by Maia Chance
“Oh?” I was thinking mice.
But Grandma Yarker said, “The door only locks from the outside.”
“Oh.” Now, of course, I was thinking of how the dossier had been filched from Berta’s room.
“I’ll make certain not to lock it, though,” Grandma Yarker said, “and I’ll tell Patience and the cleaning women not to, either.”
I thanked her, then asked if there was a telephone that guests might use. She directed me to a coin-operated telephone on the main floor.
With Cedric, I went downstairs and, after a wrong turn into the kitchen, found a hallway with a curtained alcove containing a telephone. I slid my nickel into the slot and asked the operator to connect me to Ralph’s number in New York. I needed to cancel our date. A few sweet nothings were also on the agenda.
The connection took a few minutes to go through. I imagined the long, long, snowy miles that separated me from New York. When the telephone finally rang, Ralph didn’t pick up.
In my several months of being Ralph’s girl, he’d taught me a thing or two. How to interrogate a suspect without twitching my left eyelid. That not all men were heartless ginks. And how not to get my hopes up when calling him on the telephone. He wasn’t one to loaf at home.
I slung the earpiece in its cradle and went up to Berta’s room. It was time to consult about the murder investigation that had thrust itself upon us.
Us. Suspects in a murder. Absurd.
4
Berta was ensconced in an armchair in her new room, with her detecting notebook on her lap and a freshly sharpened pencil in hand.
“We’re making a list?” I sat in the other armchair and wrestled Cedric out of his snowflake sweater so he wouldn’t bake.
“Indeed.”
“Checking it twice?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Never mind. Before we make a list, why don’t we go over what we recall from last night?” I released Cedric to explore the room. Instead, he beached himself on a braided rug in front of the electric fire.
Berta was tapping her pencil on the paper, thinking. “Hester Albans answered the front door when we arrived at eight o’clock—the time specified on the anonymous invitation—and seemed surprised to see us.”
“Yes.” Hester had also seemed annoyed to see us. She had grumbled about extra place settings, and Mrs. Goddard’s whimsies, and folks tracking snow into the house.
“She showed us to the living room,” Berta said, “where everyone else was already assembled—and already drinking, if I recall correctly.”
“And—do you remember?—they were all bickering. They fell silent when they saw us, and we stood there in the doorway—
“Realizing that we had not gate-crashed a large party, but an intimate family gathering.”
“Ugh.” I shuddered at the memory. “We were struck dumb with mortification.”
“You were struck dumb, Mrs. Woodby. Not I. Judith Goddard immediately suggested that Aunt Daphne had invited us, to which I said, ‘Oh yes, we met at the ladies’ poetry luncheon at the country club in Cleveland.’”
“Mm. That was a ickle bit overembellished, don’t you think?” I rifled in my handbag and pulled out the box of maple sugar candies I’d purchased at the general store.
“It was resourceful. If I had not compiled the dossier, we would not even have known Aunt Daphne belonged to the country club in Cleveland. And, as luck would have it, Aunt Daphne agreed that she had invited us.”
“She was already tipsy.”
“Indeed. And, it seems, inherently dotty.”
“After that, they all lost interest in us.” I held out the open box of candies to Berta. They were shaped like maple leaves.
“Not quite.” Berta selected a candy. “Do you recall that Judith ordered her son Fenton to fix us drinks?”
“Oh yes, that’s right. You had a gin and tonic, and I had a sidecar.”
“We must think carefully about what occurred next.”
We both chewed candy for a few ticks.
“The family was discussing a ski jumping contest that is to be part of the Winter Carnival,” I said. “How Maynard Coburn was going to compete, and how George—”
“The older son—the playboy.”
“Yes, how he had signed up to compete, too. And Judith was scolding George, saying he would break his neck, which angered him.”
“He seemed rather drunk.”
“Yes. A belligerent, nasty sort of drunk. Oh—and Rosemary, the daughter, was in on this argument, too, making snide little asides—what did she say?”
“That she would not attend the ski jump contest,” Berta said. “On account of being embarrassed that her mother was marrying such an unsuitable man. No one appeared to care what Rosemary thought. As for Maynard Coburn being unsuitable—well! Maynard Coburn? He is one of the best ski jumpers in the world! He took third place at Chamonix-Mont-Blanc in 1921, and he very nearly broke a world record last winter at the Solbergbakken hill in Norway.”
Okay-o. Berta was dazzled. I couldn’t blame her. Maynard Coburn, with his wafting dark-gold hair, bronzed skin, flashing white smile, and athlete’s physique, looked right at home on magazine covers. But the thing was, he wasn’t the very best ski jumper in the world. He was simply the handsomest.
“He’s quite a lot younger than Judith was,” I said.
Judith, though she must have been at least fifty years old, had flaunted an intimidating, chilly beauty: shiny black bob (surely dyed), porcelain skin (courtesy of costly face powder), glossy cranberry lipstick, fashionably protruding collarbones. Her green taffeta dress had been a sculptural work of art. Ditto her Clara Bow eyebrows.
“Maynard Coburn must be about thirty,” I said. “That’s two decades younger than Judith Goddard.”
“It is no wonder Rosemary was distressed. She seemed a very old-fashioned sort of woman, very unlike her mother.”
“She didn’t look at all like her mother, either,” I said.
Rosemary Rogerson, to be blunt, was dowdy: thick figure, puddinglike face, eyeglasses, ill-fitting dress, and a brown pageboy bob that was somehow more soup kitchen director than flapper.
“Rosemary probably seemed middle-aged when she was twelve,” Berta said. “Daughters of vain, aggressively glamorous women often compensate for their mothers thus.”
“I got the impression that Judith was, I don’t know, sort of pitting her son against her fiancé,” I said. “Almost as though she enjoyed seeing them in conflict. And then she changed the subject, almost gloatingly, I thought, to the upcoming honeymoon in Europe, and that for some reason really annoyed the fellow they called Uncle Roy—Judith’s brother.”
“Judith Goddard was a selfish woman,” Berta said. “The type whom everyone secretly wishes to bump off.”
“She was about as maternal as Al Capone,” I said.
“Indeed. What occurred next?”
I thought it over. “Well, the second I spotted the ruby ring on Aunt Daphne’s finger, I was paying attention to her, not to the family. I mean, how were we to know a murder was in the works? I went to sit near her—she was lolling on that divan, remember, a little removed from the family group, near the Christmas tree—and we chatted aimlessly. I told her all sorts of tales about the fun we’d had at the country club in Cleveland, and she seemed to believe every word. She was around the bend, of course, swimming in French champagne—I wonder where she got that? The only thing I recall clearly was her saying that Fenton had taken to spending quantities of time down in the cellar.”
“The cellar, Mrs. Woodby?”
“Yes.”
“How odd.”
“Oh—and of course, Aunt Daphne told me she’d stolen the ruby ring, in 1919, confirming what Anonymous’s invitation had said.”
“Now, here is the critical bit,” Berta said. “A few minutes before Judith collapsed. What do you recall?”
“Well, Judith ordered Fenton to make her a fresh drink, and she insisted that he take
her empty glass. I recall thinking that was needlessly demeaning to Fenton, because at that point Patience Yarker had come into the room, and she was going around with a tray collecting the empty glasses and putting out fresh ashtrays. There was no reason for Fenton to play the role of servant.”
“Fenton took his mother’s empty glass?”
“Yes. And he carried it over to the drinks cabinet.” The drinks cabinet was on a far wall, a carved and mirrored Victorian beast.
“And he fixed the new drink—”
“Yes, another Negroni, and I watched him make it—absently, you know—but all the same, I watched.”
“Out of a morbid fascination.”
“Well, yes.”
In my former life as a wealthy Society Matron, Berta had been my household cook. She was acquainted with my deathless hatred for any cocktail made with Campari, an orangey-red, toxically bitter Italian liqueur. Negronis are made with Campari, gin, and sweet red vermouth on ice.
And, in some cases, a pinch of cyanide.
I said, “I distinctly recall Fenton looking guiltily at his mother through the drinks cabinet mirror, and then proceeding to mix the new cocktail in the dirty glass.”
“The dirty glass! Did he use a shaker?”
“Oh, no. He just dumped everything straight into the glass—ice, tipply—and stirred.”
Berta was writing furiously in her notebook. “The … same … glass,” she murmured, and underlined it twice. “That is exceedingly important, because it means that the poison could not have been in a new glass on the drinks cabinet. Now, think carefully, Mrs. Woodby. Could Fenton have slipped poison into the drink while you were observing him?”
“I think so, yes. I was observing him, but not with a great deal of interest, and I was speaking to Aunt Daphne. My eyes weren’t glued upon him the entire time, you know. Then he carried the cocktail over to his mother. Less than a minute later, she was convulsing on the carpet and everyone was shrieking and shouting.”
A minute after that, she’d been dead.
Berta and I took a moment of silence to eat maple sugar candy and reflect.
I got up, went to the window, and twitched the curtain aside. The window overlooked the rear of the inn: a small, snowy parking lot with two motorcars, and a two-storied garage. An open-sided shed along the garage held stacks of yellowish split wood. A stair, swept free of snow, led to the garage’s upper level.
“It would seem logical that Fenton is the murderer,” Berta said. “No one else touched the cocktail glass.”
I turned, and leaned my rear bumper on the windowsill. “The other possibility is that the cyanide was somehow slipped into the drink after Fenton delivered it to his mother. If she set it down on a table, for instance.”
“But then it could have been anyone,” Berta said.
“Anyone except Aunt Daphne. She was right beside me the whole time. Well, then, the list of suspects is pretty simple: everyone who was near Judith just before she drank that cocktail. That was Judith’s three children—”
“Fenton … George … Rosemary.” Berta was scribbling in her notebook.
“Patience Yarker.”
“Patience!” Berta looked up. “Truly, Mrs. Woodby? She is a mere slip of a girl.”
“She was in the room. We must be objective. Oh—and Uncle Roy. He was right beside Judith on the sofa.”
“Uncle … Roy.”
“And Maynard Coburn, of course.”
Berta pursed her lips, but I saw she wrote Maynard Coburn.
“What about Hester Albans, the servant woman?” I asked.
“She never came into the living room.”
“All right, then, that’s—let me see—” I counted on my fingers. “Six possible suspects.”
“That is far too many. Where do we start?”
“We should go to Goddard Farm, I suppose. At least half our suspects will probably be up there. Of course, they’ll wish to boot us out—”
“We will resist any such efforts.”
“Aunt Daphne said something about Uncle Roy keeping a cottage in the village. We could begin with him. Warm ourselves up for the rest of the crowd. Say, why do you suppose the killer chose to poison Judith with so many people in the room? It was awfully risky.”
“Risky indeed, yet assembling a family always means assembling several persons who would like to kill the victim. It certainly befuddled Sergeant Peletier.”
“I’m afraid it has befuddled us, too.”
Hearing a door slam, I turned to look out the window again. I saw a fair-haired woman in an unbuttoned, brown-and-cream checked coat—Patience Yarker—scurry across the rear yard and up the garage stairs. At the top, she rapped on a door. She waited, glancing furtively around, hugging her coat close.
“Patience Yarker is out there,” I said to Berta. “I want to see what she does. She seems … jittery.”
Patience recoiled slightly as the door opened, but I couldn’t see who had opened it. She was speaking rapidly, her frozen breath ballooning into the air. Her brow was clouded, her shoulders hunched.
“She looks angry,” I said to Berta. “She looks as though she’s giving someone a piece of her mind— Oh. She’s done.” Patience was marching back down the stairs, cheeks flushed, eyebrows scrunched, hand to her belly—that’s odd—coat flapping behind her. She went across the parking lot and disappeared. Moments later, a door slammed somewhere below.
“Whew,” I said. “She was really throwing an ing-bing. I wonder with whom she was speaking.”
“You are certain she did not see you?”
“She glanced up, but she gave no indication of having seen me.”
“Well. It will be easy enough to discover who is staying above the garage.”
“And … there’s something else,” I said. “Patience had her hand curved around … her belly.”
Berta’s pale eyebrows lifted. “A stomachache, perhaps?”
“Sure, it could be a stomachache. Or…”
Berta gasped. “Are you speaking of peas, Mrs. Woodby?”
“Yes. Peas. In pods.”
“Surely not! Patience is unwed.”
“We must keep our eyes and our minds open. Come on. Let’s go find out who is staying above the garage, call upon Uncle Roy, and then motor up to Goddard Farm.”
5
I packed Cedric back into his sweater. Berta and I put on our coats and hats. My coat was a scrumptious mink, left over from when I was flush, and my hat was a chic, low-brimmed black wool cloche. Berta wore a shapeless brown coat and a knitted blue hat with earflaps.
Down in the lobby, Berta passed her room key to Samuel Yarker (now perusing the Weekly Caledonian) and asked if he might tell her who lived above the garage at the rear of the inn.
He peered over the top of the newspaper. “Sleuthing, eh?” He gave a rattling cough into a handkerchief.
I wondered why, with such a lung ailment, Samuel Yarker was not abed.
“Patience told me you’re lady detectives,” he said, “and that’s all well and good—even if it is downright silly—but I won’t have you spying on my premises, you hear?”
“Spying?” Berta pressed a hand to her heart. “Heavens, no, Mr. Yarker. It is only that I happened to see, from my own window, that the occupant above the garage left their window open a crack, and in this weather surely they would wish to know, heating costs being what they are these days.”
The suspicion drained from Samuel’s face. “Maynard Coburn lets the rooms above the garage—”
Well, well, well.
“—and I reckon he’s absentminded—distressed about Mrs. Goddard’s death last night, you see. They were to be married.”
“Yes, we know,” I said.
“Does Mr. Coburn live above the garage the year around?” Berta asked.
“Has for years. Course, soon as he married Mrs. Goddard, he was to move away to her palace in Cleveland, but I guess that’s not happening after all, is it?”
Berta an
d I thanked Samuel, and went out into the cold sunlight.
“Maynard Coburn?” I whispered once we were several paces along the icy sidewalk. “Patience Yarker had an impassioned, secretive argument with Maynard Coburn? After which she pressed a distressed hand to her belly—”
“You are embroidering, Mrs. Woodby. Precisely what does a ‘distressed hand’ look like? Besides, we have many people to interview before we draw any conclusions. Although it does strike me that Patience Yarker is a more natural fit, romantically speaking, for Maynard Coburn than Judith Goddard was. They are far closer in age, to begin with. And both with lovely golden hair—”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “But while Judith Goddard was, by all appearances, rolling in lettuce, Patience Yarker is not.”
“Mrs. Woodby! Are you suggesting Maynard Coburn is a fortune-hunter?”
“Isn’t that the logical conclusion? I mean, how much dough does a second-rate professional skier make, anyway? He’s living in rented rooms.”
Berta hmphed.
We stopped in at the hardware store and, finding a clerk sorting nails into wooden bins, asked for directions to Roy Goddard’s house.
“You must mean Roy Ives,” the clerk said. “He’s on Judith Goddard’s side of the family. That was her maiden name. Ives. Not from around here.”
“Of course,” I said. “Roy Ives.”
The clerk gave us directions. It was no more than a five-minute walk, he said, down River Street and across a covered bridge.
Berta and I continued on River Street, now a sluggish stream of motorcars and trucks. People arriving for the Winter Carnival, I figured. The sidewalk bustled with families and couples, laughing and chatting, their breath billowing up into the cold, vibrant sky. Rosy children clustered around the general store’s display windows, ogling the toy bears, wooden trains, tin whistles, and one glorious red-and-green National Steel coaster wagon on display.
Berta sighed as we passed. “Recalling the Christmases of my girlhood in Sweden used to fill me with joy, but now it is like a pain in my heart.”
