“I’m more eager than successful,” she said quickly. “I haven’t much to talk about yet. But I’m hoping to have time really to produce something now.”
“Well, you know my line of country from the books I buy. What’s yours?”
“I’m trying to write a joint biography of that band of Victorian novelists, the ones Hawthorne called ‘scribbling women’; Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, Mary J. Holmes, etc. It’s a far cry from your Indian warfare.”
“Do you find you are getting any time to write?”
“So far, not much. That bookshop seems more of a thoroughfare than I’d realized and no amount of planning keeps customers away.”
“Which is, perhaps, fortunate. But I think you ought to use Margie more. I couldn’t possibly write at all unless I had some quiet mornings.”
“Margie doesn’t seem to me the perfect answer,” Fredericka said a little stiffly.
“Perfect? Of course not. Nothing in this world is perfect. But she’s a good kid at heart and will be O.K. when she gets rid of her adolescent complexes and that very bad case of acne which is part and parcel of the same thing.”
Fredericka said nothing. Her feelings about Margie were best not expressed to anyone so obviously sympathetic to her as Peter. They walked on in silence until they came to a gaily decorated booth marked “Herbs and Tussie-Mussies.”
“Bet you don’t know what a tussie-mussie is,” Peter announced. “Here. I’ll buy you one and then you’ll know.” He dragged her to the booth and then stopped in surprise. “Why, Mrs. Sutton, are you tending shop yourself? Where are all your assistants?”
“Hello, Peter. How do you do, Fredericka—I hope I may call you by your first name. As a matter of fact you see me in a state of distress. Catherine promised to take the booth for me—I’m not supposed to stand, the doctor says, because of a wretched sprained ankle. Catherine’s just not appeared. However, that’s not your worry. What can I sell you? How about a tussie-mussie for the lady, Peter?” She picked up a small bouquet and smiled.
Fredericka had met Mrs. Sutton, who had made several visits to the bookshop. She was tall and must once have been handsome, but now she looked old, and lines of worry had left only a memory of beauty in her face. She’s ill, or sick with anxiety, Fredericka felt, but she had no time to dwell on these thoughts because Peter was saying: “I like the look of that one, Margaret, but is the message fitting?”
“Poor Miss Wing looks bewildered. A tussie-mussie is a bouquet with a message in the language of the flowers. I’ve written them all out and perhaps you’d better read this one first, Peter, and see.”
Peter read the scrap of paper and grinned. “Perfect,” he said.
“Can’t I see it?” Fredericka asked.
“Not yet, but you can have the pretty posy,” Peter answered, folding the paper carefully and hiding it away in his pocket. Then he looked across at Mrs. Sutton. “Can’t we relieve you for a while?”
“Oh no, dear Peter. It is good of you, but I’ve sent for Margie. She may sulk but I’m sure she’ll come. Oh, here she is now—thank goodness.”
Margie pushed her way through the crowds, and as Fredericka and Peter left, they heard her say: “It isn’t my job. Catherine needn’t think she can get away with this,” and Mrs. Sutton’s voice low and soothing.
“Poor Margie,” Peter 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