A Pint of Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

Perhaps he’d stopped in the kitchen for a snack or something, but why didn’t he at least poke his head in to see whether any patients were waiting? Janet began to get annoyed. She coughed once or twice, and when nothing happened she got up and tapped diffidently at the office door.
    Still nothing happened. She knocked louder. At last she turned the knob and said, “Dr. Druffitt, are you—”
    Then she saw the body on the floor. The crumpled mat at its feet told a clear story. The parquet floor was waxed slick as a curling rink. Dr. Druffitt must have skidded on that braided mat and bashed his head against the corner of the desk.
    Janet knelt beside him, wondering if she ought to loosen his collar or something before she called for help. But something about the look of the man told her he was beyond any help she could get. Steeling herself, she slipped a hand inside his vest to feel for a heartbeat but could find none. She remembered something she’d read once, took the mirror out of her purse, and held it to his mouth. There was no clouding of breath. She hadn’t really expected any.
    But why hadn’t she heard the crash when he fell? She’d been sitting right outside the whole time. Unless it happened during those few moments when she and Mrs. Druffitt had stood talking out at the front door. How dreadful, the husband lying dead and the wife tripping off to pour tea in her violet toque!
    “Oh my God,” Janet thought. “I’ll have to go over there and tell her.”
    Janet knew where the Tuesday Club met, in the vestry of the Reformed Baptist Church. How could she face that group of respectable ladies with a horror tale like this? How could she leave the doctor lying here alone while she went? What if some child were to come in and find him like this, or an elderly person with a bad heart?
    At last her head began to function again. Janet knew what she must do. She’d telephone to Fred Olson.
    Olson was Pitcherville’s town marshal, as well as its auto mechanic and sometime blacksmith. His police duties had never amounted to more than locking up the usual Saturday-night allotment of drunk-and-disorderlies or ticketing the odd Yank for admiring the scenery at sixty miles an hour, but he was a decent soul and better than nobody.
    By the time she got him on the line, her voice was shaking so that he had a hard time understanding the first word or two. “Fred, this is Janet Wadman. I’m down here at Dr. Druffitt’s office and you’d better come right on over. He’s—I was waiting and he didn’t come out so I knocked and then I opened the door and—for God’s sake, will you hurry?”
    She couldn’t stay there. She went back to the waiting room. It was terrible, being there alone with all those kings and queens staring down at her. Why didn’t anybody else come? Surely Dr. Druffitt must have had a few patients left.
    It was too nice a day to get sick, that was why. It was too nice a day to be finding things in people’s cellars one didn’t want to find. Now she’d never know if that jar Dr. Druffitt had sent to be analyzed was a mate to the one she had here in a bag from the Dominion Stores. She’d never know for sure that this was how Agatha Treadway was murdered.
    She might as well admit what she was thinking. Somebody had prepared those string beans wrong on purpose, and put them where Mrs. Treadway would find them, and eat them, and die. Two jars had been left in the cellar because there was a chance Mrs. Treadway might use the first before it had time to go bad. But there had been time enough.
    Then why didn’t the murderer come and take the second jar away? Maybe he, or she, had been too scared. Nobody had expected Marion Emery to stay on at the Mansion after her aunt died to hunt for that assuredly mythical hoard. Maybe the person hadn’t realized the vegetables were prepared in a different way from the rest. It wasn’t the sort of thing most people would notice.
    Mrs. Treadway herself wouldn’t