Mr Fielding Goes Missing Read online

  Mr. Fielding Goes Missing

  A Jane Carter Historical Cozy (Book Eight)

  By Celia Kinsey writing as Alice Simpson

  NOTE: BY CELIA KINSEY WRITING AS ALICE SIMPSON.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Mr. Fielding Goes Missing: A Jane Carter Historical Cozy©2019 Alice Simpson. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Inspiration for this series: This series is an adaption of Mildred Wirt’s Penny Parker Mysteries which have fallen into the public domain. Although the author has made extensive alterations and additions to both the plots and characters, readers familiar with Ms. Wirt’s books will recognize many elements of both from the originals.

  Cover images ©Freepik.com and ©incomible (Bigstock.com)

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  The Jane Carter Historical Cozies

  Peril At The Pink Lotus

  Room Seven

  The Missing Groom

  The Oblivious Heiress

  A Country Catastrophe

  Robbery at Roseacres

  Rogues on the River

  Mr. Fielding Goes Missing

  Jane Carter Box Sets

  Books One-Three

  Books Four-Six

  Books One-Six

  Felicia’s Food Truck One Hour Mysteries

  Fit to Be French Fried

  Hamburger Heist

  Pizza Pie Puzzler (Coming Fall 2019)

  Hot Dog Horrors (Coming Fall 2019)

  The Little Tombstone Cozy Mysteries

  The Good, the Bad, and the Pugly

  Lonesome Glove (Coming Fall 2019)

  Tamales at High Noon (Coming Winter 2020)

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter One

  Flo and I laughed and shouted as we clung to the little iceboat speeding over the frozen surface of the Grassy River.

  “Jane, we’re going too fast!” screamed my friend, Florence Radcliff, as she ducked down to protect her face from the biting wind.

  “We’re only going about forty miles an hour,” I shrieked. “This boat can travel at sixty if the wind is just right.”

  Bundled in a fur-lined parka, sheepskin coat, and goggles, I manned the tiller. When I’d left the house, Mrs. Timms, our longtime housekeeper, had said that I looked for all the world like a jolly Eskimo.

  The Icicle was my pride and joy. I’d built the iceboat myself—spars from a wood lot, the sail from an old tent.

  “Slow down, Jane,” Flo pleaded.

  “Can’t,” I shouted. “We’re going into a hike!”

  As one runner raised off the ice, the boat tilted far over on its side. Florence shrieked with terror and held on tight to prevent being thrown out. I tried to avert disaster by a snappy starting of the main sheet.

  For a few terrifying seconds, the boat rushed on, runners roaring. Then, as a sudden puff of wind struck the sail, the steering runner leaped off the ice. Instantly, the Icicle went into a spin from which I could not recover.

  “We’re going over!” screamed Florence, scrambling to free her feet.

  The next moment the boat capsized. Flo and I both went sliding on our backs across the ice. I landed in a snowdrift at the river bank, my parka awry, goggles hanging on one ear.

  “Are you hurt, Flo?” I called out, scrambling to my feet.

  Florence lay sprawled on the ice some thirty feet away. Slowly she pulled herself to a sitting position and rubbed the back of her head.

  “Maybe this is your idea of fun,” she complained. “As for me, give me bronco busting. It would be a mild sport in comparison.”

  I tugged Florence up and started dusting snow from her clothing. “This is great fun, Flo. We have to expect these little upsets while we’re learning.”

  The sail of the overturned iceboat was billowing out like a parachute. Slipping and sliding, I ran to pull it in.

  “Take the old thing down,” urged Florence, hobbling after me. “I’ve had enough ice-boating for this afternoon.”

  “Oh, just one more turn down the river and back,” I coaxed.

  “No!” Flo said firmly. “We’re close to the clubhouse now. If we sail off again, there’s no telling where we’ll end up. Anyway, it’s late, and it’s starting to snow.”

  I reluctantly acknowledged that Florence spoke pearls of wisdom. Large, damp snowflakes were drifting down, dotting the thick blue woolen mittens Mrs. Timms had knitted me last winter. The wind was stiffening, and the cold penetrated my sheepskin coat.

  “It will be dark within an hour,” added Florence. Uneasily she scanned the leaden sky. “We’ve been out here all afternoon.”

  “Guess it is time to go home,” I admitted. “Oh, well, it won’t take us long to get the Icicle loaded onto the car trailer. We’re lucky we upset so close to the clubhouse.”

  Flo and I took down the flapping sail. After much tugging and pushing, we righted the boat and pulled it toward the Greenville Yacht Club. The Yacht Club was closed for the winter, and the building looked cold and forlorn. I had parked Bouncing Betsy in the snowy parking lot, which was convenient to the river.

  Bouncing Betsy is my ancient Peerless Model 56. She used to be a sleek and glossy black, but now she’s more of a dapple grey. I originally bought her for thirty-five dollars in a fit of economy after my husband died rather unexpectedly and left me with little more than fond memories of our short union. Now that I’m a moderately successful lady novelist—authoress of such works of popular fiction as Perpetua’s Pride, Lady Ramfutherington’s Revenge, and my current work-in-progress: Fiona Finds a Way: A Tale of Love and Betrayal in Old New York—I cling to Old Bets out of pure sentimentality. I can’t bear to resign her to the scrap heap. We’ve been through far too much together.

  “Wish we could get warm somewhere,” Florence said, shivering. “It must be ten below zero.”

  Pulling the Icicle behind us, we climbed up the slippery bank. Snow now swirled in clouds, nearly obscuring the clubhouse.

  “I’ll get Bouncing Betsy and drive her down here,” I said, starting toward the parking lot. “No use dragging the boat any farther.”

  Abandoning the Icicle, Florence followed. A dozen steps took us to a wind-swept corner of the deserted building. Rounding it, we both stopped short, staring.

  “Great fishes! What happened to Old Bets?”

  My faithful automotive companion of lo these many years sat in the snowy parking area of the yacht club, her entire right side dented in and her front bumper askew.

  “Poor Old Betsy,” I wailed, pounding my mittens together. “She’s been savagely attacked.”

  “Look at
those tracks,” Florence said. “It looks like an automobile lost control and slid off the road into the parking lot.”

  I followed Flo’s pointing finger. A set of deep ruts in the snowy bank supported Florence’s theory.

  “I don’t think that was any ordinary automobile,” I said. “I think it was a large truck and heavily loaded, too.”

  “It looks like it lost part of its load when it collided with Betsy.” Flo pointed toward a ditch that bordered the parking area.

  I went to investigate the little ravine. Through a screen of bare tree branches and bushes, I glimpsed a large wooden crate, broken in half and partially obscured by the deep snow into which it had tumbled.

  I moved closer to investigate, Flo close at my heels.

  “Do you smell what I smell?” I asked Flo as we approached the crate.

  “Do you smell whiskey?”

  “I’m not sure what whiskey smells like,” I said. “You, on the other hand, having a father who keeps a bottle of bourbon in the garden shed, will doubtless be more knowledgeable.”

  Florence’s father, the Reverend Sidney Radcliff, is no longer a drinker, not that he was ever habitually sozzled or anything of that nature. Since the passage of the Volstead Act, Reverend Radcliff adheres strictly to the letter of the law. His wife, Mrs. Reverend Sidney Radcliff, sees to that.

  My dig at Flo about the bottle in the garden shed was referring to Reverend Radcliff’s one small act of rebellion against Prohibition. Sadly, since Flo filched his bottle, containing the remaining three quarters of an inch of bourbon, so that I could use it to impersonate a drunken intruder to the Moresby Clock Tower—don’t ask, it’s too complicated to relate here—the Reverend has had to make do with the weak tea and lemonade Mrs. Radcliff provides the inmates at the parsonage.

  “Perhaps you could pick up a resupply for your father,” I suggested to Flo.

  “Wouldn’t touch the stuff,” Florence said. “It’s probably pure poison. I did tell you what happened last week at the Church Christmas Bazaar?”

  “You did,” I said.

  Apparently, someone had spiked the punch at the St. Luke’s Christmas Bazaar, which Mrs. Radcliff took charge of each year.

  I suspected that it was the work of the son of one of Reverend Radcliff’s parishioners, Harold Amhurst. A few years back, Harold been responsible for a similar stunt during St. Luke’s Spring Social. On that occasion, I’d been disposed to take a tolerant view, since there’s nothing quite so amusing as a gaggle of old dears gradually growing spifflicated.

  However, the Christmas Bazaar had ended on quite a more sobering note. Several of Reverend Radcliff’s parishioners had been hauled off to the hospital on stretchers, and dozens of others had also become ill to varying degrees.

  Mr. Townsend, who already had a liver complaint, was still admitted to Mercy Hospital. Another stricken parishioner, Mrs. McCall, told Flo, when she paid her a visit to administer chicken soup and see to the cleaning of Mrs. McCall’s glass eye, that she (Mrs. McCall) hadn’t been out of bed for a week and was still seeing double. I considered seeing double quite a feat considering that Mrs. McCall had vision in only one eye, but the old lady had always possessed a flair for the dramatic.

  “Is your mother still convinced it was Mrs. Pruitt who poisoned the punch?” I asked Flo.

  “She is,” said Flo, “and nothing will convince her otherwise.”

  Mrs. Arnold Pruitt is Mrs. Radcliff’s archrival for supremacy as Grand Dame of Greenville’s civic circles. They’ve been involved in a war of words for years. It all started when Mrs. Pruitt suggested that Mrs. Radcliff might not be the organizational force she once was owing to it being “her time of life.”

  This spurious claim resulted in Mrs. Radcliff starting a whisper campaign questioning the moral fiber of Mrs. Pruitt and suggesting that in the not-so-distant past Mrs. Pruitt had been a woman of loose character who danced with numerous members of the male sex in return for monetary compensation.

  This claim had a modicum of truth to it, in the strictly literal sense. However, as Flo told me, the real story was that Mrs. Pruitt had been a dancing instructress at an all-boys school where she taught Victorian waltzes to the under-twelve set. Broomstick partners outfitted with little muslin skirts (for modesty) had been involved, according to Florence, so, while Mrs. Radcliff contrived to make Mrs. Pruitt’s past into an affair of Bacchanalian proportions, the woman’s real history was entirely respectable.

  “Surely,” I said, “even if Mrs. Pruitt were to have spiked the punch to embarrass your mother, she’d not have deliberately poisoned all your father’s parishioners in the process. Just last week that man over in White Falls nearly died after drinking bootleg liquor.”

  “Well, never mind the whiskey,” Flo said. “How are we going to get home? We’re miles from Greenville. No houses close by. We’re already half frozen and night is coming on.”

  “Betsy’s badly injured, but perhaps she can limp home under her own power.”

  I got in the driver’s seat and, after several attempts, got Betsy, who never had been fond of cold weather, started. However, when I tried to reverse out of the parking lot, there was a terrible scraping and grating.

  “I’m afraid her frame is bent,” I said after I’d cut Betsy’s engine and rejoined Flo in the deserted, snowy lot. “She’ll never make it up to the main road, much less all the way back to Greenville.”

  The wind was cutting right through me, and Flo’s lips were turning blue, so we climbed back into Bouncing Betsy to discuss our next move.

  “Can’t we just wait here until someone comes along and gives us a lift to town?” suggested Florence.

  “We could, but we’re on a side road, and few cars travel this way, especially in winter.”

  “Then why not go somewhere and telephone?”

  “The nearest stores are at Robison’s corner, about two miles away.”

  The snow, which continued to fall, was banking deeper on the windshield of the car.

  “Two miles in this, facing the wind, will be a hard hike. Think we ought to try it, Flo?”

  “I’m sure I don’t want to. And we needn’t either. I just remembered something. Martin told me he was coming up this way this evening to check up on his Uncle Albert, who lives in a cabin near here. Uncle Albert had a heart attack a few weeks ago, and Martin’s Aunt Mable doesn’t like Albert to be left on his own.”

  Martin “Shep” Murphy is my old friend and Flo’s current flame. I was shocked when Shep and Flo got together, but they’ve been going strong for almost a year now, so perhaps Flo’s days of pining over moving picture stars are over. It’s high time she concentrated her love and affection on a real flesh and blood man instead of Rudolph Valentino.

  Shep’s a good egg, and I heartily approved when I discovered he and Flo had lit a fire under a pot together and were approaching a rolling boil.

  “Do you know where this aunt and uncle’s cabin is located?” I asked Florence. “If it’s close by, why not tramp over there and ask Shep to give us a lift home?”

  “I was there once last summer,” Flo said. “It’s off on a rough track through the woods, but I’m sure I can find it.”

  “All right,” I said, sliding from behind the steering wheel. “If we’re going, let’s move right along.”

  We were stiff with cold as we trudged past the clubhouse and on down the road. Snow was falling harder now. Several times we paused to wipe our frosted goggles.

  “This promises to be a blizzard,” Florence observed uneasily. “It’s getting dark early, too.”

  A hundred yards farther on, we came to another side road which wound upward through the wooded hills. Already there was an ominous dusk settling over the valley. Flo paused to get her bearings.

  “I think this is the way,” she said doubtfully.

  “You think?”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure,” Florence amended. “Uncle Albert’s cabin is up there on top of one of those hills. If this snow w
ould stop, we should be able to see the smoke from his chimney from here.”

  I was not terribly reassured, but I nevertheless followed Flo across a wooden bridge and up a narrow, winding road. On either side of the frozen ditches, tall frosted evergreens provided friendly protection from the stabbing, icy wind, but walking was difficult for the roadbed was coated with a shell of treacherous ice.

  We trudged at a stiff pace, despite falling down at regular intervals. I think we were both anxious to make the most of the remaining daylight.

  “Shouldn’t we be coming to the cabin by now?” I asked Flo after we’d been trudging along for at least fifteen minutes. “Surely we’ve gone more than a half mile.”

  “The cabin is a little way off from the road,” Flo confessed, peering anxiously at the unbroken line of evergreens. “We should be able to see it.”

  “In this blinding snow? We may have passed the cabin without knowing it.”

  “Well, I don’t think so,” Flo insisted.

  “I’m nearly frozen now,” I complained. “There’s no feeling in my left hand.”

  I paused. From far down the road I heard a laboring motor.

  “A car, Flo! Everything will be all right now. We’ll hail it and ask the driver for a lift.”

  Flo and I paused and waited for the approaching vehicle. I could hear it climbing a steep knoll, then descending. From the sound of the engine, I decided that it must be a truck and that it might round the curve at considerable speed.

  Worried lest the driver fail to see us, we stepped out into the middle of the road. As the truck swerved around the bend, Florence and I shouted and waved our arms.

  The startled driver slammed on his brakes, causing the big black truck to skid. Flo and I dove for the ditch and scrambled up the bank. We were very lucky not to be struck.

  As we watched from the relative safety of the snow bank, the driver recovered control of the vehicle. He straightened out and brought the truck to a standstill farther up the road.

  “Come on, Flo,” I said. “He’s going to give us a ride.”