Grab Bag (4 page)

“You could do so much
with
it,” they moaned.

Their fingers itched to hang Styrofoam candy canes on the professor’s gleaming brass knocker. They yearned to bedeck his magnificent blue spruces with little lights that winked on and off. One after another, they had volunteered as decorators. They had showered the professor with garlands of gilded pine cones, with stockings cut out of red oilcloth, with wreaths of sour balls that had tiny pairs of scissors dangling whimsically on red satin ribbons to snip off goodies as required.

He had thanked them all courteously and passed on their offerings to his cleaning woman. By now, Mrs. Lomax had the most bedizened place in town, but the brick house on the common remained stubbornly unadorned.

Left to himself, the professor would have been perfectly willing to make some small concession to Christmas: a spray of holly on the door, perhaps, and a wax candle flickering pleasantly after dark in the parlor window. No matter what the bursar’s wife said, he rather enjoyed the holidays. Every year he sent off a few carefully austere cards to a few old friends. He then avoided as many as he decently could of the Christmas festivals, Christmas dances, and Christmas cocktail parties, and went to visit relatives.

These were a cousin and his wife: quiet, elderly people who lived a comfortable three hours’ journey from him. They would thank him for the cigars and the box of assorted jellies, then sit him down to an early dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire puddings. Afterward, the cousin would show his stamp collection. The professor did not care for stamps as such, but they were splendid things to count. As soon as he had finished his tabulation, the cousin’s wife would serve tea and her special lemon cheese tarts and remark that he had a long ride ahead of him. Professor Shandy considered his cousin to have married exceptionally well.

About nine o’clock, agreeably stuffed, he would sneak home and settle down with a glass of good sherry and
Bracebridge Hall.
At bedtime, he would step outside the back door for a last whiff of fresh air. If it was a fine night, he would feel an urge to stay out and count stars for a while. However, if he indulged the whim, some neighbor was sure to spot him and insist on inviting poor, lonely Professor Shandy over for a drink.

Altogether too many of his Christmasses had been spoiled in just such ways by the overwhelming holiday spirit of Bemisville. When the wife of the head of the chemistry department showed up on the morning of December twenty-first with a pot of poinsettias fashioned from bits of old detergent bottles, something snapped. He thrust the loathsome object at Mrs. Lomax, grabbed his coat, and ran for the Boston train.

The following morning, two men drove up to the brick house in a large truck. Professor Shandy met them at the door.

“Did you bring it all, gentlemen?”

“The whole works. Boy, you folks sure take Christmas seriously out here, don’t you?”

“We have a tradition to maintain,” said the professor briskly. “You may as well start on the spruce trees.”

All morning long the men toiled. Expressions of delighted amazement appeared on the faces of passers-by. As the day wore on and the men still toiled, the amazement remained but the delight faded. Neighbors began to peer nervously from around the edges of their curtains.

It was after dark when the men got through. Professor Shandy saw them to the door. He was wearing his coat and hat, and carrying a suitcase.

“Everything in order, gentlemen? Lights timed to flash on and off at precisely fifty-three-second intervals? Amplifiers turned up to full volume? Switch boxes provided with sturdy locks? Very well, then, let’s throw the switches and be off. I’m going to impose on you for a lift back to Boston. I have an urgent appointment at the waterfront.”

“Sure, glad to have you,” they chorused, feeling the pleasant crinkle of bills in their hands. It had been an interesting day.

On the evening of December twenty-fifth, Professor Shandy stepped out on deck for a breath of air. Around him rolled the mighty Atlantic. Above him shone only the lights from the bridge and a skyful of stars. The captain’s dinner had been most enjoyable. Presently he would go below for a chat with the chief engineer, a knowledgeable man whose hobby was counting the revolutions of the ship’s engines.

Back in Bemisville, the floodlights would be illuminating the eight life-size plastic reindeer on the roof of the brick house. The twenty-three plastic Santa Claus faces would be glowing, one to each window, above the twenty-three sets of artificial candles, each containing three pink and two purple bulbs.

He glanced at his watch. At that precise moment, the seven hundred and forty-two red, green, blue, and yellow oversize bulbs on the spruce trees would have flashed on and off for the four thousand, five hundred and eighty-seventh time; a total of three million, three hundred eighty-eight thousand, seven hundred and fourteen flashes.

The amplifiers would by now have blared three hundred and thirty-five renditions each of “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” and “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” They would at this moment be on the seventh bar of the three hundred and thirty-sixth performance of “I Don’t Care Who You Are, Fatty, Get Those Reindeer Off My Roof.”

Professor Shandy smiled gently into the darkness. “Bah, humbug,” he murmured, and began to count the stars.

THE PRINCIPAL FIGURES IN
this story are old friends. They first popped out of my typewriter back in the 1960s, but didn’t show up again until February 1985, when this story appeared in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
as “The Unlikely Demise of Cousin Claude.”

You know how it is around a medical research laboratory around half past five on a Friday afternoon. Or maybe you don’t, but it certainly is. So when Carter-Harrison emerged from the fastness wherein he does whatever he does and suggested a spot of research involving a couple of boiled lobsters and a seidel or two, I cheerfully acquiesced.

We were nicely settled in a booth at Ye Olde Lobster Trappe, a Boston landmark since 1973, with our paper bibs around our necks and our nutcrackers at the ready when Carter-Harrison remarked, “You ought to taste a real lobster.”

“I’m about to,” I replied as the waitress, whose name is neither Marge nor Myrtle but in fact Melpomene, set one in front of me.

My companion, being a man of science first and foremost, reached across the table and tore off one of its claws, which he proceeded to excavate and consume the meat thereof.

“Not bad, considering,” he admitted, wiping melted butter off his chin. “But wait till you toss a bicuspid over a genuine Beagleport lobster, hauled from the briny blue Atlantic about fourteen minutes before you get your grubhooks on to it.”

“You owe me a claw,” I said. “Where’s Beagleport?”

Carter-Harrison ate one of his own claws—or, to be scientifically accurate, one of his own lobster’s claws—and wiped more melted butter off his chin. He has one of those long, bony New England jaws ideally adapted for getting dripped on. Then he punctiliously gave me his other claw. Then he uttered.

“Did I ever tell you about my family?”

“I never knew you had one,” I replied. “I thought you sprang full-armored from the brow of Dr. Spock.”

He thought that one over for a while. “Ah, I see. One of your jokes. No, Williams, I was born pretty much according to normal procedure, of not exactly poor and almost ridiculously honest parents, in the village of Beagleport, Maine.”

“I’ll bet you were a beautiful baby,” I said with my mouth full of tail meat.

“My mother always thought so. That’s why she insisted on splicing her maiden name of Carter to the paternal cognomen. My parents have now passed to the Great Beyond, namely Palm Springs, but the old family homestead is still occupied by my Aunt Agapantha and my cousins Ed and Fred. I was thinking we might take a run up there this weekend.”

“Are you sure this is the right time of year to go?” I asked, gazing out the window at the lashing sleet that gives our city so much of its gentle springtime charm.

“The perfect time,” he assured me. “We won’t run into any tourists.”

“I wouldn’t mind running into some tourists,” I said, but he wasn’t listening. These excessively brainy types never do.

And that’s why, some three hours later, we were groping our way up the Maine Turnpike in my old Chevy. I was groping, anyway, trying to sort out the road from the surrounding frozen wastes by the occasional glimpses I was able to get through my slush-caked windshield. Carter-Harrison was thinking deep thoughts. At least I assumed he was. He never said.

By ten o’clock, I’d had it. We found a motel open somewhere between Kittery and the Arctic Circle, and turned in. I woke expecting more of the same, but Saturday dawned crisp and clear. We got out of the motel early—there wasn’t much there to hang around for—and fetched Beagleport around the middle of the morning.

Carter-Harrison started barking orders like “Left at the fire station” and “Right at the general store.” At last he sat back with a sigh of satisfaction. “Now we’re on the home road.”

“This is a road?” I cried in startled disbelief.

He didn’t answer. He was busy sniffing, his bony nose straight forward like a bird dog’s at the point, his bony cheeks flushed the way they get when he’s about to give birth to another bright idea. I felt an ominous twinge.

“What’s eating you?”

“It’s the air,” he replied.

There sure was a lot of it. I tried a few sniffs myself, a rich blend of salt, pine trees, and ancient vehicle. We sniffed our way along until we came to two houses, one of them painted baby blue with scalloped pink shutters. The other was merely white. It was when we reached this latter that Carter-Harrison yelled, “Starboard your helm.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Turn right. This is our driveway.”

And so it proved to be. Ah, I thought, civilization at last. Then a powerful voice welled up from the bulkhead and ricocheted off my eardrums.

“What in time are you settin’ there for like a pair o’ ninnies?”

Carter-Harrison leaped from the car. “Hello, Aunt Aggie.”

“Well, James. I might o’ known. Couldn’t you of wrote first?”

A woman of uncertain years wearing an awfully certain kind of expression emerged and confronted her nephew. She was almost as tall as he, though not so skinny. After a certain amount of glaring back and forth, he bent his head to kiss her on the cheek. She let him. Neither of them appeared to enjoy it much. I thought I might as well join the party, so I got out of the car and Aunt Aggie turned her glare on me.

“Who’s the young’un?”

“My colleague, Dr. Bill Williams,” Carter-Harrison told her. “I brought him up to see the place.”

“Doctor, eh?” She hauled a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles out of her sweater pocket, gave them a wipe with her apron, put them on, and looked me over. “Huh, he don’t even look dry behind the ears yet. ’Least he ain’t all skin an’ bones like you, James. Ain’t enough meat on you to grease a griddle with. Well, come on in. Can’t stand here lollygaggin’ around the dooryard all day. Oh, drat an’ tarnation! Go on, git! Scat! Shoo!”

At first I thought Aunt Aggie meant us, but it soon became clear she was addressing a large brown goat with white spots. As she pursued it across the yard, we could see the creature was chewing on a piece of rag. Aggie made pretty good time, but the goat was faster. At last she came back, her apron at half-mast, her expression one of mingled fury and despair.

“There went the last o’ my good pillowcases. I’d like to wring that critter’s neck.”

“Then why don’t you?” asked her nephew, ever the keen, inquiring mind.

“’Cause he ain’t my goat, that’s why.”

“Ergo, why do you let him into the yard?”

“I don’t let him, you dern fool. He comes.”

“Isn’t there any way to keep him out?”

“Might try a deer rifle, but I misdoubt he’d just eat the bullet an’ want another.”

“Have you thought of building a fence?” I asked her.

She gave me a look. “Ed an’ Fred spent fifty-two hard-earned dollars on barbed wire, an’ three days’ worktime stringin’ it. He’d et his way through an’ bit the tail off Fred’s Sunday shirt before they’d got the posthole digger put away.”

“You ought to sue his owner for damages.”

“That’s real bright o’ you, Willie.”

“Well,” said Carter-Harrison, “why don’t you?”

“Because,” said Aunt Aggie, “that’s why.”

She nodded over toward the baby blue house with the pink shutters. A fluffy little blonde with a fluffy pink coat on was tripping winsomely down the steps. The goat ran to meet her and she flung her arms around its neck.

“Oh, you naughty Spotty,” we heard her coo.

“What have you got in your mouth?”

She came across the yard to us, snuggling the goat against her pink fluff. “Has Spotty been a bad boy again, Auntie Agapantha?”

I expected Auntie Agapantha to snap the blonde’s head off and swallow it in one gulp. Instead, she only shrugged.

“’Twasn’t nothin’, Lily Ann. “Just an old dish-rag.

“I’ve told him and told him.” Lily Ann gave her curls a sad little shake. “I’ve said time and time again, Spotty, if you don’t leave Auntie Agapantha’s clothesline alone, I’ll have to give you a spanking. But he never pays a mite of attention.”

“Now don’t you fret yourself,” Aunt Aggie insisted. “Lily Ann, I don’t believe you’ve met my nephew James that’s a doctor down to Boston. An’ this here’s his friend William that helps around the hospital some. Lily Ann’s the one that married Claude, James. You remember I told you Claude got married?”

“Yep,” said Carter-Harrison. “And killed. Did they ever find the murderer?”

Lily Ann burst into tears. Carter-Harrison began to look uncomfortable but didn’t drop the subject.

“Stands to reason, doesn’t it? Claude was supposed to have caught his necktie in the cream separator and been strangled to death. Whoever wore a necktie separating cream? Claude wouldn’t have known how to tie one anyway even if he’d owned a necktie, which he didn’t.”