A Pint of Murder (4 page)

Then why didn’t the murderer come and take the second jar away? Maybe he, or she, had been too scared. Nobody had expected Marion Emery to stay on at the Mansion after her aunt died to hunt for that assuredly mythical hoard. Maybe the person hadn’t realized the vegetables were prepared in a different way from the rest. It wasn’t the sort of thing most people would notice.

Mrs. Treadway herself wouldn’t have noticed. Her eyes had failed badly, though she’d tried to hide the fact for fear her nieces would clap her into an old-folks’ home and help themselves to what was left of her property. But the Wadmans, who knew her so well, realized that during the past several years she’d been managing more by what she knew than by what she saw. Around the Mansion she could lay her hands on anything she wanted. She could still fix her own food and she’d eat whatever came from one of her own jars because she’d be sure it was safe. Only that last time, she’d been wrong.

Cutting beans in bunches was the quick, modern way. Only a really fussy cook like Annabelle or an old-fashioned one with time on her hands would bother to snap them one by one, feeling for perfect freshness. A would-be murderer who did home canning by modern methods would most likely chop them without thinking. One who did none at all might do the same because that was how canned or frozen beans came and he’d think that was the only way. Or somebody who knew perfectly well that Mrs. Treadway always snapped her beans might deliberately have cut the prospectively lethal string beans as a warning signal to himself.

After all, there’d been no telling when Mrs. Treadway might open that particular jar. She’d never been inhospitable. Anybody who happened to be around at mealtime would have been invited to share her meager fare. It would be hard to refuse the vegetables because there wouldn’t be much else to eat. Yet to taste that particular serving would be a dangerous thing to do.

Who was apt to eat at the Mansion? Janet herself had, on any number of occasions. Annabelle used to go over often enough when the kids were at school and Bert off somewhere and she thought the old lady might like company. Gilly Bascom came once in a great while. Marion was there a lot, of course, and had to eat what was set in front of her or go hungry. Sam Neddick must have taken some of his meals with Mrs. Treadway since he did her chores and made his home in her hayloft, although since he was also Bert’s part-time hired man, he usually preferred the more bountiful fare at the Wadmans’.

Dot Fewter couldn’t be left out, either. Dot always lugged a horrible lunch of baloney sandwiches on store-bought bread when she came to clean, if such her feeble efforts could be called, but no doubt she’d have accepted whatever else was offered on top of that.

On the face of it, Marion and Gilly were the likeliest suspects. Both knew they stood to inherit. Both were always hard up for cash. Both had every chance to get at Mrs. Treadway’s food supply.

But so did anybody else. The cellar was never locked. Anyone with a little luck and a lot of nerve could sneak in there some dark night, pinch a couple of empty jars, fill them up, and put them on the shelf with the string beans that were already there. It could be done in one trip by bringing the prepared beans in some other container and filling the jars on the spot. One wouldn’t have to be fussy about how it was done, since the whole object was to let the food spoil. A child with a bike could manage—Bobby Bascom, for instance.

Gilly’s misbegotten son was almost eleven by this time. Janet had heard that Bobby’d already been in trouble a few times for throwing rocks at Pitcherville’s few street lights, swiping fruit from orchards, letting air out of people’s tires; nothing serious but nothing that augured well for his future behavior. Annabelle thought it was plain awful the way that boy was being dragged up by the boot heels. Gilly didn’t seem to have any control over him, and the grandparents showed less interest than a person might expect them to.

That was Bobby’s grandfather lying dead in there. Janet wished she knew where the boy was now, and where he’d been twenty minutes ago. Could he have been poking around the office, by any chance? Might he have thought it funny to hide under the desk or somewhere, then reach out and give that treacherous little mat a yank?

Why should he think it was funny to do a thing like that? He was old enough to realize the possible consequences. Maybe he didn’t do it to be funny. Kids could harbor grudges as well as grownups, and Janet had had a little sample last night herself of how nasty the doctor could be.

Bobby might even have thought he was doing something great for his mother. He might know something about a jar of string beans and a much-needed inheritance. He might very well have heard through the village grapevine that Janet Wadman was coming to show his grandfather something strange she’d found in the cellar up at the Mansion. Little pitchers had big ears.

Janet found she was having a hard time trying to swallow the coincidence that Dr. Druffitt had died just when he did. It was, however, frighteningly easy to credit the possibility that somebody hadn’t wanted him to see that jar. If Bobby Bascom could have heard about her errand, so could lots of other people. If he could have done that stunt with the mat, so could others.

A doctor’s waiting room was a public place. Anybody could walk in through the waiting room. Everybody knew this was Mrs. Druffitt’s club day, and that she’d be upstairs getting herself dolled up for the occasion. Everybody knew Dot Fewter wasn’t working here today. Everybody knew everything about everybody, in Pitcherville. Somebody might still be lurking close by, wishing Janet would leave so that he could make his getaway. Why hadn’t she thought of that sooner? She was almost out the front door when Fred Olson barged in and stopped her.

“What happened, Janet?”

“We’re supposed to think he slipped on the mat and banged his head.”

Fred either didn’t catch the implication or chose to ignore it. He opened the office door and stood gazing down at the thin, elderly body sprawled on the gleaming parquet. “Poor old Hank. Never knew what struck him, I don’t s’pose. That’s a blessin’, anyhow.”

He knelt and prodded at the back of the skull, his blackened stubs of fingers tender as a mother’s. “Yep, dent there you could get your fist into. Looks as if there’s nothin’ to do now but send for Ben Potts.”

“Ben Potts?” cried Janet. “You can’t just bundle him over to the undertaker without a doctor’s certificate, can you?”

“No, I guess not, come to think of it.” Olson scratched his raspy chin. “I might get hold of ol’ Doc Brown. You prob’ly ain’t heard he’s back in town. Livin’ with his married daughter Amy out beyond the Jenkins place.”

“Dr. Brown? I didn’t even know he was still alive. He must be crawling on for ninety.”

“So what? He’s still a doctor, ain’t he? Might perk the ol’ geezer up to make one last house call. You told Elizabeth yet?”

“No. I—it didn’t seem right to leave him alone. I thought I’d better call you first.” Janet realized she was backing away from the body. She supposed she couldn’t blame Olson for backing away from such a ghastly responsibility.

“Better get ’im up on the examinin’ table an’ haul a sheet over ’im before she comes. Be an awful shock to her, seein’ him like this. Ben won’t be back till suppertime. He’s got a funeral over to West Jenkins.” He bent and picked up the smaller, slighter body and swung it around toward the black leather-covered table.

“Watch out for his head!” Without quite realizing why, Janet put out her hand to shield the skull from the edge of the desk.

“Can’t hurt it no more’n it is already,” the marshal said grimly, but Janet wasn’t paying any attention. Almost of their own accord, her fingers were exploring the shattered cranium.

“Fred, feel this dent again.”

Reluctantly, he did. “It’s busted all to hell an’ gone, sure enough. What more do you want me to say?”

“Feel the shape of the break, I mean. Don’t you notice how round and smooth it is? Shouldn’t it be more—more angular? Like a hard edge would make?”

“How should I know? I’m no doctor.”

“Neither am I, but I’ve fried enough eggs in my day to know that if I whack them with the round bowl of a spoon it makes a different sort of break than if I crack the shell on the edge of the frying pan, and so do you. Can you honestly believe the sharp corner of that desk wouldn’t at least cut into the flesh and leave some kind of ridge or something?”

Olson prodded again, a worried expression on his red pudding of a face. “Criminy, Janet, I dunno what to think. What else could it have been? There’s nothin’ else in the way he could o’ fell on. Maybe his hair—”

“What hair?”

The marshal’s jaw dropped. He stared down at his old friend as if he’d never seen him before. “Lord A’mighty, I never realized. I can remember when Hank had corkscrew curls down to his waist. Had ’em myself, not that I wanted ’em. Forty years before you was born, I s’pose.”

He sighed, picked up a clean sheet that had been lying ready beside the examining table for the patient who was never going to come now, and tucked it over his lifelong pal. “You go on over an’ break the news to Elizabeth, Janet. I’ll stay here an’ try to get hold of Doc Brown.”

Anxious as she was to get out of that place, Janet hesitated. “Fred, there’s something else I have to tell you.” She got her paper bag from the horsehair sofa, and showed him the jar. “Dot Fewter and I found this in Mrs. Treadway’s cellar this morning.”

He shrugged. “Seems as likely a place as anywhere else.”

“Fred, listen to me. You know what Mrs. Treadway died of.”

“Yep. Poisoned string beans.”

“And you know how fussy she always was about what she ate.”

“Yep. Fat lot o’ good it did ’er in the end, eh?”

“All right, now take a look at this jar. Notice it’s full of string beans. Notice that they’ve all been cut into nice, even pieces with a knife, like the ones you’d get in a frozen-food package.”

“So?”

“Is that how your mother would have fixed hers?”

Olson shoved back the ratty tweed cap he was wearing and scratched his head. “’Pears to me she snapped ’em in ’er fingers.”

“I expect she did. My mother did, too, and I’ve watched Mrs. Treadway do it ever since I was a little kid. Furthermore, there were thirteen other jars on the shelf beside this one, and every single bean in them had been snapped. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

The marshal scratched his head again. “Maybe she got tired o’ doin’ ’em all the same way.”

“And maybe pigs have kittens. Look, Fred, I knew Mrs. Treadway as well as anybody in this world did, and there never was a woman more set in her ways. She had certain ways of doing things, and she wasn’t about to change for anybody. I remember saying to her once, ‘Mrs. Treadway, let me show you a new trick I learned in home arts,’ and she said to me, ‘No, thank you. I learned enough new tricks while my husband was alive. I’ll stick to what I know is going to work.’”

Olson emitted a snort of laughter, then glanced into the office and looked embarrassed.

“Furthermore,” Janet went on, “I was there and saw the jar she’d eaten from, after Marion Emery and Dr. Druffitt took it out of her fridge. It was one of her own preserving jars and a mate to this one. I couldn’t be mistaken about that, because she’d had them for sixty years or more, and they haven’t been on the market in ages. There probably aren’t any others like them in the whole province.”

“Did you see any of the beans that were left in it?”

“No, I didn’t. Dr. Druffitt wrapped it in a cup towel and put it into his bag. That’s why I came down to talk to him today. I meant to show him the one I’d found and ask if the beans were cut like these, because if they were, it’s dollars to doughnuts somebody put them there on purpose to kill her.”

The marshal took the jar out of her hand and stared into its murky depths. At last he shook his head. “I dunno, Janet. Sounds crazy to me.”

“Of course it’s crazy, Fred. Whoever claimed murder was sane? All the same it was murder, just as if somebody’d held a loaded gun to her head and pulled the trigger. And furthermore, you’ve got another one on your hands right in that office, and you know it as well as I do. And I’m very much afraid it’s because of me and this jar that Dr. Druffitt was killed.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Because Dot Fewter was with me when I found the jar and fool-like, I showed it to her instead of keeping my mouth shut. Then I called up Mrs. Druffitt to see if the doctor was going to be in, and she asked me point-blank if I was in pain because of course she knew I’d had that operation for my appendix down in Saint John, so I had to say no, I was all right but I wanted to ask the doctor about something I’d found in the cellar. Lord knows how many people were on the party line, and you can be darn sure Dot Fewter was burning up the wires to her mother the minute my back was turned. You know what that pair are like. Annabelle calls them the Maritime Network.”

“Well Janet—”

“And you can’t deny it’s a bit too much of a coincidence, his turning up dead when I walk in here with this jar in my hand. You know as well as I do that he couldn’t possibly have got that sort of injury by hitting the desk. It’s my guess that somebody came at him from behind with something round and heavy, like the handle of that big brass poker right over there by the fireplace. They knocked him down, then dragged the body over by the desk and rumpled the rug under his feet to make it look as if he’d slipped.”

“Aw Janet,” an uneasy grin crept over Olson’s face. “You been travelin’ with the wrong kind o’ crowd down there in Saint John, eh?”

If he’d wanted to get under her skin, he couldn’t have picked a more successful way. Janet slammed the jar back into the bag and marched for the door. “Have it your own way, Fred. I’ve said my piece.”

“Now, wait a minute. Don’t go flyin’ off the handle. Gimme time to think, can’t you? S’posin’ I did pick up that there telephone right this minute an’ call the Mounties. What am I s’posed to tell ’em? At least we might as well wait an’ hear what the doctor has to say.”

Janet sniffed. “That old dodo? If he’s still able to talk, he’ll tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear. The only thing he ever knew how to treat was hypochondria. Couldn’t you find a doctor who’s halfway competent? Isn’t there a provincial coroner or somebody?”