And we never got caught. We played our secret game all the time I was growing up.
Punkin and I were secret conspirators for many years.
Then she passed away, and I went away to teacher’s college—or normal school, as it used to be called. School-teaching in those days was the only respectable work for a respectable young woman to do. Students lived in dormitories, and that’s where I first experienced a strange incident.
In the middle of the night I woke up and heard a fa-miliar scratching under the door. How could it be? Punkin 쑽쑽쑽
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Lilian Jackson Braun was dead—and buried under the old oak tree. And then I smelled smoke! I dragged my roommate out of the bed and screamed, “The building’s on fire!” We ran down the hall in our nightclothes, banging on doors and shouting
“Fire! Fire!”
The firewagon came and poured on buckets of water, and the dormitory was saved. And I was honored in assembly for detecting the danger and rousing my fellow students.
Imagine that! I didn’t tell them about Punkin. They would have laughed at me.
I never told anyone about Punkin—not even my husband. We lived in a comfortable farmhouse, where we were raising a family. Then one windy night I woke up again and heard scratching under the door. I woke up my husband, and he jumped out of bed and shouted, “Take the children down in the basement!” It was a tornado, and it took the roof off our house, but the family was safe. Of course, I never said a word about Punkin.
There was another time, too, when a burglar got in the house in the middle of the night . . . but I’m getting tired . . .
Postscript: A short note came from a caregiver at the Senior Care Facility. “It is our sad duty to inform you that Emma Huggins Wimsey passed away last night at 4:30 a.m. She had just turned ninety and was alert and cheerful all day. Shortly before the end dear Emma said, “I hear Punkin scratching under the door.”
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13.
The Dimsdale Jinx
Homer Tibbitt Tells about
the Village that Disappeared
In the mid–eighteenth century, Dimsdale was a thriving community built around the Dimsdale mine: homes and gardens for the miners, plus a chapel and a general store. And Seth Dimsdale took a paternal interest in his workers. A few years later, it was all gone. What happened? Our county historian knows the answer.
—JMQ
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It started about a hundred years ago, when the mines were going full blast, and this was the richest county in the state. This isn’t a tall tale, mind you. It’s true. It isn’t short either.
There was a miner named Roebuck Magley, a husky man in his late forties who worked in the Dimsdale mine.
He had a wife and three sons, and they lived in one of the cottages provided for workers. Not all mine owners exploited their workers, you know. Seth Dimsdale was successful but not greedy. He saw to it that every family had a decent place to live and a plot for a vegetable garden, and he gave them the seed to plant. There was also a company doctor who looked after the families without charge.
Roebuck worked hard, and the boys went to work in the mines as soon as they finished eighth grade. Betty Magley worked hard, too, feeding her men, scrubbing their 쑽쑽쑽
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Lilian Jackson Braun clothes, pumping water, tending the garden, and making their shirts. But somehow she always stayed pretty.
Suddenly Roebuck fell sick and died. He’d been complaining about stomach pains, and one day he came home from work, ate his supper, and dropped dead. Things like that happened in those days, and folks accepted them. Men were asphyxiated in the mines, blown to bits in explosions, or they came home and dropped dead. Nobody sued for negligence.
Roebuck’s death certificate, signed by Dr. Penfield, said
“Heart failure”. Seth Dimsdale paid Mrs. Magley a generous sum from the insurance policy he carried on his workers, and she was grateful. She’d been ailing herself, and the company doctor was at a loss to diagnose her symptoms.
Well, about a month later her eldest son, Robert, died in the mine shaft of “respiratory failure”, according to the death certificate, and it wasn’t long before the second son, Amos, died under the same circumstances. The miners’
wives flocked around Betty Magley and tried to comfort her, but there was unrest among the men. They grumbled about “bad air”. One Sunday they marched to the mine office, shouting and brandishing pickaxes and shovels. Seth Dimsdale was doing all he could to maintain safe working conditions, considering the technology of the times, so he authorized a private investigation.
Both Robert and Amos had died, he learned, after eating their lunch pasties underground; Roebuck’s last meal had been a large pasty in his kitchen. The community was 쑽쑽쑽
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Short & Tall Tales alarmed. “Bad meat!” they said. Those tasty meat-and-potato stews wrapped in a thick lard crust were the staple diet of miners and their families.
Then something curious happened to Alfred, the youngest son. While underground, he shared his pasty with another miner whose lunch had fallen out of his pocket when he was climbing down the ladder. Soon both men were complaining of pains, nausea, and numb hands and feet. The emergency whistle blew, and the two men were hauled up the ladder in the “basket”, as the rescue contrap-tion was called.
When word reached Seth Dimsdale, he notified the prosecuting attorney in Pickax, and the court issued an order to exhume the bodies of Roebuck, Robert, and Amos.
Their internal organs, sent to the toxicologist at the state capital, were found to contain lethal quantities of arsenic, and Mrs. Magley was questioned by the police.
At that point, neighbors started whispering: “Could she have poisoned her own family? Where did she get the poison?” Arsenic could be used to kill insects in vegetable gardens, but people were afraid to use it. Then the neighbors remembered the doctor’s visits to treat Mrs. Magley’s mysterious ailment. He visited almost every day.
When Dr. Penfield was arrested, the mining community was bowled over. He was a handsome man with a splendid mustache, and he cut a fine figure in his custom-made suits and derby hats. He lived in a big house and owned one of the first automobiles. His wife was considered 쑽쑽쑽
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Lilian Jackson Braun a snob, but Dr. Penfield had a good bedside manner and was much admired.
It turned out, however, that he was in debt for his house and car, and his visits to treat the pretty Betty Magley were more personal than professional. He was the first de-fendant placed on trial. Mrs. Magley sat in jail and awaited her turn.