“Cracks?”
“I have no recollection of assigning a host family to those poor fellows. I don’t think they’ve been visited by the Howdy Brigade.”
“Mrs. Carruthers, it’s funny that this should happen.”
“Funny in what way?”
“As you may know, I’ve made it a special part of my life in recent months to reach out to our Middle-Eastern visitors.”
“Yes, Dean Knightly told me!” Mrs. Carruthers said, her face lighting up. Then a new realization flashed into her mind, and she became stricken all over again.
Clyde was having to run his stressed and preoccupied brain in overdrive to keep up with all the stray notions running through Mrs. Carruthers’s head. He finally put it all together: not knowing the reason for Clyde’s visit, she had put two and two together and got five: she thought he had come to upbraid her for not having sent the Howdy Brigade around to visit these characters in July.
Having worked all this out, and seeing signs of an approaching nervous breakdown on Mrs. Carruthers’s face, there was only one option open to him. “Ma’am, I wonder if you might allow me to take these new arrivals under my wing a little bit, and serve as the Howdy Brigade’s representative as far as they are concerned.”
Mrs. Carruthers was so overwhelmed that she nearly blacked out and appeared to suffer from acute inner-ear malfunction for a few moments. “Would you and Desiree be so kind?” she whispered.
“Oh, I don’t think of it as kindness, Mrs. Carruthers.”
She remained skeptical that any human being could be capable of such generosity of spirit and required several minutes of additional convincing. In the end, though, she fell for it; rummaging through her purse for a key chain, she opened a storage closet in the back of the office and invested Clyde with the full insignia of Howdy Brigade authority: a food basket consisting largely of tiny wax-encased cubes of smoked cheese, and the all-important three-W packet. Clyde then had to wait for several minutes as she composed a handwritten letter of apology to the July arrivals for having neglected them for so long; while this was being accomplished, he took Maggie down to the nursery, changed her diaper again, and let her taste all of the toys.
“You have an address for these fellows by any chance?” he said offhandedly when he got back.
“I’ve just been on the phone to Mrs. Knightly about that,” she said, and handed him a piece of scratch paper with the crucial data written out in flawless cursive. Clyde could already see the house in his mind’s eye; he’d knocked on the door four months ago as part of his campaign and encountered a family of Indians waiting for the moving truck, milling around in the front hallway amid stacks of boxed VCRs and laundry machines.
It was a split-level house in a neighborhood of prosperous split-leveldom. Clyde made sure that all the car doors were locked and that Maggie was still sound asleep. Then he hung the food basket over his wrist and stuck the three-W packet under his arm and strode up the walk, trying to manage a welcoming, Howdy Brigade kind of smile.
He had made it only halfway up the walk before the front door was opened; as he’d suspected, someone had been watching him through the pink gingham curtains in the upstairs bedroom windows. Clyde didn’t want to stop in the middle of the yard, so he kept striding forward, focusing his attention on a squirrel that was bounding awkwardly across the brown grass carrying a hickory nut the size of its head.
“Yes? Sir? Hello?” said a voice from the door. Clyde covered another couple of strides as he was looking around for the source of these words. “Can I help you, sir?”
“Howdy!” Clyde finally said, bounding up onto the concrete front porch, which was as bare as it had been during his last visit there. “Mrs. Knightly says we owe you fellas one heck of a big apology! And I’m here to do the apologizing.”
“Yes, sir, one moment please,” said the man in the doorway, who then retreated inside, closed the door, and shot the dead bolt.
There followed several minutes of internal discussion, which Clyde could hear only dimly through the house’s walls. During this time he stood there on the porch with a fixed smile that was beginning to wear out his facial muscles, which were rarely exercised so. He looked around and tried to gather useful data, but to all appearances the house might as well have been vacant. He supposed that if he’d been Sherlock, even this absence of data would have been a significant clue. But it didn’t seem to be getting him anywhere at the moment. The tidiness was a positive detriment to clever detective work.