Unsettled Spirits

by Alice Duncan

  "Oh! Uh, oh, I'm dreadfully sorry, Mrs. Majesty. I beg your pardon. I got lost in thought for a moment."

  It was more than a moment. However, I only said in a voice that fairly dripped with honey and molasses and other sweet stuff, "That's quite all right. I understand there are great changes being made at the company since Mr. Underhill's untimely death."

  "Untimely," said Mrs. Tiefel as if he didn't think so. "Yes. Well, that's as may be." He squinted at me through his spectacles. "So you want to work on the line, do you? Have you ever done work of this nature before?"

  He ought to know. He'd been staring at my application for what seemed like hours. "No. I need a job in order to help support my family. I'm a widow." I hung my head and tried to look pitiful.

  "Sorry for your loss," said Mr. Tiefel as if he didn't really mean it, although I think he would have if he hadn't been thinking about other things. "Line jobs aren't difficult, although you'll be on your feet all day, and they're tiring. You'll work from eight in the morning until six in the evening. You'll have a ten-minute break in the morning and in the afternoon, and forty-five minutes for lunch at one p.m."

  Lordy, that sounded like hell to me. "I see."

  "You'll have to wear a head covering and gloves. We work with toxic chemicals here, so we all have to be careful, and we require that our line girls wear face masks covering their noses and mouths."

  Whooey. Greatly daring, I said, "I understand there were some problems here before, but that they've been... er, fixed."

  Mr. Tiefel grimaced. "Yes. Mr. Underhill wasn't... um... Well, never mind about that."

  "He wasn't concerned about the welfare of his workers?" I hazarded.

  Another grimace. "You might say that." He squinted at me. "Excuse me for asking, Mrs. Majesty, but do you type or take dictation? You, er, appear to be more of an office worker than a line worker."

  Surprised, I asked, "Why?"

  "Er, well, your general appearance and... and grammar, and that sort of thing."

  Aha. Line girls weren't well educated and couldn't expect more out of life than working at a plant bottling (or boxing or canning. I had no idea) deadly chemicals, eh? Didn't sound right to me. Then again, Billy used to accuse me of having Socialist sympathies, so I'm probably not to be trusted on these issues.

  "No. I'm sorry. I never learned any useful skills in school. I'm only fit for the lines, I fear."

  "I see. Come with me, please, Mrs. Majesty."

  So I went with him, out the door and down the dreary hall to another office, where Mr. Tiefel opened a door and ushered me inside. To my intense shock, Miss Betsy Powell sat in a chair in front of Barnett Underhill's desk, industriously taking down shorthand in a notebook. Both Mr. Underhill and Miss Powell jerked their attention to Mr. Tiefel and me.

  "I beg your pardon, Mr. Underhill. I thought you were free to interview Mrs. Majesty now. I should have knocked."

  "Interview?" said Betsy Powell, her shock as great as mine. "But aren't you a—"

  "I need a job," said I, ruthlessly interrupting her. Impolite, I know. But I didn't want her to blurt out anything that might reveal my true employment.

  "Oh," said Miss Powell.

  "Will you please leave us for a moment, Miss Powell?" asked Mr. Underhill politely. "I'd like to chat with Mrs. Majesty for a moment."

  "Of... of course," said Betsy Powell, fairly leaping from her chair and dashing to the door, clutching her secretarial pad to her bosom and gazing fearfully at me the whole time.

  When the door closed behind her, Mr. Underhill said, "Thank you, Mr. Tiefel. You may leave Mrs. Majesty with me now."

  "Very well, sir," said Mr. Tiefel, and he, too, fled, although he didn't look scared as he did so.

  After the door closed behind Mr. Tiefel, Barrett Underhill smiled at me and gestured me into a chair. "I understand you're assisting Miss Castleton in her search for Mrs. Franbold's killer, if killer there be. Frankly, I don't care who killed my father. I'm only glad he's gone, although if Mrs. Franbold was also murdered, I'd like to know who did her in. She was a lovely person, unlike my father, who wasn't."

  I sat there with my mouth hanging open, trying to find words in me somewhere in order to respond to this statement. "Um... I don't think they even know yet if Mrs. Franbold was murdered, Mr. Underhill. If anyone knows, the police haven't released the information. I... Uh, I was only interested in how your plant works, mainly, and to meet people who worked with your father."

  He sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers before his face. "So you're not really looking for a position on the lines here?"

  Oh, dear. What to say? What to do? I decided honesty, while not always the best policy, might work in this instance. "Truthfully, no. I'm mostly just trying to help Miss Castleton, even though I don't know the cause of Mrs. Franbold's death yet. No one has told me if she was poisoned or just... I don't know. Dropped dead of a heart attack or something, I guess."

  "Thank you. I appreciate your honesty, believe me."

  Did he? Very well. "I'm also interested in how anyone could get cyanide in order to kill your father. I... Well, I understand he was an unpleasant man, and I haven't yet met anyone who's sorry he's gone, but still... Murder isn't very nice." Was that weak, or what?

  With a huge sigh, Mr. Underhill dropped his hands to his desk, sat forward, and said, "No, I guess it isn't. Life is sure easier without him, though. He was a dreadful man, and if he hadn't died, we'd probably have had to wrest control of the company from him by force, or he'd have ruined it completely."

  "My goodness. How does one wrest control of a company from the company's owner's hands?"

  "We'd probably have had to vote him out of office, although that wouldn't be simple, because he owned the majority of the stock in the company. However, I'm doing my best to bring the plant back into a profitable position."

  "Um... How are you doing that? If you don't mind my asking."

  "I don't mind." He smiled. He had a nice smile. Not at all like his late father's wrinkled contortion that used, for him, to pass as a smile. "We have a board of directors, and, except for my father, all of the board members want to bring our equipment up to current standards and assist our staff members with monetary recompense commensurate with their contributions to the company. To bring the Underhill Chemical Company into the twentieth century, as it were."

  "And that includes the girls who work on the lines?"

  "If it weren't for the girls who work on the lines, the company wouldn't be able to operate at all. So yes. That includes the girls who work on the lines." Barrett Underhill shook his head. "My father was not only as miserly as Scrooge, but he was wicked. I know that sounds terrible, but it's true. If you don't believe me, ask my mother or my sisters."

  I didn't have to ask them; they'd told me, without any prompting, what they'd thought of the late Grover Underhill. "I'm sorry."

  "Thank you. Still, I suppose the police need to investigate his death."

  "Yes."

  "Even though whoever did it deserves a reward."

  "Oh, my. He was really that bad?" I asked, although I'm not sure why I was aghast. Heck, if anyone deserved to be dead, it was Mr. Grover Underhill, I reckon. To hear a son talk about his father like that made me kind of sad though.

  "Yes," said Mr. Underhill, not mincing words. "He was that bad. He beat my sisters and me, he cheated on my mother, he treated his employees like dirt, and... Well, he wasn't worth the space he took up on this earth."

  "Oh, dear. I've heard much the same thing from others."

  "I'm sure you have. Well, Mrs. Majesty, I can't give you a job on the lines—you'd hate the work anyway—but I appreciate your efforts on my family's behalf. If that's what they are. I mean, I don't want anyone to think I killed Mrs. Franbold. I aim to marry her granddaughter, for heaven's sake, but I'm not sure I want anyone to discover my father's killer."

  "That's quite frank, Mr. Underhill."

  "Yes, it is. It's also true." He stood.
"Here, let me see you to the lobby."

  Whoops! "Um... I'm sorry, but Mr. Browning told me he'd give me a tour of the plant, if it's all right with you. Do you mind calling him instead of taking me to the lobby?"

  "Don't mind at all. I'll have Susan call Mr. Browning, so I'll still be taking you to the lobby, though. We still use that antiquated tube-calling system, which will also be updated as soon as possible."

  "Thank you."

  "Thank you. I appreciate your efforts to help us. Really, I do."

  "You're more than welcome." I didn't know what else to say. However, I did want to know something. "Is Miss Betsy Powell your secretary, Mr. Underhill?"

  "Miss Powell belongs to the stenographic pool we have here in the company, Mrs. Majesty. She's been quite rattled by the two deaths in the church we all attend, as I'm sure all the congregants were. Not pleasant Sunday jollifications."

  Did he really say jollifications? I guess he did. So I said, "Indeed not," and left it at that. Guess I wasn't going to be working at the Underhill plant any time soon. That was all right by me.

  So much for that. I can't say that I learned much, although having spoken to so many people who worked at the Underhill Chemical Company solidified my understanding of how much the late Mr. Underhill was loathed. Not a single person had a good thing to say about him; not even members of his family. That's kind of pathetic.

  Mr. Underhill led me to the lobby and told Susan to call Mr. Browning for me. It wasn't long before Robert appeared, smiling broadly, with his jacket on and his tie straight.

  "Ready for our tour?" he asked.

  "Indeed, I am," said I.

  Susan stared at us as if we were a couple of folks from Mars. Oh, well.

  Chapter 19

  Robert Browning took me to the other side of the lobby from where I'd been to offices for interviews and opened the door there. That door led to a bleak-looking corridor, along which he proceeded to lead me.

  When we got to the first door on the right of the corridor, he said, "Prepare yourself. It's quite noisy in here." And he opened the door.

  He hadn't been kidding. The room into which that door led was enormous, and it was full of assembly lines. They weren't the types of assembly lines I'd seen in newspapers and magazines, because those had been photographs of automobile assembly lines. These lines were long and skinny, and each one had a moving belt on it with women standing on either side of the belt, each one doing something to whatever came down the belt. All the women wore aprons, face masks, and puffy caps. Not precisely my style. I was glad I wouldn't really have to work there.

  "Mercy sakes," said I, rather at a loss for words for one of the few times in my life.

  He grinned down at me and said, "Here. I'll show you what we do here and how we do it." He led the way to the beginning of one of the assembly lines, where a woman seated on a tall stool, wearing what looked like motoring goggles and with a doctor's protective white mask over her nose and mouth, pulled a handle whenever a jar came up to her machine. Some kind of creamy stuff shot out of the machine every time she pulled the handle and went straight into the jar. She never missed once while I watched her, nor did she take her gaze from her task to look at Robert or me.

  "Maria Gomez is the machine operator on this line," said Robert. "Hers is a more skilled job than those of the other girls on the line who, as you can see, have their own tasks to perform."

  I did see. Two women stood on either side of the assembly belt directly down the line from Maria Gomez, and like clockwork, they each grabbed a jar and screwed a lid on it. One woman capped the jar I'd seen filled, and the other woman capped the next one.

  "You can see we have this operation down to a fine art."

  "Yes." I said, thinking there wasn't a whole lot of art to it, but it was certainly efficient.

  "You'll notice that other women down the line wipe the jars—you'll also notice that they all wear face masks and gloves, because some of the chemicals we produce are caustic and some are poisonous—and so forth, down the line, until the jar reaches the end, where it's packed in a crate. Twenty-four of these jars will fill a crate."

  "And then they're ready for sale?" I asked.

  "No, not yet. First a line boy has to carry the heavy crate to a capping machine."

  "But I thought those two women at the head of the line capped the jars."

  "They do, but the caps aren't tight enough to sell to the public. We have a machine that will tighten the lids. Then the jars are put on another line where they're washed and dried and packed in another crate. Then they go to the labeling line, where more people slap gummed labels on the jars. Then they're ready for sale."

  "My word, what a fascinating process."

  "I don't know if fascinating is the word I'd use, but it's efficient and it works. But our workers deserve more money than that miserly Grover Underhill wanted to pay them. I mean, look at them! Most of them are on their feet for eight or ten hours a day. They should get some kind of compensation for exhaustion alone, if nothing else."

  I thought it was probably a good thing it was so noisy in there that the line workers couldn't hear Robert talk about their dead employer. Not that most of them wouldn't agree with him, but still....

  "You'll see two lines bottling this particular jar."

  "What's in that jar, if you don't mind my asking?"

  "Don't mind at all. That's actually one of the medicines we package. It's a cream containing a base of lanolin with a suspension of salicylate and morphine. It's used on patients with certain painful skin conditions."

  The mere mention of morphine made me wince, but I tried not to show it. Morphine's the stuff Billy took to kill himself.

  "Oh, my, I didn't know morphine could be used... What do you call it? Topically? And salicylate? Isn't that in aspirin and salicylic powders?"

  "Yes on both counts. But we have laboratory folks who keep doing research on such things. Most of us, including Barrett Underhill, would like to do more along the lines of medical products. Fertilizers are important, but I think we're on the brink of major medical discoveries, too."

  "You mean you have scientists who work for you? Doing research on stuff?"

  "Scientists and engineers. They're both kind of an odd lot, but the world needs 'em, and so does the Underhill plant."

  "Oh. I had no idea."

  "Yes. We're not just a poison plant." Robert's mouth screwed up into a grimace, and I got the feeling he would be glad to have the company for which he worked producing more healing products and fewer deadly ones.

  "I see."

  "But come along. You'll see various products in our list being packaged on the various assembly lines."

  We didn't linger by any of the other lines, but I saw folks bagging fertilizer, bottling rat poison, boxing ant poison, and canning a product containing lye.

  "You probably know that lye is terribly corrosive, but it has some very important uses in a lot of products, including soap."

  "I think I remember my mother telling me that when she was a girl in Massachusetts, her family made soap and used accumulated ashes to make lye, although I don't know how they did it."

  With a charming smile, Robert said, "Our methods of producing lye are a little more sophisticated than those used in households, but the stuff still comes from ashes. Our quantities are larger, is all."

  Just as I thought my eardrums were going to burst from the hideous noise in that room, we got to the end of it, and Robert opened another door, and out we went into the corridor again. That was one long corridor. What's more, it ended in a staircase.

  "Very well, now we'll go upstairs and you'll see where the brains work."

  "The brains?" I asked, feeling stupid and as though I didn't personally possess one of them. A brain, I mean.

  "Our scientists and engineers who do research into our products. We also have a department that tests every batch of product we package for commercial use to make sure we're following the formula correctly. We only wa
nt quality products leaving the Underhill plant."

  "I had no idea this business was so complicated."

  "I don't know if complicated is the correct word. Complex, perhaps."

  "Yes. I see what you mean. Lots of different steps."

  "Precisely."

  The corridor at the end of the staircase was much less gloomy a one than the downstairs corridor leading to that gigantic assembly room. This one had windows every few feet, through which I saw men in white coats and face masks dipping sticks into various drippy things and them slathering the drips onto slides and peering at them through microscopes. Brains, indeed. I'd bet anything those fellows hadn't loathed algebra in high school as I had. Worse, I hadn't understood it. But upstairs in the Underhill plant were dozens of men, and even a woman or two, who had clearly not had my adverse reaction to mathematics.

  "And here we have a room full of chemists," said Robert. "Some of them are research chemists and some of them are quality-control chemists."

  "Oh. There's a difference?"

  "Probably not really. They're all well-educated men who fancy chemistry and who love testing stuff."

  "Oh. I hated algebra. I'd probably have hated chemistry, too." It was a sorry confession, but I guess each of us is born with a certain talent. Mine was for spiritualism. These guys probably excelled at mathematics and chemistry, the mere mention of which—either one—made me feel queasy.

  With another laugh, Robert said, "Me, too. I was good at business management, though."

  "That's fortunate for the Underhills, I should imagine."

  "Indeed. But do you need to freshen up before we go to lunch, Daisy? There's a powder room—What are you staring at?"

  Staring I was, by golly. There, right in front of me through one of the convenient windows Underhill had provided their herd of scientists and engineers, stood Mr. Gerald Kingston in the flesh. He held in one hand something I think is called a pipette, and he was slowly dripping liquid from the pipette into a glass thing I think is called a retort. His reason for doing so was beyond my understanding. A long tube at the end of the retort dripped liquid into a bulbous glass thing that sat over a flame. In between drips from the pipette (if that's what it was), Mr. Kingston's lips moved. I'm no good at lip-reading, but I think he was counting, probably to accurately measure the length between drips from the pipette into the retort. If that's what they were. I didn't take chemistry in school, and I've always been glad of it, although I'm sure I shouldn't be. But honestly, if algebra had driven me beyond distraction, can you imagine what chemistry would have done to my feeble brain? It doesn't bear thinking of.