Killer Confections8 Delectable Mysteries(538)

I left the groceries where they were and went out back to help Mose shovel out the henhouse. We do it twice a year, when the weather’s not too cold, but cold enough so that it moderates the fumes from the acrid droppings. The fall rakings, which include a lot of straw, are spread over the vegetable patch, and come spring, it’s tame enough to make a lovely fertilizer. The spring rakings go on the compost heap. By late summer they’ve mellowed enough to assist the fall crop.

Our chickens are range fed, which means they don’t spend a lot of time in the henhouse, except at night, or to lay. Often there’s no one at home when we shovel. There’s something therapeutic, almost religious, about shoveling excrement in an empty henhouse twice a year. It’s not only humbling, but in addition to cleaning the joint, I usually feel like my soul has been somehow cleansed as well. Of course, it may be just the fumes.

“Say, Mose,” I began, once the job was done, “did you see Mrs. Ream, the Congressman’s wife, taking a walk this morning?”

Mose shook his head. “I didn’t see any of the English this morning.”

“Well, that’s strange, because Mrs. Ream told Susannah she went out for a walk by the barn after breakfast.”

Mose took off his straw hat and wiped his forehead with his coat sleeve. “I didn’t see any of the English,” he repeated, “but there was someone out by the barn.”

“You heard someone?”

“No. Matilda did.” Matilda Holsteincoo is one of our two remaining cows. To hear Mose talk, you’d think they were the daughters he never had.

“What do you mean Matilda did?”

“She wouldn’t let down her milk for the longest time. It makes her nervous, you know, if someone else is there.”

“What about Bertha? Was she nervous too?”

Mose knew I was teasing him, but as usual he never let on. “Bertha knows no shame. She gave even more than usual.”

“That hussy!”

Mose smiled despite himself. Then his face darkened. “Magdalena, which one of the English does that car belong to?” He pointed to the asphalt-gray jalopy once owned by the deceased Miss Brown.

“Ah, that belonged to the woman who accidentally fell down our stairs. Heather Brown. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know much about cars, Magdalena, but that one’s broken in back. Where you put stuff. I think it happened here.”

“You mean the trunk?”

“That’s what I mean.”

We walked over to the car to take a closer look. Sure enough, the trunk lid was open. The evidence suggested that it had been forced. There were scratch marks around the keyhole, and along the bottom of the trunk lid there was a series of indentations. It would have been obvious even to Melvin’s mother that someone had used a crowbar to force it open.

“What makes you think it happened here?”

“It didn’t look like that yesterday.”

“You sure?”

I thought I saw Mose blush. “I’m sure. I had my eye on that one. If Freni and I were ever to get a car, it would be one like that, I think. Not too worldly. Of course, we would paint it black.”

“Of course.”

I peered into the trunk. It was empty. If there had been something worth the trouble to force it open, it was no longer there. The floor of the trunk was carpeted, gray of course, and, as I would have expected from Miss Brown, must have been recently vacuumed. But then, just as I was turning away, something caught my eye. Just inside the trunk, almost hidden by the curve of metal that formed the rear lip, was a single sunflower seed. Once I saw it, it was as obvious as a diamond on a coal heap.

Mose saw it too. “The Englishman. The tall, skinny Englishman. He eats seeds like that.”

For some reason I felt immediately defensive of young Joel Teitlebaum. “One swallow does not a summer make,” I countered. “And besides, Mose, does he seem like the type who could jimmy this open with a crowbar?”

“Freni could.”

I politely rolled my eyes by turning my head away first. “Freni could do anything, Mose. She was born on a farm. I doubt if Joel could even open one of Freni’s jars of pickled watermelon rinds. I think it was someone else, trying to make it look like Joel. It seems too obvious to me.”

“What do you mean?”

I told Mose about the fire escape door being left open, and the trail of sunflower seed shells.

Mose pointed to the gravel at our feet. “Well, whoever it was, they chewed tobacco too.”

Then I noticed the glob of still-damp spittle containing tobacco fragments. Hernia is filled with tobacco chewers, not to mention consummate spitters of all kinds.