A Puree of Poison

by Claudia Bishop

  Hemlock Falls 03

  A Pinch of Poison

  Claudia Bishop

  © 1995

  CHAPTER 1

  Margaret Quilliam flipped another page in the tabloid-sized newspaper, bolted upright, and shrieked, “My god!” She shook her head. “This is outrageous. Like discovering Martha Stewart’s had a sex change operation, or that Julia Child binged on Twinkies. I can’t believe I didn’t take a look at this when it was published a week ago.”

  “We’ve been busy,” said Quill shortly. “The new restaurant’s taking up more time than I thought it would.”

  “Yeah, but, Quill. There’s no excuse. With Doreen so annoyed with you—”

  “Doreen is not annoyed with me.”

  “She’s annoyed at both of us,” said Meg comfortably. “Which is why she didn’t let us know about this outrageous newspaper, I expect. I wish I’d gotten down to the diner for the gossip this week. It must be fierce. And, by god, it says the next issue’s due out today. I’ll bet everyone’s all of a doodah. Well, you needed a murder to solve. Sure as heck somebody in town will knock this bozo off. Detecting will be good for you. It’ll pull you right out of this depression you’re in.”

  Sarah Quilliam ignored her sister, concentrating instead on the Arriving Guests list. She penciled “Query: Sashimi?” next to the names Sakura Kenji and Sakura Toshiro, then wondered where they’d find fresh fish. Ken Sakura taught art commentary at Cornell. Toshiro must be his father. She didn’t really paint anymore, and it was too much to expect that someone like Ken Sakura had heard of her, but still. Sushi would be nice. A gesture.

  She dropped the list onto the wrought-iron tabletop and sighed. Meg’s comment about depression was an exaggeration, like her reaction to the newspaper. If she, Quill, was a little down, it was because it was Friday and the Inn would be full by tomorrow. On the other hand, since a capacity crowd was unusual for the summer, it was probably the heat that was making her feel cross-wise.

  It was hot even for August. When the kitchen thermometer in the Inn the sisters owned together hit eighty-eight (with a rise of ten degrees forecast for the afternoon), they’d headed outside to the gazebo by the waterfall to finish their weekly meeting over menus and the guest list. Quill scanned the items on her written agenda: review food to be served at their new boutique restaurant; assess inventory process improvements; verify menus and activities list for the upcoming week; discuss special menu requests from the customer survey results. Meg wasn’t going to like that last one. Quill sat back and sighed. Even her elbows were sticky from the muggy weather.

  The temperature had brought most of the Inn’s guests out onto the lawn. Temporarily abandoning special menu requests, which was Meg’s job, anyway, she wondered for the fourth or fifth time if they should air-condition the building. The Inn was situated high over Hemlock Gorge, and a breeze from the falls and the river usually cooled the Inn from the ground floor to the eaves. The heat was intolerable only two weeks out of the summer.

  Maybe it wasn’t as hot as it felt. Quill was wearing a light cotton skirt, sandals, and a flowered gauze blouse with full sleeves. Most of the guests had on less than that. Meg was in shorts, and she’d knotted her T-shirt above her waistband, but sweat trickled down her temples and her face was flushed. Quill lifted her own mass of hair to let the breeze from the Gorge cool her neck. It didn’t work. It was as hot as it felt. She thought about the things she should be doing instead of sitting in the gazebo. She should grab the newspaper away from Meg and force her to plan her own bloody menus. And she should either talk to Mike the groundskeeper about deadheading the roses or do it herself. The heat had forced an early petal drop, and things were looking shaggy. What she really wanted to do was go swimming in the clear water of the gorge and let the gardens, the Inn, the menus, and the guest list take care of themselves. She looked at the building, the grounds, and the garden filled with people whose relationship to her was defined by the limits on their credit cards. She sighed. Meg was right. She was depressed. Which was undoubtedly making her feel the heat even more.

  Quill tried to convince herself that the Adirondack chairs placed at strategic intervals throughout the gardens were filled with guests drawn irresistibly outside by ‘the sound of the falls and the scent of the roses, and not the muggy temperatures. A large elderly lady next to a four-foot-high bush of Apricot Nectar fanned herself with a copy of Vogue’, her sigh of annoyance drifted accusingly across the lawn. Quill looked again at the estimate for air-conditioning, then grabbed an ice cube from her iced tea and ran it around the back of her neck. Now she was both hot and wet. She pulled a curl from behind her ear and looked at it. “Should I go blond?”

  Meg glanced up, scratched her bare leg with one hand, and waved Quill’s question away with the other. “It’s been red since you were born. It’s still red. Leave it alone.”

  “I’m going gray and I’m not even within spitting distance of thirty-four.”

  “That’s not gray, that’s Gruyere from the quiche at lunch. You’re gorgeous, okay? Now, I wouldn’t say you looked happy, or even pleasant, not for the past couple of weeks, at least. But gorgeous? Absolutely.”

  “Be quiet,” said Quill crossly. “Put that thing down. I want to get to work.”

  “In a minute. You’ve got to see this after I’m through. Hedrick Conway never claimed he was going to publish a good newspaper. But this is ridiculous. It’s not a newspaper, it’s a joke.”

  “It looks like a newspaper to me. And I don’t care what it is, anyway. How do you feel about sushi?”

  “Sushi?”

  “We have the Sakuras coming in. Do you know who they are? The father just retired as managing director of Sakura Industries, which is this huge multinational company.”

  “What’s the former managing director of a billion-dollar business doing in Central New York? Need I ask. My cooking, naturally.”

  “His son teaches art appreciation at Cornell. He’s Ken Sakura, the critic.”

  “Oh.” Meg affected an air of unconcern. “We could unpack some of your paintings, maybe? He might want to take a look.”

  “I’ve quit.”

  “Quill...”

  “My point was that it might be nice to offer a special Japanese menu.”

  “I don’t know a thing about Japanese cooking except that you have to be licensed to serve fugu.”

  “Fugu?”

  “It’s a fish. The liver’s poisonous. Kills you in something like two seconds.” Meg mimed swallowing, clutched her throat, rolled her eyes, and made a sound like a garbage disposal with a fork in it. “You have to pass a test in cutting the liver away from the fish part.” She looked thoughtful. “I wonder how they can tell when you’ve flunked? Now, there’s a worthy subject for one of the nutty statistical studies you’ve been messing with recently. The morbidity rate in fugu inspectors on the island of Honshu.”

  “I would really appreciate it,” said Quill stiffly, “if you’d cut the crap and give me a hand here.”

  Meg raised her eyebrows, said nothing for a moment, then saluted. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Quill flushed. She was willing to admit to a slight— very slight—depression over her breakup with Myles McHale, but it was not making her—what had been John Raintree’s adjective? Touchy. Or was it bitchy! Maybe it had been a little bitchy to tell John to stick to minding the general ledger. Now, telling him he was not the Inn’s resident shrink and to butt out of her private life would qualify as bitchy, since John was a friend of long standing as well as being their business manager. She didn’t think she’d gone as far as that. At least not in so many words. Anyway, business was business, and the sooner everybody at the Inn figured that out, the better off they’d be. “Which,” she
said aloud—and to Meg’s slight confusion—”we came out here to do, anyway, so we should get back to it.”

  “If you’re talking about next week’s menus, let me finish this newspaper first, and then I’ll be your willing slave. How much do you suppose Hedrick Conway and his family invested in it anyway? He’s going to lose his shirt.”

  Quill, perversely, found herself in sudden sympathy with the Conways, whom she had never met. She dampened her fingers and scrubbed at the gray strand in her hair. “You remember what everyone said about us when we opened up six years ago.” Having determined that the gray was in fact Gruyere, she interrupted herself, considered a haircut, and bunched her hair together at her chin line. “You think I should go short?”

  “No,” Meg said without looking up. “It’s nice the way it is. And yes, I remember what people said when we moved here and opened the Inn. Nothing. Nobody talked to us for a year.”

  “Well, when we did start making a few friends, they wanted to know why we were wasting our time and money on this junk heap and were we made of money or what?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Nothing would ever get accomplished if people didn’t take risks. Make sacrifices. Make tough personal decisions. Like my deciding to quit painting for the time being. And... other things. I’m getting the same kind of negative reaction to my efforts to improve the way things are done around here that the Conways are getting to their newspaper. ‘You stick to what you do best. What do you want to mess around with stuff for when the Inn practically runs itself?’ Runs itself, hah! I’d like to see some people run this Inn and find out how easy it is.”

  “So Doreen did talk to you this morning! She told me she’d had it up to here.” Doreen, their head housekeeper, was a fiftyish widow whose three husbands had not, as occasional opinion would have it, died from being nagged to death. “She’s got a right to be mad at you. I’m a little annoyed with you myself over this sudden immersion into all this quality improvement stuff.” Meg tapped the agenda in a way loaded with significance. “Doreen’s got her own case of... what’s your euphemism for your lousy mood? ‘Slight irritability,’ that’s it. Anyhow, ever since that miserable Axminster Stoker took up residence in the Shaker suite and the two of you started harassing her about how he can help her be more efficient, she’s been more than slightly irritable, she’s been pissed.”

  “It wasn’t just the process improvement stuff,” Quill said in gloomy agreement, “it’s the boutique restaurant. Despite the fact that we’ve been planning it for months and included the staff every step of the way, Doreen hates the idea. She was complaining about the restaurant again this morning.”

  “Did you tell her she could put her Amway catalogs near the cash register? As soon as you do that, she’ll come around to our way of thinking. You haven’t changed your mind about the boutique, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I think it’s terrific. And the mall design is neat. The town needs the tax revenues. I’ll be able to try some snazzy little dessert thingies that aren’t right for the main dining room. I need the creative space that a little restaurant like that can give you. I can improvise. I can—”

  “If you need creative space,” Quill interrupted, “why don’t you start with some Japanese food? The feedback from this new customer survey Mr. Stoker suggested says that people like to eat the things they’re familiar with. And the Japanese are familiar with sushi.”

  “If people want familiar, they can stay home.” Meg’s face flushed with more than the heat, well past the ninety-degree mark now. “This sort of thing is exactly what Doreen was complaining about. You’re brooding over Myles and making the rest of us jump through hoops. Process improvement for Doreen. Menu changes for me. Investment projects for John. No painting for you. I was sympathetic for a while, but you were the one who decided not to marry him.”

  “I am not brooding over Myles,” Quill said carefully.

  Meg opened her mouth, caught her sister’s eye, and closed it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to... never mind. Why don’t I get us some more iced tea? Stop thinking about the Inn. Forget Myles. Take three deep breaths.”

  Quill sat very still.

  “Are you breathing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really, truly just sitting there and forgiving me for being a tactless jerk?”

  “Yes.” Quill cleared her throat and wiped carefully under each eye with the back of her hand. There’d been a family saying for years when they were little, and she used it now. “It’s just so hot my eyeballs are sweating.”

  Meg laughed a little, squeezed her hand hard, and released it. “One of the many advantages of having an older sister is they never completely let you forget your childhood. Here. Read this. I’ll be back in a minute and we can talk about your next project. It’ll be a real community service. Trust me.”

  Determined to be diverted, Quill took the paper.

  The village of Hemlock Falls (population three thousand four hundred and fifty-six) had two newspapers for the first time in its three-hundred-year history. The venerable and conservative Hemlock Falls Gazette had carried hog and cattle prices and covered birthdays, weddings, graduations, and funerals to the exclusion of news stories for over seventy years. If anything so cataclysmic occurred that even Dookie Shuttleworth (the amiable but absentminded minister of the Hemlock Falls Church of the Word of God) was aware of it, the Gazette would refer to it in terms so elliptical that no one could possibly take offense. Natural disasters such as the Blizzard of ‘88 were usually apologized for: quite a bit of snow in town had been the headline reporting forty-eight inches. Man-made disasters, such as the murder investigations into which Quill and Meg had been involuntarily drawn several years before, were alluded to indirectly, if at all: UNFORTUNATE INCIDENT INTERRUPTS HEMLOCK HISTORY DAYS AND PAINT FACTORY PRODUCTION SLOWS were the Gazette’s response to a total of five corpses. Town opinion had it that the Gazette was more properly a medium for amiable social exchange than an organ designed for the balanced analysis of events.

  The town had been in shock when Pete Rosen had put the Gazette up for sale. When Hedrick Conway, his mother, Louisa, and his sister, Carlyle, purchased the vacant Nickerson Hardware building (the hardware business had fallen victim to the new Wal-Mart on Route 15) and announced the successful purchase of the Gazette, Hemlockians had been dubious. The old newspaper had an editor-publisher related to half the folks in town. A man, moreover, who knew that real news was published at Marge Schmidt’s diner over Sunday breakfast. Best thing that could happen was the flat-land foreigners get their clock cleaned and return to wherever they had come from, flat broke.

  Meg had rolled the paper into a cylinder with the address sticker uppermost. Quill read: Mrs. Sarah Quillam, Manageress, Hemlock Falls Inn, One Hemlock Road, Hemlock Falls, New York 14562. At least the ZIP code was right. Quill and Meg had both retained their maiden names after Quill’s divorce and the demise of Meg’s husband; they both preferred to use Ms. although Miss would do in a pinch; they spelled their name with two ‘/’s; the Inn was named the Inn at Hemlock Falls; and the term manageress had gone out with World War II, if not Warren G. Harding.

  Even Dr. Watson could deduce quite a bit from something as simple as an address label. She frowned thoughtfully at it. The Conways were probably sweet, certainly elderly, obviously retired. Hedrick was probably fulfilling a lifelong dream of running a hometown paper in the Eden-like setting of Hemlock Falls. Hedrick’s mother undoubtedly had pure white hair and a bravely wielded cane.

  Quill decided to take out a subscription, maybe even an ad. People (like, for instance, Myles McHale), were unreceptive to those who tried to change the course of their daily lives. Especially if that person was a thirty-three year old artist turned Inn manager who preferred to remain single. Who wasn’t sure she was tough enough to have a husband whose job took him into dangerous, life-threatening situations at all hours of the day and night. Especially a
husband who wanted children. Not, Quill thought, the paper crumpled in her lap, her eyes on the water cascading over the rocks to the Hemlock River below, that babies weren’t a pretty good idea in the abstract. She just wasn’t sure about the particular.

  A red-tailed hawk swept the narrow ledge of the gorge and shrieked, hunting to feed its ravenous young.

  She shook herself, smoothed the tabloid over her knees, and read:

  THE TRUMPET!

  Premier Issue no. 1 vol. one FREE COPY ONE TIME ONLY!!!

  Underneath the banner was the headline:

  DOG’S RUN WILD IN THE STREETS!!!

  “Holy cow,” said Quill.

  Meg, back from her trip to the kitchen, set a fresh pitcher of iced tea on the table and settled into her seat. “Told you.”

  “Dog’s run wild in streets?” said Quill. “In Hemlock Falls? A dog’s what, anyway? Good God, listen to this! ‘It was a dark and stormy night when this reporter took to the streets and alleys of our fair village....’ “

  “Tuesday, I should think,” said Meg with a judicious air. “That’s when it rained last, three nights ago.”

  “ ‘A dark shape followed this reporter as this reporter patrolled the muddy alley. A ferocious growl made menacing noises.’ A ferocious growl?” Quill peered around the paper’s edge. “Behold my wild surmise.”

  “I think he must have been behind Esther’s shop. That’s the first place in the village to get muddy when it rains.”

  “Got it. And the ferocious growl?”

  “Buddy, Esther’s poodle. She lets him out at seven-thirty for what she discreetly refers to as his constitutional. Doesn’t fool a soul. Turn the page.”

  Quill turned the page. A photograph of “this reporter” filled the upper right quadrant. A banana-nosed man in his early thirties held the bottom of his loafer toward the camera with an expression of extreme distaste.

  Quill shrieked.

  “He stepped in it.” Meg’s grin was reluctant. “The editorial’s about leash laws. He wants the town council to enforce leash laws—”