Free War and Peas by Jill Churchill Page A

Jane asked.
    “Exactly my thought," Shelley said. "Let's look over the Dreaded Basement.”
    It was the basement nightmares are made of — huge, with stone walls, a dank, musty smell, and a labyrinth of boxes, furniture, mysterious equipment, snaky old wiring, and a concrete floor. It was, however, as clean as such a place could be. A push broom with bristles worn down like an old man's teeth stood at the ready by the door. Though it was a single room with support pillars, the stored furniture and boxes created head-high rooms and hallways.
    “Do you suppose anyone's down here besides us?" Jane asked.
    “There was a light on when we came in. Let's look," Shelley replied.
    They prowled the basement, finding an amazing variety of things, but no people — if you didn't consider a family grouping of very badly constructed mannequins that appeared to be posed for eating a meal over a table that had long since disappeared. Jane had rounded a corner and come upon them unexpectedly and nearly had a heart attack at the sight of the black-suited father frozen in the act of carving a missing roast with a wicked-looking knife. She yelped with surprise and Shelley came running.
    “My God!" Shelley exclaimed. "He looks just like my dentist."
    “Are we going to have to categorize all this stuff?" Jane asked.
    “I hope not. I'm certain they won't want to take along something like the Happy Family here. Although" — she grinned wickedly—"I do wonder how you go about disposing of something like them."
    “Mike might like to take the daughter to college with him. She's kinda cute," Jane said.
    “And you could stand Mother at your kitchen sink so that anybody glancing in the window might imagine somebody domestic lived at your house."
    “What's this?" Jane went over to look at a large piece of furniture against the wall. It was eight feet tall and nearly as wide and was composed entirely of wooden drawers about nine inches square. At the front of each drawer was a small brass "picture frame" with a card slipped into it. The cards had numbers and letters on them, like "A34 x N47." Jane cautiously opened a drawer. It was full of shriveled-up peas.
    “This must have been Auguste Snellen's storage for his pea experiments, don't you think?" Shelley said.
    “I wonder if any of them would grow if you planted them."
    “Probably not. Well, maybe so, come to think of it. Didn't they find a bunch of wheat in a pyramid that they got to sprout after five thousand years or something? I saw a program about it on television once."
    “Wonder what the numbers mean," Jane said. "Maybe a cross between two other kinds. See, up there at the top are a bunch of drawers without the 'x something' part."
    “He probably had all the details recorded in books somewhere," Shelley said. "Some of the cards in the little frames look much older and more faded than others. There were probably lots of duds that got disposed of—"
    “Oh! The Depression pea story. I almost forgot to tell you," Jane said. She related the conversation she'd overheard when she first arrived at the museum.
    “That is nice," Shelley said when Jane was done. "It really sums up an era, doesn't it? All the kids out crawling around the field to pick the peas so they'd have ground cover to hold the soil down the next year. We couldn't get
our
kids to do that."
    “I bet we could if it was a matter of eating or starving."
    “How nice that it was Sharlene he picked to tell the story to," Shelley said.
    “Just what I thought. Shelley. ." She paused for a moment. "It really isn't any of our business who killed Regina, is it?"
    “No, it isn't. But. .”
    Jane sat down on a wooden crate and spoke quietly. "I was determined not to get involved. Not to care about someone I never knew. But now that I've come to know some of these people, I find that I'm caring in spite of myself."
    “Me, too," Shelley admitted. She perched on the corner of a sturdy buffet table. "Mel would wash our mouths out