LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 30

     An assortment of body odors wafted around the large hexagonal lounge.  An assortment of bodies contributed to this.  Matt couldn’t tell how many: the room was dim, despite a scattering of floor lamps, while the mirrors scattered among the paneling didn’t help.  He didn’t especially feel a need for more light.  What he saw of the other guests made him disinclined to pursue an acquaintance, and what he could make out of the décor did not appeal to him.

     Walls and floor had obviously been ordered from a catalog, with flimsy side tables and lamps from the same supplier.  Other furniture was more substantial—dark, armless chairs, thick footstools, and a quantity of tall wooden boxes with leather cushions on the tops–but it did not please him.

     He found no sign of waiters nor an organized floor show.  But there was plenty showing on the floor.  The hostess led them past people dressed only in their skimps, or buttoned into full uniform.  Sounds which could have come from a strong of firecrackers—but didn’t—made him wince.  About a third of the congregation were fastened to something: face u[p or face down, ankles high or ankles strapped to the legs of footstools.  A few cowered in corners, wiping tears, clutching bruises.  At least in what Matt could see, men outnumbered women about three to one: along one wall, a stag line of men wearing only shorts and placards enumerating their crimes stood under a sign which read “NAUGHTY BOYS, TAKE A NUMBER”.

     Matt didn’t want to study the bruised and bruising customers, but he had to.  Any one of them might be Miss Skull.  Not that he’d recognize anyone, be they whip-wielder or target.  Leaving aside the matter of masks, he wouldn’t know anybody out of their office clothes.

     Dodging a studded strap on the backswing, he bumped into Ada, who had halted right in the center of this den of discipline.  A yellow-masked attendant, a lumpy blonde loosely wrapped in orange silk, had come forth to greet them, holding out two paddles, one blade foremost and the other with the handle forward.  Matt glanced at Ada, who shrugged one shoulder.

     “Take one,” came from the side of her mouth.  “So nobody gets suspicious.”

     Matt reached for the handle of the nearer paddle, but had to shift his burden to do so.  A coat sleeve fell loose, but he did not notice this until he stepped on it.  He stumbled, caught himself, and slapped at his pencil pocket.  All his supplies there were secure, but now a hat and a glove flopped from his bundle.  Bending forward to retrieve them, he remembered what this lounge was all about, and straightened up at once.

     Ada stooped to gather the disobedient garments, and tossed them into his arms just as he was trying to add the paddle to the collection.  “This is getting complex,” she noted, reaching down for a scarf and another glove.  “Better sit somewhere.”

     She crammed these new delinquents back among their partners and looked around the room.  “Somewhere we can see before we’re…ah!”

     Matt was happy to see her head for a chair sitting at some distance from the other guests.  Under the circumstances, he would have been hard put to to  make conversation.  The lounge offended him by sight, sound, and smell.  He was going to try to limit it to those three senses.

     A broad armless chair and two floorlamps had been pushed up against a mirror, making room farther along the wall for a man with a briefcase and two pieces of a three-piece suit to be spreadeagled in cuffs on the paneling.  The seat was wide enough for two, but to Matt’s relief and surprise, Ada didn’t plump down next to him, but looked back at the room as he settled in.

     “Yes,” he said, voice low.  “We should be able to watch from here.  For Miss Skull.”

     “But until Walter Prince shows up,” she replied, “We’d better blend in.  Hold this.”

     Light black froth floated onto the pile of coats on his lap.  Matt had to frown at the scarf belt for a second to recognize it.  More seconds were required for him to understand what it meant.  When he looked up to object, he saw that he was too late, much too late.

     Stepping lightly to the left of her shoes, Ada drew the blouse across her body, her fingers teacupped at opposing corners of the cloth.  Matt noted with rising resentment that the chains at the front were still fastened: her own design, no doubt, so it could be removed quickly.

     He opened his mouth.  Ada tiptoed back to the right and flipped the blouse across Matty’s right shoulder.  He snatched it away and shoved it down onto the pile of coats, naturally bruising his fingers on the blade of the paddle.

     Growling, he jammed the implement down along the side of his hip with one hand while he sucked the abrasions on the other.  Ada stretched backward, her hands up under her ponytail, offering him, when his eyes came up, as good a view as he could ever need of her armpits.  She bent her knees, lowering her body a bit in case he desired a more thorough inspection.

     “You can see why they keep the thermostat cranked up back here,” she observed.

     Matt jerked his head away and met the awed gaze of a man tied down not far away in a position to be thinking of anything but what those wide eyes were watching.  Matt shifted and looked straight ahead, slightly to the left of Mrs. Silberwetter.

     Ada’s hands slipped to the small of her back and she leaned way forward, her nose almost meeting Matt’s.  “It’s so people don’t get cold feet.”

     Matt’s head made a loud thump as he tried to draw it back and found the paneled wall.  Ada straightened and set one stockinged foot up next to his knee, arching the leg and flailing at the air with her ponytail as her eyes went toward the crowd in the lounge.  “You can get into a swanky place just by waiting in line.  But this is a spanky place, and you need to be somebody.  A city swat spot, not a mere hot spot.  People come here to have some fun without getting all psychological about it.  Live and let live: that’s the motto.”

     She spoke loudly enough to attract attention.  Swats in her immediate neighborhood seemed to be slowing, and a few couples who could move away without difficulty were drawing back from the spotlight of her personality.  One or two people were dragging pinioned partners toward more shadowy corners.

     “Anyway,” she went on, lowering her voice to a whisper as she leaned forward again, “A good sleuth wants to get to the bottom of things.”  She thrust her thumbs into the waistband of her pants.  Matt flinched, and dimples deepened.  Ada stepped backward; her face proclaimed her intention to have a jolly good time at his expense.  Her trousers slid to the floor, but her eyes remained fixed on Matt’s face.

     Matt did not know how much money Marshall Silberwetter pulled down annually, but it seemed possible to him that there ought to be enough to buy Mrs. Silberwetter rather more underwear.  Tiny bunches of what seemed to be feathers—if there were birds with translucent blue plumage—sat in three places.  Her stockings were black, fastened to a glimmering blue farter belt festooned with black lace.  It seemed to him a peculiarly appropriate sign of mourning for his dignity.

     “Yes,” said his tormentor, enunciating each word with tongue, teeth, and lips, “Here you can tell people things you wouldn’t say to their face.”

     Her eyes remained focused on his face.  Matt concentrated on watching hers.  If he concentrated on those impudent cheeks and eyes, he might be able to think of something besides what was coming out of her mouth and what was coming out of her clothes.  And he might not.

     “Personally,” she said, leaning way to the left to unclasp, using just the tips of four fingers, one garter, “I also feel a good workout does wonders for the muscle tone back there.”  Matt’s eyes followed as the stocking slithered just a little down one rosy thigh.  “And Heaven knows, it ain’t the neighbors need it.”

      Her face grave, she turned to one side to allow him to judge for himself.  But Matt’s eyes were on her hands now, tiptoeing daintily along the thigh but not toward the twin of the first garter.  He bit his lip to hold back a protest.

     She kicked suddenly; her pants flew up at his face.  By the time he had them under control her other pants—a smaller bundle—were being tucked down the front of his sweater.  She spun away before he could react, her ponytail whipping her ears as she whirled to the left and then came to rest, feet spread apart, her hands light on her hips.

     Keep calm, Matt told himself.  He couldn’t help where his gaze landed now: garter belts were designed to draw attention in one direction.  But he could work on his mind.  Miss Skull seemed terribly abstract right now: that wouldn’t work.  Count the garters, he suggested.  Or shift just a little, he pleaded with his eyes; we can count the varicose veins on that woman stretched backward across the leather sofa.  Anything numerical would do to distract the mind, and she might not perceive how dry was his mouth, how damp his palms, and how thorough his gratitude for the pile of coats across his lap.

     She leaned forward far enough to render her vulnerable to attack from behind, but she didn’t see, to care.  In any case, the crowd was nearly still by now: echoes showed only a few couples in distant corners were still in business.  The woeful stag line had snaked around the other guests for a better view, and the man at the head of it was in danger, as a leatherbound woman tapped her foot in the doorway.

     Matt supposed Ada was aware of all these things, but her face still jutted toward him.  “Does your mother ever get a word in edgewise when you go chattering on like this?” she demanded.  Matt tried counting the elastic lines on the  exposed flesh.

     But the flesh kept moving.  Ada bent farther and farther in his direction and, just when a tumble seemed inevitable, set her hands flat on the floor, atop her stockings.  Someone in the audience sighed.  Now she started back up again, a stocking in each hand.  The black nylon quivered, squirmed, and started to rotate in her hands, swirling circles to the left and right.

     She smiled.  One stocking flew loose, hitting Matt in the throat, whipping around his neck.  He showed his teeth.  She did the same, and drew the other stocking between the uppers and lowers.  A little pink tongue flicked out.

     The stocking shot from her lips up into the air.  Matt was ready for it, snatched it down.  Someone in the crowd cheered, and got slapped for it.

     Ada ignored the background sounds.  She reached for her shoulder straps and slid them off her shoulders.  Then her elbows shot up toward her ears and two dainty hands squeezed together in what space they could find before two tiny hooks.  Matt swallowed.  She set her chin between her wrists.

     “You make Marshall look like a real rapper,” she said.  “If that’s proper to say in here.”

     Deploying her breasts, she slipped the brassiere around and ran it across the small of er back like a towel.  The crowd was dead silent.

     Matt was thinking of a poem, to be called “Fifty Shades of Pink” and to be inserted into some middle section of “Ascent of the Ruby Slippers”.  But even Matt-the-Writer had little power here: his brain seemed remote, inert.

     “I mean, it IS the job of the Watson to say stupid thinks so the detective can rebut them.”  The butt of one palm eased down one hip toward her last lonely garment.  Matt wondered why he was overheating.  Surely the removal of the garter belt was redundant by this time, sheer anti-climax.

     This was just another of his mistakes.  Never having taken off a garter belt in front of an audience, he had thought a woman could just stretch the waistband, let it drop to the floor, and step out.  A woman could, he thought bitterly, as his cheeks seemed to catch fire, but not Ada Silberwetter.

     She could only remove the belt by pulling it up over her head.  It slid up the gentle rise of the stomach only to be stymied by blockage.  Ada pressed one breast down into a broad oval, apparently both to make way and to reassure Matt in case he thought it was solid marble.  She repeated the process.  A shimmy was obviously required to raise the belt to her throat, and a little jump to dislodge it when it caught on the ponytail.  Once free, it was crumpled into a ball and tossed underhand, catching Matt just under the nose.

     Stepping backward, she smoothed the lines of the belt on her skin.  She wore now only her mask and a black choker.  The silence of the room was perfect, complete as even she stopped talking for a moment and surveyed the man littered with her clothing.  Matt made no move.  Her stance was obviously a threat, but what was left of his rational mind could not come up with anything more she could do to him while he was sitting under all this laundry.

     Without a word of warning, she launched herself forward.  Matt pulled away, in the wrong direction.  She was not, after all, attacking straight on.  She landed in the palm of his pants, throwing her weight against his left hip.

     Pink heels kicked up toward his face but didn’t reach it.  “Better get busy,” she informed him, wriggling into a secure position atop the pile of garments.  “Don’t make yourself conspicuous.”

     Matt coughed.  “Busy?”

     “You’re just lucky you took the one by the handle.”

     Matt recalled there was a leather-coated paddle against his thigh.  But his attention was entirely elsewhere, distracted by what was squashing down the coats and layers on his lap.  Those were certainly the softest things that had ever menaced him.  He’d rather face a firing squad.

     “That is the paddle, isn’t it?  Or are you just…no.  There are some things I won’t do for a man, and telling old jokes is one of them.”

     Matt’s teeth ground together, one hand went down to the paddle.  If anyone was asking for it, in every meaning of that term…and yet….

     A green-masked hostess materialized from the shadows on Matt’s left and, with a blend of compassion and regret, suggested “Perhaps the gentleman would prefer a more private venue.”

      Matt looked up in anguish. She smiled in understanding, without any.

     Ada dropped her knees to the seat and rose from his lap.  Her lashes lowered as her nose rose.  “Huh!  Well, add it to the tab.”

     Climbing down, she followed the hostess off to a door between two mirrors.  Matt sat where he was.  Wouldn’t he do better with Miss Skull?  All Miss Skull could do was kill him.

     “Enjoy her while she’s at this cute age,” said the reverent man he’d faced earlier.  “They grow up so fast.”

     Gathering clothes and paddle into a bundle, Matt sprinted after the hostess.  Swatting, with renewed vigor, began behind him as he reached the door.

     This corridor, unlike the first, was littered with doors.  Matt glanced into one that stood open, saw fake stones and manacles, and hurried on.  Sounds that might have horrified him came from behind closed doors, but his whole attention was on one of the women ahead of him.  Shouldn’t something that soft and round wobble?  Had this woman never heard of gravity?  Or cellulite?  She gave the impression that “fat” was simply the sound a large man made when sitting on a whoopee cushion.

     The hostess unlocked a door and stood aside.  After the guests were inside, she dropped the key onto a table by the door and departed.

     Matt stared around the room, terrified but without any real focus for his terror.  This was essentially a cheap motel room: semi-wood paneling, semi-plastic potted plants, a couch, a VCT, a large television, and an ominous bed with fringed spread and huge fluffy pillows.

     A whirr made Matt jump, but it was just the sound of an automatic room deodorizer ejecting some industrial strength pine scent.  Matt ordered himself to relax as Ada tiptoed around the room, switching on little lamps.

     The pictures on the walls were not overly offensive; the bondage art showed nice restraint.  His back to one wall, Matt eased along to two chairs.  He tossed the coats on one and sat down quickly on the second.  Rather than watch Ada tiptoe, he reached out to the trinkets on the table.  In the center of a ceramic ashtray a ceramic woman reclined on her stomach, biting her lower lip.  Next to this was a little jar labeled “anusthesia”.  He was in the wrong place entirely.

     Ada turned to face him, throwing her shoulders back to bring her breasts up.  Matt wondered whether she did this for the effect, or from force of habit.

     “You know,” she told him, “A mind isn’t the only thing it’s terrible to waste.”

     Matt licked his lips and found his voice.  It didn’t SOUND like his, but he used it anyhow.  “How…how is this going to help the investigation?”

     Ada bunched up her mouth.  “Oh, you’re always working.  If you were fishing and caught a mermaid, you’d expect her to dive for pearls.”

     She took two more steps toward him and he held up his hands.  “At least someone’s working!  You tell me we’re dealing with a murderer and blackmailer and you think the way to do it is to blend in with a bunch of…of swingers!”

     This was rather limp; she continued to advance.  “And for all we know,” he went on, “The manager is tied up in it!”

     She paused.  Matt nodded.  Ada nodded.  He hoped this argument would remind her of the danger.  But as she remained silent, he began to doubt.

     “Ye-es,” she said, finally.  “Yes.  That’s an idea.”

     Turning her back on him, she marched to the bed.  Matt watched, frowning more and more as she climbed aboard, but twisted his face to the right as she leaned way forward to grab a pillow.

     “You know.”  She glanced under her arm at him.  “It’s a good thing not all detectives are prudes like you.  I’d have switched to westerns years ago.”

     A sneer curled across his lip, but before he could lash out with a reply, two little clicks brought his eyes front.  Ada was kneeling, straddling a pillow.  Her ankles were now secured in leathern cuffs attached to thick cables drawn from somewhere inside the mattress.

     She rested her weight on one elbow and reached for the headboard.  A panel slid back, releasing another pair of cuffs.  Matt registered this with a tiny portion of his brain.  Gravity had noticed her body—no one would mistake Ada Silberwetter for an ethereal spirit creature—but that body betrayed no sign of sag.  Whatever her mental state, she was physically fit.  She must get all kinds of exer….  Matt shuddered.

     The cuffs were set out among the pillows.  When she lowered her wrists inside the circles, each snapped shut.  She lowered herself forward onto her shoulders, that one pillow tucked under her abdomen.  Matt tried to pull his eyes away from the spot where the legs converged.  Focus, he reminded himself.

     She tipped her head to the right, and closed her eyes.  Her feet came up, and her toes beckoned.  “There now?  Feeling safe?  Do whatever you like.  I can’t stop you.”

     There was a laugh in her voice.  Against his will, Matt came up.  He tried to force his body back into the chair, to force his voice into one last plea for reason.  He lacked the strength.  Without thinking about it, he put a hand down to the table.  Naturally, he missed the top and could not lean there for support.  Instead, he bruised those fingers on a knob.  He pulled the drawer open.

     The array of instruments offered for his selection made his eyes larger and rounder than before.  He glanced toward the bed.

     “Anything?” he rasped.

     “Whatever.”

     Weight dropped from his shoulders.  Heat fell from his face.  His brain was quick now, and cold.  Suddenly there was no more space in his mind for moral considerations, for flustered fear of what people might think, or how this would look.  She had removed all the shackles of civilization.  He made his choice without hesitation.  No one was here to see, and Ada had told him to do whatever he wanted.  Very well: she had asked for it.

     He grabbed his hat and scarf and was out of the room before she could utter another syllable.

Duds for Doggies

    To those of us who grew up with the open collar suburban outfit of Mickey Mouse, and who now live in a world in which Hello Kitty hand sanitizer and Hello Kitty Polaroid cameras are being marketed to us every day (saw each of those this week; look it up if you don’t believe me), the concept of animals getting dressed to go about their daily chores is hardly unusual.

     And yet, in this inventory of antique postcards which resides with me, I see about twenty animals running errand au naturel to each one who dons long skirts or trousers.  It’s as if the postcard artists preferred to establish that they COULD draw a recognizable bunny, so there.

     Mind you, there are collars, and hair ribbons, and LOTS of hats.  (When I get really inquisitive, I’ll look up this convention of storks wearing top hats when they deliver babies.  In MY day, it was generally a delivery driver’s hat.  But the dignity of honest labor has deteriorated in the day of robotics and AI, until even exotic dancers need to…where were we?)  Anyway, we are looking at full outfits, even if it has a certain “Let’s play dress-up” vibe, like this cowboy (cowrooster.)

     Or this old sea dog in his sailor’s uniform.

       Consider this couple down on the farm.  Both he and she wear perfectly everyday outfits (everyday for the mid-1930s) even if they do live in an open0air A-frame coop.

     By the way, have we ever asked why there are so many postcard cartons about a jealous husband who is a rooster, of all peop…creatures?

     It’s not as if the world of poultry is renowned for monogamy, and what’s good for the goose is…this discussion DOEs get rather involved.

     Slightly more of the animals dressed for the day are women than men: presumably so you could concentrate on this picture of a dog reading a letter (or possibly a gossip magazine) during her chores without being puzzled or worried about whether a male character is sweeping up.

     It could also have been that women’s clothes, with their long lines and punctuating frills were more fun to draw (especially if the artist is having a little trouble drawing a squirrel face.)

     And easier to draw: no necessity for figuring out how a bear’s trousers would fit to get in the way of a simple cartoon showing a typical domestic disaster.  No fuss and bother about wondering why Mr. Bear is supervising the laundry when he SHOULD be smoking a cigar while sitting in his easy chair.

     It could be argued that this joke is funnier if the monkey has clothes on, and if those clothes establish that we are being coyly threatened by an adolescent girl monkey.  Knowing what clothing fits the picture is part of the artistic process.

     The clothes here also conceal the fact that it isn’t really easy for a bloodhound to sit up on a stool this way, while the lack of shoes allows us to see clearly that the young lady is struggling to express her feelings as she writes.

     Deciding what clothes fit the scenario continues to be a key element in postcard design.  We have here a teddy bear couple enjoying a sunset in late autumn, dressed for the weather.  Meanwhile, their kitten (who is nearly as big as they are) wears no clothing at all.  THAT would have been silly.

MIDWEEK FICTION: The Pumpkin That Wouldn’t Be Spiced

His name was Robin, because all of the pumpkins in the patch were named after things they saw around them.  Robin grew in the same row as Sparrow, Clover, Crow, Mouse, Sunshine, and Man With Big Boots.  They all grew in a patch behind a castle, and were well taken care of until autumn came along.

Then the Duchess’s Gardener came around and admired them.  “Good for pie,” he murmured, studying the pumpkins all around him, “Good for a good many pies.”

“Excuse me, sir,” said Robin, “Need I be a pie?”

“Eh?” said the big man, looking around.  “Was somebody talking to me?”

“I was, sir,” Robin said, “You are the man who pulls the weeds and makes sure the cows don’t get in and eat us.”  He had never talked to anyone before, and didn’t know quite how to speak to the Man With Big Boots, except that to call him by name would only get answers from the pumpkin named after him, a huge orange cucurbita who usually only grunted.  “I wondered if I must absolutely be cut up and cooked into a pie.”

“Well, you know a lot about this, for something growing on a vine,” said the gardener, leaning down to study Robin.

“The black birds tell us a lot of stories,” Robin replied, not wanting to us the word Crow, as SHE always took long naps this time of day.  “And I’m not quite sure that’s what I want to do.”

The gardener laughed.  “Well, I don’t suppose you HAVE to be a pie, Round One.  The ladies up to the castle will be coming down to pick a pumpkin to be their jack-o-lantern this year.  Sometimes, each sister needs to have one, and sometimes the lady of the house throws a big party, so she might need a dozen or more for the tables.”

“I see.”  The crows had told Robin about jack-o-lanterns, but hadn’t wanted to believe it.  The birds had ridiculous senses of humor.  “That business where they cut you open and put in a candle?  Isn’t there some OTHER job I could do?”

“You’re also pretty particular for somebody rooted in dirt,” the gardener said.  “But nowadays, of course, we sell quite a lot of our pumpkins to companies that smash them up and spice them up into pumpkin spice matcha or pumpkin spice turnip tarts.”

“Oh, dear!”  Robin turned these choices over in his head: being smashed and spiced didn’t seem all that much better than being carved or cooked.  “Isn’t there SOMETHING else?”

“That’s pretty much all there is for pumpkins,” the Man With Big Boots told him, turning away.  “But if I meet someone looking for a pumpkin for another purpose, I’ll surely let them know.”  And, thinking this was a pretty good joke, he walked back to his shed.

Robin did NOT think this was a very good joke, but soon the ladies from the castle came out and chose pumpkins for carving, and he knew he didn’t have much time left.  So, late one night, when the moon was full, he pulled as hard as he could at his roots, tore himself out of the ground, and ran away.

This did not go exactly as he’d planned, because although he had studied running and practiced it in his head he found he wasn’t especially good at this.”  “Either keep moving or go back to sleep,” said Crow, drowsy and cross, “So I can sleep.”

“I can’t seem to run away,” Robin replied.  “Maybe you need to have shoes for that.”  He tried again, but his vines just were not designed for running.”

“And what’s all this, then?”  A woman Robin had never seen in the garden was bending over him.

“A pumpkin,” said the badly dressed young woman behind her.  Robin had seen her before; she seemed to be a maid of all work in the castle.

“I know that, dear,” said the older woman.  She picked up Robin.  “This is just the thing.  You SHALL go to the ball!”

Robin had no idea what she was talking about, but it sounded more interesting than being carved or smashed.  And so it was, for the older woman waved a sparkly stick over his head and he was transformed into a long orange automobile even larger than the one the Duchess and her two daughters had driven down the road in earlier.  And the woman waved her stick over and over until the maid wore an elegant gown that matched Robin’s shiny paint job, and robin found himself tooling along the country roads at quite an exciting speed, driven by a natty man in an orange uniform.

He was not altogether clear about a lot of what happened after that, but the maid apparently went to live at the much bigger castle of the king, where Robin was parked with other automobiles in a long garage.  The young woman, called Cinders by her new family, often drove Robin around the countryside, who would come around and cheer for her and listen to her song and take turns sitting in Robin’s plush orange seats, admiring his handsome sheen and his green-sidewall tires, and his gleaming license plate (ROBINN1031).

This was a great deal more pleasant than being spiced or sliced, and Robin heard a lot of interesting stories, and had many drives in the country.  But time went by, and newer cars came into the garage: shiny silver and back machines of quite different designs.  The men with big boots who worked in the garage started to refer to Robin as “that old gourd”, and he hardly ever saw Cinders come to the garage.  His tires started to lose their air as he sat there, largely unattended.  A few spiders threw webs around his outside mirrors, and mice nested behind one of his fenders.

“Well, this is boring,” he muttered late one night to a rusty old motorcycle called Prince.  Prince didn’t reply.  He’d been out of gas for years.

“It is a little sad,” said a voice Robin only partly remembered.  “Perhaps I could make you into a pumpkin again, as you were when you started.”

Robin blinked his headlights.  It was the old woman with the sparkly stick.  “Would you like to be a pumpkin again?”

“And then what?”  Robin asked her.  “A pie or cookie cream or a scary face?”

“Well, actually,” she told him, “You’re so old now you’d probably rot away at once.  That’s what nature does with unused pumpkins.”

Robin thought this over.  It was rather lonely in this dark corner of the garage, despite the mice.

Finally, je sad, “No, I don’t think so.  I got this far doing things pumpkins aren’t supposed to do, so I think I’ll go on for a while and see what happens next.”

The old woman smiled, and waved her sparkly stick.  “You were always rather busy, for a pumpkin.”  The mice squeaked, and Robin felt the bounce come back to his suspension as rust melted away and a couple of holes in his upholstery disappeared as the orange leather was made new again.

“It was always back here,” somebody said to somebody else.

The lady and her sparkly stick disappeared as the lights were switched on the in the garage.  “Back in the corner, next to Grandpa’s.  There it is!”

Three young men stood staring at Robin.  “I saw pictures but I never believed it,” said one.

“It’s a classic!” said another.  “Does it still run?”

“Probably needs gas,” said the first one who had spoken.  “Grandma said she hadn’t had him out for years and years.”

“Let’s try a test run,” said the second man, climbing behind the steering wheel where Cinders had so often sat.  “Before we call the library.”

Each pf the young men had to have a turn at the wheel, and Robin found himself driven along country roads he sort of recognized, but which had been built up, rather, since his day.  Somewhere after lunch the next day, he found himself being driven to a very tall building called Royal Library, where a great many people came to look at him and run their hands along his bumpers and upholstery.  He didn’t quite catch what they were saying, but it was all very exciting.

The upshot of it all was that the Royal Library was dedicated to the years and Cinders and the Prince were running the country, and robin, as Cinders’s legendary limo, was given a room of his own, surrounded by pictures of the trips he had made when she was driving.  Now and again, he would be taken out for a drive for special guests (going at a much more reasonable pace than the young men had used.)  A velvet rope was put around him when he was at rest in the Library, so people wouldn’t reach over and get their fingerprints on his finish.  But they did anyhow, and Robin didn’t care.

One of the visitors, come that October, was a small girl who was very impressed with Robin’s color and design.  “Ooh, she said, “It’s like the world’s biggest pumpkin!”

“It’s a car, of course,” said her father.  “Even if it was a pumpkin first.”

“I know that,” the little girl informed him.  She looked around, and then reached out to touch an orange fender.  “When I’m big enough, I’m going to drive orange cars.  Really fast orange cars!  Around a racetrack!”

“Things don’t work that way,” her father said.  “Little girls grow up to bake pies.”

Robin blinked one headlight at the girl.  He knew better.

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 29

     Before Matt could decide whether it would be worse for the elevator to get stuck for six to eight hours or just crash to the bottom, ending all suspense, they had reached the lobby.  Ada. Who had spent the trip considering her ponytail in the mirrored walls of the car, glanced at his glower and dimpled.

     “If you don’t behave, I’ll tell you what I dreamed last night,” she warned him, beaming at Gaston, who opened the door for her and escorted her ten feet to the outer door.

     Matt’s expression deepened.  “Perfect,” Ada told him.  “Hold that thought.”

     From a pocket in her coat she drew an envelope.  “And hold onto this.”  Matt took it automatically.  At first touch he hated the way the contents cushed together.

     “That’s right,” said Ada, admiring the shift in his face.  “You might sneer a little, too.  Put it away somewhere.  It’s more money than you ever paid to have a tooth pulled.”

     Matt had been in the process of folding the envelope into his own coat pocket, but now he froze.  From its heft, this envelope contained way too much currency for an outside pocket.  He crunched the envelope farther, jamming it into his pants pocket.  He shook his head.

     That was the pocket he’d had picked once.  He pulled back, but his hand wouldn’t come.  The envelope was stuck against the coat lining; he couldn’t fold it small enough to pull free unless he went at it with both hands.  After more mental cussing than thought, he shoved it back down into the pants pocket.  If a pickpocket could get it out through all that without him feeling it, it was earned money.

     That resolved, he looked around for Ada’s little purple bombshell.  It was not there; the self-appointed heroine of this little adventure was skipping across the street to the bus stop.  “The eleven still run on Sundays?”
     Matt strolled casually over to join her.  If she was planning to catch an eleven on a cold day, they’d have a while to talk things over.  “Where are we going?” he inquired, sliding his hands into his pockets in a way he hoped was nonchalant.

     “Trust me.”  Her smile was dazzling, and her laugh was crystalline as she studied his expression.

     A bus pulled up and opened its doors; it was a twenty-two.  “This is such fun!” said Ada.  “I haven’t been on a bus in years!  What’s the fare nowadays?”

     The driver told her, and she let the sum clatter into the cashbox, proclaiming, “We ride on a CTA bus: there’s no la-di-da about us!  We drop in our fare as if we don’t care and sit down to grumble and cuss.”

     Everyone on the bus heard this; Matt could tell by the way they hunkered down in their coats and fixed their attention out the windows.  Maybe if he walked far enough behind her, they would all assume he had just happened to board the bus at the same time as a complete stranger.

     The bus, going the wrong way for serious Christmas shopping, was only about half full, s his hopes were dashed.  “There are two seats together in the back!” she called to him, and hurried off as if afraid someone would claim these before Matt could join her.  One or two people chuckled.  The seats were not all the way at the back of the bus; they were in front of a large elderly man with round cheeks to color of good lard and tiny, tiny eyes.  He didn’t look terribly clean, but when he ventured on comment, Ada reached around the seat and patted him o the shoulder.

     Soon the two of them were engaged in an animated conversation dealing, as far as Matt could follow it, with a dog named Alphonse Beauregard III.  Matt maintained his dignity and a gaze focused straight ahead.  For several blocks he kept his hands in his pockets.  Then he decided that might be an unmistakable  sign he had something else in his pockets.  He took his hands out and tried to look poor.  From time to time he glanced out the window to get his bearings, but he seldom rode the CTA I this direction.

     He realized he had brought his bus token out of the pocket with the envelope in it.  Had the envelope come a little loose?  What if it was still sliding even looser?  Could anyone see a corner of it sticking out the coat pocket?  Suppose it had slid completely loose back at the bus stop, when he was groping for a token.  Matt didn’t look down: that would give him away.  He slid his right hand slowly up the side of the coat.  That looked totally suspicious, so he plunged his hand suddenly into the pocket.

     The envelope was still there.  Touching it made it bend with a little crunkle that Matt felt anybody within hearing distance could tell was that of a large amount of currency being compressed.  He slid his hand free, and bumped Ada with his elbow.  She  slid closer and threw an arm around his neck without pausing in her conversation  Matt wished she hadn’t.  he couldn’t reach into his pocket now, and what if the envelope really had started to pull free when he jerked his hand out?

     “Oh, this is our stop, Clive,” Ada told the old man.  “We must do this more often.  Come along.”

     The arm around his neck gave Matt any cue he needed, and they marched through the side exit.  She waved to the old man as the bus pulled away.  Matt read envy in Clive’s eyes.

     “An old buddy of yours?”

     “He is now.”  Ada stepped up on the curb and looked across the street.  “I do like older men.  They’re so intelligent and understanding and everything, and if you ask them for advice, they’re always willing to help.”

     “If they help you,” Matt told her, “They’re not that intelligent.”

     She dimpled at him.  “Oh, they’re thinking all the time.”

     “That’s not what I meant.”

     Ada curtsied to him and then ran into the street, an arm in the air.  A blue and white taxi pulled up next to her.

     “Now what?” Matt demanded, following.

     “Part of my fiendishly clever plan.”  Raising one end of her scarf mysteriously in front of her face, she told the driver, in a hoarse whisper, “35410 Crawford Street.”

     The cabbie laughed an uncertain laugh, and glanced at Matt for confirmation.  Returning Matt’s shrug, he started the meter and then the cab.

     Matt checked his pocket four times in the course of the ride; he might have done so more often, but noticed the cabbie checking him out in the rearview.  The scenery outside the window was unedifying; he was utterly out of his neighborhood.  Not they passed the “Soon-To-Be-Famous Inn”, now they passed a row of bright red houses with lacy white ironwork out front.  Matt recognized nothing.

     He looked at Ada just once, and started to ask where they were headed.  She leaned toward him and murmured, “The bluebird on the schoolbus saw the blackbird on the bank.”

     The cabbie’s eyes widened.  Matt cleared his throat and checked out the window some more.

     Way out on Crawford Street the neighborhoods were getting lonelier.  There were broad buildings, high chainlink fences, and no sidewalks.  Few cars and fewer people were abroad.  The address Ada requested turned out to be that of a tall electric security gate.  He looked at her, but she already had the door open and was handing a folded wad of currency to the driver.

     “Private garage,” she told Matt as the cab sped off.  “Really just car storage.”  She fished a little card out of an inside pocket and inserted it into a security box.

     “Is that what they turned the Hot Shots Motel into when the new owners got it?”  Matt was feeling a bit relaxed at last.  The place was quiet and there was a good, solid gate sliding through windswept snow.  They could watch anyone who tried to get in.

     “They might make more money.”  Ada stepped over in front of a security camera and smiled up at it.  “How clever of you to deduce we’re going to ‘The Hot Shots’.  But this isn’t it.”

     “Oh.”  Matt followed her inside, and made no further comment, following her to a small garage that looked like all the rest, inserted her card again, and stood back next to him as the door slid up.  A little red Crosley waited among the shadows inside.

     “I’d like to see them follow us now,” she said, stepping in to unlock the passenger door.

     “Who?”

     “Miss Skull, of course.  I bet it is Walter Prince.  But anybody in Miss Skull’s line of business might be following.  After all, we don’t want him to think it’s a trap because I’m bringing someone else tour assignation.”

     Traps were on Matt’s mind, too, but Walter Prince was not a large part of the thought.  He did not get into the Crosley.

     “Are you sure you didn’t write those other letters, too?”

     Ada leaned on the car.  “Now, why….”  She looked at the ceiling of the garage.  “Oh.  No, see, this is just a little plan Marshall and I made for when we want to go someplace without anybody knowing: little visits and weekends his kids and the media would never approve of.  You wouldn’t either.  I can tell.”

     She unlocked the driver’s side door.  “You know, you’d be a lot more fun if you’d let yourself go once in a while.”

     Matt yanked on his own door.  “Only when I’m sure I can get myself back,” he muttered.

    She threw him a grin he was meant to join, and didn’t, and then started the Crosley. She backed out; the garage door came down with a thump.  They proceeded to the gate, where she stepped out to use her security card, smile at the security camera again, and throw loose snow at Matt’s window.  Returning to her seat, she set off down the lonesome road.

     “Do you know,” she said, after several minutes of solid silence, “You have never once called me by name?”

     Matt cleared his throat.  “Well, Mrs. Silberwetter….”

     “I knew it!  I knew it!”  Compulsive laughter, like a child’s, rolled from her.  She swerved to avoid a man o a motorcycle.  “I wish I’d had money on it!  Oh, you’re so cute I wish you were real!”

     This did not encourage conversation.  Matt sank back against his seat, sullenly surveying gray heaps of snow plowed up along the roadside.

     “Never mind.”  She patted the thigh nearest to her.  “You’ll like this place.  You’ll learn about life.”

     There wasn’t enough room on the seat to pull away, but Matt did his best.  When he wanted to learn about life, he’d read about it in a book.

     Ada paid no attention to this case of the sulks, and started to sing, probably deliberately pfgf key, the theme from “Beany and Cecil”.  Matt glared out the window.

     Did Ada Silberwetter have any concept of being nervous?  To have that little pain like hunger in the webbing between your thumb and forefinger, to feel your arms rendered inert by not quite physical spasms shooting along the muscles?

     This feeling did not relent as the car barreled along the fringes of the city.  Like any fringe, these fringes were loose: open empty lots with snow frosting the garbage dumped there, separated by neighborhoods of boarded-up houses and half-dead gas stations, drive-ins, and malls.  Some of these had, in fact, died, and been transmogrified into used-car lots, discount grocery stores, and churches.  One or two people wandered along the snow in front of these, headed for no apparent destination in no great hurry.

     Ada turned right at a motel whose sign advertised ‘WELCOME TO PSIRLOIN”.  Some blocks later, she took a left around a defunct restaurant.  This sign had once featured a woman in some kind of waitress costume, but wind and weather had whipped away most of the paint, leaving only the head and cross-straps of the uniform in high relief, a long-haired skull and crossbones.

     The sign caught the attention of Matt-the-Writer to such an extent that Matt himself took some seconds to realize they had stopped, and sitting in a half-filled parking lot crisscrossed by cracks and patches of ice.

     Ada shut off the ignition.  “This is the place.”

     The place was a long low building sided in brown vinyl.  No word anywhere on the brown background indicated ownership or function: always a bad sign.  Matt leaned forward, seeking any clue.  Then he sat back again, the nervous aches abating a bit.  A portable plastic signboard on wheels was tucked just behind a Toyota, not far from the door: black letters on the yellow background announced ‘INDIVIDUAL TANNING BOOTHS”.  A cut-rate salon: nothing so sinister about that.

     Ada heard his sigh of relief, and followed his gaze.  “Ah.  Yes, indeed.  This is a place people come to get tanned.”

     “I figured that out,” Matt told her.

     “No, you didn’t.  You figured this was a place people came to get a tan.”

     Matt had no time to Watson this out.  The driver suddenly dropped, her head almost in his lap.  He scrambled for the door handle but hadn’t found it yet when he realized she was reaching into the glove compartment.

     “Perfectly respectable place,” she said, from her horizontal position.  “They take all the major credit cards.”

     A lump of something was drawn from among the road maps and first aid kits.  She sat back and unfolded a black leather mask with a blue ruffle around it.

     This was too much for Matt, who opened his mouth to object.  She went on, “And they like their customers to be discreet.  Members get blue masks.  The hostesses wear green ones, attendants get yellow, and guests….”  She handed a second mask to Matt and tossed a third back into the glove compartment.  “…wear red.”

     That was more reasonable.  She hadn’t, after all, bought a mask to match her outfit just for the drama of it.  She had dressed to match her mask.  Matt took the mask and shoved it into his coat pocket, nudging the fat envelope beyond to make sure it was there.  Ada was similarly tucking her mask into her….

     “Member?” he demanded.

     But Ada had already hopped down from the car to trot across the parking lot.  Matt quickly followed.  “Member?” he repeated, on reaching the door.

     She opened this and led him into the vestibule.  “Promise you won’t embarrass me, okay?  Put on your mask.”

     A tiny door high on the wall opened and a pair of eyes surrounded by black leather peered out.  “Me,” said Ada, holding a card up to the eyes.  “And I’ve got one of the Johnsons with me.”

     A latch clicked, and a larger door around the tiny one swung back.  Matt set his glasses over his mask.  He wasn’t convinced he wanted to see what he was getting into, but this would at least give him a chance to duck.

     But it was a perfectly ordinary man behind the door, dressed in perfectly ordinary street clothes  And a yellow mask.  Behind him stood a strictly standard adult bookstore: linoleum floor pegboard walls with racks of reading material (well, gawking material), and three blue-masked customers studiously ignoring each other.  It was not a place Matt would have chosen for any rendezvous, but it was no weird lair of villains, either.

     Ada, all business, shucked off her coat.  “Wait here, Watson,” she said, handing it to him.  “I have to go chat with the manager and see if any skeletons left messages.”

     All eyes followed her as she sauntered across the room to the cashier behind one display case.  As long as those eyes weren’t on him, Matt didn’t mind.  He eased toward a rack of books under the sign “Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted to the Full Extent of Smith and Wesson Law” and tried to look inconspicuous.

     They had quite a variety of material, a veritable library of congress.  Classics like Claremont and Wood’s “Suicidal Sluts of Saturn” rubbed shoulders (so to speak) with squarebound volumes whose covers featured photos of athletic men and women wearing nothing but their glasses.  He had never heard of “Sex With Specs” and here they were, already up to Volume XIV.

     Matt-the-writer could hardly be denied in the face of such artifacts.  What if a place like this was discovered a thousand years from now?  How would archaeologists deal with it, and what would they learn about Ancient Fertility Rituals?  And, more important, how could this be worked into “Ascent”?  The Red Section?  He wished he could take notes, but just before he reached for pen and paper he decided this might not suit the establishment’s concept of discretion.

     “I didn’t even know they MADE UD skirts!”

     Only one person would raise her voice this way in a library.  Ada Silberwetter stood before a high glass case of devices Matt had read about but never seen in real life (if that’s what this was.)  Curious, he joined her at the case, but kept his eyes moving as his driver’s ed instructors had commanded—up, down, left, right—in case she thought he was really interested.  It was an interesting display.  The customer could purchase accessories for any possible pravity, but the main display seemed to be dedicated to the rougher forms of instruction, from soft nylon whips to Stanley hairbrushes to rather lethal-looking lashes.

     Ada looked up at him from under her own lethal lashes.  “We got here first,” she murmured.  “Did you want to browse some more, or shall we wait in the lounge?”

     An inflatable doll was winking at him from the right, and Ada was studying him from the left.  Matt felt no desire to stand there and study.

     “The lounge,” he said.

     Ada turned to a green-masked woman.  “Add it to the tab.”  The woman nodded.

     “This way,” Ada told him.  “Better take off your coat.  They keep it hot back here.”

     The hostess brushed aside a rack of leather bikinis to reveal another door.  It was thickly padded with leather on the other side, and led to a long, narrow corridor hung with mistletoe, which Matt sidestepped.

     Another hostess in a green mask met them halfway through, and led them forward.  Matt, busy removing his scarf and coat without dislodging his mask, AND making sure he did not dislodge the thick envelope in his pants pocket, did not notice at once that this hostess was much less formally clad thn the one in the store.  The muscles of her back shifted the leather of her corset as she strode forward on impossibly tall stiletto heels.

     This explained at last what sort of establishment he was strolling toward.  He had naturally associated “lounge” with the one at Down: tables, ashtrays, vending machines, restroom doors.  But a “lounge” could also be a bar filled with smoke, expensive mixed drinks, and a floor show that would send Ada into giggles and reduce him to blushing incoherence.

     Miss Skull or no Miss Skull, this had to be Ada Silberwetter’s idea.  Matt’s breath came in long, seething hisses.  How much did the implements in the glass case cost, and how much would it cost an amateur to rent them for just ten minutes, to teach someone a badly needed lesson?  Some people might be a little less chirpy as they drove home if it were harder to sit down.

     Fierce, fearsome, Matt stalked along behind the two women who could not see from their angle that he was a juggernaut of righteous indignation.  His eyes burned into the unflinching backs of his shameless guides.  Which was why he never noticed the end of his scarf was dragging on the floor until he stepped on it.

     Growling, feeling his face burn, he rubbed his knees and then scooped up all the coats and scarves.  The ladies waited patiently at the next door.  Behind the masks, one pair of eyes was neutral and bored, while the other pair blazed with entertainment.

     This pair dipped as their owner gave him another curtsey.  “’Will you walk into my closet?’ said Francisco to the guy?”

     The other woman unlocked the door.  The room beyond was dim, and exuded an unsubtle odor Matt recognized before he knew it.  He pulled up short.

     He’d expected to smell beer.  That was sweat.

Hazards of the She-Driver

     As you may recall from our last thrilling episode, we were discussing the Women Driver Joke.  I was noting that there are mighty few traces of that sort of traditional male humor among my inventory of comic postcards.  In fact, in THAT column, I showed how many early cards I have which show perfectly competent and cheerful women driving their horseless carriages.  But, of course, as anyone who has ever owned such a contraption can tell you, the operation of an automobile is not always smooth and carefree.

     Even those who drive well and say their prayers by night may wind up needing to have their Fordrolet repaired.  Women would do so just as often as men, but they had difficulties with mechanics that men didn’t encounter.

     Usually, in any case.  There IS card in my array which shows a man, not a woman, encountering a mechanic who went a little too far and applied an oil gun precisely where the customer did not expect it.  Perhaps that gag was too suggestive to be applied to a female driver.

     Out on the road, of course, there are other hazards.  It didn’t matter whether the driver was a man or a woman if the traffic cop decided to write out a ticket.

     Here, too, of course, there were dangers for the woman driver that her male counterpart did not encounter.  (On postcards for general consumption, of course.  Those little comic books sold under the table in grundgy little shops are another matter.)

     But the number of postcards showing us Woman Drivers being a hazard, or even annoyance,  to others is teeny.  If I were doing this column as a collection of Fine Old Jokes about women drivers, it would not be easy to illustrate.

     There are, certainly, postcards featuring lady drivers involved in accidents.  But we are not told that this was HER fault.

     In fact, we could say, investigating these accidents, that the woman driver usually comes out on top.  (What?  Oh, very well.  I WON’T say it, then.)

     Now here we have a young lady who is decidedly a hazard, at least to her passenger.  But unless she’s going over the speed limit, I can’t see that this is HER fault as a woman driver.  (True, at this point in automotive history, very few men had ponytails, but still, not exactly a Woman Driver Joke.)

     And THIS cartoonist is blaming nothing on the lady’s driving.  If anything, this is the fault of a distracted driver behind her.  (AND an artist who needed some leg art to improve sales.)

     In fact, the only reliable joke to come in about women in automobiles is THIS gag, which puts her in another seat.  And even then, I have several versions of this which do not specify that the backseat driver is a woman.  In fact…well, we can do the history of the Backseat Driver gag in a whole nother blog.  We’ve reached the end of the road on this one.

The Woman at the Wheel

     After the wave of popular applause for the column posted hereintofore on the history of the Mother-in-law Joke (did I say “wave”? I meant “trickle”.  Okay, maybe a comment from one drip.) I thought we might consider the postcard history of a younger old joke.  We are going to consider Women Drivers.

     This gag, which assumes that women are horrible drivers, is fairly rare on postcards, at least on those which come to me.  I frequently find women at the wheel of a car without any sign that they are about to hit somebody, run over somebody, or otherwise commit vehicular mayhem.  My inventory does not include every comic card ever printed, but I have missed hardly any of the bestsellers.  And the lady who cannot drive is pretty much absent.

     Now, the automobile and the postcard grew up together though, being cheaper, the postcard was a lot more popular.  Crummy driving is a frequent theme, though more often the culprit is male.  Note that the lady driving here is merely an innocent bydriver.

     Part of the reason is that it was the postcard’s job to observe, and usually laugh at, anything new and different.  And in the very earliest days of the automobile, as the humorous cards point out, EVERYBODY who drove a car was a bad driver.  The marvel was that the horseless buggy moved at all; knowing what to do with it once it was zipping along at six miles an hour came later.  At this point, women were there to encourage men to buy pretty postcards and tuck them somewhere on the desk for daydreaming at work.

     Except for those greasy chaps in their home workshops, automobiles were the plaything of the rich and fashionable.  There ARE stories at this time about men AND women getting a car simply because they thought they looked good in the automobile outfit.  There were no Women Driver Jokes on postcards because there were no Women Driver Jokes in society.  The automobile itself, a noisy novelty, was the joke.

     Until the general populace had cars, which did not happen until CEOs like Henry Ford decided to mine the gold to be found in middle class pockets, there was no point.  There wasn’t enough traffic to carry much automobilic humor.  Plenty of jokes about car accidents, yes: it only takes one driver for that.

     So the Woman Driver Joke had to rely on a) enough people being able to afford a car (or at least the down payment) and b) enough people on the road to make a postcard company realize more of the potential customers were driving than not.  It took the inter-war years, with the rise of interstates, motels (“motor hotels” for travelers in cars), and use of postcards as what customers sent home while driving out on vacation for the Women Driver Joke to start catching on.

     It is then, according to Women Driver Joke scholar Michael L. Berger, that people told the gags, perceiving the woman behind the wheel as a shift in society’s norms.  Oh, there had been complaints earlier, when women took to bicycles: finding pleasure in being outside the house could be seen as a threat to domestic perfection.  Even then, there were plenty of self-appointed experts (yes, we had those even BEFORE the Interwebs) who announced that getting outdoors was healthy and actually GOOD for the busy housewife.

Postcards artists were not shy about ridiculing other things which took the lady of the house outdoors: social clubs, voting, and so forth. But the possibility that men did not like to see their women driving almost always eluded caricature.

     But even as the Women Driver Joke became, in the eyes of twenty-first century commentators, a Tool of the Patriarchy, postcard artists were not one hundred percent convinced.  By mid-century, there were only minor hints that men might be better drivers because they drove more often, and, as in the previous postcard, preferred to drive.  And still there were men hinted they were perfectly willing to let the lady get behind the wheel.

     For various and sundry reasons.  The Woman Driver just did NOT get the comic postcard approval enjoyed by the Mother-In-Law.  (In our next thrilling episode, however….)

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER. Chapter 28

     Ada Silberwetter had obviously dressed in a hurry.  Her hair was caught up behind in a ponytail and the soft pink knit pantsuit she wore was nearly decent.  It was perhaps a touch too tight; the top was straining against the row of little plastic chains that held it together in front, but for Ada Silberwetter it was positively Puritanical.  A black scarf belt covered any gaps between top and trouser while a dangling leather belt scarf around her neck completed the array.  Her shoes were apparently somewhere under the table again.

     “I’ve been working on this young lady’s murder,” Mrs. Benz explained.

     Matt could see Ada was thinking the same thing he was, and her eyes dared him to say ir.  After a brief struggle, he decided against it and just said “Oh?”

     His mother nodded.  “I think we’d just agreed to break into the caterer’s for clues.”

     “Um,” Matt replied.  “They, er, frown on that.”

     She waved him away with the hand that had the pencil in it.  “Oh, who cares if it’s legal as long as it’s all right?”

     Matt directed a glare at Ada, who rolled innocent eyes up at him.  “Fine,” he said.  “I’ll just run check my almanac for a list of countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the United States.”

     “I knew he’d be that way about it,” Ada whispered to her co-conspirator.

     “We need clues.”  Her glare was very similar to Matt’s; she turned it to her notes.  “The whole story so far is very unsatisfactory.  All sorts of things are missing.”

     Matt felt slightly vindicated, since the story his mother had so far was mostly Ada’s invention.  Mrs. Benz fluttered her fingers at the yellow pages scattered at her end of the table.  “Why couldn’t your victim have had more of a love life?”

     Matt blinked.  Jerry Silberwetter.  No love life.  Things WERE missing from her notes.

     She slid pages across each other.  “What we need is for this Walter Prince character to have a torrid love affair with the victim’s sister.”

     Matt shrugged.  “Change the name,” he said, unbuttoning his coat.  “I know someone named Walter Prince, and he’s not the romantic type. He hovers between rage and sullen resentment.”

     “You just don’t him very well,” Ada said, “It’s in his will that he’s to be buried with a box of Milkbones so he’ll be ready when he meets his dog in Heaven.”

     Matt raised an eyebrow at her but decided not to fight about it.  “Well, one of them should be there.”

     Catching his tone, his mother rolled her eyes.  “It doesn’t matter.  We’ll change all the names when we write the book.”  She looked up in the general direction of her guest.  “It wouldn’t do to call all the Silberwetters by their right names.”

     “Of course not,” Ada agreed.  “Who’d buy one more book full of obscene phrases?”

     Matt said, “You would.”  She stuck her tongue out at him.

     The author, meanwhile, was shuffling through her notes.  “You know what we need,” she announced, pulling them into a neat pile.  “We need another murder.”

     “Here, here!” cried Ada.

     “Somewhere else, please.”  Matt folded his arms.  “One murder is plenty.  Death makes me nervous.”

     “Pooh.”  Ada took a sip from the cup of coffee at her elbow.  “Death is just nature’s way of saying, ‘Remember me?’”

     Matt put his nose down at her and looked over his glasses.  She choked a little on the coffee and then went on.  “You know, if you want to stay on as Watson around here, you’re going to have to work on your stunned admiration.  I’ve got a good mind to make this a Women Only detective agency.”

     “You couldn’t,” Matt fired back.  “You’d….”  He remembered that his mother was within earshot.  “You just couldn’t that’s all.”

     “You never know.”  Ada shifted her chair to show more shoulder to her opponent.  “The killer might be cute.”

     “Oh, I hope not,” said Mrs. Benz, rising from her notes to catch the last of that.  “Nice murderers are so hard to handle.  That’s what the second murder is for: it defines the killer.  Now, you might assume, from the anonymous letters and the poison in the soup, that Miss Skull is an unpleasant person.”

     “I might have jumped to that conclusion,” said Matt, pulling back an empty chair and planting himself in it.

     Long dry hands swirled over the yellow pages.  “But we don’t have definite evidence.  She might have been planning this for months and have ingenious reasons for picking just those methods.  A second murder clears the air: a murder Miss Skull didn’t plan and had to make up as she went along.  Say, if she shot someone in the back, we’d reason that she was desperate, and a coward.”

     Ada glanced across the table at Matt.  “One of my stepsons was shot in the back.  His name was Jerry, and they never caught the killer.”

     Matt held his breath.  But Mrs. Benz was intent on the murder in her notes.  “That’s nice, dear.  If we decide to go that way, we can roll your story in.  On the other hand, if Miss Skull were to go face-to-face with someone, or hand-to-hand, we’d have another killer altogether, someone bolder.  With these letters, you could go either way.”

     “Let me see.”  Ada set the tip of one index finger in the center of her chin.  “Who’s expendable?  Who could Miss Skull bump off?”

     Matt returned her smile and shrugged off his coat.  “Wouldn’t the person who received the letters be the obvious choice?”

     “Oh, you can’t ever let it be the obvious person,” said his mother, as Ada stuck out her tongue.  “Anyway, I’ve pretty much decided the letters are a red herring, so we can’t hurt her.”

     Ada applauded silently.  “Let’s compromise,” she said.  “Make it an attempted murder.  Miss Skull could put on a disguise and try to shoot your detective.”

     “That might be nice.”  Mrs. Benz groped for her coffee cup.

     This was cutting too close to the bone.  Matt pushed the coffee cup within his mother’s reach, and held it so it wouldn’t get knocked over.  “I don’t like it.  Why not brainstorm on the side of law and order for a while?  Have you had any ideas about actually catching Miss Skull?  Preferably BEFORE the second murder?”

     His mother grimaced.  “Only silly ones.”  She captured the cup and took a drink.  “I do hope I don’t have to resort to a tongueslip.”

     “Sounds like fun to me,” said Ada.

     “Sloppy, though,” said Mrs. Benz, not noticing the glance Ada threw at Natt.  “You know the kind of ending: suspects saying things they couldn’t possibly know if they’d been where their alibi claims.  It’s harder and harder these days to get away with that.  You really have to bury it so the reader misses it.  Oh!  Burying!  Those tombstone pictures….”

     She pushed her chair back.  “I have them in….” Matt began, but she had already left the room by way of the kitchen.

     He started to rise.  “You’d better let her get it out of her system, whatever it is,” Ada told him.  “She’s as stubborn as I am.”

     Matt remembered that this was not a theoretical exercise in solving murders, and also that he was annoyed with everyone.  “Don’t you have anything else you could be doing?”  He shrugged his coat off his shoulders onto the back of the chair.  “I’m sure the weather’s perfect for a bath in Buckingham Fountain.”

     Ada leaned back, hands under her ponytail, adding dangerous stress to the black chains holding up her top.  “You know very well there won’t be any lifeguards, this season.  I was just in the mood for shocking clergymen and automatically thought of you.  I don’t know why.  I can’t seem to help it somehow.”

     Matt snorted, and jerked a little so the coat would fall the rest of the way free.  Ada bent forward, reaching under the table.  Having Ada Silberwetter go under the table could only be a threat, as far as Matt was concerned, and he pushed his chair back.

     She was only fetching a thick folded newspaper.  “Miss Skull—the real one—made a date for today.  She must’ve thought I’d pick up the Reader on Thursday, or Friday at the latest.  It’s the mad holiday social whirl; can’t keep track of my murderers.”

     Matt took the folded mass of paper and read through the communications from Bottibooes to Many Tales and from Islamic Secretary to Coatimundi, and found the one she’d circled.

     “ROUND-UP PONY.  Will swap teeth with you Saturday afternoon at Picturesque Spot known to both of us.  Bring plenty of Saliva.  MISS SKULL.”

     Matt read through it twice.  “I suppose you’re going to go.  What if it’s a trap?”

     She frowned without wrinkling her forehead.  “I don’t think it would be.  He wants the money too much.  Anyway, I’m not going alone.”

     “Good,” said Matt.  “I wouldn’t….”  He lowered the paper.  Ada’s smile was brilliant.

     “No,” he said.  “If you think…well, just think another think.”

     “Don’t be so dull,” ordered Ada, flipping her ponytail.  “You can’t just shrug your way through life.”

     Matt was quite content to live a life devoid of adverb, and repeated “No.”

     Ada drew in her lips.  “But it’s your job.  The Watson has to be there to point at the wrong person, yell ‘There he goes!’ and then trip over his own feet.”

     “Get someone else.”  Matt refolded the Reader.  “There are lots of guys with feet.”

     Ada stood up, planting her fists on the table.  “You can NOT be so totally useless1”

     “Why not?  I work for the City.”

     “And I have to have a bodyguard.”  She eased around the table to give him a better look at the body he’d be protecting.  Matt rose from his chair and backed away.  “I’ll have all that money for Miss Skull and it’s a lonely neighborhood.”

     Matt backed into the wall.  Ada followed, trapping him by placing a head just below his right shoulder and setting one pointed fingernail on the little bump made by the lowest button under his sweater.  Rolling her face up so she could gaze at her bodyguard-to-be, she let her fingers climb the fuzzy bumps, one by one, on each syllable as she breathed, “You’re so big and I’m so fragile.”

     She pronounced it to rhyme with “wile”.  Her hand was up to his throat when she finished, and Matt felt a strong temptation to test her fragility.  But he had resolved to resolve to control his temper in the coming year, and, anyhow, it was Christmas time: peace on Earth and goodwill even to women named Silberwetter.

     “I was going to bring in some pictures,” said his mother.  “But I forgot which ones.”

     Ada slid away, but Matt could tell by the way his mother’s eyes were strictly on the sheets of paper that it hadn’t been quick enough or far enough.  He started to clear his throat.

     At any rate, Ada was unabashed.  “Maybe you were going to show me the family albums.  Surely you had all your sons photographed on bearskin rugs.”

     Mrs. Benz’s head came up sharply and for one moment Matt felt deeper dread than he’d experienced all day.  But she did not, after all, rush back out to fetch the albums and shoeboxes of pictures and slides and home movies.

     “Pictures!” she announced.  “What an excellent idea, dear!  We can make pictures the theme of the whole book.  You remember the tombstone pictures?  We add a clue in a baby picture from a family album.  And other pictures can be scattered through the text, some clues and some side roads.”

     Ada looked straight at Matt but spoke to his mother.  “I have plenty of pictures.  I can lend you some of mine.”

     Matt refused to be intimidated.  “Your family albums must have an R rating.”

     Before Ada could respond, Mrs. Benz looked her up and down.  “You must have been a cute baby.”

     Ada whirled to face her.  “Cute?  I was adorable!”

     Both women laughed.  Matt didn’t get the joke.

     “You must tell me all about your family,” his mother went on.  “I’ve used mine in so many stories I’ve nearly worn it out.”

     Fourteen of his mother’s novels involved a somewhat hardboiled detective named Barbara Chang.  Like their author, the heroine had three children, though Matt was acutely aware that the youngest was a girl.  So many family stories and in jokes had been wedged among the pages that Joe had suggested an omnibus volume called simply “Autobiography”.

     Matt wondered how those books would have sold if they’d been based on Ada’s family instead.  “My Aunt Casey was a contortionist,” she was saying.  “You used to be able to see her show on Clark Street.”

     “Show what?” his mother demanded immediately.  Both women laughed again.

     Matt cleared his throat for real this time.  “Didn’t you have places to go and people to do?”

     Ada opened his mouth, but it was Mrs. Benz who answered, “That’s right.  You were to break into—wherever it was—the caterer’s.  Better take your coat.  It looks dark outside.”

     “The sun’s shining,” said Matt, automatically.  Ada reached down and picked his coat off the chair.

     His mother squinted at the window.  “Is it nice today?”

     Matt scowled at Ada, who was holding his coat open for him.  She smiled.  “Maybe your mother would like to come with me.”

     “No!”  Ada Silberwetter was completely capable of taking her to whatever godforsaken spot Miss Skull had chosen.

     “I’d better not, dear.”  Mrs. Bez released a tiny sigh of regret.  “I’d just slow you down, or trip the alarm.  I’ll work on these clues; you young people have a nice time and tell me what you find.”

     “We’ll make a full report,” Ada promised.  “In triplicate.”

     Mrs. Benz nodded.  Her son started to sputter explanations, excuses, and expostulations all at the same time.  He released only two syllables before he gave up.  He knew that face.  Felicia Lowe was intent on crime.  At least until she hit the first snag in the plot, nothing would make an impression on his mother: not rain, snow, sleet, hail, or dark of day, regular meals, Christmas, or the detonation of small nuclear devices.

     So he snatched the coat from Ada’s hands.  “Goodbye, Mother,” he snarled.

     “Ta-ta,” she said, her eyes on her notes.  “Don’t take any nickel woodwinds.”

Brainstorms…and Drizzles

     When my age was still in single digits, a time shrouded in mystery because we had only just invented numbers, I had to figure things out by myself.  This COULD be attributed to intellectual curiosity: I was an omnivorous reader, characterized by some as “precocious”, some as “gifted” and some as “smart-aleck” (to put it no lower.)  I personally give more credit to my discovery at an early age that asking whether Ed Sullivan was mashed into that little white dot when the television was turned off would create sounds of unsuccessfully muffled laughter.

     That last sentence was just a fictional example of my scientific inquiries.  I would never really have asked that.  (We never turned the television off right after Ed Sullivan.)  But there were numerous topics that I cleared up entirely on my own, only to have reality rear its rude head.

     PALEONTOLOGY: Our back yard featured a clothesline comprising wires strung from the house to an immensely tall pole (possibly six feet) set in a rounded white dome.  The plastic shovels for beach use were not much good for excavation, and lugging the snow shovel into the back yard in the middle of August was a lot of work.  So I was never able to prove my discovery that this pole had, in fact, been imbedded in the domed skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

     GREEK PHILOSOPHY: I was introduced to the writings of Will Cuppy at an impressionable age.  One of the minor repercussions of this was my telling my elders about am ancient Greek whose name was pronounced Airy Ossel.  They found it hilarious that I had missed a T while zipping through the pages discussing Aristotle.  I felt better about this years later when my grandfather mentioned he never knew why a character in one of his books was nicknamed “Old Sock”, when his name, Socrates, was clearly pronounced Soak Rates.

     SPELLING: It was also comforting to find I was not the first person in the world to be mizzled.  I DID reason this one out all by myself, realizing one afternoon with a book in my lap, that though I could read the word pronounced muzzled (SPELLED “misled”), I had never heard anyone actually say it, as they preferred a word which I would have spelled miss-lea…hey!

     CALISTHENICS: On the other hand, I also learned all by myself (after way too many years) that assuming a position in which your feet are separated until even with your shoulders means placing those feet “Should-width apart”.  I knew what the P.E. teacher WANTED, even if I was absolutely sure he was telling us to stand “Shoulder with the Part.”  This, um, doesn’t make a lot of sense, but a lot of things the P.E. teacher confused me.

     I could go on with the refusal of the scientific community to pick up on my revelation that there is no dark side to the moon (the moon rotates, you see, so that the “dark side” just happens to point at us during the new moon phase, when we can’t see it) or my bold attempt to let everyone into the elementary school early (I had deduced that they were all standing around outside the front door to trick me; THEY deduced I had never heard of locked doors.)  But I am older now, and I must get on with responsibilities based on my improved knowledge of the world.  (Must just check my bank balance online.  I KNOW that if I turn that website off and then on again often enough, the amount will correct itself.)

Beverage Sauce – Today and Yesterday

     Life goes on teaching me things when I least expect it, which is Life’s normal teaching method.  A couple of days ago I encountered the phrase “beverage sauce”.

     This is not a new phrase; perhaps you knew about it.  This is a serum, or potion, or what-have-you, which can, in this case, be stirred into any beverage to give it that special seasonal Pumpkin Spice flavor.  I also learned that we call these two months in autumn “Spooky Season” because pumpkin spice sneaks up on you wherever you least expect it.

     I suppose this is preferable to the old word “creamer” because Americans tend to put creamer only in coffee, whereas a beverage sauce can be tossed into your milk, your 7-Up, your Smart Water, or whatever you please.  (I have suddenly experienced a desire to find out what it would taste like to add pumpkin spice beverage sauce to one of those banana flavored smart milks.  Spooky Season, indeed: didn’t even see that one coming.)

     HOWEVER, as a card-carrying member of the Irrelevant Generation, I should like to point out that the whole ‘beverage sauce’ concept is not new.  We ALSO had something we had around the house that would instantly change the flavor of any beverage if we just managed to sneak it past our parents (and since we had to stir using a metal spoon in a drinking glass made of glass, this was fraught with suspense.)

     We called it Hershey’s Syrup.

     Hershey’s Syrup, in those antediluvian days, was available only in small tin cans, which had to be opened with a can opener: the type otherwise used, as far as I can recall, only for cans of evaporated milk or beer.  This was NOT a problem for the experimental youngster: once a can of Hershey’s Syrup had the two openings in the top (one to let the air in so the syrup could pour out the other: we learned our science in them days without having to read our textbooks by the firelight) the can sat forever in the refrigerator, open to anyone who wanted to bother.  The only deterrent was the fact that sitting in the fridge made the syrup get thicker and harder to pour.

     Some other time I will tell the sad story of the hot fudge sundae in our house.  These were rare treats because to make hot fudge, the can of Hershey’s Syrup had to be heated in a saucepan of water on the stove.  Too much trouble.  So was the plastic package of Hershey’s Syrup that could be heated in the pan of hot water.  And, later, the plastic package that had to be heated in the microwave.  At this point, the world owes me something like a hundred hot fudge sundaes.

     COLD Hershey’s Syrup, however, could be poured into milk and then stirred ferociously until the milk was a creamy chocolate.  But was this enough for the scientifically intrigued grade schooler who had pioneered the concept of pouring maple syrup from the little pitcher onto vanilla ice cream?  NAY!  It merely raised the curtain.

     There is no time to go through ALL the experiments which resulted (or the maternal exclamations).  To summarize: mixing Hershey’s Syrup in water is pointless.  Mixing Hershey’s Syrup AND a healthy heap of Tang into milk was amazing.  Hershey’s Syrup and Grape Kool-Aid would never catch on.  Mixing Hershey’s Syrup into water with a handful of those individually wrapped blue mints did very little good.  (Nothing improved the flavor of those blue mints, which dominated the Candy Drawer those last few days before payday.  Who made those things?  Translucent blue, shaped like elongated Werther’s Originals, and as pretty as they were uninteresting to consume.)

     But the world moves along, and my parents were lured into purchasing Nestle’s Quik (now Nesquik).  This was MUCH easier to mix in, but, as a powder, does not belong in the category of beverage sauce.  And, as mentioned, Hershey’s Syrup was replaced in our refrigerator by chocolate in jars or plastic packets.  I do not know what year my parents finally discarded that last can, its triangular gouges still decorated with driblets of petrified chocolate.  It may have lasted until the current century, or maybe it still exists, still fastened to the old discarded refrigerator by hard chocolate paste on the shelf.

     Anyway, the whole point is that we DID have beverage sauces in my day, and it was a boon to the scientific impulses of small children.  If only we had had the backing of our elders (and a billion dollar ad campaign) WE might have come up with our own seasonal flavors and retired before we reached the point of having to study long division.  (I still think there’s a place in modern commerce for my brother’s lemon-lime chocolate flavor.  This was a springtime sensation, and, instead of Hershey’s syrup, used Lemon-Lime Shasta as a sauce for hollow chocolate Easter eggs.  I don’t recall what this tasted like, but the resulting mess made a few squiggles of Hershey’s Syrup on the kitchen floor pale in comparison.)

LIKE A MIGHTY QUONKER, Chapter 27

     Matt was still worrying about it when he reached the bus stop.  “It’s not that I don’t want to eat with you,” he said to himself and/or Carleton Nairn.  “But I have an appointment.”

     People eased out of the bus shelter as he walked in.  They did not hurry, nor did they dawdle.  Tall men talking to themselves were unnerving, but not uncommon, sights at bus stops.

     Matt clamped his lips shut and watched his breath float up from his nose into the ice-blue sky.  Would that he had just one ounce of Ada Silberwetter’s confidence, her self-satisfaction.  Not that this would give him a way out.  He would very likely be dead soon, his novel unfinished, his life just lines in City records, a footnote in a biography of Felicia Lowe.

     A 151 pulled up; Matt forced himself forward. It would not have been his first choice, but it was pointed in the right direction, and anything was better than standing here, frozen with fear, until he froze for real.

     It was a mistake, of course.  This far north on its route, the 151 was packed full.  Matt had expected to have to stand, but hadn’t reckoned on having to stand so close to everybody else.  The people along the aisles bobbed back and forth as the bus started up again while a pack of small boys, completely uninhibited by the crush, the approach of the holiday, or anything else, pushed and shoved each other, pointing to things they spotted outside.

     “Looka at Ka’alak limo!”

     “Assa grayun!”

     “Limosant gray!”

     “Too!  M’relatiff has un!”

     “Y’reltiff!”

     “Duss!”

     “Dussen!”

     Duss abet!  Ruddinut wunsen dennay cubberdim up!”

     A slightly older girl in charge tried to shush them in a dignified manner, but none of the boys even looked at her and she was trying too hard to look sophisticated to deal with the in coin they understood.

     Matt did not precisely relax.  He was still watching for the knife he fully expected to slide into him at any moment.  But Matt-the-Writer was thinking of a boy named Georgia O’Malley, who figured prominently in “Ascent of the Ruby Slippers”.  Always unhelpful, Matt-the-Writer was blending the boys with Matt’s terror for Georgia’s activities in the “Green” section of the book.  The boy saw a forest for the first time and got lost immediately, not being able to tell one tree from another.  The dialogue might make a page of the book.  If “Ascent” remained that sort of book.  He had been giving serious consideration to adapting it into a comic book script and marketing it as a graphic novel.

     “Hey, Matt! Hold this just a second?”

     A large square box, not a little heavy, practically jumped into his arms.  Peering over it, Matt saw the top of Maryann’s head.  She shifted to one side, smiling at him and the driver impartialy, and letting people who had their tokens or dollars ready pass around her while she found her transfer.

     Matt hadn’t thought of Maryann as a suspect.  But she’d been at Down in Jerry Silberwetter’s day too.  Surely she was born at Down, wearing some neat, immaculate suit, sitting behind that neat immaculate desk.  Silly to leave her lout of consideration just because she was a secretary, and above all the political backstabbing.  But Geegee had been a womanizer, of course, and no doubt always took his camera along.

     And while Matt was considering all this, he was also realizing that his hands and arms were completely occupied with the big box, with no way to avoid that knife.  Maryann’s purse could hold, besides a bus transfer, a good-sized knife.

     “Thanks!”  Maryann held up her transfer as the driver clicked something below the fare bx.

     Matt pushed past her to the door, releasing the box onto her at the same time.  “Sorry,” he said, as she got her arms under it just in time.  “Er, my stop.  Apartment.  See you!”

    The closing doors nipped at his heels.  The bus roared off.  Looking around, Matt found that he had traveled four blocks for his dollar.  “Just as well have bought the chestnuts,” he growled.

     He checked the Fannie Mae bag to make sure no sweet-toothed pickpocket had passed.  Chocolates were hard to hide until Christmas: they had to go somewhere they wouldn’t be squashed or melted.  Not that his mother would come hunting; good hiding places were traditional in the Benz household.  Sometimes she hid presents so well she didn’t find them again until the following April.  This was not a side effect of advancing age; she’d always been like that.

     A 3 came by.  Matt didn’t want a 3; this time he was holding out for a good old 11, if he froze for it.

     Stamping his feet to warm them, he stamped them a second time in fury.  The Number 11 didn’t run this far south on the weekend; how much of his life had he wasted on Saturdays and Sundays waiting for it?  It would have to be another 151, and then a 66, and probably a 22.  He kicked at the corner of the bus shelter.  Three people eased away down the sidewalk.

     For all he knew, his mother had tried to cook something for lunch. Mat wouldn’t mind so much if it weren’t for Mrs. Andrews, down the hall, who was always frightened by the sound and called the police.  Of course, there was Miss Skull: either the case or the novel based on it might be preoccupying her to the point that she skipped lunch. She wouldn’t even answer the phone when she was intent on her work.  She wouldn’t even come to the door when Matt….

     What if someone else had come to the door?  Someone who found out about Felicia Lowe and tracked her real name to the apartment, someone who wanted to know why an author was looking into the secrets of civic government?  She wouldn’t understand the questions.  They’d apply pressure.  The strength drained from Matt’s arms; he nearly dropped his chocolates.  He shook himself and cleared his throat, covering it by walking to the curb as if looking down the street for the next bus.  He could walk to the next bus shelter: better than standing here amid paranoid scenarios.  It would drive him mad, if he wasn’t already….

     He spotted a miracle in the traffic.  Bracing his backbone, he threw an arm in the air.  “Taxi!”

     Mere minutes and more dollars than he liked to think about later, he unlocked all the locks, swung inside, and went limp against the door to shut it.  He was home, he was safe, and the weary world could be locked out for another day.

     “I like chocolate Easter bunnies myself.  Palmer.”

     “You eat the ears first, of course.”

     “Oh, of course.  Well now.  Sometimes I start with the feet.  You wouldn’t want him running away from you.”

     Matt unsagged, and marched down the hall, pausing only a moment to toss the Fannie Mae bag into his room.  He stalked into the dining nook.

     “Well, golly Jehosapaht,” drawled Ada Silberwetter.  “Look who’s here!”

     “My mother didn’t give you a key to this place, did she?”

     Ada’s nose went down and she peered up at him through long lashes.  “And don’t lower your eyes to me!” he snapped.

     “Matt?”  His mother leaned forward to peer at him.  “Are you home?”

     “No,” he said.

     “Then you’d better go see who was at the door,” she told him.