Grime and Punishment

fertilizer and grass seed piled in front and a faded sign that said, FEED.

“What in the world are you talking about?' Shelley asked, coming to a stop in front of this vision and turning the engine off. 'This is all too baroque for me.'

“Blackmail.'

“Blackmail!You?”

Jane bristled. 'I'm certain she was quite disappointed in her efforts to find out anything interesting about me.'

“Oh, I didn't mean that. Well, maybe I did.”

Jane smiled. 'I guess I might as well just face the fact that I'm boring and be proud of it. A few more encounters with Detective VanDyne ought to do the trick.'

“Jane, we're both boring in a conventional sense. All of us are. But blackmail? And how does my missing pearl necklace figure in this theory?'

“Beats me,' Jane said. 'It might not have anything to do with it. The necklace might have been missing for a while, mightn't it? When were you last sure you had it?'

“The day I stuck it in the drawer a year or soago,' Shelley admitted. 'Let me think about this while I get the birdseed.”

She hadn't been kidding about her recipe for birdseed. She took in two big, empty, lidded plastic buckets that had once contained a stupendous amount of plaster, and had the clerk fill them with a precise mixture of shelled sunflower seeds ('The cardinals love it.'), shelled peanuts ('For chickadees.'), safflower seeds ('A favorite with the titmice.') and cracked corn ('Sparrows have to eat something.').

While Shelley supervised the mixing, Jane roamed around the store. It was like being in a different world, a rather old world. Or at least an unfamiliar one to a woman who had lived nearly everywhere on earth but the American farm belt. Besides the barrels of every seed known to the mind of man or bird, there were barrels of rabbit food — which looked surprisingly like rabbit droppings — and pressed-meal dog bones big enough for a woolly-mammothsized dog. There were all sorts of cages and water troughs and animal food dispensers, and a huge supply of old-fashioned mousetraps. There were even salt licks for deer. In another section, she found canning equipment, heavy ceramic bowls, and blue-speckled pots and pans and giant coffee pots, like cowboys probably had on the trail.

On the last aisle there were gardening supplies. This evidence of suburbia was probably what kept the delightfully old-fashioned store in business. Here, the floor had been cleared, and a big sign said that in a short time this section would be full of the best quality Dutch bulbs for fall planting. Next to the sign, a wire rack contained a tidy stack of bulb catalogues. Jane picked one up and was paying for it when Shelley's long-suffering clerk went staggering out the door under the substantial weight of her purchases.

“We can always tell autumn is just around the corner when you come in, Miz Nowack,' he was saying as Jane got in the minivan. 'You're always the first to stock up.'

“Everybody feeds the birds in the winter, and if I start earlier I get all the good ones,' Shelley replied with a laugh as she started the van.

She shifted conversational gears as easily as the van's gears. They'd hardly cleared the driveway of the feed store when she said, 'In some ways it makes sense, Jane. If you leave the pearls out of it. One thing it would explain is the difference in the way people feel about Edith. You know — some people who are fanatically clean swear by her, and others who are slobs didn't think she did a good job.'

“I don't quite—'

“See, if you're a terrific housekeeper and you're being blackmailed by her, it would be dangerous to bad- mouth her, so you'd claim she was good even if you knew she was awful.'

“And you'd have to keep her on because, if you fired her, she'd tell people. No. That's backwards. If she's getting money from you for blackmail, she doesn't need to work for you anymore, but if you fire her, how can you go around saying how good she is? My brain is turning to mush.'

“Hmmm,' Shelley mused. 'You've got apoint. There are two ways of looking at this. Who's being blackmailed? The ones who keep her or the ones who fire her? Either way, if you keep her or not, you'd be under orders from her not to criticize, because the only way she has of getting a supply of new victims is to keep having new homes opened to her. Good God, Jane! What's happening to us? Here we are, inventing this whole ugly little scenario with details and finishing touches just on the strength of your thinking maybe someone got into your desk.'

“But you believe it, don't you?'

“Yes, I'm afraid I do. At least it's one way of accounting for what happened, and so far nothing else has made the least bit of sense.”

They were quiet as Shelley negotiated an entrance ramp onto the highway. Finally, as they neared their street, Shelley said, 'You know what this all means, if we accept it?'

“What?'

“That poor old Ramona Thurgood was killed by a woman, and by a woman we know.”

“Shelley! What a thing to say!'

“Think about it. We know everybody Edith works for. Monday she does Joyce Greenway. Tuesday is Mary Ellen Revere, and Wednesday is Robbie Jones — or maybe it's the other way around. Then Thursday is me, and Friday is you.'

“Not anymore. Besides, she's worked for lots of other people. You said yourself it could be that she doesn't go on working for the people she's blackmailing.'

“Still, she's a sort of fixture in the neighborhood. Look how many people we know who have had her clean for them at one time or another. Besides, if it had been somebody we don't know who killed here, then how would they have found out she would be at my house on Thursday? I don't think the Happy Helper people give out that kind of information. In fact, I know they don't. I had a woman from there once when our usual lady was on vacation a year or so ago, and she left her watch by the sink. When she didn't call me to say she'd left it by the next day, I phoned the company to find out if I could just drop it off to her if she was in the neighborhood. The company sent a guy out in a truck to pick it up instead of telling me where to find her.'

“I still think there must have been some other way. Suppose she mentioned working for you to some other customer? Some stranger.'

“And just incidentally told them which day she worked for me, what my address is — remember, we're not listed in the phone book — and which week she was supposed to be in my house alone? If you can buy that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to tell you about.'

“Oh,' Jane said and subsided into silence until they pulled into Shelley's driveway. 'You're saying, then, that if we accept this theory, one of our friends is not only being blackmailed, but is a murderer besides—'

“Friends, or acquaintances. I think the distinction may be important to us someday.'

“And it's only somebody who knew she'd be there alone because you were going out to the airport for most of the day.'

“Right.'

'So who did you tell?'

“Everybody who was supposed to come to the meeting that night.'

“Oh, Shelley, those people are all really friends of ours!'

“Afraid so. Jane, next time I go for birdseed, you'll understand why I don't invite you along for conversation,' Shelley said grimly.

Thirteen

shelley dropped off the birdseed and Jane and went off to do the rest of her errands. Jane, shaken badly by the result of her own chain of reasoning, sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

She really ought to be doing something worthwhile. Ironing, laundry, or something, but she felt oddly drained. Thinking she could take her mind off murder, she flipped on the little black-and-white TV on the kitchen counter.

A group of extremely aggressive-looking women were presenting their theory that the society of the United