The Burglar in the Library

CHAPTER Five

We had a short wait on the platform at Whitham Junction. Then the local for Pattaskinnick came chugging into the station, and when it chugged out again we were on it. The little train’s course ran north and east, and with each turn of its wheels the terrain grew more rugged and remote and the snowfall intensified.

By the time we got to Pattaskinnick it was dark out and the snow was several inches deep. Carolyn scooped up a handful and made a snowball, then looked around for something to throw it at. The only car in sight was a Jeep Cherokee with Buck’s Taxi Service inexpertly lettered on its side. You couldn’t peg a snowball at a cab and then expect the driver to make you welcome, so she shrugged and tossed the snowball over her shoulder.

“Hey!”

“Sorry, Bern. I didn’t know you were there.”

“Well, I’ve never been here before. Welcome to Pattaskinnick.”

“It’s like a village in the Cotswolds, isn’t it? Chipping Camden or one of those.”

“Sodding Boardham,” I suggested.

“Miss Jane Marple could be living in one of those cozy little cottages, Bernie. Knitting things and poking around in the garden and solving murders left and right.”

“Cottages? I don’t see any cottages.”

“Not with all this snow. But I’m sure they’re there. So’s our cab. Wouldn’t you think he’d hop out and help us with our bags?”

He did, finally, after we’d walked over and tapped on his windshield. I told him our destination and he clambered out from behind the wheel, a squat, broad-shouldered fellow with less than the traditional amount of space between his eyes. He wore one of those weird hunting jackets in orange camouflage, which makes it hard for deer to see you and hard for human beings to look at you, and he lifted our suitcases effortlessly into the Cherokee’s luggage compartment, then looked warily down at Raffles’s cat carrier.

“You got an animal in there,” he said.

“It’s a cat,” I agreed.

“I don’t pick up no animals.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” I said. “He’s not going to damage your car.”

“Ain’t a car. ’T’sa Jeep.”

“Even if it’s a brand-new John Deere tractor,” I said, “there’s no way on earth he’s going to hurt it. He’s locked up in there, he can’t get out, he couldn’t even fit a paw through the wire mesh, so-”

“I got nothing against transporting ’em,” he said. “Where I draw the line is picking ’em up.”

“Picking them up?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Carolyn said. She lifted the cat carrier and placed it on the floor of the Jeep, between the two suitcases. The driver closed the rear door, then went up front and got behind the wheel. Carolyn and I got into the passenger compartment.

“Could be it strikes you as peculiar,” he said, “but a man has to draw the line. People want you to haul all manner of livestock. If it’s a cat today it’ll be a horse tomorrow.”

I snuck a peek at Raffles. He was a cat today, and somehow I couldn’t make myself believe he’d be a horse tomorrow.

“Snowing to beat the band,” our driver said, starting the engine and pulling away from the curb. “Good thing for you you’re in a four-wheeled vehicle.”

“As opposed to a bicycle?”

Carolyn treated me to an elbow. “Four-wheel drive,” she said, and leaned forward. “You think we’re in for a lot of snow?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time, and she’s coming down right heavy. I’ll get you to Cuttleford, though. This here’ll get through most anything. Can’t take you over the bridge, though.”

“The bridge?”

“There’s a parking lot,” I explained, “where you have to leave your car, and then you walk across a bridge, and then it’s a few steps to the house itself.”

“Quarter mile,” the driver said. “Be a wagon there for your bags. I suppose you could put your animal into it.”

“We’ll manage,” Carolyn told him.

The roads to Cuttleford were something out of a Judy Garland song. They kept getting rougher, and lonelier and tougher. The snow fell steadily, and the Jeep proved equal to the challenge, going where no vehicle had gone before. I wouldn’t have dreamed of calling it a car.

“ Cuttleford Road,” the driver announced, braking and turning to the left, where a one-lane road made its way through thick woods. “Been plowed within the hour. The young ’un’s doing.”

“The young ’un?”

“Orris,” he said. “Works for them, don’t he?” He tapped his head significantly with his forefinger. “The least bit slow, Orris. Does his work, though. Have to give him that. I never credited those stories, anyway.”

“Stories?”

“You can’t believe half of what you hear,” he said. “Better to have the boy plowing driveways than locked away for his whole life.”

“Why would they lock him up?” Carolyn wanted to know. “What did he do, anyway?”

“Not my place to say. Never been a believer in carrying tales.”

Carolyn started to press the issue, then broke off when we braked to a stop alongside a clearing where eight or ten cars were parked, as well as a half-ton panel truck and a Jeep with a snowplow attached to its front.

“If you brought your own car,” he said, “that’s where you’d have to leave it. Except you’d likely be stuck somewhere, ’less you had four wheels.”

I’d been planning on suggesting that quaintness could yield to expediency for once, and that he drive us across the bridge and drop us at the door. One look at the bridge made it clear that was out of the question. It was narrower than the Jeep, narrower indeed than any four-wheeled vehicle larger than a shopping cart, and it was suspended by rope cables across a deep gorge.

The driver cut the Jeep’s engine, and I got out and walked to the edge, or as close as I cared to get to it. I couldn’t see anything below, and I couldn’t hear anything, either.

“Quiet,” I said.

“Cuttlebone Creek. She’s iced over. Be frozen clear to the bottom by daybreak, if she’s not already.”

“Is the bridge safe?” Carolyn wanted to know.

“What a question,” I said. “Of course it’s safe.”

“’S good strong rope,” he said.

“Good strong rope,” I echoed.

“Thing about rope,” he said, “is it rains, don’t it? And the damp soaks into it, and then it turns cold and freezes. And then it’s brittle, innit?”

“It is?”

“Snap like a twig,” he said.

“Er.”

“But it ain’t yet,” he said with satisfaction. “Best cross before it does. See the wagons? Put your luggage in ’em. And your animal.”

“Look,” Carolyn said. “This is a Jeep, right? Not a car but a Jeep.”

He looked at her.

“Well, he’s a cat,” she said. “Not an animal. So don’t call him an animal. Show a little respect.”

He didn’t call him an animal again, but neither did he call him anything else, or say another word. I think Carolyn left him dumbstruck, and I only wish she’d spoken up earlier. He opened the back of the Jeep, lifted out our suitcases, and stepped back in silence. Cat, animal, or four-wheeled mammal, the rules weren’t about to change. Whatever he was, we had to tote him ourselves.

We picked out a pair of little red wagons, loaded Raffles and the luggage, and made our way across the bridge and along a winding path to Cuttleford House. Crossing the bridge was actually a lot less perilous than some of the things I’ve been called upon to do in my career as a burglar, but there’s something about walking upon a surface that moves beneath your feet that can put one, well, off-stride.

Carolyn wanted to know how deep the gorge was. I asked her what difference it made. “Either way,” I said, “it’s the same rickety bridge. Either way we have to cross it.”

“I guess I just want to know how far we’re gonna fall, Bern.”

“We’re not going to fall.”

“I know,” she said. “But if we do, are we looking at bruises or broken bones or a grease spot? When you can’t see, you wind up picturing a bottomless abyss, but maybe it’s more like five or six feet.”

I didn’t say anything.

“ Bern?”

“I’m trying to picture a bottomless abyss,” I said. “What would it look like?”

“ Bern -”

I don’t think Raffles was crazy about the bridge, either, although he didn’t seem that much happier when we were back on solid ground. Plaintive noises issued from his cat carrier. I wondered if he could see his breath. I could see mine.

The path to the house had been recently cleared, and I wondered how Orris had managed it with the plow parked on the other side of the bridge. Then we rounded a bend and the house came into view, a light glowing in every window, a plume of smoke rising from the chimney. Near the front entrance, just to the side of one of a pair of pillars, stood a snow blower, its own top surface already covered with an inch of fresh snow.

“Orris can’t be too slow,” I said, “if he can figure out how to work one of those things.” I lifted our bags onto the porch, set the cat carrier alongside them. “I pick up animals. I brake for yokels. What are we supposed to do with the wagons?”

She pointed, and I saw a whole herd of red wagons, a counterpart to the group on the other side of the bridge. I parked ours with the others. “Now they can catch up on all the gossip,” I told Carolyn. “What stories they’ll have to tell.”

She rolled her eyes. I rang the doorbell, and I was just about to ring it again when the heavy door opened inward, held by a hulking youth with a shock of dark blond hair. He had the look in his eyes that the average person gets by being smacked in the forehead with a two-by-four. He motioned us inside, then reached for the suitcases and dropped them at the front desk, even as a tall gentleman with a well-bred smile was emerging from behind it.

“Welcome, welcome,” he said. “Wretched weather, isn’t it? And I’m afraid we’re in for rather a good deal of it, if the chap on the radio is to be believed. Did you have a horrid time getting here?”

“It wasn’t so bad.”

“Ah, that’s the spirit.” You’d have thought I’d kept a stiff upper lip through the Blitz. “But let me welcome you formally to Cuttleford House. I’m your host, actually. Nigel Eglantine. And you would be-?”

“Bernard Rhodenbarr.”

“I rather thought you would be Mr. Rhodenbarr, although you might have been Mr. Littlefield. We’re not really expecting the Littlefields for another hour, and they may be even later the way it’s snowing.” He frowned at the prospect, then brightened and beamed at Carolyn. “And this would be Miss Lettice Runcible,” he said.

“Uh, no,” I said. “This would be Miss Carolyn Kaiser.”

“Quite,” he said. “Of course it would. Ah, Mr. Rhodenbarr, Miss Kaiser, let me just see where we’ve put you.” He checked the register, snatched up a pencil, used one end of it to rub out Lettice’s name and the other to jot down Carolyn’s, and managed all this while telling us that we must be famished, that dinner had already been served, actually, but that there’d be something for us in the dining room as soon as we’d had a chance to get to our room and freshen up.

“We’ve put you in Aunt Augusta’s Room,” he said. “I think you’ll be quite comfortable there.”

“I’m sure we will,” Carolyn said. “But what about Aunt Augusta? Will she have to sleep in the hall?”

He laughed richly, as if Carolyn had said something wonderfully amusing. “Oh, that’s just our way,” he said. “I’m afraid we’ve named all the sleeping rooms for friends and relatives, and of course we’d be delighted to put Aunt Augusta into her room if she were ever to come visit, but it’s not terribly likely. She’s in a nursing home in Harpenden, poor thing.”

“That’s too bad.”

“But I do think she’d like the room if she ever saw it, and I hope you’ll be happy there yourselves. It’s Cissy’s particular favorite.”

“Cissy?”

“My wife. Christened Cecilia, but there’s nothing quite so enduring as a childhood nickname, is there? Your room’s up that staircase and along to the left, and you just keep going until you get to it. Will you want a hand with your luggage?”

“We can manage.”

“If you’re quite certain. I’d send Orris with you, but he seems to have slipped off somewhere.” His eyes narrowed. “I say, is that a cat in there?”

It would have been difficult to deny, the animal in question having just announced himself with a meow like chalk on a blackboard. “He’s a Manx,” I said. “His name is Raffles.”

“Of course it is,” he said. “And of course he’s a perfect gentleman about, ah, bathroom habits and that sort of thing.”

“Of course.”

“Then I’m sure he’ll be quite at home here,” he said smoothly, “and I’m sure we’ll be glad of his company.”

“It’s nice that the rooms all have names,” Carolyn said. “It’s so much cozier than having a room with a number.”

I was at the window, watching it snow. It seemed pretty serious about it.

“More challenging, too,” she went on. “If they’d put us in Room 28, we’d have known to look for it between Room 27 and Room 29. But how would anybody know to look for Aunt Augusta between Uncle Roger and Cousin Beatrice?”

“And directly across the hall from Vicar Andrews.”

“That sounds a little scandalous, if you ask me. Maybe there’s rhyme and reason to it, but you’d need a copy of the family tree to sort it all out. This is a great room, though, Bern. Nice, huh? Beamed ceiling, fireplace, big window looking out at-what does it look out at, Bern?”

“Snow,” I said. “Whatever happened to global warming?”

“You only get that in the summer. Anyway, I don’t care how much it snows now that we’re inside. I’d rather look at snow than a fire escape and a row of garbage cans, which is all you can see from my window on Arbor Court. You know, Bern, all this room needs is one more thing and it would be perfect.”

“What’s that?”

“A second bed.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, this is a real beauty, a four-poster with a chintz canopy and all, and it looks really comfy.” She hopped onto it, kicked her shoes off, stretched out. “It’s even better than it looks,” she reported, “and if you were a beautiful woman I’d like nothing better than to share it with you. They made a mistake, huh? You told them twin beds, didn’t you?”

“I must have.”

“‘I must have.’ That’s a no, right?”

“I meant to, Carolyn.”

“You meant to.”

I sighed. “When I made the reservation,” I said, “it was for me and Lettice, and I specified a double bed. As a matter of fact, I made a special point of specifying a double bed.”

“I bet you did.”

“And when I sent them a deposit, I put that in the note I enclosed along with the check.”

“And then Lettice decided to get married instead.”

“Right.”

“And you brought me in off the bench.”

“To save the game,” I said. “And I realized we would be happier with twin beds, and I started to make the call, and I felt like an idiot. ‘Hi, this is Bernie Rhodenbarr, that’s R-H-O, right, and I’ll be arriving as scheduled a week from Thursday, but I want twin beds instead of a double. Oh, and by the way, Ms. Runcible won’t be coming with me. But Ms. Kaiser will.’”

“I see what you mean.”

“I figured I’d wait until I could think of a graceful way to do it, and I’m still waiting. Look, we’ve been friends a long time, Carolyn. Neither of us is going to turn into a sex maniac in the middle of the night. We can share a bed platonically.”

“I just wonder if we’ll get any sleep. This bed’s comfy, but it sags in the middle. We may keep rolling into each other.”

“We’ll manage,” I insisted. “Anyway, we’ll probably be sleeping in shifts.”

“I brought pajamas.”

“I mean we’ll take turns. The middle of the night’s the best time for me to check out the library shelves.”

“Won’t that be suspicious, Bern?”

“Why? What else do you do when you have insomnia? You look for a good book to read.”

“Preferably a signed first edition. So you figure you’ll be up nights?”

“Most likely.”

“So I’ll be all alone in a haunted house.”

“What makes you think it’s haunted?”

“If you were a ghost, Bern, would you pass up a place like this? The walls tilt, the floorboards creak, the windowpanes rattle every time the wind blows. You might as well hang out a sign-‘Ghost wanted-ideal working conditions.’”

“Well, I didn’t see any sign like that.”

“Of course not. The position’s been filled. I’ll be lying here awake and you’ll be downstairs looking for The Big Sleep. Bern, look at Raffles, he’s pacing back and forth like an expectant father. Open the bathroom door for him, will you?”

I opened the door and looked straight at a batch of coat hangers.

“ Bern, don’t tell me.”

“It’s an old-fashioned authentic country house,” I said.

“Does that mean they don’t have bathrooms?”

“Of course they have bathrooms.”

“Where?”

“In the hall.”

“Gee,” she said, “I sure am glad we’re not in some impersonal modern resort, with numbered rooms and separate beds and level floors and rattle-free windows and private baths. I’m glad we don’t have to put up with that kind of soul-deadening experience.”

I opened the hall door and followed Raffles through it. I came back to report that the bathroom was just down the hall, between Uncle Edmund and Aunt Petra. “And Raffles doesn’t seem to mind that it’s a communal john,” I added. “He found it perfectly suitable.”

“How’s he going to get in there by himself, Bern? If the door’s closed, he won’t be able to turn the knob.”

“If the door’s closed,” I said, “that means somebody else is in there, and he’ll have to wait his turn. If the john’s not occupied, you leave the door ajar. That’s how it works with communal bathrooms.”

“What about this door?”

“Huh?”

“How’s he going to get out in the middle of the night,” she said, “if our door’s closed?”

“Hell,” I said. “We should have brought a cat box.”

“He’s trained to use the toilet, just like a person. You can’t go and untrain him.”

“You’re right. I guess we’ll just have to leave the door open a crack.”

“That’s great,” she said. “You’ll be downstairs, and ghosts’ll be dragging chains through the halls, and I’ll be lying in here in the dark with the door open, waiting for the young ’un to murder me in my bed. This gets better every minute.”

“‘The young ’un.’ Orris? Why would he murder you in your bed?”

“Because that’s where I’ll be,” she said, “unless I’m hiding under it.”

“But what makes you think he-”

“‘Better to have him plowing driveways than locked away his whole life.’ What do you figure he did that made them lock him away?”

“But that’s the point, Carolyn. They didn’t lock him away.”

“It evidently crossed their minds,” she said, “and they decided against it. What do you figure gave them the notion?”

“He’s evidently a little slow,” I said. “Maybe there was some sentiment in favor of institutionalizing him for that reason, but instead it was determined that he could lead a productive life outside.”

“Plowing driveways, for instance.”

“And being a general handyman.”

“And lurking,” she said. “And drooling. And slipping into Aunt Augusta’s Room with an ax.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “when people are cranky, it’s because they’re hungry.”

“And sometimes it’s because they need a drink, and sometimes it’s both.” She got out of bed, combed her hair with her fingertips, brushed some imaginary lint off her blazer. “C’mon,” she said. “What are we waiting for?”

After all that, I was expecting dinner to be a disaster-translucent roast beef, say, and vegetables boiled into submission. The outlook improved, though, when we got to the bottom of the stairs and met a woman with feathery blond hair, plump chipmunk cheeks, and an air of radiant well-being. “The Rhodenbarrs,” she said, beaming, and who could presume to correct her? “I’m Cissy Eglantine, and I do hope you’re happy in Aunt Augusta’s Room. I think it’s quite the coziest, myself.”

We assured her it was charming.

“Oh, I’m so glad you like it,” she said. “Now we’re getting a late supper laid for you in the dining room, but I wonder if you might want to stop in the bar first? Nigel’s especially proud of his selection of single-malt Scotches, if you have any interest at all in that sort of thing.”

We admitted to a sort of academic interest and hurried off to the bar. “The trouble with trying to compare different whiskies,” Carolyn said when we finally moved on to the dining room, “is that by the time you’re sipping the fourth one, it’s impossible to remember what the first one tasted like. So you have to go back and start over.”

“And before long,” I said, “you have trouble remembering other things. Like your name.”

“Well, nobody else remembers my name, so why should I? I just got here an hour ago and already I’ve been Ms. Runcible and Mrs. Rhodenbarr. I can’t wait to see what the future holds. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” I said. “Something smells terrific.”

And so it was. A rich and savory soup, a salad of romaine and Boston lettuce with walnuts and dill, and a thick slab of prime rib flanked with crisp little roasted potatoes. The waitress, a skittish country girl who might have been Orris’s sister (or his wife, or both), brought us mugs of brown ale without asking, and filled them up when we emptied them.

Dessert was some sort of fruit cobbler, topped with what Carolyn said had to be clotted cream. “Look at this,” she said. “You could float a scone on it. You could float the Stone of Scone on it. Bern, forget everything I said.”

“Starting when?”

“Starting when we got here. You want to know something? I don’t give a rat’s ass if the place is haunted. If the ghost’s got any sense he won’t come anywhere near our room, anyway. He’ll hang out in the kitchen. Bern, this is one of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life.”

“You know what they say. Hunger’s the best sauce.”

“I was hungry enough to eat my shoes,” she said, “I’ll admit it, but it was still an incredible meal. Can you believe it? The coffee’s good. I meant to order tea, because everybody knows the English can’t make a decent cup of coffee. But this is great. How do you explain that, Bern?”

“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.”