Something the Cat Dragged In Read Online Free PDF Page A

he?”
    “But didn’t you say Mrs. Pommell claimed Ungley had left them there after his lecture?”
    “She thought he must have when Fred couldn’t find the keys in his pocket,” Mrs. Lomax amended. “Then she went in and there they were, so she figured she’d been right, but that doesn’t prove she was.”
    “True enough. And how did Mrs. Pommell get in?”
    “She used her own key, or rather her husband’s. She carries it for him because he has all those bank keys to tote around, as she took pains to let us know.”
    “But why would her husband have a key to the clubhouse?”
    “She says all the members do. All the men, that is. Women don’t count, apparently. Anyway, I don’t know if there’s another woman but herself who goes to the meetings these days. She probably wouldn’t either, if it wasn’t so darned exclusive.”
    “Um. Just for the sake of argument, Mrs. Lomax, can you think offhand of anybody who might possibly have a reason to kill Professor Ungley?”
    “I might myself, if I’d got stuck for a whole evening having to listen to him maunder on about penknives,” she confessed. “Being as how I never got asked to join, though—”
    “Penknives?” Shandy interrupted. “What in Sam Hill did he want to talk about penknives for?”
    “It’s not so much why he wanted to do it as why the rest of ’em let him that flummoxes me. No wonder they can’t get any new members. Not that they don’t do everything they can think of to keep people out.”
    “Keep people out? What do you mean by that, Mrs. Lomax?”
    “You ever tried to join the Balaclavian Society?”
    “Er—no, I can’t say I have.”
    In fact, Shandy couldn’t have said for a certainty that he’d ever been aware until today that the group existed. He’d noticed the clubhouse because he was a noticing man, and wondered why it was never open at a time when he might conceivably have wandered in to see what it was all about. He’d also noticed a general flavor of mild decay similar to that so aptly described by Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Deacon’s Masterpiece, and thought it rather surprising that nobody ever did anything to spruce the place up a bit, but he couldn’t recall ever having tried to find out why.
    Since Mrs. Lomax was clearly waiting for him to ask what a person had to do to get in, he obliged. “How do you join?”
    “Beats me,” she replied. “Most of the clubs in town want new members so bad they’re practically yanking ’em in off the street with meat hooks, but to my sure and certain knowledge, the Balaclavian Society hasn’t let in a single, solitary one for the past sixteen years. Even Harry Goulson doesn’t belong.”
    “Good gad!” Shandy had been under the impression that the popular local mortician belonged to just about every organization in the county, even one or two of the women’s clubs. “And what about Jim Feldster?” Professor Feldster, who taught Fundamentals of Dairy Management, was an even more inveterate joiner than Goulson.
    “Turned him down flat as a pancake,” Mrs. Lomax replied, “though some said it was on account of that wife of his. Meaning no offense, her being your next-door neighbor.”
    “None taken.”
    Shandy would have blackballed Mirelle Feldster himself, if he’d ever got the chance. She’d been a continuing pain in his neck ever since he’d got his appointment to Balaclava Agricultural College. “They must have fantastically strict membership requirements, then?”
    “Fantastic isn’t the word for it, Professor. First you have to mail in a formal letter of application, along with your birth certificate—or a copy of it, anyway—and character references from your minister and two members of the church.”
    “What if you don’t go to church?”
    “Then you might as well forget it because you’re licked before you start. And, of course, if you happen not to be a Protestant, that puts the kibosh on you, too, though they don’t come straight out