said. “I can’t blame her. Catherine will always look out for Catherine and get away with it and the plain kids like Margie will have to fill the breach.”
“It won’t hurt Margie,” Fredericka couldn’t help saying, and then at once regretted it when she saw Peter’s frown.
But soon Margie and everyone else was forgotten in the fun of that hot summer afternoon. Peter and Fredericka went from booth to booth, and then sat under the shade of a nearby tree to drink lemonade and discuss life. The lazy contentment of those hours would never be forgotten by either of them even when, later, they knew them to be an overture to nightmare.
Supper was laid in the Church Hall at six—long trestle tables covered with flowered crêpe paper and dotted with steaming bowls of baked beans, platters of ham, salad and rolls. As they entered the barracklike room now crowding with people, Peter and Fredericka stopped to admire a quilt for which the ladies of the Church Guild had been selling tickets all the week. A carefully printed notice said that over five hundred tickets had been sold and that the lucky number would be drawn after supper.
“Please let it be me,” Fredericka breathed. “It’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve taken all of five tickets.”
“Trousseau?” Thane Carey asked, coming up quietly behind them in time to hear her prayer.
“No, only hope chest,” Fredericka said, laughing, as they found Connie and then joined the scramble to get places together at one of the tables.
When they had settled themselves as comfortably as possible on their hard chairs, they discovered that Margie had landed, either by accident or design, on the other side of Peter, and Fredericka sat between Peter and Thane Carey, who at once began to talk about his interest in crime and in detective fiction. Connie, on his other side, listened quietly and hardly ever spoke.
“I’m not all that knowledgeable,” Fredericka said at length. “But I am interested, and one thing that fascinates me is the way you detectives always say that crime in real life is a very different thing from crime in fiction.”
“But isn’t it? How much crime have you met in real life?”
“I confess—not much. But I do know that often the writer of detective stories can in fact be good at detection himself. I’ve just been reading John Dickson Carr’s Life of Conan Doyle. The Oscar Slater case and the Edalji case at Great Wryley were both solved by Doyle himself in order to free innocent men—and, I may add if you’ll let me, in spite of the attempts to cover up made by the authorities.”
“That was England, of course, not America,” Carey said quickly.
Peter turned from Margie who was still grumbling about her wasted afternoon, and the fact that Catherine never had turned up at all.
“You know, Carey,” he said, leaning across Fredericka, “Miss Wing is determined that South Sutton is the perfect place for a murder in the grand manner—”
“On the grounds,” Carey said easily, “that the country is the place for crime. Of course, Miss Wing, you’ve sent your arrow to the heart. You were talking of Doyle just now. Remember this—”
“Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.
But Holmes shook his head gravely, “Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at the scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought that comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there… But look at these lovely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places and no one the wiser?”
“Goodness, do you know Doyle by heart?” Fredericka asked.
“No, but I wish I did. The Hound of the Baskervilles used to scare me silly when I was a kid. I read it over and over in a kind of orgy of pure horror and—well—I’ve loved Doyle ever since.”
They all laughed and then Peter said: “Speaking of being scared to death at a tender age, I remember almost every word of a book written by Celia Thaxter which described the murder on the Isle of Shoals. A fisherman who had been considered a family friend for years rowed across the bay in the dead of winter, murdered two defenceless women with an axe in the middle of the night, chased another into the snow, and when captured at last, tried to put the blame for the murder onto two completely innocent men who were out fishing at the time, and were in fact the husband and the brother of one of the murdered women. It was a wild melodrama with a Gothic background and it gave me glorious nightmares.”
“I confess to a weakness for crimes committed by professors and love university settings. Perhaps that’s why I’ve got my eye on South Sutton,” Fredericka put in.
“Oh, you mean those stuffy Oxford dons who get all mixed up with keys and times,” Peter said.
“Yes, those, and true cases like the Webster one, the classic example of murder in Harvard University.”
“That’s a beauty,” Thane said enthusiastically. “Do you know it, Mohun? Dr. George Parkman murdered by Professor Webster who owed him money. No one dreamt of suspecting such an eminently respectable old guy but the janitor spied on him, and, oh boy, what did he see? The old professor dissecting the corpse and burning it in the college furnace!”
“Yes, I agree, a beauty. And didn’t Oliver Wendell Holmes act as witness?”
“That’s right. Good old New England, the perfect seat of perfect crimes,” Carey said, laughing.
Margie, who had been listening with paralysed intentness, now said in a very loud voice: “All right then, why don’t you start searching for the body of Catherine Clay who disappeared after lunch, no one knows where, and hasn’t been seen since? Not that anyone would care if she had been done in,” she added bitterly, but in an undertone.
“My dear Margie,” Peter turned to her, “has that woman ever come back from anywhere when she was expected to?”
“No-o. All the same, if you’re wanting to have a murder mystery in South Sutton, it’s a good beginning.”
“Wrong again,” Thane said. “Unless there’s some pressing reason we begin with the body, not with the search for it.”
“Just like the police,” Margie roared. “Perhaps there wouldn’t be any dead bodies if you paid attention to signs and portents.”
Thane, Fredericka, Peter and Connie all turned to look at the girl’s white face, now startlingly blotched with crimson. “Good God, she’s serious,” Thane said, jumping up. “Hey, kid, what are you driving at?” But before anyone could stop her, Margie had jumped to her feet and run off through the open door into the darkness of the summer night.
“Let her go, Carey,” Peter said. “It’s just what her mother calls her ‘theatrics.’ Nothing she likes better than to get a good rise out of an unsuspecting audience. And she’s got a score to settle with Catherine so she’s wishing her dead.”
After a moment the chief of police sat down and
