A Pint of Murder by Charlotte MacLeod Page A

doubt—could be getting the wear out of it. Still she wasn’t keen on the idea of sitting here with the hired help gossiping about a woman whose husband was to be buried the next day. She found, though, that Dot was a lot easier to turn on than to shut off.
    “She sure is a caution to work for! She’ll put on white cotton gloves an’ run her fingers over the furniture lookin’ for dust.” Dot shrugged. “It’s no skin off my nose if she wants to ruin a perfectly good pair o’ gloves. The doctor wanted to send for one o’ them foreign maids once, but Miz Druffitt wouldn’t hear of it. They’d have had to board her, see. ‘An’ besides,’ she says, ‘she might be pretty and it would cause talk.’”
    “Naturally Mrs. Druffitt wouldn’t want to cause talk,” said Janet. Nobody ever wanted to in Pitcherville, but somehow a lot of people did.
    “Oh no, Miz Druffitt’s dead set against talk,” Dot replied, not recognizing the irony, as Janet hadn’t really expected her to. “That’s why she’s always at Gilly to move back home. ‘What do you think people are saying,’ is how she goes on, ‘you living like a pauper when you have a lovely home to come back to?’ Gilly always gets sore an’ says, ‘Who the hell cares what anybody says?’ so her ma might as well save ’er breath. They’ve had some rare ol’ hairtangles, I c’n tell you.”
    Dot decided she could manage one more cookie. “Soon as Miz Treadway died, Miz Druffitt started on Gilly to live up here at the Mansion but Gilly wouldn’t go for that one, neither. Can’t say as I blame ’er there. Ain’t it kind of lonesome, bein’ stuck up here where there’s nothin’ to see an’ nobody to talk to? At least down in the village there’s somethin’ doin’ all the time, even if it’s only Fred Olson fixin’ somebody’s flat tire.”
    That reminded Janet of the appointment she’d wanted so desperately to keep. “I hope Sam gave Fred my message,” she fretted. “I was going to see him this afternoon.”
    Dot pounced. “What about?”
    Good grief, what had she used for an excuse? Janet racked her brain. “Oh just an old pan I was hoping he could fix. It belonged to my sister-in-law’s grandmother.”
    Dot chewed the last bite of cookie. “You got a fat chance of gettin’ any work out o’ Fred till after the funeral. He’ll be ‘owlin’ all day tomorrow. They’re marchin’ in solemn procession all the way to the graveyard.”
    “Yes, I know, and there’s that tunic of Bert’s to be got. I do rather hate asking Elmer when I barely know him. You don’t suppose Sam could take a run over first thing in the morning?”
    “I don’t see how. Soon as he finishes his chores here, Sam’s got to get slicked up an’ go help Ben Potts.”
    “Then it’s Elmer or nobody. I can’t possibly drive one-handed all that way and Bert won’t have time. Is he at the Mansion now, I wonder?”
    Dot applied a well-schooled eye to the edge of the curtain. “Yep. Leastways his car’s in the yard. You’d o’ thought he’d be down at the funeral parlor with everybody else.”
    “Why should he?” said Janet. “The Bains and the Druffitts have never been all that chummy, have they?”
    “You c’n say that again! Say, you should o’ been a fly on the wall that time Elmer ast Gilly to the high-school dance. I thought Miz Druffitt would throw a fit. No daughter of hers was goin’ to be caught out in public with no Bain, she says. So then Elmer got up on his high horse an’ says to Gilly if he wasn’t good enough for ’er folks he wouldn’t ast ’er no more.”
    “How did you happen to hear that?”
    “Oh I heard,” said Dot airily. “So the next thing anybody knew she’d run off an’ married that no-good Bob Bascom an’ if that ain’t cuttin’ off your nose to spite your face, I’d like to know what is.”
    “Gilly’s had a rough time of it,” Janet sighed.
    “Don’t talk to me about rough times. I got no