The Classic Mystery Novel MEGAPACK®. Hay James
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living-room dingus goes. You needn’t laugh. I mean it.”
“You’ll learn to duck.”
He did learn. Also, later on, we learned something about the erratic quality of rural electric power. City born and bred, serenely unaware of the complexities of country existence, we didn’t dream that our power would fail with every heavy rain and that we would spend many a stormy night in the dark. Nor could we anticipate the havoc which thunderstorms would play with telephone wires.
While I mastered oil-stove cookery, quite a trick in itself, and while Jack cautiously investigated wood chopping, the first month slipped past. Various unexpected irritations developed. We ran out of cigarettes at odd hours and missed the corner delicatessen. Also we discovered that our budget had been exceedingly optimistic. The Crockford tradespeople, to the last man labored under the misapprehension that New Yorkers could and would pay double for everything.
Then there was the pipeless furnace which Jack, softened by years of apartment dwelling, found an insoluble mystery. After two weeks, when we alternately burned and froze, he threw up his hands and we hired Silas Elkins, local talent recommended by our landlady. Silas was a thin, gangling individual, habitually dressed in overalls, usually accompanied by a small, timid, sand-colored dog. One look at Silas convinced me that he was incompetent, and further acquaintanceship failed to change my mind. In addition, he had bad manners, arrogance and an astounding conceit. Except for himself, so far as I know, he admired only one person in the world—and that person was Luella Coatesnash. Long before I first laid eyes on him, he had adopted all her ways and notions as his own. He quoted her almost daily and did everything in his power to force our regime to duplicate hers. Nearly every day I would hear him and Jack engaged in battle.
“You’re using too much coal,” Jack would begin mildly.
“If you folks would go to bed at nine o’clock when other folks do and not want heat till twelve…”
“But we do want heat till twelve, and we aren’t up at six when you fire the furnace.”
“Mrs. Coatesnash has her furnace fired at six sharp. She’s had it done at six o’clock for twenty years.”
Silas continued to adjust our heat and, consequently, our habits, in the manner he considered fitting. We retired earlier and rose earlier. We hadn’t the money to import labor, and it was, for all practical purposes anyway, impossible to replace Silas; poor as they were, the families living in and around Crockford did not work out. They would sell us fresh eggs, chickens, home-made jellies at prodigious prices, but they declined to clear the snow from our driveway or wash our windows. All such chores fell to Silas. He was the handy man—if the term is loosely applied—for the vicinity. Perched atop a battered bicycle, he pedaled about on neighborhood errands, doing each task arrogantly, stupidly, inefficiently.
His total unawareness of his own limitations was perhaps his most exasperating quality. In some mysterious fashion he had convinced himself he was an instinctive, untaught master of all trades. He told Jack how to paint, he told me how to write. I caught him one morning telling a county road surveyor how to straighten out a curve in the road. On another occasion after assuring me he was an expert plumber, he spent four solid hours in a fruitless attempt to repair a leaky water tap.
I find myself painting an unpleasant picture, and that first month, colored in recollection with the glitter of frosty stars, the smell of wood smoke and the soft constant flutter of snow at the windows was, in many respects, perfect. Jack and I got a great deal done. From nine until twelve we worked, calling encouragement back and forth. Lunch over, we hurried into coats and galoshes and explored the countryside. Sometimes we took the car, mostly we walked, since Jack liked to carry his pad and sketch a clump of bright red berries, or a stone wall tangled in leafless briars, or a tattered scarecrow, forlorn and desolate in the midst of winter. In the evenings we amused ourselves with the radio and spirited games of double Canfield.
From Silas and a Mr. Brown who delivered our coal we heard rumors of the gay whirl in Crockford—box suppers held monthly at Town Hall, bi-weekly basketball games in the high-school gymnasium, an occasional old-fashioned dance. A town band practiced discordantly once a week, and Silas, who played the cornet, was a regular attendant at these musical festivals. There was even a Wednesday-night and a Saturday-night movie. No one suggested that we take any part in the village activities, and it didn’t occur to us to do so. Thus, quite innocently and unknowingly, we gained for ourselves the reputation of being a stand-offish city pair, stuck-up and queer.
If there had been near neighbors, I might have taken the trouble to call. But the cottage was peculiarly isolated. The next house on the road, visible in daylight through a band of separating trees, belonged to Henry Olmstead a New Haven architect, and was occupied by him and his family only during the summer months. On the other side, the west side, sprawled a tumble down windowless ruin part of an estate tied up in family litigation.
That left as neighbors Mrs. Coatesnash our landlady, and Laura Twining, officially her companion but actually maid, cook, masseuse and overworked slavey. Three-quarters of a mile to the north of the cottage, in solitary grandeur, the two women lived in the thirty-room dwelling designated formally as Hilltop House.
Famous locally and built by the first Coatesnash who had emigrated from England to the colonies, Hilltop House clung to the opposite side of the hill which our home faced It was decidedly more impressive for sheer size than for beauty; generations of additions had destroyed any original grace or dignity. In June the dwelling would be mercifully hidden in a thicket of box and oak. In January, looking up and across the rocky, ascending pasture land we could see the upper story of the mansion’s three stories, a row of shuttered windows, a towering chimney shaft and a gingerbread cupola adorned by scroll work which somewhat resembled the crocheted edging my mother used to sew on underwear.
Except for the day we signed our lease, we viewed Hilltop House from a distance. Mrs. Coatesnash was an unsocial woman who made it plain that she desired no traffic with impecunious young tenants.
Laura Twining, the companion, was another matter. She had lived ten long years in the country and she loved an audience. We became the audience, more often than we chose. I liked Laura, or perhaps I only pitied her, and I willingly admitted that a little of her company went a long way. Jack frankly detested her. He likes good-looking women. Laura had a kind of peasant stoutness, pale, watering eyes, a prominent shiny nose, and a general air of having slept in her clothes. Her mannerisms were those of the socially insecure. She batted her eyes, she smoothed her hair, she patted her skirts, she straightened her stocking seams, and never got comfortably seated in a chair.
Almost every afternoon one of us would spy Laura striding down the pasture footpath, her thick body bulging in a coon coat, her untidy gray hair straggling from beneath a shapeless hat, her homely face wreathed in the happy smile of a lady about to pay a call. Jack would groan, and I would feel an inward sinking. Neither of us had the heart to be unkind; and when you live in the country, people know you are at home. They look in your yard and see your car.
Consequently we were often bored. Laura’s mind had a remarkably tenacious grasp of the obvious, the trivial, the dull. And she was extravagantly loquacious. Commonplace tales of her poverty-stricken childhood in the Middle West and later struggles in New York poured forth in an endless stream; she dwelt tirelessly upon the ten good years spent with Luella Coatesnash.
“It’s been a quiet life perhaps, but my future is provided for. I don’t have to worry about my old age, and that’s something in times like these, isn’t it?”
Jack sighed. “You’re fortunate.”
“Indeed I am. If Luelia were only a bit more sociable I’d be perfectly satisfied, perfectly. Not that one can blame Luelia. She lost her only child you know, a lovely girl, and since then she’s never really been the same. In the old days, I’m told, she entertained on a grand scale, caterers from New York, flowers from Bromley’s in New Haven, solid gold plate…”
Laura’s eyes glowed, a little color tinted her cheeks. She possessed the curbed, thwarted instincts of hospitality, and a rather pitiful groping toward a full and gracious existence. She read family