“Not possible. I suspect you’re just trying to keep me from feeling like an old man. Speaking of longevity, would you mind if we dropped in for a few minutes on an elderly couple who are your neighbors, the Enderbles? He’s professor emeritus of local fauna. Quite a distinguished scholar in his field.”
“Not the Enderble who wrote How to Live with the Burrowing Mammals and Never Dam a Beaver? I’d be thrilled!”
“He has a new one coming called Socializing Among the Snakes. Mrs. Enderble believes it the crowning achievement of a long and distinguished career. She is—er—perhaps more broad-minded on the subject of reptiles than most ladies.”
“I love the way you say ladies, Peter. You’re so Victorian. You ought to wear lavender spats and carry a cane to twirl.”
“Whatever you say. A cane would be a fine idea, actually. I could lay about me savagely when these confounded—Miss Hayhoe, if I catch you in the Crescent with that disgusting vehicle one more time—”
“Don’t sweat it, Professor.”
With a jolly laugh, the Amazon charged on.
“Drat the wench! She flouts me.”
Shandy pulled off his glove and scratched his nose. “That’s rather odd, come to think of it.”
“Why? Have you never been flouted before?”
“I wasn’t referring to any—er—personal chagrin, but to the young woman’s flagrant indifference to a sensible rule. She could run over a gawker and lose the Illumination some business. I’m surprised the other students haven’t cracked down on her.”
“She’s the type who gets away with things,” said Helen. “With a name like Heidi Hayhoe, the girl’s a natural for the role of campus cutup. She’s here for laughs and men, and she doesn’t make any bones about it.”
“Then why in heaven’s name did she choose Balaclava?”
“Oh, I expect she has some relative who’s a rich and generous alumnus. Isn’t there a Hayhoe who makes threshing machines?”
“Hayhoe Havesters! Good Lord, of course. They donated one a while back. The school raises a lot of grain, you know. Tim and I have been working on a strain of super drought-resistant millet. Millet is a very underappreciated crop in this country. Except by canaries.”
“But much of the world lives on millet. Peter, that’s breathtaking! May I see what you’re doing sometime?”
“Of course, not that there’s much to see. Agrostology is not the most—er—flamboyant of professions. That’s my proper field.”
“I see. Rutabagas are just a sideline. But think of all the cows you’ve made happy. Poor things, eating’s about all they have to look forward to nowadays. I’ll bet Professor Dysart’s field is artificial insemination. He looks like a male chauvinist pig. Probably a terror among the undergraduate women.”
“Wrong this time, madam. Dysart’s an engineer and Dr. Svenson is very strict about the student-teacher relationship.”
“Dr. Svenson says himself that there’s a lot going on around here he doesn’t know about.”
“That’s only what he said. What he meant was that there is one particular thing he doesn’t know about and God help me if I don’t provide him with an answer.”
“What will he do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it about Jemmy’s mother?”
“Yes.”
“But surely he’s not blaming you?”
“Helen, could we talk in a less public place?”
“I’m sorry, Peter. Is this where the Enderbles live? I thought he’d have a hobbit-hole.”
“Perhaps John would prefer that, but I doubt Mary would. I can’t visualize Mrs. Enderble living anywhere but here. She’s like the little woman in the weather house, never far from her own front door.”
His description was apt. Mrs. Enderble did pop out on signal. She did look like a quaint folk figure, hair in a bun, face round and rosy, eyes rounded in perpetual wonderment, and lips curved in a merry smile. Even the maroon wool skirt and hand-knitted pink cardigan she wore contrived somehow to look like a peasant costume.
“Peter Shandy! I hadn’t expected to see you again so soon. That was a lovely funeral, wasn’t it? Exactly as Jemima would have wanted, though I daresay she’d as soon have put it off a few years, like the rest of us. Come in, both of you. John’s in the study, wondering where he put something or other as usual.”
“I’ve brought an admirer of his. This is Helen Marsh.”
“Oh, you’re the lady from California. How nice! I saw you and Mrs. Lomax out shaking rugs this afternoon. Jemima had many enthusiasms, but she always used to say housekeeping wasn’t one of them. She was always scolding me for spending so much time puttering around the house when so many worthwhile things were happening outside. But I’ve never been one for committees and such. You have to let a place know you love it so it will love you back, don’t you?”
“I expect so,” said Helen. “I’ve never had a house of my own.”
“Ah, but you’re a nest builder at heart, like me,” said Mrs. Enderble. “I can tell by the way you shake a rug. John, we have company. Here, let me put those bundles down for you. What a pretty coat, Miss Marsh! Is that what they’re wearing in California? I had a notion they didn’t wear much of anything, from what you see in the papers. Come into the study, if you can stand the clutter.”
The clutter consisted of a scattering of papers on a flat-topped golden oak desk and a basketful of pine cones spilled over the hearth. Two tiger-striped kittens were batting the cones around while the mother cat, a large dog of indeterminable breed, a vast white Belgian hare, and a man not much bigger than the hare observed their frolickings with benign indulgence.
“Peter, my boy, good to see you. What do you think of these little rascals, eh?”
One kitten abandoned its pine cone and started up Shandy’s trouser leg. He reached down and gently disengaged needle-sharp claws from his left shin.
“That will do, young sir or madam. I am not a tree. I’m sure, John, that the error was due to youthful inexperience rather than perversity of nature. No, puss, don’t eat my necktie.”
“Animals always go straight to Peter,” Mary Enderble explained to Helen. “They even like the way he tastes. Oh, John, this is Helen Marsh from California. Peter says she’s a fan of yours.”
“Glad to hear it.” Enderble shook hands not without difficulty, as he was now in possession of the other kitten. “Mary, do we have anything to give these nice people?”
“Never mind us,” said Shandy, who was trying to count the first kitten’s whiskers while it sucked on his tie. “You’d better get a nursing bottle for this deluded infant. It thinks I’m its mother.”
“Oh, dear, he’s getting that lovely silk all wet. Go to mummy, Eugene.”
Mrs. Enderble placed the tiny creature under his dam’s stomach and waited until he was blissfully kneading fur before she nodded and started toward the kitchen.
“You two sit and warm yourselves. The Dysarts brought over some kind of fancy cordial and we’ve been wondering what it tastes like, but it didn’t seem right to open the bottle just for ourselves.”
She was back in the speed of light, bearing thimble-sized glasses, a small decanter, and a plateful of sugar cookies.
“Ouzo, they call it. Smells like paregoric to me.”
“Good,” said Helen. “I was raised on paregoric.”
“So was I, my dear. Now you can’t buy any without a prescription. I don’t know what we’re coming to. Well, happy days, though I suppose that’s not a very kind thing to say considering what brought you here.”
“What did bring her here?” asked Dr. Enderble.
“Why, she’s that relative of the Ameses’, come to keep house for Tim.”
“How can she keep house for Tim when he’s out with Jemmy?”
“Oh, John, you’ll be a tease to your dying day. You know what I mean. I expect it must have been an awful shock to you, Helen. You don’t mind my calling you Helen? I haven’t got over it myse
lf, Jemima here one day and gone the next and nobody the wiser. That was the awful part, nobody missing her for so long. We were so used to her being here, there, and everywhere that everybody just thought she must be somewhere else. Do try one of these cookies, dear, though I’m afraid I got in a speck too much vanilla.”
“Not a bit. They’re perfect. I’d love to have you call me Helen, but I don’t deserve your sympathy. I’m only a cousin of Jemmy’s husband’s mother, and I’d never even met either of the Ameses.”
“Then that makes it all the nicer of you to come and help out,” said Mrs. Enderble. “Don’t you think so, Peter?”
“Indeed I do. Er—speaking of Jemima’s habit of not being where you thought she was, I’ve run into a bit of a puzzle.”
“Tell John. He’s good at puzzles.”
Mary took the daintiest possible sip from her minuscule glass. “There, I knew it would taste like paregoric.”
“What’s this about Jemima, Peter?” John Enderble broke in.
“She doesn’t seem to have come out where she went in. According to the Dysarts, she left their party just a couple of minutes before half past nine and walked down the path to the shrubbery. Several of the guests watched her out the window. However, Sheila Jackman claims her husband was walking Mary home at that same time, and that she herself stood looking out the window the whole time he was gone, which was perhaps ten or fifteen minutes because he stopped to say hello to you, John. And she insists Jemima never came out of the shrubbery.”
“You don’t suppose she stopped to listen for the screech owl?”
“Oh, John,” his wife protested. “With all the yelling and hollering and carryings-on up and down the Crescent, she couldn’t have heard a calliope under full steam, let alone a poor little bird too scared to open its beak. Anyway, Jemima never stopped for anything, you know that as well as I do. You always said Jemima didn’t know whether she was coming or going half the time, but at least she never loitered along the way.”
“Did I? Wasn’t very charitable of me, was it?”
“It was the truth,” said Shandy. “Jemima was not the woman to hang around in a cold, dark shrubbery when she had something on her mind. She’d been telling everybody at the party she was going over to rip down those—er—ill-chosen decorations of mine. She was found in my living room with one of the things beside her, but how did she get from here to there without being seen?”
“Blessed if I know,” said Professor Enderble, “unless the Dysarts got the time wrong. I’m sure Sheila didn’t because young Jackman did bring Mary home right about half past nine. I’d been watching out the window myself, worrying that they might keep her out late and wondering if I should go over there, when I saw them coming across the Crescent. I don’t recall seeing Jemima go by during that time either. She’d be wearing that purple cape, wouldn’t she?”
“So far as anybody knows. She had it on when she left the Dysarts’ and was still wearing it when I found her.”
“Well, all I can say is, if she’d come through our yard then, I’d have seen her,” said Mrs. Enderble, “and so would John. We both have good eyesight, and we’re both trained observers and we’re neither of us afflicted with softening of the brain, though you might think so from the way we let these critters boss us around. Peter, I’m afraid Algernon is eating your shoelaces.”
Shandy lifted his foot away from the nibbling hare. “I hope he doesn’t choke on the tips.”
“No fear. He may be naughty, but he isn’t stupid. Here they are.”
Mrs. Enderble pounced on the tiny cylinders, though they must have been almost invisible against the dark rug in the flickering firelight. She did have exceptional eyesight.
“Perhaps she went by while you were in here talking to Mr. Jackman,” Helen suggested.
“Mercy on us, child, we know better than to ask Roger Jackman in when he’s been celebrating. Roger’s a lovely boy, but he gets to showing you how to throw forward passes with your best china vase. We just stood around the door till it got so cold we had an excuse to shut it and get rid of him. Jemima wouldn’t have passed without at least saying hello.”
“Oh. Well, that does leave one possibility, though I’m shy of mentioning it in mixed company.”
John Enderble chuckled. “You mean that she got taken short? I thought of that myself, but I’d say it’s hardly likely. She could have gone back to the Dysarts’ or knocked and asked to use our bathroom. It’s not as though we were strangers. She was only a couple of minutes from her own house, for that matter. I hardly think Jemima would take a chance on being surprised in an undignified position unless she couldn’t help it. And then she’d have left sign in the snow and I’d have noticed. Mary and I visit the shrubbery every day to fill the bird feeders, and we’re always on the lookout for animal tracks and owl casts.”
“What about human footprints?”
“None in the deep snow. The path is well trodden, of course.”
“Speaking of treading,” said Helen, “don’t you think we ought to, Peter? I don’t want to wear out my welcome on my first visit.”
“No fear of that,” Mary Enderble assured her. “You drop over any time you take the notion. John and I don’t go out much, and we’re always glad of pleasant company. You won’t mind sleeping over there all alone?”
“Oh no. I’ve been sleeping alone for more years than I care to count.”
“Then you lock your doors and windows. This is a peaceable village ordinarily, but you never know who might be hanging around during the Illumination. Lately I’ve had a sort of feeling, like you get in the woods when there’s an animal watching you. John knows what I mean.”
“Yes, I do,” said her husband, “and while I haven’t felt it myself, I don’t discount it. Mary’s more intuitive than I. We’re not trying to scare you, Helen, but you just remember there are neighbors handy and a spare room if you get edgy.”
“Thank you. I won’t try to be brave.”
“We’d lend you old Rex here, but he’s deaf as a post and no earthly use for a watchdog. Besides, he’d probably keep you awake all night fussing about Imogene and the kittens.”
Mary Enderble bundled them into their wraps, reminded them about their groceries, and was still waving from the doorstep when Shandy saw Helen to her new abode.
Chapter 13
“PETER, THAT’S BIZARRE! MORE coffee?”
“Thank you, Helen, I couldn’t. That was a superb breakfast. Then you don’t think Tim and I are deluding ourselves about Jemima’s having been murdered?”
“I don’t see how you could think anything else, especially since that marble turned up at the Cadwalls’.”
Miss Marsh began stacking dishes. “Is there any chance they might be involved themselves?”
“At the moment, I can’t think of anybody more likely.”
Shandy told her why. “Of course the motive is pure, conjecture.”
“Yes, but it makes sense, and they did have the best opportunity. The obvious answer is most apt to be the right one. Where do they live?”
“Right there.” He pointed out the window at the house next door.
“Then that could be why nobody saw Jemima come out of the shrubbery. Mrs. Cadwall was waiting for her at home. They’d planned to go over to your house together. To avoid the crowds on the Crescent, Jemima cut through the back yards.”
“Wallowing in snowdrifts all the way? I’m not much up on ladies’ finery, but I shouldn’t think even Jemima would show that much disregard for her party clothes.”
“Even when she was oh a cloak-and-dagger mission?”
“Which she’d announced at the top of her voice all over the Dysarts’ living room. Anyway, she’d have left a trail like a herd of elephants.”
“It could have snowed and covered her tracks.”
“It could have, but apparently it didn’t. I can still see the tracks the workmen made putting up those accursed lights on my spruce trees, and that happened on the aft
ernoon before she was killed.”
“Oh, Peter, you do make things difficult. I’ll have to think up a different theory. Right now, I suppose I’d better go brighten Dr. Porble’s day. Are you going to walk me up to the library, of have you something else on tap?”
“Yes to both. I’ll leave you to your job, and collect you for lunch about half past twelve, if that’s agreeable?”
“Are you sure you want to?”
“Of course.” He’d never been surer of anything in his life. “Why, would you rather not?”
“I’d adore to have lunch with you, but people might begin to think things.”
“That would be a refreshing novelty, which we as educators have a duty to encourage. If you mean they might begin to talk scandal about us. I expect they already have, so we might as well be hanged for sheep as for lambs. Is this the coat you’re going to wear? I do wish you had something warmer.”
Helen gave him a wicked smile. “Go shopping with me. That should rattle a few eyeballs.”
“It should, indeed. We must add that to our list of things to do.”
“Don’t you love making lists? It always gives me such a self-righteous glow to scratch things off.”
Shandy hoped she wasn’t planning to scratch him off, once she got the urge to move on again as she apparently was wont to do, but he didn’t dare ask. He must make do with what he could get. The walk to the library was far too short, and Porble altogether too eager in welcoming his new assistant.
“Well, Helen. Don’t mind if I call you Helen? We’re one happy family here. I’ve been thinking how we might best use you.”
“But I’m supposed to catalogue the Buggins Collection.”
“Balderdash! Can’t waste a person with your qualifications on that old junk. Now, I thought we’d start by—”
“Couldn’t I at least see where the books are kept?” she pleaded. “I’m invited to tea with the Svensons on Thursday afternoon, and they’ll be sure to ask for a progress report. The president seemed insistent that I get started on the collection right away. Didn’t you think so, Professor Shandy?”
“Very insistent,” Shandy replied.
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