"This is where a guy was killed last year."
"So I've been told," Qwilleran said.
"Used to be a summer hotel for rich people. My grandmother was a cook here, and my grandfather drove a carriage and brought people up from the railroad station. The road wasn't paved then. He used to talk about drivin' people like Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Madame Schumann-Heink, whoever she was."
"Famous Austrian opera singer," Qwilleran said. "What did your grandparents do after the inn closed?"
"Moonshinin'!" the installer said with a grin. "Then they opened a diner in the valley and did all right. They served split-brandy in teacups—that's half brandy and half whiskey. The diner's torn down now, but lots of old people remember Lumpton's famous tea."
"Are you a Lumpton?" Qwilleran asked. He had counted forty-seven Goodwinters in the Moose County phone book but twice that many Lumptons in the Spuds-boro directory.
"On my mother's side. My cousins own Lumpton's Pizza. Sheriff Lumpton is my godfather. You know him? He was sheriff twenty-four years. Everybody called him Uncle Josh. He always played Santa for the kids at Christmas, and he sure had the belly for it! Still does. But now they have some skinny guy playin' Santa . . . Well, I better get to work. Where d'you want the extension?"
"Upstairs on the desk in the back bedroom," Qwilleran said from his bed of pain. "Can you find it all right?"
"Sure. If you hear it ring, it's just me checkin' it out."
The phone rang a couple of times, and eventually the young man came downstairs. "Okay, you're all set. I left a phone book on the desk. Your big cat's sure a nosey one! Watched everythin' I did. The little one is bitin' herself like she has fleas."
"Thanks for the prompt service," Qwilleran said.
"Take it easy now."
As soon as Qwilleran heard the van drive away, he went upstairs to find Yum Yum. He could now climb one step at a rime if he led with his right foot and leaned heavily on his staff. The telephone, he discovered, had been installed on the desk as requested, but in the wrong room. It was in the cats' bedroom, and Koko was being aggressively possessive about it. Yum Yum was on the bed, gnawing at her left flank, and there were small tufts of fur on die bedcover.
Qwilleran brushed Koko unceremoniously aside and called the Wickes Animal Clinic. Dr. John, according to the receptionist, was in surgery, but Dr. Inez had just finished a C-section and could come to the phone in a jiffy.
When Inez answered, he said, "This is Jim Qwilleran, your neighbor at Tiptop. Do you make house calls? Something's very wrong with my cat, and I'm grounded with a sprained ankle."
"What's wrong?" she asked, and when he described Yum Yum's behavior, she said, "I know it looks kinky, but it's not unusual for spayed females. We can give her a shot and dispense some pills. No need to worry. One of us will run up the hill with the little black bag around five o'clock. What happened to your ankle?"
"I slipped on some wet leaves," he explained.
"Will this rain ever stop?" she complained. "The waterfall under our house is running so high, it may wash out our sundeck. See you at five."
Qwilleran babied Yum Yum until she fell asleep and then went to work on copy for the Moose County Something: a thousand words on the feud between the environmentalists and the Spudsboro developers.
"What has happened," he asked his Moose County readers, "to give a negative connotation to a constructive word like 'develop'? It means, according to the dictionary, to perfect, to expand, to change from a lesser to a higher state, to mature, to ripen. Yet, a large segment of the population now uses it as a pejorative." He concluded the column by saying, "The civic leaders of Moose County who are campaigning for 'development' should take a hard look at the semantics of a word that sounds so commendable and can be so destructive."
"And now, old boy," he said to Koko, who had been sitting on the desk enjoying the vibrations of the typewriter, "I've got to figure out how to get this stuff faxed. May I use your phone?" He tottered into the cats' room and called the manager of the Five Points Market, saying, "This is Jim Qwilleran at Tiptop. Do you remember me?"
"Sure do!" said the energetic Bill Treacle. "Did you run out of lobster tails?"
"No, but I have a food-related problem. I sprained my ankle yesterday. Do you make deliveries?"
"Not as a rule. What do you need?"
"Some frozen dinners and half a pound of sliced turkey breast from the deli counter and four hot dogs."
"I'm off at six o'clock. I'll deliver them myself if you can wait that long," said Treacle. "I've never seen the inside of Tiptop."
"I can survive until then. If you wish, I'll show you around the premises and even offer you a drink."
"I'll take that! Make it a cold beer."
