The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “And Raisa Suttler?” I asked. “How does she fit in?”

  “I don’t think we’ve got enough data yet for an absolute theory, but Scarpini-Grove could just have met her and been romantically attracted when he started coming to Sunvale Clinic to blackmail Caulfield-Coffield. That could have been how it started. Whether or not she was more deeply involved by the end, whether there was a triangle going on, and Caulfield enlisted her to help him against Scarpini ...”

  “They attended his funeral together,” I reminded her.

  She drank some coffee and said, “Well, I still wouldn’t trust anything from Coffield’s pharmacy. Especially if I had any known ties with ... sorry, Tommi ... with Rob H. Grove.”

  Soon after that I left Cagey drinking coffee and looking thoughtful in the living room. Aaron Randolph’s body would be available for visitation two evenings; I felt too emotionally wrung out to visit it that first night. I took a bath, and was sitting in bed trying to read something dry and objectively scientific when I remembered the caplet Doc Mac had told me to take before I went to sleep, and got up to get it. I was standing there with it in my palm, drowsily wondering whether to chew it or get a glass of water, when Cagey burst in without warning, shouting, “I’ve got it! Tommi, I think I know what happened! And if I’m right ...”

  * * * *

  [Note.

  This short novel was conceived and written for a contest. Further details of said contest elude both my memory and my rather catch-as-catch-can filing system, but clearly the rules said that at this point, the story should pause and present questions to the reader.]

  Proposed questions for the reader:

  1. What is Cagey’s full first name?

  2. What was the relationship between Rob Grove and Dr. Raisa Suttler?

  3. What secret did Rob Grove share with Arlington Coffield?

  4. What was in Dr. James Macumber’s black box?

  5. Who killed Rob Grove?

  6. Why?

  Chapter 9

  She looked down at my hand and her eyes widened. “You didn’t tell me they’d given you another pill?”

  “Didn’t I? Well, it had slipped my own mind till just now. Don’t worry, it’s all right, this one came straight from Doc Mac’s office cabinet.” I lifted my hand to pop the caplet into my mouth.

  Cagey jumped on top of me. Naturally, my arm jerked and the caplet went flying.

  At first I assumed it was another of Cagey’s everyday accidents. Pulling myself free, I dropped down on all fours to search the floor, exclaiming, “Oh, Sarge, help me find it!”

  “Yes!” said Cagey, picking herself up. “We’ve got to find it. Vital evidence. But don’t you dare swallow it, Tommi! Not if you want to go on living.”

  I paused. “Sergeant?” I said.

  “The others, Tommi! Rob wasn’t the only victim—that’s the whole key! There was no connection between him and Aaron Randolph! Coffield almost certainly and Suttler probably had their motives for killing Rob Grove-Scarpio Scarpini. But nobody else! Definitely not poor Aaron Randolph! In fact, if either or both of the other partners in that clinic had murdered anybody else, they’d have increased their chances of getting caught. It’d have been stupid.”

  “But it happens all the time. Murderers can be very stupid—”

  She held up one hand. “Officer, let me finish! Sunvale Clinic’s funny statistics date back to before Scarpini was probably even out of prison. He put himself right in place to get it sooner or later, the way he kept visiting that clinic even though he was perfectly healthy, but aside from that, his death was just coincidental! And ...” Her knees suddenly seeming to buckle, she sat down hard on the bed. “Wow! Tommi, thank God we gave you that substitute dye last night—thank God Macumber was convinced he could depend on you to swallow his pills at home alone, on your own.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Aaron Randolph. I suppose—I guess when Grandpa Randolph told you ‘that other one’ saw Aaron the day Suttler was treating me, we must both have just assumed he meant Coffield. After all, it was only a follow-up check for a healed broken bone. But it must’ve been the other doctor who saw Aaron—Macumber—and either persuaded him to finally take one of those so-called painkillers he’d given him earlier, or else made him swallow something right there in the office, the way he did with you that first time. The thing that gave you that long, downright hallucinogenic dream. The dream that interested Macumber so much he noted it down and then erased it from your personal-access records. The way he erased Rob’s rash and Aaron’s tiredness and who knows what else from other people’s official records.. Remember, that last time Rob went back to Sunvale, after his blowup with Suttler, he went to Macumber for his prescription. The prescription was just a cover anyway for a blackmail visit to Coffield, but who knows what your little elf of an M.D. charmed him into swallowing there in his office. Maybe in a cup of ‘herbal tea’!”

  I sat on the bed beside Cagey, feeling weak as I caught on. “Oh, Lord! Every vacation Dr. Macumber goes to the last preserved rain forests to gather untested natural substances ...”

  Cagey finished: “And then spends the rest of the year testing them on suitable human guinea pigs chosen from the Sunvale patients!”

  Epilogue

  Folktales have grown up that “Mad Dr. Macumber” fought his arrest clawing and frothing and hurling bottles of noxious preparations that fumed when they broke and corroded everything they hit. That’s all nonsense.

  In fact, he took his arrest quite philosophically, almost cheerfully, as if he’d been fully expecting it to happen sooner or later, and almost looking forward to the chance to boast a little. He actually chuckled. Handing the regular police his black box—the notorious black box of his secret files, including my dream, Rob’s rash, Aaron’s weariness, and all the other symptoms of his experiments that he had erased from the official records—he said, “Keep it carefully, lads and ladies. Someday the world will be grateful for all my data. I really ought to be getting a Nobel prize, y’know. Just keep in mind that I’ve been pulling off more miracle cures with my experimentation than happening to kill a few good people here and there.”

  Most of the new substances he tried out actually proved to be neither harmful nor medicinal; but many of them were potentially commercial. That last caplet he gave me, for instance, would have had no results either way unless I’d happened to have an unusual allergy: he’d pressed it out of a South American plant that is being grown now as a food crop and marketed in grocery and gourmet stores all over the world; out of consideration for the growers and marketers, who have taken some pains to dissociate their product’s name from the name of its discoverer, I won’t say what it is; but most of you have probably eaten it.

  After some discussion, Cagey and I decided to leave M. Coffield’s secret buried, only keeping a discreet eye on him. We were never sorry. Rob, as Scarpini, probably had forced him somehow into that one criminal action, because he was an honest and competent pharmacist as long as we knew him. As for Dr. Raisa Suttler, she had never been guilty of anything more serious than a passionate nature. Mad Dr. Macumber’s entire operation had been known to and carried out by himself alone, with no accomplices either in or outside of the clinic, not even causing any ripples except the vague suspicions hatched by Jeb Peters. With a new partner to replace Doc Mac, Sunvale weathered the storm and remains in business today. Cagey helped by having them treat the ankle she sprained falling down the courthouse steps into the crowd the last day of the trial.

  The oddest thing about Doc Mac is that he seems to have had a sincere regard and affection for people; to have regarded his test subjects as partners in his noble work. He always sent a huge floral arrangement, in the name of the whole clinic, to the funerals of everyone who died as a result of his experiments. While Cagey was testifying at his trial, one time she came very near to brea
king down completely when the full realization hit her that in a way she had been responsible for Aaron’s death; that if she hadn’t staged her fit to get into Dr. Suttler’s care that afternoon, Suttler would have seen Aaron as scheduled and the boy wouldn’t have swallowed the pill Doc Mac gave him in his office. Afterwards, Dr. Macumber sent Cagey a note through his lawyers: “Don’t whip yourself about it, Detective. If our young friend hadn’t taken it that afternoon, sooner or later he or somebody else in his house would have gulped down that first tablet I gave him, and it was the same thing. Just as our delightful friend Sylvia couldn’t help it if she happened to be in the right place at the right time to—oh, indirectly—send me Robbie Grove for a mug of very special recipe tea.”

  The case naturally made Cagey’s reputation; but she didn’t let it go too much to her head. After what has been called the most sensational criminal trial of the 2030s ended in a verdict of guilty on all counts, and while she was recovering from her sprained ankle, she promoted me to sergeant and herself to Lieutenant Cagey Warrington Thursday. Nobody, not even regular police, grudged her the honorific.

  * * * *

  Note from the latest editor: Parts of the above narrative have been questioned. So far as it deals with Cagida “Cagey” Warrington Thursday and Dr. James Fitzpatrick Macumber, it appears to be perfectly authentic and verifiable. It has often been pointed out, however, that in light of Sylvia Tomlinson Marlene’s subsequent long and happy marriage with Arlington Johnson Coffield, she or whoever published this story under her name probably made up Coffield’s guilty past, with or without his sanction. How far this affects the account as it touches the past lives of Rob H. Grove, alias(?) S. Scarpio Scarpini, and Dr. Raisa Rachmaninova Suttler remains an unexplored historical question.

  —Quincy Edwards Davenport,

  Quebec, September 10, 2188

  * * * *

  I wish I had written more stories about Cagey Thursday, who contrasts so amiably with Rosemary Lestrade. Alas, my old files have thus far disgorged a single Cagey short story, and I sadly suspect there are no more.

  THE CYCLOPS KILLER

  Tommi is absent, probably settling into married life. Her place, though not her narrative voice, is here more mischievously filled by two of Cagey’s young relations.

  * * * *

  The Appalachia Pufferbelly had three passenger cars, a dining car, a club car, and a caboose. When it chugged to its midmorning stop in Dawes Creek, Ace and Zoe were waiting up near the front of the oldstyle wood platform to watch the tourists come down out of the passenger cars.

  “Well, where is she?” Zoe demanded, scanning the two or three dozen laughing, jostling tourists, most of them dressed in some kind of costume to match the oldfashioned train.

  In all the tourist noises, the twins might have missed the little shout from the rear, if Chief Running Stag hadn’t suddenly stepped from his usual place near the back of the station to walk in long strides out onto the tracks.

  “Hey!” said Ace, giving his sister a poke. “I bet—”

  “I’m ’way ahead of you,” she told him, already trotting toward the end of the train.

  Sure enough, their grownup cousin Cagey Thursday had chosen to get off through the caboose. And, being a real clouseau, had missed her footing somewhere between the high iron steps and the ground. Now she lay sprawled behind the train, arms and legs dripping over the sides of the narrow-gauge tracks, one foot still caught on the bottom caboose step.

  A trainman was looking the situation over from the caboose door, but Chief Running Stag got to Cagey first. The twins came up just as he was bending to get a grip on her right hand.

  “Thanks, Chief,” she told him, looking at his headdress. Returning his grip, she swung along as he hauled her to her feet, the trainman lifting her toes off the caboose step just in time. She thanked him, too, then took another look at Running Stag and asked, “Or should I say, ‘Brave’? If you don’t mind my saying so, you look a little on the youngish side to—” She started falling backward as if she’d just lost her balance.

  Still gripping her hand, he pulled her straight again. “I am eighteen,” he replied proudly. “Old enough to have taken the vow.”

  “The vow?” Cagey asked at once. “Hope you don’t mind the question, Chief, but in that get-up, and with that lead-in ... What vow?”

  “Ugh!” He gave a quick grin and then started looking deep into Cagey’s eyes.

  She gazed back calmly, blinking behind her round glasses in the normal, eye-lubricating way, wearing a pleasant smile on her owlish round face, not making any big staring game out of the business, but not looking away, either.

  “Yes, you may ask,” Running Stag said at last. “You may ask because you are a force of nature.”

  She laughed, so they could tell she was flattered, but she just answered, “Aren’t we all?”

  “And because you are a force of nature, I tell you this: neither eagle nor turkey nor any other wild bird has died for my warbonnet, but each feather is made of glue-stiffened cotton thread on a hard paper quill.” Releasing her hand, he held his up in the old-movie gesture and said, “How!” before folding his arms back beneath his blanket and returning to the train platform.

  “Hey, Cagey, how about that?” Ace crowed. “Did you ever know you were a force of nature?”

  “Hunh! Some kind of twister or earthquake, that’s my guess.” She rumpled his hair. “Okay, kids, you set this interview up for me. Lead on.”

  They went back to the platform. The other passengers had already gone on into town, except for the few who were still examining the authentic, reconstructed station with its real antique vending machines and stand of souvenir print reproduction oldtime newspapers and dime novels.

  The pufferbelly made two round trips daily: up and down in the morning, with lunch on the train; up again in the afternoon and down after dark for the people who wanted “the romance of a night ride.” Every morning a few of the passengers would decide to spend several hours in Dawes Creek and continue the trip up to Dog’s Collar on the afternoon train, but most of them would reboard the morning run after its half-hour stopover.

  Dog’s Collar wasn’t anything but a tourist trap—restaurant, hotel, and souvenir emporium—built especially by the Appalachia Nostalgia Corporation as its pufferbelly’s mountainpeak terminus. But Dawes Creek, genuine two-centuries-old town or not, didn’t have much to keep tourists longer than half an hour. M. Angelou, the woman who ran the Moonshine Resort where the twins were spending the summer, liked to say that Dawes Creek had been too much lived in day by day down through the years to be anything else but plain and a little shabby, as if the big economic recovery of the 2030s still hadn’t quite hit it.

  Coming out of the station onto the end of Boone Street, the town’s one and only business district, Cagey bumped into Sheriff Detweiller. Literally bumped—the sheriff had a bigger pufferbelly than the train, and he walked up too fast for the twins to grab their cousin back.

  “Umpf,” Sheriff Detweiller remarked, retreating a step to rub his stomach and look down at Cagey. He was tall enough to play pro basketball if he wasn’t so middle-aged and heavy. “You that fancy flatland city slicker amateur gumshoe from Marltown?”

  “Yeah,” said Cagey, going into her hardboiled cop act, “if you wanta call Marltown a city. Wanta make something out of it?”

  “Hay-ell, M., up here we consider anybody a city slicker who comes from a burg with a bigger population than two thousand. That gun in your pocket loaded, or just a prop?”

  “Neither one,” she replied, taking it out of her pocket to show him. “It’s real, but it isn’t loaded.”

  “Okay, just had to check for the record. And now, lady, one word of friendly warning. From one lawbird to another, if that’s the way you fancy it. What happened to Wayne Colfax and Jethro Davis was an accident. Just that, an accident, pure and simple. Do
n’t go around trying to make one of your fancy murder cases out of it on the sayso of a couple of summer-tourist kids and a big business exec from the flatlands who doesn’t know a doggone thing about it.”

  Cagey stuck out her jaw. “I should be careful I don’t run into a little ‘accident’ of my own, is that what you’re hinting at?”

  “Hey, fancy-class cop,” said Detweiller. “You said that. I didn’t.”

  “Okay. I’ll bear it in mind. From the city cop to the country cop, thanks ... I won’t say ‘for nothing,’ because the line you’ve just handed me may turn out to be quite a bit of something. So long, sucker.” Cagey repocketed her gun, put her hands on her cousins’ shoulders, and started steering them around the sheriff.

  “Sucker yourself,” he threw back, without budging a millimeter. “Just don’t say you haven’t been warned.”

  When they were halfway down the street, and Cagey had long ago dropped her hands from the twins’ shoulders, Zoe said, “Zow! That was telling him, Cousin!”

  “Mmmm. Obviously not going to be one of the real pollies I hit it off with. Wonder what set him off?”

  “He’s sore about his daughter,” Ace replied.

  “His daughter?”

  “Eulalie D. Detweiller,” Zoe explained. “Wayne ‘got her in trouble.’ Without either of them even having a procreation permit.”