The Grub-And-Stakers Pinch a Poke (5 page)

“Stinker,” Dittany said fondly as they walked away to the luggage pickup. “What did you think of Carolus Bledsoe, Esquire? Do you suppose he’s the one who bought her all those orchids?”

“If he did, he needs to get his head examined,” was Osbert’s considered opinion. “I expect what happened was that some editor who’s trying to persuade her to switch publishers gave her a bunch, and then her own editor gave her another bunch not to go. They put them on their expense accounts.”

“Did anybody ever give you any?”

“They wouldn’t dare. What do you think we Western writers are, a bunch of sissies? I’ve never even been offered a tarantula. By the way, when did Aunt Arethusa order a custom-made crystal bowl for her goldfish? I didn’t know she had a goldfish. How come she didn’t expect us to fish-sit while she was away? Don’t tell me she’s given McNaster the run of her house?”

“Darling, don’t bug your eyes out like that. Of course she hasn’t Arethusa may be a trifle absentminded, but she’s not plumb loco. I only made up that story about the goldfish bowl to take Wilhedra Thorbisher-Preep down a peg or two. She had no business being so snippy about Lobelia Falls.”

“Was Wilhedra snippy?”

“Certainly Wilhedra was snippy. She talked as if we were all a bunch of starving church mice.”

“Now that you mention it, I am starving. Want to stop on the way home for a nibble of cheese?”

“If we can find a place,” Dittany agreed.

What she meant was a place that didn’t object to large doglike creatures with less than perfect table manners. Stopping at a restaurant was apt to mean either take-out hamburgers or hurt looks from Ethel for having been left alone while they ate.

They settled for hamburgers and ate in the car, Dittany having first spread a large plastic tablecloth so they wouldn’t get meat juice all over the new upholstery. Back in Lobelia Falls, they put Arethusa’s two pink tapestry suitcases inside her front door, to which they had a key, and went home half expecting to see her and Andrew McNaster seated at their kitchen table with napkins in their laps and knives and forks at the ready.

But Arethusa never came, not even at suppertime. The evening was peaceful, pleasant, yet somehow a trifle unsettling.

Working at fever heat, stoked by Ditanny with cups of tea, stacks of cinnamon toast, bowls of stew, and molasses cookies which he wolfed down without taking time to bite off the crinkles one by one as was his wont, Osbert finished his play late Tuesday night. On Wednesday, he held a reading for the board of trustees and Desdemona Portley to tumultuous applause, even from Arethusa.

Nobody doubted Dangerous Dan McGrew would win the competition hands-down. Mr. Glunck thought the theatrical collection would be just the ticket for the upstairs back bedroom provided the ThorbisherFreeps threw in the display cases. Everybody was agog to get rolling.

And roll they must. One thing Desdemona hadn’t happened to mention until she’d got the Grub-and-Stakers safely hooked was that they had only about a month left to put on their play. She’d already wasted most of the time allotted for the contest in vain efforts to get her old company back together. The new group understood her difficulties as soon as they started trying to assemble a cast.

Specifically, the problem lay in the ingrained reluctance of the average Canadian male to make a fool of himself in public. Nobody’s husband had any particular objection to being one of the boys whooping it up in the Malamute saloon, as long as the rest of the boys would be right there whooping it up with him. Persuading any one of them to accept a role where he’d have to stand up on his hind legs all by himself and spout off a lot of high-flown guff was a far, far different matter. Yet the characters of the miner and Dan McGrew were absolutely central to the play.

Osbert refused to take either part. He was proud to have written the play, as well he might be. He was not only willing but eager to direct his play the way it ought to be directed. But he was dadblanged if he was going to act in it, and who could blame him?

Anyway, he couldn’t possibly look dangerous enough to be Dan McGrew, and he just wasn’t the type to be a head feedbag man, much less a gold miner. Besides, there were enough members of the Monk family in the cast already.

Ethel was to be the faithful dog, needless to say, since the role had been written for her and nobody else’s dog wanted to do it anyway.

Dittany, inevitably, would be Evangeline.

“But I don’t want to be Evangeline,” she wailed when she got hit with the casting committee’s verdict. “I’m too old to be a tiny tot.

I’m a grown woman with a husband and a dog, for Pete’s sake.”

“Dittany, the show must go on,” pleaded Desdemona Portley.

“You’ve got to play the tiny tot. Your mother would play the tiny tot if she were here.”

That was no argument. Dittany knew perfectly well, and Desdemona Portley ought to know she knew, that the former Mrs. Henbit would also have played Dan McGrew, the miner, and the man who wouldn’t give the horsecar horses any carrots if she’d been given the chance.

“You’re not a bit too old,” Desdemona insisted. “I’ve still got your old baby-blond wig with the corkscrew curls. With that and a big pink hair ribbon, you could easily pass for ten years old. Twelve, anyway. Evangeline can’t be all that tiny a tot, eh, if she winds up tickling the ivories in the Malamute saloon. Besides, we have nobody else in the company who can look winsome while playing ragtime without a music book.”

“Why shouldn’t Evangeline have a music book?” Dittany demanded.

“Nobody carried a music book to the Yukon during the gold rush.

For goodness’ sake, Dittany, even if we let the piano player use a music book she’d still have to act Evangeline convincingly, and that narrows it right down to you. You’ve played more tiny tots than anybody else in Lobelia Falls, you know all the old songs your grandmother taught you, and I never thought I’d live to see the day when a Henbit would let a personal whim stand in the way of her civic duty.”

“Well, you’re seeing one now,” Dittany grumbled.

But she gave in, of course. Osbert’s debut as a dramatic writer and director couldn’t be allowed to fall flat for lack of a kid to handle the music box. But Dittany would be dadblanged if Desdemona Portley was going to stick her with another big pink hair ribbon. She’d wear a sober, matronly blue this time even if she could pass for twelve in her old baby-blond wig.

Desdemona herself would fain have played the lady who came so regrettably to be known as Lou. Even in the former Mrs. Henbit’s day, however, Dessie Portley had got cast as the heroine’s dear old mother just as inevitably as Dittany had been dragooned into portraying the corkscrew-curled infant daughter. Trouper that she was, Desdemona put on a brave smile and accepted the unsympathetic role of landlady. Zilla Trott didn’t want it anyway; she was learning to make her own tofu and the effort was taking a lot out of her.

As for Louisa, there was really no contest. All the former heroines of the Traveling Thespians had been snapped up by other companies or graduated, like Desdemona, to character parts. Only one member of the Grub-and-Stakers had the looks, the carriage, the dramatic intensity, and the black lace Merry Widow corset to essay the leading lady. Even Osbert had to admit Arethusa Monk would be a smash hit as the miner’s illfated wife.

Casting Arethusa in the female lead brought a fringe benefit nobody could have anticipated. A.S a lawyer, Carolus Bledsoe must perforce have had a streak of the thespian in him already. Impressive in appearance, affable in manner, he was the very type to have experienced a meteoric rise from lowly groom to head feedbag man at the horsecar barns. As soon as Arethusa happened to mention that the role of her cruelly misused husband was still uncast, Bledsoe leaped for it as though it had been a twenty-thousand-dollar fee.

And once Andrew McNaster got wind that Carolus Bledsoe was going to be in the play, he employed his well-known skill at connivance to obtain for himself the swashbuckling role of Dangerous Dan McGrew.

That took care of the leads. A bit of rewriting on Osbert’s part eliminated the rival feedbag man from the first act, where he hadn’t had all that much to do anyway. The gap was easily filled by having the true feedbag man, as he’d then still be, pour out his heart to Louisa about the rival’s machinations while Evangeline strummed sentimental melodies in the background, little recking the woeful disruption in store for her family.

Then Dot CoskofFs husband, Bill, said he guessed he wouldn’t much mind playing the bartender at the Malamute saloon as long as he didn’t have to do anything but pour cold tea out of whiskey bottles and spread a couple of reasonably clean bar cloths over the faces of the demised as the final curtain was about to descend; and the show was on.

It is perhaps worthy of note that the first hint about Andrew McNaster’s availability as Dan McGrew was channeled via none other than Jenson ThorbisherFreep. This came about because while McNaster’s interests were in Lobelia Falls, he still maintained bachelor quarters in Scottsbeck near the ThorbisherFreeps, of whom the Monks had been seeing a fair amount since that first meeting at the airport.

Dittany, Osbert, and Arethusa had paid their call at the unpretentious mansion, which it certainly wasn’t, to check out the memorabilia.

They’d had Mr. Glunck in tow that day. The curator had been impressed and Wilhedra had been gracious, not only to him but to Dittany and Osbert. She hadn’t had to be gracious to Arethusa. Her father handled that end of the operation with zeal and enthusiasm that Osbert thought might better have been applied to a loftier purpose.

Nor had the old actor’s zeal abated. Jenson, as he insisted the Monks call him, had made it plain to all entrants that because he knew so much more than they did, he was willing to act as consultant on any general problem where theatrical expertise was needed. Naturally, Jenson explained, he could not become personally involved with any one of the six productions that were by now formally entered in his competition. This led a good many people to wonder what general problems were causing the theatrical expert to turn up so often in the immediate vicinity of Miss Arethusa Monk.

I’ faith, as Arethusa herself might say, the reigning queen of regency romance who for years had asked only to be left alone with her typewriter and her fantasies when she wasn’t practicing her archery, attending a club meeting, or inviting herself to one meal or another with Dittany and Osbert, had suddenly become the eye of a veritable social hurricane.

Neighbors who’d started patronizing the inn now that Andy was running his Bargain Buffets (all you could eat for six dollars a head) and his Family Specials (kids at half price and free cocktails for the grown-ups) reported seeing Arethusa at the best table, being plied with filet mignon and imported champagne by the infatuated innkeeper.

Andy had even taken to wearing a dinner jacket that Hazel Munson said made him look like the bouncer in a gambling casino.

It wasn’t as though she’d ever been to one herself, but Hazel, normally the most down-to-earth of women, could sometimes startle her intimates with amazing flights of imagination.

As for Carolus Bledsoe, who could have dreamed a man trained to wade through a writ of attainder or a habeas corpus without batting an eyelid would have so much trouble mastering his part that he required private rehearsals with his leading lady twice and sometimes thrice a week? Jane and Henry Binkle, close friends of the Monks who kept the bookshop over at Scottsbeck and were kept au courant on town gossip by customers who used the shop as a sort of clubhouse, reported that Wilhedra Thorbisher-Preep was having an awful time lately remembering to be gracious.

“She lives in the mansion of aching hearts,” remarked Dittany.

Young Mrs. Monk, alias Evangeline, had been boning up on her tearjerkers in preparation for the opening scene at the Malamute saloon. The dance hall girls and the miners were to have a merry fling which should heighten the tragic impact when the miner entered fresh from the creeks, dogdirty and loaded for bear. Hazel Munson was to be one of the dancers, as were Dot Coskoff, Therese Boulanger, Ellie Despard, and several more of the Grub-andStakers.

They were planning to wear red skirts, black stockings, and a good many ruffled petticoats. This super-abundance of undergarments would be the reverse of slimming, but Osbert assured the complainers that in the eyes of a gold rush miner, the fattest had shone the brightest.

Getting back to Wilhedra, however: “I shouldn’t be surprised if she does,” said Jane Binkle, who’d dropped over to bring Ethel a box of dog biscuits for auld lang syne. “Wilhedra’s been after Carolus Bledsoe ever since he got divorced. She thought she had him all thrown and hog-tied, if I’ve phrased the expression correctly, until Arethusa happened along.”

“I rather think it’s roped and hog-tied,” said Osbert, gallantly passing Jane the cookies. “I can look it up in Louis L’Amour if you like. When did Bledsoe get divorced, Jane?”

“Not too awfully long ago because some question about jointly held property still hasn’t been resolved, from what we’re hearing around the shop. According to the terms of the divorce, there’s a building that’s supposed to be sold and the profits divided between Carolus and his former wife, but he’s using some kind of legal maneuvers to hold up the sale and contest the ruling in the hope of getting it all to himself. I gather she’s not taking his shenanigans any too calmly.”

“What’s she like?” Dittany asked.

“Excitable, I’d say offhand. They say she used to throw things at him.”

“What things?” Osbert wanted to know.

“Books, slippers, dishes, assorted produce, whatever came handy.

She alleges the judge showed unfair prejudice in the defendant’s favor because Bledsoe carried the scars of a ham and macaroni casserole into the witness box with him. Otherwise, she claims, she’d have been awarded the property free and clear, so Bledsoe has no right to hold up the sale.”

Jane paused to hold out her teacup for a proffered refill. “Thanks, Dittany. The crux of the matter seems to be that the property was left to them jointly by the terms of an aunt’s will. However, the aunt was hers, not his. Bledsoe had been handling the old lady’s legal affairs while she was alive and Mrs. Bledsoe, as she’s still calling herself because her maiden name was Whiffenpoof or something in that general vicinity, maintains her husband exerted undue influence.