Wrack and Rune (10 page)

“Well, they’re funny,” said Mrs. Lomax. “Look at Cronk, giving up a good chance—”

“To succeed among the sesses,” Shandy finished for her. “I see what you mean. Miss Horsefall does seem to bring out the combative spirit in people. I hear she and her nephew had a battle with Canute Lumpkin the antique dealer a while back. He took them to court to get custody of his cousin, didn’t he?”

“To get custody of the money, you mean. Nutie the Cutie never did give a rap for anybody’s carcass but his own. You met him?”

“Oh yes. Mrs. Shandy and I stopped in there one afternoon. She—er—didn’t buy anything.”

“No flies on Mrs. Shandy.” This from the housekeeper was the supreme accolade. “Didn’t stay long either, I’ll bet. Jane, if you don’t behave yourself I’m going to shut you in the broom closet.”

Shandy rescued the kitten, who looked up at him with the eyes of a tiny angel, started climbing his shoulder, and got her little pointed tail across his upper lip like a mustache. He eased her around to the back of his neck and remarked, “I’d say there were no flies on—er—Nutie, either.”

“Cute as a fox and twice as big a stinker if you don’t mind me saying so. He must be over there snickering and rubbing those fat hands of his together right this minute. Been scheming and contriving for that inheritance all these years, and didn’t it fall straight into his lap without him having to lift a finger.”

“M’yes,” said Shandy. “Well, I mustn’t take up any more of your time, Mrs. Lomax. I expect Mrs. Shandy will be home at noontime to find out if you want any more mops or whatever. Jane, why don’t you go take a catnap? Mrs. Lomax and I both have work to do.”

S
HANDY STEPPED ACROSS THE
Crescent, found Tim running his fingers aimlessly through a pot of humus like a miser fondling his gold, and suggested they drop out to the Horsefalls’. As they’d expected, Henny was attempting to get through the chores alone and not making much headway, so they lent a hand.

“Cripes,” said Tim half an hour later, taking a swipe at his moist brow, “this is a damn sight harder work than it was fifty years ago. How the hell do you keep going all day, Henny?”

“Have to.” The octogenarian heaved his manure fork with a lifetime’s expertise. “If I ever laid down to rest myself, I’d never get up again. Eddie an’ Ralph said they’d be over later, but what good’s later? Farm chores always has to be done now.”

“Or sooner,” Shandy grunted.

Though considerably the youngest of the lot, he wasn’t finding the job any cinch, either. Still, it was good to be out in a barn again. Maybe Helen was right about his never having got over losing the family place. He could buy a farm of his own now, but what was the point? He wasn’t a farmer anymore, and Helen hadn’t the faintest conception of what it meant to be a farmer’s wife. If they were twenty years younger with kids coming along—but they weren’t. And they had a damn good life as it was and what was the sense in bitching over what might have been? He swung his own pitchfork, noting with some satisfaction that at least he hadn’t quite lost the knack.

“Well, that much is done,” said Tim at last. “How about the hens?”

“Fergy was over an’ fed ’em for us ’bout seven o’clock. Picked up the eggs, too. I was kind o’ scared to let ’im, he’s such a hulk of a man, but he stepped around them roosts spry as a cat. Says he gets plenty o’ practice threadin’ his way betwixt an’ between them tables full o’ junk he’s got over there. He had to go somewheres in the truck, so he’s going to stop an’ pick up some groceries for Aunt Hilda on the way back. Wouldn’t take a cent o’ money to buy ’em with, neither. ‘Hell,’ he says, ‘I ain’t got no woman to bake a pie nor nothin’ an’ what’s a neighbor for?’ Fergy was always good to Spurge. He’s goin’ to shut up shop tomorrow so’s he can come to the funeral.”

“Decent of him,” said Shandy.

“Yep, it’s at times like this you know who your friends are. And who they ain’t. Oh, dyin’ Jesus! Here she comes now.”

Shandy would have known whom Henny was referring to even if the lettering on the side of the purple Dodge that was stopping in the barnyard hadn’t read “Loretta Fescue, Realtor,” and even if the large woman who got out of it weren’t wearing a purple dress, a purple hat, and bright purple flat-heeled buckskin oxfords. The man she had with her was also large and purple, at least in the face. Intuition whispered that this was Gunder Gaffson the developer, and intuition did not err.

He and Tim lurked in the barn as Henny went out to meet them, pitchfork in hand, just as a militant colonist might have confronted a marauding Redcoat. Mrs. Fescue was not afraid of pitchforks. She advanced toward Henny, all smiles and sympathy.

“We thought we’d drop by and express our condolences.”

“You already expressed ’em,” was his polite reply. “Last night. Wasn’t no call for you to come again.”

“Oh, but we wanted to. You see, Mr. Gaffson understands so well what problems you have to face now, all alone with no help on this big, unmanageable old place.”

Shandy and Tim exchanged nods and stepped forth, also with their pitchforks at the ready. They were just getting nicely settled for a staring match when Cronkite Swope charged into the yard on his motorbike.

“Hi, everybody. Say, Mr. Gaffson, this is luck. I was going to interview you next. It is true you’re about to be indicted for violations of the building code in your new condominium development? What about that sewage overflow? I understand the abutters are petitioning for a cease and desist order on—”

“No comment!” roared Gaffson, and stalked back to the car. “Mrs. Fescue, if you’re quite through wasting my time on wildgoose chases—”

“But, Mr. Gaffson!” yelled Cronkite and Loretta simultaneously. The realtor started to say something else, then took a closer look at Henny’s two new hired men, nodded with a meaningful smile, and drove her angry client away.

“What was she smirking about?’ Tim asked.

“I think she twigged us,” Shandy replied. “Nice try, Swope, but I’m afraid it will take more than a cease and desist order to get that pair off the Horsefalls’ backs. One hears rumors that Mrs. Fescue is a hard woman to say no to.”

“I’ll say she is! You ought to hear my Aunt Betsy Lomax—she’s not really my aunt, only some kind of cousin by marriage, but I always call her Aunt Betsy. Come to think of it, she helps out at your house, doesn’t she? Last time I saw her she said you and Mrs. Shandy were—” Cronkite, who had after all only got to Lesson Eleven of the Great Journalists’ Correspondence Course, blushed and floundered. “I mean, she sort of hinted there might be a little stranger in the Shandy household one of these days.”

“Our little stranger has already arrived,” Shandy told him gravely.

“Already? Gee, that was pretty fast work, wasn’t it? I mean, you and Mrs. Shandy have only been married—” Cronkite realized the implication of what he was saying, turned bright cerise with crimson spots, and shut up.

“Since January,” Shandy finished for him. “The little stranger was last seen trying to fall into Mrs. Lomax’s scrub pail. You met her last night when she climbed up your pant leg and did her trapeze act on your necktie. Always check your data, Swope.”

“Oh, hey, she meant Jane Austen. That’s pretty funny.” Swope would no doubt have laughed if he hadn’t been in such a hurry. “Speaking of data, I’ve already been to see President Svenson, and I’m here to take a picture of the runestone if Mr. Horsefall doesn’t mind. Gosh, this is the biggest story I’ve covered in my whole journalistic career! Except the time the sprinkler system went crazy in the soap factory.”

Without waiting for Henny’s formal permission, Cronkite checked to make sure his Polaroid camera hadn’t bounced out of the carrier and gunned his motorbike over the swale beyond which lay the hottest scoop since that long-to-be remembered night when the massed barbershop quartets of all Balaclava County had sloshed down Lumpkin Avenue in hip boots singing, “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.”

Henny didn’t give two hoots whether Cronkite photographed the runestone or not. He was too busy fulminating about that dad-blagged Loretta Fescue and the equally dratted Gunder Gaffson.

“Is Swope right about Gaffson’s being in trouble with the housing authority?” Shandy managed to ask when Henny stopped cussing long enough to get his breath back.

“If he ain’t he dern well ought to be. Way he throws them shacks together’s a damn disgrace. Ain’t nothin’ holdin’ ’em together but the wallpaper, from what I hear. Ralph’s son that married the Bronson girl was savin’ up to buy one till he found out from a friend of his’n that had got stuck with one what a gyp they was. Gaffson’s right there with ’is hand out when it comes to the money, but if it’s a case o’ fixin’ somethin’ that ought to work an’ don’t, you might as well forget about askin’. An’ the prices is enough to curl your hair, if you had any.”

Shandy, who was getting a bit thinner on top than he cared to be reminded of, winced. As Henny took off his old felt hat to polish his own bare skull with a bandanna, though, Shandy realized no offense was meant and therefore withdrew his umbrage. They worked along for another hour or so, then Fergy arrived with Miss Hilda’s groceries. A short time later, though none too soon for Ames and Shandy, the old lady came out to beat on the contraption of strung-together horseshoes that served the Horsefalls for a dinner bell.

“’Tain’t much of a meal,” Miss Horsefall apologized in accordance with time-honored farmwife etiquette as she sat them down to fried potatoes, fried ham, fried eggs, coleslaw, stewed rhubarb, pickles, and several kinds of pie.

“Darn sight better’n I’d get if I was by myself,” said Fergy, shoveling in the food with enough enthusiasm to make any cook feel she had not labored in vain. “Mind passin’ the pickles, Henny? An’ the bread? An’ the apple butter? Might as well stoke up the ol’ furnace while I’ve got the chance.”

“You paid for it, you might as well enjoy it,” Henny grunted.

“Heck, all I bought was the ham, which was no more than what one neighbor ought to do for another. Anyway, I’ll be takin’ most of it back with me at the rate I’m goin’ here. These sure are good pickles, Miss Hilda. Remind me of the kind my mother would o’ made, maybe, if she’d ever got around to it. Ma did open a great can o’ spaghetti, though.”

“Nice way to talk about your own mother,” Miss Hilda sniffed, slapping another slab of ham on his plate. “How long’s she been gone?”

“Gosh, I can’t quite remember. Funny how it slipped my mind. I guess there’s some things you don’t want to remember.”

Shandy, eating fried potatoes, recognized all too easily what Fergy was really saying. The man probably hadn’t the faintest idea whether his mother was living or dead and didn’t give a damn either way, and no doubt he had good reason not to. Whoever she was, she certainly hadn’t strained herself to teach him table manners. Shandy was using his own paper napkin to set a good example when one of the younger Horsefalls burst into the kitchen.

“Hi, Aunt Hilda. Am I too late for dinner?”

“Ralphie! Why ain’t you in school?”

“This was our last day. I only went because we were burning the principal in effigy. After that there was nothing left to hang around for, so I thought I’d come and see if I could help Uncle Henny. I mean, like if he wanted me to drive the tractor or anything,” Ralphie said innocently, helping himself to just about everything that was left on the table.

“How about like if you was to drive a manure fork for a while?” Henny grunted.

“Whatever you say, Unc. I cleaned out the hen house last Saturday, didn’t I? At least cows don’t have chicken lice.”

“Neither would the hens if they was took care of proper.”

Miss Hilda made the remark automatically, as if her heart wasn’t in it. She had her hair elegantly crimped today, suggesting a night on kid curlers and a resolution that if Sven Svenson happened by to suggest another walk she wasn’t going to be caught unprepared.

A vague uneasiness that had been at the back of Peter Shandy’s mind all morning began to crystallize into full-fledged anxiety. Now that young Ralph was here to help Henny, it might be the part of prudence to get Tim back to the Crescent for a rest, as his daughter-in-law had ordered. Laurie had strong-armed her elderly father-in-law into getting his first medical checkup since he’d been rejected for the draft during World War II, and he’d been found to have an elevated blood pressure, which wasn’t surprising considering the number of years he’d lived with his wife, Jemima, before her sudden, lurid demise.

They thanked Miss Hilda for the dinner, told her they’d be back later, maybe, and went out to the car. As Tim paused to impart a few words of wisdom on the proper composting of poultry manure, in which, oddly enough, the boy appeared to be passionately interested, Fergy caught up with Peter.

“Say, Professor, can I talk to you a second?”

“Of course.”

The question seemed to be redundant since Fergy had already been talking to, at, or around him for upward of an hour, but Shandy was prepared to listen to whatever the junk dealer had on his mind. It proved to be the runestone.

“I dunno why, Professor, but I’m worried about it. I wish to hell Miss Hilda hadn’t got Cronk Swope started on them runes.”

“What runes?”

“Why, the ones he found on—oh, I get it. I’m not supposed to know. Huh!” Fergy didn’t look offended, only somewhat amused as far as Shandy could tell through the orange whiskers. “Try to keep anything secret around this burg.”

“It was just that—er—Miss Horsefall didn’t want all the youngsters running down there and tearing their good clothes on the briers,” Shandy half apologized. “We realized, of course, that Swope’s—er—journalistic instincts must inevitably lead to public disclosure.”

“Huh. Name me one soul in Balaclava County who ain’t got journalistic instincts, will you? Look, I haven’t been shootin’ my mouth off and I don’t intend to. When Henny told me about them runes, I warned him not to talk too much. But I knew damn well Cronk would be writin’ up a piece for his paper an’ sendin’ it around to half a dozen more, like as not. Can’t blame the kid for tryin’ to make a name for himself, can you? It’s just that—I dunno. I got a funny feelin’, that’s all.”