“Maybe they didn’t come straight here from England,” I suggested. “Maybe they stopped off in Seattle.”
“That must be it,” she said, and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “Look at me, Bern. A couple of pops and a decent meal and I think I died and went to heaven. I’ll tell you something. I like it here. I’m glad we came.”
CHAPTER Six
After dinner we drifted from room to room, getting our bearings on the first floor of Cuttleford House. There was, God knows, an awful lot of it, and one room just sort of led to another. We started out in a sort of sitting room called the East Parlour, and I might have taken it for the library if I hadn’t already seen the Great Library in the brochure. The parlor had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. The other walls sported memorabilia-crossed spears, West African ceremonial masks, and the stuffed head of one of those crossword-puzzle animals. An oryx, say.
There were more books on a breakfront, braced by a pair of bronze Abraham-Lincoln-seated-and-looking-pensive bookends, and there were revolving bookcases flanking the floral-patterned sofa.
“There are books all over the place,” Carolyn murmured. “You saw the bookcase in our room, didn’t you?”
“Uh-huh. It reminded me of my bargain table.”
“No Big Sleep, huh?”
“Just a large yawn. Mostly late-model paperbacks. Last year’s best-sellers. The kind of book you take along to a resort and leave behind when you go home.”
“If you managed to finish it.”
“Or even if you didn’t,” I said.
We broke off to get into conversation with Colonel Edward Blount-Buller, a florid-faced gentleman in moleskin trousers and a tweed Norfolk jacket. We’d been introduced to him in the bar before dinner, and he’d evidently lingered there amidst the single-malt Scotches. Now he was moved to discourse upon the inherent nobility of the hunting trophy on the opposite wall.
“It’s the horns, don’t you know.” We must have looked puzzled. “The horns, the horns,” he said. “The long graceful tapering horns. What would he be without them, eh?” He held up a finger, its knuckle knobby with arthritis. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “Be a bloody nanny goat.”
“I’d rather be a live nanny goat,” Carolyn said, “than have some jerk shoot me and stick my head on his wall.”
“Ah,” he said. “Well, you’re a woman, eh?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“No slight intended, I assure you. But the gentler sex has a more practical nature, takes short views. Better to munch grass and give milk than to take a bullet, eh?”
“If those are the choices,” she said, “I wouldn’t have to spend a long time thinking it over.”
“Without his horns,” the colonel said, “our springbok would have gone on grazing until age made him easy prey to a lion or a dog pack. He’d have left his bones bleaching in the hot African sun. The world would have long since forgotten him.” He gestured at the mounted head. “Instead he lives on,” he announced, “countless years past his ordinary lifespan. It’s immortality of a sort, wot? Not quite the sort you or I might choose, but quite the best available to him.”
“A springbok,” I said.
“And a fine one, sir, wouldn’t you say?”
“You’re sure it’s not an oryx?”
“Hardly that.”
“Or an ibex,” I suggested. “Or an okapi, or even a gnu.”
“Fine beasts, all of them,” he said. “But our friend here is a springbok. You have my assurance of that.”
In the Sitting Room, the walls were given over to framed Ape and Spy caricatures from the old Vanity Fair, with not a single stuffed head to be seen. There were books, though, filling a three-tiered set of glassed-in shelves and propped between a pair of sailing-ship bookends.
I had a quick look at the books while Carolyn leafed through a year-old copy of Town amp; Country. When I dropped into the chair next to hers she closed the magazine and looked at me.
“Better books,” I said. “Hardcover fiction, most of it between fifty and eighty years old. Some mysteries, all by authors that nobody reads nowadays. A lot of general fiction. James T. Farrell, one of the books in his Danny O’Neill tetralogy. And Mammonart, by Upton Sinclair.”
“Are they valuable, Bern?”
“They’re both important writers,” I said, “but they’re not very actively collected. And of course the dust jackets are long gone.”
“What do you mean, ‘long gone’? For all you know they were there until five minutes ago.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I jumped to a conclusion, based on the fact that all but two or three of the books in the case are missing their jackets.”
“Then it’s a good thing they’re inside, Bern. In this weather, they’d freeze their flyleaves off.” She pointed at the window. “Still coming down,” she said.
“So it is.”
“You hardly looked at those books, Bernie. You just scanned each shelf for a couple of seconds, and you knew what was there and what wasn’t.”
“Well, I’m in the business,” I said. “When you look at books day in and day out, you develop a knack.”
“Makes sense, Bern. I’m the same way with dogs.”
“And it’s easier,” I said, “when you know what you’re looking for. There’s just one book I’m looking for, so I don’t have to take a careful inventory of everything else. As soon as I know I’m not looking at Raymond Chandler, I can go on and look at something else.”
“Like a springbok,” she said. “If that’s what it was.”
“What else could it be?”
“You named a whole lot of other things, Bern. You didn’t want it to be a springbok. How’d you learn so much about African antelopes?”
“All I know about them I learned from crossword puzzles,” I said, “and that’s why I didn’t think it was a springbok. It’s nine letters long, for God’s sake. When’s the last time you saw a springbok in a crossword puzzle?”
“You should have pointed that out to the colonel. Don’t you love the way he talks? I guess that’s what you call a pukka sahib accent.”
“I guess so.”
“If he were any more English,” she said, “he couldn’t talk at all. This is great, Bern. It’s not just that Cuttleford House is something straight out of an English mystery. The guests could have stepped right out of the pages themselves. The colonel’s perfect in that respect. He could be Jane Marple’s neighbor, recently retired to St. Mary Mead after a career shooting people in India.”
“People and springboks,” I said.
“And those two women we met in the Sewing Room. Miss Dinmont and Miss Hardesty. The frail Miss Dinmont and the outgoing Miss Hardesty.”
“If you say so,” I said. “I couldn’t keep them straight.”
“Neither could God, Bern.”
“Huh?”
“Keep them straight.”
“Oh. You figure they’re gay?”
“If this were an English mystery,” she said, “instead of life itself, I’d go along with the pretense that Miss Dinmont is a wealthy invalid and Miss Hardesty is her companion, and that’s all there is to the relationship.” She frowned. “Of course, in the last chapter it would turn out that the wheelchair’s just a prop, and Miss Dinmont would be capable of leaping around like a gazelle, or one of those other animals you got from the crossword puzzle. That’s because in the books things are never quite what they appear to be. In real life, things tend to be exactly what they appear to be.”
“And they appear to be lesbians?”
“Well, it doesn’t take x-ray vision, does it? Hardesty’s your typical backslapping butch, and Dinmont’s one of those passive-aggressive femme numbers. If you want to remember which is which, incidentally, try alliteration. Dim little Miss Dinmont and hearty horsey Miss Hardesty. As a matter of fact-”