Rex Stout - The Mountain Cat

Standing at the electric range, frying eggs, was a tall good-looking young woman some three or four years beyond Delia’s twenty.

“What’s the idea?” Delia demanded.

Clara Brand flipped an egg and announced, “Home cooking is so much better than anything you can get—”

“Sure, I know.” Delia discarded her hat and bag. “How’d you get here?”

“Walked. It’s only ten or twelve minutes.”

“What’s the idea, really?”

Clara shrugged. “Nothing startling, only I don’t like bum food and the lunches I am accustomed to at Mischne’s cost over a dollar, and two eggs and half a cantaloupe here will come to about twenty-five, and since I will be out of a job beginning Saturday at noon — but on the other hand I may not, after all. I have a date at four o’clock for a talk with Atterson Brothers, and Jackson has generously allowed me to take whatever time I want this week to look for another place.”

“Very generous,” said Delia with bitter sarcasm, taking a pound of butter from her package and putting it in the refrigerator.

Clara smiled at her. “What the heck, he has paid me handsomely for over a year.”

“He wouldn’t have had anything to pay you with if it hadn’t been for Dad. Here, I’ll use the same pan. You won’t get any princely salary at Atterson’s.”

“No, I imagine it will be a lot less. If I land it.”

“And your savings are gone. You’ll have to give up your trip to the coast.”

Clara set her plate of eggs on the table in the breakfast nook and then turned to the other with exasperation. “Damn it, sis, can’t you see I’m being cheerful and brave? Certainly my savings are gone, and the bank says the house wouldn’t bring a dime above the mortgage, and Uncle Quin is a darling and a brick but you can’t get blood out of a brick, and mother was our dearest mother but she did raise cain with the family finances, trying to get revenge that wouldn’t have done anyone any good—”

“It wasn’t revenge!” Delia, gripping the egg turner, faced her sister with flaming eyes. “Or what if it was? There are worse things than revenge, I can tell you!”

“All right, there are.” Clara gave the younger one a pat on the shoulder as she crossed for the salt. “Take it easy, Del. I’m not kicking. Cheerful and brave.” She sat at the table. “I still think it was foolish of mother to spend thousands of dollars, all she had, and mortgage the house, to pay a bunch of detectives to find out who killed Dad — especially since they didn’t find out anyway, though that wasn’t her fault. But it was her money and her house, and I don’t know why the devil I mentioned it again. This month since she... she died... it’s been enough...”

Delia let the egg turner fall onto the range and flew across and gathered her sister’s head into her arms and crushed it against her breast.

After ten seconds Clara said quietly, “Okay, sis. Let’s behave ourselves. Don’t let your eggs burn, and before you sit down get out a jar of the grape jelly. We’re not going to leave it there forever. That wouldn’t do anyone any good either.”

The next spoken remark was some minutes later, and was a purely practical suggestion from Delia to the effect that she could drop her sister at the Jackson & Sammis office on her way to school.

The Pendleton School, accommodating grades one to six, was a long-suffering brick building placed in the middle of a spacious graveled yard. It was 1:20 that afternoon when Delia Brand got out of her car and entered the schoolhouse. She exchanged nods with a teacher she met in the wide hall and proceeded to a room on the ground floor — a large room with no benches or desks, with no furniture at all except a table, a cabinet phonograph and a couple of chairs at one end. After depositing her hat and handbag on a shelf in a narrow cloakroom which was partitioned off, Delia returned to the main room, opened the cover of the phonograph, selected a record from a full rack on the table, placed it on the machine in readiness to play, and changed the needle.

The door opened and admitted a bedlam of scuffling feet. In they came, four or five dozen of them, brats, angels, kids, urchins, cubs, hoydens, lambkins, tendrils — it all depends. There was a good deal of variation as to height, weight and cleanliness, but they all appeared to be around nine or ten years of age. They cluttered in. There appeared in the doorway a large woman with sweat on her brow, who nodded at Delia and then vanished. A gong sounded somewhere and Delia commanded, “Places! All of you! Places!”

They began to arrange themselves in rows and files, with a surprising efficiency. The size of the room permitted a spacing of about four feet. When they were all in place, with the help of a few specific admonitions from Delia, and were standing quietly, she said in a throaty voice, “Good afternoon, children.”

They chorused, “Good afternoon, Miss Brand.”

She moved to the phonograph. “This afternoon, as you know, we will practice for the Closing Day Exercises. First I’ll play the piece and go through it myself, then I’ll play it over and you can try it. We must do much better than we did last week. Much better. Watch me closely.”

She started the music going, moved to front center, raised her arms and began Rhythmic Movement. Sixty pairs of eyes were fastened on her, some studiously, some understandingly, some desperately, a few scornfully.

But the ultimate in scorn for Rhythmic Movement was not being displayed in the main room at all, but in the narrow cloakroom behind the partition. To slip in there unseen as the army trooped in was not difficult for agile feet, with quick eyes to seize on the moment, and apparently that was what had been done by the two boys who squatted in the corner, the one with big ears looking sternly at the one with red hair, with his finger pressed tight to his lips. But as soon as the noise of the music was heard, the former let his hand fall and whispered hoarsely to his companion, “They’ve started! Can’t you just see ’em? They have started!”

The other shook his head and whispered back, hissing. “She does it first!”

“I can see ’em anyway! Standing there! Standing there waiting! They soon will! Oh, boy, they soon will!”

The red-haired boy nodded and hissed, “It’s horrible.”

For a while they were content to squat and whisper, but when their legs began to cramp they stood up. The big-eared one even tiptoed cautiously the length of the little room to the window, but drew back at sight of movement in the grounds outside. When, after a little, he returned to the corner, he had something in his hand.

“What you got there?”

“Miss Brand’s bag. Boy, is it heavy!”

“Where’d you find it?”

“There on the shelf.”

“What’s in it?”

To answer that required action, not words, and they proceeded to act. Squatting again, with the handbag on the floor, they opened it.

“Jeeee -sus! She lugs a gat!”

The red-haired boy took it and aimed it at the window, and his whisper was deadly and sinister: “Ping! Ping! Ping!”

“Quit that!” the other commanded. “It may be loaded. You’d better wipe off your fingerprints. Hey! Lookit this! Do you know what’s in that?”

“No. Neither do you.”

“Oh, I don’t, don’t I? Feel the weight. It’s catriches!”

The red-haired boy, grabbing for it but missing, said, “Take off the paper and see.”

“I don’t have to. Of course it’s catriches. What good’s a gat without catriches?”

“Is they any money?”

“I don’t know and I don’t want to know. There’s places to take money and places not to take money.”

“Aw, just a dime or maybe a quarter?”