Punch With Care

by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

  “So I’m right?”

  “I’m torn,” Asey said. “If I say no, you’ll go whisper things to the project, an’ I don’t think I want that. If I say yes, you’re right, you’ll go whisper things to the project, an’ I don’t think I want that, either. I wonder if you could—wa-el, I don’t like to ask you to promise anything. But could you maybe dead-pan till I find out how things shape up? I know she’s dead, an’ I know she was murdered. I saw her. But I don’t know where she is now. I’m huntin’.”

  Gerty pitched her cigarette stub into the mud hole and watched it disappear.

  “I told you a while back,” she said, “that I didn’t stick my neck out on my C.O. Well, an ex-C.O. is something else. You know what? I’ve run into a lot of nasties, but she took every prize. And,” she added quietly, “I hated her. I hated her guts!”

  She turned and looked at him expectantly.

  “Oh, I guessed that,” Asey returned. “Under the circumstances, I think you’ve really been very fair to her, too. You gave credit where it was due. After all, she hasn’t treated your friend Stinky very nice. She—” Gerty bit, just as he hoped she would.

  “Not because of him! What I think about Boone is strictly personal—it’s me, it’s nothing to do with Stinky! I thought it about her before I knew he existed!” She had never, Asey thought, sounded so deeply in earnest. “I got to Larrabee, see, and I’m minding my own business and going my own way. Then, somehow, Boone sees my records and finds out that I—oh, well, what does it matter now, for God’s sakes! Let’s just skip it!”

  While Gerty was smiling, her eyes were suspiciously bright, and Asey decided that he would skip it. Whatever Mrs. Boone had done to the girl, the hurt had been deep enough to sting even now. To bring tears welling to Gerty’s eyes, it must have been a sledge hammer blow, and he could always find out about sledge hammer items. It was the other sort of thing, the strange, complex little relationships between Jack and Stinky, and Layne Douglass, and Miss Shearing, and all the rest of the project, that would have taken him so much time to delve into without Gerty’s unwitting aid.

  Or had it been so unwitting, he asked himself suddenly. If the girl could turn herself into Mrs. Boone with just a simple twist of her wrist and a flick of her finger, or if she could snap out a report like a company commander after a few seconds’ thought, then just how far could you trust her? Where did her play-acting begin, and where did it end? And why had he been so dim-witted as to expect that she’d always ring bells to announce to her audience what act was currently on?

  Aloud, he asked her where she thought Stinky and Layne might be.

  Gerty shrugged. “I never expected he’d be this long getting back!” she said. “After all, I sent him packing off hell-bent in the wrong direction!”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Your Cousin Jennie,” Gerty said with a demure smile, “would catch that one! You’d be surprised, Mr. Mayo, how hard it is to see anyone for five minutes anywhere on a project like this, without about four hundred million other people there too!” :

  “Wait for him, then,” Asey said as he got out of the roadster, “an’ bring him an’ the car back to the Douglass’s—see here,” he took a stick and scratched a few lines in the dirt, “here’s the way the lanes go. You go here, an’ then here—see? An’ if he doesn’t turn up within a reasonable time, you come along by yourself.”

  “You mean I should drive this thing? But look,” she pointed to the gadgets, “they’re all marked funny—what makes with all those ‘J’s’ and ‘M’s’ and ‘Z’s’? I don’t know which is what!”

  “It’s just Serbo-Croat, or Croato-Slav, or somethin’,” Asey said casually, and explained the gadgets to her briefly. “Simple enough, see? After all, you probably drove jeeps, didn’t you?”

  “Sure, from Casablanca to Berchtesgaden.”

  “Then I dare say,” Asey remarked, “that you’ll be able to trundle this job to the Douglass’s if Stinky doesn’t come soon.”

  “What about you?” Gerty asked.

  Asey pointed to the woods. “Oh, I got another roadster,” he said. “I keep a spare.”

  “Dirty capitalist,” she said amiably. “And don’t worry, Mr. Mayo. I’ll dead-pan. If Sti—I mean, if somebody gets themselves mixed up in a mess like this, you can’t do anything for them! To tell you the truth, I don’t think any of our crowd’s got anything to do with it, and I think it may turn out to be the best—”

  “Best what?” Asey prompted as she hesitated.

  “As my philosophy professor said last week,” Gerty returned, “there is a wide abyss between being realistic and being callous—hell, I can’t say it’s the best thing Boone ever did in her life, can I? Well, anyway, I’ll deadpan, Mr. Mayo!”

  When he reached the edge of the pine woods, Asey paused and looked back toward the roadster. Gerty had climbed up on the folded boot-top, and was stretched out, peacefully sun-bathing and apparently sound asleep.

  “An’ I’ll bet a nickel,” he said to himself with a chuckle, “that she played gin-rummy in fox-holes—an’ probably won!”

  He had nearly reached the place where he’d left his old roadster when someone called out to him.

  “Yoo-hoo! I beg your pardon! Could you—”

  Asey swung around.

  A tall, thin girl in a striped seersucker dress was hurrying toward him, notebook in hand. He recognized her as the ex-Wave whom Cummings had pointed out earlier, over by the swamp.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said a little breathlessly as she adjusted her wide blue-rimmed glasses, “but would you possibly know the location of an abandoned mosquito-control project in this area?”

  “I’m sorry,” Asey said, “but I wouldn’t. I haven’t been over this way in years until today.”

  “Oh. Then I don’t suppose you’d know anything about where the town’s water project was started, either?”

  “Out this way? Golly, that was thirty years ago, or more,” Asey said, “an’ they gave it up within two weeks, as I remember. You’re one of the Larrabee College project, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m investigating Public Health and Welfare.” She sounded very nearly as enthusiastic about it, Asey thought, as Gerty had sounded on the topic of Stinky.

  “Don’t you find it just a mite dull, all by yourself?” he inquired.

  “Oh, no! Not at all!” she said. “I’ve managed to see some of the town’s points of interest as I’ve gone along, of course. Where the early settlers made peace with the Indians, for example, and where they planted their first com, and then the scene of the encounter with a German submarine in the First World War. It’s really been very interesting! I wonder, though,” she added with a puzzled look, “if you could explain one marker I noticed, about an ‘Encounter with the British’. Was that during the Revolutionary War?”

  “Nope,” Asey said. “The British sailed into the Bay Harbor, an’ we repelled ’em with our trusty muskets—that was 1812, the war everybody forgets. The one they burned Washington in.”

  “Washington? But he—”

  “Not he,” Asey said. “It. The city.”

  She thanked him very seriously, and said it was a very interesting piece of information indeed, but she clearly didn’t believe him. She also declined, quite distantly, his casual offer of a lift back to the Douglass’s.

  “Thank you, but I’m somewhat behind my schedule,” she said. “I have five more items to check before I shall feel free to stop. But it was very kind of you to make the suggestion.”

  Notebook in hand, she marched on through the pine woods.

  Asey backed the roadster out of the bayberries.

  He felt a sense of relief, on swinging into the Douglass’s driveway, to hear the sound of people’s voices.

  That meant the cops were there, and Cummings. And the Douglass family, and the project. Mrs. Boone’s body would have been located. Things were under way!

  He found himself blinking as he stopped on the gravel
turntable.

  His first impression was that he’d never seen so many people outside of the Grand Central Station, or Coney Island on a hot summer’s day.

  Then facts leapt at him.

  Cummings wasn’t there. Nor his car.

  The cops weren’t there. Nor their cars!

  He hardly recognized Mrs. Douglass as she wove her way through a quartet playing badminton, and hurried toward him.

  In his memory, Mrs. Douglass was a pale, inert figure, lying limply on a couch.

  This Mrs. Douglass was gay, animated, and apparently as happy as a lark.

  “Where’s Cummings?” Asey demanded.

  “The doctor? Oh, isn’t he with you? Mr. Mayo, I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that there was some perfectly frightful mistake! She’s all right!”

  “Who is?”

  “Mrs. Boone! Isn’t it wonderful? She’s all right!”

  6

  “You MEAN,” Asey sounded as incredulous as he felt, “you know where Mrs. Boone is?”

  “Well,” Mrs. Douglass said, “not exactly where, but I know that she’s perfectly all right. That—” she broke off to answer the question of a short, chubby boy whose voice still seemed to be in the breaking stage.

  As she discussed with him the possible location of some missing croquet mallets, Asey began to realize that the place wasn’t anywhere near as crowded as he had first assumed. He couldn’t count more than ten members of the project disporting themselves around the lawn. But he suddenly understood with great clarity what Jennie had meant by her repetition of the word “swarm.”

  “Now, where was I?” Mrs. Douglass said a little distractedly, as she turned back to him. .

  “No,” Asey said. “Where’s Mrs. Boone?”

  “Oh, yes! She’s with Miss Shearing,” Mrs. Douglass said. “I was practically frantic about the situation, and then Miss Shearing phoned and said that Mrs. Boone was with her, and perfectly all right, and for me not to worry. Wasn’t it silly of me to think she was dead!”

  Asey looked at her thoughtfully while the badminton game held a brisk free-for-all almost under the roadster’s front wheels.

  “Do I sort of gather,” he said, “that at one time you did think she was dead?”

  “Why, of course I did! What on earth d’you suppose I called you here for?” Mrs. Douglass demanded. “I distinctly said she was dead! In fact, I thought that she’d been murdered! I told you—”

  “Hold it just a second, please,” Asey said. “I want to go slow an’ get it straight. Just exactly when did you phone me?”

  “Just after I phoned and said she was lost!” Mrs. Douglass returned. “I called you back again, and told your cousin that I’d found Mrs. Boone dead, and I thought she’d been murdered—haven’t you talked with Dr. Cummings? Didn’t he tell you all about everything?” Asey ducked back to avoid a shuttlecock sailing into his eye, and then raised his voice over the din to inform her that he hadn’t seen Dr. Cummings for more than two hours, and that he’d be obliged if she’d tell him where the doctor was!

  “I don’t know! I thought he must have gone off after you! Mr. Mayo, I simply don’t understand this little mix-up about those calls! First I phoned you and said she was lost, and then after I found her—”

  “Where?” Asey interrupted.

  “On the floor of the Lulu Belle! After I saw her lying there, I rushed in and phoned your house again, and told your cousin—she said you were just leaving and she’d try to catch you! Mr. Mayo, haven’t you seen your cousin? Didn’t she tell you all about everything?”

  “I haven’t seen Jennie since—oh, for Pete’s sakes!” Asey plucked a shuttlecock out of his lap, and tossed it back at a husky, dark-haired girl with a thick fringe of bangs. “Try an’ keep it over that way, will you, sis?”

  “She’s been here,” Mrs. Douglass said.

  “Who?”

  “Your cousin! Oh, dear, it’s really distracting here, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that?” Asey almost had to yell to make himself heard.

  “I said, your cousin left some things for you!” she yelled back. “A basket—” she lowered her voice during a sudden lull, and then resumed in conversational tones, “and a note. I thought you knew all about them—I thought you’d probably come for them! She said the note explained something important, and you must be sure to read every word—she left it indoors, in the house.”

  Asey got out of the car. “Let’s get—I said,” he had to bellow again, “let’s get it, shall we?”

  Aunt Della’s cluttered living room was so quiet, after Mrs. Douglass had shut down the windows overlooking the lawn, that the silence was almost as deafening to Asey as the outside noise had been.

  “I suppose it’s a sign that I’m aging rapidly,” she remarked, “but it keeps seeming to me that youth keeps getting noisier and noisier, and somehow knocking over more objects! I told Layne that they simply could not step foot in this room, none of them, unless Harold or I was here! Aunt Della would never forgive me if I let that horde mill around among her treasures. Not that they’d ever mean to break anything, of course, but I know they would! Just a moment, I’ll go get your things.”

  After she’d left the room, Asey was puzzled to find himself again experiencing that same uncomfortable feeling which had so obsessed him earlier in the afternoon, before he’d climbed the water tower and gone rushing off to the meadow and Gerty.

  Something about this place still bothered him!

  And certainly, he thought as he strolled over and gazed out at the thickly populated lawn, it couldn’t at this point have anything to do with the place appearing so abandoned!

  And where in thunder was Cummings? And the cops?

  And Mrs. Boone?

  And what was this idiotic business of her being “all right”?

  He suddenly found himself wanting to jerk open the window and to bellow out at that noisy swarm, to tell them to pipe down, that there’d been a murder!

  His hand was on the window catch before he admonished himself not to be a fool. Before he could do any bellowing about murder, he’d have to have slightly more proof than a little green ticket punched with a diamond-shaped hole!

  “Here you are!” Mrs. Douglass brought in a basket covered with a white napkin, and held out an envelope to him.

  Asey slit it open to find that Jennie had apparently sat herself down and written a short novel on the Douglass’s fancy blue house-stationery, which had a sketch of the baby Baldwin and the Lulu Belle running across the top of the page.

  “I do hope she explains everything!” Mrs. Douglass said anxiously.

  “She should,” Asey returned. “It’s long enough!”

  A smile came to his lips as he read the first sentence to himself.

  “Dear Asey, that Mrs. Douglass may be a writer & a wonderful woman & all that but she is certainly a crazy coot, that’s all I got to say! ”

  “Is it important?” Mrs. Douglass interrupted.

  “Not very, so far,” Asey answered, “but it’s reasonably accurate, I think!”

  He continued reading.

  “She called our house just as you and the doc were leaving & said Mrs. Boone was murdered! I tried to yell after you & tell you but the wind was the wrong way or something because anyway you didn’t hear me. Think of it, think of her getting me all stirred up that way & packing your lunch (there is salt in waxed paper, wrapped up, in corner of basket in case the soup isn’t salt enough for you) & thank Goodness the only person I told about Mrs. Boone was Emma & how it happened I won’t ever know but when I called her back just now & said it was all a mistake, why she’d been so busy cooking & particularly pop-overs she hadn’t called anyone else & told them! If it hadn’t been popovers & her such a careful fussy cook, I can only say it’d been all over Cape Cod now about Mrs. Boone—you know Emma & how she gabs!”

  Mrs. Douglass cleared her throat. “Is she explaining everything?”

  “Jennie,” Asey said, “isn’t lea
vin’ a single stone unturned. Includin’ popovers!”

  He went on to the next page.

  “So just you bless that tea-party she was having! So I took the doc’s car figuring you’d want it & he’d want his bag, & your lunch, & on the way I stopped in town to ask about the Question but nobody has heard it & everybody is furious with Sylvester & they say he’s run away he’s so scared what’ll happen to him when folks get their hands on him. Think of it, everybody missing because he was three minutes late with the B. Moose! Someone said someone from Truro said he’d forgotten the Question, which somebody else told him at a gas station, but the answer was catnip. I mean the Question was the Latin name for it. So just in case you are anywhere & get called, remember CATNIP!”

  Asey sighed, and went on to the last page.

  “Does she make everything clear?” Mrs. Douglass wanted to know.

  “Yes,” Asey said. “Just remember catnip.”

  He entirely missed her nervous, almost frightened glance at him.

  “So,” the last page said, “I guess I was a little late getting here because I had to stop by the Red Cross on an errand & at the post office—”

  “That’s how Billy at the drug store saw the doc’s car!” Asey said aloud. “Jennie was drivin’ it around findin’ out about catnip an’ such! Well, that’s nice to know!”

  “I still can’t see,” the letter went on, “WHY I didn’t tell everybody about the murder only everybody was so busy fussing at Sylvester & I was so busy trying to get hold of the Question, I guess I never got the chance to. The P.O. was empty & at Red Cross only Mrs. Newell & her deaf as a post. Just as well I was late getting here & didn’t tell because now Mrs. Douglass says all a mistake & Mrs. B. not dead or murdered & I do think you should speak real firm to her about bothering you this way! You tell her next time she sees a body lying somewhere, why to touch it, & if she ties bells around their necks maybe she won’t lose so many guests. In all this mess there must be a cow bell! Jennie.”