The Grub-And-Stakers Move a Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page A

pink crepe paper butterfly wings pinned to her yellow organdie back. At eight she’d marched with the Brownies in the Dominion Day parade. At eleven she’d picked up discarded Molson’s Ale bottles and Hatfield’s Potato Chip wrappers for six hours without a break during the Girl Guides’ Annual Roadside Cleanup Day. At fifteen she’d whanged a mean glockenspiel in the regional high school band.
    Dittany had been proud and honored to join the Grub-and stake Gardening and Roving Club as a third-generation member.
    She’d honestly meant to be a credit to the organization but she was, after all, her mother’s daughter and the former Mrs. Henbit’s best-laid plans tended to gang agley as often as not.
    This had been one of those agley days. Dittany had started out to be beautifully organized. She’d remembered she was on the Tea Committee even before Mrs. Mac Vicar called to remind her.
    She’d prepared dainty sandwiches on thin-sliced date bread, filled with cream cheese and walnuts plus a dash of horseradish for zest and a sprinkling of paprika for color. She’d trimmed the crusts, carved her creations into neat triangles, and packed them between layers of biodegradable waxed paper in a Crawford’s biscuit tin. She’d set the tin in the fridge to keep the sandwiches fresh.
    She’d washed her hair and fluffed it with one of the four blow-dryers her mother had bought her in moments of forgetful benevolence. She’d thought of plucking her eyebrows but quit after a couple of experimental tweaks because Dittany was no masochist. Anyway they were so light a brown they didn’t show much. Dittany’s coloring was all betwixt and between: her hair more blondish than brownish, her eyes more green than blue, her complexion more fair than not, more peachy than pinky. Her face might never have launched a thousand ships, especially not on Lake Ontario, but it was a face most people would rather see than not.
    She’d got herself slicked up in the aforementioned camel-hair slacks and a matching cashmere pullover, being small and slim enough to wear such garments without bulging except where she was supposed to bulge. She’d added Gram Henbit’s gold chain and watch, which didn’t tell time anymore but was quite lovely to look at. Then she realized she’d done all these things hours too soon, so she’d dutifully sat down to stap Sir Percy’s buttons until she couldn’t stand that any longer. Then she’d gone for that catastrophic walk and now here she was with paw prints all over her clothes and huge questions in her mind and no time to do anything about either.
    She dashed into the house, grabbed her biscuit tin, and raced to the public library where meetings were now held since one member had resigned in a huff because she was forever being asked to have the group at her house and another had quit because she never got asked at all. She arrived one step ahead of the lecturer who was to present a program, with colored slides, on Larkspur and Lepidoptera, and flung herself into the tiny, inconvenient kitchen.
    There she found Caroline Pitz scowling into the recalcitrant recesses of a thirty-cup coffeemaker and Ellie Despard refilling the teakettle at what everybody had complained since the day it was installed was a grossly inadequate sink. Samantha Burberry was arranging lemon squares on a Crown Derby plate.
    “Sorry I’m late,” Dittany panted. “I’ve been having the most fantastically ghastly experience.”
    “When have you ever not?” drawled Samantha. “I hope you’ve brought sandwiches. Imogene Laplace was supposed to and she made these gorgeous lemony things instead. Not that I wouldn’t rather have them myself”-she suited deed to word by helping herself to one then and there-“but it says in the bylaws we’re supposed to have sandwiches.”
    Even with her mouth full of lemon square Samantha managed to sound coolly amused, although she herself was chairman of the Legislative Committee and would be