It was empty. The twenty tarts still lay on the table. The empty saucer still stood on the shelf by the cellar door.
I realized I was still holding my borrowed shotgun and I put it down on the table. It took only a couple of moments to assure myself that there was no one in the living room or upstairs. Now all I had to do was clean off the traces of my passage through the woods and change my clothing to make identification more difficult. But first I returned to the kitchen to retrieve the telltale shotgun. It looked quite domestic lying there on that rustic table amid a squad of jam tarts. I picked it up, turned to go, then for the second time that day temptation assailed me.
The snowball had started rolling here. Alice’s tarts, Lennie’s blackmail, the milkman’s money; the accused tramp, the escaped sheep, the crashed constable; the assaulted farmer and the stolen gun. And all for the sake of a couple of jam tarts.
Surely I deserved another?
Of course I did.
I took it and raised it to my mouth. Behind me I heard a noise. My nerves had gone beyond rapid reaction. Slowly I turned.
Standing in the cellar doorway with a bottle of elderberry wine in her hand and an expression of self-righteous triumph on her face was Alice.
“I knew it were you!” she cried. “I knew it!”
This was nonsense, of course, and mere wish-fulfillment. I opened my mouth to say as much, when I observed the triumph fading to be replaced by another less positive expression. For a second I was puzzled, till I realized that as I had turned the shotgun had turned with me and the barrel was pointed straight at Alice’s ample bosom. Flushed with effort, gashed by briars, and grim with guilt, I must have looked quite a frightening sight.
I savored the moment, knowing that I could scarcely hope twice in a lifetime to have the ascendancy over Alice.
Popping the tart in my mouth, I brought both hands to bear on the gun and curled my finger around the forward trigger. Her eyes bulged. I smiled and squeezed.
“Boom!” I said through a mouthful of pastry.
She shrieked and stepped backwards, then disappeared from view as though she’d dropped into a hole. I heard Widow Tyler’s bottle of elderberry smash to pieces on the cellar floor. And I heard no more.
After a moment, I moved slowly forward and peered down the steep flight of worn stairs.
It was a very lucky escape for Alice, I realized. If I’d squeezed the other trigger, she’d have got the loaded barrel right through her whalebone corset. As it was, I thought as I carefully closed the cellar door, her parting from this world was tragic rather than scandalous. That would have been the way she wanted it — Alice would have hated being relegated to the status of mere victim.
When Sally and Lennie returned, I was clean, immaculate, and relaxed, standing by the kitchen window eating jam tarts. Lennie looked at the tray with uncharacteristic bewilderment. There were only ten left.
Sally made no comment but put the kettle on. Her face wore that characteristic half smile which few of the world’s upsets could remove for long. She was a dear girl, able to take everything in her stride, neither asking for, nor attending to, explanations.
“I’ll make a pot of tea,” she said. “We’ll have it in the garden. Or would you prefer a bottle of Aunt Alice’s potato wine?”
I considered the option.
“No,” I said. “Tea will be fine.”
I had another jam tart. Lennie’s eyes never left me. I thought of cause and effect; small causes, large effects; single steps and journeys of a thousand miles. I had not known what I was doing when I took the tarts that morning any more than I could have foreseen the consequences that other morning (so long ago it now seemed) when I helped myself to a couple of quid from the petty-cash box. Such a fuss Leonard had made! Poor, soft, amiable, hard-working Leonard, to make such a fuss about a few pounds when for years I had been milking every penny I could out of the business! He’d been very upset. I’d told the coroner so, though I naturally did not particularize the cause. Pressure of work was mentioned. Pressure of heel as he clung to the outer scaffolding was not. The heart has its laws which the law might misunderstand.
Lennie was breathing heavily over the remaining tarts.
“Help yourself,” I said magnanimously. He considered this for a moment, the deep grey eyes under the shock of black hair inward-looking as he weighed up the situation. Then he arrived at his decision, smiled broadly, and grabbed two.
I, too, smiled, feeling almost fond of the little monster. Perhaps, I thought, preening myself slightly as I regarded my reflection in the kitchen window, perhaps he had inherited some of his father’s good qualities, too.
My reflection nodded agreement and a lock of my jet-black hair flopped down over my deep-set grey eyes. I pushed it back and thought that perhaps it was as well Leonard had not lived to see the way young Lennie developed.
“We are all children of fate,” I mused as we went out into the garden.
“Fete?” said Sally. “This afternoon’s, you mean?”
Lennie, bringing up the rear with the last of the jam tarts on a plate, said nothing.
But I felt that he understood.
Miss Butterfingers
by Monica Quill
Under the pseudonym Monica Quill, author Ralph McInerny has created one of the most entertaining of all clerical sleuths. Sister Mary Teresa Dempsey, Emtee (M.T.) to the two other remaining sisters of the Order of Martha and Mary, is a habited, overweight, stickler for correct grammar, with an endearing share of faults, and a head for sleuthing. If you haven’t encountered her before, it’s our pleasure to introduce her in the case of Miss Butterfingers...
1
By the second day, there was no doubt that the man was following her; he showed up in too many places for it to be a coincidence, but Kim let another day go by before she mentioned it to Joyce and Sister Mary Teresa. “Tell him to knock it off,” Joyce said, drawing on pre-convent parlance. “Ignore him,” Emtee Dempsey said. But Kim found it impossible to follow either bit of advice. Joyce offered to go with her, but then it was hard to say what Joyce would do for several hours in the Northwestern library. And then suddenly one day there was the man, sitting in the reading room, looking about as comfortable as Joyce would have.
To feel compassion for a pest was not the reaction Kim expected from herself. Now, after days of seeing that oval face, expressionless except for the eyes, whenever she turned around, she felt a little surge of pity.
She settled down to work, driving the man from her mind, and was soon immersed in the research that, God and Sister Mary Teresa permitting, would eventually result in her doctoral dissertation. When she went to consult the card catalogue, she had completely forgotten her pursuer, and when she turned to find herself face to face with him, she let out an involuntary cry.
“Don’t be frightened.” He looked wildly around.
“I am not frightened. Why are you following me?”
He nodded. “I thought you’d noticed.”
“What do you want?”
“I know you’re a nun.”
Well, that was a relief. The only indication in her dress that she was a religious was the veil she wore in the morning when the three of them went to the cathedral for Mass, but of course Kim didn’t wear a veil on campus.
“Why not?” Sister Mary Teresa had asked. As far as the old nun was concerned, the decision taken by the order to permit members either to retain the traditional habit, as Emtee Dempsey herself had done, or to wear such suitable dress as they chose was still in force, no matter that the three of them in the house on Walton Street were all that remained of the Order of Martha and Mary. The old nun was the superior of the house, but would never have dreamt of imposing her personal will on the others. She had subtler ways of getting what she wanted. Of course, when it came to the rule, it was not a matter of imposing her will but that of their founder, Blessed Abigail Keineswegs, the authoress of the particular path to heaven they all had chosen when they were professed as nuns in the order.