“It may look good,” Gritty said, “but it’s a pain in the you-know-what. I’m tired of floors that slope and doors that creak and septic tanks that back up and stairs with narrow treads. God! They must have had small feet in the old days. And small bottoms! Look at those Windsor chairs! I’m selling the house and moving to an apartment in Indian Village — near the golf course, you know.”
Pug said, “Mother is a champion golfer. She wins all the tournaments.”
“What will you do with your antiques when you move?” Qwilleran asked innocently.
“Sell them at auction. Do you like auctions? They’re the major pastime in Moose County — next it potluck suppers and messing around.”
:Oh, Mother!” Pug remonstrated. She turned to Qwilleran. “That big rolltop desk belonged to my great-grandfather. He founded the Picayune.”
“It looks like a rolltop coffin,” her mother said. “I’ve been doomed to live with antiques all my life. Never liked them. Crazy, isn’t it?”
Lunch was served at a pine table in the kitchen, and the quiche arrived on blue-and-white plates.
Gritty said, “I hope this is the last meal I ever eat on blue china. It makes food look yukky, but the whole set was handed down in my husband’s family — hundreds of pieces that refuse to break.”
“I was appalled,” Qwilleran said, “when the Picayune offices burned down. I was hoping the paper would continue to publish under Junior’s direction.”
“Poo on the Picayune,” said Gritty. “They should have pulled the plug thirty years ago.”
“But it’s unique in the annals of journalism. Junior could have carried on the tradition, even if they printed the paper by modern methods.”
“No,” she said. “That boy will marry his midget, and they’ll both leave Pickax and go Down Below to get jobs. Probably in a sideshow,” she added with a laughter. “Junior is the runt of the litter.”
“Oh, Mother, don’t say such things,” Pug protested. To Qwilleran she said, “Mother is the humorist in the family.”
“It hides my broken heart,” the widow said with a debonair shrug.
“What will happen to the Picayune building now? Were they able to salvage anything?”
“It’s all gone,” she said without apparent regret. “The building is gutted, but the stone walls are okay. They’re two feet thick. It would make a good minimall with six or eight shops, but we’ll have to wait and see what we collect on insurance.”
Throughout the visit thoughts were racing through Qwilleran’s mind: Everything was being done too fast; it all seemed beautifully planned. As for the widow, either she was braving it out or she was utterly heartless. “Gritty” affected him les like a courageous woman and more like the sand in the spinach quiche.
Returning home, he telephoned Dr. Zoller’s dental clinic and spoke with the young receptionist who had such dazzlingly capped teeth.
“This is Jim Qwilleran, Pam. Could I get an appointment this afternoon to have my teeth cleaned?”
“One moment. Let me find your card ... You were here in July, Mr. Q. You’re not due until January.”
“This is an a emergency. I’ve been drinking a lot of tea.”
“Oh ... Well, in that case you’re in luck. Jody just and cancellation. Can you come right over?”
“in three minutes and twenty seconds.” In Pickax one was never more than five minutes away from anywhere.
The clinic occupied a lavishly renovated stone stable that had once been a ten-cent barn behind the old Pickax Hotel in horse-and-buggy days. Jody greeted Qwilleran eagerly. In her long white coat she looked even more diminutive.
“I’ve been trying to reach you!” she said. “Juney wants you to know that he’s flying Down Below to see the editor who promised him job. He left at noon.”
“Well, that’s the end of the Picayune,” Qwilleran said.
“Fasten your seat belt. You’re going for a ride.” She adjusted the dental chair to its lowest level. “Is your head comfy?”
“How late did Junior stay at the fire scene?”
“He got in at five-thirty this morning, and he was beat! They had to stay and watch for hot spots, you know ... Now open wide.”
“Salvage anything?” he asked quickly before complying.
“I don’t think so. The papers that weren’t burned were soaked. As soon as they knocked the fire down they let Juney go in with an air pack to see if he could find a fireproof box that belonged to his dad. But the smoke was too thick. He couldn’t eve see — Oops! Did I puncture you?”
“Arrh,” Qwilleran replied with his mouth full of instruments.
Jody’s tiny fingers had a delicate touch, but her hands were shaking after a sleepless night.
“Juney says they don’t know what caused the fire. He didn’t let anyone smoke when they were taking pictures ...Is that a sensitive spot?”
“Arrh arrh.”
“Poor Juney! He was crushed — absolutely crushed! He’s really not strong enough to be a nozzleman, you know, but the chief let him take the hose — with three backup men instead of two. It made Juney feel — not so helpless, you know ... Now you can rinse out.”
“Building well insured?”
“Just a tad wider, please. That’s it! ... There’s some insurance, but most of the stuff is priceless, because it’s old an irreplaceable... Now rinse.”
“Too bad the old issues weren’t on microfilm and stored somewhere for safety.”
“Juney said it would cost too much money.”
“Who reported the fire?” Another quick question between rinses.
“Some kids cruising on Main Street. They saw smoke, and when the trucks got there, the whole building was in flames ... Is this hurting you?”
“Arrh arrh.”
She sighed. “So I guess Juney will take a job at the Fluxion, and his mother will sell everything.” She whipped off the bib. “There you go! Have you been flossing after every meal like Dr. Zoller told you?”
“Inform Dr. Zoller,” Qwilleran said, “that not only do I floss after meals but I floss between the courses. In restaurants I’m known as the Mad Flosser.”
From the dental clinic he went to Scottie’s Men’s Shop. Qwilleran, whose mother had been a Mackintosh, was partial to Scots, and the storekeeper had a brogue that he turned on for good customers.
Throughout his career Qwilleran had never cared much about clothes, being satisfied with a drab uniform of coat, pants, shirt, and tie. There was something about the north-country lifestyle, however, that sparked his interest in tartan shirts, Icelandic sweaters, shearling parkas, trooper hats, bulky boots, and buckskin choppers. And the more Scottie burred his r’s, the more Qwilleran bought.
Entering the store, Qwilleran said, “What happened to the four inches of snow we were supposed to get today?”
“All bosh,” said Scottie, shaking his shaggy head of gray hair. “Canna believe a worrrd of what they say on radio. A body can get better information from the wooly caterpillars.”
“You look as if you lost some sleep last night.”
“Aye, it were a bad one, verra bad,” said the volunteer fire chief. “Didna get home till six this mornin’. Chipmunk and Kennebeck sent crews to help. Couldna do it without ‘em — or without our women, God bless ‘em. Kept the coffee and sandwiches comin’ all night.”
“How did Junior take it?”
“It were hard on the lad. Many a time I been in the newspaper office to pass the time o’ day with his old man. A fire trap, it was! Tons of paper! And them old wood partitions — dry as tinder — and the old wood floor!” Scottie shook his head again.
“Any idea how it started?”
“Couldna say. They’d been takin’ pictures, and it could be a careless cigarette smolderin’. There’s a flammable solvent they always used for cleanin’ the old presses, and when it hit, it raced like wildfire.”
“Any suspicion of arson?”
“No evidence of monkey business. No reason
to bring the marshal up here to my way o’ thinkin’.”
“But you saved the lodge hall and post office, Scottie.”
“Aye, we did indeed, but it were touch an’ go.”
On the way home Qwilleran stopped at the public library to check the reading room. The man who claimed to be a historian was not there, and the clerks had not seen him since Tuesday morning. Polly Duncan was not there either, and the clerks said she had left for the day.
For dinner that night Mrs. Cobb served beef Stroganoff and poppy-seed noodles, and after second helpings and a wedge of pumpkin pie, Qwilleran took some out-of-town newspapers and two new magazines into the library. He drew the draperies and touched a match to Mr. O’Dell’s expert arrangement of split logs, kindling, and paper twists. Then he sprawled in his favorite lounge chair and propped his feet on the ottoman.
The Siamese immediately presented themselves. They knew a fire was being lighted before the woody aroma circulated, before the crackle of the kindling, even before the match was struck. After washing up in the of the blaze, Koko started nosing books and Yum Yum jumped on Qwilleran’s lap, turning around three times before settling down.
The female was developing an inordinate affection for the man. She was brazenly possessive of his lap. She gazed at him with adoring eyes, purred when he looked her way, and liked nothing better than to reach up and touch his moustache with a velvet paw. True, he called her his little sweetheart, but her obsessive desire for propinquity was disturbing. He had mentioned it to Lori Bamba, the young woman who knew all about cats.
“They go for the opposite sex,” Lori explained, “and they know which is which. It’s hard to explain.”
Yum Yum was dozing on his lap, a picture of catly contentment, when Qwilleran heard the first thlunk. There was no sense in scolding Koko. It went in one pointed ear and out the other. When reprimanded in the past, he had not only resented it; he had found his own ingenious way of retaliation. In any argument, Qwilleran had learned, a Siamese always has the last word.
So he merely sighed, transferred his lapful of sleeping fur to the ottoman, and went to see what damage had been done. As he expected, it was Shakespeare again. Mrs. Fulgrove had been rubbing the pigskin bindings with a mixture of lanolin and neat’s-foot oil, to preserve the leather, and both ingredients were animal products. But whatever the explanation for Koko’s special interest in these books, two of them were now on the floor, and they happened to be Qwilleran’s favorite plays: Macbeth and Julius Caesar.
He leafed through the latter until he found a passage he liked: the conspiracy scene, in which men plotting to assassinate Caesar meet under cover of darkness, shadowing their faces with their cloaks. “And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood up to the elbows, and besmear our swords.”
Conspiracy, Qwilleran reflected, was Shakespeare’s favorite device for establishing conflict, creating suspense, and grabbing the emotions of the audience. In Macbeth there was the conspiracy to murder the old kind. “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”
A tremor on Qwilleran’s upper lip alerted him. Was the Picayune’s double tragedy the result of a conspiracy? He had no clues — only the sensation in the roots of his moustache. He had no clues and no logical way to investigate.
Years before, as a prize-winning crime reporter, he had developed a network of anonymous sources. In Moose County he had no sources. Although the natives were notorious gossips, they avoided gossiping with outsiders, and Qwilleran was an outsider even after eighteen months in their midst.
He glanced at the calendar. It was Wednesday, November thirteenth. On the evening of November fourteenth he would have seventy-five certified gossips under his roof — all the best people, drinking tea and socializing.
“Okay, old sleuth,” he said to Koko. “Tomorrow night we cultivate some sources.”
5
Thursday, November fourteenth. The weather was cooperating with the major social event of the season — not too cold, not too windy, not too damp. On Thursday evening seventy-five members of the Historical Society and Old Timers Club would view the Klingenschoen mansion for the first time, and the residence would become officially the Klingenschoen Museum.
Ever since inheriting the pretentious edifice Qwilleran had considered it an absurd residence for a bachelor and two cats. He proposed, therefore — with the cooperation of the Historical Society-to open the mansion to the public as a museum two or three afternoons a week. When the mayor announced the news at a council meeting, the citizens of Pickax were jubilant, and the guests invited to the preview felt singularly honored.
Qwilleran's day began as usual in his garage apartment. He tuned in the weather report, drank a cup of instant coffee, dressed, and walked down the corridor to the cats' parlor.
"'Commuter Special now leaving on track four," he announced, opening the wicker hamper.
The Siamese sat nose-to-nose on the windowsill, enjoying the thin glimmer of November sunshine and ignoring the invitation.
"Breakfast now being served in the dining car." There was no response, not even the flicker of a whisker. Impatiently Qwilleran picked up one animal in each hand and deposited them unceremoniously in the hamper.
"If you act like cats, you get treated like cats," he explained in a reasonable voice. "Act like courteous, cooperative, intelligent beings, and you get treated accordingly."
There were sounds of scuffling and snarling inside the hamper as he carried it across the yard to the main house.
It was Mrs. Cobb's idea that the Siamese should spend their days among the Oriental rugs, French tapestries, and rare old books of the mansion. "When you have valuable antiques," she explained, you have four things to fear: theft, fire, dry heat, and mice."
At her urging Qwilleran had installed humidity controls, a burglar alarm, smoke detectors, and a direct line to the police station and fire hall. Koko and Yum Yum were expected to handle the other hazards.
When Qwilleran arrived at the back door with the wicker hamper, the housekeeper called out from the kitchen, "Would you like a mushroom omelette, Mr. Q?"
"Sounds fine. I'll feed the cats. What's in the refrigerator?"
"Sautéed chicken livers. Koko would probably prefer them warmed with some of last night's beef Stroganoff. Yum Yum isn't fussy."
After he had finished his own breakfast — a three-egg omelette with two toasted English muffins and some of Mrs. Cobb's wild haw jelly — he said, "Delicious! Best mushroomless mushroom omelette I've ever eaten."
"Oh dear!" The housekeeper covered her face with her hands in embarrassment. "Did I forget the filling? I'm so excited about tonight, I don't know whether I'm coming or going. Aren't you excited, Mr. Q?"
"I feel a faint ripple of anticipation," he said.
"Oh, Mr. Q, you must be kidding! You've worked on this for a year!"
It was true. To prepare the mansion for public use, the attic had been paneled and equipped as a meeting room. A paved parking lot was added behind the carriage house. Engineers from Down Below had installed an elevator. A fire escape was required in the rear. For barrier-free access there were such accommodations as a ramp at the rear entrance, a new bathroom on the main floor, and elevator controls at wheelchair height.
"What's the order of events tonight?" Qwilleran asked Mrs. Cobb. She had chaired the Historical Society committee on arrangements.
"The members will start arriving at seven o'clock for a conducted tour of the museum. Mrs. Exbridge has trained eighteen guides."
"And who trained Mrs. Exbridge? Don't be so modest, Mrs. Cobb. I know and you know that this entire venture would have been impossible without your expertise," "Oh, thank you, Mr. Q," she said, flushing self-consciously, "but I can't take too much credit. Mrs. Exbridge knows a lot about antiques, She wants to open an antique shop now that her divorce is final."
"Don Exbridge's wife? I didn't know they were having trouble. Sorry to hear it." Qwilleran always empathized with the principal
s in a divorce case, having survived a painful experience himself.
"Yes, it's too bad," Mrs. Cobb said. "I don't know what went wrong. Susan Exbridge doesn't talk about it. She's a very nice woman, I've never met him."
"I've run into him a couple of times, He's an agreeable guy with a smile and a handshake for everyone."
"Well, he's a developer, you know, and I take a dim view of them. We were always fighting developers and bureaucrats Down Below. They wanted to tear down twenty antique shops and some historic houses."
"So what happens after the tour of the museum?"
"We go up to the meeting hall, and that's when you make your speech."
"Not a speech. Just a few words. Please!"
“Then there'll be a brief business meeting and refreshments."
"I hope you didn't bake seventy-five dozen cookies for those shameless cookie hounds," Qwilleran said, "I suspect most of them attend meetings because of your lemon-coconut bars, Will your friend be there?"
"Herb? No, he has to get up early tomorrow morning. It's the start of gun season for deer, you know. How about the cats? Will they attend the preview?"
"Why not? Yum Yum will spend the evening on top of the refrigerator, but Koko likes to parade around and show off."
The telephone rang, and Koko sprang to the desk in the kitchen, as if he knew it was a call from Lori Bamba in Mooseville.
Lori was Qwilleran's part-time secretary, a young woman with long golden braids tied with blue ribbons that tantalized the Siamese.
"Hi, Qwill," she said. "Hope I'm not interrupting something crucial. Isn't this the big day?"
"You're right. Tonight we go public. What's the news from Mooseville?"
"Nick just phoned me from work and said I should call you. Someone's camping on your property at the lake. On his way to work he saw an RV parked in the woods there. He wondered if you had authorized it."
"Don't know a thing about it. But is it all that bad? There's a lot of land there that isn't being used." Qwilleran had inherited the lake property along with the mansion in Pickax: eighty acres of woodland with beach frontage and a log cabin.
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