Fete Worse Than Death (9781101595138)

by Bishop, Claudia

  Melbourne smoothed her hair over her ears with nervous jerks of her fingertips. “Do you suppose he was right? About that guy who’s lived to be a hundred and seventeen?”

  “He’s usually right where numbers are involved. Life’s a giant general ledger to him. Always has been.” Porter wasn’t particularly perturbed by this. Life was a general ledger to him, too.

  Route 14 had taken them into the heart of Geneva. Porter would have bet there were more nineteenth-century brick buildings in the village than in the whole of Tompkins, Ontario, and Wayne Counties. He stopped at the intersection of 41 and 5 and 20, and signaled a left turn. “Town’s looking a little seedy. Seems like there’s another dozen for sale signs every time we come through here.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Melbourne said. “There’s some marvelous Greek Revival buildings here, and a couple of stunning examples of Carpenter Gothic. The Finger Lakes wine industry’s made a huge difference in the econ—”

  “What I’m getting at, Melbourne, is that Dad’s lakefront property might not be worth what he thinks it is.”

  “He won’t sell it to us, Porter, and he’s not about to get his scrawny butt out of there unless we make him, and you’ve been harping on the fact that the state is going to take all his assets if he ends up in a nursing home until he finally kicks off at a hundred and seventeen, and then go after our assets, maybe, and we’ve got to do something.” She stopped for breath. “This business about the lake monster, for instance. It’s ridiculous. Isn’t there something we can do? The old geez…I mean poor old guy is losing it. Can’t we hold a competency hearing or something?”

  Porter winced.

  “Sorry,” Melbourne said. “That’d make it pretty public, I guess. But what else are we going to do? We’re concerned for him, that’s all. Both of us. Honestly, how are we going to feel if that little aide calls us up one morning and tells us she’s found him dead as a doornail in the lake? Or,” Melbourne continued, since Porter’s face had a “might be the best thing” sort of look on it, “with a broken hip or some other totally disabling problem. Honestly, the best thing for him is a nice little nursing home somewhere. But he needs to sell the lake house to us first for a rational price so the nursing home can’t get its paws on it. That will let him live out the rest of his life on his savings in a protected environment. Honestly…”

  Porter held his hand up. “I hear you. I’ll think about it. These things aren’t as easy as you might think.”

  “What things?”

  “Competency hearings. The state’s not all that anxious to lock people up, believe it or not.”

  “I’m not talking about locking him up. I’m talking about seeing that he’s safe and…”

  “Be quiet, Melbourne. I know what I’m doing.”

  The red light clicked to green, and Porter pulled onto 5 and 20 with a squeal of the Lexus’s tires. “We don’t want to try something like this in Rochester or Syracuse. We need a small town, where these kinds of cases aren’t as usual and maybe some personal influence will help.”

  Melbourne smiled a little.

  “There’s an old classmate of mine from Cornell. Howie Murchison. He’s got a small-town practice. I think it’s over near Ithaca. Place is called Hemlock Falls.” He reached over and squeezed Melbourne’s knee. “Howie will sympathize. The Loch Ness Monster in Seneca Lake. Right.”

  1

  Sarah Quilliam-McHale sat in the tasting room of La Bonne Goute Culinary Academy and wondered if she could find a doctor who’d excuse her from committees, based on the very sound medical reason that she was going to go stark staring crazy if she had to volunteer for another one.

  She had a charcoal stick and a sketch pad in her lap. She sketched a tiny Quill swollen up with hives. Then she sketched a tiny Quill in a straitjacket. Then she sketched a tiny Quill sprawled in hopeless resignation with a stake through its heart that read: KILLED BY COMMITTEE.

  She’d promised to sit on three Finger Lakes Autumn Fete committees this year. She couldn’t back out. She wasn’t that kind of person (although she sure wanted to be).

  She was doomed.

  “These guys on the advisory committee remind me of the second act of Oklahoma!” Miriam Doncaster said to her. “You know, that song that goes ‘Oh, the farmer and the cowman can be friends.’ But the cowboys and the farmers hate each other, right? Let’s say the cowmen in this case are from Hemlock Falls and the farmers are from Summersville. They’re pretending to agree but they want to shoot each other dead.” She rolled her eyes. She was an attractive divorcée in her fifties and ran the town library with brisk efficiency. Quill had always admired her air of cozy sensuality. She had large blue eyes and curly, gray blond hair. She raised her eyebrows suggestively. “You know that song ends in a shoot-out. The cowboys shoot at the farmers. Blam! Blam! Blam!”

  Quill made a face. “Yikes. Keep it down. We don’t want to give these guys any ideas.”

  The Finger Lakes Autumn Fete had been held in the village of Hemlock Falls for thirty years. The fete was hugely popular with thousands of tourists. Every year, one or more of the local villages from the surrounding lakes made a bid to host it. Hemlock Falls always prevailed.

  But this year, Brady Beale, whose car dealership lay between Hemlock Falls and Summersville, New York, had done a lot of behind-the-scenes politicking. The move-the-fete minority was larger than usual. The routine bickering at this particular meeting of the fete’s advisory committee had escalated into quarrels.

  Quill sighed and looked at her watch; evening meetings in this rural part of upstate New York almost never ran past ten o’clock. It was close on eleven, now.

  Clare Sparrow, who sat on the other side of Quill, leaned forward and whispered, “Madame is going to have my guts for garters. She’s never going to let me offer our tasting room for meetings again. Or if she does, she’s going to want a humongous security deposit. The cleanup is going to take hours and half the staff’s in bed.”

  Madame LeVasque, Clare’s boss, was a notorious penny-pincher. Clare was the recently appointed director of La Bonne Goute Culinary Academy. The academy sat directly across Hemlock Gorge from Quill’s own small hotel, the Inn at Hemlock Falls.

  Clare was right about the cleanup, Quill thought. Committee members had thrown stuff in exasperation. They’d pounded the table in dudgeon. Disposable coffee cups and balled-up paper napkins lay all over the polished oak floor. Smears of raspberry jelly and brioche crumbs littered the long refectory tabletop that was (usually) such an attractive feature of Bonne Goute’s vast and impressive tasting room. There were fifteen people in the room, and twelve of them were really mad at each other.

  The annual Finger Lakes Autumn Fete, hosted by the Hemlock Falls Chamber of Commerce for thirty years, was a huge tourism draw in the increasingly popular Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. The planning for the fete was a big pain in the neck. Until this year, Quill had managed to keep her own participation in the fete at a merciful minimum. She didn’t mind the work involved in volunteering, but the spats, the feuds, and temper tantrums drove her crazy.

  Brady Beale sat coiled in his chair, his eyes narrowed in an unfriendly glare at the fete chair, Adela Henry. Brady owned the local car dealership, Peterson Automotive, which he’d bought from his uncle’s estate after a hitch in Iraq. Peterson Automotive lay between Hemlock Falls, which was close to Cayuga Lake, and Summersville, which was right on the shores of Seneca Lake.

  Adela was the mayor’s wife. Quill (who had painted oils and acrylics for a living before buying the Inn with her sister Meg) often visualized Adela as a three-masted schooner, the kind with cannons on the foredeck. Adela stood at the head of the table, her considerable bosom huffed out like a topsail.

  “The committee,” Adela said with ominous calm, “is not going to consider your suggestion, Brady Beale, and that’s that.”

  “You aren’t the committee,” John Swinford heatedly pointed out. He and his wife Penelope owned the Swinford Wine
ry, which overlooked Seneca Lake. “A committee’s more than one bossy bi—” His wife Penelope poked him hard. John swallowed the word, shut his eyes for a moment, and then said, mildly, “Brady’s suggestion has merit. As I say, Adela, you aren’t the committee, not the whole committee, anyway.”

  “And you, sir,” Adela said majestically, “are not from Hemlock Falls.”

  “Well, no, I’m not. But Summersville isn’t at the other end of the Earth. We’re only ten miles from you.”

  “Eight-point-six miles, in fact,” said the elderly gentleman next to him. “I would like to add my voice in support of Brady’s suggestion to move the fete to Summersville.”

  Adela’s lower lip jutted forward in a dangerous way. “You aren’t a Hemlockian, either, Dr. McKenzie.”

  Dr. McKenzie, who was small, fit, and sported an admirable salt-and-pepper mustache, said tartly, “My veterinarian practice extends to your village, madam. I’ve always considered myself an honorary Hemlockian. The fete brings a great deal of money to village businesses. It is time to spread the wealth.”

  “Dr. McKenzie’s judged the Furry Friends competition for years,” Dolly Jean Attenborough piped up. She was shorter, rounder, and older than Adela by some ten years, but she generated the same forceful personality. “Brilliantly, I might add.”

  Adela smiled coldly. “I’m sure anyone with a pet entered into the Furry Friends pet show would feel that way, Dolly Jean. Before the judging results are in, at least.”

  Brady Beale waved his hand in the air. “Hey! Look, people. Can we get back to the point here? This is the fete steering committee, right? I mean, all of us here have got a stake in the ground with this fete. I’m going to make a motion, okay? To move the fete to Summersville instead of Hemlock Falls. And then we can vote.”

  Quill didn’t know Brady Beale very well, except that he was a distant relative of her friend Marge Schmidt (the richest person in Tompkins County), who was married to Harland Peterson, the biggest (and most good-natured) dairy farmer in the five-county area. She had the impression that the dealership did pretty well, despite the inevitable nickname bestowed on him—“Shady Brady Beale.” He’d recently added a line of high-end imported cars after a trip to an international car show in Miami. “The thing is,” he’d confided to Quill when she’d brought her Honda in for a tune-up, “we’ve got all these rich guys moving in from Toronto and New York to spend the summers here. And rich people like luxury vehicles, if you get my drift.”

  Quill got his drift. Her own Inn was thriving, mostly due to an affinity the wealthy had for her sister Meg’s gourmet cooking.

  “The group assembled here is not the official steering committee,” Adela said. “This is the advisory committee.” Her gaze swept the room, like a foretopman searching the sea for enemy vessels. “Fortunately, all the members of the steering committee are here. If you wish, Mr. Beale, to put this absurd suggestion to a vote, we will do so. Do I hear a motion?”

  “I just made a motion,” Brady shouted. “Dammit!”

  Everybody glanced sideways at the Reverend Dookie Shuttleworth. Dookie raised one hand in gentle absolution.

  “The motion has to come from a member of the steering committee,” Adela said stubbornly.

  “That is godda…I mean absolutely unfair,” Brady snapped. “The steering committee is stacked with your toadies.”

  Quill straightened up in indignation. She was on the steering committee.

  “They vote the way you tell them to vote.”

  “They will vote their conscience, Mr. Beale. Elmer! You were about to make a motion to move the Finger Lakes Autumn Fete to Summersville.”

  Elmer Henry, mayor (in name at least) of Hemlock Falls, and Adela’s devoted, if somewhat oppressed, husband, jumped to attention and said, “I so move.”

  “Mrs. Quince, you were going to second?”

  Althea Quince, a large, colorful lady of a certain age, nodded amiably. “I second the motion.”

  “Any discussion?” Adela asked with a dangerous look in her eye.

  “We about discussed this to death,” somebody muttered.

  Adela drew herself up. She was fond of pantsuits in noticeable colors. She had matched today’s purple with a bright yellow silk blouse. She looked like an infuriated pansy. “Members of the steering committee? How say you?”

  “Nay,” Elmer said.

  Althea Quince nodded decisively. “Nay.”

  “Quill?!” Adela demanded.

  “Nay.”

  “Reverend Shuttleworth?”

  “Abstain.”

  “I myself…” Adela paused dramatically. “Vote nay. Your motion is defeated, Mr. Beale.”

  ~

  “So everybody went home mad,” Quill said cheerfully to Marge Schmidt. The meeting had finally wound down close to midnight. Quill invited Miriam for a glass of wine at the Croh Bar before going home, in the hope of finding Marge there, too. If she plied her friends with wine, maybe she could convince one or both of them to take her place on at least one of her other committees.

  She was in luck. Although it was late, Miriam thought that a cool glass of her favorite Chardonnay would erase some of the tensions of the evening, and the Croh Bar was on the way home for both women.

  Nothing was very far from anything else in Hemlock Falls; Quill’s Inn was less than a mile away from the village, and Miriam lived in a pleasant old Federal brick home just off Main. Marge Schmidt, along with her partner Betty Hall, owned the Croh Bar and was there to gather up the night’s receipts and drop them off at the bank.

  “Ha! Everybody went home mad?” Marge slapped the bank bag onto the bar top. “Big surprise, that. The whole town spends the month of August being mad every year, and I’m getting sick of it. I’d be home watching American Idol with Harland tonight instead of closing this place if Betty wasn’t on that committee.”

  “Since the alternative was being on the advisory committee yourself, you tell me which you’d rather be doing,” Miriam said cynically.

  Marge’s lips twitched in a smile. She was short, with ginger-colored hair, and beady gray eyes that put most people in mind of a Marine sniper on the not infrequent occasions when she was in a temper. “Good point. So Shady Brady led the charge to move the fete this year?”

  “I buy my cars from him,” Quill protested, “he’s never seemed shady to me.”

  Marge snorted. “You know that old oak tree sits in front of the dealership? He used to do deals for George under it in the summertime. Oak? Shade tree? Get it?”

  Quill raised her hand in protest. “I get it. I get it.”

  “Brady worked for old George when he was in high school, went off to the navy and when he came back, George was dead. You wouldn’t remember about the ‘shady’ part because you’ve only been here fifteen years. You’re still a flat land foreigner.” Marge took a swallow of wine and expanded. “Now, I’ve never thought much of Brady in the business way of things, that’s true. Doesn’t have a lot of what I’d call common sense.” (For Marge, this translated into the successful conversion of opportunity into cash.) “What the heck did he expect, trying to change the location of the fete at this late date? It’s only two weeks away and the advertising’s been out for months.”

  “He offered to cover the costs of letting everyone know the location was changed.”

  Marge rolled her eyes. “Like I said. Not a lot of common sense. Thing about Shady Brady is, he gets an idea stuck in that noggin of his, he won’t let it go.”

  “Adela squashed him good and proper,” Miriam murmured. “He didn’t so much let it go as have it wrenched away.”

  “That Adela,” Marge said with reluctant admiration. “Now, there’s another one without a lot of common sense, but when she wants something, she gets results.”

  Like a steamroller flattening a house, Quill thought. She decided to change the subject and edge into the actual reason she’d stopped at the Croh Bar. It was late. She was tired. Her husband Myles had left for a mo
nthlong assignment overseas that afternoon, and she’d moved back into the Inn for the duration. So in addition to being tired, if she thought too much about him being gone, she’d get depressed. Her four-and-a-half-year-old son Jack got her up early, and she had a full day tomorrow, committee after committee after committee. “Since you skipped out on the advisory committee this year, Marge, how’s about giving me a hand with the booth assignments?”

  Marge looked startled. “How’s about I sign up for a peacekeeping mission in Beirut? It’d be a lot safer.”

  Miriam snorted into her wineglass.

  “You could help out, too, Miriam. We’re almost finished with the site map. Just a few more booth assignments to make.”

  Marge and Miriam looked at each other, grinned, and shook their heads simultaneously.

  “Let me guess,” Miriam said sweetly. “Dolly Jean Attenborough wants to put the Crafty Ladies booth right at the main entrance.”

  “Well, of course…”

  “And the Crafty Ladies’ most bitter rivals, the Craft Guild, want the very same space…”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Quill admitted.

  Marge slapped the bar top and slung the bank bag into her purse. “I’d rather eat a rat than be on any of those committees. Forget it. I’m off to the bank.”

  “Me, too,” Miriam said decisively. “Not to the bank, but home to bed. And if that’s why you offered to buy us a glass of wine, forget it.”

  “There’s a couple of openings on the Furry Friends committee,” Quill said desperately. “You guys like pets, don’t you?”

  “That’s the pet show stuff?” Miriam said. “My dog’s better than your dog? I don’t think so.”

  “Fine,” Quill said crossly. “Just fine.”

  “You’ve got only yourself to blame,” Marge pointed out. “Thing is, Quill, you’re a pushover. Always have been. Always will be.” She swung her arm around Quill’s shoulder in a companionable way, and led the way out of the bar and into the parking lot. “Go home. Let Doreen off her babysitting duties, take a hot shower, and go to bed. Things will look better in the morning.”