Читать книгу Mystery Cases of Letitia Carberry, Tish - Mary Roberts Rinehart - Страница 31
ОглавлениеChapter I.
The Green Kimono
Nothing would have induced me to tell the scandalous story had it not been for Letitia's green kimono. But when it was found at the Watermelon Camp, two miles from our cottage, hanging to the branch of a tree, instead of the corduroy trousers and blue flannel shirt that one of the campers said he had hung there overnight, it seemed to require explanation. For one of the men at the Watermelon Camp knew the kimono.
He brought it up the next morning, hanging over his arm, and asked Letitia for the trousers and shirt! He said that the young man who owned them had to wear a blanket until we returned them, not having any other clothes in camp. Also, he said there was a particular kind of bass hook in one of the pockets, and if there was any reason why we could not return the trousers, would we be kind enough to send back the hook.
Now Tish is a teacher in the Sunday-School and has been for thirty-five years. But she looked up from the bowl she was wiping—we had made a pretense at breakfast, although nobody could eat—and she lied.
"I don't know what you mean by coming here for your corduroy trousers and flannel shirt," she said, with a three-cornered red spot in each cheek. "As for that kimono, I never saw it before!"
Then she dropped the bowl. She had to pay twenty cents into the cottage exchequer for it afterward, and she explained that she felt the bowl going, and the falsehood slipped out before she knew what she was saying. Anyhow, it did no good, for the young man in knickerbockers and a bathing shirt held up the kimono, grinning and pointing to the laundry tag. It said "Letitia Carberry," as plain as ink could make it.
Aggie weakened at once. It is always Aggie that weakens. She sat down on the porch step and began to cry. She had been crying off and on all morning, having lost her upper teeth when the boat—but that brings me to the boat.
Just as Aggie threw her apron over her face, we saw old Carpenter, the boatman, coming up the path. I caught Tish's arm as she was escaping into the house. "Not a step," I whispered sternly. "If they arrest one of us, they take us all."
"You see, it was like this," the young man was saying, "Carleton, one of our fellows, was out in his motor canoe last night, and it upset. When he came in, he says he hung his trousers and shirt out on a branch to dry. Anyhow, when he got up an hour or so ago, his clothes were gone, and this—er—garment was there instead." He was staring very hard at Tish. ''He didn't notice the change, being half asleep, and he got his feet in the sleeves all right, but when it came to drawing it up, he noticed something strange about it"
At the name "Carleton" Aggie threw me an agonized glance from her apron. She would not speak without her teeth, and Tish was stooping over the pieces of the bowl. I am a Christian woman, but seeing Aggie weak-kneed and Tish as shaky as gelatine, I hoped that Carpenter, the boatman, would have apoplexy or fall and break his leg before he reached the porch. I turned on the young man at the foot of the steps.
"If you think," I said indignantly, "that three ladies, past their youth and with affairs of their own to look after, have nothing better to do than to wander around at night stealing clothing that they could not possibly wear, and leaving in exchange articles that they er—cherish, go in and examine the house."
Carpenter had come up and stood respectfully by, listening, and to my horror I saw that he held the other half of Aggie's broken oar.
"He won't go into my room!" Aggie said suddenly, and with amazing clearness, considering her teeth.
"Nonsense," I snapped. "This young man has seen an unmade bed before." But Aggie had gone pale, and suddenly I remembered. The handle of the very oar Carpenter carried was lying on a chair beside her bed. All that terrible night she had held on to it as a weapon.
The young man in the bathing shirt only smiled, however, and shifted Tish's kimono to the other shoulder.
"Certainly, if you say you haven't seen Carleton's clothes," he said easily, "the matter is settled. No doubt the same breeze last night that blew the kimono down to the camp and hung it on the branch of a tree took the trousers to make a sensation on one of the nearby islands. I am sorry Carleton didn't know they were going traveling, he would at least have had them brushed."
While I was glaring at him Carpenter stepped forward and placed the oar blade on the porch. When Aggie saw the name "Witch Hazel" she opened her mouth like a fish, and I daresay if I had not pinched her she would have told the whole miserable story then and there. Not that I am ashamed of it—I am not too old, thank the Lord, to know real love when I see it—but Aggie has no sense of proportion, and in her telling, what was pure romance would have become merely assault and battery, with intent to compound a felony.
"I reckon. Miss Lizzie," Carpenter said, addressing me, "that you and Miss Tish and Miss Aggie didn't take the Witch Hazel out last night and forget to bring her back, did you?"
Aggie shut her mouth and swallowed.
"Certainly," I retorted sarcastically. "We decided to take a midnight row yesterday evening, but the boat leaked. In the middle of the lake it filled and sank under our feet."
Tish gave me an awful look, and snapped:
"I suppose if we'd taken your boat out, we'd have brought it back, not being mermaids."
"That's what I argued down at the camp," he meditated. "I said to them, 'you boys have been up to some devilment or other, and I'll git you yet. It ain't likely that them three old—them three ladies that can't row a stroke or swim a yard would take the Witch Hazel out in the middle of the night in a storm, sink the boat, and swim home four miles in time to put up their crimps and get breakfast.' "
"Thirtainly not," Aggie said with injured dignity, "I can't thwim a thtroke."
Carpenter spat on one of our whitewashed cobblestones. "It's what you might call ree-markable," he observed. "Not another soul on the island, and won't be 'til the Methodist camp meeting next week; one of the boys at the Watermelon Camp with a blanket on instead of his pants and a bandage on his head, and the Witch Hazel stole last night by somebody who cut through her painter with a pair of scissors and takes her out with two oars that ain't mates."
The young man with the kimono dropped it carelessly into Aggie's lap and straightened with a glance at her stricken face.
"Scissors!" he repeated. "Oh, come, Abe, you're no detective. How the mischief do you know whether the rope was cut with scissors or chewed off?"
Abe dived into his pocket and brought up two articles on the palm of his hand.
"Scissored off or chewed off," he said triumphantly. "Take your choice."
There, gleaming in the sunlight, were TisKs buttonhole scissors and Aggie's upper teeth!
"Found them in four feet of water at the end of the boat dock," he said, "where I left the Witch Hazel last night. If them teeth ever belonged in a fish, then I'm a dentist."
I remember the next ten minutes through a red haze; I knew in a dim way that Aggie had clutched at her teeth and disappeared; I heard from far off Tish's voice, explaining that Aggie had dropped the scissors in the water the previous afternoon, and had lost her teeth while lying on the dock trying to fish them up —the scissors, of course—with a hairpin on the end of a string. And finally, with the line of the waterfront undulating before my dizzy eyes like a marcel wave—which is a figure of speech and not a pun—I realized that Carpenter and the sleeveless and neckless young man from the camp were retreating down the path, and I knew that the ordeal was over.
I believe I fainted, for when I opened my eyes again Tish was standing in front of me with a cup of tea, and she had been crying.
"You needn't feel so badly about it," I said, when I had taken a sip of the tea. "There are times when to lie is humanity."
"It isn't that," Tish whimpered, breaking down again, "but—but the wretches didn't believe me!"
"No," I echoed sadly, "they didn't believe you."
"I could think of so many better ones now," she wailed.
"Never mind," I said, with a feeble attempt to console her, "they won't jail us for lying, anyhow. We are reasonably safe, Tish, unless Mr. Carleton has Aggie arrested for assault and battery."
But he did not. The only court concerned was the marriage license court, from which you will know that this is a love story. Even if it does begin with a mangy dog.
At least Aggie said it was mange; her parrot had the same moth-eaten look before it died. But Tish has always maintained that it was fleas. She says they breed in the grass, and attack dogs in swarms in hot weather.
