise they were making.”