"Oh, for Pete's sake." Meg, shaping meringues into swans, paused and waved the palette knife in an accusing fashion." Anyone would think you'd spent three days in solitary instead of three hours chitchatting with Davy Kiddermeister."
"I was not chitchatting with Davy Kiddermeister. I was in jail. A prisoner. And I was cold. I told you. They took away my boots."
Doreen made a surreptitious note on a pad she kept handy in her apron. Quill had seen the pad. It had a little logo of a mouse with a reporter's hat and five large capital W's running down one edge for Who, What, Where, When and Why. Doreen had ordered it from the Lillian Vernon catalog soon after she married Axminster and they bought the Gazette. Axminster had proved surprisingly good at publishing the weekly, although Quill suspected that Doreen's nose for gossip had a lot to do with it. That, and her savings from her wages as the Inn's housekeeper. Doreen was notoriously thrifty. Doreen caught Quill's eye and shoved the pad back in her pocket. Doreen's gray hair frizzed around her high forehead like a ruff on a grouse and her nose was beaky. Spurious attempts at innocence increased her resemblance to a startled rooster.
"Axminster' s going to run a story about this, isn't he?"
"It's publicity," Doreen offered placatingly. "Publicity's good for business."
Meg snorted, "Publicity! If you'd just told Howie Murchison about those priors, none of this would have happened. What I want to know is, how come when the Inn gets publicity, it's always bad publicity? At least this time it isn't a corpse. I hate it when the headlines involve a corpse."
"They better not, missy," Doreen said darkly.
"Better not what?" asked Quill.
"Involve no corpse."
Meg grinned to herself and added a wing to the swan's body with meticulous care.
"What are you talking about? I didn't kill anybody!"
"Passin' a school bus, you might of, is all," said Doreen.
The silence intensified.
"I didn't pass a school bus!" said Quill. "I mean I did, but it was a parked school bus."
"That's when you're supposed to stop," Doreen said tartly. "When the school bus is."
"It was a parked, empty school bus!"
"Empty?" said Frank, the assistant chef. "You mean you didn't almost run over a little kid?"
"No!"
"That's what we heard," Bjarne said apologetically.
"I told you guys," said Meg.
"Told them what?" said Quill.
"I told them you didn't almost run over a little kid. You would have confessed to me." She winked.
"There is," Quill said stiffly, "evidence that I didn't run over anybody."
"Evidence?" asked Doreen.
"A videotape. From that damn hidden camera that started this whole mess. They showed it in court. All it showed was my car passing that school bus!"
"They show the whole thing?" Doreen asked alertly. "Stuff like that can be faked, ya know."
"All right, all right." Meg gestured widely with the palette knife, spattering egg white. "Doreen, you know gossip in a town this size. Quill didn't run anybody over with anything." She shook her head at Quill. "You're right, I should have stayed with you this morning. Next time you get arrested, I will. Sisters forever!" She began to hum an Irving Berlin tune so old Quill didn't even know where she'd picked it up. "Sis - ters. Sis - ters. Dah-dah-dah-sisters..."
"Thing is," Frank said earnestly, "if you didn't almost run over a little kid, what else would bring someone like Senator Alphonse Santini all the way to Hemlock Falls to prosecute a little traffic case?"
Quill rose from her seat behind the counter. "He's here for the wedding! He is not a senator. He's an ex-senator. Clearly he's turning even his wedding into a media circus! And he's running so hard for reelection he's going to need oxygen infusions before New Year's. As to why he picked on Hemlock Falls first, beats the heck out of me. Maybe because he's getting married here. You heard what Nora Cahill said - this is part of a whole campaign to reform small-town America. And he's started here. If anyone's a hit-and-run driver, it's him. I mean it's he. Whatever. I'll bet you a week's pay that right now he's off to the next town and the next victim, trailing his pet little media person and her camcorders behind him. He'll be jailing innocent people over in Covert next. Or maybe Trumansburg. And he'll come back here to get married, and I'll kill him."
"The guy's a jerk," Meg said loyally. "If the McIntoshes weren't spending all this money on his wedding, I'd do more than shove a few handfuls of mud up his nose."
"Gee, thanks, Meg," said Quill. "Food first, sisters second." She paused, cleared her throat, and said huskily, "I can't believe you guys thought I did something as terrible as almost hitting a little kid."
"Somebody circulating that rumor again?" John came through the swinging doors from the dining room, a sheaf of lunch orders in his hand. At his seemingly casual comment, everyone busily resumed work. Quill had always thought his chief asset as business manager was his unflappability. She decided now that it was his easy air of authority. He smiled at her. "Glad to see Howie sprang you from the slam. I was about to callout the cavalry."
Quill gave him an unwilling smile.
"Mr. Raintree? This rumor that's been going around about Quill's jail time..." Frank began.
"You're too smart to believe that one, Frank. And even smarter enough to stop anyone who spreads it. Quill? You have a few minutes to spare? Mrs. McIntosh would like to go over some of the wedding plans."
"Sure." Quill latched on to the proffered diversion with relief. "Where is she?"
"Office. I'll meet you there in a second. Kathleen's busy with customers out there. The RV conventioneers from the Marriott snowmobiled over here in a huge group. I told her I'd turn these lunch orders over to Frank for her."
Quill hesitated, waiting for him. "You go on ahead, Quill. I just need a few minutes with these guys."
Quill pushed her way through the swinging doors slowly enough to hear John say, "Everyone in this kitchen is going to listen to this once, and only once..."
The doors whispered closed. Behind her, John's admonitions rose and fell. Phrases like "innocent until proven guilty" would be hurled next. Not to mention, "going through a tough time at the moment." Quill folded her arms and glowered, startling a guy in an unzipped snowmobile suit at table fourteen into spilling Meg's pumpkin souffl‚ onto his T-shirt. Mindful of a public television special on psychic well-being she'd seen recently, Quill took deep breaths, strove for inner calm, and exhaled noisily, further alarming the gentleman seated at fourteen.
Quill concentrated fiercely on the McIntosh wedding, clearing her thoughts of a persistent sense of injustice. Mrs. McIntosh would want to know if they could accommodate the extra eighty people who'd somehow I, sprung up at the last minute.
She still wasn't sure how they were going to handle the entire McIntosh reception without opening the terrace, and there was no way to open the terrace because it was December and too cold for anyone except the S. O. A. P. diehards. She mentally rearranged the mahogany sideboards, the breakfront, and the tables. She waved absentmindedly at Kathleen, who was moving gracefully among the tables like a skater on a pond, and thought about taking out just one more wall. The sturdy building was used to it, and she'd been convinced they needed the extra space for a long time anyway.
When they had purchased the Inn seven years before, Meg and Quill had decided on twenty-seven guest rooms, a Tavern Lounge to seat a hundred, and an equivalent number of seatings in the dining room. They'd remodeled with that in mind. John had added a conference center for possible corporate business when he'd signed on with them two years after they had opened, over Quill's protests, The past summer John had encouraged them to open a small, boutique style restaurant in the Sakura mall which almost ran itself.
Neither Meg nor Quill had anticipated the sudden spurt of success of the last year or so resulting from John's management, Not only had the number of business parties increased - but so had the private, The McIntosh
wedding would be the largest Meg and Quill had ever planned, and it would be the first of many, if the current trends held.
She felt John come into the room behind her and said, "If we could just take out the wall between here and the foyer, I know we could seat those extra eighty people."
"I think we should stick with the buffet."
"I hate to stand up when I eat, And so does everyone else."
"Well, by all means. Let's call Mike and get that wall down, the place recarpeted, and the walls repainted by Friday."
"Oh, ha," She paused. "I don't know, you're probably right about the spacing," She scanned the room, Mauve carpeting covered the floor, The tables were covered with deep dusty rose cloths in winter, to make the room seem warmer. The east wall gave a view of the snow-filled gorge. Sunlight sparkled off the icicles formed on the granite by the waterfall, a welcome change from the gloom of the day before. The contrast between the blue-white iridescence of the winter outside and the warmth of the room had a lot to do with the animation of the people eating Meg's food, she thought. They're happy, they're full. This is a business that gives people a little peace of mind. And I like it. She pushed the thought of Myles, and a home and children a little further into her subconscious.
A plump blond woman at the foyer entrance waved agitatedly in Quill's direction. "I almost forgot about Mrs. McIntosh," she said suddenly. "Poor thing!" She tucked her hand into John's arm. "Let's go relieve her agitation."
"That," murmured John, "will be quite a trick without Prozac."
On the way through the foyer to the office, Elaine McIntosh circled them like a retriever asked to herd sheep - plucky but easily distracted. She was a pretty, plump, beautifully shaped woman who wore well-tailored trousers and plain blouses trimmed with a bit of lace on the collar or the cuffs, high-necked and long-sleeved.
Quill had discovered that Elaine's physical appearance, combined with a more or less permanent state of soft-spoken distress, brought out odd impulses in men. Even John, who was as reserved around women as the Pope, fussed over her. He settled her on the couch in Quill's office, buzzed the kitchen for tea, and pulled the McIntosh wedding file from the drawer in Quill's cabinet with a minimum of words and a maximum of composure. With a cup of hot Red Zinger in her hand and John's solid height next to her on the couch, Elaine exhibited all the aplomb of a woman who owned a large amount of property over the San Andreas Fault. This was an improvement over her usual state of mind, which was that of a periodontophobe waiting for a root canal.
"There's two things," she said breathlessly. "The first is, I just wanted to thank you again for the use of this lovely, lovely building. It's so antique! It's so historic! You know, Claire - I mean, her father - well, our money is plumbing fixture money and Alphonse is so..." She waved helplessly.
"Fatheaded?" Quill ventured under her breath.
Mrs. McIntosh twisted her rings in agitation. "Ritzy," she finally managed. "The Santinis are bigwigs. My husband Vittorio gets so mad when I say that. He says money made in plumbing fixtures is as good as anybody's, but you know, it's not!"
"Of course it is," Quill said indignantly. "My goodness."
A brass plaque set near the fireplace in the Inn's foyer read "Est. 1693," the implication being that the Inn building with its copper roof and weathered shakes had been there for three hundred years. And most people, Quill knew, thought that antiquity conferred prestige. Quill never passed the plaque without a mild sense of guilt over the aristocratic implications; three hundred years ago, the Inn overlooking the Falls of Hemlock Gorge had been a one-room log cabin owned and operated by a lady of dubious virtue called Turkey Lil. From the War of 1812 on, the Inn had been added to, until it reached a sprawling twenty thousand square feet mid-century. Subsequent owners had adapted the Inn to fit various purposes, and it had been a girls' school, a rest home, and even, briefly, the home of the deservedly unknown Civil War General C. C. Hemlock. The Inn was a lot of things, but it wasn't, in Mrs. McIntosh's parlance, ritzy, aristocratic or even prestigious. Merely old.
"And the second thing?" Quill prompted.
"It's Vittorio, my husband." Mrs. McIntosh apologized and Quill got the impression she was apologizing for the marital relationship as well as the existence of the man himself. "Actually it's Vittorio's mother, Tutti."
"Tutti?" asked Quill, leaning forward so she could hear better. Elaine McIntosh became almost inaudible when stressed, and since Elaine seemed to be stressed all the time, no one at the Inn had been entirely certain whether the McIntosh celebration was a wedding or an anniversary until Mrs. McIntosh confirmed the plans in writing last August. A secondary frustration was that no one knew why the Mclntoshes - who were clearly Italian - had a Scottish cognomen; Meg had given up altogether on being able to figure that one out. "Has she decided not to come after all?"
Elaine gestured. Her eyes filled with tears. Quill, who'd been seriously alarmed the first, second, and third time Elaine's eyes had filled with tears over a crisis reached automatically for the box of Kleenex on her desk and handed it over. John, rarely demonstrative, put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder.
Elaine, hand stuffed against her nose, shook her head and wailed, "No! No!"
"She is coming," guessed Quill.
Elaine nodded, gulped, and folded the Kleenex into a neat oblong. "She's coming. And she had a vision. Tutti's famous for her visions. She's always right."
"A vision? You mean, as in a psychic vision."
"Yes! About... you know."
Quill, who'd been experiencing some mild concern about her level of tolerance - an essential trait of any innkeeper - for some hours since she'd allowed Alphonse Santini to provoke her into battery, made a conscious effort to be calm. "Your mother-in-law had a vision about the wedding?"
Elaine picked up a fistful of Kleenex. "She said... she said... he was going to leave Claire. At the altar. That the wedding's not going to come off. That I've been pushing. That it's my fault. That he really doesn't want to marry Claire."
"Of course he does," soothed Quill. "I mean, all grooms are supposed to be a little anxious before the wedding."
"The thing is, I just know everyone thinks that Claire's marrying him because... you know... plumbing fixture money. Not the same!"
"Oh, Elaine, Al loves Claire. I'm sure he'll make a good and reliable..." She tried to think of a polite substitute for demagogue and gave up. There were limits to her policy of honesty. "You've spoken with him, John, about the bachelor party. He seemed... you know, didn't he?"
"AI Santini?" said John. "Oh, yeah, Quill. Very you know."
"But you don't understand!" wailed Elaine. "Tutti wants to call the whole wedding off!"
"With all due respect for your mother-in-law, how can she?" Quill asked gently.
"You don't know her," Elaine said tragically. "You just - what's that?"
A soft tap came on the office door.
"Our receptionist, I think." Quill called, "Come in, please," with a guilty sense of relief. Dina poked her head around the edge of the door, her eyes large. A low-pitched wailing from outside accompanied her. "Excuse me. Quill? You'd better come."
"What's that noise?"
Dina glanced nervously over her shoulder. "It's Mrs. McIntosh. The mother-in-law. Claire's grandmother. She says to call her Tutti. She's standing in the middle of the foyer. Prophesying."
-6-
"There will be three knocks!" cried Tutti McIntosh. "Three knocks on the door! And then... blood, blood, BLOOD!" The hairy little dog in her arms yapped twice. Tutti rather absentmindedly set the dog down on the Oriental rug. With a pugnacious scowl he squatted and piddled on the celadon and ivory rose medallion in the center.
"Oh, Tutti, dear!" Elaine McIntosh burst into tears. Quill, nonplussed, stood for a moment to assess the situation. Claire's grandmother was plump and wide, with the frilly softness of a crocheted doll over a telephone. She had dimples, soft white hair, and very pink cheeks. The dog was some sort of pug. Tutti was w
earing a fur coat the same color and texture as her little dog - a burnished red that was close to Quill's own hair color. Her prophecy wail was low, windy, and dirgelike, which made it easy to hear Dina's perplexed explanation.
"She came in. Saw the plaque that says 'Established 1693.' Closed her eyes. Spun around for a second saying 'prophecy' a couple of times and then started hollering about three knocks on the door and blood, blood, blood, blood, blood..."
"Stop," said Quill.
Dina gazed consideringly at the little old lady for a moment, then said indignantly, "I didn't do a thing to her."
"Of course you didn't," Elaine McIntosh said in a helpless way. "She does this all the time!" She grabbed her mother-in-law's wrist and shook it gently. "Tutti. Tutti! TUTTI!"
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