Chapter Text
THE LUNATIC YARN #1 by Carey Kasdot
Part I: Mystery Date
In Which We Encounter the Unexpected
Hindsight is for after events happen, not before. Who then can blame Roger Collins and Elizabeth Stoddard for what they were about to unleash on Collinwood the day they found the dumbwaiter?
“Whatever it is, someone wallpapered over it!” announced Elizabeth, watching her brother Roger knock and scratch at a bulky wall in one of the empty upstairs bedrooms of Collinwood’s central wing. “Could it be a cabinet built into the wall? Why would someone paper it over?”
“And set an armoire in front of it as well!” Roger remarked, for though the room was now empty of furniture, a large, squat armoire had hulked against this very wall since time immemorial. Roger picked and tore at the wallpaper with his fingernails, trying to free a strip.
This room was slated for redecoration. It was spacious with big windows, but dark woodwork frowned at the brother and sister on all sides, and a busy Victorian wallpaper touched them with tendrils of anxiety. The paper clashed with a furiously figured carpet, further upsetting the senses. The heavy, forbidding drapes had faded to an uneven dusky grape color.
Both Elizabeth and Roger were dressed casually, ready to encounter dust and dirt. Roger wore a rugged old brown sweater with sleeves rolled to the elbows, and a pair of slacks that had seen better days. Elizabeth had a red kerchief round her hair, and a blue-checked shirt with old-fashioned pegged jeans. She looked quite girlish. Her feet were in light, comfortable mules—about as close as Elizabeth Stoddard was going to get to a pair of sneakers.
They had intended to oversee some general cleanup of the central wing of Collinwood; it was Elizabeth’s ambition to attack all the woodwork of the house, which some remote, misguided ancestor had slathered with unforgiving umber paint. She wanted to update it all in white or cream. She intended to redecorate all the rooms and see to the removal of the hulking, dark furniture and the decaying draperies, and to introduce light and freshness everywhere. And though her brother would probably give her an argument, she secretly hoped to be able to do some of the painting herself.
“Don’t tell me that someone papered over a family portrait!” she exclaimed, stepping back and resting her hands on her hips as her brother dedicatedly scraped at the paper.
“Of some detestable ancestor? A three-quarter-view of Attila-the-Collins, with fez and sword, from the year 1315! Now Liz, you know there have never been any bad antecedents in our family,” Roger joked, turning his head to smile at her, then turning back as he finally got a strip of paper loose and eagerly pulled at it. It made a dry whisper of sound. Elizabeth smiled slightly and shook her head, trying to get used to Roger’s buoyant spirits. Since he’d fallen in love with Veronika Liska, a taciturn but lovely local physician whom he intended to wed, her brother had been a new man. A much happier one.
In the aftermath of a fall on the stairs that Roger had experienced at the start of April, Elizabeth had summoned an osteopath to help him with physical therapy. Though Roger and the pretty physician had exchanged snarls at first sight, their feelings had undergone rapid change. Roger now hoped to marry Dr. Liska.
As Elizabeth watched, a slim, straight crack in the wall was revealed under his working fingers.
Baffled, she continued to observe as her brother pressed his thumbnail into the crack and, following its line, drew it vertically up the paper. He was tracing a definite rectangular shape. There was some sort of cabinet built into the wall. Marveling, Elizabeth blinked and then abruptly realized what she was seeing.
“Oh, Roger, could that possibly be a dumbwaiter? Oh, I think it is. That would make sense, because I remember that Father was brought to this room when he was so ill with influenza—but you were so young you probably won’t recall. I’m sure they used this room so that they could receive food from the kitchen via the dumbwaiter while taking care of him. And,” Elizabeth continued, warming to the topic, “the stairwell is on the other side of this room. Of course. There must be a chute, a track of some kind, that runs beside the stairwell down to the kitchen. But I don’t remember seeing a dumbwaiter door in the kitchen, do you? I wonder where it's located.”
She broke off at the clatter of quick footsteps in the hall. David, not expecting to see them in this room, passed it by but then grabbed the woodwork and pulled himself back to the doorway again with a grin, banging into Hallie Stokes, who was right behind him.
“Aunt Elizabeth,” David called, “Father! We’re going out. We’ve got—”
“Not so close to lunchtime, David!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Please have your lunch first!”
“Why should they?” Roger broke in with a truculent look at his sister. He took the opportunity to draw his bare forearm across his face, displacing the perspiration there and leaving a streak of old plaster dust. “Lunch is cancelled in this house, as is every other meal, from here to eternity! If you eat at Collinwood anymore, you eat at your own risk.”
Hallie laughed at Roger.
“Roger, for heaven’s sake,” interjected Elizabeth.
“Don’t for-heaven’s-sake me, my dear sister. Until I hear that the services of the Coterie Eaterie have been re-established in this house, this radio is not receiving!”
“You know very well that some Coterie staff will be back shortly,” Elizabeth chided. “We couldn’t keep them in the backyard! They’ve gone back to their catering offices in town, and in a very short time Tish and a few others will return to supervise all our meals.”
Roger had swooned over the temporary catering service that had set up onsite and served Collinwood through the weeks in which their kitchen was being remodeled and the stove replaced. Now, after much negotiation, a Coterie staff member or two—Tish Lemon was one of the Coterie staff—would be absorbed into Collinwood’s household as permanent chefs, or “meal advisors.”
Impatiently from the doorway, his eyes running over the wall, David countered, “Well, then, can we go out for just a half hour and be right back? What is that behind the wallpaper?”
“We think it’s a dumbwaiter that someone wallpapered over and no, I’d rather you didn’t. Please go down to Mrs. Johnson, she must have your soup and boiled sandwiches ready for you.”
David sighed loudly in exasperation and stomped off down the hall, followed by the quieter Hallie.