Punch With Care

by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

  Asey drew a long breath.

  “Well?” Mrs. Douglass said.

  “There’s a P.S.,” Asey said wearily. “Jennie always has a P.S.”

  But it was brief.

  “I got clams & will have chowder tonight—nice ones on the Tonset Rd—& you be home for it. Will take the doc’s car back to our house since otherwise he won’t know where it is. If Mrs. D should ask you what I think, I am mad clear through with all her silly nonsense. J.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Douglass said as he looked up from the letter, “now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll leave you—I’ve got to get hold of Layne and tell her that they simply mustn’t climb up that water tower—it’s suicidal! And look at that silly little fat boy!”

  “Isn’t he,” Asey craned his neck to look through the window over at the tower, “isn’t he a mite younger than the rest of this crew?”

  “Oh, yes, he and the girl with the bangs, and a few others,” Mrs. Douglass said, “they were just all going to college any way. Not ex-G.I.’s, or anything. Just boys and girls—oh, dear, we’ve yearned for years to find someone who’d take that tower down for us, but I don’t want any of them to break their necks doing it! I’m so glad,” she was edging politely toward the door, “that your cousin explained everything to you, Mr. Mayo, and you were so good to come, and thanks just awfully!”

  “I’m afraid,” Asey said as he folded Jennie’s note and put it in his pocket, “that she explained things of what you’d call a more local nature, like. Mrs. Douglass, let’s review this situation, please—they’re down off the tower, an’ you can relax. First you phoned me an’ said Mrs. Boone was lost. Then you found Mrs. Boone in the Pullman, an’ rushed in an’ telephoned me again, an’ said she was murdered. Then, to coin a phrase, as the doc would say, you fainted. What was the reason for that fake faint?”

  “Well,” her cheeks were very bright, “I—oh, does all this matter, Mr. Mayo? Mrs. Boone’s all right, and we know she’s all right, and the silly thing I did then doesn’t make a bit of difference now, does it?”

  “Do you, deep down in your heart,” Asey said quizzically, “honestly believe this business about her bein’ all right?”

  “Why, I certainly do! Miss Shearing said so!”

  And she certainly sounded sincere enough about it, Asey thought.

  “Okay,” he said. “Then let’s work this out on a basis of my just insistin’ on knowin’ what happened, an’ why. Why did you pretend to faint?”

  “I was so worried about Harold, and what he might do when he learned about Carrie—Mrs. Boone, that is. We knew her long ago, you know,” Mrs. Douglass added parenthetically, “when she was just plain Carrie Branch. The only thing I could think of to do that would keep Harold quiet, and with me, and away from the Lulu Belle and her, was to faint!”

  Asey raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh, I know it seems silly!” Mrs. Douglass said. “But as I told Dr. Cummings, when a woman is in a quandary, she doesn’t stop to figure out wonderful modern solutions on a par with the atom bomb! She just damn well pretends to faint, that’s all, and solves things just the way her mother would have solved’em!”

  “But what did you think Harold might do?” Asey persisted.

  “As I said to the doctor—I’ve been through all this with him, you know, once before!—Harold is ingenious! He writes! He—”

  “Harold told me,” Asey interrupted, “that you wrote!”

  “Oh, we both do! I do dialogue and script—but don’t you see, Harold writes the plot!” she said earnestly. “I’m afraid you don’t appreciate, Mr. Mayo, what Harold might have thought up to do, if he’d known about Carrie! He never would have let well enough alone, never! It simply isn’t his nature! I never could have stopped him from moving that body, or—or some thing awful! Oh, if only you were a woman, I could make you understand!”

  “This is the second time this afternoon somebody’s wished I was a girl,” Asey said. “I managed to catch on the other time, so maybe I can grasp this. What difference d’you think my bein’ a woman would make?”

  “You’d listen!” Mrs. Douglass said. “Oh, to the radio, I mean. To day-time radio. Like serials. If only you’d followed ‘Maida’s Lost Love’ throughout the years, for example, or ‘The Life of Mother Gaston’, I’d never have the slightest difficulty in explaining to you why I couldn’t trust Harold Douglass near that body!”

  “Will Mother Gaston’s adopted daughter go to jail—by mistake?” Asey said. “Should old Doctor Muldoon tell her that Jimmy has—was it a broken neck, or cancer? Can Sonia, in her zeal for revenge, actually plant the stolen bonds on poor little Beth?”

  “My God!” Louise Douglass said. “You’ve heard some of it! Were you having your hair cut, or at the dentist’s?” she added curiously. “Ordinarily men don’t hear Mother G. unless they’re solidly tied down in a chair! But do you begin to see what I mean about Harold?”

  “You win,” Asey said, “an’ I see. I get your point. Anybody who could think up that stuff could think up anything, particularly since he didn’t like Mrs. Boone anyway. But why did you keep up the act after the doc an’ I got here?”

  “I was waiting,” Mrs. Douglass said, “for Harold to get out of the way! After all, when you two entered the room, I couldn’t very well look up and smile brightly, and jump to my feet, and say it was all a hoax!”

  Asey pointed out that Harold had left the room. “Cummings sent him for a glass of water—remember?”

  “Oh, but then” she said, “by then I was feeling too foolish! By then I realized that instead of helping Harold, I’d actually made everything much worse by assuming that he ‘would have done something to her—I tell you, I’m just no good at plot, I invariably mess it up! And at that point, the smartest dialogue in the world wasn’t going to help me any! I lay there,” she pointed to the chintz-covered couch, “and I wished the floor would open up and take me out of the whole horrid situation! I wished I had fainted, and couldn’t come to!”

  “But Cummings managed to rouse you all right, after Harold an’ I left?”

  “He pinched me,” she said briefly.

  “An’ after tellin’ all this to him,” Asey said, “what happened then?”

  Because, he thought to himself, what happened then was the crux of the whole matter. Up to the time he and Douglass left for the village, the body should still have been out in the Pullman. Up to then, Cummings was all right and in the picture. Up to that point, the situation was more or less simple.

  Some of his impatience crept into his voice as he repeated his question. “An’ what happened then, Mrs. Douglass?”

  “I cried.”

  “I don’t doubt you probably felt in the mood for cryin’, an’ gettin’ things out of your system!” Asey started pacing back and forth across the floor. “But what happened? What did you do? What did Cummings do?”

  “Why, neither of us did anything!” she returned. “I just bawled my head off, and—oh, yes, after a few minutes, the doctor presented me with his handkerchief. Mine was simply soaking.”

  She had the grace to look a little guilty.

  “I see what you mean by plot comin’ hard to you.” Asey stopped pacing and perched on the arm of the couch. “Let’s try straight narration. I told Cummings I’d been faking my faint, and why. I cried. Then what did I do?”

  “I went upstairs to wash my face and bathe my eyes and change my clothes and do my hair, of course! And when I came downstairs again, Cummings was gone—I naturally assumed he’d gone out to the Lulu Belle!” Mrs. Douglass said. “I was worried about Layne and how to break things to her—she’s very fond of Carrie, you know. And I was worried about Aunt Mary. I did feel she should have some warning of what had happened, and not just have this sprung on her—she’d set out in the beachwagon to—”

  “To go to the beach to see if Mrs. Boone had followed some of the girls over there. I know!” Asey said. “That’s one fact I seem able to get, but I’m tired of it! What d
id you do, Mrs. Douglass? What happened?”

  She had started out on foot over toward the beach, she told him, and had run into Aunt Mary walking back.

  “She’d had a flat,” Mrs. Douglass explained. “And Harold had taken out the beachwagon’s jack again to use for something else—that man is always taking tools from where they belong!—so she couldn’t do a thing about changing the tire. She thought that someone going by in a car would have a jack, or that Harold or I would probably come after her ultimately, so she waited around for quite a while before she started home.”

  “What in time—” Asey broke off his intended question as to why in time a presumably elderly aunt should even have considered changing a flat tire, jack or no jack. “What time was all this?”

  “I don’t know! I can time dialogue, Mr. Mayo,” she was beginning, Asey thought, to sound about as impatient as he felt, “but I haven’t—and never in my life have had—the faintest idea of my own personal time, and when I do things! I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what time it was when I called your house—and what does it all matter now, anyway?”

  “Call it my whim.” Asey had no intention of going into all that “Mrs.-Boone-was-all-right” business again now. “What did you an’ Aunt Mary do after the two of you walked back here? What hap—”

  “If you ask me what happened just once more, in that March-of-Time voice,” Mrs. Douglass said ominously, “I will start in pitching Aunt Della’s bric-a-brac at you! I’m telling you what happened, just as well as I can, and it’s hardly my fault that what happened wasn’t more spectacular! But there weren’t any fires, or floods, or tornadoes, or tidal waves, or strangers with beards—”

  “Or mortgages?” Asey interrupted.

  “Or what?”

  “Mortgages comin’ due, or sirens like the evil Sonia scurryin’ around with them bearer bonds to plant on poor little Poppet,” Asey said with a grin. “I know it isn’t what you might call very colossal or terrific action, Mrs. Douglass, but I certainly shouldn’t keep on ploughin’ my way into it if I didn’t think that it mattered! So, after you an’ Aunt Mary come back—?”

  “We went directly out to the Lulu Belle. Aunt Mary is an adamant soul,” she said, “and she insisted on going and looking for herself. She absolutely refused to believe that Carrie was dead, and she simply snorted with scorn when I mentioned the word murder. She wouldn’t believe me.”

  “So?” Asey said. “Why not?”

  “She said it was unquestionably the result of too much soap opera.”

  “You mean,” Asey said with a chuckle, “she thought you were makin’ it up?”

  “No, I think she thought I was sincere enough,” Mrs. Douglass said, “but laboring under a delusion. She said it was unquestionably just a horrid mistake, and that I was unquestionably overwrought with all these project people, and no servants to help me, and that I’d unquestionably jumped to a lot of silly conclusions, and that unquestionably, Carrie had only fainted. She suggested that what I needed was a nice long vacation from Mother Gaston.”

  “Wa-el,” Asey said, “I can see how she maybe might feel that way!”

  “She thought, furthermore, that Harold and I should unquestionably have read the riot act to Layne when she came last night, and insisted on her taking Carrie to some hotel—unquestionably the only proper solution! And still furthermore, she never in her fifty-seven years—actually, she’s fifty-nine!—saw the equal of this college project for sheer imposition. Does that,” she concluded, “give you just a brief hint of Aunt Mary’s character?”

  “Unquestionably!” Asey said, and,decided that maybe the possibility of Aunt Alary’s changing a tire wasn’t as out of the way as he had at first thought.

  “When we looked inside the Lulu Belle and found it empty,” Mrs. Douglass went on, “Aunt Mary just purred with satisfaction and said that she had unquestionably been quite right, hadn’t she? Absolutely nothing had happened, as anyone not unduly overwrought could unquestionably see at a glance, and for her part, she was starving hungry and wanted a sandwich, and she really didn’t think that irregular meal hours were a good thing. I protested—but she just said why didn’t I take a nice nap, and went indoors for her sandwich.”

  Asey grinned. “Assumin’,” he said, “that your sense of plot may occasionally skip a beat, still an’ all, what was your guess as to what unquestionably had happened? What did you think had become of Mrs. Boone an’ Cummings?”

  “I assumed that you and the doctor must have taken Carrie away—in books and on the radio, there’s always an ambulance that comes and conveniently takes bodies away,” she added. “That’s so you—so the writer, I mean—can get all those grisly things done away from the scene. Spares you no end of technical problems, too. But then, almost at once after I’d gone back into the house, Miss Shearing phoned and said Mrs. Boone was all right, and with her, and not to worry. Of course, Aunt Mary rose to dizzy heights at that point!”

  “Unquestionably!” Asey said.

  “While she didn’t exactly suggest that my brain has been damaged by years of writing Mother Gaston,” Mrs. Douglass said with a laugh, “she did point out in eight or ten different ways that only in a soap opera world would anyone go rushing off half-cocked, without sensibly checking to see whether or not someone actually was dead.”

  She looked at Asey as if she rather expected him to concur with Aunt Mary. But instead, he merely asked what she had done after Miss Shearing called.

  “I just sat there, dumb with relief,” she said. “And then Aunt Mary and I went back to the beachwagon and changed the tire. I was perfectly willing to leave it for Harold, but she thought it would be good exercise—and wasn’t it! That jack we took kept slipping, and we lost one of those little nut-things, and had to grub around for it—oh, it turned out to be a frightful chore! And when we finally got back, the project was here. And then, you came. There!” She heaved a sigh of relief.

  “An’ you don’t know a thing about Cummings?” Asey asked.

  “In my work,” Mrs. Douglass said, “the detective and the doctor are always in constant communication. Somehow, I assumed you and Cummings would be—after all, he’s probably just making a call on a patient! It isn’t as if you’d lost him in some vast trackless wilderness, or something!”

  Asey strolled over to a window and looked out at the lawn, now just as empty as it had been full a few minutes ago.

  Everything, he found as he sorted things out in his mind, was really quite simple—providing you stuck to the simple facts!

  He and Douglass had gone to the village. Mrs. Douglass told the doctor her story of the fake faint. She went upstairs, came down, went out, found her aunt, and the two returned to the house to find Cummings gone, and Mrs. Boone’s body gone. Then Mrs. Douglass and Aunt Mary departed to change a tire—it must have been during that, interlude, he decided, that he had come back to find everything so completely abandoned in appearance.

  “Where’s your daughter?” he asked absently.

  “Layne’s upstairs, changing her clothes. She got back from the beach just before you came.”

  “An’ Mr. Douglass?”

  “Oh, Harold came home just before Layne, footsore and weary. He’s upstairs, too, taking a shower and changing. He’s just a little annoyed with you, I’m afraid,” she added in a tone which indicated that Harold was good and mad.

  “With me? Whatever for?”

  “He said he went into the post office for a second, and while he was in there, you drove away in your roadster. He waited and waited for you to come back, turned down any number of offers of a lift home, and finally had to walk every inch of the way. I didn’t tell him anything about Carrie and this silly mix-up—Harold worries so, and there’s always his blood pressure to think about.”

  Asey turned away from the window.

  “In your Mother Gaston stories,” he said, “you indicate everything with sounds. Clippety-clop, you run upstairs, clippety-clop, you run down, rattle-bang-t
hud, you change a tire. I have to do it the hard way, an’ ask questions. But now I got the background noises settled, let’s get to the root of things—just exactly where did Miss Shearing call from, an’ what were her exact words?”

  “Aunt Mary took the call,” Mrs. Douglass said. “And let me assure you,” she added, “she’s not a person to make mistakes with phone messages! Frankly, if it hadn’t been Miss Shearing calling, and Aunt Mary taking the call, I might have had some doubts!”

  “I think,” Asey said, “that I’d like to have a little chat with Aunt Mary—Mrs. Framingham, isn’t it? Or is she changin’ her clothes, too?”

  “I’ll see.”

  Mrs. Douglass ran upstairs to return almost at once with the information that Aunt Mary was taking a tub, and would be down in about fifteen minutes.

  “And now, would you excuse me?” she said. “The project is eating at the Inn tonight, thank God, but there are a million things I’ve got to see to—won’t you just sit down and make yourself comfortable?”

  Asey started to pace around the living room after she left, but after a moment he picked up Jennie’s lunch-basket and went outdoors. The longer he stayed in that house, the less he liked the feel of it, and the basket was a good excuse for his going out to sit in the roadster while he waited for Aunt Mary.

  All the little fill-in facts were assembled, and all of Mrs. Douglass’s story was simple enough. Just as simple as Harold Douglass’s background on Mrs. Boone had been, he thought. And just as disarming.

  But he didn’t like it, he told himself, as he sat down behind the roadster’s wheel and fished out one of Jennie’s apple puffs from the basket.

  He had eaten up the sugar gingerbread and most of the sandwiches before he noticed the tire in the rear of the beach wagon parked beside him—obviously the Douglass’s beachwagon, since it had no name or decoration on the front door.

  Asey sat up suddenly and told himself he was a fool.