A Dismal Thing To Do (12 page)

“Serve you right if I happened to meet somebody more obliging.” Annabelle could still charm when she tossed her curls and turned on her over-the-shoulder smile. “But what’s Janet going to say if we go off and leave her alone, in her condition?”

“What do you mean alone?” Bert retorted. “The boys and I’ll be here, won’t we?”

“I don’t know, Madoc, it doesn’t seem right. Why can’t we wait till next Saturday when she’s feeling better, and all go together?”

“Because next Saturday you’re all coming to Fredericton to meet my mother.”

Annabelle still wasn’t ready to give in. “Couldn’t you bring Lady Rhys out here instead?”

“Mother will only just have arrived. We’ll have to give her a while to admire the new washstand before we start gallivanting, don’t we? Furthermore, we’ve already given her a faithful promise you’d be on the welcoming committee. Annabelle, is it yes or do I have to deputize you?”

“Hey, I get it,” shouted young Bert. “Uncle Madoc’s detecting somebody and Mum’s supposed to be the beautiful lady spy that gets the bad guy on the spot so the good guy can grab him. Right on, Mum!”

Annabelle turned the color that used to be known as Schiaparelli pink. “I don’t know where you kids get such crazy notions. Watching too many of those trashy television programs, eh.”

“Nope. Reading those paperbacks you’ve got hidden down in the preserve closet,” Bert Junior replied sweetly.

“I do not have them hidden! I stuck them there for want of a better place to put them because there’s so darn much junk of yours and your father’s all over this place. And furthermore, why couldn’t you have been doing some homework for a change instead of stuffing your head with that kind of nonsense?”

“Annabelle,” said Madoc, “I want you to be the beautiful spy who lets the dumb cop know who’s who and what they’re up to. I can’t take the boys because they’re too young to be hanging around a dance hall on a Saturday night. I can’t take Bert because it would look too strange for the pair of us to go off by ourselves and leave you sitting here with my sick wife. Janet suggests you and I pretend she and Bert had some family business to talk over so we decided to clear out and leave them to it.”

“What family business, for instance? Why couldn’t you and I be in on it?”

“No doubt we could, if there were any. Our story is that it was too utterly dull and boring and we didn’t want to be bothered.”

“Nobody’s going to believe that.”

“Jenny doesn’t think so, either, but she figures we’ll be doing an act of charity by giving the village something fresh and juicy to chew on. The thing of it is, Annabelle, Jason Bain’s been giving my distinguished colleague Fred Olson a rough time over that lumber he claims was stolen. He’s been threatening Fred with a lawsuit, impeachment, and six or eight other things. Fred doesn’t know yet whether Bain’s actually been the victim of some crime far more serious than he’s admitting to, or if the old man’s setting Fred up as the pigeon in one of his swindles. If it’s the former, we’d like very much to know what it’s all about. In the latter case, Bain ought to be stopped before he pulls it off, and I should take a personal pleasure in stopping him.”

“Oh well,” said Annabelle, “if it’s à case of spiking Jase Bain’s guns, of course I’ll do anything you want me to. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“Mainly because I was a bit nervous that some one of the persons present might drop a careless word in the wrong ear and upset the applecart. Listen here, you lads. You can joke about old Jase and his two-by-fours if the other kids bring it up, but if any one of you so much as looks as if he thought Fred and I might be taking the old coot seriously, I’ll chuck you all in the slammer. Is that clearly understood?”

“You bet!” was the consensus of the gathering.

“What are you going to do now, Uncle Madoc?” Charlie asked before his brothers could shut him up.

“I’m going back to the hardware store and buy your aunt a pint of dusty blue paint for her washstand. Can I drop you at the hockey rink?”

He could, and did. Then he went on to McLumber’s and selected a shade called Loyalist Blue with a good deal more assistance than he needed from a remarkably chatty young clerk. Madoc tried to get the young fellow switched off to more interesting subjects, but had no luck. Roughly half of Pitcherville was in there clamoring for attention, and Mr. McLumber appeared to expect, not unreasonably, that the clerk go and do what he was getting paid for.

Madoc hung around for a while, picking out a paintbrush, admiring various gadgets, and getting elbowed out of the way by shoppers of more serious intent, but didn’t get another crack at the garrulous youth. After a while he gave up the struggle and took his small purchases out to the farm. He found Janet sitting up in bed, talking clothes with Annabelle. She agreed Loyalist Blue was just the ticket, and went on talking clothes. Madoc went back to the woodshed and painted the washstand Loyalist Blue.

A
NNABELLE HAD DONE HIM
proud. She was wearing the Frenchwoman’s ultimate chic: a well-fitted black dress and matching pumps. A Liberty scarf Janet had brought her from London was deftly twisted at the neck and pinned with a golden brooch in the shape of a cow with a ruby eye Bert had given her to remember him by when he was out milking the herd. She’d used a discreet amount of makeup and smelled deliciously but not too strongly of the toilet water the boys had clubbed together to buy her for her birthday. When Madoc complimented her on her appearance, she laughed.

“It’s all my family’s doing. Bert, you make sure the boys get to bed at a decent hour, eh.”

“Never you mind us,” her husband retorted. “Just remember you’re there on official business and don’t go whooping it up with Armand and his crowd. If any of those guys get fresh with you, have Madoc take their names so I can bust their jaws for ’em sometime when I get around to it.”

Madoc promised he’d do any necessary busting. They went off in a flurry of last-minute orders from Annabelle and hypocritical assurances from her husband and sons that these would be followed to the letter. Janet, who’d come down in her bathrobe to see them off, waved from the kitchen window. Everybody else hollered from the doorstep. Annabelle settled her coat, fussed with her scarf, and hoped she’d do all right. She was nervous as a partridge in hunting season and relieved her tension as Annabelle naturally would, by a running monologue on everything from crime to patchwork, punctuated by an occasional “What’s old Jase really up to, Madoc?”

“We’ll know when we’ve winkled out the facts,” he told her, and kept on driving. He didn’t mind Annabelle’s flow of conversation. In fact, as the son of a choral director, he found it both natural and comfortable. Annabelle had an agreeably low-pitched voice, as well as a clever way of turning a phrase which one seldom found in the lyrics of oratorio and anthem. Nor did she keep repeating the same few words with trills and variations for page upon page.

It took them the best part of an hour to get out to Bull Moose Portage, not because the distance was so great but because the driving was so slow once they left the main road. They hadn’t had to wait at the big shed Perce had mentioned for a jeep to take them in; a big sign had told them, somewhat optimistically: ROAD OPEN, GO AHEAD TO LODGE. Probably it had been smooth enough when it was plowed out, but traffic must have been brisk since the last snowfall, for the ruts were deeply carved. The number of cars around the lodge when they finally got there confirmed Madoc’s deduction. Armand and his home-grown talent were really packing them in.

The lodge itself was pretty much what Madoc had expected, deliberately rustic on the outside and barny on the inside. Its most outstanding decorations were two stuffed bears standing on their hind feet, one wearing a hunter’s cap and fluorescent vest, the other demure in a frilly apron and flowered headscarf. A small stage had been knocked up of rough planking at one end of the room and a good many small tables with chrome underpinnings and red plastic tops were clustered around it. He led Annabelle to one of the few that were unoccupied, and ordered them each a vin blanc.

It was a middle-aged woman who took their order, and Madoc would have been willing to bet she was at least a cousin of Eyeball Grouse. She turned her hyperthyroid gaze thoughtfully on Annabelle before she went off to the bar, which was far and away the most popular spot in the room.

Annabelle was amused. “That’s Armand’s wife’s sister Prissy. Doesn’t know whether to recognize me or not. I suppose they have to be careful in a place like this, not to scare off the customers. I’d better say my little piece when she comes back, not that she’ll believe me.”

She said it, and Prissy smiled and nodded, but Madoc doubted whether she’d been able to hear a word. A gaggle of young Bergerons were onstage now with their secondhand instruments, squeaking and banging and hooting and thumping their feet and flapping their elbows in the approved manner of modern dance bands. To Madoc’s tone-deaf ears they didn’t sound much worse than his sister Gwen used to when she was starting her clarinet lessons, though they were certainly making a lot more noise.

Nobody else seemed to be minding the racket, either. Couples were out on the floor doing something that involved putting their thumbs to their foreheads and spreading out their fingers, bending at the hips to an approximate right angle, and doing even stranger things with their legs. Armand, with his penchant for home talent, must have conscripted the game warden as choreographer, Madoc thought. He leaned over to Annabelle.

“How do you like it?”

“It’s nice. The curtains are pretty.” A typical Annabellian reply. “Bernice must have run them up.”

“Which is Bernice?”

“Oh, you’d never catch her in a place like this. Bernice is awfully religious. But naturally she’d want to help out her brother. Doesn’t Cecile look pretty tonight?”

“Which is Cecile? The one at the piano?”

“No, that’s her niece Yvette. Cecile must have been giving her lessons. Cecile ‘s over at that table in front of the stage with Basil McLumber and some man I don’t—ah, I’ll bet that’s the new boy friend. Cecile’s not done so badly for herself,
hein?”

So that was the fabled Pierre Dubois. Annabelle’s enthusiasm was justified, Madoc supposed, if a woman went in for tall, broad-shouldered types with curly beards and hawkish dark eyes. He himself had dark eyes, but they were rather more like those of a scolded spaniel. That was irrelevant to the issue at hand; anyway, Janet liked them. Janet wouldn’t be impressed by Pierre.

The man had got himself up like an old-time
coureur de bois
in fringed buckskins and a wide sash handwoven in a mélange of bright colors. He’d even perched a scarlet toque with a pompon atop his overlong black curls. The toque looked brand-new. Madoc wondered if Cecile had just finished knitting it for him, possibly comparing herself to Elaine of Astolat embroidering the cover for Sir Lancelot’s shield as she murmured, “Knit two, purl two.”

Cécile was dressed in a long gown of some softly draped material in a pale shade Madoc couldn’t make out in the dim light. Annabelle would tell him later, no doubt. Anyway, she was a wispy, big-eyed little thing with slender, fluttery hands that fluttered fairly often in the direction of Pierre’s buckskin thrums. She looked like the type who could picture herself floating down the river in a funeral barge with a lily on her bosom. Only it would have to be a birchbark canoe to maintain Pierre’s image, and where would you find one these days? And what would happen when she got to the rapids?

Regardless of all that, Cecile appeared in lively enough spirits tonight. She was smiling up at Dubois, who in turn was smiling down at her. He showed a fine set of teeth unchipped by the hunting knife he carried strapped to his hip and would perhaps do his celebrated trick with before the evening was much further spent. The secret, of course, was to catch it with the lips before it ever got to the teeth; which was not to say the stunt didn’t require nerves of steel, the reflexes of a mountain cat, and a penchant for silly deeds of meaningless derring-do intended to impress moony young women like Cecile and harebrained youths like those who were clustered around Pierre.

Sure enough, they were urging him to do it. He was flashing his, teeth and shaking his head, either being modest or stalling until the band stopped playing and he could have everybody’s undivided attention. Madoc suspected the latter, and was right. No sooner had the dancers quit their mooselike antics and left the floor than Pierre shrugged, flung out his hands in a fine Gallic gesture of surrender, threw back his picturesque head, pulled the famous knife from its well-worn sheath, for which Cecile might secretly be embroidering a cover, and flipped it nonchalantly into the air.

Then the bright steel blade was quivering upright with its point hidden in the exuberant mass of his beard. Everybody applauded except Madoc and Annabelle, Madoc because he suspected Pierre was pulling a fast one and Annabelle because she thought that man was setting a dreadful example and some kid would be darned lucky if he didn’t wind up with a hunting knife down his gullet from trying to copy that crazy stunt.

She said so to the waitress, who only smiled and reached for their empty glasses. “And furthermore, a person might think a man his age would know enough to take off his hat indoors in the presence of ladies. I’m surprised Cecile hasn’t dropped him a hint.”

That at least brought a reply. “Oh, I don’t think there’s much Pierre Dubois could do wrong in Cecile’s eyes. That was two white wines, right?”

“Unless he’s got a bald spot he’s trying to hide,” Annabelle finished defiantly. The waitress smiled again and hurried off. Annabelle could think what she pleased; Armand’s sister-in-law’s job was to keep the drinks going.

Nobody was going thirsty tonight. They were three-deep around the bar now. Madoc excused himself to Annabelle and meandered to the men’s rest room, mainly so that he’d have a chance to see whether anybody was paying any attention to the impressive array of brand-name bottles stacked behind the bartender. He’d have been willing to bet most of them were either empty or illegally refilled with something other than what their labels advertised. As far as he could tell, no matter what anybody ordered, it all came from the same under-the-counter source and sold for a dollar a slug. Madoc wondered if perhaps Armand was relying on home talent in the booze department, too. Bootlegging was still a thriving industry in certain parts of Canada, and the RCMP had had some interesting times determining which parts.