“in three minutes and twenty seconds.” In Pickax one was never more than five minutes away from anywhere.
The clinic occupied a lavishly renovated stone stable that had once been a ten-cent barn behind the old Pickax Hotel in horse-and-buggy days. Jody greeted Qwilleran eagerly. In her long white coat she looked even more diminutive.
“I’ve been trying to reach you!” she said. “Juney wants you to know that he’s flying Down Below to see the editor who promised him job. He left at noon.”
“Well, that’s the end of the Picayune,” Qwilleran said.
“Fasten your seat belt. You’re going for a ride.” She adjusted the dental chair to its lowest level. “Is your head comfy?”
“How late did Junior stay at the fire scene?”
“He got in at five-thirty this morning, and he was beat! They had to stay and watch for hot spots, you know ... Now open wide.”
“Salvage anything?” he asked quickly before complying.
“I don’t think so. The papers that weren’t burned were soaked. As soon as they knocked the fire down they let Juney go in with an air pack to see if he could find a fireproof box that belonged to his dad. But the smoke was too thick. He couldn’t eve see — Oops! Did I puncture you?”
“Arrh,” Qwilleran replied with his mouth full of instruments.
Jody’s tiny fingers had a delicate touch, but her hands were shaking after a sleepless night.
“Juney says they don’t know what caused the fire. He didn’t let anyone smoke when they were taking pictures ...Is that a sensitive spot?”
“Arrh arrh.”
“Poor Juney! He was crushed — absolutely crushed! He’s really not strong enough to be a nozzleman, you know, but the chief let him take the hose — with three backup men instead of two. It made Juney feel — not so helpless, you know ... Now you can rinse out.”
“Building well insured?”
“Just a tad wider, please. That’s it! ... There’s some insurance, but most of the stuff is priceless, because it’s old an irreplaceable... Now rinse.”
“Too bad the old issues weren’t on microfilm and stored somewhere for safety.”
“Juney said it would cost too much money.”
“Who reported the fire?” Another quick question between rinses.
“Some kids cruising on Main Street. They saw smoke, and when the trucks got there, the whole building was in flames ... Is this hurting you?”
“Arrh arrh.”
She sighed. “So I guess Juney will take a job at the Fluxion, and his mother will sell everything.” She whipped off the bib. “There you go! Have you been flossing after every meal like Dr. Zoller told you?”
“Inform Dr. Zoller,” Qwilleran said, “that not only do I floss after meals but I floss between the courses. In restaurants I’m known as the Mad Flosser.”
From the dental clinic he went to Scottie’s Men’s Shop. Qwilleran, whose mother had been a Mackintosh, was partial to Scots, and the storekeeper had a brogue that he turned on for good customers.
Throughout his career Qwilleran had never cared much about clothes, being satisfied with a drab uniform of coat, pants, shirt, and tie. There was something about the north-country lifestyle, however, that sparked his interest in tartan shirts, Icelandic sweaters, shearling parkas, trooper hats, bulky boots, and buckskin choppers. And the more Scottie burred his r’s, the more Qwilleran bought.
Entering the store, Qwilleran said, “What happened to the four inches of snow we were supposed to get today?”
“All bosh,” said Scottie, shaking his shaggy head of gray hair. “Canna believe a worrrd of what they say on radio. A body can get better information from the wooly caterpillars.”
“You look as if you lost some sleep last night.”
“Aye, it were a bad one, verra bad,” said the volunteer fire chief. “Didna get home till six this mornin’. Chipmunk and Kennebeck sent crews to help. Couldna do it without ‘em — or without our women, God bless ‘em. Kept the coffee and sandwiches comin’ all night.”
“How did Junior take it?”
“It were hard on the lad. Many a time I been in the newspaper office to pass the time o’ day with his old man. A fire trap, it was! Tons of paper! And them old wood partitions — dry as tinder — and the old wood floor!” Scottie shook his head again.
“Any idea how it started?”
“Couldna say. They’d been takin’ pictures, and it could be a careless cigarette smolderin’. There’s a flammable solvent they always used for cleanin’ the old presses, and when it hit, it raced like wildfire.”
“Any suspicion of arson?”
“No evidence of monkey business. No reason to bring the marshal up here to my way o’ thinkin’.”
“But you saved the lodge hall and post office, Scottie.”
“Aye, we did indeed, but it were touch an’ go.”
On the way home Qwilleran stopped at the public library to check the reading room. The man who claimed to be a historian was not there, and the clerks had not seen him since Tuesday morning. Polly Duncan was not there either, and the clerks said she had left for the day.
For dinner that night Mrs. Cobb served beef Stroganoff and poppy-seed noodles, and after second helpings and a wedge of pumpkin pie, Qwilleran took some out-of-town newspapers and two new magazines into the library. He drew the draperies and touched a match to Mr. O’Dell’s expert arrangement of split logs, kindling, and paper twists. Then he sprawled in his favorite lounge chair and propped his feet on the ottoman.
The Siamese immediately presented themselves. They knew a fire was being lighted before the woody aroma circulated, before the crackle of the kindling, even before the match was struck. After washing up in the of the blaze, Koko started nosing books and Yum Yum jumped on Qwilleran’s lap, turning around three times before settling down.
The female was developing an inordinate affection for the man. She was brazenly possessive of his lap. She gazed at him with adoring eyes, purred when he looked her way, and liked nothing better than to reach up and touch his moustache with a velvet paw. True, he called her his little sweetheart, but her obsessive desire for propinquity was disturbing. He had mentioned it to Lori Bamba, the young woman who knew all about cats.
“They go for the opposite sex,” Lori explained, “and they know which is which. It’s hard to explain.”
Yum Yum was dozing on his lap, a picture of catly contentment, when Qwilleran heard the first thlunk. There was no sense in scolding Koko. It went in one pointed ear and out the other. When reprimanded in the past, he had not only resented it; he had found his own ingenious way of retaliation. In any argument, Qwilleran had learned, a Siamese always has the last word.
So he merely sighed, transferred his lapful of sleeping fur to the ottoman, and went to see what damage had been done. As he expected, it was Shakespeare again. Mrs. Fulgrove had been rubbing the pigskin bindings with a mixture of lanolin and neat’s-foot oil, to preserve the leather, and both ingredients were animal products. But whatever the explanation for Koko’s special interest in these books, two of them were now on the floor, and they happened to be Qwilleran’s favorite plays: Macbeth and Julius Caesar.
He leafed through the latter until he found a passage he liked: the conspiracy scene, in which men plotting to assassinate Caesar meet under cover of darkness, shadowing their faces with their cloaks. “And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood up to the elbows, and besmear our swords.”
Conspiracy, Qwilleran reflected, was Shakespeare’s favorite device for establishing conflict, creating suspense, and grabbing the emotions of the audience. In Macbeth there was the conspiracy to murder the old kind. “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”