Free Nipped in the Bud by Stuart Palmer Page B

herself, he probably thought her last word had been “bone.”

7
“‘The living should live, though the dead be dead,’
    Said the jolly old pedagogue, long ago.”
    —GEORGE ARNOLD
    M ISS WITHERS TRACKED DOWN a telephone, and the coffin-like booth and chain-bound directory that went with it. Somewhat to the puzzlement of the poodle she made no phone call, but headed north again, up Fifth Avenue, to turn east near the Metropolitan Museum and finally wind up in front of an old-fashioned four-story house crowded between looming apartments. But the place still stubbornly clung to a tiny yard on one side, with patches of yellowish-green grass and brown rosebushes that had long since given up the struggle against Manhattan’s fumes. The garden was heaven-sent, and swiftly the schoolteacher rearranged her plans to include this useful stage property.
    Shutters were drawn on all the windows of the Gault house, but Miss Withers somehow had a feeling that it was still inhabited. The knobs were polished, and the steps swept clean. She loosed Talley’s leash, then pointed at the iron fence surrounding the deserted little garden. “Do you suppose, Talley, that you could possibly scramble over that thing and get yourself trapped inside?”
    The poodle cocked his furry head, politely interested in her conversation but still waiting. Then she remembered that dogs, even poodles, best understand sentences of no more than two or three words. “Go!” she commanded. “Over!”
    Talley launched himself, sailed up a good part of the way and then scrabbled a bit, coming down on the other side of the barrier.
    “Dig!” said his mistress.
    Talley looked around until he found a reasonably soft spot and then began excavating in an uninspired sort of way, casting out earth and stones between his hind legs. His heart obviously wasn’t in this game. No bone had ever been buried here, and the last mole had given up decades ago. But his not to reason why.
    “Stay!” ordered Miss Withers, and then climbed the steps and firmly rang the bell. When a nervous little woman in cap and apron answered the door the schoolteacher spoke her own brand of double-talk in a cultured Bostonian accent, and ten minutes later she was sitting on the edge of a needlepoint chair in the stiffly formal living room full of heavy mahogany and obscure oil paintings, facing a little old gentleman and a little old lady.
    The bewildered hostess wore black satin and pearls, the host a velvet smoking jacket; both had an odd resemblance to one another and to certain illustrations in old popular magazines. Junior Gault must have been a late child; no great wonder that he had more or less broken with his family and gone in for a Park Avenue duplex and all that went with it.
    “Forgive me,” said Winston H. Gault, Sr. “I do not hear very well, and what the maid said makes no sense to me whatever. You say that your name is Weevil, and there is some problem or other about damages to your lap dog?”
    The schoolteacher carefully avoided meeting the sharp little black eyes, which belied the fumbling voice. She corrected him about her name. “Somehow,” she sailed on brazenly, “my dog has got into your garden, where I am unable to follow him because of the fence. He is, I believe, at the moment digging among your rosebushes.”
    “Oh, is that all!” It was obvious that the rosebushes were of no moment.
    “Not quite, Mr. Gault. I must admit that when it happened I was lurking in front of your house, trying to get up enough courage to ask you to see me. I am looking for a missing relative—”
    “In our garden?” gasped the little old lady, who wasn’t, Miss Withers decided, quite so old as at first she had seemed.
    “No, not in your garden. But Ina Kell has disappeared.”
    “I am very sorry. But I still don’t see—”
    “Ina Kell is supposed to be the principal witness against your son at his forthcoming trial,” Miss Withers said gently. “She admitted to the