Dread on Arrival (4 page)

Max wagged his tail and cocked his head intelligently. The screen door to the kitchen banged open. “Jack’s back from his playdate,” Doreen said. “and takin’ his nap, just on schedule. Which is more than I can say for you. Bein’ on schedule that is.” Doreen stood with her hands on her hips. Quill looked at her with affection. Doreen had been the Inn’s first hire, and she had terrorized the staff for years. She was lean and wiry, and with bright beady black eyes. Jack loved her to distraction, and so did Quill.

“I know, I know.” Quill dropped a quick kiss on her housekeeper’s mop of wiry gray hair, and moved lightly past her to the kitchen. A quick glance assured her all was well; Bjarne, the head chef, loomed over Meg, eyebrows raised, as they looked through the menu notes she’d brought from the meeting with Clare. Elizabeth Chou chopped tomatoes, humming happily.

Quill sniffed; roast lamb for the special, it seemed, and it smelled absolutely delicious.

She passed through the swinging doors to the dining room. There was always a nice, expectant air about the dining room just before they opened for dinner. The wineglasses gleamed in the sunshine streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows. The cutlery sparkled. The flowers in the vases on the table were the last of the dahlias. Outside, the rush of water over the falls reached her ears in a faint, reassuring susurration.

Quill passed from the dining room into the front hall. It was small for a reception area, no more than twenty by thirty. A cobblestone fireplace occupied one wall. A soft cream leather sofa piled with needlepoint pillows sat in front of it. The curved staircase to the second and third floors was opposite the massive oak front door. The pine floors were covered with an Oriental rug in cream, celadon, peach, and sage green. The two giant Chinese vases that flanked the reception desk were filled with late lilies. Dina Muir, her receptionist, sat behind the mahogany front desk, her nose in a textbook. She looked up as Quill whizzed by on her way down the short hall to the Chamber meeting and shouted, “Whoa!”

Quill skidded to a halt. “What is it? I don’t have time for my messages right now. I’m late for the Chamber meeting.”

Dina’s expression said: so what else is new? But she pushed her red-rimmed glasses up on her nose with one slim forefinger and dropped her voice. “I’m thinking maybe you don’t want to go in there.”

“I don’t?” Quill took a couple of steps forward and looked down the short hall to the conference room. It wasn’t really a conference room, just as the wine cellar at Bonne Goutè wasn’t a conference room, but there wasn’t any need for a keeping room, which had been a salient feature of the two-hundred-year-old Inn, so they had converted it.

Quill lowered her voice, too. “What’s going on?”

“It’s a lynching.”

“A what!?”

“Well, okay. Not a real, actual, physical lynching.” Dina marked her place in her textbook with a pink While You Were Out slip. She was a graduate student in freshwater pond ecology at nearby Cornell University. While rigorous in the pursuit of accuracy of the life cycle of her copepods, she tended to the imaginative in her approach to human beings. “But there’s been a ton of screaming and yelling going on down there, and Marge stomped out here twice, wanting to know where the heck you were.”

Quill relaxed. “Chamber meetings are always a little volatile, Dina. It’s the
Attic’
s road show taping that’s got everyone in a flap, I expect.”

Dina shook her head dubiously. “You think? How much hoorah can there be over a bunch of old furniture?”

“A lot, I should think,” Quill said. “
Antiques Roadshow
sometimes features tons of valuable stuff. Paintings, porcelain, jewelry.”

“
Your Ancestor’s Attic
doesn’t,” Dina said cynically. “If you ask me, they just follow along in the
Roadshow
’s wake, picking up all the junk the
Roadshow
didn’t want to feature. Did you see that episode where Edmund Tree announced he was coming to Hemlock Falls? Did you see that pissed off little old lady whack him over the …”

A crash from the vicinity of the conference room made them both jump.

“I don’t watch it.”

“Even if it is a riot over old junk, you still don’t want to go in there. I mean, Mrs. Henry stomped right in after Marge Schmidt came out here the second time looking for you and called Marge an old boot.”

“Adela called Marge an old boot?” Quill discovered most of her hair had fallen out of her topknot. She swept it up again and pinned it firmly in place. Adela, Elmer Henry’s imperious wife, was the real power behind the mayor’s throne and a stickler for what she called ladylike manners and grace under pressure. “No! You must have misheard her.”

“She did. And you know Mrs. Henry. She’s about the most unflapped person in Hemlock Falls. But there she was, hollering away and red in the face.”

“My goodness,” Quill said, equably.

“If you ask me,” Dina said unhappily, “we’re on the verge of revolution, right here in the village. Who would have thought something like that could happen here, of all places?”

Quill smiled at her. Years of happy attention to the pond life of upstate New York clearly hadn’t prepared Dina for the messiness of human behavior. “You remember the second rule of innkeeping.”

“‘Keep your shirt on’?” Dina shook her head. “You go on in there. You’ll see.”

2

∼Hemlock Falls Ladies’∼
Auxiliary Coffee Cake

2 large eggs1 cup salted butter1¼ cups sugar2 cups flour½ teaspoon baking soda1½ teaspoons baking powder1 cup sour cream1 teaspoon vanilla¾ cup ground pecans combined with 3 tablespoons brown sugarCombine eggs, butter, and sugar. Add flour, baking soda, and baking powder. Mix well. Fold in sour cream and vanilla. Put half of batter into a Bundt pan. Sprinkle one half of the pecan sugar mixture over it. Add second half of batter and sprinkle remainder of sugar over the top. Bake in a cold oven set to 350 degrees for about an hour. The conference room was at the end of a short flagstone hall. Quill paused before going in and put her ear to the door. It was ominously quiet.

She rapped twice, out of habit, and turned the knob and went in.

The room was long and narrow, with a low ceiling. Two hundred years before, it had been a keeping room, storing fruits, vegetables, cured hams, and barrels of flour and sugar. Quill had taken a utilitarian approach to the space. A credenza set up for coffee service was on the long wall facing the door. The floor was brick, impossible to keep warm in the winter, and it was with real reluctance that she’d installed Berber carpeting. She’d placed a series of whiteboards on the walls, and installed a conference table that seated twenty-four.

Twenty of the twenty-four spaces were filled with members of the Hemlock Falls Chamber of Commerce. They were all silent, with the kind of uncomfortable body posture that nice, middle-class Americans adopt when embarrassed. Elmer Henry sat at the head of the table, a mulish expression on his face. His majestic wife Adela, sat next to him, dressed in a bright orange pant suit and a ruffled navy blouse. Her face was red. Howie Murchison, the town justice and senior partner in Hemlock Falls’s only law firm, sat next to Adela. Howie was in his early sixties, with a fringe of graying hair and a comfortable paunch. He raised both eyebrows in greeting as Quill walked in.

“There you are, Quill. We’ve had a motion to form a new political party sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. We need your vote to break the tie.”

This was so completely unexpected that Quill turned around to make sure she had come in the right door. Then, “A what?”

“You heard Howie,” Marge Schmidt said. “Siddown and vote.”

Twenty faces swiveled and looked at her. Quill knew all of them and liked most of them a lot. Harvey Bozzel, Hemlock Falls’s best (and only) advertising man. Nadine Peterson, owner-operator of the Hemlock Hall of Beauty. Dookie Shuttleworth, the mild-mannered pastor of the Church of the Word of God. Harland Peterson, president of the local Agway and Marge Schmidt’s husband.

Marge herself, the richest woman in Tompkins County, sat right next to Harland, dressed in her usual chinos, a navy blue Peterson Dairy Farms windbreaker, and red-checked shirt. Her ginger hair capped her round skull in newly tight curls, which meant she had just made her biannual visit to Nadine’s beauty shop.

Marge narrowed her machine-gun gaze and growled, “’Bout time you got here. All right, Mayor. We got twenty-one here now, and we gotta break this tie.” She smacked her meaty fist on the table. “I call for another vote. And this time, it’d better go my way. You vote yes, Quill. Got it?”

“She’ll vote no,” Adela said. “Or else.”

Everybody looked at Quill.

She smiled cheerfully. The third rule of innkeeping was to retreat in the face of certain disaster. She looked at her watch. “Sorry. I just dropped in to tell you that I have a small emergency. I was going to ask Miriam if she’d mind taking the minutes for me. I have to be off right now.”

Miriam Doncaster, the town librarian, was a particular friend of Quill’s. She admitted to being in her mid-fifties, and Quill had always admired the faint sensual air that clung to her. She wasn’t quite sure how Miriam created the effect: it had something to do with her gray blond hair, which was thick and tousled, and her wide blue eyes. She smiled sweetly and patted the empty chair next to her. “Not on your tintype, honey. Sit down and take it on the chin, like the rest of us.”

Quill sank into the chair and said with an air of decisiveness everyone knew to be spurious. “What is the motion, exactly?”

Marge sat back in her chair and folded her arms under her considerable bosom. “I’m not saying another word.”

“Oh, sure,” Carol Ann Spinoza said. “Like you haven’t said way too many words already, Marge Schmidt.” Carol Ann had been the town’s tax assessor for an excruciating three years. She currently held the office of the Hemlock Falls animal control officer. Quill wasn’t quite sure why she had abandoned her personally designed animal control officer’s outfit, with its belt of lethal weapons, but she had, in favor of a tailored pantsuit.

She drummed her perfectly manicured nails on the table. “And I don’t know why we have to stop in our tracks just because Quill’s waltzed in hours late like she always does. You don’t have to know what’s going on, Quill. It’s your fault you’re late, so you’ll just have to go ahead and vote without us going over all this baloney again. All those opposed to sponsoring this party raise your hands.” She thrust her right arm up in the air and looked around the table.

“What party?” Quill asked. And then, bewildered, “If I’m opposed to voting, do I vote yes or no?”

“You. Were. Late,” Carol Ann said, as if speaking to a disagreeable deaf person. “Now, vote!” Carol Ann’s cheerleader good looks, perky smile, and gleaming white teeth concealed the soul of a piranha. She wasn’t the town’s meanest tax assessor any longer, so her power to intimidate was considerably lessened. But old habits die hard and a few hands went hesitantly in the air, Harvey Bozzel’s among them. Marge frowned at him and he hastily patted his hair, which was blond and gelled to perfection.

“Hang on a bit,” Howie said easily. “Due process is due process, Carol Ann. We have to at least describe the motion before calling for a new vote.”

“If the secretary had been here,” Carol Ann said viciously, “we could have had her read the motion back from the minutes. But she wasn’t and she can’t.”

Esther West sat forward timidly. “I jotted a few notes. Pastor Shuttleworth asked me to, just in case.” She held up a scrapbook covered with glitter hearts and rainbow decals. “I ordered these for the shop and I can’t tell you how handy they are. It’s a three-ring binder, as you see, so I can just take these Chamber notes right out and ta-da! I have my scrapbook back again, ready for photos or anything. They’re only ten ninety-nine, while they last. Useful for anything, these scrapbooks are.”

“Mayor,” Carol Ann said, her voice stickier and sweeter than usual. “I have a question. Are these Chamber meetings supposed to be places where some people think they can sell overpriced stuff from their shop or not? I say not. I move to have that blatant advertisement for Esther’s Country Crafts stricken from the record.”

“There isn’t any record,” Howie said. He looked as if he would like to tear his hair, if he’d had any. “That’s part of what this discussion’s about. Esther, if you would, please read the motion, just to clarify matters.”

Esther patted her curls, adjusted one faux pearl earring and cleared her throat. “A motion was made by member Marge Schmidt Peterson that a new political party dedicated to the welfare of the citizens of Hemlock Falls be officially sponsored by Chamber members. The party is named …” She squinted at the scrapbook page, then said, “Pfft?”

“Not pfft!” Marge said. “People for Free Parking. PFFP.”

“PFFP,” Quill said, scribbling her own notes. “Got it.”

“And what it will do,” Marge said between her teeth, “is get those damn parking meters off Main Street.”

“Oh,” said Quill. “I see.”

“That’s not what it says here, actually …” Esther said.

“No, you don’t see.” Marge was furious. “I got people coming to the Croh Bar for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and they gotta cough up fifty cents? And all those cruddy meters give you is two hours before my customers have to haul their behinds off of the barstools and go feed the meters? And when they come back in, do they want another beer? You have any idea how much beer sales are down since those darn meters poked up all over town?”