Ground to a Halt
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“This body was bad,” Meg said sympathetically.
“You always go off on a tangent when things are bad.”
“It was bad.” Quill agreed. She got up and walked to
her window. “Murder is always bad.”
The office fronted the drive. Normally the view outside it soothed her spirits. She shoved the drape aside and looked out. September in upstate New York was one
of her favorite times of year. The lawn running down to
Hemlock Gorge was a luxuriant green, the grass so
thick she wanted to bury her hands in it. Water plunged
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over the waterfall at the lip of the gorge with steady
cheerfulness. Late-blooming roses made pockets of
sunlit yellow and warm peach in the gardens Mike
tended so carefully. This morning, she’d looked up on
her way to the field trip to remember how lucky she was
to have this kind of beauty in her life.
This afternoon, she wasn’t so sure.
Meg scratched the back of her neck. “Is it officially
murder? I mean, did Davy actually say so?”
Quill went back to her desk and sat down with a
sigh. “Not officially, no. But he wouldn’t say anything
to me before he filed whatever it is he has to file for the
investigation.”
“So maybe you don’t have to tell Olivia that someone hated Lila Longstreet enough to bash her over the head. Maybe you just have to tell her there was an accident. Let the police take care of the rest. Why should you have to handle the gruesome part?”
“Except that someone did hate Lila enough to kill
her. And she hasn’t been in Hemlock Falls long enough
for anyone we know to do it. Which means the murderer
is one of our guests. And from what we’ve all seen of
Lila we’d be hard put to find anybody at the pet food
convention that didn’t have a motive.”
“That’s for sure,” Meg murmured.
“Which means,” Quill said, smacking her hand onto
her desk blotter for emphasis, “that the murder investigation is going to start and end right here. It’d be highly disingenuous of us to tell Olivia this was an accident
when she’s going to find out pretty darn quick that it
isn’t.”
“Highly disingenuous, huh?” Meg said dryly. She
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Claudia Bishop
tucked a chenille pillow behind her back and swung her
sneakered feet onto the coffee table. “You always get
wordier when you’re upset, too. Have you noticed
that?”
“So we need to bite the bullet and inform Olivia,”
Quill said briskly. “Tell you what. Why don’t you invite
Olivia into the kitchen and settle her down with some
hot tea? You can break it to her more gently that way.”
“Me?” Meg straightened in indignation. She ran one
hand through her short dark hair, which made it even
messier. “Why am I any better at this than you are?”
“Because you’re shorter than I am?” Quill offered in
a tentative way. “Shorter people are less intimidating.”
She thought about the numbers of eight-inch sauté pans
Meg threw across the kitchen every month. “Never
mind. Forget that.”
“I already have.”
“Okay. Try this. Olivia’s bound to have really creepy
questions about what happened. You can just say you
don’t know, because you don’t. I, on the other hand, obviously know too much, since I’m the one that found the body. It’ll be better for Olivia’s nerves this way.”
“You’re the manager of this place, not me,” Meg said
flatly. “And chief among the manager’s duties is informing guests about the sudden death of other guests. I’m the chef and I’ll go so far as to make that pot of tea—
and throw in a couple of scones. But you tell Olivia
somebody murdered Lila.”
“Wait a minute,” Quill brightened “It’s remotely possible that it was an accident, isn’t it? Do you suppose something huge and heavy fell on her, Meggie? Those
hog carcasses weigh a ton.”
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“Was she under one?” Meg asked in a practical way.
“No, she wasn’t. You said she was lying just to the right
of the cooler door, with her head . . . or what was left of
it . . .”
“Cut it out.”
“Sorry. Her head was just inside the cooler and her
feet were pointing toward the back. You said it looked
as if she’d been dragged in by the heels and left there.
You also said there were smears of blood and br . . .”
“Cut it out.”
“And umm . . . gray matter on the lintel and the concrete path to the cooler. Which you discovered after you found the body when you were looking around waiting
for the police.”
She certainly had. She’d had to throw out her one
pair of comfortable shoes as soon as she’d returned to
the Inn.
“Now, you may be a big, fat baby about bodies . . .”
“Hey!”
“Well, we’ve seen a few of them in our time, haven’t
we? And you’re still squeamish. Maybe it’s because
you’re, you know . . .”
“I know what?”
Meg smiled hopefully at her.
“Pregnant? No. Not a chance.” This, plus Meg’s unsentimental reference to the several homicide cases the sisters had solved in the past, exasperated Quill so much
that she added, “Shut up!” with the intensity of Quincy
at his most obnoxious.
“But you are a wizard at remembering the details of
a scene. Any artist is.”
Quill glanced involuntarily at the charcoal sketch
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Claudia Bishop
hanging over the couch. It was a preliminary of a piece
of hers that hung at MOMA, a portrait of the two of
them, sitting on the grass near the waterfall.
“So you can forget about trying the accident angle
with Olivia. Unless you want to weasel. The only thing
about weaseling is that the fib’s bound to come out later.
You’ll look like an idiot or a fibber. Take your pick.”
“I’m just going to tell her that Lila died unexpectedly. That we’re truly sorry . . .”
“We’re in the minority then,” Meg interrupted
blithely. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a meaner bunch of
conventioneers in my life. It’s weird. You’d think pet
food people would be, I don’t know, nice. Most people
who love pets seem to be. But will they be sorry poor
old Lila’s dead? I think not.”
“They’re not all mean, Meg.”
“Victoria Finnegan and that bozo disbarred husband
of hers?”
“See?” Quill said. “Robin’s a sad sack, sure. But he’s
not mean.”
“He has,” Meg said darkly, “a weak chin. And his
wife’s a shark. What’s that quote when it’s at home?
‘First thing, we kill all the lawyers.’ ”
“One of Shakespeare’s Henrys,” Quill said. “The
fifth? No, the fourth.”
“As for the other pet food people . . . yuck.”
Quill nodded reluctant agreement. “Now, Maxwell
Kittleburger and Millard Barnstaple—I have to agree
with you there.” Fortune magazine had put Maxwell
hadn’t climbed to the top of the pet food manufacturer’s
heap by being a nice guy. And Millard Barnstaple was
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21
just plain sneaky. He gave Iago a good name. Like Iago,
Millard smiled and smiled and yet was a villain. Or
maybe it was Casca, Quill thought. Whomever.
On the other hand, Priscilla Barnstaple’s malice was
direct and unambiguous. It was odds on which of them
was worse, sneaky husband or hammer-handed wife.
“Pamela Durbin’s not so awful,” Quill ventured.
“Maybe not,” Meg said grudgingly. “But she named
that pet store Pamela’s Pampered Puppy Palace.
Phooey. And she plays up that Southern belle stuff to
the max. She tried it,” Meg added in a dangerously calm
way, “on Jerry.”
“Who resisted, I’m sure.” Quill sighed. “Okay. I’ll
go talk to Olivia. And then I won’t have to think about it
anymore. We won’t have to think about them anymore.”
“We’ll have to think about the murder no matter
what. We know it has to be one of the IAPFP crowd.
And if we’ve got a murderer at the Inn, we’re going to
have to do everything we can to find out who it is. I
mean, I love Davy. But . . .”
Quill nodded. They all loved Davy. But as an investigator, he ranked right up there with Inspector Clouseau.
“And when is Myles coming home? He could handle
this with one hand tied behind his back.”
This was true. Myles’ career at the NYPD had
brought him job offers across the country. He’d retired
instead to the undemanding sheriff’s job in Hemlock
Falls. Iraq changed his mind. He’d taken on undercover
work. Quill never knew where he went when he left on
assignment.
She shook her head.
Meg addressed the ceiling. “We don’t know.” She
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Claudia Bishop
lowered her gaze abruptly. “Which brings up something
else we need to talk about, sis. You never seem to know
where Myles is or when he’s coming home. He’s never
there enough for you to get pregnant. And you’ve been
married less than . . .”
“Stop,” Quill said.
“You knew he was going to have to travel with this
job but . . .”
“I said ‘stop,’ ” Quill said in an even tone. “And I
mean it.”
Meg, uncharacteristically, shut up without further argument. Then she said, “Hey! Maybe Olivia already knows about Lila, being a psychic. Heck, maybe she
knows who the murderer is. We won’t have to investigate this case. We’ll just ask Olivia for a reading.”
“Olivia’s a pet psychic, as you know very well. She’s
never claimed to be psychic about humans, just animals.
Besides . . .” There was a tap at her office door. Quill
broke off in mid-sentence. It was Dina’s tap, brisk and
prolonged, so Quill didn’t bother to yell “come in.” Their
receptionist would barge in anyway.
“Hey, Quill, Meg.” Dina slammed the door open, and
shut it carefully behind her. She perched on the arm of
the couch. She had either come straight from one of her
classes at nearby Cornell or she’d been in the village;
she’d replaced her usual jeans with the calf-length black
skirt she assumed for her receptionist duties, but she
still wore her gray sweatshirt with the tiny Cornell logo
right in the middle.
“Hey, yourself,” Meg said. “Are the guests checking
out in a mighty swarm?”
Dina blinked once behind her round red-rimmed
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glasses. “Because that Lila Longstreet’s dead, you
mean? No. Not yet. As a matter of fact, they never do.”
This was true. Crime seemed to attract guests rather
than repel them. Quill had never quite understood why.
“Although that isn’t what I came in for. I came in to
ask for an Inn at Hemlock Falls t-shirt. I left mine at the
dorm. And to tell you that I can work tonight after all.
Davy canceled our date.”
Quill went to the credenza and pulled out a size small
t-shirt, which would swamp Dina, who was a size four,
dripping wet. She handed it over. Dina unselfconsciously pulled her sweatshirt over her head and replaced it with the tee.
“Do you think anyone’s told the pet food people
about the death?” Quill asked. If Dina knew, it’d be because Davy had told her. And if Davy had told her, it was useless to hope that the rest of the village hadn’t
heard already. Davy was a reluctant sheriff on occasion,
but he was conscientious to a fault. The news would
have gone over the police scanner before he made a private call to Dina. One out of three Hemlockians had police scanners in their pickup trucks. Come to think of it, the proportion was probably higher than that. “Did you
talk to Davy?”
“I talked to Davy. But I talked to some of the guys in
the village, too.” Her brown eyes widened. “It’s awful.”
God only knew what kind of garbled story Olivia
may have heard already. Driven by guilt, Quill leaped to
her feet. “I’d better go find Mrs. Oberlie. It’d be terrible
if she heard some horrible version of what happened.”
“What could be more horrible than what did happen?” Dina asked.
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Claudia Bishop
“Not much, I admit,” Quill said. “But it must have
been quick. I hope so at least.”
Dina shook her head. “Getting ground up into pork
sausage? How quick could that be?”
“Cripes,” Meg said. “you didn’t say anything about
that, Quill.”
For a long moment, Quill found herself speechless.
Finally, she managed, “That is absolutely not true.”
“It isn’t? That’s what I heard when I got into town
this morning.”
“That is utterly ridiculous. She was hit over the head.
With a blunt instrument of some sort.”
“Really? For Pete’s sake. I should have known it was
a crock,” Dina said disgustedly. “I stopped down at the
Croh Bar for a cup of coffee before I came to work and
the place was full of people talking all about it.”
“The coffee’s better here,” Meg said shrewdly. “You
stopped at the Croh Bar for the gossip. I should go down
there myself. I’ll bet Quill didn’t tell me everything.”
Dina shrugged. “Well that’s what everyone was talking about. Sausage, they said. Betty already’d taken it off the breakfast menu by the time I got there. Which
was a good idea. It certainly put me off sausage for a
while.” She bit her lip regretfully. “But you say it’s a
crock.”
“It most certainly is a crock!” Quill said heatedly.
“Who in the world started that rumor? That’s just revolting!” She grabbed her hair with both hands and tugged at it. It was red and springy and flew up in a wild
halo around her head. “Ugh! If that gets around we’re
going to be swarmed with media.”
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25
“You�
�re right about that,” Meg said sunnily. “I can
see the headlines now: ‘Secretary Ground to a Halt.’ ”
“Come to think of it, Davy didn’t say anything at all
about the sausage part, so it has to be bogus,” Dina said
with an air of finality. “And I heard about the murder
first from him.”
Quill frowned at her. “Well, you just put the kibosh
on that particular rumor. Good grief. I’ve really got to
find the IAPFP people now. Where are they, Dina?”
“The Tavern Lounge,” Dina said. “At least, Mrs.
Oberlie is. When the pet food people broke for lunch,
they never went back to meeting again. And the conference room’s a disaster area, by the way. According to Doreen.”
“Oh?” Quill frowned. IAPFP had booked the conference room for the entire week. Although the Monday meeting had been loud and contentious, the six conventioneers had left the usual sorts of mess in the conference room: used coffee cups, overflowing wastebaskets, crumbs on the floor. What more could they have done to
the conference room? Quill was suddenly reminded of
the three-day visit of the members of the Church of the
Rolling Moses some years before. “Uh-oh. They didn’t
rip the white boards off the wall to make a replica of the
tomb at Gethsemane? Did they?”
“Nope. Just broke up chairs. And dented the
Sheetrock a bit. Nate says that Mr. Barnstaple and Mr.
Kittleburger started mixing it up.”
“Mixing it up?” Quill repeated.
Dina struck a boxing pose. “You know, throwing
punches at each other. And smashing the chairs. Stuff
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Claudia Bishop
like that.” Dimples appeared in Dina’s cheeks. “Doreen
got out her mop.”
“Good,” Quill said. Their seventy-two-year-old
housekeeper was formidable when roused. “Did that
break it up?”
“Nope. Doreen was about to whack Mr. Kittleburger
a good one, but Mrs. Oberlie put a stop to the whole
shebang and everybody sort of skulked off. Except Mrs.
Oberlie. She went to the Tavern Lounge and started slugging back gin. She’s still there, as far as I know. And that little dog of hers, too.”
Gin? Quill glanced at the clock on her rosewood
desk. It was just after one.
“So,” Dina said. “What do you want me to do first?”
Quill blinked. “Be the receptionist, I guess. Was
there something else?”
“I could spend some time at the Croh Bar and
squelch that sausage rumor.” Dina pushed her glasses