The meatloaf on a platter, Kate answered the question. “Professor Hayford Strawfoot,” she said.
“Call me Spud, dear lady,” came a voice on the stairs.
Kate shook her head. She swore the man tiptoed around the house, his big ears cocked, listening for the mention of his name so he could make a grand entrance. Strawfoot and her Jack had been banding crows to collect more data on the professor’s new theory of scarecrowery, up for this year’s prestigious Cowbell Prize in Agriculture with its million-dollar stipend.
Strawfoot appeared at the bottom of the steps, loose-legged and leaning on a golf putter. He tipped his little bowler hat to the ladies just as the front door slammed and Kate saw the gurney taking Jack’s body away.
Shortly after that, Hubbard arrived and she and Anna began putting the meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and succotash on the table, and Owl left his hollow nook to perch atop one of Tree’s broken limbs so his friend could shovel in the food.
Pulling up his chair, Hubbard saw the Grimmer and gave a start. “Not here in any official capacity, I hope, sir?” he asked. (People got polite when speaking to the Grimmer.)
“Merely a social call,” came the reply. “Jack wasn’t down in my book for dying today, at least not by accident or natural causes.”
Kate and Anna sat down and the meal began. The table ate in silence until Hubbard turned to Kate and asked if Jack had been depressed lately. “I mean, any chance of him standing up, rolling some paper into a tube, sticking one end in his mouth, the other in his nose hole, and blowing his own candle out, smashing his pumpkin on the desk when he fell?”
“He’d been mutter-muttering around about things not adding up,” admitted Kate. “But suicide’s the coward’s way out. Jack came from nobler stock. The O’Lanterns were kings of Ireland.”
Modesty prevented Kate from mentioning her own forebears. The Macmalkins of Gray were old vaudevillians, counting among their number the Three Weird Sisters who appeared in command performances before Macbeth himself. Not that they came away much richer for it. The Macmalkins claimed the farthing had been invented so that Macbeth could tip.
“Did Jack have any enemies?” asked Hubbard, turning quickly from Kate to look around the table.
“Well, the crows sure as hell didn’t like him,” she replied sharply, adding a softer, “My Jack was a friend to all. A Double Boo and licensed to scare anybody he damn well pleased, he saved it all for the crows.”
“But, dear lady,” insisted Strawfoot, “our figures show Jack’s crows always came back. And why not? Raggedy-ass is so yesterday, so unscientific. No way to win a crow’s respect. With me, the crows know they’re dealing with a serious adversary.” He raised a glove of limp fingers. “When Strawfoot chases a bird it stays chaste. By which I mean not only do my crows go away and stay away, they get out of the breeding business altogether.”
Hubbard broke into the ensuing silence. “Okay, folks, who was the last to see Jack alive?”
When no one volunteered, Anna said, “Maybe me. I noticed one of my bass drumsticks had a loose cover. The big parade was coming up fast. So I went up to borrow Jack’s duct tape. He fixed it for me on the spot.”
“Was he alone?” asked Hubbard. When she nodded he said, “See anybody in the hall or on the stairs?”
She shook her head. “Only old Grimmer there, waiting by my door when I got back.”
While Kate and Anna cleared things away in preparation for dessert, Owl whispered something to Tree, who rose, saying, “Got to take my friend here out for his evening mouse or two.” Unbolting the garden door, he added a boarder’s savvy, “Save me a piece of the pie, okay?”
When they’d gone, the Grimmer leaned forward and said, “I send a lot of groceries the turkey vultures’ way, so they fill me in on the bird-land poop. They tell me the crows got so fed up with Jack running them off they put out a contract on him.”
“Could you have misheard, sir?” wondered Strawfoot. “If the crows wanted anybody rubbed out it’d be me. The Strawfoot Method means their total extinction.”
“The vultures say otherwise, Spud,” insisted the Grimmer. “ ‘Make sure you get Jack,’ they say the contract went, ‘not the la-di-dah windbag.’ ” He nodded at the door. “Maybe Owl there’s our hit man. He’s at the controls of one big piece of heavy equipment. He maneuvers Tree around behind Jack, shifts him into kill drive, and wham-o, Tree clubs Jack with the blunt end of his axe. Then Owl parks Tree out in the hall, locks the door from the inside to make it look like suicide, replaces Jack’s key, and flies out the transom. A perfect locked-door murder.”
Suddenly Tree burst in through the door with Owl clinging to him, eyes wide with terror. “Who’s the body up there?” they demanded.
Armed with candles, the kitchen emptied up into the garden. Between the path and the house they found Sam Spook’s body, his head crushed in. Hubbard turned to the Grimmer. “You must’ve seen him when you arrived, sir.”
“Am I a suspect, Constable? I assure you, when it comes to death I only do wholesale. If I didn’t see the body, perhaps it wasn’t there.”
“What the...?” said Anna, as people in mystery novels do, picking up a raw parsnip next to the body.
Stepping closer, the Grimmer pulled a heavy wooden mallet out from under the dead private eye. Looking up at the third-floor windows he asked, “Is this the murder weapon? Did Spook kill Jack then fall to his death trying to escape?”
Hubbard collected the parsnip and mallet and herded the others into the house.
But Kate hung back. Something had rolled into the grass when the Grimmer pulled the mallet free. Bending down, she found an apple, a wax apple, her wax apple, late of the bowl of artificial fruit on her dining-room table. She recognized it by the two tooth marks in the wax. She’d shown them to Jack to prove they had a fruit-bat problem. Maybe he’d given it to Spook.
With a frown, Kate put the apple in her apron pocket and returned to the kitchen, where Hubbard and Strawfoot were having a heated exchange.
“You make it sound like I creep the halls listening at keyholes,” said the professor, shaking a clutch of limp fingers in the constable’s face. “I was on my way down the hall to the gents’ to wash up before dinner. Through the transom I heard a voice ask Jack’s permission to check the attic for the Phantom Sapsucker. Jack said, ‘Be my guest, Shamus.’ Then I passed out of earshot.”
Strawfoot nodded at the parsnip and mallet. “Isn’t that how you kill a vampire fruit bat? You catch him sleeping in his lair and all turned back into his human form. Then you drive a parsnip through his heart.”
“If so, Spook was playing a dangerous game,” said the Grimmer. “Now that there’s a reward, the Phantom Sapsucker must be sleeping with one eye open.”
“How about this,” suggested Strawfoot. “Spook creeps up to the attic, mallet and parsnip at the ready. But the Phantom Sapsucker wakes, grabs the mallet, chases Spook, and slugs him on the stairs. The commotion brings Jack out into the hall. The Phantom Sapsucker strikes him down, too, drags his body back into the office, locks the door, replaces Jack’s key, changes into his bat form, and flies out the transom. Back in his human form, he tosses Spook’s body, murder weapon and all, out the window.”
“Wow,” said Anna.
“But why go to all that trouble?” asked Kate.
“To make it look like suicide,” said Strawfoot.
Hubbard nodded. “Sounds good. I found fresh pumpkin juice on the attic steps. What say we visit the scene of the crime?”
During the trooping up to the third floor Kate recalled some Shocksville gossip about Hubbard’s mother. After five boys, people said, old Mrs. Hubbard had really wanted number six to be a ghoul to follow in her husband’s footsteps on the graveyard shift at the cemetery. To help things along, she’d given baby Doug beef tea instead of mother’s milk and meaty bones when he was teething. Then one day she went to the cupboard to get her poor Doug a bone. But the cupboard was bare. (Since then, whenever townie talk turned to youth, money, wedded bliss, or other things that seemed to vanish into thin air, they always added, “like old Mrs. Hubbard’s bones.”)